thenation--2020-06-02--The Troubling Origins of Birthright Politics

Birthright citizenship is the foundation of American democracy .
The birthright principle , rooted in common law and the Reconstruction era ’ s 14th Amendment , guarantees citizenship to the children of US citizens and to everyone born within the country ’ s borders .
The grant of citizenship at birth has a powerful egalitarian effect , making every American—at least in theory—an equal stakeholder in the political community .
Yet it brings about this desirable result through what can only be described as arbitrary means .
One inherits citizenship from one ’ s parents or acquires it based on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of birth .
Our democracy of equal-born citizens is therefore built on a fundamental inequality : the unearned privilege of winning what the scholar Ayelet Shachar has called “ the birthright lottery.
” 1 Race Is About Politics : Lessons From History Birthright Citizens : A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America Two recent histories explain how the illiberal birthright principle has become so fundamental to modern democracies .
In Race Is About Politics , the French historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub offers an elegant and polemical account of how the idea of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Spain , grew into a defining form of political otherness .
Birthright Citizens , the most recent book by the prominent historian of law and race Martha S. Jones , gives us a closer look at how this process unfolded in the United States .
Taking us through the streets and into the courthouses of 19th century Baltimore , Jones shows us how free African Americans asserted their citizenship as a birthright in order to counter the hereditary logic of race and , in so doing , helped lay the groundwork for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to all those born on US soil.2 Taken together , Race Is About Politics and Birthright Citizens show the power as well as the limits of birthright politics—how it can be a vehicle for liberation and equality and how it can serve the cause of racial and ethnic exclusion .
Both books acknowledge the potential of birthright politics to generate inclusive and equal citizenship .
They also show that beneath its surface , currents of inequality persist that can make it a treacherous medium for creating a more just society.3 Birthright has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jacob bought the blessings of the firstborn from his brother , Esau .
From the ancient world through the early modern era , birth determined one ’ s station in life .
Born a king or a nobleman , one had rights and duties that a commoner would never have .
One ’ s place of birth mattered , too : The native sons of a city had privileges denied to the peasants born a stone ’ s throw outside its walls .
However , in practice , the premodern world was more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might suggest .
Commoners could become noblemen—kings , even—and nobles could fall into a penury little different from that of the peasantry .
But the principle of birthright remained the rule .
A natural-born subject , wrote the English jurist William Blackstone in 1765 , owed a “ perpetual ” allegiance to his sovereign from the moment of his birth , one that could never be “ forfeited , cancelled , or altered.
” 4 Starting in the mid-15th century , birthright politics took on a new form : the notion of race @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book , the history of race is often flattened into a timeless and universal practice of differentiation based on how people look .
But the idea of race , he insists , began as something else .
It was not about appearance at all ; in fact , early racial thought differentiated among groups that looked alike .
Race was an ideology that sought to draw boundaries of political community through genealogy and birthright .
By “ naturaliz [ ing ] ” forms of “ sociopolitical difference , ” it applied a new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of inherited political status.5 To make his argument , Schaub retells the story of the racialization of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula—which he sees as a key passage in the development of both racial thought and modern birthright politics .
Starting in the eighth century , most of Iberia fell under the rule of a succession of Muslim states , which were content to let the region ’ s large Jewish population exist in relative peace and autonomy .
But as Christian kingdoms gradually conquered the peninsula during the Middle Ages , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ religious conformity on their newly acquired lands .
Jews were massacred or subjected to mass forced conversions .
In 1492 the “ Catholic Monarchs ” Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile completed the conquest and brought this process to its conclusion , forcing all of the remaining Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave.6 Yet even as they were stamping out the last pockets of Judaism in Iberia , Spain ’ s Old Christians , jealous of the social and political power they might lose to the new converts , were finding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ By the 1440s , Old Christians had formalized in law an early form of racial ideology that rested on a distinction between two kinds of otherness : Jewish belief and Jewishness .
The Jewish faith could be washed away at the baptismal font .
But Jewishness was something else altogether—a form of genealogical inferiority embedded in Jewish bodies .
It passed from one generation to the next , and it was unalterable .
Jews were a different people as well as a different faith .
Although they could convert , they would retain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ invisible , since the conversos looked just like the Old Christians ) .7 In the decades after their first contact with the Americas in 1492 , Iberians and other Europeans carried this emerging racial ideology around the globe , creating an expansive portfolio of racializing theories to mark off many other groups as permanent outsiders .
They increasingly imagined Native Americans and sub-Saharan Africans as distinct races , granting themselves license to take their lands and reduce their people to serfdom or slavery .
Unlike the conversos , many of these populations had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that created visible forms of distinction between them and Europeans .
Though Europeans used these features to identify the members of the various “ races , ” their fundamental difference , they insisted , was genealogical—an inheritance from birth , as with the Jews of Iberia.8 The racialization of non-Europeans in the Americas and Africa thus became an essential part of European efforts to draw lines of political exclusion within and around their empires , putting millions of people outside the circle of citizenship and , in some cases , outside the circle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of identity and political membership , this birthright politics enfolded many Europeans , including women and even members of other religious groups , as natural-born members of a racial community .
But it excluded many others and insisted that belonging was an immutable fact , lodging racial otherness in the body and making the boundaries between in-groups and out-groups permanent and unalterable.9 This racialized logic of birthright , as Schaub observes , has remained latent in Western politics ever since , wielded by dominant groups over and over again as a way to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political ascent of subordinated communities.10 When the United States emerged as an independent nation , it seemed to promise at least a partial break from the idea that political belonging should be the result of birth alone .
Starting with their 1776 decision to disavow the British monarch , American revolutionaries insisted that theirs was a community of citizens who freely chose to be part of the nation .
Their actions in subsequent decades gave some substance to those claims .
The 1790 Naturalization Act , the new nation ’ s first immigration @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enter the country and become an American citizen more or less at will .
Some US politicians even seemed inclined to accept the claim that citizens could expatriate themselves—that is , give up their citizenship .
In 1795 , Supreme Court Justice James Iredell even ruminated about whether expatriation was a “ natural , inalienable right ” that could not be limited or regulated by the state.11 Julius Scott ’ s Epic About Black Resistance in the Age of Revolution Yet status by birth entrenched itself in the politics of the new republic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the nation ’ s founders embraced a birthright notion of race not unlike that of the Spanish—which they then used to justify slavery and the denial of rights and citizenship to nonwhite people living in US territories .
At the time of the American Revolution , roughly one out of every six inhabitants of the American colonies was an enslaved African .
White Americans justified their status on the grounds that Africans were members of a different and inferior race , whose stain passed from generation to generation.12 Members of the founding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ population of their new country , took an equally expansive view of the birthright principle ’ s application to members of their racial group .
David Ramsay , a South Carolina congressman and early theorist of US citizenship , believed that American citizens “ transmitted ” their citizenship to their children “ by inheritance.
” Before long , judges and legislators had extended this potent principle of hereditary citizenship to include any white person born to US citizens abroad and to white people born to noncitizens on American soil.13 In Birthright Citizens , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ free African American community tried to turn the young republic ’ s birthright politics on its head , transforming a doctrine of exclusion and hierarchy into a means by which they could claim a place for themselves in American society .
Free African Americans , like many people of color in the Atlantic world , were relentlessly pursued by the possibility that their race , not their status as free people , was their true birthright .
