Biden’s First Year + How the Movement Must Change to Meet the Moment
+ Great new jobs + Congressional Progressive Action Fund conference + bell hooks and Thich Naht Hanh + The Steal + Rev. Warnock on Voting Rights
In this issue:
We make meaning of the failure of voting rights legislation in the Senate, take stock of the first year of Biden’s presidency, and sketch some ways that progressive movements need to change to meet the challenges in front of us.
An important new job: The posting for the Executive Director of Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice is live! This new institution has the crucial mission of training, mentoring, and supporting early- and mid-career leaders for careers in social change, especially people of color, women, LGBTQ folks, and people from low-income and working-class backgrounds. Please spread the word!
Two other important jobs are posted: Career Counselor – Social Justice and Labor Organizations at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and Organizing Director at Detroit Action.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus Action Fund is hosting its annual gathering of movement leaders and champions in Congress – at a crucial time. Winning Change That's Built To Last will begin on Thursday, January 27, 2022, at 1 p.m. ET. You can register for free today and submit questions in advance or watch the livestream at @weact4progress! Deepak will be moderating a panel with Rep. Jamie Raskin, Rep. Andy Levin, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman to talk about the road ahead for democracy, climate change, and economic justice.
The Voting Rights Setback
This was undeniably a very hard week. The failure of voting rights legislation in the Senate was a real setback for democracy. What happened? It’s impossible to understand this defeat outside the context of the country’s long history of white backlash. As Perry Bacon put it in an excellent column, “An anti-Black backlash – with no end in sight,”
We are in the midst of an aggressive, sustained backlash against recent shows of Black political power. The Senate’s rejection of a comprehensive voting rights bill on Wednesday night both leaves in place some of the most pernicious elements of that backlash and confirms that Black political power in the United States remains subject to reversal from the nation’s White majority. . . When the Senate failed on Wednesday, it meant that Black Americans protested against racism and democratically chose the political leaders they wanted in 2020 — and were then punished for doing so. Nov. 4, 2008, and Jan. 5, 2021, were historic days of Black power; Jan. 19, 2022, was a show of how limited that power remains.
State laws criminalizing protest and attacks on the 1619 Project and on critical race theory are forms of backlash politics too — to power in the streets and to narrative power. Mitch McConnell made all this plain when he argued that there was no need for voting rights legislation because “African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” (Read that sentence again if its noxiousness doesn’t come through the first time. And remember that Black and Latino voters wait nearly 50% longer than white voters to cast a ballot).
However, if we understand the struggle as a decade-long war on multiple fronts rather than a short-term battle fought solely in the Senate, it becomes evident that a major setback is not the same as a defeat for pro-democracy forces. As LaTosha Brown, the director of Black Voters Matter and an indispensable leader, put it, “Americans are going to have to fight for a real democracy. This is when the real change will happen.”
As we discussed in our January 9th issue, “Just Look Up: 10 Strategies to Defeat Authoritarianism,” the fight for federal legislation cannot be abandoned, but while its short-term prospects have dimmed, many other strategies can be pursued. There is every reason to feel grief and anger this week — and more reason to recommit to the long march ahead of us.
The Biden Record, One Year In
In March 2020, Deepak wrote a piece in The Nation “From Resistance to Governing,” reflecting on his experience as a leader of a progressive organization in the Obama years and suggesting ways that movement actors today should approach a governing moment differently. We revisit that article to assess Biden’s first year in office on key questions: economic justice, the fight to preserve multi-racial democracy, and altering relations of power in society.
Three key takeaways:
(1) Biden has not made Obama’s economic policy mistakes, and the economic gains for working people and poor people over the last year have been substantial, underreported, and underappreciated. The Nation article noted that because Obama’s “elitist, neoliberal economic team were not willing to name or prosecute bankers, the field was laid wide open for a different kind of populism to take hold.” In particular, the decision to take the side of bankers over homeowners of color in the foreclosure crisis had terrible consequences for the racial wealth gap, and for politics, too. The Biden team, by contrast, has pursued a consistently progressive economic agenda, embodied in the signature and landmark American Rescue Plan, which decisively broke from previous eras in its scale and design. The Biden economic team is also far more progressive than Obama’s. (Larry Summers has thankfully been reduced to heckling from the sidelines.) And even beyond legislation, they have driven major changes through executive action, such as a $15-an-hour minimum wage for federal contractors. Moreover, Biden himself took the dramatic step of supporting Amazon workers in their unionization efforts in Bessemer, Alabama, a rhetorical stance that had real meaning. The results of the policies passed so far have been to dramatically improve the bargaining power of workers — reflected in substantial wage gains. Americans earned 10% more in wages at the end of 2021 than they did in February 2020.
