
For the past decade on the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy wielded more influence over the lives and destinies of millions of Americans than any single person who wasn’t president. He may have saved his most profound impact on the nation for last.
Kennedy, who announced his retirement from the Supreme Court on Wednesday, was the deciding voice in dozens of major cases during his tenure. He leaves behind four reliably liberal colleagues and four reliably conservative colleagues. That pivotal ninth seat will now be filled by a more doctrinaire conservative jurist chosen by President Donald Trump, who gets to name a second appointment to the nation’s highest court.
“For a member of the legal profession it is the highest of honors to serve on this Court,” Kennedy wrote in a letter notifying Trump of his decision. “Please permit me by this letter to express my profound gratitude for having had the privilege to seek in each case how best to know, interpret, and defend the Constitution and the laws that must always conform to its mandates and promises.”
The effect of Kennedy’s departure will be immediate and long-lasting. For most of his tenure, the 81-year-old justice carved out a moderate conservative voice on the nation’s legal disputes. Whoever replaces him is guaranteed to be a far less flexible figure. Instead, the court’s next justice will almost certainly help transform the court’s conservative wing into a sledgehammer for the American right.
Kennedy followed in past justices’ footsteps by retiring at the end of the Supreme Court’s annual term, giving the president and the Senate until the first week of October to choose and confirm a replacement. Trump told White House reporters on Wednesday that he would start the process to select a nominee “as quickly as possible.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Republican-led chamber would also act speedily to fill the vacancy. “We will vote to confirm Justice Kennedy’s successor this fall,” he said in a floor speech.
Democrats are effectively powerless to prevent Trump from confirming another selection to the high court on their own. Republican senators already killed the judicial filibuster when Democrats invoked it in a futile effort to block Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation last year. With a 51-seat majority, Republicans would need to lose vote from two of their own senators for a nomination to fail. Considerable outside pressure will likely fall on Maine Senator Susan Collins and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, two pro-choice Republicans, to reject a nominee who might threaten abortion rights.
Four states already have laws to ban abortion automatically if Roe is overturned.Kennedy’s retirement is a crushing defeat for the Democratic Party and for liberal policymaking. In 2016, Antonin Scalia’s death and that year’s presidential election gave Democrats an opportunity to place a fifth justice nominated by their party on the Supreme Court for the first time since 1969. Trump’s victory instead allowed Republicans to first solidify the court’s existing conservative majority, and now push it even further to the right. A liberal majority on the Supreme Court is now out of reach for at least a generation, maybe longer. Instead, every major policy program that the American left hopes to enact—Medicare for All, universal college tuition, and more—will have to face a gauntlet of conservative jurists in order to survive.
Such was Anthony Kennedy’s influence over the course of American life. He tacked rightward more often than not: Kennedy frequently sided with the court’s conservative wing on cases involving federalism, executive power, and the rights of criminal defendants. Many of Kennedy’s major 5-4 votes helped entrench the Republican Party’s political power. His majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC set the stage for a tidal wave of dark money to wash over American politics. He sided with Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and prompted GOP-led states to pass dozens of restrictive voting measures. Earlier this month, he helped turn back an effort to establish constitutional limits on partisan gerrymandering.
But he also often sided with the court’s liberals on major cases involving social issues. Those rulings preserved a delicate status quo between the American left and right that will now likely collapse in his absence. Kennedy’s middle-of-the-road stance on abortion rights led him to uphold some restrictions on the practice while also thwarting efforts to reverse Roe v. Wade entirely. In 2016, he voted with the court’s liberals to defeat a long-running legal campaign that curbed affirmative action in higher education. With him gone, conservatives will likely mount new efforts to push the court rightward on both issues. Republican-led states will more aggressively restrict abortion rights in the hope of triggering a Supreme Court showdown. Four states already have laws to ban abortion automatically if Roe is overturned.
On at least one front of the cultural wars, Kennedy served as a field marshal for the liberal side. He wrote the majority opinion in every major Supreme Court case on LGBT rights starting with Romer v. Evans in 1996, which struck down an anti-gay constitutional amendment in Colorado. Those cases led to the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide in the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, where Kennedy laid out a vision of equal dignity under the Constitution for gay and lesbian Americans. His recent vote in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case marked a step back from that legacy, though not a total repudiation of it.
Kennedy’s replacement on the high court is unlikely to share his predecessor’s flexibility. During the 2016 campaign, Trump distributed a list of 25 conservative legal figures and pledged he would only choose Supreme Court nominees from among them. The move aimed to shore up support among Republicans who feared Trump’s ideological flexibility would be reflected in his judicial nominees, imperiling a decades-long effort to reshape the nation’s courts in their image.
Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, laid any lingering fears among Republicans to rest. Since joining the high court last year, Gorsuch has been a folksy and consistent voice in lock-step with the rest of the court’s conservatives. For many Republicans, the pick helped them justify brushing aside Trump’s numerous scandals and attacks on the rule of law. Conservative legal figures who gathered at this year’s Federalist Society convention even received red stress balls emblazoned with the newest justice’s image and the refrain “But Gorsuch!”
Trump’s other potential nominees appear likely to follow in his first choice’s footsteps. By stepping down from the court, Kennedy leaves behind a complex record on the court—one that largely maintained a tenuous balance of power between America’s increasingly polarized political factions. That balance now appears to be in jeopardy: upsetting it could be Anthony Kennedy’s most lasting legacy.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not supposed to defeat Joe Crowley. Crowley has been in Congress since 1999, representing both New York’s 7th and 14th Congressional Districts at different points in his career. He led the Queens County Democratic Party. He was the fourth-ranked Democrat in Congress, a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader. On Tuesday evening, he performed Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” at what many thought would be his victory party in Jackson Heights. He dedicated the song to Ocasio-Cortez, who had just defeated him handily with 57 percent of the vote.
A 28-year-old Latina from the Bronx, Ocasio-Cortez had been working as a bartender as recently as 2017. Small donors funded the bulk of her campaign, which combined viral digital ads with old-fashioned, aggressive canvassing efforts. But Ocasio-Cortez’s tactics aren’t the only reason she won. The key to her victory can be found in her politics. Once an organizer for the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez wants to abolish ICE and for-profit prisons. She supports Medicare for All and tuition-free public universities. And that is what Democratic voters wanted, thought it is a program that the party has struggled to accept.
The party had largely lined up behind the incumbent Crowley, which placed more left-leaning members of Congress, like California’s Ro Khanna and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, in uncomfortable positions. Khanna eventually issued a “dual endorsement” of Ocasio-Cortez and Crowley after his initial endorsement of Crowley alone drew fire from the left. For almost the entire duration of her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez worked nearly unnoticed, save for pieces in left-leaning outlets like The Nation and In These Times and The Intercept. At one scheduled debate, Crowley even refused to show up, and sent New York City council member Annabel Palma to debate Ocasio-Cortez in his place.
The Democratic Party may not have taken Ocasio-Cortez seriously, but voters did, and she will almost certainly become the youngest sitting member of Congress and its second, self-identified socialist in November. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t the only leftist candidate to experience some skepticism from party leadership. In Maryland, former NAACP President Ben Jealous faced similar challenges in his primary, but prevailed to become the state’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee.
Despite a well-established record of civil rights activism, Jealous is not beloved by some influential members of his party. He appeared in the leak of John Podesta’s emails during the 2016 campaign, in a message to Podesta from Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden. “I know there are a million reasons to want Hillary [Clinton] to win,” Tanden wrote in February 2016, “but Ben Jealous feeling he has no power is a particularly good one.” In March, Tanden complained that Jealous had become “obsessed” with Clinton’s failure to repudiate Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who had closed public schools in majority black neighborhoods.
Jealous endorsed Sanders’s primary bid in 2016. In 2017, Sanders repaid the favor and endorsed Jealous for governor; meanwhile, Representatives Steny Hoyer and Chris Van Hollen endorsed Jealous’s opponent, Rushern Baker III. With Crowley out of the House, Hoyer, the minority whip, has a clearer path to becoming Pelosi’s successor.
Jealous now faces a tough race against Republican incumbent Larry Hogan. But Maryland is not a conservative stronghold, and Jealous has a real chance of winning his race in November. The skepticism of Democratic elders has been misplaced; Ocasio-Cortez and Jealous are strong candidates in their own rights. And they won without sacrificing a commitment to either progressive economic policies or social justice, a compromise Third Way types have consistently insisted the party would have to make.
This is partly because Ocasio-Cortez and Jealous ran in relatively blue areas. But they are also part of a wave that is far bigger than Maryland and the 14th Congressional District of New York. It’s happening in states and districts that should, according to conventional wisdom, be wary of envelope-pushing stances on Medicare or minority rights. Stacey Abrams, who supports ending cash bail and raising the minimum wage, is running a landmark bid for Georgia governor; Sanders endorsed her in May. Another Sanders-backed candidate, Emily Sirota, won her Democratic primary for a seat in the Colorado state House. In Virginia’s 9th and 6th Congressional Districts, Anthony Flaccavento and Jennifer Lewis are running on platforms that include support for a $15 minimum wage, free higher education, and Medicare for All. Democrat Richard Ojeda is leading his Republican opponent in West Virginia’s deep-red 3rd Congressional District—while running on an unapologetically left-wing platform that resembles the Bernie Sanders template in many respects.
