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"I think the roots of racism run deep in this country. This means that the potential audience for illiberal racialist movements is much deeper than the potential audience for anarchism and communism," said professor Thomas Main
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
Illiberal ideas are having a negative effect on our political culture
Jul 18, 2024
Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the first in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."
In a 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, President Joe Biden issued a dramatic warning: Democracy in the United States is “under assault,” he announced. Biden declared that the dangers of rising extremism, particularly from “MAGA Republicans,” posed a “clear and present danger” to the country.
In making this claim, Biden was echoing the sentiments of countless pundits, think tanks, and editorial pages that have been warning of a “coming crisis.” According to Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "Ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities."
The difference between “posturing” and “provoking” violence is, of course, a significant one. To what extent does the spread of radical, and even authoritarian, ideas online translate into real-world action, let alone violence? To get a handle on this question, I reached out to Thomas Main, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College in New York who has been tracking illiberalism in American politics for years. In two books published by the Brookings Institution, “The Rise of the Alt-Right” (2018) and “The Rise of Illiberalism” (2022), Main traces the trajectory of illiberal political ideas and voices in the United States in the years since World War II.
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Main defines illiberalism as any political ideology that explicitly rejects principles of liberal democracy, including values such as political egalitarianism, human rights, electoral democracy, the rule of law and tolerance. While he acknowledges the existence of some movements that meet this definition on the left of the political spectrum, most of Main’s energies are devoted to studying extremist right-wing political thinking. What he finds is sobering.
The centerpiece of “The Rise of Illiberalism” is a study of nearly 2,000 websites that have been identified by various sources as being illiberal. Main establishes a taxonomy of different kinds of illiberal websites (e.g., antisemitic, anti-feminist, conspiracy theory, etc.) He also tracks the number of visitors to each site as well as the amount of engagement sparked by each site. The findings suggest that the illiberal left audience is about 1.3 percent the size of its right-wing counterpart. Main concludes, “The Illiberal Left is minute, entirely isolated, and unengaged. The Illiberal Right is sizeable, closely connected with mainstream political tendencies, and dramatically more engaged with political discourse than any other ideological tendency.”
The following transcript our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Berman: Your most recent book is entitled “The Rise of Illiberalism.” I wanted to start by asking you a basic question: Has there actually been a rise in illiberalism, or is what we're living through now just a case of illiberal tendencies that have always been with us becoming more visible because of the democratizing effects of the internet?
Main: I think that there has been a rise over the post-war period, although it's kind of hard to pin that down. In my book, I look at the numbers of visitors to illiberal sites. Strictly speaking, if I was going to say that there has been a rise, I ought to be able to present numbers from an earlier period and then compare them. Unfortunately, that turns out to be very difficult to do — it is hard to get good data on visits to websites that go back more than a few years. I've also looked to see if you can find circulation numbers for the John Birch Society’s publications and other earlier illiberal publications, but these numbers really can't be compared with visits to websites. So that's the first thing I'd say: it's kind of been difficult to actually quantify a rise.
Nonetheless, I think in terms of the salience of illiberal ideas in American political culture, I would say that there has been a rise. If you go back to the late '50s and early '60s, there were racist and antisemitic movements which were analogous to the illiberalism we see today. But you also had gatekeeping by editors of political magazines and publishers and by broadcast media. If you couldn't get into the National Review, you had to start your own publication, which was very expensive. So, for the most part, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and the hardcore segregationists were pretty effectively marginalized. This was true right up to the coming of digital media. Digital media allowed these illiberal groups that had been hanging on by their fingernails to attract larger audiences. And by the way, my reading is that the old right-wing extremists like the John Birch Society were much less radical than places like The Daily Stormer are today.
Berman: One of the things that I find in the social media era is that people have to yell pretty loudly these days in order to be heard above the din. As a result, I think that there is a lot of alarmism. How big a problem is the rise in illiberalism that you describe? How worried are you that it could lead to real-life violence as opposed to internet dust ups?
