US Politics

Where does the New York Times reside in the subconscious of news hounds across America? Paul Rudnick wrote this answer for a New York City mother played by Bette Middler in Coastal Elites on HBO this year:
I love the Times. I feel like it’s my child, or my parent. Do you know what the Times means to a liberal Jewish woman like me? On the census, when it asks for religion, I don’t put Jewish. I put the New York Times. Which I have delivered. The real Times. The newsprint Times. I know I’m old-fashioned, but reading the Times online is like having sex with a robot. I mean, it’s cleaner and it’s faster but you can tell the difference. OK, I’ll just say it. The New York Times online is the New York Times for the gentiles.
The former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb put it slightly differently to me, long ago: “The Times is in the same position as the Jews: it’s expected to behave better than everybody else.”For a hundred years, for better or worse, no institution has played a larger role in American culture and politics. And no corporation with comparable clout has been continuously controlled by a single family since 1896.This month, at 69, Arthur Sulzberger Jr will retire as company chairman, after decades of speculation that he would be the last Sulzberger to run the business.In 2005, a vicious profile in the New Yorker asked: “Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr save the Times – and himself?” A couple of years later, Vanity Fair declared that he had “steered his inheritance into a ditch”.As the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, put it to the Guardian this week: “As recently as five years ago, the biggest question was: “Is [Mike] Bloomberg going to own the Times or [Mexican billionaire] Carlos Slim?”And yet, 11 days from now, Sulzberger will defy almost every expectation except his own and hand over a healthy, thriving enterprise to his son AG Sulzberger, giving the fifth generation of the Ochs-Sulzbergers the rudder of the enterprise.“It’s a rare thing and a wonderful thing to see someone exit the stage on a note of real triumph,” Remnick observed.‘I realized change needed to happen’I’ve been a student of the Times ever since I wrote my first story as a 20-year-old student at Columbia, working as the paper’s college correspondent, a part-time post that launched the careers of many Times editors. I only wrote for the paper for eight years, five as a reporter on the metro staff. But the Times tends to enter the bones of everyone who works there, and a preoccupation with its peculiarities has been my hobby ever since.The first time I met Arthur Sulzberger Jr was at a party of budding journalists in Washington at the end of 1980. I can still see him striding into the room with a swagger, a huge smile and his infant son, AG, on his shoulders. Back then, the father was just a young reporter in the Times Washington bureau. But like almost everyone else, I assumed I was watching the next publisher – and the publisher after that.In a series of conversations this month, father and son offered plenty of evidence that a love for journalism can indeed be passed down through DNA. But they also insisted that what looks like old-fashioned primogeniture is actually a bit more complicated. Each told me he had never felt the slightest pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps – and neither decided he wanted to become the boss until he was a young adult.For Sulzberger Jr, the lightbulb came on when he went to work in the advertising department.“I figured I’d give it a year, I’d hate it, and I’d go back to the newsroom,” he said. But then he made his first big ad sale and “realized that I had just covered Johnny Apple’s liquor bill for a year!” (RW Apple Jr, a fabled political correspondent and London bureau chief, had the traditional journalist’s goal: to always submit the largest possible expense account.)“Suddenly it came to me that this was supporting the enterprise. This was the critical part. It was a real eye-opener for me.”“And your father was completely silent about whether he wanted you to succeed him?” I asked.“Oh yes, very much so. You don’t want to pressure somebody to do something they don’t want. Because in the end, if they get it and they don’t want it, that doesn’t help the institution or the individual. Right?”So Sulzberger Jr adopted the same strategy with his own son.“He did not ever push me to be his successor,” AG Sulzberger said. “He was always really consistent about me following my passions. But I made the mistake of having my first job out of college being a reporting gig.” It was at the Providence Journal, and he fell in love with it.“I would have been very happy to spend my career as a reporter or editor,” he continued. But when he was 33, Jill Abramson, then executive editor of the Times, asked him to write an innovation report about the newspaper’s future.