The risks of exclusion or expulsion and the nightmare of reenslavement were a constant presence in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an inalienable birthright was a crucial way for free African Americans to overcome these dangers—and , Jones argues , their claims had a lasting impact on the nature of citizenship for all Americans.14 Baltimore was a center of these efforts by free African Americans to assert their inborn right to US citizenship , and Jones focuses her narrative on their story .
As members of an old and relatively wealthy community , Baltimore ’ s African Americans were well equipped to use the city ’ s courts as a forum for demonstrating their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people .
They sued fellow Baltimoreans of both races over matters great and small , from a debt of a few tens of dollars to control of a prosperous Methodist church and its property .
These suits protected their property , but they also had symbolic value : Even an unsuccessful suit affirmed a litigant ’ s status as a legal person .
While in court , black litigants could , as Jones put it , become “ peers to their white counterparts.
” And the act of going to court , repeated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be used to make claims , however tenuous , about citizenship and equality.15 But exercising one ’ s rights in court proved to be a weak guarantor of African American citizenship .
Throughout the antebellum period , in Baltimore and elsewhere , white legislators and jurists worked to reduce African Americans to the status of “ denizens , ” a category in English common law for individuals who were designated neither native nor foreign and occupied a middle ground between full membership and full exclusion .
In Maryland alone , the state legislature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to impose this second-class status on black people in the state .
African Americans could not freely or easily leave the state , they could not vote , and they faced restrictions on owning firearms ( though in practice , white judges in Baltimore routinely granted gun licenses to black men ) .
African American citizenship , in short , was perpetually under assault.16 Starting in the 1820s , Baltimore ’ s African Americans found their citizenship status threatened in a new and frightening way by the so-called colonization movement .
Colonization was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that sought to empty the country of free people of color .
Most proponents of colonization did not envision forcibly expelling free people of color but wanted them to leave of their own volition .
Yet even if it was not backed by a threat of force , colonization posed an existential threat to African American citizenship : All such projects rested on the assumption that the true home of African Americans was somewhere else .
When coupled with measures designed to make life in the United States difficult for free people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , colonization took on the sinister , coercive overtones of ethnic cleansing.17 To counter the threat of colonization and other efforts to reduce them to the status of denizens , black Baltimoreans and their allies began to declare their citizenship an inalienable birthright .
“ We are Americans , having a birthright citizenship , ” wrote the Pennsylvanian African American leader Martin Delany in 1852 , and activists in Baltimore transformed this claim into their political creed .
Inalienable citizenship was defined by the same birthbound language that was used to exclude them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leading black citizens issued a declaration proclaiming themselves natives of the “ land in which we were born ” and insisting that it was thus their “ true and appropriate home.
” William Yates , a white activist whom Jones discusses at length , expanded on this notion in an 1838 treatise .
Free people of color , he argued , were undoubtedly citizens because they were “ natives of the country.
” 18 These claims by black Baltimoreans began to resound forcefully beyond the city ’ s borders in the run-up to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ illustration of their reach , curiously enough , came from the pen of a famous opponent of black citizenship , Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney .
As a son of the city and a leading Maryland politician before joining the court , he was intimately familiar with the black Baltimoreans and their claims to US citizenship .
Both were clearly on his mind in 1857 when he authored the court ’ s notorious opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford , an appeal of a freedom suit brought by an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well beyond what was necessary to resolve the case presented to the court , Taney decided to use it as an opportunity to pronounce against African Americans ’ aspirations to citizenship in general .
His opinion provided a decisive rebuff to black Baltimoreans ’ claims .
African Americans , he baldly declared , were “ not citizens.
” The “ unhappy black race , ” he continued ( in language that closely echoed the Iberians ’ more than four centuries earlier ) , “ were separated from the white by indelible marks.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a brief discussion of Reconstruction , which gives a tantalizing glimpse of the connections between African American claims to birthright citizenship in the antebellum period and the arguments about it after the Civil War that culminated in the 14th Amendment .
The aftermath of the war saw a final struggle , played out across the country , to remove the persistent doubts about the citizenship status of former enslaved people and freeborn African Americans alike .
The 14th Amendment , adopted in 1868 , aimed to remove all ambiguity on this point by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that activists for African American rights had been hammering home for decades .
“ All persons born…in the United States , and subject to the jurisdiction thereof , ” the amendment states , “ are citizens of the United States.
” By the time this language was adopted , black Baltimoreans were no longer prophets in the wilderness : The idea of citizenship for African Americans had gained substantial acceptance in the North .
But they were surely gratified to find their argument set , at long last , into the US Constitution.20 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its ratification , the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment has been without doubt a force for good , a powerful instrument for unambiguously confirming membership in the American nation .
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries , in the face of virulent anti-Chinese racism , the clause guaranteed the citizenship of individuals born to Chinese parents on US soil .
It did likewise for the children of Eastern and Southern European immigrants who came to the United States in the early 20th century , and in more recent times , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ children of undocumented immigrants from Latin America and other regions.21 Yet as Schaub ’ s historical genealogy of racial thought reminds us , there is a flip side to this coin .
Like the idea of race to which it is sometimes opposed , the birthright principle works through inheritance , passing status from parent to child as if it were an innate quality in a bloodline .
It can also confer the same status based on the accident of where one is born .
In either case , the birthright principle distributes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chance rather than in accordance with any higher principle of justice .
In practice , this means equality for some is bought at the price of arbitrary exclusion for many.22 For much of the recent past , Americans have uncritically accepted the bargain we have struck between these two faces of the birthright principle .
The benefits of inclusion have seemed to far outweigh its exclusionary , illiberal mechanism for deciding who is in and who is out .
But in our age of global inequality , it is clear the arbitrary belonging @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adequate to our moment .
Globally , the distribution of wealth among the world ’ s countries has reached unprecedented levels of inequality and continues to grow more extreme .
The negative externalities of runaway consumption , above all climate change and its effects , are falling hardest on the countries and peoples least able to bear the burden .
Infectious diseases—of which the novel coronavirus is just the latest arrival—kill millions of people in poorer countries as the citizens of the richest nations shut their gates and hoard medicine and supplies .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ allocate citizenship in the world ’ s nations by mere random chance when so much depends on which ticket one draws ?
23 Rethinking the politics of birthright will not be easy .
The roots of birthright belonging extend deep into the soil of the American political tradition .
And as Schaub and Jones remind us , over the past two centuries we have gained a great deal , in terms of equality and inclusion , from the audacious grafting of democratic institutions onto a political community defined by birthright .
But as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ third century and perhaps comes to its crisis , we will have to take a hard look at the birthright principle and decide if it is still right—if , indeed , we can still accept it .
Should birth alone dictate so much about who we are ?
24

This article appears in the June 15/22, 2020 issue.