Main: Up until very recently, I haven't been so much concerned about the violence. What I've been concerned about is the penetration of illiberal ideas, anti-democratic ideas, into American political culture and, therefore, the undermining of liberal democracy. The undermining of liberal democracy doesn't necessarily have to involve violence.
When I wrote my first book on the alt-right, people would say to me that it's just some crazy people that are having no effect and that even to talk about them is a bad idea. Nowadays, I don't feel it's necessary any more to demonstrate that there is a significant audience for illiberal ideas. Besides my research, the proof of that is the growth of election denialism in the GOP. Refusing to accept the results of a democratic election is a rejection of a key component of liberal democracy. So the evidence is quite strong that illiberal ideas are having a negative effect on our political culture.
An issue that I'm trying to deal with now is: Does this lead to violence? The Dangerous Speech Project has attempted a definition of dangerous speech. They say that dangerous speech is any form of expression that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group. What I'm now trying to do is to go back to the illiberal websites that I identified in my earlier work and to pull out their characteristic vocabulary and come up with a dictionary of dangerous speech and hate speech. I've only just started this research.
Let me give you an example. Vox Day is a science-fiction writer and video game reviewer. He became involved in an episode that was known as Gamergate, which was all about sexism in video games. That was kind of the beginning of alt-right trolling. This guy, Vox Day, established a blog called Vox Populi, which has a couple million visits a month and high rates of engagement. Before he started up Vox Populi, he had another site called Alpha Game, which I believe no longer exists. Anyhow, when you go to Alpha Game ... oh man, talk about violence. He says that aggression should always be met with aggression. That logic dictates that any failure to respond to violence with even more violence is only going to incentivize and encourage its use in the future. I could go on. It's pretty radical stuff. I’m finding that on some of these illiberal sites, you do see stuff like this which is as close to coming out and endorsing violence as you can possibly imagine.
Berman: I'm thinking back to the kind of music that I listened to as a teenager and the films that I watched back then. I think you could fairly say that a healthy percentage were effectively glorifying violence. But I never engaged in any violent behavior. It is one thing to consume, or even engage in, violent rhetoric. It's another thing to perpetrate violence in the real world.
Main: I do think you are putting your finger on a problem with the dangerous speech concept. If you say that dangerous speech is any form of expression that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence, that’s a pretty broad definition. And how do you know that it increases the risk? How do you measure that? I don't know what the answer is. I think it is possible to look at the way these sites talk about violence, but it's very tricky to prove that talk actually results in more violence.
Berman: One of the things that you document in your book is that the audience for antifa and hardcore anarchist sites is dwarfed by the number of visitors to The Daily Stormer and other illiberal sites on the right. Why do you think it is that right illiberalism is a more powerful force than left illiberalism?
Main: I think the roots of racism run deep in this country. This means that the potential audience for illiberal racialist movements is much deeper than the potential audience for anarchism and communism.
In the '60s, you had groups like the Weathermen on the left, but it was all pretty thin. It never had a massive audience. It never really succeeded in getting into any form of electoral politics. Communism has never been a big draw in the United States. Racism is something else. That has much deeper roots here. For many people, being wWhite is what it means to be an American. Racial consciousness is a facet of the American psyche.
Berman: You are pretty dismissive of the idea that political correctness and censoriousness on the left is a big problem. But you also spend a lot of time talking about what you call an “ethics of controversy” that is rooted in tolerance and respect for one's adversary. You call out the Ann Coulters of the world for engaging in “illiberalism lite.” Do you think that there are equivalent figures on the left?
Main: This is something I'm going to have to look into more. But if you go to the websites of Black Lives Matter or mainstream Hispanic interest groups or feminist groups, it is hard to find a rhetoric that would really pass as anti-wWhite, anti-Anglo, anti-male. I mean, if you go back to the sixties, you can find feminists creating organizations called Society for Cutting Up Men, which is SCUM. That would be an example of feminist illiberalism. I don't see that kind of talk these days.
