How do you feel — literally? Nobel laureate Ardem Patapoutian explains the tactile science of sensation.
Before 2010, scientists knew very little about how the sensation of touch begins its journey into a person’s consciousness. They knew that nerve endings help carry the message from different parts of our bodies to our brains. But they didn’t know what kind of receptor on the nerve ending causes the message to fire — for example, when a person touches an ice cube or places a hand on a hot stove. You could say that researchers understood the wires, but not the light switch.
In 2010, Patapoutian and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute discovered the proteins that serve as two kinds of switches — proteins called Piezo1 and Piezo2 (piezo is Greek for the verb “to press”). This week, Patapoutian shared a Nobel prize with David Julius, who similarly discovered how sensations of heat and cold enter our awareness.
In mammals like humans, piezo receptors transmit mechanical sensations to the nervous system. When cells that contain these piezo receptors are stretched, the receptors open up, letting in ions (charged particles) and setting off an electrical pulse.
But each type of receptor has a slightly different use. Piezo1 is part of our body’s built-in blood pressure monitoring system, as well as other internal systems that rely on pressure-sensing. Piezo2, on the other hand, is “the principle mechanosensor for touch and proprioception,” Patapoutian told me in 2019.
That is, without Piezo2, we couldn’t feel another person’s hand graze our own.
Proprioception, which also relies on Piezo2, is less well-known than the sense of touch, but it’s sometimes referred to as the body’s “sixth” sense. It’s our sense of where our bodies are in three-dimensional space.
It’s easier to explain proprioception with a demonstration. If you put a cup out in front of you and then close your eyes, you can still find the cup with your hand. Proprioception is what guides your intuition of how far to move your hand and in which direction.
“It’s truly fascinating that we are not aware of it,” Patapoutian said of proprioception during a 2019 interview with Vox. “When I give lectures, even to college students or graduate students, I sometimes ask: “How many people know of proprioception?” Even specialized biologists often don’t know anything about it.”
I spoke to Patapoutian for a story about people who are missing Piezo2 receptors in their bodies because of a genetic inheritance. When they close their eyes, “it’s like I am lost,” one of them told me. With their eyes closed, they cannot reach for the cup in front of them. They have no idea where it is. They have no idea where their arms are in space.
Patapoutian helped me understand that the human sense of touch contains multitudes — and to this day, scientists don’t fully understand it. But as scientists learn more about touch receptors, they’re also figuring out how to tend to a body that’s in pain.
This conversation, which took place in 2019, has been edited for length and clarity.
Brian Resnick
What is the sense of touch?
Ardem Patapoutian
We think about the five senses: vision, olfaction, taste, hearing, and touch. If you really start digging deep into touch, it’s so different than the rest of the senses.
When you talk about touch, there’s so many modalities to it: There’s different physical forces we sense, like temperature and mechanical force. There’s itch. There’s this [spectrum] of pleasant touch to noxious to painful.
It’s a very complex system. The demarcation of when pleasant touch ends and painful touch starts is actually very flexible. If you have a sunburn, for example, the same amount of touch that could have been pleasant becomes painful.
All of what I was just talking about is sensation on skin.
Again, if you put on top of it proprioception and internal organ sensation, it’s a very complicated sense that we don’t really understand. There’s no totally, well-agreed terminology even to describe clearly what we mean by touch and somatosensation.
Brian Resnick
How is proprioception related to touch?
Ardem Patapoutian
Proprioception is dependent on your sensory system detecting muscle stretch. When that muscle gets stretched, these nerve endings that are wrapped around it can sense it. Piezo2 is actually sitting right at the ends of these nerves, where [they] wrap around the muscle.
When you close your eyes and touch your nose, how are you doing this? What’s the information that you’re basing this on? It’s all about learning, as you grow up, to sense how much each of these muscles are being stretched when you’re making these complex motions of your hand. From that, you know exactly where things are.
People sometimes call it muscle memory. It’s actually mostly these proprioceptive neurons that are giving you this understanding of where your limbs are compared to your body — simply from detecting how much your tendons and muscles are being stretched.
Brian Resnick
Touch and proprioception use the same receptor: Piezo2. But all those other sensations you described — temperature, itch, pain — do those all enter us through different receptors? Is it the case that all these different types of touch feelings have a different specific molecule responsible for them?
Ardem Patapoutian
Absolutely, the molecules are different. There are temperature sensors at very different ranges of temperature. Cold, heat, warm are all different.
From 2000 to 2010, my lab studied temperature sensation. We, for example, identified the first cold-activated ion channel. It ended up also being the receptor for menthol. Anytime you use one of these chewing gums or toothpastes that gives that cooling sensation in your mouth, it hijacks the cold-activated channel.
Brian Resnick
Is the goal to try to find the sensor responsible for each sensation?
Ardem Patapoutian
Yeah. What seems to have worked is starting with a very reductionist approach, in the sense of finding the sensor.
Brian Resnick
Are some of these sensors still elusive?
Ardem Patapoutian
Absolutely. Without Piezo2, you don’t have touch, you don’t have proprioception. However, acute touch — the hammer hitting your finger “ouch” kind of feeling — the identity of these ion channels that account for acute pain is still unknown.
Brian Resnick
I don’t know if this gets more into philosophy than science, but are we just the sum of all these inputs?
Ardem Patapoutian
I think the clear thing one has to realize is that sensory biology is not telling us about reality. It is representing reality.
[Reality is] very related to these senses. But that’s the thing I would emphasize — it’s kind of an approximation. We’re interpreting the world according to what sensory systems we have.
Brian Resnick
I’m thinking about proprioception. I watched someone without Piezo2 receptors try to touch a ball on a table in front of her with her eyes closed. And she couldn’t do it. I asked her, “What does it feel like when your eyes are closed?” And she said, “It’s like I’m lost.”
Then I tried to think what I feel when I close my eyes and can sense the locations of objects around me. And I don’t have a word for it.
Ardem Patapoutian
It’s consciousness. That’s what I keep going back to.
Brian Resnick
Is that just pure consciousness? It’s just awareness?
Ardem Patapoutian
I think I would get into trouble if I called proprioception consciousness. But I actually think, at the most basic level, a physical aspect of consciousness requires proprioception.
Police officers in riot gear stand across from protesters on May 30, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky, where demonstrators marched after the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. | Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
How a surge in police force against demonstrators collided with last summer’s protests.
This story contains detailed depictions of violence against protesters that may be disturbing to some readers.
When 21-year-old Louisville, Kentucky, activist Cheyenne Osuala was violently arrested at a protest in July 2020, she tried to get the whole thing on video. An officer grabbed her, slammed her up against a wall, and started pulling the handcuff so far behind her back that her wrist fractured. As he tugged her arm further and further, she remembers screaming, standing on her toes to try to relieve the pain.
She dropped her phone during the attack, but shaky footage from a bystander shows the officer pushing her face-first against the wall while other protesters scream for her release.
Osuala said she was gathered with a small group of protesters outside of a parking garage when she noticed plainclothed men on the roof shooting pepper balls down at the people gathered below. Concerned that the men could be counterprotesters looking to harm their group, Osuala and other protesters asked Louisville police officers to confirm if the men on the roof were police. Osuala says the officers told them they weren’t aware of anyone currently stationed at the top of the parking garage, so they headedup to find out who the men were — and why they were firing at a peaceful crowd.
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Protesters at a May 2020 demonstration in Louisville, among a series of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests last year that drew tens of millions of demonstrators — an unprecedented number.
That’s when, she said, officers followed them into the parking garage, blocked them from leaving, and arrested her, breaking her wrist in the process. She was later charged with criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct, although both charges were later dismissed by a judge.
Osuala filed a complaint with the Louisville Metro Police Department but received no response. She later filed a lawsuit, alleging that she was wrongfully arrested and assaulted by the department’s officers, and this spring, the Justice Department separately opened an investigation into the Louisville department’s practices, including use of force against protesters. (Louisville police did not respond to requests for comment.)
Osuala said she can recall the experience in excruciating detail, but said that she still won’t go back and watch the video. “It was too traumatizing,” she said.
The broken wrist and resulting nerve damage eventually healed, but in the months that followed, she was left feeling powerless. “I still remember feeling his weight on top of me. He was so much bigger,” she said. “It felt like a power trip. He wanted to hurt me, and I couldn’t do anything.”
In uprisings last summer that drew tens of millions across the country — an unprecedented number — protesters called for an end to police brutality. Amid the mostly peaceful protests, some demonstrations, many spurred by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, were marked by incidents of police violence. In the first two weeks of demonstrations, more than 10,000 people were arrested. The total today sits at more than 17,000, according to the Washington Post. Most arrests were for low-level offenses, such as curfew violations or failure to follow dispersal orders.
At the height of the protests that June, police were repeatedly recorded using force, many of them punching, kicking, or shoving protesters. One criminal defense lawyer collected nearly 300 videos documenting police violence across the country. Among these videos were incidents where officers beat unarmed protesters in Las Vegas, fired tear gas canisters into a crowd in Dallas, and pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters in Columbus, Ohio.
One video showed officers in riot gear in Buffalo, New York, shoving a 75-year-old man to the ground, leaving him unconscious and bleeding on the sidewalk. In New York City, an officer was caught on camera violently shoving a woman to the ground. Another video shows a group of officers beating protesters with batons in Philadelphia.
Some departments also reportedly used rubber bullets and tear gas as a form of crowd control. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reporters filmed an officer shooting a protester in the head with a foam bullet, fracturing her eye socket. In one of the most controversial and widely shared incidents, police used tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters outside the White House in Washington, DC, to allow for President Donald Trump’s photo session outside of a church.
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Law enforcement responds during a protest near Lafayette Park ahead of President Trump’s trip to St. John’s Church on June 1, 2020, in downtown Washington, DC. The proceedings that day became a national incident.
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Demonstrators continued to gather at Lafayette Park in the following days despite the incident, in which police used tear gas to clear a crowd of protesters.
