President Donald Trump’s description of Africa and Haiti as shitholes preoccupied commentators with the question, “Is the president ‘a racist’?”

A New York Times headline for a David Leonhardt column implored, “Just Say It: Trump Is a Racist.” Over at CNN, Jim Acosta wasn’t quite prepared to answer Leonhardt’s plea, carefully telling Anderson Cooper, “It’s a disturbing pattern, because it seems to come back to one truth here, and that is that this president deep down may just be a racist.” Meanwhile, The New Yorker’s John Cassidy would have none of this hedging, proclaiming, “The obvious truth can no longer be avoided or sugar-coated: We have a racist in the Oval Office.”

Trump’s long record of racist speech and behavior and inclination toward racist policies restricting immigration from poor parts of the world evidently hadn’t been as conclusive as this vulgar episode.

The expletive, like its predecessor in the Access Hollywood tape, heightened the statement’s outrageousness: Presidents are supposed to be dignified, not crass; eloquent, not vulgar; decent, not filthy. But Trump’s racist remark violated an even more fundamental norm. “The main lesson most whites absorbed from the Civil Rights Movement,” tweeted sociologist Crystal Fleming, “wasn’t that they have a personal responsibility to fight systemic racism but rather, that they have a responsibility to maintain a public appearance of being ‘non-racist’ even as racism pervades their lives.”

Politicians may engineer coups d’état, brutal austerity, or covert wars in Africa and Haiti; they may enact policies that intensify poverty, incarceration, and pollution that disproportionately hurt black and brown people in the United States, but these are not sufficient to irrefutably verify that they are “a racist.” Only public speech acts can do that, since, as Fleming continued in her Twitter thread, “the problem, for many whites, isn’t white racism or dominance —the problem is a failed public performance of being ‘non-racist.’”

In this formulation, racism is not a system but an inherent quality within an individual, proof of which comes when they publicly espouse racist views or use racist language. By formally classifying Trump “a racist” (“calling him out”), well-to-do liberals are able to implicitly deem themselves “non-racists” while keeping the pervasiveness of the attitude that Africa and Haiti are shitholes where it belongs: swept well under the rug.

But racism is not an individual quality; it is a hierarchical system of distributed power that gets mediated through people’s acts. As black-power activist Stokely Carmichael is quoted as saying, “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.”

Affluent liberals, however diligently inoffensive their public speech, have less to be proud of in a framework wherein politicians are praised not for having the correct opinion but for leading collective action toward redistributing power. The question then shifts away from whether a person has good politics and toward whether a person wages good politics.

The dominant liberal conception of white anti-racism emphasizes altruism. In this mode, white people must set aside our own self-interest in order to extend kindness to those less fortunate. Humanitarian assistance is rewarded, and those who practice it are hailed for their self-sacrifice and generosity.

White people are encouraged to defer, shrink, and assist. It is not our fight, the white-altruism mode says, so we must strive to decenter ourselves and support black people’s “advancement” as peripheral allies, doing what kindnesses we can to compensate them for the privileges we enjoy. We must reliably articulate non-racist positions using suitably non-racist terminology, correct white people who fail to do these, and under no circumstances use racist language out in the open.

Not that people shouldn’t interrupt racist personal acts or respect the expertise of people of color regarding how racism plays out in their lives and communities, but that alone does not constitute a strategy. At best, these interruptions and this deference are a woefully inadequate response to systemic racism. At worst, white altruism is a recipe for disaster. Not only does it treat racism as personal flaw rather than a system of power; it also insists that white people have an obligation to help black communities “advance,” a construction that is vulnerable to white people’s misconceptions of what constitutes “advancement.” Without being anchored to a goal of redistributing power, altruism is often carried along by the prevailing currents of racist capitalism.

At the end of the Civil War, instead of furnishing formerly enslaved black people with the 40 acres Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman had promised, well-meaning moderate Republican Reconstructionists championed the Freedman’s Savings Bank “to instill into the minds of the untutored Africans lessons of sobriety, wisdom, and economy,” which Congress considered crucial to “the economic and industrial development of a people.” According to bank’s founder, Congregational minister John Alvord, black people didn’t want free land: “We hear them saying, ‘We will work and save and buy for ourselves.’”

Over a decade, the bank’s board, made up of highly regarded philanthropists, transformed the bank into an investment outfit conducting risky speculation, bribery, and fraud. When the Panic of 1873 threatened the bank’s viability, the trustees, desperate to reinforce an image of the bank as a trustworthy institution, appointed Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and former slave, as bank president. In this capacity, Douglass discovered the enterprise to be “full of dead men’s bones, rottenness, and corruption.” The bank folded, leaving over 60,000 depositors without access to millions in strenuously earned deposits, and obliterating more than half of accumulated black wealth.

White altruism fared no better out West than down South. The policy of “allotment,” which broke up tribal lands into individually owned plots, came from white altruists. The architect of the 1887 Dawes Act, which made allotment official federal policy, was Alice Fletcher, an upper-class New York City suffragist who, out of anthropological curiosity, went west to live with and studied the Omaha Indians, ultimately adopting one as her son. She and other reformers were sure that tribal landholding was unproductive, inefficient, and destructive to the individual work ethic, that it thus prevented Indians from making healthy economic advances. In practice, allotment shrunk Indian-held lands from about 150 million acres to 48 million by the time of the Dawes Act’s 1934 repeal, leaving two-thirds of Indians either completely landless or without enough land to subsist.

Later, in the early 1940s, altruism struck again when the Rockefeller Foundation made an effort to alleviate the “tragedy of hunger” in the “backward” country of Mexico, touching off the much celebrated “Green Revolution.” Rockefeller Foundation scientists and policy experts implemented a system designed to raise Mexicans’ daily calorie intake by improving agricultural efficiency through “higher yielding and higher quality crop varieties” and disease control. The white people who designed and implemented the Green Revolution won awards. But for the farmers of Mexico, the program dramatically narrowed the genetic base of crops, destroyed indigenous agricultural practices, supplanted small and communal farming with commercial agribusiness, and displaced millions of peasants into urban slums or across the border.

Still today, manifestations of white altruism undermine the well-being of the very “shithole” denizens whose “advancement” it seeks. Microfinance, or inviting poor people into small amounts of debt, has been held up by its most powerful, enthusiastic advocates as a panacea for the ills that beset impoverished countries. In 2005 the United Nations even gave microcredit its own international year. Honors notwithstanding, microloans tend to worsen livelihoods overall, notoriously driving hundreds of Indian women to suicide. Far from raising living standards, microfinance has calcified the hierarchy that produces such poverty—and enriches Europe and North America.

Time and again, white people acting as allies in other people’s “progress” have not just failed to address racist power relations; they have entrenched white dominance. Altruism cannot be the basis for white anti-racist action. There’s only one thing that can: solidarity.

Solidarity is about unity, not around like-mindedness or affinity but around common interests. Neither having the same opinions nor even mutual fondness is required for one to enter into a solidarity relationship with another. All they need is the acknowledgement that, to achieve liberation, “I need you and you need me.” Solidarity is about fighting for oneself alongside another person, for one’s family alongside another family.

The thing is, when two people fight for themselves alongside one another, when they perceive themselves to be teammates, they begin to warm to each other. In 1939, a Chicago stockyard worker, Jim Cole, told a reporter from the Federal Writers’ Project, “I don’t care if the union don’t do another lick of work raisin’ our pay, or settling grievances about anything. I’ll always believe they done the greatest thing in the world gettin’ everybody who works in the yards together, and breakin’ up the hate and bad feelings that used to be held against the Negro.”

Only when white people come to see that our own liberation is bound up in the liberation of others can we achieve solidarity and have a basis for white anti-racism that does not produce the colonial outcomes generated by altruism.

White people in and adjacent to poverty have solid grounds for this type of solidarity; they are directly victimized by a politics that relies on racist rhetorical appeals. The cycle works the same way time and again: Politicians gin up fear of a racist mythological problem, and propose a solution that harms poor and working-class people of all colors—while consolidating wealth and power for the (almost entirely) white rich.

In the late 1970s and ’80s , the racist mythological problem was “welfare queens” living decadently off government fraud, illegitimately claiming white people’s “taxpayer money.” To solve this problem, the government cut safety-net payments, the largest share of whose beneficiaries had been white. The entire, diverse working class, disproportionately people of color, was harmed, and the white rich claimed tax cuts on behalf of aggrieved “taxpayers.”

Then in the 1990s, the racist mythological problem was “superpredators,” committing violence with “no conscience, no empathy”—the sort of people who, if affluent white Americans were ever to be safe, needed simply to be brought “to heel.” To solve “superpredators,” the government enacted harsh policing and sentencing measures, which served to expand the carceral system in which black and brown people were overrepresented, but a majority of whose inmates were white. The whole time windfall profits streamed into the accounts of the mostly white capitalists driving the prison-industrial complex.

Lately, the racist mythological problem has been “voter fraud.” Trump, in his characteristic way, has eschewed the normal dog whistles and campaigned outright on the fear of “illegal immigrants voting all over the country,” encouraging his 2016 supporters to “go down to certain areas” and make sure that “other people don’t come in and vote five times.” To solve the “voter-fraud” problem, the government has enacted a host of suppression measures from requiring documentary proof of citizenship to an Interstate Crosscheck system, which disproportionately disenfranchises voters of color and rural communities.