18th century print of the expulsion of Jews from Spain. (Fototeca Gilardi / Getty Images)
Birthright citizenship is the foundation of American democracy. The birthright principle, rooted in common law and the Reconstruction era’s 14th Amendment, guarantees citizenship to the children of US citizens and to everyone born within the country’s borders. The grant of citizenship at birth has a powerful egalitarian effect, making every American—at least in theory—an equal stakeholder in the political community. Yet it brings about this desirable result through what can only be described as arbitrary means. One inherits citizenship from one’s parents or acquires it based on the happenstance of one’s place of birth. Our democracy of equal-born citizens is therefore built on a fundamental inequality: the unearned privilege of winning what the scholar Ayelet Shachar has called “the birthright lottery.”1 Books in Review Race Is About Politics: Lessons From History By Jean-Frédéric Schaub; Lara Vergnaud, trans. Buy this book Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America By Martha S. Jones Buy this book
Two recent histories explain how the illiberal birthright principle has become so fundamental to modern democracies. In Race Is About Politics, the French historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub offers an elegant and polemical account of how the idea of racial difference, first crafted in medieval Spain, grew into a defining form of political otherness. Birthright Citizens, the most recent book by the prominent historian of law and race Martha S. Jones, gives us a closer look at how this process unfolded in the United States. Taking us through the streets and into the courthouses of 19th century Baltimore, Jones shows us how free African Americans asserted their citizenship as a birthright in order to counter the hereditary logic of race and, in so doing, helped lay the groundwork for the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to all those born on US soil.2
Taken together, Race Is About Politics and Birthright Citizens show the power as well as the limits of birthright politics—how it can be a vehicle for liberation and equality and how it can serve the cause of racial and ethnic exclusion. Both books acknowledge the potential of birthright politics to generate inclusive and equal citizenship. They also show that beneath its surface, currents of inequality persist that can make it a treacherous medium for creating a more just society.3
Birthright has been part of political life at least since Jacob bought the blessings of the firstborn from his brother, Esau. From the ancient world through the early modern era, birth determined one’s station in life. Born a king or a nobleman, one had rights and duties that a commoner would never have. One’s place of birth mattered, too: The native sons of a city had privileges denied to the peasants born a stone’s throw outside its walls. However, in practice, the premodern world was more socially and politically dynamic than the theory might suggest. Commoners could become noblemen—kings, even—and nobles could fall into a penury little different from that of the peasantry. But the principle of birthright remained the rule. A natural-born subject, wrote the English jurist William Blackstone in 1765, owed a “perpetual” allegiance to his sovereign from the moment of his birth, one that could never be “forfeited, cancelled, or altered.”4 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 How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann 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 How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Starting in the mid-15th century, birthright politics took on a new form: the notion of race. As Schaub observes early in his book, the history of race is often flattened into a timeless and universal practice of differentiation based on how people look. But the idea of race, he insists, began as something else. It was not about appearance at all; in fact, early racial thought differentiated among groups that looked alike. Race was an ideology that sought to draw boundaries of political community through genealogy and birthright. By “naturaliz[ing]” forms of “sociopolitical difference,” it applied a new and pernicious patina to the age-old practice of inherited political status.5
To make his argument, Schaub retells the story of the racialization of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula—which he sees as a key passage in the development of both racial thought and modern birthright politics. Starting in the eighth century, most of Iberia fell under the rule of a succession of Muslim states, which were content to let the region’s large Jewish population exist in relative peace and autonomy. But as Christian kingdoms gradually conquered the peninsula during the Middle Ages, they and the Catholic Church sought to enforce religious conformity on their newly acquired lands. Jews were massacred or subjected to mass forced conversions. In 1492 the “Catholic Monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile completed the conquest and brought this process to its conclusion, forcing all of the remaining Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave.6
Yet even as they were stamping out the last pockets of Judaism in Iberia, Spain’s Old Christians, jealous of the social and political power they might lose to the new converts, were finding ways to perpetuate their outsider status. By the 1440s, Old Christians had formalized in law an early form of racial ideology that rested on a distinction between two kinds of otherness: Jewish belief and Jewishness. The Jewish faith could be washed away at the baptismal font. But Jewishness was something else altogether—a form of genealogical inferiority embedded in Jewish bodies. It passed from one generation to the next, and it was unalterable. Jews were a different people as well as a different faith. Although they could convert, they would retain their racial otherness (which was also invisible, since the conversos looked just like the Old Christians).7 Current Issue View our current issue
In the decades after their first contact with the Americas in 1492, Iberians and other Europeans carried this emerging racial ideology around the globe, creating an expansive portfolio of racializing theories to mark off many other groups as permanent outsiders. They increasingly imagined Native Americans and sub-Saharan Africans as distinct races, granting themselves license to take their lands and reduce their people to serfdom or slavery. Unlike the conversos, many of these populations had physical features, especially skin color, that created visible forms of distinction between them and Europeans. Though Europeans used these features to identify the members of the various “races,” their fundamental difference, they insisted, was genealogical—an inheritance from birth, as with the Jews of Iberia.8
The racialization of non-Europeans in the Americas and Africa thus became an essential part of European efforts to draw lines of political exclusion within and around their empires, putting millions of people outside the circle of citizenship and, in some cases, outside the circle of humanity itself. Unlike other forms of identity and political membership, this birthright politics enfolded many Europeans, including women and even members of other religious groups, as natural-born members of a racial community. But it excluded many others and insisted that belonging was an immutable fact, lodging racial otherness in the body and making the boundaries between in-groups and out-groups permanent and unalterable.9
This racialized logic of birthright, as Schaub observes, has remained latent in Western politics ever since, wielded by dominant groups over and over again as a way to slow down or stop the social and political ascent of subordinated communities.10
When the United States emerged as an independent nation, it seemed to promise at least a partial break from the idea that political belonging should be the result of birth alone. Starting with their 1776 decision to disavow the British monarch, American revolutionaries insisted that theirs was a community of citizens who freely chose to be part of the nation. Their actions in subsequent decades gave some substance to those claims. The 1790 Naturalization Act, the new nation’s first immigration law, let any free white person enter the country and become an American citizen more or less at will. Some US politicians even seemed inclined to accept the claim that citizens could expatriate themselves—that is, give up their citizenship. In 1795, Supreme Court Justice James Iredell even ruminated about whether expatriation was a “natural, inalienable right” that could not be limited or regulated by the state.11 Related Article Julius Scott’s Epic About Black Resistance in the Age of Revolution Manisha Sinha
Yet status by birth entrenched itself in the politics of the new republic as well. A few exceptions aside, the nation’s founders embraced a birthright notion of race not unlike that of the Spanish—which they then used to justify slavery and the denial of rights and citizenship to nonwhite people living in US territories. At the time of the American Revolution, roughly one out of every six inhabitants of the American colonies was an enslaved African. White Americans justified their status on the grounds that Africans were members of a different and inferior race, whose stain passed from generation to generation.12
Members of the founding generation, eager to expand the white population of their new country, took an equally expansive view of the birthright principle’s application to members of their racial group. David Ramsay, a South Carolina congressman and early theorist of US citizenship, believed that American citizens “transmitted” their citizenship to their children “by inheritance.” Before long, judges and legislators had extended this potent principle of hereditary citizenship to include any white person born to US citizens abroad and to white people born to noncitizens on American soil.13
In Birthright Citizens, Jones explores how a small but significant free African American community tried to turn the young republic’s birthright politics on its head, transforming a doctrine of exclusion and hierarchy into a means by which they could claim a place for themselves in American society. Free African Americans, like many people of color in the Atlantic world, were relentlessly pursued by the possibility that their race, not their status as free people, was their true birthright. The risks of exclusion or expulsion and the nightmare of reenslavement were a constant presence in their lives. Claiming American citizenship as an inalienable birthright was a crucial way for free African Americans to overcome these dangers—and, Jones argues, their claims had a lasting impact on the nature of citizenship for all Americans.14