Berman: Fair enough. But I guess I do see a lot of left-wing politicians and pundits who, echoing Hillary Clinton, refer to conservatives and Republicans as being deplorable or words to that effect. That kind of rhetoric is not racism or misandry, but it treats political opponents with contempt, I would argue.
Main: I think you have to distinguish between principled illiberalism and people just shooting their mouths off. And in American politics, you get a fair amount of people shooting their mouths off. You can always find foolish remarks. It may well be that there's more of that than there used to be on the left because the rhetoric on the right has become so extreme.
Occasionally, I run into progressive illiberalism that encourages a certain amount of self-censorship. But I think most of what passes as progressive illiberalism is within the spectrum of normal democratic politics. It's not a healthy part, perhaps, but there's quite a difference between that sort of stuff and the right-wing illiberalism I'm talking about. When you say the election was stolen and we have an illegitimate president, that's crossing the line. Say what you want about Hillary Clinton, but she didn't refuse to concede.
Berman: A lot of your book is about our current intellectual climate. Playing devil's advocate for a second, how important are intellectuals really when you talk about combating illiberalism? How would you respond to the argument that it is more important to actually improve the material conditions of people’s lives?
Main: Well, listen, you'd be crazy to say that intellectuals are more important than organizing to increase access to the ballot, or to defeat election denials, or to increase equality.
I think intellectuals used to be more influential than they are now because they used to play an important role of translating and disseminating ideas. Among other things, intellectuals were gatekeepers. They were the people who sort of decided which ideas deserved to be more widely disseminated and which would be ignored. That was a very important function. Now I think the power of intellectuals has been vastly undermined by the rise of digital media and by the shake up in the public perception of the legitimacy of our regime. And it's much harder for intellectuals to perform the gatekeeping function that they used to perform. I would like to see a world in which intellectuals regain the ability to gatekeep. And part of that involves finding a better way to moderate digital media.
But I also think that there's been, for a long time, a self-destructive streak amongst intellectuals. You have the curious phenomenon of anti-intellectual intellectuals. One example of that isIbram X. Kendi. Kendi doesn’t believe that people come up with racist ideas that result in racist policies. He believes it goes the other way around: that people come up with racist policies and then dream up racist ideas to support them. I have respect for Kendi, but that particular position is kind of a vulgar Marxist position. How are you going to combat racism without engaging in ideas? I don't understand what that even means.
I think that there is a tendency to belittle the importance of ideas. This has been around for a long time. The Bible is right when it says that as a man thinks, so is he. My sense is that intellectuals can have a great impact on policy and politics. I think it's a mistake to write off intellectuals.
Berman: Have you read Martin Gurri's book,The Revolt of The Public? It's a few years old, but it's one of the better books I've read about the impact of the internet and social media, in particular. I think if Gurri were listening to this conversation, he might say that the crisis of public confidence in intellectuals has its roots in the underperformance of intellectual elites. That, at key moments, the intellectual consensus about things like the state of the economy pre-2008 or the handling of the COVID pandemic has proved to be wrong, or at least not entirely correct. And that the internet has essentially allowed the public to see that the emperor has no clothes. How would you respond to that argument?
Main: You would have to make a list of all of the positions that intellectuals took and then you somehow would have to decide objectively whether those positions were right or wrong. And then you would have to compare the percentage of correct positions to that of other groups like politicians or businessmen or lawyers. Would you find that intellectuals were right much less frequently than other elites? I don't think so.
I think intellectuals make a contribution. For example, the tax reform act of the mid '80s was the result of a long-term analysis of the economics of taxation. Expert economists came to the conclusion that the income tax was unjustifiable. Their thinking got boiled down into a discrete public policy idea: lower the rates, broaden the base. That had an impact. There are many other areas of public policy where ideas have had an impact.
