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Sanders and Warren Released Criminal Justice Plans This Week. Here’s What’s Good, Bad and Missing.

As the Democratic primary heats up, the fight against mass incarceration has appropriately taken center stage. This week, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—the two most progressive candidates in the race—both released plans outlining broad agendas that each candidate promises will reform the criminal justice system and propel an end to mass incarceration. Their plans provide an opportunity to see how Democrats can rectify the harms of both the Trump administration and 50 years of bipartisan support for expanded criminalization and carceral control.  

Neither of these plans would have been possible without years of grassroots organizing by currently and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones. Each incorporates some of the wisdom born of this organizing, which is itself a victory. The plans themselves mirror the candidates: Sanders often uses bolder slogans, Warren often more precise language. Sanders features a category on “ending mass incarceration and excessive sentencing,” whereas Warren’s similar section, “Reforming Incarceration,” highlights the 1994 crime bill and related policy shifts. While both plans identify urgent areas of change, they also miss some opportunities to challenge the bipartisan consensus—and to lay out a plan to close prisons and jails. They come up against the technical limits of presidential power and—to a certain degree—are hampered by a reform framework that is still stuck in austerity logic. These plans are best seen as terrains of struggle, not finished blueprints. It’s the job of social movements to keep pushing the conversation.

First, it’s important to acknowledge the mammoth task facing a president who actually wants to end this country’s punishment problem. “Mass incarceration”—the interlocking institutions of police, prosecution, surveillance and incarceration—is not one thing. Rather, it is a series of institutions—governmental, corporate and nonprofit—that operate on the local, state, federal and international levels. A local police department, a state prison and ICE are governed by different institutions. While each one is engaged in the business of social control, the mechanisms differ. And the federal government’s role is mixed. The federal Bureau of Prisons accounts for 12 percent of the incarcerated population—but the Department of Homeland Security is the ultimate governing body for immigrant detention centers—many of which are privately run—and the growing legion of concentration camps on the border.

Because much of the carceral infrastructure is governed at the state and local levels, neither candidate could do all of what they say they want to do. It’s not clear, for instance, that a President Sanders or Warren could end zero-tolerance discipline practices in schools or transform the practices of metropolitan police departments, both of which are largely local and state considerations. Their respective promises to “incentivize” change lack clear mechanisms for implementation. Our excitement about the promising elements of both plans, therefore, needs to be tempered by the realization that we have a long, hard fight ahead to end the violence of police, prisons and deportations. Nevertheless, the federal government can set the priorities—and supply the funds—for states and cities to follow.

What’s good

As they have done with other issues throughout the primaries, both Sanders and Warren connect the problem of police and incarceration to other forms of economic precarity and social control. Both speak to the need for everyone to have quality education and stable housing. Such demands are not only basic human rights, but place the conversation about ending mass incarceration where it belongs—as a fundamental component of pursuing structural equity, democracy and justice.

This is the biggest victory. Mass incarceration thrives in part because elites treat the criminal legal system as separate from jobs, housing, education, healthcare and environment. Viewing the problem in isolation, without paying close attention to the broader racial capitalist context in which many reforms are crafted and unfold, produces reforms that expand rather than shrink methods of carceral control. Trying to solve the problems of police and prisons with more investment in police and prisons—including body cameras, expanded community corrections and gender-responsive prisons, instead of less police and fewer prisons—does not go to the heart of the problem. We must dismantle oppressive methods of social control, punishment and surveillance within an economic system that requires structural inequality—not produce reforms that try to manage that inequality better. Police violence and hyper-incarceration are not simply problems of bad officers and mean prosecutors. They are the inevitable result of a society that uses punishment to respond to social problems. Fixing them requires attending to the underlying problems.

In addressing root causes, both plans make great strides: They each support expanded funding for “indigent defense” (Sanders) and “access to counsel/public defenders” (Warren). Both support efforts to end the War on Drugs and the criminalization of addiction, poverty, homelessness and other social problems. Both want to end cash bail. Both want to end private prisons and at least some forms of profiteering in the system. And both condemn the onerous assessment of “fines and fees,” though neither fully addresses the ways so-called “offender-funded justice” is a major revenue source for many municipal budgets. It is great to see Sanders and Warren target the predatory expenses that incarcerated people and their loved ones pay, since both candidates had, before now, largely focused their comments about incarceration on the relatively small fact of private prisons, rather than the much larger problem of fines, fees and expenses.

Sanders and Warren tackle some of the cruelest aspects of the criminal legal system. Both call for an end to solitary confinement. Both favor access by incarcerated people to good legal counsel. Both favor strengthening re-entry services and supports. Both support reinstating and expanding federal use of consent decrees, which are binding agreements that authorized federal monitoring of state/local law enforcement agencies with documented patterns of abuse and civil rights violations. Both plans call for an end to the death penalty, recently reinstated at the federal level. 

Sanders proposes an “alternative response system” that includes creating a state/municipal corps of unarmed first responders—social workers, EMTS and mental health professionals—to respond to a variety of mental health emergency or low-level incidents where police intervention is unnecessary and likely counterproductive. This is a necessary intervention, for it identifies non-punitive responses to people in crisis, and community anti-police violence advocates have been calling for this for years. (Warren’s plan calls for a “co-responder” system that links law enforcement to mental health professionals, which still utilizes armed law enforcement, making it a weaker proposal.) And Sanders comes out swinging on the need to “reverse the criminalization of disability,” an especially necessary but often overlooked aspect of current policing and incarceration. Sanders also echoes several of the demands from recent prison strikes in calling for a “Prisoner Bill of Rights.” People in prisons have gone on strike to achieve demands specifically noted by Sanders, including “access to free educational and vocational training,” “the right to vote” for currently and formerly incarcerated people, “ending prison gerrymandering,” “living wages and safe working conditions” for labor by incarcerated people, and the creation of an “Office of Prisoner Civil Rights and Civil Liberties” within the Department of Justice, and more.