A year ago, the possibility of a Democratic victory in West Virginia’s 3rd district seemed unthinkable. But Ojeda, a remorseful Trump voter who enthusiastically supported the state’s striking teachers this spring, seems to have tapped into a force that party leadership failed to notice. The strike galvanized the 3rd’s voters. That same dynamic might not play out in future elections, but the point is that these policies motivated Democratic voters in the first place.
November’s general elections will more accurately test the viability of leftist candidates. But it is clear, at least, that the Democratic Party’s base does not necessarily share the pragmatic concerns of party leadership or, for that matter, the party’s donors.
The trick is to give voters real targets for their resentment. Voters are correct to believe that something’s rotten. Their livelihoods are indeed under threat—but from growing wealth inequality, not from immigrants. Wages are stagnant and housing prices are going up, along with the cost of health care. “U.S. infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world,” U.N. Special Rapporteur Philip Alston reported after a trip to the U.S. in December 2017. “Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy, and the ‘health gap’ between the U.S. and its peer countries continues to grow.”
And while circumstances have worsened under Donald Trump, the country was in weak shape under his Democratic predecessor. Those infant mortality rates date from Barack Obama’s second term in office. The U.S. did not become 36th in the world for access to sanitation and water on Trump’s inauguration day. The Affordable Care Act has improved health care access, but it always left some Americans behind, and it did little to check the power of the insurance industry.
Under Trump, both the executive and judicial branches seem determined to roll back the incremental progress this country has made. The Department of Justice announced on June 7 that it would not defend the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions against a lawsuit, and congressional Republicans are on their way to attaching onerous work requirements to food stamps. Just this week, with its ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, the U.S. Supreme Court has weakened unions, even though union membership is the most reliable way for women and people of color to achieve equal pay. Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, giving Trump another Supreme Court pick. Trump himself has threatened further attacks on the right to asylum. The wall, when he builds it, won’t just be the physical manifestation of a deeply racist administration. Walls also keep people in, and behind this wall America will languish.
If the Democratic Party wants to reclaim state legislatures and Congress, it will have to turn out voters. And if voters want universal health care, free public college, and a fairer immigration policy, then the party should give them what they want. It’s also what we all need.

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement on Wednesday virtually guarantees that the most conservative U.S. Supreme Court in 85 years will become even more so, once President Donald Trump nominates a replacement that the Republican majority in the Senate will surely confirm. It means that Chief Justice John Roberts improbably becomes the so-called “swing vote” on the Court; and that means we ought to expect in the years to come broadened hostility to abortion rights, gay rights, and the constitutional rights of criminals, to name just a few topic areas in which Kennedy’s voice was decisive in tipping the Court’s balance to the left.
We forget now that Kennedy was the third and final Reagan nominee. He made it onto the Court in 1988 only because Reagan’s first choice, Robert Bork, was “borked” by Senate Democrats and because Reagan’s second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, admitted to smoking marijuana. Kennedy had always been a conservative, but his tenure was marked by a cognitive dissonance about his ideological leanings and by the Court’s own persistent march to the right. The switch from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas in 1991, and the switch from Sandra Day O’Connor to Samuel Alito in 2006, shuffled Kennedy from the court’s right wing to its center.
He didn’t move as far or as fast as the Court around him did; but that doesn’t mean he deserves all of the plaudits he has received from progressives over the years. He was “moderate” in ideology only in contrast to conservative flamethrowers like Thomas, Alito, Antonin Scalia, and now Neil Gorsuch. Compare Kennedy to prior Republican appointees like O’Connor and John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun, and his true conservative colors shine through. This term, for example, he did not side once with the Court’s liberals to form that moderate “swing” vote he so often was credited for. And just a few days ago he sided with the Court’s conservatives in upholding a Texas redistricting plan that implicitly endorses partisan gerrymandering and effectively disenfranchises voters.
On the other hand—there was always another hand when it came to this judge—Kennedy did deliver votes on occasion to progressive causes, which now will be imperiled in his absence. For example, he is largely responsible for two major limitations on the use of capital punishment in the United States. In Atkins v. Virginia in 2002 he signed onto a decision that barred the execution of defendants with intellectual disabilities, a decision he was forced to fortify 12 years later in Hall v. Florida. And in Roper v. Simmons in 2005, Kennedy was the deciding vote in a ruling that outlawed the execution of those who were juveniles at the time they committed murder. Chief Justice Roberts is not going to extend the scope of those cases. Whether he works to narrow them is the open question.
Open-ended is also the broader question of what the Court in Kennedy’s absence will do about gay rights. The first paragraph of the justice’s obituary surely will note his vital role in the same-sex marriage rulings earlier this decade; but the journey the justice took to that historic point began in 1996 with his majority opinion in Romer v. Evans.* In that case, long before gay rights were widely accepted, Kennedy and the Court struck down a Colorado ballot initiative that sought to preclude any action to protect gay and lesbian citizens from discrimination. You can draw a straight line from that ruling to Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 to Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, which struck down same-sex marriage bans across the country.
With Kennedy on the way out, one could argue that the fate of same-sex marriage in the United States is about as secure, or not, as the fate of abortion rights. It’s true that for 25 years Kennedy has largely hewed to the Court’s precedent in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, which updated and modernized the constitutional right to an abortion first announced in Roe v. Wade. It is also true that whomever Trump selects to replace Kennedy will be an ardent opponent of abortion rights. So, again, the mantle will fall to the chief justice; and the question will be whether his loyalty to precedent, to the doctrine of stare decisis, is more pronounced than his ideological leaning. I am not so sure.
But these liberal “victories” are far overshadowed by all the heavy lifting Kennedy did on behalf of conservative causes over the decades. Let’s focus, for now, on the Court’s post-O’Connor era, starting in 2006. In 2010, Kennedy sided with his fellow conservatives and moneyed interests in Citizens United v. F.E.C, a case in which the Court for the first time recognized that political spending was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. Justice Kennedy wrote that decision, equating corporations with people, and the grim effects of it on our politics are everywhere around us: from the dark money flowing into campaigns around the country, to the extension of “corporate” rights into other areas of constitutional law.
In areas like religious freedom, Kennedy earlier this month sided, gingerly, against a gay couple who were discriminated against by a Colorado baker who refused to bake them a same-sex marriage wedding cake. Yes, the decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission is an obvious compromise and not the blow that religious activists had hoped it would be; but when you pair it with the Court’s ruling in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case, in which Kennedy again sided with his conservative colleagues, it’s not hard to see where this area of the law is heading. It’s headed sharply to the right, at a pace that now will accelerate in Kennedy’s absence.
So, too, will the partisan push for voter suppression accelerate. Five year ago, Kennedy sided with his fellow Court conservatives in Shelby County v. Holder, a case that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Countless citizens either already have been or soon will be disenfranchised as a result of that ruling, one of the worst in the court’s long history. Nothing Kennedy has done since 2013 has suggested he has any remorse or regret over how Republican lawmakers around the country reacted to that ruling. Not for nothing, Kennedy also helped spur modern-day voter suppression when he signed onto a 2008 ruling out of Indiana, Crawford v. Marion County, which endorsed voter ID laws now used by Republicans to disenfranchise the poor, the elderly, students, and minority voters.
And don’t forget the guns. Kennedy has voted with the majority in the two seminal gun rights cases of our time. In District of Columbia v. Heller he signed onto Justice Antonin Scalia’s decision, recognizing for the first time a personal right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. And in McDonald v. Chicago he voted to apply that newly-recognized Second Amendment right to state laws through the Fourteenth Amendment. In each instance, the vote was 5–4; in each case, Kennedy voted with the gun lobby and for a view of gun rights that Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, once called “one of the greatest pieces of fraud” he had seen infect the courts.
He was a consistent voter for employers over employees, for corporations over consumers, and against unions—right down to one of his final votes in the public sector employee union case the Court decided Wednesday in another 5-4 vote in which the conservatives prevailed. He was also a regular voter for police and prosecutors over criminal suspects or defendants, even though he was troubled by prison overcrowding and the persistent overuse of solitary confinement. Right down to last week, in the Fourth Amendment case titled Carpenter v. United States, he was an ardent supporter of government surveillance at the expense of individual privacy rights.
For a judge who has held so many key cases in the palm of his hand over the past decade, for someone perceived by so many as having so much power to shape the course of American law and history, he may have saved his lamest response for last. In Trump v. Hawaii, with religious and racial discrimination rife, all he could muster was a vote for the Trump administration’s travel ban and a mealy-mouth concurrence in which he implored federal officials—who repeatedly have ignored the Constitution—not to ignore the Constitution. He ended thus with a whimper, unwilling to check the implementation of the Trump administration’s bigotry into policy and practice.
Kennedy’s long, slow drift to the center—both real and perceived—says more about the Court than it does about him. He brought to his long work none of the nastiness that marks the jurisprudence of Thomas or Alito or the sanctimony that Gorsuch’s nascent portfolio suggests. His temperament was more of the old school, the gentleman judge; and in that fashion, he was closer to the style of the chief justice (and before him, Justices Souter and Stevens and Brennan). That allowed him, far more than his contemporary Scalia, to build winning coalitions—to put the “swing” in the Court’s swing vote. That is until this term when, on his way out, he failed in one important case after another to find common ground with the Court’s liberal wing.
