A huge opening for justice; Best essays, Part 1
A tribute to Bob Moses + Sinema’s primary challenge + summer delights
In this issue:
+ A generational opening for progressive immigration reform comes into view
+ An eclectic set of essays we loved (part 1)
+ A tribute to Bob Moses
+ Kyrsten Sinema’s primary challenge
+ Some summer delights
Immigration Breakthrough?
There is so much news these days that a momentous positive development has gotten too little attention. Legalization and a “path to citizenship” for eleven million undocumented immigrants have been the north star goals of a vibrant social movement for decades. A major victory this year in that fight is now possible. In the larger, Democrat-only budget bill being considered by Congress, measures to legalize large numbers of immigrants are provisionally included, with the support of Senate Democratic leadership, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and now — momentously — President Joe Biden, who for the first time spoke strongly in support of including these measures in the budget bill last Thursday. Populations who would be eligible for legalization and citizenship could include Dreamers (immigrants brought to the United States as children); farmworkers; “essential workers,” whose role in caring for and feeding the nation got more attention during the pandemic; and immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), who fled natural disasters from all over the world, the largest numbers from Central America and Haiti. The stakes of this debate are even higher since a Texas judge earlier this month effectively put the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in limbo by challenging the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and closing the program to new applicants.
Including immigration provisions in the budget process is crucial because those bills only require 51 votes to pass, meaning Democrats will not have to chase chimerical pro-immigrant Republican votes. For this strategy to succeed, two things must happen. First, all Democrats in the Senate will have to back the legalization. Encouragingly, Sen. Joe Manchin has already indicated his support. Second, the Senate Parliamentarian will have to rule that these immigration policy changes are germane to a budget bill under the terms of the arcane “Byrd rule.” The substantive justification for including these immigration policies in the budget process is sound: legalizing millions of immigrants has significant budget implications, and immigration provisions included in previous budget bills created an important precedent.
Enormous credit goes to the immigrant rights movement for its remarkable tenacity in fighting to change an inhumane system. The architects of a savvy inside/outside strategy in the We Are Home campaign have positioned for a win in the face of gale-force headwinds. The outcome is, of course, uncertain. But there is real hope for a breakthrough for millions of undocumented immigrants and their family members today. There’s abundant evidence that a path to citizenship would be good politics headed into the 2022 midterms, alter power relations in society in lasting ways, and be great economic policy. But, above all, it’s a long-overdue moral reckoning that the country must have on one of the great social justice issues of our time.
Best Essays, Part 1
On the topic of immigration, we loved this piece by Daniel Altschuler and Angeles Solis in The Forge, “Who Feeds Us While We Feed You,” which unpacks how one of the biggest organizing wins of this century was achieved:
This spring, immigrant New Yorkers secured a historic victory: a $2.1 billion fund for workers who lost jobs and income during the pandemic but received not a cent of government relief.
The victory was won by workers like Rubi Correa, a domestic worker and single mother from Colombia living in Queens, New York, who has taken care of elders and children for almost ten years. When COVID hit, Rubi was one of millions left with no work, no income, no relief. She was evicted, sleeping in airports, and surviving in pantry lines. Enraged by soaring billionaire profits and government inaction, she joined the Fund Excluded Workers campaign. Rubi went on to lead a 23-day hunger strike, going without a meal for more than three weeks and facing great risks to her health to bring home urgent relief. Her fighting spirit, alongside the remarkable commitment of dozens of hunger strikers with similar stories, helped deliver an organizing win that will result in checks of up to $15,600 (before taxes) for undocumented workers — the largest relief package of its kind in the country.
The victory of these excluded workers illustrates the tremendous power of immigrant workers taking to the streets to demand dignity. But their historic achievement also tells us something else: in the fight for immigrant justice, there is tremendous power in highlighting staggering inequality and exposing those who profit from others’ pain.
Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror is a brilliant essay collection that explores in original and compelling ways, among other things, the dark side of the internet, how religion and ecstasy are related, and a culture of sexual violence against women. Here she is on the internet:
Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture. The Bush era is inextricable from the failures of cable news; the executive overreaches of the Obama years were obscured by the internet’s magnification of personality and performance; Trump’s rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their users in order to continue making money. But lately, I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly tortuous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative – and why are all those questions asking the same thing? . . .
I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.
In “How Should We Do Drugs Now,” Michael Pollan, reflects wisely on what should come after the disastrous “war on drugs.”
