After Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker were asked about reparations for slavery in a Breakfast Club interview last week, the issue quickly became hot on the 2020 campaign trail, with candidates Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro quickly voicing their support for the policy. Last night, the reparations question surfaced again when Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked for his position during a CNN Town Hall hosted by Wolf Blitzer.

“There are massive disparities that must be addressed,” Sanders answered. “There is legislation that I like introduced by Congressman Jim Clyburn — it’s called the 10/20/30 legislation — which focuses federal resources in a very significant way on distressed communities.”

He went on: “I think we have to do everything that we can to end institutional racism in this country. It is not acceptable to me that the rate of childhood poverty among the African-American community is over 30 percent in this country — that is beyond belief — that African-Americans die from cancer at higher rates than whites. So we’re going to do everything we can to put resources into distressed communities and improve lives for those people who have been hurt by the legacy of slavery.”  

Sanders’s response was broadly similar to the other candidates who support reparations. Unlike in 2016, when Sanders joined Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in not supporting reparations, the Vermont senator was careful not to appear dismissive of the underlying right to recompense. Like Sens. Cory Booker, Harris, and Warren, he acknowledged racial disparities resulting from “the legacy of slavery” and the need to address them. Unlike any other 2020 candidate, he went on to offer his support for specific legislation, which would address racial disparities: the Clyburn/Booker 10/20/30 aimed at attacking persistent poverty.

Blitzer posed a follow-up question demanding an up-or-down answer: “So what is your position specifically on reparations?”

At this point, Sanders asked a crucial, as yet unasked question: “What does that mean? What do they mean? I don’t think anyone’s been very clear.”

And he’s right.

Up until now, no one’s bothered to define reparations in the context of 2020 vetting. And the discourse has suffered for it.

Up until now, no one’s bothered to define reparations in the context of 2020 vetting. And the discourse has suffered for it.

Like Harris and Booker before them, Warren and Castro’s support for reparations amounts to a support for a principle, but not a policy.

“Black families have had a much steeper hill to climb, we need systematic structural changes to address that,” Warren has said.

Castro, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, offered: “I have long thought that this country would be better off if we did find a way to do that — reparations.”  

The “structural changes” Warren evokes aren’t necessarily racially specific. And Castro’s statement that we’d be “better off” with reparations manages to dodge the question of whether he supports reparations as a political matter entirely. “This is not something that I see through a political lens,” he said, before proposing a “task force” to look into the issue.

Although Harris has said she supports “some kind of reparations,” the examples she’s pointed to, like her LIFT tax cuts, aren’t race-specific, though they would disproportionately help black Americans. Booker similarly hasn’t proposed race-targeted programs, pointing instead to his baby bonds plan, criminal justice reform, and other anti-poverty programs.

Because they’ve not been pressed for details, the candidates have been able to voice “support” for reparations without committing to any particular policy or goals. But while the press may not appreciate the difference between symbolic posturing and genuine policy commitments, many black Americans have.

“What @KamalaHarris is proposing is a CLASS SPECIFIC piece of legislation,” tweeted Yvette Carnell, founder of the #ADOS movement, which advocates for the interests of American descendants of slavery. “Reparations for #ADOS is a RACE SPECIFIC piece of legislation. America inflicted race specific harm that requires race specific redress. Stop trying to lie to us. We’re not stupid.”

Carnell’s tweet followed an interview in which Grio reporter Natasha Alford asked Harris a critical follow-up question after the California senator evoked race-neutral programs like her LIFT Act in response to an inquiry about reparations: “So by default, it affects black families, but there’s not a particular policy for African-Americans that you’ve explored?”

Harris’s answer, after a lengthy preamble, was no: “I’m not going to sit here and say I’m going to do something that only benefits black people. No! Because whatever benefits black people will benefit society as a whole and the country, right?”

Harris couldn’t have been more clear about not supporting a race-specific reparations program. Yet the press has generally covered all of these answers on the question of reparations as yeses.

Astead Herndon at the New York Times has reported that Warren, Castro, and Harris “supported reparations,” though he acknowledged that Warren’s campaign ”declined to give further details on that backing.”

The no’s, too, have been described inconsistently. In the space of one article, Herndon characterized Sanders as having “dismissed” reparations as impractical in 2016, while writing that Clinton had merely “declined to support” reparations that year. It would be more accurate to say that she dodged answering the question directly.

And while neither Sanders, Clinton, nor Barack Obama answered yes on the question of reparations, Herndon characterized Obama’s response more gently, writing: “The first black president was seen in some political quarters as reticent about prioritizing the interests of black voters, and he called the idea of reparations impractical in 2016.”

It’s worth asking who benefits from this inconsistent coverage and empty political posturing.

Consider the effect of Obama’s rationalization against reparations, which has gone largely unscrutinized.

In a 2016 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Obama argued that “as a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right.”

Of course, that’s not true. As Obama went on to acknowledge, Jews received reparations from Germany following the Holocaust, and Japanese-Americans received reparations after internment during World War II. Obama attempted to distinguish black Americans from other groups, adopting the right-wing argument that reparations were politically impractical because too much time had passed for black Americans to collect on the debts of slavery. According to Obama, Holocaust survivors and their children — only one or two generations removed from the genocide — could say “that was my house. Those were my paintings. Those were my mother’s family jewels” in a way that black Americans could not.

But the passage of time has never been more than a pretext used to justify not paying what America had promised it would: the now proverbial 40 acres and a mule.

The passage of time has never been more than a pretext used to justify not paying what America had promised it would: the now proverbial 40 acres and a mule.

The question of reparations has been raised continuously since before the end of the Civil War — including by President Abraham Lincoln who seriously considered the issue — not for slaves, but for slaveholders who felt they should be compensated for their lost “property.” Indeed, an entire movement of slavery opponents pushed for years to simply buy out the slave population to avoid war. And throughout the 20th century — including in the 1960s, when those born into slavery were in their 90s, and many millions more of their immediate descendants still lived — requests for reparations were continually ignored. Over the years, the excuse that “too much time has passed” increasingly came to be rooted in reality. But only because it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Obama, a lawyer, should know better than to argue that the statute of limitations on reparations had lapsed when a timely claim had been made. But in truth, there are now legitimate (but not insurmountable) logistical concerns to administering a race-specific plan. How do you account for people who are only partially descended from American slaves? What about those who can’t prove their lineage? What about families who immigrated early enough to experience Jim Crow, but after slavery? Is the most politically viable way to deliver material benefits to black Americans via intersectionally designed universal programs?

These questions are crucial to anyone serious about pursuing reparations. And, it could be argued, they’re the questions that a genuine supporter of reparations wants to explore. But none of them were ever put to Obama, Clinton, or Sanders in 2016. The assumptions put forward by Obama and others were never challenged. And none of these foundational questions were raised at last night’s town hall. It’s almost as if the interest in reparations was only symbolic. Or political.

By asking Blitzer to define what reparations actually means, Sanders shifted the conversation from speculative rhetoric to practical policy.

As I argued last week, the void left by a lack of serious political conversations about reparations has created opportunities for politicians to use reparations as political brinkmanship, a way to effect commitment to black Americans without committing to anything beyond lip service.

But by asking Blitzer to define what reparations actually means, Sanders shifted the conversation from speculative rhetoric to practical policy and in doing so, made it more likely that the goals of reparations will be pursued in good faith. He forced everyone to show their hand.

Importantly, there is currently no consensus on what reparations would look like. Coates famously wrote over 15,000 words making a powerful case for reparations, but even he failed to come to a firm conclusion about what we should do next.

When I spoke to Duke University professor Sandy Darity last week, an authority on the subject of reparations, he emphasized that a full-scale attack on the racial wealth gap will require a racially targeted project on the order of a large-scale reparations program. But he also acknowledged that universal programs of the type now on the table can reduce racial wealth inequality.

Darity has specifically championed Booker’s baby bonds program as the class-based plan best positioned to close the racial wealth gap. But he was also clear that the program is flawed insofar as it’s pegged to parental income — not wealth, where the biggest racial disparity lies. (The original baby bonds program he designed with Ohio State economist Darrick Hamilton was keyed to wealth. But Darity says that Booker chose to base his plan on income because of “convenience.” When I pointed out that millions of parents calculate their wealth to apply for federal student aid for their college-bound kids every year, Darity agreed that it wasn’t as easy, but it was doable).

The point is that universal programs are not a substitute for racially targeted interventions. But “the ideal world,” he says, is one in which you’d combine approaches that target wealth: prioritize giving more resources to the poor while also closing the gap by taxing the rich.

To ensure that the ostensible goals of black Americans are met, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that equality will require a multipronged approach.

All the 2020 candidates can be faulted for not turning attention to the question of reparations until campaign season. But it feels strange to demand that candidates throw their unqualified support behind something that no one can yet define.

The preliminary questions journalists should ask instead of “do you support reparations?” are these: 1) Will you commit to meaningfully researching and developing a plan for reparations, and 2) If and when you develop a policy, will you commit to implementing it?

I suspect most candidates would have a much easier time answering “yes” to this formulation, and rightly so. At this point, every candidate who has opined has done a solid job of articulating the why of reparations: slavery, Jim Crow, disparities. Now the question worth asking is the how.

Ironically, as long as the question of reparations remains vague, it’s more likely to be controversial. Undefined, reparations can take the form of the public’s worst fears: a free “check” to the “undeserving” black masses (which, who knows, might be the best option), versus tuition or housing grants that mimic those New Deal programs from which blacks were historically excluded. Both black and white legislators have shied away from the question of reparations, treating it as a political hot potato — hiding behind the idea that reparations are just too complicated to administer. Nailing down an actual plan destroys that rationale. Vagueness is a gift to the non-committal.

The post Bernie Sanders Asks the Right Question on Reparations: What Does It Mean? appeared first on The Intercept.

When hip-hop radio host Charlamagne tha God asked Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris if they had a “specific agenda” for black Americans on his show, “The Breakfast Club,” earlier this month, it was clear that neither did.

“I have a specific agenda for the American people,” started Booker. But for Charlamagne, and many other black Americans, a generalized American agenda isn’t a substitute for a plan that specifically addresses the needs of black folks.

“They always say a rising tide lifts all boats,” Charlamagne interrupted, “but we don’t really see that in our communities.”

Charlamagne elaborated on this idea during his interview with Harris: “I think when it comes to black people in America, Democrats, for whatever reason, when you ask them … usually we get that whole ‘rising tides raise all boats’ or ‘all Americans’ rhetoric, and I think black people just want to hear specific things for them, and I always wonder, ‘Why are people afraid to say what they would specifically do for black people?’”

The desire expressed by Charlamagne is understandable and legitimate. After committing overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party for decades, black Americans have seen the racial wealth gap widen, not shrink. As a result, some are increasingly skeptical of the value of programs that aren’t narrowly tailored to accrue to our benefit.

While it is true that the neoliberal strategies embraced by the Democratic Party since the 1980s have failed to close the racial wealth gap, the growing disdain for programs that don’t accrue to the exclusive benefit of black Americans is a red herring.

The problem isn’t that universal or economically driven programs can’t significantly close the racial wealth gap. It’s that the means-tested programs backed by the Democratic Party simply don’t go far enough.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was buffeted repeatedly by criticism that he didn’t do enough to connect with black Americans in the course of his 2016 presidential run. Much of that criticism was fair. But Sanders’s failure was in articulating how his policies would benefit black Americans, not in advancing policies that would benefit us.

Prior to the 2016 election, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who ultimately voted for Sanders, wrote, “Sanders’s basic approach is to ameliorate the effects of racism through broad, mostly class-based policy — doubling the minimum wage, offering single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education. This is the same ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ thinking that has dominated Democratic anti-racist policy for a generation.”

But the Democratic Party has never backed anything approaching the redistributive goals contemplated by Sanders’s 2016 agenda. The party’s economic plan has historically focused on economic mobility, “access” to “opportunity,” and removing barriers to participating in a capitalist economy. Child care programs, paid sick leave, and job training initiatives are promoted as strategies to ensure that all Americans can participate in what most Democrats see as a fundamentally functional system.

By contrast, politicians like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren challenge the system itself, because they view it as fundamentally inequitable. Leftists support traditional interventions that meaningfully ease the burdens of those struggling under capitalism. But they also seek to change the fact that profits in this country currently flow disproportionately to a privileged few at the very top — at the expense of wage growth for the workers whose labor generates those profits. As Sanders argues, if 90 percent of profits go to the top 1 percent, having technical “access” to the 1 percent isn’t enough; the system itself must change.

This structural approach is a game changer for African-Americans. Because the value of wealth compounds, capitalism rewards the historical possession of wealth; the ability to invest today is worth more than the ability to do so in the future. That being the case, how can black Americans, first enslaved and then legally barred from participating in capitalism for the overwhelming majority of this country’s history, begin to catch up without a systemic adjustment to the system?

The answer is we can’t. There will be no racial equality under capitalism.

It would take an estimated 228 years for black Americans to earn as much wealth as white Americans possess today, at which point blacks still would not have drawn even, because whites would presumably have accrued more wealth during that time as well. Simply put, closing the racial wealth gap demands a systemic approach.

It is true that universal programs without race-specific interventions are not enough. The failures of the New Deal illustrate how universal solutions can inadequately provide for the needs of the marginalized. But the reality that universal programs don’t always go far enough should not be perverted into an argument that universal programs aren’t integral to the task of closing the racial wealth gap.

During his “Breakfast Club” interview, Booker tried to explain that the issue with the “rising tides raise all ships” argument is not that the thesis is fundamentally flawed, but that universal programs historically were designed to either exclude African-Americans or, at best, were indifferent to structural reasons why African-Americans were less able to access benefits. “A lot of the programs that built the middle class in this country, African-Americans were excluded from,” said Booker, pointing to the Fair Housing Act and the GI Bill. “You had devaluations of American communities through mortgage lending and the like.”

But that’s not to say that a new New Deal shouldn’t be a goal. After all, New Deal programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed over 600,000 African-Americans. The Public Works Administration established quotas for the number of blacks to be hired for construction jobs, and New Deal education programs taught more than a million African-Americans how to read and write. It was in part because of the New Deal that African-Americans shifted their political allegiances to the Democratic Party in the first place. In the course of ensuring that we improve upon the New Deal’s mistakes, we shouldn’t lose sight of its benefits and the potential benefits of similar programs.

Unfortunately, in some circles, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Some liberal commentators affect indifference to the racial implications of policies that directly target the wealth gap because they aren’t explicitly cast as race policies. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?” Hillary Clinton famously asked in the course of her 2016 campaign. “I would love to wake up in the morning and have my first thought be ‘I hate Wall Street,’” tweeted journalist Imani Gandy. “That’s the whitest shit I’ve ever heard.”

Similarly, when Booker offered up his baby bonds plan as part of a black-centric agenda, Charlamagne was skeptical on the basis that it wouldn’t exclusively help blacks. It “addresses all Americans,” Booker explained, “but it actually helps the racial wealth gap in a significant way,” by creating a savings account for low-income students.

Booker went on to make the case for his criminal justice bill, the beneficiaries of which are overwhelmingly African-American: “When you fix the system, you help poor white folks who get screwed by the system as well, but disproportionately, you’re gonna help those people who are most affected by an unjust criminal justice system,” he argued.

Booker is right. The unfortunate overlap between poverty and some historically marginalized identity groups means that when programs are equitably designed, a rising tide will disproportionately improve their fates: Since 1 out of 3 non-elderly Latinos and 1 out of 4 non-elderly blacks lack health insurance, those groups stand to be some of the biggest beneficiaries of “Medicare for All.” Blacks and Latinos are more likely to rely on Social Security benefits as an exclusive source of retirement income than whites, meaning attacks on Social Security threaten those groups disproportionately as well. Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented among minimum wage jobs, meaning we stand to gain more from a $15 minimum wage. And on, and on, and on.

In fact, most programs embraced as “race-specific” are economic programs or criminal justice programs — many of which, like bail reform, are race-neutral. Various “welfare programs” may be coded as “for black Americans,” but few are narrowly tailored to exclusively benefit us.

Arguably, Affirmative Action is race-based, but the biggest beneficiaries have been white women. And even though it was designed to address race-based disparities, it’s not clear that it has the intended reparative effect: The beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are disproportionately recent African and Caribbean immigrants, whose parents and grandparents were not victims of the pre-civil rights-era discrimination for which Affirmative Action is ostensibly supposed to compensate.

The one initiative that truly targets black people exclusively is reparations, for which Coates famously made a compelling case. But although he was incredibly successful at proving why African-Americans deserve reparations, at the end of his argument Coates is honest about not having a clear answer to how to deliver them, beyond Rep. John Conyers’s H.R.40 bill, which would provide resources to explore possible avenues for reparations. It’s a good start. But it’s just that — a start. That being the case, a push for reparations or any other unspecified, racially targeted policy shouldn’t come at the expense of the most radical redistributive policies this country has seen since the New Deal.

That’s especially true since the growing popularity of universal programs may actually lead to increased support for race-based reparations.

In a recent article, Vann Newkirk II spoke to William A. Darity, a professor at Duke University who is a foremost thinker on the question of reparations. “I have to say that the policies that have received the [most enthusiastic] reception are those that I might describe as universal policies that are not race-specific, but they are race-conscious,” Darity told Newkirk, referencing Booker’s baby bonds program as well as Warren’s housing grant initiative. But Darity thinks that the growing popularity of universal policies might “begin warming Americans up to the idea of reparations.”

As Newkirk tacitly admits, programs that target poverty do seem to be the best way to target the racial wealth gap — at least until more research is done. What’s not clear, however, is whether that message will go over well with a black electorate that is understandably skeptical of the notion that universal programs will ever “trickle down to them.”

For some, a black face heading a campaign will be reassurance enough that African-American interests are being advanced. But following Barack Obama’s presidency, the assumption that a black president will put black interests first has been complicated. Obama’s approach to the mortgage crisis famously bailed out big banks before homeowners, and black Americans were hit harder than any other group — losing 40 percent of our collective wealth in the crisis.

If online chatter is any indication, black voters are increasingly skeptical of representation that ends at the epidermis. Widespread criticism among African-Americans of Harris’s criminal justice record seems to suggest that identity isn’t a perfect defense for anti-black actions, though some have defended her on the basis that she had no other choice than to be tough on crime as a black woman held to higher standards.

Still, during her appearance on “The Breakfast Club,” Harris encountered none of the pushback Booker received, despite the two giving similar answers to the “black agenda” question. Harris argued that the black agenda “must include HBCUs,” and she pointed to her LIFT bill, which would give families making under $100,000 a year a monthly tax credit. She also referenced criminal justice reform and maternal mortality.

When asked specifically about reparations during her “Breakfast Club” interview, Harris “recognized” the discrimination that black Americans have historically faced, and made the case for why reparations are deserved. But like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sanders before her, she declined to support a specific reparations program. “There are a number of ways to do it,” she finally answered, before gesturing again to racially unspecific means-tested programs like her LIFT Act.

Harris still has no policies posted to her campaign website, but based on what she’s articulated so far, her agenda is no more “race-specific” than that of Sanders, whose universal health care plan specifically addressed treatment disparities, and whose free college plan provided support for HBCUs. If anything, Sanders’s plans go further than most — redistributing more wealth from the top, which is likely the reason he received so much pushback from establishment gatekeepers in 2016 and now).

When Charlamagne asked Harris why politicians seem uncomfortable speaking to black Americans’ specific concerns, she answered with what has become a very familiar refrain about “speaking truths” before elaborating: “On this subject, it’s about recognizing that there are huge disparities based on race. They cannot be denied, and they must be addressed.”

She’s absolutely right. And many 2020 contenders have done exactly that. But voters should be clear that “recognizing” disparities and doing something about them through aggressive, redistributive policies are not the same thing. To achieve results, it’s important for black voters to focus on material interventions and the ways in which they are tailored to address racial disparities — not just symbolic recognition. Equality depends on it.

The post Beyond the Rising Tide: Reparations for Slavery Have to Be More Than a Symbol appeared first on The Intercept.

Northam, of course, is infamous for including a picture of two men, one in blackface and one dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman, on his 1984 medical school yearbook page. The governor first apologized for the photograph before denying he was in it, but has admitted that he “darkened” his face to dress as pop icon Michael Jackson on another occasion.

Either way, Northam has much to atone for.

To don blackface is to choose to degrade a population of Americans whose free labor and exploitation enabled the fortunes of men like Northam — men who continue to enjoy enormous power. It’s a choice, in short, to punch down. Even worse, dehumanizing black Americans serves the purpose of justifying continued inequities. That was the case in 1884 and in 1984, and it remains the case today.

Who, a person flipping through the yearbook might ask, is Ralph Shearer Northam? A man who enjoys cars, cowboy hats, and Klansmen.

Northam didn’t “just” participate in a one-off racist joke, either. Weeks, months, or years later, he chose to incorporate a picture of the episode on his yearbook page — a space students typically use as a time capsule of their experience in school. Of all that he experienced during those four years, this incident made the curated pastiche of Northam’s life. Who, a person flipping through the yearbook might ask, is Ralph Shearer Northam? A man who enjoys cars, cowboy hats, and Klansmen.

The governor now says he didn’t understand the full social implications of blackface. But he certainly understood enough to be in on the “joke.” Transgressive humor doesn’t work without understanding the transgression, and it’s not credible to think Northam didn’t know that blackface and the KKK were potent symbols of racism. There’s a reason the man in KKK robes is posing with a mocking simulacrum of blackness. It’s a tableau vivant of racial violence.

But as Northam’s defenders have pointed out, rarely can a person’s character be understood in such black-and-white terms. The governor’s record includes plenty to recommend it. For eight years, Northam served in the U.S. Army as a medical officer. He became a pediatric neurologist before entering politics. He opposed a bill that would require women seeking abortions to get vaginal ultrasounds; opposed right-to-work laws; advocated for the state to adopt a $15 minimum wage; and voted against a bill that would have banned sanctuary cities in Virginia. On Tuesday, he restored voting rights to 10,000 former felons.

A blue governor in a historically conservative state, Northam represents a symbolic victory for Democrats — a model for how to gain a foothold on an electoral map that skews red, even as demographic trends predict the opposite. Moreover, the timing of the photo’s release — days after Northam defended late-term abortions — casts a political tint over the controversy. Would supporting his resignation ultimately be a capitulation to Republicans, whose political agenda threatens black American interests much more than a 35-year-old photograph?

Unsurprisingly, the public is divided on this issue.

One camp believes Northam is disqualified from holding office. In an op-ed titled “Ralph Northam must resign,” the Washington Post’s editorial board argue that “Northam can no longer effectively serve the people of Virginia.” It pointed to his “shifting and credulity-shredding explanations for the racist photograph” and the fact that after promising to do the “‘hard work’ of atonement,” he slipped into silence for days. “Facts do matter,” they write, “and the ones surrounding the Northam fiasco remain unsettled and unanswered. How could he possibly have admitted to something as damning as appearing in the photo if he wasn’t one of the people in it? How did that photo wind up on his page if he didn’t furnish it to the yearbook editors?” How, they ask, does Northam’s response to the controversy reflect on his judgment? “Virginians deserve better,” they write. “Mr. Northam’s time is up.”

