Tag: past half century

The Grumpy Economy

What was the worst moment for the American economy in the past half century? You might think it was the last wheezing months of the 1970s, when oil prices more than doubled, inflation reached double digits, and the U.S. sank into its second recession of the decade. Or the 2008 financial collapse and Great Recession. Or perhaps it was when COVID hit and millions of people abruptly lost their job. All good guesses—and all wrong, if surveys of the American public are to be believed. According to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the most widely cited measure of consumer sentiment, that moment was actually June 2022.

Inflation hit 9 percent that month, and no one knew if it would go higher still. A recession seemed imminent. Objectively, it’s hard to claim that the economy was in worse shape that month than it had been at those other cataclysmic times. But substantial pessimism was nonetheless explicable.

Over the next 18 months, however, the economy improved rapidly, and in nearly every way: Inflation plummeted to near its pre-pandemic level, unemployment reached historic lows, GDP boomed, and wages rose. The turnaround, by most standard economic measures, was unprecedented. Yet the American people continued to give the economy the kind of approval ratings traditionally reserved for used-car salesmen. Last June, the White House launched a campaign to celebrate “Bidenomics”—the administration’s strong job-creation record and big investments in manufacturing and clean energy. The effort flopped so badly that, within months, Democrats were begging the president to abandon it altogether.

Some kind of irreconcilable difference seemed to have opened up between public opinion and traditional markers of economic health, as many op-eds and news reports noted. “The Economy Is Great. Why Are Americans in Such a Rotten Mood?” The Wall Street Journal asked in early November. “What’s Causing ‘Bad Vibes’ in the Economy?” The New York Times wondered a few weeks later. Terms like “vibecession” and “the great disconnect” were coined and spread.

More recently, consumer sentiment has improved. After falling for months, it suddenly rebounded in December and January, posting its largest two-month gain in more than 30 years—even though the economy itself barely changed at all. Yet as of this writing, sentiment remains low by historical standards—nothing like the sunny outlook that prevailed before the pandemic.

What’s going on? The question involves the psychology of money—and of politics. Its answer will shape the outcome of the presidential election
in November.

The toll of inflation on the American psyche is undoubtedly part of the story. That people hate high inflation is not a novel observation: The Federal Reserve has long been obsessed with preventing another ’70s-style inflationary spiral; its patron saint is Paul Volcker, the former Fed chair who famously broke that spiral by jacking up interest rates, which plunged the economy into a recession. But although experts and political leaders know that inflation matters, the way they understand the phenomenon is very different from how ordinary people experience it—and that alone may explain why sentiment stayed low for so long, and has only now begun to rise.

When economists talk about inflation, they are often referring to an index of prices meant to represent the goods and services a typical household buys in a year. Each item in the index is weighted by how much is spent on it annually. So, for instance, because the average household spends about a third of its income on housing, the price of housing (an amalgam of rents and home prices) determines a third of the inflation rate. But the goods that people spend the most money on tend to be quite different from those that they pay the most attention to. Consumers are reminded of the price of food
every time they visit a supermarket or restaurant, and the price of gas is plastered in giant numbers on every street corner. Also, the purchase of these items can’t be postponed. Things like a new couch or flatscreen TV, in contrast, are purchased so rarely that many people don’t even remember how much they paid for one, let alone how much they cost today.

The irony is that consumers spend a lot more, on average, on expensive, big-ticket items than they do on groceries or takeout, which means the prices we pay the most attention to don’t contribute very much to overall inflation numbers. (Less than a tenth of the average consumer’s budget is spent at the supermarket.) Some measures of inflation—“core” and “supercore” inflation among them—exclude food and energy prices altogether. That is reasonable if you’re a Fed official focused on how to set interest rates, because energy and food prices are often extremely sensitive to temporary fluctuations (caused by, say, a drought that hurts grain harvests or an OPEC oil-supply cut). But in practice, these measures overlook the prices that matter most to consumers.

This dynamic alone goes a long way toward explaining the gap between “the economy” and Americans’ perception of it. Even as core inflation fell below 3 percent over the course of 2023, food prices increased by about 6 percent, twice as fast as they had grown over the previous 20 years. “I think that explains a huge part of the disconnect,” Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, told me. “You won’t convince any consumer that inflation is under control when food prices are rising that fast.”

Consumers say as much when you ask them. In a recent poll commissioned by The Atlantic, respondents were asked what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The price of groceries led the list, and 60 percent of respondents placed it among their top three—more, even, than the share that chose “inflation.” This isn’t exactly a new development. In 2002, Donovan told me, Italian consumers were convinced that prices were soaring by nearly 20 percent even though actual inflation was a stable 2 percent. It turned out that people were basing their estimates on the cost of a cup of espresso, which had abruptly risen as coffee makers rounded their prices up after the introduction of the euro.

Gilad Edelman: The English-muffin problem

What’s more, most people don’t care about the inflation rate so much as they care about prices themselves. If inflation runs at 10 percent for a year, and then suddenly shrinks to 2 percent, the damage of the past year has not been undone. Prices are still dramatically higher than they were. Overall, prices are nearly 20 percent higher now than they were before the pandemic (grocery prices are 25 percent higher). When asked in a survey last fall what improvement in the economy they would most like to see, 64 percent of respondents said “lower prices on goods, services, and gas.”

To fully embrace the economy’s strength would be to sacrifice part of the modern progressive’s ideological sense of self.

What about wages? Even adjusted for inflation, they have been rising since June 2022, and recently surpassed their pre-pandemic levels, meaning that the typical American’s paycheck goes further than it did prior to the inflation spike. But wages haven’t increased faster than food prices. And most people think about wage and price increases very differently. A raise tends to feel like something we’ve earned, Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, told me. Then we go to the grocery store, and “it feels like those just rewards are being unfairly taken away.”

If inflation is in fact the main reason the American people have been so down on the economy—and its future—then the story is likely to have a happy ending, and soon. My great-grandmother loved to reminisce about the days when a can of Coke cost a nickel. She didn’t, however, believe that the country was on the verge of economic calamity because she now had to spend a dollar or more for the same beverage. Just as surely as people despise price increases, we also get used to them in the end. A recent analysis by Ryan Cummings and Neale Mahoney, two Stanford economists and former policy advisers in the Biden administration, found that it takes 18 to 24 months for lower inflation to fully show up in consumer sentiment. “People eventually adjust,” Mahoney told me. “They just don’t adjust at the rate that statistical agencies produce inflation data.”