History will see him as a traditional conservative on the bench, someone very much in tune with the politics and sensibilities of the president who nominated him. Trump would have railed against Reagan the way he rails against anyone else who hews to the conservative principles that animated the 1980s and 1990s. That, too, reminds us of how nasty and intemperate our politics have become since Kennedy’s nomination, and it serves as a warning for what is about to befall us when a man like Donald Trump gets to make his second High Court pick. Lord help us when that judge shows that he, too, is in tune with the politics and sensibilities of the man who nominated him.
*A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Romer v. Evans was decided in 1992. We regret the error.

Elections have consequences. Had Hillary Clinton captured the presidency and nominated a Supreme Court justice to fill the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia’s passing in 2016, the court might never have taken up Janus v. AFSCME, Local 31.
But Trump won and nominated another conservative justice in Scalia’s mold. As a result, the court ruled 5-4 on Wednesday in Janus that public-sector unions could no longer collect fees from non-members who are benefiting from the union’s collective-bargaining work. Twenty-two states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico up until now have allowed unions to collect the fees, which are known as fair-share fees or agency fees. The Supreme Court previously approved the practice in the 1977 case Abood v. Detroit Board of Education.
In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said the fees could not be justified under the First Amendment. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of non-members by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern,” he wrote, concluding that Abood was therefore overruled. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch joined his opinion.
Wednesday’s ruling hits American organized labor where it is strongest. About one-third of federal, state, and local government workers are union members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those 7.2 million Americans account for just under half of the nation’s organized labor membership. Private-sector employees are far more numerous than their public-sector brethren, but punch under their weight: only about 6 percent of them belong to a union.
Unions traditionally align with the Democratic Party and are a mainstay of its efforts to organize and mobilize voters. As a result, Janus is one of many Roberts Court rulings that may ultimately boost the Republican Party’s electoral prospects. The impact on public-union finances wasn’t missed by one notable commentator: President Donald Trump himself, who celebrated the decision on Twitter only minutes after its release as a “big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”
Supreme Court rules in favor of non-union workers who are now, as an example, able to support a candidate of his or her choice without having those who control the Union deciding for them. Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2018Organized-labor leaders sounded a defiant note in response to Wednesday’s ruling. “Unions will always be the most effective force and vehicle to propel working people into the middle class,” Lee Saunders, AFSCME’s national president, said in a statement. “Despite this unprecedented and nefarious political attack—designed to further rig the rules against working people—nothing changes the fact that America needs unions now more than ever.”
Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote a dissent joined by the court’s other three liberal justices, sharply criticized the majority for tossing aside four decades of precedent. “Today, the Court succeeds in its 6-year campaign to reverse Abood,” she wrote. “Its decision will have large-scale consequences. Public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support. State and local governments that thought fair-share provisions furthered their interests will need to find new ways of managing their workforces.”
Janus is one of the most significant labor-law cases heard by the justices in decades. It also had perhaps the most easily predictable outcome of any case on the court’s docket. The court’s members made clear where they stood on fair-share fees in Friedrichs v. California Teachers’ Association two years ago, which challenged the practice in the California’s teachers’ union. But the path to overturning Abood began even earlier, and as of early 2016, it was clear that everything would hang on the result of the November presidential election.
What are fair-share fees? States use them to solve what’s known as the free-rider problem. Members of a government workplace’s union pay dues to support the union’s operations. Non-member workers also reap the benefits of the union’s efforts to secure better wages and working conditions, but don’t pay dues to support those efforts. Fair-share fees fix the problem by requiring non-members to pay fees that support those collective-bargaining efforts.
The Supreme Court first upheld the fees’ constitutionality in the 1977 case Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. At the time, the court agreed that the fees were acceptable under the First Amendment to avoid free-rider problems and to promote labor peace for public workforces. The court also stipulated that fair-share fees couldn’t be used for “political and ideological purposes unrelated to collective bargaining” that unions also perform on behalf of their members, like supporting candidates for public office. Janus’s fees amounted to roughly 70 percent of a full member’s dues.
To Mark Janus, who works as a child-support specialist for the Illinois Department of Health and Human Services, fair-share fees still amounted to a violation of his First Amendment rights. Janus and the wealthy conservative groups that supported him argued that all public-sector union activities are inherently political in nature. “Abood is offensive to the First Amendment,” Janus said in his brief for the court. “It permits the government to compel employees to subsidize an advocacy group’s political activity: namely, speaking to the government to influence governmental policies.”
The Supreme Court’s conservatives have signaled for years that they thought Abood was unsound. In 2012, the court heard Knox v. SEIU, a case that addressed other fees that unions could charge non-members. In his majority opinion, Alito cast doubt on Abood’s reasoning. “Acceptance of the free-rider argument as a justification for compelling non-members to pay a portion of union dues represents something of an [First Amendment] anomaly—one that we have found to be justified by the interest in furthering ‘labor peace,’” he wrote, quoting an earlier decision by the court. “But it is an anomaly nevertheless.”
Two years later, in the 2014 case Harris v. Quinn, the court considered whether a group of home healthcare workers in Illinois could be compelled to pay fair-share fees. This time, Alito wrote a majority opinion that extensively criticized the 1977 ruling’s logic, calling it “questionable on several grounds.” Nonetheless, he and the other four conservative justices didn’t overturn Abood at that time, because they didn’t think the healthcare workers bringing the case counted as government employees under the Abood decision to begin with.
At the time, Kagan criticized the conservatives’ attacks on a core labor-law ruling. “Readers of today’s decision will know that Abood does not rank on the majority’s top-ten list of favorite precedents—and that the majority could not restrain itself from saying (and saying and saying) so,” she wrote in her dissent from the 2014 decision. “Yet they will also know that the majority could not, even after receiving full-dress briefing and argument, come up with reasons anywhere near sufficient to reverse the decision.”
Two years later during the 2015-2016 term, the conservative justices placed Abood’s neck in the guillotine once more, its demise halted only by a curious twist of fate. Friedrichs v. California Teachers’ Association was virtually identical to Janus, except for the litigants’ state and profession. This time, a group of public school teachers argued that the fees violated their First Amendment rights as a form of compelled speech. The court’s conservatives seemed receptive to that stance during oral arguments. Public unions braced for the blow.
Then, in February 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly, throwing the court’s docket into disarray. The other eight justices spent the remainder of the term wrestling with cases where they were evenly divided. (Under the court’s rules, a 4-4 verdict leaves the lower court’s ruling intact but doesn’t set any precedents for future cases. It’s as if the justices hadn’t taken the case at all.) In Friedrichs, the even split sent a clear signal: that all four of the court’s remaining conservative justices would vote to rule fair-share fees unconstitutional. With Scalia’s seat vacant, the fate of fair-share fees—and public unions’ finances—was bound to the results of the 2016 election.
In Wednesday’s ruling, Alito rejected the Abood’s reasoning point by point. The 1977 ruling’s fear of harming “labor peace,” he wrote, “cited no evidence that the pandemonium it imagined would result if agency fees were not allowed, and it is now clear that Abood’s fears were unfounded.” He also concluded that the free-rider problem could be solved by less onerous measures. “Individual non-members could be required to pay for [representation in disciplinary hearings] or could be denied union representation altogether,” he suggested as one example.
Alito noted that public unions that act as a workplace’s exclusive representative enjoy a “privileged position” when negotiating wages and conditions, as well as other special perks. Those advantages “greatly outweigh any extra burden imposed by the duty of providing fair representation for non-members,” he argued. Kagan countered that the majority had disregarded the long-term damage that free riders would have on unions’ health.
Without a fair-share agreement, the class of union non-members spirals upward. Employees (including those who love the union) realize that they can get the same benefits even if they let their memberships expire. And as more and more stop paying dues, those left must take up the financial slack (and anyway, begin to feel like suckers)—so they too quit the union. And when the vicious cycle finally ends, chances are that the union will lack the resources to effectively perform the responsibilities of an exclusive representative—or, in the worst case, to perform them at all.
Some state governments may favor a weaker bargaining partner, Kagan added, but others have valued a union that robustly represents government workers. “Abood respected that state interest; today’s majority fails even to understand it,” she wrote.
Kagan also took aim at a broader trend: “weaponizing” free-speech protections to strike down economic regulations disfavored by conservatives. She cited the court’s ruling 24 hours earlier in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, where the same justices struck down a California law that required crisis pregnancy centers to post notices about abortion and state medical licensing. Anti-abortion groups decried the notices as unconstitutional compelled speech; the court’s conservatives agreed. In both that case and in Janus, Kagan said Wednesday, the court was “turning the First Amendment into a sword, and using it against workaday economic and regulatory policy” with potentially dire consequences for democratic governance.
“Speech is everywhere—a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it),” she warned. “For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices. The First Amendment was meant for better things.”

Since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013, the newspaper has been one of the great—and few—success stories in media, legacy or otherwise. The size of the paper’s staff has grown to over 800, and it has opened bureaus around the globe, most recently in Hong Kong and Rome. In 2015 it beat its arch-rival The New York Times in terms of readership (though the Times has since regained the upper hand), and it has been profitable for two years. No one, in 2018, seems to really know how to run a lucrative, well-read, daily publication, but The Post suggests that one way is to be owned by the richest man in the world.
With Google and Facebook sucking money out of newsrooms, the Bezos model has become increasingly popular. Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs purchased a controlling stake in The Atlantic last year, while billionaire Patrick Soon Shiong bought The Los Angeles Times this spring. With subscriptions falling, private equity bleeding local newspapers dry, and behemoths like Gannett and Tronc (the previous owner of The Los Angeles Times) teetering, having a wealthy patron is a more appealing option than it was just a few years ago. Led by editor Marty Baron and economically secure, the Post has been a beacon for journalists as well as readers.
