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08 February 21
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Chris Hayes | The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy
Chris Hayes, The Atlantic
Hayes writes: "The GOP is moderating on policy questions, even as it grows more dangerous on core questions of democracy and the rule of law."
he Republican Party is radicalizing against democracy. This is the central political fact of our moment. Instead of organizing its coalition around shared policy goals, the GOP has chosen to emphasize hatred and fear of its political opponents, who—they warn—will destroy their supporters and the country. Those Manichaean stakes are used to justify every effort to retain power, and make keeping power the GOP’s highest purpose. We are living with a deadly example of just how far those efforts can go, and things are likely to get worse.
At the same time, the Republican Party is moderating on policy. On a host of issues, the left is winning. It’s not a rout—and ideological battles continue—but public opinion is trending left. Yesterday’s progressive heresy has become today’s unremarkable consensus. On top of that, Democrats have established a narrow but surprisingly durable electoral majority, holding control of the House, winning back the Senate, and taking the presidency by 7 million votes.
And so the Biden era of American politics is shaping up as a contest between the growing ideological hegemony of liberalism, and the intensifying opposition of a political minority that has proved willing to engage in violence in order to hold on to power. This fight isn’t ultimately about policy, where the gaps are narrowing. It’s about whether the United States will live up to the promise of democracy—and on that crucial question, we’ve rarely been so divided.
Big waves of reform and reconstruction in America have generally required massive political majorities. Congressional Reconstruction—which marked a second founding of the nation and the first attempt to create a multiracial democracy—relied on supermajorities in both houses, indeed the most radical supermajority in American history. The New Deal and the Great Society also harnessed congressional supermajorities to achieve enormous, lasting legislative change.
In 2020, some hoped that the colossal failures of the Trump administration and the shocking catastrophe of the coronavirus would usher in a similar landslide, but those hopes were disappointed. If COVID-19 and Donald Trump didn’t manage to produce a decisive result, it is hard to imagine what would. With structural polarization and high levels of party competition, blowout electoral victories are no longer a realistic path to achieving change. Instead, political movements win by making the controversial things they’re pushing part of the consensus.
Back in 2004, marriage equality and the Iraq War were two of the most contentious and salient political issues. President George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and the conservative media were wholly invested in the propositions that the Iraq War was good and just and must be continued, and that marriage between gay people was an unprecedented assault on one of the oldest human institutions and must be opposed at all costs.
Not only were both of these issues at the center of the 2004 election; they were defining issues for the culture-war politics of the time. Everywhere you looked, the message from conservatives was that good, red-blooded, God-fearing, patriotic Americans in Red America understood the grave need for war and sacrifice to defend the nation, and opposed the new-fangled sexual politics that coastal urban liberals were trying to foist on Middle America.
But soon after the election, which Bush narrowly won, the Iraq War became an enormous political albatross for Republicans. Democrats swept to power in the House in 2006. Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008, in no small part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq. By 2016, Trump, who had once supported the Iraq War, was lying about his previous support and attacking everyone else for theirs. Ted Cruz told me on a podcast in 2019 that as a young conservative lawyer in Texas, he had opposed the Iraq War—which, if true, would make him a political unicorn. By 2020, Tucker Carlson, who had vocally supported the Iraq War and browbeat liberal opponents for their opposition, was railing against warmongers and endless wars. In fact, ending endless wars became a kind of right-wing rallying cry.
And this shift has had real policy consequences. Any time Trump moved toward starting another war, he faced genuine pushback from his political base. When Trump made the reckless decision to kill the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qassem Soleimani, politicians and the American public, across the ideological and political spectrum, quickly made clear that they had no tolerance for yet another war in the Middle East.
Now, this only goes so far: The War on Terror continues, as does the war in Afghanistan, and air and drone strikes expanded under Trump, as did civilian casualties in the places we continue to bomb. We’ve not reached some wonderful new era of hegemonic peace. But the politics of the Iraq War inverted, helping the U.S. avoid another calamity of that magnitude.
And while some conservatives have redoubled their efforts to use the courts to secure religious exemptions from nondiscrimination law, and while conservatives continue to wage political battles against transgender Americans, the central issue of marriage equality has largely been rendered moot. The GOP has more or less given up. Broadsides against marriage equality or lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals have largely disappeared from the Republican Party’s mainstream political messaging.
No political victory, of course, is ever truly total or final. But liberals won, resoundingly, two of the most contentious battles of the 2004 election, even though it was the only recent presidential election in which they lost the majority of the vote. And, indeed, as the Republican Party has changed its views on the wisdom of the Iraq War, and on the fundamental equality of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, it has taken a potent political weapon away from its Democratic opponents.
The result is that voters have more or less forgotten and forgiven Republicans’ awful rhetoric and policies on Iraq and marriage equality, because voters’ memories are short. I’m personally furious that, to this day, no one involved in those activities has ever truly paid an appropriate long-term reputational price. Nevertheless, we now enjoy a kind of broad consensus that is better and more progressive than what prevailed before.
But if Democrats are winning the big policy fights, why are our elections still so close, and the nation so bitterly divided?
Imagine for a moment that you’re in a room with 100 other people. This is in the before times, so no masks! Everyone’s socializing, maybe drinking and laughing and talking. It just so happens that 52 of the people in the room are wearing sweatshirts and 48 have T-shirts on. You step outside for a moment to take a call, and when you come back, four people have gotten a little warm and taken off their sweatshirts. There are now 52 people with T-shirts on and 48 with sweatshirts.
Would you be tempted to write a big think piece about “Why This Is a T-Shirt Room Now”? Would you find yourself seized with a horrified vertigo because you don’t recognize the room anymore? Or would you even notice?
