We speak with journalist Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, about her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, which examines myths about individualism and self-reliance that underpin the U.S. economy and the inequality it fosters. She says a focus on succeeding through hard work obscures the degree to which many rich and powerful people have benefited from social support, resulting in a cycle of “shame and blame” for those who fall short.
Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio speaks with President Joe Biden following the State of the Union address in February 2023.
Jacquelyn Martin/Getty Images
Democrat Rep. Marcy Kaptur is concerned that her party is losing touch with working-class voters.
She made a chart showing Democrats overwhelmingly represent the wealthiest congressional districts.
“How is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle?” she said.
Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio worries that her party has become too disconnected from working-class voters — and she has a handy chart to illustrate the conundrum.
Kaptur, the longest-serving female member of Congress in American history, has represented a Toledo-era House district since 1983.
During an interview on Monday in her Capitol Hill office, the congresswoman produced a two-page chart that lists every US House district by median income in 2021, with Democratic-held districts highlighted in blue and Republican-held districts highlighted in red.
The result? A sea of blue on the first page, where the highest-earning districts can be found, and a splash of red on the second page, where the lowest-earning districts are listed.
“You could question yourself and say, well, the blue districts are the wealthiest districts, so it shows that the Democrats are doing better to lift people’s incomes,” said Kaptur. “The other way you could look at it is: how is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle? How is that possible?”
Kaptur told Insider that her office first produced a version of the chart during the last Congress, and that she was “trying to impress upon my own caucus” that Democrats overwhelmingly represent some of the wealthiest corners of America.
Exit polling from the 2020 presidential election somewhat complicates Kaptur’s thesis. According to CNN, voters making less than $100,000 tended to vote for Biden, while former President Donald Trump garnered nearly 60% of voters who make between $100,000 and $199,000.
Among those making $200,000 or more, Biden and Trump were essentially tied.
Nonetheless, her chart makes clear that lower-income districts like hers tend to be represented by the GOP — and Democrats’ modern-day dominance in wealthy, highly-educated enclaves has come at the expense of traditionally-Democratic constituencies elsewhere.
“It makes a difference in how you speak,” said Kaptur. “My hardest struggle is to have my staff speak in a way that the public I represent will here. For Democrats, that’s very hard.”
According to the chart, a digital version of which was provided to Insider by her office, the Ohio congresswoman’s district clocks in at number 341 with a median income of $57,732, according to US Census data.
By contrast, many other well-known Democrats represent higher-earning districts. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district, for example, is the 7th-wealthiest in the country.
“I’m not saying Nancy Pelosi didn’t live struggle,” said Kaptur. “But you have such a different perspective on where you need to move to help your communities, right?”
“There’s an elitism that pervades when you have wealth,” she added.
Kaptur has given a version of the chart to President Joe Biden, and says she presented the document to members at a recent caucus meeting. According to her, Democrats ranging from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries down to rank-and-file lawmakers are often taken aback by the visual.
“And then they’re quiet, and they just study it,” she said. “I don’t know where it takes us, except I hope to a more enlightened future.”
It is a pattern we see again and again: New political hopefuls are elected to office espousing progressive values and vowing to challenge the status quo in Washington, D.C. They are sent off with high hopes. But then, over time, the change they promise never materializes.
Worse yet, the politicians themselves begin to change. They become more distanced from the supporters who first put them in power. They aspire for a higher office and assert their “independence” by bucking their base and playing to the center. They make amends with key commercial interests in their district. They become apologists for “the way things work,” and they criticize those wanting bolder action as naive and unduly impatient.
But does this have to be the case?
In recent years, social movements have taken increasing interest in engaging the electoral system and electing champions to office. They have done so with the recognition that we need inside players to amplify and respond to pressure generated by activists on the outside. And yet, we know that many inside players—even ones who initially seem sympathetic—end up getting co-opted and becoming part of the system.
Facing this reality, movements do not need to give up on the prospect of an inside-outside strategy. But they do need to look carefully at a central problem: How do we keep those we send into the den of Beltway politics from selling out? What factors allow for an exceptional minority to remain true to their democratic base?
The goal for progressive groups seeking to intervene in electoral politics has been to elevate “movement candidates” or “movement politicians”—people who can operate differently than the typical politicians who are prone to careerism and driven by oversized egos. And yet, the idea of what constitutes a movement candidate can be amorphous.
In giving the concept more clarity, it is important to emphasize that a movement candidate is not just someone who speaks up in support of causes of social and economic justice, or whose innate integrity makes them stay true to their values. Nor is it simply a matter of an individual’s background, with the politician coming out of a marginalized community. Fundamentally, what defines someone as a movement politician is more structural. Movement politicians do not act alone. Rather, they rely on grassroots organizations as an institutional base of strength and support to help them reject the ingrained norms and culture of mainstream politics. They stay accountable not just because they are believers, but because movements offer them an invaluable foundation from which to operate.
In order to effectively combat the corrupting pressures of mainstream political culture, it is first necessary to name these forces—to account for why so few are able to navigate the norms of Washington politics without being pulled into treacherous currents. With a detailed concept of the institutional pressures at work clearly in mind, we can then understand how movements can help politicians resist.
How Washington Co-opts
For his 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, renowned linguist and political thinker Noam Chomsky teamed up with University of Pennsylvania professor Edward Herman to analyze the culture and institutional structures of mainstream media in the United States that dominated during the Cold War. Chomsky and Herman sought to determine how—in the absence of formal systems of state censorship—the mass media could nevertheless be relied upon to serve the interest of dominant elites, making sure that viewpoints that were truly critical of corporate capitalism and Washington militarism would remain ostracized.
Sketching what they called the “propaganda model,” Chomsky and Herman argued that five “filters” were in place through which “money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public.” First, the media was owned by the rich, with mergers consolidating firms into ever fewer hands. Second, publications relied on ad revenues as a primary source of income, making them dependent on corporate advertisers for their sustenance and profit. Third, the media accepted a culture of “expertise” which deferred to official sources from business and government. Fourth, reporters who stepped out of line would be disciplined by flak from those in power. And finally, the ideology of anti-Communism could be used to push certain viewpoints off-limits for mainstream discussion.
With these filters in place, there was no need for oligarchs or government officials to officially censor the press. Instead, the filters created a media culture that would do this for them. In spite of occasional exposés that revealed corporate or political misbehavior, expressions of dissent from the tenets of the “free enterprise” system or the assumptions of Cold War foreign policy could be kept to a minimum. In Chomsky and Herman’s words, the filters worked effectively to “fix the premises of discourse and interpretation.”
For each of the five filters that Chomsky and Herman identify in their analysis of the mass media, an analog can be found in the ways mainstream political culture bolsters status quo norms and places constraints on politicians seeking change. These norms can be found throughout U.S. politics, including at the state and local levels. But they are most pronounced in Washington, D.C.
So what, then, are the filters in mainstream politics that weed out dissenters?
1. Party structures
A first filter in Washington political culture is the formal structure of the two-party system. Although U.S. political parties are weak compared with many European ones, the Democrats and Republicans still have carrots and sticks they can use to discipline their members. The parties control committee assignments in Congress, with senior members securing powerful chairmanships. Newly elected officials who aspire to greater influence quickly learn that deference to party leaders can result in valuable perks, while outspoken criticism brings impediments to career advancement.
