The Dance Begins

Labor, racial justice, and the Biden Administration; Trump and why he's playing the third-party card; and signs that Big Tech might face tougher government regulation.

I’m currently reading Daniel Schlozman’s book When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History, partially at the recommendation of one of my rabbis, Marshall Ganz, and mostly because we’re in one of those rare moments when movements and parties appear to be negotiating where their relationship is going.

I’m only a few pages in and underlining like mad. Schlozman’s main argument is that social movements in America are always faced with a basic strategic choice as they try to change the direction of the country: organize a new political party, stay neutral between the two major parties while trying to pressure both to enact favorable policies, or become a key element inside a party coalition and use its bargaining power to gain influence within the party. And they are faced with this choice because if they fail to choose they eventually fade. “No social movement has sustained effective militancy on a society-wide basis—rather than inside a single organization—over decades,” he writes. And “windows to enter the party system often open and close quickly.”

On the Democratic side, the longstanding role of the labor movement inside the party continues. Note how one of President Biden’s first clear actions was to fire the top lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board on his first day in office instead of letting them serve out their terms, which was immediately hailed by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “A union-busting lawyer by trade, [NLRB general counsel Peter] Robb mounted an unrelenting attack for more than three years on workers’ right to organize and engage in collective bargaining,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. “His actions sought to stymie the tens of millions of workers who say they would vote to join a union today and violated the stated purpose of the National Labor Relations Act—to encourage collective bargaining. Robb’s removal is the first step toward giving workers a fair shot again.” Biden has promised to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” and this move, along with an executive order yesterday directing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue stronger rules to stop COVID-19’s spread in the workplace, was his down payment on that vow.

But the rising movement for racial justice is also at the table in a very different way than twelve years ago, when Barack Obama took office. Today the New York Times reports that “Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, said she had met with members of Mr. Biden’s transition team and held initial conversations with Merrick Garland, the attorney general nominee, and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary nominee. They agreed to sit with Black Lives Matter organizers for more formal meetings once the administration was in office, she said.” Formal meetings are just one sign of the dance underway. Biden’s explicit condemnation of “white supremacy” during his inaugural address was another, and duly applauded by movement leaders like Rashad Robinson of Color of Change, who said it was “incredibly powerful.” But, Robinson also added, “as a result of our movement, racial justice became a majoritarian issue this summer. Now the work begins in translating that rhetorical issue into a governing issue.”

One sign that the Biden administration is taking a fresh approach was the number of times the phrase “racial equity” or some variation of that has surfaced in the executive orders he has already signed. It’s here in the title of one: “Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” which defines “equity” as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment.” That order rescinded Trump’s earlier order to prohibit federal contractors from conducting training on equity and inclusion, and also calls on the Office of Management and Budget to study how to advance equity in the federal budget and assess how agencies may be creating or exacerbating barriers to full and equal participation.

And equity permeates Biden’s order on the COVID-19 pandemic response, which starts out by noting that “people of color experience systemic and structural racism in many facets of our society and are more likely to become sick and die from COVID-19.  The lack of complete data, disaggregated by race and ethnicity, on COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates, as well as underlying health and social vulnerabilities, has further hampered efforts to ensure an equitable pandemic response.”

(Intriguing note for the geeks reading this—Biden’s order on “Advancing Racial Equity” includes the establishment of an “Equitable Data Working Group” which aims to address gaps in federal datasets that can’t be disaggregated by race, ethnicity, gender, disability and other key demographic variables. I’m looking forward to finding out more about this working group—hit me up if you have details!)

All that said, it’s far from clear that the racial justice movement is about to join organized labor inside the Democratic party as an “anchor” partner rather than an outside pressure, even as the window for doing so is now open. This terrific piece by Astead Herndon in The New York Times on the message that Charlottesville has for Biden illustrates the tension. While Biden is making national unity his rallying cry in the wake of last four divisive years, people on the ground where the white nationalist movement encouraged by Trump first burst into national view want justice, not just unity. Herndon writes:

An open question remains: whether Mr. Biden’s desire for civility is at odds with confronting the threat that white supremacy presents to democracy. Some in Charlottesville believe the two values are opposed, and while broader calls for racial equality have become politically popular, the policies that can bring it about still unsettle some people. “I don’t think Democrats are really handling this with the amount of urgency that they should,” said Constance Paige Young, an activist who was injured in 2017. “Because I don’t think enough Democrats understand the type of threat to the country that this stuff poses.”