Biden’s administration has also been much less hesitant about providing benefits to poor people. In his article for The Nation, Deepak recalls talking with First Lady Michelle Obama at a 2009 White House reception and noting how
progressive the stimulus legislation was, in that it included a stunning amount of money targeted to very poor households. She offhandedly said, “Yes, but let’s keep that to ourselves.” The implicit view, widely held in the liberal establishment, that gains for poor people can be secured only if the country doesn’t understand what’s happening is of course a frank admission of political weakness. And it is self-fulfilling because there can be no response from direct beneficiaries to defend gains if there is no call. Worldview—the meaning people make of what’s happening to them—is a crucial dimension of power, and the Obama administration showed little interest in using policy to shape people’s views of the role of politics or government.
By contrast, Biden’s single biggest accomplishment last year was arguably to cut child poverty by 40% through the refundable child tax credit, which goes to families without earnings. (All praise to Community Change, the Economic Security Project, grassroots groups and so many others for leading the charge to win and implement the child tax credit). Not only did the administration not hide this accomplishment, they worked aggressively with outside groups to promote it and encourage enrollment. This is to the credit of the Biden economic team and to the outside movements and progressive leaders in Congress that created the conditions for this dramatic rupture in thinking and practice.
Unfortunately, the child credit that had such a momentous impact has now lapsed, because exactly one person, Senator Joe Manchin, is stuck in a false and racist 1990s narrative about the lazy poor who won’t work if benefits are decoupled from earnings. If the child credit expansion is not renewed, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities “the differences in child poverty rates between Latino and white children would grow by 70 percent, between Black and white children by 78 percent, and between [Native American] and white children by 86 percent.”
Biden and his team are not to blame for this or for some of the other ambitious plans that have stalled. There’s no wishing away the problem of Manchin and Sinema, zombie neoliberals who have sought from the beginning to eviscerate the most progressive elements of Biden’s agenda at the behest of corporations. (See, for example, this Salon piece on corporate contributions to Manchin after his announcement of opposition to Build Back Better.) The left built a lot of power since the Obama years to drive a progressive economic agenda into the mainstream of American politics, and a lot of it got enacted. The failure to get all of it over the finish line mostly reflects hard structural realities — the limits of our power and the extent of corporate power in America — rather than tactical missteps.
(2) Biden’s team fatally underestimated the authoritarian threat posed by today’s Republican Party. For all the success on the economic front, Biden’s senior team has suffered from a misunderstanding of the Republican Party. Obama famously wasted precious months pursuing a bipartisan deal with Senate Republicans on health care that would never materialize. Biden, to his credit, didn’t wait for Republican support to pursue bold economic legislation. But he failed to understand that the Republican Party had metastasized into something far worse than the party of no. The Republican Party is now an insurrectionist party in thrall to an authoritarian leader.
Biden’s team made the disastrous calculation that after January 6th, it was best to prioritize good economic policy and deprioritize democracy reform, believing that the authoritarian threat would recede. (Carol Anderson in White Rage makes a similar point about the second life given to confederates after the Civil War by the failure of Republicans to seize the advantage.) The Biden team’s failure to move to crush the authoritarian insurgency and pursue pro-democracy reforms while the public was focused on the problem and before a counter-narrative could take hold was a tragic strategic mistake.
This may be in part due to the blinders of Biden’s inner circle. Politico reported after Biden’s marathon press conference that “Biden also made it clear he has no plans to break up the four-man band that runs his White House and has served as his brain trust for many years: RON KLAIN, MIKE DONILON, STEVE RICCHETTI and BRUCE REED.” “I’m satisfied with the team,” Biden said.” Two things are notable about this foursome of close advisors. First is that all are white men (although Anita Dunn, a white woman, should arguably have been included in this inner circle). Second, all were subject to the “this is not who we are” delusion about January 6th — the idea that it was an anomalous event inconsistent with American history and that the fever would, if ignored, just go away. Very bad things happen when white rage meets white amnesia.