Of course, we can also talk about episodes where intellectuals were wrong. You might point to the '30s, when many intellectuals apologized for Stalin's regime. So there are certainly examples of failures, but in general, intellectuals perform a function that is necessary.
Berman: One of the arguments you advance is that the rise of illiberalism has been driven by the suboptimal performance of the American government. Does President Biden's recent legislative winning streak change your analysis? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you react to the argument, advanced by scholars likeFrances Lee, that Congress is functioning pretty much the way it's always functioned in terms of legislating? For all of the talk of partisan gridlock, bipartisan legislation still happens fairly regularly.
Main: I think gridlock is a problem. It's more of a problem now than it has been in the past. In my book, I argue that the gridlock is so strong that we need a realigning election, which brings all branches of government into alignment, so we can get big things done. Like a lot of people, I was hoping for Biden to pull that off. And I suppose he did, but he pulled that off as narrowly as humanly possible, with the smallest possible majority that you can get in the Senate.
And so Biden has been unable to make the kind of changes that Lyndon B. Johnson was able to make. LBJ had overwhelming majorities, and he had the Supreme Court on his side. But it turns out that even with the narrowest of majorities, Biden has gotten quite a bit done. So my conclusion is that a realigning election works. If one day, we can manage to get a working majority in both houses of Congress and then the same party capturing the White House, this little taste of success that we've gotten under Biden might be multiplied.
To answer the second part of your question, if you say that Congress is functioning pretty much the way it always has because it was created to ensure that big change is difficult, I would say that's part of the problem. The system was created to make big change difficult. Every system needs the capacity to occasionally make non-incremental change. I mean, there's nothing wrong with incremental change, but sometimes, dramatic change is needed. So the American system, although it's kind of built to mostly encourage incremental change, it occasionally allows big changes. And the main way that happens has been through realigning elections like in 1932 and in 1964.
Berman: I would be remiss if I didn't admit that I have just writtena book that attempts to make the case for incremental change.
Main: I just want to be clear, incremental change and non-incremental change are the yin and yang of American politics. So I'm not saying that incremental change is bad by any means. Also let me just point out that I'm not talking about radical change in the sense of let's throw the Constitution out and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Non-incremental change is different from radical change.
Berman: I think you and I mostly agree. Where you and I may depart is that I don't see a significant appetite right now for non-incremental change in the country. If you look at our elections and at polling, there is no political mandate for non-incremental change. And I think that there are real dangers if the party in power pushes through non-incremental change in a deeply divided country.
Main: I would agree that there's got to be a long period of time spent building up a movement to achieve the kind of non-incremental change I'm talking about. The time is not ripe now by any means. And it's going to be a long, hard slog to work our way out of the mess we're in. It may be a 50-year project.
Berman: In your book, you argue that irony is the dominant mode of discourse on the internet. Maybe I’m occupying different parts of the internet, but I find umbrage to be the dominant mode of discourse. I find that the internet is a place where people are very open about expressing their outrage about this, that, and the other, rather than operating with the kind of cool attachment that irony implies.
Main: That’s interesting. There's a book calledThe Outrage Industry that was written about a decade ago that does an analysis of various sorts of websites and demonstrates that expressions of outrage are much more often found in right-wing media than in left-wing media. So, I think you could make that argument.
I guess what I would also say is that the kind of irony I have in mind is not a cool kind of irony. It's an irony that is used to cover or to excuse extreme statements. Someone likeNick Fuentes will say things like, “Women shouldn't be allowed to vote.” Or, “I don't want to return to 1999. I want to return to 1099.” He will say all sorts of outrageous things, but then if he gets called on it, he will say, “Oh folks, I didn't literally mean it.” I think outrage and irony go together and that the most extreme forms of outrage are sometimes excused or covered up with irony.
This article was first published by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and has been republished with permission.
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Two people leave a polling station in London after voting in July 4.
