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Constitutional scholars are already worrying about another January 6 crisis, and they warn that the next election might be harder to save.
The nightmare scenarios that most frighten election observers heading toward 2024 all culminate in a quadrennial Joint Session of Congress—the same formal meeting that rioters interrupted in their failed bid to keep Donald Trump in the White House earlier this year. What scares them, however, is not necessarily a reprise of that violent day. They fear a bloodless coup that begins in state capitals, wins the blessing of conservatives atop the courts, and then secures the decisive votes of Trump-supporting Republicans in Congress. The risk of an even worse crisis is greater in 2024, these election experts say, because Trump supporters are likely to be far better positioned than they were in 2020. “Our democracy is in great peril today,” Norm Eisen, a prominent Democratic lawyer who co-founded the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, told me. “We’re in a Weimar moment in America.”
Should Trump or his acolytes try to subvert the 2024 election, the last Democrat with any power to stop the steal—or at least try to—would be Harris. “She’s certainly going to have quite a job on her hands on January 6, 2025,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and liberal constitutional scholar, told me. Nine months ago, Tribe and other Democrats praised Pence for interpreting his authority narrowly, but the next time around, they might ask Harris to wield the same gavel more forcefully.
Whether the vice president has any substantive role in certifying the electoral vote for president is a matter of some dispute. Leading up to January 6, most legal authorities—Democrat and Republican—argued that Pence’s power in presiding over the Joint Session of Congress amounted to little more than what the Constitution gives to the vice president on any other day, which is to say: virtually none. His responsibility, as the president of the Senate, was to oversee the tallying of the electoral votes, recognize members of Congress who wished to speak, and otherwise leave the decision making to lawmakers. “The presiding officer’s role is ministerial,” attorneys for the nonpartisan Voter Protection Program wrote in a 30-page guide to the January 6 session late last year.
Trump saw it differently. He wanted Pence to reject certificates of Joe Biden’s victory from the pivotal states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona) and “send it back” so that GOP-controlled state legislatures could declare Trump the winner instead. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” the president told a rally of his supporters near the White House, shortly before the crowd marched up Pennsylvania Avenue and overran the Capitol. Trump, it is now clear, wasn’t concocting his own legal theory out of thin air. He was relying on the advice of John Eastman, a conservative law professor and attorney who in a “privileged and confidential” memo asserted that Pence could in fact hand Trump the election.
“There is very solid legal authority, and historical precedent, for the view that the President of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes ... and all the Members of Congress can do is watch,” Eastman wrote in the memo, which the journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa first published in their recent book, Peril. Eastman outlined several scenarios that would lead to Trump’s reelection and twice cited as validation the work of Tribe, who has argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court and was part of then–Vice President Al Gore’s legal team after the contested 2000 election.
Tribe told me that Eastman’s argument was “ludicrous,” but they did agree on one point: Every four years on January 6, the vice president is not powerless. “I don’t think we can argue that Kamala Harris has absolute authority,” Tribe said. “On the other hand, she is not simply a figurehead.” Harris’s principal role during the Joint Session, he said, could be to reject “ungrounded challenges” to state certifications. She may have other powers, he said, but he refused to discuss them with me. “I don’t want to lay out a complete road map for the other side, because I think sometimes they’re not as smart as they think they are,” he said.
Last year, Republican officials in key states refused to do the president’s bidding, and the Democratic majority in the House served as an extra backstop. When Trump backers in Congress formally objected to the certifications of Arizona and Pennsylvania—two states that Biden won—the House voted down the objections even though a majority of Republicans supported them. Since the election, however, GOP state legislatures in each of the tipping-points states have introduced or enacted laws that could make it easier to subvert elections, and Trump allies have moved to purge Republicans who bucked him in 2020. In Georgia, for example, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger faces a primary challenge from a conservative member of Congress, Representative Jody Hice, who backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Next year’s midterm elections, often a challenge for the party in power, pose an even greater threat to the future of American democracy. The GOP could regain majorities in Congress and oust Democratic governors seeking reelection in three states that narrowly voted for Biden—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Republicans already control the state legislatures in those states, and winning the governorship could allow them to enact more laws to restrict voting and shift authority over elections away from courts and nonpartisan election administrators. To consolidate power even further, conservatives want the Supreme Court to accept a legal theory that would allow state legislatures to pass election laws that are not subject to review by state courts and possibly not even to a veto by their governor.
Victories by Trump-aligned Republicans over the next year in state races and in the courts could open the door to a worst-case scenario for 2024 that, if the election is as tight as the past two presidential races, is both dangerous and entirely plausible, says Ben Berwick, a counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group founded in late 2016 to fight authoritarianism in the U.S. First, Berwick told me, Trump backers in the closest tipping-point states would “manufacture doubt about the results, and then use that doubt to allow state legislatures to step in and say, ‘Well, we can’t really be sure of the winner, so we’re just going to decide which slate of electors to choose.’” As my colleague Barton Gellman reported before last year’s election, ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which provides instructions to Congress for resolving disputes, could lead to chaos when lawmakers meet to tally the results.