In each of these cases, the millions of lower-class white people whose lives are materially damaged have a firm basis for teaming up with the other nonwhite members of their class in opposition to the racist politics that fuel the policies hurting them. Poor and working-class white people are suffering under white supremacy, and have good reason to demand that they too be freed from it.

The even greater challenge is to bring affluent white people into solidarity relationships with working-class and poor people of color. The systems of property, policing, and uneven distribution of political influence favor them. But even those who sit atop the racist hierarchy are pressured and bullied into the constant battle to maintain their position. In forcing them to jealously guard their resources and power against those with less—black people, immigrants, indigenous Americans, Muslims, and “white trash”—our hierarchical system makes them develop fearful and contemptuous attitudes that worsen their lives. It alienates affluent white people from their fellow Americans and humans, depriving them of fellowship and cooperation.

The wealthy are terrified of falling a few strata down the socioeconomic ladder, and who can blame them? The less money you have, the poorer your health and education outcomes, the less decent your housing, the less healthful your food, the likelier you are to be abused on the job or by the police, and the less confident you can be that your children will have it any better. Losing ground in America is such a scary prospect that it blinds the affluent to the goal they might achieve if they adopted solidarity: liberation from that fear. If they there weren’t so far to fall, they wouldn’t be saddled with paranoia at every turn.

Solidarity requires that we rethink “privilege.” At present, white anti-racism demands intense examinations of and attempts to correct for privilege. To build solidarity, we must shift away from this practice and toward a demand for universal rights. As long as anti-racist white people remain fixated on privilege at the expense of all else, we remain divided from black people and relegated to the role of, at best, helpful allies. If we can shift to a universal-rights framework, we recast ourselves as all on the same team.

To perform this shift, it’s important to differentiate what political scientist and blogger David Kaib calls the “two faces of privilege.” On the one hand, “privilege” refers to things nobody ought to have, such as the power to dominate discussions, the feeling of entitlement to the body of another person, and the unthinking assumption that comes with social hegemony: that your experiences are the default. We should indeed pay attention to such dynamics, remaining vigilant about white people’s systematic conditioning to behave in ways that exasperate teammates or cause them pain or fear.

On the other hand, it refers to things everybody ought to have. This is where the “privilege” framework can be harmful. For example, I am said to be “privileged,” because my housing has always been dependable, I have never been deprived of nutritious food, I have been able to access treatment and surgery when I have been sick or injured, I have not only received a quality education but had some say in its direction, my periods of unemployment have been brief, and I have enjoyed the free time and freedom of movement and communication necessary to pursue art, inquiry, social life, and other sorts of joy and fulfillment.

Those are human rights, and calling them “privileges” undermines the fight to get them universally respected. Freedom, dignity, and democracy are due to everyone. If the lives of other people are less free and less dignified than mine, if they are denied the say I’m afforded in the systems that affect them, that is not a matter of their lacking my degree of privilege but of their rights being violated.

The baseline matters. Describing human rights as “privileges” uses destitution as the baseline. When people work from that baseline and treat every step above it as another “privilege,” we are affirming the right-wing idea that we naturally have nothing, that we have to ruthlessly compete just to get by. But when we talk of “universal rights,” the baseline shoots way up to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and freedom from want and fear. That is the life we all deserve; that is the life we are owed.

In the “privilege” framework, racist inequality induces white people to feel guilty, which produces inaction. In the “universal-rights” framework, it induces us to feel fury, which inspires action. No longer is it, “I feel bad for even thinking it, but thank goodness I don’t have it as bad as those who are worse off.” Instead, it becomes, “let’s get together and collect our due.”

Fostering solidarity will require diverse groups (labor unions, community organizations, and political parties) organized around guaranteed rights to good jobs, decent housing, quality health care, educational opportunities, nutritious food, and so forth. People’s membership in these organizations must not be superficial, as grass-roots engagement tends to be with, say, the Democratic Party. For the solidarity to be real, disparate people have to take courageous collective action.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign, which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing at the end of his life. Premised on moving “from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights” and securing “a radical redistribution of economic and political power,” the Poor People’s Campaign was supposed to bring poor people of every color, ethnicity, and geography together to “raise certain basic questions about the whole society”—like who owned the resources and why poverty persisted in a land of plenty.

King was assassinated before the campaign came to fruition, but 50 years later Rev. William Barber II, pillar of the Moral Mondays movement, is anchoring a reimagination of the Poor People’s Campaign called A National Call for Moral Revival. Designed to bring thousands of people together in at least 25 states for a season of action targeted at state legislatures and the US Congress, the campaign will call for a dramatic overhaul of our national priorities in order to defeat poverty, systemic racism, ecological devastation, and the war economy.

In each state, people directly impacted by these “quadruple evils” are in the leadership of the campaign, which is specifically interracial and focused on universal human rights—precisely the antidote to the “white altruism” that pervades the predominant model of white anti-racism. People dissatisfied with merely proclaiming the president “a racist” and congratulating themselves on their bravery would do well to figure out how they can get involved.

When James Williams started as a labor organizer in the 1960s, he carried around an A.B. Dick mimeograph machine—the type where you had to manually spread ink inside the drum with a brush—along with an Underwood typewriter in the trunk of his car. During an organizing drive, he would wait for workers to get off a shift at 3 o’clock and report what had happened in the shop that day, and Williams would have a leaflet ready for the midnight shift.

“Now,” the 75-year old member of the Tacoma, Washington, chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America reflects, “we got WiFi and social media and things we could only dream of.” At the recent DSA Convention in Chicago, he is surrounded by people half a century his junior, many of whom have developed community, rituals, shared references, and friendships on Twitter, and practically none of whom can picture a mimeograph machine, much less operate one. “I’m way behind the curve.”

Williams, a retired professor of social work initially from Kentucky, joined DSA in 1992. For most of the following 25 years, however, his involvement has consisted chiefly of reading and trying to stay informed about what was going on in the organization. Retiring to Tacoma in 2010, he found that the local chapter had about 15 members—on paper. “All of us were white geezers, and we never really met or did anything,” he said. “Then Bernie came along, and whoosh!”

That is the sound of the membership of DSA exploding from roughly 6,000 to its current figure over 25,000. It now boasts that it is the largest socialist organization in the United States since World War II. With 697 delegates from 49 states, the 2017 convention is by considerable measure the organization’s largest ever. The great majority of the new members are Bernie Sanders’s most devout base of support: young people.

Vaughan Allen Goodwin saw it coming. “I knew that at some point the frustrations of young people would cause them to want to go somewhere and to be in something,” says the 49-year-old Boston-based delegate. Goodwin, inspired by the late scholar Manning Marable to get involved with Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, has been a DSA member ever since. This is his first national convention, though. “The emphasis was not on young people last time I was invited,” he explains. “Most successful movements start off and are led by young people.”

Like Williams, Goodwin took a hiatus from DSA, coming back after many years when the blossoming membership encouraged him to bring his long experience organizing to the novice-heavy chapter. Hailing initially from Philadelphia, Goodwin has never known a life without the left: His mother was a labor organizer, he attended Morehouse College for undergrad, and then set out for the north of England for graduate school at the University of Lancashire. It was there that he got his first taste of organizing, serving as an antiracist officer with the National Union of Students. When he returned stateside, Goodwin moved to Boston to go into his mother’s line of business and organize with a labor union.

“We have to make sure that we provide nurturing direction and support to the young people here,” he says. “Metro Boston DSA has over 500 members, including young delegates from schools like MIT and Harvard.” Despite the cultural differences between union organizers and Ivy League STEM experts, Goodwin reports, the chapter is a bastion of reciprocity and mutuality. “We’re equals,” he says. “I value and respect young people, and the young people value and respect me.”

For Maxine Phillips, 70 years old, DSA’s demographic shift has not unfolded without a hitch. Having lost her battle to dissuade the voting body from endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement to end Israeli apartheid in Palestine, she laments “this thing with the chanting and screaming and stuff,” the chants of “Free, free Palestine” ringing in her ears still.(Phillips clarifies that she opposes the academic boycott, not the boycott of goods made in the Occupied Territories.) “When I came in, there were these old socialist traditions of not clapping,” she recalls. “People aren’t used to that particular style of debate.”

Having been raised by New Deal Democrats in a Republican-dominated part of Pennsylvania, a young Phillips became active in the civil-rights and antiwar movements. Winding up a participant in a discussion group on corporate capitalism at New York’s leftist Judson Memorial Church, she was moved to join DSA in 1977. Soon, she was hired to publish the organization’s newsletter, Democratic Left, which she did for seven years before becoming DSA’s National Director.