Some of these issues could not be meaningfully addressed at the federal level, given that almost 90 percent of incarcerated people are held in state prisons and local jails. For example, the federal government could not implement things like expanded visitation or wages for incarcerated people at the state level. Yet, Sanders' proposals nonetheless signal a major rhetorical win for incarcerated people and their advocates. If these proposals were adopted in the federal prison system, it might give activists more leeway to pressure their state governments to follow suit. And they may have greater significance if a president utilized their unique platform to help mobilize state and local office-holders and activists to demand change.

While Warren does not directly speak to the above, her plan addresses the need to expand justice for people wrongfully imprisoned, and calls to “repeal these overly restrictive habeas rules” that, since the heinous 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, have limited people’s post-conviction appeal options. She also proposes using presidential authority much more actively to grant pardons and clemency as a tool to help remedy systemic injustices, countering the stingy record of both Obama and many Democratic governors on such executive authority. She pledges to establish an “advisory board comprised of survivors of violence, along with formerly incarcerated individuals,” seeming to recognize that both victims of violence and incarcerated people have perspectives that should be heard. But at the same time, she wrongly juxtaposes survivors of violence with formerly incarcerated people, who themselves have experienced violence. Warren highlights cross-community partnerships for preventing and addressing violent harm. Her proposal to end the militarization of police forces is more developed than Sanders’, as is her call to “separate law enforcement from immigration enforcement.”

What’s bad

Despite their strengths, both plans have sections that evoke the “bipartisan consensus” that has governed prison reform. The bipartisan agenda includes procedural policing tweaks, new “evidence-based” strategies, the expansion of surveillance and control via multiple forms of “e-incarceration,” fines and fees, and a host of reforms intended to make incarceration more humane. Such reforms expand the system rather than permanently shrink it. While Sanders and Warren do not endorse the most oppressive aspects of the bipartisan consensus, there are ways in which they seem to buy into it, at least in part.

For example, Sanders supports “sentencing alternatives,” and Warren supports “diversion programs,” but neither appears to have followed how these reforms are often implemented in ways that can expand carceral control while offloading costs onto individuals and their families. Instead of creating endless community-based extensions of incarceration, we need to release or decline to adjudicate many individuals who need not be in the carceral system at all—something Sanders, Warren and other major candidates are not explicitly calling for en masse.

While his “Reform Our Decrepit Prison System” section rightly names prisons as “hotbeds of human rights violations, torture, sexual assault and wrongful imprisonment,” Sanders’ plan repeats standard promises for reforms that have not created more safety for incarcerated people in the past. He opens the door to cosmetic changes and remodeling of facilities, such as making jails and prisons safe and accessible for people with disabilities in prisons and jails, and making sure trans people have access to good health care. Such demands have led some jurisdictions to propose building new prisons or expanding existing ones to accommodate “special populations,” such as transgender people or people with mental illness.

As the opposition to gender-responsive prisons in California has shown, expansion of an already-violent system through newer or more specific kinds of prisons creates more problems than it solves. Misty Rojo, an organizer with Justice Now who mobilized against new prisons and jails in California, argued in 2014 that gender responsive prisons “appropriated feminist discourse by using the language of ‘specific needs for women’ in order to manipulate the public into favoring prison and jail expansion as ‘progressive’ and necessary for the well-being of women prisoners.” As she argues, the real source of their problem is being in prison in the first place—and the most effective way to help them is to let them go. Demands to improve the care for incarcerated people need to be linked to concrete plans to close prisons, jails and detention centers.

Using the language of the bipartisan reform agenda, Warren places faith in “evidence-based programs and interventions,” such as expanded use of body cameras as a means for reducing police abuse and violence. While she promises strict accountability measures for use of new technologies—facial recognition and algorithm-based surveillance—the growing industry of e-carceration shows that technologically driven promises of accountability, however good on paper, typically don’t provide more justice. But they do sometimes provide cover for wider use of repressive practices and technologies. Though supporters hope body cameras increase police accountability, this has rarely proven true. Police departments typically control who has access to the camera footage, and prosecutors have used such footage to successfully prosecute victims of police abuse. Body camera footage did not stop officer Jeronimo Yanez from shooting Philando Castile, nor did it aid in holding him accountable for killing an innocent man. And to this day, the only person who has gone to jail for the death of Eric Garner is Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed officer Pantaleo choking him.

The candidates seem to assume that by reducing the number of incarcerated people, more money will be available to support the structural needs of communities in the areas of health care, public education and housing. Indeed, this is what many people believe. But for more than a decade, bipartisan prison reform institutionalized, in a majority of states, “justice reinvestment” mechanisms that calculate “savings” and distribute them, usually to pay for more in-jail and prison programs and the expansion of community corrections and post-release supervision. In some instances, “prison savings” are returned to general state or municipal budgets to cover revenue shortfalls, not for new investment in social supports and services for all. For example, in Mississippi, the governor simply transferred monies saved from incarcerating fewer people into the general budget to help cover the costs of corporate tax cuts (while prisoners there continue to be brutalized and killed at alarming rates). Institutionalized bipartisan consensus reinvestment mechanisms do not—at least currently—free up money for new investment in health care, housing, public education and other social goods.

Surprisingly for candidates known for their commitments to economic justice, neither plan acknowledges this austerity conundrum: that savings from reductions in incarceration and other jail/prison “cost efficiencies” are used to expand the carceral system, not to reduce it. At the same time, property tax cuts and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy starve state and municipal budgets. The result: expansion of carceral control while state and municipal governments continue to claim that they can’t afford to increase spending for public health care, education, and the like.

We need to release savings from reducing mass incarceration to help fund health and community well-being for all—including those who are returning from prison—outside of the criminal justice system. We also need to  expand the revenue pool by progressive taxation policies for corporations and the wealthy, and for community resources to be provided outside the control or influence of the criminal justice system. Both Warren and Sanders acknowledge these realities, and have all the right beliefs and commitments, but they are hampered by their failure to recognize that making this shift will require dismantling many already-institutionalized state and local “reinvestment” mechanisms and adopting radically different budget priorities.