“I realized how much change needed to happen at the Times and how essential that change was for the institution to continue to thrive,” he said. Suddenly, it felt like his “highest purpose was trying to make that change happen”.His father agreed: “I think that was his sort of eye-opening moment.”One secret to the Sulzbergers’ success is that each time power has been given to a new generation, predecessors have not become second-guessers. This is what has made it possible for the paper to change with the times.In the case of Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the first and biggest beneficiaries of that tradition were the Times’ lesbian and gay employees. During the regime of his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Abe Rosenthal, the top editor from the late 60s to the mid-80s, made it clear that the career of any gay employee would end as soon as they came out of the closet.When Arthur Sulzberger Jr became an assistant metropolitan editor, in the early 80s, he figured out who every gay employee was. Then he took each of them out to lunch, told them he knew they were gay, and promised this would have no effect on their career once Rosenthal had departed.“Until you said so,” David W Dunlap, then a metropolitan reporter, wrote years later, “I couldn’t have imagined how to reconcile my soul with my professional calling. Now suddenly there was a Sulzberger … cheerfully reassuring me I had nothing to worry about.”Indeed, as soon as Rosenthal was succeeded by Max Frankel as executive editor, the Times was transformed from the most homophobic to the most gay-friendly major institution in America.Articles of faithA big reason there was so much skepticism that the latest Sulzberger handoff would ever take place was the fate of almost every other major American publishing family of the last 40 years. The Binghams got rid of the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1986. The Taylors unloaded the Boston Globe in 1993 – to the Sulzbergers. The Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times sold their presses in 2000. The Grahams of the Washington Post hung on longer, but even they took $250m from Jeff Bezos in 2013.Sulzberger Jr insists he “just refused to to consider that kind of stuff”. Instead, as the internet ate away at the print advertising that had fuelled the business for so long, he unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.In 2007, nine TV stations went for $575m. In 2011, it was $143m for 16 regional newspapers – there had once been 35. The WQXR radio station went in two stages, AM and FM. In between came the toughest decision of all for the family, which drew much of its income from shares. In 2009, the Times suspended all dividend payments to shareholders.The Sulzbergers never flinched. But even all of that wasn’t enough. In 2009, Sulzberger Jr had to borrow $250m from Slim – at 14% interest.Four years before that, the paper had made its first effort to make subscription money off of its online edition, by putting some of its columnists behind a paywall in a program called Times Select. But after two years the company decided the loss of online revenue was more important than the gain in subscriptions, and the paywall was abandoned.That made the decision to resume a paywall in 2011 all the more difficult – and it only happened after a fierce internal debate. In the end, Sulzberger Jr sided with the then chief executive, Janet Robinson. It turned out to be his most prescient announcement.“A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the web,” he said. But he predicted the paywall would allow the company “to develop new sources of revenue to support the continuation of our journalistic mission and digital innovation … This system is our latest, and best, demonstration of where we believe the future of valued content – be it news, music, games or more – is going.”He turned out to be right.Last month, the company said it had 6 million paying online readers, and for the first time more revenue from digital than print subscribers. The Times had $800m on hand, with $250m available through a revolving credit line. It no longer has any debt, and last year it paid off a loan that allowed it to buy back its Manhattan headquarters. ‘It got really tough’Sulzberger Jr’s close friend Steven Rattner, a former Times reporter turned investment banker, explained his success this way: “If you want just one quality, it would have to be determination. No matter how tough it got – and it got really tough – Arthur never gave up. He was among the first (if not the first) traditional newspaper guy to grasp the importance of the internet, focus on it and never get distracted from it.”Paul Goldberger, a longtime Times architecture critic and one of the paper’s wisest observers, said the most relevant description of Sulzberger Jr’s philosophy could be found in an Italian novel, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”I repeated that to the departing Times chairman.“Yes,” he said. “Adapt or die.” More

When Joe Biden is inaugurated next month, he will inherit an America where democracy is in crisis.The 2020 election exposed the urgent need to protect the right to vote in America. Throughout the year, voters waited hours in line to cast their ballots, some until the early hours of the morning. Democrats and voting rights groups brought an explosion of lawsuits seeking to ease restrictions around mail-in voting as Republicans around the country refused to budge.The president-elect’s ability to fix these problems hinges significantly on whether or not Democrats win two runoff Senate races in Georgia, giving them full control of Congress and the White House. If Democrats do take full control, they are likely to move sweeping voting reforms, including requiring automatic voter registration across the country and restoring the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.But if Democrats fail to retake the Senate, Biden will be more limited in what he can do to fix voting rights. The US constitution gives the