Eventually, Phillips took a break from DSA, but not out of discouragement. “I needed a job that allowed me to be with my family,” she explains. “A political job was not it.” It is only now that her kids are grown and she has retired, that time has opened up for her to return to her work with DSA. And what a time to revive her involvement: “This is really the first time in my political life that I can say to someone, ‘I’m a Democratic Socialist’ and, even if they’re outside the left, they know what you’re talking about,” she says. “Before, if I was back in Pennsylvania and didn’t want to get into a big fight with someone, I’d just say I worked for a political-science magazine or that I was very active politically, and leave it at that.” Now, she gets to be up front about what her involvement entails. “It’s great, it’s very liberating.”

or James Williams, the thrill of DSA’s dramatic growth has brought its own set of challenges. “I feel like an old dinosaur,” he confesses. “I don’t understand a lot of the culture and sometimes I think we’re speaking different languages.” It’s not just meme references and technological jargon that keeps him relatively quiet at meetings, though. “I have to think about my own role,” he says. “I don’t want to be one of those old white guys that has the answer to everything. We got enough of them there already.”

Williams’s reluctance to assert himself in meeting hasn’t kept the young members of Tacoma DSA from seeking out his advice on theory, strategy, and tactics. “Mostly younger trade unionists,” he says, seek out his mentorship. “The longshoreman’s union has developed this young workers caucus that does a lot of good stuff” including visiting Standing Rock and supporting a miners’ strike in Idaho. “These are militant young guys, and one of the best is one of our members—a ball of fire.”

But at the convention, it’s the lack of fire that most impresses Williams. “As I look around the room, I think the people are much more thoughtful than we were in the 1960s,” he says. “There’s no one here with their hair on fire, screaming. People are rationally thinking through important matters, drawing their own conclusions, and outstripping us on a lot of this stuff.”

That, says Vaughan Allen Goodwin, is the way it has always been. Likening DSA to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee half a century ago, Goodwin sees this moment as part of a cycle. “Back in the 1940s and ’50s, Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Jomo Kenyatta—they all came out of Lincoln University,” he says. “They went back to their countries and led movements for African independence, and they were young people at the time.” Each generation, he observes, explores and experiments to build on the foundations lain by the previous one. “Resistance cannot just be ideological and courageous, it has to also be practical.”

For Maxine Phillips too, practical considerations are paramount. “I don’t know where the childcare is here,” she says. “It’s a big issue for the movement, and for the entire country.” (The Convention’s FAQ says that “We can provide space for people to supervise children.… We will not provide professional childcare.”) The urgency of this concern will only grow, she predicts, and she hopes that with it, the movement will develop imaginative solutions. “There was a time when the socialists had summer camps. Will we get to that point? With 25,000 members I don’t know, and a lot of them don’t have kids yet.”

However small in comparison to socialism’s heyday in the United States, even 25,000 presents its challenges. “When the conventions were smaller, you had more change to meet, to talk over meals. There’s no time here for talking,” Phillips says. “It’s just the difference between being small and big.” Last convention, she rode in a van with other members from New York, and the relationships that she built over that seven-hour trip, she still retains. In her view, the radically increased attendance has removed the conditions for that kind of interpersonal development. “Usually they try to have the convention all in one place,” she says; this year it spanned two different buildings. “When you only have 150, 200 people, it’s easy.” With hundreds and hundreds, it isn’t. “People are certainly friendly, but I’m not going to go out drinking with them. I assume if I were open to it somebody might invite me, but it has felt more atomized.”

Still, she can’t help be excited by the explosion of the organization. “I’ve loved going to the May Day demonstrations and not recognizing anyone,” she says. “For years, I’d show up to things and it was the same people all the time.”

James Williams is similarly invigorated. “It’s kind of astonishing,” he says. “I still have trouble getting my head around it.” He compares the current moment to the 1960s, an era of hope, optimism, and the sense that something was achievable. “There’s more optimism now than we’ve seen since then,” he says. “I’ve been to DSA conventions that could meet in the restroom.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect Maxine Phillips’s position on Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions.

Throughout the 2016 campaign, amid the 
shock of its results, and in the various recapitulations of its lessons, great swaths of the mainstream and liberal press have been consistent about whom they blame for Donald Trump and his ultra-right-wing administration: the white working class. “That’s what Trump is playing to,” The New Yorker’s George Packer told NPR’s Terry Gross days before the election. “It’s a really dangerous, volatile game, but that’s…maybe the biggest story of this election.” In the weeks after the election, liberal-hotshot-of-yesteryear Markos Moulitsas found it appropriate to crow over retired coal miners losing their health coverage from his office in gentrifying Oakland. Even today, the contempt remains obvious: Self-appointed “resistance” leader and actual flag-wearer Keith Olbermann could find no better way to insult his fellow multimillionaires Sarah Palin, Kid Rock, and Ted Nugent than by calling them “trailer park trash.”
1

Even according to pundits on the traditional right, one can find the reason for Trump’s success festering in lower-income white communities, the enemies of racial and social progress, where reactionary politics and redneck racism run rampant. “The white American underclass,” according to National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, “is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” According to this analysis, Trump’s fascism is merely a reflection of the debased preferences of poor people.
2

But scapegoating poor whites keeps the conversation away from fascism’s real base: the petite bourgeoisie. This is a piece of jargon used mostly by Marxists to denote small-property owners, whose nearest equivalents these days may be the “upper middle class” or “small-business owners.” FiveThirtyEight reported last May that “the median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000,” or roughly 130 percent of the national median. Trump’s real base, the actual backbone of fascism, isn’t poor and working-class voters, but middle-class and affluent whites. Often self-employed, possessed of a retirement account and a home as a nest egg, this is the stratum taken in by Horatio Alger stories. They can envision playing the market well enough to become the next Trump. They haven’t won “big-league,” but they’ve won enough to be invested in the hierarchy they aspire to climb. If only America were made great again, they could become the haute 
bourgeoisie—the storied “1 percent.”
3

Trump’s most institutionally entrenched middle-class base includes police and Border Patrol unions, whom he promptly unleashed after his inauguration by allowing them free rein in enforcing his vague but terrifying immigration orders, and by appointing an attorney general who would call off investigations into troubled police departments. As wanton as their human-rights atrocities in the years leading up to the Trump era have been, law-enforcement agents are already making their earlier conduct look like a model of restraint. They are Trump’s most passionate supporters and make concrete his contempt for anyone not white, male, and rich.
4

Always and everywhere, this sort of petit bourgeois constitutes the core of fascism. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, his look at the German economy and ideology in the five years preceding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Wilhelm Reich argued that this was largely because of the petite bourgeoisie’s dependence on the patriarchal family unit, which he called the “central reactionary germ cell” of “the authoritarian state.” As the “heads” of their families, small-business-owning men often exploited their wives and children and enforced a patriarchal morality on them in the interest of protecting their somewhat vulnerable enterprises. This oriented the petite bourgeoisie structurally toward reactionary politics.
5

If the petit-bourgeois American suburbs embody a sexist hierarchy, they exist in order to enforce a racist one. In the mid-20th century, white northern and western urbanites faced a choice: Stay in the cities where Jim Crow was driving a “Great Migration” of millions of black people, or flee to the new suburban residential developments, complete with racist exclusionary charters. The Federal Housing Administration made the choice easy: Its policy redlined neighborhoods where black people were settling as having low “residential security,” thus making financial services inaccessible. In white-only suburban communities, however, the FHA was pleased to guarantee home mortgages. “There goes the neighborhood,” said millions, and fled.
6

Their material security bound up in the value of their real-estate assets, suburban white people had powerful incentives to keep their neighborhoods white. Just by their very proximity, black people would make their neighborhoods less desirable to future white home-buyers, thereby depreciating the value of the location. Location being the first rule of real estate, suburban homeowners nurtured racist attitudes, while deluding themselves that they weren’t excluding black people for reasons beyond their pocketbooks.
7

In recent decades, rising urban rents have been pushing lower-income people to more peripheral locations. As suburbia has grown poorer, the more affluent homeowners have fled for the even greener pastures of exurbia. Everywhere they turn, their economic anxiety 
follows them. 
8

And yet, “among people I talk to, ‘economic anxiety’ has become kind of a joke slogan,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, by way of explaining Trump’s rise. “I mean, there is real economic hardship. West Virginia is not a happy place. But…it’s really mostly about race.” Krugman and Amanpour’s seamless transition from “anxiety” to “hardship” betrays the assumption that haunted the entire discussion: that the only form of economic anxiety is deprivation. To the contrary, the form of economic anxiety propelling the racism of devoted Trump supporters is associated with paying taxes; with jealously guarding their modest savings; with stopping black people from moving nearby and diminishing the value of their property and thus the quality of their kids’ schools; and with preserving the patriarchal family structure that facilitates it all. 
9

o where do white working-class people fit 
in? When I use the phrase “working class” here, I mean “in and adjacent to poverty.” The first thing to understand about the political participation of these folks is that, as Bernie Sanders noted during the Democratic primaries, “poor people don’t vote”—not only because of their alienation from politics, but also because of voter suppression, a lack of education and transportation, and all the other practical ills of poverty. The lower you go down the economic ladder in America, the less likely an eligible voter is to go to the polls. 
10

Needless to say, there are many white working-class people fully on board with Trump’s program. Even the portion who merely tolerate his racism and xenophobia, so long as he delivers contracts to build pipelines, present a major political challenge. But as we consider, post-election, who belongs in the “resistance,” we are making a high-stakes claim if we regard working-class white people as so irredeemably bigoted that they should not be a part of it. Any political alignment capable of addressing the deep economic inequality that fortifies and exacerbates every other problem in American life will require working-class unity across racial, gender, and sexual categories, and around shared interests. While drawing working-class white people into this coalition requires a formidable political struggle, excluding them from it makes marshaling the numbers necessary to achieve and wield power impossible.
11

