Contents

21ST-CENTURY FASCISM & RESISTANCE

Study for Struggle: Weaponizing Theory for the Fights Ahead 1

Rachel Herzing & Isaac Ontiveros

Trumpism, 21st-Century Fascism, and the Dictatorship

of the Transnational Capitalist Class 5

William I. Robinson

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Social Justice, Environmental Destruction, and the Trump Presidency: A Criminological View 8

Michael J. Lynch, Paul B. Stretesky, Michael A. Long & Kimberly L. Barrett

Orange is the New Green: The Environmental Justice Implications

of Trump’s EPA 13

Jordan E. Mazurek

HEALTH CARE

Trump’s Health Care Agenda 18

Thomas Bodenheimer

IMMIGRATION

Donald Trump and Immigration: A Few Predictions 22

Ray Michalowski

The “Immigrant Problem”: A Historical Review and the New Impacts under Trump 26

Marla A. Ramírez

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Some Aspects of the Trump Administration’s Foreign Policy 30

Gregory Shank

Latin America vs. Trump 35

Clifford Welch

LABOR & CLASS

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss:

Bracing for Trump’s Anti-Worker, Corporate Agenda 39

Colin Jenkins

LGBTQ POLITICS

A Queer Exemption? What Trump’s Presidency Means

for LGBTQ Politics 43

Clare Sears

PENAL POLITICS

Punishment and Policing in the Trump Era 47

Michelle Brown

Neoliberal Authoritarianism: Notes on Penal Politics

in Trump’s America 51

Alessandro De Giorgi

RACE & RACISM

Donald Trump and Race 55

Jason Williams

WELFARE POLICY

The End Of Welfare? 59

Gwendolyn Mink

Death by a Thousand Budget Cuts:

The Need for a New Fight for Poor People’s Rights 62

Tina Sacks

WOMEN’S ISSUES AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Gender and Trump 65

Carol C. Mukhopadhyay

Statement of the SJ Editorial Board on the Election of Donald Trump69

About SJ

Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order (ISSN: 1043–1578) is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal that offers analyses of the wide array of issues that shape our critical understanding of the present and inform current struggles for social justice—crime and social control, human rights, borders and migrations, labor and capital, environmental justice, education, race, gender, and sexuality. Our articles cross over geographical and disciplinary boundaries and offer critical and innovative analyses of past and current events.

Social Justice was launched in 1974 (under the title Crime and Social Justice) and has been independently published since.

All issues and single articles back to 1974 are available for purchase/download on our website:

www.socialjusticejournal.org

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SOCIAL JUSTICE

P.O. BOX 40601

SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94140

email: socialjust@aol.com

www.socialjusticejournal.org www.facebook.com/socialjusticejournal

CO-MANAGING EDITORS: Stefania De Petris and Gregory Shank

EDITORIAL BOARD: Adalberto Aguirre, Andreana Clay, Alessandro De Giorgi, Susanne Jonas, Edward McCaughan, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Cecilia O’Leary, Anthony Platt, Judah Schept, and Clare Sears

• • •

The pieces in this collection were originally published on January 9–20, 2017 on the journal’s website as part of the blog series “The Possible Futures of the US under Trump.”

This material is distributed under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.

All images used therein are available in the public domain or under a CC license. If the source or author is known, credits are given in footnote.

21ST-CENTURY FASCISM & RESISTANCE

Study for Struggle: Weaponizing Theory for the Fights Ahead

RACHEL HERZING & ISAAC ONTIVEROS[*]

The election of Donald Trump to the office of President of the United States set off a chain reaction among Left organizers and activists across the country. The responses were immediate and forceful. Disbelief was one of the primary reactions we witnessed via social media, informal conversations, and in-person meetings. Many people expressed grief and despair. Others, fear and dread. Still others, anger and outrage. And still others said, “I told you so.” Many took to the streets to express themselves collectively in what was sometimes a cacophony of perspectives and voices.

Nearly as immediately, we saw the release of platforms and statements. We received notices about online fora, trainings, and presentations. We heard about community meetings covering everything from strategies for making one’s church, campus, etc. a sanctuary space, to ways to protect organizers and activists from increased surveillance, to strategy sessions preparing for the 2018 elections.

In the wake of November 8th’s result, at the Center for Political Education we scoured the news, participated in online and in-person community meetings, and set ourselves to studying the range of post-election analysis circulating. We also met one-on-one with local community and political organizations to understand their current campaigns and projects, political education programs and needs, and to continue our ongoing work of understanding how we might support local groups to apply strong theory and analysis to their work on the ground. That ongoing effort has been strongly affected by the reactions of our community partners to what they see as the shifting context in the post-election era.

Many of our comrades and allies, and the communities with which they work, are spinning. Some are fearful of mass deportations, a Muslim registry, the repression of dissent and the expansion of surveillance apparatuses, and the rollback of gains made in recent years. Some are forecasting and preparing for the rise of fascism, the Alt-Right, militias and vigilantism, and the evisceration of social safety nets that have offered the slimmest relief for poor and working class communities and communities of color in both urban and rural areas. Still others are worried about environmental calamity, increased privatization, isolationism, and increased hostilities with international players. Many of our partners are also springing into action to analyze the conditions, plan strategies, and shore up defenses.

In considering the landscape on which the Left will organize, a series of questions emerge. Who is the Left being used as the point of reference here? In assessing what the Left should do, who the Left should mobilize, or how it should increase its ranks, what is the starting place for forging alliances and alignment? This question seems particularly pertinent given a steady stream of exhortations to expand our bases and forge alliances and coalitions with workers, liberals, or Democratic centrists. But with whom do we understand ourselves to be beginning these building efforts? What steps should be taken to align our understandings of the current context, goals about priority targets, and the best means and timeframes in which to attempt to shift power? While certainly this is a unique period in some senses, what lessons could be drawn from history to inform how we fight tomorrow? What are the best tools to apply toward these ends?

In our own reflection at the Center for Political Education, we found ourselves asking, will the Trump regime affect people’s abilities to think clearly? Will the fear so many are expressing about what will happen under the Trump administration lead to retreat and paralysis? Will it ignite frenetic activity that cuts corners on rigorous analysis in favor of rapid action? How may we best balance people’s real sense of fear and urgency with the need for methodical, rigorous analysis and strategic thinking? What roles are we carving out for ideological and political struggle as we strive to develop collective understandings of who we are, what we’re up against, and how best to fight back?

During the 1966 Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Amilcar Cabral made his famous “Weapon of Theory” speech. As some have noted, Cabral put forward a forceful argument that the struggle for national liberation against the devastation wrought by colonialism and imperialism was a struggle for history itself: an active historical understanding of their conditions allowed the oppressed not only to overturn the racist mythology proclaiming they had no history, but also to forcefully carve out an understanding of themselves as protagonists of a freedom struggle in the present, and as architects of a liberated future. Of course, this would not be easy. As Cabral (1966) put it:

The ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation movements—which is basically due to ignorance of the historical reality which these movements claim to transform—constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all.

In reflecting on this moment, we think it is useful to re-engage with similar challenges and questions, albeit in markedly different conditions. How do we build and use weapons of theory? How do we create lasting environments in which people can put their creative energies to use, forging and testing conceptions of how to “produce and make history”? We can start by drawing lessons from how social movement–affiliated education projects responded to crises in other periods. The Highlander Folk School, for instance, started in the wake of the Scottsborough Boys arrests and militant labor upheaval and repression in the region. The Highlander Folk School, and later the Highlander Research and Education Center, was also a key resource for civil rights activists and organizations and played a pivotal role as a strategic incubator of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and in the founding of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During a period in which Black people faced intense repression, violence, and intimidation for attempting to register and vote, Septima Clark’s Citizenship Schools extended the work of Highlander outward from the physical space of the school and were an essential (and often clandestine) vehicle in helping people meet the literacy tests required to vote, while also teaching politics and organizing.

During the ensuing decades, civil rights and liberation struggles of oppressed people in the United States increasingly drew a common cause and shared fate with Third World liberation struggles across the globe. Countless progressive, radical, and revolutionary organizations wove intensive studies and analyses of political theory and practice into their organizing work—often drawing from the theoretical engagements, elaborations, and struggles of liberation organizations worldwide. Indeed, the struggle for education as liberation drove Third World students to carve out spaces for workers and people of color on campuses across the United States, leading to the founding of Ethnic Studies as a recognized academic discipline (a struggle which continues to this day). Amidst the lethal backlash against liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the Brecht Forum in New York City emerged in part from collaborative work for Puerto Rican independence. The Brecht Forum became an important vehicle for Left learning, strategy, and struggle in the 1980s, and more recently as a place for thinking and strategizing during the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy movement.

Several organizations, including the Highlander Center and our own Center for Political Education, have joined other powerful education resources across the US and the world in continuing to provide spaces for study, reflection, analysis, and strategy. These kinds of spaces are more crucial than ever to understand our movements, to analyze our conditions, and to prepare to fight back. Returning to “Weapon of Theory,” Cabral reminds us that “every practice produces a theory,” and that “nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.” More than six decades before Cabral’s speech at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, V.I. Lenin (1902/1993), writing from within a movement facing intense state repression, offered a similar analysis in What Is to Be Done? He averred that theory was an indispensable guard against “the narrowest forms of practical activity.”

The rise of Trump and the onslaughts he has promised to unleash are matters of dire urgency. There is no doubt that social change organizations should be taking up practical activities to protect themselves and their communities while building resistance and shifting power. The urgency that surrounds and compels us may discourage us from pausing to think deeply and rigorously. However, our ability to fight for the long haul depends on this deep thinking. Creating, valuing, and nurturing durable and thoughtful spaces for developing praxis in direct response to our times, places, conditions, and abilities is critically important as we face the perils that surely lie ahead. Now more than ever, we must understand that theory and analysis are crucial weapons, rather than things we don’t have time for.

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References and Further Readings

Cabral, Amilcar. 1966. “The Weapon of Theory.” Speech delivered to the Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Havana, Cuba.

Lenin, V.I. 1902/1993. What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. New York: International Publishers. 11th ed.

* Rachel Herzing and Isaac Ontiveros are codirectors of The Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the Left, progressive social movements, the working class, and people of color in the San Francisco Bay Area.Header image (left): “Women’s March, Oakland, 1/21/17,” by Stefania De Petris, used under CC BY-SA 2.0.

21ST-CENTURY FASCISM & RESISTANCE

Trumpism, 21st-Century Fascism, and the Dictatorship of the Transnational Capitalist Class

WILLIAM I. ROBINSON[*]

Donald Trump is a member of the transnational capitalist class (TCC). His vast business empire spans several dozen countries around the world. Much of his “populism” and anti-globalization discourse has to do with demagogy and with political manipulation in function of the electoral campaign. Trumpism and the specter of 21st-century fascism must be seen as a response to the crisis of global capitalism. Trump’s global business empire could not flourish without capitalist globalization and without the super-exploitation of immigrant workers in the United States.

The TCC and Trump himself depend on immigrant labor for their capital accumulation and they do not intend to do away with a labor force that is bonded due to its being undocumented rather than “legal.” His electoral promise to deport 10 millions undocumented immigrants, now reduced to some three million, and his proposals to intensify the criminalization of immigrants are, on the one hand, an attempt to convert the immigrant population into a scapegoat for the crisis and to channel the fear and insecurity among the (majority white) working class against the immigrant community rather than against the system. On the other hand, the dominant groups have been exploring ways to replace the current system of super-exploitation of undocumented immigrant labor with a mass “guest worker program” that would be more efficient in combining super-exploitation with super-control.

Trump (and more generally the TCC) seek to place downward pressure on wages in the United States in order to make US workers “competitive” with foreign workers. The downward leveling of wages across countries and the “race to the bottom” has been a general tendency under capitalist globalization that Trumpism certainly intends to continue, now with the justification of making the US economy “competitive” and “bringing jobs back home.”

We cannot under-emphasize Trumpism’s extreme racism, but we need to deepen our analysis of it. The US political system and the dominant groups face a crisis of hegemony and legitimacy. Racism and the search for scapegoats is one key element in their efforts to face this crisis. At the same time, major sectors of the white working class have been experiencing social and economic destabilization, downward mobility, heightened insecurity, an uncertain future, and accelerated “precariatization”—that is, ever more precarious work and life conditions. This sector of the working class has historically enjoyed the ethnic-racial privileges that come from white supremacy vis-à-vis other sectors of the working class, but it has been losing these privileges in the face of capitalist globalization. The escalation of veiled (coded) and also openly racist discourse from above is aimed at ushering the members of this white working class sector into a racist and a neo-fascist understanding of their condition.

Trumpism’s veiled and at times openly racist and neo-fascist discourse has legitimized and unleashed ultra-racist and fascist movements in US civil society. I have been writing about the danger of “21st century fascism” as a response to the escalating crisis of global capitalism. The response to this crisis was the rise a neo-fascist Right in both Western and Eastern Europe, the vengeful resurgence of a neo-fascist Right in Latin America, and the turn towards neo-fascism in Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, India, and elsewhere. One key difference between 20th-century fascism and 21st-century fascism is that the former involved the fusion of national capital with reactionary and repressive political power, whereas the latter involves the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power. It is crucial to stress that Trumpism does not represent a break with capitalist globalization, but rather a recomposition of political forces as the crisis deepens. If we want to understand political phenomena we must not confuse surface appearance (or discourse) with underlying essence (or structure).

Trumpism represents an intensification of neoliberalism in the United States that assigns a major role to the state in subsidizing transnational capital accumulation in the face of stagnation and overaccumulation. For example, Trump’s heralded proposal to invest one trillion dollars in infrastructure, when we examine it closely, is in reality a proposal to privatize public infrastructure and to transfer wealth from labor to capital by way of corporate tax breaks and subsidies for the construction of privatized infrastructural works. We can expect under the Trump regime an effort to further privatize what remains of the public sector, including schools, veterans affairs, and possibly social security, along with deregulation and a further transfer of wealth from labor to capital through corporate tax cuts and austerity.

It is a mistake to view 21st-century fascism as a political development outside of the “normal” progression of global capitalism. Global capitalism faces an unprecedented crisis of social polarization, political legitimacy (hegemony), sustainability, and overaccumulation. The TCC has accumulated trillions of dollars that it is finding ever harder to “unload.” In recent years it has turned to mind-boggling levels of financial speculation, to the raiding and sacking of public budgets, and to what I call militarized accumulation—that is, to endless cycles of war, destruction, and reconstruction; to “accumulation by repression” (building of private prisons and immigrant detention centers, border walls, homeland security technologies, etc.); and to the construction of a global police state to defend the global war economy from rebellions from below.

Trump’s electoral base among the white working class will discover very early on in his regime that his promises were a hoax. How will their rage be contained? Will they be recruited into projects of 21st-century fascism? Political and economic elites in the United States (and worldwide) are currently divided and confused. But if and when the mass of humanity, the global working class, will pose a challenge to TCC control, the dominant groups will unite to defend their rule. The liberal elements among the transnational elite will be unlikely to object to 21st-century fascism in political power if that is what it takes to beat down challenges from below and to maintain control. I fear we are before the gates of hell. There will surely be massive social upheavals from below, but also an escalation of state and private repression.

The spiraling crisis of global capitalism has reached a crossroads. Either there is a radical reform of the system (if not its overthrow) or there will be a sharp turn to a 21st-century fascism. The failure of elite reformism and the unwillingness of the transnational elite to challenge the predation and rapaciousness of global capital have paved the way for the far-Right response to crisis. In the United States, the betrayal of the liberal elite is as much to blame for Trumpism as are the far-Right forces that have mobilized the white population around a program of racist scapegoating, misogyny, and the manipulation of fear and economic destabilization.

Critically, the political class that has been in place for the past three decades is more than bankrupt—it is feeding the turn to the far Right. Its brand of identity politics has served to eclipse the language of the working and popular classes and of anti-capitalism. It has served to derail ongoing revolts from below, to push white workers into an “identity” of white nationalism, and to help the neo-fascist right organize them politically.

A global rebellion against the TCC has been spreading since the financial collapse of 2008. Wherever one looks there are popular, grassroots, and leftist struggles and the rise of new cultures of resistance. Can we beat back the threat of 21st-century fascism? Our efforts must involve analytical clarity as to what we are up against. Trumpism is not a departure from, but an incarnation of an emerging dictatorship of the transnational capitalist class.

• • •

* William I. Robinson is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also affiliated with the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program and with the Global and International Studies Program at UCSB. His scholarly research focuses on macro and comparative sociology, globalization and transnationalism, political economy, political sociology, development and social change, immigration, Latin America and the Third World, and Latina/o studies. An earlier version of this article (in Spanish) was published by La Jornada on December 4, 2016 (here). Header image (left): “Women’s March, Oakland, 1/21/17,” by Stefania De Petris, used under CC BY-SA 2.0.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Social Justice, Environmental Destruction, and the Trump Presidency: A Criminological View

MICHAEL J. LYNCH, PAUL B. STRETESKY,

MICHAEL A. LONG & KIMBERLY L. BARRETT[*]

We represent three generations of scholars who study environmental crime, law and justice, and the enforcement of environmental regulations. Our work focuses on how the politico-economic organization of capitalism promotes ecologically destructive behavior by profit-driven corporations, exploits nature and human labor, generates ecological destruction/disorganization, and furthers the unequal distribution of wealth and ecological resources. With respect to how the Trump administration and proposed cabinet selections will affect social and environmental justice and any effort to study environmental crime by corporations, we expect a return to the conditions that existed during the G. W. Bush Administration and that some of us witnessed firsthand.

For starters, under the Bush administration the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reduced publicly available data relevant to the study of environmental crime and the enforcement of environmental regulations. For example, we were often frustrated to learn that environmental crime data that were available under Clinton’s EPA were no longer reported and/or had been removed from the EPA’s website during the Bush administration, and could now only be obtained through a Freedom of Information request. Moreover, the Bush administration’s emphasis on market-based solutions to improve environmental performance pushed environmental regulation research away from examining state interventions, thus curtailing criminology’s potential (albeit generally conservative) contributions to the study of environmental issues.