An obsession with having “access” and being on good terms with powerful people does not affect only junior party members. It shapes the entire milieu of progressive advocacy in Washington, D.C. In a 2022 Twitter thread, Evan Sutton, a Democratic political operative and former trainer for the Obama-era New Organizing Institute, described how such preoccupation becomes toxic: “Access is a plague,” he wrote. “During the Obama administration, I sometimes attended meetings organized by the White House Office of Public Engagement. The groups invited would almost never say boo, because in D.C. the most important thing is being invited to the meetings and the Christmas party.”
The slights that come when an upstart politician refuses to defer can impose significant costs. The parties run big-money committees to oversee efforts to win seats in both the House and the Senate—bodies such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC. These institutions have influence in determining which candidates will be recruited and backed in various districts, and whether they will be deemed worthy to receive millions of dollars of support for their campaigns.
In addition to determining priority races and giving their blessing to selected candidates, the parties’ campaign committees help to determine who can get jobs working in politics—at the level of campaign managers, strategists, and media consultants. In 2018, shortly after veteran Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley was defeated by the insurgent campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, and after incumbent Mike Capuano similarly lost to Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, the DCCC implemented a new rule designed to send off such grassroots primary challenges. Specifically, it announced a ban on doing business with political consulting operations that took on incumbents—effectively freezing out some of the most mobilized forces at the party’s base.
Ocasio-Cortez would later rail against the logic of the decision: “If you are the DCCC, and you’re hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms,” she said. “But instead, we banned them. So the DCCC banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing.”
2. Campaign finance
The second filter that colors Washington culture is money, specifically the massive amounts that fuel U.S. campaigns and end up infecting the political system as a whole. Officials in both major parties havedescribed the current structure of American democracy as “a system of legalized bribery and legalized extortion.” The costs of contesting for elected positions in the United States is astronomical. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the combined total of all spending in House and Senate campaigns came to more than $4 billion in 2016—almost double the inflation-adjusted total from 2000. Tasked with raising thousands per day throughout the length of their terms, sitting representatives spend lengthy sessions “dialing for dollars” from wealthy donors at party-sponsored call centers just blocks from Congress.
In a 2016 interview with 60 Minutes, then-Rep. Steve Israel explained that these demands sharply escalated after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for spending in elections: In the early 2000s, “I’d have to put in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, at most, two hours a day into fundraising,” he said. “And that’s the way it went until 2010, when Citizens United was enacted. At that point, everything changed. And I had to increase that to two, three, sometimes four hours a day[.]”
Elected officials themselves widely dislike such fundraising burdens, and beleaguered staff members often have to cajole their lawmakers to stick to scheduled “call time.” Nevertheless, if politicians wish to rise through the ranks of their party, they must excel at the task. In addition to raising money for their own campaigns, elected officials are expected to contribute to organs such as the DCCC or its Republican equivalent—payments known as “party dues.”
A 2017 report by the reform group Issue One explained, “although they do not often admit it publicly, party leadership, in private, explicitly ties congressional committee assignments to members’ dues.” The report quoted Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, who stated: “They told us right off the bat as soon as we get here, ‘These committees all have prices and don’t pick an expensive one if you can’t make the payments.'”
Trey Radel, a former Republican representative from Florida, described the none-too-subtle mechanisms through which expectations are conveyed: “Every time you walk into a [National Republican Congressional Committee] meeting, a giant goddamn tally sheet is on prominent display that lists your name and how much you’ve given—or haven’t,” he writes. “It’s a huge wall of shame. The big players, people in leadership positions and chairs of powerful committees, always dominate the board, raising millions[.]”
To secure these funds, lawmakers lean on not only wealthy individuals but also on businesses. As the Issue One report further argued, “chairs are often reliant on money from lobbyists and special interests, frequently pressuring and cajoling those working in the industries they regulate to donate generously to their campaigns.” The impact, as former Democratic Rep. Jim Jones of Oklahoma described it, is that “Big money doesn’t come in casually. It wants to have its point of view prevail, whether it’s to block legislation or to promote legislation.”
In principle, politicians are not personally enriched by campaign contributions: the money goes to fund their campaigns, and it is not bribery in the sense that the cash is pocketed by an overtly corrupt official. Yet financial largesse both enhances their job security by allowing them to get reelected, and it heightens their power and standing among their peers. Moreover, should they ever decide to “retire” from public service, cozy relationships with lobbyists mean that plush boardroom appointments and handsome consulting contracts await them through Washington’s infamous “revolving door.”
In the end, money permeates nearly every aspect of Beltway culture and profoundly shapes the strategic vision of the major parties, including how they relate to their bases of support. “I go to the Democratic caucuses every week,” Sen. Bernie Sanders explained in a 2013 interview, “and every week there is a report about fund-raising … In the six years I’ve been going to those meetings, I have never heard five minutes of discussion about organizing.”
3. Experts, consultants, and staffers
Mainstream political culture takes cues from a relatively small network of think tanks, legislative advisers, and technocrats. This class of policy experts, staffers, and political consultants create a third filter that enforces politics as usual and screens out wayward viewpoints. They make up the “adults in the room” whose sensibilities help set the ” Overton Window,” or the range of policy positions that are regarded as realistic for elected officials to pursue.
Not surprisingly, within these ranks, representatives of poor and working-class people tend to be few and far between, as are critics of the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, business leaders and economists directly or indirectly backed by corporations are considered credible voices on a wide range of public affairs, and the selection of Wall Street veterans for government posts related to the economy is regarded as reassuring to markets. Foreign policy positions are passed between neocons and reliable centrists who can be counted on to endorse American exceptionalism and support the spread of “free markets.”
In December 2018, newly elected members of Congress were invited to a week-long training at the Harvard’s Institute of Politics meant to ease their transition into Washington life. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted of the event: “Invited panelists offer insights to inform new Congressmembers‘ views as they prepare to legislate: # of Corporate CEOs we’ve listened to here: 4. # of Labor leaders: 0”
In a 2018 article in the Nation, journalist Joseph Hogan cited former U.S. representative and current Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who cautioned that constantly standing up to consensus opinion can be a wearying prospect: “You are surrounded 24-7 by colleagues and lobbyists who are constantly telling you how things work. You know they’re wrong but after a while you halfway believe their BS.”
Community organizing leader George Goehl echoed the sentiment: “[P]rogressives who get elected and go into the halls of power quickly realize that neoliberalism is the baseline, the dominant politic. Quickly, their radical imagination starts to fade,” he explained. Elected officials “need to learn to be able to spot the way neoliberal assumptions and compromises can creep in,” he argued. “Otherwise, we elect people with great intentions, good politics, who still get swept up by the machine.”
Even with Democrats in power, neoliberal economic groupthink has prevailed at critical moments. In her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance, Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote of the Obama administration’s failure to create any serious accountability for the financial sector in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis: “The president chose his team,” she argued, “and when there was only so much time and so much money to go around, the president’s team chose Wall Street.”
In retrospect, Obama himself has been willing to acknowledge that the biases of prevailing wisdom in Washington limited the policy options his administration was willing to consider. “I think there was a residual willingness to accept the political constraints that we’d inherited from the post-Reagan era—that you had to be careful about being too bold on some of these issues,” he stated in a 2020 interview with New York magazine. “And probably there was an embrace of market solutions to a whole host of problems that wasn’t entirely justified.”
Of course, many progressive groups—including ones that contributed to the unusually robust grassroots drive that put Obama into office—were telling the administration at the time that Wall Street’s irresponsibility in creating the financial crash should be the occasion for a major break from past economic orthodoxy. But these people were not seen as the “serious” voices that the president needed to heed.