Others disagree, citing the age of the picture, the fact that there’s an outstanding question of whether Northam is actually in it, and the absence of any evidence that Northam committed other racist acts between 1984 and the present.

“Ask yourself this,” writes Virginia conservative Daniel Payne in the Washington Enquirer. “Do we want to be a culture that can forgive very old, offensive behavior when a transgressor recants and seeks forgiveness? Or do we want to be the kind of culture that ruthlessly seeks out past transgressions and savagely drives all transgressors from polite society, whether or not they are sorry?”

There’s truth, I think, in both takes.

When Payne asks whether we want a society in which forgiveness is possible rather than one where mistakes are irredeemable, my answer is yes. It seems clear to me that progressive politics require that response.

But as my former colleague Zaid Jilani recently pointed out, there can be “a curious dissonance” between the compassion the left extends to some, like the formerly incarcerated, versus others, like those who’ve committed more minor social transgressions. When it comes to crime, factors like poverty and a lack of educational opportunity are understood to constrain individual choice. There’s a distaste for punitive measures both because they’re inhumane and because they’re known to have little deterrent effect: When we consider that various social factors predict crime, it makes sense to broaden our focus to root causes — not just punishing individuals. The result isn’t to diminish the role of individual responsibility; in properly contextualizing the role of individual will, it increases our faith in rehabilitation.

The problem isn’t just Northam. It is the culture from which he sprang.

The broad left understands that rehabilitation is not only a social good — a benefit to both individuals and their communities — but is ethically compelled. We understand that human lives have intrinsic value that must be protected and that a humanistic approach to crime can be more effective than punitive alternatives.

But even though liberals acknowledge external factors that influence bigoted behavior (we live in a racist culture, just as we live in a rape culture and a heteronormative culture, etc.), blame and retribution are often focused on individual bad actors while broader social forces are dismissed as less significant. Northam’s yearbook page is abhorrent, yes, but not anomalous. As disconcerting as the image is, more unnerving is the reality that perhaps a dozen decision-makers who produced the yearbook didn’t think twice about including it, because it wasn’t disconcerting to them. The problem isn’t just Northam. It is the culture from which he sprang.

Acknowledging this doesn’t absolve Northam. But it does shift one’s consideration of whether his bias is static and irredeemable or fluid and forgivable — informed by the world around him and subject to change. And that, of course, informs what you think should happen next.

To be clear: None of this means that Northam deserves to keep his job.

Where I depart from Payne and Jilani is that their analysis insufficiently considers the role of atonement. Preserving space for Northam to be forgiven does not mean that Northam is entitled to stay governor of Virginia. To justify remaining in office, he must earn forgiveness. Repentance precedes absolution.

Penance is an effort to fix the damage caused by a transgression. It’s an act, not merely a feeling. The restorative justice approach to criminal justice is helpful here in teasing out the path forward. It emphasizes accountability and making amends over punishment. It asks victims what they need to repair the harm done to them, not merely what vengeance should be exacted on the transgressor.

In his recent piece on Northam and the question of mercy, Jilani compared the governor to Lewis Conway Jr., who, after two decades in jail for murder, ran for the Austin City Council. Jilani questioned why some on the left championed Conway’s rehabilitation while remaining skeptical of Northam’s ability to evolve from a much less heinous offense. But the difference is in how they’ve atoned for their crimes.

The governor has spent more effort creating factual ambiguity around his yearbook photo than engaging in the hard work of penitence.

Whereas Conway served 20 years in prison, Northam couldn’t sit in judgment for 24 hours before revising his apology into a disclaimer: It wasn’t me. The governor has spent more effort creating factual ambiguity around his yearbook photo than engaging in the hard work of penitence. In his Sunday CBS interview with Gayle King, he claimed that “this is really the first time I have ever really seen that picture,” citing as proof how unprepared his reaction was. When asked why he apologized for being in a picture he now claims he isn’t in, he blamed the “state of shock” he was in following the revelation. This is the opposite of accountability.

Northam’s dodge is even more frustrating given that it only marginally improves his moral position. Yes, traditional blackface — with its coal-black paint, crimson lips, and affected minstrelsy — is technically worse than efforts to achieve a facsimile of a black person as part of a costume. Why? Because while the intent to degrade can exist in either instance, it’s always present in the former. But this isn’t a criminal trial, and the lack of intent doesn’t save Northam from critique. The effect of blackface is always degrading, because of the historical legacy of blackface in this country. To wear blackface is to trade in either ignorance or indifference. The latter is more forgivable. But it is not above rebuke.

Moreover, Northam has shown little to no substantive understanding of what he’s done wrong. At an initial press conference, he seemed to take the controversy so lightly that he contemplated doing the “moonwalk” when asked if he had the moves. (He owes his wife an above-average Valentine’s Day gift for steering him away from that disaster.)

Although the purpose of the CBS interview was ostensibly for Northam to demonstrate his new understanding of racial issues, he compounded public frustration by calling slaves “indentured servants from Africa,” appearing to sanitize the subject. And while Northam (sort of) acknowledged his racial privilege, he failed to connect that privilege to his behavior — missing the point that his ignorance about race is not just an excuse for his actions, but a symptom of a larger problem that might continue to undermine his effectiveness as governor.

Northam characterized the racist yearbook photograph as reflecting “unconscious attitudes” and said that white people did not realize how “impactful” and “offensive” certain “racial insensitivities” were to black people. “I have learned, I admit to my mistakes,” Northam told King, “and I am going to improve my life and do better and be in a position where I can help other people.”

But he hasn’t fully admitted his mistakes or demonstrated that he understands why, precisely, he’s in the wrong. He’s said nothing concrete about how he is going to improve his life and “do better” or help others, and he certainly hasn’t said anything about how he specifically plans to help the constituency his actions have harmed: black Americans.

Northam told King that “the man you’re looking at and talking to right now is not who I was in my early 20s.” But he’s offered no evidence of this, pointing only to the absence of a smoking gun from the last 34 years that would “prove” the yearbook incident was a one-off. But that’s not how racism works.

Racial ignorance often manifests in the indifference to policies that are racist in outcome, if not in design. Connecting the dots between his subconscious biases and his policymaking really would make this a “teaching moment.” Instead, what we have is a lesson in how cheaply absolution is bought.

Northam says he’s not stepping down. Instead, he’s embarking on a “reconciliation tour” to engage with his constituents about race and healing. Given what we’ve heard from him so far, I’m not optimistic, but it could be the start of a restorative process that turns this yearbook controversy into a genuine opportunity for Virginians. What will make the difference is whether the public pressures him to take active responsibility for his actions — to find solutions in collaboration with the injured parties and community members and make amends — or whether it focuses exclusively on his resignation. At this point, Northam has made clear that he’s “not going anywhere.” But that only means justice can’t be served if the public maintains a narrow, purely punitive framework for what justice entails.

As Rev. William Barber eloquently put it in an op-ed on Northam last week:

Scapegoating politicians who are caught in the act of interpersonal racism will not address the fundamental issue of systemic racism. We have to talk about policy. But we also have to talk about trust and power. If white people in political leadership are truly repentant, they will listen to black and other marginalized people in our society. They will confess that they have sinned and demonstrate their willingness to listen and learn by following and supporting the leadership of others. To confess past mistakes while continuing to insist that you are still best suited to lead because of your experience is itself a subtle form of white supremacy.

Amen.

The post Ralph Northam Still Doesn’t Understand What It Takes to be Forgiven appeared first on The Intercept.

Last night’s State of the Union address and rebuttals were a fight over what constitutes “real America.” They weren’t a rehash of the debate about whether American authenticity is clustered at the coasts or spread out over the heartland. Rather, it was a contest for which politician, party, or movement has the most accurate assessment of what it feels like to be American today.

This is Trump’s home turf, or it used to be. Since he launched his presidential bid in June 2015, he’s painted a picture of an America in disarray. “Our country is in terrible trouble,” he said back then. “We don’t have victories anymore.” He evoked Mexicans invading and Chinese people stealing jobs. “When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time,” he said.

The media at the time hashed and rehashed Trump’s remarks, fact checking lies and condemning his racism, laughing all the way. Trump’s candidacy was a joke, they said — a clumsy Charybdis of falsehoods and xenophobia that would swallow itself before it caused too much trouble. But of course, those predictions were wrong.

What most missed then, but which should be obvious now, is that between his bigoted bromides, Trump was painting a picture of an America that felt more familiar to millions of viewers than anything they’d been served for years.

He acknowledged that although unemployment numbers were low and declining, the “real unemployment” numbers were higher — “anywhere from 18 to 20 percent.”

“Don’t believe the 5.6,” he warned during that first Trump Tower address. “Don’t believe it.”

“A lot of people up there can’t get jobs,” he said. Health care costs were going up. We spent relatively more on education, with fewer returns. Deductibles were “going through the roof.” Obamacare needed to be replaced with something “much better for everybody.” The infrastructure, airports, roads, “everything” was like “a third world country.” And the thing is, he wasn’t all wrong.

He struck his darkest note on his first day in office, during his inaugural address:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

Trump was successful in large part because he is impressively adept at diagnosing America’s problems. “Make America Great Again” is not only a regressive slogan that recalls more prejudiced and unequal historical periods fondly; it’s also an acknowledgement that America, as it is, needs improvement. Or as Barack Obama put it, it could be “more perfect.” In 2016, the Democratic Party at times lost sight of the fact that making America great was a goal shared by both parties. Instead, it defaulted into “America is already great,” offering a platitude which couldn’t compete with the reality of unpaid bills and soaring health care costs.

Increasingly, however, Trump is in a political pickle — one that flows from a promise made during that inaugural address: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Trump’s brand is diagnosing America’s ills, but as he ages into his incumbency, those ills increasingly manifest on his watch, and he’s forced to lean more heavily on new manufactured crises that can’t be attributed to his leadership.

As in his January Oval Office address, Trump’s State of the Union remarks were full of inaccurate fearmongering about the border. He criticized the high cost of health care and, in a somewhat unexpected turn, the scourge of childhood cancers and HIV.

But now it is Trump who must defend his record. It’s Trump who feels pressured to make the case that America is already great.

In the first portion of his remarks, he did exactly that. He celebrated combat veterans from WWII (when America presumably was great) and then lauded American astronauts who are “once again” going into space, drawing a rhetorical line between these achievements. He bragged about an “unprecedented economic boom” — a boom that started before his presidency and continues despite it — and held up low unemployment numbers as evidence of his leadership prowess.

 Trump is facing is the impotence of incumbency.

The Trump who advised Americans to consider “real unemployment” numbers is long gone. In his place stands a man so eager to defend his record that he reported employment statistics, his best Trump card, four different ways so as to magnify the impression of his success: “5.3 million new jobs”; “600,000 new manufacturing jobs”; blue-collar jobs, growing faster than anyone else thought possible; more people working than at any time during American history. Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

Trump’s focus on jobs numbers is understandable given how little else he has to brag about: Cutting more regulations in two years than any other administration had done in four; a transparent greed-driven tax cut for millionaires and billionaires that’s growing more difficult to spin as tax season approaches and Americans start to see the consequences on their returns; America becoming the world’s No. 1 oil producer at a time when scientific consensus says that oil dependence is a death sentence. The accomplishments enumerated during last night’s address were underwhelming at best.

But what’s important to note here is that Trump is facing is the impotence of incumbency. Without being able to point to policies that have materially improved people’s lives, he’s forced to argue that his paltry efforts have made America great. And given the state of the nation, that’s no enviable position to be in.

In her reply, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was able to capitalize on Trump’s new posture. To justify his lack of accomplishment, Trump had to invent a twisted fantasy-scape of marauding Mexican murderers, while tiptoeing around his broken promises with vague references to health care costs that didn’t directly implicate his attacks on existing health care infrastructure.

Abrams was free to fill the role Trump once played so well, accurately identifying America’s problems.

But Abrams was free to fill the role Trump once played so well, accurately identifying America’s problems: Voter suppression; farmers hobbled by a tariff war; factories closing; children caged at the border. Even Fox News pundits had to acknowledge: “She seemed to get more to what people’s lives are like in the reality.” With a diverse crowd standing behind her and a message that gave voice to a broad range of concerns, Abrams won the fight over what America really looks like.

Abrams deftly ran through the panoply of policy issues ignored by Trump, and offered a warm, compassionate alternative to Trump’s drowsy teleprompter recital. Our strength as a country, she argued, is our ability to pull together to advance common goals. “We may come from different sides of the political aisle, but our joint commitment to the ideals of this nation cannot be negotiable.” Unfortunately, Abrams argued, Republicans have bargained away their commitment to the ideals shared by most Americans. “Under the current administration, far too many hard-working Americans are falling behind, living paycheck to paycheck, most without labor unions to protect them from even worse harm. The Republican tax bill rigged the system against working people. Rather than bringing back jobs, plants are closing, layoffs are looming, and wages struggle to keep pace with the actual cost of living.”

Her message was concise and effective: “With a renewed commitment to social and economic justice, we will create a stronger America together. Because America wins by fighting for our shared values against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That is who we are, and when we do so, never wavering, the state of our union will always be strong.”

And while centrist hacks (and complicit mainstream media outlets) attempted to construe Sen. Bernie Sanders’s State of the Union response as a racially motivated upstaging, his State of the Union response, which he has given for the past two years, was, in fact, a complement to Abrams’s successful rebuttal.

Whereas Abrams had only 10 minutes to respond, a limitation intrinsic to the party’s official address, Sanders had the space to articulate, in detail, exactly where Trump went wrong. If winning the game is about accurately diagnosing the country’s problems, then Bernie came to play.

“I want to talk to you about the major crisis facing our country that, regrettably, President Trump chose not to discuss,” began Sanders. America is great again, he offered, appropriating Trump’s thesis before flipping it on its head: At least it is “for the members of his Mar-a-Lago country club.”

“For many of President Trump’s billionaire friends, the truth is they have never ever had it so good,” argued Sanders. “As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.’” Today, as then, the economy is great for the rich. Twenty-five hedge fund managers on Wall Street made nearly twice as much as all 140,000 kindergarten teachers in America, explained Sanders. Meanwhile, the “real wages for the average American worker are lower today then they were in 1972 … 46 years ago.” If Trump once wanted Americans to focus on “real wages,” Sanders was happy to oblige.

Sanders adroitly undermined Trump’s claim that his leadership resulted in low unemployment numbers, pointing out that job creation tapered off during Trump’s first year. He explained that the average worker received a raise of merely $1.60 a week, while “the three richest people in America saw their wealth increase by more than $68 billion.” He argued that Trump was right to want to address infrastructure, but wrong to try to privatize our highways — selling them off to the highest bidder for individual gain at the cost of citizens.

Sanders painted a clear picture of the winners and losers of the Trump era. Under this administration, Walmart, Pfizer, and other big corporations have paid out big bonuses to their CEOs while laying off employees — many of whom were already struggling to get by with the support of the social safety net. And the Vermont senator called Trump out for vowing to protect that social safety net as he supported cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Sanders pointedly highlighted Trump’s hypocrisy about violence committed by undocumented immigrants, explaining that they commit less crime than natural-born Americans. He called out Trump for talking about the murder of Americans by an undocumented man in Nevada while staying silent about the deadliest incident of gun violence to ever happen in America, which also took place in Nevada in 2017. Sanders castigated Trump for failing to mention climate change, and for undermining the security of “Dreamers.”

But in the most powerful part of his address, Sanders didn’t merely react to Trump. In an ad lib not captured in the official transcripts, Sanders asked the only question that really matters: “Why don’t you do what the American people want you to do rather than what wealthy campaign contributors want?”

What do the American people want? Sanders ran down the stats:

• According to a Fox News poll, 70 percent of Americans support a tax increase on families making over $10 million.
• According to Reuters, 70 percent of Americans and 52 percent of Republicans support “Medicare for All.”
• Seventy-two percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Republicans, want to expand Social Security benefits.
• According to Gallup, 76 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, want the country to spend on infrastructure.
• Ninety-two percent of Americans want Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.
• Sixty-four percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Republicans, believe marijuana should be legal.
• Over 94 percent of Americans support background checks for all gun purchases.

… And on and on and on.

A $15 minimum wage; free public college; government assistance for child care — what Americans want are progressive policies. So, Sanders asked, “why isn’t Congress and the White House doing what the American people want them to do?”

The answer is not complicated, he explained in a familiar but still salient refrain. “The answer has everything to do with the power of the monied interests.” Greed is destroying the nation, says Sanders, not Mexicans. The 1 percent is the source of American hardship, not the border.

In a separate response for the Working Families Party, Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin’s new lieutenant governor and a rising progressive star, hit some of the same notes as Sanders, singling out the wealthy few as a barrier to social justice advocacy. “We need a movement that sees our fights for economic justice, and racial justice, and climate justice, and for a real and reflective democracy as all bound up together,” he said. “Our movement seeks not only to change what is possible, but what is expected. We must commit ourselves to an America that works for the many, not the few.”

There was perhaps no greater testament to the power of Sanders’s reframing than the fact that Trump’s remarks seemed to anticipate not the official Democratic Party’s response, but rather the rhetoric most famously advanced by Sanders and fellow democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“Here, in the United States,” said Trump, “we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence — and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”

But Sanders, who was spotted scribbling notes during Trump’s address, was prepared to respond to this line of attack: “Trump said, ‘We are born free, and we will stay free.’ Well, I say to President Trump: People are not truly free when they can’t afford to go to the doctor when they are sick. People are not truly free when they cannot afford to buy the prescription drugs they desperately need. People are not truly free when they are unable to retire with dignity. People are not truly free when they are exhausted because they are working longer and longer hours for low wages. People are not truly free when they cannot afford a decent place in which to live. People certainly are not free when they cannot afford to feed their families.”

By the end of Sanders’s remarks, it was clear why Trump felt the need to call out socialism. Genuine, progressive populism — messaging that put society’s and people’s interests first — is a threat to Trump’s oligarchy-dressed-in-populist-clothing. Ocasio-Cortez agrees.

“I think that he needs to do it because he feels like — he feels himself losing on the issues,” Ocasio-Cortez told Rachel Maddow following Trump’s remarks. “Every single policy proposal that we have adopted and presented to the American public has been overwhelmingly popular, even some with a majority of Republican voters supporting what we’re talking about.”

“I think he sees himself losing on the issues, he sees himself losing on the wall in the southern border, and he needs to grasp at an ad hominem attack, and this is his way of doing it. What we need to realize is happening is this is an issue of authoritarian regime versus democracy. In order for him to try to dissuade or throw people off the scent of the trail, he has to really make and confuse the public. And I think that that’s exactly what he’s trying to do.”

Ocasio-Cortez is right; fear tactics and money only go so far. To paraphrase both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders: They’ve got money, but we’ve got people.

The post Trump’s State of the Union Address Reveals His Growing Anxiety Over Encroaching Left-Wing Populism appeared first on The Intercept.

Kamala Harris has a prosecutor problem.

She’s running for president as a progressive, but as attorney general of California, she criminalized truancy — making it a crime for kids to be late for school and dragging into the criminal justice system even more disproportionately low-income, predominantly black and Latino families. She’s overlooked the misconduct of her prosecutors and fought to uphold their wrongfully secured convictions. She defended California’s choice to deny gender reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate, and in 2014, she appealed a federal judge’s holding that the death penalty was unconstitutional.

The list goes on and on. But in some ways, the details don’t matter. The problem isn’t that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well, encouraging education and re-entry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all.

To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system. As Paul Butler, former prosecutor and author of “Chokehold: Policing Black Men,” told The Guardian, “as a lawyer who went to law school with a goal of helping black people and using my legal skills to make things better, the realization that the law itself was a mechanism to keep African-American people down was frightening.” He added, “Lawyers are competitive and ambitious, and the way that manifests itself in a prosecutor’s office is you want to get tough sentences. I got caught up in that world. You feel like you’re doing the Lord’s work — you tell yourselves that you’re helping the community.” But, he vividly recalls, the expectation is far from reality.

To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system.

Compare his self-reflection with Harris’s reply when asked about her decision to become a prosecutor: “There is a duty and responsibility to be a voice for the most voiceless and vulnerable and to do the work of justice. And that’s the work I wanted to do.”

Harris’s response might be understandable coming from someone with less experience — a layperson, a law student, or even a junior district attorney. But who, especially in the era of Black Lives Matter, would flatly describe the enforcement arm of the criminal justice system as doing “the work of justice”? What person with any experience in criminal court can claim to be an advocate for the “most vulnerable,” without recognizing that the victim in one case is often the defendant in the next — that the issues at play are systemic and that the justice meted out by the court system is a rough one at best? Harris has stayed away from engaging with these deeper questions in interviews. Perhaps because as a prosecutor, she understands that there are no good answers.

In a recent NPR interview, Harris revealed that her own parents questioned her choice to become a prosecutor. “My family and extended family thought, at best, it was a curious decision,” she recalled,  saying that she had to defend it “like one would a thesis.” They asked, in Harris’s words, “why would you go and be a part of an institution that is not always fair and does not always pursue justice?” An understandable question from parents who met in Berkeley in the 1960s — a bastion of American progressivism at a time of rapid social progress — speaking to a daughter who was making the choice to jail people for a living at the start of the mass incarceration crisis of the 1990s.

Harris’s choices are thrown in a more unflattering light when compared to the relatively short tenure of former public defender and civil rights lawyer Larry Krasner, district attorney of Philadelphia.

In his first week, Krasner fired 31 prosecutors who weren’t committed to his reforms, and last February, he promulgated a list of new policies with massive, “revolutionary” scope. The office no longer charges sex workers with fewer than three convictions, nor does it prosecute marijuana possession. It no longer starts the plea negotiation process with the highest possible sentencing, a practice that privileges leverage over substantive justice. And he instructed his prosecutors to tally the cost of incarcerating everyone sentenced with a crime and to demonstrate why the expense — upwards of $42,000 a year per person — is justified in a city where the average total family income is $41,000. Although it’s hard to make a difference from inside a prosecutor’s office, Krasner has shown that it can be done from the very top.

Notably, the dramatic reforms he has put in place were informed by his experiences on the defendants’ side of the courtroom, which offers a clearer view of systemic inequities intrinsic to the criminal justice system: clients who languish in jail due to a failure to come up with a few hundred dollars in bail money; undocumented parents who go to trial because taking a plea would mean deportation and separation from their children; exculpatory evidence wrongly withheld, and, all too often, the lack of consequences for the prosecutors who withhold it.

Importantly, if Harris had to be tougher on crime because she is black, it wasn’t for the sake of some higher ideal. It was because her personal ambitions demanded it.

As California’s “top cop,” Harris was no Krasner. While Krasner has made headlines for commanding the full scope of prosecutorial discretion in service of vulnerable communities, Harris most notoriously used her discretion to let Steve Mnuchin, a chief villain of the housing crisis cum secretary of Treasury, off the hook.

