thenation--2020-12-16--Mutual Aid Can’t Do It Alone

Mutual Aid Can’t Do It Alone

Since arriving on our shores this year , the Covid-19 pandemic has eroded Americans ’ confidence in the ability of the government to perform its most basic functions .
This loss of faith in the state has been accompanied by a renewed belief in the voluntary and reciprocal care of others , commonly referred to as mutual aid .
Once relegated to pamphlets strewn about folding tables at a Food Not Bombs potluck , celebrations of mutual aid are now everywhere .
Even the pages of The New York Times are adorned with endorsements of its transformative political potential , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bottom-up by such practices of magnanimity .
These displays of community care have indeed been vital throughout this time of bleeding .
As the lockdowns have ravaged the American economy , existing inequalities have deepened .
Millions of people have lost their employer-provided health insurance , and tens of millions have experienced food insecurity as food banks and professional charity operations have been stretched beyond their capacity .
In this grim context , the writer Rebecca Solnit has applauded the “ creative and generous altruism ” and “ brilliant grassroots organizing ” of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She celebrates the volunteers who provide meals and groceries to the elderly and the infirm , emergency aid to undocumented immigrants and sex workers , and free musical entertainment from apartment balconies .
Others , like the anarchist attorney and law professor Dean Spade , have encouraged mutual aid work that is at once antagonistic and an alternative to welfare administrators who measure worthiness according to formal criteria before doling out assistance .
Across the liberal-left expanse , mutual aid is on everyone ’ s lips and in every extended hand .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ t the only ones extolling the virtues of mutual aid .
For decades now—and especially since the pandemic started—libertarians and conservatives from organizations like the Heritage Foundation and writers for National Review have commended care provided by those other than the state .
Like their counterparts on the left , these groups have advanced an understanding of mutual aid not as a tactic alone but as a vision for remaking society .
Though ideologically distinct , many on the left and the right now share a hope that mutual aid can overcome poverty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organic relationships rather than beginning from plans for serious structural reform .
For instance , Brooklyn-based efforts have been lauded for the cross-class mingling among people like tech workers and out-of-work restaurant workers that has come to define care networks in gentrified neighborhoods .
And while the characterization of mutual aid as solidarity , not charity , stands in stark contrast with the conservative faith in tax havens that masquerade as philanthropy , the two converge on critiques of the government ’ s capacity to provide for the many .
It may sound @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spirit of social generosity .
But its anti-statist outlook ought to make mutual aid ’ s progressive advocates wary .
After all , most on the left likely do not want to replace what remains of our welfare state with a gift economy , despite the romanticism attached to that more primitive condition of collaboration .
Before we get too attached to mutual aid ’ s promise , it is worth looking back to the origins of its prominence in the United States , a time before voluntary associations were replaced by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1902 book Mutual Aid , Peter Kropotkin , a Russian aristocrat turned anarchist , challenged the reigning social Darwinism of his time .
Eugenicists like Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton had cast all of earthly life as an endless battle among competitive individuals seeking their self-interest .
Kropotkin counterposed those dour depictions of the survival of the fittest with a theory of human nature rooted in cooperation .
Inspired by his observation of birds , beavers , and other “ sociable animals ” weathering the brutal Siberian tundra , Kropotkin saw all organic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of scarcity and reciprocal care .
Though Kropotkin has been duly criticized for his naive view of human evolution—basically the inversion of the reductive accounts that it opposed—he did accurately observe that the late 19th century was rife with social organizations centered on collective care .
This period also saw the first practices of mutual aid in the United States , predominantly taking the form of the fraternal society .
By 1910 , an estimated one-third of the adult male population belonged to one of these membership-based networks .
Friendly societies and local @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , care for orphans , assistance for the elderly , and burials .
Others like the Grange assembled over 1.5 million farmers to purchase machinery that was owned collectively .
As the Industrial Revolution kicked into full swing and the yeoman farmer and sharecropper alike were uprooted from agrarian life , the fledgling fraternal societies protected this new crop of wage laborers .
Although some historians have portrayed the lodges as safe havens for white men alone—such organizations tended to be segregated by race and gender—the fraternal society was a sheer necessity rather @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rural masculinity .
Notably , in the new urban landscapes , poor immigrants from Europe and Black sharecroppers from the South quickly formed benevolent associations of their own .
Today conservatives often recall the mutual aid society with rosy nostalgia .
They wax poetic about a supposedly preideological era , in which members endeavored to make capital and labor friends and eschewed state solutions to social ills .
That view of the history , however , distorts just how intertwined the early trade union movement and mutual aid institutions could be .
Some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Labor , formed lodge-style arrangements to generate solidarity among workers as they struggled against Gilded Age robber barons and agricultural monopolists .
Later in the 20th century , groups like the International Workers Order emerged to provide health insurance and medical clinics to its nearly 200,000 members .
Today labor unions like the United Electrical , Radio and Machine Workers of America carry on that tradition by instructing union stewards to funnel resources to out-of-work members .
In this rendering , mutual aid was—and is—less about mere benevolence than it is about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an injury to all .
Much like our present Covid care networks , mutual aid communities historically thrived during moments of crisis .
Take the 1870s financial panics , in which a generation of workers lost their wages and savings .
No longer willing to trust commercial institutions with their livelihoods , Americans turned to mutual savings banks and similar organizations that provided life insurance policies and other safeguards against sudden ruin .
As a protracted depression followed the panics , many societies centralized their operations in order to serve a national membership @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 20th century , mutual aid had evolved from small kinship-style communities into a harbinger of the welfare state to come .
Despite their best efforts , mutual aid societies were not enough to stave off the worst of these crises .
Slowly , as veterans ’ organizations , federations of women ’ s clubs , and labor unions put pressure on the federal and state governments , early social welfare policies , including mothers ’ and veterans ’ pensions and state-guaranteed workers ’ compensation , began to overtake the friendly societies .
By @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of 1929 , the inadequacy of mutual aid was becoming painfully apparent .
In a rejection of small-scale efforts to tackle a colossus , the New Deal agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt ’ s administration began an unprecedented expansion of social spending .
In pairing pro-labor legislation like the National Labor Relations Act with social programs , the New Deal allowed unions to provide support for their members while shaping the state for progressive ends .
Whereas in the past the American Federation of Labor turned its back on legislative reform for fear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than could be won at the bargaining table , the trade union movement began to play an essential role in constructing the welfare state .
Labor advocates welcomed the relative inclusivity of New Deal reforms , happily ditching the old fraternal societies , which often raised dues rates on or barred entirely those employed in hazard-prone professions .
By the start of FDR ’ s Second New Deal in 1935 , the mutual aid society had been superseded by a new nexus of state and social institutions more capable , protective , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before it .
If the New Deal rendered mutual aid obsolete , the welfare state ’ s subsequent fissuring and rollback have been largely responsible for the rebirth of the private-sphere social safety net .
The tenuous nature of the New Deal coalition is partly to blame .