Hugh R Hastings/Getty Images
Watching the U.K. election gives a feeling of electoral envy
Jul 17, 2024
Sheehan Zaino is a professor of political science and international studies at Iona University, Bloomberg political contributor and senior democracy fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress
Many Brits were perplexed when Rishi Sunak called for general elections, particularly given polls suggesting his party would lose. The results prove their concerns were valid.
As an American, I questioned the timing of the election as well, although for a very different reason.
Was the choice of a rare summer poll, on our Independence Day, meant to stick it to us? By choosing our nation’s birthday to go to the polls, perhaps the Brits were trying to rub our nose in the fact that for all our Framers got right (and there’s a lot!), there are a few areas where they faltered, primary among them our electoral process.
Let’s start with the fact that, on May 22, Sunak announced the elections would be held on July 4 — in a mere six weeks (or 43 days to be exact). By comparison, the 2016 U.S. election lasted a whooping 596 days, and the 2020 election 1,194 days — or more than three years, if we count from the time the first candidate, former Rep. John DeLaney, announced his candidacy.
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As it pertains to the current election, which is still ongoing (much to the chagrin and embarrassment of so many Americans) we have now surpassed 600 days. That’s more than 14 times longer than the British election!
All of which makes me suspicious that it was no accident that of all the possible dates Sunak could have chosen, he chose Independence Day, the one remaining day on which Americans can still feel some sense of pride in our government.
But the absurd length of our elections in comparison to our brethren across the Atlantic is not the only reason we have electoral envy.
In Britain, during the current blink-or-you’ll-miss-it political exercise, there are strict limits on what candidates and parties can spend. In late November 2023, the British government increased spending limits for both parties and candidates. The move has prompted many to worry that this current six-week exercise may be one of the most expensive since regulations were put in place. Even if it is,it is unlikely to come anywhere close to the billions we spend on U.S. elections. And for all that money, we are lucky if six out of 10 Americans go to the polls.
In the U.K.’s 2017 general election, approximately £40 million was spent. Compare this to the approximately $7 billion spent on U.S. elections the year prior ($1 billion of which was raised and spent by a candidate at the top of the ticket, Hillary Clinton, who lost). That was nothing compared to the 2020 U.S. election, in which spending topped $14 billion, or the current cycle, which is expected to easily exceed $15 billion and may turn out to be the most expensive in history.
In case you aren’t watching the presidential race closely, this won’t be much of a challenge for our major-party candidates. On just one day in April, Donald Trump broke records with a fundraiser in Florida that raked in more than $50 million. Not to be outdone, President Joe Biden responded with a Hollywood fundraiser that, in one evening, broke records on the Democratic side by taking in more than $28 million.
Where is all this money going? Huge chunks of it go to advertising. And for anyone who has lived in both the U.S. and U.K., this is one of the most glaring differences between our elections. The number of political pitches we are subjected to in the U.S. across multiple platforms is hard to put into words (except one: mind-numbing). AdImpact predicts that the 2024 U.S. election will be the costliest ever, with spending on advertising alone expected to dwarf $10 billion; a 13 percent increase over spending in the record-breaking 2020 election.
Not so in the U.K. where, you guessed it, there is a ban on political advertising on commercial media. Instead, the parties are given time (free, mind you) for short, pre-election televised broadcasts.
Moreover, in true British form, even their rules are more civilized: By law British broadcasters must give equal time to all major parties. Not so in the U.S., where we have a popularity contest — meaning, he who can get the most eyeballs, clicks, viewers, listeners gets the most attention. Think of a car crash and the rubberneckers who slow down to see what the heck happened — that is probably the best way to describe our free-for-all media environment, which incentivizes outrageous and outlandish behavior.
Trump won the 2016 election despite not raising and spending as much as his opponent in part because he is the “King of Free Media,” able through one outlandish antic or statement after another to garner vast amounts of media attention. In 2016, for instance, he rode $5 billion in free media directly into the White House.
