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US Government & the Fed in Blind Panic - Free Speech TV

As climate change accelerates, theres also a strong argument to be made for developed countries to increase their migrant intake on the grounds of environmental justice. Ecological collapse, the product of developed-world industrialization, will hit those in poorer countries hardest. For centuries, Europe and the United States plundered these countries, and now their reward is impending obliteration by the ecological distortions that the rich worlds self-interest has unleashed. In addition to aid and other channels of economic assistance, significantly higher immigration intakes are one effective way for the developed world to discharge the moral obligation that this chain of cause and effect creates. This seems especially urgent at a time when those displaced by environmental degradation still have no formal refugee status under international law.

And yet. Despite the obvious benefits, these are not hospitable times for immigration across the developed world. Inspired by the Great Replacementinflected thinking of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, several countries in Eastern Europe are pulling up the drawbridge to foreign migrants, their dim demographic prospects notwithstanding. Even in nations with a healthy immigration intake today, the story is not much happier, and migrants continue to attract a xenophobic backlash. In some of these countries, such as the United States, nativists have ascended to the highest chambers of power. But even in those societies run by less nakedly reactionary governments, the dog whistle and the assimilationist value-grab remain sturdy tools of everyday policymaking. Theres a hypocrisy at the heart of immigration policy in the West today. On the one hand, immigrants are seen as useful agents of growth; on the other, immigrant-bashing is now a reliable vote winner. Openness to migrants is justified and encouraged as a matter of policy, in order to boost a countrys demographic and economic prospects, but the demands of electoral politics simultaneously require that openness to be undercut. Its not quite the case that democracy dictates that immigrantsmustbe demonized, but all too often short-term electoralism means they are.

Shedding immigration policy of its xenophobic skin is especially hard when it comes to climate change, since environmental destruction has long been associated, in the popular political imagination, with the libidinous, foreign Other. Indeed, theres a direct line connecting the thinking of post-Malthus populationists and those who oppose immigration in the developed world today. More important to the history of U.S. policy formulation than EhrlichsThe Population Bombwas a pamphlet of the same title published in 1954, 14 years before Ehrlichs book, by Dixie Cup co-founder Hugh Moore. Moores pamphlet paralleled the Eisenhower administrations approach to international aid policy at a time when the Unites States major concern was to limit the spread of communism. Containing population growth in the global southa place to be exploited for its natural resources and cheap labor but feared for its fecund and potentially Marxist billionsbecame a major priority for U.S. administrations during the Cold War. When an adviser to Lyndon Johnson suggested increasing relief to India in advance of a visit by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Johnson replied, Are you out of your fucking mind? Im not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems. Before long, the international development community had joined this misguided effort to tie aid to reproductive suppression. The full horror of postwar population control measuresforced sterilization, infanticide, the state invasion of womens bodies, whole countries left demographically distorted for generations to comerested on this basic, orientalizing notion: The real danger to social order, not just globally but also at home, came from the irresponsible, untrustworthy foreigner incapable of controlling basic human urges.

This is to say nothing of the more general historical links between environmentalism and race science, which are plentiful. Californias Save the Redwoods League was founded in 1918 by eugenicists who explicitly linked the protection of the environment with the preservation of racial purity. In 1974, Garrett Hardin, a eugenicist and self-styled human ecologist, published Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor, in which he compared the United States to a lifeboat with little space to spare and argued that admitting more people would cause everyone to drown. World food banks move food to the people, hastening the exhaustion of the environment of the poor countries. Unrestricted immigration, on the other hand, moves people to the food, thus speeding up the destruction of the environment of the rich countries. Hardins anti-immigration environmentalism paralleled the U.S. governments campaign against undocumented workers from Mexico. By the late 1970s, environmental policy scholar Robert Gottlieb has written, population control was becoming synonymous with efforts to control the flow of Mexican migrants. The heirs to Hardins xenophobic brand of environmentalism today are organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, both of which continue to push the line that curbing immigration will help reduce carbon emissions. The United States is not the only country where powerful interests employ a veneer of environmental concern to decorate the caravan of bigotry. In Australia, for example, a loose coalition of electronics store owners, ecologists, mining profiteers, and parliamentarians (with some overlap between these categories) has assembled to push the agenda for a smaller, whiter country. The Hardinesque slogan critics have mockingly tarred them with: Fuck off, were full.

