Jacobin

Yes, Israel Is an Apartheid State. That Means It’s a Racist One, Too.

2023-07-20T01:41:05Z

In yet another reality-denying ritual of fealty to the pro-Israel lobby, members of Congress absurdly voted to say Israel was neither an apartheid state nor racist. Only a few progressives, including members of the Squad, stood firm in opposing the measure.

An Israeli soldier checks the identity card of a Palestinian man at a checkpoint near the Kdumim settlement west of the West Bank city of Nablus, on July 6, 2023. (Nidal Eshtayeh / Xinhua via Getty Images)

In the midst of all the partisan rancor, backbiting, and oozingly slow progress on getting anything actually done in Washington, it’s refreshing and inspiring when the two major US parties can still find an issue on which they can come together.

Not the ever-growing national homelessness problem, the ongoing depravities of the US health care system, or the fact that the wealthiest country on the globe continues to lag the developed world in metrics ranging from poverty and food insecurity to its shrinking life expectancy. No, I’m talking about the bizarre, regular ritual where US lawmakers fall over each other to demonstrate their fealty to a foreign government, specifically that of Israel.

Last night, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on an absurd resolution saying that not only is Israel not an apartheid state, but that it’s not a racist one either. Israel is apparently such a hyper-advanced and enlightened shining beacon of goodness, it’s evolved beyond the scourge of racial prejudice that today continues to plague even the most socially liberal of Western democracies. Quite an achievement.

Lawmakers who spoke up in favor of the resolution upped and upped the ante on heaping praise on a government that just bombed and raided a Palestinian refugee camp and hundreds of whose citizens just rampaged through a Palestinian village setting fire to homes.

Israel was a “robust, thriving, multiracial, multiethnic and multireligious democracy which shares our democratic values,” and is “not now or never has been a racist state.” It is “the only nation” in the Middle East that shares not just “our democratic values,” but “the values of human law.” It’s “standing in that steely breach as a force for democracy, a force for freedom, as a voice for free people.” Some saw no contradiction in insisting that Israel isn’t a racist country while also affirming “the need for Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic” (emphasis mine).

This spectacle was prompted by Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s offhand remark this past weekend at the Netroots Nation conference in Chicago, words she swiftly walked back under criticism. After Palestinian rights activists interrupted a panel she was on, Jayapal defended her progressive colleagues, telling the crowd that “we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us, that it does not even feel possible.”

The comments came as Israeli president Isaac “Bougie” Herzog was set to speak to Congress today, and four progressive lawmakers announced they would boycott the address over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people in recent weeks. Hence, this show of force from Congress as, in the words of one lawmaker in support of the resolution, an “affirmation” to both Israel and “the entire world” — namely, “enemies in the world like Iran” — that “the United States is with Israel.”

Not many members of Congress covered themselves in glory here. Only nine lawmakers voted against the resolution, with 412 in favor and eleven not voting. To their immense credit, the only ones who broke from the rigid Washington consensus on this and bravely voted against the resolution were members of the left-wing “Squad” and associated progressive freshmen — both the original quartet (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar) and the new members who have been added in subsequent elections (Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Summer Lee). Illinois’s Delia Ramirez — technically not a member of the group but closely aligned with the coterie of young, left-wing progressives of color — also voted against the resolution, as did Indiana’s André Carson.

It may have been a symbolic vote, but these members of Congress made their votes at great political risk. The pro-Israel lobby has spent eyewatering sums of money in recent years to defeat progressives in any way critical of Israel, throwing down $70 million in the 2022 midterms alone with considerable success. Some, like former Bernie Sanders surrogate Nina Turner and the more establishment-friendly Donna Edwards saw their campaigns buried under the landslide of negative advertising this pile of cash brought them, while others like Rep. Summer Lee just barely scraped through, seeing their initially massive polling leads dwindle after the well-financed attack-ad onslaught.

Bowman, who is also one of the lawmakers boycotting the Herzog speech and whose district was redrawn to a more moderate, pro-Israel constituency, Tlaib was targeted by pro-Israel interests these past midterms, while Omar narrowly survived a stiff challenge last year financed by big money. That pro-Israel forces plan to use the corrupt US campaign finance system to punish those it sees as insufficiently loyal to the country and shape US political debate is more or less an open strategy. “We’re seeing much more vocal detractors of the US-Israel relationship, who are having an impact on the discussion . . . and we need to respond,” Howard Kohr, head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, told the Washington Post last August.

Not all young progressives were as brave. Conspicuously missing from the “nay” column were new Squad member Greg Casar and Maxwell Frost, once tipped as a prospective new member of the bloc, both of whom moved to the center on the question of Israel and Palestine during last year’s midterms to preemptively head off an avalanche of pro-Israel money against them.

The Palestinian American Rep. Tlaib, who spoke out in near tears against the resolution on the House floor, deserves particular mention. Tlaib correctly pointed out that the charge that Israel is an apartheid state has now reached the realm of objective reality unless you’re in Washington, with everyone from the United Nations to human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israel’s own B’tselem reaching that conclusion. It’s also been a charge made by not just storied survivors of South African apartheid like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, but even some former Israeli prime ministers.

But Tlaib also pointed out the various, unambiguously racist statements made by Israeli officials, from Herzog’s own 2018 statement that marriage between Jews and non-Jews is a “plague,” or a former Israeli justice minister posting a passage calling for the killing of Palestinian civilians and the “little snakes” who are their children, to a former Israeli defense minister stating that Palestinians “are like animals, they aren’t human.”

“He’s talking about people like my grandmother, Mr Speaker,” Tlaib said.

She could have mentioned much else: current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (the country’s longest ever serving) calling Palestinians “wild beasts,” his current finance minister’s claim that Palestinians are a “fictitious people” with no “history” or historical rights to land, its current national security minister who was convicted of inciting racism and has ties to a host of racist figures, or the member of parliament Netanyahu had nominated as his top diplomat in New York, whose nomination was scuttled due to outrage over her own statement that she was “proud to be a racist.”

That’s just the current government — go further back, and you can find many, many more odious statements from other leading political and religious figures in the country. There’s a reason why neo-Nazi Richard Spencer views Israel as a shining example of the kind of white ethno-state he’d like to turn the United States into.

Yes, Israel is an apartheid state, and unless you want to make the absurd argument that a country can enforce a system of apartheid while being free of racial prejudice, that means it’s also a racist one. That so many in Washington want to deny this is isn’t a matter of not having the right facts. It’s a matter of lacking political courage.

The Left Shouldn’t Get Too Excited About Joe Biden’s “Supply-Side Liberalism”

2023-07-19T17:09:14Z

Pundits have lauded the Biden administration for replacing the free-market consensus with supply-side liberalism. But it is geopolitical tensions with China and labor’s weakness that have made elites feel comfortable with a milquetoast industrial policy.

President Joe Biden displays a semiconductor during a White House press conference, February 24, 2021. (Doug Mills / Pool / Getty Images)

Even prior to his inauguration, there was talk that Joe Biden’s administration would mark a break with the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated both parties since the Ronald Reagan era. During the height of the pandemic, the president claimed that the “blinders have been taken off,” and his administration would have to address challenges that “may not dwarf but eclipse what FDR faced.”

The unexpectedly generous, albeit frustratingly temporary, COVID-19 relief package that Biden signed into law in March 2021 and, later, his passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIB), the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) seemed to confirm these initial estimates of his ambitions. The president has been, if not the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt, at least a Democrat in a different mold from that of either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of “Bidenism” is its embrace of what pundits have called “supply-side liberalism” or “supply-side progressivism”: giving the state a prominent role in directing investment in the form of tax incentives, direct subsidies, and tariffs to encourage domestic production of goods deemed strategically necessary. The IRA, for instance, offers subsidies for building renewable energy and green manufacturing; the CHIPS Act uses tariffs and subsidies to encourage domestic manufacturing of computer chips.

In April, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, outlined this new approach in remarks he delivered to the Brookings Institute think tank. The current administration, Sullivan claimed, was rejecting faith in “tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself” and instead “restor[ing] an economic mentality that champions building.”

What should socialists make of this turn away from neoliberal orthodoxy and the emergence of industrial policy? Biden’s ambitions do mark a step in the direction of rebuilding infrastructure and encouraging economic activity through government intervention. But this move away from the economic orthodoxy of the past forty years has not occurred as a result of the strength of the Left or any other progressive bloc. Despite the recent uptick in worker militancy, it is the weakness of organized labor and working-class political organizations that characterize the current moment.

The exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the rise of a new cold war with China — mentioned fifteen times in Sullivan’s remarks — opened the door to greater government intervention in the economy. But as that crisis fades from view, the current administration has justified much-needed public investment almost entirely in geopolitical terms, with industrial policy necessary to enable American hawkishness toward the world’s second-largest economy. As long as industrial policy remains tied to the geopolitical ambitions of the Democratic Party, the Left should be very sober about the limits and even dangers of Biden’s supply-side liberalism. Ultimately, it is the marginal status of the domestic left and labor and the consequent lack of space for an internationalist approach to foreign policy and economic planning that have led to this right-wing form of industrial policy.

Still, this does not mean that socialists should reject the turn away from neoliberalism initiated in some ways by Donald Trump and carried through by Biden. We must instead point to the limits of such a policy and argue that the investments required to fix America’s failing infrastructure and decarbonize the global economy can and must be achieved without the dangerous anti-China stance. Unless workers and the Left organize to assert their own power, the government’s newfound largesse will do little to address glaring economic inequality, further a just green transition, or de-escalate rising geopolitical tensions.

All Carrot, No Stick

Famously, Bill Clinton declared that “the era of Big Government is over,” and Barack Obama, despite his claims to offer an alternative to this consensus, championed free trade. Biden’s recent moves, despite breaking with the legacy of his predecessors, does not signal a return to the ambitious liberalism of the New Deal, let alone an experiment in European-style social democracy or “socialism,” as right-wing hysterics would have it.

Supply-side liberalism is rather a policy approach that acknowledges markets do not always produce the desired outcome — not only in providing for people’s consumption needs but in ensuring the production of certain necessary goods like clean energy or adequate infrastructure. Supply-side liberals, unlike their neoliberal counterparts, acknowledge certain shortcomings of the free market and recognize the need for more direct government intervention in the economy.

We should be skeptical, however, that Biden’s break with the old “Washington Consensus” can achieve its lofty goals. The tools with which supply-side liberals have sought to address America’s problems are meager at best. First, the amount of money committed to the IRA pales in comparison to what will be required to carry out a green transition. The International Energy Agency predicts that the transition away from fossil fuels requires investments of $4 trillion annually through 2030, or $28 trillion over the next seven years. In comparison, the IRA only allocates $400 billion over the course of an entire decade.

Some have pointed to the potential in the uncapped tax credits included in the bill, which by some estimates could triple the IRA’s sticker price to $1.2 trillion and further mobilize private investment. But even this remains far too little, especially in the wake of decades of austerity that have hollowed out state capacity. Though these are substantial amounts of money relative to recent decades, we should not overstate what has been achieved thus far.

A second problem with Biden’s market-oriented turn to industrial policy is that it is all carrots and no sticks. With few stipulations, the federal government has committed to giving firms cash in hopes of guiding investment choices to government priorities like semiconductors and green energy. As Daniela Gabor has argued, the state is “derisking” investment in these sectors. What this means is that governments encourage private investment by taking responsibility for potential losses. Profits are privatized while losses are socialized.

Under this approach, there is no mechanism to discipline firms that either do not follow through with promises or simply decide not to participate in subsidy programs; there’s no way of forcing existing industries to restructure. This inability of the state to discipline capital was the Achilles’s heel of industrial policy efforts by “developmental states” like India in the twentieth century. Capitalists made use of subsidies and protection for domestic industry, but they refused to invest in the way state planners wanted them to. Here in the United States, the need to placate capital hamstrung previous attempts at supply-side policymaking.

The Biden administration’s close ties to private finance — Brian Deese, a former BlackRock executive, served until recently as his top economic advisor — all but ensures that the absence of disciplinary mechanisms in the IRA will turn it into a blank check. “Targeted public investment,” according to Sullivan, will “unlock the power and ingenuity of private markets, capitalism, and competition.” It would be naive to expect radicalism from Biden, but his unwillingness to discipline capital through control of the federal purse strings makes evident the distance between his rhetoric and reality.

This was illustrated just last week when the government announced that it would loan Ford nearly $10 billion for the construction of new electric vehicle factories. The catch? There is no catch. Not only did the government fail to impose any requirements on Ford to ensure these new factories would be union shops, they included no mandates on working conditions. Meanwhile, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), on track to receive billions from the CHIPS Act, has done its best to resist union labor.

Finally, the third problem is that, in the absence of a powerful left-wing challenge to the political establishment, Biden’s industrial policy is certain not only to disproportionately enrich capital but to do so at the expense of workers and the broader public. Private capital is normally wary of empowering the state in any way that might encroach on its domain. But as the political economist Cedric Durand has observed, absent any possibility of higher taxes or at least partial nationalization, “state subsidies imply a transfer of resources from labor and the public sector to capital.”

None of this should come as a surprise. As exciting as the last few years have been for segments of the labor movement, it remains historically weak. Without a major change in the balance of class power, any reform program will primarily serve the interests of capital. All of the above shortcomings stem from this fundamental issue.

Great Power Rivalry

Although the president has personally focused on this concern less than his predecessor Donald Trump, whose America First agenda was in many ways a precursor to Bidenism, the United States’ intensifying great power rivalry with China is the primary motivation behind the turn to industrial policy. Already during Obama’s presidency, a major priority was what that administration termed the “Pivot to Asia”: the goal was to reduce involvement in the Middle East in order to free up attention and resources to reinforce US influence in China’s “backyard.” The failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade bill, championed by Obama in his second term, was an attempt to keep East Asia locked into a US-centered global economy using the traditional neoliberal toolkit.

Trump, less committed to economic orthodoxy, understood the unpopularity of free-trade deals that had forced many Americans to compete with cheaper overseas labor. He instead favored economic protectionism, a policy considered taboo since the advent of neoliberalism that elicited horror from mainstream policymakers.

It is on this front, among others, that the Biden administration has carried on his predecessor’s policies. For instance, last year, China, Turkey, Norway, and Switzerland won a case in the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the United States on the grounds that steel tariffs introduced by Trump were not legal under the body’s rules. The United States has long wielded the WTO as a weapon to pry open foreign markets. But now, with the shoe on the other foot, the Biden administration argued that steel tariffs fell under a national security exemption and that the WTO was on “thin ice.”

While Trump may speak in a cruder nationalist register, Biden’s policies are a continuation of the turn against neoliberalism initiated by his predecessor. Sullivan and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen see the new industrial policy as a means of ensuring the economic, military, and ideological superiority of the United States over China. The CHIPS Act, for instance, was explicitly pitched as an attempt to onshore manufacturing of computer chips that are essential to the US military; right now, the vast majority of such chips are manufactured in Taiwan, the biggest flashpoint for rising US-China tensions.

This effort to boost domestic chip manufacturing has gone hand in hand with aggressive new export rules designed to cripple China’s own ability to make such chips. The rules “essentially seek to eradicate, root and branch, China’s entire ecosystem of advanced technology,” New York Times Magazine reported. The magazine quotes a semiconductor analyst who says, “If you’d told me about these rules five years ago, I would’ve told you that’s an act of war — we’d have to be at war.”

What Do Socialists Want?

“Bidenomics” is a far cry from the type of expanded role for the state in the green transition that socialists have advocated in the form of a Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–style Green New Deal. Its limitations, however, ultimately stem from the political climate out of which it has emerged. The alternative vision, put forward by Sanders, AOC, and the few other left-wing elected officials in Congress, was to rapidly decarbonize the economy via a massive expansion of public ownership of industry and infrastructure, aimed at achieving full employment and increasing unionization. A Green New Deal of that sort would empower workers, reduce economic inequality, and make major steps toward democratizing the economy.

If you squint, Bidenism appears to offer something that bears resemblance to the more radical aims of the US left. The role of socialists must be to point out the difference between the militaristic corporate handout that is the IRA, CHIPS Act, and associated policies, and the vision of redistribution and economic planning we need to confront climate change and inequality.

The ultimate aims of socialists are for an end to great power conflict, the reconstruction of the global order in the interests of the international working class, and the democratization of the economy so that decisions around investment and workers’ conditions are made by the public. Biden’s agenda clearly does not seek to address these issues. Democrats are unwilling to base their proposals on anything that might smell like socialist principles or suggest insufficient reverence for the sanctity of private enterprise, so they are forced to justify exceptions to free-market dogma by the presence of the supposed threat of China.

The point is not that socialists should advocate for “free trade” or oppose attempts to increase semiconductor production in the United States, but we must be careful not to get sucked into supporting Democrats’ increasingly militaristic posturing. This will be easier said than done. Absent a stronger social base and independent political voice, it will be difficult for socialists to explain how our support for investments in domestic industry differs from that of the anti-China hawks.

This is not to say that there’s nothing for socialists to like in the Inflation Reduction Act and other Biden administration policies. At least in part due to the various subsidies provided, we are in the middle of a factory construction boom, with investment at a thirty-year high. In a relatively tight labor market like the one we have now, this could make it easier for workers to unionize, even in the traditionally nonunion South — like the 1,400 workers at a bus manufacturer in Fort Valley, Georgia, who just voted to unionize. And in New York, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and allies recently pushed through a bill that makes use of federal IRA funds to direct the state to build public renewable energy, with strong labor protections for new green jobs.

Yet these victories did not happen automatically, and neither will the many more larger wins we’ll need for a just transition. Even as legislation has included some modest labor provisions, it’s no accident that so much funding is flowing to right-to-work states. Prevailing wage requirements are restricted to a narrow set of jobs, and real employer neutrality or union labor mandates were left out of recent bills. It was not even a year ago that Biden and Congress denied railworkers the right to strike; we saw there how paper thin pro-union sentiment can be when profits are on the line. Socialists should be clear-eyed about the fact that government policy toward unions will remain ambivalent at best.

When it comes to legislation, the Left cannot be content with being “junior partners” to a militaristic and corporate-friendly Democratic establishment. Socialists can’t be afraid to openly criticize Biden and the Democrats; we must build our own public identity and political organization, as groups like DSA are continuing to do, and agitate for ambitious pro-worker demands like a green jobs guarantee and public ownership of the energy system.

If any such campaign is to find success, we also need to see a reverse in decades of declining union density. Ossified unions, particularly in the manufacturing and energy sectors, must be transformed so that they actually devote their considerable resources to organizing and fighting the boss. If history is any guide, that will likely require socialists to be active on the shop floor, both as militant reformers in existing unions and as “salts” in nonunion workplaces. This kind of confrontational, class-based program is our best bet at ramping up the pressure on establishment politicians like Biden and ultimately building support for real solutions to the climate crisis.

Crucially, the Left must not respond to the failings of Biden’s program by calling for a wholesale abandonment of industrial policy. This moment has shown publicly, for the first time in decades, the massive influence the state can have in managing the economy. It’s our responsibility to provide an alternative vision of that power both domestically and internationally. Conversely, those on the Left who are most optimistic about this neo-industrial turn have a responsibility to be similarly vocal about the dangers of yoking industrial policy to the drumbeat of war with China.

“Supply-side liberalism” is no panacea to the United States’ social problems, nor even a radical break from the approach taken by political elites in recent years. But it does represent a shift in the terrain on which we’re fighting — a shift that workers, and the Left, must quickly adapt to take advantage of.

Cultural Capital Is No Substitute for Cold, Hard Cash

2023-07-19T17:30:22Z

Anthony Minghella’s sumptuous drama The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), based on the 1955 psychological thriller by Patricia Highsmith, scans almost as a manual for faking your way into the upper echelons of the American elite. Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a lowly Manhattan piano tuner, dons a borrowed Princeton jacket at a black-tie fundraiser and convinces […]

Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style” Can’t Help Us Now

2023-07-19T15:00:31Z

Sixty years after its publication, it’s time to lay Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” to rest. Then as now, the classic essay has almost nothing to say about why conspiracies arise and prosper.

A woman wears a tinfoil hat at the Alienstock festival on the “Extraterrestrial Highway” in Rachel, Nevada, on September 20, 2019. (Bridget Bennett / AFP via Getty Images)

Nearly sixty years have passed since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Nearly sixty years have passed, too, since Richard Hofstadter spoke at Oxford University on November 21, 1963, lecturing that “American political life . . . has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds.” Behind the emergent radical right, he continued,

there is a style of mind, not always right-wing in its affiliations, that has a long and varied history. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

The synchronicity of the two events is as appropriate as it is uncanny. Kennedy’s assassination came to represent, according to the historian Peter Knight, a “symbolic watershed” — a point after which notions of straightforward causality faltered and conspiratorial narratives flourished. And Hofstadter’s speech, which was adapted into a 1964 essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (and later a book of the same title), has formed the bedrock for the mainstream understanding of conspiracy theories.

Hofstadter assembles a greatest hits of conspiracism throughout US history, touching upon eighteenth-century fears of the Illuminati’s stranglehold over world affairs, the anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic panics of the nineteenth century, and the virulent anti-communism of the early Cold War. There has been a longstanding predisposition among a substantial number of Americans, Hofstadter concludes, to identify hidden plots and invoke apocalyptic anxieties in their reckoning of “opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable.”

Since its publication, “The Paranoid Style” has enjoyed an elevated status as the go-to reference point on conspiracy theories — its easy applicability key to its staying power. Hillary Clinton did her best impression in a 2021 profile in the Atlantic, noting that “there’s always been a kind of paranoid streak in American politics”; a column in the Hill opines that “America [is] now embracing the ‘paranoid style’”; and practically every account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s 2024 presidential campaign reaches for the essay to add a dash of historical authenticity.

But it’s time to lay “The Paranoid Style” to rest or, at the very least, recast and revise it. While Hofstadter deserves credit for jump-starting the serious study of conspiracy theories and theorists, his scholarship linked the former to a pseudo-psychological diagnosis and positioned the latter as irrational, alienated individuals on the fringes of both society and politics. In doing so, he helped transform “conspiracy” into a convenient shorthand for delegitimizing the implicit critique of power relations often found in particular interpretive styles. As a result, “The Paranoid Style” has also been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Self-Assured Anxieties of the Liberal Establishment

Hofstadter wasn’t wrong to point to the persistence of conspiratorial thinking throughout American history. (That much is apparent given today’s new golden age of conspiracy.) However, as a historical interpretation of conspiracy theories and their believers, “The Paranoid Style” has surprisingly little to say.

The essay came from a bitter period of personal transformation, occasioned in equal parts by mounting Cold War hostilities and the march of McCarthyite reactionaries, who understandably provoked Hofstadter’s disdain. As a young scholar, he pulled few punches in provocative critiques of US political and business elites. In both Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 and The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, he identified ideological continuity and conformity across time and party lines, pointing to the shared imperatives of capital beneath superficial differences. But Hofstadter would eschew much of the sharp commentary and hopeful socialism of his earlier scholarship as disquiet about the sanctity of US liberalism crept into his work.