By all accounts, he will do it again this time around; although after watching Biden’s recent debate performance, a conspiracy theorist might be forgiven for surmising that the incumbent is vying to best Trump at the free media game.
And it isn’t just the time, cost, or media coverage — Brits are also spared oddities like the inane Electoral College, where the winner of the popular vote can lose (and has, several times, most recently in 2016 and 2000), or the full slate of primaries and caucuses, which highlight states like Iowa and New Hampshire — places most Americans have never visited and which hardly look like the country at all. And don’t even get me started on voting machines! While Americans worry constantly about our votes being tampered with, the British don’t have this issue because they vote by paper/pencil.
I understand from my friends across the pond that none of this has made them feel any better about their government, politics, choices or future. And the lower-than-expected turnout this month and greater levels of voter discontent bear this out.
To their point, perhaps I can be convinced that the choice of a July 4 poll was, in the end, mere coincidence. I am also willing to concede that the British electoral process is far from perfect. (Case in point: The largely unregulated social media environment.) But as we sit here in the U.S., amid one of the most embarrassing and confounding presidential elections in history, I suspect I am not the only Yankee peering across the Atlantic feeling more than a bit of electoral envy.
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Attendees at the Braver Angels convention watch the presidential debate.
Jeff Sevier
Building civic hope through Braver Angels
Jul 17, 2024
Boyte is co-founder and senior scholar of public work philosophy at the Institute for Public Life and Work.
Last month’s Braver Angels convention in Kenosha, Wis., began with perhaps the largest debate watch party in the nation. Around 700 delegates observed the exchanges between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on a giant screen in the chapel of Carthage College on the shore of Lake Michigan. Equal numbers of Republicans wearing red lanyards and Democrats wearing blue ones, roughly 300 of each, with 170 independents and “others” identified by yellow and white, mingled together.
To emphasize the BA mission of bridging America’s toxic polarization, the site for the convention was chosen because Kenosha is midway between Milwaukee, host of the Republican convention, and Chicago, where the Democratic convention will take place.
Virtually all present believed that the debate was a disaster, “like two high school boys fighting on the playground,” as one debate watcher put it.
Since its founding after the election in 2016, BA has developed highly effective methods to help people overcome stereotypes about each other, recognize their own biases and engage in respectful discussions. As Bill Doherty, recently retired professor from the family social science department at the University of Minnesota and self-described “citizen therapist” described the approach, BA aims to help people “bring their best selves forward, listen to the other person, not immediately get into an argument, and reflect on their own contribution to the problem” of polarization.
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The dignity, respect and consequent hope that BA generates across partisan divides were visible throughout the convention. Rather than wallowing in despair, participants recognized their responsibility as everyday citizens. "If they won't fix it, we will," said Monica Guzman, executive producer of the “A Braver Way” podcast for BA. People on both sides of the divide agreed the political system is broken. We the people must address the problem. This shift toward agency and constructive action moved Stell Simonton, a journalist covering the event for Newsweek, to title his report, “Why the debate left me hopeful.”
Convention attendees discussed the BA “American Hope Campaign” to be rolled out this election season. It includes ways the more than 11,000 BA members, many organized in 100 local alliances, can make visible their respect for others who think differently and press politicians to lower the toxicity. One intriguing project is recruiting red and blue pairs who vote differently in November to show up at polling places with posters signaling their continuing relationships after the election.
The BA convention also highlighted developments in the organization’s “Civic Renewal” focus announced last year. BA President Blankenhorn began the event by emphasizing the importance of “the citizen.” Barbara Thomas, chief operating officer, said most Americans feel that polarization is like the weather — it simply happens to them. BA shows that people can change it.
BA discussions on civic renewal this last year highlighted citizens’ self-organizing work across American history, including little-known stories such as the more than 5,000 “Rosenwald schools” built by Black Southern communities during segregation. These were centers of hope, community life, citizenship education and leadership development. Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, Medgar Edgars, Maya Angelou and thousands of other civil rights leaders attended such schools, a history that makes vivid the idea that democracy is a way of life, not simply elections.