president almost no power over elections, instead entrusting that authority to state legislatures and Congress. Nonetheless, there are a few key areas where Biden could act unilaterally.2020 censusBiden may immediately have the opportunity to undo some of Donald Trump’s unprecedented meddling in the 2020 census, the critical decennial survey that determines how many seats in Congress each state gets and how $1.5tn in federal funds get allocated. Even after the Census Bureau faced severe delays, the Trump administration has rushed the agency to complete its work before Trump leaves office, raising significant questions about the quality and accuracy of the census data.The rush is probably linked to an executive order the president issued last summer, seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from the data used to apportion congressional seats. The US government has long allocated congressional seats based on the total population and Trump’s change would probably cause immigrant-rich states like California and Texas to lose congressional seats while benefiting conservative, whiter places. The US supreme court recently dismissed a lawsuit challenging the measure, saying it was premature, but a majority of the justices did not weigh in on the merits.The Census Bureau recently disclosed, however, it may not be able to deliver apportionment data to Trump before he leaves office. If Biden takes office before the data is produced, he could rescind Trump’s memo order undocumented people excluded from the apportionment count. Even if Trump sends the data, there may be procedural mechanisms for the US House to invite the new president to revise it.Either way, the Biden administration will take on a census “that faced unprecedented disruption due to the pandemic, but also because of unprecedented political interference in the modern era”, said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a census consultant.“I think the Biden administration rightly can, and should, look at ways that the current administration’s actions may have affected decisions by career Census Bureau officials to ensure the most accurate and high quality census possible,” Lowenthal said. “And if the new administration determines that the Census Bureau wasn’t able to do its best work, free from political or partisan considerations, I think the new administration would be justified in directing the Census Bureau, through the commerce secretary, to revisit whatever work it’s already done.”Expanding voter registrationThe constitution allows each US state to set its own voter registration rules, but Biden could use an existing federal law to significantly expand voter registration opportunities. A 1993 statute, the National Voter Registration Act, requires nearly every state to offer people the opportunity to register to vote when they interact with the DMV and other state agencies.Federal agencies, however, like the Department of Veterans Affairs, Social Security Administration and the Indian Health Service, can choose to offer voter registration services if a state requests it, but are not required to do so. Biden could change that and issue an executive order requiring federal agencies to accept if a state asks them to serve as a voter registration agency under the law.“That would go a long way to addressing the fact that there are tens of millions of eligible citizens who are not on the rolls,” said Chiraag Bains, director of legal strategies at Demos, a civil rights thinktank that has advocated for the change.Such a change could make a big difference for Native Americans, a group for whom voter turnout has historically lagged behind national rates. The Indian Health Service, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, provides medical care to approximately 2.5 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives. Designating US Customs and Immigration Services a voter registration agency under the law could also expand voter registration for the nearly quarter-million people who become naturalized citizens each year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.The Department of JusticeSince Trump took office, the voting section at the Department of Justice (DoJ), charged with enforcing America’s most powerful voting rights laws, has not made much of an effort to protect voting rights. In fact, the department has been nearly silent on the topic. The only high-profile cases the department has been involved in have been ones where it has aligned with states to defend voting restrictions, including Ohio’s aggressive voter purge policy and Texas’ voter ID law.As president, Biden will appoint both an attorney general and someone to oversee the department’s civil rights division, which houses the voting section. Both of those officials could signal that voting rights enforcement is a major priority for the department and push the department to be more aggressive in bringing voting rights suits.The justice department’s absence in the voting rights arena makes a big difference, former department officials and civil rights advocates told the Guardian earlier this year. The justice department has significant resources to bring voting rights cases and can deter bad actors from passing measures that make it harder to vote.The justice department also represents the views of the United States, carries credibility in court that attracts the attention of judges. The justice department does not typically get involved in many voting rights disputes, but when it does, courts listen.“It’s not going to be easy. The courts have gotten considerably more conservative and hostile to voting rights claims. But the justice department has to be a player in this and it’ll be good to have them on the right side of voting rights cases again,” Bains said. More

