Jamelle Bouie

It’s also a contemplative space, where visitors can reflect on and honor the 168 people who died in the April 1995 bombing, carried out by a white power terrorist with ties to a network of like-minded extremists.

Attached to this memorial is a museum, which walks attendees through the events of the day — the rescue efforts and the aftermath — with an unbroken focus on the men, women and children who lost their lives. I hadn’t planned to visit, but I was in Oklahoma City and thought it was an appropriate stop, given the latest outbreak of white power terror, an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that took the lives of 50 Muslim worshippers and maimed dozens of others. I thought visiting the memorial might help me reflect on the recurring nature of white supremacist violence, at home and abroad.

The museum portion of the memorial is a harrowing experience for visitors who give it their full attention. You can listen to recordings of routine government proceedings that suddenly erupt with the sound of the blast. You can examine debris and watch interviews with survivors. Again and again, you see the faces of those victims. The young children stand out.

The museum doesn’t avoid either Timothy McVeigh or his chief accomplice, Terry Nichols, who orchestrated the bombing. Visitors are given an almost play-by-play description of McVeigh’s arrest. You can examine his getaway car and watch interviews with the law enforcement officers who captured him. There is a map of the United States showing every location he visited as he prepared his attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. An entire section of the exhibit is devoted to his trial and execution.

But in all of this detail, there is little discussion of McVeigh’s ideology. We learn, briefly, how he was angered by the sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, but those aren’t placed in a larger context of white power activity. We learn that McVeigh read and drew from “The Turner Diaries” — a lurid fantasy of apocalyptic “race war” by neo-Nazi author William Pierce — but we’re left in the dark about his ties to larger networks of white power activists. At one point, McVeigh is described as an antigovernment extremist, but even this obscures the depth of his white supremacist, nativist and anti-Semitic ideology and commitment to revolutionary violence against the state.

It makes sense that a memorial would not want to focus too closely on the perpetrators. But there’s no way to understand McVeigh or his accomplices without looking deeper. As historian Kathleen Belew notes in “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” “McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state, belonged to the white power movement. He acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives and supported by resistance cell organizing.”

That understanding of McVeigh and Nichols as part of a movement with well-defined goals and a theory of action — which itself fits into a history of ideologically driven hate networks — is important if the mission of the Oklahoma City memorial is education as much as remembrance. And in visiting the site and museum, I was troubled by shallow treatment of that context. Are visitors making the connections between past and present? Do they see the relationship between the violence in Oklahoma City and the shooting of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 or the murder of 11 Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018? Do they see McVeigh as a singular threat or as an important antecedent to our present-day white power killers?

In the manifesto he released, the accused Christchurch shooter made frequent references to “white genocide,” the idea that nonwhite immigration and mixed-race relationships constitute a genocidal threat to “white” people. He recites the “14 words” — a white supremacist mantra — and elsewhere posted images of a gun with the number 14 written on it. As Jane Coaston noted in Vox, the term “white genocide” was coined by David Lane, a white supremacist responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in 1984. He, like McVeigh, was also inspired by William Pierce. Again, the museum devotes some space to this movement and those ideas — copies of Pierce’s books “Hunter” and “The Turner Diaries” are on display — but they are overshadowed by exhibits that focus on the experience of the bombing and its aftermath.

If visitors aren’t making those connections, they wouldn’t be alone.

President Donald Trump doesn’t see them, and in the wake of the New Zealand attack, he called white power violence a minor problem. “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. It’s certainly a terrible thing.” Of course, it’s in the president’s interest to downplay this activity, given his past equivocation on white supremacist violence and use of white nationalist language.

Likewise, there’s been little soul-searching among Trump’s Republican allies about their tolerance (or worse) of language that legitimizes anti-Muslim prejudice or places white nationalist ideas into wider circulation. Instead, they are busy denying the weight of their words. “If you find yourself using the tragedy in New Zealand to take backhanded swipes at conservatives in America — many of my colleagues already have — then you really have no shame and you are part of the problem,” said Dan Crenshaw, a Republican congressman from Texas, on Twitter.

But you can’t separate the current wave of white power activity from the president’s dark warnings of foreign “invaders” or the pervasive anti-Muslim rhetoric from conservative media personalities or the outright use of white supremacist tropes from a sitting congressperson. Words have weight, and this weight makes targets more vulnerable to all forms of dehumanization, including those that end in violence.

