THIS WEEK, Sen. Cory Booker held the Senate floor for a record-breaking 25 hours to protest actions taken during the first two months of the Trump administration. The New Jersey Democrat said the harm being caused demanded action that would call out the administration and show a willingness to fight back.

Polls of Democratic voters show that Booker’s resolve fits the mood of Democrats nationally, and especially here in Massachusetts, who have grown frustrated with a perceived lack of fight from their representatives in Congress.  

A new MassINC Polling Group poll of Massachusetts voters finds that 62 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want Democrats in Washington to “mainly work to stop the Republican agenda.” Only 27 percent want Democrats to mainly work with Republicans.

The poll was carried out from March 17-20, immediately after 10 Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, joined Republicans in allowing a vote on a funding bill that avoided a government shutdown. 

The 35-point gap in favor of resistance to Republicans is much larger than when CNN asked the same question of Democrats nationally earlier in March. CNN found 57 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favored opposition, versus 42 percent who wanted cooperation.

Even with the tighter margin, those numbers are a reversal from when CNN asked this question during the first Trump administration. In September 2017, 74 percent of Democrats wanted cooperation, and only 23 percent wanted resistance.

Democrats are clearly in a fighting mood. The same CNN poll found that only 63 percent of Democrats held a favorable view of the national party, likely driven by the feeling that not enough was being done to oppose the new administration. A separate Economist/YouGov poll from March found that 71 percent of Democratic voters felt Democrats were “not doing enough” to “resist actions by Donald Trump that they disagree with,” up from 60 percent in February. 

Given that Massachusetts is one of the deepest blue states, it makes sense that it would be firmly in the vanguard of the resistance to Trump. The challenge for the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation is that the overall Massachusetts electorate is not exactly mounting the barricades.

Among all voters – Democrats, Republicans, and independents – 48 percent want Democrats in Congress to work with Republicans, while 40 percent want opposition. (MassINC Polling Group asked this question of all voters; CNN only asked it of Democrats, so there isn’t a national comparison here.) 

Unsurprisingly, 87 percent of Massachusetts Republicans and Republican leaners want Democrats to work with Republicans. But so do 50 percent of the remaining independents who do not lean towards either party. These independents are also less likely to follow the news closely.

While 45 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans say they are following the news about the Trump administration “very closely,” only 27 percent of independents say the same. Independents are not wholly tuned out of political news, but they are more likely to pay less attention. 

How voters feel about that news also shows a strong partisan split. The poll asked voters to pick three emotions from a list to describe their feelings about national politics right now.

The clear top three for Democrats are “angry” (52 percent), “fearful” (48 percent), and “ashamed” (47 percent), followed by “frustrated” (37 percent) and “anxious” (32 percent). 

Republicans, by contrast, are feeling “optimistic” (45 percent), “patriotic” (25 percent), and “motivated” (23 percent). Following these, there is a long tail of ambivalent and negative emotions. “Satisfied,” “inspired,” “proud,” and “satisfied” (all 19 percent) run into “conflicted,” “frustrated,” and “anxious” (16-17 percent). One in 10 Republicans report feeling overwhelmed or exhausted. Even the least popular option, “ashamed,” garners 5 percent of Republicans. This pattern suggests that Massachusetts Republicans are more divided in their opinions than are Democrats. 

Independents again split the difference. They feel more negatively than positively, as Democrats do, but express a broader range of responses, more like Republicans. In place of a clear top one to three responses, they have six to eight: “Anxious” and “ashamed” top the list with 32 percent, followed by “frustrated” (31 percent). But independents are also feeling “exhausted” (29 percent), “conflicted” (28 percent) and “overwhelmed” (21 percent) at higher rates than Democrats and Republicans.  

Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed may explain why more of these independent voters have tuned out from the news, which may weigh on how they want Democrats to react.

Overall, about half (51 percent) of Massachusetts voters who are paying “very close” attention to the Trump administration want opposition from Democrats. Among those paying less attention, 53 percent want Democrats to work with Republicans. That pattern holds even among Democrats: 76 percent of Democrats who are following the news very closely want opposition. Among Democrats paying less attention, that drops to about half.  

Democratic lawmakers are clearly hearing from their party faithful that they need to do more to resist the Trump agenda. The challenge for them will be balancing that impulse against the desire for bipartisanship from the rest of the electorate — and against the limits of their resistance as the minority party.  

John Gee is research manager and Richard Parr is senior research director at the MassINC Polling Group.