Though federal social spending soon far eclipsed mutual aid coverage , Southern Democrats were successful in exempting massive numbers of Black and white agricultural workers from government largesse .
Women were also excluded from programs like old age insurance , consigned instead to the far @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The situation of labor changed drastically , too , in the immediate post–New Deal era .
Whereas the 1930s had been hospitable to a two-front fight aimed at both bosses and the state , the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and the dawn of McCarthyism deterred many trade unionists from pursuing further such battles .
While labor was forced into a defensive crouch , the liberal stewards of the New Deal order increasingly abandoned pro-worker policies for market-friendly ones .
Turning their attention from full employment and single-payer health care , John F. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1960s implementing monetary and trade policies that laid the groundwork for our current wage stagnation and tariff wars .
This all set the stage for the New Left ’ s intense suspicions of the state—and a pivot to practices of community care .
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an exemplar of this tradition .
Cofounders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale grounded the party ’ s work in nearly two dozen service-to-the-people survival programs , the corollary of a broader agenda to educate , organize , and foment revolutionary activity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ meant to illuminate capitalism ’ s inability to fulfill the people ’ s daily needs .
One of the most effective of these projects was the Free for Children breakfast program .
Within a year of its launch in 1969 , the Panthers had fed over 20,000 youths in 19 cities .
The program was so successful that it was mimicked by California Governor Ronald Reagan , who expanded the state ’ s nutrition assistance programs to counter the Black Panthers ’ influence .
The Panthers ’ free breakfast brigade is still remembered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of New York recalled its legacy , comparing her office ’ s Covid-19 relief outreach to the breakfast program .
But admirers of the Panthers often overstate the impact of their undeniably noble work .
Despite her claim that the Panthers pressured the federal government to authorize a free breakfast program in 1975 , the Department of Agriculture ’ s Food and Nutrition Service rolled out the first of several pilot programs three years before the Panthers ’ .
( It was made permanent in the year Ocasio-Cortez cited . )
Since 1946 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ free and reduced-price National School Lunch program , a replacement for a patchwork array of volunteer ventures .
Still , much more important than debates over which came first are the issues of scale and routes toward systemic reform .
While the Panthers fed an astounding number of children across an impressive geographic range , their 1969 record was dwarfed by the more than 500,000 kids the federal government served free and reduced-price breakfasts the following year .
( The program currently feeds 14 million children . )
Compared with the suite of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the War on Poverty , the Panthers ’ service-to-the-people projects were a drop in the bucket .
But scale wasn ’ t their only goal .
Unlike organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin—who conjoined labor , civil rights , and demands for a federal minimum wage and jobs program—the Panthers were interested in building dual power institutions that would one day compete with the state .
As party member Lorenzo Kom ’ boa Ervin explained , their aim was to bypass @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into dual power communes , from which we can wage a protracted struggle with capitalism and its agents.
” Take What You Need and Give What You Can : A Mutual Aid Portrait How Sex Workers Are Using Mutual Aid to Respond to the Coronavirus But as the Panthers ’ influence waned , an increasing number of self-styled community leaders became integrated into a political and entrepreneurial elite that largely neglected policies that would materially benefit the working-class Black population .
Some would even come to assist a revanchist capitalist class in pillaging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of labor .
There is a striking parallel between these developments and the trajectory of 19th century ethnically organized mutual aid outfits and related small-business ventures , which just as often evolved into capitalist enterprises and municipal political machines as they did vehicles for reform .
And while a handful of those groups paved the way for strong unions and welfare policies , Black power came onto the scene at a time when the American left was enervated and there were few similar opportunities for egalitarian influence .
A left-wing politics of mutual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and brokerage .
By the late 20th century , liberals pushed for a more limited deployment of the state , inaugurating the practice of leasing out state functions to private entities like nonprofits .
By the late 1970s , an all-out assault on labor and the welfare state began to roll back 20th-century workers ’ wins .
As the United States went into lockdown last spring , the country entered a pandemic-induced recession with scant social protections .
Faced with a hollowed-out welfare state and inadequate relief from the federal government ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but to rely on the generosity of their neighbors , friends , and colleagues .
Since March , people from weekend volunteers to full-time anarchists have done extraordinary things to distribute food staples and provide shelter for those who found themselves hungry and homeless .
Still , given that nearly a quarter of American households with children are carrying rental debt and that a permanent exodus of the poor and working class from major urban hubs is underway , such efforts are confined mainly to the margins .
Weathering the current crisis requires @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That means ditching our magical thinking about the sustainability of those mass mobilizations of goodwill that make the nightly news and pepper the pages of left-wing periodicals ( both of which neglect the fact that charitable giving actually plummets during recessions ) .
It also means recognizing that crises are excellent opportunities for revanchist right-wing forces to further raze state institutions and slam the lid on cries for justice .
When labor-left movements were strong and could afford to go on the offense , the Great Depression created an opening for reform @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mutual aid ’ s role in these past triumphs , it is that such community work was subordinated to the tasks of invigorating trade unions and pushing the state to enact universal programs .
Kropotkin was not wrong about our natural inclination to cooperate .
But how we organize and nurture that cooperative instinct is crucial .
A crisis can bring us together to rebuild durable structures for the collective good .
It can also exacerbate the dog-eat-dog mentality that neoliberalism has cultivated for decades .
Our country is coming to resemble a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ acts of compassion for those left out .
We would do well to guard against this despotic individualism—the natural condition of the social without the state—and to be sober about what spurred this renaissance of mutual aid and what it portends .

This article appears in the December 28, 2020/January 4, 2021 issue.
Since arriving on our shores this year, the Covid-19 pandemic has eroded Americans’ confidence in the ability of the government to perform its most basic functions. This loss of faith in the state has been accompanied by a renewed belief in the voluntary and reciprocal care of others, commonly referred to as mutual aid. Once relegated to pamphlets strewn about folding tables at a Food Not Bombs potluck, celebrations of mutual aid are now everywhere. Even the pages of The New York Times are adorned with endorsements of its transformative political potential, the idea that society might be redesigned bottom-up by such practices of magnanimity.
These displays of community care have indeed been vital throughout this time of bleeding. As the lockdowns have ravaged the American economy, existing inequalities have deepened. Millions of people have lost their employer-provided health insurance, and tens of millions have experienced food insecurity as food banks and professional charity operations have been stretched beyond their capacity.
In this grim context, the writer Rebecca Solnit has applauded the “creative and generous altruism” and “brilliant grassroots organizing” of our times, as have many others. She celebrates the volunteers who provide meals and groceries to the elderly and the infirm, emergency aid to undocumented immigrants and sex workers, and free musical entertainment from apartment balconies. Others, like the anarchist attorney and law professor Dean Spade, have encouraged mutual aid work that is at once antagonistic and an alternative to welfare administrators who measure worthiness according to formal criteria before doling out assistance. Across the liberal-left expanse, mutual aid is on everyone’s lips and in every extended hand.