Presiding over the assembly will be Harris, who, as Pence, Biden, and Gore did in previous elections, will likely appear on the ballot herself. What will she do—what can she do—if Republicans empowered with congressional majorities refuse to accept the certification of a Democratic win in one or more key states? How would she handle a certification from a Republican governor or secretary of state that appeared to subvert the popular vote in that state? What if, in other words, it were up to her to stop the steal? I asked Harris’s office how she viewed her role and whether she had, more than three years in advance, received briefings on her authority in those scenarios. “Vice President Harris will always fulfill the constitutional duties of the office,” Sabrina Singh, a spokesperson for Harris, replied. “We learned in 2020 that the most important principle in our democracy is that voters, not partisan politicians, choose the president.”
Worries about a constitutional crisis have led to a push in Congress to revise the Electoral Count Act to head off disputes about how it should be interpreted and who should have final say in a contested election. Multiple lawyers I spoke with said that Harris’s role would likely be moot if Republicans wield majorities in 2025 because they could simply overrule any decision she tried to make. “The principal responsibility will always lie with the members of the two houses,” Eisen said. “If they chose to, they could fight the actions of the vice president.” Tribe, however, suggested that the law wasn’t that clear.
Advocates have begun quiet talks on Capitol Hill with members of both parties, hoping to keep the issue separate from the more polarizing discussions over voting laws. But it may be too late. Republicans have unanimously opposed all Democratic election-related proposals since 2020, though a few conservatives outside Congress have invoked the possibility of Harris’s starring role in tallying electoral votes to prod the GOP to support a fix for the Electoral Count Act. “Common sense dictates that we act to ensure that no vice president ever steals an election,” Kevin Kosar, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote earlier this year. So far, however, elected Republicans have been silent.
Without new legislation clarifying the Electoral Count Act, advocates worry, the January 6 session could devolve into a messy battle of parliamentary maneuvers. “The current language of the statute leaves too much room for uncertainty regarding the vice president’s responsibilities,” wrote members of the National Task Force on Election Crises, a bipartisan coalition formed ahead of the 2020 election. Members of Congress could call for votes to overrule any decisions that Harris makes, or, as Eastman suggested in his memo, the vice president could try to declare a winner without any vote at all. Either way, the legitimate outcome of the presidential election would remain disputed, and the losing party would be left to take their fight to the Supreme Court or, worse, out into the streets.
Talking through the doomsday scenarios of a particular session of Congress more than three years away elicits a bracing sense of urgency from the lawyers and advocates for whom the shock of January 6 remains fresh. They acknowledge that nothing is inevitable in politics, that the system held in 2020 (if barely), and that for it to crumble in 2024, dozens of elections will have to go a certain way, as would nearly as many legal challenges. “If people pay attention in this moment, there’s lots of different ways that the American people can push back,” Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of the States United Democracy Center, told me.
Yet what pushes that urgency into something close to panic is a recognition that the public is not paying enough attention, that Congress is not acting, that the moment of crisis is the present rather than the future. “The failure to modernize federal law will allow this cancer to continue to creep through the system. We all know how it turned out for Weimar,” Eisen said. “And we may face the hypothetical, the worst-case scenario, where it’s only the vice president standing between totalitarianism and us, between a bloodless coup and democracy.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff at a news conference on Capitol Hill on March 30, 2017. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Steve Bannon and Kash Patel all defying subpoenas under instruction from Trump
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, strategist Steve Bannon and Pentagon aide Kash Patel are defying subpoenas for documents and testimony, under instruction from the former president.
Amid fears that the panel will not take legal action to enforce its will, Adam Schiff, a member of the panel as well as chairman of the House intelligence committee, spoke to CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
The 6 January committee, he said, “wants to make sure that these witnesses come in and testify, and we are prepared to go forward and urge the justice department to criminally prosecute anyone who does not do their lawful duty”.
Schiff also greeted a decision by the Biden administration not to invoke executive privilege over documents pertaining to the Capitol attack.
The riot, around which five people including a police officer died, followed a rally near the White House at which Trump exhorted followers to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat.
Schiff said he hoped the House committee would see such materials “very soon”.
“I applaud the Biden administration for not asserting executive privilege,” he said, “not trying, because it’s protecting its own prerogative, to deprive the American people of the full facts. So hats off to the administration.
“We should I think get those documents soon because the sitting president has the primary say on executive privilege.”
On Friday, in a letter announcing their client’s decision not to comply with his subpoena, attorneys for Bannon attempted to assert executive privilege themselves.
Observers pointed out that executive privilege applies to communications involving the president the White House wishes to keep confidential – but though Trump was then in power, Bannon was not working for him.
Trump repeated the lies about electoral fraud which fuelled the attack at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday. Two senior state Republicans, Senator Chuck Grassley and Governor Kim Reynolds, stood with him.