The other problem with this team is that they all came of political age in the time of “bi-partisan consensus.” (Reed was one of the architects of the very worst part of that racist, neoliberal consensus: the 1996 welfare reform law.) The game they know how to play, an insider game of Hill negotiations in which opponents play by a prescribed set of rules, is no longer the game of American politics. It took far too long for the Biden team to see the anti-democratic threat for what it was, and by the time they were pressured into taking steps on voting rights by Black leaders and progressive organizations, Biden’s political capital had shrunk, and the public opinion about January 6th has shifted in disturbing ways. (Through relentless repetition of the Big Lie, a YouGov poll found more Democrats and Independents today believe “some fraud” took place in the election than did a year ago.)
(3) Despite some improvement, questions of power continue to take a backseat in the Democratic approach to governance. From the Nation piece:
The most consequential mistake that Obama and his team made that paved the way for the Trump regime is different than the ones usually ascribed to them. The problem was less Obama’s legislative program than his total lack of interest in building the power that could have expanded the scope of the possible. . . Some Obama legislation redistributed income downward. But virtually nothing in those bills redistributed power downward. The health care bill extended coverage without curbing the power of the insurance companies or big pharma. And taking the side of the banks over the foreclosed—supposedly the heart of the Obama constituency—was a deeply demoralizing accommodation to the power structure that has had lasting political consequences. This orientation to technocratic policy solutions—notwithstanding the occasional rhetorical flourish about “Stonewall, Selma, and Seneca Falls”—was not unique to Obama, and is the fatal flaw in the center-left, elitist culture that views broad democratic participation as incidental to the “real work” of governing. The results of Obama’s lack of interest in altering the relations of power became brutally clear very quickly. Republican “trifectas” in which they controlled both houses of state legislatures and the governors’ mansions increased from 10 states to 22 states in the 2010 elections—on the eve of a redistricting process that set the playing field for a decade. By the time Obama left office, union membership had been reduced to 6.4 percent and the overall progressive infrastructure was even weaker than it had been. It’s almost impossible to conceive of the parallel universe in which corporations would limp out of a Republican administration weaker than they started.
Biden’s team has been somewhat better on questions of power. They’ve been more pro-union, for sure, and made some promising appointments, like Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, who can be expected to tackle concentrated corporate power from regulatory perches. There were also important power-shifting measures tucked into the American Rescue Plan Act and others that are being pursued in a number of agencies. But altering power relations in structural ways is the first, second, and third agenda of Republicans when they take power. Destroying unions, eroding voting rights, and attacking immigrants are the priorities for conservative governance, even when they are unpopular. Biden’s administration has not prioritized voting rights or immigration — and on immigration, it has even left in place some Trump-era policies that have done immense harm, as Cristina Jimenez and Deepak wrote about last year.
There’s also continuity between Obama and Biden in the unwillingness to name villains, including the corporations that have financed the attack on the signature Build Back Better legislation. It’s very hard to tell a good and convincing story in the absence of villains.
So, to sum up, Biden’s administration, pushed by progressives in and out of Congress, has resulted in important gains that have delivered massive, real, material improvements in people’s lives on poverty, wealth, and wages. And there has been a significant rupture in the neoliberal paradigm. But there have also been big failures — most notably on the fight for democracy, voting rights, and immigration. And while there’s some improvement, the asymmetry between the two parties in how they approach questions of power continues to plague governance. (For more on policy feedback loops and the asymmetry, see “Building Power Through Policy” in The Forge.)
We hope that the next period brings some needed course corrections in strategy by the White House because the fate of outside movements in this authoritarian period is inevitably linked to Biden’s (and vice versa). We have a stake in his success. But movements should not put all their hope in solutions from D.C. The question isn’t only or mainly what Biden should do, but what we should do.