Whiteness itself confers a degree of property, as the legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris has described, and poor and working-class whites, who lack other forms of property, therefore have reason to try to protect it. This led W.E.B. Du Bois to observe: “So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.” America’s original sin has thereby created an enormous hurdle to organizing black and white workers together. In order to do so, white workers must be convinced to give up one form of privilege—the one that’s offered by the myth of racial superiority—in order to struggle alongside black workers. Solidarity, as a result, has been a monumental challenge, and white racism has often won the day. American history nevertheless offers us a variety of examples of workers choosing solidarity, often due to the leadership and perseverance of black workers and thinkers.
12

In 1894, an alliance between the poor white Populists and poor black Republican agricultural workers won control of the North Carolina legislature and started making reforms, including the appointment of black officials. Four years later, a white-supremacist election returned the legislature to the “planter class”–backed Democrats. Two days after the election, mobs of 
Democrat-aligned white people roamed black neighborhoods, shooting, killing, and burning.
13

During the Great Depression, Communists went to Birmingham, Alabama, to organize for economic rights among the unemployed working class; they initially thought white workers would step up, but predominantly black workers did, and they ended up organizing black and white together. Making a national cause of the 1931 Scottsboro case, in which nine black teens were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, the Communists formed a series of organizations. These included the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which prefigured the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and a sharecroppers’ union that at its peak boasted 12,000 members, including white ones. As commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor waged war on them in the 1940s, and though he was able to crush the Alabama Communist Party, he couldn’t crush the groundwork it had laid for the civil-rights revolution against Jim Crow—including Rosa Parks’s early political action. 
14

In the late 1960s, both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton assembled interracial coalitions of lower-income people. In 1967, when initiating his Poor People’s Campaign, King suggested that since “the economic question [is] fundamental for blacks and whites alike, ‘Power for Poor People’ would be much more appropriate than the slogan ‘Black Power.’” Hampton didn’t shy away from “Black Power,” but he paired it with other forms: “White Power to white people, Brown Power to brown people, Yellow Power to yellow people, Black Power to Black people, X power to those we left out and Panther Power to the Vanguard Party.” For their efforts, both were murdered, Hampton by the Chicago Police Department and the FBI, and King by a “working-class white” assassin that his family and associates maintain was a pawn in a conspiracy involving the Memphis Police Department, the FBI, and others. 
15

In all of these cases, the racism that destroyed these efforts did not come from the white working class, but from affluent whites and law enforcement. 
16

To be sure, the white people who participated in these coalitions were not free from suspicion of and contempt for black people, but they were not so incorrigibly hateful as to be blind to the important points of unity they shared. These working-class whites were able to see working-class black people as teammates.
17

This is key: People find ways to warm to those we perceive as teammates. Historian Judith Stein, for instance, cites the case of Jim Cole, who recalled of his time working in the CIO-organized Chicago yards: “I don’t care if the union don’t do another lick of work raisin’ our pay, or settling grievances about anything, I’ll always believe they done the greatest thing in the world gettin’ everybody who works in the yards together, and breakin’ up the hate and bad feelings that used to be held against the Negro.”
18

“Egalitarian racial sentiment,” Stein concludes, “is often the consequence, not the cause, of unionization.”
19

athologizing the white working class as inherently bigoted serves two functions: It discourages working-class organizing across racial lines, and it provides white liberals with a convenient scapegoat who, being white, can’t charge racism. As Malcolm X cautioned, “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” 
20

If you’re looking for Trump’s implacable support, Texas trailer parks and Kentucky cabins are the wrong places to find it. Fascism develops over hands of poker in furnished basements, over the grill by the backyard pool, over beers on the commuter-rail ride back from the ball game—and in police stations and squad cars. 
21

To overcome fascism, we will have to stop fetishizing the middle class and start uniting the working class. To that end, the Movement for Black Lives’ platform provides a blueprint for the emancipation not only of black people but the working class at large. With an emphasis on divesting from law enforcement and incarceration and investing in guaranteed human rights to income, housing, health care, education, and a healthy environment, the agenda provides a broad umbrella that can accommodate the visions driving several of our recent period’s social movements: Labor, environmental, peace, and immigration groups, among many others, have already endorsed it.
22

As the beneficiaries of systemic racism, white people have a special obligation to organize toward the realization of this program, and to acknowledge that black people’s reluctance to work with those who hold bigoted attitudes is understandable and that the need for independent black organizing is pressing. Still, the only political force capable of advancing the Movement for Black Lives’ agenda will be rooted in the shared interests of the working class. The failure to follow the lead of Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King and engage working-class white people in the fight for socialism and black liberation will only continue to undermine that struggle and sacrifice those same people to the cul-de-sac brownshirts and the revolting demagogue at their helm.23

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece misidentified the location of Daily Kos’s office. Though the office was once in Berkeley, it is now in Oakland. The text has been corrected.

Let’s get rid of private housing.

Plenty of time and effort have lately gone into analyzing a host of related crises—homelessness, unaffordable urban real estate, devastating gentrification, and a housing bubble whose burst landed us in the Great Recession. But the explanations tend to be incomplete, the attributions shortsighted, and the policies rearguard. For every liberal who insists that deregulating zoning laws will curb skyrocketing urban housing prices, there’s a conservative who blames the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act for the housing bubble, and none of them is anywhere near the mark.

The true culprit is so deeply embedded in American notions of wealth, rights, and property that we cannot see it for the terrible economy policy it is: private housing. Real estate as a store of private wealth is the rotten tree that sprouts these diseased branches, and the solution is to quit pruning twigs and chop the sucker down.

I’ll propose some models and policies that can do the trick, but first—what is private housing, exactly?

First off, it is mostly land. That is, real estate is the most valuable asset form in the United States, and the majority of that value is not that of the building itself, which depreciates until it requires renovation, but of the “unimproved” land it sits on—the location. Imagine a skyscraper filled with sumptuous luxury condominiums, located in the center of Antarctica: However many millions had gone into its cutting-edge furnishings, without a community (parks, transit options, schools, shops, etc.) around to situate it in a desirable location, that building would be worthless as a real-estate investment. These community resources are reflected in what is commonly called “land value,” but is more precisely the price of the location. Rather than flowing to the community that created it, however, it is captured by individual real-estate owners.

More fundamentally, though, what we call private housing is actually public land that government has set aside for private purposes. Land, save the bits beneath one’s feet, can’t be “possessed,” as a phone or a shirt can. What a “land owner” possesses is a deed—a voucher one may redeem with the government to marshal violence (through policing) to exclude all competing claimants. The government established this location-exclusion program, designating pieces of nature as being solely for the use of the deed holders, and devoting its violent capabilities to enforcing that designation. In the 19th century, the government enacted homesteading laws to allow frontier settlers to claim indigenous lands as their own. If those deeds were challenged, the federal government sent troops to back them up. Or look at the 20th century, when the government funded highways and commuter transit—the Federal Housing Administration extended loan guarantees to new housing developments in order to create a massive suburban private-housing stock. The entire apparatus by which housing is privately “owned” is created by the government’s decisions to subsidize or protect certain interests.

Ostensibly, the government pursues the public interest, but treating real estate as privately owned wealth, as a financial asset, has devastating public effects. On a grand scale, treating land as an asset allows speculators to create bubbles large enough to threaten global economic collapse. The housing bubble—really a land bubble—of the last decade bid the price of land up so high, concocting such dangerous “complex financial instruments” to turn out so many sub-prime mortgages, that the burst was enough to sink some of the world’s most profitable firms, plunge us into the Great Recession, extinguish the majority of all black wealth in the United States, bankrupt pension funds worldwide, and destroy the governments of Greece, Iceland, and other nations.

Closer to home, private ownership of land underlies racist segregation. The aforementioned FHA policy, for instance, designed to protect homeowners’ access to gains in their houses’ location value, provided white people with the incentive to take their capital and flee urban centers for sprawling exurban developments, there to adopt racial exclusivity covenants, in order to prevent black people from moving in and undermining the location price—thus, the plot of A Raisin in the Sun. In the resulting “inner city,” which the public Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “red-lined” on its residential security maps, black people who were locked out of “middle-class” neighborhoods were conscripted to capital-starved, decaying ghettos, where parasitic slumlords reigned supreme.

Finally, developers have an incentive to snap up urban land and then leave it vacant until it appreciates in value, driven by community development around it, and then sell it. Meanwhile, residents have to live with the social repercussions of a community riddled with vacant lots.

What to do?

There are a few ways to turn land and housing stock toward the public good.

An exclusion fee

For a start, everyone should be compensated for their exclusion from passage over certain locations on the earth. To do this, we ought to levy an exclusion fee whereby the location price of the property in question would be returned to its rightful recipient, the community. As long as land value is socially created and land ownership is duty-free, a theft is occurring.