How should the huge financial costs of the pandemic be paid for, as well as the other deferred needs of society after this annus horribilis?Politicians rarely want to raise taxes on the rich. Joe Biden promised to do so but a closely divided Congress is already balking.That’s because they’ve bought into one of the most dangerous of all economic ideas: that economic growth requires the rich to become even richer. Rubbish.Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once dubbed it the “horse and sparrow” theory: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”We know it as trickle-down economics.In a new study, David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London lay waste to the theory. They reviewed data over the last half-century in advanced economies and found that tax cuts for the rich widened inequality without having any significant effect on jobs or growth. Nothing trickled down.Meanwhile, the rich have become far richer. Since the start of the pandemic, just 651 American billionaires have gained $1tn of wealth. With this windfall they could send a $3,000 check to every person in America and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. Don’t hold your breath.You don’t need a doctorate in ethical philosophy to think that now might be a good time to redistribute some of richesStock markets have been hitting record highs. More initial public stock offerings have been launched this year than in over two decades. A wave of hi-tech IPOs has delivered gushers of money to Silicon Valley investors, founders and employees.Oh, and tax rates are historically low.Yet at the same time, more than 20 million Americans are jobless, 8 million have fallen into poverty, 19 million are at risk of eviction and 26 million are going hungry. Mainstream economists are already talking about a “K-shaped” recovery – the better-off reaping most gains while the bottom half continue to slide.You don’t need a doctorate in ethical philosophy to think that now might be a good time to tax and redistribute some of the top’s riches to the hard-hit below. The UK is already considering an emergency tax on wealth.The president-elect has rejected a wealth tax, but maybe he should be even more ambitious and seek to change economic thinking altogether.The practical alternative to trickle-down economics might be called build-up economics. Not only should the rich pay for today’s devastating crisis but they should also invest in the public’s long-term wellbeing. The rich themselves would benefit from doing so, as would everyone else.At one time, America’s major political parties were on the way to embodying these two theories. Speaking to the Democratic national convention in 1896, populist William Jennings Bryan noted: “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”Build-up economics reached its zenith in the decades after the second world war, when the richest Americans paid a marginal income tax rate of between 70% and 90%. That revenue helped fund massive investment in infrastructure, education, health and basic research – creating the largest and most productive middle class the world had ever seen.But starting in the 1980s, America retreated from public investment. The result is crumbling infrastructure, inadequate schools, wildly dysfunctional healthcare and public health systems and a shrinking core of basic research. Productivity has plummeted.Yet we know public investment pays off. Studies show an average return on infrastructure investment of $1.92 for every public dollar invested, and a return on early childhood education of between 10% and 16% – with 80% of the benefits going to the general public.The Covid vaccine reveals the importance of investments in public health, and the pandemic shows how everyone’s health affects everyone else’s. Yet 37 million Americans still have no health insurance. A study in the Lancet estimates Medicare for All would prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year, while saving money.If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with ever more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels.The returns from these and other public investments are huge. The costs of not making them are astronomical.Trickle-down economics is a cruel hoax, while the benefits of build-up economics are real. At this juncture, between a global pandemic and the promise of a post-pandemic world, and between the administrations of Trump and Biden, we would be well-served by changing the economic paradigm from trickle down to build up. More