Elizabeth Warren relates that she was explicitly warned against disparaging those in power upon arriving in Washington. In April 2009, when she was serving on the congressional oversight panel monitoring the Treasury Department’s economic rescue plan, Warren was taken to dinner by President Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers. “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice…” she writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”
4. Flak
The fourth filter in Chomsky and Herman’s model, known as “flak,” consists of the negative responses that a reporter or news organization would receive if they stepped out of line. Advertisers could pull their sponsorship. Access could be withdrawn. And irate administration officials could complain to a reporter’s editors. All of these served to illustrate that it was less painful to follow the path of least resistance.
A similar type of flak can be directed at officials who place themselves at odds with the norms of mainstream political culture. While the first three filters can be subtle and preemptive, setting boundaries so as to stop wayward action from ever taking place, flak comes later and is less subtle. It is the retribution experienced by those who persist in spite of implicit warnings. It is losing a committee assignment, being denied campaign funding from the DCCC, or, as per Larry Summers, being expelled from the circles of “insiders” given influence over policy deliberations.
Evan Sutton notes that “The Biden White House has made no bones about its willingness to cut people off” and that having the “temerity to publicly challenge the president lands you on a permanent shitlist.” He adds, “The Hill is no better. Pelosi’s office and many others will burn your number for stepping out of line. Funders will cut you off if you’re perceived to be crossing the president or the speaker.” As a result, Sutton explained, “very few are willing to risk it.”
Industry produces flak of its own. In describing the system as “legalized bribery and legalized extortion,” Sen. Russ Feingold emphasized that the second part was just as relevant as the first: those who refuse to play along face a threat of something bad happening. Often, this takes the form of opposition groups funding primary challenges by rivals, or running well-resourced recalls or referendum campaigns that cripple efforts to pursue progressive policy.
In a 2013 interview, Bernie Sanders described situations in which fellow lawmakers would express sympathy for legislation he proposed, but were cowed by the promise of flak. “If there’s a tough vote in the House or the Senate—for example, legislation to break up the large banks—people might come up and say, ‘Bernie, that’s a pretty good idea, but I can’t vote for that,'” he explained. “Why not? Because when you go home, what do you think is going to happen? Wall Street dumps a few million dollars into your opponent’s campaign.”
Nor can those who are challenged count on the support of their party. There have been numerousincidents where Democratic organs have opted not to endorse their own incumbents who are seen as too progressive. And although flak is not always decisive, the constant need to combat it can be a serious drain on time and energy—as well as a deterrent to others who are not willing to brave the same treatment.
5. Ideologically imposed limits to debate
A final filter identified by Chomsky and Herman pertains to how ideological labeling and scaremongering could be used to impose boundaries on public debate and mark certain positions as impermissible. Specifically, writing in the 1980s, they highlighted how the ideology of anti-communism was deployed. The fact that left-leaning policy aims—whether foreign or domestic—could be denounced as signs of creeping socialism “helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism,” they argued.
Twenty years after the original publication of Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman revised their framework slightly to note how other ideologically laden charges—particularly those related to “anti-terrorism” and the “war on terror”—could be used to push dissenting opinions outside the bounds of acceptable debate.
In today’s context, the filter of ideology might be applied to a diversity of issues—limiting what is acceptable in discussions of immigration, policing, and prisons, or a range of other topics. Examples would include the ways accusations of radicalism were used to force the resignation of “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones from the Obama administration. Or one could point to the concerted attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, which sought to characterize her criticisms of Israeli policy and objections to AIPAC stances as antisemitic and beyond the pale.
While this filter can be interpreted in a more expansive way, the extent to which specifically anti-communist dogma and red-baiting tactics have lingered long after the Cold War is noteworthy. Among Republicans, the line of attack remains ever-pertinent. Just in the past few years Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has used red-baiting language to denounce everything from the Green New Deal (a ” radical, socialist” policy) to student debt forgiveness (“student loan socialism“) to statehood for the District of Columbia (“full-bore socialism“) to pandemic social spending (“a Trojan Horse for permanent socialism“). In early February 2023, House Republicans made a point of passing a resolution stating that “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.”
Perhaps more distressing is the number of Democrats who play into the attack—or fumble when responding to it. While the success of Bernie Sanders and the Squad in recent years has changed the political landscape, party leaders remain defensive and fearful. In 2017, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a point of stating, “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.” And, for their part, 109 Democratic members of Congress voted with the Republicans in support of their February resolution.
How movements break the filters
Chomsky and Herman argued that the filters on the mass media rarely needed to be imposed in an overt manner. Over time, the biases they created became so embedded in the professional culture that practitioners internalized them. “The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news ‘objectively’ and on the basis of professional news values,” they wrote.
Likewise, within Washington politics, the cultural norms are pervasive enough that those who are primed to succeed are the ones who have habituated themselves in advance. They have accepted the way in which the game is played, and they are comfortable embarking on a quest to gain power within the confines of the existing system.
Meanwhile, those who try to retain their integrity by denouncing the system find themselves constantly repulsed. In November 2020, as she reached the end of her first term, Ocasio-Cortez had been remarkably successful by conventional standards, solidifying her support in her district, achieving widespread celebrity, and gaining a large platform from which to advance her views. Yet she stunned a New York Times interviewer by reporting that she regularly considered getting out, saying “I don’t even know if I want to be in politics.”
“Externally, there’s been a ton of support,” she explained, “but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.” She made clear that it was not just violent threats and demonization from the right that were disconcerting, but also the behavior of fellow Democrats: “It’s the lack of support from your own party,” she said. “It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy.”
When we wonder why once-hopeful political champions bow out, or why politicians elected to take on the system acculturate themselves to it over time, the combined power of the five filters provides a compelling explanation. Left on their own, individual elected officials have slim hope of standing up to the institutional forces arrayed against them. Although some exceptional individuals may be able to sustain themselves, most need significant help if they are to survive.
This is where movements come in. Having a base of grassroots institutions to back movement candidates gives them a grounding they can use to sidestep Washington norms, wage insurgent campaigns, and govern in a manner that shows accountability to their core constituencies rather than to wealthy elites. Instead of relying solely on personal values to remain principled, they make this challenge into a collective task. With regard to the five filters, movements provide tools for resistance, offering infrastructure, resources and conscious strategy for counteracting each of them in turn.
In terms of party structures, movements help politicians form effective factions and allow them to join organized attempts to create realignments in party composition and ideology. While groups including Justice Democrats work at such tasks in Washington, D.C., more developed structures exist at state and local levels. In some cities, central labor councils have significant influence in nominating or approving candidates for party leadership. In some instances, progressive caucuses have created unity and allowed for mutual support among elected officials who may be to the left of their party’s local leadership. In others, bodies such as the Working Families Party or New York DSA’s Socialists in Office committee have provided alternate quasi-party structures that can provide a home for lawmakers who may otherwise be marginalized.
When it comes to campaign finance, technologies of small donor fundraising have given grassroots campaigns the ability to compete with more conventionally funded candidates. (Bernie Sanders, for one, raised more than $231 million from 2.8 million donors in 2016.) Furthermore, the ground game and volunteer muscle of movement field operations—drives that knock thousands of doors to reach local voters—have sometimes given progressive candidates the edge over more lavishly endowed opponents who rely on the “air war” of political attack ads. While neither solution is perfect, movements offer candidates the option of trying to win by energizing the base, rather than triangulating toward the center.