But members of our crowd aren’t the only ones extolling the virtues of mutual aid. For decades now—and especially since the pandemic started—libertarians and conservatives from organizations like the Heritage Foundation and writers for National Review have commended care provided by those other than the state. Like their counterparts on the left, these groups have advanced an understanding of mutual aid not as a tactic alone but as a vision for remaking society.
Though ideologically distinct, many on the left and the right now share a hope that mutual aid can overcome poverty and rigid class divisions through spontaneous, organic relationships rather than beginning from plans for serious structural reform. For instance, Brooklyn-based efforts have been lauded for the cross-class mingling among people like tech workers and out-of-work restaurant workers that has come to define care networks in gentrified neighborhoods. And while the characterization of mutual aid as solidarity, not charity, stands in stark contrast with the conservative faith in tax havens that masquerade as philanthropy, the two converge on critiques of the government’s capacity to provide for the many. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
It may sound churlish to be skeptical about this rekindled spirit of social generosity. But its anti-statist outlook ought to make mutual aid’s progressive advocates wary. After all, most on the left likely do not want to replace what remains of our welfare state with a gift economy, despite the romanticism attached to that more primitive condition of collaboration. Before we get too attached to mutual aid’s promise, it is worth looking back to the origins of its prominence in the United States, a time before voluntary associations were replaced by the care of the state.
In his 1902 book Mutual Aid, Peter Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat turned anarchist, challenged the reigning social Darwinism of his time. Eugenicists like Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton had cast all of earthly life as an endless battle among competitive individuals seeking their self-interest. Kropotkin counterposed those dour depictions of the survival of the fittest with a theory of human nature rooted in cooperation. Inspired by his observation of birds, beavers, and other “sociable animals” weathering the brutal Siberian tundra, Kropotkin saw all organic life as defined by a communal management of scarcity and reciprocal care. Current Issue View our current issue
Though Kropotkin has been duly criticized for his naive view of human evolution—basically the inversion of the reductive accounts that it opposed—he did accurately observe that the late 19th century was rife with social organizations centered on collective care. This period also saw the first practices of mutual aid in the United States, predominantly taking the form of the fraternal society. By 1910, an estimated one-third of the adult male population belonged to one of these membership-based networks. Friendly societies and local lodges afforded wage replacement for sick workers, care for orphans, assistance for the elderly, and burials. Others like the Grange assembled over 1.5 million farmers to purchase machinery that was owned collectively.
As the Industrial Revolution kicked into full swing and the yeoman farmer and sharecropper alike were uprooted from agrarian life, the fledgling fraternal societies protected this new crop of wage laborers. Although some historians have portrayed the lodges as safe havens for white men alone—such organizations tended to be segregated by race and gender—the fraternal society was a sheer necessity rather than a site for rejuvenating a tattered rural masculinity. Notably, in the new urban landscapes, poor immigrants from Europe and Black sharecroppers from the South quickly formed benevolent associations of their own.
Today conservatives often recall the mutual aid society with rosy nostalgia. They wax poetic about a supposedly preideological era, in which members endeavored to make capital and labor friends and eschewed state solutions to social ills. That view of the history, however, distorts just how intertwined the early trade union movement and mutual aid institutions could be. Some labor federations, like the Knights of Labor, formed lodge-style arrangements to generate solidarity among workers as they struggled against Gilded Age robber barons and agricultural monopolists. Later in the 20th century, groups like the International Workers Order emerged to provide health insurance and medical clinics to its nearly 200,000 members. Today labor unions like the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America carry on that tradition by instructing union stewards to funnel resources to out-of-work members. In this rendering, mutual aid was—and is—less about mere benevolence than it is about the ethos that an injury to one is an injury to all.
Much like our present Covid care networks, mutual aid communities historically thrived during moments of crisis. Take the 1870s financial panics, in which a generation of workers lost their wages and savings. No longer willing to trust commercial institutions with their livelihoods, Americans turned to mutual savings banks and similar organizations that provided life insurance policies and other safeguards against sudden ruin. As a protracted depression followed the panics, many societies centralized their operations in order to serve a national membership base. By the advent of the 20th century, mutual aid had evolved from small kinship-style communities into a harbinger of the welfare state to come.
Despite their best efforts, mutual aid societies were not enough to stave off the worst of these crises. Slowly, as veterans’ organizations, federations of women’s clubs, and labor unions put pressure on the federal and state governments, early social welfare policies, including mothers’ and veterans’ pensions and state-guaranteed workers’ compensation, began to overtake the friendly societies.
By the time of the Wall Street crash of 1929, the inadequacy of mutual aid was becoming painfully apparent. In a rejection of small-scale efforts to tackle a colossus, the New Deal agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration began an unprecedented expansion of social spending. In pairing pro-labor legislation like the National Labor Relations Act with social programs, the New Deal allowed unions to provide support for their members while shaping the state for progressive ends. Whereas in the past the American Federation of Labor turned its back on legislative reform for fear of undermining union power and accepting less than could be won at the bargaining table, the trade union movement began to play an essential role in constructing the welfare state. Labor advocates welcomed the relative inclusivity of New Deal reforms, happily ditching the old fraternal societies, which often raised dues rates on or barred entirely those employed in hazard-prone professions.
By the start of FDR’s Second New Deal in 1935, the mutual aid society had been superseded by a new nexus of state and social institutions more capable, protective, and widespread than any voluntarist variant that came before it.
If the New Deal rendered mutual aid obsolete, the welfare state’s subsequent fissuring and rollback have been largely responsible for the rebirth of the private-sphere social safety net. The tenuous nature of the New Deal coalition is partly to blame. Though federal social spending soon far eclipsed mutual aid coverage, Southern Democrats were successful in exempting massive numbers of Black and white agricultural workers from government largesse. Women were also excluded from programs like old age insurance, consigned instead to the far less generous benefits administered by states.
The situation of labor changed drastically, too, in the immediate post–New Deal era. Whereas the 1930s had been hospitable to a two-front fight aimed at both bosses and the state, the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and the dawn of McCarthyism deterred many trade unionists from pursuing further such battles. While labor was forced into a defensive crouch, the liberal stewards of the New Deal order increasingly abandoned pro-worker policies for market-friendly ones. Turning their attention from full employment and single-payer health care, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson spent the 1960s implementing monetary and trade policies that laid the groundwork for our current wage stagnation and tariff wars.
This all set the stage for the New Left’s intense suspicions of the state—and a pivot to practices of community care. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an exemplar of this tradition. Cofounders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale grounded the party’s work in nearly two dozen service-to-the-people survival programs, the corollary of a broader agenda to educate, organize, and foment revolutionary activity. As Newton recounted, such programs were meant to illuminate capitalism’s inability to fulfill the people’s daily needs.
One of the most effective of these projects was the Free for Children breakfast program. Within a year of its launch in 1969, the Panthers had fed over 20,000 youths in 19 cities. The program was so successful that it was mimicked by California Governor Ronald Reagan, who expanded the state’s nutrition assistance programs to counter the Black Panthers’ influence.