After protesters were arrested en masse, for some, the physical trauma was immediate. Explosive imagery from some protests shows people bleeding from projectiles, choking on tear gas, or left with swollen wrists after being detained for hours. In the face of an increasingly militarized police force — armored vehicles, military-grade riot gear, flash grenades, sound cannons, and tear gas canisters — protesters were left reeling from violence that felt like it belonged on a battlefield.
In the aftermath of the uprisings, another kind of pain lingers. While their physical wounds may have long since healed, some protesters, like Osuala, said they have been left with deep psychological scars that remain open and raw.
“I feel like we’ve all been through the war,” Osuala said. “All the people who have really been out there from the beginning and have stayed out there consistently — we all have PTSD.”
Vox spoke with several protesters about the lingering effects of last summer’s protests. Now that much of the attention on the George Floyd protests has faded, Osuala and protesters like her say they’re left wondering how to put the pieces back together when it feels like the rest of the world has moved on.
Since the protests began last summer, some therapists, including a few Vox spoke with, have reported an influx of patients experiencing hypervigilance, anxiety, panic, and nightmares from their involvement in the demonstrations.
Licensed psychotherapist Cheryl Ades has seen a spike in the number of people coming to her practice with protest-related trauma. “The level of PTSD is going to be extreme,” said Ades, who works with protesters as a part of the network Therapists for Protester Wellness in Louisville. “It might not hit for a while — a few months, a year, five years — but it’s going to come down on people sooner or later.”
Months after the demonstrations, dozens of evaluations of police departments across the country exposed the full scope of the violent response. These reviews found that officers behaved aggressively and used crowd-control munitions indiscriminately against largely peaceful demonstrators. Their tactics, the reports found, often escalated violence instead of defusing it.
These findings were the culmination of a broader shift in American policing, said Jennifer Earl, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona and an expert on policing tactics.
From the civil rights movement in the 1960s to last summer’s protests, police departments using military-grade riot gear have increasingly become the norm in American cities. In part due to the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows law enforcement agencies to receive military hardware, American police departments have access to a wide arsenal of such equipment. From 1998 to 2014, the value of military equipment sent to police departments shot up from $9.4 million to $796.8 million.
“The access to militarized equipment means they’re approaching the protests in a different way — with a sort of warrior mentality,” said Earl.
As the police response becomes more militarized, so do the tactics of protesters on the ground. “It contributes to the feeling of protests as a war zone,” says Dana R. Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who studies social movements in the US. “If you tear-gas people in the streets, they’re not going to go home and say they’re not going to go out again. What happens is that everybody goes home and comes out with gas masks and with helmets, leaf blowers, and umbrellas.”
Experts say that decades of research have led to a similar conclusion: Escalating force leads to more violence, not less. Police wearing riot gear and deploying military-style weapons is more likely to lead to the same kind of violence they were supposed to prevent.
Increased violence also leads to increased emotional trauma. A report by the nonprofit Don’t Shoot Portland in 2020 noted that experiencing or witnessing violence in a protest setting was linked in recent research to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety.
For some Black protesters, the trauma of violence experienced on the ground is only intensified by the ancestral trauma of centuries of oppression, experts say. “It’s personal,” says Jennifer Mullan, a psychologist whose Decolonizing Therapy business provides resources for therapists to address inequities in the mental health industry. “It’s tied to your liberation and the liberation of your people. This is something that many people of color have been experiencing our entire lives. These communities are already in a heightened state of trauma. It just amplifies the trauma of protest.”
Cory, a community activist from Los Angeles who is being identified only by his first name due to safety concerns, says protesting is just another part of survival. “[Being a Black person is] like trauma upon trauma. I’m literally fighting against these people who could kill me during a traffic stop. There’s so much more invested for me.”
More than a year after her arrestin June 2020, 20-year-old Judith Velasquez finds herself trapped in a recurring flashback. When she closes her eyes, she’s back on the police bus in Los Angeles, packed alongside dozens of other protesters, her hands cuffed. It’s completely dark; the only light comes from faded street lamps seen through the reinforced glass windows. She can barely make out the silhouettes of those around her.
“I was terrified,” Velasquez said about the several hours she spent on the bus after being arrested for breaking curfew. “We were completely vulnerable in the dark, just waiting for them to do something.”
All the while, she said, people were screaming and pleading to be released. Some were shaking uncontrollably. According to Velasquez, one protester urinated on her seat after hours without access to a bathroom.
Every time Velasquez sees a police car — a regular presence in her working-class Latino community in Los Angeles — she freezes. “I see the red, white, and blue lights, and it takes me back,” she says. “I start shaking so hard. Because I remember how there was nobody to protect us. They could do anything to me.”
Like Velasquez, Cory says he has signs of PTSD. Difficulty sleeping, distressed by loud noises, nightmares, flashbacks.
Months after the George Floyd protests in Los Angeles, Cory found himself on the streets again to protest Dijon Kizzee’s fatal shooting by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
On the first night of protests in September 2020, he was heading toward the front lines when there was a sudden shift in the air — he turned around to look at the line of officers, looked back at the crowd, and then, he says, there were rubber bullets flying all around him. He started running, diving behind a box truck for cover while the officers continued to fire at him. There was so much tear gas on the streets around him that he couldn’t breathe. (Vox has corroborated Cory’s account with other protesters and news sources.)
Over the four days of demonstrations in Los Angeles, Cory says that the protesters experienced continual violence. As they took cover from pepper balls and chemical irritants fired by the sheriff’s department, he watched someone get hit in the head with a concussion grenade. A friend of his was struck by several pepper balls, fracturing her hand and leaving her bleeding on the sidewalk.
The impact on his mind and his body was immediate. “I couldn’t really sleep, I couldn’t really go out. My nervous system was so fucked that I couldn’t think straight.”
These symptoms are now a constant presence in his life. When he goes back to the locations where he’s experienced violence, his anxiety spikes. Loud noises send his heart racing. He has trouble concentrating and often finds himself dissociating.
“It was like being in a war zone,” he said. “Watching that happen, watching people get brutalized — it will never leave me.”
The nature of this ongoing violence — night after night, week after week — can make the path to healing complicated.
Ihotu Ali, a Minneapolis-based healer and organizer, says it may be impossible to completely recover from these experiences. “If you continuously break your leg … it’s never going to heal.”
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A woman reacts to being hit with pepper spray during protests in Washington, DC, on June 22, 2020.
When protesters turn to therapy for support, they can come away feeling even more traumatized. As both a community organizer and a mental health therapist in Los Angeles, psychotherapist Devon Young has seen it happen time and time again. “They’re experiencing trauma on the ground and then go to look for support from these experts,” she said. “But they might not find validation or recognition in that industry, which tends to overlook marginalized experiences. Not to mention barriers like money and health insurance.”
Thinking back on everything she’s been through, Velasquez knows there’s no turning back now. Her outrage has only grown over the past few months, amplified by the fact that it feels like the rest of the world has moved on.
“It’s been years of pain, years of people suffering at the hands of the system and on the streets,” she said. “If you can go back to normal after this, then you exhibit a privilege that I can only dream of.”
In the face of militarized policing and the continued deaths of Black people at the hands of police, Mullan acknowledges that many activists feel a need to stay on the front lines. But she stresses that community healing is just as important — and can even act as another form of resistance.
“We know the reason why they inflict this violence. They want to take us off the streets, to split us apart,” she said. “That’s why it’s deeply necessary for us to lean on each other for healing. Even as things are burning down around us, our communities become a form of home. We educate each other, take care of each other, support each other. It’s the opposite of what the system wants us to do. They don’t want us to come together.”
Instead of relying on systems that have consistently failed the most vulnerable in the protest community, Mullan encourages a shift toward community-based care. “Trust in the community, in the possibility for transformational restorative justice work, can be extremely healing for people who are on the front lines. Community can become a point of healing.”
Young echoes the need for a transformative shift in therapy for front-liners. “We need to build a better mental health infrastructure,” she said. “And it won’t come from the state. It needs to happen from within activist circles. We know the fight will continue and these traumas are going to occur. The best we can do is create support systems that are built by the people.”
For Velasquez and other dedicated protesters, stopping the fight for justice isn’t an option. The more the police try to drive them off the streets, they said, the more determined they are to stay.
“There’s something that stays with you after you’ve gone through something like this,” Velasquez said. “Even with everything that happened, I kept going.”
While her experiences left a deep emotional impact, she also remembers how the protesters kept their spirits up on the prison bus: singing songs, chanting protest slogans, pulling up each other’s masks, and finding ways to break free from the plastic cuffs. “We were all supporting each other,” she said. “And we weren’t quiet for one second.”
Even with the progress the movement has made over the past year, Velasquez can’t help but feel disillusioned with the system. Looking back on everything protesters have been through — and continue to go through — she says no amount of accountability or reform can make up for the impact of her experiences. But through community healing, she’s found a way forward.
“They’re not going to protect us,” she said. “But we can protect us.”
Julia Dupuis is a Los Angeles-based writer covering protest movements and police violence.
The number of gig workers in the US grew an unprecedented 34 percent this year. | Getty Images
An astonishing one in three US workers does gig work now.
More people are turning to gig work than ever before, but since these jobs usually don’t come with employer benefits, their proliferation could worsen inequality for millions of Americans.
The number of people employed in nontraditional ways in the US rose to a record 51 million this year, an unprecedented 34 percent jump compared to 2020, according to new data from MBO Partners, a company that provides business solutions to the independent workforce and has conducted a long-running study of the group. These types of workers — which include contract workers, people who are self-employed, temporary and on-call workers, and those who get short-term jobs through online apps or marketplaces — are now equivalent to a third of US employment.
Gig work shifts the risk from employers to employees and can lead to financial volatility for those who do it, resulting in more economic and psychological stress than regular work. Most obviously, independent work doesn’t include many of the protections afforded by traditional employment. That includes things like minimum wage, overtime, paid parental leave, and employer-subsidized health care. If people’s gig work doesn’t compensate enough to pay for those extras independently, it can put people at a severe economic disadvantage compared to regular employees.
