How a presidential candidate announces their bid can speak volumes. Hillary Clinton unveiled her 2016 campaign with a well-crafted video that showcased a diverse slate of ordinary Americans. President Donald Trump descended a golden escalator in Trump Tower to give a freewheeling speech where he referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. His audience, which consisted of hired actors, did not get paid by the Trump campaign until after the firm that booked them filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts took a different tack on Monday when she announced the formation of an exploratory committee for her 2020 bid, a move that’s tantamount to declaring one’s candidacy. Warren is the first major Democrat to make the move, and she won’t be the last. Her video announcement begins with standard fare—a recap of her life story and her career arc—before switching to her vision for governing the country.
Every person in America should be able to work hard, play by the same set of rules, & take care of themselves & the people they love. That’s what I’m fighting for, & that’s why I’m launching an exploratory committee for president. I need you with me: https://t.co/BNl2I1m8OX pic.twitter.com/uXXtp94EvY
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) December 31, 2018Most candidates offer bromides about American greatness, or describe in vague terms the issues they’d tackle as president. But Warren went a step further, offering a grand unified theory for how things went awry in modern American democracy and framing her entire agenda around a single issue.
“Today, corruption is poisoning our democracy,” she says in the video, as footage of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and other Republican leaders scrolls by. “Politicians look the other way while big insurance companies deny patients life-saving coverage, while big banks rip off consumers, and while big oil companies destroy this planet. Our government’s supposed to work for all of us, but instead it has become a tool for the wealthy and well-connected.”
Anti-corruption is familiar ground for presidential candidates trying to position themselves as outsiders who will fix Washington. Trump argued that his prodigious wealth made him incorruptible, empowering him to “drain the swamp.” The truth turned out to be quite the opposite, of course, but it was an effective campaign message against an established political force like Clinton.
But Warren tied her anti-corruption message to Democratic talking points on progressive issues. “How did we get here?” she asks at one point. “Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie, and they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice. They crippled unions so no one could stop them, dismantled the financial rules meant to keep us safe after the Great Depression, and cut their own taxes so they paid less than their secretaries and janitors.”
Warren isn’t the first Democratic candidate to rail against insurance companies or fossil fuels. Her pitch, however, is that what ails modern American democracy is not just about policy, but power. “The whole scam is propped up by an echo chamber of fear and hate designed to distract and divide us,” she says over footage of Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, as well as Trump officials like Stephen Miller. “People who will do or say anything to hang onto power point the finger at anyone who looks, thinks, prays, or loves differently than they do.”
For two years, Democrats have debated how best to confront Trump. Should they highlight relatively esoteric matters, like his potential violations of the Emoluments Clause? How much weight should the Russia investigation—and Trump’s campaign to hinder it—receive? Should more attention be given to meat-and-potatoes policy issues like healthcare and economic growth? Warren answers with a broad brush, essentially casting the modern Republican Party as an outgrowth and a contributor of the self-dealing forces that elevated Trump to the presidency.
In a New York magazine profile in July, Warren said that opposing corruption “is becoming a much more defining part of my work.” The next month, she introduced the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, a sprawling bill that would impose new lobbying requirements, rewrite campaign-finance rules, and tackle a wide range of other good-government reforms. In her speech announcing the bill, Warren argued that corruption was not just a byproduct of Trump’s rise, but enabled it as well.
She cited polling that found only 18 percent of Americans have confidence in the government’s ability to do the right thing. “The way I see it, a loss of faith this broad, and this profound, is more than a problem—it is a crisis,” she said. “A crisis of faith. This is the kind of crisis that leads people to turn away from democracy. The kind of crisis that forces people to stop believing in what we can do together. The kind of crisis that creates fertile ground for cynicism and discouragement. The kind of crisis that gives rise to authoritarians.”
Fueling this problem, she argued, is the disproportionate wealth possessed by a shrinking number of Americans, as well as the outsized influence it allows them to wield in the American political system. “Our national crisis of faith in government boils down to this simple fact: people don’t trust their government to do the right thing because they think government works for the rich, the powerful and the well-connected and not for the American people,” she said. “And here’s the kicker: They’re right.”
The term “corruption” typically evokes government officials, but one of Warren’s most intriguing legislative proposals focuses on remedying it in corporate governance instead. Her Accountable Capitalism Act would require big businesses to obtain federal charters and make decisions based on public interests as well as those of shareholders. Its central proposal may be its most radical one: The bill would require corporations to let workers elect 40 percent of the board members, and give them a voice in determining when the corporation spends funds for political purposes.
What’s at stake here isn’t corruption in its most cartoonish form, like Thomas Nast cartoon characters passing burlap sacks of cash to one another. Instead, Warren casts the Trump era (and what led to it) as a crisis for civic virtue. Her goal isn’t just to limit obscene self-enrichment in everyday life, but to channel American political and economic life towards improving the public welfare. It’s an audacious goal that may be beyond any president’s ability to accomplish in a four-year term. But it certainly seems like it’s worth a shot.
Whether Warren can actually win the Democratic nomination is uncertain. More than a dozen other top contenders are mulling bids, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders. Warren’s highly publicized use of a DNA test to prove her distant Native American ancestry also sparked concerns among supporters that it amounted to a self-inflicted political wound. Even if she’s not the party’s standard-bearer in 2020, however, she’s put forward a strong case for what a unifying message for Democrats should look like.