The Panthers’ free breakfast brigade is still remembered fondly; this year Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York recalled its legacy, comparing her office’s Covid-19 relief outreach to the breakfast program. But admirers of the Panthers often overstate the impact of their undeniably noble work. Despite her claim that the Panthers pressured the federal government to authorize a free breakfast program in 1975, the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service rolled out the first of several pilot programs three years before the Panthers’. (It was made permanent in the year Ocasio-Cortez cited.) Since 1946, the department has been offering its free and reduced-price National School Lunch program, a replacement for a patchwork array of volunteer ventures.
Still, much more important than debates over which came first are the issues of scale and routes toward systemic reform. While the Panthers fed an astounding number of children across an impressive geographic range, their 1969 record was dwarfed by the more than 500,000 kids the federal government served free and reduced-price breakfasts the following year. (The program currently feeds 14 million children.) Compared with the suite of aid programs launched by the Great Society and the War on Poverty, the Panthers’ service-to-the-people projects were a drop in the bucket.
But scale wasn’t their only goal. Unlike organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin—who conjoined labor, civil rights, and demands for a federal minimum wage and jobs program—the Panthers were interested in building dual power institutions that would one day compete with the state. As party member Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin explained, their aim was to bypass the state by building “our communities into dual power communes, from which we can wage a protracted struggle with capitalism and its agents.” Related Articles Take What You Need and Give What You Can: A Mutual Aid Portrait John Washington and Tracie Williams How Sex Workers Are Using Mutual Aid to Respond to the Coronavirus Jack Herrera
But as the Panthers’ influence waned, an increasing number of self-styled community leaders became integrated into a political and entrepreneurial elite that largely neglected policies that would materially benefit the working-class Black population. Some would even come to assist a revanchist capitalist class in pillaging the welfare state and breaking the back of labor. There is a striking parallel between these developments and the trajectory of 19th century ethnically organized mutual aid outfits and related small-business ventures, which just as often evolved into capitalist enterprises and municipal political machines as they did vehicles for reform. And while a handful of those groups paved the way for strong unions and welfare policies, Black power came onto the scene at a time when the American left was enervated and there were few similar opportunities for egalitarian influence. A left-wing politics of mutual aid and self-care gave way to accommodation and brokerage.
By the late 20th century, liberals pushed for a more limited deployment of the state, inaugurating the practice of leasing out state functions to private entities like nonprofits. By the late 1970s, an all-out assault on labor and the welfare state began to roll back 20th-century workers’ wins.
As the United States went into lockdown last spring, the country entered a pandemic-induced recession with scant social protections. Faced with a hollowed-out welfare state and inadequate relief from the federal government’s initial stimulus, Americans had no choice but to rely on the generosity of their neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Since March, people from weekend volunteers to full-time anarchists have done extraordinary things to distribute food staples and provide shelter for those who found themselves hungry and homeless. Still, given that nearly a quarter of American households with children are carrying rental debt and that a permanent exodus of the poor and working class from major urban hubs is underway, such efforts are confined mainly to the margins.
Weathering the current crisis requires nurturing useful hope while avoiding palliative delusions. That means ditching our magical thinking about the sustainability of those mass mobilizations of goodwill that make the nightly news and pepper the pages of left-wing periodicals (both of which neglect the fact that charitable giving actually plummets during recessions). It also means recognizing that crises are excellent opportunities for revanchist right-wing forces to further raze state institutions and slam the lid on cries for justice. When labor-left movements were strong and could afford to go on the offense, the Great Depression created an opening for reform. If there is a lesson from mutual aid’s role in these past triumphs, it is that such community work was subordinated to the tasks of invigorating trade unions and pushing the state to enact universal programs.
Kropotkin was not wrong about our natural inclination to cooperate. But how we organize and nurture that cooperative instinct is crucial. A crisis can bring us together to rebuild durable structures for the collective good. It can also exacerbate the dog-eat-dog mentality that neoliberalism has cultivated for decades. Our country is coming to resemble a long-sought libertarian fantasy, with only atomized acts of compassion for those left out. We would do well to guard against this despotic individualism—the natural condition of the social without the state—and to be sober about what spurred this renaissance of mutual aid and what it portends.


thenation--2020-12-16--Dean Spade on the Promise of Mutual Aid

Dean Spade on the Promise of Mutual Aid

Whether it ’ s the climate crisis , wage theft , housing costs , police brutality , deportation , corporate health care , or plain ol ’ political malfeasance , it ’ s easy to look at the United States and see nothing but catastrophe ahead.1 What is less remarked upon is how we can learn to face such immense challenges and what it means to recognize the scope of the problems without losing hope .
In a new book , Mutual Aid : Building Solidarity During This Crisis ( and the Next ) , Dean Spade , a professor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project , offers a guide for creating durable movements to combat injustice , while also meeting the immediate needs of the people harmed by poverty , criminalization , racism , transphobia , and ableism.2 Spade argues that we live in one of “ the most atomized societies in human history , which makes our lives less secure and undermines our ability to organize together to change unjust conditions on a large scale.
” It is in this context—one defined both by social isolation and dependency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the promise of mutual aid , which he writes gives us the tools to meet “ each other ’ s needs based in shared commitments to dignity , care , and justice.
” While some imagine national politics as the primary venue for social change , Spade argues that real , lasting transformation comes from the organizing inside our communities .
His book is at once a call-to-arms , a balm for all those despairing at the present and future , and a blueprint for how we might better live with one another.3 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book , you note that mutual aid is not the same thing as charity .
How do these two practices differ ?
5 ean pade : Mutual aid describes the work we do in social movements to directly support each other ’ s survival needs , based on a shared understanding that the crises we are facing are caused by the system that we ’ re living under , and are worsened by those systems .
Mutual aid focuses on helping people get what they need right now , as we work to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problems.6 Charity , on the other hand , is based on rich people—and the governments they run—giving small amounts of their stolen wealth to poor people , usually to quell uprisings that people would engage in against systems that are so extractive .
Charity also focuses on who is deserving and undeserving of aid , which means that charity always has a lot of strings attached .
It might be that these programs only support individuals who do not have a criminal history or only those who have kids or only those who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Charity is all about encountering people in crisis and saying : “ How do these people need to be fixed ?
” Mutual aid encounters people in crisis and says : “ You should have everything you need , and it is the systems that are to blame for these crises , not you.
” It offers aid without strings attached and without these rigorous eligibility requirements , based on the idea that everyone should have housing , medicine , childcare , or whatever they need.7 DF : One line that stuck out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that “ disasters often simulate fantasies of a benevolent government as we face brutal government failure and wish that things were different.
” How does mutual aid help us cope with disasters in the immediate term ?
What does it do to make things different ?