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Making Life Cheap - The New Republic

Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, speaks in front of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 47th annual March for Life in Washington Jan. 24. (CNS/Gregory A. Shemitz, Long Island Catholic)

April saw the rapid spread of efforts by the Trump campaign to mobilize U.S. Catholics in the push to reelect President Donald Trump. Bookending the month were the April 2 online launch of the Catholics for Trump coalition and an April 25 conference call with Trump and over 600 people, including New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan and several Catholic leaders.

Dolan spent much of the next couple weeks warding off criticism including from NCR over his uncritical praise of President Trump on that call. But it was the earlier event, the Catholics for Trump launch, that centrally featured another New Yorker, a familiar face to Catholics, especially those active in pro-life circles, and someone whose praise of Donald Trump over the last four years has been not only uncritical but rhapsodic: Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life.

Pavone, 61, is no stranger to controversy. His rhetoric and tactics through the years have drawn criticism, and his leadership of Priests for Life an operation that earned about $13.2 million in total revenue in both 2016 and 2017, according to to Form 990 tax documents for those years has brought him into conflict with U.S. bishops (including Dolan). In 2016, he appeared in a livestreamed video in which he placed the body of an aborted fetus on an altar, a move that drew condemnation from Catholics over his treatment of human remains. The video, urging opposition to candidate Hillary Clinton in that year's presidential election, embodied the core of Pavone's decadeslong activism, which, politics aside, he distills down to four words: "You don't kill babies."

Pavone now does frequent webcasts from his Florida-based national headquarters, with Trump's photo often visible in the shot. "We're doing something that I think the church wants to do, which is to speak the teachings and the value of the church into the world of politics," Pavone told NCR. Seeing the Trump campaign from the inside, he paints a picture that belies the outward chaos of Trump himself. "They're so well organized," he said of his involvement with the campaign and its aggressive outreach to various coalitions, including pro-lifers and Catholics.

The admiration is mutual, as the Trump campaign recognizes what an asset Pavone is. Mercedes Schlapp, senior advisor for strategic communications, said in a comment relayed via email, "Through his steadfast pro-life advocacy and outpouring of support for the Catholic community, Father Pavone remains one of President Trump's most meaningful allies."

Pavone's advocacy for Trump is nothing new, having enthusiastically endorsed Trump's 2016 bid for the White House. The visual pairing of the Roman collar and the red "Make America Great Again" hat make him virtually a mascot for Catholics casting their lot with the man who is now president. But this posture is also a source of concern for Catholics and pro-lifers alike, who cite major disconnects between the church's witness in the public square and Pavone's embrace of Trump.

"I'm quite sure his heart is in the right place. And he's got the right views on the central question," said Charles Camosy, an associate professor of theology at Fordham University, via email. "But it is hard to quantify just how badly the pro-life movement has been damaged by uniting so uncritically to Trump. At least in the long term. And Father Pavone is at the heart of that."

Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, speaks during a prayer and protest rally outside of the new Planned Parenthood building in Washington Jan. 21, 2016, the day before the annual March for Life. (CNS/Lisa Johnston, St. Louis Review)

Man of the movement

Pavone is a native of Port Chester, New York, a village in Westchester County bordering Connecticut. He recounts his earliest recollections of political engagement as playing out in his childhood, as he and his younger brother tuned in the national party conventions of the '70s and the Watergate proceedings. In the seminary, he attended the worship service of a different non-Catholic denomination each weekend, driven by an ecumenical sensibility that he believes prepared him well for his work in pro-life circles. According to Pavone, the pastor of the Baptist church in his hometown even invited him to preach at her Good Friday service one year, a liturgy attended by several of Pavone's fellow seminarians. She would later attend his first Mass.