“Another dictator, Gen. Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, has fallen, and good riddance to him,” read The New York Times on January 2, 1959. The day before, a band of youthful revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer and ardent nationalist, took the capital city of Havana. New Year’s Day 1959 marked the apotheosis of a ragtag insurgency that had unofficially kicked off six years earlier with a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and another on the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks in the city of Bayamo. Government forces repelled the rebels, who retreated into the foothills of the Sierra Maestra mountains. Those who were not killed were captured several days later.
“History will absolve me,” Castro defiantly declared in a four-hour speech that autumn. Despite being sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison, Fidel and many of his comrades were granted amnesty and relocated to Mexico in 1955, where they met a young Argentinian doctor named Ernesto Guevara who would join the Cuban exiles on their trip home in December 1956 to resume the guerrilla struggle.
Today, Cuba signifies different things to different people. For some, it is a crumbling redoubt of authoritarianism, an outdated anomaly in a region that mostly abandoned the utopian horizon of revolution long ago. Others see the small socialist island as a beacon of principled resistance against overwhelming odds. Castro, after all, held on to power through ten different U.S. administrations despite the superpower’s periodic attempts to remove him from office. The bearded revolutionary’s seeming invincibility contributed to Cuba’s subversive mystique, the specter of which helped usher in a spate of reactionary and often U.S.-backed military dictatorships throughout Latin America: Brazil in 1964, followed by Chile in 1973 and Argentina in 1976.
These military regimes, justified through the narrow terms of the Cold War, had their own particular characteristics. One thing they shared, however, was the abiding notion that the success of the Cuban Revolution posed an existential threat to the status quo in the region. If Castro and his meager crew could topple Batista, a military dictator backed by the United States, who was to say peasants in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, for example, couldn’t do the same? As Cuba under Castro drifted away from the United States and firmly into the orbit of the Soviet Union, concern mounted that Brazil might follow suit. It was one thing for Washington to “lose” a little Caribbean island, as they put it. It would be quite another for the largest Latin American nation to align against the United States. Kennedy and Johnson, committed cold warriors, were committed to not letting that happen.
Whatever its faults, in the context in which it emerged, the Cuban Revolution gave millions of ordinary people hope that their destiny was in fact in their hands, and that they could drastically remake their governments and their lives on their own terms. For the powerful, that was precisely the problem. In 1962, the Public Affairs Institute warned about the revolutionary potential of legitimate grievances many residents of countries to the south of the United States held against their domestic elites: “Throughout much of Latin America there is a prevailing belief that the governments are under the control of men who are indifferent to the needs of the lower-income groups, and that these groups will use the armies to prevent any more representative government from taking power.” In fact, containing social movements that could conceivably lead to insurrection had become an urgent task for Latin American armed forces. As historian Jerry Dávila points out, “Castro had executed the officers of the president he deposed, so Latin American military officers saw their struggle against insurgencies as a fight to the death.” Radical popular power scared Latin American elites more than communism per se.
Like the capture of Havana on January 1, 1959, the inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil on January 1, 2019 is a culminating event: the ultimate validation of a right-wing resurgence that started gathering strength in 2013 when massive demonstrations of general dissatisfaction clogged the arteries of the country’s major cities. In 2016, protestors once again took to the streets of Brazilian cities, this time to demand the ouster of President Dilma Rousseff. Clamorous yet substantively thin calls for Rousseff’s impeachment began soon after the fourth consecutive victory for her center-left Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT). Demonstrators characterized the PT era, which began thirteen years earlier with the presidency of former metalworker and union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and admittedly had its fair share of scandals even as it lifted millions out of abject poverty, as an insidious plot to subvert the fabric of Brazilian society and align the nation with international pariahs like Iran and Venezuela. The pro-impeachment camp demanded that Rousseff’s defenders—progressives, generally—move to Cuba, that enduring bastion of a Latin American left-wing supposedly frozen in time.
The violent authoritarian impulse that led the armed forces to remove democratically-elected president and labor-friendly João Goulart in 1964 was never fully excised from the Brazilian body politic, even after power returned to civilian hands in 1985. The notion that anyone challenging the established order should be met with overwhelming force, that visible displays of dissatisfaction over endemic poverty and inequality are best addressed through violent means, has lingered just below the surface of national life despite the palpable gains achieved since the return of democracy.
Against the backdrop of economic crisis, endless tales of official corruption, and an astronomical crime rate, Bolsonaro rode a visceral anti-progressive backlash to office with precious little substance to his campaign beyond a promise to ratchet up state violence against criminals, real or imagined. The end of the Cold War, which seemed to promise an end to the black-and-white strictures of East versus West in global affairs, did not deliver nuance or inject complexity into the worldview of millions who, for various reasons, still see even mildly progressive discourse as a threat. While the guard is changing in Cuba, echoes of 1959 still sound across Latin America, with Venezuela and Cuba enduring as boogeymen for conservatives in the region.
There is a cosmic irony to the reactionary Bolsonaro being inaugurated on the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Commemorations of the revolutionary hope of yesteryear, achieved through a violent insurrection of unelected militants, will coincide with the consecration of today’s authoritarian promise, secured at the ballot box through democratic means. Whom will history absolve?
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