Mahoney and Cummings posted their study on December 4, 2023—18 months after inflation peaked in June 2022. As if on cue, consumer sentiment began surging that month. (Perhaps helping matters, food inflation had finally fallen below 3 percent in November 2023.)

There is another story you can tell about consumer sentiment today, however, one that has less to do with what’s happening in grocery stores and more to do with the peculiarities of tribal identity.

It’s well established that partisans on both sides become more negative about the economy when the other party controls the presidency, but this phenomenon is not symmetrical: In a November analysis, Mahoney and Cummings found that when a Democrat occupies the White House, Republicans’ economic outlook declines by more than twice as much as Democrats’ does when the situation is reversed. Consumer-sentiment data from the polling firm Civiqs and the Pew Research Center show that Republicans’ view of the economy has barely budged since hitting an all-time low in the summer of 2022.

Meanwhile, although sentiment among Democrats has recovered to nearly where it stood before inflation began to rise in 2021, it remains well below its level at the end of the Obama administration. It may never return to its previous heights. Over the past decade, the belief that the economy is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful has become central to progressive self-identity. Among Democrats ages 18 to 34, who tend to be more progressive than older Democrats, positive views of capitalism fell from 56 to 40 percent between 2010 and 2019, according to Gallup. Dim views of the broader economic system may be limiting how positively some Democrats feel about the economy, even when one of their own occupies the Oval Office. According to a CNN poll in late January, 63 percent of Democrats ages 45 and older believed that the economy was on the upswing—but only 35 percent of younger Democrats believed the same. To fully embrace the economy’s strength would be to sacrifice part of the modern progressive’s ideological sense of self.

The media may be contributing to economic gloom for people of every political stripe. According to Mahoney, one possible explanation for Republicans’ disproportionate economic negativity when a Democrat is in office is the fact that the news sources many Republicans consume—namely, right-wing media like Fox News—tend to be more brazenly partisan than the sources Democrats consume, which tend to be a balance of mainstream and partisan media. But mainstream media have also gotten more negative about the economy in recent years, regardless of who’s held the presidency. According to a new analysis by the Brookings Institution, from 1988 to 2016, the “sentiment” of economic-news coverage in mainstream newspapers tracked closely with measures such as inflation, employment, and the stock market. Then, during Donald Trump’s presidency, coverage became more negative than the economic fundamentals would have predicted. After Joe Biden took office, the gap widened. Journalists have long focused more on surfacing problems than on highlighting successes—bringing problems to light is an essential part of the job—but the more recent shift could be explained by the same economic pessimism afflicting many young liberals (many newspaper journalists, after all, are liberals themselves). In other words, the media’s negativity could be both a reflection and a source of today’s economic pessimism.

What happens to consumer sentiment in the coming months will depend on how much it is still being dragged down by frustration with higher prices, which will likely dissipate, as opposed to how much it is being limited by a combination of Republican partisanship and Democratic pessimism, which are less likely to change.

Will the place that it finally settles in come November matter to the election? How people say they are feeling about the economy in an election year—alongside more direct measures of economic health, such as GDP growth and disposable income—has in the past been a good predictor of whom voters choose as president; a healthy economy and good sentiment strongly favor the incumbent. Despite all the abnormalities of 2020—a pandemic, national protests, a uniquely polarizing president—economic models that factored in both economic fundamentals and sentiment predicted the result and margin of that year’s presidential election quite accurately (and much more so than polling), according to an analysis by the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck.

It is of course possible that consumer sentiment is becoming a more performative metric than it used to be—a statement about who you are rather than how you really feel—and perhaps less reliable as a result. Still, the story that voters have in their heads about the economy clearly matters. If that story were influenced solely by the prices at the pump and the grocery store or the number of well-paying jobs, then—absent another crisis—we could expect the mood to be buoyant this fall, significantly helping Biden’s prospects for reelection. But the stories we tell ourselves are shaped by everything from the news we read to the political messages we hear to the identities we adopt. And, for better or worse, those stories have yet to be fully written.

Rogé Karma

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February 14, 2024
A MAGA Judiciary

Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending affirmative action in college admissions, and potentially making most state-level firearm restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. That movement long predates Trump, and these goals were long-standing. But, like the rest of conservatism, much of the conservative legal movement has also been remade in Trump’s vulgar, authoritarian image, and is now preparing to go further, in an endeavor to shield both Trump and the Republican Party from democratic accountability.

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The federal judiciary has become a battleground in a right-wing culture war that aims to turn back the clock to a time when conservative mores—around gender, sexuality, race—were unchallenged and, in some respects, unchallengeable. Many of the federal judges appointed during Trump’s presidency seem to see themselves as foot soldiers in that war, which they view as a crusade to restore the original meaning of the Constitution. Yet in practice, their rulings have proved to be little more than Trump-era right-wing punditry with cherry-picked historical citations.

The 2016 Trump administration was focused on quickly filling the judiciary with judges who are not just ideologically conservative but dedicated right-wing zealots. But that administration “didn’t have all of the chess pieces completely lined up” to get right-wing ideologues into every open seat, Jake Faleschini, of the liberal legal-advocacy group Alliance for Justice, told me. More restrained conservative jurists filled some of those seats. Trump and his allies will be better prepared next time, he said. “Those chess pieces are very well lined up now.”

Read: Trump’s most lasting legacy could be his judges

The federal district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former anti-abortion activist, is the prototypical Trumpist judge. He has publicly complained about the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, “very permissive policies on contraception,” and marriage equality, and has opposed nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community. And like many of his Trump-appointed peers, Kacsmaryk has predictably issued rulings flouting precedent when doing so is consistent with his personal morals.

One of the most egregious examples came in September, when he dismissed a lawsuit filed by students at West Texas A&M University after the school’s president, Walter Wendler, banned a drag-show benefit aimed at raising money for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ-focused suicide-prevention organization. Wendler made clear his political objections to the show, referring to drag as “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” But even Wendler himself recognized that the show, as expressive conduct, was protected speech; amazingly, he admitted that he was violating the law. He would not be seen to condone the behavior of the show’s actors, Wendler wrote in his message banning the event, “even when the law of the land appears to require it.”