But this problem goes far deeper than the particular rhetoric of a particular political party. If the United States and other western democracies have a recurring problem with white power and white supremacist violence, it’s because they grow out of habits and assumptions that are still embedded in our societies. The extremists who dream of a white ethno-state aren’t too far removed to the more ordinary people who see no problem with (and even defend) continued segregation of schools and neighborhoods. The people who target mosques at home are channeling our disregard for Muslim lives abroad. Settler societies built on the removal and extermination of native peoples will produce ideologies that treat those actions as good, even laudatory.

Which is just to say that as we struggle against the forces behind these decades of violence, from Oklahoma City to Christchurch, we must remember that we aren’t fighting with strangers. Instead, we are confronting the very worst of our legacy — wrestling with our own shadows.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9cf5edb1-98f5-4dfe-9c78-7a77e6242d08" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/mcveigh-new-zealand-white-supremacy.html">The New York Times</a>.

The march of White Supremacy, from Oklahoma City to Christchurch

OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma City National Memorial consists of two stark structures connected by a reflecting pool, intended as monuments to the strength and resiliency of the city.

<h1>As they begin their search for a nominee, most Democrats — more than half, according to a February poll from Monmouth University — prize electability above all else. They want a sure thing, someone who will beat President Donald Trump.</h1>

But beating Trump isn’t the same as beating Trumpism. Unseating the president won’t automatically undermine the white resentment and racial chauvinism that drive his movement. That will depend on the nature of the campaign against him and whether it challenges the assumptions of his ideology or affirms them in the name of electoral pragmatism.

The possibility of defeating Trump without defeating Trumpism looms over Joe Biden’s possible run for the 2020 Democratic nomination. The former vice president’s not-yet-candidacy centers on his appeal to the white, blue-collar workers who rejected Hillary Clinton in favor of Trump. He believes he could have won them in 2016, and he thinks he can win them now. This isn’t just about Biden’s working-class affect. As a senator from Delaware, Biden understood himself as a staunch defender of Middle American interests.

But those interests were racialized, which is how a younger Biden could at once be a committed liberal and an ardent opponent of busing to desegregate his state’s public schools. As an article in The Washington Post last week demonstrated, Biden was at the forefront of opposition to busing in Delaware. The rhetoric he deployed in defense of his position channeled the visceral hostility of suburban (and urban) whites whose children were bused or whose schools took in bused children.

“I do not buy the concept, popular in the ‘60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race,'” Biden told a Delaware-based weekly newspaper in 1975. “I don’t buy that.”

Biden made his argument using language that is still common to opponents of efforts to rectify racial inequality: “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.”

Busing did its job — integrating schools and improving outcomes for black students — but many whites viewed it as an encroachment on the privileges afforded them in a racially stratified society, what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “psychological wage” given as compensation for racial solidarity. These Americans thought they could keep black children out of their schools and neighborhoods. Busing meant they couldn’t, and they were angry.

That is the reason a segregationist like former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms had kind words for Biden’s position, welcoming him “to the ranks of the enlightened.” Biden made a straightforward defense of white racial advantage aimed at those communities that viewed integration with suspicion and hostility. He articulated their anger. And while Biden tried to distance himself from outright demagogues like George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate, his rhetoric was on the same wavelength.

“The real problem with busing,” he said, was that “you take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school … and you’re going to fill them with hatred.”

Politically, Biden’s position made sense. Most white voters in Delaware opposed busing. And just three years earlier, in 1972, the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, had prompted a revolt among working- and middle-class whites with his defense of the policy. McGovern tried to reframe the issue, asking white voters if “stopping the buses is really going to give them all the other things they want: jobs, homes, healthy families, better schools, safe communities — futures to look forward to with pride.” It didn’t work.

“Support for it was a difficult case to make to white working people who felt that integration was taking place on their backs,” historian Jefferson Cowie explains in “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.” “Immediate defense of white identity, home, and school readily trumped the abstract hope of a better world someday.”