His next book, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR, a 1955 Pulitzer Prize winner, emphasized illusion and illiberalism in the American populist and progressive movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Consequently, Hofstadter tacitly endorsed proceduralism and pragmatic engagement with existing structures of power, admitting in the introduction that he had hoped to “foreshadow some aspects of the cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time.” Although he may have intended to shed an “ambiguous character” upon subjects usually rendered in terms of clashing economic interests, The Age of Reform anticipated the glib pitfalls of “The Paranoid Style.”

Reviewing The Age of Reform for the Nation in 1956, the historian William Appleman Williams argued that Hofstadter “substituted a social psychological theory of progressivism for the history in question.” Evidence for his claims was cherry-picked and indicated his class position among a “predominant group of American intellectuals,” Williams wrote, and as a result, he was unable to engage “with the past, present or future save in terms of the present.” By working backward from ideal types (“models of reality, not molds for it”), Hofstadter had “transformed History into Ideology.”

Hofstadter’s Harper’s essay leans further into psychological abstractions, using simplistic terms as stand-ins for complex concepts. With his formulation of the so-called “paranoid style,” he insists not to be “speaking in a clinical sense” but “borrowing a clinical term for other purposes.” The association isn’t easy to shake, especially when an alternate definition isn’t made clear. And on the moral character of the so-called “paranoid style,” Hofstadter comes right out and says it: “Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be. . . . [It] has a greater affinity for bad causes than good.” Taken at his word, Hofstadter seems to locate the root of the “paranoid style” in troubled individual minds and minority movements.

Though he contested it, Hofstadter was frequently associated with the “consensus” school of American historians. Recognized by John Higham in 1959, this scholarly bloc dished up palatable Cold War liberalism, aiming, in large part, to discredit threatening political movements and castigate dissent on both sides of the political spectrum. As a riposte directed at the New Right and the rising prominence of Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society, “The Paranoid Style” was acerbic. It accordingly reflected the tense, self-assured anxieties of the mid-century liberal establishment — the unruly energies of the masses had to be reined in by evenhanded technocrats.

Ideological myopia prevented Hofstadter from writing about paranoia or conspiracy beyond a diagnosis. Insights into how the changing nature of US statecraft, along with the nation’s expanding global empire (itself possessing a newly heightened capacity for paranoid skullduggery), might have impacted broader belief in conspiracies were missed. So, too, were opportunities to discuss machinations originating from within the halls of power, like General Smedley Butler’s seditious Business Plot or Henry Ford’s mass dissemination of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In his rearview hunt for preferred evidence, Hofstadter begins to sound a little, well, paranoid.

Still, there are moments in the essay where Hofstadter seems poised to make more perceptive arguments. There were, he concedes “certain elements of truth” expressed by the anti-Masonic movement. (Consider the Morgan Affair: the 1826 disappearance of a man who publicly criticized the Freemasons stirred up a public frenzy that embodied material tensions and dissatisfaction with the American political establishment, leading to the creation of the first US third party.) Moreover, he says that “nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style” and that, often, “class conflicts . . . can mobilize such energies.” In their underdeveloped state, these assertions are neither as accurate nor as helpful as parsing out the real-world origins of his subjects’ actions and ideologies.

Hofstadter would have done well to place greater emphasis on the structural transformation of civil society than on individual pathology. Indeed, the rise of US conspiracy culture can’t be separated from the rise of its mass culture. Through eighteenth-century advances in newspaper pressing and distribution, conspiracy theories came to play a leading role in the theater where conflicts over slavery, westward expansion, industrial and financial capitalism, and, importantly, strains upon Americans’ lives and expectations were staged.

But the displacement of historical analysis for DSM-lite catchphrases and shortsighted political goals in “The Paranoid Style” ultimately obscures questions of why conspiracies take shape and multiply. As Greg Grandin reminds us, William Appleman Williams also lamented that “perhaps the major American casualty of the Cold War . . . has been the idea of history.”

Paranoia’s Symbolic Content

Hofstadter passed away in 1970, his life cut short by leukemia. It’s unlikely that he could have anticipated the conspiracy-dense world that would come to be. The stormy decades following the publication of “The Paranoid Style” — characterized by political assassinations, revelations of government secrecy and misconduct, as well as social and economic strife — provided ample fodder for conspiracy theorizing that defied mental maladies and pointed to real grievances.

For one, the bombshell disclosures of the Iran-Contra scandal and, later, of CIA complicity in the Central American drug trade weren’t irrational fictions but totalizing crimes that put the US security state’s zero-sum militarism and market fever on full display. These too would pass, registered as brief shocks to a system that made quick work of metabolizing them. As the Cold War sputtered to a halt and George H. W. Bush declared the coming of a “new world order,” an eternal present filled the void where cause and effect had once been. Conspiracy theories gelled with the slick consumerism of the 1990s, letting believers, often with a heavy dose of ironic detachment, transcend a disenchanted world.

“The Paranoid Style” is as much the product of a particular time and place as its author was. At this point, it’s perhaps better understood as a historical document than a prescriptive one. But Hofstadter’s influence remains palpable today: it’s become increasingly difficult to talk about the morbid symptoms of the present without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. (To recognize this is hardly an apologia for the undemocratic and loathsome qualities of some conspiracy theories.) The internet’s decentralization of seemingly all information has supercharged the dissemination of far-out notions, backgrounded by the fact that institutional faith has cratered. The US government retains a Manichean worldview that demands invasive domestic surveillance and endless foreign wars. Interconnected global elites act in concert to defend their shared interests through hegemonic networks.

While the confused paranoid component of Hofstadter’s equation has distorted the ability to reckon with conspiracy theories’ place in American life, what he got right, as Michael Butter and other scholars of conspiracy suggest, was his latter emphasis on style. “Style,” Hofstadter wrote, “has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than the truth or falsity of their content.” That history is typically experienced through rupture, incommensurate with what we are conditioned to expect of it, can reasonably suggest the presence of a hidden motive force, bringing with it a veneer of coherence.

Jettisoning Hofstadter’s singular focus on their political affiliations, it’s worth dwelling on conspiracy theories’ symbolic content. They may frequently amount to a misconception of power, but this doesn’t preclude their ability to communicate important truths about the fragmentation of the public sphere; about the intensification of mechanisms of social control; and about the decline of opportunity. Recall Joseph Heller (or, if you prefer, Kurt Cobain’s) adage: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

By examining the contexts from which conspiracy theories emerge as well as the functions they perform for believers, we can take more telling and politically fruitful lessons from them. A materially sensitive approach would draw attention to causality and contradiction, tracing the relationship between individuals and the structures that surround them. Hofstadter bemoans that while we are all “sufferers from history,” the “paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.” As long as this is the case, though, we all lose.

Republicans Are Trying to Block Joe Biden From Declaring a Climate Emergency

2023-07-19T11:01:40Z

Amid extreme heat and wildfires, President Joe Biden could free up disaster relief funds and slash carbon emissions by declaring a climate emergency. But last month, a group of GOP lawmakers introduced a bill to prevent him from making such a declaration.

CalFire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) firefighters take on the Rabbit Fire in Moreno Valley, California, on July 14, 2023. (Jon Putman / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)

As record heat and wildfire smoke engulf huge swaths of the country, President Joe Biden could free up disaster relief funds and slash carbon emissions by declaring a climate emergency — a move Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly called on him to make.

But last month, a group of Republicans introduced a bill to prevent Biden from making such a declaration, with one senator arguing it would wrongfully “grant him more executive authority and grow the size of government all in the name of climate change.”

If Biden were to declare a national emergency over climate change, he could take aggressive action to cut fossil fuel production and speed up clean energy manufacturing by reimposing the ban on crude oil exports, halting oil and gas leasing, investing in public transit infrastructure, and requiring private companies to manufacture renewables.

“It’s outrageous that Republicans are trying to obstruct the government from confronting the climate crisis even as one hundred million Americans are under heat alert,” said Jean Su, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “President Biden should counter Republicans’ head-in-the-sand ignorance by declaring a national climate emergency and moving to rapidly phase out the fossil fuels driving this apocalypse.”

The Republican bill, derisively named the “Real Emergencies Act,” is being led by Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX) and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), both of whom have been fighting Biden’s climate agenda and have personal investments in fossil fuels.

“Our legislation ensures that President Biden does not abuse the power of his office to pursue his anti-American energy agenda against the will of the American people,” said Pfluger in a statement when the bill was introduced.

Pfluger is the House’s second-highest recipient of oil and gas donations, only after Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and is a director at Gentry Creek Energy LLC, “an energy company engaged in pipelines and infrastructure,” according to his personal financial disclosure.

He has introduced legislation to repeal a tax on methane emissions and is invested in a pipeline company that is a member of lobbying groups that cheered that bill’s passage in the House.

Capito, a longtime fossil fuel booster who has fought Biden’s climate agenda, has been a major backer of the natural gas Mountain Valley Pipeline. She is also personally invested in the company constructing the pipeline project, which got a major boost from a special provision mandating its approval in the recent bipartisan debt ceiling deal.

The Real Emergencies Act’s seven sponsors in the Senate received a combined $3.1 million in contributions from fossil fuel industry executives and political action committees (PACs) over the 2017–2022 cycle, according to data from OpenSecrets. The bill’s nineteen House sponsors raked in $1.7 million from fossil fuel executives and PACs during the 2021–22 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.

The Capito-Pfluger legislation would prohibit the president from declaring a national emergency “on the premise of climate change,” under any of three laws — the National Emergencies Act, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, and the Public Health Service Act — according to the bill text. The bill was first introduced last year, but made no progress in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Invoking emergency powers would give Biden a vast array of tools to fight climate change and fund resilience efforts without authorization from Congress. It would also free up funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to spend on disaster relief and mitigation efforts.

Biden has previously made national emergency declarations to extend COVID-19 programs and halt Russian oil imports. President Donald Trump declared a national emergency to secure funding for a border wall after his requests were rejected by Congress — which lawmakers from both parties decried as executive overreach.

But while Republicans warn of potential executive overreach by the president, Biden has so far refused to declare a climate emergency, despite repeated demands that he do so from Democratic lawmakers and more than 1,200 organizations in the People vs. Fossil Fuels coalition.

Last summer, amid similar extreme heat and wildfires exacerbated by climate change, Biden reportedly considered declaring a climate emergency, but ultimately declined to do so. Last fall, after Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act — which provides hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits for companies to build clean energy infrastructure and for consumers to buy electric cars, among other measures — a group of Democratic senators demanded Biden build on the legislation by declaring a climate emergency.

“A president’s emergency powers should not be used wantonly,” wrote Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) in an October 2022 letter to Biden, signed by seven other Democrats. “What we cannot afford, however, is to shy away from tackling the climate crisis just because President Trump misused the National Emergencies Act. If ever there is an emergency that demands ambitious action, climate chaos is it.”

They called on Biden to investigate the fossil fuel industry, decarbonize the Defense Department, and promulgate rules to reduce emissions from power plants, vehicles, oil and gas facilities, and fossil fuel production on public land. This spring, the Biden administration proposed two major regulations aimed at reducing emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants and vehicles. Top Republicans, Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and the fossil fuel industry are fighting the power plant rules, even though they would only apply to a small fraction of gas facilities, and could actually extend the life of some coal and gas power plants.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Keir Starmer Wants to Keep Children in Poverty

2023-07-19T09:39:34Z

Just how far to the right is Keir Starmer willing to drag the Labour Party?

Labour leader Keir Starmer gives a press conference at MidKent College, July 6, 2023. (Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)

In 2015, then British chancellor George Osborne introduced a cap on social benefits available to families with children. Osborne justified the policy, which limits benefit eligibility for families with more than two children, using the repugnant and familiar rhetoric of incentives: he claimed it would help encourage unemployed parents to work and “ensure that families in receipt of benefits faced the same financial choices about having children as those supporting themselves solely in work.”

Evaluated even on these rather grotesque terms, the policy has been a failure. Research published last year shows that punishing Britain’s poorest families with benefit cuts has done nothing to discourage them from having children, though it has succeeded in pushing them further into poverty. Today roughly 10 percent of British children are affected by Osborne’s hideous two-child benefit cap — which can be worth as much as £3,000 (or roughly $3,900) per child every year.

According to more recent research commissioned by Labour MP Jon Trickett, simply nixing the policy would lift about 270,000 households — representing nearly a million people — out of poverty at a cost of £1.7 billion. “The consequences of this cruel Tory policy on pushing people to the brink of destitution is clear,” Trickett remarked in the Daily Mirror. “But we see that a relatively small increase in social security spending would have a huge impact on the life chances of hundreds of thousands of deprived families.”

In a sane political universe, eliminating Osborne’s cruel cap on child benefits would be a no-brainer for any center-left opposition party worth a damn. And despite having moved sharply to the right on civil liberties, taxation, environmental policy, public ownership, migrant rights, tuition fees, and the NHS, it briefly seemed that even Keir Starmer and the rest of Labour’s front bench grasped this basic reality. Deputy Leader Angela Rayner has called the policy “inhumane,” and it was barely a month ago that Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, was branding it as “heinous” and insisting it was “absolutely keeping children in poverty.” Even former Conservative cabinet minister David Freud agreed with Ashworth’s assessment, saying he had been “absolutely correct to describe it as a vicious policy.” Asked about Labour’s position on the BBC several days ago, however, Starmer was unequivocal: “We are not changing that policy.”

The U-turn, which directly contradicts Starmer’s own past comments in favor of scrapping the Tory benefits model, is the latest in a lengthy tally of rightward pivots undertaken by the post–Jeremy Corbyn Labour leadership. Starmer, who ran to succeed Corbyn on an explicit pledge to retain many of the radical policies and ideas that helped give Labour its greatest surge in support since Clement Atlee’s formative victory in 1945, has hitherto spent his tenure as leader of the opposition refashioning the party into an establishment-friendly vehicle of the technocratic center right.

Even by his own less-than-lofty standards, however, Starmer’s latest broken promise stands out for its callousness — effectively representing a conscious choice to keep hundreds of thousands of children in poverty. Beyond callousness, the probable reasoning behind this calculation is easy to discern.

The underlying theory of Starmerism is that elections are won by securing support from wealthy people and other elite constituencies. Like the Blairite ideologues that came before them, its acolytes believe that any party aspiring for power demonstrates its “credibility” and adult bona fides by distancing itself from activist policymaking and anything else that falls outside the existing elite consensus. In this case, the implication of such cynical thinking is that it’s better for countless children to stay in poverty than for a nominal party of the progressive center-left to be seen embracing a modest increase in social spending.

Starmer’s reversal has justifiably been met with a vociferous backlash from key trade unions and parts of Labour’s backbench, though recent precedent leaves little room for optimism that any of this will lead to a change in policy. Starmer has successfully routed the Left and, despite an increasing share of voters viewing him as untrustworthy, now enjoys such a massive lead in the polls that he evidently calculates it won’t matter.

As dispiriting as it is to contemplate, this calculation is almost certainly correct. Throughout their now thirteen years in power, the Conservatives have overseen the single greatest drop in living standards in the UK recorded in modern times and, thanks to both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, now preside over a regime so dilapidated and discredited that virtually any opposition would likely win the next general election by default. Since he replaced Jeremy Corbyn in early 2020, however, it’s become increasingly clear that a cabinet led by Keir Starmer will largely wield its majority to maintain Tory policies, albeit with a different brand name attached to them.

As a general rule, parties usually grow more conservative in government than they once sounded in opposition. If such a pattern holds after Labour wins the next election, this week’s U-turn on child benefits makes it genuinely chilling to consider how far to the right Keir Starmer might be willing to go as prime minister.

Ireland Should Resist the Pressure to Join the Western Military Bloc

2023-07-19T09:15:58Z

Ireland’s neutrality policy has a complex history, but it has blocked Irish participation in disastrous wars and enabled some positive interventions in world affairs. We should resist pressure to scrap neutrality, whether or not it means formally joining NATO.

Irish foreign minister David Andrews (L) is watched by NATO secretary general George Robertson (R) as he signs the Partnership for Peace document on December 1, 1999, at the NATO headquarters in Brussels. (Jacques Collet / BELGA / AFP via Getty Images)

War mania has convulsed Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. NATO is having something of a renaissance. EU member states have bought into the renewal of the alliance or plotted a kind of strategic autonomy, although some flirt with both approaches. According to the most recent estimates on the European Peace Facility (EPF), the EU’s extensive military support to Ukraine has totaled €5.6 billion.

Under relentless pressure from within and without, Finnish and Swedish neutrality came to an end last year as both states agreed to join NATO. Even nominally neutral Ireland has contributed €122 million under the EPF in “non-lethal support” for the Ukrainian military. War and its sibling, great-power rivalry, have thus unsettled century-old orthodoxies.

Against this backdrop, the Irish government recently closed the four-day Consultative Forum on International Security Policy, which was presented as a “public consultation process” after the government backed out of holding a more democratic Citizens’ Assembly. Chaired by the political scientist Louise Richardson, this forum followed months of concerted efforts by the Irish media and the government to “open a debate” on neutrality through a constant drip-feed of opinion pieces, supposedly revelatory polls, and new discoveries that allegedly undermine old shibboleths.

Dangerous Drift

This campaign has above all exhorted Irish citizens to consider how a lack of investment in the Irish Defence Forces renders the country helpless in the face of cyberwarfare and hybrid threats. We need to rethink neutrality, runs the argument, because there are recently disclosed secret air defense arrangements with Britain’s Royal Air Force to secure and defend Irish airspace, or because Russian warships have been monitored in Ireland’s “exclusive economic zone,” allegedly putting undersea cables that transmit vast internet traffic between the United States and Europe at risk of sabotage. There have also been suggestions that NATO membership might be the price Irish people need to pay for reunification.

For pro-neutrality activists and antiwar campaigners, the greatest immediate risk is to the so-called triple lock, which requires a mandate from the United Nations, a decision by the government, and a vote in Ireland’s parliament, the Dáil, in order to send more than twelve Defence Forces personnel overseas. Critics say that this mechanism gives Russia and China an unconscionable veto power over Irish missions in the UN. Yet the veto privilege is one also possessed by the United States (which has used it more than the other permanent members of the Security Council) and the UK (which is the only member of the council to have colonized Ireland and occupied it with armed forces).

A frantic energy courses through these efforts to “enlighten” the supposedly childish, myth-blinded Irish masses. However, the ruling parties have seriously miscalculated the national mood. Opinion polls consistently show that the vast majority of Irish voters believe that neutrality should be maintained. One voice of reason has been the country’s president, Michael D. Higgins, who correctly judged that Ireland is on a “dangerous drift” toward NATO.

Ireland has never been impeccably neutral, if such a thing is even possible. Commentators and activists of left and right agree that “neutrality” is an imperfect descriptor — even a diplomatic chimera of sorts. To grasp this slippery term and its even slipperier application, we must first examine the historical roots of Irish neutrality.

A Perplexing History

If neutrality’s core functions have sometimes escaped Irish governments, it has proved equally perplexing to some outsiders. The Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko once remarked to an Irish taoiseach: “I don’t understand Ireland, you are not aligned, and you are not aligned with the non-aligned.”

In his book A Singular Stance, Patrick Keatinge identified two “ideological sources” for this abstract and inscrutable “conception of neutrality.” First is the manifestation, and performance, of independent statehood; second are clear overtures to the most cosmopolitan elements within European liberalism, which he says argue for “the futility and immorality of force and the ultimate harmony of the interests of all mankind.” These conflicting notions, Keatinge suggests, “may well converge to provide an effective justification for the aspiration to be neutral.”

There are some discernible historical roots for what we today call neutrality. After World War I descended on the continent, James Connolly and others founded the Irish Neutrality League in 1914, and the slogan “We serve neither king nor kaiser” raised by Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army took on a totemic meaning for pro-neutralists and socialists alike. While the Irish Republican Brotherhood made efforts to seek support from Germany before the Easter Rising of 1916 — the proclamation of an Irish Republic mentions Ireland’s “gallant allies in Europe” — Irish neutrality received a new lease of life in 1918, when the British government considered imposing conscription in the final months of the war.

The strength of feeling against the move resulted in a mass protest campaign and a general strike. This set the seal on Sinn Féin’s rise to political hegemony in Ireland, with the party’s landslide victory in the UK election held later that year, followed by the declaration of Irish independence. Neutrality had become a political tool that allowed Irish nationalists to express sovereignty on the world stage: it was, in this view, a simple but powerful emanation of independence, and abandoning it would only reverse or undo the gains of the national revolution.

The Emergency

As neutrality’s fiercest critics like to point out, Irish rebels made a habit of seeking military assistance from various European powers in a very unneutral fashion, from the Holy See to France and Germany. Much has been written about Ireland’s sui generis foreign-policy strategy during World War II, which was referred to obliquely as “the Emergency.” Aided by censorship, the country was officially neutral yet secretly collaborated with the British state on matters of counterespionage and security.

For all the invisible collaborations, however, neutrality was never fully sacrificed. In July 1940, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera rebuffed a conditional British offer of Irish unification in return for an Irish declaration of war on Germany or agreement that British troops would be sent to southern soil.

De Valera was willing to countenance alternative arrangements that involved security cooperation with Britain. But he believed that these conditions would have meant committing the state “definitely to an immediate abandonment of our neutrality” while receiving “no guarantee that in the end we would have a united Ireland.”

During the Cold War period, it was the partition of the island that prevented Ireland from joining NATO, not any principled neutrality. Whether this was a convenient rhetorical device for Washington-sympathizing politicians or the manifestation of a deeply felt anti-partitionism, the coalition government of the late 1940s stressed that Irish agreement to join NATO would have meant recognizing British sovereignty over Northern Ireland in both de jure and de facto terms.

Adventures in Nonalignment

After Ireland joined the UN in 1955, the concept of Irish neutralism became infused with some nonaligned ideas. Fianna Fáil’s minister of external affairs Frank Aiken courted notoriety by occasionally denouncing Europe’s colonial wars — particularly France’s effort to hold on to Algeria — and voting to open discussion on the admission of the People’s Republic of China.

Aiken’s most controversial initiative was a set of proposals for mutual great-power disengagement in Central Europe. As many people do today, he understood neutrality as an opportunity rather than a constraint. As he put it in July 1961:

We have, owing to the accident of history or whatever way you like to put it, been independent, untied, neutral in the accepted sense of the term, in the military sense of the term. It was our duty as a delegation in the United Nations to take full advantage of that position, in order to promote the peace, to try to make propositions which countries tied to blocs could not make without committing their blocs.