Referring to a Senate judiciary committee majority report this week about how Trump pressured his acting attorney general before the Capitol attack, Schiff said: “We saw Grassley [the senior Republican on the judiciary committee] in Iowa yesterday, unable to condemn the president’s effort to to get the justice department to overturn the election.”
Referring to Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican whip, Schiff pointed to “another Republican leader unable to acknowledge that the election wasn’t stolen”.
On Fox News Sunday, Scalise refused three times to say if he believed the election was stolen.
“It’s these personal capitulations that are putting our country at risk,” Schiff said, adding that the Republican party “is now an autocratic cult around Donald Trump … not interested in governing”.
Trump’s Iowa rally was part of a shadow campaign. The former president remains eligible to run for the White House because enough Republican senators stayed loyal in his second impeachment trial, for inciting the Capitol attack, to stave off conviction. But Trump has not formally declared a run.
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, said the American people should see Trump aides testify under oath in Congress.
“When you consider that these were Trump appointees,” he said, of events before the 6 January rally outlined in the Senate judiciary committee report, “people who are willing to go right to the chalk line, and in my view, even over it, when those folks saw this as outlandish and illegal and something that they don’t quit before they participate in, that shows how berserk this had gotten.”
Referring to Jeffrey Clark, a senior justice department lawyer whose willingness to help Trump was outlined in the Senate report, Whitehouse said: “We then go on to the further question of, ‘OK, how was this organised? Was this really just one little guy in the Department of Justice with a wild idea?’ I doubt it.”
Observers including the comedian Bill Maher have warned of a “slow-moving coup”, shorthand for processes by which Republicans at state levels have since 2020 moved to change voting and electoral laws and to install sympathetic officials in positions which monitor and certify elections.
The former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, author of a tell-all book about her former boss, also appeared on NBC.
She said that if Trump “does run again in 2024, he’ll have no guardrails because he will never have to worry about re-election, so he will do whatever he wants. He will hire whomever he wants. And I think that includes people of the 6 January mind … imagine who he could put into the DoJ in 2024, knowing he’s got no consequences there.”
Asked if Trump would “destroy the democracy”, Grisham said: “I think it will be a very terrifying time.
“I think it will be nothing but revenge, retribution and how he can benefit himself. There will be pardons happening. I think there will be very draconian policies that go way too far. So I believe if he is re-elected it will be a really, really scary time.”
Andrea Kane on her last day as superintendent of schools in Queen Anne's County, Md. (photo: Michael A. McCoy/NYT)
A Black superintendent’s email to parents after the killing of George Floyd engulfed a small, predominantly white Maryland community in a yearlong firestorm.
Dr. Kane, the superintendent, saw him in the faces of Black students in her district and heard him crying out for his mother when she spoke to her own sons. So she started her letter with a warning that it would bear not just “good news,” but “a bit of a reality check.”
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the high-performing district on the Eastern Shore of Maryland had closed out the year with much to be proud of. But like the rest of the country, Dr. Kane said, the community had another crisis to confront.
Toxic vapor pours from a chimney at a power plant in Belchatow, Poland. (photo: Piotr Malecki/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Think you’re investing ethically? You might be surprised.
Investors have become eager to put their money toward good in recent years. In 2020, assets under management using sustainable investing strategies in the United States reached $17.1 trillion, according to a report from the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investing. That’s one of every three dollars under professional management in the country. Investments that consider environmental, social, and governance factors— or ESG — are gaining more public attention, too. There are over 800 registered investment companies with ESG assets.
It’s good that the general public, including investors, is trying to pay attention to where money flows. What isn’t so good: Plenty of people think they’re investing in ways that match their values when in reality, they aren’t. It’s really easy to slap the ESG label onto an investment product, likely increase fees on it a little bit, and call it a day. Plenty of big investors claim they’re managing their money in an environmentally friendly, socially responsible way — and assume nobody’s peeking behind the curtain.
“What you get is an industry that knows if they put ‘ESG’ or ‘green’ on something, they can make a lot more money out of it,” said Tariq Fancy, the former chief investment officer for sustainable investing at BlackRock, who has since spoken out on the pitfalls of socially minded and ESG investing. “And you have a public that says, ‘If it says ESG on it, I should probably buy this.’”
“I compare it to the ’70s, when everybody was labeling their food as organic and the government was like, ‘Hey, there’s a definition to that word,’” said Nell Minow, vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, a consulting firm that focuses on corporate governance. Currently, there’s no solid definition for ESG.
This isn’t to say that investing ethically is impossible — though there are some experts, including Fancy, who would argue that it is largely the case. Either way, it’s a much thornier issue to navigate than meets the eye. Plenty of people would be surprised to learn the fossil fuel-free fund they’ve got their 401(k) in isn’t so fossil fuel-free, or that the company providing them the fund — such as BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard — may happily vote for bloated CEO pay packages and against disclosures on items such as diversity and climate.