What’s missing

Surprisingly, neither Sanders nor Warren devote much attention to how they would reduce or eliminate “crimmigration,” the four-decade creep of the criminal-legal system into immigration policy. To be fair, both Sanders and Warren have released statements on immigration, and Warren’s criminal justice plan does call to “separate law enforcement from immigration enforcement” by eliminating 287(g) and the Secure Communities program. (Sanders has previously opposed Secure Communities, but his criminal justice plan does not address it.) Yet immigration enforcement is a domain that rests largely with the federal government and has been central to the current administration’s brutality. There will be no end to mass incarceration while concentration camps dot the borderlands, asylum protections are gutted, and nativist racism guides policymaking. Sanders and Warren know this, but their criminal justice plans do not discuss it. That is a missed opportunity to target the severe expansion of the country’s punishment apparatus at its most urgently gruesome point—something fully in the purview of presidential authority. And, as the journalist Andrea Pitzer has noted, the longer concentration camps exist, the harder they are to close.

Warren calls for repealing the 1994 Crime Bill, but the worst parts of it, federal grants to hire more police officers and build more prisons, have come and gone. Neither she nor Sanders have called to overturn the other still lingering policies of carceral expansion from that era. In particular, neither one calls to eradicate the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which vastly curtailed the ability of incarcerated people to file suit against the cruelty of their conditions, nor the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which enhanced the deportation regime. And neither one calls for the steady, incremental closure of  federal prisons, immigrant detention centers, state prisons and local jails, even though such closures are the surest and most lasting way to reduce the number of people incarcerated. To be sure, such closures would be wildly controversial, and federal closures would likely require congressional approval. To address the economic impacts of fewer carceral jobs as well as the negative environmental impacts of prisons and jails, these proposals should be joined with the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and other bold policy proposals that address the most urgent issues of our time.  

Neither plan names and opposes mens rea, or “guilty mind” reform, the much sought-after right-wing crown jewel of criminal justice reform. This proposed federal reform (it is also promoted in many states) would make it all but impossible to hold corporations, other private and public institutions, and white-collar actors legally liable for wrongdoing or infliction of harm, including harm to entire communities and ecologies. Liberal and Obama administration opposition in 2016 curtailed attempts by the Right to pass federal legislation, but it will return. Its passage would further undermine efforts to assert collective claims to justice. Both candidates object to the fact that the wealthy face more lenient justice standards than everyone else—their histories show that. But Warren’s proposal for holding corporations and their executives accountable falls short of the mark, and Sanders’ plan does not specifically address corporate accountability—even though both of them have frequently called for white-collar executives to face stiff, even criminal, penalties for their misdeeds.

Moving forward, both candidates should join their critiques of the criminal justice status quo to a dramatic reorganization of the economy. Their criminal justice plans need to be in greater conversation with their plans on tax reform, climate remediation and corporate accountability. Neither proposal makes clear that, in addition to different budget priorities, structural shifts from spending on carceral control to the collective well-being of entire communities requires significant changes in tax policy. It’s great and necessary to say “stop criminalizing poverty,” but it’s far stronger to say, “We’re going to give Department of Corrections funding to provide equitable public schools instead.”

What should the Left be doing? 

Today, every split state legislature in the country, except Minnesota, is dominated by one party. Republicans control 30 of them, Democrats 19. Many of them are gerrymandered. Yet this is the level at which much of the necessary changes to prisons and police can happen. The task of structural change, always daunting, is especially so now.

Progressive and Left movements must buttress vision with an accurate understanding of the institutions we propose to transform, and develop organizing strategies to match. And as always, the work of the left is to expand beyond what is on offer. For every bold stroke in the plans put forward by Sanders and Warren, there are absences or limitations that warrant attention. It is heartening, for instance, to see Warren call for greater involvement of formerly incarcerated people and survivors of violence (often the same population) and Sanders call for a Prisoners Bill of Rights. We also need to ensure that currently incarcerated people—and not only people convicted of low-level, nonviolent offenses—serve on advisory boards and shape policy. Families of incarcerated people should be represented as well. These additions would ensure a platform that not only protects criminalized people’s rights but maximizes their own power.

The attention to ending the war on drugs and expanding expungement is welcome. Both candidates call for expunging marijuana convictions and Warren suggests that the federal government provide a “certificate of recovery for nonviolent offenders who have served their time and maintained a clean record for a certain number of years.” But we need to extend that generosity to others targeted by the domestic wars that have fueled mass incarceration. Any serious plan to end mass incarceration also has to challenge harsh sentencing and long terms for people convicted of violent offenses. Even though most of that work will need to happen at the state level, where the majority of people are incarcerated, presidential candidates serious about addressing mass incarceration need to also address violent harm.

Supporters of either plan should recognize how difficult implementation will be. We should see these plans as developing rather than final, especially given that it is not at all clear that much of what these plans include could be implemented from the federal level. Sanders’ plan includes many exciting, necessary ideas—such as  “unlimited visits, phone calls, and video calls” for incarcerated people, and a promise to “stop excessive sentencing”—without discussing how they could be put into effect. (Are incarcerated people really going to be able to call their loved ones at 2:00 a.m. if they want? When does a sentence become “excessive”?) Warren offers a similar list for meeting basic human rights standards and protecting “special populations.” Yet implementation is where the rubber meets the road: The history of prison reform is replete with examples of wardens, sheriffs, police chiefs and associations of correctional officials rejecting progressive options—legally or otherwise—or co–opting demands to strengthen repressive measures.  

Both plans are exciting steps forward—and both plans are limited. They give us some things to fight for, some things to push beyond, and some things to question. Discussing their strengths and weaknesses can push the candidates to clarify some of what remains implicit while also strengthening efforts to build new justice paradigms, particularly at the state and local level. And, just as grassroots movements made those plans possible, it be movements that determine whether any of them get implemented. The fight against mass incarceration will require bold initiatives to shift the country away from its reliance on police and incarceration toward safe and thriving communities. A presidential election can’t inaugurate all the changes we need. But these plans should inspire organizers to do what they do best: Keep pushing, always within the framework of a more transformative vision.