Welcome to contemporary American politics. In 2020, Georgia swung more than any other swing state and moved about five points. In politics, five points in four years is an enormous change, but again, that’s just a few people in the room switching their shirts.
Much of American political history after the Civil War was dominated by fairly durable majority coalitions in national politics. While the presidency swapped back and forth, congressional majorities endured—but no longer. In her book Insecure Majorities, the political scientist Frances Lee argues persuasively that the rapid switches in legislative control we’re seeing now between the two major parties are actually rather anomalous. Democrats and Republicans have traded control of Congress over the past few decades more frequently than at any other time since the end of Reconstruction and the dawn of the Gilded Age.
Somewhat remarkably, the country does have a narrow but improbably durable progressive majority: For the first time in American history, one party, the Democrats, has won the popular vote in seven of eight presidential elections.
But that edge is neither large nor guaranteed. The average margin of those Democratic wins is narrow, about 2.5 percent, and the growing gap between the Electoral College tipping-point state and the popular vote means the Democratic coalition is becoming increasingly inefficient. The Constitution puts a wind at the backs of Republicans and makes them more competitive than they would be otherwise. And the political coalitions aren’t fixed; the Democratic and Republican Parties are in flux.
To a degree that has little precedent, place—as opposed to region—has become a strong predictor of voting patterns. Democrats are winning fewer and fewer counties while still winning national majorities, and Republicans are winning wipe-out margins in the large majority of rural counties across the country while hemorrhaging votes in major metro areas. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won 80 of the 100 counties that had the highest density of college graduates, but in 2020, Joe Biden won 84 of them.
Rural voters are moving to the right, and suburban voters to the left, in nearly equal proportion. What’s more remarkable about this density divide is that it reinscribes itself fractally. If you zoom in on precinct-level data, you’ll find that even in very rural areas, the precincts closest to the center of town are reliably Democratic, or at the very least reliably less Republican.
Other demographic cleavages are also reshaping the electorate. For much of the history of modern democracies, men and women, as groups, have not significantly diverged in their voting behavior. In recent decades, though, women have begun tipping to the left and men to the right, not just in the United States, but across OECD countries. And race remains one of our most significant dividing lines. Somewhat counterintuitively, the electorate has grown less racially polarized in recent elections; from 2016 to 2020, exit polls and precinct-level voting data suggest that Trump improved his performance among Black and Latino voters while losing ground with white voters. But that was at the margins. In the aggregate, Republicans still won majorities of white voters and Democrats won majorities of nonwhite voters.
The durability of these divisions—place, education, gender, and race—their imperviousness to events, is probably the single most salient lesson of the past year. Donald Trump’s approval rating fluctuated less than that of any other recent president. In fact, his approval rating in October 2020 was close to what it had been in February 2017. Think of everything that happened last year: A president was impeached for only the third time in American history, a contentious Democratic primary took place, and then a once-in-a-century calamity led to tens of millions of people losing their jobs and 350,000 people dying and daily life being suspended for about two months, followed by months of painful adjustments. And the result—politically—was that practically no minds were changed.
Almost every ad you see, article you read, snip of marketing copy you encounter, and sports-league promo you watch was produced by a person who has a college degree and lives in a large metro area. Nearly the entirety of mainstream American culture is produced by a cohort—urban, well-educated, increasingly diverse—that trends strongly liberal. The resentments of the right are hardly baseless; the commanding heights of American culture are largely occupied by their ideological foes.
There are, of course, real exceptions. The universe of evangelical cultural production—films, books, podcasts—is both extremely successful and widely consumed. And just because most American culture is produced by people with college degrees in metro areas doesn’t mean that it necessarily advances left-wing views. Fox News draws on urban, college-educated professionals to produce its work, but is geared toward right-wing views and viewers. Facebook is produced by the same urban, college-educated cohort but, to a great degree, acts as a funnel for right-wing information. Lots of popular media is reactionary—take television’s many cop shows, for example—or in the service of capital. Economic power in the United States is still in the hands of a ruthlessly amoral set of actors with outsize influence and little sentimental attachment to either political coalition.
All of that said, though, the people who show up to MAGA rallies aren’t wrong when they look out at most of American culture and conclude that the people producing it don’t share their worldview and values.
Which is why I think MAGAism is best understood as being about not any particular agenda so much as the question of who gets to rule. If you understand the hydraulics of polarization and resentment in these terms, you can recognize that although, at the margin, big policy disputes probably do move some voters enough to affect election outcomes—witness the attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act—on the whole, what’s motivating and mobilizing the Republican coalition is a set of resentments (often intensely gendered and racialized) about who will run the country.
Policy—even good, popular policy—plays a limited role in moving the electorate. Critics of the Democratic Party, particularly those on the left, will often point out that ballot initiatives for progressive policies outperform Democratic candidates. In Florida, more than 60 percent of voters backed a minimum-wage hike, while Biden and down-ballot Democrats got rinsed.
Left-wing critics argue that if Democrats would throw themselves behind popular, populist economic messaging—things like the minimum wage—they’d have more success with some of the voters drawn to Trump. There’s a lot to that! But Biden actually supported a minimum-wage increase, and he spent some time discussing it in the second presidential debate.
What if those kinds of policy fights offer only limited returns? What if we are conflating two different issues? What if the overwhelming number of Trump supporters simply won’t vote to give control to the Democratic Party, even if the party is pushing agenda items they like? What if the driving imperative for the large majority of voters—but particularly for those on the aggrieved right—is that they want their people in control?
The contemporary GOP is on a strange trajectory. Republicans are growing more radical, extreme, and dangerous on core questions of democracy, the rule of law, and corruption, while simultaneously moderating on policy in some crucial ways.