President-elect Joe Biden announced a racially diverse slate of environmental advisers on Saturday, to help his administration confront what he called “the existential threat of our time, climate change”.Biden touted his selection of Deb Haaland as the first Native American secretary of the interior, which has wielded influence over the nation’s tribes for generations.North Carolina official Michael Regan is slated to be the first African American man to run the Environmental Protection Agency. A state environmental head since 2017, he has made his name pursuing clean-ups of industrial toxins and helping low-income and minority communities significantly affected by pollution.“Already there are more people of color in our cabinet than any cabinet ever,” Biden said. Six members of his proposed cabinet are African American.His commitment to diverse picks including a record number of women, he said, “opens doors and includes the full range of talents that we have in this nation”.“We literally have no time to waste,” Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, citing out-of-control wildfires that have devastated the western states, tropical storms that “pummelled” the south, and record floods and droughts that have ravaged the agricultural midwest.“Folks, we’re in a crisis,” Biden said. “Just like we need a unified national response to Covid-19, we need a unified national response to climate change. We need to meet the moment with the urgency it demands, as we would during any national emergency.”Biden’s approach is a shift from that of Donald Trump, whose presidency has been marked by efforts to boost oil and gas production while rolling back government measures intended to safeguard the environment. The Trump administration is seeking to start as many initiatives as possible before Biden takes power.Biden, who has said he will seek US re-entry into the Paris climate deal, from which Trump withdrew, will therefore try to undo or block as much of Trump’s work as possible. There also will be an emphasis on looking out for low-income, working class and minority communities hit hardest by fossil fuel pollution and climate change.Biden called his team “brilliant, qualified, tested and barrier-busting”.The former two-term Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm is in line to be energy secretary. Biden’s nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality is Brenda Mallory. The CEQ oversees environmental reviews for virtually all major infrastructure projects and advises the president on major environmental issues. If confirmed, Mallory would be the first African American to hold the position since it was created more than 50 years ago.Two members of the team do not require Senate confirmation. They are Gina McCarthy, as national climate adviser, and Ali Zaidi, her deputy. McCarthy was EPA administrator from 2013 to 2017, during Barack Obama’s second term.Biden has promised to make tackling the climate crisis one of the pillars of his administration. But with a slim majority in the House of Representatives and control of the Senate undecided, he and his team may have to turn away from Congress and instead rely on rules from regulatory agencies to enact sweeping change.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report More

Donald Trump pushed to have the lawyer and “kraken” conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell named as a special counsel to investigate supposed electoral fraud, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
Citing two anonymous sources, the newspaper said most presidential advisers including personal attorney Rudy Giuliani pushed back against the plan, which Trump floated at a meeting on Friday.
The Times also reported that Trump asked aides about the former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s suggestion of deploying the US military to battleground states, in order to re-stage votes central to Joe Biden’s victory.
“That was also shot down,” the well-sourced reporter Maggie Haberman wrote, drily, on Twitter.
Trump pardoned Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation, in November.
Biden’s victory has been certified by the electoral college and the Democrat leads in the popular vote by more than 7m ballots. Nonetheless, Trump has refused to concede and claims without evidence that the election was rigged against him.
It was reported this week that he had threatened not to leave the White House on inauguration day, 20 January.
“He’s throwing a fucking temper tantrum,” CNN quoted an unnamed adviser as saying. “He’s going to leave. He’s just lashing out.”
But the same report cited an anonymous source as saying the atmosphere in the White House had “turned crazy”.
Trump’s legal team suffered more than 50 defeats in court cases over electoral fraud. Powell was cut from the team almost a month ago, after making bizarre claims including that voting software used in key states was created at the direction of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013.
She also promised to “release the kraken”, a reference to a terrible sea monster of myth and legend. No kraken, legal or otherwise, was forthcoming.
The Times report about Trump’s wish to bring her back into the fold came shortly after the president played down Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s admission that a vast hack against the US government and private companies had been carried out by Russia.
Powell “was at the White House for a meeting that became raucous at times”, the Times said. “Other administration officials drifted in and out … and the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, pushed back on the ideas being proposed.
“Ms Powell accused other Trump advisers of being quitters … but the idea that Mr Trump would try to install Ms Powell in a position to investigate the outcome sent shock waves through the president’s circle.”
The paper also said Giuliani had “separately pressed the Department of Homeland Security to seize possession of voting machines”, but had been “told the department does not have the authority to do such a thing”.