The truth is much bleaker to the activists in Charlottesville. For them, this year’s mob violence took aim at the peaceful transfer of presidential power, but it’s the broader transfer of democratic power — from a largely white America to a rising multicultural coalition — that is testing the nation. Mr. Biden should not pitch unity to those who oppose shared political power, they say, but should unite the country in defeating those who stand in the way.

That is, in essence, where we are. We had a peaceful transfer of figurative power, but democratic power is still hanging in the balance. While a working group on equitable data sounds good, a task force on white supremacy, as suggested here by Cynthia Miller-Idriss of the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University, would be a much bigger deal. (That same link takes you to other great proposals from folks like Deb Roy and Eli Pariser.)

Meanwhile in Maga-a-Lago

President Trump has talked with associates about forming a new political party, the “Patriot Party,” the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Restuccia reported earlier this week. That led to a spike in search interest from his fans and condemnation from some Republican leaders. Well, as someone who has followed the third-party beat for a long time, let me put this report in context.

In the late 1990s, Trump dallied briefly with running for the Reform Party’s presidential nomination. But he ultimately rejected that approach, and like Bernie Sanders on the left, he decided that it made much more sense to try to take over a major party. But unlike Sanders, Trump used the third-party option as a strategic threat, to force the Republican party to bow before him. In 2015, when he launched his then-unorthodox and unlikely bid for the GOP nomination, he repeatedly signaled that if he wasn’t “treated fairly” by his primary rivals and party bigwigs that he might break away.

He’s making the same move now by dallying with a possible Patriot Party. The GOP’s worst nightmare is a Trump third-party bid in 2024. In all likelihood it would be no more successful that Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 run as the candidate of the Progressive Party (aka the “Bull Moose” party), which took a big chunk of the Republican vote away from incumbent William Taft and assured Woodrow Wilson’s victory. Wilson got 42% of the vote; Roosevelt 27%, Taft 23% and Eugene Debs, the Socialist, 6%. The barriers to a successful third-party bid haven’t changed much since Ross Perot got 20% of the vote in 1992. So while Trump leaves office with some formidable assets--$200 million+ in campaign cash and a big email list—he isn’t very likely to risk everything on going third-party. It’s the threat that matters, especially as Republicans in the Senate get ready to vote on his impeachment.

Speaking of threats, I hope we focus more not just on the organized white nationalists who stormed the Capitol, but on how they may be digitally storming incumbent Republican office-holders, intimidating them from speaking their minds about the continuing threat to democracy. Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) told MSNBC before the House impeachment vote that “the majority” of his Republican colleagues are “paralyzed with fear,” adding “I had a lot of conversations with [them] last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.” Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI), one of the few who did vote to impeach, also said that many of his colleagues were afraid to certify the election because they feared “that vote would put their families in danger.” These hidden threats need to be rooted out much more vigorously if we want our elected representatives to be free to speak their minds and vote their consciences.

Odds and Ends

-Rebecca Slaughter's appointment as acting head of the Federal Trade Commission is a sign that Biden may really be preparing to get tough on Big Tech. Her dissenting opinion two years ago, when the commission decided to settle a massive privacy lawsuit against Facebook with a $5 billion fine, suggests she is no pushover. She correctly noted that $5 billion was just one-month’s profit for Facebook, that the settlement didn’t limit how Facebook would continue to collect data in the future, and that it did not provide for substantial public transparency into its use. Most important, she objected to the FTC’s decision to release Mark Zuckerberg from any liability for his company’s violation of the law. Let’s hope Biden keeps her.

-Ryan Mac of BuzzFeed News reports that Zuckerberg told company employees yesterday that he believes Facebook “is very important for helping to rebuild the social fabric in our country and around the world,” and that he is still committed to “helping people join and become a part of groups that are very meaningful to them.” Zuck also claimed, falsely, that the company had stopped recommending political groups to users. So, he’s committed to fighting misinformation while actually spreading it to his own staff. Lovely.

-Good riddance to outgoing FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, who did nothing serious to improve Americans’ access to high-speed internet during his tenure, and doubled down on his weak legacy with a final report affirming that the telecom industry was doing hunky-dory in that department, as John Brodkin reports for Ars Technica.

-While the Biden Administration is moving quickly on many fronts, akin to FDR’s First 100 Days, it’s disappointing to see that its stance on financial disclosures by its appointees lacks teeth. As this letter to him from a group of 40 public interest organizations notes, Biden’s nominees should do more to disclose the details of their past work for private sector actors, “especially those under investigation by or in ongoing contacts with the federal government.” This is especially important as we know that several top appointees had corporate clients like Palantir, Facebook, and Raytheon.