But while we can now begin to glimpse an end to the drug war, it is much harder to envision what the drug peace will look like. How will we fold these powerful substances into our society and our lives so as to minimize their risks and use them most constructively? The blunt binaries of “Just say no” that have held sway for so long have kept us from having this conversation and from appreciating how different one illicit drug is from another.
The drug war’s blunt, black-and-white approach at least had the virtue of simplicity. “Just say no” is certainly easier to follow than “yes, but only this way and not that.” With all illicit drugs lumped together in the drug war, there was no need to take account of their different properties and powers, what they are good for and what they are bad for. Nor did we need to figure out the best cultural container for each of them, the set of rules and rituals and taboos that might allow us to use them safely, productively and, yes, with pleasure.
The long history of humans and their mind-altering drugs gives us reason to hope we can negotiate a peace with these powerful substances, imperfect though it may be. We have done it before. The ancient Greeks grasped the ambiguous, double-edged nature of drugs much better than we do. Their word for them, “pharmakon,” means both “medicine” and “poison” — it all depends, they understood, on use, dose, intention, set and setting. Blessing or curse, which will it be? The answer depends not on law or chemistry so much as on culture, which is to say, on us.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently issued a brilliant and urgent open letter to Joe Biden: “Mr. President, You’re Just Plain Wrong on Voter Suppression,”
Biden wants to be the Robin Hood of the working class, a swashbuckling blue-collar savior. He wants to go down in history as the president who rebuilt America. In that grand vision, risking it all to save voting access for Black people comes up short. It’s a nuisance, a horrible inconvenience.
Black people gave all to save Joe Biden’s candidacy, but Joe Biden refused to give all to protect their right to vote. Reciprocity is not compulsory.
If Joe Biden clearly, forcefully and repeatedly demanded that the filibuster be scrapped to defend voting rights, it still might not be axed. But Black people like me need to see you go down fighting rather than avoid the fight or grudgingly enter it.
Biden wants to make history with his agenda, but history is already being made by Republicans with this extraordinary voter suppression push.
During Biden’s victory speech, he said to his Black supporters, “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.” I’m sorry, Mr. President, but that statement rings hollow because in Black people’s greatest time of need, you’re more concerned about roads than rights.
In her New Yorker essay “The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition,” Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor profiles abolitionist Miriame Kaba.
The continuation of police abuse has reaffirmed the calls of some activists for an end to policing as we know it; for others, it has confirmed that the institution of policing should be abolished completely. In the past year or two, the propositions of defunding or abolishing police and prisons has travelled from incarcerated-activist networks and academic conferences and scholarship into mainstream conversations. Of course, this doesn’t mean that these politics have become mainstream, but the persistence of police violence disproportionately harming Black communities has pushed far more people to contemplate radical proposals for dealing with issues of harm and safety.
One Black woman who has been at the center of these conversations is Mariame Kaba, an educator and organizer who is based in New York City. Kaba fund-raised for large-scale mutual-aid operations as the impact of covid-19 began to set in and the lack of public provisions threatened hunger, homelessness, and illness for untold numbers. She is also known for helping to organize a successful campaign to award reparations to Black men who survived torture orchestrated by the former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. Those reparations include a five-and-a-half-million-dollar compensation fund for the victims and their families, waived tuition at the City Colleges of Chicago, a mandatory curriculum for Chicago public schools about the police torture, and a public memorial. It was an unprecedented campaign and outcome, which mirrored the professed values of the growing abolitionist movement: repair and restoration. Kaba and her fellow-activists were less interested in prosecuting the offending police officers than in developing initiatives that could repair the harms done by the Chicago Police Department.
Adam Marantz’s “Are We Entering a New Political Era?,” in the New Yorker, features an inspiring profile of Justice Democrats and considers what they’ve accomplished.
The mission of Justice Democrats is to push for as much left-populist legislation as Washington will accommodate, with the understanding that what Washington will accommodate is a function, in part, of who gets elected. The group recruits progressives, many of them “extraordinary ordinary people” with no political experience, to run primary campaigns against some of the most powerful people in Congress. In its first effort, in 2018, it ran dozens of candidates on shoestring budgets. All of them lost, except one—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—but she turned out to be a potent validation of the group’s model. Today, the Justice Democrats-aligned faction in Congress includes about ten members, depending on how you count.