As we enter the era of the Trump administration, we expect to once again encounter problems gaining access to important environmental data. Notably, we believe we will see EPA budget cuts impact the availability of environment-related crime data. After all, conservative politicians often view data reporting and environmental regulation as pointless burdens for corporations and businesses. Trump has made no secret of his belief that environmental regulation—much of which deals with reporting requirements—is economically harmful to business. Consider for example the following exchange between Donald Trump and Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday (October 15, 2015):

Donald Trump: Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace. Every week they come out with new regulations. They’re making it impossible —

Chris Wallace: Who’s going to protect the environment?

Donald Trump: They—we’ll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses.

Far from being a disgrace, in our view environmental protection is a necessary part of ensuring that the ecosystem is protected for future generations, and that ecosystem inhabitants—from humans to wildlife—are protected from the ecologically destructive behaviors of corporations. It is no disgrace to take environmental concerns seriously and to pass and enforce regulations that protect public and ecological health. Rather, the disgrace is believing that if left to their own, corporations will protect the ecosystem. In fact, the history of environmental regulation is a demonstration of how the state, as a representative of the people and public health, must force corporations to protect the ecosystem, countering their proven tendency to favor the bottom line over ecosystem health and stability.

Based upon Trump’s first statements on this matter, we believe the Trump administration will do away with important data reporting programs, producing a rupture in the historical record of important environmental data and a significant reduction in the enforcement of environmental regulations. It should also be noted that, even when environmental data are collected, EPA appointees can limit access to those data. One example of this problem was reported by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in their review of mercury emissions rules during the Bush administration. Citing numerous sources pointing toward “unusual” approaches for crafting mercury pollution regulations during the Bush administration, the UCS noted that “political appointees at the EPA completely bypassed agency professional and scientific staff as well as a federal advisory panel in crafting the proposed new rules.” The Washington Post reported that the “Bush administration’s proposal for regulating mercury pollution from power plants mirrors almost word for word portions of memos written by a law firm representing coal-fired power plants.”

We can certainly expect similar tactics during the Trump administration as Trump appointees, many of whom will push efforts for environmental deregulation as a mechanism to expand economic production, will ignore relevant research on this subject [such as the association between improved environmental corporate performance and increased corporate financial performance demonstrated over a 35 year period (1975–2011) by Elisabeth Albertini (2013)]. We can expect that the ideology of economic growth rather than science will guide the Trump administration’s environmental policies, and furthermore that those policies will benefit the owners of large-capital industries rather than the populace base that supported Trump.

One of the most critical issues we face is the Trump administration’s (already apparent) misperception of science, its indifference to what scientists know about things such as climate change, pollution, and public health, and its insistence on “making America great again” by returning to the conditions of an earlier era—long ago banished by the globalization of corporate capitalism—that relied on reduced environmental regulation and increased fossil fuel production and consumption. Besides Trump himself, his proposed cabinet includes climate skeptics, fossil fuel industry executives, and political leaders from states with strong fossil fuel connections. This is similar to what happened with G. W. Bush’s cabinet; thus, in contrast to the idea that a Trump presidency will be unique because it is influenced by Washington outsiders, we already see tendencies that have characterized prior administrations. (By the way, for those who think that federal policies are too restrictive, let us remind them that US EPA has failed, through decades of policy, to meet the federally mandated requirements of many federal laws, including, for instance, the provision in the Clean Water Act to make US waters fishable and swimmable by 1985, a provision that has yet to be met since that legislation was passed in 1972.)

Trump’s proposed cabinet includes several officials who will adversely affect environmental policy and enforcement, and therefore the quality of the US ecosystem. As head of EPA, for instance, Trump proposed Scott Pruitt, former attorney general of Oklahoma. Pruitt’s position on the EPA is similar to Trump’s. For instance, in 2014 Pruitt’s office told the New York Times: “It is the job of the attorney general to defend the interests and well-being of the citizens and state of Oklahoma … This includes protecting Oklahoma’s economy from the perilous effects of federal overreach by agencies like the EPA.” Pruitt denies the existence of climate change (calling it a hoax or fraud), and at one time he announced his intent to force the Obama administration to repeal ALL of its newly imposed environmental regulations. In the pursuit of this goal, Pruitt has sued the EPA on various occasions in an effort to: limit the Regional Haze Rule, which regulated air quality in National Parks; rescind ozone pollution restrictions; cancel EPA coal-fired power plant mercury emission regulations (the Clean Power Plan); and limit the Waters of the United States rules and regulations. None of these suits have been successful, and thus one could argue they have been a waste of taxpayer dollars as Pruitt strived to protect the interests of his wealthy supporters, including the oil lobbies that have funded his political career (e.g., he received funding from Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, a fossil fuel company, and later joined a suit by Continental, Oklahoma Gas & Electric and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance against climate change regulations). Pruitt has sued the federal government on many other matters, and has also sued California over its caged hen egg-laying rules (California Proposition 2)—an issue that seems hardly related to the governance of Oklahoma. As Kenneth Kimmell, President of the Union of Concerned Scientists has noted, the selection of Pruitt to head EPA should be considered unusual in light of his “clear record of hostility to the EPA’s mission.” For instance, as Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt sent a letter that challenged EPA estimates of air pollution caused by energy companies in Oklahoma; the letter was signed by him but composed by employees of Devon Energy who had donated money to his campaign.

Trump’s choice to head the Department of Energy is Rick Perry, someone who once said he would abolish the agency (in a well-known instance during a presidential debate in which he couldn’t actually identify the agency by name). Perry believes that climate change is an unproven scientific theory—scientifically speaking, of course, theories are proven by testing hypotheses, and a theory emerges when significantly related hypotheses cannot be rejected, but perhaps it is too much to ask that people placed in charge of federal agencies dealing with science should know such things. Perry, who has held the longest term of any former governor of Texas, obviously has deeply embedded connections to the fossil fuel industry (Texas is the foremost producer of fossil fuels in the United States), so one can easily imagine that his energy policies will favor fossil fuels over alternative energy, which is the same condition found in the Department of Energy during the G. W. Bush administration (headed first by Spencer Abraham, who was also part of Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force, and second by Samuel Bodman).

As the proposed head of the Department of the Interior, Trump named Ryan Zinke, a Montana congressional representative. In that role, Zinke will influence national policy related to drilling for oil and gas on federal lands and the construction of national oil and gas pipelines. He has already established a congressional voting record favoring the destruction of federal lands for fossil fuel exploration, supporting the Keystone XL pipeline (vetoed by President Obama), and removing protection for endangered species in order to promote the above policies. At one time a supporter of climate change policy, he now denies the science behind climate change, perhaps, as Tim Murphy implies on Mother Jones, after receiving political contributions from the fossil fuel industry.

Trump has also proposed Rex Tillerson to be the Secretary of State. Tillerson is the former chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil. Tillerson, at least, does not deny climate change and supports a carbon tax. However, his company consistently lobbies against climate change regulation and is being investigated by the State of New York for providing misleading statements about climate change.

Many other Trump’s cabinet nominees also deny climate change but will hold positions where perhaps climate change policies are less vital. One exception here is the nominee for the Department of Human Health and Services. For this office, Trump proposed Tom Price, a climate change skeptic who has signed a pledge from Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers, to oppose climate change legislation.

As green criminologists, our concern is that the changes to federal policy that we can expect from the Trump administration will be deleterious to the majority of Americans, to people in other nations, and to the health of the global ecosystem (not to mention the health of the US ecosystem), and that they will exacerbate environmental racism and environmental injustice in the United States. We anticipate:

- an increase in environmental pollution and in exposure to environmental toxics, which may be especially problematic in urban areas;

- diminished efforts to enforce environmental regulations against corporate polluters, creating a context in which corporations will increasingly violate pollution permits and regulations that are no longer enforced;

- an increase in the unequal distribution of pollution and exposure to environmental pollution in impoverished areas, communities of color, and Native American Indian reservations, which will aggravate the health of residents and will be exacerbated by a reduction in federal health care policy;

- reductions in penalties for corporations that violate environmental laws;

- a deterioration of air and water quality in the US, generating additional public health problems; and

- rising rates of animal extinctions, a trend already of scientific concern.

• • •

References and Further Readings

Albertini, E. 2013. Does Environmental Management Improve Financial Performance: A Meta-Analytical Review. Organization & Environment 26(4): 431–57.

Bullard, R.D. 2000. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Downey, L. and Hawkins, B. 2008. Race, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States. Sociological Perspectives 51(4): 759–81.

Kosmicki, S. and M.A. Long. 2016. Exploring Environmental Inequality within US Communities Containing Coal and Nuclear Power Plants. In Hazardous Waste and Pollution: Detecting and Preventing Green Crimes, edited by Tanya Watt, pp. 79–100. New York: Springer.

Lynch, M.J., R.G. Burns, and P.B. Stretesky. 2010. Global Warming as a State-Corporate Crime: The Politicalization of Global Warming during the Bush Administration. Crime, Law and Social Change 54(3): 213–39.

Lynch, M.J., M.A. Long, K.L. Barrett, and P.B. Stretesky. 2013. Is it a Crime to Produce Ecological Disorganization? Why Green Criminology and Political Economy Matter in the Analysis of Global Ecological Harms. British Journal of Criminology 53(6): 997–1016.

Lynch, M.J. and P.B. Stretesky. 2012. Native Americans and Social and Environmental Justice: Implications for Criminology. Social Justice 38(3): 104–24.

Parenteau, P. 2004. Anything Industry Wants: Environmental Policy under Bush II. Environmental Law and Policy Forum 14(2): 363–404.

Stretesky, P.B., M.A. Long, and M.J. Lynch. 2013. The Treadmill of Crime: Political Economy and Green Criminology. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

* Michael J. Lynch is Professor of Criminology in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida; Paul B. Stretesky is Professor of Criminology in the Department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University; Michael A. Long is Associate Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University; and Kimberly L. Barrett is Assistant Professor of Criminology in the Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology Department at Eastern Michigan University.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Orange is the New Green: The Environmental Justice Implications of Trump’s EPA

JORDAN E. MAZUREK[*]

Let’s start by ripping that big orange band-aid off. This piece will not make you hopeful. The environmental justice movement—that is, the grassroots movement championed by people of color and the poor to address the environmental harms they are disproportionately victims of—is going to face significant challenges under Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency in particular, and his administration more broadly. Trump’s nomination to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is a global-warming-denying, Big-Oil-loving Oklahoma attorney general who’s made his name off leading the conservative crusade against the EPA and the Obama administration’s environmental policies. Meanwhile Trump’s wider cabinet seems to consist of a Who’s Who of the “Eco-Villains” that Captain Planet fought in the 1990s (not to mention the 1%-ers!).

Faced with such a cabinet, I think we as organizers, activists, and academics must prepare for an almost certain intensification in three key areas across-the-board:

- An intensification of what Barnett (1994) describes as “regulatory capture,” or the domination of regulatory agencies by the very industries they are supposed to be regulating. This directly contributes to:

- An intensification in the deregulation of private industries and defunding of monitoring agencies. This further exacerbates:

- An intensification of the types of harms to communities of color and the poor inherent in historical patterns of racialized capitalism.

I use the term intensification to convey that these are not new conditions coming to bear down under Trump, but merely extensions of preexisting ones. For the sake of space, however, I will limit my analysis to how environmental justice will likely be affected by this intensification in relation to Pruitt’s EPA.

In terms of regulatory capture, the EPA has a long and sordid history of representing and defending the interests of corporate polluters, rather than regulating them; an arrangement that, at the time of writing, Simon (2000, pp. 641–42) found to pay off nicely for “20 high-ranking former EPA administrators that … left the agency [to] become millionaire waste-industry executives.” It is beyond reasonable to hope that Pruitt’s EPA will be much different in tendency given his already well-established capacity for developing secret alliances with oil and gas companies and then serving as literal mouthpieces for them, as revealed by the New York Times in 2014.

Given his cozy relationship with Big Oil and Pruitt’s track record of attacking EPA regulations, which amounted to at least 13 lawsuits against the agency to date with eight still pending, the deregulation or active non-enforcement of existing environmental policy is all but imminent. Let’s first focus on federal environmental justice policy.

The policy ground upon which the EPA and other federal agencies incorporate and address environmental justice concerns remains exceptionally vulnerable. This vulnerability is a consequence of the fact that federal environmental justice policy is based not on congressional law but on Presidential Executive Order 12898, signed by Clinton in 1994 in response to mounting pressures from environmental justice activists. EO 12898 mandated that “each Federal agency make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations,” with this effort to be spearheaded by the EPA.

As is often the case with policy that may positively affect people of color, little tangible progress on addressing environmental justice issues at the federal level manifested itself. For the remainder of Clinton’s presidency, the EPA had little direction on how to actually implement EO 12898, and since it remained only an EO, no following administrations or agency heads were under any legal mandate to actually pursue environmental justice objectives. George W. Bush’s administration took full advantage of this to actively shift the EPA’s focus on “environmental justice” away from minorities and the poor and to essentially ignore the topic for eight years.

Indeed, towards the end of Bush’s administration the United Church of Christ published a 20-year follow-up study on its foundational environmental justice study Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The conclusions, after 20 years and EO 12898, remained largely the same: race remained the predominant predictor of where hazardous waste sites would be located, with little to no tangible progress having been made. Neighborhoods hosting hazardous waste facilities were found to be “56% people of color whereas non-host areas are 30% people of color”; meanwhile, 69% of the population living in areas with close clusters of hazardous was of color (Bullard et al. 2007, pp. x–xi).

The Obama administration represented a significant departure from the previous two administrations in terms of making environmental justice an agency priority within the EPA. Under the leadership of Lisa Jackson, in 2010 the agency began developing its first systematic attempt, known as Plan EJ 2014, to incorporate the environmental justice requirements of EO 12898. This effort was greatly expanded with the development and publication of its EJ 2020 Action Agenda in late October of 2016. EJ 2020 is a robust strategic plan leading up to an EPA in 2020 “that integrates environmental justice into everything we do, cultivates strong partnerships to improve on-the-ground results, and charts a path forward for achieving better environmental outcomes and reducing disparities in the nation’s most overburdened communities.” (I would be amiss, in terms of my current organizing efforts with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, if I did not point out that the EJ 2020 plan completely ignores prisoners as a potentially “overburdened” population worth of environmental justice consideration. This was challenged by the campaign under the banner of the Prison Ecology Project and over 130 other social justice, environmental, and prisoner’s rights organizations that mobilized to influence the drafting of EJ 2020).

Considering that the EJ 2020 plan will just start to take effect as Trump steps into office and Pruitt takes the reins of the EPA, I’m highly skeptical that the agency will meet any of its 2020 goals. Perhaps the best-case scenario for existing environmental justice policy would be if the Trump administration followed in the footsteps of George W. Bush’s administration, that is, if the administration more or less ignored those goals but let the legislation in place for future, possibly friendlier administrations. Given that all the EPA’s environmental justice efforts still rely primarily on EO 12898, however, the worst-case scenario seems likely. Trump could issue an alternate Executive Order overriding EO 12898 and thus completely dismantling, instead of just delaying, what took the entirety of the Obama administration to implement, effectively cutting environmental justice out of the scope of the federal government.

Let’s not forget, however, that since 1994 federal environmental justice policy has remained largely symbolic. That is to say that, although the EPA will certainly be no ally of the environmental justice movement under Trump, this agency has failed under every administration to systematically address the structural causes of environmental injustice. Indeed, at the time of this writing it’s been 21 months since (in April 2015) the EPA Region 5 office became aware of the high lead levels in the Flint, Michigan water supply, poisoning the majority-Black population. Yet the EPA failed to take action until January 2016. Flint STILL has lead in its water. This crisis was precipitated by multiple structural factors, including a history of weak environmental regulation of the local automotive industry, local economic hardships wrought by neoliberal economic policy in the 1990s (i.e., NAFTA), and increasing levels of government defunding. Indeed, from 2010 to 2015 the EPA faced five straight years of budget reductions, losing 21% of its federal funding ($2.2 billion USD) and bringing the number of staff down to its lowest levels since 1989.

These budget cuts to the EPA under the EPA/environmental justice-friendly Obama administration (granted, lead by Republicans) point to what could possibly be the worst-worst-case scenario: that is, the possibility that Trump will hold true to his campaign promises of completely eliminating the EPA, effectively leading to total environmental deregulation at a federal level.

The harms environmental justice activists fight against are inherently spatial and direct consequence of a segregationist racialized capitalism. Pollution, like power, tends to harm the populations deemed most easily exploitable and most readily expendable. Faced with almost total deregulation, whatever little protections communities of color and the poor have built up against the sources of hazardous toxins in their neighborhoods may begin to crumble. The first casualties will most likely be the federal-level victories that grassroots environmental justice activists have achieved only in the last couple years of the Obama administration. For example, activists with the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum on Climate Change were responsible for significant changes to Obama’s Clean Power Plan in terms of protecting air quality for poor and minority communities. However, Trump has vowed to kill the Clean Power Plan, and one of the pending lawsuits that Pruitt is still involved in is a 27-state suit against the Plan. Given Pruitt’s already stated affinity with the oil and gas industry, the recent environmental justice victory of more stringent EPA regulations on petroleum refinery emissions (expected to lower cancer rates for 1.4 million people) will also likely be on the chopping block. In short, Pruitt’s EPA and related deregulation will lead to an intensification of environmental harms in poor communities and communities of color.

I know that all sounds a bit doom-and-gloom, but I warned you, didn’t I? If you want hope, looking from the top-down isn’t the place to find it. The strength and resiliency of the environmental justice movement, and the ability of communities of color and the poor to force governmental structures to meet their needs over corporate interest, have always derived from the bottom-up. Look to the roots, get involved, and I look forward to meeting ya’ll in the streets!

• • •

References and Further Readings

Brook, D. 1998. Environmental genocide: Native Americans and Toxic Waste. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 57(1): 105–13.

Bullard, R.D., Mohai, P., Saha, R. & B. Wright. 2007. Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987-2007. New York: United Church of Christ.

Commission for Racial Justice. 1987. Toxic Waste and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites. New York: United Church of Christ.

Friedrichs, D.O. 2006. Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Kolinsky, D., ed. 2015. Failed Promises: Evaluating the Federal Government’s Response to Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pinderhughes, R. 1996. The Impact of Race on Environmental Quality: An Empirical and Theoretical Discussion. Sociological Perspectives 39(2): 231–48.