The Republican Party is a fusion of two distinct elements with very different desires. The first is the donor class, a combination of self-serving plutocrats and genuine ideologues who are also very rich and who possess extensive and granular policy aims. Their main goals are tax cuts, deregulation, and resistance to redistribution of any kind. These goals account for the two main domestic-policy pushes during the Trump administration’s first two years, when Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House: repeal of the ACA and massive corporate tax cuts. But after failing to accomplish the first and succeeding at the second, the GOP made little further effort to legislate. The donor class is more focused on the courts, where it can achieve a huge part of its objectives; the Senate spent much of its energy over the next two years confirming conservative judges.
As for the party’s base, what policy issues are MAGA rally-goers wound up about? Not the deficit or taxes, and not the ACA. In the past, those issues gave expression to their underlying grievances, but no longer. After the election, one GOP polling firm asked Republicans about their biggest concerns for a post-Trump Republican Party. Forty-four percent wanted a party that would “fight like Donald Trump,” while only 19 percent worried that a post-Trump GOP would “abandon Donald Trump’s policies.”
And what were Trump’s policies, exactly? In a few places, he deviated from GOP orthodoxy, particularly on trade and, to some extent, immigration. Polling showed that his views on these issues were quite popular among his target audience even before he took office, so in that crucial respect, Trump did move the GOP toward its voters. But I think the lesson is larger here: As long as a Trumpist GOP is sticking it to the libs, standing up for its heritage and identity, and, crucially, using every possible tactic—including flatly antidemocratic ones—to battle for power, the modern base of the GOP is willing to accommodate, or even heartily support, all kinds of wild deviations from conservative orthodoxy. If Trump had come out strongly for a $15 minimum wage, the party’s base would have backed him.
The Republican Party has already moved toward the center on some key economic issues. Paul Ryanism, as an ideology and a message, is dead; it has no real constituency. Trump pledged to protect Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, violated that pledge by trying to slash Medicaid in the 2017 attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and generated the lowest stretch of approval ratings of his presidency. After that, the GOP under Trump largely abandoned attempts to cut the social safety net and instead became a party of reactionary Keynesianism, complete with $1,200 relief checks signed by the president.
The plutocrats and corporations that control the policy apparatus of the GOP aren’t going anywhere, and will do their best to resist the party’s ongoing move in this direction. But the utter disintegration of free-market conservatism as a coherent ideology has led to a more mercenary division of labor, in which the GOP’s moneyed interests do what they can behind closed doors and in the courts, while in public the politicians spend their time “owning the libs.”
Even so, the party is realigning. The MAGA base has come to view some parts of the economic establishment as the enemy, targets for its leaders to destroy. The Federal Trade Commission’s actions against Facebook are supported by most state attorneys general across the country, from the most liberal to the most right-wing—yet some of those same right-wing AGs were also part of the insane, seditious Texas lawsuit to throw out the votes from four other states. The common thread is that they are fighting for control. Sometimes, that produces stances that are antidemocratic and quasi-authoritarian, and sometimes—as with taking on Facebook—it yields progressive assaults on economic concentration.
That’s the strange paradox of this moment. On many policy issues, the gap between the parties is narrowing. Republican votes may well support tougher antitrust enforcement against Big Tech, for example, or provide direct cash assistance to struggling families. But at the same time, any attempt to reform the political system to make it more responsive to the will of voters—abolishing the filibuster, granting statehood to Washington, D.C., or enacting the democracy reforms included in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—is bound to provoke ferocious and implacable opposition.
Yet the fight to democratize political power is precisely what is most necessary. Any progress toward that goal, any effort to push back against minoritarian control, will lead to bitter conflict. But there is no way to avoid that fight if we’re to defeat the growing faction that seeks to destroy majority rule. No substantive victories can endure unless democracy is refortified against its foes. That task comes first.
House Oversight chairman Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., is renewing an investigation into former President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images)
House Democrats Renew Investigation Into Trump-Era COVID-19 Response
Kelsey Snell, NPR
Snell writes: "House Democrats are renewing their investigation into the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus crisis, citing new documents and what they call evidence of political interference in the government response to the virus."
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., sent letters to White House chief of staff Ron Klain and acting Health and Human Services Secretary Norris Cochran informing them of the investigations and additional evidence. Clyburn cites an internal HHS email that he says includes details of an effort to end testing of asymptomatic infections over concerns that people who test positive would quarantine and suppress the economy.
The letter focuses particularly on allegations that Trump administration adviser Dr. Paul Alexander tried to suppress scientific data and pressured members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force to alter public information.
"The previous Administration refused to cooperate with the Select Subcommittee's inquiries, with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) blocking documents and witnesses related to the politicization of public health information, testing and supply shortages, vaccine development and distribution, and other critical aspects of the nation's virus response," Clyburn wrote. "Documents recently obtained by the Select Subcommittee raise further questions about political interference with the coronavirus response during the previous Administration."
The White House is currently reviewing the letter, according to a spokesman.
"We appreciate Chairman Clyburn and the Select Subcommittee's diligent work to help ensure an effective, science-driven pandemic response on the part of the United States government," the spokesman said in a statement. "The White House is focused on vaccinating the U.S. population efficiently and equitably and slowing the spread of COVID-19."
Committee Democrats cite emails between Alexander and former Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Caputo pushing to reopen businesses based on information that contradicted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance.
The letter also outlines questions about the Trump administration's approach to herd immunity, vaccine distribution and controversial treatments such as hydroxychloroquine. Democrats began investigating many of those issues last spring, and the letter details plans to continue that probe.