In most House elections, more than ninety per cent of incumbents are reelected. Justice Democrats is betting that the most efficient way to reshape the Democratic Party is to disrupt this pattern, giving moderates an unignorable reason to guard their left flank. “It’s one thing for the progressive movement to tell a politician, ‘It sure would be nice if you did this,’ ” Alexandra Rojas, the group’s executive director, told me. “It’s another to be able to say, ‘Look, you should probably do this if you want to keep your job.’ ” This insurgent approach has caused establishment figures from both parties to refer to Justice Democrats and its ilk as the Tea Party of the left. Max Berger, an early employee, said, “If that’s supposed to mean that we’re equivalent to white-supremacist dipshits who want to blow up the government or move toward authoritarianism, then I would consider that both an insult and a really dumb misreading of what we’re trying to do. But if it means that we come out of nowhere and, within a few years, we have one of the two major parties implementing our agenda—and if our agenda is to promote multiracial democracy and give people union jobs and help avert a climate crisis—then, yeah, I’m down to be the Tea Party of the left.”
Brendan O’Connor’s “When the Party’s Over: Organizing After Bernie,” in The Baffler, is a savvy take on the future of left politics.
This is the power of organization—of, more specifically, party building: to provide discipline, focus, and direction to the chaos and upheaval of movements. To the romantic who waxes poetic about the force and vibrancy of the people in the streets, organization might look like a moderating, even a conservatizing force. Movements and activity are exciting: history is in motion! This, we are told, is what democracy looks like: hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of ordinary people flooding public spaces. In comparison, another two-hour meeting of the outreach subcommittee of the working group to draft a proposal for the adoption of a new priority campaign seems immeasurably dull.
The frustrating truth, however, is that the slow, deliberate, boring work of the meetings and the spreadsheets and the phone calls is necessary to build the structures that can carry movements forward, provide accountability, and allow for thoughtful deliberation and debate. This too is what democracy looks like. . . .
In the aftermath of Bernie 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the George Floyd rebellion, it has become clearer than ever that one of the primary questions that the left in the United States today must answer is that of organization.
Bryce Covert’s Nation article “Imagining a Better Way to Grow Old in America” explores how we can and should do aging and care differently.
Caregiving is already a crisis for American families, but it’s only going to get worse, and quickly. From 2018 to 2030, the number of Americans age 65 and older is predicted to increase by more than 60 percent. By 2034, the country is expected to have more seniors than children. This growth, fueled by the aging baby boom generation, “is unprecedented in the history of the country,” [said Kenneth] Knapp [director of the Center for Long-Term Care at New York Medical College]. . . .
Much could be accomplished simply by changing the way we approach caring for the aging and disabled: not as an individual crisis but as a collective obligation. That mindset is at the heart of some smaller-scale innovations that rely heavily on the idea of community. . . .
. . . Joe Biden campaigned on a care package that included elder care, and as president he has proposed a $400 billion investment in home- and community-based care for seniors and the disabled in his American Jobs Plan. The pandemic revealed not just the shortcomings of our nursing homes—which turned into nightmares as sickness and death spread inside them—but also that care for our loved ones enables us to live full lives.
“Beforehand, if you didn’t have the ability to afford long-term care, you just thought of it as a personal failure,” [said Ai-jen Poo, director of National Domestic Workers Association.] “Now we’re talking about what is our responsibility as a nation to support our collective ability to take care of the people that we love.”
Bob Moses – a Tribute
Last week, our country lost one of the best organizers and humans it ever had. Deepak met Moses a few times and was moved by his grace, humility, and strategic genius. In our celebrity culture of hashtag activism, it’s hard to fathom the idea of someone who purposely stayed behind the scenes and conceived of their contribution as helping other people discover their own power, together. But if there’s going to be a durable progressive revival in this country, we are going to have to recover some of the qualities that Moses exemplified: being close to the lived experience of people fighting oppression, a commitment to small “d” democracy, faith in the ability of people without degrees or pedigrees to make the right decisions, and a willingness to take bold risks. One of the best books about organizing is Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, which distinguishes between two different approaches to people power in the civil rights movement. One, which Moses stood for, upheld slow, patient, deep organizing in a democratic mode, emphasizing the development of local leaders. The other emphasized short-term campaigns, movement moments, and charismatic leaders. Both were and are necessary, but the former tradition has fallen out of fashion. Chapter eight of Payne’s book, “Slow and Respectful Work: Organizers and Organizing,” illuminates Moses’ approach and the deep trust he built with local community leaders.
From Payne’s book, here are two windows into his gifts:
Bob Moses was once asked how you organize a town:
“By bouncing a ball,” he answered quietly.
“What?”