One could sense a lingering Aiken-ism amid the surge in antiwar organizing and New Left activism in Ireland during the 1970s and ’80s. Neutrality had a substantial appeal at the time of the Cold War, allowing campaigners to press Irish governments on the chasm between Ireland’s actually existing practice of neutrality and a more uncorrupted form that would be truly aligned with peace and justice on a global scale.

As my own research has found in the case of the Irish Nicaragua Solidarity Group, activists reasoned that a position faithful to the tenets of Irish neutrality would mean explicitly condemning US interference in Central America, particularly the subversion of the Contras. Ireland’s neutrality during the Cold War functioned, in the view of the historian Van Gosse, “via a peculiar mix of Catholic nationalism, residual anti-imperialism, and emerging Euro-philism, permitting it to operate as simultaneously an anti-communist friend of the West and an anti-colonialist friend of the developing Third World.”

Today, the form of neutrality practiced and preached by the Department of Foreign Affairs has shapeshifted: Catholic nationalism and residual anti-imperialism have exited the scene, while the process of Europeanization is complete. Irish Atlanticists cling on to the idea of military neutrality, unrecognized under international law, which refers only to nonmembership of a mutual defense pact such as NATO. In fact, the post–Cold War moment saw Irish governments double down on the term “military neutrality.”

In truth, that term is a political fudge formulated by neutral states who sought membership of the European Community/European Union. They sensed that this commitment to political union would necessarily lead to a collective EU defense settlement, yet still needed to reassure voters at home that their neutrality was sacrosanct.

Debunking Myths

There is something of a cottage industry among Irish academics and journalists as well as retired politicians and diplomats who insist, through empirical reasoning, that Irish neutrality has never really existed — that it is the stuff of “mythology.” As the former Fine Gael taoiseach Garret FitzGerald wrote in 1999:

Our “traditional neutrality” was in fact an unintended historical accident . . . contrary to sedulously fostered myths, we were not neutral in the last World War; our absence from NATO has nothing to do with neutrality; and every Irish Taoiseach from 1960 to the 1990s rejected the concept of neutrality and accepted eventual Irish participation in European defence.

Let’s take these assertions one by one. Most people accept that Ireland was, as the historian Joe Lee puts it, at the very least “benevolently neutral for Britain” during World War II. On his second point, FitzGerald is right to note that Irish nationalists raised the prospect of the whole island joining NATO in exchange for reunification with Northern Ireland. His final point also stands up to scrutiny: taoiseachs such as Seán Lemass and Jack Lynch explicitly and emphatically questioned whether neutrality was necessary or even desirable.

But this all seems beside the point. Semantic quibbles aside, there is tacit agreement that Ireland has never been purely neutral across the political spectrum, from socialists and republicans to liberals and conservatives. Supporters and opponents of NATO both dispute the purity of this long-standing policy, citing the same examples but to completely different ends.

For FitzGerald and many of his ilk, Ireland must come to its senses and cast off these mythological pretensions so that it can join the Western alliance to which it belongs. In trademark fatalistic language, Fintan O’Toole, the country’s foremost liberal public intellectual, recently expressed this perspective when he claimed that “Ireland is too much part of the West to stand apart from it.”

Even if the political class conflated neutrality with nonmembership of NATO, a war-averse Irish people expanded it into a much broader idea, as Karen Devine has argued — one rooted in a commitment to the UN, to development aid and human rights, to peacekeeping and attempting to pursue a foreign policy independent of large, powerful states. But how have these ideals survived the last thirty years of NATO collaboration and encroaching EU militarization?

Orbiting NATO

Although politically effective in one sense, the line many activists take — that Irish people must view the current debate as a Trojan Horse for imminent NATO ascension — sometimes misses the precise nature of Ireland’s watered-down neutrality. No party is pushing directly for Ireland to join NATO, at least for the time being, so we should set our eyes on the current order of things.

Irish citizens voted to reject EU treaties on two occasions, to a significant extent because of a perception that they represented threats to Irish neutrality. Both the Nice and Lisbon treaties had to be approved in a second referendum after they failed to pass the first hurdle. EU treaties even contained specific provisions for Ireland and other neutral states.

For example, the Lisbon Treaty safeguards the “specific character of the security and defence policy of certain member states” by exempting them from participating in the NATO Article 5 mutual assistance clause. A lesser-known consequence of the Lisbon Treaty, in Irish quarters at least, is that it guaranteed EU dependency on NATO, with stipulations that the security and defense policies of member states must be “consistent” with NATO.

While many dispute that this exemption even qualifies an opt-out from collective security, it has been said to allow for “active neutrality,” exemplified by Ireland’s long history of supporting and participating in peacekeeping missions. As Carol Fox reminds us when writing about Ireland’s efforts to promote peace through disarmament, Irish negotiators could leverage neutrality to initiate the efforts that led to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Ireland has long been pulled into the NATO orbit, having joined the alliance’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) program in 1999, though its neutral status limits its contributions. Facilitated by PfP, Ireland looks set to take part in a brand-new NATO project called the Critical Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell. In 2024, its forces will take part in an exercise called Thor’s Hammer in Indiana. A representative of the Irish Defence Forces currently chairs the Partner Interoperability Advocacy Group, which strives to strengthen cooperation between NATO members and partner states like Ireland.

Some insist that a nonaligned, virtually unarmed Ireland is Europe’s “worst security policy free rider.” Three months before the Consultative Forum on Security Policy, the NATO deputy secretary general, Mircea Geoană, addressed an Irish audience, pointedly telling them that the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines had brought “into sharp focus” the security of undersea cables connecting Ireland to North America and Europe: “As an advanced, knowledge based economy, with thriving technology, pharmaceutical, and financial sectors, ensuring Ireland’s resilience will be critical in the years ahead.”

The NATO-Ireland partnership is expanding slowly but is still relatively insubstantial, constricted in part by its political toxicity. Nevertheless, these paeans from NATO to Ireland’s economic system indicate that a quiet displeasure lurks beneath the organization’s public face. In the eyes of NATO officials, they can untangle this stubborn knot of neutrality through mechanisms of collaboration — a destination short of full membership that we should still find troubling.

EU Militarization

Under the cover of Brexit and the pandemic, the EU to which Ireland has chained itself has bolstered its security policy and boosted defense spending. As the Financial Times recently observed, the war in Ukraine has further galvanized “efforts to make good on vague or failed ideas to bolster Europe’s status as a cohesive global military power.” In a bellicose speech in May, a high-ranking EU official promised an audience of European defense-industry representatives, NATO staffers, and admirals that the EU will transition into “war economy mode” to feed the industrial appetite for weaponry and materiel.

Aside from Irish participation in Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), another alarming development — agreed last December — was the launch of the €8 billion European Defence Fund (EDF). This is intended to develop new weapons and technology for militaries within the EU and abroad. Similarly, the European Peace Facility is set to improve the EU’s ability to provide training and equipment, including weapons, to non-EU military forces.

Indeed, 2022 was a milestone year for militarization. The Strategic Compass committed the EU to the establishment of a “Rapid Deployment Capacity of up to 5000 troops for different types of crises.” As a 2021 report by members of the European Network Against Arms Trade observed:

EU Member States and institutions — with substantial lobbying by the European arms and security industries — have advanced the militarisation of the EU at a worrying pace . . . to the detriment of Member State cooperation on social issues and peace.

From an Irish perspective, there is also an industrial consideration. The value of military equipment exported from Ireland soared from €42.3 million in 2019 to €108.5 million in 2020. The development of a burgeoning defense industry, which could take advantage of a very low corporation tax rate, other tax loopholes, and a pool of highly skilled workers, would push Ireland by default further in the direction of alignment. Over time, will Ireland seek to benefit from and contribute to the EU’s self-declared “war economy mode”?

Predictably enough, even peacekeeping capacities seem to be giving way to missions evoking militarist zeal. Earlier this year, the Irish government announced that it was withdrawing a large peacekeeping mission in Syria from April 2024 so that it can redeploy personnel to the EU Battlegroups — yet another ominous outgrowth of EU militarization.

The Meanings of Neutrality

There are several arguments — some more persuasive than others — that suggest that Irish neutrality is meaningless, whether on account of Ireland’s EU membership, its failure to join the Non-Aligned Movement at the peak of its influence during the Cold War, or its record of voting with the United States more than many other neutral or formerly neutral states at the UN. There is also an oft-repeated view that Ireland benefits from an accident of geography since its borders do not straddle those of a war-making power (although this fact should give the state more reason to be neutral, not less).

Yet there is still more substance to Irish neutrality than some would contend. It is not merely a curiosity or a historical essence. Nor is it purely “mythological.” The implied (and sometimes explicit) endorsement of Euro-American foreign-policy objectives by successive Irish governments, evident throughout the past few decades, still never led to Irish soldiers occupying Afghanistan, or bombing Libya, or training Malian soldiers who led a coup.

The crucial question facing the Irish antiwar movement is this: can there be any true rupture in Irish foreign policy without transforming the Irish economic model and the state’s political culture, so reliant on EU membership and an umbilical relationship with US capital?

As Irish Times journalist Conor Gallagher has shown, the decision to allow the US army use of Shannon Airport — most heinously for extraordinary rendition flights — could be explained at least in part by government worries that a refusal might disrupt US investment in Ireland. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs also uncritically swallows and regurgitates the EU line on geopolitical issues, carefully diverging from that line only by degree when a neutral-esque pose appears suitable.

Having long been a stalwart of the pro-neutrality camp, Sinn Féin has shown signs of willingness to blunt the edges of its stance, as demonstrated by the party’s recent dropping of a pledge to withdraw Ireland from PESCO and PfP if it forms a government. For now, however, the party is still arguing against further steps toward militarization. As Gallagher summarized his conversation with Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald on neutrality:

One thing is not up for discussion: while Sinn Féin may accept that Ireland would have to remain in the PfP programme, there would be no further integration with Nato structures if the party were in government. In other words, under a Sinn Féin government, there is no chance of Ireland moving to the second level of PfP, as countries like Finland, Sweden and Ukraine have done in recent years.

She also wanted the EU to formally recognize Irish neutrality:

One of McDonald’s goals if Sinn Féin takes power is to place Irish neutrality in the basic law of the EU in a way that goes far beyond the “specific character” reference contained in the Lisbon Treaty. Such a move would put Irish neutrality on par with the Swiss version in terms of international legal recognition of its status.

McDonald argues that Ireland could form part of a network of states that “could take the lead in EU conflict resolution efforts in situations where the involvement of EU-Nato members could prove counterproductive.”

At any rate, popular support for the principle of neutrality does not appear to be waning. Formally placing this policy in the Irish constitution, as People Before Profit has argued should be done, could be on the agenda if there is a Sinn Féin–led government after the next general election.

A Pretty Good Fight

At the height of the Cold War, the historian and campaigner E. P. Thompson called for a policy of “active neutrality”:

Not the passive self-preserving isolationism of a small power, but positive, indeed aggressive, foreign policy aimed at relaxing East-West tension, dismantling military blocs, and resuming economic, cultural and political intercourse between the Communist and non-Communist world.

It would no doubt be a delusion of grandeur to think that Ireland could manage by itself to ease geopolitical tensions or de-escalate conflict. Yet as a small state, it is Ireland’s duty to promote peace on a global scale at every opportunity.

The neutrality debate also reveals real anxieties about Irish national identity in an age of hyper-globalization. Early Irish leaders and diplomats may have occasionally spoken the language of anti-colonialism. But as Conor Cruise O’Brien once suggested, there was a somewhat irresolvable tension between this part of Irish history and the sense of Europeanness that was being cultivated:

Ireland’s love of freedom had to be balanced against Ireland’s Common Market hopes; love of freedom put up, it must be said, a pretty good fight, but it did not always come out the winner.

We should hope that Ireland’s love of peace wins out over both “Common Market hopes” and Common Defence fantasies in this age of tumult and a New Cold War.

AI Is Being Used to Attack the Working Poor

2023-07-18T15:43:25Z

In Australia, automated decision-making technologies have extorted half a million welfare recipients. Despite government recriminations, the use of artificial intelligence to harass workers is only gaining ground.

Over 90 percent of Australian bosses are using digital tools to police worker productivity. (Thomas Jackson / Getty Images)

Australian business and government have joined the global chorus warning about the risks artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity. But despite their fretful tone, the introduction of algorithms into Australian political life has been less apocalyptic and more business-as-usual. Changes to the Australian welfare system are a prime example. Punitive and difficult-to-access by design, the system is now best known for a disastrous algorithmic innovation nicknamed robodebt.

Robodebt was designed by the Liberal Party and high-level Australian public servants to ostensibly catch “welfare cheats.” It ran from 2016 until it was declared illegal in 2019. A royal commission into the now-infamous scheme handed down its findings last week. They were, unsurprisingly, scathing. The scheme relied on a rigid and flawed algorithm that erroneously issued threatening debt repayment notices to around half a million Australians. Over its short but catastrophic life span, robodebt resulted in deaths, suicides, impoverishment, housing stress, and mass trauma.

The fallout from the scheme and the commission’s predictable findings is ongoing. But the whole sordid saga has raised many questions. These relate not only to the corrupt and cruel behavior of politicians and the public service, but also to the uses and abuses of algorithms and AI in Australians’ working lives.

The Labor government, relishing the ignominy heaped upon its predecessor, has issued a slew of reports and discussion papers on the “safe and responsible” use of AI in Australia. But these reports, quite naturally, avoid discussion of what technological advances in capitalism are generally designed to do: prolong the working day, intensify the labor process for workers, and maximize profits for big business.

“An Ice Cube’s Chance in Hell…”

When it was launched in 2016, the robodebt scheme came under instant fire for its flawed premise and formulation. The algorithm measured tax return information, which is calculated annually, against social security payments, which are paid fortnightly. If the averaged annual income did not match the amount reported fortnightly by a social security payment recipient, the algorithm automatically declared the discrepancy a debt and issued a menacing repayment order. Then human services minister Alan Tudge appeared on television to echo the threat, warning “we’ll find you, we’ll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison.”

Before the scheme had even launched, lawyers at the Department of Social Services warned that all this was probably illegal. Repeated external legal advice over the next few years confirmed this assessment. But public servants admitted in the royal commission that these concerns were discarded because the scheme had political backing from then prime minister Scott Morrison. At the time, Morrison had tied his political fortunes to the demonization of welfare recipients and refugees. He argued that “just like they won’t cop people coming on boats, they are not going to cop people who are going to rort that system. So there does need to be a strong welfare cop on the beat.”

As critics instantly pointed out, robodebt made absolutely no sense: social security legislation had been repeatedly amended to force welfare recipients into casual and part-time work. Most didn’t earn a regular salary each fortnight, but the unreliable, piecemeal wages that the legislation cajoled them to earn.

In the nightmare scenario that ensued, the algorithm’s assessments were not just incorrect, they were more or less incontestable. Once the algorithm had declared you guilty, the only way to prove your innocence was to produce pay slips for the period in question. But if you weren’t actually working at that time — a reasonable prospect for someone who has turned to the social safety net — this was literally impossible.

Robodebt did not technically involve AI, but a clunky algorithm known as an automated decision-making (ADM) system. This was not for lack of trying. After the scheme launched to howls of derision, the Liberal government desperately tried to get the government agency responsible for scientific research to invent an AI up to the task of hunting down the working poor. They were told it was not possible.

If the robodebt algorithm played the role of judge and jury, private debt collection companies kindly stepped in as executioner. Some were owned by huge venture capital firms with ties to the Liberal Party. They were paid commissions — essentially bounties — to extort as much money as they could as quickly as possible from the algorithm’s innocent victims. Corrupt megaconsultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) also put its snout in the trough. Incorrectly confident that robodebt would guarantee it some profit for years, PwC nevertheless received $1 million to produce a report about the scheme’s flaws. The report never materialized — PwC was asked to disappear it with “a nod and a wink.”

Overall, robodebt aimed to “recoup” a largely imaginary AUD$2 billion. It cost $606 million to administer up until 2019 and managed to extort $785 million from innocent people. Once the scheme’s illegality was officially declared, this was all then “paid back” under a $1.8 billion settlement. Only a small fraction of this, however, went to the actual victims.

So, apart from costing lives and livelihoods, robodebt cost the Australian taxpayer dearly. It’s worth noting that the paltry amount the scheme initially promised to recoup from the working poor pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars Australia loses every year through pro-rich scams like tax havens and negative gearing.

Between Equal Rights, Hal Decides

The robodebt scheme highlights the insidious way new technology has been harnessed to punish welfare recipients. But welfare recipients aren’t the only section of society to come under its sway.

A report from global law firm Herbert Smith Freehills on the monitoring of employees found that over 90 percent of Australian bosses are using digital tools to police worker productivity. As one of the firm’s Australian partners winced,

dystopian is not the right word but there is this sort of omnipresence that people’s movements are being monitored, in a way that I think as Australians we haven’t previously been used to.

This looks different in different contexts. In the insecure gig economy, arbitrary algorithmic decisions enforce 50 percent pay cuts. In the low-paid and highly monopolistic warehousing industry, Australian workers wear algorithm-powered headsets that enforce backbreaking pick rates. Workers at Coles and Amazon report that these algorithms function as unsympathetic overseers policing them down to the second. Even white-collar employees at companies like PwC are being harassed by AI to account for toilet breaks.

As a recent report from the Australia Institute showed, there are very few areas of the economy that are not being affected by the intrusion of algorithms and AI. Companies try to defend these tools as inspired by health, security, or environmental concerns. The obvious truth is that whether it’s in gig, manual, or corporate workplaces, they are designed solely to intensify the working day and squeeze every last cent of possible profit out of the workforce.

This increased scrutiny and intensity contrasts markedly with the treatment awarded to Australian bosses. In March, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services found that the corporate regulator Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) was employing an automated digital tool to sift through criminal complaints about company directors. The AI only referred 3 percent of complaints to a higher, human level, despite the vast majority including allegations of criminal behavior. In marked contrast to robodebt, the ASIC algorithm is literally programmed to presume innocence on the part of tens of thousands of dodgy bosses.

Do Algorithms Make History?

There has been a lot of scaremongering about AI from big business in recent months. But if bosses are doing so well from technological advances, why all the fussing?

A quick glance at the Labor government’s recent reports on AI reveals something illuminating. They might be put in the context of warnings about AI-driven apocalypse, but they largely express concern about Australian companies’ ability to gain market share of emerging sectors that are already dominated by US companies. If the US tech barons’ recent calls for greater regulation are in fact a call for a greater shift of power to themselves, Australian business monopolists’ whining is more about foreign monopolies.

The Labor government has compared robodebt to the punitive poorhouses of the nineteenth century. Australia’s Amazon and supermarket warehouses, with their digital foremen, have been likened to sweatshops of the same era. Despite their futuristic hype, recent technological advances are reproducing — in a new and twisted way — the enduring logic of our wheezing mode of production: monopoly, with fewer and fewer opportunities for expansion, and exploitation, at an ever-increasing intensity.

Michigan Amazon Workers Staged a Walkout on Prime Day

2023-07-18T15:09:39Z

Joined by striking delivery drivers, last week Amazon workers in a Michigan warehouse staged the largest delivery station strike yet.

Amazon warehouse workers on strike at a Pontiac, Michigan facility, July 14, 2023. (Amazon Teamsters / Twitter)

In the middle of Amazon’s “Prime Day” promotional sales rush, sixty warehouse workers walked out for more than three hours at the company’s delivery station in Pontiac, Michigan — bringing the facility to the brink of a total shutdown.

A delivery station is the last warehouse an Amazon package passes through before it is loaded into a truck or van en route to the customer.

This year’s Prime Day shopping bonanza on July 11 and 12 set a record for the largest sales day in Amazon’s history. The crush of Prime Day puts even more pressure on workers to keep up with conveyor belts overflowing with boxes that can weigh as much as fifty pounds.

“We are demanding a safe work environment where we are not straining, pulling muscles from lifting heavy packages, or tripping over boxes falling off the conveyor belt,” said Alicia Ozier, one of the strikers at the delivery station.

She and her coworkers walked out after Amazon retaliated by refusing to accommodate her when she sustained an injury on the job.

They were joined by Amazon delivery drivers from Palmdale, California, who recently organized with the Teamsters. Those drivers have been on strike for three weeks, during which time they have picketed nine Amazon facilities around the country.

That strike “shows that workers can fight back against this company,” said Pontiac warehouse worker Nick White in a press release. “We invited them to extend their picket line to Michigan because this is one fight.”

Primed for Injury

Safety is a top issue among Amazon’s 1.6 million employees worldwide. That number doesn’t include 275,000 Amazon delivery drivers who are nominally employed by contractors through the company’s Delivery Service Partner program. Amazon says it employs twenty-thousand workers in Michigan across twenty facilities.

Workers at Amazon warehouses in the United States sustained nearly thirty-nine thousand injuries in 2022, according to the Strategic Organizing Center, and the injury rate at Amazon warehouses is 70 percent higher than other warehouses.

The company pushes workers to a pace that breaks down their bodies, influencing the productivity metrics and robotics of competitors like Walmart and Target.

“It’s very rare to walk into a warehouse in any industry at all and see a million units being shipped,” Marc Wulfraat, a longtime consultant in the logistics industry who runs the consulting firm MWPVL International, told Vox last year.

“A million a week is a high-volume operation, but Amazon, on a peak day, is doing a million units a day,” Wulfraat said. “In the history of warehouses, we’ve never seen these levels of automation coupled with these rates.”

Last October, Ozier and her coworkers marched on management to deliver a petition demanding that Amazon slow down its dangerous line speed and stop deducting hours from workers’ time-off bank for being mere minutes late.

“Amazon grants us UPT [unpaid time off],” she said, and then “steals it back in one-hour increments instead of the true time, or the minimum 15 minutes.” If you run out of UPT, you can get fired.

Another sore point: “We should not have to use our vacation, paid time off, or unpaid time off to cover an illness,” Ozier said on the bustling picket line. “We want sick time.”

Through petitions, marches on the boss, and button-up actions, the workers in the delivery station have already notched some wins. For one, Amazon now provides them with bottled water at all times. (Due to failing infrastructure, northern Michigan has been experiencing periodic water advisories, when tap water isn’t safe to drink unless you boil it first — so workers can’t use the warehouse water fountains.)

Workers also gained a modicum of shop-floor control when Amazon agreed to allow them to stop the conveyor belt if there was an unsafe situation.

Scorching heat was another concern; they’ve been toiling in what Ozier describes as “near-heatstroke conditions.” The workers forced Amazon to install fans. But this remedy was short-lived — once the fans broke down, Amazon didn’t replace them, said White, interviewed on the picket line.

In May, Amazon started holding captive-audience meetings to pressure the workers not to form a union.

Fudging the Numbers

An Amazon spokesperson downplayed the Pontiac walkout: “With less than one percent of the employees at the facilities participating in today’s protest, we don’t anticipate any significant impact on our operations.”