Baltimore was a center of these efforts by free African Americans to assert their inborn right to US citizenship, and Jones focuses her narrative on their story. As members of an old and relatively wealthy community, Baltimore’s African Americans were well equipped to use the city’s courts as a forum for demonstrating their citizenship by exercising the rights of free people. They sued fellow Baltimoreans of both races over matters great and small, from a debt of a few tens of dollars to control of a prosperous Methodist church and its property. These suits protected their property, but they also had symbolic value: Even an unsuccessful suit affirmed a litigant’s status as a legal person. While in court, black litigants could, as Jones put it, become “peers to their white counterparts.” And the act of going to court, repeated year in and year out, could be used to make claims, however tenuous, about citizenship and equality.15
But exercising one’s rights in court proved to be a weak guarantor of African American citizenship. Throughout the antebellum period, in Baltimore and elsewhere, white legislators and jurists worked to reduce African Americans to the status of “denizens,” a category in English common law for individuals who were designated neither native nor foreign and occupied a middle ground between full membership and full exclusion. In Maryland alone, the state legislature heaped on law after law that sought to impose this second-class status on black people in the state. African Americans could not freely or easily leave the state, they could not vote, and they faced restrictions on owning firearms (though in practice, white judges in Baltimore routinely granted gun licenses to black men). African American citizenship, in short, was perpetually under assault.16
Starting in the 1820s, Baltimore’s African Americans found their citizenship status threatened in a new and frightening way by the so-called colonization movement. Colonization was a project, led by white Americans, that sought to empty the country of free people of color. Most proponents of colonization did not envision forcibly expelling free people of color but wanted them to leave of their own volition. Yet even if it was not backed by a threat of force, colonization posed an existential threat to African American citizenship: All such projects rested on the assumption that the true home of African Americans was somewhere else. When coupled with measures designed to make life in the United States difficult for free people of color, as it often was, colonization took on the sinister, coercive overtones of ethnic cleansing.17
To counter the threat of colonization and other efforts to reduce them to the status of denizens, black Baltimoreans and their allies began to declare their citizenship an inalienable birthright. “We are Americans, having a birthright citizenship,” wrote the Pennsylvanian African American leader Martin Delany in 1852, and activists in Baltimore transformed this claim into their political creed. Inalienable citizenship was defined by the same birthbound language that was used to exclude them. In 1831, Baltimore’s leading black citizens issued a declaration proclaiming themselves natives of the “land in which we were born” and insisting that it was thus their “true and appropriate home.” William Yates, a white activist whom Jones discusses at length, expanded on this notion in an 1838 treatise. Free people of color, he argued, were undoubtedly citizens because they were “natives of the country.”18
These claims by black Baltimoreans began to resound forcefully beyond the city’s borders in the run-up to the Civil War. The most striking illustration of their reach, curiously enough, came from the pen of a famous opponent of black citizenship, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Taney. As a son of the city and a leading Maryland politician before joining the court, he was intimately familiar with the black Baltimoreans and their claims to US citizenship. Both were clearly on his mind in 1857 when he authored the court’s notorious opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, an appeal of a freedom suit brought by an enslaved man from the Midwest. Going well beyond what was necessary to resolve the case presented to the court, Taney decided to use it as an opportunity to pronounce against African Americans’ aspirations to citizenship in general. His opinion provided a decisive rebuff to black Baltimoreans’ claims. African Americans, he baldly declared, were “not citizens.” The “unhappy black race,” he continued (in language that closely echoed the Iberians’ more than four centuries earlier), “were separated from the white by indelible marks.”19
Jones’s book closes with a brief discussion of Reconstruction, which gives a tantalizing glimpse of the connections between African American claims to birthright citizenship in the antebellum period and the arguments about it after the Civil War that culminated in the 14th Amendment. The aftermath of the war saw a final struggle, played out across the country, to remove the persistent doubts about the citizenship status of former enslaved people and freeborn African Americans alike. The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, aimed to remove all ambiguity on this point by constitutionalizing the very principle of birthright citizenship that activists for African American rights had been hammering home for decades. “All persons born…in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” the amendment states, “are citizens of the United States.” By the time this language was adopted, black Baltimoreans were no longer prophets in the wilderness: The idea of citizenship for African Americans had gained substantial acceptance in the North. But they were surely gratified to find their argument set, at long last, into the US Constitution.20
In the century and a half since its ratification, the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment has been without doubt a force for good, a powerful instrument for unambiguously confirming membership in the American nation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the face of virulent anti-Chinese racism, the clause guaranteed the citizenship of individuals born to Chinese parents on US soil. It did likewise for the children of Eastern and Southern European immigrants who came to the United States in the early 20th century, and in more recent times, it has extended citizenship to the American-born children of undocumented immigrants from Latin America and other regions.21
Yet as Schaub’s historical genealogy of racial thought reminds us, there is a flip side to this coin. Like the idea of race to which it is sometimes opposed, the birthright principle works through inheritance, passing status from parent to child as if it were an innate quality in a bloodline. It can also confer the same status based on the accident of where one is born. In either case, the birthright principle distributes citizenship’s privileges and blessings by chance rather than in accordance with any higher principle of justice. In practice, this means equality for some is bought at the price of arbitrary exclusion for many.22
For much of the recent past, Americans have uncritically accepted the bargain we have struck between these two faces of the birthright principle. The benefits of inclusion have seemed to far outweigh its exclusionary, illiberal mechanism for deciding who is in and who is out. But in our age of global inequality, it is clear the arbitrary belonging created by birthright politics is no longer adequate to our moment. Globally, the distribution of wealth among the world’s countries has reached unprecedented levels of inequality and continues to grow more extreme. The negative externalities of runaway consumption, above all climate change and its effects, are falling hardest on the countries and peoples least able to bear the burden. Infectious diseases—of which the novel coronavirus is just the latest arrival—kill millions of people in poorer countries as the citizens of the richest nations shut their gates and hoard medicine and supplies. How is it even remotely fair to allocate citizenship in the world’s nations by mere random chance when so much depends on which ticket one draws?23
Rethinking the politics of birthright will not be easy. The roots of birthright belonging extend deep into the soil of the American political tradition. And as Schaub and Jones remind us, over the past two centuries we have gained a great deal, in terms of equality and inclusion, from the audacious grafting of democratic institutions onto a political community defined by birthright. But as the modern world of nation-states enters its third century and perhaps comes to its crisis, we will have to take a hard look at the birthright principle and decide if it is still right—if, indeed, we can still accept it. Should birth alone dictate so much about who we are?24


thenation--2020-06-02--The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party Is a Fight for the Future

The simple farmhouse where Henry Wallace was born and came of age can be found in Orient Township , on the southern side of Iowa ’ s Adair County , just off what is referred to as a minimum maintenance road .
Drivers are advised to travel it “ at your own risk.
” That pretty well sums up the approach that has been taken with Wallace , Franklin Roosevelt ’ s second vice president , over the 75 years since he battled for the soul of the Democratic Party at its 1944 convention , struggled to keep alive the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as an anti–Cold War presidential candidate in 1948 , and retired to the political wilderness .
On the December morning when I visited the farm , no one was there .
I brushed the snow off a plaque mounted on a stone that read , “ Henry A. Wallace .
Birthplace 1888.
” 1 This excerpt is adapted from John Nichols ’ s latest book , The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party ( Verso , 2020 ) .
Wallace had hoped to live to the age of 100 .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he might have attended an Iowa caucus meeting on behalf of Jesse Jackson .
In an effort to draw rural voters for his 1988 campaign , Jackson and his supporters set up their Rainbow Coalition headquarters in Adair County , just up the street from the county courthouse in Greenfield ( population 1,713 ) .
But Wallace died at age 77 , barely 20 years after he finished his vice presidency .
The death of a former vice president who almost certainly would have succeeded to the presidency had he beaten the corporatists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ noted .
Wallace ’ s old ideological nemesis , The New York Times , headlined his November 19 , 1965 , obituary “ Ex-Vice President , Plant Expert.