The idea for such a fee was most famously advocated by political economist Henry George in his book Progress and Poverty, under the name “single tax” or “land-value tax.” Several municipalities in George’s native Pennsylvania have a version of it: a two-tiered property tax, wherein the assessed value of the location is taxed at a higher rate than the assessed value of the building. For best results, 100 percent of the location price should be confiscated and invested in a sovereign wealth fund, the way Alaska’s oil royalties are. That fund could either pay out universal dividends, the way the Alaska Permanent Fund does, or provide the public with a huge pool of resources with which to invest in public institutions. How huge? Michael Hudson estimates that the land value of New York City alone is greater than the total combined worth of the entire country’s productive infrastructure.

An exclusion fee effectively makes the land public, leaving the “owners” of the buildings without a way to collect more in rental income than the building, distinct from the land, is worth.

Community land trusts

But why endow private profit-motivated interests control over construction at all? There is no reason to suspect that a given property-development capitalist should be more capable of determining for a community what optimally desirable new buildings to produce than the community itself is. Luckily, there is an entity capable of turning development over to the most concerned parties: nonprofit community land trusts, their boards typically composed at least one-third of residents, take land off the market, and lease homes long-term to residents at below-market rates, retaining the majority of the home equity gained over time.

The predominantly black and Latino residents of the Dudley Street area of Roxbury, one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, got Boston city officials to take the unprecedented step of granting the power of eminent domain to the community for more than 1,300 parcels of abandoned land. With this tract, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) established a community land trust that has democratically directed a renovation project resulting in hundreds of affordable-housing units and other public spaces, among them community centers, new schools, a community greenhouse, parks, and playgrounds.

While the rest of Boston has lately struggled with a blight of post-bubble vacancies, followed by a massive wave of turn-overs due to rising rents, residents of DSNI’s land trust maintained a stable community. Most of the first batch of houses sold on the trust still contain their initial owners, who are passing them on to their children. “If you’re looking to buy a house, flip it, and speculate elsewhere,” says Tony Hernandez, longtime resident and director of operations for the land trust, “you’d better move on, because that’s not what this is intended for.”

Public housing

Ultimately, though, the best antidote to private housing is public housing. Unfortunately, the result of American city planners’ contempt for poor and especially black people is clear: squalid conditions, severe architecture, and placement of public housing in neighborhoods starved for educational, healthcare, and other crucial resources. It is common in the United States to suppose that these conditions are a byproduct of cultural defects particular to black and other poor people. As community organizer Karen Narefsky writes, “While few would blame potholed roads on the drivers who use them, a great effort has been made to attribute the degeneration of public housing in the US to public housing residents themselves.”

But public housing needn’t be this way, as the Vienna model attests. Owing to its erstwhile socialist government (“Red Vienna,” 1918–34), the City of Vienna is the largest landowner in all of Austria. On its land, the city government provides comfortable housing (whose units might be high-end condos in the United States) not just to poor and working-class people but to virtually half the city. Public housing accounts for more than 13 times the housing overseen by the affordable-housing agency of Philadelphia, a city with a comparable population size. The public-housing system established Vienna’s first libraries, and many of its kindergartens, daycare centers, dental clinics, and parks. “These places are incredible,” architectural historian William Menking is quoted as saying. “There are swimming pools and saunas and bicycle parking.”

Moreover, while a private capitalist-driven housing system must prioritize cost over all other considerations, the Vienna model situates expense amid three other equally weighted factors: architectural quality, environmental performance, and social sustainability. This forecloses, if the expression can be excused, the possibility of the sort of ghettoization that has been endemic in US public-housing programs. To emulate the Vienna model here, significant federal funding should be provided to municipalities to buy land (or claim it by eminent domain), and build gigantic stocks of public housing, with a specific emphasis on environmental soundness, and diversity of class and ethnic background.

* * *

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative transformed more than 32 acres of land in Boston from commodity to community. Regarding how it was able to perform this transformation, and how it has successfully resisted an economic system that greedily militates for land to be privatized, Eliza Parad, a DSNI community organizer, cites “the political power this community, a majority community of color, has built since the 1970s.” As the lives of the Dudley Street neighbors testify, land removed from the private market, de-commodified, and placed under the ownership and management of the people who live there is land that creates and renews its own political constituency.

Likewise, the Vienna model of public and publicly managed housing is politically insulated, because it encompasses nearly half the city. In US cities, the residents of public-housing projects constitute a small minority of easily marginalized and maligned poor people, ill-equipped to do battle with landed interests. Thus, Baltimore offers millions in tax breaks to developers to buy up the public housing stock, while the working-class Viennese residents of Karl Marx Court enjoy their saunas.

Gentrification, home-mortgage bubbles, homelessness, skyrocketing rent—these are not facts of nature. They are the outcomes of the policies that consign the basic human need of location to the whims of rent-obsessed landlords and chop-licking speculators looking for an easy flip. Private land policies are as evil today as they were almost 4 centuries ago when the Pilgrims near Bridgewater, Massachusetts, arrested Wampanoag people for hunting on a tract of land after the Pilgrims had “purchased” it. “What is this you call property?” the sachem, Massasoit, argued on that occasion. “It cannot be the earth, for the land is our Mother…. everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How then can one man say it belongs to him only?” There was no satisfactory retort then, and there isn’t one now.

We are in the midst of a movement to upend white supremacy. Thousands of people across the country, acting in response to the unpunished killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Michael Brown and so many more unarmed black people who have lost their lives to police or vigilante violence, have taken to the streets to proclaim that “black lives matter.” While this is a powerful proclamation all its own, it can now be strengthened by a vision of what it will take to make those lives matter in America.

In 1966, along with A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and other organizers and scholars, Martin Luther King Jr. released the now all-but-forgotten Freedom Budget for All Americans, which included full employment, universal healthcare and good housing for all. “The Freedom Budget is essential if the Negro people are to make further progress,” he wrote. “It is essential if we are to maintain social peace. It is a political necessity.” Dr. King came to espouse this view toward the end of his life, acknowledging that civil and voting rights were a critical but merely partial victory in the struggle for complete equality.

King’s vision, needless to say, was never realized. This is why we propose that, in addition to calls for police reform, it is vital for the defeat of the racist system that the #BlackLivesMatter movement advance an economic program. We cannot undo racism in America without confronting our country’s history of economically exploiting black Americans. Demands from Ferguson Action and other groups include full employment, and this foundational item is one that can and should be fleshed out, as we hope to do here.

Before laying out our proposals, we should clarify why, historically, eliminating racism requires an economic program. America’s story is one of economic exploitation driving the creation and maintenance of racism over time. The inception of our country’s economic system condemned black people to an underclass for a practical rather than bigoted reason: the exploitation of African labor. Imported Africans were prevented by customs and language barriers from entering into contracts, and unlike the indigenous population, their lack of familiarity with the terrain prevented them from running away from their slavers. To morally justify an economy dependent on oppression, in a nation newly founded on the rights of men to freedom, it was necessary to socially construct a biological fiction called race, one that deemed some people subhuman, mere property. “During the revolutionary era,” Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields write in their book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, “people who favored slavery and people who opposed it collaborated in identifying the racial incapacity of Afro-Americans as the explanation for enslavement.” White citizens, making their fortunes and proving their social standing through the ownership of African persons, codified the idea of race into law. Those of African origin would come to form the lowest class of American life, while people of Western European origin were free to extract labor and wealth from their bodies. Material inequality, in other words, preceded the racist rationale.

This didn’t change with Emancipation. The convict-leasing system, the lynching of black business owners, and the razing of economically independent black towns by White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan made it impossible for the former slaves to flourish. After Reconstruction, the ideology of race that erected Jim Crow society was crucial for maintaining class divisions among whites. As the Fieldses write, “One group of white people outranked the other precisely because it was in a position to oppress and exploit black people.” Thus, through the daily experience of this dynamic, “the creed of white supremacy” was bolstered, in the words of the historian C. Vann Woodward, “in the bosom of a white man working for a black man’s wages.”

As a result, black Americans continued to experience racist violence, both physical and economic, and no corrective policy prescriptions were forthcoming. In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, notes that the progressive movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advocated increased government resources for poor immigrant groups, while continuing to attribute black poverty to the alleged cultural and moral deficiencies of African-Americans. This legacy haunts us today in every new injunction that ending racism depends on young black people wearing belts. And it lives in the widespread rejection of the obvious fact that drug abuse, violence and educational failure don’t breed poverty; poverty breeds them. The large-scale relegation of black Americans to poverty is the essential “race” problem.

In the postwar boom, as Ta-Nehisi Coates details in “The Case for Reparations,” his article for The Atlantic, black people were largely locked out of homeownership, the largest driver of the wealth gap in modern America, and further housing discrimination meant that black people were also not allowed to attend the schools offering the highest-quality education—another factor in gaining well-paid jobs. The “New Jim Crow” of mass incarceration via the “war on drugs” has replaced vagrancy laws and convict leasing, but with similar results: robbing large numbers of black people of economic opportunities while also denying them access to federal programs aimed at alleviating poverty. A person with a felony record is denied access to food stamps, welfare and public housing. And with no wealth to speak of in a country where political participation is predicated on dollars and cents, black Americans continue to lack political representation; the repercussions include an absence of choice in who is speaking for them in Congress and in which mayor or police chief has jurisdiction over their neighborhood. Inadequate economic security is literally a life-and-death matter for black Americans.