The post Massachusetts Democrats want delegation to fight Trump. The rest of the state? Not so much. appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

Manufacturing Catastrophe: Massachusetts and the
Making of Global Capitalism, 1813 to the Present
By Shaun S. Nichols
378 pages, Oxford University Press

IT’S RARE FOR a work of academic history to brim with as much contemporary relevance as Manufacturing Catastrophe: Massachusetts and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1813 to the Present. Through 200 years of manufacturing in the South Coast communities of Fall River and New Bedford, Shaun Nichols outlines cycles of growth and decline in multiple industries.

Current debates about “competitive” tax policy, immigration, the financial sector, worker shortages, and quality jobs all find counterparts in the ups and downs of whalers, spinners, weavers, sewers, and assembly-line workers of the past. While history offers no clear prescriptions, Nichols (a South Coast native with a Harvard PhD, now a professor at Boise State University) raises compelling and uncomfortable questions about regional economic development.

The story goes beneath familiar images of areas “left behind” by late 20^th century deindustrialization, presenting instead a regional economy that has attracted new industries and jobs multiple times, with different effects on the well-being of its residents.

New Bedford and Fall River became prime sites for textile mills after the collapse of whaling in the mid-19^th century. After the mills shut down in the interwar period, garment shops came in, replaced over the course of the post-World War II decades with light electronics and parts manufacturers. As these factories gradually shed jobs or wound down, however, the South Coast had trouble attracting a slice of high tech, and it now pins its hopes to varying degrees on arts, tourism, logistics, and offshore wind.

In other words, the crisis of deindustrialization is not the end-point of the story, but the low point of a cycle. By Nichols’s account, that cycle is driven by the story’s villain, the abstract figure of “mobile capital.”

A global economy, in which capital is free to move to more profitable investments, creates the ever-present possibility of a regional industrial crisis—if factories relocate toward cheaper labor, for example. This possibility generates pressure to keep and attract industry, and therefore jobs, by placating business demands for friendlier policies. Meanwhile, business owners have little incentive to invest in local industry for the long haul: Better to keep one foot out the door, either as an idle threat or just in case the winds change.

Mobile capital is a fickle provider, always tempted to chase outsized speculative returns in new places instead of keeping a good thing going at home. In the 1920s, faced with seemingly inevitable problems of overproduction and competition from the low-wage South, owners opted to liquidate textile mills instead of upgrading them, even after an initial wave of liquidation left the remainder profitable.

In bowing to the possibility of crisis, the mill owners created a real crisis for Fall River and New Bedford, which the communities patched up by attracting garment shops with cut-rate incentives. This is the next phase of the cycle, in which the pool of unemployed workers and capital that has been left behind can bring in new players. But beggars can’t be choosers. As Nichols shows, garment factories were sweatshops prior to New Deal labor standards and unionization.

On the flip side, prosperous businesses with good jobs are precarious. Following a boom in the 1960s, multinational conglomerates and private equity schemes “milked” area factories for profits that could be plowed into high-return ventures elsewhere, ultimately allowing the new facilities to depreciate just as the mills had. (Readers with MBAs will recognize this technique as a version of the “growth share matrix” approach to portfolio management, developed by the Boston Consulting Group.) As Massachusetts debates the role of private equity in the Steward Health Care debacle, and the possibility of regulating the sector more tightly, it is worth reflecting on the current episode as part of a longer and wider history.

Being a historian, Nichols does not argue that the past provides any blueprints for the future. However, he does give a very clear word of caution: Do not try to attract jobs to the region with corporate giveaways and cuts to social spending. As he puts it in closing, “these are time-tested tools to foster short-term growth and cannibalize long-term prosperity.” Given the currency of “competitiveness” as a policy keyword under the Healey administration, this argument is a needed reminder to think twice about what kind of competitiveness we want, and at what cost.

Not all incentives are created equal, of course. In Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England, David Koistinen distinguishes between strategies to attract businesses and strategies to spur development. The line is not hard and fast, but there’s a difference between (for example) Fall River’s fifteen-year tax exemption agreement for Amazon, and New Bedford’s attempts to take advantage of the local fine arts campus by making living and working space affordable (a more difficult task since the New Bedford location’s departure).

Nichols doesn’t argue against the latter kind of strategy in general. However, he does see the South Coast’s biggest attempt at it—the development of UMass Dartmouth—as an ambitious failure, producing an overskilled workforce in an area ill-positioned to take high-tech jobs away from the entrenched knowledge economy infrastructure of Greater Boston.

He might have gone into more detail on this question, as those involved in regional development are well aware of the needs both to lean on local strengths and to avoid reliance on quick-and-easy low-wage job growth. In recently defending the economic role of UMass Dartmouth in the South Coast, for example, economist Michael Goodman, an advisor to the university’s chancellor, pointed to distinctive programs related to its coastal location (as well as Portuguese language and culture, a result of the history narrated in Manufacturing Catastrophe). 