On Twitter, Haberman added: “The fact of the meeting – and Giuliani hope of seizing the voting machines – has alarmed some of the president’s advisers, who see his … refusal to accept the election results as in a dangerous new place.” More

A second federal prisoner scheduled to be put to death next month, as the Trump administration rushes to execute more people before Joe Biden takes power, has tested positive for Covid-19, his lawyers said on Friday.Cory Johnson’s diagnosis came a day after attorneys for Dustin John Higgs confirmed he had tested positive at a US prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where both men are on death row.Johnson, Higgs and a third inmate, Lisa Montgomery, are scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at the federal complex just days before Biden takes office.The Trump administration resumed federal executions after a 17-year pause in July and has carried out 10 death sentences since then, including two last week. It has executed more people in a single year than any other administration in more than 130 years and this year has killed more inmates than all the states put together.Johnson’s lawyers, Donald Salzman and Ronald Tabak, called on federal authorities to strike their client’s current execution date of 14 January – six days before inauguration day. Higgs is scheduled to die a day later.Montgomery’s execution date is 12 January, but because she is the only woman on federal death row she is held at a separate prison in Texas and would need to be brought to Indiana to be executed. She would be the first woman killed by the US government in 67 years.Johnson’s attorneys said his infection would make it difficult to interact with him in the critical days leading up to his scheduled execution, adding: “The widespread outbreak on the federal death row only confirms the reckless disregard for the lives and safety of staff, prisoners, and attorneys alike.”“If the government will not withdraw the execution date, we will ask the courts to intervene,” they said.The US Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons did not respond to requests for comment.Prosecutors alleged Johnson was a crack cocaine dealer who killed seven people in 1992 in an attempt to expand the territory of a Richmond, Virginia, gang and silence informants. His legal team has argued that he is intellectually disabled, with a far below average IQ, and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.Higgs was convicted of ordering the 1996 murders of three women in Maryland. Montgomery was convicted of using a rope to strangle a pregnant woman in 2004 and then using a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from the womb, authorities said.The Bureau of Prisons confirmed in a statement on Thursday that inmates on federal death row have tested positive for Covid-19. As of Thursday, there were more than 300 inmates with confirmed cases at FCC Terre Haute. The Bureau of Prisons said “many of these inmates are asymptomatic or exhibiting mild symptoms”.Nationwide, one in every five state and federal prisoners has tested positive for the coronavirus, a rate more than four times as high as the general population, according to data collected by the Associated Press and the Marshall Project. More

“If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined,” lamented King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose costly triumph in 279 BC inspired the phrase “Pyrrhic victory”. In 2020, the Democratic party learned what King Pyrrhus was talking about. They recaptured the White House and narrowly held on to the House of Representatives. And if the Democrats win both Senate runoffs in Georgia, they may yet capture the Senate. But Republicans increased their share of the House, making it easier for them to recapture it in 2022, and they control a majority of state legislatures whose redistricting plans for the US Congress can help the Republican party.Perhaps the greatest blow has been to the progressive interpretation of American politics. Most progressives have understood Trumpism as the last gasp of a dwindling, reactionary white male population. The future of the Democrats, it was said, lay with women and minorities. And yet in 2020 white men shifted more toward Biden than white women did. Black and brown Americans still voted mostly for Democrats, but there were significant shifts toward the Republicans among black and Hispanic voters and all of the Republicans who took contested seats from the Democrats were minority group members or women.What a winning coalition would look like depends on which issues unite the progressives and non-progressivesThe mystery is not why the progressive wave that was supposed to establish a new era of progressive politics did not materialize. The mystery is why anybody believed that there would be a progressive wave. After all, progressives – defined as voters who are both socially and economically liberal – are a minority of the American electorate. According to Gallup in July 2020, only 26% of Americans identify themselves as liberal, compared with conservative (34%) or moderate (40%).Not only are progressives a minority of American voters, they are also a minority of Democratic voters. According to Pew, in 2020 only 47% of Democrats described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal”. The majority of Democrats are “moderate” (45%) or “conservative” (14%).Voters of color are mostly Democratic, but that does not mean they are leftwing, as black support for Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary proved. Only 28% of black Americans and 30% of Hispanic Americans identify themselves as liberal. In our two-party system, consistent progressives can be part of an electoral majority only if at least half of their Democratic coalition is less progressive. What a winning coalition would look like