8 DS : Sometimes , when we have powerful movements that include mutual aid , we get concessions from the government .
And sometimes the government can provide benefits at a larger scale than mutual aid projects can , because it has different amounts of resources and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing about government aid is it is always restricted by eligibility criteria , and it can be taken back at any time .
When the political winds shift or we ’ re no longer as mobilized , aid can be shrunk or removed altogether .
Hoping for a benevolent state that will someday deliver aid in a way that isn ’ t racist or ableist or leaving out the poorest and most stigmatized people is not realistic in the US.9 We should , of course , celebrate when our movements succeed in getting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ really trying to build is our capacity to meet our own needs in our own communities , to decide for ourselves , together , how our lives work rather than having rich people and their puppets decide .
We want local people to control their electricity grid , and to create and control food , health , and housing systems that are sustainable , affordable , and can provide for everybody , rather than hoping the government will someday do that in the right way.10 DF : This distrust of the state is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ m curious how you respond to people who say that certain crises can only be addressed by a large , centralized government ?
11 Take What You Need and Give What You Can : A Mutual Aid Portrait DS : People need to understand that what the government does now is actually a massive upward redistribution project .
It taxes everyone and then it gives that money to corporations , the military , prisons , and police .
We ask : “ Why do we have poverty ?
” and it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state apparatus that ensures the extraction of profit from most people to a very small number of people .
The state ensures that poor people ’ s water and air can be polluted and that their food , health , and housing needs can be profit-generating for someone else.12 You need an enormous and complex and coercive system to force people to work in Tyson factories , to pay rent , to submit to all the terrors and humiliations of living like this .
With mutual aid , we ’ re talking about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not something the US government does , even if they occasionally throw a little chump change to people they consider the deserving poor .
There are various kinds of liberals who are interested in saying there was some time when things were better .
A lot of people fantasize about the New Deal .
But the state always uses its administrative capacity to articulate racialized gender control , extraction , and maldistribution .
Social security was created to exclude domestic workers and agricultural workers and to undercompensate women workers .
These things are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ How do you distinguish between mutual aid that is grounded in a distrust of the state , and the sort of “ mutual support ” programs that libertarian organizations love to praise ?
14 DS : The fact that people on the far right have a critique of the social welfare state and that people on the left do , too , does not mean they are the same critique .
The right is afraid of having to support people who they despise and whose lives they think are not worthwhile .
Right-wing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inequality that is very racialized and gendered , and then take away all government support for people who ’ ve been made poor and miserable by state programs that have distributed land and work in particular ways and have ensured that certain populations don ’ t have their basic needs met.15 That is not at all what people who are coming from an anti-racist , feminist perspective are talking about .
We want to stop having the state violence that maintains extreme wealth concentration .
We are opposing the corporate and government structures @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and we are interested in creating new social relations in which everybody has what they need.16 DF : You note that we ’ re often fixated on short-term gains , rather than building the long-term capacity for our well-being and the well-being of movements that we care about .
What does it take to reorient ourselves to this sort of work ?
17 The Border Patrol Is Cracking Down on Humanitarian Aid For Tara Raghuveer , ‘ Every Eviction Is an Act of Violence ’ DS : Most people enter movements because they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ someone to help me with my eviction , and I ’ ve heard you guys are helping people at this mutual aid project.
” A lot of what mutual aid groups can do is be a place to receive people who are newly mobilizing and not be like , “ You need to already have all the same analysis , ” Instead , we want to engage with people and ask , “ What are you mad about ?
What do you want to do ?
Do you want to help us try @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” And through that , let ’ s keep talking and build an analysis of what we think the root cause of these conditions are.18 DF : How do we build from small victories , which can be personally empowering , to the sort of political victories that can materially improve the lives of tens of millions of people ?
19 DS : I think that most of the political opportunity is at the most local level , and most of the disaster happens at the most local level , too .
When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or when we ’ re trying to think about how to address Covid , that is the scale where we meet disaster and political opportunity .
And when people are encouraged to passively watch the celebrity sideshow of national politics , it feels really , really demobilizing .
That ’ s one of the great mythologies in the US—that politics happens primarily in elections.20 But politics is happening all over the place , all the time .
It ’ s happening in the interactions that people have every day to survive and get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all their interactions with the police and all these government offices that control their lives .
So when we talk about the famous speeches and the charismatic leaders from a moment like the Montgomery Bus Boycott , we don ’ t talk in detail about all the people who coordinated the rides , all the labor needed to make that possible .
We have to change our ideas about scale and understand that scale means something , not because it is centralized in one place or because there is one person you can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many people are practicing something like mutual aid at a local level.21 DF : So would you say that mutual aid is mostly local ?
22 DS : I would be sad if mutual aid is being characterized as only local work , because I have been involved in and care about a lot of movements that work at different scales .
I ’ m coordinating with people in lots of different cities that are trying to defund the police in their cities , and we are sharing strategies .
People from all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concern that Biden will put back in place Obama ’ s dreadful immigration policies , but they are responding from their locality where they are supporting people inside of detention centers or going through deportation proceedings or living in fear of ICE raids .
We ’ re all mobilizing locally and supporting people locally , while coordinating and sharing analysis and strategy .
This decentralization matters , and it is the opposite of what the state wants to do , which is all about centralization .
It ’ s aid that is actually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wisdom and useful practices , not rolling out standardized solutions that inevitably enforce exclusions.23 Mutual Aid Can ’ t Do It Alone The local and decentralized nature of mutual aid is essential , and we can see this in disaster response especially , where FEMA is generally useless on the ground , whereas local mutual aid projects made of people who know their neighbors and know the place are more effective .
It is a mistake to characterize practices based in local knowledge and local control as “ small scale ” when people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ knowledge and resources across large distances.24 DF : I ’ m curious if you have any advice for people on how to stay mobilized—how to not let what has happened in the last few months be the end of their political participation .
Where do we go from here ?
25 DS : The crises that we ’ re facing are not going away .
I think more and more people feel that , and this election has further disillusioned people who thought that we could vote our way out of anything we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think that ’ s why so many people are engaging in mutual aid projects and are hungry to find ways to feel more connected to something that actually makes a difference.26 To some degree I fear that people who have been mobilized by their terror at Trump might be demobilized by a Biden presidency .
But a lot of people are still going to see that the crises are in our face just as much .
The weather we ’ ve had this year , the fires and storms we ’ ve had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the government respond to Covid in a way that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people , it suggests the urgency of many different kinds of political action , including mutual aid and direct action and very deep , very widespread organizing.27 We ’ ve seen the wealth divide grow and the police force grow and the deportation machine grow and US military imperialism expand and all of these incredibly long wars .
One response to that , which is appropriate , is to be horrified and feel grief , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us too .
We ’ ve been living through these incredible uprisings against white supremacy and police violence , where a lot of new people have gotten into the streets .