” Wallace ’ s end was not the big story that morning .
Rather , it was a report on the burgeoning US military presence in Southeast Asia under another headline , “ Casualties High.
” Wallace ’ s funeral took place at an Episcopal chapel near his farm north of New York City .
It featured no eulogy , no sermon , and no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was chosen ( “ He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the Earth ; he breaketh the bow , and cutteth the spear in sunder , he burneth the chariot of fire ” ) , as was a reading from Psalm 121 ( “ He will not suffer thy foot to be moved ” ) .2 The most prominent of the 300 attendees , John Gardner—who was then Lyndon Johnson ’ s secretary of health , education , and welfare—had , like Wallace , started as a liberal Republican and become @ @ @ @ @ @ @ He brought a wreath of red and white carnations from the White House and said he was honored to pay tribute to “ an extraordinary American.
” Like Wallace in the mid-1930s , Gardner in the mid- ’ 60s was a true believer in a presidency that sought to balance the scales a little more on the side of the common man and woman .
( “ To his admirers , ” the Times said in his obituary in 2002 , “ Mr .
Gardner was a modern-day Plato , needed by Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Unlike Wallace , however , Gardner would not finish his tenure with the administration in which he oversaw the launch of Medicare and championed its War on Poverty .
A month before Johnson announced his decision to forgo a bid for reelection in 1968 , Gardner quietly left the White House at a point when , the Times noted , “ the war in Vietnam was increasingly occupying the president , and the nation ’ s domestic problems were relegated to a lower priority , as reflected in budget cuts.
” 3 This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Democratic Party in the postwar years .
It might see a New Frontier on the horizon or imagine a Great Society , but it never really got around the generals and the profiteers of the military-industrial complex .
It might grasp at the promise of hope and change , but it was invariably derailed by the campaign donors and consultants who counseled that it would not do to invoke the hatred of Wall Street , as FDR once had , or to propose , as Wallace did , that instead of an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was “ the century of the common man.
” And yet on that morning in 2018 , as I wandered across the barnyard where a young Henry Wallace came to recognize the great possibility of the American experiment , I felt as if the Democratic Party that he had championed , the morally driven and future-oriented party he imagined in 1945 , might yet come into being.4 It had something to do with the politics that emerged from the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders for the party ’ s nomination .
Like Wallace @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a party establishment that was not inclined to go big .
Yet the senator from Vermont ’ s initial bid for the presidency planted seeds .
And something was growing.5 I made my second visit to Wallace ’ s birthplace with Sanders on a rainy afternoon in the summer of 2019.6 The two of us were in a room where the windows looked out on cornfields and wind turbines , an image , I suspect , Wallace would have adored .
We paused to consider a photo of FDR and his vice president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during a 1940 campaign appearance—the man Wallace described as “ the greatest liberal in the history of the United States ” and the vice president who sacrificed his power , career , and proper place in American history for the liberal vision that the Democratic Party had abandoned.7 “ You seem to have made it a mission of this campaign to renew the Economic Bill of Rights , to take this 75-year-old idea and bring it to the present , ” I said .
“ Why ?
” 8 Transit Is a Social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ellison on Police Brutality : ‘ We Need a Vision That Says There ’ s Going to Be Accountability ’ Trump ’ s Social Media Executive Order Shows Just How Low He ’ ll Go to Win Sanders started answering with specifics , references to proposals for a Medicare for All , single-payer health care plan and tuition-free college .
Then he stopped himself .
“ I want to start again , ” he said .
“ The answer is that we have to rethink politics in America .
We have to ask @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us to ask .
What Roosevelt said back in 1944 is we have a Bill of Rights , which protects our political freedoms , and that ’ s very important .
But we have nothing to guarantee economic freedoms .
So the question , in essence , that Roosevelt was asking is , if today you ’ re making $ 9 an hour , if today you have no health care , if today you can ’ t afford a higher education , how free are you really ?
And that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
What does freedom mean ?
” 9 I asked Sanders how he would answer that question .
“ Freedom does not mean that you ’ re sleeping out on the streets , ” he replied .
“ Freedom does not mean that you ’ re $ 100,000 in debt because you went to college .
Freedom does not mean that you can ’ t go to the doctor when you ’ re sick .
So we have to redefine what freedom means , and that ’ s what fighting for an Economic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that we are saying—and this is not radical , some of it already exists in other countries around the world—is this : Health care is a human right .
OK ?
Then the United States has got to join every other major country in guaranteeing that.10 “ If you work 40 hours a week and you can ’ t make it on $ 10 an hour , then we have to raise that minimum wage to at least $ 15 an hour and make sure that workers can join a union .
All @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a massive housing crisis .
It ’ s not just half a million people sleeping out on the streets .
It ’ s people paying 50 to 55 percent of their limited incomes on housing .
Freedom means that you have decent housing at a cost that you can afford .
Freedom means that when you turn on your water faucet , the water that comes out is not toxic but drinkable.
” 11 I looked up at a Time magazine cover from September 1940 , a little less than a year before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ portrait , Wallace of Iowa by Grant Wood , the American Gothic painter , who was born a couple hundred miles away in Anamosa , Iowa .
It was from a time when the media portrayed Wallace as a heroic figure .
But the dynamic contender of one election year could be portrayed as the threat of the next and the radicalized dupe of the one after that .
I reminded the senator that Wallace ’ s advocacy for an Economic Bill of Rights that would apply to all Americans had run afoul @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ They had segregationists leading the party !
” Sanders interrupted.12 “ What Roosevelt understood is that you have entrenched economic interests—he called them economic royalists , we call them the billionaire class—who will do anything that they can to protect their incredible wealth and their incredible power , ” he continued .
“ So one of the points of this campaign is to ask the questions the corporate media will not ask , of course , and Congress does not discuss .
Where is the power in America ?
Why aren @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you end up with three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of America ?
Those issues we don ’ t discuss .
And I want to force discussions on those issues , because I ’ ve said it a million times and I ’ ll say it again : No president , not Bernie Sanders or anybody else , can do it alone .
We can ’ t transform this economy , this government , unless millions of people are involved in an unprecedented grassroots political movement to challenge the power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would learn over the ensuing months that the power structure gave no concessions to movements .
As we spoke , I thought about the difference between the tepid politics Democrats have so frequently practiced and the transformational politics that are needed .
If Democrats hope to be more than just an electoral machine , if they hope to transform our politics in ways that might finally address militarism and inequality , racism and the climate crisis , they have to think as Roosevelt and Wallace thought when they spoke of a New Deal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Rights .
And they have to do so with an understanding that such bold responses are the best way to avert the threat of the American authoritarianism that the 33rd vice president began warning about three years before the 45th president was born.14 So why be optimistic ?
Why not give in to the pessimism that has shaped so much of the postwar era ?
I found some of the answer in Orient but not all of it .
Because while the story of Henry Wallace begins in those Iowa cornfields , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the summer of 1943 he made the connection between the struggle against European fascism and “ an Americanized fascism.
” I visited Detroit in the summer of 2018 , traveling with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she campaigned for progressives in the state ’ s Democratic primaries .
The days were hectic .
So we agreed to meet at a café in a predominantly Arab American neighborhood in Dearborn a little bit before midnight .
She had been going all day .
She was tired , yet she still wanted to talk .
When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see the Democratic Party change , she blended the language of the past and the future , speaking of “ a 21st century New Deal ” and a new New Deal coalition.15 “ There is a hunger for an assertive , strong , ambitious , defined effort to establish and advance economic and social and racial justice for working-class Americans , ” she told me .
