What's Next? A Look Into the Middle Distance

The Sack of Rome in 1527 by Johannes Lingelbach

by Thomas Neuburger

Diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe

The following offers a brief look into the middle distance, a view past the immediate future — the next few weeks or months when the virus will run its predictable, consequential course — but not so long a view as to reach the logical next phase of human history, the reduction of the species by the ravages of the “Jackpot,” as William Gibson called it: the big one, the global climate crisis and all that will bring.

What's missing from a view of the inevitable immediate and the collapsing distant is what gets us from here to there, from the virus in our faces to the emerging climate to come. The future's unknown, but much can be deduced. In that vein I offer these reflections on the few years or so. From this we learn that despite all that is uncertain, despite the many branches of our path, all roads may yet lead to Rome.

• On the 2020 nomination: Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee or he will be replaced as unfit — not unfit for the job (he's already unfit for that) but for the job of appearing to be fit for the job. A middle path is to give the VP nomination to his heir apparent and hint that the Party will be in charge, but these are roughly equivalent alternatives. Corporate Democrats will offer a corporate candidate.

• On the 2020 election: Trump will beat the Democrat (not certain, but likely in my opinion) or the Democrat will win the White House (much less likely). If Biden is the nominee after all, the election will turn on the votes of Democratic Party loyalist voters — most will turn out — added to the independent anti-Trump vote, who may or may not turn out in sufficient numbers to stem the incumbent tide. In that case, the election may well turn on incumbency.

If someone other than Biden is the nominee, the election will turn on Sanders-supporting independent voters, who will likely look at the substitute nominee, a person who received no primary votes and won no delegates, and ask, “Who is this person? Where was he when the primary was actually happening? Oh, nowhere; that’s where I thought he was.”

In other words, a more-competent-than-Biden alternative will have an even bigger hill to climb than Biden would have had, and his or her odds of losing to Trump will be significantly increased. The impression of increased competency won't increase support among Party loyalists, whose votes are guaranteed in any case, but an out-of-the-blue corporate candidate will increase the resistance of non-Party-loyalist and Bernie-got-screwed independents. Many will stay home, more than would have stayed home for Biden; others will revenge-vote for Trump under the principle, "I don't like the knife in my chest, but I hate the one stuck in my back."

• In none of these cases will much of anything change after the election, at least not once Covid has run most of its course. The need for a radical restructured economy will be waved away — by the corporate Republicans as too much "government interference"; by corporate Democrats who control the post-Sanders Party, as “irresponsible” and “unaffordable” given the glut of spending on the virus crisis itself.

In other words, whether Biden is the nominee or not, his promise that nothing will fundamentally change will indeed be kept by whoever is elected. Trump, if president, will do what Trump will do, or something worse. The Democrat, if president, will do what the Party always does, serve its donors while trying to placate workers they've abandoned. In neither case will workers see relief.

• The rebellion against both parties’ corruption will continue as before — or as it would have continued had Coronavirus not worked its interrupted the course.

If Trump is the next president, his Republican critics (they do exist) will be moved to silence by the thought that at least “their guy” is in power. Angry independents though, and newly bankrupt Sanders-supporting Democrats, will not depart so quietly.

In fact, they will not depart at all. They will conclude, instead and correctly, there’s no electoral path that will change their lives.

If a corporate Democrat (the only kind still standing) is the next president, his Democratic critics will be guilted into silence by the shame-selling corporate press. Angry independents though, newly-bankrupt Sanders-supporting Democrats, and all struggling Trump-supporting Republicans will not depart so quietly.

In fact, they will not depart at all. They will conclude, instead and correctly, there’s no electoral path that will change their lives.

• Thus the non-electoral portion (to steal a line from My Favorite Year) of this decade-long rebellion will begin, with all that this implies for endless populist promises not kept, multinational billionaire bailouts purchased and passed, and the clash of the newly-desperate against the muscular force of federal, state, local and judicial machines, all charged with keeping the “peace” at the expense of the people. 

With Sanders out of the game — whether by choice, inability, or the sly Obama hand that puppeteered in plain sight, it matters not at all — with Sanders gone, there are no non-corporate candidates left, which leaves the ravaged with no good choice at all. If they choose to act, they will choose among bad choices, and the corporate state will do what it will do, what entrenched power always does when faced with rebellion.

So far in this drama, the people have not lain quiet; they have acted. I expect no less now. Thus we arrive at Rome by any path.

This is the middle-distance as I see it, the route for the next few years. All roads may lead to Rome, but maybe not to the empire of our minds. People forget that Rome was sometimes sacked. 
  