And through this combination of mutual aid , political education , building solidarity , and direct , disruptive action in the streets , we ’ ve seen people develop a new way to think about what their role might be in confronting these crises and saving all of our lives.28

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Whether it’s the climate crisis, wage theft, housing costs, police brutality, deportation, corporate health care, or plain ol’ political malfeasance, it’s easy to look at the United States and see nothing but catastrophe ahead.1
What is less remarked upon is how we can learn to face such immense challenges and what it means to recognize the scope of the problems without losing hope. In a new book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), Dean Spade, a professor at the Seattle University School of Law and the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, offers a guide for creating durable movements to combat injustice, while also meeting the immediate needs of the people harmed by poverty, criminalization, racism, transphobia, and ableism.2
Spade argues that we live in one of “the most atomized societies in human history, which makes our lives less secure and undermines our ability to organize together to change unjust conditions on a large scale.” It is in this context—one defined both by social isolation and dependency on toxic and hostile institutions—that Spade situates the promise of mutual aid, which he writes gives us the tools to meet “each other’s needs based in shared commitments to dignity, care, and justice.” While some imagine national politics as the primary venue for social change, Spade argues that real, lasting transformation comes from the organizing inside our communities. His book is at once a call-to-arms, a balm for all those despairing at the present and future, and a blueprint for how we might better live with one another.3 Looking for last-minute holiday gifts with a conscience? Check out The Nation Shop and help support The Nation’s journalism while you complete your list.
—Daniel Fernandez4
D aniel F ernandez: Early on in your book, you note that mutual aid is not the same thing as charity. How do these two practices differ?5
D ean S pade: Mutual aid describes the work we do in social movements to directly support each other’s survival needs, based on a shared understanding that the crises we are facing are caused by the system that we’re living under, and are worsened by those systems. Mutual aid focuses on helping people get what they need right now, as we work to get to the root causes of these problems.6 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
Charity, on the other hand, is based on rich people—and the governments they run—giving small amounts of their stolen wealth to poor people, usually to quell uprisings that people would engage in against systems that are so extractive. Charity also focuses on who is deserving and undeserving of aid, which means that charity always has a lot of strings attached. It might be that these programs only support individuals who do not have a criminal history or only those who have kids or only those who are documented or Christian or sober. Charity is all about encountering people in crisis and saying: “How do these people need to be fixed?” Mutual aid encounters people in crisis and says: “You should have everything you need, and it is the systems that are to blame for these crises, not you.” It offers aid without strings attached and without these rigorous eligibility requirements, based on the idea that everyone should have housing, medicine, childcare, or whatever they need.7 Current Issue View our current issue
DF: One line that stuck out to me as I was reading is that “disasters often simulate fantasies of a benevolent government as we face brutal government failure and wish that things were different.” How does mutual aid help us cope with disasters in the immediate term? What does it do to make things different?8
DS: Sometimes, when we have powerful movements that include mutual aid, we get concessions from the government. And sometimes the government can provide benefits at a larger scale than mutual aid projects can, because it has different amounts of resources and equipment and administrative capacity. But the thing about government aid is it is always restricted by eligibility criteria, and it can be taken back at any time. When the political winds shift or we’re no longer as mobilized, aid can be shrunk or removed altogether. Hoping for a benevolent state that will someday deliver aid in a way that isn’t racist or ableist or leaving out the poorest and most stigmatized people is not realistic in the US.9
We should, of course, celebrate when our movements succeed in getting concessions. But what we’re really trying to build is our capacity to meet our own needs in our own communities, to decide for ourselves, together, how our lives work rather than having rich people and their puppets decide. We want local people to control their electricity grid, and to create and control food, health, and housing systems that are sustainable, affordable, and can provide for everybody, rather than hoping the government will someday do that in the right way.10
DF: This distrust of the state is a recurring theme in your book. I’m curious how you respond to people who say that certain crises can only be addressed by a large, centralized government?11 Related Article Take What You Need and Give What You Can: A Mutual Aid Portrait John Washington and Tracie Williams
DS: People need to understand that what the government does now is actually a massive upward redistribution project. It taxes everyone and then it gives that money to corporations, the military, prisons, and police. We ask: “Why do we have poverty?” and it’s because there is an enormous state apparatus that ensures the extraction of profit from most people to a very small number of people. The state ensures that poor people’s water and air can be polluted and that their food, health, and housing needs can be profit-generating for someone else.12
You need an enormous and complex and coercive system to force people to work in Tyson factories, to pay rent, to submit to all the terrors and humiliations of living like this. With mutual aid, we’re talking about redistribution downward, and that’s not something the US government does, even if they occasionally throw a little chump change to people they consider the deserving poor. There are various kinds of liberals who are interested in saying there was some time when things were better. A lot of people fantasize about the New Deal. But the state always uses its administrative capacity to articulate racialized gender control, extraction, and maldistribution. Social security was created to exclude domestic workers and agricultural workers and to undercompensate women workers. These things are not accidents—they are by design.13
DF: How do you distinguish between mutual aid that is grounded in a distrust of the state, and the sort of “mutual support” programs that libertarian organizations love to praise?14
DS: The fact that people on the far right have a critique of the social welfare state and that people on the left do, too, does not mean they are the same critique. The right is afraid of having to support people who they despise and whose lives they think are not worthwhile. Right-wing forces want to freeze frame extreme wealth inequality that is very racialized and gendered, and then take away all government support for people who’ve been made poor and miserable by state programs that have distributed land and work in particular ways and have ensured that certain populations don’t have their basic needs met.15
That is not at all what people who are coming from an anti-racist, feminist perspective are talking about. We want to stop having the state violence that maintains extreme wealth concentration. We are opposing the corporate and government structures that concentrate wealth and maintain profit, and we are interested in creating new social relations in which everybody has what they need.16
DF: You note that we’re often fixated on short-term gains, rather than building the long-term capacity for our well-being and the well-being of movements that we care about. What does it take to reorient ourselves to this sort of work?17 The Q&A The Border Patrol Is Cracking Down on Humanitarian Aid Jessica Suriano Jack Halberstam’s Call of the Wild Tal Milovina For Tara Raghuveer, ‘Every Eviction Is an Act of Violence’ Nawal Arjini
DS: Most people enter movements because they need something, like “I need someone to help me with my eviction, and I’ve heard you guys are helping people at this mutual aid project.” A lot of what mutual aid groups can do is be a place to receive people who are newly mobilizing and not be like, “You need to already have all the same analysis,” Instead, we want to engage with people and ask, “What are you mad about? What do you want to do? Do you want to help us try to address some of these conditions?” And through that, let’s keep talking and build an analysis of what we think the root cause of these conditions are.18
DF: How do we build from small victories, which can be personally empowering, to the sort of political victories that can materially improve the lives of tens of millions of people?19
DS: I think that most of the political opportunity is at the most local level, and most of the disaster happens at the most local level, too. When a fire comes through our community, or when we’re trying to think about how to address Covid, that is the scale where we meet disaster and political opportunity. And when people are encouraged to passively watch the celebrity sideshow of national politics, it feels really, really demobilizing. That’s one of the great mythologies in the US—that politics happens primarily in elections.20