Rebovich, D.J. 1992. Dangerous Ground: The World of Hazardous Waste Crime. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Saha, R. & P. Mohai. 2005. Historical Context and Hazardous Waste Facility Siting: Understanding Temporal Patterns in Michigan. Social Problems 52(4): 618–48.

Simon, D.R. 2000. Corporate environmental crimes and social inequality: New directions for environmental justice research. American Behavioral Scientist 43(4): 633–45.

Szasz, A. 1986. The process and significance of political scandals: A comparison of Watergate and the “Sewergate” episode at the Environmental Protection Agency. Social Problems 33: 200–17.

* Jordan E. Mazurek is an Erasmus+: Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Fellow pursuing a Doctorate in Cultural and Global Criminology from the University of Kent and the University of Hamburg. His research interests include prison abolition, green criminology, organizing/activism, visual theory, and the photodocumentary tradition. His work can be seen in The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism, and The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies. He currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons.

HEALTH CARE

Trump’s Health Care Agenda

THOMAS BODENHEIMER[*]

The nomination of Tom Price to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and of Seema Verma to run the Medicare and Medicaid programs ensures a major attack on health services for the people of the United States. On health care, there is agreement between the Steve Bannon/Tea Party faction of the Trump pre-administration and the Paul Ryan/traditional Republican faction: they both want to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This agreement will affect both the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion portions of the ACA. On the other major healthcare issue, the future of Medicare, the Trump factions disagree. The Paul Ryan faction and Tom Price hope to convert Medicaid into a privatized voucher system, whereas Trump’s pre-election statements—supported by much of his base—suggest that Trump wants to leave Medicare alone.

This review of Trump’s health care agenda looks at the ACA’s individual mandate, the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and the future of Medicare.

The Individual Mandate

Inspired by the work of the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s, the ACA required people without health insurance to purchase insurance from a federal or state insurance exchange or to pay a fine. This is called an individual mandate because it mandates people to buy individual insurance if they lack employer-based private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid. However, the Heritage Foundation has reversed itself and is now a leader in the movement to repeal Obamacare.

By 2016, the ACA had insured about 20 million previously uninsured people, about 10 million through the individual mandate and 10 million through Medicaid expansion. People buying insurance through the federal or state exchanges could purchase a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum policy, with the bronze plan having the lowest premiums but highest deductibles and the platinum plan having the highest premiums and lowest deductibles. About three-quarters purchased the silver plan, which pays for 70 percent of average healthcare costs leaving 30 percent for the patient/family to pay out of pocket. In 2016, premiums for the silver plan varied widely by patient’s age and health status and by location; for example, the silver plan monthly premiums for a 40-year-old nonsmoker were $186 in Albuquerque and $719 in Anchorage, Alaska. However, 85 percent of people insured through an exchange received a federal subsidy that reduced their premium by an average of 73 percent. Even with the subsidy allowing families to purchase a silver plan, the average silver plan deductible in 2016 was $3,000 per person.

Tom Price, HHS secretary-designate, has been a leader in the multiyear Republican effort to repeal Obamacare. He has introduced a replacement that eliminates the individual mandate and proposes tax credits (far smaller than the ACA’s subsidies) to help people purchase individual insurance policies. Analyses of these voluntary tax-credits have estimated that only a few people would choose to buy insurance under such a program, thereby leaving most of the 10 million individual enrollees in Obamacare without coverage. Trump’s campaign promise that he would not allow insurers to exclude people with pre-existing conditions is an empty promise, because the insurers could raise their premiums for people with such conditions to unaffordable levels.

The strength of a popular backlash against the Obamacare repeal is difficult to judge. In a post-election poll, 52 percent of Republicans wanted Obamacare repealed, down from 69 percent in October. Trump, Tom Price, and Paul Ryan may have their hands full.

Medicaid

The expansion of Medicaid, the program for low-income individuals and families, has been the most successful portion of the ACA, adding 10 million Medicaid beneficiaries in 31 states plus the District of Columbia. (Most Republican governors refused to expand Medicaid in their states.) Medicaid is now the country’s largest health insurance program, covering 73 million people. In Medicaid expansion states, everyone (except the undocumented) with incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty line ($33,500 for a family of four) is eligible for Medicaid. In most expansion states, Medicaid beneficiaries have no premiums or deductibles and no or minimal copayments. Most states enroll Medicaid beneficiaries in managed care plans that have been quite successful in reducing the growth of Medicaid costs.

For years, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans have pushed to transform the entire Medicaid program into block grants. Currently, each state government pays managed care plans a certain amount per Medicaid beneficiary or it pays hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies when Medicaid beneficiaries receive care; then the federal government pays the states a certain percentage of those costs—50 percent for higher-income states like California, 90 percent for poorer states like Mississippi. For states that have expanded Medicaid under the ACA, the federal government has paid almost all of the costs. How would block grants change this payment model?

Under block grant legislation, the federal government would send each state a lump sum each year, which would be considerably less than what states currently receive from the federal government. States could then decide how to address the severe funding reductions. Some states could cut Medicaid beneficiaries from the program; others could reduce the services provided under Medicaid (such as eliminating dental care); others could pay hospitals and doctors and nursing homes less, which would cause those providers to stop caring for Medicaid beneficiaries.

The preferred model for state policy under a block grant program is currently underway in Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s Indiana, and it was devised by Seema Verma, who Trump has nominated to run Medicare and Medicaid. Indiana’s Medicaid program requires enrollees to pay a monthly premium of $1 to $27 depending on income. Enrollees below the poverty line who choose not to pay the premium are charged copays for physician visits and prescriptions. If the premium is not paid, beneficiaries above the poverty line lose Medicaid coverage for six months, whereas those below the poverty line must make copayments for services. About one-third of individuals who apply for Medicaid and are found eligible are not enrolled because they do not make a premium payment.

A large body of research shows that premiums and cost-sharing are barriers to care for individuals with low incomes and significant health care needs. State savings from cost-sharing and premiums accrue more because of declines in coverage and utilization than due to increases in revenues. In its 2003 redesign, Oregon Medicaid created a “standard plan” with premiums of $6 to $20 per month; people who missed a premium payment lost their Medicaid for six months. In addition, copays were instituted. Due to these patient cost-sharing requirements, 77 percent of Medicaid standard plan beneficiaries dropped their coverage. Many reported increased medical debt and financial strain related to healthcare costs. Fewer people went to the doctor. Many who lost coverage remained uninsured and experienced major unmet healthcare needs. Florida, Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin saw similar declines in enrollment when they raised the premiums in children’s health programs. Other states have abandoned enrollee cost-sharing (premiums and/or copayments) because it was too expensive to administer.

The combination of block grants and patient cost-sharing requirements will make Medicaid —the program for the most vulnerable populations—the most damaged health care program in the country.

Medicare

For years, Republicans have tried to privatize Medicare. Rather than automatically receiving a Medicare card upon turning 65, elderly people would be given a voucher to be used in buying a private insurance plan. However, the voucher would be worth far less than the cost of the insurance plan, forcing Medicare beneficiaries to pay far more for their coverage and their care. Medicare administrative costs, now about 3 percent, would jump to 15 or 20 percent.

Medicare is not exactly cheap for seniors now; it currently pays for only 58 percent of the average beneficiary’s health care costs, requiring the majority of beneficiaries to buy private plans to fill in the gaps. But under the Obama administration, some of these private plans—the Medicare Advantage plans—have actually offered good deals for seniors while saving money for the government. Trump’s campaign promise to reduce Medicare drug prices has already been placed on the back burner, likely never to surface again.

Prior to the election, Trump promised to leave Medicare alone. But his HHS Secretary pick, Tom Price, agrees with Paul Ryan that Medicare should be privatized. Pressure from the grassroots will determine what happens, but Medicare is not safe.

Summary

About half the population is covered by employer-sponsored health insurance and will be less affected by Trump’s health policy; but the other half—those on Medicare, Medicaid, and individual private insurance—will find their health care coverage on the chopping block unless the public resists with a massive voice. Most vulnerable is Medicaid, which, as a program for low-income people with less political clout, could be destroyed beyond recognition.

• • •

* Thomas Bodenheimer is a medical doctor who has practiced in San Francisco. He is the co-author with Kevin Grumbach of Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach (McGraw-Hill, 2012). Header image (left): “Healthcare Is a Human Right” by Juhan Sonin, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped and modified.

IMMIGRATION

Donald Trump and Immigration: A Few Predictions

RAY MICHALOWSKI[*]

As the great Yankee’s baseball catcher and American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “Only a fool would make predictions. Especially about the future.” With that caution in mind, I am going to hazard a few predictions about the likely impact of Donald Trump’s election on immigration policy.

Prediction #1

Shortly after taking office, President Trump will rescind the executive order establishing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), initially issued in 2014 by President Obama.

Why Trump Might Rescind DACA. Trump listed canceling DACA as his number-one priority for his first 100 days in office, a promise that was highly popular with his anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican base. Reversing DACA is a low-hanging political fruit. Trump can easily fulfill this campaign promise because DACA was created by an executive order that the new president can rescind with the stroke of a pen.

Why Trump Might Not Rescind DACA. Allowing Dreamers to stay in the country, and eventually become citizens, is broadly popular with the American public, if not with Trump supporters. About 66% of the public believes that youth who meet DACA criteria should be allowed to stay in the country. At the moment, Trump is a minority president. Wise political advisors (if he has them) might caution him against what would be an unpopular action. On the other hand, if he allowed DACA to continue, he would have to confront an angry base that wants undocumented immigrants out of the country.

Why Rescinding DACA Might Fail. Although rescinding DACA would be easy, removing the three-quarters of a million American-looking and American-acting young people will be a logistical and public relations nightmare for the Trump administration. Efforts to deport those with deferred action will be met with a firestorm of lawsuits that will tie up actual removal of Dreamers in the courts for years. The ACLU has already promised this. Also, many DACA youth are picture-perfect “citizens” who graduated from US high schools and colleges and who are serving in the military, working, building families and so on. They will get a lot of sympathetic coverage from news media, particularly because their undocumented status was not a result of their own actions. In the face of this, Trump may find it politically difficult to deport them.

Prediction #2

Trump will propose suspending immigration from “terror-prone” countries and implementing “extreme vetting” of anyone trying to enter the US from “terror-prone” regions.

Why Trump Will Propose This. This too was one of his promises for the first 100 days in office. He will need to be seen making an attempt to block immigration and visitations from the Middle East to keep the anti-terrorist, anti-Muslim portion of his political base on board.

Why This Will Probably Fail. The U.S. Code section governing entry into the country sets forth a number of highly detailed criteria for refusing visas or immigration status (8 U.S. Code § 1182 - Inadmissible aliens). It does not, however, authorize blanket prohibitions on immigrants or visitors from specific countries or regions, or with particular ethnic backgrounds.

Some have argued that section 8 U.S.C.§ 1182 (C)(i) grants this authority. However, this section reads that entry can be denied to “an alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is inadmissible.”

This section refers to “an alien,” not to a class of people (i.e. people from specific countries or regions or with specific backgrounds). This language would in all likelihood require ICE to establish the “adverse” grounds in each individual case, opening any attempt at a blanket prohibition to a wave of lawsuits.

Also, this section refers to “adverse foreign policy consequences.” In other words, the government would be required to establish that allowing people from countries with large Muslim populations (and make no mistake, that is what Trump is talking about here) would somehow damage US international relations. Actually, the opposite is more likely. Denying Muslims entry is what would have negative foreign policy consequences.

Prediction #3

Trump will make a half-hearted effort to “build the wall” and “have Mexico pay for it.”

Why Trump Will Do This. This was another thing Trump promised to do during his first 100 days as President. It was one of his most popular proposals, as can be seen in many videos with masses of supporters changing “Build the wall, build the wall.”

Why the Effort Will Be Half-Hearted. First of all, walling the US off from Mexico is a fool’s errand, and I don’t think Trump is a fool. History tells us that walls rarely work. Of equal significance, the United States has been trying to build a wall between the US and Mexico for the last 7 years. Currently, about 700 of the 2,000 miles of the border are walled off. Much of the remaining areas pose significant challenges due to terrain, as anyone who has spent time traveling along the US–Mexico border knows. According to the Department of Homeland Security, building a large and solid wall between the US and Mexico on this terrain will likely cost $10 million per mile. This comes to around 13 billion dollars, almost half again as much as the 8 billion dollars Trump quoted for his proposed wall. This is only the cost to build it. The cost of maintaining such a wall would be significant, something that is rarely mentioned by proponents of the wall.

It is my guess that cooler heads in Homeland Security and elsewhere will prevail. There will be some expansion of the current wall to make it appear that the Trump administration is keeping its promise, but the “great, great wall” between Mexico and the United States will not be built on Trump’s watch. It has taken 7 years to wall off the easiest 700 miles. There are 1,300 miles to go. Do the math.

Attempts to extend the wall along the entire border will also be bogged down by lawsuits, since much of that land is either critical habitat or Native American land. I would not be surprised to see activists creating encampments to protect these areas and/or to protest the wall. These will prove another legal and public relations headache for the Trump administration, just as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests proved for the Obama administration.

As for getting Mexico to pay for it, that was campaign bluster. It can’t be done. Mexico is a sovereign nation, and one that is more than a little concerned in protecting itself against US pressure. Mexicans will not pay for the wall unless they are given something of equal or greater value in return, which means US taxpayers will be footing the bill anyway.

Prediction #4

Despite Trump’s promise to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, by the end of his first term the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US will be only slightly smaller or about the same as it is today.

What Will Trump Do? Shortly after taking office, Trump will order ICE to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the United States. He promised to do this, and risks significant political backlash from many of his supporters if he does not at least appear to be trying.

What Will Happen? Deportations under President Obama were higher than at any time in recent history—nearly 500,000 people a year. About half of those deported had criminal convictions, although the majority of offenders deported had not committed the kind of serious felony offenses the policy was supposed to target (Rosenblum & McCabe 2014).

Obama’s deportation efforts have strained ICE and the immigration courts. Since the majority of undocumented immigrants in the country have been here for more than five years, they are entitled to a hearing in an immigration court. People who have built lives in the United States are not likely to accept deportation easily. They will ask for hearings on their cases. Currently the immigration court backlog in many jurisdictions is running about three years. The present system simply cannot manage mass deportations without collapsing. Mass deportation will require either that Congress repeal the right to an immigration hearing or provide significant new funding allocations for a massive expansion of ICE and the immigration court system.

It is my expectation (and hope) that Congress will not eliminate judicial review for immigrants. Doing so would be a fundamental strike against the rule of law and would hopefully not survive significant legal challenges. Whether or not Congress would fund a massive expansion of ICE and immigration courts is an open question, and my crystal ball is rather murky on this.

Dangers. A potential danger lurks behind calls for mass deportation. There is a possibility that emergent vigilante groups or current Three Percenter militias will take it upon themselves to round up undocumented immigrants and turn them over to ICE. This would be illegal. However, given that the Fraternal Order of Police and a union representing immigration officers endorsed Trump’s candidacy, there is the (hopefully remote) possibility that these law enforcement agencies will stand aside and let the vigilantes facilitate mass deportations. This would create a significant divide in the law enforcement community and seriously undermine the rule of law in the United States.

• • •

* Raymond Michalowski is Regents’ Professor of Criminal Justice at the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. His research areas include criminological theory, international human rights, immigration and border policy, and corporate, environmental, and political Crime. Recent publications include State Crime in the Global Age (with William Chambliss and Ronald Kramer) and State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government (with Ronald Kramer).

IMMIGRATION

The “Immigrant Problem”: A Historical Review and the New Impacts under Trump

MARLA A. RAMÍREZ[*]

Despite the widespread rhetoric that depicts the United States as a country of immigrants and a land of opportunity for all, and despite the fact that people from all over the world have made the United States their home since the nation’s infancy, immigrants have not been easily accepted in the country. Since the nineteenth century, different ethnic and racial immigrant groups—Southern and Eastern European, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants—have been classified as irreducible “others” and as a threat to the nation’s safety, racial purity, and cultural values. In many cases, laws have been enacted to deport specific ethnic and racial groups and prevent future immigration from certain regions. For instance, the Act of 1881 required federal inspectors to examine immigrants—who at the time were mainly Europeans arriving though Ellis Island—and deny entry to “undesirables.” Immigrants who were diseased, morally objectionable, or whose immigration fares were paid by someone else were denied admission into the United States. Only a year later, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902, effectively banning Chinese immigrants and making them ineligible for US citizenship for 61 years. This law was finally overturned in 1943. Filipino and Mexican immigrants have also been labeled as “inassimilable”: during the Great Depression, Mexicans and later Filipinos were perceived as highly dependent on public assistance, blamed for the economic ills of the country, and removed in mass regardless of their legal status.

Fear of immigrants and the insistence to scapegoat them for the problems of the country is nothing new. In this sense, Trump’s immigration discourse resembles and recycles weary immigration narratives that date back to the early twentieth century. In 1931, for instance, Jane Perry Clark, a political scientist and immigration consultant to the U.S. Federal Government, conducted a study on the mass deportations during the years leading up to the Great Depression and concluded that:

Deportation of aliens whose presence in the United State is believed to be undesirable is not new, but it has become increasingly emphasized as a panacea for our economic difficulties, particularly unemployment. “Send them unnaturalized aliens out of the country!” is the cry. “Let them go home so that our citizens can have their jobs!” (Clark 1931, 119)

Donald Trump delivered an almost identical anti-immigrant message to his supporters during his presidential campaign by promising to “establish new immigration controls to boost wages and to ensure that open jobs are offered to American workers first.” This rhetoric continues to create a hierarchy of “valued” citizens based on whiteness as well as gender, race, and class backgrounds.

Historically, anti-immigrant narratives have resulted in “good vs. bad” immigrant models. The “good” or “ideal” immigrants are those who immerse themselves in US culture, are not dependent on public assistance, have no criminal record, and have secured upper socioeconomic mobility. However, as several immigration scholars have argued (see further readings below), the “ideal immigrant” image is unrealistic given the structural barriers of inequality and racism that prevent immigrant minority groups from achieving upper mobility and inclusion. The “bad” or “undesired” immigrant, by contrast, is the opposite of the mythical ideal immigrant, and often categorized as criminal. As a result of such discourses, historically the imagined “ideal” immigrant has been welcomed, whereas the real “undesired” immigrant has been denigrated and deported.