depends on which issues unite the progressives and non-progressives. There are only two choices. The Democrats can be an economically liberal party, with socially liberal and socially conservative wings, or they can be a socially liberal party, with economically liberal and economically conservative wings.The New Deal/Great Society coalition that transformed the US in the mid-20th century, between the presidencies of Franklin D Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, was an example of the first kind of coalition. Most New Deal/Great Society Democrats supported economic programs that made life better for the working-class majority, from social security in the 1930s and Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s to the minimum wage and pro-labor laws.But even outside of the Democratic south, an anomalous region with an apartheid society and a backward economy, the Democratic party was not a socially liberal party. Northern trade union members were often Catholic, with traditional views of sex and marriage. The midwestern agrarian wing of the New Deal often combined populist support for farm families with religious fundamentalism, while northern progressive Democrats tended to be influenced by Social Gospel Protestantism. Asked about his political philosophy, Franklin Roosevelt responded: “I am a Christian and a Democrat.”Today’s Democratic party is the opposite of the New Deal coalition. In the past generation, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have transformed the Democrats into a socially liberal party, with economically liberal and economically conservative wings. Catholic and Protestant opponents of abortion have been made unwelcome in the party, and more recently Democrats have made support for gay marriage and gender fluidity litmus tests. But white, affluent college-educated Democrats tend to be less religious and more socially liberal than African American and Hispanic Democrats, giving Republicans the opportunity to pry away some Democratic voters of color with appeals to their values.Making social liberalism a litmus test has allowed the Democrats to pick up some moderate Republicans and libertarians who are alienated by the Republican religious right. Biden won in part because most voters who supported the Libertarian party in 2016 appear to have voted for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020. But attracting small-government free marketeers to the Democrats comes with a price. Republicans and libertarians who convert to the Democratic party tend to combine their liberalism on social issues like contraception, abortion and gay rights with hostility to higher taxes and more government spending. These converts reinforce the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party at the expense of the progressive wing.The Clinton-Biden strategy of attracting more affluent white voters to the Democrats by stressing social liberalism rather than economic liberalism has already converted the party into something FDR and LBJ would not recognize. Of the 100 counties with the highest median incomes in the presidential election of 1980, the Democrats won only nine, with 91 going to the Republicans. In 2020, Biden won 57 to 43 for Trump. In 2018, the Democrats won back the House of Representatives by winning all 10 of the 10 wealthiest congressional districts, and 41 of 50 of the wealthiest.These affluent voters prefer Democratic policies on abortion, gay rights and climate change – but only as long as they do not have to pay higher taxes. Back in 2015, Hillary Clinton promised that, if she were elected president, there would be no tax increases on households making less than $250,000. Biden went further this year, promising that taxes would not go up on households that make less than $400,000 a year.Because it is impossible to fund the Nordic-style welfare state of which American progressives dream without raising taxes on the merely affluent as well as the super-rich, the Democratic party’s pandering to the affluent on taxes means that there will not be a Green New Deal, a major expansion of social insurance and social programs, or massive public investment in infrastructure. To appease the Democratic party’s new high-income voters and donors, the last two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, abandoned their ambitious spending plans once elected and pivoted toward austerity and deficit reduction. It remains to be seen whether Biden will do the same.Progressive Democrats have a choice. They can continue to be junior partners in a whiter and more gentrified Democratic party that nods toward racial justice and environmentalism and sexual freedom, but says no to a new New Deal. Or they can try to rebuild something like the New Deal coalition and win back sociallymoderate and conservative voters – some of them voters of color – who favor expanding social security and a higher minimum wage, but oppose affirmative action and abortion and decriminalizing illegal immigration. In either case, progressives must accept that they are only a quarter of the US population and cannot hope to win or exercise power without teaming up with people who reject many progressive views. More