She described DDT6 as a fulfillment center that opened this year with 1,200 employees.

But those figures are garbled. Delivery stations like DDT6 employ on average one hundred to two hundred workers. A fulfillment center is a much larger warehouse where customer orders are received and items are packed for shipping.

There is a large robotic fulfillment center DET3, which employs three thousand people, located at the same Pontiac site. Both facilities opened in 2021.

Asked to clarify, the spokesperson wrote only, “Apologies, Luis — that should say DET6. Thanks for checking!” But DET6 is a whole different fulfillment center, seventeen miles away in Detroit.

Unfortunately, local news reports didn’t catch the obfuscation and wrote things like, “A fraction of those workers — close to 100 people — were on the line Friday.”

Competitive Wages

In their petition last fall, the delivery station workers also demanded to restore a $3 peak-season pay increase, which Amazon had revoked in January 2022.

“Amazon sells this place as a career, but our workers shouldn’t have to DoorDash, they shouldn’t have to Uber, they shouldn’t have to do all these side gigs in order to make ends meet,” said White. He makes $19.45 — the $17.95 base rate plus a $1.50 night-shift differential.

Employers struggled to attract and retain warehouse workers early in the pandemic, which caused a shift in spending from services to goods, said Monique Morrissey, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Non-college-educated workers had found new leverage by quitting and moving to better-paying or easier jobs, forcing Amazon and its competitors to respond with sign-on bonuses and wage increases. White saw ads from Walmart and Target last year advertising warehouse jobs that started in the $20 to $24 range.

“No doubt Amazon had to prominently advertise an increase in pay in response to negative reports about the company’s poor working conditions and low wages,” said Morrissey.

But wages have since slumped. Hiring website ZipRecruiter lists $15 to $16.50 for a Walmart freight handler in Madison Heights, Michigan; Indeed.com shows a Target overnight warehouse job starting at $15.25 in Sterling Heights. Amazon didn’t bother adding any peak-season bump last year.

Overall, Amazon has put downward pressure on wages in the industry. US warehouse wages have fallen over the last decade to an annual average of $45,900, which is far below what workers were making decades ago — even as warehouse employment soared to 1.5 million by 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Across all industries, while worker productivity surged 62 percent from 1979 to 2020, average hourly pay crawled up just 17 percent when adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

In 2018, in response to mounting organizing and political pressure, Amazon announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $15. At the same time, UPS Teamsters were in contract negotiations. UPS part-timers, who work in warehouses sorting parcels and loading them into delivery trucks, were pressing for a $15 starting wage.

But the union capitulated to a $13 starting rate, rising to $15.50 in 2022. Part-timers already on the job got no catch-up raise to stay ahead of new hires. Then president James P. Hoffa Jr forced the contract through even after a majority voted it down. This year, with new leadership, the Teamsters are fighting for higher starting wages for new hires and catch-up increases for current employees.

Industry Standard

In Palmdale, the delivery drivers negotiated a contract with Amazon’s subcontractor for $30 an hour — but Amazon terminated the contractor. They are now fighting for Amazon to honor that contract and bargain with the union as a joint employer.

Meanwhile at UPS, part-timers are pushing for $25 an hour, more full-time jobs, and an end to the “market rate adjustments” that allow the company to hike wages to attract new hires when the labor market is tight and lower them when the labor supply is plentiful.

UPS Teamsters have already won many of their key noneconomic demands, but with negotiations at a standstill over part-time pay and other top economic demands, they’re hitting the bricks around the country in “practice picketing.” Their contract expires July 31.

A strong Teamster contract at UPS could show Amazon workers what a union can do. At a practice picket outside a Brooklyn UPS hub on July 14, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien rallied Local 804 members.

“UPS is going to strike themselves unless they get real, get smart,” he said over cheers and clapping. “They made $100 billion off all of you. Now is the time to reward the people that made them a tremendous success.

“We need to take this contract as a model, as an industry standard to organize the unorganized.”

Former Labor Notes staff member Zach Rioux contributed reporting from Pontiac, Michigan.

Americans Feel Negatively About Biden’s Economy Because There’s a Lot to Feel Negative About

2023-07-18T14:22:00Z

Pundits are insisting Americans only feel bad about the economy because they’re ignorant or delusional. But maybe it has something to do with the very real economic hardships Americans are still suffering three years after the worst of the pandemic economy.

Bronx residents receive food at the St Helena Pantry in the Bronx on September 28, 2022 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

Why aren’t Americans jumping for joy about the economy? Pundits have come up with the answer: Americans just don’t get how good they’ve got it.

“You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid,” Paul Krugman recently wrote while pondering this question, before quickly suggesting this was the case anyway. There are “huge gaps between what people say about the economy and both what the data says and what they say about their own experience,” Krugman remarked, blaming partisanship, the media, and economists’ predictions for this gulf in perception.

He’s far from the only one. In a piece titled “America Is Doing Just Fine,” millionaire MSNBC talking head Joe Scarborough pointed to macroeconomic figures like GDP growth and the size of California’s economy to insist that “your country is doing pretty damn well.” In a recent appearance on Stephanie Ruhle’s show on the network, economist Justin Wolfers assured viewers that it was all just the warping effect of partisanship and that Americans simply “tell themselves stories that are completely at odds with reality.”

Let’s give these commentators their due: it’s true that there are many bright spots in this economy. The 2021 stimulus worked, combining with the unusually generous pandemic relief programs to pull the country away from the economic cliff and give a shot in the arm to the personal finances of many American households. What’s more, it looks likely that contrary to neoliberal doomsaying, the inflation that followed the stimulus (when it wasn’t being driven by the shocks of the Ukraine war and corporate greed) really was simply a temporary side effect of this spending, with inflation recently easing despite a lack of job losses. Unemployment is low, those at the bottom saw the biggest wage gains, and income inequality has actually narrowed for the first time since Richard Nixon was president.

But as heartening as all this is, fixating on these metrics masks just how badly the US political economy continues to fail the people it’s meant to serve.

More than two million people have lost their Medicaid coverage as of mid-July since President Joe Biden unwound the pandemic emergency declaration, many of them simply thanks to administrative errors, with millions more tipped to lose the affordable, publicly provided health insurance coverage in a country where not having it can mean bankruptcy or death. The end of the declaration also triggered food stamp cuts that deprived forty-two million Americans of an average $90 a month, even as high as $250 a month.

Evictions are soaring around the country, more than 50 percent higher than the pre-pandemic average in some cities, as the protections renters enjoyed during the emergency have similarly ended. As a result, homelessness has shot up nearly 40 percent from last year in major cities like New York and Chicago, an understatement of the problem since cities like San Francisco and Seattle, where the crisis is at fever pitch, weren’t included in that particular count. Meanwhile, the student loan repayment pause that gave households financial breathing room to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month is now likewise kaput thanks to the White House’s June debt ceiling deal.

Childcare — which has gone up 220 percent in cost over the past thirty-three years and is leading women to drop out of the workforce to save money — is set to get even more expensive this September when federal funding for providers is due to run out, another pandemic-era welfare policy started under Donald Trump that will sunset under the current Democratic president.

While the Inflation Reduction Act will eventually lower prices for some prescription drugs when that provision kicks in three years from now, at the moment, they’re so expensive that nine million people have failed to properly take their medication as a way to trim costs. The highest share of adults (28 percent) since 2014 skipped medical treatment due to cost last year, while Obamacare premiums went up 3.4 percent this year after three consecutive years of falling.

The pundits insist that all that’s happening is that Americans are expressing how they feel about the economy, not what they feel about their own, supposedly fantastic personal financial situations. But this isn’t borne out by recent surveys.

A March poll found 70 percent of Americans are financially stressed, with 58 percent living paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s ten-year-long “Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking” found the proportion of those feeling worse off had spiked fifteen points this year to the highest level in the poll’s history, while the share reporting they were doing “at least ok financially” dropped by the largest number on record from the previous year’s high.

A different March poll found that 60 percent have no retirement savings account, while 45 percent can’t cover a $1,000 emergency. In fact, a Fed survey conducted in October last year and released in May paints an even more dire picture, with 37 percent unable to even cover one worth $400. According to another, nearly a third of Americans report a net worth of zero or in the negatives, including about a fifth of those aged fifty-nine and older.

A poll released by Provident Bank in March has 17 percent of Americans with no savings at all and an uptick in those who report spending hundreds more per month on groceries. The US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey for June had nearly twenty-seven million Americans reporting not having enough to eat either sometimes or often, 12 percent higher than the same time last year and 4 percent more than even the month before.

If we’re to believe the pundits, these people are all delusional. Their lack of savings, inability to afford food or health care, feelings of financial stress, or even experience of being thrown out of their homes — they’ve simply made it all up because a Democrat is in the White House. Well-paid commentators on cable news and legacy papers, after all, know what’s going on with your financial situation better than you do.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. There’s an election coming where Trump or another scary Republican will be on the ticket, and there is a pronounced lack of enthusiasm, among both rank-and-file Democrats and big-money donors, for the Democratic incumbent. There’s a very real risk they’re going to screw this up.

And as always, rather than pushing the president to do more to protect working Americans and take on corporate greed, and thereby give them an actual stake in the election result, the Democratic machine has decided instead to blame the ignorant masses for not realizing how great their leader is, preemptively absolving themselves of any blame for what happens next year in the eyes of loyal party voters, while lulling those same voters into self-assured inaction.

The Biden stimulus worked, as many pro-Democratic pundits and left-leaning economists said it would. The problem is that this alone was not enough to fix the deeply rooted, structural pain that’s plagued the country long before the pandemic, and there seems to be little appetite to pressure the current White House to try.

If pundits want to spend their time assuring liberal readers that it’s the voters who are wrong about this economy, that’s their prerogative. But let’s not pretend this is much more than political messaging driven by election fears. In the meantime, there certainly are Americans out there telling themselves stories at odds with reality; they just happen to all be in the media.

André Gorz Was the Theorist Who Predicted the Revolt Against Meaningless Work

2023-07-18T12:54:26Z

The COVID-19 pandemic led millions of people to question their meaningless jobs. French socialist thinker André Gorz anticipated this shift, sketching out a vision of a new civilization that would free us from the constraints of work.

A young André Gorz.

Throughout his career as a writer, André Gorz was engaged in critical reflection on the nature of work and the capitalist economy, which only came to an end with his death at the age of eighty-four in 2007. He highlighted the ways in which work was being transformed by neoliberalism with the end of stable employment and the postindustrial stratagems of financialized capitalism.

His groundbreaking work Farewell to the Working Class, which argued that work was becoming less significant as a focus for political mobilization in the leading capitalist societies, was poorly received by left-wing writers at the time of its publication in 1980. Yet more than four decades later, its relevance and topicality appear striking.

This may seem like a strange argument to make, since the current economic climate has resulted in a marked fall in unemployment, with stock markets demonstrating a certain resilience in Europe and the United States alike. But we have to consider the wider impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many young people experienced the lockdown as a period without work, which made them reflect on the meaning of their lives and the meaningless of the jobs they have had to do so far. “Bullshit jobs,” as David Graeber called them, came under scrutiny. The “Exodus” predicted by Gorz — more recently dubbed the “Great Resignation” by Anthony Klotz — has started to become a reality.

In the United States, a total of forty-seven million workers quit their jobs in 2021. Turnover is common in times of economic recovery. The difference now is that people are not just using a change of job as a way to improve their pay and working conditions. For many, it is an opportunity to rethink their goals in life.

The Opacity of Production

In Farewell to the Working Class, Gorz questioned the traditional Marxist view that capitalist development was creating the material preconditions of socialism, with a working class that could take over the existing means of production from the capitalists:

The productive forces called into being by capitalist development are so profoundly tainted by their origins that they are incapable of accommodation to a socialist rationality. Should a socialist society be established, they will have to be entirely remoulded.

For Gorz, it had been a particular layer of skilled workers who were able to think of gaining control over the capitalist factory:

The idea of a subject-class of united producers capable of seizing power has been specific to these skilled workers proud of their trade. To them, power was not something abstract but a matter of daily experience: on the factory floor, power was theirs, they ruled over production. Their irreplaceable skills and practical know-how placed them at the top of a factory hierarchy that was the inverse of the social hierarchy. The boss, the chief engineer and the inspectors alike depended upon the know-how of the skilled worker, which was complementary and often superior to theirs. They had to rely on the workers’ cooperation and advice, to win their respect and loyalty, whereas the skilled workers themselves needed neither the boss nor the “officers of production” to perform work.

However, Taylorism and automation had gradually reduced the size and influence of this layer of workers. Gorz noted the advent of what we now call neoliberalism, which liquidated the Fordist-style large factory and broke the back of the trade unions, weakening the working class in both political and sociological terms. The years that followed saw relentless waves of automation, subcontracting, offshoring, and privatization, combined with the rollback of the welfare state, the growth of services, and the financialization of the economy.

This showed workers that they had no control over production or the goals that capitalism was pursuing on a global scale. The idea of workers’ control and self-management had been a cherished objective for the Western labor movement during the 1960s and ’70s, at the height of its power. It was now no more than a chimera, according to Gorz:

It is no longer possible to regard the factory as an economic unit. It has become a productive unit integrated with other productive units often long distances away, dependent upon a centralised management coordinating dozens of productive units for its supplies, outlets, product lines etc. In other words, the sites of production are no longer the sites of decision-making and economic power. The social process of production has become opaque, and this opacity has come to affect the work process in every technical unit. The final destination and even the very nature of what is produced remains unknown. Apart from management, nobody knows exactly what the things being produced are for — and in any event nobody gives a toss.

Heteronomy

Gorz described the alienation of contemporary work, produced by an uncontrollable economic megamachine, as a functional “heteronomy” of the worker, who now belonged to “the non-class of post-industrial proletarians.” Work itself could no longer be the focus of their social identity:

The neo-proletariat is generally over-qualified for the jobs it finds. It is generally condemned to under-use of its capacities when it is in work, and to unemployment itself in the longer term. Any employment seems to be accidental and provisional, every type of work purely contingent. It cannot feel any involvement with “its” work or identification with “its” job. Work no longer signifies an activity or even a major occupation; it is merely a blank interval on the margins of life, to be endured in order to earn a little money.

For three decades after the neoliberal era began, this new social configuration generated high structural unemployment. The so-called precariat has become the typical face of employment, and expectations of work have collapsed.

At the same time, what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello dubbed “the new spirit of capitalism” was put into effect, notably with the introduction of a new, more individualized approach to labor relations, supposedly geared toward greater involvement and autonomy for workers. We now know that these managerial practices, far from liberating workers, have enslaved them even more.

They find themselves exposed to the stress of individualized performance appraisal and burnout. “Autonomy” can involve bogus self-employment with no rights or benefits while remaining subject to the tyranny of the company’s deadlines, or even to algorithmic management surveillance.

Gorz anticipated such trends in Farewell to the Working Class:

For workers, it is no longer a question of freeing themselves within work, putting themselves in control of work, or seizing power within the framework of their work. The point now is to free oneself from work by rejecting its nature, content, necessity, and modalities. But to reject work is also to reject the traditional strategy and organizational forms of the working-class movement. It is no longer a question of winning power as a worker, but of winning the power to no longer function as a worker.

Cognitive Capitalism

Gorz argued that the general intellect, as Marx called it, was becoming the main productive force of contemporary capitalism — he used the term “cognitive capitalism” to analyze this development. As he wrote in 1998:

Human capital — i.e. inventiveness, creativity, the capacity to learn — is today more important than material capital in the process of valorization, because from now on immediate labor, as Marx called it, represents only a small fraction of the time used by labor power to produce and reproduce itself.

This subordinate and heavily supervised form of “autonomy” has an extraordinary — and potentially revolutionary — side to it, because it stimulates a countertendency by encouraging the aspiration of individuals for autonomy from the economy itself. Gorz was no longer betting on emancipation through work, but rather on emancipation from work itself. “The question of the meaning of life, of final ends, of rationality is posed in a new way,” he asserted in 1985.

As an inveterate existentialist, Gorz was convinced that this question could not find an answer outside the individual subject, who always retained an innate capacity for rebellion against the social order, despite the functional socialization that he or she underwent through work. Contrary to the arguments of Gorz’s friend, the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the task of reducing individuals to the status of docile workers or consumers was never complete.

In a system where, as Gorz puts it, “we produce nothing of what we consume, and consume nothing of what we produce,” it is up to each and every one of us, connecting with others as a collective mass, to regain control over the meaning of work and over the determination of the needs that legitimize it. This is also the way for us to question the disastrous impact that the economy is having on the environment through its blind logic of profit and growth.

Firstly, we have to get rid of the productivist ideology of work, which is promoted by employers but also by an important part of the Left, leading us to believe that work is a natural thing with its own inherent value, regardless of its economic purpose and environmental impact. Secondly, we have to move away from the injunction, promoted through advertising, to consume anything and everything, regardless of our needs or the ecological quality of the product.

In Farewell to the Working Class, Gorz criticized the usual benchmarks deployed for calculating economic success:

They present any growth in output and purchasing as a rise in national wealth, even if it includes the growing quantity of throw-away packaging, gadgets and metal thrown on the refuse-tips, paper burnt along with rubbish, non-repairable household goods; it even includes artificial limbs and medical care required by victims of industrial or road accidents. Destruction officially appears as a source of wealth since the replacement of everything broken, thrown out or lost gives rise to new production, sales, monetary flows, and profits. The more quickly things are broken, worn out, made obsolete or thrown away, the larger the GNP will be and the wealthier the national statistics will say we are. Even illness and physical injury are presented as sources of wealth, for they swell the consumption of drugs and health-care facilities.

An Ecological Civilization

Gorz outlined his vision of an ecological civilization that will emancipate us from the constraints of work in writings that can be found in two posthumous collections, Ecologica (2008) and Leur écologie et la nôtre (Their ecology and ours [2020]). He identified three pillars of the transition to this state of affairs:

1) A drastic reduction in working hours, with the possibility of choosing part-time work. This would be the first step toward freeing up time for those currently in work, while at the same time giving others access to employment, and making thankless yet socially necessary work more bearable.

2) The introduction of a universal basic income, which would give people an amount sufficient for them to live in dignity. This would mean they no longer had to work in order to receive an income.

3) The time freed up in this manner would pave the way for what Gorz calls “muti-activity.” This is not work in the capitalist sense of the term, geared toward the production of surplus value and GDP growth.

In 1985, Gorz drew up a striking picture of such “multi-activity,” based on ties of self-managed cooperation:

These activities must merge with the very movement of life itself, be the time of life, have as their end not the production of external things but the self-fulfillment of each individual. They are essentially relational activities, creating, beyond and through their material object, rich human relationships, experiences, and exchanges . . . salaried professional work will increasingly tend to become secondary, while self-determined activities must be able to transcend the family and private sphere to create an ever-denser web of social relations.

A socialist policy can only exist in the future if it sets itself this objective, which is above all cultural. If we do not want people to become primarily consumers of industrialized, computerized entertainment and leisure, autonomous educational, artistic, craft, micro-industrial and cooperative activities must become the stuff of life. Mutual aid, emotional exchanges, raising children, taking care of one’s own health, managing the commune and maintaining, equipping, and shaping one’s own space, self-production — including of food — and repair, using equipment that doesn’t always have to be individual . . . all this is part of the non-economic, non-market activities of liberated time.

The “Big Quit,” “career refusal,” and the “desire to change one’s life” are now the stuff of front-page newspaper headlines in the wake of the pandemic. Could these limited but gratifying signs be part of a battle waged by young people to go beyond a system that is slowly but relentlessly destroying our humanity and making life on Earth unbearable?

Home Insurers Are Exploiting the Climate Crisis to Gut Consumer Protections

2023-07-18T11:19:37Z

As the risk of wildfires and hurricanes continues to intensify in states like California and Florida, home insurers are shifting costs of climate-fueled disasters to homeowners by raising premiums and demanding that regulators relax consumer protections.

A firefighter salvages items from a families house on Coronado Pointe in Laguna Niguel, California, on May 12, 2022. (Paul Bersebach / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register via Getty Images)

In the last two months, three of the country’s largest home insurers have announced plans to limit new business in California, citing rising costs in a state where climate-fueled wildfires have become a fact of life. Homeowners already bracing for extreme weather this summer now face another threat: that their homes will become uninsurable, making it nearly impossible to rebuild or relocate should disaster strike.

Yet as insurers demand higher rates and cancel policies amidst intensifying climate risks, they’re actively contributing to those risks. The three groups planning to limit or cease new business in California — Farmers Insurance Group, State Farm, and Allstate — also hold nearly $40 billion in fossil fuel investments, according to a Lever review of the most recent data reported to state regulators.

But instead of addressing their own role in the climate crisis, insurers are using the disaster to push for deregulation. In order to continue writing homeowner policies, insurers and their lobbying groups are now demanding that regulators relax the state’s landmark price-gouging protections, considered the most rigorous in the nation.

Watchdogs warn that this amounts to an attempt to exploit a crisis that the industry profits from twice over, shifting the costs of climate-fueled disasters to consumers in the form of higher premiums while continuing to invest billions of those premium dollars in oil and gas.

Contrary to industry warnings, a new analysis from the New York Federal Reserve finds that the largest property insurers have sufficient capital to cover estimated losses from climate-related catastrophes — but that their portfolio holdings in oil and gas pose additional financial risks.

Shortly after Farmers announced earlier this month that it would begin limiting new homeowner policies in California, property insurers’ top lobbying group issued a statement calling for reforms to the state’s “outdated regulatory regime” that it claimed stymied industry efforts to secure adequate rates.

In a public hearing last Thursday, Allstate representatives made the ultimatum explicit, telling regulators that their presence in the state depends on being permitted to pass more costs on to consumers and use black-box risk models currently disallowed under rate transparency rules.

Thirty-five years ago, California voters passed Proposition 103, a ballot initiative requiring insurers to seek “prior approval” from state regulators of the rates charged to consumers — and allowing consumers to challenge the basis for proposed increases.

“Insurance companies hate the notion of the public scrutinizing what they’re doing and demanding proof that they need a rate increase,” said Harvey Rosenfield, a public interest lawyer who authored Proposition 103 and founded the group Consumer Watchdog. “Climate change is undeniably a crisis for California, but the insurance crisis happening in the market today is manufactured by companies that don’t want to comply.”

Neither Farmers nor Allstate responded to the Lever’s request for comment.

Ensuring the Climate Crisis

Insurance companies may not top the list of well-known climate villains, but they play a key role in propping up the oil and gas sector.

In addition to investing customer premiums in fossil fuels to turn additional profits, insurance companies also act as “gatekeepers” whose coverage is required for large-scale oil and gas projects to proceed, according to Carly Fabian, an insurance policy advocate for the consumer interest group Public Citizen.

