Tagged: History

What the Hell is Going on: Politics in the Viral Era







  1. Prolonged economic hardship after the financial crash
  2. Rapidly-changing social norms regarding race and gender









































The Discriminatory Roots of Odd-Year Elections


Nationwide the 2015 election had the lowest voter turnout the country has seen in 72 years, 36%.  Countless state, county, city, and school races across the US went scarcely noticed by voters.  San Francisco held a hugely controversial election that many commentators said was a battle for the city’s soul, with millions of dollars spent on ballot initiatives aimed at the city’s spiraling housing costs and rapid gentrification.  Yet only 41% of registered voters cast ballots.  Closer to my home, the city of Santa Barbara held a historic election, its first since switching to city council districts, which promised the potential to shake up City Hall, yet voter turnout was 38%.

Why Odd-Year Elections Keep People From Voting

Local governments that choose to hold their elections in odd-numbered years typically see far lower voter turnout, often dropping by half, and the voters that cast ballots are overwhelmingly whiter, older, and wealthier than those who participate in general elections.

Imagine a working immigrant mother who recently became a US citizen.  She’s excited to vote, but has never done it before.  After working long hours cleaning houses, picking her kids up from childcare, cooking them dinner and washing the dishes, she realizes it’s election day and the polls close in an hour.  The local city council elections haven’t really been covered on TV, which focuses mostly on national news, and are rarely mentioned in the weekly local Spanish newspaper.  The candidates don’t bother knocking on doors in her apartment complex, where few residents are eligible or registered to vote, and even fewer turn out during odd-year elections.  She doesn’t know who is running for city council, what they stand for, or what issues are being debated.  With time running out before the polling booths close, she decides she’ll wait to vote next year, when she can cast her ballot for the president.

The gap between voter turnout in national elections and odd-year local elections has widened over the years, with a few potential causes:

  • Demographic change means there are more voters like the woman mentioned above, young people or immigrants who are new to voting and have less access to information about local politics.
  • Americans are working longer hours, which means they feel more and more strained for time to follow local politics, research issues, and vote.
  • As campaigns have become longer and more expensive, people living in cities or states where an election takes place every year feel overwhelmed and fatigued by trying to research and sort through information in seemingly endless election seasons.
  • Local newspapers and TV stations have declined, gone bankrupt, and laid off investigative journalists, while national cable news like Fox News and national online news sites like the Huffington Post have boomed, leaving voters with scarce access to information about local issues.

The problem with odd-year elections made national headlines after the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, where off-cycle elections are one of the primary reasons why the city government so starkly lacked representation from the majority black community.

The Anti-Irish History of Odd-Year Elections

But why do these off-cycle elections even exist?  What reason does a city have to hold an election separate from the state and national elections?  Why spend extra taxpayer dollars to run a separate election when it clearly leads to lower voter turnout?

The answer lies in history.  Off-cycle elections are mostly credited to Progressive Era reformers in the late 1800’s who saw them as a way to fight corruption in big cities.  But they were also a favorite policy of anti-immigrant political groups who blamed rapidly growing populations of Irish and other immigrants for using urban political machines to get jobs and services for their communities.

Sarah Anzia is probably the leading academic scholar studying odd-year elections.  While much of the attention on her work has focused on her suggestion that public employee unions are one of the major factors keeping municipal elections in odd years, I think something much more interesting is buried in her earlier examination of the history of odd-year elections.  Their original intent was primarily to break the backs of Irish political organizations in big cities.

Anzia found that by the 1890’s, when Progressive Era reformers took up the cause of off-cycle elections for cities, there had already been a long history of politicians changing the dates of city elections to manipulate outcomes.  There is no thorough national record of this history, but it can be dug up in case studies of individual cities.  Off-cycle elections emerged during the mid-1800’s through what Anzia refers to as “partisan power plays”, political parties jockeying to change the rules of the game to help them win.  Specifically in cities like New York and San Francisco, it was a result of an alliance between anti-corruption reform parties and nativist anti-immigrant parties who found a common enemy in the Democratic Party, which in many big cities had become dominated by a well-organized urban Irish voter turnout machine.