Independent work, though, has its perks. It offers workers the flexibility of being able to choose, to some extent, what, when, and where their work is.
While advocates and some policymakers are actively trying to secure the benefits of full-time employment for independent workers, progress has been piecemeal and nonlinear. California’s landmark bill AB 5 made many contractors into employees and afforded them the same benefits — but soon after it was signed into law, Proposition 22, a ballot measure sponsored by gig companies, passed and exempted many gig companies from having to consider their workers employees. The battle in California isn’t over; in August, California’s Superior Court invalidated Prop 22 and made it unenforceable, but gig companies say they are going to appeal.
In the meantime, the march toward independent work is happening nonetheless.
Growth in business registrations for companies without employees (say, an individual selling products on eBay or freelancers finding graphic design work through Upwork) has outpaced wage employment. Average weekly signups to the Freelance Union, a nonprofit that advocates for and provides resources to the growing independent workforce, grew 300 percent since the pandemic began.
While independent work grew among all employment situations, it grew fastest for people performing occasional (regularly, but without set hours per week) independent work. Those ranks grew 51 percent, to 24 million people. Many of them are doing what is commonly thought of as gig work: on-demand jobs from platforms like Uber Eats or freelance job sites.
Work found through online marketplaces was important for part-timers and full-timers as well. Some 40 percent of all independent workers reported finding jobs using online marketplaces, up from 27 percent in 2020.
The rise of independent work has been happening for decades and for a variety of reasons, from the dissolution of traditional employment to the proliferation of online platforms that connect people with this kind of work. Like many trends, it was accelerated by the pandemic — economic instability historically increases independent work — but it shows no signs of going away when the pandemic is over. And so the jump in gig workers in the US is something we should all be paying attention to.
Why are people choosing gig work?
Despite a rapid economic recovery, there are still 6 million fewer employed Americans than there were pre-pandemic, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Many of those have had to turn to independent work — which often gets missed by the BLS data — to compensate.
Other independent workers do have regular jobs, but those jobs just don’t provide enough money. Nearly three-quarters of new part-time independents in the MBO survey said they took on independent work to supplement their incomes.
“Making ends meet has just gotten harder and harder,” Steve King, a board member at MBO and a future of work expert, told Recode. “In our world, it’s very challenging for a lot of people to hit their monthly target.”
Low wages aren’t the only shortcomings of traditional employment.
“By and large, what we’ve seen over the last four and a half decades is just huge erosion of worker leverage in a way that’s led to just incredibly low job quality for huge swaths of our labor market: low wages, low benefits, bad hours, bad working conditions,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at Economic Policy Institute think tank and former chief economist at the US Labor Department, told Recode.
Most independent workers (63 percent) consider working independently to be their own choice completely. But Shierholz says the choice isn’t because independent work is especially good.
“We know that the quality of these [independent] jobs they say they’re choosing are often just incredibly bad,” Shierholz said. “And that means their other choices are also really, really bad.”
The quality of these [independent] jobs … are often just incredibly bad. And that means their other [traditional] choices are also really, really bad.
Still, some 77 percent of independent workers in the MBO study said they were highly satisfied with their arrangements, 10 percentage points higher than traditional jobholders.
Gig work is a way for people to have more control over what their jobs entail, more flexibility in when and where they work, and a better work-life balance. Perks like the ability to work remotely have become increasingly in-demand during the pandemic, which jarred people into rethinking the primacy of work in general in their lives. Such work is especially important to people with child care or elder care responsibilities, or for people with disabilities where regular employment is difficult.
“I think one of the big things is that online platform work is really enabling people who are looking for greater flexibility,” Adam Ozimek, chief economist at freelancing platform Upwork, told Recode. “A lot of people had a taste of working remotely this year and they see the flexibility that comes with that, and they want even more.”
An increasing share of traditional employees (29 percent) even views independent work as less risky than theirs, according to MBO. Two-thirds of independent workers think so.
Independent work is also sometimes just easier to get. The rise of apps or platforms like TaskRabbit and Fiverr has made the process of finding independent work a lot less arduous by centralizing and simplifying the process of attaining it.
Then there’s the issue of misclassification driving the growth in independent workers. Industries as far afield as construction and ride-hailing are increasingly calling their workers contractors rather than employees. The distinction, while sometimes legally dubious, is economically advantageous. Employers can save about 25 percent by switching employees to contract workers, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. The savings come from employers not having to pay things like unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and paid leave.
How do you protect the growing ranks of independent workers?
Not having protections like unemployment insurance or employer-subsidized health care means events like an accident, a new child, or a global pandemic could negatively affect independent workers more than traditional ones.
“Freelancers don’t have the social safety net to rely on to get them through the weeks or months that they’re out of work,” Rafael Espinal, executive director of the Freelancers Union, told Recode.
The union is one of many advocates working to create something called portable benefits so that independent workers get things like paid leave, unemployment insurance, retirement plans, and affordable health care, regardless of their employment status.
So far, fewer than 10 states have guaranteed paid employment leave for new parents that would include gig workers. Biden’s proposed American Families Plan would create a “national comprehensive” paid family leave plan that the Freelancers Union is hoping will include freelancers. The proposal is still being fought out in Congress, so even if it passes, what it will ultimately include is up in the air. Independent workers are not included in the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gives workers job protection during unpaid leave.
“When the budget passes, we will have to ensure independent workers are included in the implementation of the program,” Espinal said. “It shouldn’t be a hard lift given that a handful of states were able to successfully implement a similar program.”
And paid leave is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to benefits. It’s not enough to deal with all the needs of the rapidly growing number of freelance and independent workers, who represent a substantial share of the US workforce.
Espinal believes the onus lies with the government to protect independent workers.
“If it becomes unsustainable, it’s because the federal government failed to react,” Espinal said. “I do believe that the silver lining to this pandemic is that it shocks the federal and state governments to the point where they have to react and look at how they create a safety net for millions of people who traditionally have gone without one.”
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It’s the biggest thing you might ever buy. And it could be turning you into a bad person.
“Homeowner” is an identity baked into the fabric of America.
From political speeches to articles and advertising, Americans are bombarded with messaging valorizing homeownership. In 1995, President Bill Clinton released a 100-point plan to “boost homeownership to an all-time high,” writing that “for millions of America’s working families throughout our history, owning a home has come to symbolize the realization of the American Dream.”
His successor, President George W. Bush, made increasing homeownership a key policy priority of his administration, once explaining: “This Administration will constantly strive to promote an ownership society in America. … After all, if you own your own home, you have a vital stake in the future of our country.”
Researcher Rachel Bogardus Drew points to more than a century’s worth of messages praising the benefits of homeownership, “everything from personal freedom and self-determination, social equality and inclusion, personal and economic success, and a better quality of life.”
One of the messages Drew cites is from a 1916 article in the Hutchinson News telling readers: “Owning a home raises one in the estimation of his neighbors and associates. … Nothing gives a man a better standing in a community than the fact that he is a house-holder, a payer of taxes on real estate.”
Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change
There aren’t many other purchases that confer this aura of civic duty, and it’s worth examining the dark side of what happens to you when you become a homeowner.
Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change, manifesting as anything from opposing homeless shelters in your neighborhood to blocking transit projects in your region. This identity transcends partisanship, a rarity in our polarized age. You’ll find Democrats and Republicans alike screaming opposition to change and growth, no matter what it costs. To that end, Republicans have supported onerous regulations they would likely scoff at in the abstract, and Democrats have defended a system that has perpetuated the racial and economic segregation they often rail against in theory. What can help explain this phenomenon?
A home is the largest asset the vast majority of Americans can ever own. Protecting its value is akin to protecting your family’s future — your ability to weather bad financial times, borrow if your kid needs help paying for college, or rest easy knowing that in a country that will leave you out to dry if you get sick, at least you can sell your house if it ever gets that bad.
Homeownership is supposed to mean security, opportunity, and a sense of investment in your community. But often, the pressure of tying your family’s financial security to one asset incentivizes homeowners to behave selfishly and antisocially, opposing important public works that could provide significant public benefits.
Homeownership in the 21st century is homeownership under scarcity
Homes are scarce.
One credible analysis found that the United States was short 3.8 million homes as of the fourth quarter of 2020, leaving millions of Americans overcrowded in their current living situations, paying increasingly high rents, and unable to find a starter home to break into the ownership game.
The problem has only gotten worse over the past year as the supply shortage became the primary driver of the chaotic housing market. At one point near the end of 2020, researchers found that the country had just 1.9 months supply of housing left. In simpler terms, if no new housing came onto the market, the nation would have run out of homes to sell in under two months.
In a newsletter titled “America’s scarcity mindset,” economist Noah Smith described the political effect of what happens when people are forced to live under scarcity: “Survival values, which supposedly come about because of economic scarcity, include ethnocentrism, xenophobia, fear of disease, and a hunger for authoritarianism. Sounds a lot like Trumpism, but I think you can also see echoes of this in various leftist ideologies and spaces.” He goes on to cite housing politics as the quintessential example of this phenomenon.
The most charitable reading of this behavior is that the failure of the United States to provide a social safety net for its residents has forced homeowners to defend the value of their asset however they can.
Unlike many things, the value of a home is largely dependent on subjective evaluations of things outside of the individual homeowner’s control. An individual can’t control for school quality or the crime rate or whether homebuyers will find their neighborhood aesthetically appealing. But all those things will affect how much they can sell their home for. And even if homeowners did control every policy lever available, the solutions for these problems are incredibly complex.
So to hedge against the possibility that changes in the neighborhood could harm the value of their largest asset, some homeowners will use whatever local levers they have available to them to block change in their communities, whether it’s new housing, homeless shelters, transit, or Covid-19 testing centers. This phenomenon is often referred to as Nimbyism (NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard”), and it often describes people opposing development or public projects in their area, particularly when they have no objection to the project when it exists somewhere else.