It’s also up for debate whether avoiding certain investments and divesting actually works. When investors sell off shares of a company whose practices or business models they object to, they are giving up their seat at the table and to other investors who don’t care. Divestment campaigns, like the one Harvard announced to no longer hold direct investments in fossil fuels, are good at drawing attention to causes and creating negative PR. But in the short term, they don’t accomplish much in terms of harming companies, and in the long term, there’s debate about their financial effectiveness as well.
“The problem with the financial markets is they’re so big that you can’t possibly affect them by deciding not to own something that’s objectionable,” Fancy said. “In five milliseconds, someone who doesn’t give a shit will go buy it.”
There are steps one can take to make sure their money is aligned with their values (more on that below), but ultimately, there’s only so much individual investors can do. Regulators need to define ESG so that the people creating such funds have something to comply with, and investment professionals need to be encouraged to contemplate broader issues when advising their clients (if that’s what their clients want).
At a higher level, there’s always a question of how much good can be accomplished through investing — a corporation or industry won’t change its practices just because some people on Wall Street say so.
There’s a lot of “woke-washing” going on in socially minded investing
Most people constantly have a thousand things they’re trying to pay attention to, and what’s in their 401(k), IRA, or Betterment account isn’t generally at the top of the list.
But plenty of regular investors want to make sure they’re not harming the planet with their investments, and they think that in the long term, responsible investments will be more lucrative. They’re inclined to trust that the label on the product they’re putting their money into is accurate, and if it says ESG on it, they want to believe it.
The companies making these products are well aware of that inclination. They also know that they may be able to charge higher fees on ESG products because investors are willing to swallow them if they think it’s for the greater good, even if what’s in the product isn’t much different from what’s in any run-of-the-mill (and lower-cost) fund.
“There’s a lot of green-washing, of woke-washing, a lot of washing within this category of ESG,” said Marilyn Waite, a program officer in environment at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a nonprofit charity, and the author of Sustainability at Work.
It doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do better; it just means it’s harder than it seems.
“Most people are invested and have no idea what they’re invested in, because most people invest in mutual funds — which are these baskets of stocks — and they only tell you on the prospectus what are the top 10 holdings,” said Andy Behar, CEO of As You Sow, a nonprofit that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility. “You may hold companies that are profiting from burning down the rainforests, profiting from private prisons, profiting from climate destruction, and you have no idea. It’s very, very difficult to figure it out.”
As You Sow has created multiple tools for people to learn what’s in their investments and try to decipher whether it aligns with their goals and values. People can type in a ticker or name of an ETF or mutual fund to see how it rates in terms of fossil fuels, gender equality, or guns, among other items.
A quick spin around As You Sow’s ratings shows this ESG marketing play in action. Behar pointed to a “Fossil Fuel Reserves Free” ETF; according to his group’s analysis, it has holdings in 23 fossil fuel companies, including ones in coal and oil and gas. It’s under 2 percent of the overall fund, but it’s not nothing. “Why do you name a fund ‘fossil fuel reserves free’?” Behar said. “It’s marketing.”
Investing better means paying a little bit of attention
There’s an old maxim in investing attributed to Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain that says you should put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch the basket. If you want to invest ethically, you have to watch the basket or leave it with someone who will.
Minow, from ValueEdge Advisors, said that the easiest way to try to move your money toward doing good (or at least not something terrible) is to take a look at your 401(k). If there’s an index fund with an ESG component in there and the potential social benefits outweigh the potential costs, consider choosing it. A next step, if you’re up for it, is to look at how funds vote their proxies, meaning ballots shareholders get to vote annually on various corporate issues.
In the case of many funds, the firms behind them vote on behalf of their individual investors, and because they have so many shares, they have quite a bit of sway. Are they voting for or against outrageous CEO pay packages? Climate proposals? Diversity requirements? Big investment managers like BlackRock say they’re paying attention, but are they?
“Either they put their money where their mouth is or they don’t,” Minow said. “If a company says we’re making a commitment to be carbon-neutral by 2050 but they don’t make that part of the CEO’s pay plan, don’t listen to them, because they’re not serious about it.”
There are ways to dive in a little more, if you’re willing to put in the energy. For people who have an investment adviser, you can talk to them about your priorities, where your money is being invested, and why. To be sure, that requires thinking about what matters to you.
“What’s the issue you care about or want to have an impact on? How are you measuring that issue and your impact? And who are you working with to do that?” said Rachel Robasciotti, founder and CEO of Adasina Social Capital. Adasina works directly with social justice groups to craft its investment strategies and offers a suite of products for investors. “What social movements say to us very often is: ‘What future are you investing in?’” Robasciotti said.
If you’re up for it and you remember, you can also vote your proxy on shares of the companies you’re invested in during their annual meetings. (You should get a ballot and information from the company ahead of time, and you can find a company’s proxy statement on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website.) It’s a little tricky, impact-wise, because big institutions have much more voting power than individuals do, but it’s something. And some votes are non-binding, meaning management doesn’t have to do what shareholders say.
There’s also been a lot of attention and emphasis placed on divestment over the years, with activists pushing universities and pensions to just get out of investments in fossil fuels or other arenas. There’s disagreement among experts about how well divestment works.