An Alliance Between Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Corruption Activists

For many reformers in the 1800’s, Irish and corruption were synonymous.  The era was the height of a wave of immigration to the rapidly industrializing US from Ireland and Southern and Eastern Europe.  Immigrants lived in extreme poverty, worked under highly exploitative conditions, and received little assistance or rights from the government.  More than any other group, the Irish built political power in the US’s biggest cities in response to the intense racism Irish immigrants met when they arrived.  Tammany Hall and other Irish-dominated political organizations ensured immigrant communities access to basic services, jobs and emergency assistance, built infrastructure and charities, and were rewarded by a loyal bloc of voters.  Yet they also became a symbol of corruption, rewarding their supporters with government jobs and giving bribes to get what they wanted, especially under New York’s notorious Boss Tweed.

Of course history is written by the victors, and the late 1800’s political battles between middle-class Protestant whites of English descent and the working poor Catholic and Jewish immigrants are simplistically depicted as the good reformers versus the corrupt mobsters.  There was corruption in the urban immigrant political machines no doubt.  But poor people and immigrants voted for them because they provided basic infrastructure and human services in their neighborhoods and defended their rights, as opposed to the intensely racist treatment they got from parties like the Whigs or the Know Nothings.  As we make policy today, we should examine this history with a critical eye to separate real anti-corruption efforts like civil service reform from shameless attempts to break Irish political power like odd-year elections.

The reform movements of the late 1800’s certainly had their discriminatory undertones, walking the fine line between hating corrupt Irish political machines and hating Irish people.  Legendary reformer cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose work is shown in this post, is credited in history textbooks with taking down notorious Boss Tweed but often depicted Irish people as drunken violent monkey-like creatures who had taken over the country.  The movement’s belief in rational scientific progress flirted at times with eugenics, the idea that keeping the poor and uneducated from breeding would further the human race.  And the push for alcohol prohibition was often tied to the idea that Irish, Russians and other urban immigrant groups were drunks who were ruining the moral fiber of American society.

San Francisco and New York

But in the case of off-cycle elections, the switch was often won through a direct alliance between anti-corruption reformers and anti-immigrant bigots.  In 1850’s New York, the racist nativist Know Nothing party allied with the Whigs (precursors to Republicans) in the state legislature to separate New York’s city election away from the state and national elections.  Voter turnout for city elections plunged, especially for Democrats, who depended on working-class immigrant voters who failed to turn out in off-cycle elections.

Irish who came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush brought Tammany Hall-style political organization to the West Coast in the 1850’s.  The People’s Party, a local San Francisco party that drew its support from both the financial elite and anti-Irish nativists, was born in response.  During their decade of control of San Francisco, the People’s Party led a successful push to switch San Francisco to off-cycle elections by allying with Republicans in the state legislature to change the city’s charter.

These cities set the precedent for a trend that swept the country decades later.  Today, our cities are facing low voter turnout and unequal representation because of a policy rooted in anti-Irish racism.  There is no evidence now that cities with even-year elections have any more corruption than those with odd-years.  But the much greater threat facing our democracy, the power of unlimited corporate money, is made much more powerful in low turnout off-years, when voters are disengaged and tuned out, and it’s easy to buy an election.

Today’s defenders of odd-year elections say that if local elections are moved to even-years that local issues will be drowned out by national politics.  They say that the small turnouts for odd-year elections are actually a good thing—that a small group of citizens who are well-informed and pay attention to local issues are the ones who should make the decisions.

But is it possible that the “uninformed” voter has something meaningful to contribute to their community?  That a young person or low-wage worker who rides the bus every day might actually have a better perspective on the city’s public transit system than a member of the Chamber of Commerce who has seen a presentation by a city official on the subject?  That an undocumented immigrant or young black person may not go to the same dinner parties as city councilmembers and school board trustees, but they’ve experienced harassment at the hands of city police that the members of the Rotary Club have no idea about?  That while some people’s definition of local issues are limited to parking and potholes, the family who just got evicted because they can’t afford rent might consider raising the city’s minimum wage to be an important local issue?