It is vital for the defeat of racism that the #BlackLivesMatter movement shut down the economic engines propelling the continuous reinforcement of white supremacy. Only through the redress of black America’s economic grievances (the pronounced disparities in terms of income, wealth, and community resources like housing, healthcare and education) can we begin building a just society.

1. True Full Employment

Nothing would do more to transform the current political economy than what is at the core of the Freedom Budget and mentioned in the Ferguson Action demands: a policy of full employment.

What we mean by that phrase—an “involuntary unemployment rate” of 0 percent—differs from what mainstream economists mean, even those who nominally support it. By “full employment,” they usually mean nearly full employment. During the most recent period of “full employment” (the also dubiously named “Clinton economic boom”), the unemployment rate never dipped below 3.8 percent. However powerful the boom, millions of people in certain corners of the economy were relegated to a permanent state of bust. The people deepest in those corners, the least employed people in the United States, are teenage black high-school dropouts from poor families, on whom is currently imposed the conscience-rattling unemployment rate of 95 percent.

It is clear that we require more than the conventional policies for boosting job growth if we are to meet the demand for full employment. Luckily, there are two policies up to the task: a federally funded job guarantee and a universal basic income that is unattached to employment. By offering employment as a guaranteed right, the federal government could direct capital to the communities where it is most desperately needed, while employing those communities themselves to do the work needed to improve their own quality of life: cleaning and replacing those oft-decried broken windows, filling potholes, caring for the children of working parents and for the elderly, clearing slum housing and replacing it with decent housing. By paying a basic living wage and normal benefits for a federal employee, the program would effectively set a minimum wage and standard of treatment for private-sector employment. In boom times, when there is danger of inflation, the program and its budget would automatically shrink, and during downturns, when inflation is extremely unlikely, it would grow to fill the gap.

This program could and should be paired with a universal basic income, which Dr. King called “the simplest…and most effective” approach to eliminating poverty, citing three essential virtues of the program. First, poor people, their consumption directly subsidized, will no longer want for basic comforts. Second, the political position of the marginalized would grow stronger: “Negroes,” King wrote, “will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.” Finally, King highlighted the “host of positive psychological changes” that universal material security would yield: “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands…. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.” This psychological relaxation is the direct negation of the anxiety and terror that persistently accompany black American life.

A twofold full-employment program would mightily advance the fight against mass incarceration and racist policing. Guaranteeing access to employment and income would also reduce prison recidivism. Employing people to handle “broken windows” would transform the trappings of poverty from an excuse for police harassment to paid community work. And millions of people whose livelihoods are currently dependent on an ever-expanding prison-industrial complex would be able to secure employment and income elsewhere, allowing stronger working-class organizing for a rollback of the prison state. Currently, prison closures have devastating effects on the communities for which these institutions act as economic anchors.

2. A Tax Overhaul

In the current economy, we tax labor and industry, which suppresses employment and offshores profit, and we leave the real-estate sector mostly untaxed, encouraging the accumulation of real-estate fortunes. Real-estate property includes not just buildings but, crucially, the land upon which they’re situated. The buildings themselves—plumbing, woodwork, etc.—deteriorate over time until they require refurbishing, so the speculative commodity in real estate, the investment that stands a chance of appreciating in value over time, is really just land. Speculation in the land market has instituted a great deal of the structural racism that characterizes white supremacy today.

The postwar impetus to maintain segregationist housing policies was the protection of property value. When millions of Southern-born blacks swept into Northern cities, millions of whites fled for new suburban residential developments, taking their capital with them and driving down the land value in black areas. White home buyers (who make up the vast majority of home buyers nationally), with their wealth bound up in real estate, wouldn’t have black people depreciating it with their proximity. Moreover, the Federal Housing Administration, in a policy designed to protect this access to landed wealth, was more likely to guarantee mortgages in communities that adopted racially exclusive charters. This policy “redlined” neighborhoods with low “residential security,” or land value, depriving black neighborhoods of access to financial  services for decades.

The appreciation of land value was at the heart of Wall Street’s recent mortgage bubble and its racist predatory lending, by which 53 percent of all black wealth was destroyed. “Mortgage investors,” meaning land-market speculators, would buy up houses and sell them once the land value had increased, making off with the gain. To keep prices rising, the real-estate/financial complex offloaded garbage loans on unsuspecting black families, who have suffered a massive wave of foreclosures in the years since the crash.

Education is also linked to land value. Pegging school resources to property taxes undermines equality from two directions: well-to-do people are driven to move into ever more expensive neighborhoods for fear that their kids will be conscripted into inferior schools (thereby further concentrating education funding), while schools in poor areas degrade as wealth flees, driving down land value in the already underserved area.

Keeping land untaxed also gives landowners an incentive not to develop properties in poor areas, since it’s thereby free to hang onto an undeveloped plot until white people decide that the neighborhood is “up-and-coming” and bid up the land value. In the short term, this leads to abandoned buildings and vacant lots—that is, to slums plagued with “broken windows.” In the long term, it has a catastrophic effect on communities: while these plots of land remain undeveloped, our tax system holds down the housing supply at a time when a severe urban housing shortage has city land prices skyrocketing. And this, in turn, fuels a community-bulldozing wave of gentrification whose primary beneficiaries are the land-speculating interests.

To stop those interests, we must shift from taxing labor and toward taxing monopoly and land rents. The American political economist Henry George, whom King cited in his economic advocacy, famously proposed a 100 percent land-value tax as the only tax capable of ensuring equality amid economic development. As the board game Monopoly (invented by George devotees) makes clear, even when everyone starts with equal money, private rent extraction inevitably directs all funds into a few hands. George saw taxing the full rental value of land as the only way to develop an economy equitably—that is to say, without producing poverty constantly. And several local jurisdictions in George’s native Pennsylvania tax land, albeit not at 100 percent. No human created the land, and so no one—not an absentee slumlord, not Goldman Sachs—should be extracting its value from the people who live on it.

3. Baby Bonds

In the end, black people in poor areas will always be vulnerable to disastrous community disruption as long as white people control the vast majority of wealth. It is wealth (the stock of overall resources someone controls), rather than income (the inflow someone receives over a year), that ensures true economic security—waiving the income a job provides is less intimidating to a person with independent wealth. As bad as income inequality is in the United States, wealth inequality is even worse, as those born rich get richer and those born poor stay that way. As long as white people can take advantage of lopsided bargaining positions to outbid black people for land use, the land remains whites’ to claim and distribute. The only true and permanent way to alleviate the many ills detailed here is to close the racial wealth gap.

The political challenges to implementing a reparations program—which we support—were daunting from the outset and are now possibly prohibitive. To address this dilemma, Duke University’s William A. Darity Jr. and the New School’s Darrick Hamilton have proposed another innovative program that they estimate would close the wealth gap within a few generations. Even those who cannot concede our premise—that black people have been condemned to poverty by public policy, not by their own lack of ambition and discipline—will surely agree that no newborn child is to blame for his or her impoverished condition, and that each one deserves a fair chance at leading a fulfilling and comfortable life. Darity and Hamilton have thus suggested a “Baby Bond” program aimed at these newborns. Everyone born into a “wealth-poor” family (any family below the median net-wealth position) would be granted a trust fund at birth that would mature when the person reaches 18, whereupon the grantee would obtain access to the fund. The further below median the family is, the larger the fund the infant would receive, such that the lowest quartile would receive a $50,000 or $60,000 bond. Note that although this program is not limited to the descendants of black slaves, its effect is quite similar to the one desired from a reparations program: eliminating the wealth advantage that white Americans command over their black countrymen.

* * *

Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields highlight law professor Derrick Bell’s 1990 essay “After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Post-Racial Epoch,” in which the writer imagines space aliens purchasing all the black people from the United States, whereupon “post-racial America” must truly confront, “straightforwardly, for the first time…the problem of who gets what part of the nation’s wealth, and why.” With white supremacy gone as an organizing principle for social relations, it becomes clear that resource distribution was the question all along. Implementing a program of guaranteed employment and income, a taxation policy targeting monopoly and land rents, and a system of wealth-equalizing baby bonds would eliminate material insecurity for all people—blacks, whites and others—thereby eliminating white supremacy’s reason for existence.

These policies may seem like a long shot in the current political environment. But if the #BlackLivesMatter movement continues to increase its political power, it can channel support from Americans who already favor more equitable wealth distribution into a truly transformative program. It seems to us that the thrilling movement shutting down transit and commerce operations has the power not just to get more civil-rights reforms, but to transform the foundation of our society. It has the power to make black lives be treated as though they finally, truly matter.

If Bill de Blasio’s landslide win is any indication, it’s clear that liberals—and New Yorkers in general—deplore Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and his controversial stop-and-frisk policy. So it was no surprise that when he went to Brown University on October 29, his appearance generated a certain amount of buzz. What was unusual was that, after about half an hour of booing and heckling from the audience of students and members of the public, Kelly and the Brown administration were forced to cancel the talk. Was this “shoutdown” an abrogation of free speech or a necessary moment of speaking truth to power? The Nation asked writers Rania Khalek, Richard Yeselson, Jesse A. Myerson and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt to weigh in.