The case landed on Kacsmaryk’s desk. And because Kacsmaryk does not like pro-LGBTQ speech, he simply ignored decades of precedent regarding free-speech law on the grounds that, by his understanding of history, the First Amendment does not protect campus drag shows. The drag show “does not obviously convey or communicate a discernable, protectable message,” Kacsmaryk wrote, and consists of potentially “vulgar and lewd” conduct that could, he suggested, lead to “the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” (The confidence with which conservatives have accused their political opponents of child sexual exploitation in recent years is remarkable, especially because their concern applies almost exclusively to situations, like this one, that justify legal suppression of their favored targets. It is far easier to find examples of pedophilia in religious institutions—hardly targets of either conservative ire or conservative jurisprudence—than it is to find drag queens guilty of similar conduct.)

The key to Kacsmaryk’s ruling was “historical analysis,” which revealed a “Free Speech ecosystem drastically different from the ‘expressive conduct’ absolutism” of those challenging Wendler’s decision. Echoing the Supreme Court’s recent emphasis on “history and tradition” in rulings such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which struck down gun restrictions in New York State, Kacsmaryk simply decided that the First Amendment did not apply. If not for its censorious implications, the ruling would be an amusing example of some conservative beliefs about free speech: A certain form of expression can be banned as “nonpolitical”—nothing more than obscenity—even as those banning it acknowledge their disapproval of that expression’s political implications.

The invocation of “history and tradition,” however, is no joke. The prevailing mode of conservative constitutional analysis for the past half century has been “originalism,” which promises to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time of its writing. As the dissenters pointed out in Dobbs, the Founders themselves imposed no such requirements on constitutional interpretation, noting that the “Framers defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning.” And in practice, originalism has just meant invoking the Framers to justify conservative outcomes.

Harry Litman: Originalism, divided

“It’s a very subjective inquiry,” the NYU law professor Melissa Murray told me. “This insistence on originalism as history and tradition ties you to a jurisprudence that’s going to favor a particular, masculine kind of ideology. Because those are the only people making meaning at that moment in time.”

In 1986, the late conservative legal scholar Philip B. Kurland observed, “We cannot definitively read the minds of the Founders except, usually, to create a choice of several possible meanings for the necessarily recondite language that appears in much of our charter of government. Indeed, evidence of different meanings likely can be garnered for almost every disputable proposition.”

“History should provide the perimeters within which the choice of meaning may be made,” Kurland wrote. “History ordinarily should not be expected, however, to provide specific answers to the specific problems that bedevil the Court.”

Right-wing justices have in all but name imposed this expectation, despite Kurland’s warning. It is no surprise that Kurland was not heeded—he testified against the nomination of Robert Bork, the father of originalism, to the Supreme Court, and cautioned that “he will be an aggressive judge in conforming the Constitution to his notions of what it should be,” one “directed to a diminution of minority and individual rights.” Now, with six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, every judge is slowly being forced to conform the Constitution to Bork’s notions of what it should be.

Adam Serwer: The most baffling argument a Supreme Court justice has ever made

In Dobbs and Bruen, and in a later case striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, the conservative justices cited historical facts that strengthened their arguments while ignoring those that contradicted them, even when the evidence to the contrary was voluminous. In Dobbs, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, ignored the history of legal abortion in the early American republic and the sexist animus behind the 19th-century campaigns to ban it. In Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas was happy to invoke the history of personal gun ownership but dismissed the parallel history of firearm regulation. In the affirmative-action case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Thomas’s imposition of modern right-wing standards of “color blindness” on the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment was ahistorical enough that it drew an objection from Eric Foner, the greatest living historian of the Reconstruction era.

Not every right-wing judge is as blatantly ideological in their decision making as Kacsmaryk, nor is every Republican appointee a Trumpist zealot. But those with ambitions to rise up the ranks stand out by how aggressively they advertise both qualities. And the proliferation of the language of “history and tradition” is turning originalism from an ideology of constitutional interpretation into something more like a legal requirement. Judges are expected to do historical analysis—not rigorous analysis, but the kind that a prime-time Fox News host will agree with. Conservative originalists seem to see themselves as the true heirs of the Founders, and therefore when they examine the Founders, they can see only themselves, as if looking in a mirror.

It is no coincidence that as conservatism has become Trumpism, originalism has come to resemble Trumpist nationalism in its view that conservatives are the only legitimate Americans and therefore the only ones who should be allowed to wield power. The results for the federal judiciary are apparent as right-wing appeals courts turn “fringe ideas into law at a breakneck pace,” as the legal reporter Chris Geidner has put it, in the hopes of teeing up cases for the Roberts Court, which can hide its own extremism behind the occasional refusal to cater to the most extreme demands of its movement allies.

It is not only the substance of the rulings that has changed—many now resemble bad blog posts in their selective evidence, motivated reasoning, overt partisanship, and recitation of personal grievances—but the behavior of the jurists, who seek to turn public-service roles into minor celebrity by acting like social-media influencers.

Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, a favorite of the conservative legal movement and a potential future Trump Supreme Court nominee, is one example. In 2022, Ho announced that he was striking a blow against “cancel culture” by boycotting law clerks from Yale after an incident in which Yale students disrupted an event featuring an attorney from a Christian-right legal-advocacy group. In 2021, the Trump-appointed judge Barbara Lagoa complained publicly that American society had grown so “Orwellian” that “I’m not sure I can call myself a woman anymore.” She later upheld an Alabama law making gender-affirming care for minors a felony, arguing, of course, that such care was not rooted in American “history and tradition.” In June 2023, in the midst of a scandal over Justice Thomas receiving unreported gifts from right-wing billionaires with interests before the Court, the Trump-appointed judge Amul Thapar went on Fox News to promote his book about Thomas, and defended him with the zeal of a columnist for Breitbart News.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, the appointment of far-right ideologues has meant a series of extreme rulings that have upheld speech restrictions and book bans; forced the administration to pursue the right’s preferred restrictive immigration policies; narrowed the fundamental rights of women, the LGBTQ community, and ethnic minorities; blessed law-enforcement misconduct; restricted voting rights; limited the ability of federal agencies to regulate corporations; and helped businesses exploit their workers.