It’s a risk-averse strategy that can work, often not because there’s good evidence that these things would necessarily lower the value of their homes but because the effect is that fewer homes end up getting built. This exacerbates the supply problem, but for homeowners it ensures that anyone who wants to live in their neighborhood will have fewer options, thereby increasing competition and prices for the existing homes.
Stanford University researchers Andrew Hall and Jesse Yoder find that homeownership increases participation in local elections and that “asset investment may be an important mechanism for the participatory effects.” That is, purchasing the home and seeking to protect its value may drive people to become more involved in local politics.
And when they do, they fight policies that would provide for affordable housing.
Boston University researchers Katherine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer looked at planning board and zoning meetings in nearly 100 Massachusetts cities and towns and found that meeting participants were disproportionately homeowners. Participants also were more likely to oppose new housing in their communities than to support it.
There’s also a structural imbalance to the types of projects homeowners often oppose. People who benefit from new housing or transit or a Covid-19 testing center are a diffuse group. No one knows exactly who will be the direct beneficiary of a new home or a new bus line, but the people who might be annoyed by construction or have the value of their homes impacted are a distinct class. And that means they advocate and organize as a group in a way that the beneficiaries of these policies cannot.
A less charitable interpretation: Classism and racism
Opposing change and progress in your community is not only due to lack of a social safety net. Rich Palo Altans, wealthy Upper East Siders, and the Boston elite all exhibit the same traits of Nimbyism that I described above. The wealthy do not need a social safety net, so why are they so opposed to progress?
The aforementioned Boston University researchers also looked at the types of comments made by meeting participants who were opposed to new housing and found several commenters who feared that “their homogenous communities would resemble much more diverse ones if a project were approved.” They cite a commenter who asked if there would be restrictions to ensure people receiving rent assistance from the government could be prohibited from occupying the potential development.
The wealthy do not need a social safety net, so why are they so opposed to progress?
This type of rhetoric is not uncommon. The San Francisco Chronicle documented a man in the Bay Area worrying that affordable housing might turn his area into a “ghetto.” Others called the proposed homes “high-rise slum[s]” that would “become the best place in San Francisco to buy heroin.”
As part of an attempt to make it harder for lower-income people to live in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford, the mayor said “we believe in neighborhoods, not hoods,” and that students walking down the streets “are predominantly African American kids who bring in that mentality from the inner city where that was a gang-related thing by staking their turf. We are trying to stop that.”
More common are the allusions to “neighborhood character,” which is an amorphous term that could mean something very anodyne or sinister. As St. Paul, Minnesota, City Council member Mitra Jalali told Rewire: “People who use coded language like ‘neighborhood character’ and ‘historic preservation’ are participating in structural white supremacy that has historically and presently mostly valued white ‘character’ and white ‘history’ at the expense of everyone else.”
It’s not that homeowners somehow have an exclusive claim on classism and racism — it’s that the median homeowner is likely to be older and wealthier than the average US resident. Older and wealthier people often have a preference for stability; they’re closer to retirement and more likely to be facing medical needs, as they are later in life. That means this group is predisposed to fear change even more than the average person. And they are overrepresented in our political system.
None of this is meant to be an indictment of people who want to become homeowners. But it’s a warning about how it could affect your thinking and politics. Because while there is some rationality to the fears that drive homeowners to oppose growth and progress in their communities, there is also a massive cost.
Economists have measured the loss of aggregate growth as a result of restrictions to housing supply to be roughly 36 percent — the average worker could have made roughly $3,600 more absent some of the restrictions that local officials have placed on housing development. Blocking affordable housing and public transit also serves to segregate Black and brown communities that are purposely priced out of low-poverty neighborhoods. And the lack of transit in the densest cities could be costing Americans roughly 10 percent in aggregate economic growth.
And the neighborhoods these homeowners are seeking to protect? Perhaps their bet will pay off and when they’re ready to retire, they’ll be sitting on a nest egg. But perhaps instead they will watch their kids grow up and leave, unable to afford rent. They may see community businesses struggle to support themselves as workers leave for other opportunities, unable to continue justifying living an hour away from their job and spending that entire time stuck in traffic. They may even find themselves unable to afford their rising property taxes after they’ve spent a lifetime paying down a mortgage.
Pro-growth policies are what allow for economic opportunity. And America’s failure to provide a reasonable social safety net and its deference toward the interests of homeowners at the local level has undermined those policies at every turn.
Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) (R) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) arrive for a bipartisan meeting on infrastructure after original talks fell through with the White House on June 08, 2021 in Washington, DC. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty
So long as Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin oppose filibuster reform, Democrats have no clear path forward.
Senate Republicans are set to filibuster the motion to proceed to debate on the For the People Act Tuesday. The only remaining question is whether Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who opposes the current version of the bill, will join the GOP, or whether the vote will go down entirely on party lines.
The bill’s defeat was certain either way. It’s unlikely that any significant election reform could have won over the 10 Republican senators necessary to overcome a filibuster. But this bill is specifically designed to roll back practices like voting restrictions and gerrymandering — practices that both parties agree currently benefit the GOP. The For the People Act was crafted by Democratic politicians to reflect Democratic priorities (despite a late attempt by Manchin to put forward a compromise proposal).
And yet, throughout this effort, there has been debate over whether Democratic leaders truly wanted the bill to become law. Quiet disagreements about the bill’s priorities and specifics simmered within the party, as I wrote in April. Democrats support the bill’s national standards for voter accessibility, which would aim to counter vote restriction laws in various states, but other provisions like its anti-gerrymandering reforms have been more controversial.
Publicly, though, nearly every Democrat in Congress united around the message that passing the bill was essential to combat Republicans’ voter suppression efforts. That message was likely the real point: Whatever they might say publicly, Democratic leaders fully understood that this bill that had no path to becoming law under the current Senate rules. By holding a vote on it anyway, they were trying to tell activists demanding action that Democrats are on their side, and trying to tell the party’s base voters that this issue is a priority. Meanwhile, moderates unhappy with parts of the bill could be placated with the understanding that it wouldn’t become law anyway.
Progressive activists and left-leaning members of Congress have another message in mind. They hope the Republican filibuster will help them make the case that the Senate’s rules must be changed to let the chamber advance at least voting rights bills, or even all bills, with a simple majority, rather than the 60-vote supermajority that is currently required.
But Democratic leaders from President Biden on down don’t entirely seem committed to this strategy — likely because they doubt it will succeed.
The chances for election reform look slim
Democrats need all 50 of their senators to vote to change the chamber’s rules. By late January it was already clear that Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) would be the biggest obstacles to such a move, as both publicly pledged to defend the filibuster.
Little has changed since then. On Monday night, Sinema wrote an op-ed reiterating her opposition to eliminating the filibuster. Manchin has previously done the same. And a new NBC report emphasizes that additional Senate Democrats also oppose filibuster abolition, though they are quieter about it. Other reports have previously made the same point.
The most reformers can hope for at the moment is a more limited rules change. In a recorded private call obtained by the Intercept, Manchin voiced at least some openness to two ideas: lowering the 60-vote threshold to 55, or changing it so that opponents need to get together 41 votes and hold the Senate floor to block a bill (rather than supporters affirmatively needing 60 to advance it). It doesn’t seem that either rules change would help this voting bill, which is uniformly opposed by the 50 Senate Republicans.
Meanwhile, President Biden has not exactly been barnstorming the country in support of the For the People Act, as activists have noted with chagrin. This contrasts oddly with the public rhetoric from many Democrats that the bill is essential to preserving democracy. But the Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan and Paul Kane reported that, privately, some White House officials seem not to agree with that assessment, arguing that the bill wouldn’t be as helpful as many argue because Republican state legislators would find workarounds.
Additionally, Biden has other priorities that he sees as having more plausible paths to success, such as measures that can advance through the Senate’s majority-vote budget reconciliation process, or the confirmation of nominees. While activists want him to pile on the pressure on Manchin and Sinema for voting rights, Biden also needs their votes for all his other priorities; alienating them would be untenable.
Manchin himself still holds out hope that, with more time, he could put together a bipartisan compromise on election reform. That, too, is quite unlikely. As I wrote when I profiled, the West Virginia senator has had some impressive bipartisan successes — but not on issues where views are very polarized between the parties. His gun control compromise flopped, much like efforts at bipartisan immigration reform have, and voting reform would likely end up the same way.
So, what will Democrats do about Republican voter suppression measures in the states? When it comes to Congress, the answer increasingly looks like “nothing.”
Amanda Northrop/Vox
The Republican Party has embraced an agenda that rigs the rules in their favor. There’s a name for that behavior.
American democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why.
It’s common to call this GOP behavior “anti-democratic,” but the description can only go so far. It tells us what they’re moving America away from, but not where they want to take it. The term “minority rule” is closer, but euphemistic; it puts the Republican actions in the same category as a Supreme Court ruling, countermajoritarian moves inside a democratic framework rather than something fundamentally opposed to it.
It’s worth being clear about this: The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda.
There are many kinds of authoritarian systems, and many ways to become one of them. In the United States, the threat that looms is a slide into what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”: a system that still holds elections, but under profoundly unfair conditions that systematically favor one side. That process, of one party stacking the deck in its favor over the course of years, isn’t unique — we’ve seen it in countries across the world in recent years, in places as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.
Understanding what’s happening in the US as something fundamentally similar to what’s happened elsewhere — using the a-word, unflinchingly — helps us not only diagnose the most dangerous policy steps the GOP is taking, but also truly appreciate the gravity of the situation in which America has found itself.
We are suffering from the same rot that has brought down democracy in other countries: a party that has decided it no longer wants to play by the rules and that would instead prefer to rule as authoritarians rather than share power with its opponents.
“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” former President Barack Obama said in a CNN interview last Monday.
We’re not where Hungary is, thankfully. Democrats can and still do win power, as they did in 2020.