After record turnout in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in some states are already signaling they will pursue measures that make it harder to vote in the coming years.The Republican efforts come after an election in which nearly 160 million people voted, the highest in a presidential election in over a century. About half of voters cast their ballots by mail, a big increase from 2016, while about another quarter cast their ballots in person ahead of election day.The GOP backlash underscores how swiftly and severely the party is willing to cut off access to the ballot amid signs of a changing electorate. The baseless accusations of fraud that Donald Trump and other allies continue to levy about the election has offered election officials justification for passing the measures.“There will be some states where it is very clear that the existing power structure is worried about their voters. And part of their job security plan is to make it harder for their voters to participate,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice.Two states that appear to be at the center of the push are Georgia and Texas, where Republicans are already advocating measures to scale back mail-in voting and other access to the ballot. Both states, traditionally seen as Republican strongholds, are increasingly seen as politically competitive because of demographic shifts, with the electorate becoming much more diverse. In Georgia, there has been significant growth among Black, Hispanic and Asian eligible voters over the last two decades, while Texas has seen a surge in its Latino population.“I am not at all surprised to see this happening in Texas and Georgia that I think are on the cusp of a big shift,” Pérez said. “You have some dinosaurs who are not going to stay in power much longer trying to suppress votes.”In Georgia, a state where record numbers of voters cast their ballots by mail, Republicans who control the state legislature have said they want to pass a slew of new restrictions focused on mail-in voting. They have said they want to require voters to submit a copy of their ID with their mail-in ballot and eliminate ballot drop boxes. While Georgia currently allows anyone to vote-by-mail, Republicans said they intend to work on a new law that would only allow voters to cast a mail-in ballot if they have an excuse. Newt Gingrich, the conservative Georgian and former speaker of the US House, complained earlier this month that Republicans were helping Democrats by making it easier to vote.The Republican push to do away with no-excuse absentee voting comes just 15 years after the party embraced the practice and adopted a state law doing away with the excuse requirement to vote by mail. In previous elections, Republicans in the state have used the practice more widely than Democrats, said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia.“Now, they’re clearly operating on the premise that: ‘fewer votes, we win’,” he said. “Making it harder to do absentee voting, assuming we don’t remain all locked in our homes because of the pandemic, that may hurt Republicans more than Democrats. It’s kind of a simple, knee jerk reaction to an election they very narrowly lost.”Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group that works on expanding voter access, questioned why Republicans were suddenly interested in restricting access to vote by mail. “I’m just gonna be honest, more white people used vote by mail than people of color, because they didn’t trust the process – now that we’ve got them trusting the process, now they want to go in and change the rules,” she told the Guardian earlier this month.In Texas, which already has some of the most stringent rules around voting in the country, lawmakers have pre-filed several bills with new restrictions. One bill would prevent state officials from sending out applications to vote by mail. The measure comes after election officials in Harris county tried to mail applications to all 2.4 million registered voters in the county.“There are differently going to be those same efforts, like we saw during the election, to combat what local election administrators are doing to try and innovate to try and make voting more convenient and safer,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, a government watchdog group. “Texas is always on the cutting edge of finding new ways to suppress the vote.”Another measure would require state officials to investigate anyone who casts a ballot while swearing they don’t have an acceptable form of photo identification (something currently allowed under Texas law). The same bill would require the state to regularly compare its voter rolls with a Department of Homeland Security data to try and find registered non-citizens, a process that has been shown to be inaccurate in the past. In 2019, Texas officials announced they had found nearly 100,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls, but were forced to retract that accusation once the data was shown to be inaccurate.This isn’t the first time that lawmakers have moved to cut off voting access after turnout surged, Pérez said. After the 2008 presidential election, Republicans took control of state legislatures in 2010 and were more likely to pass voting restrictions in places where there were high minority populations or high turnout among minority voters. “People don’t get threatened about participation levels until they start reaching a certain threshold where they can actually disrupt the power structure,” she said.Keith Bentele, a professor at the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona who has studied efforts to restrict voting access, said it was “extremely likely” that Republicans – who will still wield enormous power over state legislatures – would pass new voting restrictions.“Given the extraordinarily intense amplification of the voter fraud myth by President Trump and allies unfolding currently, it would seem odd if state legislators did not follow through with legislation to address these alleged (and in nearly all cases immaterial) issues of election integrity,” he wrote in an email.Pérez questioned what kind of message it would send to the American public to see politicians so swiftly restrict access to voting after many people used it for the first time.“What does it do to the American population to have to see our politicians being so self serving. So brazen in their attempts to make it harder for people to vote?,” she said. “It’s just gonna tell a really ugly story about America.” More