It is in this respect that Trump’s presidency might signal the emergence of something new. Trump, indeed, has taken this anti-immigrant discourse to a new level by targeting both the socially constructed “good” and “bad” immigrants. He promised that if elected president, he would immediately terminate President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA grants deferred action (low priority for deportation) and a temporary work permit that is renewable every two years to eligible applicants. DACA recipients represent “ideal” immigrants because they are mostly undocumented immigrants who arrived to the United States as children, have good moral character, value US culture, and in many cases hold college and advanced degrees. At the same time, Trump has also targeted the perceived “undesired, criminal” immigrant by promising to deport 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records. The concept of criminal records has been broadly defined in this area, and people with traffic violations, for instance, have been placed on deportation under the Secured Communities program that Trump promises to enforce nationwide.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign popularized a narrative that vilifies all immigrants, specifically targeting Mexicans and Latinas/Latinos, and makes little or no difference between the socially and historically constructed “ideal” and “undesired” immigrants. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he stated on June 16, 2015, during his now infamous presidential candidacy speech in which he also classified Mexican immigrants as a threat to US society and blamed them for bringing drugs, crime, and rape into the country: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” His proposed solution, as is well known, is the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Moreover, Trump’s immigration discourse, while not new, is not entirely consistent with historical approaches to immigration. Trump has scapegoated immigrants not only for the economic ills of the nation, as seen in the past, but also for most, if not all, the nation’s problems. “We will enforce all of our immigration laws,” emphasized Donald Trump on August 31, 2016 during his step-by-step immigration plan speech in Phoenix, Arizona—a speech that was delivered only a few hours after a surprise meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. In his immigration speech, Trump outlined 10 steps to fix what he referred to as a “terrible, terrible, problem,” and justified his proposal by stating: “We’re in the middle of a jobs crisis, a border crisis, and a terrorism crisis like never before. All energies of the federal government and the legislative process must now be focused on immigration security.” The promise that unemployment, drug trafficking, and terrorism will be solved by mass deportations is not only false and unrealistic, but also dangerous, as it incites Trump supporters to physically and verbally attack people who are perceived as undocumented immigrants. Such attacks have already been reported and documented.

We will not know exactly what effects Trump’s presidency will have on immigrant communities until he is in office, and probably not until some years after his term is over. What we already know is that so far Trump has backed up on some of his immigration promises. For example, Trump initially promised to build an impenetrable wall along the US–Mexico border to be paid by the Mexican government; as of January 6, 2017, however, he is proposing that the U.S. Congress, and by extension all taxpayers, including undocumented immigrants who do pay federal income taxes, pay for the wall. After public criticism, he retracted in a tweet by stating that Congress will pay for the wall first and then Mexico will reimburse the U.S. government for the expenses (though he has not explained how the Mexican government will be made to reimburse the United States for these expenses).

What we also do know is that immigrant communities and allies have historically fought—and will continue to organize and resist against—oppression, hate, and exclusion. The constitutional rights and protections guaranteed by the US constitution to all people living in the United States, regardless of immigration status, income, race, ethnicity, gender, age, or sexual orientation, have been fought for by different generations; today, we must continue to strategize to protect equal rights for all. Immigrant organizers and allies have fought (and we should continue to fight) to:

- Demand due process in deportation proceedings.

- Launch “know your rights” workshops nationwide to inform people about their rights when interacting with immigration officials.

- Establish sanctuaries for immigrant, queer, and Muslim peoples. The more cities and college campuses become sanctuaries, the harder it will be for Trump to follow through with his campaign promise to block funding for sanctuary cities.

- Organize congressional visits, meetings with representatives’ local offices, and phone banks to push against exclusionary legislation.

- Educate others in the workplace, school, and through social media about our country’s immigration history and the myths around immigration debates.

- Listen to the concerns others face to discuss and propose solutions that center on inclusion and reject hate.

The above is not a comprehensive list, and I am sure that immigrant communities and allies will certainly develop new strategies not included here. As an immigrant myself, I am not fearful of the effects of the Trump administration. I am, instead, inspired by the power of the people who across the history of this country have come together to further inclusivity and respect across differences.

• • •

References and Further Readings

Arredondo, G.F. 2008. Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–39. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Clark, J.P. 1931. Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ruiz, V.L. 1998. From Out of the Shadow: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Suárez-Orozco, M.M. 2000. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Assimilation but Were Afraid to Ask.” Daedalus 129(4): 1–30.

* Marla Andrea Ramírez was born in Michoacán, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. She joined San Francisco State University in Fall 2016 as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. She specializes in oral history, Mexican migrations, mass forced removals, immigration law and policies since the 20th century, gendered migrations, and the “Mexican Repatriation” Program.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Some Aspects of the Trump Administration’s Foreign Policy

GREGORY SHANK[*]

In 2016, Donald Trump’s right-wing populism splintered the coalition constituting the Republican Party and coopted issues that set apart the most vibrant wing of the Democratic Party, the supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. That platform suggested movement toward a noninterventionist approach in foreign policy, opposition to globalization strategies and multilateral agreements favoring liberal internationalists within the corporate elite, and, implicitly, a condemnation of the harmful effects of post-2007 austerity (caused by the excesses of financialization) on the increasingly marginalized middle and working classes of the United States (and Europe, perhaps with the exception of Germany).

The core of Trump’s foreign policy is outlined in his campaign speeches before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPEC) Conference in March 2016, before the Center for the National Interest in April, and in his September national security address in Philadelphia. Further evidence comes from the post-election appointments to key positions in the national security apparatus and the cabinet portfolios responsible for foreign policy. Finally, although the chief executive may enjoy the greatest freedom of action in the foreign policy arena, all options are severely constrained by the wars and crises handed off by the previous administration, a reality President Obama also confronted.

Israel

Trump’s address before 18,000 people at the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC, sought to bring his candidacy into the mainstream and to lay out policies that might smooth over relations with the Jewish community. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kurshner (a Trump senior advisor on domestic and foreign policy), Haaretz newspaper reported, wrote the speech. He consulted with Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer (a longtime Trump admirer, who defended Trump strategist Steve Bannon against charges of anti-Semitism), on matters relating to Israeli diplomatic and security policy. Kurshner, a real estate investor, AIPAC donor, and Orthodox Jew with connections to Israel’s Likud party, also enlisted the help of Ken Kurson, the editor of the New York Observer (a Kurshner property). Kurson offered expertise and experience as a speechwriter and close collaborator in advancing Rudolph Giuliani’s presidential aspirations.

The content of the speech is derived from materials provided by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It highlights vintage global war on terror threats concerning “rogue states” and terror networks emanating from Iran (and its “puppet states”) intent on destabilizing and dominating the region, while dismissing Palestinian claims to sovereignty and freedom from occupation because their schools and mosques produce a “culture of hatred” and indiscriminate death, again thanks to Iranian funding. Trump reiterates that Israel will remain a strategic ally; his intention to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, “the eternal capital of the Jewish people” (a hot-button issue fortified by David Friedman, Trump’s designated ambassador to Israel); his opposition to United Nations (UN) resolutions that condition an eventual agreement between Israel and Palestine; and his ambivalent plan to either dismantle the Iran nuclear accord or simply “enforce the terms of the previous deal to hold Iran totally accountable.”

Non-Intervention

Given the primacy of Israel, plus the March 2016 naming of militarist foreign policy advisors and the incorporation of Iraq War hawks James Woolsey and John Bolton as Trump national security and foreign affairs advisors in August and September, early critics understandably concluded that the incoming administration’s international initiatives would differ little from the dominant neoconservative practices of the Bush and Obama presidencies. Worse yet, human rights would probably be downplayed internationally, including unabashed Ronald Reagan-style support for foreign dictators. Yet that view overlooks a novel element in the Trump victory: the probable ouster of the entire foreign policy establishment serving George H.W. Bush onward and the demotion of covert regime change initiatives organized primarily by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Middle East. If personnel choices translate into policy, this could portend a significant shift. It would account for much of the Never Trump movement among Republicans and some of the bipartisan post-election fury surrounding Russia, which aims to undermine Trump’s amorphous but stubborn moves toward détente.

The repudiation of neoconservative interventionists in the Democratic and Republican parties had multiple sources during the 2016 campaign. Rand Paul libertarians, along with personnel from the Charles Koch Institute and the Koch-funded Cato Institute, launched a think tank called the Defense Priorities Foundation and an advocacy arm, the Defense Priorities Initiative, to lobby for a less militaristic foreign policy (the Kochs did not finance these new entities). The Trump campaign outflanked this initiative on the right, with differences centering on the purported security threat posed by immigration and unconditional support for Israel. Each campaign and set of institutions called for an end to perpetual war, arguing that the lethal military power pursued over the past fifteen years in the Middle East, including the expanded use of drones, had failed to protect the United States. Each buttressed the case with respected military officers, veterans of the string of limited wars and counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

In a March interview with the Washington Post, Trump signaled his intention to take a noninterventionist approach in world affairs or at least to lighten the US footprint worldwide. Despite unrest abroad, especially in the Middle East, Trump said the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding domestic infrastructure. These themes were flushed out in two critical speeches, one on “America First” at the Mayflower Hotel and the other on “Peace Through Strength” at the Union League of Philadelphia. The central message is that Trump’s foreign policy will be tempered by realism and will dispense with the long-dominant foreign policy wing of the Republican Party. After the struggle against German and Japanese imperialism and the succeeding Cold War, Trump told his audiences, the United States has been on a downward arc for lack of a new vision. An arrogant democratizing and nation-building mission in the Middle East and elsewhere has produced chaos and genocide, while overextending national resources. With war-fighting generals at his side, he will avoid endless wars and no longer topple regimes, a policy that has created power vacuums and immigration insecurity across Europe and the United States. Supposedly temporary post-World Way II security structures such as NATO and the nuclear umbrella have become an outdated, unaffordable luxury, and countries that have enjoyed American largess (especially Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia) must assume more of the burden to defend themselves.

US military strength, Trump says, must be bolstered by expanding the capacities of all branches of the service and updating the arsenal of nuclear weapons, to match Russian and Chinese efforts. US economic strength must be leveraged to gain more cooperation from China in terms of North Korea and the South China Sea; and the American technological lead must grow in terms of artificial intelligence and cyber warfare. These tools, plus financial and ideological warfare, will be used against terrorist threats. Resort to military force may be necessary, but the emphasis is on restoring stability, peace, and prosperity, not war and destruction. Russia and China share interests with the United States and need not be adversaries (unlike Iran). The nation-state is paramount, and globalism in the form of international unions is unnecessarily constricting. For instance, the NAFTA agreement has hollowed out the nation’s manufacturing capacity and eliminated jobs. Reversing these agreements, and investing in military modernization and cybersecurity, will provide jobs for young Americans—including in the inner cities.

This hybrid set of goals derives from several conflicting political currents. The more visionary dimension is reflected in the host of the April 27 speech: the Center for the National Interest (CNI). Jared Kushner facilitated the choice of CNI, which publishes the National Interest. Its editor, Jacob Heilbrunn, promotes the “realist” school of foreign policy, which advocates balance-of-power geopolitics, careful circumspection about intervention abroad, and the need for the United States to husband its resources. Layne’s “Graceful Decline,” published in The American Conservative (owned by Silicon Valley software developer Ron Unz) systematically sets out in polished form the key concepts that Trump refers to elliptically in his speeches. After describing why the United States has declined internationally, Layne argues that the current era of globalization is ending, with Pax Americana to be replaced by an international order that reflects the interests, values, and norms of emerging powers, such as China, India, and Russia. In this multipolar world, the United States must coexist with rising powers, especially China.

The new US global posture would involve strategic retrenchment, burden shifting (which rolls back current security commitments to NATO, Japan, and South Korea, while providing advanced weapons and military technology to friendly states in Europe and Asia), and abandonment of the global counterinsurgency campaign in the Middle East. The default US foreign policy of intervention must end, meaning the sidelining of the counterinsurgency lobby in both major political parties, including their respective private think tanks. In short, the emerging strategy reduces the importance of nonstate terrorists or minor powers, because great powers can only be defeated by other great powers.

The European Right

Another policy current consists of Trump advisors who identify with European right-wing movements. Some coalesced around the anti-immigrant focus of Jeff Sessions’ congressional office, others drew support from Mercer-funded entities that are now involved in the upcoming French and German elections (using Breitbart, just as Cambridge Analytica was in the pro-Brexit Leave.EU effort, to Trump’s delight), along with denizens of the national security apparatus (such as national security adviser Michael T. Flynn), with concerns over the spread of “radical Islam.” Steve Bannon views in Trump the possibility of restoring true American capitalism, assisted by the right-wing populist uprisings in Europe to “undo the global power structure—the banks, the government, the media, the guardians of secular culture.” Symptomatic of this insistence on the menace of immigration, notably absent from Trump’s speeches was any notion that the continent of Africa (except Libya) exists or that below Mexico the hemisphere includes Central and Latin American nations. Most realists take offense at this, as do Silicon Valley companies that rely on an international pool of skilled coders, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

Trump’s unique turn of phrase, the “folly of globalism,” may originate in the writings of Garet Garrett, an Old Right luminary and part of the generation behind the 1940s isolationist America First mass movement (see Raimondo 2008). The phrase also figures prominently in the lexicon of the European far Right, such as in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, where globalism (mondialisme, not globalization) refers to the homogenizing influence of world markets on peoples and cultures, promoted by open borders, massive immigration, and the transference of sovereignty to a supranational European Union (see Zúquete 2015). In Trump’s “Declaring American Economic Independence” speech, his stances on trade and supranational agreements such as NAFTA align him with that position, but also with critics like Joseph E. Stiglitz (2016), who argues that “Americans are economically worse off than they were a quarter-century ago” and that trade and financial liberalization have not delivered the general prosperity promised.

Although Layne’s realism calls for deep reductions in defense expenditures, Trump’s “Peace Through Strength” speech is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s duplicitous missile-gap message. The term often signifies peace through war and an overreliance on force over political and diplomatic solutions, but Trump has stated that resort to force is a sign of weakness. Why, then, field an army of 540,000 troops (the size of George W. Bush’s full-scale invasion forces in Iraq and Afghanistan)? Military Keynesianism would appeal to defense contractors and a planned reversal of sequestration of military spending for all the services would help to defuse opposition by the civilian neoliberal counterinsurgency lobby. Yet, increasing the defense budget by 55 to 80 billion dollars per year cannot be offset by better controls on fraud or by policing procurement inefficiencies. This will necessitate cuts in the domestic safety net. As an employment strategy, military spending creates far fewer jobs than the same dollars do when invested in education, clean energy, or health care.

Preliminary Conclusions

Unlike the initiatives concerning the domestic policy arena, some of Trump’s foreign policy proposals, such as a reduced role in the Middle East and a scaling down the post-World War II global security architecture may not be unreasonable. However, there is no guarantee that the Trump coalition will accomplish this realignment. In the past, a civil war over foreign policy was waged in the shadows, and then openly, by opponents of Richard Nixon’s policies of détente with the USSR, rapprochement with China, and a negotiated end to the Vietnam War. That group coalesced as the neoconservatives, who sabotaged Nixon’s foreign policy agenda and his presidency (Colodny & Shachtman 2010). Today, those neoconservatives are joined in their counterattacks by Clinton Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Democrats engaged in post-election autopsy sessions should look hard at the yawning gap between the hawkish candidate they offered and the consistent popular sentiment against US military involvement abroad.

• • •

References

Barrett, W. 2016. Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. New York: Regan Arts.

Colodny, L., and T. Shachtman. 2010. The Forty Years War. New York: Harper Perennial.

Raimondo, J. 2008. Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Stiglitz, J.E. 2016. How Trump Happened. Project Syndicate, October 14.

Zúquete, J.P. 2015. “Free the People”: The Search for True Democracy’ in Western Europe’s Far-Right Political Culture.” In The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives, edited by Carlos de la Torre, pp. 231–64. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

* Gregory Shank is the Co-managing Editor of Social Justice and lives in San Francisco.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Latin America vs. Trump

CLIFFORD WELCH[*]

The new year had barely begun when the sting of a yet-to-be-installed president Trump rocked Latin America with Tweets supporting the Ford Motor Company’s decision to abandon construction of a car plant in Mexico. This one event, coupled with Trump’s reported attempts to cause Toyota and General Motors (GM) to downscale their operations in the region, seemed to confirm the troubled future a variety of Latin American pundits have projected for US–Latin American relations once Trump is inaugurated.

During the campaign, Latin America was rarely mentioned. Since voters elected Trump, however, discussion around the region has hovered like a drone over uncertain targets: What will the future bring? How will access to the United States change—for tourists, immigrants, investors, and products? What will the new hemispheric security arrangement be? How can the region benefit from Trump’s presidency? These questions and more have been debated in the media and the academy since Trump became the GOP presidential candidate.

Most readers know that US–Latin American relations have often been tense. The United States generally supported movements to end Spanish colonialism in the 19th century but gradually sought hegemony over the region with new forms of commercial and ideological domination in the 20th century. A few periods were marked by closer relationships. One of these occurred during the Great Depression and World War II, when the United States needed resources and security assistance from Latin America; another came after the Cuban Revolution culminated in 1959, when the United States allied with diverse authoritarian governments to operate counter-insurgency programs in the region. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, counter-insurgency operations morphed into counter-narcotics and counter-terrorist initiatives, and trade agreements grew in importance. To some extent, relations improved with the ongoing Middle East crisis in the 21st century, because it caused the United States to pay less attention to the region, allowing increased autonomy so long as the region presented neither security nor commercial threats. As a result, the region lessened its dependency on the United States by increasing its relations with other countries, especially China.

Trump’s election called into question these more recent security and commercial arrangements. As the former Mexican diplomat Jorge Castañeda wrote about the advent of Trump, “one thing seems certain, the international order that emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989 will change.” In the context of Ford’s announcement, Mexico’s La Jornada reported that Trump threatened Toyota, too, for its plans to build a factory in Mexico. Trump similarly threatened GM with an import tax on any Mexican-made vehicle it attempted to sell in the United States The threats and pull-out, which was said to be motivated by reasons other than Trump’s tweets, angered Mexicans and sent shock waves as far away as Argentina, where the Clarin news organization associated the threats with Trump’s “protectionist, antiglobalization policies” aimed at generating industrial jobs in the “depressed Mid-West.”