A Civic Renewal plenary featured a least a dozen current examples, including a BA video, “Stories of Hope from Action.” A breakout session explored trends of civic decline and signs of civic regeneration that Trygve Throntveit and I describe in a recent Time magazine essay, “America Must Face Its Civic Crisis.” We call for a “return of the citizen,” shifting from consumer to civic producer.
BA is one among many signs of civic renewal. The National Civic League is soon to release its “Mapping America’s Healthy Democracy Ecosystem” study, which identifies thousands of civic and democracy efforts. This civic energy is captured in an addition to the BA platform passed overwhelmingly in this year’s convention, highlighting the idea of citizens at the center of democracy:
“Civic renewal … requires citizen-led action on common problems. Such action usually begins at the local level and strengthens local cultures of citizenship, while enhancing democratic patriotism and love of country. Civic action builds civic muscle — our capacity to work together across our differences — and in so doing, creates hope. It returns citizens to the center of the democratic way of life.”
The platform also calls for developing the convening capacities of local BA alliances and members of the BA Partners Network, now including more than 300 organizations, to facilitate local civic action.
These developments suggest that BA could become a key leader in the civic renewal movement that is gaining ground. How it acts to realize this potential will have major consequences.
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The Team
Meet the change leaders: Joe Kennedy
Jul 17, 2024
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Joe Kennedy is a lifetime basketball player and coach. A 2007 graduate of Northwestern with a bachelor’s degree in education and social policy, he was a four-year letterman on the Wildcats’ basketball team. He was named a team captain his senior season and received Academic All Big Ten recognition three times.
After graduating, Kennedy was a special assistant for the Office of Public Engagement at the White House, where he served as a liaison to key national organizations that helped promote and implement the administration’s legislative priorities. He also built a coalition of sports organizations — which includes the NBA, WNBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS, PGA, USOC and the NCAA — to promote then-First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, and coordinated and executed championship visits and other sporting events at the Obama White House.
In the years following, Kennedy spent three seasons as the director of men’s basketball operations at Northwestern, was the director of player personnel at Oregon State and served as a video coordinator for the Sacramento Kings. He has also been an assistant coach for the College of the Holy Cross men’s basketball team. He helped the Crusaders win the Patriot League championship and advance to the 2016 NCAA tournament. During his 12-year coaching career, Kennedy has been an active member of the National Association of Basketball Coaches.
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Most recently, in September 2022, Kennedy became the first executive director of The Team. During the 2020 election cycle, Kennedy connected with Eric Reveno, associate head coach of Stanford’s men’s basketball team, and they became a major force leading a new college athletics movement to expand student-athlete voter registration and create civic resources for coaches and teams. Kennedy is working towards a future where all student-athletes and athletic departments establish civic engagement as a priority. and he believes The Team can make that dream a reality.
Kennedy leads a Team project in partnership with the Bridge Alliance that started in the fall of 2023 called The Engaged Athlete Fellowship. This fellowship empowers student athletes from across the country to strengthen nonpartisan civic participation on their teams, on their campuses and in their broader communities. (The Bridge Alliance publishes The Fulcrum.)
I had the wonderful opportunity to interviewKennedy in June for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of her democracy reform work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyfxuO4t3DA&t=1s
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Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images
Soaring grocery prices are not acts of God
Jul 17, 2024
Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
Since the pandemic, going to the grocery store has become a jarring experience. On a recent visit, I packed my purchased items into my tote bag and then gawked at the receipt in disbelief.
I’m not alone. Griping about the high cost of groceries has become a national pastime. It’s not just a figment of our imaginations: Grocery prices have soared nearly 27 percent since 2020, higher than overall inflation.