Biden’s sensitivity to the fears and anxieties of his white constituents helps explain his positions on drugs and crime in the 1980s and 1990s. He was an ardent drug warrior and “tough on crime” Democrat who hoped to outflank the Republican Party on those issues, winning ground from worried white voters. “One of my objectives, quite frankly, is to lock Willie Horton up in jail,” he said in 1990 when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

That line, which refers to a notorious political ad from the 1988 presidential election, gets to the heart of Biden’s appeal in that era. He was working for voters who viewed cities and their denizens as carriers of crime and disorder who should be controlled if they couldn’t be isolated. His central work on the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, like President Bill Clinton’s later support for welfare reform, was part of a larger effort to position the Democratic Party as both a defender of white middle-class interests and as a disciplinarian — in clamping down on assumed black pathologies of criminality, promiscuity and dependency. Biden himself was trying to take this path in the 1988 election, before he derailed his campaign by plagiarizing a British Labour Party leader.

No one is their past, however, and it is possible Biden has morally and politically redeemed himself through his association with Barack Obama’s historic presidency. And Biden has been supportive of civil rights laws as well as a strong ally to groups like the NAACP. At the same time, however, the former vice president has only tentatively addressed his intimate role in building the modern incarceration state, and he still defends his position on busing.

The questions, then, are simple: Are Biden’s politics still racialized? Is his blue-collar and Middle American appeal still an implicit affirmation of white racial privilege?

If it is, then a Biden candidacy may be one where he tries to capture the supposed center of American politics by presenting himself as the real embodiment of working-class white identity against Trump’s inauthentic embrace of the blue-collar worldview.

Consider the message this would send. For decades Biden gave liberal cover to white backlash. He wasn’t an incidental opponent of busing; he was a leader who helped derail integration. He didn’t just vote for punitive legislation on crime and drugs; he wrote it. His political persona is still informed by that past, even if he were to repudiate those positions now. Biden could lead Democrats to victory over Trump, but his political style might affirm the assumptions behind Trumpism. The outward signs of our political dysfunction would be gone, but the disease would still remain.

This article originally appeared in <a id="197fc5aa-dae9-432f-9b12-d27a2d025e4c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opinion/biden-busing-integration.html">The New York Times</a>.

The possibility of defeating Trump without defeating Trumpism looms over Joe Biden’s possible run for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

The trouble with Biden

<h1>There’s something odd about the self-described moderates and centrists considering a run for president. If “moderation” or “centrism” means holding broadly popular positions otherwise marginalized by extremists in either party, then these prospective candidates don’t quite fit the bill.</h1>

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax on the nation’s largest fortunes is very popular, according to recent polling by Morning Consult, with huge support from Democrats and considerable backing from Republicans. But Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York who has flirted with running for president as a moderate Democrat, rejects the plan as an extreme policy that would put the United States on the path to economic ruin. “If you want to look at a system that’s noncapitalistic, just take a look at what was once, perhaps, the wealthiest country in the world, and today people are starving to death. It’s called Venezuela,” he said during a January trip to New Hampshire. He is similarly dismissive of the idea of “Medicare for all,” warning that it would “bankrupt us for a very long time.”

Likewise, Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia, has staked out ground as a moderate politician, even as he opposes similarly popular ideas. A substantial majority of the public favors proposals to greatly expand college access or make it free outright. In a January op-ed for The Washington Post, McAuliffe dismissed “universal free college” as a misuse of tax dollars. “Spending limited taxpayer money on a free college education for the children of rich parents badly misses the mark for most families.”

And let’s not forget Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks chief executive who might run for president as an independent, who characterizes himself as a “centrist” despite holding positions that have little traction among the public as a whole. “We have to go after entitlements,” he has said, referring to the unpopular idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare to shrink the federal deficit.

In each case, these moderate politicians have positioned themselves against broad public preference. What then makes a moderate, if not policies that appeal to the middle?

You’ll find the answer in two comments from Joe Biden, who served two terms as vice president under President Barack Obama and is mulling a third run for the Democratic nomination. The first is from a speech in 2018, the second from more recent remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Speaking last May at the Brookings Institution, Biden rejected the confrontational language of some other Democrats. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders,” he said. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. I get into a lot of trouble with my party when I say that wealthy Americans are just as patriotic as poor folks.”

Speaking a month ago, Biden defended his praise for Fred Upton, the electorally embattled Republican congressman from Michigan whom he commended in a paid speech last year. Republicans used these comments to bolster Upton in campaign advertising, helping him win a narrow victory over his Democratic challenger. Biden’s response to critics was defiant. “I read in The New York Times today that I — that one of my problems is if I ever run for president, I like Republicans,” he said. “OK, well, bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Biden hasn’t endorsed a “Medicare for all” plan, but if he runs, he won’t be running on deficit reduction or modest tweaks to existing programs. He supports free college and a $15-per-hour minimum wage. He wants to triple the earned-income tax credit, give workers more leverage and raise taxes on the rich. This is a liberal agenda. And yet Biden is understood as a “moderate” like Bloomberg, McAuliffe and Schultz.