Bernie Sanders, Organized Labor & the Use of Force

Striking mill workers facing off with National Guardsmen in Greenville, S.C., in 1934. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

by Thomas Neuburger

     Power concedes nothing without a demand. 
     —Frederick Douglass

One of the things I worry about in the coming election is not just whether a progressive will be elected, but whether enough of a progressive will be elected. I've written about that previously — see "Thoughts on Warren and Sanders: How Much Change Is Needed in 2021?" — but there's a lot more to say on the subject.

One example of Sanders' more aggressive-progressive approach to both policy and process was recently captured in, interestingly, the New York Times, and by, also interestingly, former Hillary Clinton supporter Jamelle Bouie. (For an example of Bouie's 2016 Clintonism, see "Bernie Sanders' Scorched Earth Run Against Hillary Clinton Is a Mistake").

And yet Bouie is onto something — that the fight against a radically entrenched, radically anti-worker establishment must be engaged with force, not negotiation or the use of insider leverage alone.

That argument makes itself. To quote the great Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." And more often than not, that demand must be backed by enough force to make the demand impossible to ignore. It must be accompanied by an "offer that can't be refused."

From Bouie's article on Sanders' needed radicalism, here's his retelling of the turbulent, violently repressed yet successful labor strikes of the 1930s. Consider the force these labor actions represent, and consider if anything less would have worked. Also consider how far labor leaders are today from anything like these approaches.

First, Bouie discusses Sanders' radical labor proposals (emphasis mine):

The Necessary Radicalism of Bernie Sanders

His plan to enhance workplace democracy puts the strike back where it belongs: at the center of political power.

... [T]he most important parts of Sanders’s plan have to do with striking and other powerful levers. He would give federal employees the right to strike and ban the permanent replacement of any striking workers. He would also end the prohibition on secondary boycotts, which keeps workers from pressuring “neutral” employers — like suppliers and other service providers — in the course of an action against their “primary” employer. This prohibition closes an important avenue for collaboration among workers. Lifting the restriction would open new paths for collective action.

This push to enhance workers’ freedom to strike is more consequential than it might look at first glance. Conflict was the engine of labor reform in the 1930s. And mass strikes and picketing, in particular, pushed the federal government to act.

In the post-war era, labor has been successively hobbled by these restriction, each encoded into law. Then Bowie tells the story of the mass strikes of the mid-1930s that forced passage of the Roosevelt-era pro-labor laws in the first place.

It's an amazing, inspiring, impossible-to-believe-in-today's-environment tale:

In 1934, the historian Irving Bernstein writes in “The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941,” “there were 1856 work stoppages involving 1,470,000 workers, by far the highest count in both categories in many years.” In that year, nearly five years into the Great Depression, “labor’s mood was despair compounded with hope.”

The despair was self-explanatory. The hope came from the growing conviction that workers had to act of their own accord — to, Bernstein wrote, “take matters into their own hands and demonstrate their collective power to recalcitrant employers through the strike.” And strike they did.

In Toledo, Ohio, for example, workers demanding union recognition organized a strike against Electric Auto-Lite, an automobile parts manufacturer, and its related firms. When Auto-Lite and its partners hired strikebreakers and kept their factories open, the union worked with the American Workers Party, a small, radical political party that organized jobless workers to keep them from breaking strikes.

Together, unionists and labor radicals led mass pickets against Auto-Lite. Thousands of workers, employed and unemployed, surrounded the plant. Fighting broke out when a strikebreaker attacked a striker. The police and company guards attacked, and a battle ensued. The National Guard arrived and the fighting continued. In their attempt to break the siege and evacuate the strikebreakers, troops killed two strikers and injured more than a dozen others. After a week of violence, Auto-Lite agreed to close the factory. The next month, after additional mass protests and the threat of a general strike, the company backed down, recognizing the union and agreeing to rehire the strikers.

Mass pickets appeared elsewhere in the country. Late that summer, the United Textile Workers of America called a national strike, demanding union recognition and a shorter workweek. Hundreds of thousands of workers formed pickets at mills as far north as Maine and as far south as Alabama. “This strike now in progress,” Joseph Shaplen reported in The New York Times, “is obviously a mass movement.”

The strike was most active in North and South Carolina, where strikers closed hundreds of plants. “Moving with the speed and force of a mechanized army,” Shaplen wrote in a Sept. 4, 1934, report, “thousands of pickets in trucks and automobiles scurried the countryside in the Carolinas, visiting mill towns and villages and compelling the closing of the plants.” He continued: “The growing mass character of the picketing operations is rapidly assuming the appearance of military efficiency and precision and is something entirely new in the history of American labor struggles.”