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#Rail line in #Hampshire is world’s first to be powered by #solar farm | Business | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/22/rail-line-in-hampshire-is-worlds-first-to-be-powered-by-solar-farm

#RenewableEnergy #Renewables #Railways

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Ninth Circuit Goes a Step Further to Protect Privacy in Border Device Searches

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a new ruling in U.S. v. Cano [.pdf] that offers greater privacy protection for people crossing the border with their electronic devices, but it doesn’t go as far as we sought in our amicus brief.

Cano had attempted to cross the border near San Diego when cocaine was found in his car. He was arrested at the port of entry and border agents manually and forensically searched his cell phone. He was prosecuted for importing illegal drugs and moved to suppress the evidence found on his phone. The Ninth Circuit held that the searches of his cell phone violated the Fourth Amendment and vacated his conviction.

In U.S. v. Cotterman (2013), the Ninth Circuit had circumscribed the border search exception as it applies to electronic devices. The court held that the Fourth Amendment required border agents to have had reasonable suspicion—a standard between no suspicion and probable cause—before they conducted a forensic search, aided by sophisticated software, of the defendant’s laptop. Unfortunately, the Cotterman court also held that a manual search of a laptop is “routine” and so the border search exception applies: no warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing is needed.

In Cano, it was disappointing though not surprising that the three-judge panel reaffirmed Cotterman’s en banc rule and held that a manual search of a cell phone requires no suspicion while a forensic search requires reasonable suspicion. We argued in our amicus brief that the Ninth Circuit should revisit this issue and require a probable cause warrant for all border device searches, in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Riley v. California (2014). In that watershed case, the Court acknowledged the extraordinary privacy interests people have in their cell phones, irrespective of how the devices are searched, and held that police must obtain a warrant to search the cell phone of an arrestee.

On the bright side, the Cano court further held that warrantless, suspicionless border device searches—both manual and forensic—are only permissible under the Fourth Amendment to determine whether the device contains digital contraband. The court agreed with the arguments we presented in our amicus brief that the border search exception is “narrow,” being justified by the purpose of interdicting contraband and not simply finding evidence of illegal activity. Additionally, the court held with respect to forensic searches, “We clarify Cotterman by holding that ‘reasonable suspicion’ in this context means that officials must reasonably suspect that the cell phone contains digital contraband.”

While we still believe that electronic devices should fall outside the border search exception and thus require a warrant for search, limiting the scope of all device searches under the border search exception to looking for digital contraband is a good pro-privacy rule.

The Cano court emphasized that border agents may not conduct warrantless, suspicionless border device searches “for evidence of past or future border-related crimes.” This is striking because we know from our civil case against the government, Alasaad v. Nielsen, that CBP and ICE agents do regularly conduct device searches (under the border search exception, they argue) to look for mere evidence of border-related crimes and in support of general law enforcement. The Cano rule means that border agents within the Ninth Circuit states can’t conduct broad-ranging fishing expeditions for digital data such as correspondence between the traveler and his associates, or metadata like location information. Such data might be evidence, but is not itself contraband.

It’s important to note, however, that emails and text messages are not totally off limits. The Cano court noted that child pornography may be sent via email or text message, and so border device searches for digital contraband within these kinds of cell phone data are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

As for Cano himself, the Ninth Circuit held that the recording of phone numbers and text messages during a manual search “had no connection whatsoever to digital contraband.” And while border agents “had reason to suspect that Cano’s cell phone would contain evidence leading to additional drugs,” the forensic search was unconstitutional because “the record does not give rise to any objectively reasonable suspicion that the digital data in the phone contained contraband.”

The Cano court also stated that “the detection-of-contraband justification” for warrantless, suspicionless border device searches “would rarely seem to apply to an electronic search of a cell phone outside the context of child pornography.” We will advocate for courts to narrowly define the “digital contraband” that, under Cano, is the outer limit of the scope of warrantless, suspicionless border device searches. We will also continue to advocate for a warrant requirement.

Bernie Sanders Calls To Seize the Means of Electricity Production

A year after a neglected Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) power line sparked a wildfire that tore through northern California, presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday visited Chico, Calif., where many who fled the fire made a new home. He held a town hall the same day he released a new climate plan, in which he declared that the days of investor-owned utilities—with their profit incentives to underinvest in the electric grid and double down on fossil fuels—have to end.

He’s right: It is time for a massive public takeover of the nation’s electric grid.

The for-profit companies that reign over our energy system now have shown no meaningful sign of being willing to transform our energy system; they are much more interested in shareholder gains and business as usual. Together, for-profit utilities and fossil fuel companies have created powerful political-economic machines across the country to solidify the status quo of extraction and extortion. In contrast, democratic public ownership of our energy system could prioritize community benefit over profit, paving the way for a just and equitable energy system.

“We will end greed in our energy system,” says Sanders’ climate plan. “The renewable energy generated by the Green New Deal will be publicly owned.”

His plan comes as public power ownership campaigns mobilize across the country. California’s movement took off after the state’s largest for-profit utility, PG&E, requested a bailout after the fire forced the utility to declare bankruptcy under the weight of liability claims. Communities across the state are now demanding public ownership, and the company’s hometown of San Francisco has begun looking into municipalization.

In New York, in the midst of a July heat wave, Con Edison sacrificed low-income communities of color in Brooklyn by cutting their power to avoid a larger blackout. Residents responded with outrage, and Mayor Bill de Blasio, another presidential contender, called for kicking out the utility in favor of public ownership.

The birthplace of the monopoly for-profit utility, Chicago, just introduced legislation to take over Commonwealth Edison after years of rate hikes and inaction on climate change. Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa said that "through municipalization, Chicago could accelerate decarbonization, and implement a progressive rate structure that ensures better rates for working-class Chicagoans.”

Over the past months, multiple Democratic presidential candidates have come out in favor of democratizing our energy system. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (who this week dropped out to run again for governor) centered much of his plan for a clean energy economy on community-owned and community-led renewables. And Julian Castro—the former mayor of San Antonio, where one of the more progressive public utilities is located—has voiced support for policies that empower the public to set up democratic utilities not only for electricity but also internet services and water.