Read: Red states are rolling back the civil-rights revolution

All of this and more will continue should Trump win a second term. Conservative civil servants who placed their oath to the Constitution above Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election were depicted by Trump loyalists not as heroes but as internal enemies to be purged. Republican-appointed judges will take note of which path leads to professional advancement and which to early retirement.

Already imitating Trump in affect and ideology, these judges are indeed unlikely to resist just about any of Trump’s efforts to concentrate power in himself. They will no doubt invoke “history and tradition” to justify this project, but their eyes are ultimately on a future utopia where conservative political power cannot be meaningfully challenged at the ballot box or in court.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A MAGA Judiciary.”

Adam Serwer

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December 5, 2023
Letting Go of the Iowa Caucus

My father was a registered independent for most of my childhood because he resented having to choose. But choosing was not hard for my mother. She was an MSNBC devotee, a liberal Pennsylvania transplant who took her adopted role as an Iowa Democrat seriously. She wanted me to take politics seriously, too.

Which is why, on a freezing January night in 2000, Mom zipped up our coats, buckled 7-year-old me into our white Toyota Previa, and drove us along five miles of gravel to the nearest town: Danville, population 919. It would be my very first Iowa caucus, with New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley and Vice President Al Gore vying for the Democratic nomination. Mom thought Bradley had more personality, so she stood, with me at her side, in his corner of the Danville Elementary School gymnasium. When Bradley was considered not “viable,” per caucus rules, Mom walked us over to Gore’s group, and he was soon declared the winner. Mom recounted all of this recently; I remember little from that night, except the outlines of bulky puffer jackets and a general tingliness at being the only kid in a room full of adults doing something that seemed important.

Accuse me of harboring a pro-caucus bias and you’d be right; I love them and I always have. A caucus is like a primary, but not: There’s no secret ballot. You demonstrate your preference for a candidate by physically moving your body to a different chair or another corner of the gym. Only a few states do it this way, and “this way” looks different everywhere.

Read: Iowans vote first, if they can vote at all

After that night in 2000, Mom took me with her at each opportunity. Every four or eight years, we held hands and navigated icy sidewalks after dark. We explored student-less school hallways and cozy church luncheon rooms. We stood under basketball hoops and listened to neighbors argue about candidates as though their opinions really mattered, because that night they actually did.

Over the past half century, Iowa’s prominence in politics became part of its identity—something the state was known for besides its acres of corn and millions of hogs. Iowa doesn’t have any major-league teams to root for, or the kind of glittering cities that draw visitors from all corners of the world. But the caucuses helped make Iowa special—and on the national political stage, they made it relevant.

Still, it’s possible to hold two truths in tension. The caucus is part of Iowa’s identity, and deeply rooted in my own, yet the process has never really been fair—not to many Iowans, and not to other Americans. So, even though I felt a sharp pang of sorrow earlier this month when President Joe Biden suggested that my home state should give up its spot on the early-voting roster, I wasn’t surprised. Most Iowans have seen this day coming. Some are more prepared than others.

Thanks to the caucus, I never thought it was strange that I’d met Barack Obama twice before I turned 20. Nothing seemed shocking about Newt Gingrich showing up to speak at the restaurant where my parents have happy hour on Fridays. I was only slightly unsettled to discover that my high-school friend was having a summertime fling with a political reporter I knew from D.C.

For 50 years, these meet-cutes and history-making appearances have been normal, tradition. Iowans heard Howard Dean make the animalistic roar that supposedly ended his campaign. They sheltered in place with Elizabeth Warren during a tornado. They watched Fred Thompson rolling around the state fair in style, and bore witness to John Delaney’s sad ride down the Giant Slide.

Iowa’s prominence in the process dates back to the 1970s, when the caucuses helped put George McGovern, and later Jimmy Carter, on the proverbial map. State law requires that Iowa holds its caucuses eight days before the first primary happens, hence the quadrennial Iowa–New Hampshire pairing. Most people know this by now; it’s the process they don’t get—the appeal of the thing. The magic.

That’s how many Iowans see the caucus: a messy, intimate project that represents politics in its most sublime form—a dose of pure democracy smack-dab in the middle of Iowa’s fields and farms. I’m not sure about all that. But the caucuses are intimate. You discuss electability with your legs wedged beneath a lunch table designed for children. You look your neighbor in the eye and tell him why he’s wrong. On a school night! During one of his first-ever caucuses, my father, sitting at Senator Bernie Sanders’s table, was approached by a neighbor from Hillary Clinton’s. “Didn’t you hear that Sanders was a conscientious objector?” the man asked. Dad replied that he didn’t realize it was a liability for a presidential candidate to have a conscience. I remember thinking that this was a good comeback.

David A. Graham: Why the Iowa caucus birthed a thousand conspiracy theories

As a sophomore in college, I viewed the caucus as a noble process, probably because I was reading a lot of Hannah Arendt for class. The German philosopher wrote often about the polis—from which politics is derived—and in The Human Condition she defined it as “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.” The caucus, I thought. How romantic. But at the time, I was unaware—being young and able-bodied and generally self-absorbed—that caucuses don’t allow all people to act and speak together.

Mailing in your candidate preferences has never been an option in the caucuses. And many Iowans are not free at seven on a weeknight in January or February. That includes people working shift jobs, people working late, people with little kids, people with relatives to take care of, people with disabilities, people who don’t drive at night, people who have important plans, people who are simply out of town. Over the summer, state Democratic officials, in a bid to keep their place, finally did propose an absentee option. The DNC was apparently unimpressed.

The other most common criticism of the caucus is that Iowa is too white to make a decision that sets the political tempo for the rest of the country. Iowans would counter that their state proved to be the launching pad for America’s first Black president, but the point is well taken. In 2020, Biden finished fourth in mostly white Iowa, and it took the Black voters of South Carolina to push him to the front of the pack.