But, as Vanity Fair reported last week, “a crack appears to be developing in this cheery facade.” The Washington Post’s union, which represents hundreds of non-management positions at the paper, has been working without a contract for the past twelve months. Earlier this month, 400 of their members signed an open letter asking for pay bumps and better retirement benefits. (Full disclosure: Non-management employees of The New Republic are represented by the News Guild, which is, like the Post’s union, part of the Communication Workers of America.) Bezos is in the midst of a very tough negotiation with significant implications not only for the future of the Post, but also an entire industry that is increasingly looking to billionaires for salvation.
The wealthy media owner is often presented as either a philanthropist stepping in to save a legacy brand from oblivion, or as an opportunist trying to launder their reputation and influence the political conversation in their favor. Bezos leans toward the former. Citing the paper’s grandiloquent motto—“Democracy Dies In Darkness”—he has said that owning the Post is his civic responsibility. “Certain institutions have a very important role in making sure there is light, and I think the Washington Post has a seat, an important seat to do that, because we happen to be located here in the capital city of the United States of America,” he said in 2016.
However, he has also made clear that the Post is not a charity. “This is not a philanthropic endeavor,” Bezos said last year. “For me, I really believe, a healthy newspaper that has an independent newsroom should be self-sustaining. And I think it’s achievable. And we’ve achieved it.”
Drawing lessons from his day job, Bezos also said that the Post should treat its audience the way Amazon does; Amazon routinely tops surveys judging consumer satisfaction. “We run Amazon and The Washington Post in a very similar way in terms of the basic approach,” Bezos said. “We attempt to be customer-centric, which in the case of the Post means reader-centric. ... If you can focus on readers, advertisers will come.”
These factors—civic responsibility, a commitment to the customer, and an insistence on running the Post like a business—have contributed to Bezos’s reputation as the defender of one of America’s most important publications. They have also, combined with investments in new positions and bureaus, apparently made him popular with much of the staff. The union dispute is the “first tangible conflict,” one Post journalist told Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo—a fairly impressive feat in and of itself, given that Bezos has owned the newspaper since October of 2013.
Post staffers have been grateful to have an owner willing to invest in the paper. Bezos’s investments, moreover, worked for both him and the staff—they were designed to increase the paper’s relevance and profitability. Still, they were made on Bezos’s terms. When contracts were last negotiated with the paper’s union in 2015, the Post had still not returned to profitability. Pensions were frozen then; the Post’s retirement plan is the central source of conflict in the current dispute, as are a lack of employment protections and cost-of-living increases. In recent days, Post Union Vice Chairman Fredrick Kunkle told me, waivers for non-disclosure agreements—the paper is insisting that departing employees sign them—have become a sticking point.
In its second negotiation with the Bezos-owned Post, the union is getting a better sense of its owner’s priorities. “We are in this position where, on the one hand we are all very thankful to this day that Jeff Bezos bought the Post, invested so much money in it, and has given us the long runway he talked about,” Kunkle said. “But we’re also very concerned that even as the Post is on the rise, the terms and conditions for people working here are becoming worse. That’s the place we are right now, and it makes us feel uncertain.” Earlier this month, over 400 Post employees signed a letter to Bezos asking for better compensation and benefits. (A spokesman for the Post declined to comment.)
A major concern is that the lack of basic workplace protections and benefits in the tech sector—Amazon very much included—is at the core of Bezos’s strategy for operating the Post as well. Bezos is not directly involved in the negotiations, which are being led by the newspaper’s general counsel. But he is very much a creature of Silicon Valley. He has been hostile to organized labor at Amazon, which has been singled out for its grueling corporate culture and for the alarming conditions of many of its fulfillment centers. In the Post’s debates over pensions and NDAs, as well as the arduous contract negotiation itself, it’s easy to see the influence of Silicon Valley’s hardball approach to labor.
The Bezos who bought the Post is no different from the Bezos who upended the book publishing industry, who has run roughshod over local and federal tax law, and who has kept workers at his fulfillment centers in conditions reminiscent of the 19th century. He may still be the best option for The Washington Post, but he also represents the flaws of a model that relies on the good graces of extremely wealthy people who have their own highly developed views on how to run a business.
Bezos may have created a new model for media ownership, combining the old school titan of industry with tech-based ideas about employment and content production; but the result is familiar. “It’s the age-old strategy of people who own factories and means of production,” Kunkle said, “trying to get the most out of the people they employ while giving them the least they can get away with.”

The applause rang out in the drab meeting hall across the river from David Hockenbury’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. David’s heart was pounding, and he felt his cheeks flush under the gaze of the large group gathered there on a spring night in 2016. It had been 30 days since he had last flexed his arm, found a vein, and spiked it with a dose of heroin—and now, in a ritual common to many Alcoholics Anonymous groups, he was being called on to receive his first sobriety chip.
David got up from his folding chair.
Several people reached out to shake his hand or slap him on the back as he
passed. Everyone in the room knew how tough it was to achieve that first month
of sobriety. But as the little red medallion was handed to him, the question
that had haunted him for the last month flashed across his mind: “Am I a
fraud?”
David had a secret. After years of failing to kick his addiction, he had finally been prescribed Suboxone, a pill to ease his cravings and help him recover. The pill helped. For the first time since engaging in heavy heroin use, he was managing to stay clean. But David knew that many in the recovery community would not consider him truly sober if they knew he was taking medicine. “Most people look at Suboxone and think you are cheating, that you are getting high somehow, that you are taking the easy way out,” he told us. “There is this junkie pride where you are supposed to go through detox and withdrawal. Suffer it out. Cold turkey.”
As David walked back from the podium, he felt confused and alone. Should he trust his doctor, who had told him that Suboxone was an effective way of treating opioid addiction and akin to an antidepressant? Or his peers, who preached complete abstinence, even from medication—and honesty, no secrets, as the only pathway to recovery? In the support group people had shared their darkest secrets as part of the 12 Steps to recovery. Some had told the group that they had been molested as children. One had even confessed to David that he had committed a murder. “But I didn’t even feel comfortable to say that I was on Suboxone,” David said.
Back in his folding chair, he turned the small A.A-engraved token over in his needle-scarred hand, and the last bit of pride he had felt over his accomplishment was stifled by the paradox of his situation: The medication that gave him a fighting chance at escaping addiction was also what held him back from truly belonging to the support group he desperately needed to stay sober.
Eventually, David stopped taking Suboxone, part of his on-again, off-again relationship with the treatment. “I guess that sense of isolation and loneliness led me back to the kind of people that I was getting high with, led me back to the streets and the drugs,” he said. “Everybody needs their tribe.”
For many people, that tribe comes at a great cost. Health authorities and medical researchers widely consider medication-assisted treatment (MAT) with methadone or Suboxone the most effective way of treating opioid addiction, which in 2016 affected some two million people across the United States. Yet in the midst of a national opioid epidemic, only a fraction of addicts receives MAT. In response, President Donald Trump recently vowed to expand access to MAT, which can be expensive and difficult for patients to obtain. The push, sorely needed as it may be, faces an obstacle that is beyond the abilities of the federal government to remedy. The real barrier may not lie in a lack of resources, but in the very way America still thinks of addiction, thanks to a decades-old 12 Step philosophy that has left a new generation of addicts out in the cold.
It was pitch black outside and the
sun would not rise for another two hours. Michael Dever, a skinny 34-year-old in horn-rimmed glasses, black hoodie, and black pants, was already in his
car, driving to a methadone clinic in the east end of Louisville on a January
morning, just as he had most mornings for the last seven years. This is his
routine. “I’ve tried to separate it from my person. Because this is just
something I have to do,” he said. “It enables me to live a normal, stable
life and get up and go to work every morning and be productive, and not be on
heroin shooting up three or four times a day.”
The Crossroads of Louisville methadone clinic is situated on a dead-end road. Two large spotlights shined on the parking lot, making the ground look glassy in the light rain, as Michael made his way hastily towards the clinic. On busy days, when clients are called five at a time, and lined up against a wall festooned with inspirational quotes, Michael almost feels like he is in prison. Today, the nurse only called Michael, went over his dose, and dispensed 16 mg of methadone in a small plastic cup. Michael swallowed the cherry-flavored shot and rinsed with water. “That’s how it’s supposed to run, so it doesn’t interfere with your day so much,” he said. “But it doesn’t happen like that every day. It rarely happens like that, actually.”
If he comes in a few hours late or if the line is longer than usual, his hands will go clammy, as the synthetic opioid substitute dissolves from the receptors that they have been blocking and craving starts to kick in.
Michael can deal with the hassle of getting the medicine. What he finds harder to live with is the suspicious attitude people take toward it. On the walls of the clinic, large posters address some of the myths that feed that attitude. One is that it is just a replacement drug—that patients on methadone are just trading one addiction for another addiction. “That’s not true at all,” Michael said sharply. “Methadone-assisted treatment is nothing like a heroin addiction. It’s not even close.”