“ That requires a plan .
It requires ambitious ideas .
People , I think , are searching for those champions , searching for that movement .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that is by ] linking all of the individual movements that we see happening across the country and taking up those causes as our own .
Taking up Ferguson as our own .
Taking up Flint as our own .
The Bronx as our own .
Rikers as our own .
Rural America as our own .
I think that ’ s what it ’ s about , and that ’ s why it needs to be a movement.
” 16 Could something like the New Deal be done again ?
Could it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a 21st century Green New Deal move from a speaker ’ s platform to the program of government and then to the reality of a nation ?
Could the movement become the Democratic Party , and could that party transform America ?
Ocasio-Cortez recognized that the original New Deal had fallen short in too many ways .
But she refused to believe that the spirit of the thing , the striving energy that FDR embraced at his best and that Wallace never surrendered , had died .
If rural electrification was possible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Deal ?
“ I want us to be the party that wired and electrified—literally—the nation , ” she said , as the weariness of the late hour dissipated .
“ Because it ’ s not over .
We did that .
And now we have a lot more to do.
” 17 Democrats once dreamed the biggest dreams : of thwarting the politics of hatred and defeating the threat of American fascism , of achieving economic and social and racial justice and peace and prosperity .
This is history .
But it need @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from where a Democratic vice president of the United States had thrown down the gauntlet and proposed a fight against racism and inequality that would finally extend the American dream to all Americans , here was a young Democratic leader who spoke of the New Deal as it should be spoken of—not as some majestic memory but as a touchstone .
Beaming now , filled with energy and excitement , Ocasio-Cortez spoke of forging a party that would again extend from the bottom up , that would be “ first and foremost accountable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people.
” She looked up , toward the North Star above the great American city of Detroit .
“ I don ’ t want that to be something that we just talk about but something that we are about , ” she said .
“ I want us to be that party again.
” 18

This article appears in the June 15/22, 2020 issue.
The simple farmhouse where Henry Wallace was born and came of age can be found in Orient Township, on the southern side of Iowa’s Adair County, just off what is referred to as a minimum maintenance road. Drivers are advised to travel it “at your own risk.” That pretty well sums up the approach that has been taken with Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president, over the 75 years since he battled for the soul of the Democratic Party at its 1944 convention, struggled to keep alive the promise of the New Deal, failed as an anti–Cold War presidential candidate in 1948, and retired to the political wilderness. On the December morning when I visited the farm, no one was there. I brushed the snow off a plaque mounted on a stone that read, “Henry A. Wallace. Birthplace 1888.”1 This excerpt is adapted from John Nichols’s latest book, The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party (Verso, 2020).
Wallace had hoped to live to the age of 100. If he had, I like to think he might have attended an Iowa caucus meeting on behalf of Jesse Jackson. In an effort to draw rural voters for his 1988 campaign, Jackson and his supporters set up their Rainbow Coalition headquarters in Adair County, just up the street from the county courthouse in Greenfield (population 1,713). But Wallace died at age 77, barely 20 years after he finished his vice presidency. The death of a former vice president who almost certainly would have succeeded to the presidency had he beaten the corporatists and the segregationists in 1944 was briefly noted. Wallace’s old ideological nemesis, The New York Times, headlined his November 19, 1965, obituary “Ex-Vice President, Plant Expert.” Wallace’s end was not the big story that morning. Rather, it was a report on the burgeoning US military presence in Southeast Asia under another headline, “Casualties High.” Wallace’s funeral took place at an Episcopal chapel near his farm north of New York City. It featured no eulogy, no sermon, and no hymns. A reading from Psalm 46 was chosen (“He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the Earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder, he burneth the chariot of fire”), as was a reading from Psalm 121 (“He will not suffer thy foot to be moved”).2
The most prominent of the 300 attendees, John Gardner—who was then Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of health, education, and welfare—had, like Wallace, started as a liberal Republican and become the conscience of a Democratic administration. He brought a wreath of red and white carnations from the White House and said he was honored to pay tribute to “an extraordinary American.” Like Wallace in the mid-1930s, Gardner in the mid-’60s was a true believer in a presidency that sought to balance the scales a little more on the side of the common man and woman. (“To his admirers,” the Times said in his obituary in 2002, “Mr. Gardner was a modern-day Plato, needed by Americans looking for optimism and idealism.”) Unlike Wallace, however, Gardner would not finish his tenure with the administration in which he oversaw the launch of Medicare and championed its War on Poverty. A month before Johnson announced his decision to forgo a bid for reelection in 1968, Gardner quietly left the White House at a point when, the Times noted, “the war in Vietnam was increasingly occupying the president, and the nation’s domestic problems were relegated to a lower priority, as reflected in budget cuts.”3 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 How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann 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 How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
This was the long, sad story of the Democratic Party in the postwar years. It might see a New Frontier on the horizon or imagine a Great Society, but it never really got around the generals and the profiteers of the military-industrial complex. It might grasp at the promise of hope and change, but it was invariably derailed by the campaign donors and consultants who counseled that it would not do to invoke the hatred of Wall Street, as FDR once had, or to propose, as Wallace did, that instead of an American Century, what was really needed was “the century of the common man.” And yet on that morning in 2018, as I wandered across the barnyard where a young Henry Wallace came to recognize the great possibility of the American experiment, I felt as if the Democratic Party that he had championed, the morally driven and future-oriented party he imagined in 1945, might yet come into being.4
It had something to do with the politics that emerged from the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders for the party’s nomination. Like Wallace before him, Sanders ran up against a party establishment that was not inclined to go big. Yet the senator from Vermont’s initial bid for the presidency planted seeds. And something was growing.5
Be idealistic: 1944 Democratic National Convention delegates rally for Wallace. However, he was replaced on the ticket by the more cautious Harry Truman. (Bettmann)
I made my second visit to Wallace’s birthplace with Sanders on a rainy afternoon in the summer of 2019.6
The two of us were in a room where the windows looked out on cornfields and wind turbines, an image, I suspect, Wallace would have adored. We paused to consider a photo of FDR and his vice president, beaming in delight with each other during a 1940 campaign appearance—the man Wallace described as “the greatest liberal in the history of the United States” and the vice president who sacrificed his power, career, and proper place in American history for the liberal vision that the Democratic Party had abandoned.7
“You seem to have made it a mission of this campaign to renew the Economic Bill of Rights, to take this 75-year-old idea and bring it to the present,” I said. “Why?”8 More From John Nichols A GOP Debate Without Trump Is the Definition of Pointlessness August 11, 2023 A Win for Abortion Rights, a Win for Democracy: Ohio Voters Reject Issue 1 August 9, 2023 The Biggest Threat to Donald Trump Could Be the Constitution Itself August 4, 2023
Sanders started answering with specifics, references to proposals for a Medicare for All, single-payer health care plan and tuition-free college. Then he stopped himself. “I want to start again,” he said. “The answer is that we have to rethink politics in America. We have to ask questions that the establishment does not want us to ask. What Roosevelt said back in 1944 is we have a Bill of Rights, which protects our political freedoms, and that’s very important. But we have nothing to guarantee economic freedoms. So the question, in essence, that Roosevelt was asking is, if today you’re making $9 an hour, if today you have no health care, if today you can’t afford a higher education, how free are you really? And that’s the kind of discussion that we need. What does freedom mean?”9