But the playing field is indisputably tilted against them — and only growing more so. The escalation in authoritarian behavior since January 6, from both national and state Republicans, shows that things are worse than even some pessimistic observers have feared.
It’s happened elsewhere. It can happen here, too.
The varieties of authoritarianism
When people think of authoritarian governments, they typically think of police states and 20th-century totalitarianism. But “authoritarianism” is actually a broad term, encompassing very different governments united mostly by the fact that they do not transfer power through free and fair elections. Some of these governments, like modern China, are violently and nakedly repressive; others control their population through subtler means.
Competitive authoritarian governments fall into the latter category — so closely resembling a democracy on paper that many of their own citizens believe they’re still living in one.
The concept was first developed in a 2002 paper by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and the University of Toronto’s Lucan Way, two leading scholars of democracy. They identified competitive authoritarian systems as ones that hold elections but ensure that they’re fundamentally unfair — stacked in the incumbent party’s favor so heavily that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them.
“Competitive authoritarianism is not only thriving but inching westward. No democracy can be taken for granted.”
“Incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results,” Levitsky and Way write. “Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.”
Yet competitive authoritarian systems survive in part by convincing citizens that they are living in a democracy. That’s how they maintain their legitimacy and prevent popular uprisings. As such, they do not conduct the kind of obvious sham elections held in places like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria (he won the 2021 contest with 95 percent of the “vote”).
In competitive authoritarianism, the opposition does have some ability to win a bit of power through, well, competition — even if the scope of their possible victories are limited.
It’s a tricky balance for the regime to pull off: rigging elections enough to maintain power indefinitely while still permitting enough democracy that citizens don’t rise up in outrage. Many competitive authoritarian regimes have collapsed under the stress, either transitioning to democracy (like Taiwan) or forcefully repressing the opposition and becoming a more traditional autocracy (like Belarus).
But many systems manage to survive. In a 2020 paper revisiting their work, Levitsky and Way found that 10 out of 35 competitive authoritarian regimes they identified in 2002 remained in place nearly two decades later. And new ones had emerged in countries that had previously been seen as solidly democratic — most notably Hungary, which is today one of the most effective competitive authoritarian systems in the world.
Hungary is, as it happens, one of the foreign countries most admired by American conservative intellectuals. In the 2020 paper, Levitsky and Way observe that features of its system are starting to show up in America.
“Competitive authoritarianism is not only thriving but inching westward. No democracy can be taken for granted,” they write. “Similar tendencies have even reached the United States, where the Trump administration borrowed the ‘deep state’ discourse that autocrats in Hungary and Turkey used to justify purges and the packing of the courts and other key state institutions.“
After the events of January 6 and subsequent Republican pushes to steal the election, I reached out to Levitsky to see how his thinking had evolved.
“I’m terrified,” he told me in a phone call. “I think Republicans are going to steal the next election.”
The GOP and competitive authoritarianism
Happily, the United States still passes the most basic test of whether a system is democratic: whether the public can vote out its leaders. But it is hard to deny that the Republican Party has begun chipping away at that baseline principle, using the flaws in our political system to entrench their power.
Republicans already have unfair structural advantages, due to our outmoded Constitution. The nature of the Electoral College means that the key battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania, are considerably redder than the country as a whole. The Senate is so biased against dense urban states that under half of Americans control 82 percent of Senate seats. The combination of anti-urban bias and intentional gerrymandering means that, by one measure, the GOP has had a leg up in House elections since 1968.
The current Republican campaign builds on these inherent tendencies of the US constitutional system toward minority rule to push us toward something more properly termed authoritarian. It combines intentional state-level election rigging with the abuse of countermajoritarian institutions at the federal level to ensure GOP control of the nationwide levers of power, all the while working to delegitimize the press and other non-state institutions that could challenge it.
“I’m terrified. I think Republicans are going to steal the next election.” — Steven Levitsky
Some of these developments, like extreme gerrymandering and efforts to keep their supporters in a propaganda bubble insulated from nonpartisan media, are long-running. But many of the most concerning developments, ones that directly echo the approach of competitive authoritarian regimes abroad, are new.
In Hungary, one of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s key power-consolidating moves was stacking the country’s election administration agency with cronies from his Fidesz party, allowing the party to more easily rig the game in its favor.
In 2021, the GOP has started subverting election agencies in earnest; a new report from three pro-democracy groups found that 14 Republican-controlled states have passed a total of 24 bills this year interfering with election administration. Georgia’s SB 202 is perhaps the most egregious, allowing the Republican-dominated state legislature to take over the vote-counting process from county officials.
In 2021, the GOP embraced this idea at both the state and federal level. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading 2024 presidential contender, recently signed a flagrantly unconstitutional bill that levies heavy fines on platforms that ban politicians like Donald Trump. In April, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.” Three GOP senators proposed a bill stripping Major League Baseball of its antitrust exemption as an explicit punishment for its decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest SB 202.
All competitive authoritarian regimes need some kind of ideological justification for anti-democratic politics, something to rally its supporters against their enemies. In Hungary, it’s a combination of nationalism, xenophobia, and a defense of traditional gender norms. The GOP has long employed elements of all of these but now has united around a more straightforward cause: American elections are corrupt, and Republican efforts to make elections unfair are actually efforts to fix them.
The point here is not that the GOP’s anti-democratic inclinations are completely new: In fact, they’ve evolved over decades. But the crucible of the Trump presidency and the January 6 election have forged these inchoate notions into an actual competitive authoritarian agenda.
Authoritarianism is as American as apple pie
Of course, the United States is different in many important respects from a place like Hungary. One important difference: our decentralized electoral system.
The US Constitution devolved election administration to the states, giving local legislatures control over the rules around elections and the process of actually tallying up the votes. State governments are what political scientist Phil Rocco calls “the infrastructure of democracy” — the place where the terms of political competition at the national level are set.
In theory, this should serve as a bulwark against the emergence of competitive authoritarianism, preventing one faction from rewriting the rules in their favor in one fell swoop. Historically, Rocco points out, it’s often worked the opposite way: The decentralized system enabled the creation of Jim Crow, which turned Southern states into authoritarian enclaves marked by one-party Democratic rule for decades.
“Racial apartheid in the South constructed a ‘Jim Crow Congress’; insulated from electoral competition, Southern committee chairs became the fulcrum of national policymaking — foreclosing the New Deal’s social democratic aspirations,” he writes in a 2020 essay. “Episodes of democratic collapse at the state level have had profound reverberations for national politics.”
The threat in the United States is the reemergence of this sort of bottom-up, state-level authoritarianism that has national electoral repercussions. It’s a subtle threat, one that comes into being quietly and incrementally — as is often the case when a democracy devolves into competitive authoritarianism.
“If people think that there is one day that you wake up and you’re in a competitive authoritarian system, that’s not the case,” says Hadas Aron, a political scientist at New York University who studies weak and failing democracies. “It’s actually complicated and a very, very long process.”
Experts disagree on how close we are to crossing the line. Levitsky, for example, thinks that Republicans could fatally undermine the democratic system as soon as 2024, using a combination of state-level interference with vote counts and congressional action to illegitimately block a Democratic victory.
Aron, by contrast, thinks we’re still quite far from the point of no return — that American democratic institutions are far more vibrant than their Hungarian peers were just before their collapse.
The combination of anti-urban bias and intentional gerrymandering means that the GOP has had an advantage in the House since 1968
But even Aron, a longtime skeptic of the idea that America is on the path to authoritarianism, is rethinking her views in light of the GOP’s increased commitment to anti-democratic politics since January 6.
“I can’t say anything good” about Republican behavior, she tells me. “They want to stay in power and they want to change the system so it will benefit them as much as possible.”
This view is approaching a consensus among experts. A recent letter by 100 leading scholars of democracy warned that “Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures. … Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.”
Yet many of our elected officials — including key Democrats — do not recognize the urgency of the crisis.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told Forbes last week that “if democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it. [But] I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), in an op-ed justifying his decision to vote against the democracy reform bill HR 1, equated the bill with Republican efforts to undermine democracy.
“Today’s debate about how to best protect our right to vote and to hold elections, however, is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage,” Manchin writes. “Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it.”
This is why it’s vital to be open about what’s happening — to raise the specter of authoritarianism. Because the slide toward competitive authoritarianism is incremental, it’s easy to fall into complacency, to overlook what’s happening in front of our eyes.
When I visited Hungary three years ago, I met with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former member of the Hungarian parliament from Fidesz who left out of disgust with Orbán’s authoritarian instincts. She told me that the European Union, which has immense financial and diplomatic leverage over the Hungarian government, largely ignored the country’s authoritarian drift after it started in 2010.
“Five years later, they understood who this person was,” she told me. “But by that time, Hungary was completely changed.”
Students wearing protective masks talk on campus on the first day of classes at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on August 25, 2020. | Ty Wright/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Higher education may not be doomed, but it’s in trouble.
The pandemic hit almost every industry hard, but few were hit as hard as higher education.
Times were already tough for many American universities, mostly because of declining enrollment numbers and weakening financial support from state governments. The pandemic accelerated these trends and forced colleges — especially smaller private colleges and a ton of midlevel state schools — to gut their budgets and lay off workers to offset revenue losses.
As we emerge from this pandemic, it’s worth asking what will become of higher education in America. And if the situation is as dire as it appears, should students — and parents — seriously rethink the value of college?
To get some answers, I reached out to Kevin Carey, who covers higher education for the New York Times, to talk about the state of American colleges. We discuss the student debt crisis, why the pandemic is impacting institutions in wildly disparate ways, what kinds of schools are facing extinction, and if he thinks the future of higher ed in America will look anything like its past.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Is there an actual crisis in American higher education?
Kevin Carey
Parts of it are facing a crisis. It’s an enormously diverse system with lots of institutions serving different people and goals. If you’re a wealthy university that enrolls wealthy students, times are still pretty great. If you’re a small private college with a small endowment that lives year to year on tuition, these are really tough times. If you’re one of those mid-tier public universities, particularly in states that have pulled back on funding, things are bad.