To disrupt a culture of insider expertise, movements can both inoculate incoming officials and elevate alternate sources of policy know-how. Networks such as People’s Action have invested in political education trainings for rank-and-file members and prospective candidates alike. Others, such as Movement School and re:power (formerly Wellstone Action), have invested in creating pipelines for campaign managers and legislative staffers rooted in movement values. Finally, community-based groups can organize progressive academics to craft alternative proposals for public policy.
When flak comes in, having a movement at your back can make the difference between robust defense and abandonment by your own party. And, ideologically, movements create a new sense of the possible. They work to move the Overton Window and bring ideas that might initially be considered verboten into acceptable public discussion: Same-sex marriage, millionaires’ taxes, the Green New Deal, a $15 minimum wage, and student debt cancellation are just a few such ideas.
As bolder demands are mainstreamed, attempts to ostracize their advocates as radical extremists lose their potency—to the point where even politicians who were once fearful to be associated with a cause may suddenly ” evolve” in their consciousness, as a wave of public officials did in 2013 after same-sex marriage was shown to be a winning issue. Movement politicians who share in a set of collective beliefs are less likely to back down from principled positions, because they have a clear sense that these stances are rooted in the values of their community.
A basic tenet of social psychology is that if someone is surrounded by others who accept the same set of norms and rules of behavior, that person will find it very difficult to avoid internalizing this dominant set of values. “Honestly, it is a shit show. It’s scandalizing, every single day,” Ocasio-Cortez has reported of her experience in Washington. “What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing. Some folks perhaps get used to it, or desensitized to the many different things that may be broken,” she says. And yet she emphasizes the need to guard against such desensitization and resist deferring to the supposed “adults in the room” who have made their peace with the system. “Sometimes to be in a room with some of the most powerful people in the country and see the ways that they make decisions—sometimes they’re just susceptible to groupthink, susceptible to self-delusion,” she notes.
That this conventional groupthink prevails is no accident. It is a product of political economy and cultural influence, the forces that make up the five filters. Movements provide a structural counterbalance that makes resistance possible. The institutional support of grassroots organizations gives movement politicians a chance to avoid being absorbed into the system. And for those interested in social change, it is likely the best chance we have.
The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the GOP wants to cut.
A much larger share of Republican than Democratic House members represent districts where seniors exceed their share of the national population, census data show. Republicans are also more likely to represent districts where the median income trails the national level, or the proportion of people without health insurance is greater than in the nation overall.
House Republicans, in their ongoing struggle with President Joe Biden over raising the debt ceiling, have signaled they will push for sweeping reductions in domestic social programs, likely including Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the principal federal programs providing health care for working-age adults. And while House Republicans appear to have backed away from pursuing reductions in Social Security and Medicare, the conservative Republican Study Committee has set a long-term goal of cutting and partially privatizing both programs.
The fact that so many House Republicans feel safe advancing these proposals in districts with such extensive economic need testifies to the power of what I’ve called “the class inversion” in American politics: the growing tendency of voters to divide between the parties based on cultural attitudes, rather than class interests. That dynamic has simultaneously allowed House Democrats to gain in more socially liberal, affluent, metropolitan areas and House Republicans to consolidate their hold over more culturally conservative, economically hardscrabble, nonurban areas.
Yesterday, Biden forcefully reiterated his charge that Republicans would shred the safety net at a White House ceremony commemorating the 13th anniversary of Barack Obama signing the ACA into law. An extended battle between House Republicans and Biden this spring and summer over the safety net may test whether any economic argument can allow Democrats to break through the cultural resistance that fortifies Republican control of these downscale districts.
While Republicans have gained in some areas primarily around culturally and racially infused disputes such as those over crime and immigration, a struggle over spending priorities will inevitably highlight that “their policies on these bread-and-butter issues remain diametrically opposed to the economic interest of much of their base,” Paul Pierson, a political scientist at UC Berkeley and a co-author of Let Them Eat Tweets, told me.
As I reported last week, to understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
That analysis inverts many traditional assumptions, even within the parties themselves, about whose voters rely on the social safety net. “There has been a massive transformation of the coalitions,” Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.
Democrats, who led the legislative efforts to create Social Security under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Medicare under Lyndon B. Johnson, have long thought of themselves as the party of seniors. But today, Republicans represent 141 of the 215 House districts where adults aged 65 and older exceed their 16 percent share of the national population, while Democrats hold a clear majority of seats in districts with fewer seniors than average, according to the Equity Research Institute analysis.
Republicans now also control most of the House seats in which the median income trails the national level of nearly $65,000 annually. Republicans hold 152 of the 237 seats in that category. Democrats, in turn, hold 128 of the 198 seats where the median income exceeds the national level.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Republicans hold a clear majority of the districts where the share of residents who lack health insurance exceeds the national level of 9 percent. The GOP now holds 110 of those 185 highly uninsured seats. Democrats control 138 of the 250 seats with fewer uninsured than the nation overall.
Equally revealing is to examine what share of each party’s total strength in the House these seats represent. From that angle, the parties offer almost mirror-image profiles. About two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts with more seniors than the national level, while about two-thirds of Democrats represent districts with fewer of them. Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts where the median income lags the national level, while three-fifths of Democrats hold seats where incomes surpass it. Almost exactly half of Republicans, compared with only about one-third of Democrats, represent districts with an unusually high concentration of people lacking health insurance.
The economically vulnerable districts that each side holds also present a stark demographic contrast. Low-income Democratic seats tend to be in urban centers with large nonwhite populations. In more than three-fourths of the Democratic seats with a median income below the national level, and in virtually all of the Democratic districts with more uninsured people than average, the minority share of the population is also higher than the national average.
Some low-income Republican districts also have large minority populations, particularly in Texas and Florida, where the GOP has made inroads into culturally conservative Latino communities. But mostly the low-income GOP seats are centered on working-class white areas, many of them outside metropolitan areas.
In the 141 seats Republicans hold with more seniors than the national average, white residents exceed their national share of the population in 127 of them. Likewise, white residents surpass their share of the national population in more than four-fifths of the Republican-held districts that lag the median income. Nearly half of House Republicans represent districts in which all three things are true: They have more seniors than the national level, more white residents than the national level, and a lower median income than the national level.
All of this reflects how working-class white voters, many of them financially squeezed, have become the unquestioned foundation of the GOP’s coalition at every level, from the House through presidential elections.
Biden is laying siege to those voters with a strategy of deemphasizing cultural disputes and stressing kitchen-table economic benefits. “Democrats really are making appeals to these districts in a big way,” Pierson said. “Most of that infrastructure and climate [spending] is going to go on in red states. There really is a big effort to say, ‘We are going to use policy to try to make our electoral coalition bigger.’”
A key element of Biden’s courtship of these voters is defending the social safety net, especially Social Security and Medicare. The president’s repeated rejection of reductions in those programs, combined with former President Donald Trump’s opposition to potential cuts, has resulted in the most obvious concession by House Republicans to their evolving electoral base: public declarations by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other leaders that they will not target Social Security and Medicare in the cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit this summer.
Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs that many voters in blue-collar Republican districts rely on, potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.
Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. “We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,” Blendon said. “The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.”