Pavone was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of New York in 1988 by Cardinal John O'Connor a longtime and vocal proponent of the pro-life movement. An early turning point in Pavone's own advocacy for the unborn occurred when Fr. Lee Kaylor,founder of Priests for Life,asked himto take overthe organization a couple years after its founding in 1991. After transferring to the Diocese of Amarillo, Texas, with the intention offounding an orderof priests, Pavone found himself in conflict withtwo successive bishops Bishop John Yanta,who shut down the order in 2007, and Bishop Patrick Zurek,who in 2011forbade Pavone from traveling outside the diocese following a conflict over the financial transparency of Priests for Life. A subsequent Vatican-mandated restructuring of Priests for Life overseen by Cardinal Dolan, who asked the organization to undergo a forensic audit and establish an independent board,ended in 2014, when Dolan wrote to the U.S. bishops, declaring, "I am unable to fulfill [the Vatican's] mandate, and want nothing further to do with the organization."

Pavone insisted to NCR that he has deep respect for the hierarchy and that church structures and functions have been abused to disparage him. The New York Archdiocese and the Amarillo Diocese did not respond to inquiries for this story. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declined a request for comment. And following anApril profile by Catholic News Agencyinquiring whether Pavone was still a priest in good standing in Amarillo or elsewhere, Pavone sent the outlet an email that read, in part, "The Congregation for Clergy, after a thorough investigation, has declared that I am a priest in good standing. Whoever denies this, in any manner and in any forum, will be called to respond before the competent civil and canonical authorities." The Congregation for Clergy also did not respond to inquiries from NCR.

Despite this bruising history, Pavone still enjoys some unlikely allies, particularly in the pro-life movement, where he is regarded, however improbably, as a bridge builder. Terrisa Bukovinac, founder and executive director of the group Pro-Life San Francisco, is a self-described leftist, atheist, feminist pro-lifer, the kind of "whole life" activist whose approach to say nothing of background would seem at odds with Pavone's.

"We cannot win a social justice movement without people power," said Bukovinac. "Unity is required, and Father Frank knows that, 100 percent. He has put this on the line his entire career, and he will not give up." Bukovinac notes that even attaching himself to Trump "makes perfect sense" to her. "He's using Trump as a way to gain unprecedented interest in this topic."

Herb Geraghty, an atheist who espouses Cardinal Bernardin's "seamless garment" ethic through his work as director of outreach for the organization Rehumanize International, first encountered Pavone as the priest offering an unexpectedly warm welcome to him as a board member of the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians.

"We're coming at the issues from all angles," Geraghty noted of the diversity of the movement, adding that he considers Pavone a friend and colleague who has done good work for babies and "people like me." Pavone likewise considers Bukovinac and Geraghty friends with whom he would be more at ease sitting and conversing with than he would with many bishops. And, he adds, his willingness to seek out diverse voices and work alongside the LGBTQ community puts him, in this regard, to the left of much of the hierarchy.

"The more things you require people to agree on if they're going to accomplish a common task, the fewer people you're going to have. The fewer things you require them to agree on and the more focused laser focused your purpose is, the broader and more diverse is going to be the group of people you get together to do that one thing," Pavone told NCR.

Screenshot of a YouTube video featuring Fr. Frank Pavone during a livestream May 4 (NCR photo/https://youtu.be/utDfsjZ1bNE)

Going full MAGA

This laser focus comes into play with the Trump campaign, where Pavone has made opposition to legal abortion the determining factor as to whether a candidate is anathema or unassailable. The embrace of Trump is one that Pavone's allies liken to the concession another pro-lifer or Catholic might make, for instance, in partnering with someone who supports Planned Parenthood while working on immigration reform.

But Camosy,who publicly leftthe Democratic Party because of its support for legal abortion, says there's no comparison.

"Pavone isn't cooperating on this or that issue with Trump and the GOP while keeping critical distance in other ways. For instance, he absorbed and defended the child separation policy at the border ... even when the USCCB itself has criticized it and called it a pro-life issue. That's just one example," Camosy said.