The House launched a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis in April 2020. The bipartisan committee began investigative work last year, but the Trump administration largely refused to cooperate with its probe. The committee issued subpoenas for former HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield in December 2020, but those subpoenas were ignored.
Democrats have vowed to continue their probe into the actions of the previous administration while providing oversight over the ongoing response to the crisis.
Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken removes his face mask after being introduced by President-elect Joe Biden at the Queen Theatre in Wilmington, Delaware, on Nov. 24. (photo: Mark Makala/Getty Images)
US Moves to Re-Engage With UN Human Rights Council in Reversal of Trump Action
Associated Press
Excerpt: "The US announced plans Monday to re-engage with the United Nations human rights council, from which Donald Trump withdrew almost three years ago, as the Biden administration reverses another move away from multilateral organizations and agreements
Former president withdrew almost three years ago as Blinken says pullout ‘did nothing to encourage meaningful change’
Announcing the new approach from Washington, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said the pullout in June 2018 “did nothing to encourage meaningful change, but instead created a vacuum of US leadership, which countries with authoritarian agendas have used to their advantage”.
“The Biden administration has recommitted the United States to a foreign policy centered on democracy, human rights, and equality,” he said. “Effective use of multilateral tools is an important element of that vision.”
The decision is likely to draw criticism from conservatives and pro-Israel voices, who have derided the council and echoed Trump administration complaints that it was too quick to overlook abuses by autocratic regimes and governments – and even accept them as members.
Blinken said Joe Biden had instructed the state department to “re-engage immediately and robustly” with the council, but he acknowledged it still needs work.
“We recognize that the human rights council is a flawed body, in need of reform to its agenda, membership and focus, including its disproportionate focus on Israel,” he said.
Blinken said the council, when it works well, “shines a spotlight on countries with the worst human rights records and can serve as an important forum for those fighting injustice and tyranny”.
“To address the council’s deficiencies and ensure it lives up to its mandate, the United States must be at the table using the full weight of our diplomatic leadership,” he added.
Israel has received by far the largest number of critical council resolutions. Trump also pulled the US out because the council failed to meet an extensive list of reforms demanded by then US UN ambassador Nikki Haley.
The Trump administration took issue with the body’s membership, which currently includes China, Cuba, Eritrea, Russia and Venezuela, all of which have been accused of human rights abuses.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of advocacy group UN Watch, which often decries the council’s excessive focus on Israel, said the Obama administration had had a “tendency to become a cheerleader for the council” – and called on the Biden team to avoid it, and instead call out the council’s “abuses”.
“The cost of the US decision to rejoin is that it gives legitimacy to a council where tyrannies and other non-democracies now comprise 60% of the membership,” Neuer said. “In exchange, the US must demand serious reform, removing despots from the council such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro regime, holding dictators to account, and removing the agenda item that targets Israel in each session, the only one to focus on a single country.”
The council’s next session – the first of three each year, and the only one to feature a “high-level segment” that often lures top diplomats – runs from 22 February to 23 March. Although the US will have only nonvoting observer status for now, US officials say the administration intends to seek one of the three full-member seats left vacant when the current terms of Austria, Denmark and Italy expire at the end of 2021.
The UN general assembly makes the final choice in a vote that generally takes place in October every year to fill vacancies in three-year terms at the 47-member council.
US engagement with the council and its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, has been something of a political football between Republican and Democratic administrations. While recognizing its shortcomings, Democratic presidents have tended to want a seat at the table while Republicans have recoiled at its criticism of Israel.
Trump’s withdrawal from the UNHRC, however, was one of a number of US retrenchments from the international community during his four years in office. He also walked away from the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN education and cultural organization, Unesco, and several arms control treaties.
Trump also threatened to withdraw from the International Postal Union and frequently hinted at pulling out of the World Trade Organization.
Since taking office last month, Biden has rejoined both the Paris accord and the WHO and has signaled interest in returning to the Iran deal as well as Unesco.
Migrants from Haiti stand near the Zaragoza-Ysleta International Bridge after being deported from the United States in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on Feb. 3, 2021. (photo: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)
Confronting the Long Arc of US Border Policy
Harsha Walia, The Intercept
Walia writes: "Police, prisons, and borders all operate by immobilizing the people caught in their crosshairs."
An excerpt from the new book “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.”
he celebratory clamor surrounding President Joe Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium was short-lived, as a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the pause on deportation within a few days of its announcement. Even though the court order did not require the Biden administration to proceed with deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement swiftly deported hundreds of people to Guatemala, Honduras, and Jamaica anyway.
Marking the start of Black History Month, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, an advocacy group, blasted Biden’s refusal to stop ICE and tweeted, “Nothing about this admin’s values + actions give us confidence that Black people will be prioritized in the ‘new’ national agenda. Continued detention & hastened deportations are a sounding alarm for what’s to come.” They and other immigrant rights organizations point out that the moratorium does not mandate the release of detainees from ICE prisons, and one person has already died in ICE custody under Biden’s watch. As organizers with Mijente, a grassroots organization made up of Latinx and Chicanx people, have said, “Joe Biden’s current plan — a de facto return to the Obama years — would mean more desperation, more deportations, and more death.”
That community pressure seems to have worked—for now. Following the outcry from the immigrant rights community, the Department of Homeland Security halted deportation flights to Haiti, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The immigrant rights movement will inevitably find itself in an ongoing battle with Biden and his ilk of liberal-centrists, especially when the administration attempts to force through future compromises over who gets to stay and under what conditions, and who is disposable and deportable. To effectively confront those state efforts at divide and rule, movement activists must understand how central Democrats have been to shaping abhorrent U.S. border policy and must refuse to sanitize the Democratic Party’s shameful record.