The irony is that NAFTA, the free trade treaty constructed between Mexico, the United States, and Canada nearly a quarter-century ago, has benefited the United States much more than Mexico. Millions of peasant farmers lost their land and livelihoods when NAFTA allowed US farmers to export their corn to Mexico and transnational agribusinesses to grow produce for export to the United States without fear of tariffs. In fact, the US agricultural trade with Mexico tripled under NAFTA, and the destruction of suddenly unprotected traditional agriculture sent millions in search of jobs. The economy failed to absorb the flood of new jobseekers, whose presence also depressed wages. Thus, Mexico’s poverty rate has not improved since NAFTA’s launch. As a consequence, one of NAFTA’s main goals—discouraging illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States—failed to materialize. In fact, Central American and Caribbean countries that have also signed free trade agreements with the United States join Mexico as major sources of undocumented immigrants to the United States. Trump’s interventions, which already eliminated hundreds of Ford construction jobs and a planned 2,800 factory jobs, only worsen prospects for improvement.

The lesson of the Ford case for La Jornada is recognition that the end of the development model based on free trade agreements is close at hand and that Mexico must “urgently reconfigure” its economy around “el mercado interno y … la diversificación commercial.” The intellectual and campesíndio activist Armando Bartra had made these points a month earlier in the same newspaper, anticipating that Trump’s neoprotectionist and migrant-expulsion plans would make 2017 a “catastrophic” year. He saw in Bernie Sanders’s phenomenal electoral appeal hope for a leftist victory in Mexico and called on voters to support candidates who represent indigenous Mexico and “un programa consensuado de salvación nacional.”

The inward turn represented by Trump and somewhat by Bartra and La Jornada’s editorial writers is present in other responses to Trump’s election. In sum, both Trump’s pro-US discourse and his actions have stimulated nationalism in Latin America. They have restored relevance to the nation-state in the context of globalization’s celebration of internationalism. Humberto Vacaflor, writing in the venerable El Diário, emphasized similarities between Bolivian president Evo Morales and Trump, noting that Morales shares the American magnate’s suspicion of trade agreements, since they “take advantage” of countries like Bolivia. Trump says he wants foreign states to pay more for the presence of US armed forces, but Morales does not want US military support. In the war on drugs, Trump’s nationalism may help Bolivia avoid pressure to cooperate with the US military, since Bolivia’s cocaine is sold in Brazil, Argentina, and Europe, not the United States. In a tweet congratulating Trump, Morales defiantly expressed his hopes to work jointly against racism, machismo, and xenophobia.

In the case of Cuba, the story is somewhat inverted, as the country has struggled bravely against US-imposed isolation ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. President Obama helped change the situation by negotiating to normalize relations with Cuban president Raul Castro. However, nearly all of his initiatives took the form of executive orders that Trump has threatened to revoke, demanding sweeping changes in Cuba in exchange for normalization. Trump’s plans to restore the old order provoked Cuba to react traditionally to the United States’ threats: a few days after the US election, Castro ordered four days of strategic military exercises.

Venezuela is another country searching for a silver lining in Trump’s triumph. Undermined by low oil prices, president Nicolás Maduro’s government also faces fierce political opposition. Part of his strategy for maintaining power has included representing the United States as a threat. By insulting the United States, Maduro may stoke Trump’s wrath, Vacaflor suggests. With the stroke of a pen, he could cut off oil exports to Venezuela, provoking further economic havoc. This would hand Maduro’s enemies one more weapon. For them, Trump’s victory is an example of the dramatic electoral change they have longed for since Hugo Chavez was elected president in 1999, initiating close to 15 years of radical change in the country. For his part, Maduro congratulated Trump on his election and expressed his admiration of the president-elect’s defense of national sovereignty and self-determination.

In covering Ford’s reneging on the car plant in Mexico, the Argentine press followed some distinct lines of argument that held out hope for US investments. They gave special attention to reports claiming that the company’s decision was related not to Trump’s tweets but to changes in forecasts for the auto industry, especially to increased interest in self-driving vehicles. According to this perspective, Ford abandoned expansion plans in Mexico because they envisioned slow sales for the cars they planned to build in the plant and little chance of reorienting production toward self-driving cars because such a high-tech operation “necesita personal que tenga conocimientos de informática, más graduados de la universidade que de la escuela secundaria, mano de obra altamente calificada, más fácil de conseguir en Estados Unidos que en México”—as the Argentinian Infobae news outlet polemized. Since Argentines infamously see themselves as more European than Latin American, the subtext of this story is that such a pull-out would not have occurred in Argentina.

With the recent election of neoliberal Mauricio Macri as president, Argentina quickly became the new model for Latin America’s future. Last March, Obama visited the country to “affirm Argentina’s shift to the center.” Whereas Trump cancelled planned talks on construction projects in Argentina as part of his response to concerns about conflict of interest, his son Eric visited the region early in 2017 and commented on how Argentina had changed under Macri to become “un mercado mucho más receptivo para las inversiones.” In fact, Donald and Mauricio have known each other for more than 30 years. Macri’s father was a real estate developer in New York who fell afoul of the mafia that controlled construction and trucking. Trump played the senior Macri like a puppet, selling him five mansions for a high price and buying them back from him for a low price once Macri gave up on the project. Macri just didn’t have the connections Trump enjoyed.

If Trump really does break the free trade treaties that govern many multinational and binational relations between the United States and Latin America, the region’s leaders will have to be careful not to be taken advantage of like Macri’s father. The first to pay for such errors are the poor and the needy and the state institutions designed to further social justice. Although Morales will soon be replaced as president, voters in Bolivia and other Latin American countries may find in Trump stimulus to support politicians who, as Bartra indicated, will place questions of social justice ahead of economic growth schemes that seem to backfire.

• • •

* Clifford Welch is a former San Francisco longshoreman, ranchhand, reporter, and cofounder of the National Writers Union. He teaches contemporary Brazilian history at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP).

LABOR & CLASS

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Bracing for Trump’s Anti-Worker, Corporate Agenda

COLIN JENKINS[*]

Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their ‘work’ is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.—Sergio Troncoso

In a February speech on his campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump lambasted his opponents for their cozy relationships with Wall Street bankers. “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over [Cruz],” Trump said. “Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.” Trump’s campaigns for both the Republican candidacy and the US Presidency were heavily themed on this inside-out approach to posing as a whistleblower of the elite, a billionaire businessman gone rogue, eager to feed other members of his exclusive club to the lions. Americans by the tens of millions—ravaged by decades of predatory loan schemes, joblessness, and unfathomable debt—gathered in the den, fevered by this angst-ridden anti-establishment message, thirsting for the flesh he was to heave from the castle on the hill.

Nine months later, Trump was elected to the office of President of the United States. Taking a page from George W. Bush, Trump successfully packaged his billionaire, elitist self into an average dude sitting on the bar stool across from us. Taking a page from Ronald Reagan, Trump successfully molded the chronic economic woes of the American working class into avenues for racial and xenophobic hatred. Trump’s infamous wall is the modern-day version of Reagan’s mythological “welfare queen”—both masterful mind tricks designed to avert the attention of the understandably ravenous working-class lions away from the ringmasters and toward others in the den. The oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer. The end result: a billionaire businessman buoyed to the highest office of the land by 63 million working-class voters during a time of unprecedented poverty and wealth inequality.

Predictably, Trump’s ascension to the presidency has ended his inside-out shtick. Much like Barack Obama in 2008, Trump’s anti-establishment marketing assault has culminated into an uber-establishment cabinet. Within six weeks of his election victory, Trump has proceeded to form what some have referred to as the General Billionaires Administration. As of December 7th, Trump’s prospective cabinet topped a combined personal wealth of $14 billion, “more than 30 times greater than that of even President George W. Bush’s White House.” And that represents only half of the total appointees to come. Instead of “draining the swamp” as he promised to do on the campaign trail, Trump has called on his real-estate instincts to expand the swamp into a gargantuan monstrosity of a cesspool. For working-class Americans, this means the President and those surrounding him are even more out of touch with the common struggle than ever before.

Although personal wealth does not necessarily imply the embracing of a blatant anti-worker ideology, it almost always sets this tone through efforts to legitimize said wealth, promote false meritocracies, and push unrealistic narratives rooted in “personal responsibility” and “pulling up boot straps,” all of which ignore the material realities of working-class people. Taken on their words and actions, there is no reason to believe that Trump and his cabinet will be anything but disastrous for working-class Americans.

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, wants to privatize education and treat it as an industry among others in a competitive capitalist market. “Let’s not kid ourselves that [public education] is not an industry,” she told a crowd in Texas, “we must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” In other words, run it as a for-profit venture, which inevitably means lowering pay, benefits, and standards for employees (teachers) in order to maximize the bottom line. Not good for working-class Americans who teach for a living, and not good for working-class children whose educations will take a back seat to profit margins.

Andrew Puzder, Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary, has proven to be fiercely anti-worker in his role as CEO of CKE Restaurants. NY’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman referred to this appointment as a “cruel and baffling decision by Trump” due to Puzder’s presiding over a fast-food chain “that repeatedly stole workers’ hard-earned wages.” As an employee at one of Puzder’s restaurants, Rogelio Hernandez called Puzder “one of the worst fast food CEOs,” adding that his appointment “sends a signal to workers that the Trump years are going to be about low pay, wage theft, sexual harassment and racial discrimination.” Not good for tens of millions of working-class Americans who are desperate for living-wage employment.

Ben Carson, Trump’s pick to run Housing and Urban Development, has been consistently opposed to government assistance programs like the one he is about to oversee. Rather than viewing such programs as necessities in a capitalist system that leaves many people without the means to fulfill basic needs, Carson sees them as “socialist experiments” that “attempt to infiltrate every part of our lives.” Carson even said that trusting the government “to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens” can be “downright dangerous.” Ironically, he is now entrusted to do just that. Not good for the millions of working-class Americans who rely on public housing programs to shelter themselves and their families.

While most of Trump’s own plans have been hidden in vague political rhetoric (“Making America Great Again,” “create a dynamic booming economy” with “pro-growth tax plans” and “new modern regulatory frameworks”), they are mostly taken from the same neoliberal agenda that has shaped American policy for the past three decades, merely repackaged with Trump-speak. If his own business dealings are any indication of how he feels about working people, the Trump presidential agenda will most certainly be anti-worker. Workers have filed numerous lawsuits against Trump over the years, alleging everything from anti-union intimidation to paying below-minimum wages. “In one case, the Trump Organization paid $475,000 to settle a claim with nearly 300 Los Angeles golf club employees in a class-action suit alleging unpaid wages and age discrimination, among other offenses.” In another case, the Trump Organization “settled for an unknown sum” regarding the employment of undocumented Polish immigrants who “were paid $5 an hour or less when they were paid at all,” and “worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week with no overtime.” Earlier this year, workers at Trump’s Las Vegas hotel filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging they were “interfered with, restrained, and coerced” in an effort to avoid unionization. Dozens of similar complaints against Trump businesses have come to light over the years, including alarming trends of misogyny against women employees.

Like most marketing slogans, “Make America Great Again” has no real meaning in regards to concrete plans. Its call on some glorious past allows for an embrace of generic change, and its purposeful vagueness speaks to whatever is important to each individual who embraces it, essentially allowing for a wide range of beauties in the eyes of a wide range of beholders. Trump’s “pro-growth tax plan” draws on the same neoliberal ideology that was implemented by Reagan and survived by every administration since, proclaiming that lowering corporate tax rates will incentivize American companies to stay in the US, which will create more jobs, and will inevitably allow the increased corporate wealth to trickle down to the rest of us. The only problem is that never happened. Ironically, the implementation of such policies actually paralleled the mass exodus of American companies, partly due to free trade agreements like NAFTA and partly due to the globalization of the capitalist system, which allowed for the formation of an international labor pool to replace the industrialized, unionized labor pools that once existed in countries like the US.

Between 1986 and 1988, Reagan lowered the corporate tax rate from 46% to 34%. To put this move in perspective, this rate had stayed between 46% and 52.8% since 1951. The Reagan rate has barely moved since, despite 16 years of Democratic administrations. And it has done nothing to keep American companies home; rather, it actually complemented massive outsourcing of American jobs. In fact, “manufacturing employment collapsed from a high of 19.5 million workers in June 1979 to 11.5 workers in December 2009, a drop of 8 million workers over 30 years. Between August 2000 and February 2004, manufacturing jobs were lost for a stunning 43 consecutive months—the longest such stretch since the Great Depression.” This trend has continued as the US lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2016. According to the Center for American Progress, “US multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers… cut their work forces in the US by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.” All of this despite historically low corporate tax rates. Trump’s solution: double down by cutting corporate tax rates even more.

Remaining consistent with the neoliberal agenda, Trump has also promised to “scale back years of disastrous regulations unilaterally imposed by our out-of-control bureaucracy.” Yet another failed policy direction, tried and tested for decades, being recycled to give already reckless corporations even more maneuverability. Trump plans to repatriate trillions of dollars of corporate money that has been hidden in foreign banks for years. By allowing special immunity to these corporations (which have essentially evaded taxes through loopholes) with a temporary reduction in the tax rate (from 35% to 10%), Trump believes roughly $5 trillion will return to the US (although reports estimate closer to $2.5 trillion). Unfortunately, the last time such immunity was granted, in 2004, “a congressional report noted that some companies used more than 90 percent of the repatriated cash to enrich shareholders, generally through stock buybacks. Corporations that brought home the most cash, in fact, cut jobs.”

Trump’s recycled economic agenda has proven time and time again to boost corporate wealth at the expense of working-class interests. The widely reported deal made with Carrier recently, which was facilitated by Trump and promises to keep 800 jobs in Indiana, is a perfect example of this misguided approach. The Carrier deal was said to include a tax giveaway, the main tool in Trump’s corporate welfare tax plan, which stands to cost about $6.2 trillion in lost federal revenues over a decade. Not only does this approach “starve the beast,” as originally intended by Reagan, it simply does not create American jobs as promised. The past four decades have proven this. The corporate tax rate in the US (which is actually on par with G7 countries, whose rates average over 30%) is not a tremendous factor in why companies move elsewhere. They avoid taxes because they can. There is no reason to believe they wouldn’t avoid them just the same with a lower rate. They also relocate for the “cheap labor,” which is near chattel-slavery levels in some places, and for preferable infrastructures. As the New York Times reported shortly after the Carrier deal, “Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, never mentioned taxes as the reason for the offshoring move. Instead, it cited its ‘existing infrastructure’ and ‘strong supplier base’ in Mexico. More revealing, United Technologies says it can save $65 million a year by moving operations to low-wage Mexico.”

Trump’s economic plan does nothing to stray from the corporate-friendly neoliberal agenda of the past three decades. In many cases, it doubles down on it. These strategies have never benefited the working-class majority, and they will continue to represent an abysmal failure for those of us who depend on wages and salaries to live—a reality that Trump and his cabinet have never faced. Their out-of-touch, fairy-tale lives will undoubtedly amount to out-of-touch policies, leaving most of us entrenched in our ongoing struggle for living wages, affordable housing, reliable healthcare, and meaningful educations for our children. This struggle must take place in our communities, at our jobs, and in our children’s schools. Rejecting the corporate agenda embraced by Trump will not be easy—but it is a struggle we’ve inherited from decades ago, only with a new face at the helm.

• • •

* Colin Jenkins is founder and Social Economics department chair at The Hampton Institute: A Working-Class Think Tank. He is an anarchist, a member of the Socialist Party USA, and a Wobbly.

LGBTQ POLITICS

A Queer Exemption? What Trump’s Presidency Means for LGBTQ Politics

CLARE SEARS[*]

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was characterized by raging rambling speeches and late-night belligerent tweets that threatened and mocked multiple groups of people. Undocumented immigrants, Muslims, disabled people, and women were frequently targeted—LGBTQ people were not. In a campaign marked by hypermasculine posturing, blatant misogyny, and sexual boasts and accusations, Trump’s decision to pass over a constituency marked by sexual and gender differences is striking. In this post, I reflect on Trump’s queer exemption and consider what his presidency will mean for LGBTQ politics. Specifically, I ask: How can we make sense of Trump’s restrained anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in relation to his persistent anti-LGBTQ actions?

Clearly, Trump’s failure to treat LGBTQ people as a political punching bag does not make him an ally, despite his occasional claims to the contrary. As presidential candidate and president-elect, Trump has consistently supported people and policies that will devastate queer and trans communities. Two examples will suffice:

- Mike Pence: Trump’s selection of Mike Pence for vice-president provides a particularly stark indicator of his disregard for LGBTQ issues. It is no secret that Pence is a blatantly homophobic evangelical Christian conservative, who views homosexuality as a choice that undermines God’s will and heralds “societal collapse” (U.S. Congress 2006, p. 14796). As Governor of Indiana, Pence passed a “religious freedom law” that legalized discrimination against LGBTQ people; he also oversaw funding cuts for HIV testing sites and a state ban on needle exchange that led to one of the worst domestic HIV outbreaks in recent times. As a member of Congress, Pence took a similar stand against effective public health interventions by opposing funding for HIV prevention programs that featured queer sex-positive messages. He also opposed the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” supported a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, and advocated “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ people. Trump will likely grant unprecedented decision-making power to Pence, making his virulent anti-LGBTQ agenda all the more terrifying.

- State-Level Discrimination: Trump also backs state discrimination against LGBTQ people. During his campaign, he announced support for North Carolina’s House Bill 2, a state law that overturns municipal anti-discrimination ordinances protecting LGBTQ people and forces transgender people to use public restrooms that diverge from their gender identity. According to Pence, Trump will also rescind a White House directive that advises public schools to treat transgender students according to their gender identity, rather than the gender assigned at birth, or risk violating federal sex discrimination law. In both cases, Trump paid lip service to the goal of equality but argued that states have the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people as they see fit.

Although Trump invokes limitations on federal power to justify inaction on anti-LGBTQ discrimination, he is more than happy to exert federal muscle in other realms. When it comes to immigration policy, law-and-order politics, and health insurance coverage, for example, Trump proposes significant reforms and rollbacks that pose a deadly threat to millions, including LGBTQ people. Indeed, several of Trump’s signature proposals directly target social movements led by queer people of color.