New undergraduate enrollment is down by about a million and a half students from the peak in the late aughts, which was a high-water mark. We’ve seen income growth remain pretty stagnant for everyone except the well-off, and there just aren’t as many students, and families don’t have enough money to pay tuition. There’s been a real sea change in social attitudes toward debt, and people are (rightly) worried about it.
So, yeah, from a pure business standpoint, a lot of colleges are having a hard time making the numbers add up — and that will continue to get worse.
Sean Illing
What about larger, more prestigious public universities in states that value higher education?
Kevin Carey
They have problems, but public universities in states that support higher education are doing better. Historically, support for higher education has been a fairly bipartisan or nonpartisan thing in this country. But that’s changed as the electorate has been bifurcated along education and class lines.
You can see this after the Great Recession. That was an enormous hit to state budgets. Every state cut funding to its higher education system; one, because they didn’t have as much money, and two, because in recessions, states always disproportionately cut university budgets because universities can raise prices, whereas K-12 schools and prisons can’t. The difference is that some states — like New York and California — put money back into the system as their budgets recovered. Other states, like Louisiana or Pennsylvania, that historically have done a bad job of funding higher ed didn’t put money back in, and those are places that are really struggling.
Sean Illing
Was the pandemic a bigger hit on higher ed than the Great Recession?
Kevin Carey
We really don’t know yet. The effects of the Great Recession unfolded over the course of five years or so, mostly because the public revenues didn’t snap back for a long time. Traditionally, college enrollment is kind of cyclical. People get laid off and then they’ll go back to get a credential in order to improve their value in the labor market and also because they have the time.
The pandemic recession was different because it was so fast and so severe, but also weird and unique and it happened so fast. People were going back to school when they were’t ready to go back, and so most of it was online. It was a mess. But things definitely look bad for a lot of colleges right now since enrollment is declining.
Sean Illing
There are lots of private colleges that are in really dire straits. How many do you think are facing extinction?
Kevin Carey
It’s a good question. Coming up with a precise number is hard, but it’s not a tiny number. Just based on publicly available financial information, you can see that plenty of schools are in danger of going out of business in the next five years or so. Even in the years leading up the pandemic, there has been a steady drip of small private colleges just going bankrupt.
A lot of these schools have actually weathered the last year better than I would’ve expected. Overall employment in the higher education sector is down about 15 percent, so I think a lot of institutions took the crisis as an opportunity to lay off people they probably wanted to lay off anyway. I hate to use the phrase “trimming fat” to describe people losing their jobs, but that’s what schools have done to reduce their labor costs.
They were also very aggressive about trying to get people back on campus last fall, even when it ran counter to the best interests of public health. But they live and die by enrollment, so they were very adamant about getting people back through the doors. Whether this has a permanent effect on enrollment, I think it’s a little hard to tell at this point.
Sean Illing
Does reducing “labor costs” basically mean firing teachers and gutting liberal arts or humanities programs?
Kevin Carey
We don’t have those kinds of numbers. Colleges weren’t spending that much money on these things to start with, because not that many students enroll in the humanities. Most of the enrollment is in business, the social sciences, education, and health. There aren’t that many history majors anymore, not like there used to be, anyway. You can hire a history teacher for nothing in the market now because it’s absolutely saturated with people that have the credentials to be college professors. The academic labor market was in a real crisis before the pandemic. Everything that’s happened in the last year has made it worse. I think the hiring will probably accelerate the trend to more contingent faculty, particularly if this big shift to online education continues.
Sean Illing
One thing I wonder about is whether the current model can last for much longer, especially in light of the student debt crisis. If people are continually forced to acquire mountains of debt in exchange for the promise of upward mobility, do you feel like we’re going to hit some kind of tipping point where the costs of a degree don’t match the market value and it’s just not feasible for non-wealthy people to attend college anymore? And if that happens, what becomes of higher education?
Kevin Carey
I think the tipping point is more on the institutional side. If people are no longer willing to pay money to certain kinds of colleges, then those colleges will decline and fail. But it’s not that they won’t go anywhere; it’s just that they just won’t go to those places.
The thing is, we have an enormously complicated and highly structured market where there are massive spaces you simply can’t enter without a degree, sometimes even by law. You can’t be a teacher without a degree. Every occupational licensure process is tied to the higher education system. Our entire health system works this way. If you want to be a nurse, you have to go to college. If you want to be part of the professional managerial class, if you want a well-compensated professional life, a stable professional life, you probably have to go to college. And you’re definitely more removed from an acute employment crisis in this economy if you have a college degree.
So I don’t think higher education is going away, but institutions will fail and the market will have to correct.
Sean Illing
How much of the turmoil in higher ed is due to the complete embrace of the business mode? So many universities have disinvested in teaching and turned college into a post-adolescent consumer experience. Is that a big part of the story for you?
Kevin Carey
Well, there’s only one real model of success in higher education: the academic city-state. It’s the global research university. Everybody wants to be the University of Michigan or something like that. Obviously there’s the Ivy League, but the Ivy League is such a strange and esoteric place. What you really want to be is a big, successful, prosperous institution that has all kinds of smart people and beautiful buildings and sports teams and grassy lawns and football games on Saturdays and social prestige and everyone makes enough money to have a nice little house where they can ride their bike to work. That’s the model of a successful university.
But this is very much a zero-sum game, and everyone’s trying to get there at the same time. There are only so many upper-middle-class students to pay full tuition to support your lazy river and your science center. So there can only be so many University of Michigans. I think a new report came out yesterday that says that private colleges now provide on average about a 54 percent discount against the published tuition price. And that number is going up every year. So they’ve just kind of exhausted their pricing power.
If universities play this game and lose, they end up in a tough spot. What we need, from a societal and policy standpoint, is most institutions not trying to be University of Michigan. There shouldn’t be 2,000 research universities in this country. What we need is probably like 300 great research universities and 1,700 universities that are mostly there for teaching. But if status is about research and teaching is just something that you do because you have to, and so therefore you do it as cheaply as possible with basically an indifference to quality, that’s not good for anyone. Including the institution. But that’s where we are right now.
Sean Illing
What do you think higher ed looks like in a decade? Does it even resemble its current form?
Kevin Carey
Lots of institutions that exist today will be gone. There will continue to be attrition and bankruptcy on the private side, probably mergers on the public side. Because almost all the institutions in the bottom half of the distribution of resources and prestige are going to face enormous challenges in terms of their cost structure and the related issues of declining enrollment and a decline in pricing power.
I suspect the long-term trend of more online students will continue as it has for many years. Even before the pandemic, 35 percent of college students were taking at least one online class, and something like 15 percent were totally online. That’s all going to continue. I think you have a relatively small number of institutions that will succeed at that at scale, but most of the colleges that exist now will still exist. Colleges are very resilient historically.
Sean Illing
At what point should students and parents seriously reconsider the value of higher education altogether?
Kevin Carey
I think they should think deeply about the value of all of their choices in higher education, because there’s an enormous amount of variance in value. Not all colleges are the same. They don’t charge the same amount of money, they don’t provide the same experience, and your odds of graduating are very different depending on what institution you enroll in.
I guess the last thing I’d say is that college has become very high-stakes both from a price standpoint and a value standpoint. So no one should wait to think hard about the value of higher education. The moment is now to take a hard look at all of the choices and not believe all the promises that colleges make. Because they’re making them in their own interest, not in yours.
Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. A pro-Trump mob later stormed the Capitol, breaking windows and clashing with police officers. Five people died as a result. | Brent Stirton/Getty Images
“I’m not sure people appreciate how much danger we’re in.”
Donald Trump may be out of Washington, but his spirit very much lives on in the party he left behind. This month, Republican congressional leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell effectively quashed any chance of a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
The direction of the GOP poses an enormous challenge for Democrats: How do you deal with an opposition party that is strategically committed to undermining core democratic institutions? And, more urgently, what are the consequences of not reforming those institutions before they’ve been dismantled?
As it stands, Democrats and progressive activists for democratic reform have coalesced around HR 1, a bill passed by House Democrats that would, among other things, end partisan gerrymandering and create a national system for automatic voter registration. But the prospects of HR 1 becoming law are slim, mostly because key Democratic senators like Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) won’t break the filibuster to pass it.
Back in 2018, I spoke with Roosevelt University political scientist David Faris about his book It’s Time to Fight Dirty. His argument then was that Democrats had to play constitutional hardball and basically do whatever was necessary to win.
The situation today is even more dire than it was in 2018. “I’m not sure people appreciate how much danger we are in,” Faris wrote in a recent Twitter thread. “If Republicans succeed [in rigging the rules to take the presidency in 2024], they will crack this country in half.”
I reached out to Faris again to talk about what the options are if Democrats fail to pass democracy reform in the Senate — hint: there aren’t many — and if he thinks the Democrats are sleepwalking into a serious political crisis if they don’t find a way to pass major democratic reforms in the next year or two.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
You said we were “at a very dangerous moment in American history” back in 2018. I have to say, the situation seems worse now. Trump is gone, but over the last year or so the Republican Party has taken an explicit turn against democracy itself. So what’s your current level of concern?
David Faris
My current level of concern is exploring countries to move to after 2024. I’m deeply concerned about the direction that the Republican Party has taken, especially over the last year or so. Things were bad in 2018, but the basic problem in 2018 was that we had structural factors working against the Democrats and you had a Republican Party that was fundamentally trying to keep people from voting.
The most destructive thing that Trump did on his way out the door was he took the Republicans’ waning commitment to democracy and he weaponized it, and he made it much worse to the point where I think that a good deal of rank-and-file Republican voters simply don’t believe that Democrats can win a legitimate election. And if Democrats do win an election, it has to be fraudulent.
So 2020 felt like a test run. The plot to overturn the 2020 election never had a real chance of working without some external intervention like a military coup or something like that, which I never thought was particularly likely. But the institutional path that they pursued to steal the election failed because they didn’t control Congress and they didn’t control the right governorships in the right places.