The misconception stems from the fact that most medications for treating addiction, like Suboxone and methadone, are opioid-based. With the correct prescription, an addict’s compulsive behavior, loss of control, constant cravings, and other hallmarks of addiction will usually vanish. But if you take too much, you will get high. The idea that MAT is just a replacement drug has been debunked countless times by medical organizations, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Nonetheless, Michael has been told that he is still a junkie, not only by people in the 12 Step meetings he used to go to, but also by friends: “They look at you like you are still using, that you are not sober, that you are basically still living the life of a drug addict, when you are not.” Michael has come to terms with the fact that he will probably have to take methadone for the rest of his life. He hates the stigma associated with his medicine, but he knows that he needs it to function.
The effects of MAT have been studied by health authorities and medical experts for over five decades, and the evidence in favor of the treatment method is overwhelming. One 2017 review of 19 studies, published between 1974 and 2016, found that when people received medication-assisted treatment, their overall risk of dying from an overdose went down by more than 50 percent. HHS affirms that long-term MAT has the best track record for controlling opioid use and saving lives.
But MAT is still greatly underused. One study from 2017 found that less than one in four patients diagnosed with opioid dependence or abuse received the combination of MAT and psychosocial treatment that clinical guidelines recommend. Furthermore, this figure does not include undiagnosed addicts or addicts without health insurance. The actual percentage of recovering addicts on MAT is likely much lower.
A visit to the men’s detox ward for the Healing Place in Louisville—a facility that is based on A.A.’s 12 Step method—points to one of the causes. Twenty-five beds are positioned side by side in an open room, smelling of sweat and detergent. A man lay sprawled on his mattress with his pants down to his knees. Another rested with a sheet over his face. The drapes were drawn, the room lit only by the ambient glare of fluorescent tubes. There was no sense of time in here. Scattered around the room were several copies of one tome: The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
At lunch in the detox ward, everyone got the same thing: two pieces of wheat toast wrapped in foil with slices of cold turkey. The irony was almost too thick.For nearly 30 years, this facility has played a vital part in the city’s social work. The Healing Place provides food and shelter to up to 700 people every day; the bulk are in the recovery program, some are in detox, and the rest are homeless people coming from shelters or from the streets. For addicts who want to kick the habit, but cannot afford expensive rehabs, there is almost nowhere else to go.
Fifteen years ago, when Michael was just 20 years old, his parents forced him to go there to wean himself off his growing addiction to opioids. He stayed for only one night. Early next morning, he staggered out the door and walked for miles back to his house. Neither the interior of the detox ward, nor its philosophy, has changed much since. The recovery facility believes in full abstinence, so before they do anything else, patients must spend their first 24 hours to nine days in the ward detoxifying themselves from whatever substance they are on: alcohol, heroin, painkillers—or medication-assisted treatment like methadone or Suboxone.
Heaps of faded sheets were piled at the end of the room. Depending on the drug used, withdrawal symptoms can include severe sweating, nausea, and diarrhea. “It’s just absolutely horrible. It’s like a cold and a flu combined times ten,” said former resident Keenan Beckhart, who now holds the title of gift officer of the development team. Yet, apart from mild pain relievers, patients are not allowed to use any medication. The staff members, most of whom have been through the program themselves, have limited medical training.
At lunch in the detox ward, everyone got the same thing: two pieces of wheat toast wrapped in foil with slices of cold turkey. The irony was almost too thick. One guy stirred a big pot of gray porridge with a texture like wallpaper paste and doled out portions for those who had the strength to eat. Most stayed in bed.
On the wall hung photographs of about 200 people who had previously been through the program. The Death Board, as it is called, is a memorial, meant to honor former patients, and to serve as a gloomy reminder of what can happen to current patients if they relapse. Adam Harmon, a young man with a scruffy brown beard, had been a resident at the Healing Place for almost a year before he became a peer-mentor. “I was in the program with him… and him… and him…” he said, pointing to the small photographs of men who had overdosed and died. “Twelve people that I know have died within the last 11 months.”
But what is accepted with grim resignation at the detox ward is a source of deep dismay for medical experts. “Detox without MAT is potentially dangerous,” said Bachaar Arnaout, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. “An overwhelmingly majority of people end up relapsing after detox. It’s a gamble with lives.”
When patients go through detox, their tolerance decreases drastically. If they fall off the wagon and take the dose of opioids they were used to, or even a lower dose, this can be enough to shut down vital body functions. This is especially the case today, Arnaout said, because the opioid epidemic is largely driven by fentanyl—an opioid up to 50 times more potent than heroin.
Both national and international
studies have shown that detoxing without medication is associated with
increased risks of mortality. HHS does not recommend going through serious
opioid withdrawal without medication such as Suboxone or
methadone. The health authorities in Canada—a nation that is facing a similar
public health emergency—go even further and strongly recommend against detoxification
without MAT.
“One wonders whether it would actually be safer to continue using drugs,” Arnaout said, “rather than attending programs that do not lower the risk of relapse, but result in lowered tolerance, and thereby an increased risk of overdose.” He hastened to add that he did not advocate abstaining from treatment. “But my point is that people should have access to the treatment that works.”
The official stance of the Healing Place is that recovery is different for everyone, and that, for some, MAT might be the right solution. Yet they are very clear that MAT is not compatible with their methods. “Our program works just fine without Suboxone or methadone,” said Keenan Beckhart. “And if you are willing to change your life and get off of Suboxone or methadone, you are more than welcome to come in here.”
The patients that make it through detox typically start their new lives as residents at the Healing Place. They go to church, take classes on fundamental life skills, and participate in A.A. meetings. More than 40 weekly 12 Step meetings are held at The Healing Place. As you reach the end of the program, you are not only sober—you are also equipped to go out and live a normal life, Beckhart said. “At a Suboxone clinic you learn how to take Suboxone and to stay on Suboxone. The same with methadone,” she added. “We don’t do that here. We teach fundamentals of life.”

The recovery facility is funded
mostly by donors and the state of Kentucky. The main contributor in 2016 was
Kentucky’s Justice & Public Safety Cabinet, which donated
$500,000. Adam Bisaga, a professor of
psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, strongly believes that programs
withholding effective treatments, intentionally or unintentionally, should not
receive public funding: “Public resources, especially when limited, should be
steered towards the most effective interventions.”
Alcoholics Anonymous was founded 83 years ago, 330 miles northeast of Louisville, in Akron, Ohio. Prohibition had recently been lifted, and alcohol consumption was on the rise. In 1935, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, a stockbroker and a surgeon, started A.A., and formulated 12 principles to guide alcoholics to sobriety.
Today, with an estimated two million members, A.A. is deeply ingrained in American culture. In 2012 the Library of Congress designated the founding text—The Big Book—as one of 88 “Books that Shaped America.” The organization is, in many ways, the bedrock of American addiction treatment. In 2016, 73 percent of all treatment facilities used the 12 Step approach.
Over the course of nearly a century, the 12 Steps have helped millions of people quit alcohol, pills, and needles—and given them a place to share and heal. But Clay, a public information coordinator at Alcoholics Anonymous, is fully aware that people receiving MAT do not always have the chance of benefiting from the fellowship. Instead, many feel excluded by their peers. “There are people in A.A. that have an orthodoxy,” Clay acknowledged. “They think that A.A. must be this. So yes. These things are going on. There is no orthodoxy in A.A., but there are people who believe that.” Clay’s comments offer a rare window into an organization that is known for its secrecy. He works at A.A.’s headquarters in New York City, and, as an active member, has asked to be identified only by his first name.
A.A.’s official stance is that it has no opinion, positive or negative, on MAT. But it will not interfere if groups exclude people on Suboxone or methadone: “That’s the one thing we can’t do. Because, we have no authority,” Clay said, referring to the unyielding principle that every A.A. group is self-governed and fully autonomous.
To Bisaga of Columbia University Medical Center, that is not a valid excuse: “It is unacceptable that A.A. does not have a position, because they do not want to adjust to change. They are still functioning the way they did, when they were born in the 1930s,” he said. Bisaga, the author of Overcoming Opioid Addiction, is co-director for the organization PCSS-MAT, which advocates for MAT. “It is unfortunate that they don’t have a clear stance in line with all professional medical organizations, including the WHO,” he added.
A.A.’s founders stated that its methods are meant for alcoholism only. But today the popular 12 Steps are used in treating everything from compulsive gambling to sex addiction, and dozens of organizations have sprung from A.A. In the early 1950s, when people struggling with drugs started knocking on A.A.’s door, Narcotics Anonymous was established. With an estimated 67,000 meetings a week, it is by far the largest of the organizations that follow A.A.’s model.
Clay said that people who mainly have
a drug problem ideally should seek help at an organization like Narcotics
Anonymous. However, that may not help a recovering opioid addict on MAT.
Because, unlike A.A., N.A. does take
a stance on MAT. In the eyes of Narcotics Anonymous, people in recovery are not
clean before they abstain from all drugs—including Suboxone and methadone. And
so N.A. advises its member groups not to let individuals on MAT share at
meetings, be speakers or sponsors, or hold any trusted positions within the
organization.
For some people, the only way to stay alive is to stay on medication for the rest of their lives.
This stance was made clear most recently in an official N.A. pamphlet from 2016, drawing from the 1996 Bulletin no. 29 “Regarding Methadone and Other Drug Replacement Programs.” In this text, a phrase appears that will sound familiar to David, Michael, and countless other addicts in recovery: “Our program approaches recovery from addiction through abstinence, cautioning against the substitution of one drug for another.”