Beyond just the South Coast, the MassINC Policy Center (part of MassINC, which publishes CommonWealth Beacon) has promoted the development of all of Massachusetts’s former industrial hubs – the state’s so-called Gateway Cities – over the past two decades. Their 2020 report on equity in development emphasizes the importance of building local “small-business ecosystems” to support jobs in a range of service and nonprofessional sectors employing a lower-skilled and less white workforce, instead of just “borrowing size” from urban-centered, capital-intensive, and less diverse industries like tech. These are points that they and Nichols presumably agree on, and it suggests that they are aware of some pitfalls Nichols has highlighted. Whether those points are sufficiently incorporated into the actual development of the Gateway Cities, and whether current and proposed development policies address them effectively, would be a helpful debate to open up.

Of course, Nichols’s focus is on the past. Does the South Coast’s history offer positive alternatives, or just bad news?

Manufacturing Catastrophe suggests the question could be rephrased as: What must happen for business, labor, and the state to cooperate? The moment of optimism in Nichols’s story occurs at the tail end of what historians call the New Deal Order, or the “Great Exception,” from the 1930s to the 1960s, in which it seemed that a capitalist economy could exist under the regulation of a strong state, with the cooperation of strong unions, providing enough growth for broad-based prosperity.

What this looked like in practice was a triangle of concessions. The state offered development incentives, and business leaders had acknowledged civic commitments. Unions accepted the tying of wages to profitability, and businesses accepted the need to bargain. Unions supported the opening of borders to trade and immigration, as long as the government promoted (and business adopted) fair labor standards abroad. Needless to say, this delicate balance broke down over the course of the 1970s and 80s under a variety of pressures.

Today, your average local elected official considering how to attract jobs to their area is likely to ask: do we really have a choice? Doesn’t capital have the upper hand, especially in relation to local and even state government? What political forces could rein it in?

While it is responsible for a historian not to shape the narrative too much toward practical conclusions, Nichols could have laid out an explanatory model in clear terms. This wouldn’t need to be a formal model, but one that would distinguish the abstract features of the industrial cycle from the historical peculiarities of any given turn of the wheel. He could then say how far he sees the various cycles as comparable or not, whether any historical conditions are likely to recur, and what people might be able to do to shape the future.

Doing so would have allowed Nichols to address more squarely the question of how to build a vibrant postindustrial economy, which bedevils the South Coast in the present, and which lies at the heart of the one-time deindustrialization narrative he rebuts.

Yes, deindustrialization and reindustrialization have taken place many times in one place. But demographic transition, the rise of the service economy, the concentration of higher education, and long-term productivity gains in manufacturing all combine to produce the possibility that the conditions governing capitalism from the days of the textile mills to the “last days of the working class” in the 1970s have passed on irrecoverably.

Nichols does refuse nostalgia for past times, arguing that factory jobs are not inherently good, and that only well-compensated work with legal protection and organized representation is truly worth fighting for. Regional planners typically seek to retain industrial jobs for this reason, but new jobs could just as well be unionized health care positions as offshore wind.

Right now, however, the prospects for that kind of work outside privileged areas are unclear. Millions of corporate dollars are flooding Massachusetts to convince voters that gig workers shouldn’t have basic employment protections. Organized labor, while regaining strength in already-unionized sectors (and making a stab at expanding to places like Starbucks), is still weak overall. The federal government is declining to allow asylum seekers to contribute to the economy, exacerbating an already-existing state budget crunch, while the fiscal base of most municipalities is under increasing pressure. Federal support for green energy jobs is a boon, but those jobs can’t go everywhere.

In the end, Nichols’s story does imply a practical upshot: If business is out of control, and if the state’s hands are tied, that means the burden is on workers and voters to organize each other to improve their lot.

John Gee is a podcast producer for the MassINC Polling Group and CommonWealth Beacon. He has a PhD in history from Harvard University, where he studied US intellectual history.

The post Questioning competitiveness appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

WITH CLAUDINE GAY’S resignation, the McCarthyism that has been ravaging public higher education in red states has notched a victory against Harvard. University leaders there and elsewhere must be clear-eyed: The right-wing activists who saw this through will not be satisfied to draw blood from their great nemesis, and they will not rest content with a sacking based on real misconduct.