What connects them (and similar politicians) is a belief that meaningful progress is possible without a fundamental challenge to those who hold most of the wealth and power in our society. For Biden, you don’t need to demonize the richest Americans or their Republican supporters to reduce income inequality; you can find a mutually beneficial solution. Bloomberg, a billionaire, may have a personal reason for rejecting wealth taxes, but he may also see them as unnecessary and antagonistic if the goal is winning powerful interests over to your side. McAuliffe governed Virginia with an eye toward the business community. Sweeping social programs might be popular, but they might alienate that powerful constituency. And Schultz wants a Democratic Party less hostile to those he calls “people of means,” who otherwise back goals like gun control.

But this is a faulty view of how progress happens. Struggle against the powerful, not accommodation of their interests, is how Americans produced the conditions for its greatest social accomplishments like the creation of the welfare state and the toppling of Jim Crow. Without radical labor activism that identifies capitalism — and the bosses — as the vector for oppression and disadvantage, there is no New Deal. Without a confrontational (and at times militant) black freedom movement, there is no Civil Rights Act. If one of the central problems of the present is an elite economic class that hoards resources and opportunity at the expense of the public as a whole, then it’s naive and ahistoric to believe the beneficiaries of that arrangement will willingly relinquish their power and privilege.

If there’s a major division within Democratic politics, it’s between those who confront and those who seek to accommodate. Because we lack a varied vocabulary in mainstream political discourse, we call the latter “moderates” or “centrists,” which doesn’t capture the dynamic at work.

Anna Julia Cooper was an author, activist and public intellectual, a prominent voice in the struggle for black liberation. In her 1892 book, “A Voice From the South,” she ruminates on what’s necessary for “proper equilibrium” in society:

“Progressive peace in a nation is the result of conflict; and conflict, such as is healthy, stimulating, and progressive, is produced through the coexistence of radically opposing or racially different elements.”

Antagonism, indignation, anger — these qualities don’t diminish democracy or impede progress. Each is an inescapable part of political life in a diverse, pluralistic society. And each is necessary for challenging our profound inequalities of power, wealth and opportunity.

“The child can never gain strength save by resistance,” Cooper wrote, a little later in that volume, “and there can be no resistance if all movement is in one direction and all opposition made forever an impossibility.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f8dfb05b-5f0b-4e80-972d-5e555b084aa0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/bloomberg-schultz-moderate-democrat.html">The New York Times</a>.

The false promise of the moderate Democrat

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax on the nation’s largest fortunes is very popular, according to recent polling by Morning Consult, with huge support from Democrats and considerable backing from Republicans.

<h1>Over the last month, we’ve learned just how much racism is too much to sustain a career in American politics.</h1>

It took almost 16 years for House Republicans to reprimand Steve King of Iowa for his frequent expressions of explicit racism, by stripping him of his committee assignments. The catalyst? An interview with The New York Times in which he expressed sympathy with racist ideas. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” King said.

Compare that slow-moving response with the quick dismissal of Michael Ertel, the Republican secretary of state in Florida, who resigned the same day that photos of him in blackface were revealed to the public. Taken at a Halloween party in 2005, they show Ertel with a painted face and a costume that make clear he was mocking survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

The reaction after the discovery of a racist image on the medical school yearbook page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia has been almost as swift. As the world now knows, the photo, taken at a party in 1984, shows one person in blackface and another dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, both holding beers and gazing at the camera. Northam initially said he was in the photo, although he couldn’t say which figure he was. He later backtracked, claiming he wasn’t in it and vowing to finish his term.

Nonetheless, Democrats — including Terry McAuliffe, the previous governor of Virginia, the state’s two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, its African-American legislative caucus and most of its congressional delegation, as well as multiple 2020 presidential candidates — are asking him to resign, which would allow Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax to take his place. Fairfax, the great-great-great-grandson of a man enslaved in Virginia — who took his oath of office while carrying his ancestor’s manumission papers — would be the second African-American governor of Virginia and only the fifth in the nation’s history. To make the situation even more historically resonant, 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of African enslavement in the state.