Proponents of divestment point out that even if it doesn’t necessarily hurt companies or affect their stock price in the short term, it can make a difference in the long term in creating negative attention. “Social movements make visible that an asset is not a good investment when they mobilize investors to leave that asset. Over time, it can become a toxic asset,” Robasciotti said. This is true even if it doesn’t necessarily hurt companies or affect their stock price in the short term.
In the short term, though, selling shares doesn’t hurt the company or really ding its stock price — someone else just comes along and picks up those shares. The shares being divested are already trading among secondary shareholders, so instead of Harvard holding shares of Exxon or Chevron, it’s just some hedge fund or other investor — often an investor that doesn’t care.
“The people who have the least social interest are the ones who end up holding the stock,” said Alex Thaler, the co-founder and CEO of Ikonik, a soon-to-be-launched trading platform that lets individual investors band together for shareholder campaigns. Proponents of divestment often point to campaigns around South Africa in an effort to bring apartheid to an end decades ago, but evidence on just how much of a role divestment played there compared to other factors is mixed.
“The only thing that it does is allow people to cover their asses, because they can basically say, ‘I’ve washed my hands of it.’ Oil companies still exist,” Fancy said.
A small, climate-conscious activist investment firm secured three seats on Exxon’s board of directors in a shareholder push earlier this year, which activists say could have big implications for its climate-related activities. They wouldn’t have been able to do that had they given up their seat at the table (and, probably, if Exxon hadn’t been losing money in recent years).
You can’t save the planet with your Robinhood account
As good as it feels to believe we’re doing something about the issues we care about, it’s also true that as individuals, we can only do so much. Thinking about a problem as enormous as climate change can make you want to act, including through your 401(k). Indeed, some fossil fuel companies would much rather you think about it through the lens of what you’re doing rather than what they are. But saving the planet — including trying to help with your stocks and retirement fund — requires more than your own action and attention. The government also needs to step in.
One place to start, experts say: The SEC is working to define what ESG is, and it needs to do more. There are many inconsistencies among ESG products, and the firms offering those products are allowed to get away with a lot. The SEC and federal prosecutors are reportedly looking into Deutsche Bank’s sustainability claims, but the German bank is hardly the only one stretching the limits.
The Department of Labor is also taking a look at its guidance for ESG criteria in retirement investment plans. This can be a little wonky, but managers of retirement plans have a fiduciary duty that’s essentially to protect the investment and make money with it. And it’s not clear where issues such as sustainability and social responsibility fit into that.
Experts, such as Lenore Palladino, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, say that asset managers should be able to look at a bigger picture as part of their fiduciary duty. “There is this whole world of ESG funds and sustainable investing, but they all stay within the framework of essentially the only thing you can do with your money is put it into a fund, and the only thing the person managing that money should care about is increasing the value of money,” Palladino said. “They can’t also care about the status of the planet if that will contradict their ability to make money.”
People with a pension fund to live off during retirement also, presumably, want a planet to live on. Regulators need to open the door more for managers to take that into account. Palladino also said it should come with a bigger shift in how we think about investing.
“If you think the whole purpose of buying and selling shares in corporations is to raise the value of those corporations, but then you realize we as shareholders also live on the planet and deal with the negative externalities created, if you don’t allow for or even push money managers to take into account the fact that we are whole humans and we live in a society, then it’s not ethical investing in my view,” she said.
To be sure, there are significant limits in how much change can be accomplished through investing or shareholder advocacy. The federal government needs to act directly on climate change, and corporations do too.
Fancy, the former BlackRock chief investment officer who now runs an education nonprofit called Rumie, takes a pretty nihilistic view of the entire ecosystem of socially minded and ESG investing. His argument is that ESG products are useless — a fund just shuffles some shares around between ETFs and mutual funds, slaps a label (and likely a higher fee) on top, and keeps churning. He worries it’s a “placebo” that makes people think they’re accomplishing something when they’re really not.
“If you really care about social changes, invest your portfolio as you’ve always done, which is to get the best returns and preserve your savings, and then turn to the government and push political action around solving climate change, because that’s the only level where it can actually be solved,” Fancy said.
Many of the other experts I spoke to for this story disputed that view and held that ESG investing can work — but it requires some effort on the part of investors, and it can’t be the only thing they do.
“We’re kind of ignorantly complicit in the world that we see around us because we’re supporting the companies that are in an extractive and destructive business,” Behar said. “The core of it is to know what you want and then align it with your values.”
Bedford, Indiana. (photo: Jeremy Hogan/Getty Images)
By not organizing in decimated post-industrial towns, we’re ceding ground to the right wing.