But Sanders has voiced the most direct support for 100% public power, and this demand is fundamental to his climate plan. Unlike other proposals to date, Sanders’ plan explicitly commits to using public dollars for everything, refusing to leave the transition to corporate investors who so far have failed the public. By doing so, the Green New Deal proposal also ensures that the benefits of the plan don’t disappear into the pockets of billionaires like Elon Musk but are directed toward a more equitable society. Publicly funded projects, when structured so communities have a say in the types of projects and jobs they create, also have the potential to be more accountable, and can prioritize marginalized communities’ access to high-paying, unionized public jobs and respect the rights of the communities where this new infrastructure is built.

Sanders’ plan envisions harnessing and expanding the four already-operating federal Power Marketing Administrations (PMAs) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), as well as creating a fifth PMA, to build out renewable energy. It would inject $1.52 trillion into renewable energy expansion and $852 billion into energy storage, working particularly with publicly or cooperatively owned utilities. By 2035, this plan would essentially decommodify energy generation through the federal authorities. Unlike the TVA of the past, designed largely for the benefit of white men in search of work in the South, the entire plan is based on the Jemez Principles of environmental justice that focus on bottom-up organizing and including all people in decision-making.

At the municipal, district and state levels, Sanders explicitly commits to supporting the growth of public and co-op utilities. Already, public and cooperatively owned utilities serve 49 million people in the United States, at lower costs and with generally more reliable service. In fact, the entire state of Nebraska runs fully off of public power after the state expelled the for-profit utility in the 1940s because of its extortionist rates. Unlike their for-profit counterparts, these entities are ultimately beholden to the public and any profits are reinvested into the community’s schools, parks and public services. This plan would help this sector expand its reach and invest more in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and much more.

It also provides express assistance to states and municipalities so they could start their own democratically owned utilities—ones driven by the public interest and a climate-resilient future. This could be key for places like New York or Chicago that are starting the process of taking over their utility, seeking guidance and expertise throughout the process. By taking energy utilities into public ownership, we can catalyze renewable energy deployment at the same time we redistribute wealth and power.

Elements of Sanders’ proposal are similar to a proposal for a Community Ownership of Power Administration that was co-created by The Democracy Collaborative (where I work) and grassroots energy groups.

Sanders’ plans for public ownership don’t stop at electricity. He would also allocate funds to massively increase public broadband projects to give people access to a new and necessary public good: the internet. An estimated 19 million people, largely located in rural America, still do not have access to broadband. He offers a vision for integrated and effective local public transportation systems with high-speed rail connections. He stresses the importance of building high-quality, low-carbon-footprint public housing, as well as weatherizing already-standing homes to end energy poverty. The plan reinstates the federal Civilian Conservation Corps jobs program to restore our public lands. It invests dramatically more in public regional development agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission. It even creates spaces for cooperatively owned grocery stores to facilitate local agriculture not held hostage by monopolies like Monsanto.

Sanders is not alone in his call for more public ownership. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has similarly audacious plans for services like broadband, and both Warren and Sen. Cory Booker have invoked the Civilian Conservation Corps as a model. However, Sanders’ Green New Deal proposal stands alone in its comprehensive commitment to public funding and programs.

The future is public. It is accountable to the principles of environmental justice. It is democratic. It is decommodified. Sanders’ plan is the latest to set the bar for a new economy shepherded in by the green energy transition. We learned long ago that private interests won’t solve for climate and justice at the same time—that change will have to come from united and empowered people. Now, this realization is firmly on the presidential political agenda. 

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Browsers Take a Stand Against Kazakhstan’s Invasive Internet Surveillance

Yesterday, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari browsers started blocking a security certificate previously used by Kazakh ISPs to compromise their users’ security and perform dragnet surveillance. We encourage other browsers to take similar security measures. Since the fix has been implemented upstream in Chromium, it shouldn’t take long for other Chromium-based browsers, like Brave, Opera, and Microsoft’s Edge, to do the same.

What Happened, and Why Is It a Problem?

Back in July, Kazakhtelecom, Kazakhstan’s state telecommunications operator, began regularly intercepting encrypted web (HTTPS) connections. Usually, this kind of attack on encrypted HTTPS connections is detectable and leads to loud and visible browser warnings or other safeguards that prevent users from continuing. These security measures work because the certificate used is not trusted by user devices or browsers.

However, Kazakh ISPs also sent instructions telling users to compromise their own security by manually trusting the certificate on their devices and browsers, bypassing the security checks that are built into most devices.

The two-step of Kazakh ISPs deploying an untrusted certificate, and users manually trusting that certificate allows the ISPs to read and even alter the online communication of any of their users, including sensitive user data, messages, emails, and passwords sent over the web. Research and monitoring from Censored Planet found around 40 domains that were being regularly intercepted, including Google services, Facebook services, Twitter, and VK (a Russian social media site).

The government of Kazakhstan had expressed their intention to perform dragnet surveillance like this in the past, but, following widespread backlash, it failed to act on those statements. Now, it seems the Kazakh authorities were serious about undermining the privacy of their entire country's communications — even if it meant forcing individual Internet users to manually compromise their devices’ own built-in privacy protections.

What’s Next?

Earlier this month, Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee stated that Kazakhstan had halted the program. The announcement, along with a tweet from the president of Kazakhstan, called the program a successful pilot, claiming it was mounted to detect and counteract external security threats, even though the government’s actions primarily compromised the security of Kazakhstan’s own citizens. The announcement also stated that the program may be deployed again in the future. Censored Planet’s live monitoring indicate that the system was turned off after the first week of August.

This step by Google, Mozilla, and Apple to block the particular certificate that Kazakh ISPs used for traffic interception prevents the government of Kazakhstan from resuming this invasive program, as well as setting a precedent such that browsers may take similar actions against network attacks of this nature in the future. Without strong pushback, it’s likely that Kazakhstan, or other states, might try to repeat their “pilot,” so we also encourage browser vendors, device manufacturers, and operating systems to improve the warnings and tighten the flow around manually trusting new certificates.

Kazakhstan’s actions were a drastic response to the slowly improving security of end-user devices and end-to-end communication online, but they and other countries could take even more invasive steps. Faced with just a handful of secure browsers, the government could next push their citizens to use a browser that does not currently implement this safeguard. We encourage other browsers to take the same steps and stand in solidarity against the government of Kazakhstan’s decision to compromise the Internet security of their entire population. What’s more, designers of user software should anticipate such intrusive state action in future threat models.