While former President Donald Trump’s overtly malicious policies of separating families, caging children, banning Black and brown Muslims, and building the border wall garnered international condemnation, cruel policies of immigration enforcement are a pillar of Democrats’ governance. The rhetoric of “productive” and “legal” immigrants, with the simultaneous demonization of “criminal” and “illegal” immigrants, has been the cornerstone of the party’s immigration platform for three decades. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, an entire immigration enforcement apparatus bent on expanding detention and deportation, criminalizing migration through prosecutions, militarizing the border, and imperialist outsourcing of border enforcement was cemented.
The Border Is a Prison
The Clinton years normalized the most severe consequences of border militarization and mass detention. In 1994, as Clinton was signing the North American Free Trade Agreement to ensure the free movement of capital, the Army Corps of Engineers was fencing the border to constrict the movement of the very people displaced by this latest iteration of neoliberal capitalist warfare. Border Patrol tripled in size to become the second-largest enforcement agency at the time, and operations such as Hold the Line in Texas, Gatekeeper in California, and Safeguard in Arizona militarized the border under the official strategy of “prevention through deterrence.” Within six years of funneling migration toward the more dangerous Sonoran Desert, Arizona uplands, and southern Texas brush, border deaths — what we should more accurately label as premeditated border killings — increased by 509 percent.
Clinton’s “tough on immigration” strategy converged with his “tough on crime” policies. In 1996, Clinton passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. These statutes mobilized the dehumanizing rhetoric of “crime, drugs, illegals” to expand the category of aggravated felony convictions and widen the net for detention and deportation of legal permanent residents with minor convictions stemming from stop-and-frisk policing and the war on drugs. The laws also fast-tracked deportation, mandated detention for many, and imposed criminal penalties for unauthorized border crossings. Within a few years, average daily detentions tripled, and deportations shot up to an average of 150,000 annually.
Decades later, “tough on crime” and “tough on immigration” policies continued to have devastating impacts. By 2009, about half of the people ICE detained had come on its radar through the “Criminal Alien Program,” which uses collaborations between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement as a pipeline for expulsion.
Clinton’s punitive crime and welfare laws also intensified neoliberal impoverishment. The 1994 crime laws expanded police and prisons and mandated harsher sentences while the 1996 welfare laws barred many people with drug convictions from accessing benefits and slashed welfare, especially for single teenage mothers. The war on crime, like the war on drugs, pathologized Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Indigenous and other racialized cultures as the cause of poverty, when structural inequality was actually an inevitable consequence of racial capitalism.
As Naomi Murakawa explains on the long arc of the carceral crisis, “The US did not confront a crime problem that was then racialized; it confronted a race problem that was then criminalized.” The particular association of Black communities with both welfare benefits and crime gave legitimacy to policies of austerity that shrank the welfare state while policies of law and order expanded the carceral state. The simultaneous production and policing of precarity is what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls organized abandonment alongside organized violence. The prison industrial complex exploded to enforce both poverty and confinement on deliberately gendered and racial lines, a modern method of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous genocide, giving the U.S. the shameful honor of having the world’s highest incarceration rate.
It was this expanding neoliberal carceral state, including the largest immigration detention system on the planet, that provided the material foundation for Trump’s horrific immigration concentration camps and, subsequently, thousands of mobilizations to demand their closure. At the same time, abolitionist uprisings in response to the cold-blooded police murders of Black trans and cis men and women George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery exposed the irreformable brutality of carceral institutions.
Police, prisons, and borders all operate by immobilizing the people caught in their crosshairs. Notably, the word “mob,” a criminalizing vocabulary used to link large groups of poor, racialized people to social disorder in inner cities and at the border, derives from the word “mobility.” Angela Davis and Gina Dent write, “We continue to find that the prison is itself a border.” Drawing on Davis and Dent, we can say that the prison is a border and the border is a prison. Indeed, the U.S.-Mexico border was formed between 1846 and 1850 by annexing over 525,000 square miles of Mexican territory, capturing Indigenous lands, and punishing Black movement through the Fugitive Slave Act. The violent transformation of land and people into racial property sanctioned global white citizenship; meanwhile, racialized migration was scrutinized and controlled. The border is thus at once domestic and global, and a world without police, prisons, private property, militaries, and borders is a necessarily interconnected abolitionist horizon of freedom.
The War at Home, The War Abroad
A decade after Clinton, Obama also spent billions of dollars securing the border, and during his tenure, border and immigration enforcement budgets began to outpace the budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. In 2010, Obama ordered more than 1,000 troops to the border before signing legislation to increase the number of Border Patrol agents and expand the border’s virtual surveillance systems. Private contractors making a killing through war contracts were also granted billions of dollars to build the virtual wall with their promises of infallible high-tech drone surveillance.
Depictions of domestic and foreign threats merged. Unmanned aerial vehicles were first tested on the U.S.-Mexico border before they were used in drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan. Obama dropped 26,171 bombs — an average of three bombs every hour — mostly through air strikes and drone warfare on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan in 2016. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Defense acquired the largest drone fleets of all state agencies; thus boomeranged the war at home and the war abroad.
Obama earned the moniker of “deporter-in-chief” for overseeing 3 million deportations, which he accomplished by weaponizing “good immigrants” against “bad immigrants.” Like Clinton, his administration prioritized deporting noncitizens with criminal records. Before introducing his much-lauded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, protections, Obama signaled his intention to increase enforcement against undesirables with the Secure Communities program: “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.”