Odd-year elections are driven by a fear of the people that tears against the fabric of our democracy.  It’s a fear that the people are too stupid to govern themselves.  Although it might be couched in more polite language today, it’s the same fear of the ignorant Irish masses, mindlessly mobilized by political machines.  Today’s defenders of odd-year elections should know the history of what they’re defending because they carry on its legacy today.


Is Feminism’s Resurgence the Key to Fighting Economic Inequality?


From an outburst in open feminism in media and popular culture, to the growing strength of grassroots activism around issues like sexual assault, reproductive rights and equal pay, in recent years the fight for gender equality has undergone a revival among the American mainstream public.  This could have huge implications for the raging debate on economic inequality.

The knife of American poverty cuts deep, but it has always cut deepest against women and people of color.  Politically marginalized groups have long been on the front lines of right-wing attacks on the working-class and poor.  This is the only way conservative politicians can be accountable to an elite agenda that prioritizes corporate profits, while still saving face with their voter base of white working-class men.

This is why so many basic labor protection laws exclude jobs like farm work and domestic work historically performed by people of color and women.  And although most Americans on welfare are white working-class people, this is why the movement to dismantle welfare in the 1980’s-1990’s was largely driven by rhetoric targeting urban black welfare recipients, ultimately wreaking devastating harm to poor women and children across racial lines.

Yet while the racial skew of poverty and economic inequality is highly visible in American political debates, the gender skew is often invisible and unspoken.  Conservatives have a good reason not to talk about it: the danger of 150 million women finding their economic interests to be more closely aligned with the left.  But why have progressives failed to talk about women and economic inequality?  Perhaps because in the past four decades where inequality soared, the feminist movement (like many other progressive social movements) was struggling, a shadow of its former political strength.

If mass feminism had been more well-organized and politically powerful in the 80’s and 90’s, and more accountable to the concerns of low-income women, could the left have stopped what was perhaps the most devastating attack on single mothers ever enacted in United States history?  It’s hard to know.  But what is important is the question before us now:  If feminism is truly making a resurgence among the American general population, will it be the force that allows us to break through on economic inequality?

For decades, we’ve seen the same battle lines in political struggles around support programs for the poor and the rights and wages of workers.  Corporate interests push lower wages, taxes, and regulations to grow their profits, while labor unions and organizations representing people of color fight for the opposite.  As you might imagine, the corporate interests usually win.  While women’s organizations and other groups on the left have often weighed in on the debate, it has traditionally been in a backseat role.  (The labor movement’s history of sexism plays no small role in this dynamic.)  So the core political coalition for fighting poverty in the US has traditionally been made up essentially of people of color and union members.  The former has grown over the last few decades while the latter has shrunk, consistently leaving the political base against inequality a mathematically outnumbered minority for an entire generation.

But although it is rarely framed this way, poverty is overwhelmingly a women’s issue.  Nearly two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women, and seven in ten Americans living in poverty are women and children (mostly kids in female-headed households).  An economy that increasingly puts profits before families through lack of paid parental and sick leave, unaffordable childcare and preschool, and workers’ lack of control over hours and scheduling, is forcing many American women to leave the labor force.  The ongoing attacks against teachers and other unionized public service workers fall heavily on women, as the public sector provides a huge share of female employment and much less gender wage inequality than the private sector.  There are even unseen gender dynamics at play in debates like whether tipped workers should be excluded from the minimum wage (most tipped workers have historically been women, who face rampant sexual harassment in service professions, especially when tips at the whim of the customer make up virtually their entire incomes.)

As feminism picks up steam again with the American public, the sheer number of female voters makes it a political force to be reckoned with.  This is also not your grandmother’s feminism: the modern feminist movement is much more inclusive of working-class women and women of color.  Modern feminists are not simply content to lean in to climb their way up the corporate ladder, but are instead organizing collectively to fight for economic equality for women as a whole through systemic policy change.