The point here isn’t to judge Harris by Krasner’s standard. But it is important to acknowledge that Harris, who regularly describes herself as a progressive prosecutor, is not one, and criticizing her record is fair game.

But many of Harris’s defenders disagree.

Although the growing focus on Harris’s law enforcement background is commensurate with her rising profile as a 2020 contender, to some of her supporters, the attention seems unfair.

Journalist Jill Filipovic argued on Twitter recently that she judges Harris’s history less harshly because black women “shoulder additional burdens” compared to white men, and women have to prove that they are “tough.” Filipovic acknowledges that Harris’s race and gender don’t “excuse” her record, but, she insists, “context matters.”

It’s difficult to understand, though, how the context matters here except to provide some kind of excuse. I’m not without sympathy for the additional pressures exerted on Harris because she is a black woman — after all, unlike Filipovic, I am one too. But those sympathies do not eclipse the concern I have for the black women who bore the consequences of Harris’s prosecutorial misjudgment. Importantly, if Harris had to be tougher on crime because she is black, it wasn’t for the sake of some higher ideal. It was because her personal ambitions demanded it.

Filipovic is asking that we trade the representational benefit of having black leadership — or even worse, the careerist ambitions of one elite black woman — for the well-being of the black constituents she was ostensibly elected to protect. To become San Francisco district attorney, she notably defeated Terence Hallinan, a committed progressive who, like Krasner, thought that sex workers and minor drug offenders should not be prosecuted, and he is also a white man. If anything, Filipovic’s tweets constitute an argument against electing black people to higher office — one that I don’t agree with, to be clear.

Filipovic argues that Harris is a victim of an Overton window shift, tweeting: “Now, the rules have shifted (and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they shifted right as more women began succeeding within the system).” Of course, the growing consciousness around criminal justice issues isn’t a conspiracy to keep black women out of office. But in one way she’s right. The world has changed.

Candidates who started laying the bricks of their path to the White House years ago will have to reckon with the fact that the public imagination has expanded beyond the impotent incrementalism that has long been held up as America’s best option.

It used to be the case that a well-worn and respected path to politics started in law school and cut through the district attorney’s office. Forty-seven members of the 115th Congress were former prosecutors. Two former state attorneys general, Bill Clinton and Martin Van Buren, even made it to the Oval Office.

That trajectory seems less tenable today — at least for those on the left — and candidates who started laying the bricks of their path to the White House years ago will have to reckon with the fact that the public imagination has expanded beyond the impotent incrementalism that has long been held up as America’s best option. The more deft among the candidates — and we’ll see if Harris is among them — will figure out how to distance themselves from their records with sincere apologies and, even better, actions that manifest a commitment to change. Not everyone will successfully rehabilitate themselves. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

During a recent episode of her show, MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid didn’t even pause to question the expectation that Democrats pander to right-wingers and moderates by tacking to the right on crime. “[Harris’s] criminal justice background is probably good in a general election because Democrats always like to run as, you know, criminal justice, tough on crime, etc. etc. etc. since the Clinton era,” she said.

Reid was, of course, right to observe that Democrats have run as “tough on crime” for the very same reasons Filipovic offered as a justification of Harris’s record: They were practically required to do so to get ahead. But I would suggest this: None of them were so obligated.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign — during which he earned votes from 43 percent of Democratic Party primary participants despite starting with name recognition in the teens, enduring a corporate media blackout, and declining to take corporate PAC money — is that the traditional rules around how much you have to sell out to get ahead were wrong. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and myriad candidates who won or over-performed in last year’s midterms understood this, as do the leaders of the 2020 field, who have largely sworn off corporate PAC money and who have adopted the bulk of Sanders’s 2016 platform. As it turns out, doing the right thing is actually a winning proposition.

Things have changed. For the better.

The post A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President in the Age of Black Lives Matter? appeared first on The Intercept.

A wide range of interests across the economic spectrum are jeopardized. But not all interests are suffering equally: Wealthier and more powerful interest groups have been granted preference by the government.

Over Christmas, the shutdown threatened to stop the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, from issuing flood insurance certificates. According to federal law, FEMA must provide flood insurance certifications before banks may issue federally backed mortgages to prospective homeowners living in federally designated floodplains — even in areas that FEMA has determined should not be built on due to high risk of flooding. The National Flood Insurance Program of 1968 ensures that FEMA has the ability to issue and pay out claims for the insurance.

Without the certificates, roughly 40,000 closings a month would be at risk, resulting in millions in lost revenue for banks and mortgage companies. So it came as no surprise when interest groups successfully lobbied a bipartisan congressional cohort to temporarily reauthorize the NFIP through May on the eve of the shutdown. The stopgap bill was signed into law by Trump on December 21, hours before the federal government shuttered.

“There are 140 million Americans who live in coastal counties, millions of whom depend on this program to protect them from flood risk,” said former Rep. Tom MacArthur, a Republican from New Jersey who lost his seat in the midterm elections, during the brief House debate on the bill. “Without this program, they cannot buy or sell homes.”

But that wasn’t the end of it. Despite the reauthorization, FEMA believed that the shutdown meant that the agency could not, by law, provide these certifications. The reason? A law called the Anti-Deficiency Act prohibits government agencies from entering into contracts or spending money if the projects aren’t funded.

“As long as the only people feeling pain are federal employees, nobody really cares about shutdowns.”

Craig Fugate, the former administrator for the agency from May 19, 2009 to January 20, 2017, disagrees with FEMA’s take. The NFIP is solvent, Fugate explained, subject to a different funding source and funding code, and generates its own revenue. That allows the NFIP to continue operations in the face of a shutdown. There’s no lapsed funding for the program and thus, no need to stop it from working, even in a shuttered FEMA. “As long as they’re reauthorized, they’re up and running,” said Fugate.

Nevertheless, FEMA announced on December 26 that the agency was not going to issue the certifications, citing the shutdown and anti-deficiency. The reaction from interest groups was as swift as it was predictable.

The National Association of Realtors, the largest lobbying group for the industry, made its displeasure over the possibility of lost revenue and closed home sales known. “Today’s surprise FEMA ruling jeopardizes tens of thousands of home sales across America,” said the association’s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Shannon McGahn, “as NAR estimates up to 40,000 closings are disrupted each month that the NFIP cannot issue flood insurance policies.”

Once the rage of the business sector — and Congress — was made clear to the White House, the administration ordered FEMA to resume issuing the certificates. “Upon realizing the trouble they were in — especially with Republicans — they back tracked pretty quickly,” Stephen Ellis, executive vice president for government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, told The Intercept in an email.

In a December 28 statement, the agency announced that it would consider the 48-hour lapse in the program to never have happened, and that the program would be regarded as having continued without interruption since December 21.

“FEMA worked with the administration and industry partners during this funding lapse to assess the impact and determine what options exist to enable the NFIP [National Flood Insurance Program] to allow the sale and renewal of flood insurance policies to continue,” Alex Bruner, a FEMA spokesperson, told The Intercept in an email.

Looking at what happened to the NFIP, said Fugate, gives a lot of insight into the priorities of the government when it comes to the shutdown. Federal workers in the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service, and other agencies are expected to work without pay. Public lands are being destroyed by garbage and misuse in the absence of rangers. Those effects haven’t spurred the president or Congress to act.

“As long as the only people feeling pain are federal employees, nobody really cares about shutdowns,” said Fugate.

But when the unintended consequences of the political struggle affect the rich, the rich apply pressure. And the government doesn’t even allow half a week to go by before fixing the problem.

“You’ll notice the White House turned right around and ordered FEMA to issue the certificates,” said Fugate.

The post A Shutdown for the 99 Percent, Concierge Government for the 1 Percent appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, my experience, and that of some of my female co-workers, became the focus of a New York Times story on the sexual harassment and sexism that took place in the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. I told my story to bring attention to the sexist environment that is unfortunately endemic to most workspaces, including political campaigns. However, I was disheartened to discover that the takeaway by many pundits was not that sexism and harassment is pervasive, but that Sanders was somehow uniquely culpable. I was also struck by some of the messages and tweets calling into question the character of the women who spoke out.

As was the case throughout the 2016 campaign season, my personal experiences as a woman of color were sublimated to serve an establishment media narrative that pretends the progressive movement is all white, all male, and runs counter to the interests of women and people of color.

But my story should not be taken to confirm the “Bernie bro” mythology. It should be taken to confirm the pervasiveness of sexism in professional life and distill the hard truths that all campaigns should learn from.

It’s not as if the Sanders campaign alone is nursing the last vestiges of sexism and sexual harassment in the political sphere. Both were reportedly features of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. During her first run at the White House, Clinton’s campaign chose to retain a senior adviser who reportedly harassed a young woman repeatedly rather than fire him. And just last month, an aide for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., resigned after it was reported that he settled a sexual harassment lawsuit for $400,000.

Politics reflect society’s general problem with sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.

Politics reflect society’s general problem with sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. As a whole, our country does not believe, respect, or even like women as much as men. Our president has bragged about sexually assaulting women and made countless demeaning comments about their physical appearances. Two out of 9 Supreme Court justices have been accused of sexual misconduct. One in 3 women have experienced some form sexual violence. A nonprofit administered an online survey last January and found that 81 percent of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment. The numbers and stakes are even higher for women of color and transgender women.

It’s not surprising, then, that these systemic problems infect political campaigns — especially since those calling the shots are mostly male, white, and disconnected from the working class. In my experience, women hired as strategists or managers are frequently treated like assistants and translators. Men often pass off our ideas as their own and “put us in our place” if we are too assertive.

It’s the classic double-bind: We are not smart enough or too smart; not attractive enough or too attractive; not dressed appropriately or dressed too nicely; not poor enough or too poor; not confident enough or too arrogant; not likable or too female. To be a woman in politics is to be held to an unattainable standard of perfection. To be a woman of color is even harder. When we see women like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez overcome the odds against her, set these expectations on fire, and score impressive accomplishments like getting the media and Democratic leadership to take a Green New Deal seriously, we should rejoice. But even she’s not immune. 

After the New York Times story, I was hoping to see a more productive discussion about the insidiousness of sexual harassment and sexism in politics. In sharing my experiences, I was hoping to highlight this issue for all future campaigns and celebrate the power of women organizers who worked together and successfully got the attention of Sanders and his team. But that’s not what happened.

For one, the corporate media unfairly focused on Sanders — casting the harassment that happened within his campaign much differently than similar cases with other campaigns — implicating his personal ethics in a way that they’ve declined to do with other politicians.

Sanders recently apologized and acknowledged that his 2016 campaign could have handled sexual harassment and sexism claims better, and in his 2018 re-election campaign, he reportedly instituted sharper protocols like better hiring, training, and designating an independent firm that staff could utilize to report sexism and harassment. But new allegations of sexual harassment in his 2016 campaign have since surfaced, indicating the depth of the problem was likely deeper than most knew. Now, Sanders should take the rare step of setting up an independent investigation into the 2016 allegations. 

At the same time, I was deeply disappointed by the feedback I received from some on the left. Both myself and other women who spoke on the record about our experiences on Sanders’s campaign received messages and tweets from Sanders supporters accusing us of lying and wanting to purposefully attack the Vermont senator. I was told to “enjoy my 15 minutes of fame” and was mocked while the sexual harassment I endured was normalized. Neoliberals and corporate media are unfair to Sanders and his supporters because our movement threatens their supremacy. But to dismiss our claims as mere bias is at best disingenuous and at worst cruel.

By blindly attacking anyone who raises valid concerns about sexism because it’s “not a good look” for the senator, they are actually making him look worse. Ironically, in their defense of Sanders’s campaign, these individuals are behaving as if acknowledging the presence of sexism and sexual harassment in his campaign is akin to calling Sanders a sexist — the implication that the establishment media seems keen to draw.

Accusations of sexual misconduct during a political campaign should not be weaponized to serve a political agenda. Nor should claims be ignored to protect a beloved candidate — doing so only adds to the cycle of shame and punishment that makes sexism so hard to tackle.

Sexism will persist if women are discouraged from openly talking about our experiences. I sincerely hope that neither fear of political exploitation nor personal attacks discourage other women from speaking out against sexism or any abuse they’ve suffered.

The post I Was Sexually Harassed on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Campaign. I Will Not Be Weaponized or Dismissed. appeared first on The Intercept.

Last night was yet another example of the Democratic Party’s glistening ineptitude.

President Donald Trump’s border wall speech, once he’d backed off the “national emergency” idea, was anticipated to be little more than a concentrated primetime dose of xenophobic hysteria. He didn’t disappoint.

In under 10 minutes, he set up a clear, if familiar, argument: There is a crisis at the border. It threatens American security and depresses wages. The drugs brought across the border kill hundreds of Americans each week, and the immigrants themselves have committed thousands of crimes. All are equally guilty — children are merely “pawns,” not people. The wall will stop this tragedy, and the only thing preventing the wall from going up is Democrats, who opportunistically supported a barrier prior to Trump’s presidency, but object to it now in bad faith.

Trump’s spiel, as is typical of the president, was a jumble of half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies. And anticipating that, the Democratic leadership, in the form of Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, made Trump’s dishonesty and hatefulness the theme of their response.

“Much of what we have heard from President Trump throughout this senseless shutdown has been full of misinformation and even malice,” opened Pelosi, awkwardly standing next to a glaring Schumer.

Pelosi seems to have thought more about alliteration than what pitch would effectively challenge the inaccurate but narratively satisfying story the president had just told.

But Pelosi seems to have thought more about alliteration than what pitch would effectively challenge the inaccurate but narratively satisfying story the president had just told.

The emphasis through both leaders’ remarks circled around a central theme: The crisis isn’t real. It’s manufactured. Trump is like a child throwing a “temper tantrum,” and he’s failing to respond to a “humanitarian crisis.”

But that message rang somewhat hollow after Trump’s visceral Boschian portrait. Trump’s speech was filled with lies, but it also identified real problems: Public resources are strained — not because of immigrants, but because of the austere policies of political leaders whose primary purpose is to shrink the size of government and the social welfare programs it supports. Resources are scarce — not because of immigrants, but because historically high wealth disparities mean less profit is reaching the workers who created it. Wages are being driven down — not because of immigrants, but because Republicans, occasionally joined by Democrats, launched a decades-long battle against unions, driving membership down from a high of 35 percent in the mid-1950s, to just under 11 percent today. And what Trump said about who is hurting most is true: “Among the hardest hit are African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.”

Where Pelosi argued that the families crossing the border “are not a security threat,” but “a humanitarian challenge,” Trump had already pre-empted the attempt to paint him as an cold-hearted tyrant by admitting in his opening line that “there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.”

Democrats, focused on “fact-checking” Trump’s many lies and inaccuracies, failed to acknowledge the truths that resonate more with some Americans than bloviating about barriers on the border. (H/T Pelosi). An opioid crisis does kill thousands of Americans each year. More Americans did die from drugs last year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.

And Democrats have supported barriers at the border in the past, which does make it easy to cast today’s resistance as a cynical political ploy.

Trump’s rhetoric, if not his stilted delivery, was successful at animating the harms he attributes to immigrants. He spoke of “ruthless gangs” and “the cycle of human suffering” and the “tragic reality of illegal immigration.” He repeatedly evoked a “crisis,” and his speech put a face on the victims: “America’s heart broke the day after Christmas when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien, who just came across the border. The life of an American hero was stolen by someone who had no right to be in our country,” he said.

Of course, immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans, and Trump’s fear-mongering is baseless and cruel. But the response from Democratic leadership? A tepid evocation of “800,000 innocent workers across the nation — many of them veterans.”

If it seems like I’m being unfair, consider this: Between Pelosi and Schumer, Democrats made only one mention of those who should have been the protagonists of their story — the workers who are being hurt by the government shutdown. And the mention made was antiseptic.

The only color — an unsubtle pander to veterans — failed to make vivid the reality of hundreds of thousands of families going without a paycheck this winter.

“The president has chosen fear. We want to start with the facts,” intoned Pelosi, leaning again on alliteration over substance.

As underwhelming as the Democratic Party’s official response was, it was hardly a failure. Trump has backed himself into such a corner that it would be difficult to do real harm to the party’s position. But what ended up a non-event could have advanced the political ball in the Democrats’ favor, as evidenced by the responses of Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Sanders’s opening salvo? “As we speak, some 800,000 federal employees, people who are our neighbors, friends, and family members are going without pay. As working people, many of them are wondering how they will pay their mortgages, how they will feed their kids, and how they’ll be able to go to the doctor. These are people in the FBI, in the TSA, in the State Department, in the Treasury Department, and other agencies who have, in some cases, worked for the government for years.” He went on to quote a federal employee — giving literal voice to real-world concerns in the context of what has become an attenuated political battle: “I am a single mom and a federal employee, I have $100 to last me — and my vehicle payments will not be made this month. I live paycheck to paycheck, and I can’t get a side job because I still have to go to my unpaid federal job.”

Sanders packed more visceral humanity in the first minute or so of his remarks than in the entirety of Pelosi and Schumer’s response.

“Our federal employees deserve to be treated with respect,” elaborated Sanders, “not held hostage as political pawns.”

Sanders packed more visceral humanity in the first minute or so of his remarks than in the entirety of Pelosi and Schumer’s response. In Sanders’s world, those affected aren’t just “federal employees.” They are our intimates — the people who comprise our families and communities.

In fairness to Pelosi, whose net worth is nearly $30 million, framing government employees this way likely required more of an imaginative leap than it did for Sanders, one of the poorer members of Congress. But there is no excuse for impotently resorting to right-wing virtue-signaling about “veterans,” when many of the women and men affected by the government shutdown are literally charged with protecting this country — something they continue to do despite not being paid — something which, ostensibly, is Trump’s goal in securing funding for the border wall. In one sentence, Sanders not only humanized the victims, he revealed the hypocrisy of Trump’s actions.

And perhaps most importantly, he validated that there is, in fact, a crisis afoot: one created by Trump, as well as several produced by structural forces the political class has long ignored.

And perhaps most importantly, he validated that there is, in fact, a crisis afoot: one created by Trump, as well as several produced by structural forces the political class has long ignored.

“President Trump, you want to talk about crises? At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, tens of millions of workers in our country are earning starvation wages and are unable to adequately provide for their families. You want a national emergency? Thirty million Americans have no health insurance and many more are underinsured.”

“Millions of Americans including the disabled, the children, and the elderly may not be able to get the food stamps they need to eat. Pregnant mothers and their babies may go without the nutrition assistance they need to stay healthy, as the WIC program is on the verge of running out of money. Small businesses and farmers will not be able to receive the financial assistance they need — and some may go out of business. Security at our nation’s airports could be threatened if TSA employees and air traffic controllers are not getting paid. People who are buying or selling their homes may see significant delay because the Federal Housing Administration is unable to process and approve mortgage applications.”

Rather than spend too much time picking apart factual inaccuracies, Sanders challenged Trump’s narrative with a more powerful one: Yes, Americans are in trouble, but there’s only one person to blame for the current impasse.

“Let me be as clear as I can be,” said Sanders, “this shutdown should never have happened.”

In their remarks, Pelosi and Schumer delved into the politics that preceded the shutdown, but in a way that read as opaque and jargony. “On the very first day of this Congress, House Democrats passed Senate Republican legislation to reopen government and fund smart, effective border security solutions. But the president is rejecting these bipartisan bills which would reopen government.” Did you follow that? Because I didn’t when listening live. “Democrats passed Senate Republican legislation?” It’s a classic writing mistake: In an effort to be concise, Pelosi sacrificed clarity.

Sanders, meanwhile, was an effective communicator: “As many of you will recall, on December 18, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to keep the government open. Unanimously. No Democrat or Republican opposed the bill that passed the Senate.” The explanation was plain, and the takeaway repeated for emphasis: “unanimously.”

And most importantly, Sanders used Trump’s admission that the shutdown was his own fault against him: “President Trump has made it very clear who is responsible. As you will all recall in a very public meeting he held in the Oval Office, he said, and I quote, “I am proud to shut down the government … I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you [Chuck Schumer] for it.”

That both Schumer and Pelosi got through their remarks — the eyes of millions of Americans on them — without once quoting that language back to the president is in and of itself an act of mind-blowing political negligence.

The temptation to fact-check is understandable. And a certain amount of fact-checking is necessary to keep Trump accountable. But poking holes in Trump’s narrative, by itself, is not enough.

Sanders addressed Mitch McConnell directly, asking that the Senate majority leader respect the bipartisan consensus coming out of the House and bring the Democrats’ identical Senate bill to a vote; and he deftly used the statements of Trump’s own agencies against him — appealing to the authority of “Trump’s own State Department” and “Trump’s own Drug Enforcement Administration” to undermine some of the president’s lies about the connection between border crossings and terrorism or the drug crisis.

And he wisely emphasized those immigration-related policies that draw substantial bipartisan consensus — like the DACA program, which Trump has threatened, and Trump’s policy of separating children at the border. (It goes without saying that Schumer and Pelosi mentioned neither. They never even mentioned the appalling cost of the wall: $70 billion. Sanders did).

But perhaps more stunning than Sanders’s performance was that of Ocasio-Cortez, who in a few short minutes on Rachel Maddow’s show was able to undermine Trump’s narrative by appealing not just to the humanity of native-born Americans, but by speaking to the inherent dignity and value of immigrants themselves.

“[Trump] talked about what happened the day after Christmas? The day of Christmas, a child died in ICE custody,” she emphasized with a level of authentic passion that feels strangely out of place on the evening news (but shouldn’t). It wasn’t the fact-checking that went viral. It was this simple claim to human decency.

And this is an important point: The temptation to fact-check is understandable. And a certain amount of fact-checking is necessary to keep Trump accountable. But poking holes in Trump’s narrative, by itself, is not enough.

There is enough truth in Trump’s description of the struggles Americans face that it can’t be refuted with claims that he didn’t get the story exactly right. The narrative threads that represent accurate claims about the problems of everyday Americans need to be spun into something more authentic than what Trump is offering — a story that respects the victims, but points to an enemy with actual teeth. A compelling counter-narrative: Immigrants didn’t cause the opioid epidemic, the pharmaceutical industry did. Immigrants didn’t depress wages — politicians doing the bidding of concentrated corporate power did.

Trump cannot be allowed to make himself the face of compassion for average Americans — not even Republicans. To prevent that from happening, the Democratic Party needs representatives who bear some relationship to ordinary people — not the well-preserved totems to the anti-aging powers of wealth that spawned a thousand memes last night.

Both Trump on the one hand, and Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders on the other, identified several crises, but perhaps the most exigent is the crisis of leadership. It’s either time for Democrats to learn, or it’s time for them to change the guard.

The post What’s The Matter With the Democratic Party? Just Watch Pelosi and Schumer Respond to Trump’s Wall Speech. appeared first on The Intercept.