“Insurers could have started phasing out fossil fuel coverage decades ago,” Fabian said. “Instead, they’re backing away from homeowners while continuing to support new oil and gas projects.”

Last month, the US Senate Budget Committee launched an investigation into the issue, asking seven insurers to disclose how they invest in and underwrite fossil fuels.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) who chairs the committee, said widespread policy cancellations in high-risk markets underscore the importance of greater oversight.

“Fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with our climate and economic goals, yet even insurers now limiting coverage underwrite and invest in new and expanded fossil fuel projects that worsen their risk,” Whitehouse said in a statement to the Lever. “Their failure to account for climate risk threatens our entire economy.”

While some federal agencies have also begun turning their attention to the connection between insurers and climate change, the industry remains regulated primarily at the state level.

Under California’s previous insurance commissioner, Dave Jones, the state became the first to require large insurers licensed by the state to report their investments in oil, coal, and natural gas. Insurers also divested about $4 billion of holdings in thermal coal following a call from Jones in 2016.

In 2019, more than sixty consumer and environmental groups called on Jones’s successor, Ricardo Lara, to go a step further and require insurers to also disclose their underwriting of fossil fuel projects, but Lara rejected their petition for rulemaking.

After pledging initially not to take campaign cash from the industry he regulates, Lara was forced to return more than $80,000 in insurer contributions in 2019, his first year in office. Lara won a second term last year, despite losing the endorsement of the state’s major newspapers over ethics scandals.

Lara’s office did not respond to the Lever’s request for comment.

While New York and Connecticut are now also taking steps to rein in insurers’ contributions to climate change, red states like Texas have moved in the opposite direction, seeking to block insurers from implementing shareholder proposals that would curb fossil fuel exposure.

In recent years, oil and gas companies have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into otherwise low-profile state insurance commissioner races.

Gutting Protections and Chasing Profits

Beyond the threats that intensifying storms pose to life and property, many homeowners are already feeling the financial pain of teetering insurance markets.

Nearly one in five homeowners in Louisiana had their policies canceled last year, according to a recent survey. While insurers must provide advance notice of such cancellations, homeowners have little recourse. Unable to line up or afford alternative coverage, growing numbers of residents in disaster-prone states are reportedly going without insurance — leaving large numbers of retirees, in particular, exceedingly vulnerable should disaster strike.

In Florida, where Farmers Insurance also plans to cancel about a third of its homeowner policies, consumers already paying nearly triple the average rate nationwide are being told that their premiums are expected to increase by another 40 percent this year.

That’s despite the passage of a raft of the insurance industry’s preferred measures by the Florida legislature in the last year, including a law that will make it harder for homeowners to sue insurers that wrongfully delay, deny, or underpay claims, as the Lever has reported previously.

While the industry has blamed frivolous lawsuits as the culprit of rising costs in Florida, autopsies of bankrupt insurers have pointed to excessive executive payouts as a key problem.

Despite sky-high housing costs, Californians still pay less than the national average for homeowner’s insurance — a fact that consumer groups credit to strong transparency and price protections.

Before California voters passed Proposition 103 in 1988, beating out an $80 million industry opposition campaign, the state was facing an insurance crisis. Rates had skyrocketed without regulations, and consumers alleged that insurers were effectively redlining, refusing to sell insurance in certain neighborhoods.

The consumer protections approved by voters — which prohibited “excessive, unjustified and arbitrary rates” and provided the public with avenues to enforce that prohibition — have since saved California consumers more than $150 billion on auto insurance alone, according to a 2018 analysis by the Consumer Federation of America.

That doesn’t mean that insurers can’t raise rates at all. According to data from the state insurance department analyzed by Consumer Watchdog, regulators approved 94 percent of the premium increases home insurers applied for between 2021 and 2023.

And while home insurers paid out more in claims than they took in from California customers’ premiums during the state’s catastrophic wildfires of 2017 and 2018, that remains the exception rather than the rule. In 2021, insurers paid out less than half of what they took in from California homeowners’ policies, according to state data.

Yet the industry has pushed repeatedly to weaken the state’s insurance regulations, including spending more than $1 million lobbying for a 2020 bill that would’ve allowed policy providers to pass the costs of reinsurance — the coverage that insurers themselves purchase to protect against large losses — to their customers.

The bill, which consumer experts estimated would raise premiums by at least 40 percent, ultimately failed.

After donating nearly $4 million to candidates for California’s state legislature last year, insurance groups are once again pushing to figure reinsurance costs into premiums. They also want to be allowed to set rates using black-box risk models being marketed heavily by a cottage industry of private equity–backed climate data firms.

In California, insurers must currently plan for their future losses based on past ones. Many states, by contrast, allow the use of so-called catastrophe models, which aim to simulate and predict future events, sometimes using artificial intelligence. A host of firms developing the models have appeared alongside insurance lobbyists in state legislative hearings this year.

But consumer advocates fear insurers will use the opaque models, which rely on proprietary data sources and algorithms, to circumvent the rules requiring them to provide justification for rate hikes.

In Florida, where insurers have long used catastrophe models to estimate hurricane losses, a 2010 investigation in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune found that while the algorithms were treated as infallible “black-box truth machines,” they were plagued by bad data and subtle manipulation by insurers with an incentive to predict bigger storms in order to charge higher rates.

The result was predicted hurricane damage routinely exceeding actual losses by a factor of two or three. As the Herald-Tribune put it, catastrophe “models are being used not to seek the most accurate picture of hurricane risk but to chase the highest profits.”

At a public hearing held by California’s insurance department last week, consumer advocates proposed a different solution: drawing on the state’s climate experts to develop a transparent, publicly owned risk model.

“Insurers simultaneously refuse to acknowledge or address their own significant contributions to climate change while pushing for private climate models to unjustifiably manipulate rates even higher,” said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog. “What private industry is doing is relying on public data — we might as well create it in the public interest for everyone to use, and protect consumers in the process.”

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Why Germany Struggled to Reckon With the Nazi Past

2023-07-18T10:08:04Z

For decades after 1945, the victims of Nazism’s crimes had less of a voice in West German society than the perpetrators. Germany’s much-credited reckoning with the Nazi past was a long time coming — but most of the criminals were never brought to justice.

German chancellor Willy Brandt kneels in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in a gesture of humility toward the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, December 1970. (Ben Martin / Getty Images)

Germany is often credited for its success in reckoning with the Nazi era — with some observers even labeling the country “world champion in remembrance.” Scholars like Susan Neiman have intelligently drawn on the German example to reflect on how the United States could think about its own racial reckoning in the twenty-first century. In other former Axis powers like Italy — today a hotbed of historical revisionism — many anti-fascists bewail the absence of a moment like the Nuremberg Trials in which the regime could be brought before the court of history.

Yet claims about German society’s success dealing with the past also deserve scrutiny. In postwar decades, the Federal Republic was slow to purge Nazis from its ranks, and there was no quick or general recognition of the monstrous, genocidal crimes of the Shoah. Even in the 1980s, with countless criminals still walking free, the famous “Historians’ Dispute” among leading scholars tended to banalize the Nazis’ actions by equating them with their communist enemies. In both East and West Germany, the different groups targeted by Nazism often struggled to make themselves heard; in many formerly occupied countries, they never had any chance of bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Tommaso Speccher is a researcher at Berlin historical institutions including the Jewish Museum, the Topography of Terror, and the Wannsee Conference House. His recent study La Germania sì che ha fatto i conti con il nazismo questions triumphalist accounts of postwar German memory culture. He explains the conflicts within Germans’ way of talking about the Nazi era — while also highlighting the initiatives by victims’ groups, political movements, and activist judges who did seek a reckoning with the past.

In an interview, Speccher spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about denazification, postwar efforts to bring Nazis to justice, and how the memory of World War II shapes German identity today.

David Broder

Many Italians bemoan the fact that their country had nothing like the denazification process that followed Germany’s military defeat in 1945. Your book questions the extent of this process in Germany itself. What kind of denazification happened — and was it just something the Allies imposed, or something done by the West German state, too?

Tommaso Speccher

This study is part of a book series called Fact Checking, which seeks to debunk historical myths. There’s this commonplace idea that after 1945 Germany really reckoned with the past. My argument is that it’s more complicated than that. The book seeks to put together the real history of political debates, criminal trials, and memory-policy choices in the postwar period that made it possible to work through the past.

At the beginning, the Allies had radical ideas of denazification. Even the Americans wanted to deindustrialize Germany, and Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had the “Outlaw Theory” of the criminal Nazi elite. This idea of eliminating between fifty thousand or one hundred thousand Nazis was not all that implausible. But then many other factors came into play — judicial ones, certainly, but also those regarding the future global political order.

In 1945–47, the Allies worked together on putting war criminals on trial, with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg made up of the British, French, Americans, and Soviets. But then the Cold War began to develop, setting the two main allies at odds. As a result, Americans became concerned with building up a strong West German state, and this meant the Federal Republic also needed a political order with robust legitimacy.

The famous “article ten” of the charter behind the Nuremberg war crimes trials had set an extensive penal principle, holding that any member of a criminal organization would be liable for the crimes against humanity committed by anyone else within that same organization. In the last months of World War II there were 2.5 million SS and 7.5 million Nazi party members — meaning ten million potential criminals.

But right after the establishment of the new Federal Republic, this article was set aside. The second law of Konrad Adenauer’s first West German government — passed by parliament on December 31, 1949 — was to suspend it and reintroduce the classic penal code, according to which each citizen is responsible only for their own actions and cannot be charged with crimes committed by anyone else. The extensive principle of the Nuremburg Trials was thus dropped.

This change weighed on all subsequent trials, because it became difficult to establish direct responsibility for each of the millions of individual crimes that made up the Holocaust. Things would change only in 2009 with the trial in which former camp guard John Demjanjuk was tried for tens of thousands of counts of being an accessory to murder.

David Broder

How about the perpetrators outside the Nazi Party itself — for instance, with the role of private business in the Holocaust?

Tommaso Speccher

The Americans had established four “pillars” of denazification: the breakup of the Nazi Party, the breakup of the SS, the breakup of the Wehrmacht and — added to those — the overhaul of the big German private firms. When US treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau proposed the deindustrialization of the country, he wanted to strike at what had been one of the main engines of exploitation in the concentration camps, by dismantling companies such as Siemens, BMW, Kodak, and so on. But with the beginning of the Cold War during the Adenauer era, it was clear that turning West Germany into a postwar “economic miracle” wouldn’t be possible without them. So, putting their leaders on trial wasn’t an option anymore.

David Broder

I’m interested in this self-absolution by the Adenauer government. You may have read Daniel Marwecki’s work, which looks at the reparations that the West German state started paying to Israel in 1952. He suggests that while West Germany’s place in the Western side in the Cold War was already obvious by this point, these reparations were still important in rehabilitating it diplomatically. In what sense was this discussed in German public life as an act of contrition or moral reparation rather than of Realpolitik?

Tommaso Speccher

This move surely had a highly political value that went beyond any kind of moral or ethical consideration. If Germany wanted to reenter international politics, it had to do so by building a relationship with the United States and Israel, especially as this latter became an outpost of Western policy in the Middle East. Through the 1950s and 1960s, and even under Willy Brandt, there was always some outside German support for Israeli defense, though this could not yet be talked about publicly.

Last year marked seventy years of this reparations policy, which concerned not just Israel but twelve countries, all of them in the West. There were also protocols drawn up for West Germany’s responsibilities toward Greece, Norway, France, Italy, the Netherlands . . . in short, all the Western countries invaded during World War II. This was an instrument of international politics, but also a way of closing the book on the issue of compensation.

Internationally, this was a matter of building relations — and internally, in West Germany, it also established a split between those who were due compensation and those who weren’t. For instance, think of all the difficulties that Communists and Social Democrats had in securing compensation, or of the fact that one prerequisite for eligibility was that you needed to have had resided in Germany for at least one year at the moment of application. Many victims had been extradited and lost their citizenship, then had to deal with a very long process of securing recognition for what had been done to them. Furthermore, as I say in the book, many of the civil servants running the compensation programs were the same bureaucrats who had played active roles in the Nazi administration.

So, both at the level of international macro-policy and at the level of individual restitution, the issue of reparations was first and foremost a political instrument. That is, it helped build West Germany’s international connections while also operating an internal selection among the victims, simply by categorizing who was a victim worthy of compensation and who was not. In the 1950s, anti-communism played a decisive role in this process, also because many Nazis had been reintegrated into the state administration, as they could be trusted to take staunchly anti-communist positions.

David Broder

In this sense, it seems that Germany’s coming to terms with the Holocaust was unique — but also hardly comparable to the way in which the Nazis’ crimes against humanity in other countries, for instance in Italy, were processed in the public mind.

Tommaso Speccher

From the outset, it is clear that there was a division between the genocide against the Jews and what were deemed crimes against “political” victims. The crimes against humanity in Italy were considered within a political framework, and this has also governed policies of compensation and restitution up to the present. When in 2009 some Italian trials were opened up again, this became apparent: the decisions issued by the Italian tribunals were not recognized by the German courts and so became moot (and this, despite the work of historians).

After the discovery of the “cabinet of shame” [nearly seven hundred files on Nazi war crimes in Italy, found in 1994], more than sixty trials were launched, but in the last fifteen years, the German prosecutors did not hand over any criminals to justice. So, why isn’t there any cooperation, why aren’t they handed over for a final ruling? Clearly, behind it there is this choice to define the Shoah as one thing and the other crimes as political matters internal to the war context. It needs to be said though, that Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were allied, and so the big picture is even more complicated.

David Broder

Recently, I went to the Risiera di San Sabba, the concentration camp in Trieste, northeastern Italy, where Yugoslav anti-fascists and Jews were murdered. In the exhibition, I was surprised to read that when a trial was organized against the camp’s leadership in Italy in 1976, the court could not consider the massacres of the “political” victims, and it was impossible to extradite the defendants due to a bilateral agreement between Rome and Berlin signed during the war.

Tommaso Speccher

The first phase of trials — supported by the Allies — against German war criminals in Italy ended in 1960 with twenty-five convictions. Many other investigations, almost seven hundred, ended up in the “cabinet of shame,” but also fell victim to the 1942 pact between Germany and Italy that rejected the extradition of Germans for crimes in Italy. It may seem surprising, but such a treaty applied also after the end of World War II.

David Broder

Your book cuts against the idea that there was a proper reckoning with Nazism immediately after 1945. For instance, it notes that when Social Democratic chancellor Willy Brandt famously fell to his knees in front of the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, this was indeed a remarkable and new sign of atonement, a full quarter century after the war. In what sense did his government represent a turning point compared to Adenauer’s, also in terms of West Germany’s place in postwar Europe?

Tommaso Speccher

Certainly, Brandt represents a turning point, particularly in terms of the recognition of the loss of German territories in the East. I cite a speech he gave in parliament, arguing that “if West Germany wanted to be a European country at the heart of the continent, then it had to accept the results that had come out of World War II.” This is something Adenauer had failed to do, didn’t want to do, somehow remaining in a nostalgic vision imagining that the two Germanies would one day return to what they had once been, including territories that had since become part of Poland. At a certain point that debate was left behind. Today, not even right-wing extremist groups talk about that anymore. It is really Brandt who connects this border issue to accepting Germany’s historical responsibility and the idea of being a European state. He kneeled as a gesture of apology, which, it must be said, was an epochal shift.

Even so, there is a certain complexity to the issue insofar as even in his past phase at the Foreign Ministry, this remained one of the departments most contaminated by old Nazis, and Brandt failed to do anything about it. There’s some odd stories about him. The historian Götz Aly talks about how in 1963, at the United Nations in New York, Brandt had given a really profound speech on the Holocaust. Aly points out that this was a speech that Brandt could not have given in Germany because a certain antisemitic sentiment was still present in the country. As mayor of Berlin he secretly opposed, in 1966, the first memorial promoted by Joseph Wulf at the site of the Wannsee Conference. In 1971, when he decided to donate his Nobel Prize money to the restoration of the Scuola Grande Tedesca, one of the synagogues in Venice, he said that this decision should be communicated only after his death.

There was this complexity to the story, because the same apparat persisted, and antisemitism was no passing phenomenon but a structural one, at least before it was more openly confronted in the 1980s.

David Broder

Even given the presence of Nazis within the postwar state apparatus, I wonder what cultural shifts took place in society itself: What about the younger generations, born after the war? Could the diary of Anne Frank, or Hollywood movies and TV series, generate a wider discussion about what had happened?

Tommaso Speccher

In the first postwar decades, very little. Despite the work of victims’ associations like the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, the voice of the victims was drowned out by the voice of the perpetrators. In the 1950s or 1960s, Nazism was not a subject dealt with in school curricula. For sure there was some discussion of it, but the criminality of Nazism was played down considerably. For instance, I have a history book from 1968, which does address Nazism but does not talk about the concentration camps — as if they did not exist.

That was the case at least up until the late 1970s and the TV series Holocaust. People born in the immediate aftermath of the war will all tell you that this was a crucial moment, and that thanks to the series, the Holocaust started to be discussed in families.

However, a turning point had already come earlier with the movements of 1968, even if it was not a real collective debate but rather the struggle of a small number against the entire German nation — “six against sixty million,” as it was dubbed. But it still represented a break. The creation of associations and grassroots movements slowly created a certain more widespread awareness.

David Broder

It seems that ’68 pointed the finger at a West German society that hadn’t changed — but didn’t itself drive a real collective reflection on fascism. You point to simplistic ’68er readings of history repeating itself, for instance Red Army Faction (RAF) slogans saying that the Americans in Vietnam were Nazis. Drawing such stark parallels clashes with the way that the German left today talks about the uniqueness of German historical guilt.

Tommaso Speccher

Often we have this outsized impression of the RAF as a moment of rupture in which a new generation opposed itself to, and sought to overcome, this Nazi past. The problem though, which I remark on the book — also picking up on Aly — is that those were the years when it would have been necessary to support those others who were already working on that, indeed the likes of the organizations of the victims, the likes of Joseph Wulf or the attorney general Fritz Bauer [key to the manhunt that captured Adolf Eichmann, and instigating the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in 1963–65]. With great difficulty, there was a movement to bring out the historical truth and even bring people to justice.

What’s missing is this connection between the West German student movement and these legal initiatives — for all the protests that they organized in those years, nobody was outside the courts protesting the old Nazis and supporting the prosecutors. If anything, in the mid-1960s there was a critique of the likes of Fritz Bauer as men who belonged to the old society — “they, too, contributed,” when in fact they were the first victims.

Aly says, and I think he’s right, that one generation wasn’t enough of a time span to process what had happened. The maximalism that characterized the RAF’s rhetoric lent itself to a certain oversimplification and to Manichaean claims to the absolute truth, leading to a simple rejection of civil society and its contradictions. In German it would be called Sturheit, stubbornness. But evidently, the RAF is the degeneration of ’68, albeit a symbolically important one, rather than the basis of a judgement on ’68 itself.

David Broder

I’d like to make a comparison with anti-fascism in Italy. There, the attempt to form a government even passively reliant on neofascist support, in 1960, was quickly confronted and defeated by popular mobilization, somehow kickstarting the social movements of the decade that followed. The Italian ’68 prominently included a certain criticism of the official, constitutional antifascism as stale, but also a call to complete the unfinished business of the Resistance. In what sense was there a critique of insufficient official anti-fascism, in German society?

Tommaso Speccher

After 1945 Italy was steeped in institutional anti-fascism, and in the postwar decades many of the state’s highest officials were former freedom fighters, whereas in West Germany anti-fascism had no official place in the constitution of 1948.

If we compare the two countries in the postwar period, we see them heading off in two opposite directions. To explain: in Italy, anti-fascist culture is written into the country’s constitution and imbued the republic up until the turn of the 1990s. Those years mark the watershed known as “the end of the First Republic,” followed by the advent of the Berlusconi era.

In Germany institutional anti-fascism only started to emerge after a phase in the 1980s that Jürgen Habermas called “constitutional patriotism,” however only in the 1990s did anti-Nazism become a kind of cordon sanitaire of republican defense.

Nowadays anti-Nazism is taken for granted, but we cannot ignore signs of erosion. The ten-year-long existence of the far-right Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party is one of those signs. At the moment, AfD is still a political pariah, and none of the main parties has sought its support, though in 2020, when the Christian Democrats in Thuringia were about to form a regional government reliant on AfD’s external support, Angela Merkel warned them against it, and her advice was taken. However, while the inclusion of AfD in a governing coalition was averted, its popularity continues to grow nationwide.

David Broder

I’d like to look more at the theme of anti-communism. In the 1980s there was a famous dispute among German intellectuals about how to incorporate the Holocaust into German historiography. Thanks to historians like Ernst Nolte, this “Historikerstreit” eventually offered a form of self-absolution of German society, through the strong comparison it established between Nazism and communism.

Tommaso Speccher

Yes, we could also argue that the Historikerstreit offered an opportunity for relativizing Nazism. The dispute showcased a moment of crisis of the historical debate, as these gentlemen debated which crimes were “worse,” in the context of a society that remained full of old Nazis — many still in official posts – and with many war criminals still at large. These historians failed to focus on what was still happening: What about all the trials that hadn’t been held? What about the victims, the children and grandchildren of people sentenced to death?

The Nazi judge who sentenced to death Erika von Brockdorff, the mother of a dear friend of mine who was involved with a resistance group, lived in a mansion until his death in 1987 enjoying a judge’s state pension. That might sound like a trivial instance but it’s not — it’s an injustice perpetrated over time. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the legitimacy of the Federal Republic could not be untangled from the history of Nazism, which could not be confronted head-on because of the structural continuities from the one to the other. So, this historians’ dispute in the 1980s was absolutely sterile and trivial.

David Broder

Today it is often said that while the East German state boasted of its anti-fascist identity, its memory culture never talked about the Holocaust. The impression is rather that Jews were treated as no more than part of the wider millions of victims, or else the Nazi repression of political militants was foregrounded in a way that marginalized the genocide itself. Yet, one could counter that there were things like school-group visits to the death camps, so it is hardly as if the Holocaust was simply under a veil of silence. In what sense does it make sense to say that this history was overlooked in East Germany?

Tommaso Speccher

Let’s say that the anti-fascist ideology in the GDR had its own logic, which excluded all that made the Holocaust specific — in ethnic, gender, religious, racial terms — to bring it under a general interpretation in which Nazism is the ultimate end point of the history of capitalism.

The difference is that in the East the discussion was guided from above, whereas in the West it was able, with a great deal of delay, to develop within society. But when people talk about Germans being the “world champions of memory culture,” then the evidence for that doesn’t date back very far. The Wannsee Conference House was opened in 1992, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in 2005, and the Topography of Terror Museum in 2010.