Of course, there is plenty to do to get Harvard’s own house in order, but merely tidying up corporate governance issues will not work. Higher education must find steady ground, dig in its heels, and push back against its enemies. The task is enormous. The first step, however, is to admit that there are indeed enemies of higher education, and that the whole enterprise needs to be defended.

The invocation of McCarthyism is not rhetorical. We can look first to Chris Rufo, whose recent “how we did it” op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explained that the campaign against Gay was targeted, coordinated, and ultimately aimed at diversity initiatives in higher education as a whole. Beyond his role in this fracas, Rufo’s relentless bad faith and hostility toward higher education are accepted in mainstream conservative circles. Rufo is a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and he has been appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to the New College of Florida board of trustees to oversee its ideological purge of faculty.

In short, Rufo, DeSantis, Rep. Elise Stefanik, and others are cooperating to paint disfavored institutions like universities (or Hollywood) as cesspools of radical leftism, argue that leftism is a totalitarian ideology that threatens American values, and then use a combination of congressional inquiry, feverish propaganda, and employer crackdowns to censor public expressions of left-wing politics. What word could there be for this but McCarthyism?

While Rufo’s bad faith is evident, it is important not to lose sight of his broader project. He did find real problems in Gay’s academic work, university presidents really did flub their recent congressional testimony, and there are real questions about the implementation of campus DEI programs. Nonetheless, these facts take on a distorted and outsized importance if we accept the hostile framing of them.

In that frame, universities are full of mediocre diversity hires and unscholarly radicals hell-bent on indoctrinating students with the totalitarian “woke mind virus.” A scholarly misstep therefore discredits all Black women scholars; a failure to express campus policies in a media-friendly way means that universities are ignoring antisemitism. It may be distasteful to defend your friends against scandal only because their enemies dug it up, but it is reasonable to insist that offenses be judged against an appropriate standard and not a conspiracy theory.

Recognizing McCarthyism means that universities must ground their defense of free expression in their institutional values, not technical distinctions. It is right to suggest that universities avoid official stances on issues of the day, as free speech advocates have called for.

Nonetheless, universities uphold freedom of research, teaching, and political expression in order to support a democratic public sphere. That civic mission encompasses the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion that their right-wing critics are busy demonizing, and which cannot be thrown under the bus for expediency. When those related values are under threat, universities will inevitably have to take sides, or appear to do so.

In particular, university leaders (typically centrist or center-left, outside of red states) must defend left-wing students and professors against distortions. Rather than concede that students chanting “from the river to the sea” might have been calling for genocide, the university presidents should have stated clearly that they were not doing so, and that such exaggerations only get in the way of combating actual harassment. There was no contradiction between protecting Jewish students from antisemitism and defending the political expression of anti-Zionist activists; but nor was there any way to respect everyone’s interpretation of the facts.

Pushing frankly against propaganda is necessary to fight McCarthyism, because of the ideological reversals by which such censorship operates. As Ellen Schrecker writes in her classic history, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, campus McCarthyites insisted they were acting in defense of academic freedom. They argued that communism was an inherently dogmatic and conformist ideology, and that pushing it off campus was a defense of free inquiry instead of its opposite. Schrecker has extended this analysis to the Bush era in The Lost Soul of Higher Education, and it continues to apply today.

The tactic is schoolyard: Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. The right insists that any substantial diversity initiatives are actually discriminatory against white people and conservatives, and that campus DEI is the real McCarthyism, instead of a commitment to a core value of a multiracial democracy. While billionaire donors use their money to demand students be disciplined or blacklisted, the right insists that the real threat is students using their political voice to mobilize against invited speakers. Openly racist professors become conservative celebrities when they are removed from teaching duties (but keep their jobs).

Examples of such controversies abound, and there isn’t space here to adjudicate them individually. What’s important is that in each case, the university concerned cannot rest content with a superficial reading. There is no mechanical formula to decide what is acceptable free speech and what is totalitarian, because the enemies of free expression will always find a pretext to reverse the terms. The only response is to make principled decisions oriented toward supporting a community of free inquiry.

It is unfortunate, but unavoidable, that swathes of the right wing are hostile to the mission of higher education, and that they pretend the same is true of the left. Universities should not be hostile to all conservatives in return, but they do need to be honest about who is really pushing illiberal propaganda, and who is really threatening political freedom.

Mounting an effective defense of their mission means being drawn further into politics, not back. University leaders can keep their heads if they acknowledge the urgency of the problem, root themselves in their institutional values, and act with clarity and courage.

John Gee is a podcast producer for the MassINC Polling Group and CommonWealth Beacon. He has a PhD in history from Harvard University, where he studied US intellectual history.

The post No middle ground on campus McCarthyism appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.