The one risk for Republicans in such areas, he noted, would be if voters conclude that they present a genuine threat to Social Security and Medicare. Even most conservative voters strongly favor those programs, Blendon told me, primarily because they view them as an earned benefit that workers have contributed to during their lifetime. If the GOP seriously pushes ideas such as converting Medicare into a voucher program, or diverting part of Social Security revenue into private investment accounts, then “in districts with a lot of older people, they are going to get in trouble,” Blendon said.
Pastor, the director of the Equity Research Institute, also believes that current Democratic arguments targeted at older and non-college-educated white voters that they are “voting against their interests” economically are unlikely to succeed. The problem, he says, is that those arguments don’t directly address the way many voters also define their interests to include cultural and racial dynamics. Because Republican strength in these older, predominantly white, financially stressed districts is rooted largely in “the alienation of white voters who fear the country is shifting on them demographically,” Democrats must ultimately make a more explicit case to those voters about how all Americans can benefit from a more diverse and inclusive society, Pastor said. “The Democratic Party needs to figure out how to talk more effectively about race and racism—not try to ignore it, but try to inoculate people against it,” he said.
Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, notes that the majority of voters, including seniors, support Biden’s approach to preserving the safety net for retirees: In a recent national survey, his group found that voters were nearly four times as likely to support stabilizing Medicare by raising taxes on the affluent rather than cutting benefits. “There is quite a bit of economically populist appetite even among Republicans for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations,” Bennett told me. Even Medicaid, once seen as a program for the poor, now draws widespread support across party lines, he said.
Yet Bennett, too, is cautious about predicting that Republican efforts to cut the safety net will hurt them in districts that highly depend on it. The GOP, Bennett said, is gambling that it can cut programs that benefit the party’s lower-income white base and still prevent those voters from defecting to Democrats by stressing “other issues like immigration and the culture war.”
If Republicans face any internal resistance to sharp cuts in the safety net, in fact, it may be more likely to come from their members who represent socially liberal white-collar districts that don’t rely as much on these programs than from their members who represent the culturally conservative blue-collar districts that do depend on them. The Republicans who seem least concerned about targeting the social safety net are those who represent the places that need those programs the most. That’s another telling measure of just how fully the concrete has settled beneath a modern political alignment that revolves more around culture than class.
Bryce Covert
When child care is unaffordable and unavailable, people can’t get to work—it’s mainly mothers who are held back.
Scolding regular people for contributing to climate change is out of fashion. But scolding people for making new people is, apparently, totally fine. Many climate activists say the worst thing an individual can do, from an emissions perspective, is have kids. The climate-advocacy group Project Drawdown lists “family planning and education,” which are intended to lower fertility rates, as leading solutions to global warming. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian and celebrated climate researcher, published an op-ed in Scientific American this month titled “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement.”
In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.
Malthus argued against aid to poor Britons on the grounds that they consumed too many of the nation’s resources. In making his case, he semi-accurately described a particular kind of poverty that we still refer to as the “Malthusian trap” today. Agricultural productivity in poor societies is not high enough to support the population without significant labor input, so most people work on small subsistence farms to feed themselves and their families. The inescapably linear growth in the food supply could never outstrip the exponential growth in human populations, he argued.
But human societies have proved repeatedly that they can escape the Malthusian trap. Indeed, agricultural productivity has improved to support a British population seven times larger than in Malthus’s time and a global population eight times larger. As a result of these stubborn facts, most Malthusian imitators haven’t come out and said they’re Malthusians. And instead of focusing on famine, they have tended to emphasize humanity’s destruction of nature.
The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich has been the world’s leading overpopulation hawk since the publication of his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich did warn about food shortages, but as an entomologist and a conservationist, his primary concern was our influence on the natural world. “The progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than the food-population gap,” he wrote.
In a description of a trip to New Delhi, he was vividly forthcoming about his distaste for the living, breathing individuals who make up a population:
People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
If people, people, people are the primary threat to the natural world, what is the solution? Uncomfortable as it is to say, conservationist and eugenicist theories have long been intertwined. Indeed, in his newly published autobiography, Life: A Journey Through Science and Politics, Ehrlich credits the early-20th-century thinker William Vogt, whom he calls “a liberal conservationist,” as inspiration for his work on population. Here is how Vogt explained his proposal to offer “sterilization bonuses” to the poor:
Since such a bonus would appeal primarily to the world’s shiftless, it would probably have a favorable selective influence. From the point of view of society, it would certainly be preferable to pay permanently indigent individuals, many of whom would be physically and psychologically marginal, $50 or $100 rather than support their hordes of offspring that, by both genetic and social inheritance, would tend to perpetuate the fecklessness.
In the beginning of the previous century, there was simply no contradiction in being a “liberal conservationist” and being a eugenicist. Vogt was the national director for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which has recently reckoned with the eugenicist commitments of its founder, Margaret Sanger. The Sierra Club, which was initially led by a number of avowed eugenicists, commissioned Ehrlich to write The Population Bomb and for decades operated a program focused on ways to reduce fertility and immigration.
Now 90 years old, Ehrlich still takes pride in the work he did turning population growth into a global concern, even though the mass famine and pestilence that he predicted in the ’60s never came to pass.
“I must admit,” he writes in his autobiography, “that in 2019 I was pleased to find an article in a history journal that credited us ‘neo-Malthusians’ with stimulating ‘thinking of the planet as a whole and anticipating its future.’”
And Ehrlich remains a venerated figure. In January of this year, CBS featured Ehrlich on an episode of 60 Minutes on species extinction. The climate scientist Michael Mann called the memoir a “wide-ranging, wondrous, and pleasantly amusing account of his amazing life—as a scientist, thinker, communicator, influencer, and champion for a sustainable world.”
Intellectual descendants of Ehrlich’s in the environmental movement continue to sell old Malthusian wine in new bottles.
Oreskes draws attention to the same problem that Ehrlich did in his day: biodiversity loss associated with high-fertility, low-productivity societies caught in the Malthusian trap. Because subsistence farms have low yields, and because the farmers tend to rely on wood and other biomass for energy, they remain a major driver of deforestation, land-use change, and wildlife extirpation.
In Oreskes’s recent Scientific Americanop-ed, she acknowledges that her ideas have a tarnished legacy. “Population control is a vexing subject,” she writes, “because in the past it has generally been espoused by rich people (mostly men) instructing people in poor countries (mostly women) on how to behave.” Her workaround is to emphasize educational opportunities as a “reasonable” way to “slow growth.” In an email, Oreskes said that she does not consider herself a Malthusian and that she focuses on education “because we know that it can work, and unlike some other approaches it is good for women, and non-coercive.”
The Overpopulation Project (TOP) also highlights education, arguing that governments in every country should “make population and environmental issues and sex education part of the basic educational curriculum.” Likewise, Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth, which Ehrlich co-founded in 1968) develops “K-12 curricula and secondary education materials for teachers and professors so they can easily incorporate population studies into their classes.”
Access to education—in general, or to sex ed and “population studies” in particular—is certainly preferable to Vogt’s forced sterilization. But what about solutions to environmental decline that emphasize better growth instead of slower growth? Solutions such as modern energy infrastructure, high-productivity agriculture, and access to global markets?