For sure there were memorial sites like the Sachsenhausen concentration camp [from 1949 in the territory of East Germany]. But the exhibitions you find now are utterly different from the ones that were there in the 1970s and 1980s. They had focused on the socialist and communist resistance, and on the political persecution of the Left, while the Jews appeared as one among several victim groups.

No, Reactionary Gender Warriors Aren’t “Anti-Elitist”

2023-07-18T10:34:51Z

Right-wing governments around Europe are funneling state funds to reactionary lobbies in the name of resisting “gender ideology.” Their supposed anti-elitism is a fraud.

A woman holding a crucifix attends the March for Life and Family in Krakow, Poland on June 25, 2023. (Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

From Catholic reactionaries in Spain to Kremlin ideologues obsessed with birth rates, the ardent defenders of traditional gender roles today call themselves “anti-gender” — using the English word “gender” to mean a mix of feminist and queer causes. But if protesters demanding “gender out of schools!” send a confusing message, what is “anti-gender” really about?

Beyond its own damnation of “gender ideology,” we can see “anti-gender” as a global illiberal civil society. Connecting right-wing populist parties, ultraconservative church leaders, transnational organizations such as Ordo Iuris, and neoliberal and conservative politicians and lobbyists, the representatives of anti-gender discourse are united by ideology and shared political objectives. In recent times, they have resisted the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, opposed antidiscrimination legislation and sex education, and blocked legislative efforts to equalize the rights of LGBTQ people.

One essential book for understanding this phenomenon is Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment, by Polish academics Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff. The authors reveal the strategies of the global anti-gender movement and its political connections, explain why it has succeeded in its fight to restrict reproductive rights around the world, and propose concrete strategies to counter these reactionaries.

In an interview, coauthor Elżbieta Korolczuk spoke to Magdalena Dušková and Eliška Koldová about the anti-gender movement’s strategies in different countries and what kind of mobilizations can stop it in its tracks.

Magdalena Dušková: In your book Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment, you speak of an “opportunistic synergy” between different anti-gender forces. Let’s perhaps start by repeating who these actors actually are and how they benefit from this mutual cooperation.

Elżbieta Korolczuk: By this term we refer to the ideological and organizational synergy between movements, religious actors, and political parties — a synergy that is anchored in anti-gender rhetoric. Many organizations behind the anti-gender campaigns, such as the World Congress of Families or various European anti-choice groups, have been active in the public space since the 1990s. So, at the beginning of our work, my colleague Agnieszka Graff and I asked ourselves: Why have they become so powerful right now, and how do they have such an influence on politics?

Eliška Koldová: Many political actors on the Right have only recently started to use “anti-gender” rhetoric and support gender-conservative solutions, such as banning abortions, restricting the rights of queer people, or opposing legislation supporting survivors of domestic violence. Why have people like Matteo Salvini or Donald Trump, who are not particularly religious themselves, suddenly taken on the role of supporters of traditional families and defenders of innocent children against “genderism”?

Elżbieta Korolczuk

We observed that although these actors are not necessarily ideologically anchored in an ultraconservative worldview, they employ this discourse to achieve specific political gains. Current right-wing politics is largely based on the mobilization of a vocal minority and deepening polarization around cultural issues. For example, in the Polish or Italian context, this vocal minority is Catholics and people who feel threatened by current social and cultural changes.

Representatives of the populist right seek to be perceived as the leaders of these groups and to mobilize people around cultural issues. This is enabled precisely by the opportunistic synergy — a cooperation between civil society actors, religious fundamentalists, and right-wing populist politicians, who can, through this connection, strengthen the otherwise very weak ideological roots of right-wing populism and moralize the divide between us and them.

The populist right usually tries to convince the population that there are corrupt elites out there that threaten “the people.” Anti-gender discourse allows them to moralize the divide as a moral issue, not just a struggle between those with power and those without. The abyss between ”people” and “elites” deepens and political debate turns into a Manichean struggle between good and evil.

Moreover, anti-gender rhetoric allows them to redefine the question of who is the oppressed minority, so that, for example, LGBTQ people or women fighting for reproductive freedoms are depicted not only as immoral but also as part of the global liberal elites, and thus violent acts committed against them by anti-gender actors are justified self-defense. Anti-gender has a very strong, emotional dynamic. It enables the mobilization of people, who thus gain a sense of unity and justice. It allows them to feel righteous, as if they are truly the “defenders of innocent children against perverts.”

Changing the elites is part and parcel of this opportunistic synergy. In the right-wing populists’ designs, the representatives of religious groups and ultraconservative civil society organizations are meant to become the new cadres of various state bodies, join advisory committees, or even take up key executive positions within the state administration. Civil society and religious actors work closely with political representatives of the right-wing populist parties; they help each other ideologically, organizationally, but also financially. In many countries, state funds are allocated to these organizations, which in return are loyal to the state. The opportunistic synergy benefits all parties involved.

Magdalena Dušková: How is it that the populist right is so successful with its anti-gender agenda? What mistakes have the liberal elites and perhaps also the Left made?

Elżbieta Korolczuk

Many liberals, but unfortunately also supporters of the Left, tend to still differentiate between cultural and economic rights as if they were two separate sets of issues, and the rights of women, LGBTQ, or racialized people are treated as related to culture. This is not only a political and strategic mistake, but above all it does not reflect reality. While we talk about the need to overcome stereotypes and change discriminatory language about representation and generally about culture, equality also has economic and social dimensions. Whose work is valued and whose is left unpaid? Who provides care? Who has access to resources? These are questions that we often miss if we focus on identity and representation.

The success of right-wing populists, especially in countries like Poland and Hungary, lies largely in the fact that they were able to link cultural and socioeconomic issues, by combining an ultraconservative agenda with a new system of social support, creating a welfare-chauvinist system. In Poland, it takes the form of the 500+ program, under which families receive 500 zlotys ($125) per month for each child under age eighteen. In Hungary, welfare chauvinism is reflected in subsidies for middle-class white families active on the labor market. It is a chauvinist system because any nonnormative individuals or families, such as migrants, Roma people, or single mothers, cannot benefit.

Most current social problems are connected with the effects of neoliberalism, and anti-gender discourses are used to tap into people’s anxieties and loss of hope. In countries like Poland, liberals believe that the free market is necessary in the democratization process — it is part of the package. The Left, on the other hand, often focuses only on the economic criticism of neoliberalism — they talk about precarious working conditions or poor labor rights.

Meanwhile, the populist right has succeeded in voicing a critique of neoliberalism that links the cultural and economic. They portray liberalism, gender equality, and identity politics as the main source of rampant individualism, alienation, and breakdown of local communities that go hand in hand with late capitalism. Right-wing populists in Europe say: only the family will save us from the ubiquitous decline, and therefore the state must protect it at all costs — that is, only the “right” type of family. Therefore, we cannot interpret anti-gender only as a reflection of the religious beliefs of the vocal minority and its conservatism. The anti-gender campaigns can be interpreted as a reactionary response to neoliberalism.

Eliška Koldová: Anti-gender narratives contain both an appeal for the creation of a new global moral order and strongly nationalist sentiments. What binds these two seemingly contradictory types of expressions?

Elżbieta Korolczuk

If we look at the structure of anti-gender campaigns, it is clear that it is a global movement. At the same time, they always try to appear locally rooted and close to the people. It is not a new phenomenon, really. The Catholic Church has operated as a multinational corporation with branches all over the world for millennia now. At the same time, it is seemingly “authentic” and connected to national identity in each country.

The Church is the epitome of globalization and cultural colonization as it has historically tried to spread its values to other countries using violence and coercion. This doesn’t prevent the anti-gender actors from using anti-colonial rhetoric — they claim that the national Catholics (or more broadly Christians) are the oppressed and the global liberal elites represent the colonizer.

It is precisely in our region that such a strategy became successful. For the last thirty years, Central and Eastern Europe has been catching up with the West, its economic success and supposedly well-functioning democracy. But in the anti-gender narrative, we are ultimately the ones that the West should follow and learn from, because, it is said, the much-celebrated Western democracies are degenerating.

I currently work in Sweden, which is often portrayed as morally degenerate and torn apart by Muslim minorities. Polish ultraconservatives love to hate Sweden and wait for every sign that the country is nearing collapse. Anti-gender discourse works with strong emotional dynamics of pride and shame. For a long time, we were ashamed of the fact that our society is not developed enough, and now we can finally be proud of the fact that we are the ones from whom other countries should learn from and gradually create a new world’s moral order. It’s a very compelling story we tell ourselves. And stories are very important to politics.

Magdalena Dušková

In the Czech Republic, the anti-gender discourse is much more secular than, for example, in Poland, mainly because of the atheistic nature of our society. In the book, you claim that it is an ideology that is flexible and yet internally coherent.

In the first text of our series, we wrote that the Czech anti-gender resembles a chameleon. Can the seemingly secular presentation of Czech organizations such as the so-called Movement for Life or Alliance for the Family be an example of successful balancing between flexibility and internal coherence of anti-gender?

Elżbieta Korolczuk

Definitely, yes. Flexibility is also related to the aforementioned division into West and East. We can demonstrate this in the attacks on gender studies. For example, in Sweden, the efforts to limit gender studies are justified by claims that it is a nonscientific discipline. Right-wing columnist Ivar Arpi claims that gender studies is a religion rather than science. In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, however, gender studies often symbolize a Western colonial import and are seen as an attack on religion.

Similarly, flexibility manifests itself in the balance between open misogyny or homophobia on the one hand and homonationalism or femonationalism on the other. In Poland, politicians openly present homophobic and transphobic attitudes, whereas in Sweden they are more refined and much more subtle in this area, talking for example about protecting Swedish women and Swedish gays from Muslim barbarians from the East who allegedly want to rape and murder them.

Anti-gender discourse can adapt its language to the local context and local needs. However, at its core it is always the tendency to moralize political differences and deepen the division between the people and the elites. And as I have already mentioned, anti-gender actors position themselves as defenders of ordinary people, which allows them to justify committing violence. This brings us to the question of where anti-gender campaigns actually end and where fascism begins.

Eliška Koldová

When I talk to my Czech friends of the same age, many are convinced that abortion will never be banned here or that measures like Poland’s LGBTQ-free zones cannot be introduced, precisely because we are one of the most atheist countries in the world. Representatives of Czech anti-gender, however, use a strategy of “gradual crawling,” slowly testing how far they can go. Sometimes they don’t quite succeed and reveal their true colors, like when they criticized the provision of emergency contraception for rape survivors during the war in Ukraine.

Sometimes I feel like one day we’ll wake up and we will no longer have the same rights, without realizing when we actually lost them. That’s why I’m interested: What can we learn from anti-gender’s impact in Poland, where its strategy is so different?

Elżbieta Korolczuk

Yes, it is possible to wake up one day and realize that certain rights have been taken away from us without realizing when it happened, especially if we pay little attention to politics. But this kind of change is usually a long process. Personally, I see great danger in how anti-gender and anti-choice activists take over and exploit the language of human rights and various feminist concepts. They take a certain word, like “women’s rights,” change its meaning and add a great emotional charge to it.

Language matters, and we can see it very clearly in the outcomes of opinion polls. Their results will be different if you ask the same people if they want to “protect unborn children with disabilities” or if they would like to “force pregnant women to carry a fetus with abnormalities to term, even if the child dies shortly after birth.” Anti-gender advocates also often connect antiabortion rhetoric with the protection of women, especially in the socioeconomic realm.

It is easy to dismiss Poland as a “special case” because the Catholic Church has a much stronger position here than in the Czech Republic, not necessarily morally, but politically. I think, however, that you have to be careful all the time. If you look at the campaigns or events organized by Czech anti-gender organizations you can see that most of the time priests participate in or lead these campaigns. Today, many religious fundamentalists are able to promote ultraconservative views under the pretense that they are a matter of conscience or common sense, seemingly disconnected from religion.

So, I think that now more than ever we must be aware of what values we stand for and what language we use to fight for them. We must be aware of our ideological anchoring. If the language of human rights is contaminated by anti-gender rhetoric, it will be much more difficult for the general population to recognize what the debate is actually about, especially for people who may not have much knowledge on the issue.

How to do it? An example can be taken from the Polish feminist protests, the so-called Black Protests. The protesters did not speak in the abstract language of human rights, as activists or academics often do. Strong emotions were included in their vocabulary and they talked about the specific effects of legislative proposals, about their experiences, their pain, fear, and suffering. We need a language that is strongly connected to our lived experience and conveys emotions that mobilize people.

Paradoxically, the attack on women’s and LGBTQ rights in Poland changed people’s attitude in the opposite direction from what ultraconservatives envisioned. There was a huge change in the attitudes of many people, especially among the younger generation during the last six years. For the younger generation, the issue of abortion is no longer a matter of compromise: 70 to 80 percent of young Poles are in favor of full legalization.

Magdalena Dušková: One of the texts from our project is devoted to the field of education and the impact of anti-gender on youth. Representatives of Czech anti-gender movements regularly visit schools and give lectures to young students. Usually, these lectures are in complete contradiction with modern sex education. Could you describe what such influencing of the youth looks like in Poland?

Elżbieta Korolczuk

In Poland, the government has very effectively managed to limit the access of civil society organizations, especially progressive civil society organizations, to schools and other educational spaces. The current education minister is an ultraconservative politician who openly presents his ideological agenda, on the basis of which he would like to remake the entire education system into a breeding ground for nationalists and devout Catholics.

In addition, there is also good cooperation between ultraconservative organizations and schools at the local level or in the online space. Such organizations receive millions from the state, in the form of various donations or specific programs. Progressive organizations, however, are cut off from any financial support from the state. Poland is an extreme case of what happens when you allow anti-gender organizations to dictate the rules of the game when it comes to working with the state.

Eliška Koldová: You have been researching anti-gender movements for a really long time. I’ve only been doing it for four months and I find it really exhausting. When my colleague and I confronted one of the main representatives of the Czech anti-gender several times, we agreed that we are actually afraid of her. Representatives of anti-gender movements can tell you to your face that Polish women are living well and are certainly not dying, while they calmly smile at you. Where do you get the courage and energy to continue your research and activism?

Elżbieta Korolczuk

I come from Białystok, a small town in northeastern Poland, which is very conservative and has a strong Catholic community. My mother and grandmother were strong believers. My mother even ran in the local elections for a right-wing nationalist, anti-European party in 2004. Despite that, we loved each other, and she was my big supporter when I started to engage in the women’s movement. I think a lot of people who fall for anti-gender propaganda do so for a reason. They are, for example, strongly religious, afraid of a rapidly changing world in which they are forgotten, or socioeconomically disadvantaged. And suddenly anti-gender advocates point to the culprits of their problems and offer them hope for a better future.

I feel neither love nor hatred for politicians or representatives of anti-gender organizations. I am aware that their strategies and that their attitudes are often opportunistic — they themselves do not believe what they preach. They are cynical hypocrites. And we should constantly expose their hypocrisy and oppose their campaigns. However, we should not reject people who are subject to anti-gender propaganda, but rather think about how to make our country a space where there is a place for everyone. This is incredibly difficult when we are the ones whose rights are under threat and who are constantly being attacked. One is not born a woman, one becomes one. And in the same way, one is not born a fascist either, one becomes a fascist through the course of life.

Polarization is a two-player game. It’s like dancing — it takes two to tango. Once we play the same game with fascists, we become part of the problem, not the solution. However, I understand that this attitude is definitely not an option for everyone. For me, as a cis heterosexual woman, for example, it is not as difficult to detach myself from homophobic attacks as it is for a queer person. I am not saying that we should accept our political adversaries as they are. But I think we should at least try to understand why they are so susceptible to anti-gender narratives.

Magdalena Dušková: You claim that we need feminist populism as a response to anti-gender. Can you explain what populist feminism means? And does it need to be anti-capitalist? I’m asking that second question because in the book you refer to the anti-capitalist manifesto Feminism for the 99%, but you also disagree with its content in some way, if I’m not mistaken.

Elżbieta Korolczuk

In our thinking about feminist populism with Agnieszka Graff, we follow Chantal Mouffe, who speaks of populism as an ideology or a political style that is neither necessarily good nor bad. It takes different shapes and forms in different contexts. We are living in a crisis of the capitalist system and at the same time in a crisis of democracy, linked to questions of representation and power. The key question today is: Who are the people, who has a voice, legitimacy and who is truly represented?

When right-wing populists claim to be the voice of the people, it doesn’t quite work for us on the Left to counter them through the language of the rule of law, talking about the Constitutional Tribunal and the stability of the judicial system. These are undoubtedly important aspects of democracy, but the conflict in today’s politics lies elsewhere. Like Polish women, we must therefore say: we, women and minorities, are the people, and you anti-gender elites do not represent us. You are the corrupt elite. I am not suggesting that we should abandon the language of law or the language of human rights. We just need to charge it with conflict and emotions, we need to infuse it with meaning.

I find it absolutely bizarre that today’s politicians, apart from the populist right, try to steer clear of emotions. Our life is about emotions, therefore politics is also about emotions. Affects are not contradictory to facts, they are intertwined. When politicians talk about access to abortion, they shouldn’t talk about it as some abstract choice. They should talk about the real experiences of women who are forced to give birth to a child they don’t want or can’t afford to have. What kind of emotion is it? It’s despair. It’s torture. It’s a horrible experience that no one should have to go through if we can prevent it. Progressive politics must consciously reflect our lived, bodily experience, name the facts and connect them with emotional consequences.

Eliška Koldová: Many people in the Czech Republic think that Polish feminists failed in their efforts because of the ban on abortion there and that the fascists won over them. How do you see it?

Elżbieta Korolczuk

I teach a course on social movements at university. And this question comes up very often from students: Was the US civil rights movement successful? Yes, of course, it was extremely successful. They repealed Jim Crow laws and introduced legislation to end racial segregation in the key spheres of social life. Then the question usually comes: Was it a big success or a small success? And didn’t they actually fail, considering that Martin Luther King Jr was killed, that the living conditions of many African Americans have not changed to this day, that police violence is so widespread? It was a success in many respects, but the process of change continues.

The same goes for Poland. The decision of the Constitutional Tribunal cut the access to legal abortion in the country. But it may have been a focal point of a much broader change, which will bring fruit in the future. Many people have changed their opinion on this issue. Sixty to 70 percent of the Polish population is in favor of some form of legalization of abortion, while before 2016 it was only 30 percent. The feminist movement became a mass movement. Unlike, for example, in Hungary, feminism in our country is not only centered in nongovernmental organizations and the bureaucratized sector — we have local mobilization, protest groups, a mass movement.

The Polish left-wing party also managed to reenter the parliament and we have several female MPs who openly support feminism and who are connected to activist circles. In the last year, the availability of abortions mediated by the Abortion Dream Team has also increased a lot, specifically last year they managed to help forty-four thousand Polish women. While the political sphere is becoming more and more conservative, society is becoming much more progressive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately and how we perceive it today. Hope has been privatized, thus we feel that good things have to come for us to feel hope. That we must achieve success that then will give us hope as individuals. But historically it has not been like this. The civil rights movement saw hope as the work that needs to be done collectively, rather than as a reaction to the outside world.

I wish we could re-politicize hope and not just take it as our individual reaction to the world outside, but rather a commitment to make the world a better place. Hope is our collective effort driven by a vision of a better world, and that’s how we should begin to see it again.

This interview is a part of the project In Between God and the Alt-right: A Study of the Czech Anti-Gender Movement, which was published on Czech online daily Alarm. The series, which consists of reportages, analyses, and investigative articles, was supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Unionize the Postdocs

2023-07-17T16:21:47Z

Postdoctoral research work is poorly paid and highly unstable. It’s also socially necessary, crucial to solving big problems like climate change and pandemics. For workers and the public, postdocs must unionize.

Academic workers and supporters picket during a strike at the University of California Los Angeles campus in Los Angeles, California, US, on November 21, 2022. (Jill Connelly / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A wave of union activity is engulfing higher education, as best exemplified by last year’s University of California strike, which was the largest academic strike in US history. The focus of media reports and analysis of this upsurge tends to be on graduate workers and adjunct faculty. Comparatively little attention is paid to another subgroup of workers riding this wave: postdoctoral scholars. Like other academic workers, we receive low pay and have little job security, and we’re organizing to change that.

Postdocs are early-career researchers in our post-PhD journeyman years. We’re expected to be able to move anywhere in the country on short notice to start jobs in labs where we know nobody and have little job security. In those labs, we drive yearslong research projects and often provide the mentorship that graduate students don’t get from their advisers. In return, without union protections, we typically receive low pay, high expectations, and supervisors who might even control whether we can stay in the country.

This is not a friendly environment for unionization. Nevertheless, in recent years postdoc organizing has taken off on a large scale all over the country, mostly under the aegis of the United Auto Workers (UAW). It’s about time.

There is much at stake in this fight. Postdocs bring in billions of dollars in grants to universities, and the potential of our research outputs is worth even more. Yet a staggering 94.8 percent of us report that low pay negatively affects our personal and professional lives. Postdoc scholars often leave our positions after years of having been asked to sacrifice too much in terms of low pay, impacts on our mental health, and delays in starting a family.

Individual researchers suffer on account of poor conditions for postdocs and the resulting retention crisis — and so does the public, which depends on the work that we do. Making postdoc jobs sustainable is in the common interest, as our work is critical to solving the biggest problems our society faces, like climate change and global pandemics.

It is possible to create a scientific community that serves all of us, one that sustains workers and our research in the long term. As postdocs at UC, we have firsthand experience fighting for and winning contract provisions that will help build that kind of scientific community.

We are members of UAW Local 5810. When our union formed in 2008, it was the first stand-alone postdoctoral researcher union in the United States, and since then our efforts have raised the bar for postdocs at UC and at universities across the country. This was never more evident than during our strike last year, during which tens of thousands of academic workers at all ten UC campuses took to the streets. Postdocs struck alongside three other UC-UAW bargaining units, including those representing academic researchers, teaching assistants, and graduate student researchers. For weeks we walked the picket lines, and in the end, we won the best-ever contract for postdocs in the United States.

Under the new contract, the lowest-paid UC postdocs will see a 57 percent increase over the course of the contract, reaching $85,734 by 2027, and postdocs will get a minimum 7.5 percent increase each year between cost-of-living and experience increases. This increase raises our salaries to the very top tier of postdoc salaries nationwide. We also won eight weeks of 100 percent paid family and parental leave, up from four weeks — a huge boost for postdoc parents and caregivers. And for the first time ever we won an annual childcare subsidy.

Another key win was making UC more accessible for disabled postdocs by expanding our access process beyond the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). ADA accommodations can take months of bureaucratic wrangling to secure, but under our new contract postdocs are guaranteed immediate temporary accommodations so that we never have to work under conditions that further damage our health.