The Democratic Party is already starting to seize the opportunity.  In the 2014 midterm elections, one of the party’s strongest messages focused on how the Affordable Care Act banned a common practice of insurance companies charging women higher premiums and improved the affordability of reproductive healthcare.  Another powerful campaign message hammered Republicans for voting against legislation to address unequal pay between men and women in the workplace.  Meanwhile, it seems that Hillary Clinton’s policy team is preparing an economic agenda for 2016 that pushes back against economic inequality with an emphasis on women and families.

It’s a smart move for Democrats.  There’s a reason the party’s pivot towards a firmer stance on economic inequality has been politically successful.  What could be a better issue than one that energizes Democrats’ core base voters of people of color, young people and non-married women, while simultaneously driving a wedge between white working-class men and the corporate elite that dominate the Republican Party?  More importantly, what could be a better issue than one that actually fundamentally, tangibly and immediately improves the lives of people of color, young people, women, and white working-class men while hurting the pocketbooks of the corporate elite?

But to truly grasp the significance of this possibility, we have to view it in historical context.  From the 1930’s to the 1960’s the New Deal Coalition, made up of the white industrial working-class, the white rural poor, and most racial and religious minority groups, was the most powerful force in American history working to end poverty, and built the largest middle-class the world had ever seen.  But when Nixon’s Republican Party used racial fears as a wedge to separate rural whites, particularly in the South, away from the rest of the American working-class, the coalition fell apart.  Since then, America has lived without a strong political majority organized against economic inequality, and watched as the rungs on the economic ladder grew farther and farther apart.  If a rising feminist movement is willing to take on economic inequality, we may finally have a chance to rebuild that majority and provide real economic security and opportunity for millions.

Times Like These


















In Defense of Optimism: How I Became Disillusioned with Disillusionment



I read a great story about King today:












Who Jacked the Word “Responsibility”?

Conservative politicians use the word “responsibility” a lot, especially to sell policies that punish people—for being poor, for being immigrants, for being sexually active women, etc.  If you’re poor, it’s your individual responsibility to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and get more money, it’s not our social responsibility to give you food stamps so you don’t like… die and whatnot.

Effective political messaging taps into the universal values we hold like freedom, fairness, compassion, etc. that go deeper than our political affiliations.  That’s how you move people who might otherwise disagree with you.

Responsibility messaging resonates strongly with me.  Responsibility was the single most important value I was raised with.  If I could magically create a wordcloud of everything that came out of my mother’s mouth when I was a child (after removing some heavy cussing) “responsibility” would probably be the most commonly uttered word in my formative years.


My mom’s friend Dana babysitting me and my brother at our home in Oakland in the 90’s

But I was taught a different kind of responsibility than the right wing likes to talk about.  I had a single mom who was working, going to school, and raising children all at the same time.  I admired her individual grit and determination, but also the responsibility of her circle of friends who all pitched in to collectively help raise me and my little brother because my mother gave birth earlier than they did.  Now my mom owns her own home and has an empty nest, and it seems like every month she’s letting a new friend crash at her house until they get back on their feet.  My understanding of the word responsibility comes from the incredible women I was raised by.  It means stepping up to care for our communities in times of need.

The kind of responsibility I learned growing up was not my responsibility to myself, but my responsibility to others, to my family, to my community.  In elementary school I was packing my own lunch, doing my own laundry.  These are things you can reasonably expect a 9 year old to do, the basic tasks of taking care of oneself to not be a burden on others.  But by the time I was a teenager, greater responsibilities were expected of me.  I was cooking dinner every night for the family, making sure bills were paid on time every month.  I stepped up because my family needed me.

I think the right-wing is stuck in what I would call Elementary School Responsibility.  It’s a worldview where responsibility is not about community, but about the individual.  Or as my mom would say, “How to wipe your own ass”.  In their worldview, responsibility is about taking care of yourself alone.  It’s making sure you personally go to a good college, get a job where you make a lot of money, own things like houses, and don’t end up in jail.  Apparently if you get any help doing any of these things, you’ll never learn the true meaning of responsibility.

Unfortunately, this definition of the word “Responsibility” has become the dominant one in America.  But it wasn’t always this way.  On a hunch I looked up historical trends in the usage of the phrases “Your responsibility” and “Our responsibility” in American texts using Google NGram.