But politics is happening all over the place, all the time. It’s happening in the interactions that people have every day to survive and get what they need. It happens in all their interactions with the police and all these government offices that control their lives. So when we talk about the famous speeches and the charismatic leaders from a moment like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, we don’t talk in detail about all the people who coordinated the rides, all the labor needed to make that possible. We have to change our ideas about scale and understand that scale means something, not because it is centralized in one place or because there is one person you can look to, but because it means many people are practicing something like mutual aid at a local level.21
DF: So would you say that mutual aid is mostly local?22
DS: I would be sad if mutual aid is being characterized as only local work, because I have been involved in and care about a lot of movements that work at different scales. I’m coordinating with people in lots of different cities that are trying to defund the police in their cities, and we are sharing strategies. People from all over are coordinating to respond to the concern that Biden will put back in place Obama’s dreadful immigration policies, but they are responding from their locality where they are supporting people inside of detention centers or going through deportation proceedings or living in fear of ICE raids. We’re all mobilizing locally and supporting people locally, while coordinating and sharing analysis and strategy. This decentralization matters, and it is the opposite of what the state wants to do, which is all about centralization. It’s aid that is actually determined by the participants by sharing local wisdom and useful practices, not rolling out standardized solutions that inevitably enforce exclusions.23 Related Article Mutual Aid Can’t Do It Alone Joanna Wuest
The local and decentralized nature of mutual aid is essential, and we can see this in disaster response especially, where FEMA is generally useless on the ground, whereas local mutual aid projects made of people who know their neighbors and know the place are more effective. It is a mistake to characterize practices based in local knowledge and local control as “small scale” when people are doing them all over and sharing knowledge and resources across large distances.24
DF: I’m curious if you have any advice for people on how to stay mobilized—how to not let what has happened in the last few months be the end of their political participation. Where do we go from here?25
DS: The crises that we’re facing are not going away. I think more and more people feel that, and this election has further disillusioned people who thought that we could vote our way out of anything we’re facing right now. I think that’s why so many people are engaging in mutual aid projects and are hungry to find ways to feel more connected to something that actually makes a difference.26
To some degree I fear that people who have been mobilized by their terror at Trump might be demobilized by a Biden presidency. But a lot of people are still going to see that the crises are in our face just as much. The weather we’ve had this year, the fires and storms we’ve had this year, the experience of having the government respond to Covid in a way that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, it suggests the urgency of many different kinds of political action, including mutual aid and direct action and very deep, very widespread organizing.27
We’ve seen the wealth divide grow and the police force grow and the deportation machine grow and US military imperialism expand and all of these incredibly long wars. One response to that, which is appropriate, is to be horrified and feel grief, and those realities and feelings can mobilize us too. We’ve been living through these incredible uprisings against white supremacy and police violence, where a lot of new people have gotten into the streets. And through this combination of mutual aid, political education, building solidarity, and direct, disruptive action in the streets, we’ve seen people develop a new way to think about what their role might be in confronting these crises and saving all of our lives.28


thenation--2020-12-16--Biden’s Risky Peace Offering to Republicans

On Tuesday , Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged for the first time that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential race .
This was far from a hasty decision , taking place a full 38 days after the election—and a month after most news outlets had called Biden ’ s victory .
The New York Times describes McConnell ’ s actions as “ a clear bid by the majority leader , who is the most powerful Republican in Congress , to put an end to his party ’ s attempts to sow doubt about the election.
” There ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ McConnell ’ s lead .
In fact , it was notable that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy refused to join in the congratulations .
The same day , 26 Republicans freshly elected to the House of Representatives signed a letter asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate voting irregularities , indicating they supported Donald Trump ’ s narrative of a stolen election .
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Check out The Nation Shop and help support The Nation ’ s journalism while you complete your list .
McConnell ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ applause .
But Biden , who has been patiently waiting for any signs that Republicans are ready to move on from the Trump era , was quick to salute McConnell ’ s words .
“ I called to thank him for the congratulations , told him although we disagree on a lot of things , there ’ s things we can work together on , ” Biden told reporters .
Biden campaigned on the promise to be a national unifier who would heal the divisions created by Trump .
During the election , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rhetoric aimed at swing voters who like to hear about bipartisan cooperation or a sincere plan on Biden ’ s part .
The fact that Biden continues hitting this theme during the transition suggests that he is indeed making an overture to Republicans .
Joe Biden Needs to Revive the Spirit of Tammany Hall How Bob Dylan Wrote the Second Great American Songbook This is a gambit fraught with risks .
The Obama administration was thwarted from the start by a determined campaign of Republican obstruction , led by McConnell .
From 2009 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much time fruitlessly negotiating with McConnell and sometimes making major concessions to him , in the futile hope that he would relent .
Earlier this summer , Obama told The New Yorker , “ Through its actions , the Republican Party has discredited the old-style negotiations and compromises that existed in Congress when Joe first came in .
And it ’ s probably taken him a little time to let go of that.
” But all evidence suggests that Biden still nurses the fantasy of bipartisan comity .
Speaking to supporters on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I predict to you , and I may eat these words , I predict you as Donald Trump ’ s shadow fades away , you ’ re going to see an awful lot of change.
” He added , “ I know I ’ ve been criticized heavily for saying from the beginning , we ’ ve got to unify the country .
I think you ’ re going to be surprised .
It ’ s going to take six to eight months to get it under way but I think you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Politico noted that “ Joe Biden thinks he ’ ll succeed where President Barack Obama failed—at least when it comes to Republicans in Congress.
” According to the news site , “ Biden believes infrastructure and other issues like rural broadband are early openings for some bipartisan agreement ( infrastructure week may finally happen !
? )
and is steering away from issues where the parties are just too far apart .
The Biden team also believes the thin majorities in each chamber along with the demographic realignments in both parties offer some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jentleson , a former staffer for retired senator Harry Reid , opined on Twitter that Biden is operating on the Green Lantern theory that he has a super power denied to other politicians .
“ I hope that either Biden is right , and he ’ s the Green Lantern uniquely able to overcome the massive structural forces pushing Republicans to obstruct , or that he can change course quickly , ” Jentleson wrote .
“ The worst case is chasing the dream long after everyone else knows it ’ s not happening.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ grounded .
It ’ s hard to see how this strategy of seeking Republican cooperation could possibly succeed .
After all , the Democrats are far weaker in the House than they were from 2009 to 2011 and weaker in the Senate than they were from 2009 to 2015 .
Political polarization is far more intense now than it was even in the Obama era .
According to a Fox News poll , 77 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump believe that the election was stolen .
As president , Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but what is likely to happen is that any Republican who responds favorably will immediately be branded a Republican in name only ( RINO ) by Trump himself or his many allies in the right-wing media .
After all , if Biden stole the presidency , then cooperating with Biden is tantamount to treason .
RINO hunting will be a major sport among Trumpists .
Elected Republicans will live in fear of primary threats from the MAGA brigade .