‘Racism Is Not For Debate,’ Rania Khalek

During his reign as NYPD police commissioner, Ray Kelly has taken suppression policing of black, brown and Muslim bodies to a whole new, record-setting level. So when Brown University students heckled him off stage as he attempted to give a lecture on “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City,” I thought, good riddance! It’s about damn time that bigot face his critics.

After all, this is the same man who said to state officials that his purpose as the overseer of stop and frisk is to “instill fear” in black and Latino men “every time that they [leave] their homes.” Meanwhile, he has the audacity to claim publicly that his racist policies are saving the lives of young men of color. He’s also the architect of a massive spying apparatus on Muslim communities that rivals the FBI at its COINTELPRO finest. Given that Kelly’s policies have long suppressed voices and bodies of color across New York City, it seemed fitting that students from and speaking up for those communities managed to successfully drown him out.

While I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, I was stunned to see several self-proclaimed liberals and progressives express outrage not at Brown’s embrace of a racist public figure but at the students who confronted him.

Peter Beinart of The Daily Beast went so far as to label the student protesters “fascist” for acting in a “totalitarian spirit” that has apparently spread to campuses across the country as part of some vast conspiracy to deny controversial speakers (i.e., powerful figures who happen to be racists and/or war criminals, like Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Beinart specifically references) their right to free speech.

It’s quite revealing that this same rhetoric is almost never applied to the racists and war criminals who are temporarily inconvenienced by protesters. I don’t recall, for example, anyone in the mainstream describing the NYPD’s excessive force against Occupy Wall Street protesters or their seemingly endless killings of unarmed people of color in such stark terms.

There’s also a tendency among critics to promote a false equivalence between the student protesters and Ray Kelly, a warped logic that completely ignores the power imbalance of lecturer versus audience, of influential public official versus proletariat. People in positions of power have huge platforms that typically shield them from their detractors, leaving those impacted by their policies with little recourse for their grievances.

Just as Kelly has a right to free expression, so too do the students who pay tuition to the school he was paid to speak at. Brown students had a rare opportunity to confront New York City’s finest bigot, and they took it. Sure, they weren’t polite about it. But as one protester shouted, “Racism is not for debate.”

‘The Problem With Moral Monsters,’ Richard Yeselson

The West German student left of the late ’60s—opposed to the war in Vietnam and fearful that the government’s “emergency” legislation could be the first step leading to a recurrence of fascism—had grown impatient with the elderly professor and his pedantic distinctions between street propaganda and rigorous political analysis. Students heckled and shouted down his lectures, called him a capitalist apologist and despised his weak-willed opposition to their takeover of publishing houses and universities. That this stale academic had publicly called for a general strike of West Germany’s powerful unions in response to the Emergency Act won him no acclaim. Once, several young women even rushed his podium, showered him with rose pedals, exposed their breasts to him and mockingly attempted to kiss him. The old man fled in shame.

By February 1969, the professor was at wit’s end. Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School sociologist and philosopher, wrote to his great friend, the modernist genius Samuel Beckett, and mused, “The feeling of suddenly being attacked as a reactionary comes as something of a surprise. But perhaps you too have had the same experience in the meantime.” Beckett, whose nonpolitical plays and novels belied his participation in the French Resistance against the Nazis during the Second World War, remarked about the student militants, “Was ever such rightness joined to such foolishness?” Until he died of a heart attack just a few months later, Adorno was a man who had dedicated his life to the task of imagining an emancipatory left, “one in which people could be different without fear,” as he wrote in 1945, in the shadow of the barbarism of Auschwitz and the Gulag and the destructive dawn of the nuclear age.

This Marxist intellectual wouldn’t, I suppose, seem to have much in common with New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who his antagonists tell us is a racist, and thus needn’t be heard, or, conveniently enough, rebutted either. If you know what you know, why bother to even to argue with those you disagree with? They’re wrong; you’re right—case closed.

As a pragmatic intellectual inquiry, this is an exercise in epistemic closure little better than those that Rush Limbaugh leads every afternoon on your AM dial. If you don’t engage the arguments you really hate, and instead scream them into silence, you can’t refine and improve your own arguments, which make it harder to gain more adherents to your cause. As a political strategy for leftist struggle, feeling victorious after forcing an odious guest speaker to retreat to his hotel room is kind of like thinking that you’re ready for Wimbledon because you just kicked a 9-year-old’s ass, 6-0, 6-0. By contrast, free speech is the friend of leftist dissent, not its enemy. It’s why the very first major campus fight of the ’60s, at Berkeley, was called the Free Speech Movement—the cause and the use of speech was the lever that enabled students to fight the university administration. Leftists may have wiped out Ray Kelly last week, but, over time, suppressing speech is a game that universities, with aid from the state and augmented in the private workplace, play much better than students do.

You might imagine that you could never be in the position of a racist authoritarian purveyor of state violence like Ray Kelly—he’s a top minion of the ruling class, and you permanently fight the power. But that is another way of saying you don’t think you’ll ever have the power and influence to command the podium yourself, that you are permanently a subaltern. Because the hegemonic discourse unequally assigns Kelly many more opportunities than his adversaries, it’s best to throw away one of your own opportunities to expose his ideas as pernicious—as long as you take him down with you. Just desserts.

But then consider Adorno: at the end of his life, he can’t believe that he is being called a “reactionary.” Theodor Adorno, one of the most important leftist thinkers in the history of the twentieth century! In the late sixties, he was regularly shouted down as if he were no better than… Ray Kelly. That’s the trouble with making a group decision to prevent an alleged moral monster from speaking, rather than upholding the democratic norm that speakers—whatever their politics—speak, and then other speakers (that’s you) vigorously respond to their terrible speech with better speech, more convincing and humane speech. Who knows? The next time, or the time after that, another group may decide that you’re the moral monster. And that group might not even come from the right. I understand—how absurd: Who could be more radical, more militant than you?

That’s what Theodor Adorno thought, too. And you’re no Theodor Adorno.

‘No Other Avenues,’ Jesse A. Myerson

The available avenues for redress against a ruthless paramilitary commandant like Ray Kelly are extremely slim in the United States. As is clear from the gaping dearth of prosecutions on Wall Street and many-times-over war criminal Henry Kissinger’s open invitation to advise presidents on foreign policy, this country’s propensity to treat its elites, however nefarious, with polite deference ensures that future villains will develop their programs undeterred by any anxiety.

To be sure, New York’s Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio is likely to replace Commissioner Kelly. But as important as that gesture may be, it has nothing to do with holding Kelly responsible for the abuses of his tenure. To the contrary, Kelly is highly enough regarded in the law-enforcement world right now to be floated as a possible secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. No matter who Bill de Blasio puts in charge of the NYPD, Ray Kelly is poised to go on to another elite position, probably one that offers a superior salary and just as much influence as his current one.

Shouting down a speaker is clearly not the optimal exercise of democracy. In the democratic utopia for which we perennially strive, good faith debate would always carry the day. And if the means existed to impose significant consequences on Ray Kelly for the abuses of his tenure as commissioner of the largest municipal police force in the country, I would gladly advocate those means over shouting.

But those means do not exist. The way things go in this country, Ray Kelly will never be held to account for the un-debatably authoritarian police state he has supervised. No amount of leafleting outside a Ray Kelly speech, or respectfully incisive questioning in the Q&A section thereafter can hold Kelly to account for the millions his regime stopped, frisked, humiliated and spied on. And leafleting or questioning could never garner the amount of media attention that the “shoutdown” at Brown has. Under these circumstances, the only power therefore afforded to these students to enact a modicum of accountability is the power to make it known that Ray Kelly and others like him cannot expect to speak at Brown University and be treated with respect. It’s not much, but it’s something.

In my assessment, more is gained than is lost by the breach in decorum which Rich Yeselson has worked himself into a fury condemning—going so far as to call me and others who smile on the protest “authoritarian” on Twitter (in defense of Ray Kelly!). Yeselson warns of the corrosive effect that this sort of shouting has on “a democratic culture.” The existence of such a culture is dubious to begin with. Furthermore, agreeing to a public speaking engagement necessarily implies bearing the risk of being shouted down. People like Ray Kelly, whose careers consist of the wielding of violent power over an entire population, ought not to have such tender feelings that they can’t cope with this sort of reception.

Bearing in mind and heart every kid from my neighborhood who has ever wanted to shout back at one of New York’s Finest but has contained his frustration for fear of the jail cell his passions would land him in, I applaud the uncouth, impolite, disrespectful Brown students who gave that bigot a moment’s discomfort.

‘Campus Leftists, Use Your Words,’ Katha Pollitt

What did shouting down Ray Kelly achieve? What did it win for campus organizers and the larger movement against aggressive policing in black communities? Why was it a better idea than informational picketing, holding a teach-in or other counter event, campaigning for a speaker of one’s own, letting Kelly speak and questioning him sharply in the Q-and-A portion of the evening? An activist could have asked a question (many questions!) that put him on the spot, that got him off his talking points and led him into a gaffe that would have been great publicity against stop-and-frisk. Shouting him down was brawn over brains—and that was bound to go over poorly on a campus full of people who value discussion, debate and ideas and pride themselves on liberal values of open-mindedness and fairness. Maybe the point was to show strength, but actually it showed weakness: it suggests (wrongly) that leftists didn’t have good arguments, so bluster would have to do.