Proposals of this sort, which Oreskes refers to derisively as “cornucopianism,” are the alternatives to Malthusianism that have proved effective across history. Rough contemporaries of Malthus, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, argued that improvements in economic productivity would allow humans to grow enough food to meet rising population levels, and they were right. Vogt’s pessimism lost out to the ingenuity of, among others, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning agronomist Norman Borlaug, as the historian Charles Mann recounts in his 2018 book,The Wizard and the Prophet. Borlaug’s innovations in wheat and maize cultivation helped stave off the famines Vogt and other eugenicists had predicted. Ehrlich, infamously, lost a bet with the libertarian economist Julian Simon over resource scarcity. (Simon goes completely unmentioned in Ehrlich’s autobiography.) And “cornucopianism” can do more than fend off famine; it can serve conservationist ends. Thanks to innovation and technological decoupling, an average American today is more than twice as wealthy as an average American was the year The Population Bomb was published, yet generates 30 percent fewer carbon emissions and uses 50 percent less land for their diet.
Like Oreskes, the scientists at TOP and Population Connection insist that their proposed solutions to the population “problem” are noncoercive. They just want to nudge people in the direction of fewer people. Another of TOP’s priorities is to “reduce immigration numbers” to developed countries with low fertility rates. Additional ideas include proposals to lower government support for third and fourth children and for medical fertility treatments.
But Ehrlich said the same thing. “I’m against government interference in our lives,” he told an interviewer in 1970. How that sentiment squared with Ehrlich’s demands in The Population Bomb for “compulsory birth regulation” and “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children” remains unclear. And it didn’t stop powerful institutions from taking his warnings about overpopulation literally as well as seriously. As Betsy Hartmann recounted in her 1987 exposé, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, the Population Council, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and other organizations funded fertility-reduction programs that, in tandem with sometimes coercive government policies, led to millions of sterilizations in China, India, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. China’s one-child policy can be directly traced to Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome’s famous Malthusian screed warning of resource shortages and overpopulation.
When the problem is defined as too many carbon emissions, the solutions will be optimized to reduce emissions. When the problem is defined as too little education and bodily autonomy, solutions such as schooling and birth control make intuitive sense. When the problem is defined as too many people, the “solutions” will surely once again go far beyond the gentle, humane approaches that the neo-Malthusians emphasize. As The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas put it, “Enough with the innuendo: If overpopulation is the hill you want to die on, then you’ve got to defend the implications.”
Fortunately, much of civil society has gotten wise to the new, friendly Malthusianism. Ehrlich’s appearance on 60 Minutes was met with widespread condemnation. Last year the Sierra Club shut down its long-standing population-control program, writing, “Contraception and family planning are not climate mitigation measures.”
And these concerns are being raised at a peculiar moment in human history. The total population of human beings on Earth is expected to peak and declinelater this century, not because of war, famine, or disease, but because of secularly declining fertility. The challenges that nations including Germany, Korea, Japan, and even India and China are dealing with today is underpopulation, not overpopulation. Migrants, particularly those who are young and skilled, will be crucial to generating economic growth in these countries. This makes the neo-Malthusian dismissal of technology, infrastructure, and growth particularly troubling. Supporting an aging population will require an economic surplus that has traditionally been supplied by a favorable ratio of younger workers in the labor force to retirees. As that ratio reverses, it is not clear how infrastructure maintenance and social-services financing will fare.
Given that the Malthusian dream—a peak in global population—is already in sight, one might think that single-minded efforts to further suppress population growth would wane. But the old population-control movement is still alive and well today.
The increasing inaccessibility of cars is having detrimental effects on the nation’s social fabric
Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay writes in Jacobin about climate change and the institutional blindness and warped incentives that should scare the crap out of all of us.
A helicopter prepares to make a water drop as smoke billows along the Fraser River Valley near Lytton, British Columbia, Canada, on July 2, 2021. (James MacDonald / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
There is a scene in the 1998 movie about two modern-day teens trapped in an idyllic 1950s TV show, Pleasantville, in which Tobey McGuire’s character runs into a firehouse to tell the firemen that an actual fire has broken out. The firemen, who in their perfect, scripted television world only ever rescue kittens, stare blankly at McGuire from their dinner table, as he yells “Fire!,” over and over again. They have zero existing framework to even understand the basic concept of “fire,” let alone take action to contain it.
It’s a really funny moment. But if you talk to any climate scientist, writer, or activist these days, they will tell you that this is what they face in reality.
Climate events every day make it clear that the escalation is happening much faster and more violently than anyone anticipated. Britain crossed 40°C (104°F) last summer, causing homes to burst into flames; trees have started growing in the Arctic circle; water is drying up in the American Southwest and across the globe at a startling rate; and it is all but certain that we will cross 1.5°C warming in the next two years. And on and on.
A recent piece in the Guardian by Roger Harrabin describes a disconcerting encounter he had with a renowned scientist:
The heat phenomenon in the Canadian town of Lytton, for instance, produced a “dome” of trapped heat that cranked up the temperature to 49.6C. Wildfires raged and the town was razed. I broke the news to one of the Royal Society’s leading members, Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, but at first he did not believe me. Then he said: “Oh, my god, that’s really scary.”
Extreme change is happening much, much faster than we thought. Water and food shortages are already here. With dozens of events — including the frequency of winter tornadoes tripling in the American South — popping up every day, it’s clear we are dealing with a “right now” time frame. Nonetheless, governments, leaders of industry, the banking world, and large swaths of the news media have so far reacted like the blank-faced firemen in Pleasantville.
Just earlier this week, the Biden administration signaled that it would approve the Willow oil drilling project on federal land, a project that will release over nine million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere — the equivalent of putting an additional two million cars onto the road. The administration is doing it under the Jamie Dimon–backed premise that more fossil fuels are required in order to eliminate fossil fuels.
At first blush, every aspect of this move reads as madness. But I believe this decision, and the almost total lack of curiosity or concern surrounding it, demonstrates something much more dangerous than foolishness or imbalance. It shows that many entrenched political forces can only understand the rapid warming of the planet as just another issue that polls indicate some people are concerned about. For these leaders, the climate crisis is placed neatly against traditional concerns, such as the economy, rising gas prices, or an angered donor class. It’s a level of institutional blindness and warped incentives that should scare the crap out of all of us.
Let me be clear: I’m not saying that leaders, CEOs, or media members who fail to take in the reality of this consequential moment are necessarily all “bad people,” but instead were selected by and have thrived in a reality that no longer exists.
And I’m not being hyperbolic. Humans have never lived in a climate with this much carbon. It’s been two million years since the earth’s atmosphere had the level of greenhouse gases that scientists are currently reporting.
Can our institutions account for their blind spots and pivot to the moment we’re in?
It’s certainly not looking good lately. But the scene that follows Maguire yelling “Fire!” in Pleasantville shows his character turning on a never-before-used hose from the fire truck to finally put out the blaze.
“So that’s what that’s for!” says the fireman next to him.
Government leaders, the media, and heads of industry need to stop living in a world that fits their needs and feels familiar, and start living in the world as it is. The alternative is unimaginably grim.
Rebecca Gordon: Singing the “Bourgeois Blues”
On my way home from the doctor’s office, I regularly pass the New York apartment building where I grew up. I would invariably stop, stare, and feel an overwhelming desire to visit the place I hadn’t seen in perhaps 60 years. The street door hadn’t changed a bit.
A few months ago, on a whim, I looked for the buzzer to apartment 6D, pressed it, and a woman’s voice answered. I promptly said, “Hi, I’m Tom Engelhardt. I grew up in the apartment you now live in and was wondering whether you’d let me see it again.” To my amazement — yes, this is New York City! — she promptly buzzed me in and I found myself riding to the 6th floor on the barely updated gate elevator I used as a kid. Ours was, I must tell you, a remarkable apartment. Even to get to it, you had to step out of the elevator, walk down a short corridor out onto a covered but open catwalk (where you can still see the roofs of New York around you), and then down another corridor.