Iowa’s critics were vindicated that year, when the caucus became synonymous with chaos. The actual process went relatively smoothly, but a faulty new app and jammed phone lines disrupted the reporting of the results. That year, I’d invited my boyfriend to come to my hometown while I covered the caucuses. I’d wanted him to be charmed by the quaint small-town-ness of it all; instead, I was embarrassed. The entire state was. That was the final straw. This summer, a Democratic National Committee panel required every state to make the case for going early in the primary season. Earlier this month, with Biden’s support, the committee passed a proposal that would reorder which states vote first: South Carolina would start, and Michigan and Georgia would be part of the first five. Iowa was not on the list.

Long-time party activists are suffering varying degrees of disappointment at the news. Some lean more toward acceptance. “We’ve taken our role seriously. I think that it was probably time to move on,” Kurt Meyer, a retiree who’s led caucuses for years in northeast Mitchell County, told me. “As an Iowan who cares about such things, I’m sorry to see it go … but it’s okay.” Then he chuckled: “It’s like an aging ball player saying, It was a good run and I enjoyed those World Series games, but now I’m ready to watch from the comfort of the den with a drink in my hand.”

Others are left with a bitter taste. They have some arguments in their favor, after all: Candidates with no money can travel across Iowa easily and purchase ads cheaply. The caucus process itself allows people to rank their preferences and enables coalition-building among supporters of different candidates. “I don’t think people understood the nuance that was there, and that might be the party’s biggest failure,” Sandy Dockendorff, a longtime caucus leader in the southeast, told me. The result, she said, is that people in flyover country will feel even more neglected than they already do.

“That’s telling a lot of rural folks—a lot of the breadbasket—that we don’t matter,” Dockendorff said. “That’ll be felt for generations.”

Three years ago, I wrote a story about the Iowa Democratic Party’s plan to offer “satellite” caucuses that would let some people with work commitments or disabilities participate remotely. I was critical of the proposal because it wouldn’t solve all of the caucus’s inclusivity problems. After my article ran, a well-known Iowa labor leader emailed me. “I can tell you really dislike Iowa!” he wrote. The note was short, and I was crushed. My chest hurt. Had I betrayed my state with a single, 1,300-word article? But I think I understand how he was feeling. I get it now.

Americans outside the Midwest may soon forget about the Butter Cow. Iowa will take an economic hit if the state doesn’t go first in the Democrats’ nominating process. The restaurants serving tenderloins and chicken lips to eager-to-please politicians won’t make as much; the hotels and bars frequented by the national press corps will suffer. But the real reason these changes will be hard for many Iowans to accept is that a whole lot of pride is tied up in this thing. I hear it when I’m talking on the phone with my parents, and when I’m listening to people like Dockendorff and Meyer reminisce. Caucus advocates claim that Iowans are perfectly suited for the part because they are a particularly discerning people. I don’t think that’s true. But Iowans do take the role seriously—at least the ones who participate.

Read: A world without Chuck Grassley in the Senate?

Iowa Democrats have invested decades of effort into hosting bright-eyed, young campaign staffers from California and Massachusetts in their homes. They’ve given rookie candidates with few resources the space to make a case and a name for themselves. That all of this might soon be ripped away by a faceless group of people in D.C.—who seem to harbor, if not ill will, then at least a light disdain toward Iowa—is hard to swallow. Identity is a tricky thing.

No one is totally sure what happens next. The DNC will vote on the new order in February, and this summer, states will submit plans for the upcoming election. Iowa will have to decide how to play it. If state Democrats agree to move the caucus, in theory that breaks state law; the state attorney general could sue them. Some party leaders seem eager to say “Screw it!” and hold a first-in-the-nation caucus anyway, which could mean that Iowa’s delegates aren’t counted at the national convention. Candidates who campaign for such an unsanctioned event could face repercussions. But whatever happens, after committee members vote and state leaders draw their line in the sand, the Iowa caucus probably won’t look the same.

I don’t get to decide what the best outcome would be, for the state or for the process itself. But for all of my life and 20 years before that, Iowa has enjoyed a very particular feeling—a heady mix of relevance and attention—that has become enmeshed, irrevocably, into Iowans’ sense of their home and themselves. I learned to cherish that feeling as a 7-year-old. Maybe it’s time for other people, in some other state, to feel it, too. It will be hard to let go.

Elaine Godfrey

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December 13, 2022
What Joe Biden Has (And Hasn’t) Accomplished

Voters will render a midterm verdict on President Joe Biden as they decide whether to keep Democrats in control of Congress. Forgive them if their views about the president’s record so far are a bit complicated.

In less than two years, Biden has chaotically ended the war in Afghanistan while struggling to bring the nation fully out of a two-and-a-half-year pandemic. Domestically, he’s pursued nothing less than a transformation of the American social safety net, with an agenda comprising a dizzying number of progressive policy goals. Biden has accomplished quite a lot of them—perhaps more than most political observers expected with such narrow Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill. Some of his legislative moves, on infrastructure and clean-energy manufacturing, for example, have even been bipartisan victories. But Biden has also failed to achieve many of his most progressive priorities, which have fallen victim to a combination of lockstep GOP opposition and crucial defections in his own party.

Biden’s approval ratings have languished far below 50 percent for more than a year; the end of his presidential honeymoon coincided with the messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the prolonged pandemic. Most conservatives, of course, never gave him a chance. Many blame his high-spending policies for exacerbating inflation. The view from Democrats and independent voters is more complex: Will they conclude that Biden’s legislative successes—a record infusion of funds to fight climate change, a major infrastructure bill, action to lower prescription-drug prices, modest gun reform—outweigh his failure to enact promises such as paid family leave, universal pre-K, far-reaching voting-rights legislation, and a ban on assault weapons? In the past few months, Biden has bolstered his progressive record without the help of Congress, unilaterally forgiving student-loan debt for millions and pardoning thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession.

The signing of just three enormous bills—the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, and this summer’s climate-and-health spending bill—made Biden’s first two years among the most productive of any president in the past half century. The initial pandemic bill, also known as the American Rescue Plan, was about the size of Barack Obama’s two biggest legislative achievements—his initial economic stimulus package and the 2010 Affordable Care Act—combined. The legislation sent $1,400 checks to Americans across the country, nearly doubled the child tax credit, shored up state budget accounts, and funded testing, treatment, and vaccines to fight the pandemic. The politically named Inflation Reduction Act is actually the largest climate bill in U.S. history and allows Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs for the first time.