Just before the new year, Steve Phillips, senior fellow at liberal think tank Center for American Progress, filed paperwork to launch a Super PAC to support New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s anticipated 2020 run. The announcement raises a number of red flags, including about the choice to rely on Super PACs at a time when voters are increasingly skeptical of large campaign donations. But perhaps the most concerning issue is that Phillips’s involvement with Booker’s campaign may represent the further deprioritization of ideology among Democratic politicians.

Let me explain.

The dominant lens through which Philips understands politics is demographic. He is the author of “Brown is the New White,” a New York Times best-seller about how America’s growing nonwhite population is the key to the Democratic Party’s success. Phillips believes that Democrats should prioritize mobilizing nonvoting Americans of color (which it should). But he also argues that Democrats should not “waste money” appealing to white swing voters, derisively rejecting “conventional wisdom” that advocates for “empathy for the anxiety of moderate white voters.” According to Philips, because there is a “ceiling” of white support, courting white voters offers diminishing returns.

Of course, the “demographics as destiny” strategy didn’t pan out in the 2016 presidential election. To the extent that there is a ceiling for white voters set by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton didn’t reach it — nabbing only 75 percent of the white voters who backed Obama. If she had matched Obama’s numbers among white voters, she would have won, making it difficult to argue that fortifying the Obama coalition would be a “waste.”

The thing is, although much is made of the browning of America, the country is still 70 percent white, and electoral strategies that are wholly dismissive of that population set themselves at an unnecessary disadvantage. America’s “browning” is largely attributed to the fact that Hispanics constitute the largest growing ethnic group in the country. But a majority of Hispanics identify as white, and one third continue to support Donald Trump despite his nativist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Americans need a reason to go to the polls — something that makes them feel like their vote matters. Something more than being anti-Trump. Something ideological.

And even if they didn’t so identify, melanin doesn’t guarantee Democratic support. Of the 4.3 million Obama voters who stayed home or voted for third parties in 2016, a third were black. So as important as it is to register voters, ensuring access to franchise is not enough. Americans need a reason to go to the polls — something that makes them feel like their vote matters. Something more than being anti-Trump. Something ideological.

And yet since 2016, the effort to understand the ideological inertia that motivated Trump’s victory has met resistance from establishment Democrats, many of whom, perhaps defensively, limit their analysis of 2016 to Trump’s open bigotry and Russian interference. Recently, this trend has reached absurd levels.

In the course of last month’s Twitter dispute over whether three articles criticizing Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s voting record constituted an unfair “attack” from the far left fans of Bernie Sanders, feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte argued that the famously no-nonsense and reclusive senator’s appeal is actually about his charisma, not his politics. “The evidence suggests that [Bernie] Sanders did well in the primaries, not because of his progressive views,” she tweeted, “but because his voters were attracted to a charismatic white guy they viewed as an outsider.” She argued that if charisma and whiteness were all it took to attract a Bernie-sized following, then Beto offers a younger, better option. “Beto is far more that future in 2020 than Bernie,” she wrote.

Journalist Jamil Smith offered a similarly reductive non-ideological take on Sanders’s popularity, suggesting recently that “a significant portion of Bernie’s support came from white guys unwilling to vote for a woman.” In O’Rourke, he argued, those voters might have found “a new white, male candidate.”

In fact, Sanders voters are the least likely to hold bigoted views about black people, according to a widely circulated study depicting the comparative racism of 2016 voters — most coverage of which excluded Sanders voters. Sanders also has the highest approval rating among nonwhites compared to other 2020 candidates. Ignoring Sanders’s long record of anti-racism stretching from civil rights-era protests to his recent bail reform bill, Smith cited the fact that 1 in 10 Sanders voters backed Trump as evidence that Sanders’s appeal is rooted in racism. But the fact that in 2008, Clinton voters were 2.5 times more likely to vote for John “I Hate Gooks” McCain over the first black president is rarely considered to be reflective of the racial equality bonafides of her backers.

Both of these arguments, so plainly errant as to feel like gaslighting, are part of a larger rhetorical trend toward divorcing voter preferences from ideology. Wittingly or not, the effect is to undermine the obvious power of progressive ideas. If Sanders’s appeal can be reduced to charisma, then he can easily be replaced by a younger, more charismatic candidate who is friendlier to big-money interests. If his support is the result of racism or sexism, then his political message can be dismissed as the fruit of that poisonous tree, and other, more diverse candidates can become powerful symbols for anti racism — even if their records betray their commitment to people of color.

As Peter Beinart recently observed in The Atlantic, “The best hope for Democrats who don’t want to purge corporations from the party might be a presidential candidate with a less confrontational economic message who enjoys widespread African American or Latino support. Booker could be such a candidate. So could Kamala Harris or O’Rourke. Which is why skirmishes like the one that pitted the Center for American Progress’s Neera Tanden against supporters of Bernie Sanders will likely only escalate in the year and a half to come.”

Americans firmly agree that the system is rigged, its political institutions are failing the people, and that the American dream — already inaccessible to many due to structural prejudice — is increasingly out of reach.

But here’s the thing: Most Americans do want to limit the reach of corporate influence.

In an increasingly polarized nation, Americans firmly agree that the system is rigged, its political institutions are failing the people, and that the American dream — already inaccessible to many due to structural prejudice — is increasingly out of reach even for the white men who, historically, have disproportionately benefited from it.

I’d argue that the most important American divide to keep in mind going into 2020 isn’t red versus blue, North versus South, coastal versus “flyover,” but insider versus outsider — what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., renders as the bottom versus the top. The popularity of both Trump and Sanders (and arguably Obama in 2008) suggests that the real silent American majority is this constituency of the aggrieved. If Democrats ignore it, Trump will continue to satisfy many of these voters with nativism and bigotry. The alternative is for Democrats to speak more vividly to their specific concerns: The answer to “they’re taking our jobs” is a Green New Deal, not “America is already great.”

But power brokers in both parties have an interest in minimizing the currency of that broadly shared ideology.

Organizations like Third Way, a centrist think tank founded in 2005 to marry center-right economic policy with center-left social policy, have been leading the charge against ideology as a political organizing tool. In 2017, it commissioned a 23-city bus tour to collect empirical evidence about why Trump won — a “safari in flyover country.” But according to Molly Ball at The Atlantic, who covered the tour, Third Way’s conclusion that voters wanted moderation and pragmatism contrasted with what voters expressed on the ground: “All these centrist ideals,” said one Wisconsin cafe owner, “are just perpetuating a broken system.”

And recently, Third Way tweeted that Sanders’s “ideas were crushed in the midterms” and argued that “Democrats must say no to litmus tests” — in other words, ideological standards by which voters should judge candidates beyond “is a Democrat” or “isn’t one.”

Last Thursday, the anti-ideological trend continued with a Washington Post op-ed by Terry McAuliffe, former governor of Virginia, Democratic National Committee chair, and close affiliate of the Clintons, who argued that “ideological populism” is “playing on Trump’s turf,” and that voters are looking for “realistic solutions.” A federal jobs guarantee, he argued, is “too good to be true,” as is universal free college. “Medicare for All” didn’t even get a mention in his piece. Instead, McAuliffe focused on expanding the Affordable Care Act and curbing high pharmaceutical prices — this despite the fact that 70 percent of all Americans, including a slim majority of Republicans, support “Medicare for All.” Sixty percent of Americans also support free college. And as of this spring, nearly half of Americans support a federal jobs guarantee.

The pragmatic approach is the progressive one.

These numbers indicate that the pragmatic approach is the progressive one — which explains, more than Sanders’s “charisma,” why many top 2020 contenders like Booker, Harris, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., have shifted left over the last couple years. Voters also appreciate that even explicit commitments to politics can be undermined by monied interests, which is perhaps why these candidates have also taken the no corporate PAC pledge.

But the center-left too often rejects this framing. Rather than credit the critique of O’Rourke, which centered on his breach of a “no fossil fuel” pledge and frequent votes with conservatives — including votes that helped fossil fuel interests — as sincere, it has endeavored to characterize the criticism as a pre-textual attempt to defend Sanders’s status as a uniquely progressive vanguard. Rather than ask what standards the party should have — what litmus test should exist — it blithely blurs the lines, seeing political opportunity in ideological ambiguity.

But a bold, clear ideology is precisely what excites Americans. Look at Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist whose social media feeds have become envy of the entire political establishment. Over the holidays, O’Rourke, Gillibrand, Harris, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., all tried to match the enthusiasm Ocasio-Cortez has piqued around her late-night livestreams during which she cooks dinner and chops it up about policy. But these attempts have fallen short. What these politicians don’t get is that Ocasio-Cortez’s magic isn’t in the medium. It’s in the message.

Ocasio-Cortez understands (more than most pundits) that her victory and subsequent popularity can’t be reduced to charisma or mere demographics. As she (sub)tweeted: “A few social media ideas for public servants looking to build an audience: Endorse Single-Payer Medicare for All. Hold Wall Street Accountable. Make Min Wage = Living Wage. . . Support a Federal Jobs Guarantee, Bail Out Student Debt, Legalize Marijuana & Explore Reparations, Baby Bonds.”

Ocasio-Cortez is a one-woman litmus test generator.

In direct contrast with Third Way’s warning against litmus tests, Ocasio-Cortez is a one-woman litmus test generator. When she takes to Instagram Live or Twitter, she’s setting new standards for transparency that feel fresh and unfamiliar to voters inured to the self-preserving conservatism of politicians. She’s not just cooking. She’s cooking with fire.

Unfortunately, that lesson is far from learned.

To many Democrats, the distinction between Sanders and other 2020 hopefuls, including O’Rourke, has become one without much difference. In a recent interview with NBC, Jon Favreau, Obama’s former speech writer, described O’Rourke, Sanders, Harris, and “others” who are likely to run all as “progressives.” Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden repeatedly bristles at any suggestion that the Sanders wing of the party represents a significant ideological departure from her own. “What are you talking about,” she tweeted in response to a journalist’s claim that CAP pulls the Democratic Party to the right. “You don’t get to define what is and is not progressive.”

But while no one writer is an authority on what makes a progressive, the word becomes meaningless if, like Tanden and Favreau, it’s applied evenly to an ideologically broad range of people.

Tanden, for example, would count Hillary Clinton and Justin Trudeau among progressives, despite the former’s reluctance to adopt what have become widely popular programs like single-payer health care and a $15 minimum wage, and the latter’s broadly centrist politics. CAP describes itself as “progressive,” but neither CAP nor its current chair, former Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle, have come out in support of “Medicare for All” — despite Daschle once considering single payer to be “inevitable.” Daschel is now a health care lobbyist who was recently named as a potential surrogate for a pharma-backed bipartisan campaign against “Medicare for All.” Is that the face of progressivism?

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic argued recently on Twitter that “Beto people are not irrational or superficial for looking for a candidate who appeals for non-ideological reasons.”

But choosing to support a candidate for reasons other than their ideology — their expressed policy prescriptions — is definitionally superficial. It’s also illogical when you consider that authenticity brings its own rewards. This is a lesson that needs to be learned sooner rather than later. It’s 2019 after all.

The post Progressive Ideas Matter to Voters. So Why Do Democrats Fixate on the Identity of the Messenger? appeared first on The Intercept.

Earlier this month, Hyde-Smith made headlines when she said of one of her supporters that “if he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” She is running against Mike Espy, who is black, and to many, the comment evoked the state’s history of lynchings of African-Americans. The next day, Hyde-Smith was recorded endorsing voter suppression on college campuses, specifically saying that “there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools that maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it a little more difficult.”

Reporters investigating Hyde-Smith’s background have since discovered that the former state senator posted a picture of herself with Confederate artifacts on Facebook, and that as a state legislator, she backed a resolution that promoted a revisionist history of the Civil War sympathetic to the side defending slavery. The Jackson Free Press also reported that Hyde-Smith attended a segregated private academy that was founded to circumvent desegregation orders. Hyde-Smith sent her daughter to a similar school, from which she graduated last year.

Following the negative media attention, political action committees affiliated with Facebook, Major League Baseball, Google, Pfizer, Leidos, Walmart, Union Pacific, Boston Scientific, Amgen, AT&T, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Ernst & Young have requested that their donations be refunded. Several of these companies specifically evoked Hyde-Smith’s “divisive” statements or their commitment to diversity and inclusion as the reason for withdrawing financial support. Pfizer condemned “racism and bigotry in all its forms” in a statement to the Washington Examiner.

But at least a dozen other national companies and organizations that have donated to Hyde-Smith’s campaign have not publicly asked for their donations back.

According to Federal Election Commission filings, PACs for media companies like Comcast/NBCUniversal have contributed to Hyde-Smith’s campaign, as have those for corporations like Amazon, Ford, Delta Airlines, UPS, FedEx, and Best Buy. Major financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and PricewaterhouseCoopers have also given to Hyde-Smith’s re-election effort, as have law firms DLA Piper and Hogan Lovells. Even the American Kennel Club is a donor.

A spokesperson for UPS did not distance the company from its PAC’s donation. The Intercept has reached out to the other companies listed above to see if they stand by their support, and will update this story with their responses.

Other notable contributors include four members of the DeVos family, which made its billions by co-founding Amway. Daniel DeVos, CEO of DP Fox Ventures and majority owner, president, and CEO of the professional hockey team the Grand Rapids Griffins, has given $2,700, as have Amway President Doug DeVos and Suzanne DeVos, vice president of corporate affairs at Amway and sister to Doug and Daniel. Betsy DeVos, secretary of education for the Trump administration, is married to the fourth sibling, Dick DeVos.

Until Hyde-Smith’s stumbles, the special election runoff for the Senate seat opened up by Thad Cochran’s resignation last April received comparatively little media coverage and very little support from the national Democratic Party. This was also true of Mississippi’s other Senate race this year, which Democratic challenger David Baria lost to incumbent Republican Roger Wicker.

Although President Donald Trump visited Mississippi to campaign for Hyde-Smith in late October (and came back to the state to campaign for Hyde-Smith yesterday), the highest-profile politicians to stump for Espy prior to the midterms were former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Espy’s path to victory requires Barack Obama-level turnout, but although the former president did a lot of campaigning during the midterms in states like Illinois, Georgia and Florida, he skipped Mississippi, where he won over 43 percent of voters in 2008. (Booker has returned to the state to campaign for Espy since the midterms, and newly elected Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley flew to Mississippi over the weekend to help get out the vote.)

Moreover, as The Intercept reported, the Republican Party outspent the Democrats 4 to 1 in the state, and while Republican candidates benefited from millions in independent expenditures, Democrats garnered lesser amounts. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, spent over $26 million on independent expenditures targeting Republican candidates, but none of that money was leveraged against Hyde-Smith prior to the November 8 midterms (when Espy came in second in the first round of the special election). PowerPAC, which is dedicated to electing diverse candidates, has spent $91,000 in support of Espy since the midterms, while People for the American Way, a liberal PAC founded by television producer Norman Lear, and Progressive Turn Out PAC both made substantial contributions to Espy’s campaign on Sunday. But the DSCC has not contributed directly.

By contrast, the National Republican Congressional Committee has given over $21,000 to Hyde-Smith’s campaign since the midterms, adding to a post-midterm independent expenditure haul of nearly $470,000.

In terms of direct contributions, since November 6, Espy has brought in a little more than $56,000, of which Act Blue, a Democratic PAC, contributed nearly $19,000. Hyde-Smith has raked in nearly $110,000 during that same period.

That imbalance carries over to spending on advertising as well. Hyde-Smith and her supporters spent approximately $2.7 million on broadcast and cable ads between November 7 and 24, while Espy’s camp spent $1.2 million. Espy has run three ads for every four of Hyde-Smith’s. Hyde-Smith’s ads have attempted to paint Espy, a moderate, as aligned with a “leftist mob,” leveraging resentment over opposition to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh against him. Espy’s ads paint Hyde-Smith as a “disaster” who has embarrassed the state with her recent comments.

The Washington Post reported that the DSCC continues to be “hesitant to elaborate” on how or how much it’s spending on Espy’s race. “It’s a Mississippi race run by Mississippians,” DSCC senior adviser Ben Ray told the Daily Beast. Moreover, the Democratic Party seems as reluctant to use the racial controversy to raise money or galvanize voters now as they were before the midterms. Democratic consultant Joe Trippi tweeted the video of Hyde-Smith’s milquetoast apology for her “hanging” comment with a request for donations to Espy’s campaign, but the Democratic National Committee has not followed suit.

The Washington Post characterized the DNC’s reticence as “strategically disciplined” — “part of an effort to minimize any perception that Washington is pulling the strings in Espy’s campaign.” That may be right, but their hands-off approach is consistent with the party’s historical attitude to Mississippi and is in line with a broader pattern of abandoning so-called red states as lost causes — a pattern which some, including, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., think should end.

Arguably, the attention Espy is now receiving would have been more helpful prior to the midterms when the Republican vote was split between Hyde-Smith and Chris McDaniel. McDaniel nabbed only 16 percent of the vote, while Hyde-Smith won 41.3 percent and Espy got 40.9 percent. Polls predicted that Espy’s best shot at victory was a runoff with tea party candidate McDaniel, who did not enjoy the Republican Party’s support and was even more right wing and controversial than Hyde-Smith (he put the Confederate flag on his lawn signs). An NBC News/Marist poll had Espy up 7 points in a race against McDaniel, while a Mason-Dixon poll put Espy up by 2.

By comparison, the most recent surveys put Espy 10 points behind Hyde-Smith, with polls closing tonight at 8 p.m. ET. Democrats hope that high African-American turnout will push Espy to victory over his controversial opponent as it did for Alabama Sen. Doug Jones in his race against accused child molester Roy Moore. At 37 percent, Mississippi has the highest proportion of black Americans of any state, but to win, Espy would need to earn the support of one out of four white voters, in addition to getting 95 percent of black voters to vote for him at turnout levels not seen since Obama’s candidacies.

The post Amazon and UPS Stay Silent as Other Corporate Donors Renounce Support for Racist Mississippi Senate Campaign appeared first on The Intercept.

Google “is Trump racist?” and you’ll find that just within the last week, at least three major news outlets have taken on that very question.

At the Chicago Tribune, columnist Clarence Page asked, “Is President Trump a racist — or does he just act like one?” At CNN, Mallory Simon and Sara Sidner offer that “Trump says he’s not a racist,” but “[t]hat’s not how white nationalists see it.” And at New York magazine, the headline doesn’t hide the ball, declaring: “The Republican Denial of Trump’s Racism Is Absurd.”

I tend to agree. Over the past year, a consensus seems to have finally formed — at least among the broad political left — that President Donald Trump is, in fact, racist. Liberals have largely backed away from euphemisms like “racially charged” and “racialized” and just started speaking plainly. “Just Say It,” read a headline last January in the New York Times. “Trump Is a Racist.”

But the question of how politicians should characterize Trump supporters is a different matter altogether. Some Trump voters are certainly racist. But is it worth the strategic risk for politicians to call them out?

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., found himself in hot water last week when, in a clumsy quote to the Daily Beast, he said that voters who rejected black candidates because they are black might not be racist.

Sanders’s full remarks, cut from the Daily Beast article but released later in an audio clip, included a strong condemnation of racism. When asked to comment on the “race-oriented” nature of the gubernatorial campaigns waged by Brian Kemp of Georgia and Ron DeSantis of Florida against African-American candidates Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, respectively, Sanders corrected the reporter, saying, “Why don’t we use the right word — not use the phrase ‘race-oriented.’ Why don’t we say ‘racist,’ how’s that?” Sanders went on to describe Gillum as having had to take on some of the most “blatant and ugly racism that we have seen in many, many years.”

But when discussing whether voters themselves, rather than the candidates, might have acted out of racism, Sanders seemed to equivocate. “There are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist, who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their life about, you know, whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American,” he said.

Of course, as many have pointed out, Sanders’s comment didn’t make much sense. Declining to vote for a candidate because of their race is, by definition, racist, and Sanders should have known better than to suggest otherwise.

But much of the criticism that followed focused on Sanders’s perceived tendency to “downplay” racism — a claim that isn’t supported by the interview transcript or his subsequent statement, in which he said, “Let me be absolutely clear: Donald Trump, Brian Kemp, and Ron DeSantis ran racist campaigns. … They used racist rhetoric to divide people and advance agendas that would harm the majority of Americans.” On NPR later that day, he explained that “there’s no question that in Georgia and in Florida, racism has reared its ugly head, and you have candidates who ran against Gillum and ran against Stacey Abrams who were racist and were doing everything they could to try to play whites against blacks.” He’s been similarly blunt before, as in an August MSNBC appearance, when he said, “I think we have to do a heck of a lot better getting through to some of those people. I am not going to deny for a second that some of those supporters are racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes. That’s true.” But, he said, “I don’t believe that’s a majority.”

In response, some critics still observed that “in neither statement did Sanders indict voters for backing racists candidates.” To them, it wasn’t enough for Sanders to call out racism or racist politicians. The litmus test seemed to be whether he would call voters racist. And that reopened a debate, familiar from when Hillary Clinton labeled Trump voters “deplorables,” about how politicians ought to address racist voters. Should they call out racists, or should politicians avoid that confrontation in hopes of building a broad coalition that can better attack racist policies and systems?

A politician must be persuasive. She must be many things for many people. She must represent the masses, and appeal to thousands, if not millions.

Consequently, setting aside extreme examples like white supremacists, terrorists, or abusers, politicians often take “the customer is always right” approach when it comes to voters. They might be cajoled, but they’re rarely criticized.

Instances in which politicians publicly contradict average voters are so rare and unexpected that they become iconic, as when late Sen. John McCain clumsily corrected a supporter who claimed that then-Sen. Barack Obama was “an Arab,” and thus couldn’t be trusted; or when Texas congressional candidate Beto O’Rourke voiced support for Colin Kaepernick in response to a constituent who found the football player’s protests “disrespectful.”

It takes courage to contradict a constituent when one’s career depends on votes, and moments of political and personal integrity are rightly celebrated. But even in these instances, O’Rourke and McCain understood that voters needed to be treated, well, politically.

McCain didn’t call the woman who objected to Obama on the (mistaken) basis of his identity a racist — even though choosing to reject a candidate on racial grounds undoubtedly is. And O’Rourke didn’t argue that antipathy for the NFL Black Lives Matter protests is rooted in anti-blackness, though he’d be justified in doing so. Instead, both men responded with strategic grace. Notably, O’Rourke set the stage for productive communication by first offering that “reasonable people can disagree on this issue,” and establishing that it makes people “no less American to come down on a different conclusion on this issue.”

Whether or not you agree that reasonable minds can differ on the issue of police violence, it’s hard to argue that O’Rourke’s soft touch didn’t help his argument. His approach — which some might call “good politics” — acknowledges what Zak Cheney-Rice, writing about Sanders in New York magazine, noted when he said that “calling racist white people ‘racist’ is probably a good way to ensure they do not vote for you.” At 72 percent of the country, white Americans are still a necessary part of any political coalition, and the geographic distribution of ethnic groups combined with our electoral college system means white votes are weighted more heavily than others.