Obama turbocharged the Secure Communities initiative until 2014, under which over 1,000 local law enforcement jurisdictions were linked to ICE and FBI databases, nearly doubling deportation rates. By 2014, about half of all federal criminal arrests were immigration-related. That same year, following a surge of unaccompanied minors at the border, Obama laid the foundation for incarcerating migrant families by detaining them in camps on military bases, which then escalated to forced family separation and hundreds of missing children under Trump. In fact, several of the photographs of children in cages that went viral during Trump’s presidency were actually taken during the Obama years.
Similarly, the groundwork for the terror of Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as the “Remain in Mexico” program — a program that allows U.S. border officials to return asylum-seekers back to Mexico as they await their hearings, which has trapped tens of thousands of Central American and African migrants in teeming tent camps — was laid by Obama’s imperial outsourcing of border enforcement. Though Biden has directed Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to review the MPP protocols, he has made no mention of the extensive network of migration prevention protocols that predate them.
Initiated by President George W. Bush and vastly expanded under Obama, the multibillion-dollar U.S.-Mexico Mérida Initiative provides funding to Mexican police and border agents and has created a battery of police and migration checkpoints beginning all the way in southern Chiapas and ending at the U.S.-Mexico border. Mérida and its counterpart, the Central American Regional Security Initiative, paramilitarize the entire landscape through the triad of the war on drugs, the war on Indigenous lands, and the war on migrants.
The U.S. also funds immigration enforcement in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico through the Grupo Conjunto de Inteligencia Fronteriza. Shortly after the U.S. launched the Mexico-Guatemala-Belize Border Region Program, Homeland Security officials declared that “the Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border,” thus solidifying this new frontier of U.S. border militarization.
Biden has announced that he will halt border wall construction, but the outsourcing of border policy, a system perfected by Obama, will allow the Biden administration to strengthen an entire fortress stretching far beyond the symbolic border wall itself. Just as Biden took office, thousands of migrants from Honduras headed toward the U.S. were blockaded and tear-gassed by Guatemalan soldiers and police. Instead of condemning the crackdown or implicating the long arc of U.S. dirty colonial coups, enforced capitalist trade agreements extracting land and labor, or climate change causing displacement and migration, a senior official in the Biden administration warned the caravan against making the journey.
Though less visible than the horrific images of immigration raids and overflowing detention centers within the U.S., border outsourcing is a more sophisticated and dangerous enforcement method aimed at preventing migrants from even reaching the southern U.S. border. Immigration diplomacy through the soft power of aid agreements or outright threats of trade war has compelled various Latin American countries to accept outsourced migration controls. Imperialism is already a root cause of global migration, and now the management of global migration through outsourcing the enforcement of the border is also becoming a means of preserving imperial relations and outsourcing U.S. policies of migrant repression.
Abolish ICE, Abolish Borders
Under Biden in the coming years, the catastrophic effects of climate disasters — displacing one person every two seconds — will likely escalate talk of “refugee invasion” or “border crisis.” Climate migrants and refugees will be declared the new migration crisis, and the U.S. border will hypocritically be positioned as a victim. Language like “migrant crisis” depicts migrants and refugees as the cause of an imagined crisis at the U.S. border while conveniently erasing the role of the U.S. as a primary driver of the actual crises of global capitalism, conquest, and climate change.
The far right will feed us eco-apartheid drivel about migrant and refugee “swarms” ruining our environment, stealing our jobs, draining our services, infecting our neighborhoods, and tainting our values. This dangerous nationalist and ruling-class ideology will deflect responsibility from the underlying systems producing mass inequality in our warming world by conveniently scapegoating “foreigners.” In response to revanchism, the Biden administration will peddle tired old liberal centrism. We will be offered the shallow politics of humanitarianism, such as “Welcome refugees,” or liberal multiculturalism proclaiming, “We are all from somewhere,” or commodifying platitudes such as “Immigrants build our economy.”
But our movements must refuse Biden’s banal liberal center. Calls to abolish ICE, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and all immigration enforcement must replace assimilationist calls for immigration reform that rely on white supremacist and cisheteronormative distinctions between “good” and “undeserving” migrants. Criminality and illegality are both political constructions within which proving one’s innocence or respectability is a frustrating and inherently impossible political stance.
Just as migrant justice must not endorse categories of desirable or undesirable, we must also refuse gestures of charitable humanitarianism, tropes of grateful refugees migrating to modernity, the commodification of immigrant labor to benefit capital accumulation, and carceral regimes as legitimate institutions of governance. Instead, we must make clear: not one more detention, not one more deportation, and immigration status and labor protections for all.
We must also go further and reject the normalization of the colonial border that casts racialized people as perpetual outsiders, erases Indigenous nations, reproduces an anti-Black social order, fortifies the West against the rest, deflates labor power, and is the ideological basis for all immigration policies. After all, the borders of settler states are illegal; human beings are never illegal.
A man wearing a mask walks by the New York Stock Exchange on March 17, 2020 at Wall Street in New York City. (photo: Getty)
New Polling Shows That Millions of Americans Really Hate Wall Street
Luke Savage, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The GameStop saga was more than a simple tale of upstart traders taking on big business. But it highlighted again how disconnected Wall Street is from ordinary workers - and new polling finds that even more Americans now resent Wall Street."
few days ago, as the institutions of Wall Street swatted away rogue stock traders, none other than Ted Cruz decided to try and get in on the action. “Today’s Democrat Party,” declared the Texas Republican, “is the party of Wall Street, Big Tech, and Hollywood and they’ve turned their back on working men and women.”
The remark was a textbook case of conservative pseudo-populism, lumping together economics and culture and failing to resist the inclusion of “Hollywood” in its list of liberal bogeymen. Nonetheless, Cruz, whose wife is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, had clearly detected a whiff of renewed anti–Wall Street sentiment and decided to make the most out of it. Cruz wasn’t exactly wrong, of course: the leadership of the Democratic Party very much enjoys close ties to Wall Street, whose donations to Joe Biden’s recent presidential campaign were several orders of magnitude higher than those made to Donald Trump’s.