Arnaout, the professor at Yale School of Medicine, urged Narcotics Anonymous to change its view on MAT and encourage its members to seek treatment: “It would be appropriate if they said: ‘We are here to support you, but you should see someone in the health care system, too.’”
Bob, who works in public relations for Narcotics Anonymous World Services, confirmed that some groups may discourage people from actively participating. “Because that goes against our core tenant of complete abstinence,” he explained. Bob, like Clay, has asked not to have his last name published. A member on medication-assisted treatment is not officially clean, according to N.A.’s definition. “Hopefully it will be a goal for them, and their doctor, not to take medication for the rest of their life,” Bob said.
Bisaga does not agree. For some people, he said, the only way to stay alive is to stay on medication for the rest of their lives: “If we do not accept that, we’ll just continue to have people dying.” Bisaga regards it as a great loss that N.A. does not embrace MAT: “We do really want people to have medication, but we also want people to benefit from the recovery community.”
The loss is especially felt in places like Louisville, where the opioid epidemic runs deep. About the time that David Hockenbury and Michael Dever began experimenting with drugs—when they were angry teens in baggy clothes and Timberland boots, their hair spiked with gel—a big story in the world of health was the under-treatment of pain. Chronic pain, long neglected, was taken up by patient advocates, who demanded better treatment options. Pharmaceutical lobbyists quickly picked up on the trend, pushing for wider prescriptions and the use of more potent opioid-based products. The initiative was embraced by Kentucky’s coal miners and other manual laborers.
The first time the boys experimented with pills was when David’s girlfriend gave them some of her mother’s Xanax. It didn’t take much of an effort to find more. At parties, David and Michael would nose around in cabinets overflowing with Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, and Benzos of all shapes and sizes. They would take out the powder, snort it, and fill the empty pill cases with sugar. Michael and David could not see that they were part of a vast epidemic spreading in their town, their state, and all across the country.

When they both landed themselves in the hospital—20-year-old David after a car crash, 17-year-old Michael with a stomach condition—they were sent home on heavy opioids. First Percocet. Then OxyContin. Every chemical was stronger than the previous one. And when their hospital stashes diminished and cravings kicked in, they turned to the street.
Little by little, news coverage of pain treatment gave way to stories about the millions of Americans who were becoming dependent on opioids. Crackdowns were launched. Prescription opioids became less accessible, and much more expensive. Suddenly 80 mg of OxyContin had a street price of $60.
For David and Michael, rowdiness turned into violence and weapon charges as a drug-filled lifestyle led them into more serious crime. That was also when they began to seek out a cheaper, more efficient option: heroin. Their lives followed a by-now familiar trajectory. There were blackouts and overdoses, visits to the hospital; there was jail time.
In 2009, the number of Americans who died from an overdose surpassed the number who died from being shot. In 2011, overdoses surpassed deaths by car accidents.
The opioid crisis had its origin in the rural heart of America, but is now spreading to the cities. From July 2016 through September 2017, overdoses increased by 30 percent across the country. The Midwest, Appalachia, and New England are losing the most lives to the epidemic. In 2016, Kentucky had the fifth-highest rate of death due to drug overdose.
There still aren’t many support groups beyond A.A., and few places in Louisville provide a sanctuary for people on MAT. Medically Assisted Treatment To Recovery (MATTR) was founded in August of last year as a response to people on MAT feeling excluded from other recovery groups. At a meeting at the boardroom of the Morton Center addiction facility in January, four pale women found seats at the large table. “Before you say congratulations, I just want to say that I’m not pregnant,” one said. “I’m just really, really constipated.” Others restlessly scratched their arms and necks. Numbness, tingling, trouble concentrating—all are common side effects of the Suboxone they take, along with constipation.
The meeting was led by co-founder Andrea Jones, and the group was eager to share. “Hi, I’m Diana. My sobriety day is 12 22 2017,” said a young woman wearing sweatpants and a washed-out Batman t-shirt, absentmindedly scratching the inside of both elbows with blue polished nails. (The names of the MATTR attendees have been changed.) It was her first day on Suboxone, and the decision to start taking it had not been easy. “I was so confused. Because so many people were already judging and telling me not to do the treatment. I didn’t know how to think.”
In 2009, the number of Americans who died from an overdose surpassed the number who died from being shot. In 2011, overdoses surpassed deaths by car accidents.The medicine was audible in the slow, soft croak of her voice. It usually takes a few days for the body to adjust. But today, for the first time in a long while, she had not thought about running off and doing drugs, she told the group. “I want to be open about it,” she said. “And this is like one of the only places I can be open about it.”
Next, Jessica, a petite woman with a bun of brown curls and large golden earrings, shared her story. An addiction to heroin and methamphetamine had brought her here. “I went from smoking weed a little bit every day to being five months pregnant with my second daughter, shooting up in a gas station bathroom, begging God to just let me die.” She stopped and took a deep shuddering breath. “MAT saved my life.”
The others nodded in sympathy and thanked her for sharing. Samantha, the young woman with the swollen belly, took over. She was pretty, but the sickly pallor of her skin and her expressionless face made her resemble a mugshot. In a slow Southern drawl, she told the group that her boyfriend broke up with her when he found out she was on Suboxone. “He said that I’m just getting on MAT to get legal, cheap high.”
Some 12 Step meetings openly prohibit the use of MAT. But more often, these women were shamed out of meetings by other participants. They were told that their all-important sobriety date was false and that they were not truly sober. Jessica was even kicked out from a meeting when the other participants learned that she was on Suboxone. “People are just uneducated about it. For one, it’s not a high. If anything, I’m exhausted,” she said, sinking back in the large office chair. “But it slows my brain down enough to let me do what I need to do that day.” Her voice thickened and tears welled in her eyes.
Diana’s voice rose: “I shouldn’t have to worry about this. I’ve literally drawn myself into an anxiety attack because I don’t know how the world will react to this.” They had all had close friends, even family, question their medicine. “I may be on something to maintain me,” Diana added. “But I’m not gonna abuse it. There’s a difference between abstinence and sobriety. You’re doing something to recover. That counts.”
She delivered the last statement with defiance, as if trying to convince someone.
When N.A. member Amber suggests to people on MAT that they get off of their medicine, she does so politely. She has talked to people like the women from MATTR, and advised them against maintenance drugs: “I would encourage you to get off of Suboxone,” she said, reminding them that it can be bought off the streets and used to get high. Amber, who has also asked to be identified by her first name, had tried Suboxone herself, but said she felt that her doctors pressured her into taking it. They would tell her that if she just took this medication, she would not need to get high anymore. To Amber, however, it felt like “substituting one drug for another,” as she said. Today, she is one of many N.A. and A.A. members who have a clear stance on MAT: “You don’t need to be on Suboxone.”
But to many addicts on MAT, like David and Michael, this approach feels like cruel and needless banishment. With the help of methadone, Michael has been sober since last summer. David, after years of relapses and recovery, recently chose to quit A.A. and find a support group open to everyone—including people on MAT. Today, he has been sober for over a year. Still, last fall he decided to wean off medication again. Prescriptions and visits to the doctor cost him almost the same as rent. But that was not the only reason. The negative opinions toward MAT among his peers in A.A. continued to bother him: “Coming from this absolutist black-and-white recovery community, where you had to be totally abstinent and off of everything, I still had pressure in my own mind to get off MAT.”
The hunt for complete abstinence still haunts many of the people they know—or have known. “If five years ago there was no stigma attached to MAT and if it was accessible and affordable, I think a lot of our friends would probably still be alive,” Michael said in January in a Starbucks on the outskirts of Louisville.
“How many people have died that we were friends with?” he asked David, who was calmly sipping a bottle of orange juice.
Both of them looked distant. Losing a friend had long ceased being an extraordinary event.
“Jesse, Mike, Muff.”
They counted on their fingers, but ran out of fingers to count.
“Burford, Kyle.”
“Who’d you say?”
“Noodle.”
“Oh, yeah. Noodle.”
“And Devon?”
“And then the people I know from A.A. It’s an even larger number,” David said.
“Jon.”
“Yeah, and Erica, she died that same day,” David said quietly. He was the one who talked her into going to A.A., where she eventually decided to stop taking methadone. She relapsed and died.
He shrugged. “I lose count. I think it’s at least 30. And at least 15 of my close, close friends.”
“I mean really, it’s just me and you and two other friends from our old group that are still alive,” Michael said.
If everybody needs a tribe, most of theirs is gone.

What do we talk about when we talk about class? Is it economic or is it cultural? Is it the working poverty of a nurse and single mother in Washington County, Pennsylvania, whose household is poisoned and small homestead ruined by fracking? Or is it the identity politics of a white Wisconsinite flying a Confederate flag from his pickup truck a short drive from the Canadian border? Is class an open wound in American life, evident in Bernie Sanders’s denunciations of “the billionaire class” and Donald Trump’s images of “American carnage,” or is it the country’s secret shame, constantly shuffled aside with reassurances that poor Americans are simply “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” as John Steinbeck put it?
For Karl Marx, whose 200th birthday passed this year, class named a person’s role in the way a society wrests its living from the earth and divides the value. Class described the difference between a sharecropper and a plantation owner, between the enslaved person being worked to death in a Caribbean sugar field and an investor living in London on dividends from the sugar trade. It was the only nonarbitrary way to begin a description of human life, because we are our bodies, productive and need-ridden. As God told Adam and Eve, and as John Smith reminded the starving colonists at Jamestown, those who do not work do not eat. By the same token, those who do not find some stand-in to work for them—a machine, a draft animal, or another person—do not get much chance to rest, play, or learn. So to understand any group of people, you must know who does the work and who gets the goods. You can expect that a great deal of politics, law, culture, and religion will be shaped in response to these material patterns—sometimes against them but more often in an attempt to give them the appearance of inevitability and justice.