More important, shouting Kelly down shows lack of respect for the audience and for the larger—much larger—number of people who had never given stop-and-frisk much thought. By shutting down the event, activists successfully threw their weight around—all 100 or so of them—but did they persuade anyone that stop-and-frisk was a bad, racist policy? Did they build support for their larger politics and their movement? I don’t think so. I think the only minds that changed that night were of people who felt bewildered and irritated by being prevented from hearing Kelly speak by a bunch of screamers and now think leftists are cynical bullies who use and abandon free-speech arguments as it suits them.

It’s fashionable on the left to mock liberalism as weak tea—and sometimes it is. But you know what is getting rid of stop-and-frisk? Liberalism. A major force in the campaign against stop-and-frisk was the NYCLU, which carries the banner of free speech for all. And Bill de Blasio, who just won the mayoral election by a landslide, has pledged to get rid of the policy and Ray Kelly too. Those victories were not won by a handful of student radicals who stepped in with last-minute theatrics. They were won by people who spent years building a legal case and mobilizing popular support for change.

Last point: even if you don’t believe in an abstract right to free expression (bourgeois!), it’s the best protection going for the left. How will campus leftists argue for their right to present unpopular speakers if, on some future occasion which will surely come, conservative students shout them down? What goes around comes around, and if it all comes down to who shouts loudest, what makes leftists think their voices won’t be the ones drowned out?

The evening is rainy and quite warm, which is disconcerting since it is almost December. A hundred or so people gather on the east side of what we may safely call Zuccotti Park, for their General Assembly.

Nothing about the park feels like Liberty Plaza anymore. Every inch of the perimeter, for instance, is lined with metal barricades, just inside which stand private security guards, husky and rude, dressed in all black, apart from their yellow vests. A massive Christmas tree has been set up in the park and barricaded off. Besides the few protesters, that’s who’s here. The guards and their barricades.

There’s no kitchen, no library, no medical tent, no media center. There is no drum circle, no sign-painting station, no welcome table on Broadway, no altar around the meditation tree in the northwest corner. There are only about a hundred people, deliberating democratic minutiae, trying to get through a too-big agenda, packed with yesterday’s unattended business.

This would be hard enough to do without the people who keep loudly interrupting the meeting. But every meeting I’ve recently attended—and from what I gather, every recent meeting I have not—has been brought to a grinding halt, the basic ability to debate and consent to proposals crippled by a determined few who will not to let things proceed until their issues are addressed. This is the reason for the backed-up business. The people shouting about their needs over the debate.

It’s clear that the primary issue afflicting Occupy right now is the lack of an occupation. In the month since the New York Police Department violently forced the occupiers out of Zuccotti, the people whose residence was Liberty Plaza Park have nowhere to go. Some of them had previously been homeless. Others left their homes to join the movement. But deprived of the food station, the medical tent, the things that once fulfilled their needs for basic survival, they have rapidly lost faith in Occupy Wall Street’s much-vaunted democratic process to provide the supportive community that once existed here.

The Occupy activists have tried to help find shelter for those left homeless by the eviction, sending out urgent bulletins almost nightly to arrange accommodations. Some have been sleeping at a shelter in Far Rockaway, some in churches in Harlem and on the Upper West Side. As with national numbers on the homeless, it is difficult to tell exactly how many occupiers need housing, but it is surely in the hundreds. These include not just experienced urban survivalists like Ghengis Khalid Muhammed, or GKM, who works with the support organization Picture the Homeless, which helps people find food stamps and soup kitchens, but also people who have no idea how to live on the streets and who are freezing, starving and unable to get MetroCards to travel to places where shelter may or may not be available. Lauren, of Occupy’s Housing Committee, tells me that two pregnant women have so far been turned away from churches.

The activist core of the occupation—the people who met over the summer in Tompkins Square Park, who set up and continue to participate in working groups and who spend their days in meetings—sees this as an Empire Strikes Back moment, taking the opportunity to plan actions and events for the winter. In the atrium at 60 Wall Street and in the Occupied Office at 50 Broadway, they are planning important things, chiefly the continuation of the Occupy Our Homes foreclosure resistance project that kicked off last week. They have their eye on the Jedi’s return.

There is nobility in responding to ones own homelessness by working hard that everyone else might have a home. But elsewhere the current lack of clarity—about what to do right now—is causing tensions to bubble over. Absent a park to keep clean, for instance, what is the function of the Sanitation Working Group? Or Medical or Comfort, for that matter? The fracturing of Occupy Wall Street from its camp has created two distinct populations: the activists—planning for the future—and the occupiers—confronting the current reality.

The people who don’t drink tea in a comfy office space but stand out in the rain, says Chris, 50, of Long Island, are being excluded from the movement. “I know what an occupier looks like. I slept here. See him? He slept here. That guy slept here, that guy slept here, that guy slept here. And then this GA starts and this facilitation team shows up with an agenda already planned out. Who are these people? Where did they come from?”

Chris, who is at least 6’6″ and of very imposing build, does not express his displeasure with the prescribed downward-waggling fingers or even by attempting to generate consensus for a proposal. “WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?” he shouts. “FUCK THIS! FUCK THIS! FUCK THIS! I DON’T FUCKING KNOW YOU!”

The diminished attendance at the GA these days is insufficient to compete sonically with such outbursts. Especially since Chris is not alone. Another now-homeless occupier, who walks with a mutt and has tattoos on every inch of his face, does not recognize the authority of the facilitation committee to hold General Assemblies at all. He’ll go a little deeper into democratic theory than Chris, but eventually, it comes back to not having a place to stay. “I can’t go into a church,” he tells me. “I got my dog.”

An occupier named Nan was at Zuccotti Park at the start of Occupy Wall Street. She worked in the kitchen and has gone to meetings since the beginning. But since the eviction, her contrarianism has turned to outright, wholesale obstructionism, repeatedly blocked the formation of the Spokes Council by the General Assembly. A “block” is an expression of concern over a given proposal that is so serious, the blocker in question would prefer to leave the movement than rather than consent to it. Blockers are invited to introduce friendly amendments. But Nan blocked creation of the Spokes Council every time, for reasons that were not clear, and eventually voted against it. If the GA cannot achieve full consensus, the proposal goes to a vote and is passed if at least 90 percent vote in favor.

Theoretically, at this point, blockers leave the movement. But Nan instead has registered her objection by coming to every Spokes Council meeting to keep the body from progressing. “I am trying to get the GA to dissolve the Spokes Council as soon as possible,” she tells me. “They should not be controlling our lives.” It’s clear that she thinks the Spokes Council is an attempt to grab power away from the masses, but it isn’t easy to find out why or how.

Then there is Sage, who opines, sometimes lucidly, sometime careeningly, about anything and everything, interrupting, shouting down and employing ad hominem attacks. While he thwarts meetings, he also respectfully facilitates sometimes, and I have seen him be enormously kind to friends. I ask for an interview and he says I caught him at a bad time. “I was born in a mental hospital and I don’t have anything to eat.” He flips a quarter and on the basis of the result, says he cannot do the interview.

Occupy’s version of democracy was messy; meetings lasted too long and tempers ran high and it took forever to achieve consensus. But there were many more people in those days, and the hold-ups were usually within the framework of a process, not because of an uninterrupted, concerted effort to break it down. Jeff, 41, who works with the Press Working Group, thinks that the occupation should be stricter with its insistence on the process. “I can’t see why it’s bad to say, ‘There are rules to this. If you can’t follow them, you can’t participate,’ ” he says.

It is difficult to disagree, as I stand at the General Assembly, watching the process that inspired a movement disintegrate before me. The democracy on offer at Occupy Wall Street is compassionate, open and hard-working, its deliberations producing beautiful things: aid to fellow protesters in Oakland, the commission of a safe space for women, attempts to establish even more compassionate, more open and more hard-working democracy than it already has.

But there are people who haven’t eaten today. One protester, Bathabile, puts it this way. “Think about if you need to go to the bathroom really badly, but somebody wants to have a conversation with you about how to have a conversation.” The division between activists and occupiers, who operate in such separate spheres, is a problem that will have to be reconciled.

For now, Zach, 25, of the Housing Committee is suspicious of the Finance Committee who “stay in an office, sitting on a million dollars, and restricting access to that money.” Bre, 21, of the Finance Committee, who slept for two months in the park and now couch surfs, finds this unfair: “We just account for where the money goes. It’s all allocated by the GA and Spokes Council.” GKM has suspicions of his own. “What’s happening is that homeless people are coming down here looking for free money.”

In a step towards reconciliation, an emergency housing meeting is called, including members of the Housing, Kitchen, Comfort and Finance working groups. The most the group can do over several hours—which repeatedly break down into chaos—is hammer out a two-week stop-loss proposal to provide MetroCards to occupiers to get to shelter and coffee to prevent the ones who sleep slumped over at tables in all-night fast food restaurants from being kicked out. That group, says Lauren, “will meet tirelessly to develop a long-term solution.”

Perhaps the screaming and atrophy have spurred action. Perhaps there’s something to be said for such a model: forcing all discussions into gridlock until the needs of the least fortunate are met.