So many years later, I did just that and, when the present resident of 6D let me in, felt overwhelmed with memories as I saw the staircase to the second floor where my old bedroom was, the living room with the remarkable skylight under which my mother drew her caricatures, and even the little porch beyond it. And yes, it sounds, I know, like quite a place, which it was (and remains). Today, fully renovated, it’s undoubtedly a wildly expensive coop or condo, but, in 1946, when my parents got that duplex apartment, just after my father left the Air Force in the wake of World War II, it was rent-controlled and cheap as hell. (Lucky for them as, in the 1950s when I was a kid, they were eternally short on cash.) But no surprise then either. After all, at the time, all of New York was rent-controlled and veterans stood a reasonable chance of getting a fine apartment they could actually afford.
As in much of the country now, rent control in New York is largely a thing of the past as rents here have all too literally gone through the roof, with even studio apartments soaring toward $4,000 a month. As Bloomberg News reports, there’s never been a worse time to rent in the big city. More than three bedrooms will cost you an average of $9,592 per month. And yes, that’s to rent, not buy! Imagine that! Once upon a time, that apartment of mine was something like $190 per month! And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon fill you in on rent madness in twenty-first-century America. Tom
Don’t Try to Find a Home in Washington, D.C. Or Pretty Much Anywhere Else If You’re a Renter
In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no hotel would give them shelter, nor would any Black landlord let them in, because they were accompanied by Lomax, who was white. A white friend of Lomax’s finally agreed to put them up, although his landlord screamed abuse at him and threatened to call the police.
In response to this encounter with D.C.’s Jim Crow laws, Lead Belly wrote a song, “The Bourgeois Blues,” recounting his and Martha’s humiliation and warning Blacks to avoid the capital if they were looking for a place to live. The chorus goes,
Lord, in a bourgeois town It’s a bourgeois town I got the bourgeois blues Gonna spread the news all around
And one verse adds,
I want to tell all the colored people to listen to me Don’t ever try to get a home in Washington, D.C. ‘Cause it’s a bourgeois town
Such affronts, Lead Belly sang, occurred in the “home of the brave, land of the free,” where he didn’t want “to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie.”
There are music scholars who believe that Lead Belly didn’t really understand what “bourgeois” meant. They claim Lomax, later accused of being a Communist “fellow traveler,” provided him with that addition to his vocabulary and he simply understood it as a synonym for “racist.” Personally, I think that, in a few deft verses, Lead Belly managed to show how racism and class stratification merged to make it all but impossible to find a home in Washington, as in so many other places in America.
Still a Bourgeois Town
In the late 1970s, after a period of unemployment, my mother got a job for a year in Washington. We’d lived there while I was growing up, but she hadn’t been back for almost a decade. She was a white middle-class professional and it was still hell finding an affordable place to rent. (She’d been without a job for more than a year.) It would be some time before credit ratings would be formalized, thanks to the financial corporation FICO, producing a model of a standardized credit score for anyone. But her prospective landlords had other ways of checking on her creditworthiness. That she was a divorced woman with no rental history and no recent jobs didn’t make things easy.
Still, she had her sense of humor. One day during that search, she mailed me an old 45 rpm recording of Lead Belly’s “Bourgeois Blues.” It seemed to perfectly catch her frustrated efforts to escape a friend’s guest room before she wore out her welcome.
I was reminded of that record recently when I read about the travails of Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a new Democratic congressman from Orlando, Florida. Born in 1996, he’s the youngest member of the House of Representatives. He quit his full-time job to campaign for Congress, supporting himself by driving an Uber. When he tried to find a home in Washington, his application for a studio apartment was rejected because of a bad credit score. As Frost tweeted:
Just applied to an apartment in DC where I told the guy that my credit was really bad. He said I’d be fine. Got denied, lost the apartment, and the application fee. This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have money.
Nor, as Lead Belly might have added, for people like Frost who are Black.
Washington, D.C., it seems, remains a “bourgeois” town.
The True Costs of Renting
Suppose you want to rent a place to live. What will you need to have put aside just to move in? This depends not only on the monthly rent, but on other fees and upfront payments in the place where you plan to live. And, of course, your credit score.
Application fee: One part of Frost’s story caught my attention: he had to forfeit his “application fee” for an apartment he didn’t get. If, like me, you haven’t rented a house or apartment in a while you might not even know about such fees. They’re meant to cover the cost of a background check on the applicant. You might expect them to be rolled into the rent, but in a seller’s (or renter’s) market, there’s no risk to landlords in making them extra.
Frost’s fee was $50 for one application. (These fees tend to top out around $75.) Not so bad, right? Until you grasp that many potential renters find themselves filing multiple applications — 10 isn’t unheard of — simply to find one place to rent, so you’re potentially talking about hundreds of dollars in fees. California, my own state, is among the few that regulate application fees. The maximum rises to match inflation. In December 2022, that max was $59.67. Some states set a lower maximum, and some don’t regulate the fees at all.
Move-in fees: If you haven’t rented in a while, this one may take you by surprise. Unlike a security deposit, move-in fees are nonrefundable. They’e supposed to cover the costs of preparing a place for a new tenant — everything from installing new locks to replacing appliances and painting. Once subsumed in the monthly rent, today these costs are often passed on directly to renters. Nationally, they average between 30% and 50% of a month’s rent.
In June 2022, the median rent for an apartment in the United States crossed the $2,000 threshold for the first time, which means the median move-in fee now ranges from $600 to $1,000.
First and last months’ rent: This upfront cost should be familiar to anyone who’s ever rented. Landlords almost always require two months’ rent upfront and hold on to the last month’s rent to ensure that a tenant can’t skip out without paying. Because landlords can invest the money they’re holding (and tenants can’t invest what they’ve forked over to landlords), in recent years, most states have required landlords to pay interest on the tenant’s funds.
Security deposit: Unlike the move-in fee, a security deposit — often a month’s rent — is refundable if tenants leave a place in good condition. Its ostensible purpose: to reimburse the landlord for future cleaning and repair costs that exceed normal wear-and-tear. (But wait! Isn’t that what the non-refundable move-in fee should do?)
Other fees: If you’re renting a condo, you may have to cover the owner’s monthly Home Owner Association fees. In some cases, you’ll also pay for a utility’s hookup like gas or electricity.
So, how much will you have to pay to set foot in that apartment? Well, if you’re like Nuala Bishari, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who recently tried to rent a house in nearby Oakland, California, you’ll need to set aside almost $10,000. If you’re not sure how you could possibly put that kind of money together, the credit score company Experian has some advice for you:
First, “calculate your odds.” Find out how many other people are applying for the unit you’re interested in and, if the competition is stiff, “consider looking elsewhere.” (As if you haven’t done that already!)
Then tighten your belt. “Reducing extraneous expenses,” it observes, “is an easy way to save.” Stop going out to eat, for instance, and look for free family activities. If that’s not enough, it’s time to “get serious about cost cutting.” Their brilliant suggestions include:
“Cut back on utility use. [Wait! I thought I was supposed to cook more at home. Never mind. I’ll just sit here in the dark.]
Carpool to work instead of driving. [I take the bus, but maybe I should start walking.]
Such “advice” to people desperate to find housing would be amusing if it weren’t so desperately insulting.