The new analysis, by several Democratic consultants, parses election results at a county level to argue that the simple narrative that Democrats win urban areas, Republicans win rural areas, and the suburbs are a battleground, is simplistic and misleading. In fact, the report finds that Democrats’ biggest losses in the 2020 election came in “factory town” counties with smaller cities that traditionally relied on manufacturing employment — counties that account for 40% of all voters. Across 10 states in the Midwest and Northeast that comprise the fading heart of America’s former manufacturing hubs, Democrats lost 2.6 million votes between Obama’s election in 2012 and Biden’s in 2020. That is a million more votes than Democrats gained in those states’ cities and suburbs. In other words, across vital battleground states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, the Democratic Party is most vulnerable in the very places that have been most acutely devastated by the decline of American manufacturing jobs over the past two decades.
But this is not just a typical story of economic hopelessness. It is, more accurately, a story of the decline of the power of organized labor. Because the report finds that more than 90% of the decline in union members that the United States suffered between 2010 and 2020 was focused in nine of the states studied. “On average, our nine states lost 10% of their union membership over 10 years — a rate three times greater than the U.S. average,” the report finds. So, within the very swing states that the Democratic Party needs to win to hold onto the White House, the institution of union membership is crumbling faster than anywhere else in the country.
Trivially, this decline is due to the familiar Republican legal and regulatory and economic attacks on organized labor, like “right to work” laws that make it harder to organize and maintain unions. That is true, as far as it goes. But it is not the message that the political class should take away from this.
For the labor movement, the story here is that as traditionally unionized manufacturing jobs disappeared, unions failed to organize the next set of (worse) jobs that rose up to take their place in these left-behind towns. Global capitalism is a fearsome beast. Reining in the post-NAFTA decimation of the U.S. manufacturing economy is a job that will require institutions bigger than unions. What unions can do, and must do, and have not done, is to focus at all times on the working people themselves. If the factories leave, and people go work at the Dollar General, then unions need to unionize the Dollar General. That has absolutely not been done. Nor has it even been attempted on any reasonable scale. Workers in these devastated areas live in the economy of 2021, and unions are still living in the economy of 1970, in their own minds. It is fine to fight as hard as possible to retain good union jobs. But if you lose them, you still need to organize the people who are left behind. Wake the fuck up and build the next generation of unions in these places. The labor movement is very, very late to this job.
And for the Democrats, the lesson here is that seeing unions as a simple interest group that exists to provide money and door-knockers to the Democratic Party is a losing proposition. Prior to Biden, the post-Reagan Democratic presidents have mostly assumed that since they weren’t actively persecuting unions like Republicans were, that was enough. Wrong. The Democratic Party has a direct interest in the rebuilding of the labor movement. If it is not actively assisting unions (with more than words) in the project of organizing millions and millions of workers who have been left behind in our modern Amazonified capitalist world, it is idiotically fiddling while its base burns. A strong and vibrant and well-functioning union can be the difference between a laid-off factory worker becoming an advocate for a progressive world, or falling into a MAGA pit.
The union losses in these factory towns have hit hard. These were often unions that have deep roots in the community. They were institutions. They were part of the social and political fabric of those cities. They served as the safety net that picked up where the government’s broken safety net failed. By allowing the closure of factories to result also in the permanent erasure of strong unions, we have condemned these communities twice over. Not only have they lost their jobs; they have lost their collective security, right when they need it most.
The good news is that broad investment in union organizing can pay more dividends than political pundits even suspect. Yes, unions raise wages and improve benefits and workplace safety and generally provide direct positive economic impacts that are sorely needed. Beyond that, though, the process of organizing new unions is also one that transforms people themselves. It is often the only real demonstration of the power of solidarity and democracy that anyone will ever personally experience. The qualities instilled by union organizing campaigns tend to give working people a way to see the world that aligns with broadly progressive values: Unity with everyone, equality, fighting for justice against the rich. The Democratic Party — especially the worthwhile part of the Democratic Party — needs people to believe these things, if it is going to build a lasting majority. And far more importantly, humans need these things, to survive and thrive.
Unions have a lot of work to do. Get to organizing, or we all keep sinking together.
Britain's Minister of State Lord David Frost delivers his speech on Brexit at the annual Conservative Party conference, in Manchester, Britain, October 4, 2021. (photo: Toby Melville/Reuters)
The protocol was part of the Brexit settlement Prime Minister Boris Johnson negotiated with the EU, but London has repeatedly said it must be rewritten less than a year after taking force due to the barriers businesses face when importing British goods into Northern Ireland.
Ireland's foreign minister Simon Coveney on Twitter asked: "Real Q: Does UKG (UK Government) actually want an agreed way forward or a further breakdown in relations?"
That drew a rebuke from Frost: "I prefer not to do negotiations by twitter, but since @simoncoveney has begun the process..."
Frost dismissed Coveney's argument that he was making new demands, saying that Britain's concerns over the European Court of Justice's role in the process were set out three months earlier.
"The problem is that too few people seem to have listened," Frost said.
On Saturday, Frost had released extracts of a speech he is due to make this week again calling for change and signalling a desire to free the protocol from the oversight of European judges.
Responding to that, Ireland's Coveney said Britain had created a new "red line" barrier to progress that it knows the EU cannot move on.
The row comes at the start of an important week in the long- running debate over how to manage the flow of goods between Britain, Northern Ireland and the EU.