- DACA: Throughout his campaign, Trump emphasized his plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary protection to certain undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, allowing them to attend school, obtain work permits, and receive temporary reprieve from deportation. Queer undocumented youth led the movement for this reform, mobilizing within and against mainstream advocacy organizations that often opposed their radical tactics. Their efforts paid off in 2012, when President Obama established DACA by executive order. Over 741,500 young people have signed up for the program, many of them LGBTQ. If Trump’s plans materialize, thousands of undocumented LGBTQ youth will be caught up in the dragnet, facing mass arrest by ICE officials, incarceration in immigration detention facilities, and deportation to countries they barely know.

- Law and Order: As public awareness of anti-Black police violence reaches new heights, Trump has taken a stand against Black Lives Matter, the social movement founded by three black queer women. Using barely coded racist rhetoric, Trump has vowed to end “the war on our police” and propagated a dystopian vision of US cities wracked by gun-toting criminals and murderous immigrants. Positioning himself as a law-and-order leader who will “make America safe again,” Trump has promised to reinstitute stop-and-frisk policing, increase police access to military-grade weaponry, and destabilize sanctuary cities. These proposals directly threaten LGBTQ people, particularly those who are black or brown, poor, homeless, and/or involved in street economies (sex work, drug sales, unlicensed vending). Multiple studies show that LGBTQ people are overrepresented in street-based populations and suffer police harassment at elevated rates. In particular, transgender women and homeless queer youth of color will bear the brunt of Trump-era militarized policing.

- Affordable Care Act: Trump has made clear his intention to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which provides healthcare to 20 million individuals, including one million LGBTQ people. If he succeeds, these people will lose health insurance as well as legal protections that are particularly valuable to transgender folks and those living with HIV. These protections prevent insurers from (a) discriminating on the grounds of gender identity, (b) denying coverage on the basis of a pre-existing condition (including HIV and “gender dysphoria”), and (c) imposing annual and lifetime caps on coverage that harm people with chronic costly conditions (such as HIV). Under Trump’s presidency, LGBTQ people will face increased discrimination, illness, and death.

Given Trump’s support of politicians and policies that will devastate LGBTQ communities, what are we to make of his decision to exempt LGBTQ people from his trademark rhetorical attacks? Moreover, what are we to make of his occasional pro-gay statements, such as the speech he delivered at the Republican National Convention, where he spoke of LGBTQ people as “wonderful Americans” who deserved to be protected from violence? Some observers applauded Trump’s words, noting that he was the first Republican to speak positively of LGBTQ people while accepting the party’s presidential nomination. A closer look at Trump’s speech, however, reveals a troubling context that sheds light on the relationship between his pro-LGBTQ rhetoric and anti-LGBTQ actions.

During his RNC acceptance speech, Trump spoke of LGBTQ people when addressing the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which had occurred the previous month. The shooter, Omar Mateen, attacked the gay nightclub on its “Latin night” and most of the 49 people killed were queer Latinx clubgoers. In his RNC speech, Trump described the victims as “wonderful Americans [who] were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist” and vowed to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.” Omar Mateen was not foreign and his connections to terrorism were minimal, but this did not stop Trump from linking his support for LGBTQ people to his anti-Islam nationalist agenda. Clearly, Trump was exploiting the deadliest act of anti-LGBTQ violence in US history for political gain, but he was also testing a particular political formation—pro-gay/anti-Muslim—that will likely resurface throughout his presidency.

In her 2007 book Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar refers to this formation as homonationalism, denoting the ways that nation-states incorporate certain queer subjects (typically white cisgender men) to mark the border between “gay friendly” Western democracies and “homophobic” Islamic nations. According to Jin Haritaworn (2015), this process is in full swing in European cities such as Berlin, where neoliberal governments adopt punitive policies against Muslim immigrants under the guise of promoting diversity and protecting LGBTQ communities. Far-right political parties in Europe are now following a similar path, promoting “Western values” such as gay rights to win support for their populist agendas rooted in white supremacy, nationalism, and anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim violence. Trump’s strategic mention of LGBTQ people in his acceptance speech suggests a similar development on the US political stage that we need to monitor closely in the months to come.

• • •

References and Further Readings

Haritaworn, J. 2015. Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mogul, J.L., A.J. Ritchie, and K. Whitlock. 2011. Queer (In)justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.

Puar, J.K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Spade, D. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. New York: South End Press.

U.S. Congress. 2006. Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 109th Congress, Second Session. Volume 152, Part 11. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.

* Clare Sears is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at San Francisco State University. Her research and teaching interests include critical criminology, queer theory, transgender studies, historical methods, and disability studies. Sears is author of the book Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Duke University Press, 2015) and coeditor of a special issue of Social Justice on sexuality and criminalization.

PENAL POLITICS

Punishment and Policing in the Trump Era

MICHELLE BROWN[*]

In the days to come under the Trump presidency, the United States will move toward the end goal of any carceral regime: dehumanizing repression. This end is what Judith Butler names in Trump’s appeal as a “murderous desire” that thrills in its arrogated power to command, for instance, the building of walls and the deportation of millions. While many commentators have emphasized the ways in which Trump’s presidential campaign modeled the Nixon-era law-and-order playbook, it also deviated significantly from it. Its unabashedly white misogynistic nationalist platform left much of 1960s racial coding behind in order to overtly emphasize neo-fascist “correctives,” zealously promising intensified conjunctures of policing and punishment. What must we anticipate at such a nexus?

In the convergence of police, punishment, and authoritarian power, we should, of course, expect the worst. More police. More punishment. More state violence. Fewer constitutional protections and civil and human rights handholds (although these were only limited to begin with). More continuous erasure of the structural conditions necessary for life. But, if we truly seek to alter the future, we should 1) think carefully about how these kinds of convergences repetitively take shape and under what historical and structural conditions, in order to 2) engage in new modes of analysis that set the stage for meaningful challenges and transformative alternatives to carceral regimes.

In the beginning, much of the Trump administration’s efforts are likely to take the form of politically symbolic rollbacks against the Obama administration in statewide and national efforts toward criminal justice reform. For instance, it is likely that we will see the political weakening of legislative efforts directed toward reduced imprisonment and policing, a move of support away from “reform” efforts within prisons and police practice, as well as new strategic efforts from the Right to counter decarceration and growing abolition efforts. The most impactful of these actions will borrow from the visually symbolic elements of Trump’s campaign: for instance, efforts to build up the Southern border are less likely to take the shape of a wall but are likely to ignite new regulatory forms of mass detention and deportation across everyday life. Alongside of this, we must expect a less visible, more ordinary, systematic set of developments: a revalorization of prisons, police, drug wars, and the man- and fire-power of criminal justice systems; the unbridled development of various shadow markets of growing injustice technologies, registries and tracking systems; and a deep criminalization of everyday life through an enlarged predatory justice system made up of fines, fees, debt, arrests, and detention. Furthermore, the collusive growth of progressive and conservative criminal justice think tanks that lay claim to expertise, policy, and change in a post-truth era expose our institutional lexicon for social transformation as defunct and obsolete.

Imprisonment in the Trump era is clearly marked for growth and capital investment. I stood on corrections trade floors ten years ago and listened to vendors eagerly explain how, anticipating the evisceration of black communities, immigrant women and children, youth, and the rural poor would represent the next boom industries. Private prisons are more likely to expand under Trump, particularly given their control over federal immigrant detention. And while private prisons experienced an immediate shock wave of growth in the aftermath of the election, it is the larger project of neoliberal investment in the prison system (and criminal justice more broadly) that is most pressing. In fact, the intersection of reform efforts with new net-widening possibilities remains one of the most pernicious sites of venture capital and security rebranding in surveillance, “community corrections,” E-carceration, rapidly developing police technologies, and “mass incarceration lite.” As James Kilgore has argued, carceral humanism defines the progressive reform agenda and promises to recast cages as social service sites and jailors as civil servants and reform-minded advocates. Given that most major corporations and the nation’s banks have deep financial roots in the carceral state, it is Trump as business man, not just as an authoritarian leader, that looms large in his administration’s penal impacts.

There are a wave of correlative capital punishment shifts as well. California was poised to abolish the death penalty, but instead Proposition 66 sped its practice along. Nebraska brought back the death penalty after a historical ban, and Oklahoma added an incredible amendment that forecloses constitutional challenge, simply stating that the death penalty itself “shall not be deemed to be or constitute the infliction of cruel or unusual punishment.” We must also expect an uptick in executions at the federal level. While capital punishment remains a definitively local practice in the United States (50% of all executions occur in 2% of US counties), and one that faces serious impediments in its ongoing practice, these election outcomes reveal punishment as riven with contradiction, its proclivities always toward authoritarian displays of power.

Furthermore, the Trump administration brings an enlarged public and cultural space for the performance of punishment. Punishment circulates frequently in Trump’s everyday discourse, from tweets to speeches. He has advocated for “some form of punishment” for women who obtain abortions, framing reproductive justice through carceral logics. He and his supporters have brought back the public spectacle of punishment with misogynistic “lock her up” chants and racist, circling mob attacks of protestors. Trump is seemingly at his most successful when heightening the affective, subjective life of punishment: humiliation, degradation, hitting, pushing, grabbing, cruelty. It is this punitiveness and resentment against various forms of vulnerability that culminates in the discriminatory and dehumanizing practices at the affective core of carceral regimes and police states. These tactics cleave to the criminalization of existence and resistance among the most vulnerable: people of color; Muslims; immigrants; queer and trans communities; the mentally ill; the poor and homeless; drug users and addicts; political prisoners, organizers, and protesters; and any one of the million people who have an unpaid fine, a parking ticket, a trash can lid that has fallen to the sidewalk.

The engine that drives criminalization in a carceral regime is the police. Trump promises the return of the most authoritarian and criminologically disproven forms of policing in modern history—policing with no connection to crime. Against scientific evidence and moral and ethical appeal, his obsession with stop-and-frisk/broken windows policing demonstrates his larger principle: racial control. As my colleague Victor Ray writes, “The singular accomplishment of stop-and-frisk was the worsening of racial inequality: 85 percent of those stopped were innocent black and Latino men.” Policing in the Trump era is, as it has always been, about the lowering of thresholds for the violent interruption of specific groups of people’s lives. It is likely to be revalidated as rightfully predatory, explicitly biased, and highly discretionary, thereby allowing for the elimination of police oversight mechanisms and federal investigations. Trump-era policing is emblematic of a militarized culture of war that is foundational to the prison-industrial complex, situating itself in an intoxicating form of deadly self-pity. From watch lists to registries, the Trump administration promises a shifting of political focus away from state violence and its attendant structural inequalities and toward the criminalization and destabilization of social movements that are naming alternative ways forward to social goods. In particular, we must anticipate and plan for an open attack on the most transformative justice policy platform of our era, the Movement for Black Lives.

Finally, the Trump era heralds the end of labor through the arrival of the “fastest growing government job sector”: homeland security and criminal justice. This is an amazing neoliberal feat, one where labor is transformed into the daily machinery for the disposability of surplus life. But against lethal forms of capitalist economies, carceral regimes, and truncated emancipatory claims, neoliberal hegemony can only unravel. We should anticipate new social movements and solidarities. The project now is abolition. Starting strategies?

- Lay claim to the local. Criminal justice is profoundly local, with variability across states and regions. Local plans of action and advocacy for community control of police, courts and prisons are essential. And they are happening. Find them. Watch the cops. Pack the courts and the legislature. Show up at the jail. Organize.

- The power of assembly. Strategic alliances and coalitions at the level of the local and their gatherings are crucial: Spaces of assembly driven by the directly impacted; spaces to educate, to dismantle white privilege and supremacy, to share ideas and testimonies, to brainstorm first responses, interventions, divestments, and interruptions.

- Sanctuary. Universities, churches, community centers, cities have a rare moment in which to ensure safety, protection, hospitality and dignity to targets of the carceral state. Sanctuary allows for study, strategic response, keeping one’s family and loved ones intact, and survival. It is a political strategy against criminalization and criminal justice.

- Rebel cities. Municipal power, anti-fascist coalitions, people’s movements… right where we are. Start at home. Network out. We are hardly alone.

A commitment to multi-perspectival vision and new modes of analysis is urgent to survival. Alongside of a focused, deadly serious pragmatism, we must engage relentlessly in generative efforts to imagine how we will resist the carceral present and its futures we abhor.

• • •

* Michelle Brown is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, The University of Tennessee. Her research interests include carceral studies; law & society; feminist perspectives; media, theory, and culture; and transformative justice. She is the author of The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, & Spectacle (NYUP, 2009) and coauthor of Criminology Goes to the Movies (NYUP, 2011), among other publications. She is working on a series of articles and a book manuscript examining the production of death in American criminal justice and life-extending alternative forms of justice.Header image (left): “rally at the manhattan institute” by hollow sidewalks, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped and modified.

PENAL POLITICS

Neoliberal Authoritarianism: Notes on Penal Politics in Trump’s America

ALESSANDRO DE GIORGI[*]

I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end. Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored.—Donald J. Trump, Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, Cleveland, OH, July 21, 2016

The more of those that are in jail serving time, the less people are going to get murdered. It’s mathematics. And that’s really what happened since 1980 with the increasing number of people that were incarcerated. It worked.—Jeff Sessions, Address to US Senate, Washington, DC, October 3, 2015

After 40 years of unabated penal expansion, a wave of reforms initiated in the mid-2000s under the bipartisan banners of “smart on crime” and “evidence-based” criminal justice policies have produced modest but consistent reductions in the size of the US prison population. Although targeting almost exclusively those fractions of the criminalized population identified as non-violent (and often at the cost of ramping up punishments for other categories of offenders), these reform initiatives attest to the recognition by the nation’s power elites of the problematic nature of mass incarceration—at least in terms of its compatibility with the neoliberal tenets of fiscal austerity and budget responsibility. Over the past few years, this reformist moment has created a few dents in the American carceral machine and in the law-and-order consensus that had dominated all levels of US governance since the punitive shift of the early 1970s. In this sense, the 2016 election of Donald Trump as the first president to run on a law-and-order campaign in several years may well forebode the premature end of the current season of reforms. Is this going to be the case?

Although any detailed plan for criminal justice (as for most other issues) has been conspicuously absent from Trump’s campaign, it is not hard to grasp the president elect’s views on the matter. An instructive read in this regard is Trump’s 2000 book The America We Deserve, a prescient compendium of policy proposals for a hypothetical Trump administration. Among other things, in this publication Trump nominates James Q. Wilson (one of the strongest supporters of mass incarceration in conservative academic circles) as his favorite criminologist (pp. 93-94); predicts that “when the population of adolescent males rises early next century, we’re going to have wolf packs roaming the streets, and not only downtown” (p. 99); laments that “no, the problem isn’t that we have too many people locked up. It’s that we don’t have enough criminals locked up” (p. 102); celebrates the wonders of zero tolerance policing, a position he has reiterated in the 2016 campaign by supporting the racially discriminatory practice of stop and frisk; and finally dismisses as “ridiculous” any sociological explanation of criminal behavior that attempts to connect it to “poverty, lack of opportunity, or early childhood mistreatment” (p. 94). As far as capital punishment is concerned, a good source of information on Trump’s views is the full-page ad he published on four different newspapers on May 1st, 1989, in the aftermath of the brutal rape and beating of a female jogger in New York’s Central Park. In the ad, titled “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY! BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Trump invoked the execution of the five teenagers, all of them minors between the ages of 14 and 16, who were falsely accused of the crime—a point of view he has maintained as late as 2014, after the city of New York settled with the men for their wrongful convictions and a total of 40 years spent in prison.

Overall, Trump’s political posture—his calls for law and order, his xenophobic attacks on undeserving immigrants and dangerous refugees, his evocation of an imagined “people” betrayed by a clique of self-serving and corrupt politicians, his virulent anti-intellectualism, and his promise to restore a fictional golden age of cultural homogeneity, racial hierarchy, gender normativity, and obedience to authority—falls squarely within the coordinates of what in 1979 cultural theorist Stuart Hall defined authoritarian populism: an autocratic form of power that, unlike classical fascism, is compatible with the existence of representative institutions and is sustained by an active popular consent (Hall 1979, 15). Historically, a strong emphasis on law and order and national security has been an integral part of authoritarian-populist platforms—from Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979 to the more recent electoral exploits of Marine Le Pen in France, Norbert Hofer in Austria, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, to name just a few. And indeed, it would be reasonable to expect that the incoming Trump administration will attempt to capitalize on the punitive sentiments it has fueled during the presidential campaign and follow the all-too-familiar path to penal populism paved by the likes of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

And yet, I will hazard the prediction that the Trump administration might not engage in a full-fledged campaign of penal expansion and carceral buildup. Penal populism is indeed a very expensive enterprise—as even a cursory glance at trends in criminal justice expenditures since the unfolding of the punitive turn in the US will reveal. If Trump were to jump on the wagon of populist punitiveness, his strategy would involve a significant expansion of the state sector—something hardly feasible without a sharp increase in public spending (and consequent tax increases) or a substantial investment of resources in already overfunded correctional departments—and this is something that Trump’s electoral constituency would most likely reject. On the other hand, large-scale experiments with private prisons in the past—especially following a series of financial mismanagement scandals in the 1980s and 1990s—have proven to be an expensive and overall ineffective alternative to state punishment.

The broader issue here is that while Trump’s populist ascendancy emerges as a conjunctural phenomenon, the US power elite’s commitment to the neoliberal dogmas of deficit reduction, fiscal austerity, and budget conservatism is of a structural nature. Particularly in the post-2007 recession environment, those principles provide the structural coordinates with which any political enterprise must be compatible. After all, the infamous taxpayer protection pledge introduced in 1986 by Americans for Tax Reform—an anti-tax lobbying group directed by Grover Norquist, one of the main crusaders of right-wing criminal justice reform—which commits elected officials to reject any tax increase under any circumstance, has been signed by 49 Senators and 218 House Representatives in the current US Congress, as well as by 13 incumbent governors and approximately 1,000 incumbent state legislators. In the end, neoliberal austerity could well represent the main obstacle to Trump’s authoritarian dreams, at least as far as penal expansion is concerned.