But Pavone doesn't see it that way,tweeting last July 19: "So much political hypocrisy when people complain about 'family separation' but fail to point out that if someone is breaking the law, being separated from their family is not the fault of those enforcing the law but of those who broke it! #Immigration #Catholic #KeepAmericaGreat."

Caravans of migrants from Latin America are another immigration-related issue that have led Pavone to embrace the rhetoric of Trump.

"Honest to God, I am really getting sick and tired of these caravans. What in the world is this? Just come and push your way into the country? And all of this just happening by itself?" Pavone tweeted on Jan. 15, 2019, going on to thank Trump for standing "against the un-American #Democrat party. #MAGA."

Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, speaks in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington Oct. 1, 2019, after a petition with more than 250,000 signatures calling for Roe v. Wade to be overturned was presented to the court. (CNS/Tyler Orsburn)

On their shared appreciation for brashness and shock value, via Twitter or otherwise, Pavone said he hears people say in conversation, "Father Frank is bringing into the church world what Donald Trump has brought into politics."

Not everyone in the pro-life movement or the church welcomes this point.

"I have very major disagreements with Father Frank," said Geraghty, who suspects that his friend's vocal support is about feeding the president's ego. And, through it all, "I know he's doing that because he supports the unborn. I am willing to work with him on things other than electing President Trump."

Camosy is less accommodating: "His uncritical support of Trump even using Trump's vile language and euphemisms makes the very people we need to convince to join us to protect and support vulnerable human life dramatically less likely to do so."

Cathleen Kaveny, a theology and law professor of Boston College, regards Pavone as "an increasingly marginal figure" in the church and notes that extreme rhetoric, in the tradition of a Fr. Charles Coughlin, tends "to shore up people who are already a narrow group of true believers. And those people tend to give money." She added, "I don't think they're all supporting Trump for pro-life reasons," citing anti-immigrant and economic policies.

Pavone places his policy advocacy squarely along the divide of whether a Catholic moral principle allows for legitimate disagreement in its policy application here he cites poverty and immigration or if a principle that is itself the policy, which is how he frames defense of unborn life. But Kaveny says this dichotomy isn't reflective of what Pope St. John Paul II was trying to accomplish with his 1995 encyclicalEvangelium Vitae("The Gospel of Life"), a text Pavone claims is foundational in his work.

"There wasn't a whole lot of difference between Bernardin" and John Paul's thought, Kaveny said, noting that the pope was trying to move perceptions of abortion from the realm of personal sin to a social ethic. "That program got hijacked" by the culture wars, Kaveny added. "There was a convergence in Catholic teaching that got ripped apart by American politics."

Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, and Alveda King, director of African-American outreach at Priests for Life and niece of late civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., pose in the Freedom Ride Bus in Birmingham, Alabama, in this April 26, 2010, file photo. (CNS/Priests for Life)

Gains vs. costs

A quarter century later, a Latin American pope has spent his pontificate speaking out on behalf of migrants, raising care for the environment to unprecedented moral weight and even explicitly warning against the allure of strongmen who exploit societal unrest by pinning blame on a "non-neighbor." Yet Pavone is unequivocal in his support for both Trump the man and the policy gains under this administration.

"It's the Emmaus experience: 'Were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke to us?' President Trump accomplishes that," Pavone told NCR, citing Trump as an inspirational speaker when he speaks about the greatness of America. "We're not going to be taken advantage of anymore I mean, that's a Catholic value! And he talks about it in the way that American people are talking about it in their living rooms."

John Gehring, contributor to NCR and Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a progressive advocacy group in Washington, notes that this is not an articulation of Catholic values: "Trump's ugly nativism and nationalist policies are radically out of step with a Catholic understanding of the global common good," Gehring said. "The entire construct of 'America First' is anathema to how Catholic teaching asks us to see our interconnectedness as people and as an international community. It's also a reactionary ideology with roots in white nationalism. You can try and defend that as a Republican if you want, but not as a Catholic."

But as with much of the U.S. political debate and Catholics, Pavone cites abortion, particularly an exchange on late-term abortion in the third 2016 presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, as a turning point in the narrative. Trumpsaid in that exchange: "Now, you can say that that is OK and Hillary can say that that is OK, but it's not OK with me."