We also won new rights to address the burdens faced by international scholars working on visas, who comprise 65 percent of postdocs — including guaranteed leave time to attend visa appointments, and longer terms so that we can avoid the arduous process of renewing our visas every year.

And we won historic protections from bullying and harassment, protections that for the first time cover all forms of bullying and abusive conduct, a critical victory in a hierarchical workplace where workers’ future prospects depend on supervisors’ approval.

For postdocs in particular, the strike was meaningful beyond just the material gains we made. Postdoc labor, like much other research and laboratory labor, can be quite isolating. On the picket lines, we found camaraderie and experienced what it’s like to be part of something bigger: to be in solidarity with thousands of other workers at UC and across the country who believe that we can create more sustainable, inclusive working conditions in academia, not just for ourselves but for the future of research.

The University of California is by far the largest employer of postdocs in the country. Nationally, our union represents 10 percent of postdocs. By striking and winning here, UC postdocs have changed the industry standards for postdocs everywhere. Our strike has already had repercussions outside California, as many universities across the country, including the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Princeton, and Yale, have since raised postdoc pay to stay competitive. These universities, however, do not guarantee annual step increases, comprehensive health coverage, or any of the other rights we won in our contract. If postdocs at other universities want to make those demands, they must join the movement and form their own unions.

There are now postdoc unions at a growing number of universities, including at the University of Washington, Columbia University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, and Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, all of which are part of UAW. Recently, postdocs at another major employer of postdocs, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), also filed for a union election after a supermajority of NIH postdocs and researchers signed union authorization cards.

The recent surge of union activity in higher education shows that the sector is at a crossroads. No longer will we accept that prestigious institutions must be powered by low wages and exploitative conditions. Academic workers have been told repeatedly over the past decade that there is no alternative to this model. Now it’s clear that a better university, one that behaves in the interest of workers and the public, is well within our grasp.

The US Military’s Defense of Affirmative Action Is Hypocritical and Self-Serving

2023-07-17T15:40:32Z

In the recent SCOTUS case on affirmative action, the US government argued for the importance of race-conscious admissions at its military academies. This isn’t about “racial justice”: the military wants to use race in admissions to strengthen American empire.

Cadets walk into Michie Stadium during West Point’s graduation ceremony on May 27, 2023 in West Point, New York. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

The Supreme Court’s recent decision restricting race-conscious admissions has a notable carve-out for US military academies like West Point, which will be allowed to continue making admission decisions with the aim of creating a racially diverse student body. Many have pointed out the obvious inconsistency here, arguing that if affirmative action is good for the US military, it is good for civilian colleges as well. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The majority recognizes the compelling need for diversity in the military and the national security implications at stake . . . but it ends race-conscious college admissions at civilian universities implicating those interests anyway.” Peter Dreier, writing in the Nation, expressed a sentiment common among liberals on social media: “If racial diversity is good for the leadership of the nation’s military, why isn’t it also good for the country’s other core institutions, including health care, business, education, law, science, the media, and the arts?”

But it is worth asking why the US military supports affirmative action, and what it means for the cause of racial justice. The Department of Defense’s (DOD) support for affirmative action is hypocritical and self-serving — and far from promoting racial justice, it helps perpetuate racial inequality and oppression both in the United States and abroad.

The amicus brief submitted by the US government in Students for Fair Admission v Harvard lays out the military’s case for affirmative action. First, the military cares about race in college admission decisions because it needs a diverse officer corps to command a racially diverse force of enlisted service members. Diversity has long been framed by the military as a “force multiplier,” meaning that it provides competitive efficiencies through the additional cultural and language skills of racially diverse military workers. Yet this force-multiplying diversity is confined to the lower ranks: according to the 2020 DOD Diversity and Inclusion Report, the enlisted are 18 percent black and 19 percent Hispanic, while only 8 percent of officers are black and 8 percent are Hispanic.

This is in line with a broader pattern. Although conservatives accuse it of being “woke,” the US military is profoundly shaped by racial inequality, with research documenting racial discrimination in promotions and military justice and racially unequal risk of PTSD, as well as a recent lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in access to veteran services. And it is hard to ignore proliferating reports of organized white supremacists in US military ranks.

The specter of Vietnam War–era “racial unrest” haunts the US government’s support for affirmative action in colleges. The amicus brief contains a list of examples of uprisings, revolts, and attacks on predominantly white military management by the more diverse lower ranks; the implication is that a more representative officer corps reduces such conflict and makes the military more effective.

But fifty years after the United States lost the Vietnam War, the officer corps has only slightly diversified, least of all in senior leadership. The amicus brief expresses concern that without affirmative action in university admissions, the officer corps will continue to be too white, which could in turn create the impression that non-white soldiers are “serving as ‘cannon fodder’ for white military leaders.” White officers would also lose the opportunity to be exposed to people of color in college, important to their supervisory skills.

The second reason that the military supports affirmative action in college admissions is attempting to increase recruitment. This is not surprising given the current recruitment crisis. Could a more diverse officer corps inspire more youth of color to join the military? Perhaps — although according to the DOD’s own polls, the top reasons that youth do not consider joining the military are the possibility of physical injury, death, or PTSD or other emotional and psychological issues.

The Supreme Court’s ruling lets the military academies keep affirmative action in admissions. But that is not enough for the armed forces, simply because these academies produce only 19 percent of officers. The rest come through civilian colleges. In fact, officers categorized as racial minorities are more likely to have gone through the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs in civilian colleges. That is why the US military has been a defender of affirmative action at selective colleges like Harvard.

Beyond the fact that the institution of the military is rife with racial inequality, there is also what the military does in the rest of the world. The ongoing “war on terror” is one in which “terror” is associated with Muslims, Arabs, and the Middle East, part of a long history of the United States targeting enemies construed as racialized others. Overseeing the largest military in the world, the diverse officer corps promised by affirmative action directs the destruction of infrastructure and communities, supervises the extraction of resources and destruction of the planet, and manages injury, disease, and death — most of which falls on people of color in the Global South.

The DOD’s consistent advocacy for race-conscious admissions is no social justice bona fide; in fact, it is entirely compatible with its being a fierce enemy of racial justice. Rather than celebrating the armed forces’ attempt to put a progressive sheen on its war-making, we should seek to end the mayhem they are responsible for abroad, and redirect resources to actually advancing the cause of economic and racial equality by providing for people’s urgent material needs.

Public-Private Partnerships Are a Deal With the Devil

2023-07-17T14:01:08Z

Recent experiences with public-private partnerships in Canadian cities, like Ottawa’s light-rail disaster, reveal how the model prioritizes profit over quality, leaving citizens with higher costs and worse services.

Recent experiences with public-private partnerships in Canada have revealed how disastrous the model can be. (Andrew Lahodynskyj / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

For those still unconvinced that public-private partnerships (P3s) are a bargain with the devil, recent experiences with P3s in various Canadian cities ought to seal the deal. The Ottawa case study is a doozy. To tackle downtown traffic congestion from bus overload, the city attempted to build out its light-rail. Because of the P3 model deployed, disaster ensued: lawsuits, sinkholes, trapped workers, delays, layoffs, scathing reports, malfunctioning doors, transit riders hopping a fence to escape the station, system failures, faulty trains, and more. And the Edmonton case isn’t a ringing endorsement of the model either. Ditto Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown LRT.

The premise of a P3 is that the public shoulders an outsize cost burden and shifts profits to the private sector on major projects — typically infrastructure. Deficit and debt hawks will tell you that the arrangement is a godsend, since it helps reduce public debt. But in the end, someone pays, and it’s always the user, which is to say the citizen, resident, or visitor who is left with higher costs and worse service. These projects often suffer from delays, exceed allocated budgets, and result in poor outcomes, all while lacking adequate democratic accountability.

In 2022, the Ottawa Light Rail Transit (LRT) inquiry documented the disastrous development and roll out of the light-rail in the city. The inquiry criticized the P3 model, noting “the P3 model caused or contributed to several of the ongoing difficulties on the project.” The project was an utter mess, and once the LRT launched, it was plagued by delays and breakdowns. As the inquiry notes, the P3 approach played a significant role in the botched project by boxing out the public. “For example, whereas the City traditionally had a hands-on, leading role in projects, given the lesser role it played under this model, the City was left in a position where it had limited insight or control over the OLRT1 project,” it says.

In the wake of the Ottawa debacle, the Ontario New Democratic Party called for an end to P3s, saying “We see that the true results of P3 projects are a brutal lack of transparency to the public, conflicting interests from partners, and less control by a city over massive infrastructure plans.” The report drew the attention of officials with the Ottawa Hospital and Infrastructure Ontario, raising concerns about the P3 hospital in Ottawa. Unfortunately, the project was already committed to the model.

Edmonton’s experience with P3s isn’t a ringing endorsement of the model, either. In August last year, Mayor Amarjeet Sohi called for a review of the city’s large projects and P3 use after years-long LRT development delays. He claimed the model “was forced upon the city” by the federal government. As CBC reported, the feds “would only contribute money to the project if the city entered into a semi-private delivery model.”

The Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) is a federal monument to the belief that P3s are the answer to the country’s building needs. While there is a need for a federal infrastructure funder, the semi-private model represents an abdication of the state’s role in doing public things by and for the public. The entrenchment of P3s through the CIB means higher costs for private financing and service delivery — and, one can expect, worse service to boot.

One argument for P3s is that they can mitigate risks for the public. As the LRT report notes, “the City was able to offload the geotechnical risk to RTG [Rideau Transit Group].” The report points out that when a sinkhole covered under the contract terms emerged on Rideau Street, “the City saved costs of over $100 million because it had transferred the geotechnical risk to RTG.” Of course, it remains an open question whether a different model or approach would have prevented the emergence of the sinkhole in the first place. Moreover, the report raises concerns that the P3 model led both the city and RTG to prioritize their liabilities, legal rights, and responsibilities instead of ensuring a reliable LRT system. Notably, the executive summary of the report observes that “the delivery model chosen by the City left the City with little control over RTG’s work.”

Ottawa’s LRT P3 was a “design-build-finance-maintain” contract — which is exactly what it sounds like. The private builder was responsible for designing, building, financing, and maintaining the LRT for a set price. In this model, the builder’s motivation lies in meeting the contract terms, ensuring the design, construction, and maintenance are done in a way that recoups their investment and maximizes profits. A perceptive observer may already discern the inherent risks in this setup.

An apocryphal quotation about free-market cost cutting is attributed to astronaut John Glenn. The quote has appeared in various forms. In one iteration, when asked how he felt ahead of becoming the first American to orbit Earth, he replied, “I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts, all built by the lowest bidder.”

The P3 model’s fundamental problem lies in its lack of public-spiritedness and focus on the common good. It is profit-focused. Moreover, it is focused on maximizing profit. That is a recipe for designing, building, delivering, and maintaining poor, expensive projects and services. And no amount of recommendations, shame, or inducements will change its nature. The fundamental logic of the model ensures bad outcomes.

And yet we’ll have to learn and relearn this lesson time and again. Governments are terrified of deficits and debts subnationally. In part, they’re right. Unlike the federal government, provinces and territories and cities have fewer tools and revenue-generating capacities. Moreover, years of neoliberal austerity in the 1990s and early 2000s led to federal governments cutting funding and downloading responsibilities to provinces and cities. Indeed, municipalities got the worst of it because they were abandoned or overburdened by both federal and provincial governments. Combine that with the long-term centrist and right-wing war on the idea that governments can and should do things, and the relentless capitalist pressure on states to shovel contracts and subsidies their way, and you get the rise and dominance of P3s.

It’s well beyond time to ditch P3s. The Ottawa LRT inquiry won’t be the last of its kind, nor will the messes in Edmonton and Toronto. The fight to end the model requires governments to step up and accept that big public things ought to be fundamentally public all the way down. But that only works if all levels of government are willing to spend the money to undertake projects themselves, and that struggle is a long way from being won.

Steven Soderbergh’s New Crime Series Full Circle Is Off to a Bumpy Start

2023-07-18T04:14:58Z

The new neo-noir series Full Circle, directed by Steven Soderbergh, has big ideas to share about class, race, nationality, and crime. But so far it’s a slog to watch.

Jared Browne (Ethan Stoddard) circled as a kidnapping target in Full Circle. (Max, 2023)

If you know Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece High and Low (1963) — and if you don’t, you’ve got some urgent viewing to do — you’re going to guess the major plot twist early on in Full Circle, Steven Soderbergh’s new six-part series. Both works concern the botched attempt to kidnap a boy from a wealthy family, a calamitous event that wreaks havoc among unexpectedly intertwined lives up and down the class scale.

Keep in mind that, for all his hyper-competence as a filmmaker, Soderbergh isn’t in Kurosawa’s league. Admittedly, almost no one is. The series’ complex multicharacter, multi-plot-strand, multinational narrative — a Soderberghian tendency by now — gets off to a slow, disjointed start, only gradually building suspense over the course of the two episodes currently available to view on Max. There’s a kind of baggy, unformed quality to the structure — too long and plodding in some sequences, racing along at a choppy pace in others — making it unsurprising to read that the show was being rewritten on the fly during production.

There’s an excellent cast doing all they can, featuring Timothy Olyphant and Claire Danes as Derek and Sam Browne, the parents of the targeted teenager, Jared (Ethan Stoddard). Dennis Quaid plays “Chef Jeff” McCusker, an abrasive celebrity chef whose multimedia empire, run by his daughter Sam, generates the family fortune. Jeff’s corrupt and clandestine business practices are indicated immediately by the loathsome French-braided ponytail he wears, by his smarmy way of protesting too much about all his good deeds and charitable works, and also by the goons who show up with bags of cash to assist him in a crisis. And there are many hints at secrets and lies involving tormented son-in-law Derek.

CCH Pounder plays Savitri Mahabir, who heads a Guyanese crime family operating out of Queens. In consultation with a mysterious shamanic figure, she has designed an intricate plan to get revenge against an as-yet-unnamed business rival, as well as lift a curse that has long plagued her family. This design involves renderings of and references to the image of coming “full circle” that is central to her kidnapping plan, including a reference to pi in the amount of ransom money demanded: $314,159. Her nephew Aked (Jharrel Jerome of I’m a Virgo and Moonlight) is tasked with pulling in poor young Guyanese immigrants including Louis (Gerald Jones), Xavier (Sheyi Cole), and Natalia (Adia) to do Mrs Mahabir’s dirty work, paying their way to New York City as a way to hold them in bondage indefinitely until they can pay the money back.

And Zazie Beetz plays Melody “Mel” Harmony, an obsessively ambitious Postal Service inspector — described as someone investigating mail-related crimes, but she behaves like a regular cop in a cop show. She’s sick of cafeteria meetings with her stolid, doughy boss Manny Broward (Jim Gaffigan), who seems determined to hold her back. At the same time, he’s got a point — she’s incredibly callous and arrogant and grating in her desperate careerist desire to be in on the solving of a “sexy” crime, like the Browne family kidnapping.

It’s possible that there will be a cumulative impact by the sixth episode of Full Circle, and the crisscrossing patterns of race, class, age, gender, sexuality, nationality, and ideology will all cohere into something meaningful at the end. That’s betting that Soderbergh is working in the zone where he achieves his best effects, which so far doesn’t look like the case. He’s incredibly uneven — for every inspired film like The Limey (1999), for example, he churns out a rote dud like Kimi (2022). But at least he’s relatively unpredictable and periodically does something genuinely exciting.

His long career ranges from big-budget star-studded crowd-pleasers like Magic Mike (2012), Contagion (2011), Ocean’s Eleven (2001), and Erin Brockovich (2000) to small-to-mid-sized genre films like The Limey, Traffic (2000), and Out of Sight (1998), to indie, experimental, and oddball works such as The Girlfriend Experience (2009), The Informant! (2009), Bubble (2005), Schizopolis (1996), and Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). These days he seems largely occupied with churning out HBO/Max and Netflix films. With Full Circle he’s once again working in partnership with writer Ed Solomon (of Men in Black and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure). Their last collaborations for HBO were No Sudden Move (2021) and Mosaic (2018).

The good news is that both have a healthy respect for genre. The bad news is that genre can only help you so much when what you’re interested in thematically isn’t very clear or compelling. “It never begins, thus it never ends,” a voice intones at the very beginning of the series, and the face of Jared Browne, circled in red in a newspaper shot of his wealthy family, also underscores the “full circle” idea of a long overdue payback for old sins. From this beginning it’s pretty manifest that the wealthy, seemingly respectable white family with a celebrity founder will be revealed to have violent and exploitative connections to the black crime family reflective of a grim colonial history.

Maybe Full Circle will make something more exciting from that than what we see so far. But it’s turning out to be a bit of a slog.

Chief Justice Roberts Wants Absolute Power in the Supreme Court — If It’s Conservative

2023-07-17T11:09:28Z

In the early 1980s, Chief Justice John Roberts, then a young lawyer, worked with the Reagan administration to strip power from a liberal judiciary. Today he has reversed course to shield the Supreme Court’s absolute power.

Chief Justice John Roberts in Washington, DC, January 26, 2009. (Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)

In the early 1980s, a young John Roberts was working as a lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s administration, crafting legal and constitutional arguments in favor of Republican efforts to strip power from a liberal judiciary that threatened their agenda.

Roberts argued in a 1983 memo defending term limits for federal judges that the “federal judiciary today benefits from an insulation from political pressure even as it usurps the roles of the political branches.”

Now, as chief justice of the most conservative Supreme Court in a century, Roberts has reversed course to shield the court’s absolute power. He has defended the court’s decisions revoking rights from tens of millions of people against public outcry, arguing that “you don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is.”

“In the 1980s, when the Right felt that it had popular control that the judiciary was obstructing, [Roberts] had no trouble challenging the judiciary in the way that people on the Left want to do now,” Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University, told the Lever.

In recent months, a string of reports from ProPublica and other news outlets have detailed apparent violations of ethics laws among the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, undermining the legitimacy of an institution that had already been captured by dark money and faced historically low approval ratings.

The high court, meanwhile, has continued to issue decisions overturning decades of precedent and key components of the Democratic agenda — sometimes with little legal or constitutional basis — while Roberts has refused to comply with a congressional ethics investigation or conduct an internal investigation.

Congressional Democrats have flirted with efforts to wrest power from the court, by attacking its legitimacy, seeking information from the justices’ benefactors, proposing legislation to impose term limits and a code of ethics, and attempting to preempt judicial review in several recent pieces of legislation.

Roberts has issued threats against lawmakers who want to conduct any oversight of the court — but it was Roberts himself who helped write the playbook they could now follow.

“The Case for Insulating the Judges From Political Accountability Weakens”

In the early 1980s, Southern Republicans like North Carolina senator Jesse Helms were concerned about the power of the federal judiciary to advance a liberal agenda and defang conservative policies, and proposed more than two dozen bills aimed at stripping power from the courts. In the previous two decades, the Supreme Court had defied social conservatives and entrenched abortion rights in Roe v. Wade, upheld busing to enforce desegregation, and declared school prayers unconstitutional.

Officials within the Reagan administration were split on the so-called “jurisdiction stripping” legislation and questioned whether it was constitutional. Roberts, then a lawyer in the Justice Department, seemed to favor the effort. He criticized the Office of Legal Counsel’s assistant attorney general Ted Olson, who believed the efforts were unconstitutional, on numerous occasions.

“Opposition to jurisdictional limits on constitutional grounds will be considered as a position of courage, integrity and principle,” Olson had written in a memo on the legislation.

“Real courage would be to read the Constitution as it should be read and not kowtow to the Tribes, Lewises, and Brinks,” Roberts wrote in the margin of Olson’s memo, referring to three liberal lawyers who had opposed the jurisdiction-stripping bills.

Ken Starr, then Reagan’s attorney general, directed Roberts to provide a reasoned defense of jurisdiction stripping.

Roberts wrote in a 1981 memo that the Constitution’s “exceptions clause,” which has been interpreted to allow Congress to strip power from the Supreme Court, was “clear and unequivocal,” adding that the framers of the Constitution “were not inartful draftsmen and can be expected to have known how to express the more restricted interpretations advanced by modern commentators had such constructions in fact been intended.”

“He was willing to get rowdy in facing down the judiciary,” said Moyn.

While jurisdiction stripping was favored by many conservatives at that time, Roberts also supported a far more fringe effort to rein in the courts.

In 1983, a senator from Oklahoma who was concerned about the power of federal judges “to turn criminals loose” introduced legislation to impose a ten-year term limit on federal judges, after which point the Senate could reconfirm them for an additional term. Reagan’s Justice Department prepared a report opposing the amendment, arguing that it undermined judicial independence and taking issue with the fact that judges could be reconfirmed by the Senate without the involvement of the executive branch.

But Roberts, at that point a White House lawyer, once again argued against his fellow administration lawyers, just months after the Supreme Court handed down rulings that thwarted the power of the other two branches. Those decisions included ending Congress’s “legislative veto,” blocking Reagan’s deregulation of airbags and automatic seat belts and ruling that deregulation was subject to the same legal standards as issuing new regulations, and reaffirming the constitutional right to an abortion.

On October 3, the first day of the Supreme Court’s 1983–84 term, Roberts sent a conspicuously timed memo in favor of term limits for judges “without possibility of reappointment” by the Senate. The court was set to hear major cases that term including Chevron v. NRDC, which dealt with which branch of government — the courts or federal agencies — retained the power to interpret laws in certain cases.

Roberts’s memo claimed that the Justice Department’s report opposing term limits was “somewhat disingenuous” because it cited documents from the time of America’s founding that “were predicated on a view of the judge’s role that many if not most sitting federal judges would find unacceptably circumscribed.”

“To the extent the judicial role is unabashedly viewed as one in which judges do more than simply figure out what the Framers intended,” wrote Roberts, “the case for insulating the judges from political accountability weakens.”

He was arguing, in other words, that if the court was going to engage in politics, it could not also claim it was above politics and therefore immunized against accountability.

“A Very Lonely Dissenter”

Between working as a Reagan administration lawyer and ascending to the high court himself, Roberts went from being a critic of the court’s immunity from accountability to one of its staunchest defenders against any possible encroachment by Congress.

“Since he’s been on the Supreme Court, he’s [been] deeply skeptical of Congress being able to tell courts how to rule in a particular case, or to narrow the kinds of cases or the kinds of issues they can rule on,” said Alan Trammell, a law professor at Washington and Lee University. “Sometimes he’s been a very lonely dissenter on that.”

One such case was Bank Markazi v. Peterson (2016), which dealt with a law passed by Congress that required the Iranian government to pay damages to US victims of terrorist attacks. Iran’s central bank sued, arguing that the law violated the separation of powers by intervening in a specific, pending lawsuit over the damages. Seven justices on the court sided with Congress, but Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

“Today’s decision will indeed become a ‘blueprint for extensive expansion of the legislative power’ at the judiciary’s expense,” Roberts wrote in his dissent.