Marx’s emphasis on class was not exactly new. Adam Smith wrote that government was “instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor.” Much of his intricate social psychology concerned how wealth and power attract esteem, while “the poor man goes out and comes in unheeded.” John Stuart Mill devoted chapters of Principles of Political Economy to the class structure of the modern economy and its premodern predecessors and observed that “all privileged and powerful classes, as such, have used their power in the interest of their own selfishness.” He even argued that, if the market economy continued to give the wealthy who did no work “the largest portions,” while those who performed “the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour” struggled to get by, then the right thing could only be to try communism instead. The philosophical fonts of modern theories of the self-regulating market and the self-defining personality, Smith and Mill found it impossible to talk about collective life without putting class at its center.
A decade ago, there was little discussion of class in the mainstream of American politics or culture, except as anathema when some hapless redistributionist was accused of “class warfare.” Then the 2008 financial crisis showed the fault lines in a superficially prosperous economy, Occupy Wall Street crystallized the diffuse class consciousness of “the 99 percent,” and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century spread the word that humanity is divided into the many who are treading water, the few who are getting more comfortable, and the very few whose household budgets might as well be midsize university endowments or midsize national economies. In 2016, the two presidential campaigns that became movements, Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’s, both rallied popular indignation against elite control. Class is back, but its meanings range from anti-oligarchy to racially coded just-folks nationalism, and it is cross-cut by race, gender, and migration in ways that earlier generations found much too easy to minimize. Long a silent presence in American life, class has lately raised a cacophony.
Three new books go beyond recent assumptions about class in America and attempt to grasp a new situation. Phil Neel, a graduate student at the University of Washington, draws attention to the geography of class in Hinterland, identifying both a new working class and the global forces that have shaped it. Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity (deftly named for two side-by-side towns with little of either) meanwhile emphasizes lived experience, as she closely depicts the lives of the rural Western Pennsylvanians whom she visited off and on for seven years as they were worn down by fracking pollution and the grind of working poverty. To these reports Steve Fraser, a labor historian and product of 1950s suburbia and 1960s radicalism, brings a longer perspective. In Class Matters he traces Americans’ reluctance to talk in terms of class and tendency instead to favor the myth of “the pristine free individual.” This long history of what one might call class denialism is an essential complement to Neel’s and Griswold’s portraits of the present and future of class identity and experience. Understanding class today means taking in its material, emotional, and ideological reality at scales that are both global and intimate, historical and immediate.
It would be easy for Neel to claim to be an authority on class in rural America on the strength of his own upbringing, as authors such as J.D. Vance have done. In 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy and subsequent writing, Vance built his interpretation of Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the Trump era on a sensitive but blinkered portrait of his own family’s strengths and wounds. Neel deliberately avoids this strategy: Although he grew up in a trailer in the Siskiyou Mountains, in the marijuana country of California’s far north, there is no family narrative in his book, not even enough to sort out whether his parents were hippie back-to-the-landers, survivalists, loggers, weed farmers, or American Buddhists—or, perhaps more accurately, in what respects they were part of each culture, as they overlap and mingle in that particular hinterland (as milder versions of them do in the Appalachian hinterland where I grew up a decade ahead of Neel).


Instead of describing a sense of class that is anchored in a specific region, Neel emphasizes that upheavals and dislocation connect working-class experience across regions and continents. Like the other commodities of global capitalism, wage laborers are often defined less by any place they call home than by their patterns of movement. They are drawn from the land in one place, run through factories in another, and processed in the massive logistics hubs of ports, rails, trucking networks, and warehouses. Neel’s book opens on a train in Southern China, where he is surrounded by migrant workers moving among home villages and factory towns. He later recounts experiences on work crews in Nevada; in jail or prison somewhere unspecified; looking for a job near the Seattle-Tacoma airport; and at the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. In each spot, it’s clear he has recently arrived from somewhere else. He doesn’t draw his lessons from origins in a working-class place but from passing through the global patterns of working-class life.

The hinterlands of Neel’s title are defined by these patterns of capital-dictated movement. Hinterlands are the invisible but indispensable logistics hubs where the shitty but abundant jobs are, and, even more centrally, the increasingly abandoned countryside of extraction and primary commodity production where jobs in farming, mining, and logging are being lost to automation, and not much has shown up to replace them. These are the little towns where militias crop up, the places that went 60 and 70 and 80 percent for Trump. There are such landscapes everywhere, Neel argues, because production, extraction, and other work everywhere reflect the same globally integrated logics. The same warehouses and heavily mechanized factories spring up in depopulated fields and forests, and little towns are emptied of working-age people, leaving the same desolate hinterlands. You wouldn’t come to understand all this by virtue of being raised in the Siskiyou range, but you might understand because you, too, have been hurled and tugged across the landscape like a low-margin commodity seeking a buyer.
Neel suggests that in these places new classes are being born. There are the people who do the logistics work, taking orders from algorithms to keep global markets humming, while exercising no real initiative and having little concrete human interaction. Then there are the people who have not even been able to get jobs in this economy—left-behind people in left-behind places, getting by on the peripheries of the deep hinterland. Neel is particularly interested in the political future of these places. This leads him to some provocative reflections on race. At the same time that “whiteness” is being elevated as an identity on the alt-right and interrogated on the progressive left, its material reality is increasingly fragmented. The predominantly white professional and “upper-middle” classes thrive, while statistics show rural and blue-collar whites slipping toward unemployment, imprisonment, and early death. Neel hastens to emphasize that these fates still disproportionately haunt African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos; but given the depth of racial inequality in the United States, it surely reveals an important shift in lines of vulnerability that, in at least 30 counties in the South, middle-aged white women are dying faster than black women of the same age. Even as race and racism become more salient in national politics, the disregarded and discarded classes are a composite of the downwardly mobile and the long-trapped, who often remain scared of one another despite an increasingly shared relation to the economy that makes their lives.
At the same time, ironically, a Southern-inflected “country” culture has become the standard fare of white Trump voters, who are mostly exurban and middle-class but are drawn to the touchy toughness of the big truck, the rifle, and the swagger. Indeed, “country” style generally, a form of distinctly white identity that spans the exurbs and rural places, is a weird mix of Western kitsch and Southern threat—cowboy boots and Confederate flags in the northern Midwest and Western New York, places once better known for radical miners’ unions and abolitionism. Neel asserts that “traditional methods of transforming class antagonism into racial difference are beginning to reach a sort of saturation point,” but this halfway optimism seems unlikely: Trump’s predecessors have created even more animus in the past.
Neel doesn’t propose to solve any current “What’s up in Trump country?” debates. Instead he sets out to show the transformation, and often enough the hollowing out, of large tracts of twentieth-century life as the product of global capitalism. Hinterland is hectic and unsystematic but often tonic, not least because few people who think this way have seen most of the places Neel has, let alone from the standpoints he has sometimes occupied—rioter, prisoner, day laborer. He is less convincing in the lessons he draws. His touchstone for thinking about politics is the riot, which he presents as the incipient form of a new mode of cooperation in which the dispossessed threaten to break and reappropriate the supply lines of global capitalism. He is fascinated by right-wing militias, such as the border-patrolling Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, because he thinks that, stripped of racism and nationalism, street-fighting vanguards can liberate territory and populations for a different oath: “fidelity to [the] destruction” of the same global capitalism that is creating and dispossessing the hinterlands.

“I don’t know what’s coming, even though I know something is rolling toward us in the darkness,” Neel concludes. “Whatever’s coming has no name, and anyone who says they hear it is a liar. All I hear are guns cocking over trap snares unrolling to infinity.” This blending of gnomic pronouncements with macho intimations of violence—a little Heidegger, a little more Hunter S. Thompson—is the weakness in Neel’s thinking and in his prose.
The thought that riots would be revolutionary—not against some weak backwater state but against a global order of production and exchange—has it backward. Institutions such as the state, with its sustained power to quash or remake markets, are the historically unique political resource of our time. That is why everyone with much at stake in global capitalism, from the Trump family to Silicon Valley, cares very much who controls the state. A revolution, after all, is not just an insurrection but an alternative mode of order that replaces the previous one. The conceit that a riot could prefigure such a mode of order is much less plausible than a grimmer and very different forecast that Neel makes: In the new hinterlands, “political support will tend to follow whomever can offer the greatest semblance of strength and stability.” Self-styled communist rioters are likely to lose that contest to right-wing strongmen of the Trump variety. But anti-racist social democrats just might have a chance of winning it—after all, Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primaries in many hinterland regions, such as West Virginia and the Great Plains, by running against corporations and for social protection.
Indeed, self-styled democratic socialists recently won several Democratic primaries in state legislative races around Washington County, Pennsylvania, where Eliza Griswold spent parts of seven years during a massive fracking boom. Her time there brought her close to a world that is both like and unlike what Neel describes. Neel mostly explores male labor and masculine responses to the crises of the hinterlands; Griswold attends mainly to women and children. Neel is not much interested in characters or narratives; Griswold weaves Amity and Prosperity around the stories of Stacey Haney, a nurse and divorced mother of two, and her sister, Shelly, for most of the book a single mother. Stacey is an anti-fracking activist by accident. Her political work emerges from years of frustration trying to persuade state and federal regulators and Range Resources, the local fracking behemoth, to acknowledge and do something about the slow poisoning of her family by fracking contamination.