EU PACKAGE ON CUSTOMS, FOOD, MEDICINES
The European Commission is expected to present new measures on Wednesday tosmooth trade, while stopping short of the "significant change" London is demanding to the protocol.
The measures are designed to ease customs controls, clearance of meat, dairy and other food products and the flow of medicines to Northern Ireland from the UK mainland.
The Commission will also set out plans to engage more with politicians, business people and others in Northern Ireland.
The proposals could enable supermarkets to supply their Northern Irish stores with sausages and other chilled meat products from Britain that are banned from entry into the European Union - and so in theory into Northern Ireland.
While remaining part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland has stayed in the EU's single market for goods, meaning exports to the rest of the bloc face no customs checks, tariffs or paperwork. The result is an effective customs border in the Irish Sea, disturbing GB-Northern Ireland trade and angering the province's pro-British unionists.
Under the Commission's plans, British sausages, for example, would be allowed into Northern Ireland as long as they were solely intended for Northern Irish consumers.
On Tuesday, a day before that announcement, Frost is due to give a speech to the diplomatic community in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon.
He will say endless negotiation is not an option and that London will need to act using the Article 16 safeguard mechanism if solutions cannot be agreed rapidly.
Article 16 allows either side to take unilateral action if the protocol is deemed to have a negative impact.
A farmer carries pineapples to be planted at the Greenfields pineapple farm in Ekumfi on June 29, 2018. (photo: Cristina Aldehuela/AFP)
Mass dispossession of smallholder farmers is not a side effect of the ‘African Green Revolution’. It is the whole point.
But one point apparently lost on the summit’s attendees is that the project of “agricultural modernisation” which many of them have supported for decades is only making food insecurity worse in recent years, especially in Africa.
Since the 2007-08 world food price crisis, Western governments and philanthropies, led by the United States and the Gates Foundation, have backed a multitude of programmes across the continent to raise farmers’ productivity and connect them to commercial supply chains. Together, these efforts carry the banner of an “African Green Revolution” – an approach not unlike the primarily Asian and Latin American Green Revolution before it.
But at the heart of this massive philanthropic and governmental undertaking lies an essential contradiction: agricultural “modernisation”, we are told, will benefit Africa’s smallholder farmers by giving advantages to farmer-entrepreneurs with larger landholdings. The result is a “revolution” ostensibly meant to help the poor which actually makes rural life difficult for anyone but the most well-off, well-connected, commercially-oriented, and “efficient” business people.
In our research, we have both encountered the reality of the African Green Revolution in Ghana, a country that has experienced a surge in agricultural foreign aid in recent years.
As geography professors Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Rachel Bezner Kerr have mentioned in their 2015 paper, British colonialists developed production and market systems to extract cocoa – a crop not widely consumed in the country but which continues to attract significant investment and subsidies today. In the post-colonial period of the 1960s and 1970s, the government of Ghana, with support from Western government donors, introduced high-yielding varieties of rice and maize, as well as imported chemical fertilisers.
In a 2011 paper, University of Ghana professor and anthropologist Kojo Amanor also explains, that from 1986 to 2003, Sasakawa Global 2000, a development organisation founded by Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa and Norman Borlaug, the initiator of the Asian Green Revolution, tried unsuccessfully to bring new farm technology to rural Ghana and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Sasakawa Global 2000 took over the government’s previous role, distributing low-interest credit packages to smallholders willing to buy hybrid seed, chemical fertiliser and other agrochemicals, and become part of global, commercial supply chains.
Sasakawa Global 2000 found many farmers willing to accept their assistance. But according to Amanor, many of the farmers who initially adopted the technology reverted to traditional practices and local seed varieties after the project concluded. Even after years of working in rural Ghana, the organisation saw only a 45 percent recovery in crop investment.
These days, there are many reasons why smallholders do not cooperate with the “modernisation” programmes of the African Green Revolution. In their 2015 study, Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner Kerr found that smallholder farmers often preferred to plant their own maize varieties, even when government and development organisations made more “advanced” hybrids available.
As the farmers understood well, their own hardier, local varieties of maize were more resistant to drought, required less labour, cost less, and required little or no chemical fertiliser. Moreover, unlike hybrids, whose wide leaves obstruct the sun for neighbouring plants, farmers could plant their own maize varieties alongside peanuts, cowpea, and bambara beans – all nutritious crops well adapted to the local ecology.
Development planners have long touted technologies like hybrid seeds as “solutions” to the many problems resulting from climate change, and it is true farmers sometimes turn to them in their struggle to adapt to unpredictable ecological conditions. In one study, one of us found that many smallholders in an area of northern Ghana reluctantly turned to those technologies in a desperate gambit to adapt to increasingly erratic rainfall, shortening growing seasons and drier, less fertile soils.
But beyond climate change, farmers have also adopted technology to deal with the problems induced by the African Green Revolution itself, such as increasing competition for land, as local businessmen (and they are overwhelmingly men) acquire farms to capitalise on the very programmes supposedly meant to help smallholders.