The Shape of the Struggle: How Progressive Movements Need to Adapt to New Realities
The brilliant Greisa Martinez of United We Dream wrote a tweet this week that began with a line that we think encapsulates the imperative of this moment: “The shape of our struggle must change.” Here, then, are some preliminary thoughts on new realities and needed adjustments in movement strategy. (For those of you following along, this is a first foray into exploring strategy #10 in our January 9th issue 10 strategies to defeat authoritarianism).
(1) Securing wins at the federal level still matters, but attention and resources need to be redirected to organizing at the state and local level.
In his March 2020 Nation piece, Deepak wrote of the Obama years that
The absence of feisty, broad-based movements demanding more, the implacable opposition of the Republicans in Congress, and the controlling hand of conservative Democrats created real constraints on the scope of what could be achieved. . . . [If a Democrat wins the 2020 election, the] temptation to turn inward to the machinations of Washington will be strong. But it must be resisted, with major resources devoted to engaging the millions of people beyond the choir who will still be struggling after the election—and in need of major change.
Salvaging big pieces of the Build Back Better agenda is important on its own terms — delivering child care assistance to millions of people and investing hundreds of billions of dollars to address climate change, for example, would be major accomplishments and deliver meaningful results for key constituencies. There is no substitute for voting rights legislation to address the disenfranchisement of voters of color. But if federal legislation to prevent partisan takeovers of local elections, discourage intimidation or violence against local election officials, and other measures to prevent the subversion of elections can be passed, they should be supported. So, too, the President should be pushed to use aggressive executive action on things like climate, immigration, and student debt.
But progressive priorities need to be rebalanced and more attention and resources must be devoted by the movement to contesting for power locally — including in local races for key positions that oversee elections, which Steve Bannon and the right are targeting to take over.
As Ben Wikler of the WI Democratic Party put it:
To protect voting rights now, organize in the states.
The battle for the ballot—shifting tides, historic breakthroughs and heartbreaking setbacks—has never been a "one vote in the Senate" situation. You, the non-senator reading this right now, have a critical role. We need all hands on deck. This vote failed. Time for Plan B.
Want to think nationally? Act locally—and strategically. Look for organizations in states that will be critical to winning the presidency, the Senate, the House. States like Wisconsin—and MI PA GA AZ NC NV NH. Donate. Volunteer. Recruit others to help.
As Amanda Litman of @runforsomething put it,
With the failure of federal voting rights legislation, it will be tempting to say "welp, democracy's fucked, I'm out." I get it! I'm furious too! … TL;DR: We need *thousands* of people who care about democracy to run for local election administrator jobs. Filing deadlines start hitting in March. @runforsomething will help you figure it all out.
And critical to all of this will be supporting the community-based organizations in critical states that do the year-round work of engaging working-class people and people of color on the issues that matter to them. A non-exhaustive list of examples of organizations worthy of support includes New Georgia Project Action Fund; One Arizona; LUCHA in Arizona; Promise Arizona; Detroit Action; Michigan United; Moses Action; Voces de la Frontera in Wisconsin; WI Citizen Action; Make the Road PA; and Reclaim Philadelphia.
(2) The days of single-issue campaigning and an overemphasis on policy to the exclusion of mass organizing should be over.
The progressive movement, in sharp contrast to the conservative movement, organizes much of its work around individual issues. This is partly a function of the orientation of conservative funders towards taking power, the technocratic orientation of liberal funders to policy design, and their squeamishness about power. So we’ve got many more organizations and coalitions focused on single issues. And as a result, the Nation piece argued, we have an army of
policy professionals who dominate advocacy in Washington [who] are purely preoccupied with delivering on policy agendas with no interest in how such policies are received by their beneficiaries, or whether they alter relationships of power nationally or in communities. Such “good government” policy work produces a cacophony of demands on different worthy issues, with no governing logic about how to prioritize or sequence them through the lens of power.
If we are in an existential fight against authoritarianism, there are no separate lanes in which individual issues can be won. There is no strategy to win paid leave or debt-free college if democracy falls. The fates of each progressive constituency and issue are now fatefully linked. We rise and fall together. There needs to be a substantial reconstruction of the progressive infrastructure for the new realities we face, and a reorientation away from policy and single-issue strategies towards power building.
(3) We must restore a culture of recruitment — rather than only engaging and mobilizing people who already agree with us.