Some consumers have gone into debt to afford groceries. According to an Urban Institute analysis, many families have had to tap credit cards, savings and payday loans to afford the essentials.
The standard explanation for these grocery price increases has been supply chain disruptions caused by pandemic-related labor shortages, rising fuel costs and droughts.
Certainly those factors have all played a significant role. But is that all that’s going on here? Let’s probe a little deeper.
Concurrent with the alarming rise in grocery prices has been a record increase in grocery industry profits. The major grocery chains have been operating at the highest profit margins in two decades. A recent Federal Trade Commission study on grocery supply chains found that major retailers have leveraged their size and influence to dictate what they pay to their suppliers.
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So during a time when everyone else’s costs have escalated, grocery chains have been able to control costs even as their prices soared.
For example, Pepsi and Coca-Cola dominate the beverage industry. In 2021, during the middle of the pandemic, Pepsi raised its prices, blaming it on alleged higher costs. Yet somehow it still raked in $11 billion in profits. Then in 2023, even though the pandemic was over and inflation was dropping, Pepsi still hiked its prices by double digits for the seventh consecutive quarter. Its profits soared another 14 percent.
Pepsi’s only major competitor, Coca-Cola, announced the same price hikes around the same time. If Pepsi and Coke had other large competitors, consumers would have more choices. But Pepsi and Coke own most of the substitute beverage products!
That’s what’s called a market monopoly, and soft drinks are not the only food products dominated by a handful of businesses. Only four companies control the processing of 80 percent of beef, nearly 70 percent of pork and almost 60 percent of poultry. With so few businesses competing, it is pretty easy for them to coordinate price increases. Consequently, at the end of 2023, Americans were paying at least 30 percent more for beef, poultry and pork products than they were before the pandemic.
The number of grocery stores itself has fallen 30 percent in the past 25 years, resulting in more than a third of grocery sales coming from only four retailers. Walmart alone has nearly a quarter of the grocery market. Low competition gives these retailers more market power to raise prices.
So yes, inflation is down, but many people don’t notice because food prices are still high, partly due to several years of price gouging by monopolies. And this dynamic goes well beyond the grocery store. In 75 percent of US industries, whether pharmaceuticals, airlines, health care, utilities, energy or others, fewer companies now control more of their markets than 20 years ago.
What role do presidents or politics play in all of this? During the recent debate, Donald Trump attacked President Joe Biden over high grocery prices, saying, “He caused the inflation … it’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore.”
Certainly it’s true that prices have greatly increased during the Biden presidency. But much of that initially was a result of the pandemic — which began during Trump’s presidency. It’s unlikely that either president could have controlled those pandemic-unleashed economic forces.
To Biden’s credit, his administration has been pressing grocery retailers to lower prices, and actually has done more than any president since Teddy Roosevelt to crack down on monopolies. His FTC has taken action against price-fixing in the meat industry and filed a lawsuit to block the merger of supermarket giants Kroger and Albertsons that would eliminate even more competition and lead to higher prices.
Trump, in his strategy to protect American businesses, has called for a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods. That makes a great campaign slogan, but given that the United States imports 15 percent of its food supply — including 60 percent of fresh fruit and nearly 40 percent of fresh vegetables — that would likely further increase food costs.
Just recently, there’s evidence that some of the anti-monopoly saber rattling might be working. Grocery chains have finally begun lowering prices. Target announced it would lower prices on roughly 5,000 items, including staples such as milk, produce, bread, coffee, diapers and pet food. Aldi, the fastest-growing grocery chain in the country, announced price cuts on hundreds of items. Walmart and Safeway have followed suit.
But this is not some newfound corporate generosity. With prices so high, U.S. consumers had reduced their grocery spending to the point that it actually began to threaten Big Grocery’s sales and profits. Greedy grocery chains have quite literally bitten the hand that feeds them.
Going forward, as America races toward a presidential election, voters will be eyeing their grocery bills and comparing the candidates’ statements over who will provide the most relief.
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