Put these examples together and you can begin to discern a standard: In American politics, lawmakers can get a pass for almost anything short of open allegiance to racist ideologies or the explicit use of racist imagery.

There is a logic to this dynamic, even as it produces absurd results, like forceful condemnations of racism from a Virginia Republican Party that fielded an unapologetic neo-Confederate for Senate just more than three months ago or calls for Northam’s resignation from a Republican National Committee that otherwise stands firmly behind President Donald Trump.

Put simply, there is a plausible (in theory, at least) nonracist reading of King’s preoccupation with the preservation of “Western civilization” or the president’s belief that some countries, like Haiti, are "shitholes" whose residents should be kept off American soil. By contrast, blackface is an unambiguous form of racist mockery with clear origins in the virulent white supremacist history of the United States.

The most popular form of entertainment in 19th-century America, which continued well into the 20th, blackface minstrelsy was defined by its caricature of and gross hostility toward black Americans. In the minstrel show, blacks — and free blacks in particular — were objects of ridicule, lampooned for seeking equality and respectability. Beyond simple mockery, the pleasure of blackface for white performers and their audiences lay in the vicarious experience of an imagined blackness — a wild, preindustrial “savage” nature that whites attributed to black Americans.

“Painting oneself hearkened back to traditional popular celebrations and to paint oneself as a Black person, given American realities at the time, was to throw reason to the winds,” historian David Roediger wrote in his 1991 book, “The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.” He notes later that blackface was a form that “implicitly rested on the idea that Black culture and Black people existed only insofar as they were edifying for whites and that claims to ‘authentic’ blackness could be put on and washed off at will.”

In other words, blackface is so thoroughly associated with the worst of American racism that we should expect immediate condemnation of politicians and public figures who have any association with it, even if it’s a decades-old offense.

But this high bar for sanction — essentially a “pics or it didn’t happen” standard for racism — is also a problem. It treats expressions of racist contempt or mockery as the most egregious forms of racism, when that distinction should belong to the promotion of racist policies and ideas. King should have been punished as far back as 2006 when, at a rally in Las Vegas, he smeared undocumented immigrants as killers responsible for a “slow-motion holocaust” of American lives. Likewise, there should have been broad, bipartisan outrage over revelations that a voter identification law passed by North Carolina Republicans in 2013 targeted the state’s black voters with “surgical precision” in order to suppress the vote. Jeff Sessions’ tenure as attorney general — during which, among other abdications of his duty to protect Americans’ civil rights, he directed the Department of Justice to curb its investigations of abusive and racially discriminatory police departments — should have been a national scandal.

If racism is principally a problem of power and resources — of race hierarchy and the denial of life, liberty and opportunity to blacks and other nonwhites — then our political culture ought to expand the offenses that earn the kinds of swift condemnation we’ve seen over the last few days. Voter suppression and the lawmakers who back it deserve the same contempt we save for open racial bigotry; officials behind policies rooted in prejudice, like the travel ban or child separation, ought to be forced from office.

American society is still structured by color. Your health, your wealth — your ability to live and act freely — still turns to a large degree on whether you were born white. Like Ertel, Northam should resign. Virginia’s history with racism is too fraught to allow this association with blackface (to say nothing of the Ku Klux Klan imagery) to stand unaddressed. But any collective reckoning with racism that comes out of this moment must go beyond the personal and offensive to the unequal depths. We should care about racist imagery, but we should care even more about our still-segregated society.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ec1bc749-7bc7-47d7-b6be-4951e1c6fce3" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/opinion/northam-blackface-racism.html">The New York Times</a>.

Compare that slow-moving response with the quick dismissal of Michael Ertel, the Republican secretary of state in Florida, who resigned the same day that photos of him in blackface were revealed to the public.

Blackface is the tip of the iceberg

<h1>An old but still potent critique has re-emerged in American politics, one that holds concentrated wealth, and perhaps American capitalism itself, as inimical to the democratic society we want to build.</h1>

The basic idea holds capitalism as at best an uneasy partner with our democratic values. At worst, it erodes them completely, undermining the social and material basis of republican citizenship as envisioned by the American revolutionaries.

Since the start of the new year, this thinking has become especially prominent. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., came out in favor of high marginal tax rates on the rich, arguing last week that “a system that allows billionaires to exist” while others live in extreme poverty is “wrong.”