“You stand on a street and bounce a ball. Soon all the children come around. You keep on bouncing the ball. Before long, it runs under someone’s porch and then you meet the adults.”
Jean Wheeler Smith: “Bob and a band of ten or so organizers, all under 20, could go into a community in the morning … find their contacts, establish sleeping quarters and some means to eat, get a church and turn out the community for a mass meeting that same night.”
Krysten Sinema – A Primary Challenge?
One of Bob Moses and SNCC’s main innovations was to challenge the accommodation of racism by the national Democratic Party by establishing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and taking the fight public at the national Democratic convention in 1964. Though they lost the skirmish, they forced the Democratic Party to declare itself on the question of political apartheid.
It is not widely appreciated that a lot of social change is the product of conflict within parties, not just conflict between parties. So, for example, DACA was the result of the pressure brought to bear by the immigrant rights movement on the Democratic Party, which had to respond to its demands. In order to secure voting rights, there will need to be a reckoning inside the Democratic Party between its most loyal supporters of color and party leadership that has thus far not matched the savvy or ruthlessness of its authoritarian rivals.
One way that conflict should take shape is through a primary challenge from the left, announced soon, to Senator Krysten Sinema of Arizona, about whose migration from radical leftist to corporate weathervane we’ve written previously. Arizona is a purple state — not a ruby-red state like West Virginia — so Sinema doesn’t have an excuse for betraying her core constituents. She voted against a $15 minimum wage. She recently signaled her opposition to the $3.5 trillion price tag of the Senate Democrats reconciliation package, and just to add insult to injury, there is this from Politico:
Then, Biden said that Sen. KYRSTEN SINEMA (D-Ariz.) — who said Wednesday that she would not support a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill — is “on board for passing [reconciliation] if in fact she sees all the pieces of it. That’s why she allowed the budget to go forward.” Speaking of which …
CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP SINEMA’S SUMMER — Sinema is not letting BIF[the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework] or the reconciliation bill get in the way of her summer plans.
When CHUCK SCHUMERannounced earlier this month that he might keep the Senate in session into August — delaying a previously scheduled recess in order to shepherd the two gigantic bills through the chamber — Sinema told the majority leader that she was not sticking around to vote, multiple Senate sources tell Playbook.
She had prior vacation plans, she said, and wasn’t about to let the infrastructure or reconciliation bills get in the way.
In fairness, Sinema isstaying in D.C. this weekend to work instead of attending one previously scheduled event: a wine retreat fundraiser at Sonoma’s ritzy MacArthur Place Hotel & Spa, where summer rates hover around $950 per night.
Sinema is not up until 2024, but the beginning of an organized effort now could have enormously positive legislative consequences now.
Summer Delights
The Metropolitan Museum of Art just concluded a magnificent exhibition of the paintings of Alice Neel, “People Come First,” which will travel to San Francisco next year. Neel chose people who were usually not the subject of portraits — working-class people, people of color, pregnant women, gay couples — and rendered them with astonishing skill and humanity.
Three movies we loved:
Honeyland is a mesmerizing, unique documentary about a wild beekeeper in rural Macedonia and her feud with a family of itinerant neighbors. (Hulu)
Summer of Soul, based on long-ignored footage from a series of concerts in Harlem in 1969, features astonishing performances by Black artists that were unjustly eclipsed by Woodstock. (Hulu)
I Carry You With Me, by director Heidi Ewing, is a beautiful love story of two undocumented, gay, Mexican immigrants who struggle to build a life in New York City. (In theaters now.)
There’s also the utterly delightful comedy series on Netflix Never Have I Ever, which will bring a special chuckle to first-generation Indian Americans.
Finally, at a time when billionaires gloat about spending a few minutes in space and many ponder the possibility that we’ve been visited by U.F.O.s, it is worth remembering that visionary jazz bandleader Sun Ra had been in contact with extraterrestrial intelligences in the 1930s and carried their message of liberation to humanity until his death in 1993. To see Sun Ra and his Arkestra in their prime, watch Robert Muggee’s 1980 documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (free on YouTube). This New Yorker profile by Hua Hsu is a fitting appreciation of a genius too often overlooked in jazz history. (Ken Burns didn’t see fit to mention the Sun Ra Arkestra in his sprawling PBS series.) Today the Arkestra continues making joyful noises. Now a 20-piece ensemble led by the sprightly, 97-year-old alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, they recently came to New York’s Central Park and delivered a transcendent, resplendent performance. Be sure not to miss them if they visit your planet.