Progressives shouldn ’ t be afraid to play the role of Cassandra in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ should be warning about the pitfalls of the strategy .
Aside from the dubious likelihood of yielding results in Congress , it ’ s also a self-defeating strategy for a party that desperately needs to rebuild its down-ballot ranks .
If you argue that the Republican Party is on the verge of an epiphany , then you are giving marginal voters permission to stay home and swing voters permission to vote for Republicans .
A message of bipartisan cooperation might have helped Biden win the election , but it also demobilizes down-ballot voters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Georgia only weeks away , Biden is giving aid and comfort—and ammunition—to the enemy .
But beyond electoral outcomes , progressives need to develop a Plan B for what to do when Biden ’ s strategy fails , as it almost certainly will .
They have to keep hammering home the fact that there are enormously consequential policy decisions Biden could make by executive order or through administrative fiat .
If the Republicans obstruct economic policy , then the logic of using an executive order to cancel student debt becomes imperative .
Taking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also pressure the Federal Reserve to adopt an easy money policy designed to spur recovery and achieve full employment as soon as the pandemic is over .
In an ideal world , Biden should adopt these policies from day one .
Alas , he seems still wedded to the fantasy of bipartisan comity .
But that daydream is likely to encounter a rude shock quite soon .
The task of the left is to have a plan in place once Biden realizes his preferred mode of governing isn ’ t going to work @

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On Tuesday, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged for the first time that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential race. This was far from a hasty decision, taking place a full 38 days after the election—and a month after most news outlets had called Biden’s victory. The New York Times describes McConnell’s actions as “a clear bid by the majority leader, who is the most powerful Republican in Congress, to put an end to his party’s attempts to sow doubt about the election.”
There’s scant evidence that the GOP will follow McConnell’s lead. In fact, it was notable that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy refused to join in the congratulations. The same day, 26 Republicans freshly elected to the House of Representatives signed a letter asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate voting irregularities, indicating they supported Donald Trump’s narrative of a stolen election. Looking for last-minute holiday gifts with a conscience? Check out The Nation Shop and help support The Nation’s journalism while you complete your list.
McConnell’s tardy acceptance of reality hardly deserves applause. But Biden, who has been patiently waiting for any signs that Republicans are ready to move on from the Trump era, was quick to salute McConnell’s words. “I called to thank him for the congratulations, told him although we disagree on a lot of things, there’s things we can work together on,” Biden told reporters.
Biden campaigned on the promise to be a national unifier who would heal the divisions created by Trump. During the election, it was unclear whether this was campaign rhetoric aimed at swing voters who like to hear about bipartisan cooperation or a sincere plan on Biden’s part. The fact that Biden continues hitting this theme during the transition suggests that he is indeed making an overture to Republicans. More From Jeet Heer The Indigenous Roots of Robbie Robertson’s Rock and Roll Revolution August 14, 2023 Why Does This Racist Keep Getting Silicon Valley Money? August 11, 2023 When Phallocrats Go Limp August 4, 2023
This is a gambit fraught with risks. The Obama administration was thwarted from the start by a determined campaign of Republican obstruction, led by McConnell. From 2009 to 2015, Obama and Biden wasted much time fruitlessly negotiating with McConnell and sometimes making major concessions to him, in the futile hope that he would relent.
Earlier this summer, Obama told The New Yorker, “Through its actions, the Republican Party has discredited the old-style negotiations and compromises that existed in Congress when Joe first came in. And it’s probably taken him a little time to let go of that.”
But all evidence suggests that Biden still nurses the fantasy of bipartisan comity. Speaking to supporters on a call on Monday, Biden said, “I predict to you, and I may eat these words, I predict you as Donald Trump’s shadow fades away, you’re going to see an awful lot of change.” He added, “I know I’ve been criticized heavily for saying from the beginning, we’ve got to unify the country. I think you’re going to be surprised. It’s going to take six to eight months to get it under way but I think you’re going to be surprised.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Current Issue View our current issue
Politico noted that “Joe Biden thinks he’ll succeed where President Barack Obama failed—at least when it comes to Republicans in Congress.” According to the news site, “Biden believes infrastructure and other issues like rural broadband are early openings for some bipartisan agreement (infrastructure week may finally happen!?) and is steering away from issues where the parties are just too far apart. The Biden team also believes the thin majorities in each chamber along with the demographic realignments in both parties offer some chances to pick off votes.”
Adam Jentleson, a former staffer for retired senator Harry Reid, opined on Twitter that Biden is operating on the Green Lantern theory that he has a super power denied to other politicians. “I hope that either Biden is right, and he’s the Green Lantern uniquely able to overcome the massive structural forces pushing Republicans to obstruct, or that he can change course quickly,” Jentleson wrote. “The worst case is chasing the dream long after everyone else knows it’s not happening.”
Jentleson’s skepticism is well grounded. It’s hard to see how this strategy of seeking Republican cooperation could possibly succeed. After all, the Democrats are far weaker in the House than they were from 2009 to 2011 and weaker in the Senate than they were from 2009 to 2015. Political polarization is far more intense now than it was even in the Obama era. According to a Fox News poll, 77 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump believe that the election was stolen.
As president, Biden could try to reach across the aisle, but what is likely to happen is that any Republican who responds favorably will immediately be branded a Republican in name only (RINO) by Trump himself or his many allies in the right-wing media. After all, if Biden stole the presidency, then cooperating with Biden is tantamount to treason. RINO hunting will be a major sport among Trumpists. Elected Republicans will live in fear of primary threats from the MAGA brigade.
Progressives shouldn’t be afraid to play the role of Cassandra in this drama: Right now, they should be warning about the pitfalls of the strategy. Aside from the dubious likelihood of yielding results in Congress, it’s also a self-defeating strategy for a party that desperately needs to rebuild its down-ballot ranks.
If you argue that the Republican Party is on the verge of an epiphany, then you are giving marginal voters permission to stay home and swing voters permission to vote for Republicans. A message of bipartisan cooperation might have helped Biden win the election, but it also demobilizes down-ballot voters. With the crucial Senate races in Georgia only weeks away, Biden is giving aid and comfort—and ammunition—to the enemy.
But beyond electoral outcomes, progressives need to develop a Plan B for what to do when Biden’s strategy fails, as it almost certainly will. They have to keep hammering home the fact that there are enormously consequential policy decisions Biden could make by executive order or through administrative fiat. If the Republicans obstruct economic policy, then the logic of using an executive order to cancel student debt becomes imperative. Taking a page from Trump, Biden could also pressure the Federal Reserve to adopt an easy money policy designed to spur recovery and achieve full employment as soon as the pandemic is over.
In an ideal world, Biden should adopt these policies from day one. Alas, he seems still wedded to the fantasy of bipartisan comity. But that daydream is likely to encounter a rude shock quite soon. The task of the left is to have a plan in place once Biden realizes his preferred mode of governing isn’t going to work.