"Well that's exactly what the average pro-life American is thinking," Pavone told NCR, adding that Trump has since done "everything in his executive power to take money away from the abortion industry, especially money that was coming out of our pockets."

This has included, he notes, expanding theMexico City Policy,forcing Planned Parenthood outof Title X, strengthening the ability of states to funnel money away from abortion, more robust enforcement of protections in law for those who don't want to work in abortion, stopping internal government funding for fetal tissue research and promoting ethical review for would-be government contractors who might conduct fetal tissue research.

For Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of the pro-life organization New Wave Feminists, this list is unpersuasive because of how the alignment with Trump sets back the decadeslong struggle to undo perceptions of the pro-life movement as being anti-woman.

"It is not a mindset we're going to change by aligning with someone who degrades women," she said. "I have not seen Trump do anything that actually makes it easier for women to choose life." Herndon-De La Rosa grew up Protestant and was horrified, during the 2016 campaign, to see the people who'd instilled her the moral values in her turn to Trump as a savior figure. The ensuing crisis of faith has led her to self-identify as agnostic.

Herdon-De La Rosa, whose organization was disinvited from the first Women's March in 2017 over their pro-life stance, draws a comparison to aging feminists who turned a blind eye to former president Bill Clinton's misdeeds in their desire to elect Hillary Clinton as a woman president in their lifetimes.

"I think the same thing happened for a lot of pro-lifers, where they're older, they've been saying since 1973 that 'Roe is not going to survive me. I'm going to be part of overturning this,' " she said. "Now you're locked into this very bad decision, and you're going down with this ship."

Conversely, Pavone sees the choice to support Trump as existential. "If he weren't where he is, we wouldn't be where we are, because he literally saved us from incurring crippling fines from our own government fines that we would have incurred for living out the demands of our faith," he said, in reference to the Department of Health and Human Services' contraceptive mandate put in place by the Obama administration. "It was only the election of the president that took that mandate away, and I don't think Catholics can afford to forget this."

Steven Millies, associate professor of public theology and director of the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, calls this rationale a perverse caricature. "I would not be cheerful for a bishop to be persuaded that he should hold any political position bearing on the rights of other Americans who do not share our faith only because of his diocese's bottom line," Millies said.

And where Pavone sees alliance with Trump protecting the church's institutional well-being, others cite concern for the long-term well-being of the pro-life movement. Herndon-De La Rosa sees him and other pro-lifers engaged in a strategy that aims for the lowest possible bar zero-sum policy gains for the unborn that don't foster a wider culture of life.

"It's the only thing they could imagine doing," she said. "I don't think he's a horrible monster. I think he's somebody who's fought a very good fight for years, and it has made him a bit unhinged and fanatical when it comes to the unborn. Which I don't think is a bad thing. I think that we should all be a bit fanatical when it comes to defending human life inside the womb."

[Don Clemmer is a former staffer of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He writes from Indiana and edits Cross Roads magazine for the Catholic Diocese of Lexington. Follow him on Twitter:@clemmer_don.]

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'Catholics for Trump' puts Fr. Frank Pavone back in the spotlight - National Catholic Reporter

Merlin Chowkwanyun, The Washington Post

COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers

As the Congress and Senate reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus bill amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Stacker looked at news and government reports to provide a by-the-numbers breakdown of how those funds will be allocated. Click through for an explanation of notable inclusions in the historic relief package and updates as they come in.

This slideshow was first published on theStacker.com

COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers

As the Congress and Senate reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus bill amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Stacker looked at news and government reports to

Photo: Chip Somodevilla // Getty Images

COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers

As the Congress and Senate reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus bill amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Stacker looked at news and government reports to provide a by-the-numbers breakdown of how those funds will be allocated. Click through for an explanation of notable inclusions in the historic relief package and updates as they come in.