From the Nation:
Restoring a culture of recruitment to the left (as distinct from a culture of mobilization, which focuses on energizing existing activists) will be essential if our fortunes are to be reversed. There is a cultural aversion in too many parts of the activist left to the core work of recruitment—which requires engaging respectfully with people who are not consistently ideological and contain bundles of messy contradictions in how they approach politics and seeking to move them over time. It is slow and patient work, and often uncomfortable. The genius of the right has been not only the mobilization of its fierce partisans but also the many on-ramps to engagement, membership, and ideological conversion that it has created for new recruits. Far too often the activist and organizational left, trapped in bubbles of ideological purity or demands to service existing members, fails abysmally at this task—a crucial ingredient for winning elections as well as for governing successfully.
The Trump years produced a massive influx of activists into organizations — it got easy to mobilize the already angry for the next demonstration. But that has diminishing returns, and the numbers are simply not enough to win the fight for democracy. So the work of recruitment — real organizing, not mobilizing — of the kind classically done by community organizations and unions needs major reinvestment and revalorization as the central strategy for social change in this era.
(4) Finally, and perhaps hardest of all, to defeat authoritarianism, we’ll have to construct a “united front” with forces and people we vehemently disagree with about many things.
The idea of a “united front” comes from Leon Trotsky. In “For A Workers’ United Front Against Fascism,” he argued that in the face of the rise of the Nazis, the German Communists must make a common alliance with their competitors, the Social Democrats. Incredibly, some in the Communist leadership believed that they must first defeat the Social Democrats and only then turn their attention to opposing the fascists.
Trotsky concluded this way:
In the meantime, there are among the Communist officials not a few cowardly careerists and fakers whose little posts, whose incomes, and more than that, whose hides, are dear to them. These creatures are very much inclined to spout ultraradical phrases beneath which is concealed a wretched and contemptible fatalism. “Without a victory over the Social Democracy, we cannot battle against fascism!” say such terrible revolutionists, and for this reason . . . they get their passports ready.
Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!
Trotsky argued that the Communists should not give up their ability to speak independently, criticize allies, or pursue their own line — but that the imperative of defeating fascism required abandoning “ultraradical” posturing and engaging in a practical coalition.
In the American context in 2022, the fate of democracy does not depend on whether communists and social democrats can get along. Translated to our current context, it has two implications. First, we should aggressively and forthrightly challenge sectarian tendencies — often manifesting as intra-organizational or movement squabbling that turns the people you agree with about 99% of issues into your targets. Every action to prosecute war against allies is a decision to support authoritarian politics because it is a disastrous diversion of energy. Second, and still more challenging, it means building a working coalition with the full range of pro-democracy forces — from moderate Democrats to Republicans and willing conservatives. This does not mean changing what we believe or not airing differences in the coalition when we differ about policy or strategy. But we must distinguish between allies and enemies in the fight for multi-racial democracy — and make the decision to focus scarce resources on the real enemy we now confront.
Deepak’s 2020 Nation piece concluded with the warning that “Should President Sanders or Biden be in the White House, the Tea Party will be a pale shadow of the kind of right-wing opposition in the streets that progressives will face. The demons let loose in Charlottesville and supported from the Trump White House will not easily be put back in their bottles.”
There were real setbacks this week, but the decisive tests still lie ahead and the struggle for multi-racial democracy can still be won.
Delights and Provocations
In a beautiful and provocative 2017 conversation, “Building a Community of Love,” bell hooks and Thich Naht Hanh (both of whom died recently) discussed the connection of spirituality and social justice and explored how love doesn’t mean the absence of conflict but requires an insistence on justice.
For those looking to push back against disinformation about the 2020 election, Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague provide an essential dissection of team Trump’s lies in their new book The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It. The Washington Post raves:
A gripping ground-level narrative of the weeks after Donald Trump lost the popular vote… The Steal is a marvel of reporting: tightly wound… but also panoramic — a kaleidoscope of stories about how officials and activists in pivotal states like Arizona and Georgia responded to Trump’s false claims of election fraud… The result is a narrative that mirrors the way elections are actually run in the United States: state by state, county by county, precinct by precinct.
And if you missed Rev. Raphael Warnock’s floor speech to watch, we urge you to watch. Although we lost this one battle, his words still inspire.