Of course, the reaction to the Auto-Lite strike from those in power was violence:

Mill owners and management responded with private militiamen and armed strikebreakers, all backed by state and local authorities. A police officer killed a picketer in Augusta, Ga. In one South Carolina mill town, sheriff’s deputies fired on picketers, killing seven. In Rhode Island, armed state troopers — equipped with machine guns — drove a crowd of 600 strikers from a mill that refused to close. And during a confrontation in Burlington, N.C., soldiers bayoneted several picketers.

Bayonets, machine guns, the arsenal of the State in defense of ... I have to say it ... capital and its owners. This is what labor, working people, always face when they resist the wishes of wealth.

Finally, the Roosevelt administration capitulated to the strikers: "The strike ended when the Board of Inquiry for the Cotton Textile Industry, established by President Franklin Roosevelt at the start of the strike, issued its report, which recommended a federal study of work conditions and pay." The unions' leaders declared a victory and ended the strike — to the great and bitter disappointment of the striking workers, I might add, since even under Roosevelt workers didn't trust government to ultimately side with them when the final report was issued.

There were many other strikes in 1934; it was a turbulent year:

The year saw many other monumental strikes. After the San Francisco police killed four workers in a confrontation with striking longshoremen and their allies, local unions announced a general strike. More than 150,000 workers left their jobs, paralyzing the city. And in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job in solidarity with a Teamsters strike in the city.

It was this widespread labor struggle — as well as an overwhelming victory for New Deal Democrats in the 1934 midterms — that created new space for political action in 1935. Senator Robert Wagner of New York introduced a labor bill that would give workers “the right to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” Facing re-election and eager to shore up support from labor, Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act that summer.

That's how the National Labor Relations Act got passed — not because labor asked, or negotiated, or leveraged deals with insiders, cleverly and carefully trading one thing for another. The law was passed because FDR had two choices — do what Hoover had done and call out the army (thus risking his support in the 1936 election), or give in to labor's demands because those demands were backed by a force — constant and national strikes — that no one could ignore.

Sanders' radical plan, which is curiously and academically called his "theory of change," is plainly and simply the massive use of force — the wielding of his multi-million-person mailing list to mobilize anti-establishment resistance and demand that his policies be passed.

These days, given how entrenched insiders are in their force-defended world, I don't trust anything but outside force to dethrone them. Let us negotiate with them after we've given them no other choice, not before. For example, consider what a nationwide general strike would do today to the balance of power in the U.S.

Any course of action — any "theory of change" — that doesn't depend primarily on force is doomed, I fear, to fail. And if it does fail, I also fear for the fragile, pre-revolutionary nation it attempted to save.
  

Children Of The Revolution

“In America,” wrote the Our Revolution team in a mass e-mail this morning, “we often make the mistake of overvaluing the importance of individual leaders and undervaluing the impact of grassroots movements. One of the most destructive consequences of this tendency can be seen in the dangerously naive comments of out-of-touch politicians and pundits who think the underlying problems that led to the election of Donald Trump will magically disappear if we are able to simply find the best candidate to beat him next November. At Our Revolution, we know that simply defeating Trump is not enough to transform our corrupt system… The only way to challenge the structural forces that threaten our survival as a society is to build a grassroots movement powerful enough to challenge establishment control over our politics and economy… [W]e are building a national grassroots network of powerful local groups who are fighting to win progressive issue fights, elect progressive champions, transform the Democratic party, and be ready to fight alongside President Bernie Sanders to make lasting structural change. The future of progressive America depends on our ability to mobilize a movement powerful enough to help our next president defeat the corporate elites who will do whatever it takes to maintain the status quo… During the first six months of 2019, our grassroots movement mobilized to get a record number of House Democrats to support Medicare for All by taking on the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies; we organized workers to fight plant closures by General Motors and other major corporations; we fought to rollback the DCCC Blacklist and other Democratic Party policies designed to favor establishment politicians over progressive challengers; and we won elections up and down the ballot from the LA School Board to the Philadelphia City Council. Grassroots movement-building matters. We have a responsibility to every person in America to do everything we can to build a grassroots movement powerful enough to challenge entrenched corporate power and win. That’s what Our Revolution is all about.”

Until 2016— more than a decade after our founding— Blue America had never endorsed a presidential candidate. Bernie was our first. This year we’re waiting and watching, impressed by Bernie and by Elizabeth Warren and open to hear the messages of other candidates who stand a chance of beating Trump next year. Meanwhile, we’re back to our regular mission: recruiting and supporting progressives for Congress.