“Our responsibility” was the more common usage through most of our history.  The phrase suggests collective action to care for the needs of a larger community.  It grew gradually over time, with spikes during national crises like WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII.    “Your responsibility”, meaning taking care of yourself, takes off suddenly in the early 1970’s and becomes the dominant usage at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution.

Growth of real hourly compensation for production/nonsupervisory workers and productivity, 1948–2011What’s fascinating about this graph is that it mirrors historical trends in income inequality, union membership, the real value of the minimum wage, and other economic data that shows that sometime in the early 1970’s there was a change of direction in America.  Something snapped, where average working families’ incomes no longer grew along with the nation’s economic productivity, as they had throughout American history until that point.  For the last 40 years we’ve been moving rapidly away from a “We’re in this together” economy and towards a “You’re on your own” economy.


Those terms were coined by economist Jared Bernstein, but we could just as easily call it an “Our Responsibility” economy and a “Your Responsibility” economy.

This didn’t happen naturally.  Somebody jacked the word “responsibility”.  Or more accurately, a whole generation of right-wing politicians, academics, lobbyists and media commentators did, intentionally and effectively, as part of a comprehensive effort to slash the social safety net, gut regulations, cut taxes on the wealthy and lower wages.  Words matter.  As a people, we’ve allowed our language to be corrupted, and have abandoned “our responsibility” in favor of “your responsibility”.

Now I think making sure over 30 million people can see a doctor when they get sick even if they can’t afford it is the definition of responsibility.  I also think the Republican idea of responsibility these days looks like this:

But we can take back the meaning of responsibility, just as we can correct our course after four decades driving down the path of widening inequality and cold individualism.  We can provide education for our children, take care of our loved ones when they’re sick, and allow our elders to rest.  We can, and in fact, we must.  It’s our responsibility.

The Real Reason Obama Deports So Many Immigrants

Yesterday I read a post on the Daily Kos that included a searing critique of the 4th of July holiday by Frederick Douglass.  The article mentioned Douglass’s feud with Abraham Lincoln over the president’s stubborn dedication to the policy of capturing and returning runaway slaves from the South, even while he advocated for abolition.


I was struck by a similarity to President Obama, who often cites Lincoln as his personal role model.   Obama recognizes the need to create a roadmap to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States who moved here to find a better life, but now live in constant fear of deportation.  He made the issue the most important policy priority of his second term.  But at the same time, his administration is deporting immigrants at a faster pace than any president in history, causing hardship and heartbreak among separated families.  Moral inconsistency?  Political necessity?  Who knows.

But here’s the real reason Obama deports so many immigrants.  He’s the president of the United States.  That means a majority of American voters had to like him better than the other guy.  The problem with a lot of American leftists is that they live in places like Berkeley and don’t get out much.  They just don’t come in contact with the solid majority of Americans who support drone strikes, militarizing the border, and all sorts of other nasty things.

Honestly, ask yourself: Could I be elected president of the United States?   I couldn’t– not by a long shot.

Anyone who can be elected president is either:

a) Not really that progressive, or

b) Acts like a centrist really convincingly

In Obama’s case  I think it’s a combination of both.  Generally I would say Obama is better than the average modern Democratic president of the United States.  So I think it’s nice that he’s done more progressive stuff than the guy who signed NAFTA and DOMA, deregulated the banking system and slashed the social safety net.  But I’m just not going to expect him to be the messianic love-child of Karl Marx and Gandhi.

Someone recently told me a quote that struck me:  “Those who are easily disillusioned were suffering from too many illusions in the first place”.

My main point is one I’ve harped on before.

Elected officials shouldn’t be your movement leaders.  They should be your targets.  Even elected officials who are your allies should be your targets, because you can often push them to do more than they would otherwise (see Obama, DREAMer sit-ins, Deferred Action).

What I’m trying to say here is don’t expect Obama to become Frederick Douglass.  Obama is Lincoln.  Frederick Douglass could never be elected president of the United States.

Just be Frederick Douglass.  We could really use one right now.