So I worry complacency has set in on the Democratic side and people are lulled into thinking things are normal and fine just because Biden’s approval ratings are good.
Sean Illing
2020 was a “test run” for what, exactly?
David Faris
It was a test run for a way to overturn an election with the veneer of legality. You have to give Trump and Republicans some kind of dark credit for figuring out that this is really conceivable. I think they now know that, even though it would cause a court battle and possibly a civil war, that if they can’t win by suppressing the vote and the election is close enough, they can do this if they control enough state legislatures and the Congress.
If Democrats don’t make some changes to our election laws and if they lose some races that they really need to win in 2022 and 2024, then we’re in real trouble.
“When people think of democracy dying, they think of some very dramatic event like Trump riding down Pennsylvania Avenue in a tank or something. That’s not the reality here.”
Sean Illing
I’m not naive about what’s possible here, but I do want to mention a tricky dynamic. Some — not all, but some — of the Republican support for the election shenanigans was likely performative, right? The Republican base is essentially a personality cult, and Republican politicians know this. They had virtually no chance of actually overturning the 2020 election, but it was politically beneficial to play along. If they knew there was a real chance at succeeding, that would be a different calculation because surely some of them understand how cataclysmic that would be.
Again, to be super clear here: I’m not saying they wouldn’t do it. Some of these Republicans seem totally down the rabbit hole, and some of them are behaving like method actors who are just completely lost in their characters. But I really do wonder how the calculus would change for them if they absolutely knew their vote would overturn an election.
David Faris
That’s what I thought in the first few weeks after the election when the people in Congress would go on background to reporters and be like, “We just got to let them vent a little bit,” or that “Trump is like a toddler and we just have to let him work his emotions out in public.” But if it was really the case that most of them didn’t really believe it or wouldn’t go along with it, then I don’t think it ever could have gotten to the point where well over 100 members of Congress formally objected to the election results.
Sean Illing
You were urging Democrats in 2018 to pass the sorts of reforms that are still on the table today, like packing the courts or granting statehood to DC and Puerto Rico. Are we beyond that now?
David Faris
What needs to be done has gotten more complex. The structural problems are even worse than I anticipated. I also didn’t fully anticipate the unapologetically authoritarian turn in Republican politics. But the fixes are still there. You have to abolish the filibuster in the Senate, you have to mandate national nonpartisan redistricting, you have to make voting easier, and you have to outlaw some of these Republican voter suppression tactics.
Sean Illing
I’ve had conversations with some Democrats and when these ideas about nuking the filibuster or court-packing or granting statehood to DC and Puerto Rico come up, the argument is often that it’s a nonstarter because Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema simply won’t do it. What’s wrong with that thinking?
David Faris
Certainly the laws that you can pass are contingent on getting the most moderate member of your caucus on board. If Joe Manchin (D-WV) says, “I won’t do $15 minimum wage, I’ll do $12.” Then you’re stuck with $12 or you get nothing. And so that’s a reality.
But I think the problem with this analysis is the assumption that Manchin is an ideological roadblock for progressivism, where he seems to me more of a procedural roadblock to the constitutional hardball that needs to get played here. I mean, he voted for the Covid-19 relief bill, and that was one of the most left-wing things I’ve ever seen come out of Congress. So I don’t actually think that Manchin is that far from the center of the caucus in terms of policy.
Where Manchin seems to be very far away from what House Democrats want to do is on the democracy reform stuff. It’s maddening because nothing that Manchin wants to do policy-wise can get done without abolishing the filibuster. Democrats are not going to have a majority after next year if they don’t do some of these things now. So it’s a mistake to assume Manchin can’t be moved. That’s the job of leadership. That’s Joe Biden’s job. That’s Chuck Schumer’s job.
“The most destructive thing that Trump did on his way out the door was he took the Republicans’ waning commitment to democracy and he weaponized it”
Sean Illing
Let’s just say that Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, for whatever reason, refuse to respond to the realities of the moment — then what?
David Faris
It’s bleak. I don’t know what else to say.
Democrats have to get extremely lucky next year. They either need to luck into the most favorable environment for the president’s party that we haven’t ever had for a midterm election or … I don’t know. There’s not much else they can do. None of these democracy reforms can get through on a reconciliation bill. If Democrats don’t pass nonpartisan redistricting, they’re going to be fighting at a huge disadvantage in the House. That’s the ballgame.
Progressive activists are going to pour a billion dollars into the Florida Senate race, and then [Marco] Rubio is going to win by 10 points. So if they don’t act, it’s very simple. The Democrats will have to fight on this extremely unfair playing field against a newly radicalized Republican Party that is going to pull out all the stops in terms of voter suppression to win these elections, on top of the situation where they’re making other changes to state laws that could allow them to mess around with results in other ways, like what we’re seeing in Georgia now.
There’s a very circular structure to this kind of proto-authoritarianism. You have anti-democratic practices at the state level that produce minority Republican governments that pass anti-democratic laws that end up in front of courts that are appointed by a minoritarian president and approved by a minoritarian Senate that will then rule to uphold these anti-democratic practices at the state level.
And so there is no path to beating some of these laws through the courts. The Supreme Court has already said it’s not going to touch gerrymandering. And so there’s nothing left except Congress using its constitutional authority under the elections clause to do some regulation to the elections. I just don’t see another way.
I’m not sure people appreciate how much danger we are in. This is coming. And if Republicans succeed, they will crack this country in half. It will be ugly and violent and I really would like to note live through that. We must act now. 9/
It feels like we’re sleepwalking into a real crisis here, but it’s hard to convey the urgency because it’s not dramatic and it’s happening in slow motion and so much of life feels so normal. And yet our democratic system is losing any semblance of legitimacy and down that road is a range of possibilities no one wants to seriously consider. …
David Faris
When people think of democracy dying, they think of some very dramatic event like Trump riding down Pennsylvania Avenue in a tank or something. That’s not the reality here.
Take the scenario where Republicans don’t have to steal the 2024 election. They just use their built-in advantages in which Biden wins the popular vote by three points but still loses the Electoral College. Democrats win the House vote but lose the House. Democrats win the Senate vote, but they lose the Senate.
That’s a situation where the citizens of the country fundamentally don’t have control of the agenda and they don’t have the ability to change the leadership. Those are two core features of democracy, and without them, you’re living in competitive authoritarianism. People are going to wake up the next day and go to work, and take care of their kids, and live their lives, and democracy will be gone. There really won’t be very much that we can do about it. Or there’s the worst-case scenario where the election is stolen and then we’re sleepwalking into a potentially catastrophic breakup of the country.
One thing I would ask Republicans: If it goes that way, what is it that you think you will have won? What are we even fighting about at this point? You got your corporate tax cuts. You got the Supreme Court. What is the purpose of this? Why do you want the power if it means alienating half the country and potentially breaking it up? I guess I just hope that there will be some introspection among party leaders when we’re approaching that precipice.
Capitol Police officers ride past the US Capitol on May 12, 2001. | Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images
Republicans and some progressive Democrats opposed the January 6-inspired measure
A $1.9 billion emergency funding bill to boost security at the US Capitol in the wake of the January 6 insurrection barely passed the House on Thursday. The measure, which would also provide additional personal security for lawmakers facing an intensifying wave of threats and harassment in Washington and their home districts, received no Republican support, and exposed fissures within the Democratic Party over the issue of increasing funding for any police force.
The bill ultimately passed on Thursday, following last-minute negotiations led by House Speaker NancyPelosi, with 213 votes for the bill and 212 against.
Every voting Republican voted no on the bill, claiming that it was too much money and that there was no guarantee it would be properly spent enhancing security. Those votes followed recent statements downplaying or outright fabricating facts about the violence that transpired at the Capitol on January 6.
More strikingly, Democrats were not unified among themselves. Left-wing members of the House, including the members of the so-called Squad, broke from the party out of what could be loosely described as a defund-the-police rationale.
Democratic Reps. Cori Bush (MO), Ilhan Omar (MN), and Ayanna Pressley (MA) voted against the legislation; Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Jamaal Bowman (NY), and Rashida Tlaib (MI), voted present, which means they officially took no position.
The defection is a sign of fissures within the party over how to think about police reform and the use of force, a policy domain that has been a source of intense national debate since the protests that swept the nation last year following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
It also appears to be a carefully aimed warning shot by the Squad, illustrating that, when they’re unified, they have the ability to torpedo Democratic legislation. The Democratic party relies on a narrow majority in the House to pass every one of its bills.
Bush, Omar, and Pressley released a joint statement saying the package “pours $1.9 billion into increased police surveillance and force without addressing the underlying threats of organized and violent white supremacy, radicalization, and disinformation that led to this attack will not prevent it from happening again.”
Bowman told reporters he voted present because “there are some things about the bill that I support, like making sure our custodial staff and our cleaners have the resources they need to respond and deal with this trauma, but there are other parts of it that I don’t support, like adding more funding to police budgets.”
While Democrats have been unified on most major legislation during the opening months of the Biden administration, that unity may not hold as more complicated and polarizing policy issues come up for debate, and throw some Democratic bills into jeopardy.
Meanwhile, Republicans’ unified opposition to a nominally pro-law enforcement bill may signal — once again — a challenge to President Joe Biden’s vision of being able to unify Congress around shared values.
January 6 and its aftermath raised serious security questions
The violence and security breaches by pro-Trump rioters seeking to shut down the certification of the 2020 election results on January 6 have raised big questions about what security should look like at the US Capitol going forward.
Capitol Police were unprepared for and slow to react to thousands of demonstrators — some of whom were armed — who stormed the Capitol, destroyed property, chanted death threats, searched the halls for lawmakers, and successfully shut down the certification of the election results. Some 140 officers were injured and several people died. Experts say things could’ve gone far worse, had lawmakers not narrowly avoided the mob in a few close encounters.