Like Cruz, however, Trump is a case in point for why political capture by Wall Street is almost always a bipartisan affair — rhetorical animus toward big finance being markedly different from actually aligning yourself with ordinary people against it. Doing the first certainly helped the ex-president beat Hillary Clinton. But, having run on a pledge to “drain the swamp,” Trump quickly set up camp in the bog of high finance and made it his own.
Cynical and disingenuous as it was, Cruz’s attack on Wall Street was ultimately a phony attempt to capitalize on something all too real: namely, the widespread public antipathy toward Wall Street that appears to have renewed itself in the wake of the GameStop stock fiasco.
The affair is a lot more complicated than a simple tale of upstart traders taking on big business suggests. As labor journalist Edward Ongweso Jr explained in Jacobin last week, several multibillion-dollar companies have profited plenty from the episode.
Nevertheless, a new survey suggests it has become a very real lightning rod for anti–Wall Street sentiment. In her introduction to the study, Morning Consult reporter Claire Williams was unequivocal: “One of the biggest takeaways of the GameStop Corp. market mayhem so far, according to new Morning Consult polling, is that Wall Street remains the public’s top villain.”
Overall, some 64 percent believe “the stock market is rigged against amateur investors in favor of large, professional investors.” Hedge funds — investment pools that were at the center of the recent GameStop drama — received the greatest hostility overall, with half of respondents agreeing they are under-regulated. The figure for Wall Street as a whole, meanwhile, was 45 percent: an increase of 5 percent from a Consult poll conducted in November 2018, which suggests Wall Street elicits even more generalized dislike than big tech, health insurance companies, or big oil.
Though most of the public probably isn’t up on the finer points of the stock market and its sometimes impenetrable machinations, the GameStop affair suggests that millions of Americans correctly recognize Wall Street as an institution apart from the lives of most ordinary people. The ongoing pandemic may be contributing as well — the astonishing boom enjoyed by major corporations and financial firms amid widespread poverty and unemployment highlighting yet again just how severed from the country at large Wall Street prosperity really is.
With Bernie Sanders’s presidential ambitions defeated, the prospect of a concerted political offensive against Wall Street over the next few years is probably slim. But the GameStop controversy, which in a few weeks’ time may well be forgotten, nonetheless underscores the deep resentment held by millions of Americans toward the rigged game of big finance — and the astonishing democratic potential that might still be seized upon by any politician who actually wants to get tough on the gangsters who run the casino.
Health workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (photo: Getty Images)
New Ebola Case in Congo Raises Fear of Revived Outbreak
Reid Wilson, The Hill
Wilson writes: "Health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo said Sunday that a woman had died of the Ebola virus in the city of Butembo, eight months after the worst outbreak in the nation's history was declared over."
The woman, whose husband survived an Ebola infection during that outbreak, died after seeking treatment at a local health center. The World Health Organization (WHO) said Congo’s National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa was sequencing samples to determine how the virus she contracted was related to the last outbreak.
It is not uncommon for small flare-ups to occur even after an Ebola outbreak subsides. The virus can remain in bodily fluids of a survivor even months after they have recovered.
But the woman’s infection raises the potential of more cases that may be circulating in North Kivu Province, an impoverished area on the borders of Uganda and Rwanda. The WHO said it had already identified more than 70 people with whom the woman had contact.
Nearly 2,300 people died in the two-year outbreak that exploded in North Kivu and Ituri provinces.
“This resurgence of Ebola is worrying as it comes amidst rising numbers of Covid-19 cases in DR Congo and could fuel existing challenges,” said Whitney Elmer, who runs operations in Congo for the nonprofit group Mercy Corps. “We know that Ebola is endemic in this region, but we cannot take anything for granted and we must take swift action to stop the spread of this new outbreak.”
In Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency was rushing vaccines to the region.
The global response to the 2018 outbreak, declared over in June 2020, was one of the most complex operations public health agencies have ever mounted. North Kivu and Ituri provinces are home to dozens of rebel groups who have fought the Congolese government in far-off Kinshasa, and more than a million people have been displaced.
President Joe Biden. (photo: Tom Brenner/Reuters)
Biden's Civilian Climate Corps Comes Straight Out of the New Deal
Kate Yoder, Grist
Yoder writes: "One of the most popular programs from the New Deal is making a comeback, nearly 90 years later."
President Joe Biden recently signed an executive order to create a Civilian Climate Corps. The initiative, he wrote, will provide “good jobs” for young people and train them for environmentally friendly careers, putting them to work restoring public lands and waters, planting trees, improving access to parks, and of course, tackling climate change.
It’s inspired by the original Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signature New Deal programs launched to take on the Great Depression.
Climate advocates celebrated Biden’s move. Naomi Klein, the activist and author of This Changes Everything, said Biden’s announcement was a “hard won victory.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had reportedly sold Secretary of State John Kerry on the idea of a climate corps. The resemblance to the New Deal program — it even has the same acronym, CCC — may explain why the proposal sounds like part of a Green New Deal.
“The Green New Deal is all about a jobs and justice approach to climate policies, so I think that the new climate corps proposal really encapsulates that,” said Danielle Deiseroth, a climate analyst at Data for Progress, a progressive think tank. Not that you’ll hear Biden saying much about a Green New Deal, since commentators on Fox News have turned the slogan into a synonym for “socialist plot that’ll take away your hamburgers.”
The CCC employed 3 million men from 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression, to 1942, after the country had joined World War II. Lasting reminders of the CCC are all around us. Go into a state park or national park anywhere in the country, and you’ll likely see buildings, trails, and hiking shelters built by the program’s volunteers.