Washington County lies southwest of Pittsburgh, at the border of Appalachia and the Midwest. Many of the people there trace their history to the late eighteenth century and the American Revolution, which saw exceptionally bloody and sadistic fighting between Anglo settlers and regional tribes. Moving across the generations from one small farm to another along dirt and gravel roads, the local people sometimes look land-rich from coasts where professionals struggle to buy apartments, but they are persistently cash-poor in local economies where there has not been much work for years outside of public schools and hospitals.
Griswold’s characters have not been drawn into Neel’s global web of extraction and exchange, but in many ways their quietly stressed existence is a product of it. Their landscape is postindustrial with a fragmented bucolic overlay. Their water supply is often drained off or broken underground by decades of coal mining. The streams are sometimes dangerously polluted, thanks partly to a local entrepreneur who makes his money illegally dumping toxins. There were once steel jobs—Pittsburgh is not that far away—and the Haneys’ father, a Vietnam vet with PTSD who lost his mill job under Reagan, feels permanently betrayed by American geopolitics and industry. The fracking boom brings a new industrial army into Washington County—Texans, Oklahomans—and the young men in pickups bring the fights, prostitution, and drug use of all boom towns.
Griswold documents class without having to name it. Class is contaminated water, children with chronic pain and fatigue, and no money or extra time to address the fact that their grades are collapsing year by year. It is living downhill of the pond where fracking fluids are stored. It is being hurried through a signing session for a drilling lease on your small property, without a lawyer and without a chance to read documents written to confuse you. It is wondering whether you have time to meet with an environmental enforcement agent about your problems when the last one disappeared without communicating and every meeting means time away from your nursing job. It is lawyers and bureaucrats looking at their phones while they meet with you. It is a high-schooler adjusting his expectations from going to college to joining the Army to mowing lawns.
Class is contaminated water and children with chronic pain and fatigue. It is living downhill of the pond where fracking fluids are stored.It is months of scrimping to keep up appearances at the 4-H livestock show, while your ailing son would rather smoke weed than promenade for the judges with his goat, and it is the mix of gratification and humiliation when the fracking company you are fighting buys the children’s animals at the subsequent auction—traditionally a compliment, but now also a way of saying they own you. It is wondering what God is trying to tell you when thieves—you assume they are junkies, because most property crimes near you are committed for drug money—strip the house you have abandoned because of contamination. In short, it is doing your very best, working hard and showing up, and learning that no one is paying attention, and that the world is not set up to reward you or even to make sense to you.
Griswold is scrupulous toward her subjects, frequently paraphrasing them on the meaning of their experience and drawing few conclusions of her own. She listens nonjudgmentally, setting out a forum for Stacey and her family to narrate their own lives. In this ethical posture, she unavoidably highlights the awkward decorum of interclass relations between a Princeton graduate and people living in a semi-industrial countryside on the edge of respectability—a nurse just holding her little household together, a former heroin addict living in his family’s junkyard, another single mother whose living room is organized around a disconnected Jacuzzi that she bought as scrap and uses to store clothing. Griswold memorializes their malapropisms (“arsenip” for arsenic, which may be poisoning them and their livestock) and spelling errors (“I hope you rott with cancer!!!” writes Stacey to the unknown criminals who strip and trash her house).
These passages made me cringe a little, not for Griswold, but because she had brought me so near the difficulty her book explores, the keen, ubiquitous American awareness of class and the ways it makes unforced expressions of respect and mutuality so difficult. A few of these sentences convey in miniature the dilemmas of tone that dogged the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. There is no good way through it.
Class is everywhere, impossible to escape or even look away from, but it is still unusual for politicians or commentators to call it by name. In a class-ridden society, Americans often manage to dodge the issue. How? Steve Fraser blends memoir with historical essays that aim to explain the process by which class has often been erased in the telling of important episodes in American history: early English settlements, the erection of the Statue of Liberty, the cowboy era of the Western range, and the transition from the labor radicalism of the 1930s to the Civil Rights era.
It is a worthy endeavor, and sometimes illuminating. I learned that the French progenitors of the Statue of Liberty wanted it to symbolize a liberal, humanitarian politics, steering between right-wing reactionaries and the left-wing radicals of the Paris Commune, and that many of its American funders were small donors out to shame decadent Gilded Age robber barons who wouldn’t contribute to a civic monument. It is good, too, to be reminded of the odd transformation of the cowboy—the low-status proletarian of some two decades in which East Coast and European capital dominated the open range—into a symbol of American masculinity and independence.
In some ways, Fraser covers well-trodden ground, as his historical chapters trace a perennial fantasy that freedom could mean personal self-reliance rather than collective emancipation. Both the early English settlers and the American Revolutionaries lived in profoundly class-ridden societies, with downtrodden (and sometimes cruelly disciplined) servants and restive debtors and runaways, yet official American history identifies with the rulers of these hierarchical societies as if they were middle-class democrats. Abraham Lincoln argued in 1858 that (white) Americans had sidestepped the class divisions of the Old World, a fantasy that has shaped national memory for the majority of people today.
Fraser seems unclear on what gives the fantasy its power. At times he suggests that “the fear and denial about class indigenous to the American makeup” have worked “black magic” to, say, turn Cold War anti-communism into a McCarthyite crushing of the left-wing strains of labor, the black freedom struggle, and the left flank of the Democratic party. The purpose of Fraser’s capsule histories is to rise above this kind of generalization, in favor of more specific accounts of how class rose and fell in American politics and culture at one time or another. Without a more explicit theoretical apparatus, though, Fraser tends to default to the “indigenous to the American makeup” story. That, unfortunately, is just a paraphrase of noticing the suppression of class everywhere without really being able to say how it happens.
Fraser’s most vivid observation is a simple one: Although the Civil Rights movement’s official triumphs feel almost contemporary in official American iconography, serving as the images of the dawn of an age, the strikes and mass mobilization just a decade or two before might as well have happened in a different country. How did one American radicalism become the official common ancestry of the country’s mainstream, while the other disappeared down the collective memory hole? Fraser’s main explanation is Cold War anti-communism, which gave conservatives the chance to press radicals to the margins or persecute them outright. He thinks the conceit that American politics rests upon a consensus on freedom and equality—from the Declaration of Independence through the Gettysburg Address to the “I Have a Dream” speech—is itself a product of the Cold War search for a nonracist, nonreactionary, but also nonsocialist basis of national unity.
Even this, however, is a very broad brush. The Cold War period was rather multifarious in its “consensus” politics. Despite McCarthyism and more mainstream anti-leftism, the Johnson years struck many influential observer-participants, such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith and Senator Edmund Muskie, as the beginning of a social-democratic era of leisured prosperity in a newly inclusive country. By the 1980s, Cold War America was instead the union-busting, tax-slashing, mill-closing Reaganite twin to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal Britain. Cold War American elite governance could mean the Warren Court, which consolidated the desegregation of public institutions and established the one-person-one-vote principle, or the Supreme Court of the 1970s, which laid out the premises for Citizens United and a constitutional ban on affirmative action. The inch of difference between these two Cold War worlds has made all the difference in many lives.

One of the more suggestive documents of the transition from the halfway social democracy of the Cold War era to today’s mostly neoliberal order is a memo that Lewis Powell, soon to be a Nixon appointee to the Supreme Court, wrote in 1971 to Eugene Sydnor Jr., the head of the Chamber of Commerce. Powell warned of a “broad attack” on “the American Free Enterprise System,” and urged “businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival.... If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.” Powell urged a broad mobilization of business interests, from newly aggressive lobbying and litigation to campus speaker series. There should be “no hesitation to attack” the enemies of the free market, Powell insisted, nor “reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it,” because what was at stake was not just profit or freedom to manage, but individual liberty itself. “Freedom as a concept is indivisible,” Powell wrote, echoing libertarian intellectuals such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman who spent the mid-twentieth century defining the defense of capitalism as the defense of freedom.
Each book ends up a meditation on the opacity of class experience, to those who live in it but also to those who theorize it.Each of these books—Neel’s, Griswold’s, and Fraser’s—honors the view from below or from the hinterland, where class is something that happens to you, like the weather but worse and more unrelenting. This emphasis has much to recommend it: ethically in its attention to lived experience, politically in its emphasis on concrete conflicts, intellectually in its alertness to variation and nuance. In one way or another, though, each book ends up a meditation on the opacity of class experience, to those who live in it but also to those who theorize it.
By contrast, there is nothing murky in the class-consciousness of the Powell memo. It suggests that there have always been many Americans for whom class is no mystery at all, but a very practical project of self-advancement and self-defense. There is nothing conspiratorial in this thought. It simply acknowledges the same class-conscious common sense that Powell’s memo expresses. Recent studies of the Koch brothers’ influence campaign, the construction of the conservative legal movement that produced most of the judges Donald Trump will put into lifetime positions on the federal courts, and the decades-long businessmen’s assault on the New Deal all tell the story of class consciousness from above. In some ways, the view from there is very clear. Maybe it is time for a study called, in ironic appreciation of the Marxist humanist historian E.P. Thompson, The Making of the American Owning Class.
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