I asked Sanders how he would answer that question. “Freedom does not mean that you’re sleeping out on the streets,” he replied. “Freedom does not mean that you’re $100,000 in debt because you went to college. Freedom does not mean that you can’t go to the doctor when you’re sick. So we have to redefine what freedom means, and that’s what fighting for an Economic Bill of Rights is about. All that we are saying—and this is not radical, some of it already exists in other countries around the world—is this: Health care is a human right. OK? Then the United States has got to join every other major country in guaranteeing that.10
“If you work 40 hours a week and you can’t make it on $10 an hour, then we have to raise that minimum wage to at least $15 an hour and make sure that workers can join a union. All over this country now, we have a massive housing crisis. It’s not just half a million people sleeping out on the streets. It’s people paying 50 to 55 percent of their limited incomes on housing. Freedom means that you have decent housing at a cost that you can afford. Freedom means that when you turn on your water faucet, the water that comes out is not toxic but drinkable.”11
I looked up at a Time magazine cover from September 1940, a little less than a year before Sanders was born, with an iconic portrait, Wallace of Iowa by Grant Wood, the American Gothic painter, who was born a couple hundred miles away in Anamosa, Iowa. It was from a time when the media portrayed Wallace as a heroic figure. But the dynamic contender of one election year could be portrayed as the threat of the next and the radicalized dupe of the one after that. I reminded the senator that Wallace’s advocacy for an Economic Bill of Rights that would apply to all Americans had run afoul of the segregationists in the Democratic Party. “They had segregationists leading the party!” Sanders interrupted.12
Rise up: The Green New Deal would bring the boldness of the New Deal to bear on the climate crisis and the need to reshape our economy. (Erik McGregor / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images)
“What Roosevelt understood is that you have entrenched economic interests—he called them economic royalists, we call them the billionaire class—who will do anything that they can to protect their incredible wealth and their incredible power,” he continued. “So one of the points of this campaign is to ask the questions the corporate media will not ask, of course, and Congress does not discuss. Where is the power in America? Why aren’t things changing? How do you end up with three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of America? Those issues we don’t discuss. And I want to force discussions on those issues, because I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it again: No president, not Bernie Sanders or anybody else, can do it alone. We can’t transform this economy, this government, unless millions of people are involved in an unprecedented grassroots political movement to challenge the power structure of this country.”13
Sanders would learn over the ensuing months that the power structure gave no concessions to movements. As we spoke, I thought about the difference between the tepid politics Democrats have so frequently practiced and the transformational politics that are needed. If Democrats hope to be more than just an electoral machine, if they hope to transform our politics in ways that might finally address militarism and inequality, racism and the climate crisis, they have to think as Roosevelt and Wallace thought when they spoke of a New Deal and Four Freedoms and an Economic Bill of Rights. And they have to do so with an understanding that such bold responses are the best way to avert the threat of the American authoritarianism that the 33rd vice president began warning about three years before the 45th president was born.14
Choose a side: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Democrats must be “first and foremost accountable to working-class people again and to marginalized people.” (John Locher / AP)
So why be optimistic? Why not give in to the pessimism that has shaped so much of the postwar era? I found some of the answer in Orient but not all of it. Because while the story of Henry Wallace begins in those Iowa cornfields, it also passes through Detroit, where in the summer of 1943 he made the connection between the struggle against European fascism and “an Americanized fascism.” I visited Detroit in the summer of 2018, traveling with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she campaigned for progressives in the state’s Democratic primaries. The days were hectic. So we agreed to meet at a café in a predominantly Arab American neighborhood in Dearborn a little bit before midnight. She had been going all day. She was tired, yet she still wanted to talk. When I asked her how she hoped to see the Democratic Party change, she blended the language of the past and the future, speaking of “a 21st century New Deal” and a new New Deal coalition.15
“There is a hunger for an assertive, strong, ambitious, defined effort to establish and advance economic and social and racial justice for working-class Americans,” she told me. “That requires a plan. It requires ambitious ideas. People, I think, are searching for those champions, searching for that movement. I think [the way we do that is by] linking all of the individual movements that we see happening across the country and taking up those causes as our own. Taking up Ferguson as our own. Taking up Flint as our own. The Bronx as our own. Rikers as our own. Rural America as our own. I think that’s what it’s about, and that’s why it needs to be a movement.”16 Current Issue View our current issue
Could something like the New Deal be done again? Could it be done better? Could this talk of a 21st century Green New Deal move from a speaker’s platform to the program of government and then to the reality of a nation? Could the movement become the Democratic Party, and could that party transform America? Ocasio-Cortez recognized that the original New Deal had fallen short in too many ways. But she refused to believe that the spirit of the thing, the striving energy that FDR embraced at his best and that Wallace never surrendered, had died. If rural electrification was possible, then why not a Green New Deal? “I want us to be the party that wired and electrified—literally—the nation,” she said, as the weariness of the late hour dissipated. “Because it’s not over. We did that. And now we have a lot more to do.”17
Democrats once dreamed the biggest dreams: of thwarting the politics of hatred and defeating the threat of American fascism, of achieving economic and social and racial justice and peace and prosperity. This is history. But it need not be history alone. Just blocks from where a Democratic vice president of the United States had thrown down the gauntlet and proposed a fight against racism and inequality that would finally extend the American dream to all Americans, here was a young Democratic leader who spoke of the New Deal as it should be spoken of—not as some majestic memory but as a touchstone. Beaming now, filled with energy and excitement, Ocasio-Cortez spoke of forging a party that would again extend from the bottom up, that would be “first and foremost accountable to working-class people again and to marginalized people.” She looked up, toward the North Star above the great American city of Detroit. “I don’t want that to be something that we just talk about but something that we are about,” she said. “I want us to be that party again.”18


thenation--2020-06-02--The Suburban Commute Is a Soul-Crushing, Environment-Destroying Invention

Like more than half of Americans , I live in the suburbs .
Luckily , I don ’ t have to commute to the city every day—or even wear pants—because I ’ m a writer .
But if I had a real job , it would take me well over an hour to get from my door to The Nation ’ s offices .
As it is , going into New York City for a meeting starts with a 12-minute walk from my house to the commuter rail .
That train takes 38 minutes to get to Grand Central station @ @ @ @ @ @ @ walking up and down various ramps to get to a subway .
The subway takes about eight minutes to get to Port Authority .
From there it ’ s a 10-minute walk to the office .
And that ’ s when everything is running on time .
Everything takes longer if it ’ s raining or snowing or if I ’ m hungover .
The whole process has to be reverse engineered to get home .
That was before the coronavirus .
Now commuting to a meeting takes one minute from my bedroom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I take the scenic route and chat with my wife on my way to work .
I ’ ve gone two months without being within coughing distance of any office .
Why would I ever go back ?
Why would anybody ?
Office workers have known forever that spending hours per day commuting is nonessential and a gigantic waste of time .
Suburban living isn ’ t a phase .
It ’ s not new .
Americans have been moving to the suburbs for nearly a century .
That trend has had all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Urban decay , white flight , housing market bubbles , and massively unequal school resources are just a few of the ills caused by suburbanization .
And don ’ t even get me started on the anodyne , sterile , normative consumerist “ culture ” championed by the suburban ideal .
It would be good for the country if the suburbs were razed to the studs and the land returned to nature .
But since that ’ s not going to happen , the pandemic is a great opportunity to finally bring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and where people actually live .
Despite technological advances that would look like magic to Alexander Graham Bell , we ’ ve remained tied to an Industrial Revolution idea of workers showing up to the giant widget place so an overseer can motivate them to produce profits .