Rent Is Unaffordable for More Than Half the Country
Suppose you’ve managed to get together your up-front costs. What can you expect to pay each month? The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development considers housing affordable when rent takes no more than 30% of an individual’s or family’s monthly income. Human Rights Watch (!) reported in December 2022 that the Census Bureau’s 2021 Annual Community Survey revealed a little over half of all renters are spending more than 30% of their income that way — and in many cases, significantly more.
It tells you something that Human Rights Watch is concerned about housing costs in this country. The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) put its data in perspective through what it calls a “Housing Wage”: the hourly rate you’d need to make working 40 hours a week to afford to rent a place in a specific area. For many Americans, housing, they report, is simply “out of reach.”
In 2022, a full-time worker needs to earn an hourly wage of $25.82 on average to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental home in the U.S. This Housing Wage for a two-bedroom home is $18.57 higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. In 11 states and the District of Columbia, the two-bedroom Housing Wage is more than $25.00 per hour. A full-time worker needs to earn an hourly wage of $21.25 on average in order to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home in the U.S.
Unfortunately, many people don’t earn $21.25 an hour, which is why they hold two or three jobs, or add Uber or Door Dash shifts to their other work. It’s hardest for minimum wage workers. As the NLIHC observes, “In no state can a person working full-time at the prevailing federal, state, or county minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment at the [fair market rate].” Furthermore, “in only 274 counties out of more than 3,000 nationwide can a full-time worker earning the minimum wage afford a one-bedroom rental home at the [fair market rate].”
For people living at or below the poverty line, the situation is even direr, which is why so many end up unhoused, whether by couch-surfing among friends and family or pitching a tent on the street.
In the coming months, the situation is only expected to worsen now that pandemic-era eviction moratoriums and the $46.5 billion federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program are expiring. According to the Pew Research Center, those programs prevented more than a million people from being evicted.
It Wasn’t Always This Way
People have always experienced poverty, but in the United States, the poor have not always gone without housing. Yes, they lived in tenements or, if they were men down on their luck, in single-room occupancy hotels. And yes, the conditions were often horrible, but at least they spent their nights indoors.
Indeed, the routine presence of significant populations of the urban unhoused on this country’s city streets goes back only about four decades. When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1982, there was a community of about 400 people living in or near People’s Park in Berkeley. Known as the Berkeley Beggars, they were considered a complete oddity, a hangover of burnt-out hippies from the 1960s.
During President Ronald Reagan’s administration, however, a number of factors combined to create a semi-permanent class of the unhoused in this country: high-interest rates implemented by the Federal Reserve’s inflation fight drove up the cost of mortgages; a corruption scandal destroyed many savings and loan institutions from which middle-income people had long secured home mortgages; labor unions came under sustained attack, even by the federal government; and real wages (adjusted for inflation) plateaued.
Declaring that government was the problem, not the solution, Reagan began a four-decade-long Republican quest to dismantle the New Deal social-safety net implemented under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and supplemented under President Lyndon Johnson. Reagan savaged poverty-reduction programs like Food Stamps and Medicaid, while throwing more than 300,000 people with disabilities off Social Security. Democrat Bill Clinton followed up, joining with Republicans to weaken Aid to Families with Dependent Children (“welfare”).
A decade earlier, scandal-ridden state asylums for the mentally ill began to be shut down all over the country. In the late 1960s, Reagan had led that effort in California when he was governor. While hundreds of thousands were freed from a form of incarceration, they also instantly lost their housing. (On a personal note, this is why, in 1990, my mother found herself living in unsupervised subsidized housing for a population of frail elderly and recently de-institutionalized people with mental illnesses. This wasn’t a good combination.)
By the turn of the century, a permanent cohort of people without housing had come to seem a natural part of American life.
And It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This Forever
There is no single solution to the growing problem of unaffordable housing, but with political will and organizing action at the local, state, and federal levels it could be dealt with. In addition to the obvious — building more housing — here are a few modest suggestions:
At the state and local level:
Raise minimum wages to reflect the prevailing cost of living.
Remove zoning restrictions on the construction of multifamily buildings.
Pass rent-control ordinances, so rents rise no faster than the consumer price index.
Pass limits on up-front rental and move-in fees.
Pass legislation to prevent no-cause evictions.
Pass legislation, as California has already done, to allow renters to report their on-time rent payments to credit bureaus, allowing them to boost their credit scores without borrowing money.
At the federal level:
Raise the federal minimum wage, which, even in this era of inflation, has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.
Increase funding for SNAP, the present food-stamp program (whose pandemic-era increases have just expired).
Increase federal funding for public housing.
Provide universal healthcare, ideally in the form of Medicare for all.
Increase “Section 8” housing subsidies for low-income renters.
Raise taxes on the wealthy to fund such changes.
Finally, shift part — say one-third — of the bloated “defense” budget (up $80 billion from last year to $858 billion in 2023) to programs that actually contribute to national security — the daily financial security of the people who live in this nation.
Then maybe the next time we send new people to Congress, all of them will be able to find a home in Washington, D.C.
Momfluencers of the world, listen up.
Bottling your kid’s childhood into social media content for the sake of monetization, as a number of affected kids recently explained to Teen Vogue, will make them absolutely miserable. And when those kids grow up, they’ll probably hate you.
As they likely should. The pervasive trend — “sharenting,” “famfluencing,” call it what you want — is like Child Acting 2.0, but with even fewer legal protections. Worst of all, it’s accessible to pretty much every parent with a camera and the will to publish every inch of their children’s lives on social media.
And no matter how “authentic” this content might appear, once the money starts rolling in, the reality of running this kind of business is that parents become employers, while their kids become legally unprotected, unconsenting employees, made to act out their childhoods instead of actually living them.
Now, affected kids are starting to speak out about the horrors of having to live this kind of life.
“That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” one of these kids, who reportedly first went viral when she was a toddler and has lived a life on-camera ever since, told Teen Vogue, speaking under condition of anonymity. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].”
“Nothing they do now is going to take back the years of work I had to put in,” she said, adding that she’s considering going no-contact with them when she turns 18.
And who can blame her? Being forced to financially support your family as a minor amounts to “a lot of pressure,” the teen told the publication.
And it’s not the only dark side to this kind of content creation. Scholars are consistently finding that social media isn’t good for kids in the first place, and child vloggers told Teen Vogue that the content that their parents have published has resulted in harassment by predators, bullying by peers and even teachers, anxiety over their safety, and more.
That’s not to mention the fact that these kids never even signed up for this and have practically no legal protections.
“I plead [with] you to be the voice of this generation of children because I know firsthand what it’s like to not have a choice in which a digital footprint you didn’t create follows you around for the rest of your life,” Cam, a 24-year-old ex-content kid who doesn’t go by her legal name out of concern for her safety, told legislators during a hearing last month.
The hearing was about a bill that would give kids the option to have their parent-published digital footprints removed from the internet entirely once they turn 18.
Living like this sounds very scary, and our heart goes out to these kids. No one should have to perform their own childhood, and intimate moments should remain as just that.
And if you don’t believe us, believe them.
“To any parents that are considering starting a family vlog or monetizing your children’s lives on the public internet, here is my advice: you shouldn’t do it,” another affected child, who also chose not to reveal her identity, recently wrote in a letter to a TikTok satirist named Caroline, who read the letter aloud to her 2.3 million followers on the platform.
“Any money you get will be greatly overshadowed by years of suffering,” the letter continued, “your child will never be normal… I never consented to being online.”