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Joe Biden and the Perils of Bipartisanship

The Democratic presidential campaign playbook has, for decades, included grand promises to reach out to the GOP to solve the nation’s ills.

In 2020, some candidates are throwing that playbook out the window.

“If the Republicans are going to try to block us on key pieces that we’re trying to move forward, then you better believe we gotta keep all the options on the table,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said, referring to the possibility of eliminating the filibuster. In a speech to the 2019 California Democratic Convention, Sen. Bernie Sanders (IVt.) pledged “no middle ground” on issues dear to progressives. Even centrist Michael Bennet, at the June Democratic debate, acknowledged that working with Republicans would be impossible in 2021: “Gridlock will not magically disappear.”

Four progressive lawmakers elected in 2018— Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—model what a rebellious Democratic approach can look like. The “squad,” as they’re known, has proposed far-reaching measures like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal while combating right-wing attacks and calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump. While mainstream Democrats still pledge to build bridges, this new generation is more likely to occupy them.

It’s a remarkable turnaround. If worship of the U.S. Constitution is an American civic religion, with the Founders as prophets and Capitol Hill as a place of worship, then bipartisanship has become its holy sacrament.

This uncompromising approach from young progressive legislators and presidential candidates like Warren and Sanders is also an implicit rebuke of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is campaigning on the promise of an outstretched, bipartisan hand.

For Biden and his generation of Democratic lawmakers, bipartisanship has long been hailed as a worthy end in its own right, no matter the result. He has pledged that a new day will dawn once Trump is removed from the White House. “This nation cannot function without generating consensus,” Biden said in May. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

But as moderator Chuck Todd told Biden at the first Democratic debate, “It does sound as if you haven’t seen what’s been happening in the United States Senate over the last 12 years.”

An increasingly far-right GOP has ruthlessly obstructed Democrats while dangling cooperation to lure them rightward. The outcome has been a disaster for progressives. The parties have cooperated to water down or kill left-leaning measures and advance a right-wing agenda, from shredding the New Deal to ramping up deportation, turning the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into graveyards of progressive policies. Democrats increasingly understand that, if they want to generate consensus, they’ll have to do it some other way than meeting a right-moving GOP in the “middle.”

In the first round of the Democratic primary debates, Biden was the only candidate (besides little-known centrist John Delaney) to say “bipartisan.”

Biden, however, is not the only one clinging to faith in cross-party cooperation.

In April 2017, New York Times columnist David Brooks speculated that, assuming the departure of Trump in 2020, Congress would again enjoy a “world with the possibility of bipartisanship.” Politico Magazine’s Michael Grunwald explained that Biden’s “bipartisan friendships, Washington experience and genial Uncle Joe approach really can help produce results.”

Indeed, “discomfort with open division is part of the DNA of the nation,” says historian Rick Perlstein, author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. “It’s all about repressing this original fissure: Slavery. The entire history, for the first half of the 19th century, is this all-consuming attempt to keep this genie in the bottle.”

To get slave-owners to at least pay lip service to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Founders compromised that three out of every five slaves would be counted in a state’s population when apportioning congressional seats. Slave states wielded this inflated electoral power to ensure slavery continued in the new republic, while the Compromise of 1850 facilitated slavery’s westward spread and made the federal government responsible for recovering “fugitive” slaves.

These compromises “came at a tremendous cost,” says historian Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. “If you think of slavery as a gross abuse of human rights, then compromise doesn’t sound so good.”

This compromising dynamic outlived slavery. The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, made room for Jim Crow and, by pulling federal troops out of the South, gave a green light to racist terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan.

Yet Biden and others who yearn for the “pragmatism” of days past aren’t inventing things. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days—so consequential they would turn that number into a measure of success for every president thereafter—likely would have failed had he not secured pivotal support from Republicans and even put several in his cabinet. Four-fifths of Republicans in Congress voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.

All of this was possible, says historian Thomas Frank, in part because “there was a time when the parties were not divided by ideology or by their place on the political spectrum. The parties were regional and ethnic.”

In the early 20th century, Republicans dominated politics as a party of the Northeast, white Protestants, business owners, African Americans and the middle class, while Democrats foundered as a largely agrarian party of the South and Great Plains. Things changed when Roosevelt cobbled together an ultimately unstable coalition of Southerners, Catholic immigrants in urban areas, blue-collar workers and, crucially, African Americans, who fled the GOP as they began economically benefiting from the New Deal. In practice, this meant progressive politicians from both parties could work together to get things passed.

So what happened? Commentators across the spectrum name one culprit: Partisanship.

“Too much estrangement on both sides,” groused Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in 2018. A 2017 Atlantic Council report on U.S. political dysfunction blamed a “dangerously codependent” partisan divide birthed by gerrymandering that made officials accountable to partisan radicals. Bruce Wolpe, who worked on the Democratic staff in Congress during the first Obama administration, charged that Congress was beset by “hyperpartisanship” defined by “no compromise, no consensus” and “no working together in the national interest.”

In June, Biden echoed these sentiments, bemoaning the loss of “civility” that marked his salad days in Congress when he worked with segregationists despite disagreements.

“We got things done,” Biden said. “We got it finished.”

These analyses omit, however, the key agent of this growing political polarization: the GOP.

Soon after FDR took office in 1933, a coterie of conservative intellectuals, prominent political figures and wealthy businessmen (such as the Du Pont brothers) began organizing against what they saw as the “socialistic” overreach of the New Deal. With a messianic resolve and a seemingly bottomless pit of cash, they created think tanks, books, periodicals, colleges, television and radio programming and more. The result was an alternative intellectual landscape that demonized government and deified the free market.

Electoral politics followed. Frustrated with the “dimestore New Deal”-ism of the postwar GOP, what came to be called the “New Right” engineered a grassroots takeover of the Republican Party, resulting in the 1964 presidential nomination of hardline conservative Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater lost spectacularly, liberalism’s triumphs only fueled right-wing organizing. A well-cultivated conservative and evangelical backlash against the civil rights victories of the 1960s and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision culminated in the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan, previously viewed largely as an unelectable ideologue out of step with the times.