This does not mean, however, that Trump’s peculiar mix of authoritarian rhetoric and neoliberal measures will not have a profound, and harmful, impact on penal politics. At the state level, where most criminal justice policy is formulated, the rhetoric of criminal justice reform might well continue, as long as it can be framed as part of a broader cost-saving—rather than rights-granting—agenda. Here we might witness a lukewarm continuation of the piecemeal reforms aimed at reducing the number of low-level drug offenders in prisons, possibly in conjunction with a toughening of penal measures against more serious crimes. At the same time, however, it is likely that right-wing criminal justice initiatives such as Right on Crime will set the tone of the public debate on penal reform, with the effect of further narrowing the path towards any real decarceration for common offenders (while at the same time shielding corporate criminals from prosecution, for example by decriminalizing several financial crimes, deceptively defined as “regulatory offenses,” and by loosening strict liability rules for businesses). Moreover, it is likely that we will witness a strong acceleration of the (ongoing) privatization of broad sectors of extra- or post-carceral penal control—such as community supervision, probation and parole, electronic monitoring, prisoner reentry, and drug rehabilitation—with the related shifting of increasing portions of the costs of such “services” onto their “clients.” Finally, Trump’s vicious rhetoric—which has liberally drawn, and will continue to draw, from the racially coded language of crime and safety—will have profound and potentially long-term effects on the very way punishment is talked about, imagined, and ultimately administered in the courts, in prisons, or on the street. It may not be Clinton’s disgraced “super-predator,” but some version of that racialized imagery that may please Trump’s white supremacist base is likely to gain a renewed prominence in public discourse. Independently of how many new prisons are built or stricter laws are passed, that image is what prosecutors and judges will have in mind when executing the law and the police will look for when patrolling the streets. The consequences of this in a period of increasing evidence of police brutality and racial bias across all levels of the penal system cannot be underestimated.

As John B. Judis argues in a recent book, unlike left-wing populisms, which are based on a binary opposition between the people and the establishment, right-wing populisms “champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group … Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon an out group” (Judis 2016, 15). Authoritarian populism is sustained by the ongoing production of undeserving “others” against whom ordinary citizens can be mobilized. Today, the quintessential image of the undeserving other pampered by the authorities at the expense of law-abiding citizens is most likely that of the undocumented immigrant, and the president-elect will hurriedly join his neo-fascist European partners in their ongoing crusade against refugees from “terror-prone” countries, against Muslim communities in the US, and for the deportation of as many “criminal aliens” as feasible. Although it is unlikely, as Raymond Michalowski argues in his contribution to this blog series, that Trump will be able to round up the estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the US, it is likely that immigration raids, detentions, and deportations will increase, precipitating immigrant communities into an age of deep insecurity and fear: after all, the mass-deportation infrastructure has already been successfully tested by President Obama, under whose administration immigrant deportations have reached all-time highs.

To the extent that the immigration issue can be framed in the language of a moral panic about border security, immigrant crime, and global terrorism, the field of immigration control is where I surmise we will witness Trump’s authoritarianism unfold in its most unbridled form. Based on the first declarations of the new members of his administration, immigration control will be one of the very first policy areas the president will put his hands on, if only to score easy points and perhaps earn a few credits with major sectors of his constituency. His approach to penal politics will probably be, as I suggested above, less straightforward, though not necessarily less pernicious. As we wait for the next tweet to indicate the future of penal politics in the biggest carceral state in the world, we should get ready to defend the most vulnerable and oppressed fractions of the population against the combined attack of authoritarian control and neoliberal neglect.

• • •

References

Hall, Stuart. 1979. “The Great Moving Right Show.” Marxism Today, January: 14–20.

Judis, John B. 2016. The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports.

Trump, Donald J. 2000. The America We Deserve. New York: Macmillan.

* Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor at the Department of Justice Studies, San Jose State University. His teaching and research interests include critical theories of punishment and social control, urban ethnography, and radical political economy. He is the author of Rethinking the Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on Post-Fordism and Penal Politics (Ashgate, 2006). Currently, he is conducting ethnographic research on the socioeconomic dimensions of concentrated incarceration and prisoner reentry in West Oakland, California.Header image (left): “rally at the manhattan institute” by hollow sidewalks, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped and modified.

RACE & RACISM

Donald Trump and Race

JASON WILLIAMS[*]

The ascendency of Donald Trump to the highest office in the United States was for some a surprise, and for others something that could have been expected. Trump’s battle to victory was like anything we’ve ever seen before. Trump ran his campaign using well-known tactics that many would consider artifacts of the past, though seemingly they have never gone away. He propelled himself into the White House with the help of racism, xenophobia, and exclusionary white supremacist tactics. During his campaign he uttered racist and xenophobic remarks against Mexicans (and the broader Latino community), referring to them as rapists and criminals. He also delivered hatred against the Muslim community, stating that he would institute a barring of Muslims into the United States. One of his first commentaries to the Black community was delivered to a crowd of mostly whites, where he spoke to Blacks as caricatural, stereotypical helpless urbanites in need of protection against the constantly lurking criminals in their communities. Oblivious to his obvious disconnect from the reality of Black life in the United States, Trump continued on with this mantra, iterating to Blacks, “What do you got to lose?” He faced immediate backlash regarding his uninformed, badly crafted pivot to the Black vote.

On the Reemergence of Pre-1960s White Supremacy

A key hint toward the rise of pre-1960s white supremacy came in the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s election. During a speech to the Heritage Foundation, high-ranking GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell explicitly noted that his top priority was to derail Obama’s Presidency making him a one-term president. Meanwhile, a series of vicious, racist campaigns aimed against President Obama in many GOP-dominated jurisdictions displayed a diametrically opposed reality to the notion of post-racialism so often claimed in the aftermath of the election. The biggest grassroots group in opposition to President Obama’s election was of course the Tea Party, which was essentially a neo-racist political operation for the reemergence of a white prosperous America. In the midterm election following President Obama’s election, the Tea Party did great damage to establishment GOP politics by managing to get dozens of their own representatives into the Capitol. The ascendency of the Tea Party into the Capitol increased and dramatized the divides between the president and the GOP, thus leading to many conflicts and inactivity in Washington. To many racialized individuals, that conflict illuminated the racial disdain the GOP held against President Obama, as their refusal to work with him was unprecedented.

Also stirring in the backdrop of the Tea Party was the now President-elect, Donald Trump himself. Along with other birthers, Trump continuously iterated his confusion and disbelief regarding President Obama’s citizenship, and thus his fitness to be president. Trump’s vicious campaign against the legitimacy of President Obama’s election to the White House traveled great lengths. For instance, he frequently bragged about hiring individuals who traveled to Hawaii, and he questioned President Obama’s attendance at Columbia and Harvard while issuing an award to anyone who could retrieve his college transcripts. Even though the birther movement was at best a racist attempt to delegitimize President Obama’s election, most mainstream sources failed to conceptualize it as such, thus normalizing the birther movement.

The normalization of birtherism is what led to the Trump presidency. As mentioned above, Trump utilized countless racist tactics to galvanize support while on the campaign trail. His most prominent thoughts, of course, were against Mexicans and for the building of a wall along the Southern border. Trump played to white economic insecurity to gain the offensive on immigration, claiming that Mexicans were coming to the United States to steal jobs from hardworking Americans—a tactic that has always worked with working poor and middle-class whites and that is of course a legacy of slavery, when the capitalists turned working-class whites against their African American counterparts. For centuries, sadly, this tactic has continued to push working poor and middle-class whites to vote against their own interests. However, Trump for these individuals represents a great-white-hope, a person who could return America to the good old days and “Make America Great Again.” Certainly many African Americans could not conceive of a period in which America was great, given their racial-ethnic positioning throughout America’s history. Thus, Trump’s very campaign represented a kind of racism that many thought to be long gone but that was in truth still alive, just sidelined and awaiting to be reactivated. Trump especially gained the loyalty of GOP supporters in the aftermath of the Dallas shooting of police officers by a Black man, when he claimed to be the “law-and-order candidate” and thus sparked the fire of a GOP tactic used in the not-so-distant past.

Backlash against Black Lives Matter

The future of race relations in the United States can easily be conceptualized based on Trump’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted during the primaries. Trump casted Sen. Bernie Sanders as weak after BLM protestors crashed one of his rallies during the primaries. He explicitly stated that BLM would never come to one of his rallies and take over because he would not give up his mic. Such a comment gives one an inside look into how Trump understands the BLM protests. Nevertheless, his indifference to BLM came with scores of dog whistle statements that would further galvanize his base. Soon after his comments there were countless episodes in which Trump supporters physically attacked BLM protestors who would show up at Trump rallies.

Trump’s response to these incidents was hardly a disciplining of his supporters. Rather, he seemed to encourage his supporters to continue physically attacking protestors. In fact, at a rally in Las Vegas Trump lamented that he would like to punch a protestor in the face, also mentioning how in the good old days, protestors would be treated differently. The reference clearly was to how African Americans were treated during the Civil Rights struggle—physically beaten, dehumanized, and casted beyond the margins of democracy. Trump does not try to hide his racist intentions; rather he boasts about them, and in return he is able to galvanize his base and gain additional support for his platform. During a rally in Ohio, Trump also stated his belief that BLM had instigated some of the killings against police—once again exacerbating some of the already existing hateful rhetoric against BLM.

His comments against BLM added to the increasingly baseless rhetoric used with regards to many of the easily provable claims boasted by BLM protestors. In many ways Trump’s campaign ushered America into a post-truth society, as facts and sensible debate became artifacts of a past America that once embraced intellect and the pursuit of truth.

The Anti-Minority Presidency

Immediately following Trump’s election to the White House, the number of anti-minority incidents spiked throughout the nation. For instance, in late November 2016, Newsweek reported 900 hate incidents in the aftermath of Trump’s victory. The Southern Poverty Law Center also published a report, titled “Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election,” which also illuminates the extent of the increase in hate-oriented incidents against minorities. The report cites cases of harassment against Blacks and those perceived to be immigrants in K-12 schools, religious buildings, and other public spaces. Many individuals subjected to this post-election harassment indicated that these experiences were somewhat unimaginable to them—that in 2016, they would have never expected to see or experience such terroristic attacks.

The election of Trump has emboldened white racists to publicly showcase their intentions against minorities. In fact, many white nationalist groups explicitly supported Trump, and continued to do so even after he disavowed them because of the pressure by the media. Vox reported that Trump’s win was largely due to racism and sexism. Citing from an academic paper, the article concluded that race was more significant than economic dissatisfaction, thus concluding that racism was the clear factor that determined the election.

Given Trump’s birther beginnings and his historical distaste toward minorities (i.e., see the cases of Central Park Five, of housing discrimination, etc.), one can predict with near certainty that his presidency will be unmatched in the modern era of American politics. His election seems to emanate a kind of old white resentment against scapegoated minorities that have little to do with the contemporary state of white insecurity and more to do with the fact that capitalists have given up on them too. As a result, a Trump administration will not only continue to scapegoat the vulnerable for its own political gain, but it will also remain silent against the countless expressions of racism now emanating as a result of his hateful campaign. To make matters worse, Trump decided to appoint Sen. Jeff Sessions to the United States Attorneys General position. Sessions, himself a bigot with a racist past, is unlikely to take up (or take seriously) causes regarding civil rights and equality. He has a colorful past of being ferociously anti-Black and shares Trump’s anti-immigration sentiment. Civil rights activists and grassroots organizations have begun campaigns to block Sessions ascendency to the top law enforcement position in the land. Sadly, appointees like Sessions illuminate what the future will look like if Trump is able to confirm his cabinet.

Now more than ever there needs to be solidarity amongst marginalized peoples and allies. Since the November 2016 election Trump has shown an unlikelihood of changing his ways and his inability to be a president for all Americans. Instead, he has embraced the vicious and inhumane policy aspirations of the GOP, which will disproportionately affect minorities, women, and poor people. He has vowed to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, increase support for law enforcement, and strengthen the so-called free market. Trump’s promise to America is one that will further concentrate political power into the hands of powerful rich white men, and his cabinet appointments have shown just that. Such a presidency will send race relations into an unprecedented frenzy. Many people are reporting to be fearful, and frankly they have every right to be afraid. But such fear should not lay dormant; it should be used as fuel to resist Trump and his party every step of the way.

• • •

* Jason M. Williams (Williamsjas@mail.montclair.edu) is Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. He is also involved in several public research and information forums, such as The Hampton Institution, where he serves as chair of the criminal justice department. Most recently, he as coedited (with C. A. Jones) A Critical Analysis of Race and the Administration of Justice (Cognella Academic Press, 2015). Header image (left): “Demilitarize the Police, Black Lives Matter” by Johnny Silvercloud, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped and modified.

WELFARE POLICY

The End Of Welfare?

GWENDOLYN MINK[*]

The war on welfare was won long before Donald Trump’s election. The celebrated bipartisan welfare overhaul of the mid-1990s began a two-decade process of federal disengagement from the well-being of poor people, especially single mothers raising children alone. By 2016, the welfare system that once provided a modicum of income support for families in poverty was unrecognizable, in good measure because the federal government had changed the terms of support for individuals and had broadened the states’ flexibility in spending block-granted welfare money. By the time Donald Trump was elected, many states had decided to spend their block grants on services rather than cash assistance: services—such as marriage promotion—that sometimes have been aimed as much at non-poor heads of families as at poor ones.

The key accomplishment of the 1996 welfare reform has been the end of the guarantee of welfare assistance to all who needed it. Additional provisions of the 1996 welfare law compounded the brutal effects of cancelling poor families’ entitlement to aid, most notably: the imposition of a lifetime time limit on welfare eligibility, regardless of continuing poverty; strict work requirements for those who did manage to receive welfare aid; and incentives for states to substitute hortatory and disciplinary services for income support.

Because the war on welfare succeeded, the long-standing political strategy to win white majorities by demonizing racialized welfare mothers was not foregrounded during Donald Trump’s racist and misogynist 2016 presidential campaign. But the elements of that strategy—mobilizing white voters through race-baiting appeals—were deployed shamelessly throughout the Republican campaign. One consequence of Trump’s electoral college victory is the Republican claim of a mandate to do as Trump promised in the campaign: ban Muslims, deport undocumented immigrants, return to “law and order,” and more.

Trump’s social policy agenda is unclear: he had little to say about welfare, poverty, or income security during the campaign. But other Republicans have explicit plans to unravel policies that help Americans cope with the economic effects of inequality, weather economic vicissitudes, or navigate life circumstances such as old age or single motherhood. Those Republicans, led by Speaker Paul Ryan, have been chomping at the bit to impose the welfare reform model on all programs conceived to help struggling individuals and families make ends meet. To be borrowed from the welfare reform model and deployed more generally against the safety net are work requirements, block grants, and further withdrawals of economic assistance guarantees.

The current leader of the crusade against the New Deal social contract, Paul Ryan, has been advancing ideas to defund safety net programs for at least 10 years. As member of the Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2010, House Budget Committee Chair from 2011 to 2015, and as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ryan has argued for tax-cutting the path toward deficit reduction by gutting spending for the poor and economically insecure. He is not merely a deficit hawk; his ideas are fleshed out by an Ayn Randian anti-government ethic tying social improvement to individualized self-help.

Ryan’s agenda cohabits with Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the rich, as Ryan’s plans would cut social spending considerably. For starters, Ryan would like to consolidate important safety net programs—food stamps, housing vouchers, and child care, for example—into a single block grant to states. The defining feature of block grants is capped spending: each state receives a fixed sum to spend toward designated goals, with a few strings attached (such as work requirements) but no elastic for when funds are tapped out.

Correspondingly, Ryan aims to drastically slash direct assistance to individuals. For example, he would like to roll back Pell grants and phase out Head Start. He would also achieve cuts by imposing conditions on benefits: hence Republican calls to intensify work requirements for (block-granted) food stamps and to tie work requirements to (block-granted) Medicaid and federal rental assistance. Ryan’s idea that work participation must be the goal of poverty assistance does not leave any population untouched: the Ryan plan calls for diverting the focus of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for low-income disabled children from cash assistance to work preparation.

Although welfare policy provides a model for dismantling the welfare state, Ryan’s plan does not leave it undisturbed. The very first set of recommendations in his 2016 poverty white paper, A Better Way, concerns the need to strengthen work requirements for individuals in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and to reduce state flexibility to exempt recipients from work engagement. With Republicans in control of all branches of government, the question for TANF reauthorization will be just how fast and how far the federal government will go to make poverty assistance unattainable or its terms untenable for poor families.

The Republican takeover of the federal government forecloses immediate debates about how to fix the current welfare system to make it work for low income families, especially families helmed by single mothers, disproportionately of color. For the next little while, poor people and their allies will have to fight to preserve the status quo ante—to maintain such assistance as is currently provided by the tattered safety net. But a sizable majority of Americans did vote against the Republican way, and for a presidential candidate and party that advanced an intersectional understanding of inequality and poverty. The popular majority that voted for the Democratic candidate voted for equal pay, a higher minimum wage, paid sick days and accessible child care—all policy goals that would mitigate the economic vulnerability of low-income single mothers and their children.

Democrats did not articulate a platform for restoring the safety net in 2016. Nor did they look beyond the labor market as they strategized mechanisms to attenuate economic insecurity. But the outsize rate of single mother poverty (36% in 2015) commands our attention not only to the labor market, but also to the role played by the distinctive tension between full-time care-giving and full-time wage-earning for mothers who are parenting alone. We must center the ways in which caregiving and the lack of social support for it distort our economy and society and expose millions to the kind of vulnerability that undermines women’s self-sovereignty and the well-being of families.

One bright spot in the Democratic conversation in 2016 was unabashed support from both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton for imputing economic value to family caregiving in the algebra of social security benefits calculations: both candidates wanted to credit workers who take time out of the labor market to care for a child or sick adult so that they are not punished for, as Clinton put it, “taking on the vital role of caregiver.” This powerful acknowledgement of the irreducible importance of family care work should smooth the way to future policies that build upon the principle that poor mothers (and fathers) care, too.