Clinton felt the consequences of labeling voters racist when her “deplorables” gaffe became one of the more notable controversies of her 2016 presidential campaign. And Gillum seemed to appreciate the danger of calling his Republican opponent racist outright, saying instead, “I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.” (Even that deft sidestep might have hurt Gillum, who lost the election.)

Obama — who negotiated the third rail that is American racial politics more successfully than perhaps any other politician — declined to directly confront racists. During his famous “race speech” in 2008, he went out of his way to emphasize that although his own white grandmother exhibited prejudice, she sacrificed for him and loved him “as much as she loves anything in this world” — a framing choice that seemed to recognize that he would get further by lighting a path for those with bigoted beliefs to join the fold than by shaming them. He didn’t win by calling out racist voters, but by suggesting that they could be “more perfect.”

Like it or not, the opinions of white voters matter, and politicians have to balance the validation that marginalized communities deserve against the anxieties of white voters. As Cheney-Rice noted, it’s frustrating that white voters’ sensitivity about being called racist often becomes a more central part of the national conversation than the actual consequences of experiencing racism.

The consequences of not considering white voters in one’s political messaging strategy are more than just frustrating.

But the consequences of not considering white voters in one’s political messaging strategy are more than just frustrating. To millions of black and brown people, LGBTQ Americans, women, immigrants, and differently abled people, they are existential. In just the last two years, voting protections have been bulldozed, transgender rights stripped, and the deficit exploded on a tax giveaway to the rich — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If Democrats can’t win in 2020, things will only get worse.

Cheney-Rice worries that an “unwillingness to alienate racist voters inevitably leads to coddling racist voters” — an understandable and common concern. But I’d argue that there’s nothing inevitable about it. To the extent that politicians have put the interests of white voters before others, it’s been a choice, and not something intrinsic to multiracial coalition building.

Too often, politicians, including Democrats, have exploited racial bias to gain power in this majority-white but ethnically diverse country. The third-way strategy perfected by Bill Clinton relied on right-wing racism to keep nonwhites in line with the Democratic Party while he pivoted hard to the center — branding himself as a welfare-slashing, tough-on-crime candidate who was so invested in capturing the “law and order” vote that he paused his first presidential campaign to personally oversee the execution of a functionally lobotomized black man.

Unlike many Republicans and some moderate Democrats, many progressive candidates today seek to erect a big tent by offering broad-based, universal policies — not by weaponizing identity politics. Despite rejecting white majoritarianism and relying instead on cross-racial, class-based solidarity, they’re often met with understandable, if undeserved, skepticism. Words like “pandering,” “courting,” and “coddling” — as well as newer slang, like “caping for whites” — are frequently bandied about when the political motives of white voters are interrogated beyond the question of racism.

But not all politicking is pandering, and it’s incumbent on journalists to be observant about the difference: Are racist sentiments or group stereotypes being exploited, or are the interests of various groups being authentically met? If we treat genuine, if messy, efforts at communication and cynical identity politicking the same way, we run the real risk of derailing efforts to deliver maximum benefits to the most vulnerable among us. And the vulnerable simply can’t afford it.

Clinton’s defenders often point out that her “deplorables” speech was accurate: that anyone who would endorse the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia coming out of the Trump administration is deplorable.

Some Trump voters are undoubtedly racist. But racism is a popular and bipartisan endeavor. A much touted Reuters/Ipsos poll from 2016 showed that over 30 percent of Trump voters think blacks are less “intelligent” than whites, while 40 percent think we’re “lazy.” But the fact that 20 percent of Clinton voters agree went underreported. That number is especially troubling when you consider that without the 22 percent of Clinton voters who are black, there might not be much daylight between white voters regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

The prevalence of racism means that most accusations of racism are accurate — if only by broad definitions that include implicit bias, or structural systems in which most Americans are complicit. But as common as it is, few people see themselves as racist, and that fact neuters the efficacy of accusations of racism. The accused often react defensively and become even more resistant to change. “Telling people they’re racist, sexist, and xenophobic is going to get you exactly nowhere,” says Alana Conner, executive director of Stanford University’s Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions Center. “It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen.” As I’ve argued before, shaming, though cathartic, just doesn’t work.

This gulf between what racism is and what the average American understands racism to be is at the root of this racial double bind. Whether to call out voters isn’t always a question of political temerity. It can be a matter of political strategy.

Whether to call out voters isn’t always a question of political temerity. It can be a matter of political strategy.

The difference between Sanders and some other Democratic politicians (and liberal voters) is not a reluctance to call out racism. It’s that he’s not willing to write off people who hold bigoted beliefs as beyond political reach — perhaps understanding that racism is a pathology avoided by few. It’s the difference between seeing racism as something mutable and susceptible to the influence of persuasion (e.g., politics), or something intrinsic, static, and essentially corrupting.

I’ve always thought the more problematic part of Clinton’s statement was her deployment of the word “irredeemable.” Irredeemable voters don’t just hold abhorrent views. They’re permanently, essentially toxic. By calling half of Trump voters — millions of Americans — “deplorables,” she transmuted an adjective into a noun, and morphed bad actions and beliefs into untouchable people. One’s personal antipathy for racism shouldn’t preclude understanding that a president, responsible for all who live within her nation’s borders, shouldn’t consider any constituents beyond saving.

On some level, liberals seem to agree that racism is mutable. Despite somewhat deterministic historical accounts which have become popular in recent years, they celebrate the fact that higher education is correlated with liberal political views — as is living in racially mixed urban areas. But although they acknowledge that exposure to diversity is a balm for bigotry, many still scoff at middle-American conservatism as though their politics wouldn’t likely be different if they’d been born in Boise, Idaho.

Sanders takes the more humanistic approach. He has been rebuked repeatedly for believing that some Trump voters could be flipped, and for declining to write off all of them as “irredeemable.” He has been criticized for carving out space for their rehabilitation and reintegration into the Democratic party — even while he’s clear that not all can be convinced. For over two years now he has traveled the country — visiting parts of America long abandoned by the Democratic Party — red states full of black voters and white states that used to go blue — selling America on progressive policies that have consequently become mainstream. But few who criticize him pause to reflect on the relationship between Sanders’s inclusive, nonjudgmental approach and the increasing currency of his ideas.

In his statement following the Daily Beast article, Sanders threaded this needle well. He seemed to draw on a Demos report from earlier this year, which shows that so-called persuadable voters — those that fall in the middle of the political spectrum — are most receptive to political messaging that condemns the 1 percent for exploiting racial division. By appealing to voters’ belief that they aren’t racist, that they are better than divisive rhetoric, those voters are offered an opportunity to position themselves on the side of anti-racism, and against the more powerful enemy: corporate oligarchs. “It’s not just that politicians divide us based on what we look like, but that they do it to rewrite the rules to line their pockets,” was one message that tested well, according to the Demos study. “It’s not just that they generate fear based on race, but that they do it to benefit the wealthy few at our expense,” was another. Or, as Sanders put it in his response last Thursday, “They used racist rhetoric to divide people and advance agendas that would harm the majority of Americans.”

So is the answer ignoring individual racism? Not at all. I only question the utility of calling voters racists — not policies, or politicians, or other public figures. Nor am I suggesting that politicians should stay silent on biased remarks or behaviors — no matter who voices them. But pointing out acts, beliefs, or systems as racist is different, and more effective, than focusing on individuals, who are likely to become defensive and resistant to change. It’s not that politicians should do anything to win, but they shouldn’t tether themselves to a strategy that neither lessens racism nor helps them access the political power necessary to better people’s lives.

If the Democrats want any chance of winning in 2020, they should reconsider whether they want to force their most compelling and progressive politicians into an unwinnable double bind.

The post Calling Out Racist Voters Is Satisfying. But It Comes at a Political Cost. appeared first on The Intercept.

The energy in the room up to that point had been jubilant. Unlike her primary watch party, at which the then-28-year-old learned of her stunning upset over 10-time incumbent Joe Crowley, this event was packed from the start, with a line at the door. The large space in the New York City neighborhood of Woodside, Queens, was filled with smiling young people in Ocasio-Cortez’s now-iconic purple and white campaign T-shirts, accessorized with millennial flair: rolled sleeves, oversized earrings, and, of course, red lipstick. A live flamenco band inspired dancing. Later, members of the crowd occasionally paired off as Latin music rang out. At one point, while I was talking to Justice Democrats founding member Alexandra Rojas, the music shifted and she paused, scanning the crowd. Her mom, she anticipated, was probably dancing somewhere. This was a song she couldn’t resist.

But halfway through Ocasio-Cortez’s victory speech, the politics of the outside world breached the ebullient sanctum of the party. CNN had called Beto O’Rourke’s loss to Ted Cruz, whose face hung above the room on large screens, temporarily tipping attention away from Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks.

It took a beat before Ocasio-Cortez realized what had happened. She had been about to hit one of her more popular points — highlighting the gap between America’s unprecedented wealth and the paltry support offered to the poorest among us — when groans escaped from the crowd.

“Right now, in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, our greatest scarcity is not a lack of resources —” Ocasio-Cortez paused and repeated the line before realizing that the dispirited crowd wasn’t reacting to her words, but to the screen above their heads. “Oh, sorry guys. I was like, ‘Whoa! Room turned fast!’”

The crowd laughed, grateful, it seemed, for some levity in the face of a hard-felt defeat. “But, you know what?” improvised Ocasio-Cortez, sensitive to the fact that the crowd needed comforting before she continued with her prepared remarks. “What we need to do as well is realize that these short-term losses do not mean that we have lost in the long run. It does not. In 2018, we turned the state of Texas purple. That’s what we did this year.” The crowd rallied.

“We are going to flip that state in our generation, I’ll tell you that much right now. We will flip Texas; it’s just a matter of time. We should never be scared. There is never any fight that is too big for us to pick. We proved that this year.” She went on. “When we advocate and champion the causes of our neighbors and our economic dignity, and come with innovative and ambitious plans for our future, there is no state beyond our grasp, and no community beyond victory. We just need to keep at it.”

With that, she slipped back into her victory speech more seamlessly than politicians who have been giving speeches for as long as Ocasio-Cortez has been alive.

What could have come off as an empty platitude resonated instead as much needed perspective. On a night filled with hard losses, including three high-profile governor’s races featuring compelling black candidates, it was easy to forget that coming so close to victory in parts of the country long deemed irredeemable represented progress in and of itself.

What last night revealed was that the red and blue troughs that define America’s political battleground are shallowly dug. In the industrial Midwest, newly minted Trump country, incumbent Democrats cruised to victory. Sharice Davids, a lesbian Native American, who is also a mixed martial arts fighter, ousted a Republican incumbent in deep-red Kansas; that same state, which Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders were ridiculed for visiting just a few months ago, now has a Democratic governor. They didn’t go blue, but states like Texas and Mississippi and Georgia did go purple. And as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, that ain’t nothin’.

In fact, too frequently, politicians talk about red states and blue states — Donald Trump country and Hillary Clinton suburbs — as though the politics of people from these communities are as fixed as the gerrymandered districts they live in. Defying this logic, the Obama-to-Trump voter becomes a chimera uneasily dispatched with the truism that “one can be racist and vote for Obama,” while the inverse truth — that racist Trump voters could be convinced to vote for Democrats again — is dismissed by much of the pundit class as an attempt to pander to bigots. Meanwhile, despite polls showing otherwise, white Democrats are framed as being beyond racism: Voting for a Democrat seems absolution enough.

Nonwhites are flattened to the point of caricature. The diversity of a district becomes a shorthand for its progressivism — as though over one-third of Latinx Texans didn’t vote for Cruz — and the needs of minority voters are perceived as only skin-deep, even while universal causes like “Medicare for All” stand to benefit some of us much more.

This understanding of politics lacks imagination and insight. And importantly, it hasn’t worked. The job of politics isn’t just poll-based prognosticating, or deducing what we must believe from who we are and pandering accordingly. It’s the work of communication, of persuasion, of listening to people and crafting an agenda that meets their needs — and then of conveying that plan on a human level that supersedes partisanship. This is perhaps the most singular and important job of a politician: relating an empathic understanding of the people’s concerns; not just responding to polls, but sparking a movement that shifts poll results altogether.

Listening to Ocasio-Cortez succeed at this essential political task should remind us how few politicians are up to the task.

As she put it to me in an interview last night, “I think that when we truly listen to the communities that we are running in, [when] we are really connecting with the everyday people on the ground, it requires a progressive message to animate a disaffected electorate that has not historically come out. And so what I hope we learn, and what I hope we adopt moving forward, is to not be afraid of our values — to not be afraid of differentiating ourselves from the Republican Party, and really committing and doubling down to our vision.”

At the root of Ocasio-Cortez’s message has always been the understanding that what we have in common is more significant than what divides us. This is not a trite kumbaya observation intended to paper over real differences that require real political solutions, but rather an insight rooted in the reality that despite our politics, Americans understand intuitively that human dignity should be inalienable. As Ocasio-Cortez ultimately noted, following her impromptu remarks on Cruz’s victory: “Right now, in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, our greatest scarcity is not a lack of resources, but the absence of political courage and moral imagination.”

It takes political courage to call for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a time when immigration is the country’s most perilous third rail. And it takes moral imagination to use the undeniable power of human dignity to leverage support for universal health care and a living wage.

If Trump has taught us nothing else, it is that boldness is rewarded, and conviction can be its own currency. Yesterday, authenticity was on the ballot with every candidate who forsook corporate political action money, challenged party orthodoxy with progressive policy positions, and dared to articulate a vision of the future rooted in values instead of polls. Yesterday showed that authentic progressive values can help to redefine our political reality. And if Ocasio-Cortez can shift the spirit of the House the way she lifted the spirits in Queens last night, we might just be alright.

The post In Victory, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Showed That Authentic Progressive Values Can Redefine Political Reality appeared first on The Intercept.

Mike Espy’s candidacy has gotten some national attention — largely because he’s competing in an exciting three-way “jungle” primary against establishment Republican candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith, who replaced Thad Cochran on an interim basis when he stepped down in April, and Chris McDaniel, a tea party candidate who has benefited from millions of dollars of independent expenditures from right-wing PACs.

If none of the candidates gets 50 percent of the vote, the top two go into a runoff election, in which Hyde-Smith is heavily favored. Polls from early October showed Espy and Hyde-Smith in a dead heat, but she’s been polling about 10 points ahead of Espy since a visit from President Donald Trump, who rallied for her in Mississippi on October 3.

But unlike Espy, who has benefited from high-profile media coverage and visits from national figures like Sen. Cory Booker and former Gov. Deval Patrick, David Baria’s race against 11-year incumbent Roger Wicker is so under-covered, the title of a recent local news article described the race as the state’s “other” Senate campaign.

A double Senate race has only happened 55 times in American history, but the twin Mississippi races still can’t break the news cycle. And no wonder.

With 35 Senate seats and 435 House seats hanging in the balance, national focus has understandably been reserved for those races that seem to be most “winnable.” It’s reasonable to be pessimistic about red states, and given the conservative politics of the deep South, it’s particularly hard to be sanguine about Mississippi.

But Mississippi is not just red. It’s black. At 37 percent, no state has a higher proportion of African-American residents — or black senators over time. Of the 10 black senators ever elected in American history, the first two were elected by the Magnolia State — both in the decade following the Civil War, before senators were directly elected by voter.

Reconstruction-era politics are an unlikely hook for contemporary Senate chances, but there is a more recent reason to be hopeful: Barack Obama won over 43 percent of Mississippi voters in 2008, the best showing for a Democrat in the modern era since Jimmy Carter won 48 percent of the vote in 1980. For all of the demographic prognosticating about the increasing power of the Hispanic vote and glib democratic posturing about how African-Americans are a “firewall,” few seem to have taken notice of the untapped political power that lies in the heavily African-American Democratic base of Mississippi.

Few seem to have taken notice of the untapped political power that lies in the heavily African-American Democratic base of Mississippi.

Espy, the first African-American secretary of agriculture and a former representative from Mississippi’s 2nd District, sees a path to victory. He says often that it runs through the black community, but he also understands that attracting black voters alone is not enough. To win, not only would he need 95 percent of African-Americans to vote for him at Obama’s turnout levels, but Espy would also need one 1 of 4 white voters on his side.

In a September MSNBC interview, Espy pointed out that he’s achieved as much in the past. When he first won his congressional seat in 1992, he did it with only 85 percent of the black vote and 11 percent of the white vote. But by 1996, he’d garnered 95 percent of the black vote and 40 percent of the white vote, thus proving that the odds might be long, but they aren’t impossible.

FiveThirtyEight is forecasting Espy’s vote share at only a fraction of a point behind Hyde-Smith — 39.2 percent to her 39.9 percent. But he’s nowhere near the 50 percent needed to secure the election without a runoff, and his odds sour considerably in a runoff, during which Hyde-Smith would no longer be competing with McDaniel for Republican votes.

The time to win is now. Which is why it’s frustrating that the Democratic Party hasn’t taken more interest in the state.

According to Federal Election Commission filings, the Republican Party spent nearly $8 million in the state as of late October, while Democrats have received a little more than $2 million from the Democratic Party.

And conservatives are also overwhelmingly outpacing Democrats with respect to independent expenditures. In particular, right-wing groups like the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, Citizens United, and Remember Mississippi — a pro-McDaniel Super PAC — have poured millions of dollars into the race in support of McDaniel or opposing Hyde-Smith.

Meanwhile, outside help for Baria and Espy has been limited. The American Civil Liberties Union spent $130,000 in radio advertisements for Espy’s campaign, but independent expenditures for the Democratic candidates have been meager. Espy received about $5,000 each from The Collective, a PAC founded to remedy African-American underrepresentation in elected office, and the Congressional Black Caucus PAC. Indivisible kicked $1,497 to Baria in October.

In a rare national media interview, Baria was asked whether he felt he was getting enough support from the Democratic National Committee. He demurred, saying that the DNC has offered support through state parties. But according to FEC disclosures, Baria has received less than $7,000 in party committee contributions. The DNC has given over $300,000 to the Mississippi Democratic Party this cycle, but the state party has made fewer than $6,000 in disbursements outside of operating expenses. Only $1,250 of that meager sum seems to have gone to Baria.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is solely dedicated to electing Democrats to the Senate, has given directly to only four candidates — offering the maximum $47,400 donation to Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. The bulk of its independent expenditures — $28.68 million — has been against Republican candidates, compared to $1.1 million for Democrats. But it doesn’t appear that any of that money has been used against the Republican candidates in Mississippi. Curiously, the DSCC saw fit fund an ad attacking Wicker on health care and wages back in 2008, but not in 2018, when highlighting that the threat Republicans pose to residents of the disproportionately low-income state would benefit two candidates at once.

The failure to invest is particularly troubling given the low cost of advertising in Mississippi. An ad that costs $35 per minute in Los Angeles might cost less than half as much in Jackson. Small, independent ads have proven to be overwhelmingly beneficial to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who saw a huge spike in funding after an advertisement by socialist filmmakers Means of Production went viral.

In May, CBC member Rep. Bennie Thompson D-Miss., articulated his hope that the DSCC would help Espy. “If I get asked, I’ll tell them they should,” Thompson said, according to the Clarion-Ledger, a local newspaper. “If we are the base voters for the Democratic Party, then you need to invest equally in those voters,” — not two weeks before the election, but two years before. A day before the election, that hope has not materialized.

Baria’s campaign is interesting in its own right. He’s running the kind of inclusive, issue-based campaign that’s been shown to have traction in red, rural districts that Democrats gave up on long ago. And with a biracial son, he’s not without a certain amount of identity-based appeal. Certainly it’s a long shot — 43 percent of those polled favored Wicker, giving him a 14-point lead. But Baria is quick to point out that Wicker fails to break the 50 percent mark in polls and that there are more than enough swing voters to tip the balance in his favor — especially since black voters tend to be underrepresented in these polls.

WATCH: Our first ad of the general election, "Ready for Change" is up! Please RT and donate to help keep up the momentum!

DONATE: https://t.co/yBxYsGwZjK #mssen #BariaForMississippi pic.twitter.com/HznYAHFIAV

— David Baria (@dbaria) September 7, 2018

More cynically, however, Baria’s presence on the ticket serves as a natural boost for Espy’s campaign — even more so given that he could turn out white moderate Democrats who might not be inclined to come out for Espy, but may be likely to vote a straight ticket at the polls.

The two candidates have campaigned together around the state, bumping into each other at “beans and greens,” fundraising dinners where the candidates can talk to constituents and give their stump speeches. When their paths overlap, both Baria and Espy will tell audiences that they have a chance to vote two Democrats into the Senate on November 6. The candidates apparently see the opportunity for collaboration, but that hasn’t been taken advantage of on a broader scale.

The candidates apparently see the opportunity for collaboration, but that hasn’t been taken advantage of on a broader scale.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., visited Mississippi in April to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, he identified Obama’s success in the state as a point of political opportunity. “If you had a Democratic Party that was a 50-state party, which was paying attention to Mississippi, and South Carolina and Georgia, as well as Kansas and Montana and Idaho, if you had a party that was putting resources and energy into every state in the country, there is no way on earth that you will not get 20 or 30 percent of white Mississippians voting for a candidate like Obama.”

Recent gains in the South have proven as much. In Georgia, another deep South long shot, Stacey Abrams is neck and neck with Brian Kemp in the race to become the first black female governor in the state. Her inclusive messaging strategy and voter registration work have paid clear dividends and provide a blueprint for other states. Espy, it seems, has adopted similarly broad and inclusive messaging. “I don’t look at race so much as I look at economic possibilities, common ground for everyone regardless of race,” he said during a recent MSNBC interview. “I’m talking about not just black, but all Mississippians.”

Sen. Doug Jones’s victory in Alabama over accused child predator Roy Moore is also an instructive lesson in the power of grassroots organizing by the black electorate. Espy’s campaign has hired staff members from Jones’s campaign and is hoping to recreate the levels of turnout that contributed to Jones’s victory.

But the story of that Alabama race is also a story about the power of opposition advertising. Not only did black voters — especially black women — come out in support of Jones, Republican voters stayed home — unenthusiastic about voting for an accused child molester. Negative ads highlighting Republican efforts to cut Medicaid and Social Security could have a suppression effect on Republican voters, who, like the Alabama conservatives turned off by Moore, might decide to sit this one out. After all, Mississippi is the worst state in the country with respect to health outcomes, and both Democratic candidates have been campaigning on health care as a centrally important issue to Mississippi voters.

As Jones’s Alabama win showed, even if winning is a long shot, there’s value in showing up.

But despite the political gains to trade here — the historic opportunity presented by two Senate seats up for grabs in Mississippi and the opportunity to maximize the value of ad dollars by supporting two Democratic candidates in one media market — the Democratic Party has largely ignored the election. Given the significant impact even a small spend could have in the state, Mississippi feels like a missed opportunity. As Jones’s Alabama win showed, even if winning is a long shot, there’s value in showing up.