Reviving the CCC resonates right now, Deiseroth said, because the pandemic has sent the country into crisis mode with some 18 million Americans receiving unemployment benefits. The Congressional Budget Office recently said that it doesn’t expect the workforce to recover from the blow until 2024.
According to a December survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, some 85 percent of Americans support reestablishing the Civilian Conservation Corps, though that survey didn’t mention anything about the climate. A different poll from Data for Progress last May found that nearly 70 percent of the public supports the idea of a new, climate-focused corps. Even a majority of Republican voters, 62 percent, liked the idea.
But making it work could prove to be a complicated task. “The original CCC was extremely popular, but it also had some problems,” said Neil Maher, the author of Nature’s New Deal and a history professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The Corps’ history provides insights — encouraging signs and cautionary lessons — for how the Biden administration could structure and promote the program.
In the worst years of the Great Depression, nearly a quarter of the country was unemployed, suicides skyrocketed, and people started hopping on freight trains — “riding the rails” — in search of work. An estimated 2 million Americans wandered the country, many of them young folks who’d felt like a burden to their cash-strapped families. Then came Roosevelt’s New Deal and a slew of new acronyms with the Civil Works Association, Social Security Administration, Works Progress Administration, and the CCC. The Corps took many young men off the streets and gave them a purpose, putting them to work in the wilderness.
Americans came to love the Corps. “Young men, when they came home for visits, would wear their CCC uniforms, and people would sort of flock around them,” Maher said. “There were stories of other young men stealing the uniforms to try to pretend that they were CCC guys.”
Enrolling was seen as so desirable that companies started incorporating images of it into their advertising. In 1935, an ad for the American Fork and Hoe Company showed a young man’s face, smothered in shaving cream, being “shaved” with an ax normally used for chopping wood (“… and it didn’t hurt a bit!”) as men in CCC uniforms waited in line behind him. The next year, the Mapleine Syrup Company put out an ad showing its “lickin’ good” product poured over a stack of steaming pancakes set in a forested camp. “Boy! That’s Swell Syrup,” a grinning CCC enrollee says.
This followed the federal government’s promotion campaign. The Corps put out films, newsreels, and countless press releases. “It was a real publicity machine,” Maher said. The CCC was one of Roosevelt’s favorite programs, and he often talked about it during his famous “fireside chats” on the evening radio. The program, he explained, was “killing two birds with one stone” by “conserving not only our natural resources, but also our human resources.”
The CCC had some critics, of course. Early on, locals in rural areas weren’t so sure about all these city boys coming in and dancing in town with their daughters, Maher said. “But as soon as the money started flowing from the camps into the local communities, a lot of that opposition evaporated very quickly.” On average, each camp spent about $5,000 per month on local goods, helping keep small businesses afloat. The men in the Corps also sent most of the money they earned back home to help their families through the Great Depression.
Much of the Corps’ success had to do with its visibility. In addition to all the ads, locals were also invited into camps for dinners, social events, and tours of the conservation projects.
“During the ’30s, the CCC was not really politicized,” Maher said. “Once it got up and running, it really became sort of untouchable when it comes to real criticism from either party.”
Of course, a government program from the 1930s isn’t going to be the perfect model for today. One big one issue with the CCC, and other New Deal programs, was discrimination. About a tenth of CCC volunteers were Black, and while camps outside the South were originally integrated, officials ended up caving to racist pressure and segregating them into separate work sites. On top of that, only men could join. Eleanor Roosevelt kept pushing her husband to allow women into the corps — and eventually, a sister organization was formed. But the “She-She-She Camps,” as they were called, were a much smaller operation.
A reenvisioned version of the CCC, Maher said, would “obviously have to be open to all people, regardless of age, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, and all that.” The Civilian Climate Corps could be about more than conserving public lands, expanding its focus to other pressing problems, like cleaning up polluted towns. In his executive order, Biden declared that the corps should “bolster community resilience” and “address the changing climate.”
Maher envisions a CCC that builds green stormwater management systems, installs solar panels on homes, helps clean up toxic waste sites, and develops urban gardens. He also hopes that locals will have some say in the Corps’ projects.
The program’s popularity could get a boost from an advertising blitz similar to what the country saw during the initial launch of the CCC in the 1930s, but adapted for modern times. “Looking ahead,” Deiseroth said, “it’d be great to use the power of social media to showcase how these projects that the Biden administration is promoting are tangibly impacting communities.” Once they get up and running, CCC camps could start showing locals what they’re up to. The program will be more visible if people see the real-life projects underway in their towns and cities — and, of course, know who’s behind them.
Biden’s initiative will likely face some criticism once the details get figured out. Some have expressed concern that problems could arise if the new CCC were modeled after AmeriCorps, as some have proposed — a program that sends people all over the country to help with disaster recovery, support build affordable housing, conserve the National Parks, and more. This could be a relatively cheap and fast way of reestablishing the CCC, but modeling it on AmeriCorps might mean low wages instead of good-paying jobs, or sporadic investments in projects dedicated to tackling climate change.
The program is also likely to get some negative press from the conservative media. “It’s very likely that talking heads on Fox News, they’re going to talk about this as, you know, ‘another part of a radical socialist Green New Deal,’” Deiseroth said.
So far, however, Biden’s approach seems to be working against such talking points, Deiseroth said. He’s been countering those narratives by talking about the tangible benefits of job creation, leaving a more sustainable world for future generations, and making sure the country has clean air and clean water for our kids and grandkids. The best way to counteract criticism, Deiseroth said, “is the way that Biden’s doing it right now.”
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