Beyond those headline bills, Biden more quietly amassed a bevy of smaller legislative wins, often with bipartisan support. A modest gun-safety bill expanded background checks (although not universally), made it easier to prosecute illegal gun trafficking, and provided federal funding for so-called red-flag laws. Congress also passed the CHIPS Act to boost domestic production of semiconductors, a long-stalled postal-reform bill, substantial military aid for Ukraine, and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act—all with fairly broad support from both parties. Biden’s executive actions on student-loan forgiveness and pardons for marijuana possession answered a pair of progressive demands.

Perhaps Biden’s biggest legislative disappointment in his first two years was the Senate’s failure to overcome a Republican filibuster of a major voting-rights-and-election-reform bill at the start of the year. (Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona memorably refused to support an exemption to the Senate’s rules to pass the bill.) The shrinking of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda sacrificed another large chunk of the president’s initially transformative progressive vision. Democrats jettisoned plans for a $15 federal minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, free community college, a huge affordable housing initiative, an expansion of Medicare, and an extension of the American Rescue Plan’s child tax credit. They also bowed to Sinema’s opposition to reversing tax-rate cuts enacted by former President Donald Trump.

Some of Biden’s plans never stood a chance. The Senate did not make a serious effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform or more aggressive gun-control measures, such as universal background checks or a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Nor did Congress act on restoring the public insurance option left out of Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

Russell Berman

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November 7, 2022
What Democrats Don’t Understand About Ron Johnson

APPLETON, Wisconsin—Senator Ron Johnson was midway through a rambling speech on all that’s wrong with America—his villains included runaway debt, the porous southern border, gender-affirming medical treatment, and FDR’s New Deal—when he paused for a moment of self-reflection.

“It’s a huge mess,” Johnson said of the country. “I really ought to have the people who introduce me warn audiences: I’m not the most uplifting character.”

A few people in the not-quite-packed crowd at the FreedomProject Academy, a drab, low-slung private school, chuckled. The 67-year-old Republican, stumping for a third term in the Senate, was speaking at an event that his campaign had not advertised to reporters. It was sponsored by an affiliate of the John Birch Society, the right-wing advocacy group now headquartered a mile down the road in Appleton. When attendees arrived, they found on their chairs a flyer promoting a six-week seminar on the Constitution. Part one? “The Dangers of Democracy.”

In the audience, several dozen mostly older, white conservatives seemed to share Johnson’s sense of national doom. They nodded along as Johnson assailed journalists (“highly biased” advocates who “lie with impunity”) and teachers (“leftists”), as he accused President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats of “fundamentally destroying this country.” He lamented the “injustice” suffered by people awaiting trial on charges of storming the Capitol on January 6. When Johnson trumpeted his fight on behalf of “the vaccine injured” and his promotion of discredited COVID-19 treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, he received a hearty round of applause.

Among Senate Republicans up for reelection this fall, Johnson is the Democrats’ top target, and the race is one of several that could determine which party holds a majority next year. Wisconsin is perhaps the nation’s most closely divided state: Fewer than 25,000 votes separated the two major-party candidates in each of the past two presidential elections. But Johnson isn’t racing toward the political center in the campaign’s home stretch, and he might not need to.

Read: Democrats’ No. 1 target for 2022

Johnson made a fortune as a plastics executive in nearby Oshkosh before winning his Senate seat in 2010. He reminded the crowd in Appleton that he’d made two promises during that initial campaign: that he would always tell the truth and that, as he put it, “I’ll never vote—and by extension I’ll never conduct myself—with my reelection in mind.” Democrats would vigorously dispute that Johnson has kept his first commitment. They might not contest that he’s kept the second.

After a rather unremarkable first term in the Senate, Johnson over the past few years has turned into a master of the controversial and the cringeworthy. He’s spent much of the pandemic peddling conspiracy theories about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. He became entangled in the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump and later told reporters he had ignored a warning from the FBI that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. Johnson also became involved in the events that led to Trump’s second impeachment: The House Select Committee investigating January 6 revealed that Johnson’s chief of staff had tried to hand then–Vice President Mike Pence a slate of fake electors from Wisconsin. Johnson has downplayed the attack on the Capitol, saying that the riot was not an insurrection and that he would have been concerned had those who stormed the building been “Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters” rather than Trump supporters.

At the same time, Johnson’s popularity has plunged. A Morning Consult poll published this week found that just 39 percent of Wisconsin voters approved of his performance, giving him the second-lowest home-state rating (behind only Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader) of any senator in the country. The Johnson of 2022 is unrecognizable to some Republicans who championed his first two campaigns and who saw him as a staunch but not extreme conservative, a politician more like Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan than Trump. “There’s no question that the Ron Johnson who ran in 2010 and 2016 was not the conspiracy theorist that you see now,” Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative-radio host in Wisconsin who co-founded The Bulwark, told me. Sykes has many theories about the cause of Johnson’s transformation. But it boils down to a simple conclusion: “Trump broke his brain.”

Yet if Johnson this year is the Senate’s most electorally vulnerable Republican, he’s also proving to be among its most resilient. He scored a come-from-behind reelection victory after GOP leaders abandoned his campaign in 2016. In the past few weeks, he’s erased a summertime polling deficit to take a slim lead over his Democratic opponent, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, and give Republicans a better shot at reclaiming the Senate majority. Johnson led 52 percent to 46 percent among likely voters in a survey released yesterday by Marquette University Law School.

Johnson’s resurgence has frustrated and even confounded Democrats, who worry that a well-funded and vicious crime-focused ad campaign is dragging down their nominee in a pivotal battleground. But they may be underestimating the depth of Johnson’s appeal and misjudging whether his supposedly unpopular stands hurt him as much as they thought.

Oddly enough, the one topic Johnson didn’t bring up in Appleton was his opponent, Barnes. With help from national Republicans, Johnson is pummeling Barnes on the airwaves, spending millions to convince Wisconsinites that the 35-year-old vying to be the state’s first Black U.S. senator is a criminal-coddling radical. The ads seek to exploit positions on which even some Democrats concede that Barnes is vulnerable; his support for ending cash bail has come under particular scrutiny following a Christmas-parade massacre last year in Waukesha, when a suspect who was out on bail for domestic violence allegedly killed six people and injured dozens more after driving his SUV into a crowd.