In the meantime, however, we need to resist in order to move forward. We need to defend access to social supports, however meager, and preserve funding levels, however inadequate. As we work to defend against further broadsides against social provision, we must do so in a way that broadens both the feminism and the economic egalitarianism that popular majorities support, but that have been trammeled by the Electoral College. Centering a poverty agenda on the multiple inequalities endured by the worst-off women—poor single mothers, disproportionately of color—would do just that, while also keeping alive the goals of reversing the damages wrought by the 1996 welfare law and improving social supports for families in poverty.

• • •

* Gwendolyn Mink is an independent scholar. She is the author of several books, including The Wages of Motherhood (Cornell University Press, 1995) and Welfare’s End (Cornell University Press, 1998). With coauthor Felicia Kornbluh, she is completing a new book titled Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform after Twenty Years.
Header image (left): “Poor People’s March at Lafayette Park, Washington, DC” (1968) (edited). From Wikicommons.

WELFARE POLICY

Death by a Thousand Budget Cuts: The Need for a New Fight for Poor People’s Rights

TINA SACKS[*]

You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed—what the hell do you have to lose?—Donald J. Trump on the presidential campaign trail, August 2016

As of January 2017 it appears that, we, indeed, have everything to lose. Donald J. Trump’s rhetorical exhortation to urban—i.e., Black—voters during the 2016 presidential campaign seems all too real now that he has ascended to the US presidency. Much has been made of the looming threats Trump poses to the safety net, including the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s flawed but remarkable piece of legislation that has expanded health insurance to 22 million Americans, protected people with preexisting conditions, and allowed young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26. Although the dismantling of the ACA is a horrifying prospect, particularly for people who have benefited from the Medicaid expansion, Trump’s deadliest actions may be felt by our fellow Americans living in poverty.

The most vulnerable Americans depend on the United States’ rather meager social safety net, which Trump seems hell bent on dismantling. Although Trump has been described as non-ideological, his unholy alliance with Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan must certainly be characterized as deeply dogmatic. Ryan, a devout Roman Catholic, is almost without peer in his open hostility to the poor, and Trump has no better angels to call upon to resist him. Ryan has previously outlined plans to gut school lunches, food stamps, and Medicaid. Not even children, once held harmless like motherhood and apple pie, are off limits for the Ryan (and now Trump-Ryan) juggernaut. Given that we spend less than 10 percent of the federal budget on all safety net programs combined, it seems unlikely that insisting that millions of poor kids forego a turkey sandwich at lunchtime will really balance the budget. Instead, it seems Ryan is determined to shame, control, and penalize the poor, and he seems to have found a new ally in Trump, a man who extolls the virtues of being rich as evidence of superior moral character.

A Trump-Ryan alliance should be terrifying for anyone who cares about how little separates the American poor from abject misery. In fact, the official US poverty line is just under $12,000 ($11,880) for a single person or just over $24,000 a year for a family of four. In 2015, 43.1 million Americans were officially classified as poor, and yet little was made of their material deprivation during the election. If four people living on less than $25,000 is already an undeniable hardship, Ryan’s radical approach to government indicates he intends to further disembowel our measly safety net. Programs that were previously considered sacrosanct—such as Social Security, the holy grail of the welfare state developed during Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Medicare and Medicaid, developed during Johnson’s Great Society period—are now likely under threat. Ryan has repeatedly called for block granting or privatization schemes that will fundamentally alter these programs, leaving them vulnerable to the vagaries of the market instead of being a shelter from them. Under almost any presidential administration, Republican or Democrat, this would be unthinkable. Tinkering with Social Security and Medicare has long been the third rail of American politics, largely because these are programs with broad, i.e., white and elderly, constituencies. But, as many others have noted, nothing about this election or Trump has been normal.

Ironically, the national media has coalesced around the vulnerability of the white working class while omitting the very real and persistent condition of Black, Brown, and white people who are poor or extremely poor. In 2011, poverty scholars Shafer and Edin found that approximately 1.55 million US households were raising 3.55 million children on less than $2 per person per day. Almost 4 million children: that’s almost as many people as the city of Chicago and its suburbs who subsist on less than $2 a day. For these families, who are often working in very low-paying, precarious jobs, the high-end manufacturing work we heard so much about during the election must seem like a relic from a different century. In other words, for the minority poor who are often last hired and first fired, high-quality jobs have never seemed like an entitlement.

And yet, although everything about Trump brings a chill to my bones, Ryan may be the most wicked of them all. In contrast to chief strategist Steve Bannon, Ryan casts himself as the suited up, scrubbed clean Midwestern everyman, ready to decimate everything we’ve fought so hard for. Where Bannon uses his media platform to spew white supremacy, Ryan uses the indiscernible tool of block granting to codify institutional racism and economic exploitation. Under Trump-Ryan’s dystopian vision, Black, Brown and poor white people will suffer death by a thousand budget cuts.

But we cannot let that happen. The long fight for poor people’s rights, and anti-oppressive struggles in general, predates the Trump-Ryan impending apocalypse (see Davis 2014). Poor people’s movements, like other social movements, have long emerged in the face of repression and exploitation (see Piven and Cloward 1979). One such movement, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), developed in the 1960s, led primarily by Black women sick and tired of toiling in the low-wage labor market. These women developed a broad national coalition that fought for minimum income floors, adequate food, and minimum standards for furniture and clothing. The women of NWRO coalesced during a period of great social upheaval, and they successfully (for a time) reclaimed the idea that society had a social and fiscal responsibility to poor and non-white women raising our nation’s children.

I am not naïve enough to suggest that this historical moment mirrors the 1960s. Yet, we have much to learn from the history of anti-racist, anti-colonial, worker’s, feminist, and anti-capitalist movements. Now is the time to look to collective action movements for substantive lessons in vigilance and solidarity. As austerity and authoritarianism are reemerging across the globe, it is clear that the United States is vulnerable to these modes of governance. As Trump and Ryan lead this wave stateside, we are called upon to resist the metaphorical tyranny of allowing children to go to school hungry. Collective action and social movements can, and always have, push back against the plunder of social institutions and social programs. Fighting for the most vulnerable is indeed a fight for our way of life, because democracy cannot function without a safe harbor from the vicissitudes of capitalism. If we are to reclaim our republic, we must pay attention to our neighbors with too little food, medicine, or shelter.

The Trump-Ryan alliance is ready to ransack what remains of our system of social security. As people of conscience, we must be one step ahead of them.

• • •

References and Further Readings

Davis, A. 2014. Freedom is a Constant Struggle. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Piven, F.F. and R.A. Cloward. 1979. Poor People’s Movements. New York: Vintage Books.

* Tina Sacks is Assistant Professor at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Her fields of special interest include racial disparities in health; social determinants of health; race, class and gender; and poverty and inequality.Header image (left): Poor People’s March at Lafayette Park, Washington, DC (1968) (edited). From Wikicommons.

WOMEN’S ISSUES AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Gender and Trump

CAROL C. MUKHOPADHYAY[*]

The 2016 election truly set a precedent for gender politics. The Democratic Party became the first major US political party to select a woman, Hillary Clinton, as its presidential candidate. As is now well-known, she won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes but lost in the Electoral College. Among the multiple factors responsible for her defeat, gender played a major—though under-analyzed—role. The failure of (mainly male) political consultants and pollsters to recognize how gender issues and misogyny permeated this campaign may be one reason they miscalculated Trump’s appeal and the election results. Yet post-election discussions, often by these same pundits, continue to downplay gender, or simply draw upon long-standing cultural and religious models that blame women for personal and societal failures. So we blame Hillary for being such a “weak” candidate (by what standards?), or “white” (Euro-American) women for “abandoning” Hillary Clinton, despite evidence to the contrary relative to previous elections.

Therefore, as we assess the likely impacts of a Trump/Republican presidency, we must not ignore gender, especially since the progressive Left has often prioritized other “isms” and injustices over gender justice. In what follows, I will sketch some of the ways this election has affected and will continue to affect gender issues in the United States.

Women on the US Political Leadership Stage

In 2016, for the first time, two women participated in televised presidential primary debates. Millions, including children, saw articulate and accomplished women competing with men for the title of Commander-in-Chief. In three presidential debates, millions watched Hillary Clinton successfully handle the prototypic Alpha male, Donald Trump, as he alternatively bragged, growled, interrupted, smirked, insulted, even stalked, and in other ways tried to dominate and intimidate his presidential opponent. Untold numbers of women decided they, too, were “nasty women,” and proud of it! The positive role-modeling impacts were incalculable... But how long will they last, now?

The Gendered White House Family

The 2016 presidential campaign challenged, at least momentarily, the traditional gendered institution of the White House’s First Family. If the president’s spouse were to be male, what would happen to the First Lady role? Who would be “help mate” and “listener,” handle “domestic affairs,” and organize important social occasions? Had Hillary Clinton become president, gender would have come to the forefront as the “First Gentleman” role evolved. Certainly no one expected Bill Clinton to choose China patterns, redecorate, or become a fashion setter.

The First Family and First Lady who will inhabit Trump’s White House symbolize a retrograde, pre-feminist vision of gender and family. News reports already show Donald Trump surrounded by and conversing with men... except for the strikingly dressed, heavily made-up, spike heels–wearing, visually present but silent and voiceless future First Lady. What role model does Melania Trump represent for US girls? And for girls (and boys) globally? It is a model of womanhood where looks are more important than having something to say, and physical appearance rather than educational or professional accomplishments is the route to success, wealth, and power.

Consensual Sexual Interactions

The presidential campaign stimulated a discussion of often-ignored gender-related topics. Despite some progress, sexual harassment and sexual assault, including rape, remain widespread at work and colleges (see the Stanford case), as well as the pressure on women—and institutions—to remain silent. The backlash against women willing to share their Trump stories during the campaign illustrates why women are reluctant to come forth; but it also inspired thousands of other women to go public with their own experiences.

The ability of the Trump campaign to deflect—and of voters to ignore—Trump’s brazen bragging about sexual assault, the multiple well-researched cases of Trump’s unwanted sexual aggressions, and his denials and threats of retaliation against accusers do not bode well for the future. Voter reactions indicate that “locker room talk” and unwanted sexual “advances” are still considered normal and acceptable by some, perhaps many. After all, “boys will be boys”... just like our president!

Double Standards and Patriarchal Stereotypes

The 2016 presidential campaign reflected a double standard for women vs. male candidates. Hillary Clinton’s competence and stamina were subjected to scrutiny and criticism not applied to male candidates. Additional gender-specific criteria were imposed: likeability, smiling, warmth, and appearance—she did not look” “presidential.” But had she been 6’1” ft. tall, with large biceps, and “tough,” she would most likely have been disqualified from the start!

Acceptable male traits—being ambitious, goal-focused, strategic, and wanting the Presidency—became part of a “power-hungry” critique of Hillary Clinton, and many voters perceived her as less trustworthy and truthful than Donald Trump. At Republicans rallies, shouts of “lock her up” bore a frightening resemblance to mob violence against African Americans, or Jews, gays, and socialists in Nazi Germany; or to the violence that fueled Medieval European witch-burnings of women.

Reproductive Rights

One of the most troubling consequences of Trump’s election concerns reproductive rights. For women who grew up without access to birth control or legal abortion, and for feminists who have studied gender systems, reproductive rights are essential for achieving gender equality. Under a Trump/Republican administration, we can expect assaults on and attempts to criminalize abortion, and increases in forced pregnancy and forced motherhood.

Any Supreme Court justice nominee must pass an anti-abortion, anti–Roe v. Wade litmus test with profound consequences for court decisions. States will increasingly pass restrictive laws requiring abortion clinics to have hospital-level facilities, or defining a fertilized cell (sperm-egg fusion) as a person, with any pregnancy termination constituting “murder.” Even if abortion remains legal, we can expect other burdensome regulations, such as parental or spousal consent, invasive vaginal probes, long waiting periods, or requirements that physicians provide biased, often false abortion “information.”

The virulent anti-abortion rhetoric of the Republican primaries and Trump’s electoral win will embolden anti-abortion activists to intensify protests and intimidation tactics. Some Planned Parenthood clinics have reported more verbally aggressive protestors, harassing clients with shouts of “Don’t kill your baby.” We may see challenges to laws restricting protestors (e.g., blocking clinic access), as well as clinic bombings and murders of physicians and other abortion providers. Fewer medical schools will teach abortion procedures, and even fewer physicians will take the risks (physical and financial) of providing abortions. Today, with Roe v. Wade intact, less than 15% of all US counties have a legal abortion provider. That percentage will decline.

The war on Planned Parenthood will intensify. Planned Parenthood, under current law, cannot use public funds for abortions. Defunding Planned Parenthood essentially means making it ineligible to receive Medicaid reimbursement for other health-related services like cancer screenings, pregnancy, family planning, or genital infections. This affects poor women the most, and millions could lose access to basic health care and contraception. Planned Parenthood will survive; but its resources, ability to serve current clinics and populations, will decline. And all reproductive rights organizations will have to expend resources to challenge restrictive laws or defend against new attacks (e.g., accusations of fetal tissue “sales”).

Under the lead of conservative religious Republicans, comprehensive sex education programs may be replaced by abstinence-only programs that only advocate sex within heterosexual marriage (despite their documented failure). Even if contraception coverage should survive new attacks of the American Family Foundation, more private businesses, like Hobby Lobby, will probably refuse to cover employees on grounds of their personal religious beliefs.

Recent declines in unplanned teen pregnancies will likely be reversed as comprehensive sex education is defunded. Female fertility rates will increase, most among younger, poorer, less educated women from conservative religions. If history repeats itself, we can expect negative impacts on girls schooling and on education-dependent jobs and careers. Women and families will struggle to feed, care for, and educate additional unplanned children; and local and state governments will strain to provide education and other services for a growing population. Less contraception access leads to more pregnancies... and to more abortions, legal or not. Currently, an estimated 22 million women experience unsafe abortion worldwide, causing approximately 47,000 deaths each year. Those numbers will go up.

Conclusion

Trump’s election in many ways represented the reemergence, indeed the triumph, of hyper-masculine, hyper-sexualized, hyper-aggressive, tough-guise masculinity... and a successful assault on the models of gender and gender relationships represented by Hillary Clinton and many of her supporters. Some younger professional women were apparently shocked at the level of sexism and misogyny revealed by this election. They had naively assumed that they were living in a post-feminist, post-sexist, post-misogyny world.

Perhaps one positive impact of Trump’s victory will be to awaken these young women (and men), to stir them to action and into taking ownership of the next wave of feminism. The fear is that it might take several years to recover from the damages of a Trump/Pence/Republican administration.

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Additional Resources and Links

Center for American Women and Politics

Pew Research Institute (US and International Data)

Presidential Gender Watch

* Carol C. Mukhopadhyay is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at San Jose State University. She specializes in gender, family, sexuality, race/ethnicity, methodology, and comparative education, and has conducted field research on gendered activities in domestic, political, and public life in India and the United States. Recent publications include How Real is Race? A Sourcebook on Race, Culture and Biology (with R. Henze and Y. Moses, 2014) and several articles and chapters in edited books.Header image (left): “Keep Abortion Safe, Legal & Accessible” by Debra Sweet, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped and modified.

Statement of the SJ Editorial Board on the Election of Donald Trump

Dear Readers and Friends:

We all started 2017 with a heavy heart. The election of Donald Trump has cast a shadow on the days ahead of us, and his first appointments to the highest offices in the country have fueled our indignation and confirmed our fears.

We fear the retrenchment of civil rights and women’s rights we hoped we would struggle to expand, not to defend; we fear a war against the oppressed communities in our country, along the Southern border as well as in our neighborhoods; and we fear a further reduction in all forms of social welfare, a growing inequality, an imperiled environment, and an unconscionable, uninformed foreign policy in a world marked by bloody conflicts and an unbearable amount of human suffering.

At the same time, the election of Donald Trump has forced us all to pause, and reflect. Why did a significant part of US voters—although not the majority, as we know—choose Trump? Was it the reaction of working-class whites abandoned by Washington (and by the market) against the financial and political elites represented by Hillary Clinton? Or was it a backlash from the white suburban middle class against the growing diversity in our cities? Was it simply a tactical defeat—the price the Democratic Party had to pay for sacrificing Bernie Sanders to the interests of the neoliberal elite—or the expression of more visceral tensions underlying social and racial relations in the United States?

The election of Donald Trump has also prompted an immediate outpouring of initiatives and mobilizations locally and nationally, including a series of actions and protests planned for January 20 and the Women’s March in Washington, DC on the day after the Inauguration. Expressions of solidarity with immigrants, refugees, and other communities directly targeted by Trump’s hateful rhetoric have populated social media as well as our streets; meetings of all kinds, from academic conferences to political gatherings, have brought us together to analyze the challenges to come and strategize for them.

So we also look ahead with a hopeful, and combative, heart. Trump—the interests he represents, the beliefs he embodies, and the powers he will soon have—is a threat to everything we struggle for. However, if we can turn our fears into a call to action; our questions into the pursuit of critical knowledge; and our emerging mobilizations into the seeds of political organization, then we’ll have the opportunity to turn this treacherous moment into a chance for a different future. The struggles we participate in or advocate for began well before Trump (or Obama, for that matter), and will continue well after him. Within this long arc—that, as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. famously taught us, inexorably bends toward justice—this is our time. We didn’t choose it, but let us use this moment in time to organize and struggle collectively to build a more just future for all.

In solidarity,

Social Justice Editorial Board

January 9, 2017

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Table of Contents

Contents

About SJ

Study for Struggle: Weaponizing Theory for the Fights Ahead

Trumpism, 21st-Century Fascism, and the Dictatorship of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Social Justice, Environmental Destruction, and the Trump Presidency: A Criminological View

Orange is the New Green: The Environmental Justice Implications of Trump’s EPA

Trump’s Health Care Agenda

Donald Trump and Immigration: A Few Predictions

The “Immigrant Problem”: A Historical Review and the New Impacts under Trump

Some Aspects of the Trump Administration’s Foreign Policy

Latin America vs. Trump

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Bracing for Trump’s Anti-Worker, Corporate Agenda

A Queer Exemption? What Trump’s Presidency Means for LGBTQ Politics

Punishment and Policing in the Trump Era

Neoliberal Authoritarianism: Notes on Penal Politics in Trump’s America

Donald Trump and Race

The End Of Welfare?

Death by a Thousand Budget Cuts: The Need for a New Fight for Poor People’s Rights

Gender and Trump

Statement of the SJ Editorial Board on the Election of Donald Trump