Despite the apparent need for more technology, smallholders find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle, sacrificing tomorrow’s soil for today’s planting. While even some of the poorest farmers in Ghana rely on chemical fertiliser to grow enough food to survive, a number of farmers said their soils were infertile without ever-larger doses of chemicals. Or as some put it, the land was “addicted to chemicals”. This dependency increased their debt and their risk of land dispossession, particularly for women.
Far from levelling the playing field so that any farmer can succeed, the emphasis on expensive technology and commercial access has only made it harder for smallholder farmers to survive in their native lands, while opening the door to local businessmen who see in the African Green Revolution their own investment opportunity. As one farmer said, “[donors] are supposed to help, but what do we see? […] you see big cars. This district executive wants 50 acres, the party head wants 100 acres.”
As another put it, development workers “treat farmers like they are so stupid”.
Even at the smallest scale, farming is more than a livelihood. Studies show that a major share of the world’s food is grown by smallholder farmers. Yet many critical agrarian thinkers like Henry Bernstein have argued that smallholder farming is becoming increasingly difficult, and even impossible in some places. Developmental aid that largely goes to the agri-food companies and well-capitalised businessmen, while smallholders lose the very farmland they need to survive, is undoubtedly one of the underlying causes of this phenomenon.
It is tempting to think of mass displacement as an unforeseen consequence of the African Green Revolution. But displacement and marginalisation were always bound to result from an effort that rarely envisions smallholders as anything more than a component in a supply chain managed by other, more powerful actors.
In Ghana, several organisations, including World Vision, the Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and the World Bank have empowered relatively well-off business people to provide assistance to farmers that the state once provided. As part of one project we researched, USAID supported a group of relatively well-off “nucleus farmers” to distribute seeds and facilitate the occasional service of a tractor for smallholders in exchange for a portion of their crop. The aid agency and its contractor said the multi-year project, which ended in 2020, directly involved tens of thousands of impoverished farmers in an effort to modernise one of the country’s agricultural processing chains.
But when one of us travelled to Ghana in 2016 and asked some of the nucleus farmers how they dealt with smallholders who, despite the assistance, could not grow enough soy to compensate them, these agro-entrepreneurs revealed a darker side to the programme. At their direction, struggling smallholder farmers borrowed money from local banks to buy snacks to sell by the roadside to pay off the debt. When a farmer repeatedly failed to grow sufficient amounts of the crop, one nucleus farmer said, he instructed the farmer to let someone else take over their plot for the rest of the season. While some returned the next season, many did not.
When asked about these outcomes, one executive for the development contractor managing the programme deferred to a standard refrain. Nucleus farmers were “independent businesses” and how they dealt with farmers was none of their concern. But the fact that smallholder farmers in Africa were leaving their farms was no reason for concern.
“That’s an evolutionary process,” this person said. “I don’t think that’s anything anyone is trying to counter.”
Proponents of a Green Revolution in Africa often employ justifications like these when confronted with unflattering stories about rural life in Africa: smallholders are leaving the countryside, but that is their choice. And if it is not their choice, their departure is only part of a natural process outside anyone’s control. In any case, when smallholders drop their hoes and head to the nearest city, they are only doing so to find a better livelihood.
But among like-minded people, enthusiasts will often make their position on rural depopulation quite clear. Speaking to an audience that included several African heads of state and numerous development contractors in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2018, Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah – one of the most prominent supporters of the African Green Revolution – had this to say: “A uniquely African agricultural revolution was meant to beat hunger by making food more available and accessible. But this revolution was also meant to create a diversified, modern economy, where food production no longer dominated how nations deployed the majority of their labour.”
Like other development planners who cheer the collapse of smallholder agriculture in Africa, Shah – who previously headed USAID under the Obama administration and the Gates Foundation’s agriculture programme – did not acknowledge some of the bleaker consequences of this population shift: growing slums and joblessness in Africa’s cities (and the cities of other continents), rising food insecurity, and a growing reliance on monocultures and other environmentally destructive farming techniques in rural areas.
Instead, he went on to say that from 2003 to 2018, sub-Saharan Africa’s population had increased from 700 million to over a billion people, while the proportion of people working in farming on the continent had fallen from 65 percent to 57 percent.
“Real progress,” he said. “But the eight-point drop over 15 years in the share of labour employed in agriculture is simply too small to celebrate.”
In other words, a mass displacement of smallholder farmers is not a natural process or a side-effect of the African Green Revolution. It is exactly the outcome development planners want and expect.
As the many grassroots organisations representing smallholder farmers in Africa and around the world understand, this story is fundamentally about who deserves to farm and reap the rewards from Africa’s farmland. It is one reason why so many of them boycotted the Food Systems Summit in September. But to succeed, groups standing up for smallholders will have to continue on many other fronts.
We call on activists to continue to speak the truth about the Green Revolution in Africa, and to take a stand against the donors, philanthropists, diplomats and academics promoting it. Let us call out actors that claim to help smallholders, but actually strive to kick smallholders off their land.
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