The GOP ads strike many Barnes supporters as clearly racist. One spot from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that calls Barnes a “defund-the-police Democrat” depicts him in front of a wall spray-painted with graffiti alongside two other Democrats of color, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Another uses similar imagery and flashes the words dangerous and different next to Barnes.

If the barrage is angering Barnes, he’s good at hiding it. Despite his relative youth, he’s been running for office for a decade. When I sat down with him after a speech in Sheboygan, Barnes was effortlessly on message. Johnson’s ads, he told me, were “some of the worst I’ve seen in any election cycle, anywhere.” And he acknowledged that “the unprecedented sums of money” funding them represented the biggest obstacle he faced between now and the election.

Despite this assessment, however, Barnes seemed relatively unperturbed by their content. He refused to label them racist, as many of his supporters do, and he dismissed the attacks on him as evidence that Johnson had done little in the Senate worth promoting. “Unlike Ron Johnson, I can talk about things that I want to do to actually help people,” Barnes said. “And that’s what people want to hear day to day.”

Barnes won election as lieutenant governor in 2018 after four years in the state legislature. His bid for the Democratic Senate nomination had been competitive for months, but Barnes ultimately consolidated the party’s support when, one by one, his opponents withdrew and endorsed him days ahead of the August primary. He has close ties to the progressive, labor-oriented Working Families Party, having delivered its response to Trump’s State of the Union address in 2019. Barnes frequently highlights his devotion to unions—“My dad worked third shift” is a constant refrain—as a way to connect with Black workers in and around Milwaukee and to make inroads with more culturally conservative white laborers elsewhere in the state, many of whom backed Trump.

Barnes’s supporters see him as a once-in-a-generation talent, and he comes across as warm and easygoing on the stump. “Hello, Senator, our future president!” one older woman fawned as she shook his hand before he spoke to a crowded union hall in Sheboygan. “Oh no,” Barnes replied. “This is stressful enough.”

Although Barnes is running ads attacking Johnson on abortion and economic issues, many of his commercials are much sunnier spots clearly designed to reassure Wisconsin voters that he’s not the “dangerous” radical Republicans are making him out to be. In one he’s pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket, and in another he’s unpacking groceries. “Ron Johnson’s at it again, lying about my taxes,” Barnes says while making himself a PB&J in another ad. The strategy is reminiscent of the campaign that Reverend Raphael Warnock ran in Georgia in 2020, when he relied on cheery ads featuring a beagle, Alvin, to counter nasty GOP attacks aimed at scaring off white suburban voters.

Democrats I spoke with applauded Barnes’s ads. But as the polls have shifted toward Johnson in recent weeks, they lamented that Johnson’s race-baiting message was succeeding, and worried that Barnes’s campaign of reassurance, although necessary, was insufficient. “Get aggressive. Get dirty like they do,” Fred Hass, a 76-year-old retired union worker, said in Sheboygan when I asked what he wanted to see from Barnes.

“I don’t think he has the luxury to spend all his time on reassurance,” David Axelrod, the former top adviser to Barack Obama, told me, referring to Barnes. “He shouldn’t fight with one hand tied behind his back, and I think he almost has to be on offense here.” (When I asked him about this criticism, Barnes defended his decision to focus equally, if not more, on himself. “Your opponent being bad isn’t enough,” he said. “You’ve got to tell people what you stand for.”)

No politician has succeeded in Wisconsin quite like Obama did, a fact that complicates the question of how much race is a factor in Barnes’s recent slide. Obama’s 14-point victory in 2008—he won by seven points in 2012—remains the largest margin for any presidential candidate in Wisconsin in the past half century. (It’s also unmatched by any contender for Senate or governor in the years since.) Every other presidential contest in this century has been decided by less than a single point. In 2018, the Democrat Tony Evers—with Barnes as his running mate—defeated the Republican Scott Walker’s bid for a third term as governor by fewer than 30,000 votes. With that in mind, the only prediction that both Democratic and GOP operatives are willing to make is that the Johnson-Barnes race will be close. (The Republican bidding to oust Evers, Tim Michels, declared at a recent rally that he’d win in a “Wisconsin landslide,” which he then defined as “probably like three points.”)

Although Wisconsin has earned its reputation as a 50–50 swing state, it does not habitually elect leaders who hug the political center and historically has embraced ideologues from both the left and right. The home of Robert La Follette and the Progressive Party of the early 20th century soon became the state that twice sent the anti-communist demagogue Joseph McCarthy to the Senate. More recently, as Wisconsin veered left to embrace Obama, it also voted again and again for Walker, who amassed one of the most conservative records of any governor in the country. No state has two senators as ideologically mismatched as Wisconsin’s Johnson and the Democrat Tammy Baldwin, a progressive and the first openly LGBTQ woman elected to Congress. “There’s a little bit of political schizophrenia in Wisconsin,” Sykes said.

Read: ‘I Am Stunned’: Wisconsin democrats’ improbable victory

Given the polarized and closely divided electorate, political strategists see a vaningishly small population of swing voters, perhaps 100,000 or 150,000 out of about 3.5 million statewide. Johnson, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment, clearly sees his path to victory in turning out the conservative base and disqualifying Barnes in the eyes of that sliver of persuadable voters.

The hope of Barnes’s campaign in the final stretch—and the biggest threat to Johnson’s—is embodied in a man named Ken.

Ken lives in a suburb of Green Bay, in an area that shifted, along with much of the state, ever so slightly to the left between Trump’s victory in 2016 and Biden’s in 2020. On the first Saturday in October, a pair of Barnes canvassers were knocking doors as I trailed along. Not many people were answering, and the few who did politely turned them away.

Then the canvassers approached a group of three middle-aged white men who were enjoying beers on a patio in back of one of the houses on their list. Anyone familiar with the demographic divide in modern politics would have taken one look and assumed they were Trump (and by extension, Johnson) voters. They did not appear eager to talk politics, and after a few curt replies, Nicole Slavin, a sales manager who had experience canvassing, bid them a polite goodbye and began to back away.