The crisis in turn has precipitated massive scrutiny of the Capitol Police and created a morale problem in its ranks, which appears to have caused an uptick in resignations and retirements among rank-and-file officers.
In spite of this, Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have downplayed the threat that Capitol Police faced on January 6. This has served to both exonerate supporters of former President Donald Trump for their role in the violence on that day, and also underpinned arguments for maintaining the security status quo at the Capitol.
At a hearing on Wednesday, one Republican from Georgia said last week that some of the people who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were behaving as if on “a normal tourist visit” to Washington. Another likened the rioters to a “mob of misfits.” And appearing on a Fox News program on Wednesday, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson called the incursion a “peaceful protest.”
A majority of Republicans also opposed the formation of an independent commission tasked with investigating the events of the day. While 35 House Republicans broke ranks with their party on Wednesday to support the investigation, top Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, opposed such an inquiry.
This disregard for the perils that Congress members faced on January 6 comes as threats and harassment against lawmakers have been increasing. Members of Congress report that they’re increasingly being confronted in stores and while traveling, receiving threats to their families, and having private details of their lives posted online. Compared to last year, threats against federal lawmakers have more than doubled so far this year.
The nearly $2 billion bill passed Thursday is meant to address a wide variety of issues, including: back pay for overtime hours, hazard pay and retention bonuses; better equipment and training; a “new quick-reaction team that would essentially create a standing force of the D.C. National Guard,” according to Politico; fortifying the Capitol complex with movable fencing, surveillance equipment, and reinforced windows and doors; and extra security for lawmakers who have been threatened and typically are not eligible for publicly funded security.
The Squad is averse to increased police funding without reform
Without any Republican support, Democrats were able to pass the spending package, but just barely. Pelosi and other top Dems had to scramble to try to assuage the Squad’s concerns about the bill, which included, according to Politico, considerations about allocating more money to a Capitol Police force in which some officers indirectly contributed to the day’s violence through lax enforcement.
“I am tired of the fact that any time where there is a failure in our system of policing, the first response is for us to give them more money, rather than investigate the failings and hold those responsible accountable,” Omar, who voted against the bill, told The Intercept. “I’ll continue to fight for structural change that actually centers people’s safety and humanity. That applies to us here in the Capitol, as well as my constituents in Minneapolis.”
The joint statement from Omar, Bush, and Pressley expressed a broader set of concerns with the bill. Here’s a key passage:
Increasing law enforcement funds does not inherently protect or safeguard the Capitol Hill or surrounding D.C. community. In fact, this bill is being passed before we have any real investigation into the events of January 6th and the failures involved because Republicans have steadfastly obstructed the creation of a January 6th commission.
The bill also does far too little to address the unspeakable trauma of the countless officers, staff, and support workers who were on site that day – dedicating fifty times more money to the creation of a ‘quick reaction force’ than it does to counseling. We cannot support this increased funding while many of our communities continue to face police brutality while marching in the streets, and while questions about the disparate response between insurrectionists and those protesting in defense of Black lives go unanswered.
Ultimately, Pelosi’s Democratic caucus emerged with the bill they wanted because three members of the Squad decided to vote “present” rather than oppose it.
But the entire episode showed the progressive wing of House Democrats flexing its muscle as a voting bloc, and likely foreshadows future legislative battles to come, whether on issues tied to criminal justice or other major points of policy disagreement.
Pelosi’s 11th-hour negotiations to save the bill also suggest that, with a narrow majority in the House, Democratic Party leadership cannot afford to alienate its most progressive members on any must-pass legislation — potentially offering those farther-left members more leverage on their own priorities.
And while Biden and Democratic House leadership seem to have been able to satisfy the Squad on Biden’s coronavirus relief bill and the administration’s opening gambit on a massive infrastructure bill, some rifts between the establishment and the Squad may have further-reaching consequences. For example, in light of Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza,some members of the Squad introduced an unprecedented resolution to block Biden’s $735 million arms sale to Israel this week; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a similar proposal in the Senate.
While these resolutions are unlikely to get traction, they can embolden others in the party to break from Biden — as some briefly seemed to do on the weapons sale — and serve as symbols of how the small left-wing bloc in Congress could become a thorn in the side of party leadership in the coming months and years.
Donald Trump with Justice Amy Coney Barrett. | Getty Images
The Supreme Court is serious about exempting religious conservatives from the law — even when their rulings could kill people.
For 30 years, the Supreme Court applied a simple rule when someone with a religious objection to a state law sought an exemption from that law. So long as the law applied equally to everyone, regardless of whether someone is religious or not, then everyone had to comply with the law.
As the Court held in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), religious objectors must follow “neutral law[s] of general applicability.”
Ever since Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court last fall, however, the Supreme Court has been rapidly dismantling Smith. On Friday night, the Court fired a bullet into Smith’s heart. It ruled that people of faith who want to gather in relatively large groups in someone’s home must be allowed to do so, despite the fact that California limits all in-home gatherings to just three households.
Although the Court’s new 5-4 decision in Tandon v. Newsom doesn’t explicitly overrule Smith, the decision makes it so easy for many religious objectors to refuse to comply with the law that Smith is basically a dead letter.
The Court’s new majority has accomplished what amounts to a revolution in its approach to religion and the law, entirely through cases brought by churches and other religious actors seeking exemptions from public health rules intended to slow the spread of Covid-19.
The Court is serious about giving religious conservatives broad immunity from the law — so serious, in fact, that it is literally willing to endanger people’s lives in order to achieve this goal.
What happened in Tandon v. Newsom?
Tandon is the latest in a series of decisions brought by houses of worship — or, in this case, specific worshipers — who wish to defy public health rules limiting the number of people who can gather for religious activity.
California limits gatherings in people’s homes to members of just three households. This is a blanket rule, applying to people who gather in a home for any reason, regardless of whether they do so to pray, to quilt blankets that they plan to sell on Etsy, or just to socialize with friends. So, under Smith, this rule would be lawful because it treats religious and secular actors exactly the same.
Nevertheless, a majority of the Court concluded that people who wish to gather in someone’s home for religious activity must be exempted from California’s public health rule. And, although the Tandon opinion does not explicitly repudiate Smith, it defines what qualifies as a “neutral law of general applicability” so narrowly that the term is basically meaningless.
“Government regulations are not neutral and generally applicable,” the five most conservative justices write in an unsigned opinion “whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.” But the Court also defines what qualifies as “comparable secular activity” very broadly. (Although no justice signed their name to the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissented. So we know that the remaining five justices formed the majority.)
“California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise,” the majority opinion in Tandon claims, “permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time.”
As Justice Kagan explains in her dissent, there are three very good reasons why a state might treat these secular activities differently than a gathering in people’s homes. First of all, “when people gather in social settings, their interactions are likely to be longer than they would be in a commercial setting,” and the people at social gatherings are “more likely to be involved in prolonged conversations.”
Additionally, “private houses are typically smaller and less ventilated than commercial establishments,” and “social distancing and mask-wearing are less likely in private settings and enforcement is more difficult.”
But, ultimately, none of these distinctions mattered to the Court’s majority. The practical impact of Tandon is that, so long as many religious objectors can cite any secular activity that is treated differently than a religious activity — no matter how distinct those two activities may be — this Supreme Court is very likely to grant the objector an exemption.
Even after Roman Catholic Diocese, two Republican-appointed judges — Judge Milan Smith, a George W. Bush appointee, and Judge Bridget Shelton Bade, a Trump appointee — concluded that California’s across-the-board restriction on in-home gatherings should remain in effect.
The Tandon decision, in other words, is a signal that even conservative lower court judges need to be more protective of religious objectors — even when those objectors seek legal exemptions that could help spread a deadly disease.
It’s not clear how Tandon will apply to faiths the Court’s majority disapproves
In theory, the decision in Tandon should apply to all religious objectors, regardless of which faith motivates such objections. In practice, however, the Supreme Court has not always been protective of people of faith who are unpopular in the Republican Party.
In Dunn v. Ray (2019), for example, the Court rejected a request from a Muslim inmate on Alabama’s death row to have an imam comfort him during his final moments. At the time, Alabama permitted Christians to have a pastor present during their execution, but not Muslims. So Dunn involved a straightforward case of religious discrimination.
In fairness, the Court recently backed away from its decision in Dunn, after the decision triggered a widespread backlash even from many conservative commentators (the National Review’s David French labeled it a “grave violation of the First Amendment”). But, at the very least, Dunn shows that this Court is instinctively less protective of Muslims’ religious liberty than it is of Christians.
The clearest example of this kind of religious preference is Trump v. Hawaii (2018), which upheld a Trump-era policy prohibiting nationals from several majority Muslim nations from entering the United States. The Court did so despite the fact that Trump and his inner circle repeatedly bragged about their plans to target Muslims, in violation of the Constitution’s ban on policies “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.
In fairness, the Court based its decision in Hawaii largely on concerns that courts should be reluctant to interfere with a president’s decisions relating to national security. But it’s hard to imagine how the risk of allowing an immigrant from Yemen to enter the United States poses more of a danger to Americans than Covid-19 — and, indeed, before Justice Barrett joined the Court, a majority of the justices tended to defer to public health officials for much the same reason they defer to elected officials on matters relating to national security.
As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), a case decided before Barrett joined the Court, public health decisions typically “should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”
As the Court’s about-face in the Dunn case suggests, there is some nuance to the Court’s approach to Muslim civil rights. The Court does sometimes rule in favor of Islamic plaintiffs in religious liberty cases. In Holt v. Hobbs (2015), for example, a unanimous Supreme Court agreed that Muslim prison inmates should be allowed to grow a half-inch beard if their faith requires them to do so.
But decisions like Dunn and Hawaii also suggest that the Court is more reluctant to grant relief to Muslims than they are to grant such relief to Christians. It remains to be seen, in other words, whether the hyper-protective rule laid out in Tandon will apply equally to all people of faith — or whether certain favored religions will receive special treatment.
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