This slideshow was first published on theStacker.com

COVID-19 stimulus bill by the numbers

As the Congress and Senate reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus bill amidst the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, Stacker looked at news and government reports to

Accusations of socialism have lost their bite

Recently, Joe Biden declared that any future stimulus would need to be a "hell of a lot bigger" than the $2 trillion Cares Act. He isn't alone. On Tuesday, House Democrats proposed a coronavirus rescue bill that would appropriate more than $3 trillion for health agencies, state and local governments, an extension of unemployment benefits and a second round of stimulus checks to Americans, among other components. Other prominent Democrats are pushing for even more, like monthly $2,000 payments.

Proponents of these and other measures do not seem afraid of being called "socialist," and many of them have historically leaned toward the center, not the left. That's obviously because of the moment. But it may also be among the legacies of Sen. Bernie Sanders' historic run in the Democratic Party primary. In unapologetically embracing the "democratic socialist" moniker, Sanders, I-Vt., dulled the socialist label's stigmatizing power and may have even normalized the term. In turn, it's expanded the universe of policy solutions to support Americans during the pandemic - and beyond it.

That's striking, given McCarthyism's effect on American politics over the past 60 years. Most know McCarthyism as driving loyalty oaths and investigative boards throughout the 1950s that scrutinized people for associations with communism or broader left-wing sympathies. But its residual effects endured long after the House Un-American Activities Committee closed up shop. They're on display any time an ambitious domestic policy proposal is denounced as "socialist."

Consider, for example, health care. Every proposed expansion of government-funded coverage has had to deal with the boogeyman of socialism. The Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill in 1947, which would have created national health insurance, was smeared along those lines by opponents such as the American Medical Association, which characterized it as "socialized medicine" and government monopoly on medicine. The same happened with Medicare, though it eventually passed successfully. In 1962, future president Ronald Reagan declared, in a speech for the AMA, that if Medicare were to become a reality, the country would soon "awake to find that we have socialism."

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama's health-care proposals also attracted McCarthyist attacks, even though both relied heavily on private insurance companies and the market. Yet the distance between these proposals and socialism didn't protect them from being attacked as "socialism." Through his time in the White House, Obama constantly fended off persistent charges from right-wing groups that he was a socialist, largely because the Affordable Care Act expanded government intervention in the health-care market.

It's not just medicine, though. Historically, the threat of being publicly labeled a socialist has exerted powerful chilling effects in many areas. Officials investigated by the government during the 1940s, as part of the "federal loyalty program," sometimes dropped out of government altogether or advocated diluted positions to preempt political innuendo and attacks. One former advocate of public housing, Catherine Bauer, subsequently went so far as to repudiate much of the idea altogether by the late 1950s.

Ellen Schrecker has found a similar impact in academia, identifying a de facto blacklist in the 1940s and 1950s, whereby universities regularly denied promotion or nixed the hiring of leftist professors. It affected all fields, even the basic sciences, medicine and mathematics, and led to self-censorship and the marginalization of leftist thinking in the social sciences and humanities. The latter wouldn't be reversed until the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s trickled into the universities and reshaped academic knowledge.

McCarthyism's long shadow is what made Sanders' popularity as a democratic socialist all the more remarkable. Young people, increasingly removed from the Cold War, didn't see his democratic socialism - in reality, a mix of New Deal liberalism and a hodgepodge of reforms collected from Western Europe and Taiwan - as all that threatening. Nor did they seem to care what term he used to characterize his proposals.

Sanders, meanwhile, invoked safe American political iconography, most prominently Franklin D. Roosevelt and major pillars of the modern American welfare state, such as Social Security and collective bargaining. And he consistently connected economic autonomy to liberty and freedom, which historians such as Eric Foner have identified as a core tenet of political thinking during the American Revolution. Sanders' socialism was much more American than Soviet.

This rhetorical strategy bore similarities to that of one of Sanders' heroes: Eugene Debs, who ran for president as the Socialist Party nominee four times, winning nearly a million votes in his last two campaigns in 1912 and 1920. But, Debs consistently wrapped a socialist program in palatable American tropes, and he regularly peppered his speeches with references to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and abolitionists, not to mention Emerson and Thoreau.