Roberts’s careful guarding of the court could become a problem as Democrats consider even meager jurisdiction-stripping efforts as a way to enact their agenda. While they haven’t proposed anything as radical as the bills introduced by Southern Republicans in the early 1980s, Democratic lawmakers have slipped anti-judicial review provisions into a handful of bills recently.

In the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the keystone Democratic legislative initiatives of Joe Biden’s presidency, lawmakers included language to prevent the courts from reviewing the prices negotiated as part of the measure allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices on some medicines.

Drug companies and their lobbying groups have challenged this anti-judicial review provision as unconstitutional in lawsuits attempting to block the legislation from taking place.

But a comprehensive study of congressional efforts to preempt the courts from reviewing agency decisions, conducted by Laura Dolbow, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that such provisions in statutes are actually fairly common. “At least 190 provisions in the US Code expressly preclude judicial review over agency actions,” according to a forthcoming article by Dolbow to be published in the Vanderbilt Law Review.

Medicare, Dolbow found, has the most of these laws of any program. “It’s very common that when Congress sets up a program where Medicare will pay for health care services or pharmaceutical products, that it says the payment rate will not be subject to judicial review,” Dolbow told the Lever.

While the courts typically respect the so-called “review bars,” Dolbow said, the drug price negotiation lawsuits are attempting a somewhat novel tactic to bypass the review bars.

“The big issue right now that courts are kind of dodging is whether or not a review bar like this can preclude constitutional claims,” she said. “All of the complaints that have been filed over the drug price negotiation program exclusively raised constitutional claims. They’re doing that because they’re trying to get around the review bars.”

The arguments, Dolbow said, are weak, and the lawsuits might get tossed out on standing grounds before the courts hear them — since negotiations haven’t started. But the suits pose a test to the Roberts court over a key Democratic agenda item.

“[Roberts] has been more inclined than most other justices to say, ‘hold on, Congress is invading our power,” Trammell said. “And he’s been very reluctant to find that Congress has even stripped jurisdiction.”

That was the case in Patchak v. Zinke (2018), where six of the justices sided with Donald Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, to uphold a law directing federal courts to dismiss lawsuits pertaining to a particular tract of land. But Roberts penned a dissent, arguing that the majority had incorrectly viewed the law as a jurisdiction strip.

“Congress cannot, under the guise of altering federal jurisdiction, dictate the result of a pending proceeding,” Roberts wrote.

His dissent is now being cited by environmentalists challenging a recent debt ceiling law provision that required federal agencies to issue permits for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline backed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and blocking federal courts — which have been holding up the project — from exercising judicial review over the permits.

“His first goal, which leads him to sometimes subordinate his own ideological and political priors, is to make sure the court’s power remains untrammeled,” said Moyn. “Many of his seemingly good decisions are really about Roberts joining the liberals to save the court’s reputation so that its power is not diminished. That makes those good decisions look much less glamorous. Because they’re about self-preservation.”

“The Status Quo Is No Longer Tenable”

It’s not just the court’s jurisdiction that Roberts has been preciously protecting. He has previously threatened that Congress’s power to impose financial reporting, gift, and recusal rules on the high court had “never been tested.”

Supreme Court justices must comply with long-standing federal ethics laws mandating financial disclosures, though the court does not have its own ethics code governing issues like standards for recusal.

In 2011, following reports that conservative justices had attended Republican fundraisers and strategy sessions, Democrats introduced legislation to impose a code of ethics on the court. Roberts shot back in his annual report that year, warning that while Supreme Court justices voluntarily comply with the ethics rules that cover the rest of the federal judiciary, the high court “has never addressed whether Congress may impose those requirements on the Supreme Court.”

Roberts has declined, meanwhile, to enforce federal ethics laws against the justices or impose an internal code of ethics on the court.

Now, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promises to hold a vote this year on a Supreme Court ethics code and House Democrats have reintroduced legislation to create term limits for the federal judiciary, they could be setting up for a battle with Roberts.

In April, following bombshell reporting by ProPublica that Justice Clarence Thomas had for two decades accepted undisclosed gifts from billionaire GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked Roberts to testify before the Senate about Supreme Court ethics.

The court’s ongoing ethical lapses “were already apparent back in 2011, and the court’s decade-long failure to address them has contributed to a crisis of public confidence,” Durbin wrote in a letter to Roberts. “The status quo is no longer tenable.”

Roberts declined to appear, writing in response that “testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the Chief Justice of the United States is exceedingly rare, as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”

Rather than conducting his own, internal ethics investigation into the Thomas revelations, he punted the matter to the Judicial Conference, a policymaking body made up of largely Republican-appointed federal judges. That body referred the matter to the Committee on Financial Disclosure — whose members’ identities were previously kept secret.

It is not clear that the Supreme Court would necessarily respect the conclusions of the Financial Disclosure Committee, since it is made up of lower court judges.

Reports have continued to flood in about ethics violations or the appearance of corruption on the court. Justice Samuel Alito accepted an undisclosed private jet flight from conservative hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer and did not recuse himself from cases involving Singer’s business. Alito’s wife leased land to a major oil and gas company for drilling, while Alito voted to scale back the Clean Water Act with the backing of fossil fuel interests. Conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, who reportedly organized Alito’s ride on Singer’s plane, separately steered consulting payments to Thomas’s wife Ginni.

The head of a major law firm with a Supreme Court practice bought property from Justice Neil Gorsuch just nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate — and Gorsuch did not disclose the buyer. Sotomayor earned millions in book royalties from Penguin Random House but declined to recuse herself from cases involving the publisher. Lawyers with business before the court paid a Thomas aide via Venmo in connection to Thomas’s Christmas party. The list goes on.

Meanwhile, the court has struck down key components of the Biden agenda, most recently his student debt cancellation plan, using procedural gimmicks and ignoring glaring issues like plaintiffs’ lack of standing. Last year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating federal protections for abortion rights and allowing states to once again ban the procedure.

In response to the mounting revelations and increasingly right-wing rulings, top Senate Democrats announced that the Judiciary Committee would hold a vote on Supreme Court ethics legislation on July 20. Their bill requires the high court to adopt and make public a code of conduct, establishes new gift and travel disclosure requirements, creates rules for recusal, and empowers a panel of lower court judges to review ethics complaints.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) has reintroduced legislation to impose eighteen-year term limits on Supreme Court justices and allow presidents to appoint two justices per term.

“Our Founding Fathers intended for lifetime appointments to ensure impartiality,” Khanna said in a statement last month. “The [student debt] decision today demonstrates how justices have become partisan and out of step with the American public.”

For his part, Biden seems unwilling to do anything. While Biden recently acknowledged that the Roberts court “is not a normal court,” he opposed calls for Democrats to add seats to the Supreme Court, arguing it would “politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy.”

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

I Fell Down the Alt-Right Rabbit Hole. Eventually, I Climbed My Way Out.

2023-07-18T02:14:56Z

At a time of personal confusion and pain in my life, Jordan Peterson and the alt right gave me direction and purpose. I eventually realized that purpose was spreading a cruel, antisocial worldview — but not before I inflicted that cruelty on those around me.

I can vividly remember my first public confrontation after having fallen into the alt-right pipeline. A transgender classmate at Augusta University spoke up during a class discussion, and I saw an opportunity.

By this point in my life, watching untold hours of videos with titles like “WOKE FEMINIST OWNED BY STOIC LIBERTARIAN” had trained me to pounce. Once called on, I launched into a tirade, repeatedly denouncing “wokeness” and attacks on “Western Civilization.” What’s hardest for me to recall now, though, is the cruelty I gleefully expressed toward my classmate. More than once, I made a point to purposefully refer to this peer as a woman, despite the fact that he had clearly stated his identity as a man (and had surely suffered immensely along his life path toward that decision). “Despite what she says, she’s not a man,” I told the class.

When I finished, my classmate responded succinctly: “It’s ‘he,’ and you’re an asshole.” But in my mind, I’d done it: I had mounted a simultaneous attack on political correctness and defense of Western values. I had waded into the marketplace of ideas, done battle against progressivism, and that was all that mattered.

More than anything, I was trying to emulate the man I’d grown to idolize: Dr Jordan Peterson.

Peterson’s Allure

My obsession with Peterson began in a seemingly nonideological place. In the summer of 2015, my parents told my sister and me that their marriage was ending. As I grew up in a military, evangelical household, my father often worked long hours or was deployed to other countries. When he was back, we lived under his rigid law. When he was gone, my mom was a church-grounded disciplinarian. I grew up to fear both God and the rod, attending Methodist and Baptist churches of my mother’s choosing as we moved from military base to military base.

From a young age, I heard stories at home and in the pews about the God-given roles for men, women, and children. I learned that the outside world contained countless temptations that should be avoided or challenged at all costs. We floated from congregation to congregation as we moved between military stations. I can’t remember a time through high school and college when church or the military was out of the picture, with my family attending service twice on Sundays and once on Wednesdays. But all that religion wasn’t enough to stop my parents’ marriage from falling apart.

At the same time, I discovered the online right-wing media sphere known today as the “intellectual dark web” (IDW). Reacting to “politically correct” currents in academia and public life, figures like Peterson and orbiters who had gained celebrity during the “Gamergate” episode — a vehemently anti-feminist, “anti-woke” online campaign that started in the video game community but soon spread far beyond it — like Mark Meechan (“Count Dankula”) and Tim Pool saw a meteoric rise in popularity among a growing swathe of disaffected, intellectually curious, but socially inept right-wing audiences.

Few people then or today knew much about it, and maybe most who heard tell had no interest in learning more. But I was one of those young men who, during Gamergate, glommed onto figures like Peterson.

At the time, the University of Toronto psychology professor had publicly denounced Canada’s Bill C-16, an amendment that would add discrimination based on gender identity and expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act’s criminal code. According to Peterson, his opposition was rooted not in bigotry but a belief in basic rights of free speech and antiauthoritarianism.

While the university did not condone Peterson’s charges, it never leveled formal disciplinary measures against him. He later resigned from his post of his own volition. Still, almost overnight, Peterson somehow successfully portrayed himself as a martyr for free speech, “Western values,” and men’s issues.

Jordan Peterson addresses students at the University of Cambridge in the UK on November 2, 2018. (Chris Williamson / Getty Images)

Feeling vulnerable and alone because of my parents’ dissolving marriage, I decided to follow these preoccupations. Peterson offered me, at a time of personal strife, the kind of principled fatherly guidance and direction that had been absent in my life following my parents’ divorce.

During one particularly rough month in late 2018, for instance, Peterson’s interviews and lectures gave me a reprieve from my parents’ chaotic postdivorce spats. Made to split my time between two homes and two lives, I felt that the only constant was the steady stream of advice and empathy that Peterson offered me via lectures and interviews on YouTube.

In one standout interview, Peterson was asked why he was brought to weeping over the issues impacting men. His response, delivered through tears, hit home for me: according to Peterson, at the end of public speeches, college-aged men would approach him in droves to thank him for his advice. In Peterson’s estimation, these men had been forgotten about. I agreed: I had been forgotten about.

Something about his sincerity clicked. He spoke, as no others would or could, to my station, my concerns. Especially in those dark moments, Peterson felt present for me, ready to field my complaints and champion my value and future. He appealed to a growingly antisocial and pessimistic group of young men like me who were almost certain that a decades-, even centuries-long culture war had debased the primacy and value of men’s experiences. For this reason, I, and many other men like me, ate up Peterson’s videos, articles, and books, and became deeply personally invested in niche micro-celebrities like him and the sense of catharsis they offered.

Peterson’s videos addressing his supposed martyrdom appeared to focus more on abstract principles of freedom of expression than overt misogyny or homophobia. The accoladed professor seemed interested in the ideas, not the fake drama that I felt characterized most politics at the time. I was hooked. Here, with perfect timing, was the father figure that I so dearly wanted and desperately found myself searching for.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I worked through Peterson and co.’s back catalogue of videos as YouTube suggested more alt-right clips for me to watch. In one case, the algorithm recommended that I watch a podcast interview from the channel h3h3. Its hosts, Ethan and Hila Klein — who brushed with courting alt-right fans, but to whom I had been subscribed for their nonpolitical content — had Peterson on their show in 2017. (They have since removed the episode after their public shift from center-right toward more left-leaning interviewees like Hasan Piker). Peterson’s numerous appearances on Joe Rogan’s podcast were next.

Soon, almost all the videos I watched, podcasts I listened to, online forums I frequented, and books I read were shot through with right-wing ideology, guiding not just my thinking but my actions in the digital world and everyday life. I repeatedly found myself interjecting at work, in class, and in comments sections online, playing my part as the self-appointed reactionary devil’s advocate.

My interventions weren’t always in person, like my misgendering episode in class. Many of them unfolded in the venue where I felt most comfortable: online. In one prolonged episode, I remember arguing in the comments section, using an anonymous account, under a YouTube video about the #MeToo movement’s progress in 2019. For longer than a week, I antagonized what I deemed to be “woke” commenters who posted their support for the movement. Seeing Peterson’s interactions with feminists and women in general as a guide on how to interact with progressive arguments, I checked in daily to refute and debunk all the flak that I was getting for bringing vitriol into the discussion.

Another time, I spent an afternoon at work berating a coworker who celebrated our employer’s weekly practice of donating soon-to-expire food to soup kitchens and homeless pantries in the area. Having recently watched a video of Peterson denouncing such activism, I repeated the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” narrative that online conservatism encouraged. I was convinced that poor and homeless families in the area and across the country were in precarious situations due to their own lack of responsibility — a belief that had been incubated in me implicitly by Peterson’s self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which espoused individualism in practice. It’s a common-enough argument on the Right, but I’m struck now at how needlessly cruel it is in suggesting that fellow human beings seeking life’s most basic necessity, food, should be denied it.

I had become needlessly disruptive and antisocial, launching into vitriolic arguments with those around me. My personal life suffered greatly. During this period, I distanced myself from family and close friends whom I suspected of “wokeness.” I lashed out at anyone — friends, family, partners — who wasn’t part of the alt-right or alt-right-sympathetic bubble I’d discovered and constructed around myself.

I shut down discussions with friends of color who tried to convince me that racism was a problem. None of their stories of discrimination or marginalization — not even those stories of encounters with police, or mistreatment by teachers or managers who we all knew personally — swayed me. I was certain that these were stories from people wedded to making excuses for their lot in life. Transgender friends steered clear of me because of my comments. My intolerance was not limited to screens — I was driving people away from me in the real world.

Turning Around

Flash forward to the spring of 2019, the end of my third year at Augusta. I’d remained on a steady diet of Peterson’s content: he uploaded more lectures, appeared on more programs, and continued promoting his self-help book to wider audiences. I, meanwhile, became more seriously devoted to my studies while also reading and watching more from Peterson, including his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. At this point, I even began dabbling with sites like 4chan, where I identified with the post-ironic right-wing meme figure Pepe the F rog. I was probably on track to become, if not an active member of a far-right group like the Proud Boys or Three Percenters, at least a strong sympathizer.

I was headed down that path when, as part of my college’s English program, I had to take courses on African-American literature, Shakespeare, and book history and print culture.

The course on African-American literature covered familiar, canonical names: Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and more. Here, for what seemed like the first time since I’d discovered Peterson, I was tasked with a true liberal education, including hearing out and engaging with the plights and imaginations of people who saw their most basic rights suppressed.

The defining feature of the course was the insistence of the professor that we ought to reflect upon our own position relative to the texts and their authors. I found this exercise to be deeply uncomfortable: practicing self-reflection in the presence of a black professor and a social justice–oriented group of peers was not something I did often.

It was Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave that helped me to embrace the discomfort necessary for change — mainly by way of tackling the texts with my peers in class. Douglass was a figure whose name I had heard often but whose story I hadn’t read in full by that point, which, in retrospect, seems like part of the problem behind the ease with which I fell down the alt-right rabbit hole. The narrative turned a mirror onto me and, in upsetting detail, showed me that my inclinations toward antagonizing those who looked, acted, or believed differently than myself was the selfsame attitude, albeit less severe and a century later, that led to Douglass’ dehumanization.

Title page of an 1845 edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. (Wikimedia Commons)

Douglass’s texts confronted another core tenet that fueled my beliefs: the notion that I was the victim. Until this point, I had convinced myself, by spending days consuming all kinds of alt-right propaganda, that I occupied a position at the bottom rung of the social ladder — which led me to justify my bigoted thoughts and actions. In truth, the Narrative showed me that the opposite was true, historically speaking. Not only that, but also that I could, and should, use my station for good. Douglass et al. were, in some sense, counting on sympathetic readers to aid in making their world better rather than wallow in the individualistic, self-made vision of the world that I’d built up because of thinkers like Peterson.

In assigning the book and asking us to discuss it or read it out loud in class, the professor, in my mind, was harsh but ultimately fair in his methodology. By challenging me and my peers to address our preconceptions of the world, he helped us grow to see the parallels between our moment and the past, while also considering how our thoughts and actions inevitably create or prevent the creation of the kinds of institutions that led to Douglass’s tribulations in the first place. More than anything, this professor recognized the importance of taking us to task to learn and grow, rather than to put us down and keep us there. To that point, I had not encountered such patience or responsibility from the likes of Peterson et al.

In a class I took with another professor, history wasn’t merely shaped by the whims of powerful men who looked, acted, or believed as I did. I was again encouraged to contemplate the lives and experiences of everyday people, downtrodden people, people on the margins — people who had lives far harder than mine, yet lived lives worth learning from.

One of the standout examples of this professor’s influence on my thinking was her required read of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms. The text follows Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller and peasant, as he faces charges of blasphemy levied by the Roman Catholic Church. Ginzburg’s historical storytelling and the professor’s insistence on allowing the “little guy” to speak through time helped me see history from new angles. The idea that I could, as part of a collective group of people, make or shape history was a revelation.

Quite quickly, Peterson’s stories about the primacy of individualistic and powerful men, as well as his insistence that people like me were being displaced in society, left my thinking almost entirely. In being made to encounter discomforting media and, eventually, in seeking it out to challenge my own views, I had developed a new understanding of my own beliefs and how they were shaped. This changing worldview prompted a change in the YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit algorithms feeding me new ideas.

Much has been made in recent years of the role those algorithms have played in guiding angry young men into the open arms of the Right. That was certainly true for me. But those same algorithms steered me in another direction when I was ready.

I watched a debate on YouTube between Peterson and the Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. The first thing I remember thinking about the video was that it couldn’t have been a better visual juxtaposition of ideology and charisma. Žižek was slouched and slobbish. Peterson was well dressed, far more consistent in his cadence, and reliant upon what I thought was a more developed vocabulary.

But once the debate began, my impressions of the two men flipped. I saw the artifice of my stand-in father crumble before the arguably simple procession of facts and sporadic rhetoric that characterized the goofy leftist’s arguments. That Peterson hadn’t even bothered to read Marx’s Communist Manifesto before the debate, despite carrying himself as well read and always informed, was a revealing admission, I remember thinking. This video was one of many that would come to demolish my perception of Peterson as a figure worth emulating.

The recommended tab and, by extension, the algorithm as a whole — apparently influenced by my rare jaunt into something other than an antisocial and academized version of racism, transphobia, or elitism — slowly introduced me to Cornel West. Like Žižek, West presents himself as an opposite to Peterson. Though both figures are engaging orators, West’s articulation of history, theory, and politics was incredibly compelling to me.

In contrast to Peterson’s sternness, West brought a deep sense of warmth and caring to his message. West also has an ability to challenge his audience to dig deeper, making his intellectual work feel accessible and relatable. For me, this helped break the spell of the Petersonian worldview I’d concocted.

Whereas Peterson et al. never once encouraged me to take my politics to the streets in a way that made my life better, these new thinkers were always touting the importance of making politics less about online appearances and more about in-person action. I decided to take their suggestions and became active in real-world politics.

As a result of the progressive show and podcast the Majority Report’s coverage of the Kellogg workers’ strike in 2021, as an example, I made a vow to be part of a union when I entered my PhD program — a promise I’ve kept, joining with the Boston College Graduate Employees Union as soon as I could. And I made a concerted effort to be involved with Democratic Socialists of America. In other words, I’ve become everything Jordan Peterson has spent his career trying to destroy.

Learning for a Better World

When I look back at my sojourn on the alt right, I feel the need to talk about it. For at least four years, I spent my time learning how to be bigoted and antagonistic. My insecurities and prejudices were fostered and accepted by a group of alt-right figureheads, especially Peterson, something I desperately needed in my life. I was guaranteed community with people who were just as jaded and antisocial as myself.

But that train led nowhere fast. The right-wing rabbit hole took me to places I now deeply regret. Ultimately, what pulled me away from the terminally online alt right was left-leaning spheres of content and engagement that helped to keep me challenged and informed when I was not in the classroom or library.

Undeniably, I would not have moved leftward — at least not as quickly — had it not been for my liberal arts education. Unlike online spaces, where I curated the information that I wanted to see, and the algorithm fed me more of the same bigoted, hateful content, college was perhaps the first time I was required to engage with media outside of my usual diet. There, I read, watched, and listened to stories from people who could not have been further afield from me in their appearances, nationalities, beliefs, and so on.

In reflecting on the impact that this liberal arts education had and continues to have on me, I realize why the Right, including Peterson to this day, is so hell-bent on dismantling liberal arts education. Without being exposed to people and media from disparate places, I would have been allowed to let yet another facet of my life become consumed by my disgusting fascination with the antisocial content pumped out by the likes of Peterson, Tim Pool, and Ben Shapiro.

From my experience, once you get a taste of learning — genuine, complicated wrestling with philosophies and histories different from your own — it’s hard to leave it and its lessons behind.

Because the right-wing saturation of platforms like YouTube was so central to my becoming a reactionary, I believe that creating a competing left-wing presence in online spaces should be a priority for the Left. Currently, conservatives enjoy a nearly unchallenged role in grabbing young men who may very well be supportive of progressive movements, but whose lack of community drives them away from collective politicking. This needs to change.

Leftists shouldn’t view sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit as implacable strongholds for the Right. Social media and online platforms need to be viewed as battlegrounds. Leftists can win on them.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we need to treat “severely online” individuals and groups as approachable. While I do not think that good, left-wing media alone would have changed my thinking, at least not in as short a time, having videos, books, podcasts, and shows in the wings when I eventually got called out in the real world meant that when I was ready to embrace the curiosity that eventually led me out of conservative thinking, resources were waiting for me. If my story has indicated anything, it is that there are swathes of politically curious people out there who, with some help, can be turned onto a path of self-discovery that promotes a better world.

The Left should see producing politically informed media as paramount to capturing the minds of people who, without intervention, may very well wander down the alt-right pipeline. If this is done, we can prevent people from losing friends, families, and even themselves to harmful ideologies — and grow our movement in the process.

If not, the path looks a lot darker. Trust me, I’ve been there.