Rather than approaching elections as though outcomes are a fait accompli determined by polling and historical trends, Democrats could try harder to change outcomes by doing the actual work of politics — persuading voters that the Democratic platform would benefit constituents’ lives — no matter where they live. Beto O’Rourke has expanded the left’s political imagination in Texas, where he poses a genuine challenge to Republican incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz despite running an unapologetically liberal campaign, one largely funded by grassroots donations. By running an inspirational campaign, O’Rourke was able to tap into tens of millions of dollars to make the race competitive. Democrats in Washington think too often about the downsides of allocating scarce resources. Instead, they should also look to expand the resources that are available.

The analogy isn’t lost on Baria. Last week, he retweeted a supporter: “Hey Mississippi, did you know we have our own version of @BetoORouke? His name is David Baria, and he is going to Washington to fight for our healthcare, or right to marry who we love, and our education.” If only more people knew.

States where Democrats have lost by greater margins than Obama lost Mississippi are considered to be swing states, hotly scrutinized as sites for political opportunity. In 2016, Hillary Clinton earned only 43 percent of the vote in Ohio and 41 percent in Iowa, compared to Obama’s 43 percent share of Mississippi voters in 2008.

Of course, close elections alone don’t make swing states. Both major political parties needed to have won in recent years for a state to get that designation, and a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t won in Mississippi since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Moreover, a Democratic senator hasn’t sat in the state since John Stennis — a pre-realignment segregationist — retired in 1989. In other words, Mississippi has yet to “swing.” But it might be a loaded ballast just waiting for the right push.

The post Both of Mississippi’s Senate Seats Are Up for Election. National Democrats Barely Paid Attention. appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday morning, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., released a video in response to President Donald Trump, who has persistently mocked her as “Pocahontas.” For years, Trump has derided Warren for identifying as a Native American faculty member at Harvard Law School, and in other contexts, despite presenting as white. The implication by Trump and other conservatives has been that Warren secured her position at Harvard Law as a result of affirmative action, and that consequently, she was not qualified for the job.

He returned that line of attack on Tuesday.

Now that her claims of being of Indian heritage have turned out to be a scam and a lie, Elizabeth Warren should apologize for perpetrating this fraud against the American Public. Harvard called her “a person of color” (amazing con), and would not have taken her otherwise!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2018

Warren’s response has been to insist that she does have Native American ancestry, but to deny that her racial background played a role in the hiring process. In Monday’s video, she recruited several Harvard Law professors involved in her hiring, including Randall Kennedy and Charles Fried, to corroborate that her race wasn’t considered during her hiring process. Warren also offered new evidence in the form of a DNA test, as well as testimony from her brothers, which appears to back up her claim that she has a distant Native American relative.

But whether or not Warren has some Native ancestry has never been the basis of any legitimate concern, and her video failed to address the only action for which she needs to answer: her role in enabling Harvard Law School to hold her out as a diversity hire.

Warren’s response unwisely focuses on bad-faith arguments — namely, the implication that she wouldn’t have achieved a tenured faculty position at Harvard without relying on her Native American heritage. But that claim is easily dismissed without trotting out former colleagues to attest to her merits. Warren wasn’t just any Harvard Law professor. Her reputation as one of the most distinguished law professors in recent history speaks for itself. Importantly, the partisan ideologues who insist she isn’t qualified aren’t likely to be persuaded by any volume of Ivy League testimony.

It’s not especially relevant whether Warren is of Native American descent

Warren’s video also devotes too much time to the claim that Warren lied about her identity. Conservatives have questioned the legitimacy of her Oklahoma family’s lore, that Warren’s parents had to elope because her father’s family objected to her mother’s Cherokee heritage. The bulk of the video is dedicated to backing up the story via testimony from multiple family members and a Stanford genetics professor, who delivers the results of Warren’s genetic analysis over the phone. “The president likes to call my mom a liar, what do the facts say?” asks Warren. While the genetic test doesn’t speak to Warren’s mother’s character, it did confirm that Warren has some Native American ancestry — a bit less than the average white American.

But it’s not especially relevant whether Warren is of Native American descent, or even whether she credibly believed the account of her family history. The only issue, from an ethical perspective, is that Warren held herself out as Native American, allowing Harvard Law School to use her as cover for its impotent diversity efforts.

According to a much-cited investigation by the Boston Globe, Warren consistently checked “white” on personnel forms throughout her career, including in 1981, 1985, and 1998 while employed at the University of Texas. But in the 1986-1987 edition of the Association of American Law School’s directory and eight subsequent editions, Warren listed herself as a minority. She began identifying as Native American on personnel forms three years into her post at the University of Pennsylvania. And while multiple professors have attested to the fact that Warren was considered white during the hiring process at Harvard University, in 1995 she self-identified as Native American, and the school’s statistics were updated to reflect as much. Harvard recorded Warren as Native American from 1995 to 2004.

Warren now claims that while her self-identification was insufficiently nuanced, she wasn’t being dishonest about her heritage, citing her genetic test and family history as proof. But by focusing on the hereditary aspects of identity, rather than the cultural or experiential ones, Warren undermines the stated objectives of diversity programs.

In response to a request for comment to this article, her spokesperson offered a statement Warren has used before: “I wish that I had been more mindful of the distinction between heritage and tribal citizenship. Only the tribes can determine tribal citizenship and I respect their right. That’s why I don’t list myself here in the Senate as Native American.”

The purpose of affirmative action is not to increase the numbers of people who merely self-identify as diverse. (If it were, Rachel Dolezal would be a qualified diversity applicant.) Nor is the point to celebrate minute blood quantum among faculty who otherwise present as white and who don’t engage with nonwhite cultural traditions in any meaningful way. Rather, the major goals of diversity in higher education are twofold: Affirmative action is an effort to level the playing field between white men and historically marginalized groups, such as people of color and women, who were denied access to equal education, higher education, competitive employment, housing, or even the ability to acquire credit cards until relatively recently. Racial diversity efforts are also intended to diversify intellectual perspectives with the understanding that race can be a proxy for experiences, and scholarship is enriched by a wide range of perspectives.

An additional goal of faculty diversity is to establish a support system for students who encounter identity-specific obstacles with which a similarly identifying faculty member may be better qualified to assist. As Lani Guinier, the first nonwhite female Harvard Law professor, has written, there exists a “hierarchy of perspectives” in law school. Students who identify with the institution experience less dissonance than other students “who do not see themselves in the faculty, who vacillate on the emotionally detached, ‘objective’ perspectives inscribed as ‘law,’ and who identify with the lives of persons who suffer from existing political arrangements.”

It’s hard to see how Warren’s minuscule amount of Native American DNA, even coupled with her family lore, furthers diversity objectives. She was not raised with Native American traditions and has not demonstrated any particular experience as a Cherokee woman.

Warren’s minuscule amount of Native American DNA does nothing to further diversity objectives.

Although a person’s appearance is not dispositive of their ethnicity, how a person is publicly perceived does affect whether they suffer discrimination. And in turn, whether a person experiences discrimination affects whether they deserve to benefit from the equalizing effects of affirmative action programs. Discrimination is hard to quantify, and it operates on a systemic level, as well as an individual one. But if Warren has been perceived as white over the course of her life, it’s difficult to credibly argue that she should be the beneficiary of a program intended to level a playing field made uneven by discrimination on the basis of identity.

The University of Pennsylvania tacitly acknowledged this when it declined to tout Warren’s minority status to the press — even while it identified her as nonwhite in the university’s 2005 Minority Equity Report by bolding and italicizing her name along with other minority faculty members. “It counts for way more if you are visibly, recognizably a person of color,” explained Colin Diver, dean of the law school at the time in an interview with the Globe.

By allowing herself to be held out as Native American, Warren enabled the university to leverage her identity as a pretext and decline to hire additional Native American faculty members.

This isn’t just a hypothetical claim: In a 1996 article in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard Law School’s spokesperson Michael Chmura used Warren to diffuse criticism directed at Harvard Law School for its diversity failures: “Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women, Chmura said Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren is Native American.”

Even though there is no evidence that Warren approved of her identity being used this way, it was naive of her to identify as Native American given the heated political environment of the time. In 1992, when Warren first taught at Harvard Law, the school was in the midst of a massive, student-led push for diversity. The students ultimately sued the law school for discrimination in faculty hiring, and were subject to a public trial by the school’s administrative board for participating in a sit-in at the dean’s office.

In 1990, Harvard Law’s first African-American tenured law professor Derrick Bell protested the lack of diversity among the tenured faculty by taking an unpaid leave of absence. After two years, Harvard had still not hired any minority women for tenured or tenure-track positions, and when Bell requested an extension of his leave, he was denied — ending his own tenure status.

Harvard University has struggled to recruit diverse faculty members over the decades since. It hired its first actual tenured Native American professor this year and didn’t hire its first nonwhite woman — Lani Guinier — until 1998. In the wake of historic on-campus tumult in response diversity complaints, it’s implausible that Warren didn’t understand the implications of identifying as a woman of color.

Warren has nothing to defend with respect to her qualifications. Not only is Trump’s repeated invocation of Pocahontas an offensive and perverse flattening of Native American history into one grossly misrepresented icon, any attack on Warren’s merit from conservatives is hypocritical: Only last week, Republicans championed the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, whose legacy status made him markedly more likely to be admitted to Yale, even while he claimed that he got in all on his own. In the 1980s, when Kavanaugh attended college, a quarter of Yale freshman had at least one legacy parent, and matriculating at the college significantly upped the odds of admission to the law school — 27 members of Kavanaugh’s class attended Yale College compared to 10 from Harvard and three from Stanford.

She empowered Harvard to exploit her identity and claim credit for diversity.

But Warren deserves criticism for failing to acknowledge that by holding herself out as Native American, she empowered Harvard to exploit her identity and claim credit for diversity without achieving any of affirmative action’s substantive goals.

If Warren wants to secure the moral high ground in this debate, she should defend the objectives of affirmative action and exert pressure on Trump to acknowledge what’s implied by his taunts about Warren’s authenticity: that campus diversity is a good thing, and genuinely diverse students and faculty members bring valuable experiences to the table. Instead, Warren has emphasized that she is qualified, tacitly suggesting that others whose race was a factor in their hiring are not — even though the Supreme Court has upheld affirmative action for qualified individuals only, not unqualified ones.

The issue has never been what Warren believes about her history, but what Warren believes to be ethically appropriate. She now acknowledges that it was wrong for Harvard Law to hold her out as a diverse member of its faculty. All that’s left is for her to take accountability for her role in Harvard’s misrepresentation and acknowledge that remedial efforts to make up for Native American oppression shouldn’t accrue to her benefit, and that she is an inadequate representative for Native American perspectives or interests on campus. Only then will she be able to transcend this controversy and prevent her biology from becoming her political destiny.

The post What Elizabeth Warren Still Doesn’t Get appeared first on The Intercept.

For the past week, conservatives have argued that if Democrats can’t prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Judge Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, he should be appointed to the Supreme Court.

But of course, this is not a trial, and it is not appropriate to apply the level of proof meant to protect criminal defendants from having their life or liberty stripped to a judicial confirmation process.

In fact, the appropriate standard isn’t even the lesser preponderance of the evidence or the “more likely than not” standard that Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she relied on in deciding to confirm Kavanaugh. That civil standard is lower because less is at stake in civil matters — one’s property can be taken away, but not one’s liberty. But even that standard is too high. As Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor hired by Senate Republicans to question Ford, said at last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: “A Senate confirmation hearing is not a trial, especially not a prosecution,” and “there is no clear standard of proof for allegations made during the Senate’s confirmation process.”

Regardless of whether you agree that the stakes here are ultimately comparable to a (very important) job interview, as many, including myself, have argued, it is undeniable that neither Kavanaugh’s personal liberty nor property is at risk. Although his own behavior during last week’s hearing might put his reputation in jeopardy — the American Bar Association is revisiting its positive evaluation of Kavanaugh based on “new information of a material nature regarding temperament” — if Kavanaugh’s confirmation were to have failed, he would lose nothing tangible that he already had. Like Merrick Garland, whose nomination was stalled for months until former President Barack Obama was no longer in office, he would simply go back to being a judge on the second most powerful court in the country.

That being the case, it was refreshing to hear a conservative acknowledge that the Supreme Court is an institution whose members should engender a high level of respect, rather than merely meet a low bar. During her remarks Friday night, Murkowski seemed to acknowledge that the burden was not on Democrats to conclusively prove Kavanaugh was a sexual predator, but on Kavanaugh to demonstrate that he was qualified for a position that only 113 Americans have ever held — a position that has the power not only to influence the lives of millions, but also to provide an important check on the other branches of our government, and establish confidence in our political system.

“I have a very high bar for any nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States,” she began. Unlike other conservatives, who appropriated criminal law standards that were self-servingly lofty, Murkowski relied on the only truly relevant standard: the Code of Conduct for United States Judges — the nonpartisan benchmark set by the legislature — the standards to which all the senators in the chamber have implicitly signed on.

“The code of judicial conduct,” she read, “states that ‘a judge should act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary,’ and shall ‘avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.’”

“I go back and I look to that,” she said, looking at her notes as if continuing to wrestle with the words. “It is pretty high. It is really high. That a judge shall act at all times — not just sometimes when you’re wearing a robe — but a judge should act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence.”

“The standard is that a judge must act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.

“Even in the face of an overly and overtly political process, a politicized process,” she continued, anticipating a common Republican refrain, “and even when one side of this chamber is absolutely dead set on defeating his nomination from the very get go before he was even named … the standard is that a judge must act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.” After Kavanaugh’s hearing testimony, Murkowski didn’t believe he satisfied that standard. 

Murkowski took on the popular talking point that Kavanaugh’s partisan, red-faced remarks were justified in light of the seriousness of the accusations levied against him. “I’ve been deliberating — agonizing — about what is fair — is this too unfair a burden to place on somebody that is dealing with the worst, most horrific allegations that go to your integrity? That go to everything that you are?”

But as Murkowski later pointed out, judicial temperament is not conditional: “I am reminded that there are only nine seats on the bench of the highest court in the land. And these seats are occupied by these men and women for their lifetime. And so those who seek one of these seats must meet the highest standard in all respects at all times.”

Murkowski returned time and time again to one particular phrase from the code of conduct: “public confidence.” After Kavanaugh’s remarks, in which he called the sexual assault charges against him and the consequent hearing “a calculated and orchestrated political hit … revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups,” it seemed obvious even to many conservatives that the blush of impartiality was off the rose. 

In light of the failure of public confidence endemic to the Trump administration and also, said Murkowski, to the Obama years, “this judiciary must be perceived as independent, as nonpartisan, as fair and balanced in order for our form of government to function. And it’s that hope, it’s that hope that I seek to maintain. And I think that’s why I have demanded such a high standard to maintain or regain that public confidence.”

It’s remarkable that most Republicans seem to think so much less of the Supreme Court — that so many are so willing to lower the bar.

Correction: October 8, 2018
A previous version of this story stated in a photo caption that Sen. Lisa Murkowski represents Arkansas. She is a senator from Alaska. It has been updated.

Top photo: Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairs a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Capitol Hill, Sept. 25, 2018 in Washington, DC.

The post Sen. Lisa Murkowski Admits That the Reasonable Doubt Standard Doesn’t Apply to Brett Kavanaugh’s Confirmation appeared first on The Intercept.

The presumption of innocence is, in fact, the fundamental project of Black Lives Matter. The controversial movement, born from a controversial hashtag, was intended to elevate black lives not above others, but so that they are considered equally valuable. It’s a movement intended to call attention to the fact that some Americans, disproportionately black and poor, are frequently presumed guilty in extrajudicial contexts — killed by police officers who rarely face consequences; they are denied due process and the presumption of innocence.

The political right in this country has typically aligned itself behind law enforcement as a principle, regardless of how faithful individual officers have been to the duties that come with their shields. As a result, the presumption of innocence and other constitutional protections intended to safeguard the life and liberty of ordinary citizens have been of secondary importance to them, if they register at all.

That is, until Brett Kavanaugh.

A few weeks ago, news broke that a psychology professor named Christine Blasey Ford had come forward with an accusation that the Supreme Court nominee sexually assaulted her at a house party in 1982. Last Thursday, both Ford and Kavanaugh offered testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kavanaugh denied Ford’s accusations, but to most observers, Ford — measured and sincere where Kavanaugh was evasive and angry — appeared to be the more credible of the two.

Since the hearings, Republicans have rushed to explain and defend Kavanaugh’s furious testimony, framing his rage as the rational response of an innocent man falsely accused. Some conservatives have even abdicated the pretense of Kavanaugh’s innocence, writing articles arguing that “Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court even if he’s guilty.” The standard by which we should judge Kavanaugh, they seem to say, is beyond guilt or innocence. It’s something more. It’s beyond credibility. He’s literally beyond a reasonable doubt.

Tuesday night, at a rally in Mississippi, President Donald Trump expressed concern about what precedent a failure to confirm Kavanaugh would set. He lamented what it would mean if a stranger could cause a person to lose their job by merely making an accusation. “Guilty until proven innocent, that’s very dangerous for our country. That’s very dangerous for our country,” he repeated, emphasizing that in America, due process comes first.

Of course, he used to feel differently.

Even if you remember the ad from when it ran, it’s worth taking another look at the small print today. “They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence,” Trump inveighed. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them. If the punishment is strong, the attacks on innocent people will stop.”

All five convictions were vacated in 2002, after Matias Reyes, a serial rapist and convicted murderer, confessed to raping Meili, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt. To date, Trump has never apologized for calling for the deaths of these innocent children.

“At what point did we cross the line from the fine and noble pursuit of genuine civil liberties,” asked Trump in his 1989 ad, “to the reckless and dangerously permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman and then laugh her family’s anguish. And why do they laugh? They laugh because they know that soon, very soon, they will be returned to the streets to rape and maim and kill once again — and yet face no great personal risk to themselves.” They laugh, in other words, with impunity.

This week, in Mississippi, Trump was the one laughing. With an enthusiastic crowd behind him, Trump joked about Ford’s inability to remember certain details about the night of her alleged assault, 36 years ago: “How did you get home? ‘I don’t remember.’ What neighborhood was it? ‘I don’t know.’ Where’s the house? ‘I don’t know.’ Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? ‘I don’t know. But I had one beer.’” As the crowd behind him jeered, it was difficult not to recall Ford’s fragile testimony, during which she said one thing she could never forget was the laughter of her attackers, “indelible in the hippocampus,” still echoing 36 years later.

At last Tuesday’s rally, Trump seemed to consider, for a moment, that the claims against Kavanaugh might have merit. But it didn’t seem to matter. “People are saying, ‘well maybe it’s true.’ And because of the fact that maybe it’s true, he should not become a United States Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “How horrible is this? How horrible is this?” It wasn’t a denial. It was a rejection of the premise that anything, even a credible assault claim, should stand between Kavanaugh and his destiny.

How horrible is it for one extremely powerful man to be barred from ascending to an even higher, more influential position — at least while a credible claim of assault is investigated? Is it more horrible than condemning five minors to death without due process, 11 days after their arrest? A concern for “due process” was no bar against Trump’s public ire then. What does it say about Trump’s interest in deterring sexual predators that he won’t deny Kavanaugh a job promotion — even temporarily? What does it say about his concern for women and young girls who, like Ford, have been pinned to beds — muzzled by a forceful hand while another searches frantically for the borders of their bathing suits?

Kavanaugh is being cast as not just innocent, but chosen. “No. 1 in his class at Yale, perfect human being,” is how Trump described him Tuesday night. He was “destined for the Supreme Court.” “Top in his class at Yale Law School,” he emphasized again. “He’s led, like, a life that’s unbelievable. He’s had no problems.” How dare Democrats accuse him of a “gang rape!” averred Trump.

It was a rejection of the premise that anything, even a credible assault claim, should stand between Kavanaugh and his destiny.

It’s a heavy accusation indeed. But when the targets were Hispanic and black teenagers, Trump didn’t hesitate to declare that “CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” Today, the impulse to curb civil liberties in favor of safety is no more. Gone is the goal of disincentivizing bad behavior. There’s no “bad behavior” that merits keeping a good ol’ boy off the bench.

Trump finds it unconscionable that Kavanaugh — raised in a wealthy family, sent to a prestigious prep school, admitted to Yale as a legacy student, plucked to sit on the second most powerful court in the land (without ever having spent a day as a judge), and now nominated to the Supreme Court — might not get exactly what he wants. Who but the most egoistic narcissist would feel entitled to a job that only 113 Americans have ever had? Trump is angry on Kavanaugh’s behalf not because Kavanaugh earned a position on the Supreme Court, but because he sees infinite privilege as their shared birthright. It’s clear that Trump, who was recently exposed by the New York Times as having benefited enormously from his father’s fortune, both legally and illegally, relates personally to Kavanaugh in more ways than one. “I’ve had dozens of accusations like this against my myself,” Trump repeated several times last Tuesday. The conclusion to be drawn from that admission was tacit: I’ve been accused, yet I am president. Why should we start holding anyone responsible for sexual assault now?

Perhaps if the Central Park Five had gone to a prep school Trump would have been more sympathetic. But they spent their high school years, and beyond, in Rikers. Perhaps if Trump saw their lives as valuable, he would have hesitated before accusing children of “gang rape.” Perhaps he would not have casually tossed aside the importance of the presumption of innocence if one of those boys were in a position to help him, the way Kavanaugh is poised to protect Trump from the criminal consequences of the Mueller investigation. Perhaps.

Another tearful testimony occurred Tuesday, this one in a Chicago courtroom. It was from Officer Jason Van Dyke, of the Chicago Police Department, who shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald to death on October 20, 2014, almost four years ago. McDonald had a knife that night. And he was wielding it. But Van Dyke, standing 10 feet away, had a gun. His proximity to McDonald, was not the result of McDonald’s approach, but Van Dyke’s: Van Dyke testified that he drove up to McDonald in his squad car with the intention of knocking him over with his door. But his plan failed. Instead, he got out of the car and pointed his gun at McDonald.

Police video shows McDonald walking in the middle of the street, parallel perhaps, but not toward the officers who stood, guns drawn, to his left. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, he falls to the ground, spinning from the force of the bullet and collapsing like a rag doll. The video has no audio, so it’s difficult to tell from looking, but an autopsy confirmed that Van Dyke emptied 15 more rounds into McDonald after he was on the ground. He fired until his gun was empty.

Van Dyke said he shot McDonald “in defense of his life.” He said he emptied his gun into McDonald because he thought that the 17-year-old was getting back up. “I could see him starting to push up with his left hand off the ground,” he said. “And I see his left shoulder start to come up, and I still see him holding that knife with his right hand, not letting go of it. And his eyes are still bugged out. His face has got no expression on it.”

The video shows none of this. And when the prosecutor asked Van Dyke to show where, on the tape, McDonald tried to get up, he said “the video doesn’t show my perspective.” When asked to tell the court what he said immediately after the shooting, he said he couldn’t recall. “I was still in shock.” When asked why he didn’t move away from McDonald if he felt threatened, he said he thought he did. He then shifted the blame to McDonald: “He could have made a decisive turn and walked in the opposite direction. He could have thrown that knife away and ended it all right then and there.”