Unlike Debs, Sanders didn't run as a third-party candidate; he had a far greater impact and influence, fighting on the turf of the Democratic Party in 2016 and 2020, and both times, came stunningly close to securing the nomination. In the process, he defanged "socialism" of its power as a political epithet.

That matters a lot now. In a coronavirus world, sweeping domestic legislation may be floated over the next couple of years. Its opponents will no doubt open the old playbook and hurl "socialism" its way. Yet I suspect such McCarthyist histrionics will carry less weight than they once did and feel more like relics of a Cold War mausoleum. At a time of near-record unemployment, many are hungry for fresh economic policies and care less about what they're called or what connotations people attach to old labels. That's partly because of Sanders' unapologetic embrace of domestic socialism, his tying of it the United States's biggest social welfare triumphs, and his unlikely emergence as a prominent critic of our modern brand of capitalism with its stark inequalities and fraying safety net.

For decades, the shadow of McCarthyism has lingered and made it easy to marginalize critics with the socialist charge. Sanders confronted it head-on and weakened the tactic's power. Whatever you think of Sanders himself, it's a big reason to appreciate his two campaigns.

- - -

Chowkwanyun is an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

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Accusations of socialism have lost their bite - SFGate

Read: Socialism, but in Iowa

Midwest DSA chapters, too, have seen growing interest in their work. Membership in the Twin Cities DSA has ticked upward since late February by some 200 members, said the groups 29-year-old co-chair Rita Allen. The chapter saw a blitz of new members with Bernie fever in the run-up to Super Tuesday. After Joe Biden regained his lead in the primary, even more people joined the chapter as a way to keep pushing for Medicare for All and other Sanders-backed legislation. Within weeks, the state shutdowns started happening.

Anyone who lives with a little precarity in their life could see that the overall response to the pandemic was completely insufficient, Allen told me. We seized on that moment.

The Twin Cities DSA began calling for an eviction moratorium, for the cancellation of rents and mortgages, and for the state health-insurance provider to extend its open-enrollment period. At the onset of the pandemic, the group began organizing neighborhood grocery runs and created a solidarity fund to raise and distribute cashnearly $25,000to needy community members.

The DSA is interested in recruiting higher-income workers on the front lines of the crisis, too. Through word of mouth, the Twin Cities chapter has reached out to health-care employees who feel like their workplace conditions are unsafe. Bridget Gavin, a 38-year-old Minneapolis nurse, told me that she was alarmed and frustrated by the lack of N95 masks and other personal protective equipment at the hospital where she works. A Sanders supporter in the primary, Gavin was approached in mid-April by a handful of other nurses recruiting for the DSA, and she agreed to join the organization. I feel supported and heard and challenged in a good way, Gavin told me.

If the DSA is smart, it will channel members energy and outrage into electing political candidates and campaigning for its pet legislative reforms, including the Green New Deal, high-quality affordable child care, and universal health-care coverage, says David Meyer, a sociology professor at UC Irvine who studies social movements and public policy. The U.S. government is going to be spending shitloads of money to get the country going again, Meyer told me. The next few weeks and months offer a chance for leftist reform groups like the DSA to get in and decide where that goes and to make claims.

Read: What do progressives do now?

The DSA has faced and will continue to face obstacles in pushing for reforms, given the organizations tiny sizeits way smaller than the major political partiesand the anti-socialist attitudes that are still prevalent in America. But the group has been propagating these ideas for decades, making it well positioned to capitalize on the societal upheaval happening now, Meyer said.

Since joining DSA in late March, Harms has been making 40 calls a week to other laid-off or essential workers, encouraging them to sign petitions, attend DSA meetings, and join Denvers rent-cancellation campaign. Harms is heading back to work at the board-game shop this week, now that Colorado is reopening. But when I asked whether their DSA work will continue, Harms answered with an immediate and definitive yes.

Were going to see real change after this, Harms said. People wont forget what this was liketo not have income and not have a job and still be expected to pay all these different bills.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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Thousands of Americans Have Become Socialists Since March - The Atlantic