Seeking confirmation of our hunch, I asked which candidate they were supporting, and Ken (he declined to provide his last name) spoke up and said he had already returned his ballot by mail. “The only reason—the only reason—I voted for Evers and Barnes was the abortion decision,” Ken said. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revived an 1849 Wisconsin law banning abortion in most cases, which the GOP-controlled legislature has refused to repeal or modify. “It’s almost like sending women back 50 years, what they’re talking about,” Ken said. A longtime Republican, he told me he voted for Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in the last election. “I don’t care about all the other crap, but that was one thing that really stood out,” he said of the abortion ruling.

Slavin was pleasantly surprised, but she told me she had met several people in the past few months who cited abortion as the driving factor in their support for Democrats. Conversations like those, and voters like Ken, are giving the party some hope that anger over the Dobbs decision will change the electorate in Wisconsin, much as it turned what was expected to be a close August referendum in Kansas into a landslide win for supporters of abortion rights.

About an hour before Slavin hit the doors, Barnes had launched a statewide “Ron Against Roe” tour aimed at shifting the focus of his campaign away from Johnson’s attacks on him and back toward friendlier turf. A few days later, Barnes launched a new TV ad hitting Johnson for backing a national ban on abortion and for saying in 2019 that if people don’t like abortion restrictions in their state, they “can move.”

Johnson has since called for a statewide referendum on abortion, a position he highlighted when Barnes attacked him on the issue during a debate last week. But his 2019 comment was, to Johnson’s critics, just one more example of his lurch out of the political mainstream over the past few years—a shift for which Democrats hope Wisconsinites hold their senator accountable. To them, he is one more Republican who lost his mind in the Trump era. Johnson’s supporters see in him a conservative iconoclast who hasn’t wavered. “Wisconsinites like independent people, and that’s why I think Ron Johnson is going to win,” Representative Glenn Grothman, a Republican who represents Johnson’s home, in Oshkosh, told me. “Anybody who thinks that Ron Johnson has changed is just a partisan reporter.”

Whether Johnson has changed could ultimately prove less important than whether the events of the past several months, and the abortion decision in particular, have changed Wisconsin voters and what they care about. Johnson has proudly stood against public opinion plenty of times before, with few tangible consequences. The next few weeks will decide whether this year, and this issue, will be different.

Russell Berman

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October 13, 2022
Biden’s Cancellation of Billions in Debt Won’t Solve the Larger Problem

For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.

Today, calls for relief were answered when President Joe Biden announced that his administration would be canceling up to $10,000 in student loans for those with federal debt, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. As long as a borrower makes less than $125,000 a year, or makes less than $250,000 alongside a spouse, they would be eligible for cancellation. The president will also extend the current loan-repayment pause—originally enacted by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020 as a pandemic-relief measure—until December 31.

The debt relief—which by one estimate could cost a total of $300 billion—is a massive benefit for Americans who have struggled to repay loans they accrued attending college, whether they completed a degree or not. But equally as important as addressing the damage that student loans have caused is ensuring that Americans aren’t saddled with overwhelming debt again. And the underlying issue of college affordability can be addressed only if America once again views higher education as a public good. Belatedly canceling some student debt is what a country does when it refuses to support students up front.

According to a White House fact sheet, 90 percent of Biden’s debt relief will go to those who earn less than $75,000 a year—and the administration estimates that 20 million people will have their debt completely canceled. “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, for a college degree,” Biden said at a White House event. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided.” That Democrats arrived at this point at all, though, is a testament to how grim the student-loan crisis has become. A decade and a half ago, Democrats were advocating for small increases in the federal grant program to help low-income students afford college. Over successive presidential campaigns, Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for canceling most, or all, student debt issued by the government—effectively hitting reset on a broken system. And now the party is announcing one of the largest federal investments in higher education in recent memory.

Read: How the Democrats got radical on student debt

When he was running for president in 2007, Biden advocated for a tax credit for college students and a marginal increase in the size of individual Pell Grant awards—tinkering around the edges of solving a brewing mess as America lurched toward a deep recession. From 2006 to 2011, college enrollment grew by 3 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the same time, states began to cut back on their higher-education spending. On average, by 2018, states were spending 13 percent less per student than they were in 2008.

Historically, when states look to cut their budgets, higher education is one of the first sectors to feel the blade. Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree that a college degree pays off. But college, unlike K–12 schooling, is not universal, and a majority of Republicans believe that investment in higher education benefits graduates more than anyone else. So lawmakers have been willing to make students shoulder a greater share of the burden. But this shift leaves those with the fewest resources to pay for college—and those whose families earn a little too much to qualify for Pell Grants—taking on significant debt.

The shift flies in the face of the Framers’ view of higher education, though. “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature,” George Washington, an early proponent of the idea of a national university, said in his first address before Congress, in 1790. “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, and others believed that colleges might be a place where Americans could build a national identity—a place where they could, for lack of better words, become good citizens.

In that spirit, the federal government provided massive investments in the nation’s colleges, albeit inequitably—through the Morrill Act, which formed the backbone of state higher-education systems as we know them; the GI Bill; and the Pell Grant program—which directly subsidize students’ expenses. But in the past half century, radical investments in higher-education access have dried up. Now a political divide has opened up: Conservative lawmakers—whose voters are more likely not to have attended college—have grown not only suspicious of but in some cases openly hostile toward the enterprise.

Read: America is divided by education

Meanwhile, 77 percent of Democrats believe that the government should subsidize college education. “We want our young people to realize that they can have a good future,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in April. “One of the best, very best, top-of-the-list ways to do it is by canceling student debt.” He wanted the president to be ambitious and called for giving borrowers $50,000 in relief—“even going higher after that.” A month into his administration, though, Biden shot down the idea of $50,000, to the chagrin of relief advocates. “Canceling just $10,000 of debt is like pouring a bucket of ice water on a forest fire,” the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson and Wisdom Cole argued today. “It hardly achieves anything—only making a mere dent in the problem.”

The administration is coupling its announcement with a redesign of payment plans that allows borrowers to cap their monthly loan payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income. But the basic problem remains: Young Americans of modest means can no longer afford to attend their state university by getting a part-time job and taking out a small loan. For millions of students, borrowing thousands of dollars has become the key to paying for an undergraduate degree. Biden’s plan will give graduates—and those who have taken out loans but not finished school—some relief, but the need to overhaul a system reliant on debt remains as urgent as ever.

Adam Harris

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August 24, 2022