“The election of Ronald Reagan was a symbol of the eclipse of the Rockefeller Republicans by the Barry Goldwater wing, sending a signal to the party to get on board,” says Corey Robin, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Reagan used his bully pulpit to popularize the idea of getting “the government off the backs of the people.”

“The conservative wing of the GOP established hegemony over not just the Republican Party, but the American political order,” says Robin.

Testimonies from the conservative Hoover Institution at the close of Reagan’s presidency attest to that fact. As historian Stephen Ambrose put it, while Reagan “failed to break the Democratic hold on Congress, he did force the Democratic Party to move to the right.” Historian Karl O’Lessker wrote that “Reaganomics may well have caused a fundamental shift in the political community’s approach to fiscal policy. … There has been little if any disposition among congressional Democrats to advocate, still less vote for, big new spending or taxation programs.” 

The GOP came to explicitly align itself with the agenda of super-rich, right-wing patrons like the Koch brothers, while the Democrats, shell-shocked from electoral defeats, began relying on big-dollar fundraisers that hastened a rightward turn.

“[Republican Party patrons have] turned the GOP into a kind of Leninist party of the Right, one in which no dissent is allowed after the course has been set,” says historian Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. “It wants to dramatically diminish the power of the federal government in order to remove the reins from capitalists.” And yet, she says, “We are still operating as a nation as if there is a Republican Party.”

The newer, more strident class of Republicans who entered Congress in 1979 “had not been exposed to the demoralizing impact of Watergate, the Agnew and Nixon resignations, the Ford defeat, and maneuvering in a Congress dominated by two-to-one Democrats,” read a 1979-1980 internal report commissioned by GOP congressional leadership. “Where older members saw persistence and shrewdness, the freshmen saw timidity and indecision.” Newt Gingrich was one of them. In the 1990s, he would continue the process that Reagan began by spearheading the tactic of obstructionism by the minority.

Gingrich fancied himself “the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times” and called for “large-scale, radical change.” Working to polarize debate between the parties, he pioneered the threat of a government shutdown as a political strategy. He calculated that obstructionism would nurture popular contempt toward the institution of Congress, which would serve the Right’s anti-government agenda.

Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who served as House Majority Whip when Gingrich was Speaker, later wrote about the GOP’s strategy under Clinton. Knowing that Clinton and the Senate would tack to the center, he explained, the GOP would “start every policy initiative from as far to the political right as we could” to move “the center farther to the right” and achieve a “much greater success rate than we had ever known.” DeLay boasted in his memoirs, “We moved the whole of American governance to the right.”

The old-guard Republicans joined in. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole pioneered the filibuster-threat strategy now synonymous with Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), making 60 votes necessary for anything to get done, from healthcare reform to a stimulus package.

This rightward shift led scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein—at the Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, respectively— to declare in 2012 that the GOP had “become an insurgent outlier.” The party was “ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”

Joe Biden’s political career is an exemplar of the price the Democratic Party paid as the Right slid into the dark reaches of the political spectrum.

As overt racism faded in polite society after the 1960s, those committed to beating back the advance of civil rights found proxy issues to dog whistle a racist tune: crime, drugs, welfare and busing. They found a willing partner in a 30-year-old freshman senator: Biden.

Biden hailed from Delaware, whose culture and borders straddled the Mason-Dixon line and whose political and economic life was dominated for decades by the Du Pont family that had helped jumpstart the rebellion against the New Deal. (As Biden would later assure a Republican Rotary Club in South Carolina in advance of his 2008 presidential run, Delaware, a slave state, had only “fought beside the North. … because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”)

As conflict over court-ordered busing roiled his home state, Biden led a crusade against the civil rights measure, later boasting that he made it politically acceptable for other liberals to oppose it. He built alliances with Republican racists like Sen. Jesse Helms (N.C.) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (S.C.), the record-holder for longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour attempt to stall the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During the Reagan administration, Biden, Helms and Thurmond would help usher in an era of mass incarceration, working together to establish racist crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

Biden also led the way on budget-slashing: In 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Nancy Kassebaum (Kan.), Biden put forward a budget “freeze” that cut deficits by $100 billion more than Reagan proposed and eliminated scheduled increases to Social Security and Medicare. Biden also ranked among the sizable number of Democrats who gave their stamp of approval to signature Reagan victories like increased military spending, privatization and lower taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was cutting his teeth in this same punishing era. In 1980, Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas after raising car license fees to fund highway repairs and trying to rein in the timber industry. The loss taught Clinton to eschew challenging corporate power and, instead, embrace what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg termed “the politics of ultraconsensus.”

While Clinton’s presidency is remembered as a time of partisan warfare, bipartisan consensus was a quiet fixture throughout. Clinton brought in his own personal Rasputin in the form of political operative Dick Morris, who laid his strategy out in a memo: “fast-forward the Gingrich agenda” to make “Republican issues less appealing” and take the wind out of their sails. Unbeknownst to Clinton, Morris also created a back channel to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), a former client, whom he giddily told: “We’ll pass everything.”

“Everything” meant measures like welfare reform, a balanced budget, cuts to Medicare and an immigration overhaul that helped create the deportation state currently operated by Trump.

Biden was an important player in these bipartisan deals. As Senate Judiciary Chair under Clinton, Biden led the passage of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and worked to make sure Clinton would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” With Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn.), Biden lamented “the polarizing partisanship and presidential politics that have permeated the issue” and insisted that a “tough, bipartisan welfare reform bill is easily within reach.” In 1996, the Senate passed welfare reform (what Lott described as “the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan”) thanks to the votes of 51 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

“These were great monuments to consensus in Washington,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? “They were just downstream of racism.”