Due process is not a shield behind which the privileged can duck the social consequences of their bad choices. It’s a bedrock principle, not a political playing card.

But the only one who acted with forethought that night was Van Dyke. It was Van Dyke who decided to get close to McDonald. He felt safe doing so because he knew he had a gun, and McDonald didn’t. Van Dyke knew that, if push came to shove, he could always kill McDonald if he got scared. He contemplated as much before he arrived on the scene, saying to his partner, “Oh my God, we are going to have to shoot the guy.”

I ask you to consider in what world does an armed police officer, safe in his car, minutes away from man with a knife, contemplate murder as a necessary recourse? In what world does he exit a car and approach an erratic young man with a knife unless he sees killing a suspect as a reasonable option? How might a person act differently if the murder of a 17-year-old weren’t so casually on the table? Might they keep their distance? Wait for the Taser team, which was en route, before approaching? Might they, at the very least, stop firing bullets into the young man once he lay prostrate on the ground?

What does it say about the value of a life when killing a suspect seems a reasonable path of first resort? And might this be evidence that all lives don’t matter in the eyes of the law?

Republicans don’t want to see the Kavanaugh hearing as having to do with race, and in some ways I agree. It’s about more than just race. It’s about that fact that Kavanaugh is a member of a particular class in this country, overwhelmingly white, for whom the presumption of innocence is a birthright. This week, for once, Americans are asking that a member of this class be held responsible for his actions and denied a promotion — not that he be sent to jail, like the innocent teenagers of the Central Park Five, and not that he be murdered, like McDonald, who was sentenced to death for the crime of wielding a knife without judge, jury, or sentencing — without due process.

All that is being asked of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee is to not treat a seat on the Supreme Court like an entitlement.

All that is being asked of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee is that Kavanaugh be treated the same as ordinary Americans — the same as the middle- and working-class whites who cheered Trump on at Tuesday night’s rally would be treated. All that’s being asked is that Kavanaugh be judged like most Americans who didn’t go to Yale; whose lives aren’t so charmed as his; who aren’t considered “destined” to ascend to a lifetime appointment on the highest court of the land.

All that is being asked of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee is to not treat a seat on the Supreme Court like an entitlement. Due process is important. But this is not a trial. And a Supreme Court nomination is a privilege to be earned, not bestowed.

If they confirm Kavanaugh, the Republicans in the Senate will be abandoning all pretense that they care about meritocracy or the victims of crimes. They’ll be preserving the impunity of the elite, and they’ll be doing so with the imprimatur of average, everyday Republicans who will never be given the same benefit of the doubt as Kavanaugh, and his “perfect” life. Even more painfully, they’ll be doing so over the voices of millions of Americans, citizens who are equally the responsibility of Trump and other Republican leaders — women, people of color, the poor, and their allies — who, for centuries, have had our claims considered beyond reason; doubted, because of who we are.

Top photo: President Donald Trump announces Brett Kavanaugh as his Supreme Court nominee in the East Room of the White House on July 9, 2018.

The post Presumption of Innocence Is for Privileged Men Like Brett Kavanaugh, Not Laquan McDonald or the Central Park Five appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona cited “due process” as the reason he would vote for Kavanaugh last week (before protesters cornered him in a Senate elevator), and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said of the allegations that “you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it did happen.”

But in the words of Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor picked by the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee to handle their questioning of Ford last Thursday, “a Senate confirmation hearing is not a trial, especially not a prosecution,” and “there is no clear standard of proof for allegations made during the Senate’s confirmation process.” Even so, there’s a clear strategic reason why Republicans would frame the issue this way: By doing so, they raise the burden of proof in Kavanaugh’s favor.

The less cynical explanation for the focus on “due process” and “burdens of proof” is that reputational damage from an accusation of attempted rape is real. Accusing someone of a crime is considered “per se” defamation, meaning you don’t have to prove a defamatory statement actually caused reputational harm if it relates to being accused of a crime. The charge is just that serious.

As a leftist who is principally concerned with the criminal justice system’s overreach, I share that worry and would caution against any rush to judgment that would undermine Kavanaugh’s due process rights in a legal proceeding. But despite the pomp of Thursday’s hearing (and the number of prosecutors present), it was not a legal proceeding, but rather one of several qualifying interviews for the most prestigious legal job in the country. It’s a job for which there are many qualified candidates — about half of whom are Republican, and most of whom, like Donald Trump’s previous nominee Neil Gorsuch, could presumably be confirmed easily without needing to respond to accusations of sexual assault.

The burden of proof in a job interview is not the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard applied in criminal proceedings, where the threat to personal liberty is extraordinarily high. Nor should Kavanaugh be held to the lower preponderance of evidence or “more likely than not” standard applied in civil cases, because, again, this isn’t a trial of any kind. As most of us have experienced — and many Republicans in at-will employment states celebrate — most employment is subject to an employer’s whims, with the exception of discrimination against certain protected classes.

The question before the Senate “hiring committee,” then, is whether, in light of Ford’s credible claim, they want to move forward and hire Kavanaugh or pick from a pool of qualified applicants with cleaner records. To stay in the running, the burden is now on Kavanaugh to prove that he is the most qualified person for this most prestigious promotion. At bottom, it’s on Kavanaugh to sufficiently undermine the credibility of Ford’s claims such that the hire is worth the risk.

But for the conservatives who remain unpersuaded by the argument that lesser consequences merit a lesser burden of proof, what if this were a trial? What if we did handle the evidence adduced so far in a way that was consistent with the burdens placed on prosecutors? Is it true, as many have argued, that there is insufficient “proof” against Kavanaugh? That all Ford’s claims have been “refuted”? That her claim isn’t, in fact, credible?

On Sunday night, Mitchell released a memorandum outlining what she says is her “independent assessment” of Ford’s allegations, based on her professional experience as a sex-crimes prosecutor in Arizona. Many on the political right have seized on the memo as “exonerating” Kavanaugh.

But Mitchell’s memo is far from dispositive — even by the higher evidentiary burden she artificially sets.

As an initial matter, Mitchell’s memo is, on its face, a one-sided credibility assessment. At no point does she measure Kavanaugh’s credibility against his accuser’s. But when considering a “he said she said” case, the credibility assessment is necessarily relative, not absolute. That Mitchell critiques Ford’s ability to remember events from 36 years prior, while failing to comment on Kavanaugh’s inability to remember attending parties like the one Ford described (even as a similar event was marked on his much ballyhooed calendar) speaks volumes.

Her choice to weigh small memory lapses…while ignoring Kavanaugh’s significant omissions, is akin to deciding that a sexual assault victim is not credible because she couldn’t remember last Tuesday’s breakfast.

While Mitchell makes efforts to shore up her own integrity throughout her report, describing her assessment as “independent” and her appointment as the result of a “bipartisan recommendation,” her choice to weigh small memory lapses, like Ford’s inability to recall whether she showed a full or partial set of her therapy notes to the Washington Post, while ignoring Kavanaugh’s significant omissions, is akin to deciding that a sexual assault victim is not credible because she couldn’t remember last Tuesday’s breakfast. (I, for the record, cannot).

Mitchell also notes that Ford could not remember the address of the home where the assault took place, and tries (and fails) to expose some inconsistency in Ford’s descriptions of the moments following the rape. At the same time, Mitchell is skeptical that Ford could remember other details, such as the fact that she wasn’t on any medication that night, that she only had one beer, or that she wouldn’t mention to her therapist when recounting the assault decades later that her friend Leland Ingham Keyser was also at the party.

All of this is consistent with traumatic memories. It’s easy to understand why a victim might tend to focus on and recall details that relate to a trauma — for example, one’s level of intoxication and whether they were under the influence of any other substances. The number of teenage boys present might feel relevant to a girl who was afraid or embarrassed after a sexual assault in a way that the number of teenage girls present wouldn’t. (This is an easy implication to draw from Ford’s testimony that she remembers not wanting to look like she’d been attacked when she left the house). Anyone who has strong memories of a traumatic event might relate to the notion that while some details are indelible, like, for instance, the sound of an attacker’s “uproarious laughter,” other, more quotidian details fall away.

And at no point during Kavanaugh’s testimony did Mitchell question his memory — including about the July 1 party noted on his calendar, which, consistent with Ford’s testimony about the assault, both of his friends Mark Judge and P.J. Smyth attended. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mitchell was cut off by Senate Republicans as she started down this road of inquiry. Still, her assessment could have included mention of the many well documented prevarications, inconsistencies, dodges, and lies in Kavanaugh’s testimony.

Perhaps most substantively, Mitchell’s memo repeats the same talking point Kavanaugh raised nine times during the proceeding: That the witnesses Ford identified “either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them.”

As an initial matter, if this were a trial, out of court statements like the ones made by the named witnesses would be excluded as hearsay. And with good reason. The principle behind the hearsay rule is that a litigant should have an opportunity to test the credibility of statements which are offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted, rather than taking them at face value. These statements should be subject to questioning, and there should be opportunities for clarification. The idea that Mitchell would make a claim about whether she would or wouldn’t prosecute this case based on the small amount of un-vetted evidence available prior to any investigation is professionally suspect on its face.

Even if they were acceptable evidence, it’s not clear that the witness statements really refute or contradict Ford’s account. For instance, Smyth said he did not recall or had no knowledge of the event, which is not inconsistent with the event having happened — after all, Ford said he was downstairs, and not a witness to the assault. Judge has indeed “refuted” Ford’s claims, saying in a statement that he “never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.” But as any prosecutor should consider, Judge is accused of participating in the assault, and has motive to deny the event.

In fact, of the five people Ford was able to identify by name as being in the house that day, two say they believe it did happen: Ford herself, of course, but also her friend Keyser, who, after first saying that she doesn’t know Kavanaugh and has no recollection of being at a party with him (again, not a refutation), told the Washington Post that she believes Ford’s allegations. Keyser’s statement may not provide a detailed account of the night that tracks with Ford’s, but her support is still broadly corroborating.

Unsurprisingly, Mitchell selectively cites Keyer’s statements, ignoring Keyser’s supportive comments to the Post. Instead, she argues that because Keyser is a “lifelong friend,” Keyser’s failure to corroborate Ford’s claims weighs particularly heavily against Ford’s credibility.

Mitchell’s claims fall short of dispositive, and frankly, skew toward intentionally misleading.

In what comes off as a particularly desperate line of argument, Mitchell even suggests that because Keyser “did not follow up with Dr. Ford after the party to ask why she had suddenly disappeared,” the event must not have happened, hanging the veracity of Ford’s sexual assault allegation on an odd presumption about the expected attentiveness of a female friend. (Given Mitchell’s conjecture here, I think it’s fair to speculate about Mitchell’s gender expectations, and whether she would have built a similar straw man if Keyser had been a boy).

I want to emphasize how flakey this argument is, because Mitchell has largely based her assessment of Ford’s testimony on this particular claim that the witnesses refuted or failed to corroborate it. She opens her memo by announcing that this is her “bottom line,” and in a bolded paragraph, cites the witness statements as the key basis for her conclusion that “this evidence is not sufficient to satisfy the preponderance of the evidence standard.” (Again, a standard which she admitted didn’t apply to this proceeding). Given that the only witnesses who refuted Ford’s allegations are those accused of sexual assault, and one witness actually did support Ford’s account, Mitchell’s claims fall short of dispositive, and frankly, skew toward intentionally misleading.

Next, Mitchell argues that “Dr. Ford has not offered a consistent account of when the alleged assault happens.” She points to the fact that Ford first told the Washington Post that Kavanaugh assaulted her in the “mid 1980s” before narrowing it down to the “early 80s” in a July 30 letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Ford has been consistent about the timing since then — eventually narrowing the time frame down to the summer of 1982.

Mitchell characterizes the shift from “mid” to “early” 80s as damning, noting that “while it’s common for victims to be uncertain about dates, Dr. Ford failed to explain how she was suddenly able to narrow the timeframe to a particular season and particular year.”

The thing is, Ford did explain how she was able to narrow the timeframe to the early 80s: She realized the assault occurred before she was old enough to have a driver’s license, and was able to infer her age from that fact. Mitchell should know this, because Ford explained it in response to Mitchell’s own questioning:

Mitchell: How were you able to narrow down the time frame?

Ford: I can’t give the exact date. And I would like to be more helpful about the date, and if I knew when Mark Judge worked at the Potomac Safeway, then I would be able to be more helpful in that way. So I’m just using memories of when I got my driver’s license. I was 15 at the time. And I — I did not drive home from that party or to that party, and once I did have my drivers license, I liked to drive myself.

Mitchell: I’d assume the legal driving age was 16.

Ford: yes.

Mitchell: Ok.

(Notably, although Ford said she could pinpoint the date even better if she could confirm when Judge worked at the Safeway, the abbreviated FBI investigation into the incident has been limited to exclude an inquiry into that store’s employment records.)

In one of her more blatant mischaracterizations, Mitchell argues that Ford “struggled to identify Judge Kavanaugh as the assailant by name.” There is no basis for this statement. Here, Mitchell casts Ford’s choice not to identify Kavanaugh by name to her therapist or her husband as an inability to remember it. But at no point did Ford testify that she declined to name her assailant because she couldn’t recall who he was. In fact, she testified that she was “100 percent” certain that Kavanaugh was her attacker, that she was very familiar with who Kavanaugh was in high school, and in fact, “went out with” one of his friends who is featured prominently on his calendar.

By the end of the memo, Mitchell’s evidence against Ford’s credibility is very weak indeed. She claims that since Ford said she originally wanted her allegations to remain confidential, the timeline of her contacts with the Washington Post “raises questions.” The implication is that Ford’s decision to come forward was politically motivated, and therefore, less credible. Ford’s motive to come forward is probative of, though not dispositive of her credibility, but more importantly, giving an anonymous tip to the Washington Post is entirely consistent with wanting, well, anonymity. Ford only came forward, as she testified on Thursday, after word got out about her story, and reporters started waiting outside her home and calling her colleagues.

In her final, and perhaps her most frivolous argument, Mitchell suggests that Ford’s credibility is undermined by the fact that Ford “alleges that she struggled academically in college,” due to PTSD and anxiety from the assault, “but she has never made any similar claim about her last two years of high school.” This simply isn’t true. During Thursday’s hearing, Mitchell asked Ford whether the alleged attack “affected [her] life.” Ford responded: “The primary impact was in the initial four years after the event.” That would include the last two years of high school.

Determining credibility is something each of us do daily. We assess the credibility of our children and partners and friends based on body language, eye contact, and context. We consider whether they give indirect answers, or change the subject entirely. We compare their statements to other “extrinsic” evidence: Did she claim to be delayed by the rain on a clear night? Is it plausible that a buddy who’s always late was really caught in traffic this time?

How frequently a person lies is a significant credibility factor.

The Federal Rules of Evidence, which guide what evidence is admissible in federal court proceedings, are squeamish about letting in character evidence: they generally exclude prior bad acts from being used against an accused to show they’re guilty of the charged offense. This is an important evidentiary limitation. As many who have defended Kavanaugh over the recent days have argued, it’s not fair to suggest that just because someone hasn’t always a been boy scout, they’ve necessarily committed a particular crime. Progressives like myself, who are concerned about prosecutorial overreach, recognize that the assumption of guilt tends to accompany more melanated subjects of the criminal justice system.

A witness statement made at trial can be contradicted or “impeached” with evidence that they are not a truthful person. This is bad news for Kavanaugh.

However, the rules do contemplate some exceptions. And one exception is that witnesses who testify open themselves up to being challenged with evidence that speaks to their truthfulness. This makes sense: testifying requires a witness to make an explicit claim about their credibility — they swear an oath to tell the truth. Thus, a witness statement made at trial can be contradicted or “impeached” with evidence that they are not a truthful person.

This is bad news for Kavanaugh.

Some have argued that because Ford modified certain details of her story, and Kavanaugh stuck to his claims — no matter how incredible or implausible — he should be believed. But it’s unlikely that a court would ever instruct a jury to consider credibility that way.

Importantly, Ford adjusted her testimony after giving it further thought — not because she was cornered by difficult questioning. The modifications were small, and she did so voluntarily and under no pressure — despite knowing that any admission of uncertainty on her part would be used against her. This fact is strong evidence of her forthrightness.

By contrast, as The Intercept and others have laid out in painstaking detail, Kavanaugh repeatedly lied or stretched the truth about even the most trivial things during his testimony on Thursday, from whether he was of drinking age in the summer of 1982, to whether his frequent references to beer, partying, and vomiting in his yearbook indicate that he was a heavy drinker. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Kavanaugh is lying when he says he didn’t sexually assault Ford. But does weigh against his credibility. More seriously, it has significant implications for his fitness as a jurist.

Some Republicans are framing the Democratic opposition to Kavanaugh’s testimony as prudish opposition to his drinking or partying or acting like a teenager. Some particularly craven commentators have suggested that if Ford similarly can be shown to have drunk beer or partied or had sex in high school, her testimony should be discredited.

But the concern here isn’t that Kavanaugh imbibed, used vulgar slang, or made disparaging jokes about the sexual behavior of his female classmates. It’s that because he drank so much, he might not be able to remember, and therefore credibly deny, that he sexually assaulted Ford. It’s that he might have chosen to lie about the commonly understood meaning of “devil’s triangle” — a sex act between two men and a woman — because admitting that he referenced that sex act on his yearbook page, less than a year after he and another boy allegedly assaulted a classmate, would be too damning.

No one can say with certainty what happened between 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh and 15-year-old Christine Blasey Ford during the summer of 1982. But what do know with certainty is that Ford’s actions have been broadly consistent with witness statements and available evidence. During her testimony, Ford attempted to answer every question, while Kavanaugh prevaricated. Ford asked for an FBI investigation while Kavanaugh demurred. Ford submitted to a lie detector test, while Kavanaugh lied or stretched the truth about easily confirmed facts, like whether he was of drinking age in 1982, or whether he was a legacy admit at Yale.

For these reasons, Kavanaugh is, at best, a bad witness. At worst, he is an attempted rapist. And at minimum, he should be disqualified from being our nation’s highest jurist.

Top photo: Rachel Mitchell questions Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh in Washington D.C., on Sept. 27, 2018.

The post Here’s What Prosecutor Rachel Mitchell Gets Wrong About the Evidence Against Brett Kavanaugh appeared first on The Intercept.

Kavanaugh strained credulity when he argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the “Devil’s Triangle” — a phrase that appeared on his high school yearbook page — referred to a drinking game, a definition which, before Thursday, you’d have a hard time finding anywhere. (It actually refers to a sex act involving two men and a woman). He also unabashedly claimed that the term “boof” is a reference to “flatulence,” rather than other butt stuff, and that “ralph,” which means to vomit — implicitly from the overconsumption of alcohol — was a reference to Kavanaugh’s weak stomach.

Kavanaugh claimed references to “Renate Alumnius” in his yearbook were allusions to his friendship with classmate Renate Schroeder Dolphin, and not, as many understood, a sexist smear about her promiscuity. (Dolphin told the New York Times days before the hearing: “I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue.”) Kavanaugh even claimed to not really know Ford at all, despite her testimony that she “went out with” one of his close friends — someone whose name appeared in his now notorious calendar 13 times.

Kavanaugh’s choice to lie about things that are easily disproved speaks to a kind of hubris, or entitlement, that befits someone of his pedigree. He insinuated that he was of drinking age during the summer of 1982 because, back then, in Maryland, 18-year-olds could legally imbibe. With artful wording, he testified that drinking was “legal for seniors,” even though it was decidedly illegal for him — a rising senior who wouldn’t turn 18 until the following year. At other moments, he claimed ignorance about the consequence of plainly relevant evidence — railing against the suggestion that his high school yearbook, a totem to debauchery and sexual frustration, could be relevant to the issue of whether he committed blacked-out sexual assault in high school. “Have at it, if you want to go through my yearbook,” he told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., with disdain. As though the inquiry itself was made in bad faith.

In fact, Kavanaugh dissembled about whether he ever drank to excess at all  — an incredible claim given the contents of his yearbook; his friend Mark Judge’s damning memoir, which is titled “Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk;” and the sheer number of  times Kavanaugh mentioned “beer” during Thursday’s hearing. Although he admitted in his opening statement that “sometimes I had too many beers,” when pressed on how much was too much, he was evasive again: “I don’t know. You know, we — whatever the chart says, a blood-alcohol chart.”

Kavanaugh’s choice to lie about things that are easily disproved speaks to a kind of hubris that’s fitting to someone of his pedigree.

Perhaps most gallingly, when Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked Kavanaugh whether he had ever blacked out — just after she empathetically offered that her own father had struggled with alcoholism — he turned on her and shot back: “I don’t know, have you?” (Kavanaugh later apologized to Klobuchar.)

He even tried to play off Judge’s memoir as “fictionalized” — this despite the book’s title page, which reads: “This book is based on actual experiences.” No lie, it seems, is too small for Kavanaugh.

Among the most consequential of Kavanaugh’s false claims, and the one Senate Democrats pushed back against the least, was his assertion that all of the witnesses who could corroborate Ford’s testimony denied it ever happened.

In true Kavanaugh fashion, that’s not quite right.

Ford testified that in addition to Kavanaugh, at least four other people were in the house on the night of the alleged assault: Mark Judge, who Ford alleges witnessed the assault; and P.J. Smyth, Leland Ingraham Keyser, and an unnamed boy — all of whom Ford said were downstairs when the alleged assault occurred.

Nine times during Thursday’s hearing, Kavanaugh claimed that four of the teenagers, including himself, made statements affirming that Ford’s version of events didn’t happen. 

In an exchange with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Kavanaugh argued, “But the core of why we’re here is an allegation for which the four witnesses present have all said it didn’t happen.” Later, in an change with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., the nominee claimed, “The witnesses who were there say it didn’t happen.”

But, apart from Kavanaugh, who denied the allegations, none of the named witnesses said the allegations didn’t happen. Rather, they stated that they did not recall the house party, or have personal knowledge of the alleged sexual assault.

Having “no recollection” of the night in question, or no “knowledge” of the alleged events, is not the same as saying it didn’t happen.

Kavanaugh specifically argued that Judge had “provided sworn statement saying this didn’t happen.” But in Judge’s letter to the Judiciary Committee, sent on September 18, he wrote that he has “no memory of this alleged incident,” does “not recall the party described,” and “never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.” (On Thursday, after the conclusion of Kavanaugh’s testimony, Judge followed up with a second letter, stating that he did “never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”)

Moreover, Keyser’s statement, issued by her lawyer over the weekend, says only that she “does not know Mr. Kavanaugh, and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.” Not that the event “didn’t happen.”

Further complicating matters, Ford testified that after Keyser submitted her September 19 statement, she texted Ford “with an apology and good wishes.” And last weekend, the Washington Post reported that Keyser believes Ford’s allegations — hardly the refutation Kavanaugh claimed.

Smyth’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee stated only that he has no personal knowledge of what’s alleged to have occurred between Kavanaugh and Ford. “I am issuing this statement,” he wrote, “to make it clear to all involved that I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct [Ford] has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh.”