This thinking is also present in a new proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to tax the nation’s largest fortunes. The plan, which would impose an annual 2 percent wealth tax on fortunes greater than $50 million and a 3 percent tax on ones greater than $1 billion, is geared as much toward protecting democracy as it is toward raising revenue. It’s an attempt to arrest the many types of economic inequality that threaten political equality — the ability of everyone to have something like an equal say in the democratic process.

Most Americans tend not to think of these egalitarian (even anti-capitalist) sentiments as part of the nation’s intellectual heritage. But Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and similarly situated politicians like Bernie Sanders are drawing on influential currents in American political history.

Some of those stretch back to the founding era. Despite his own status as a wealthy slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson was wary of extreme disparities of wealth and thought it was incompatible with republican political ideals. Commenting on “the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind” in Europe, he described his position in a famous letter to James Madison in 1785. “Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.” He concluded with a statement of belief: “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”

More than a century later, labor and agrarian radicals would make a version of this observation vis a vis the unjust and unfair arrangements that trapped farmers and industrial workers. For them, the extreme inequality and labor exploitation of the era was simply incompatible with meaningful democratic citizenship, as it left both hopelessly dependent on the owners of capital, corroding American democracy’s basis in the ideal of equal relations between citizens. “Suddenly, without warning, the shop closes down” or the worker “is discharged and his wage, small at best, is cut off. He has to live, the rent must be paid, the wife and children must have clothing and food, fuel must be provided, and yet he has no job, no wages, and no prospect for getting any,” wrote the socialist leader Eugene Debs in a fiery 1904 pamphlet, “Unionism and Socialism,” which painted a dire picture of capitalist dependency.

He continued: “Is a worker in that position free? Is he a citizen? A man? No! He is simply a wage slave, a jobholder, while it lasts, here today and gone tomorrow.” Channeling the founders, Debs held independent material security as a precondition for individual liberty. “No man is free in any just sense who has to rely upon the arbitrary will of another for the opportunity to work,” he had written in 1900. As Debs saw it, if we are deprived as workers, then we cannot truly act as citizens.

The National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union had its heyday some years before Debs entered public life, but its theorists similarly connected ordinary people’s dislocation from the political process to the growing dominance of corporations and concentrated capital. They too saw the answer in a transformation of the American economy that placed the monetary system under democratic control and moved the entire system in a more cooperative direction.

This plan, the historian Lawrence Goodwyn wrote, “would have produced a more democratic sharing of the nation’s total economic production. The ‘producing classes,’ no longer quite so systematically deprived of the fruits of their efforts, would have gotten a bit more of the fruits. Hierarchical forms of power and privilege in America would have undergone a significant measure of rearrangement.” The reorganization of economic power would yield a more vibrant democracy, where ordinary people had more power to shape the economic and political institutions that dominated their lives.

Neither labor radicals nor agrarian rebels ever attained enough power to enact their ideas in full, although they had a huge influence on the New Deal, which attempted to reconcile the reality of an industrial society with the nation’s democratic values. Likewise, the labor and political radicals of the New Deal period itself helped bring somewhat marginal ideas about political and economic equality to the mainstream.

But by the end of the 20th century their insights had been smothered by corporate power and its political allies, with predictable consequences: We live with a narrow politics where democratic deliberation rarely touches fundamental questions of power and ownership. The re-emergence of this democratic critique of inequality through the political success of figures like Warren, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez seems to point to the beginning of a course correction, or at least the beginning of dialogue about a course correction. The extent to which our economic elites are rattled by the mere fact that this discussion is happening is a clear sign that it needs to happen.

As Americans across the political spectrum gear up to try to deny President Donald Trump a second term in office, all of this may seem divisive — a distraction from the emergency at hand. Just the opposite is true. Trump’s presidency is a symptom of profound democratic weakness. Should he lose in 2020, that will be the beginning of a recovery. We’ll still need to rethink and rebuild our democracy and that has to include a re-imagining of the economy on which it rests.

This article originally appeared in <a id="600c13f5-63d6-4dd5-837f-c5aa8f034c86" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/opinion/columnists/warren-ocasio-cortez-wealth-tax.html">The New York Times</a>.

Economic power corrupts, and absolute economic power corrupts absolutely

The basic idea holds capitalism as at best an uneasy partner with our democratic values.

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