Many nonservice industries have had the technology to exist without a centralized office for 30 years , and over the past 20 , the Internet could have made a central office nearly obsolete .
But until 10 weeks ago , most people were trudging in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s maddening because , while the technology is there to allow many people to work from home , the infrastructure is not there to support the overwhelming and ever-increasing number of commuters .
Our infrastructure hasn ’ t kept up with our suburban expansion ( or any expansion , really ) .
Our bridges and tunnels are crumbling .
Our trains and buses are so inefficient that Europeans wonder why we don ’ t set them aflame in riots .
Our roads and highways are poisonous parking lots warming the planet one traffic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ environmental impact of commuting is undeniable .
Studies show that the average drive to work adds 4.3 metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere a year—per car .
If everyone in the US drove just 10 percent less , it would have the equivalent environmental effect of taking 28 coal-fueled power plants off-line for a year .
And let ’ s not forget : Commuting is unhealthy .
People with longer commutes tend to be less physically active and have higher rates of obesity and high blood pressure .
Every commuter has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to build in some daily exercise , but “ don ’ t spend three hours a day sitting on a train ” is also solid physical fitness advice .
And that ’ s where we were before Covid-19 made us more aware that our public transportation systems are petri dishes for communicable diseases .
One of the most mind-blowing moments in the whole pandemic was when New York City announced , triumphantly , that it would start bleaching its subway cars every night .
I did not know until that moment that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ riding around in yesterday ’ s filth , not just today ’ s .
I ’ m going to need a hazmat suit before I get on the subway again .
I simply can not fathom a world in which the pandemic is declared over and everybody starts commuting to work again .
I do not think that we can go back to expecting people to fork over hours and hours a day sitting in traffic or trapped on a disease tube simply because they have a meeting .
Zoom or Skype or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way to conduct face-to-face business , but the lockdown has shown that any number of daily , mind-numbing check-in meetings can be handled remotely .
Bill de Blasio Has Failed the Test of This Moment There will be resistance to allowing people to work from home after the pandemic has passed .
What ’ s the point of having a sweet corner office if nobody ’ s there to cower outside it ?
Working from home robs many bosses and brownnosers of some of their favorite methods for doling out favors and establishing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the work kind of has to stand for itself .
But that ’ s a bad paradigm if you ’ re a talentless man who has your job only because your dad and the boss are golfing buddies .
There are a lot of people whose only professional skill is laughing at their boss ’ s jokes at happy hour , and those people can ’ t wait to get back to the office .
But the raw efficiency of working from home will , with any luck , cause most offices @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people have had this taste of managing their own time like the adults they ’ ve always been , dragging them back into a daily routine of inefficiency and health risks will be hard .
Telecommuting was one of the big ideas to emerge in the late 20th century .
In the post-pandemic 21st century , it might finally become a reality .

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy.
This article appears in the June 15/22, 2020 issue.
Like more than half of Americans, I live in the suburbs. Luckily, I don’t have to commute to the city every day—or even wear pants—because I’m a writer. But if I had a real job, it would take me well over an hour to get from my door to The Nation’s offices. As it is, going into New York City for a meeting starts with a 12-minute walk from my house to the commuter rail. That train takes 38 minutes to get to Grand Central station. I then spend about six minutes walking up and down various ramps to get to a subway. The subway takes about eight minutes to get to Port Authority. From there it’s a 10-minute walk to the office. And that’s when everything is running on time. Everything takes longer if it’s raining or snowing or if I’m hungover. The whole process has to be reverse engineered to get home.
That was before the coronavirus. Now commuting to a meeting takes one minute from my bedroom door to my desk chair. Sometimes I take the scenic route and chat with my wife on my way to work. I’ve gone two months without being within coughing distance of any office. Why would I ever go back? Why would anybody? Office workers have known forever that spending hours per day commuting is nonessential and a gigantic waste of time.
Suburban living isn’t a phase. It’s not new. Americans have been moving to the suburbs for nearly a century. That trend has had all sorts of deleterious social and political ramifications. Urban decay, white flight, housing market bubbles, and massively unequal school resources are just a few of the ills caused by suburbanization. And don’t even get me started on the anodyne, sterile, normative consumerist “culture” championed by the suburban ideal.
It would be good for the country if the suburbs were razed to the studs and the land returned to nature. But since that’s not going to happen, the pandemic is a great opportunity to finally bring our work expectations in line with how and where people actually live.
Despite technological advances that would look like magic to Alexander Graham Bell, we’ve remained tied to an Industrial Revolution idea of workers showing up to the giant widget place so an overseer can motivate them to produce profits. Many nonservice industries have had the technology to exist without a centralized office for 30 years, and over the past 20, the Internet could have made a central office nearly obsolete. But until 10 weeks ago, most people were trudging in to work every day. Current Issue View our current issue
That’s maddening because, while the technology is there to allow many people to work from home, the infrastructure is not there to support the overwhelming and ever-increasing number of commuters. Our infrastructure hasn’t kept up with our suburban expansion (or any expansion, really). Our bridges and tunnels are crumbling. Our trains and buses are so inefficient that Europeans wonder why we don’t set them aflame in riots. Our roads and highways are poisonous parking lots warming the planet one traffic jam at a time. 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 How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann 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 How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
The negative environmental impact of commuting is undeniable. Studies show that the average drive to work adds 4.3 metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere a year—per car. If everyone in the US drove just 10 percent less, it would have the equivalent environmental effect of taking 28 coal-fueled power plants off-line for a year. And let’s not forget: Commuting is unhealthy. People with longer commutes tend to be less physically active and have higher rates of obesity and high blood pressure. Every commuter has been told to take the stairs as a way to build in some daily exercise, but “don’t spend three hours a day sitting on a train” is also solid physical fitness advice.
And that’s where we were before Covid-19 made us more aware that our public transportation systems are petri dishes for communicable diseases. One of the most mind-blowing moments in the whole pandemic was when New York City announced, triumphantly, that it would start bleaching its subway cars every night. I did not know until that moment that I had spent most of my life riding around in yesterday’s filth, not just today’s. I’m going to need a hazmat suit before I get on the subway again.
I simply cannot fathom a world in which the pandemic is declared over and everybody starts commuting to work again. I do not think that we can go back to expecting people to fork over hours and hours a day sitting in traffic or trapped on a disease tube simply because they have a meeting. Zoom or Skype or Google Hangouts might not be the ideal way to conduct face-to-face business, but the lockdown has shown that any number of daily, mind-numbing check-in meetings can be handled remotely. More from Mystal Bill de Blasio Has Failed the Test of This Moment Elie Mystal
There will be resistance to allowing people to work from home after the pandemic has passed. What’s the point of having a sweet corner office if nobody’s there to cower outside it? Working from home robs many bosses and brownnosers of some of their favorite methods for doling out favors and establishing loyalty. When everybody is working remotely, the work kind of has to stand for itself. But that’s a bad paradigm if you’re a talentless man who has your job only because your dad and the boss are golfing buddies. There are a lot of people whose only professional skill is laughing at their boss’s jokes at happy hour, and those people can’t wait to get back to the office.
But the raw efficiency of working from home will, with any luck, cause most offices to embrace working remotely. Now that people have had this taste of managing their own time like the adults they’ve always been, dragging them back into a daily routine of inefficiency and health risks will be hard. Telecommuting was one of the big ideas to emerge in the late 20th century. In the post-pandemic 21st century, it might finally become a reality.


thenation--2020-06-02--The Year of Making America Great

The Year of Making America Great

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