Bipartisanship reached its apogee after September 11, when Biden swiftly became one of the most prominent Democrats to hitch himself to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks created a stunning uniformity of opinion, and Biden, up for reelection in 2002, would soon be heavily criticized in the Delaware press for a speech that appeared dovish. Biden told reporters they should count him “in the 90%” of voters who backed Bush. He stacked a hearing on Iraq with pro-war voices and made regular TV appearances parroting the administration’s talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, like 28 other Democratic senators, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

In 2008, Vice President Biden found a home with “postpartisan” Obama, who, Perlstein says, “was wedded to the myths of consensus in a way that a lot of his supporters hadn’t realized at the time.”

Obama had risen to stardom with his 2004 convention speech denying the existence of a “red” and “blue” America, a feeling that suffused Democratic politics. Nary a 2008 primary debate went by without Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), for example, pledging something or other of a bipartisan nature: a “bipartisan process” to tackle Social Security, a “bipartisan way” on immigration reform, even “bipartisan diplomacy” headed by “bipartisan emissaries.”

But once president, “Republicans used Obama’s own longing for consensus and bipartisanship against him,” says Frank.

Obama ran aground upon a decidedly partisan opposition that took advantage of racist sentiments against him. He tried for months to secure minimal Republican buy-in on Obamacare so he could slap a “bipartisan” label on it, only for “moderate” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) to use it as leverage to endlessly delay and erode the bill. Obama ramped up deportations as a bipartisan gesture, and the GOP continued to obstruct immigration reform.

Nothing spoke more to Obama’s futile attempt to reach common ground with Republicans than his 2011 attempt at a “grand bargain” on cutting the deficit. Biden was dispatched to negotiate with a radically anti-tax, anti-government GOP. He capitulated to every Republican demand, including cuts to food stamps, Medicare and Social Security, while agreeing to rule out new taxes. Ironically, it was only thanks to the Tea Partiers’ obstinacy that the deal did not pass.

The public was not so lucky in 2010, when Biden made a deal with Sen. McConnell to extend unemployment insurance in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the estate tax. The deal was so lopsided that it outraged even conservative Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and prompted an eight-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. Two months later, in the midst of affectionately paying tribute to McConnell at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for the senator), Biden pointed to the deal as “the only truly bipartisan event that occurred in the first two years of our administration.”

“We both got beat up, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” Biden said. “The process worked.”

He explained to the audience that, whether they were liberals, conservatives, Tea Partiers or Blue Dogs, little actually divided members of Congress.

“We basically all agree on the nature of the problems we face,” Biden said, as McConnell, leading a historically radical campaign of obstructionism against the Obama administration, looked on.

A continuing faith in compromise may well be the last gasp of a dying era.

“A lot of the things that made bipartisanship sound attractive are now vestigial,” Perlstein says. “Like a lot of neuroses, it was a response that was useful for dealing with trauma that was present and important at the time, but has outlasted its usefulness.”

Or, as Robin says, bipartisanship is “a mourning for a neoliberal accord between Democratic and Republican party elites.”

Today’s Democrats increasingly recognize the folly of seeking progressive change by partnering with a GOP that’s fundamentally opposed to it. A new generation of Democratic lawmakers is taking a combative, unflinchingly progressive approach reminiscent of the 1979 class of freshmen GOP legislators that included Gingrich.

As Ocasio-Cortez told journalist Ryan Grim, “The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ [after Trump]. For us, it’s never been normal, and before that, the bipartisanship was shitty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, [the Defense of Marriage Act] and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything.”

These young progressives are backed by social movements whose adherents have no desire to cooperate with nativists and corporatists. Together, they are seeking to remake the existing governing consensus in their image, just as Reagan managed to do four decades prior. The irony is, they’d be following the Right’s own road to success.

“The rise of the Right is the closest thing we have to an example of a political success story in our time in America, and it was largely achieved by smashing consensus,” Frank says.

But MacLean warns it would be a mistake to believe that obstructionism alone is a path to victory. “The radical Right is winning now because its chief architects played a very sophisticated, well-funded, integrated long game and built a vast infrastructure that is well-aligned to achieve their agenda,” MacLean says.

For inspiration, today’s progressives might look back to the anti-slavery movement, which went from a relatively small band of uncompromising, “radical” activists to controlling the presidency and Congress. 

“Abolitionists were never anywhere near a majority in the North or anywhere else,” says Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “They were a vanguard.”

Abolitionists worked at both the grassroots and official levels to enact change, whether through legislation and court decisions or direct action and education. They made pioneering use of cutting-edge technology such as the printing press, the railroad and the telegram to spread their message. Their efforts helped lead Abraham Lincoln to drastically shift his thinking, jettisoning ideas like gradual emancipation and instead embracing black citizenship. 

“Abolitionists and radicals were able to shift the pendulum to the left, and were able to make moderates inhabit radical ground,” says Sinha. “In the end, it wasn’t the abolitionists who abolished slavery,” Foner says. “It was more moderate people like Abraham Lincoln. But without the abolitionists, there’s no Lincoln. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Political shifts require years of movement building, but change ultimately happens suddenly. Thirty years after the abolitionist movement took off, there were nearly 2 million more slaves in the United States. Three years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. 

“The abolitionist movement lasted for a long, long time, and for a long time failed abysmally,” Foner says. “Radicals have to not give up.”

The time is looking ripe for another hegemonic shift. The Trump administration has sparked a wave of political activism and organizing by Americans previously disengaged from politics. A bevy of socialist intellectual organs and figures have risen to newfound prominence, their arguments cited by mainstream news outlets and shared quickly and easily over the internet, much like the cheap, ephemeral books and magazines passed around by conservatives in the mid-20th Century. Workers are showing a renewed militancy, from the teachers who went on strike in red states across the country to the flight attendants who helped end the government shutdown in January.

Polls suggest the public has moved left, supporting everything from Medicare for All and the Green New Deal to a much higher minimum wage. Even as Trump stokes a racist anti-immigrant campaign, polling shows a public more pro-immigrant than ever.

Republicans will demonize these movements. The Democratic establishment will try to ignore them. But as the ranks of today’s radicals grow, and the more a concerted movement to remake the country expands, the harder it will be for even the most committed centrists to hew to their vision of consensus. As Biden told the audience at the McConnell Center eight years ago: “Reality has a way of intruding on one’s tightly held view.”