Importantly, having “no recollection” of the night in question, or no “knowledge” of the alleged events is not the same as saying it didn’t happen — especially since Ford never alleged that anyone but Kavanaugh and Judge witnessed the assault. So why would a judge, someone presumably familiar with the implications of what it often means when a witness avers they “do not recall,” so grossly mischaracterize the nature of those statements?  

Kavanaugh’s apparent willingness to perjure himself over accusations of underage drinking or sexual innuendo — which alone don’t necessarily bear on his suitability for the bench — is troubling both because of what it implies about his integrity, and because of what it suggests about his reasoning as an adjudicator.

How should we judge someone who, during his testimony, repeatedly misrepresented facts and dissembled when pressed for detail? Should we understand these moments as lies, or as misinterpretations rooted in substandard analytical rigor? And given the importance of the position at hand, which is worse?

The law, in large part, is parsing hairs.

Some of this may seem like parsing hairs, but the law, in large part, is parsing hairs. Easy questions don’t make it to the Supreme Court. Slam-dunk cases settle out. Outside of constitutional issues, the Supreme Court only agrees to hear cases that are so subject to interpretation, they’ve been inconsistently decided between states or federal circuits. Analytical precision, therefore, is a big part of the job. 

That being the case, it was concerning to hear a federal judge clamor for “due process” as he sidestepped an opportunity to call witnesses, hear evidence, or have his name cleared by a federal investigation. How should we view a federal judge who seems not to understand, or who for political reasons ignores, that he is not, in fact, on trial, but at a job interview? Who, either due to a lack of understanding or a surfeit of political ambition, emotes as though the stakes were that of a criminal proceeding, in which the high burden of proof would militate in his favor? Do we want a justice who artfully aims for what’s “technically” true (and misses often), or one whose integrity is, well, unimpeachable?

“Due process” means fair treatment under the law — that an accused person has notice of the proceedings being brought against them and an opportunity to be heard before the government takes away their life, liberty, or property. The fundamental goal of due process is to prevent the state from depriving people of their most precious freedoms. But Kavanaugh isn’t threatened with any of those deprivations. He’s not facing jail time, a fine, or any confiscation of personal goods. The stakes are these: whether he will go from sitting on the bench of the second most prestigious court in the land, to the first.

What matters, then, is whether Kavanaugh is of sufficiently fit character to fairly and ethically interpret the law. Thursday’s hearing, perhaps as much as the allegations against him, has thrown that into serious doubt.

A primary question here, and one that has largely been skipped over by the general public, is why, precisely, Kavanaugh’s past behavior, up to and including Thursday’s hearing, has any bearing on his ability to serve on the Supreme Court. What behavior would we consider disqualifying as a matter of principle? What qualities are nonnegotiable in the nation’s top jurists — people whose decisions directly affect the lives of over 300 million citizens, and billions across the world who are often beholden to the toxic effects of domestic policy?

We would argue that honesty is key to administering justice.

A Supreme Court judgeship is a lifetime appointment. And as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., recently pointed out, members of the Supreme Court are asked to make dozens of decisions every year directly relating to the life, liberty, and happiness of Americans — half of whom are women, and all of whom deserve jurists who possess a baseline level of integrity.

As Blumenthal, the Connecticut senator, said at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Friday meeting, Kavanaugh’s character and fitness give ample reason to vote “no.”

Update: September 29, 2018
Kavanaugh even lied about having no connections to Yale. “I have no connections there. I got there by busting my tail,” Kavanaugh said under oath about getting into Yale Law School after attending Yale as an undergrad. In fact, he was a legacy: His grandfather, Everett Edward Kavanaugh, also went to Yale for undergrad, as this yearbook shows.

1928 yearbook.

Top photo: Brett Kavanaugh is sworn in before testifying at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27, 2018.

The post The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh appeared first on The Intercept.

Konst has been engaged in politics since age 16, getting her start backing Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign in New York. She went on to serve as a national co-chair on Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign, and later, acted as a surrogate for “Draft Biden” — the effort to recruit the former vice president to run as an alternative to presumed frontrunner Clinton in 2015.

More recently, Konst has established a reputation as a forceful voice pushing now-popular progressive policies like “Medicare for All” and free college, as well as wonkier, but also important, issues relating to party politics. She gained a national profile as a Bernie Sanders surrogate during the 2016 campaign, and then as his representative on the Democratic National Committee’s Unity Reform Commission. A well-known New York activist, she has been a vocal opponent of the Independent Democratic Conference — a group of Democratic state senators who caucused with Republicans to provide them a constructive majority in what could have been a Democratic legislature.

Many, including Konst, anticipate that the race will be crowded. Likely candidates include several current and former city council members, such as Melissa Mark-Viverito and Christine Quinn, who lost the 2013 mayoral bid to Bill de Blasio. New York State Assemblyman and DNC Vice Chair Michael Blake and Kirsten John Foy, a staffer to then-Public Advocate de Blasio, are also speculated to run.

New York City’s public advocate has no voting power, but can attend meetings and introduce legislation. The position’s profile grew after de Blasio, the city’s third-ever public advocate, used the post as a launching pad for a successful mayoral run. That’s the same trail nearly blazed by the city’s first public advocate, Mark Green, who would likely have become mayor if not for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which threw the election into chaos, resulting in a narrow win by Michael Bloomberg.

“I’m not beholden to any political machine. I’m not beholden to any special interest group. And as of right now, I think that does make me very unique.”

But Konst rejects the notion that the job is a launching pad for higher office. In fact, she sees herself as uniquely suited to the job because, like herself, it exists somewhat outside of politics. “Unfortunately if you’re an elected official in New York, because of the circumstances, it’s almost like you take part in that system. They do control your ballot line, they can run people against you, endorsements …” she trailed off. “But I’m not beholden to any political machine. I’m not beholden to any special interest group. And as of right now, I think  that does make me very unique.” The public advocate is there as a “check on the system,” said Konst, “and by definition, someone who is a check on the system should not be part of the system.” Konst pointed out that Green was a consumer advocate — he worked with Ralph Nader from 1970 to 1980 at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. “The role of the public advocate was designed to keep the issues of the public on the forefront” — all the time, not just during an election year, said Konst.

“I have a history of investigating corruption and calling out these machines and these special interest groups,” Konst told The Intercept, “and I have a platform that I think aligns with the core leftist politics that most New Yorkers believe in. And to have a vehicle to express that is exactly what the public advocate should be.”

A viral clip of Konst dropping an F-bomb on C-SPAN while advocating for fundraising transparency exemplifies much of her appeal as an impassioned advocate for the people. “We spent a billion dollars, lost the easiest presidential race in history,” she inveighed. “I did go through FEC [Federal Election Commission] filings and it doesn’t look good, it smells. We’re talking about close to $700 to $800 million between the joint fundraising agreement and the DNC being spent on five consultants.” She went on to say that, in her mind, the DNC fundraising committee is responsible for the human cost of the party’s failures — for example, a women who might die because she loses access health care after red-state legislatures cut funding to Planned Parenthood. “It’s fuckin’ — excuse me — corruption,” she concluded.

The choice to frame herself as an outsider candidate contrasts with traditional city party politics, where belonging to the status quo is transformed into a selling point by way of rhetoric about “experience” and “qualifications.”

Konst suggested that her experience cleaning up the DNC means that she can help clean up NYC. On the Unity Reform Commission, she was tasked with getting the Democratic Party back on track after its devastating 2016 electoral defeat and the loss of over 1,000 seats in state and local government since 2008. While on the commission, Konst says she was able to enact direct reform, including introducing a resolution banning conflicts of interest. With the new resolution, she says, “if you are making money off the Democratic parties or candidates, you cannot vote on the position being held.” (It was later diluted by the Rules Committee). “When the Democratic Party is made up of lobbyists who are voting on the policies of the Democratic Party, and those lobbyists have that much influence on who the leaders of the Democratic Party are — who the endorsements are going to be for the Democratic Party. … Of course that’s going to influence how they are going to frame the debate.”

Konst pointed to the “direct relationship between corporate capitalists in New York City,” and speculators in Puerto Rico, to which she has traveled frequently between November 2017 and May 2018 reporting for the Young Turks, as another area she hopes to focus on if elected. She explained that many of the bonds for Puerto Rican debt are held by Wall Street banks, and Democratic consultants who work for them are profiting off human suffering on the island. Few politicians want to touch the issue due to the power held by the corrupt players involved. This strikes Konst as incongruent with what New York City residents want.

“I think New York is a progressive city. This is where the Progressive Era was located,” she told The Intercept. “This is where the Triangle Shirt[waist fire] happened. … You had young, female workers who were exploited and died in the largest tragedy in [American] history before 9/11. Workers’ rights emerged out of these experiences. The Progressive Era was one of New York City’s proudest moments.

“Not only do we have to fix those subways, we have to make them free.”

New York City is the largest city in America with a progressive voter base, and as a result, Konst thinks New York leadership should do more than push for “Medicare for All” and free college — ideas which have gotten widespread national support. It also should be covering new ground. “Not only do we have to fix those subways,” said Konst by way of example, “we have to make them free.” To Konst, the subways are a criminal justice issue and a working people issue. People’s jobs depend on it, she said.  

Konst went on to argue that a $15 minimum wage is a good start, but in New York, where income inequality is the highest in the country, it should be double that. “Fifteen dollars an hour over time is a path to poverty in New York City,” said Konst. “That works I think in other cities, but in New York City, you cannot survive on $15 an hour with a family. You can barely, honestly, survive with a family on $30 an hour. I’m going to call for a $30 minimum wage by the end of 2020, so that we change that debate and we normalize it.”

Konst wasn’t indifferent to the burden that places on small businesses either. “If a small business wants to be able to afford to pay their employees a livable wage and they can’t, we have to start talking about commercial real estate costs,” she said, putting the onus on “foreign oligarchs,” who buy up local real estate, rather than on workers’ wages.  

Some might argue that Cynthia Nixon’s recent loss meant that New York isn’t that progressive — despite the victories of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julia Salazar, and the six insurgents who defeated former IDC members. Konst, however, sees the governor’s race as distinct.

For one, the race for public advocate is an open primary, so independent voters, who skew younger and more liberal, can vote. “The Democratic Party does not control this election,” said Konst, which means “none of this ‘did you register two years before?’ or being purged from the polls,” as was the case in 2016, when 27 percent of registered voters in New York couldn’t vote in the presidential primaries, and again in this month’s state elections.

Konst also pointed out that the funding gap, from which Nixon suffered, will be less of a problem in the public advocate race, since municipal candidates in New York City can make use of matching funds as long as they’re on the ballot and collect a minimum number of $10 contributions from residents in the area they seek to represent. Those funds can add up, and donations from New York City residents match at a rate of 6-to-1 for donations up to $175.

“Every race is different,” explained Konst, but she sees the progressive movement gaining steam despite Nixon’s loss. Nixon “had $25 million thrown at her that Zephyr Teachout didn’t have — not to mention there were independent expenditures. … It was like the vengeance of the machine after Alexandria.” She pointed out that while Ocasio-Cortez’s opponent Joe Crowley’s machine “was a little bit dormant,” Cuomo’s was not.

“It is a special election, it is a winter election, and there’s likely to be low turnout,” she said. “But when you organize, you win.” In fact, after her upset, Ocasio-Cortez made the case that low turnout is a benefit to insurgent challengers, since grassroots, door-to-door campaigning can have a bigger impact.

New York’s democratic socialist organizing network has proven it can get results, but it’s unlikely that Konst will be the only progressive in the race. Democratic City Council Member Jumaane Williams, who narrowly lost the lieutenant governor race earlier this month, has been cited as a likely frontrunner. He told The Intercept he’s still weighing his options. “It would be an honor to have folks even consider me in the mix,” he said. “I’m seriously considering it, but I haven’t made a decision of what I’m going to do. I’m planning to do that in the coming days.”

A recent New York Times article noted that Williams earned over 414,000 votes in New York City alone, which is more than any other likely public advocate candidates have received in an election. (In 2017, incumbent Leticia James won the race in a landslide with 812,234 votes).

“I think that because I’m not elected, I can do a lot of things that they can’t do. That’s not to be held against them, it’s just the scenario, it’s just the truth. I have the freedom to go out there and be bolder.”

But Konst thinks the fact that she’s not an elected official is a boon, and she doesn’t see herself as being in direct competition with others who are. “There’s a lot of people on the left. And a lot of them are my friends who I’ve worked with. But I think that because I’m not elected, I can do a lot of things that they can’t do. That’s not to be held against them, it’s just the scenario, it’s just the truth. I have the freedom to go out there and be bolder.”

Konst pointed out that although in his current role, Williams can do things she can’t, like present legislation, there are also things she can do, like unreservedly take on the real estate industry and political machine. “I think he did a tremendous job in the lieutenant governor’s race, and I was so proud to support him throughout the way, but I do believe the public advocate position should be a race that is independent of politics.”

Konst sees her experiences, including as a reporter on the ground covering movement issues and investigating root causes of corruption, as more diversified and valuable to the role of public advocate. “He’s definitely popular right now, and that is wonderful and that is so good for our movement, but I will say this is a year when democratic socialism has an opportunity to present ideas that have really been dismissed for a long time, but are becoming tremendously popular and to have somebody who’s committed to those issues and has shown commitment, and has been involved with the Democratic Socialists [of America] — the DSA — for a long time is, I think, really important.”

This isn’t the first time Konst has run for office. In 2012, she made an attempt at Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s vacated seat in Tucson, Arizona, where Konst lived during part of her youth not spent in western New York. “That was a great lesson in how much you can depend on political institutions. I learned a lot out of that race. I learned a lot about campaign finance. I learned a lot about the Democratic Party.” Konst said she also learned a lesson in insider politics. “When I talked about economic issues, I didn’t realize that was off limits for the political establishment. And so I was pushed out of the race.” But, she said, “the stakes are too high here” to back away from those concerns.

“This is New York City. A progressive city. There are matching funds. We have a great progressive history here. And I think that the moment that we’re in is a moment when these issues should be at the forefront,” she told The Intercept. “I am going to push the narrative to make sure that these issues are at the forefront, despite what any political institution or groups want me to do. I think it is of the utmost importance that we change the narrative in New York City politics.”

Top photo: Nomiki Konst attends the 22nd Annual Webby Awards in New York City on May 14, 2018.

The post Democratic Socialist Nomiki Konst Announces Campaign for New York City Public Advocate appeared first on The Intercept.

On September 19, two weeks after losing the September 4 election by 692 votes, her primary opponent, Paul Caccaviello, announced a write-in campaign. 

In many ways, the primary election was a referendum on criminal justice reform strategies. Harrington and a third candidate, Judith Knight, both advanced a more progressive approach than Caccaviello. Harrington, for example, pledged to review all unindicted cases of sexual assault and rape from the last 15 years, addressing the department’s perceived indifference toward rape and sexual assault. Knight’s campaign prioritized criminal justice reform for cases targeting youthful offenders, proposed drug and alcohol education initiatives, and focused on prosecuting violent crime.

By contrast, Caccaviello ran on a status quo platform — largely promising to continue the policies of his predecessor David Capeless, who abruptly resigned his position earlier this year to give Caccaviello the opportunity of incumbency. “I’m taking this step now,” Capeless told reporters, “because I want Paul to be able to run as the district attorney, as I did 14 years ago.”

Yesterday, Caccaviello announced that he was heeding the call of “hundreds” of supporters urging him to stay in the race, citing his experience as a prosecutor as necessary for the job. “They must know that their DA is an experienced criminal attorney with a vast depth of knowledge, not a product manufactured by a powerful political machine,” wrote Caccaviello. (When asked what he, the establishment candidate, meant by that characterization of Harrington, Caccaviello demurred, telling The Intercept that he would go into more detail on the charge in the weeks to come).

“The voters made their choice, and elections have consequences.”

Harrington hit back hard against that charge in an interview with The Intercept, saying, “These are the ideas that were thoroughly debated during the primaries. The voters made their choice, and elections have consequences.”

Harrington sees her primary win as a victory for the county’s marginalized communities against entrenched power. “Women, people of color, people with disabilities — we fight and we fight and we fight, and we don’t win,” said Harrington the night of her viewing party at the Flavours of Malaysia restaurant in Pittsfield, Massachuestts. “But tonight, it looks like we may have changed that story.”

Caccaviello dismissed Harrington’s ideological mission as motivated by political considerations, and said that he would bring a nonpartisan approach to the office if re-elected. “Citizens must have the utmost confidence that their District Attorney will represent and protect them without regard to their party affiliation or political ideology,” wrote Caccaviello in an email to The Intercept.

The primary election results seem to corroborate Harrington’s view that voters wanted reform. Although Harrington won by only a narrow margin, her vote share, combined with Knight’s, suggests that voters chose progressive “change” over the status quo by a margin of over 25 percent.

But although they both ran to the left of Caccaviello, Knight and Harrington are far from allies. Knight was friendlier toward Caccaviello than Harrington during the campaign — even attending his election night viewing party. Knight told The Intercept that if Caccaviello embraces progressive change, she might support him, but she can’t imagine a situation in which she would support Harrington — both because of the tenor of the campaign and Harrington’s relative inexperience. “She has great progressive ideas, but the daily running of the office, in light of her limited experience, will take up all her attention,” said Knight.

Throughout the campaign, Knight distinguished herself from Harrington by pointing to the length of her career: Knight worked as an assistant district attorney in eastern Massachusetts’s Middlesex County for 5 years and has practiced criminal law for 30 years, while Harrington has been practicing defense and civil litigation for the past 15 years.

Knight added that she thinks she can convince Caccaviello to take a more progressive stance, and said that if he sufficiently changed his approach, she would consider taking a job with his office — even though she pledged not to during a debate. “If a new day dawns in that office, then maybe,” Knight told The Intercept.

“That speaks for itself,” said Harrington when asked to comment.

The primary campaign kicked off in earnest in April when Capeless and Gov. Charlie Baker agreed to hand off the incumbency to Caccaviello before Capeless’s official resignation.

Ultimately, that strategy may have backfired. Harrington told The Intercept that while canvassing, a number of voters told her that they resented the political favoritism demonstrated by the maneuver. That indignation may have helped her pick up some primary votes from constituents who wanted a change from insider politics — even if they were less than enthused about Harrington’s program of reform, she opined.  

Massachusetts’s open primary system allowed Harrington to reach left-leaning voters outside of the Democratic Party, which was a boon for her given the political leanings of her district. Berkshire County is liberal, even by Massachusetts standards. As of August 15, according to the Massachusetts Elections Division, 54.76 percent of voters identified as “unenrolled,” or as having no party affiliation, while 35.44 percent identified as Democrats. Only 8.6 percent of registered voters are Republican — hardly a factor in the region’s elections. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton performed significantly better in this district than they did statewide in the last three presidential elections, and there’s no Republican candidate running in the general election.

But despite the politics of Berkshire County voters, implementing criminal justice reform there has been an uphill battle. The Berkshire County DA’s Office lobbied against criminal justice reform at the state level in 2017, when Capeless was one of a number of Massachusetts DAs who signed a letter decrying proposals like bail reform as “a return to the old and discredited ways of the past.”

The office is notorious for setting bail for black defendants at 5 times the amount for white defendants. Shirley Edgerton, a local education and community activist who also sits on the board of the local NAACP, explained that people who can’t afford bail languish in jail, missing work and getting further behind on their bills — even though they have yet to be convicted of a crime. Once they’re free, they have to explain to their employer — if they still have one — why they missed work. And once employers are made aware of the charges against their employees, many employees lose their jobs and become unable to afford rent or food. It’s a pattern Edgerton has seen for years with the Berkshire DA. “It’s the beginning of the destruction of their lives,” she said.

According to Hall, there’s a sense of “liberal exceptionalism” in Massachusetts that allows residents to ignore the state’s very real criminal justice issues.

The bail issue is part of a greater problem of racial injustice in the state and country as a whole, said Rahsaan Hall, director of the Racial Justice Program for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who added that it’s an issue that’s having a rare moment in the public discourse, in part because of Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow,” and the subsequent activism that the book inspired against the prison system.

“The atrocities, gross injustice, the indignities — people felt like they needed to do something but were unsure of how to do it. Harrington ran a progressive, reform-minded campaign that spoke to the desires of all those people who felt they wanted to do something,” Hall told The Intercept.

According to Hall, there’s a sense of “liberal exceptionalism” in Massachusetts that allows residents to ignore the state’s very real criminal justice issues. It’s a state with some of the lowest levels of incarceration of the country, but where racial disparities are well above the nation’s average. “The enforcement of criminal laws does not visit the doorstep of white liberals in the same way it does to people of color,” said Hall. “The way it happens to communities of color makes it a much more pressing issue to these communities.”

Edgerton said that Harrington’s campaign pushed back against a system that disproportionately hurt economically disadvantaged men of color. It’s part of why Edgerton approached Harrington to run for office back in 2016. “When I heard the seat would be vacant, I thought it would be a prime opportunity to select and support someone we thought would be open to ideas of compassion, justice, and equity,” said Edgerton.

Another Harrington campaign committee member, Darcie Sosa, told The Intercept that her candidate’s platform appealed to voters looking for nontraditional solutions to criminal justice issues, and required buy-in from those members of the community. The question remains whether the buy-in that won Harrington the primary will carry her to victory if Caccaviello splits the ticket in the general.

Even if Harrington wins this fall, changing local policy will likely be an uphill battle. The office has historically been hostile to the kind of reform Harrington is proposing, and during the primary, she faced an entrenched political system.

“She understands that she’s under the microscope and that there are people who want her to fail,” Sosa told The Intercept. But Sosa believes that her candidate’s openness and accessibility will allow for the kind of community engagement that’s necessary to effect change.

Edgerton told The Intercept that the successes of progressive DAs across the country — like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia — are heartening. Harrington agreed, pointing out that some people who object to criminal justice reform are not opposed to the policy. They’re just concerned that compassion has to come at the expense of safety. The county’s drug problem and an increase in violent crime have left many in the Berkshires wondering what’s not being done — and looking for solutions. “People don’t see it as reform but as what we’re doing not working,” Harrington said.

“The voters made the determination that I was the right one for the job, and I trust the voters.”

Harrington knows she has to work to find common ground with people in the community and the DA’s office who have different approaches to criminal justice. She says that’s a challenge she’s happy to take on. Transforming how the community looks at criminal justice requires a “big tent” approach. “You do that by listening and being gracious and attentive,” said Harrington.

Caccaviello’s decision to run in the general hasn’t prompted Harrington to change her strategy or her schedule. She still believes she’s going to win in November. “The voters made the determination that I was the right one for the job,” she says, “and I trust the voters.”

Top photo: Andrea Harrington, candidate for Berkshire District Attorney, speaks at the South County Campaign Kickoff on May 21, 2018 in Great Barrington, MA.

The post A Progressive DA Won in Massachusetts. But the Man She Beat Won’t Back Down. appeared first on The Intercept.