If Bernie or Elizabeth becomes the next president— or they merge their efforts and become a winning ticket— their agenda is going to be very hard to fulfill without a supportive Congress. That isn’t going to be a Congress led by Mitch McConnell. Nor a Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer (nor by their hand-picked heirs, Cheri Bustos and Hakeem Jeffries).

Meagan Day, writing for Jacobin asserted that “Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in the United States. If he were to make it through a crowded Democratic Party primary field, successfully dodging attacks from party elites who recognize he’s not their ally, there’s no question that he could win the presidency in 2020. It’s an exciting prospect for those of us who believe, as Sanders once put it, that ‘this is class warfare, and we’re going to stand up and fight.’” In her post, Here’s What Bernie Could Do in Power, she notes that the Supreme Court is likely to be a stumbling block for “decades to come” and that “a majority of Congress will likely be composed of some combination of conservative Republicans who are bent on austerity and centrist Democrats who are more than willing to meet them halfway. Even if their numbers increase exponentially, progressives like Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who share Bernie’s economic and social justice agenda, will be in the minority under a Sanders administration.”

We should have healthy reservations about what a lone democratic socialist could accomplish at the helm of the capitalist state. In this political environment, what could Sanders do besides fight and loose, negotiate and concede, inevitably disappoint?

Executive orders are powerful tools for the president, who often issue hundreds of them for both good and ill. There are the soaring heights of Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation, and there’s also Trump’s recent directive permitting more federal logging on public lands. Franklin D. Roosevelt used 3,522 executive orders to do things like create the Civil Works Administration, which gave jobs to the unemployed, and the Rural Electrification Administration, which brought power to the rural poor; he also used an executive order to initiate the internship of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Executive orders are ephemeral: they can be reversed by the president who comes next, overturned by the Supreme Court, and in some cases nullified by new legislation. To make lasting change, we can’t rely on directives from a single politician. We need a mass movement from below that can send progressive and democratic-socialist representatives into the state, while mounting protests, strikes, and other disruptive activities that create crises outside of the state, to which officials are forced to respond.

But building that movement is not mutually exclusive with aggressive executive action. If a hypothetical President Sanders were to pass hundreds or even thousands of orders intended to curb the power of capitalists, it would be a major boon to extra-parliamentary movements.

First, ambitious executive orders can expand the popular imagination and raise expectations. Policy ideas that once seemed unfeasible can be instantly legitimated, and so can the politics that animate them. Second, adjustments made by executive order that mitigate ruling-class power make it easier for workers to organize and participate in political activity aimed at longer-term change.

The Right has caught onto the fact that dramatic shifts in policy have enormous potential to alter the balance of power. Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders is a case in point. From instituting a discriminatory travel ban to ordering the construction of a border wall, he has moved political goalposts and established horrifying norms in American politics, even as fights have ensued in the courts and in Congress.

A President Sanders wouldn’t be able to bring society’s masters to heel alone, but he would be obligated to use every tool at his disposal, including executive orders. Here are just a few examples of the kind of measures he could issue in office. This list is far from comprehensive, but it demonstrates the power of a single president to intervene and to create new political possibilities— in this case for the many, instead of the few.

CLIMATE

By executive order, a president could set aggressive greenhouse gas and energy use reduction goals across the federal government, including the military (the Department of Defense is one of the world’s worst polluters). He could direct all appropriate executive branch agencies— including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, and the Army Corps of Engineers— to account for the greenhouse gas impacts of any proposed infrastructure project, and declare that any project with the potential to exacerbate climate change should be rejected.

“This will inevitably lead to litigation,” explains Basav Sen, Climate Justice Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). “Courts will eventually allow some of these projects to proceed, but this is a very important delaying tactic, and it creates a roadblock because the industry will have to fight a court battle against the federal government for every piece of harmful infrastructure they try to build. Some of them will be blocked and all of them will be significantly slowed down, sinking capital and making it harder to build new fossil fuel infrastructure.”

Sanders could also issue an executive order directing federal agencies to account for environmental justice impacts of all proposed infrastructure projects, Sen adds, and then reject the ones which do disproportionate harm to communities of color and the poor.

He could also issue an executive order to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord. “The Paris agreement is fundamentally flawed,” says Sen. “Its goals are not ambitious enough and it is entirely voluntary. But that being said, it is still important for us to be part of the global community of responsible nations, and actually engage with this process and contribute in the ways that we can to global climate action.”

A President Sanders could establish an interagency task force to lay out the parameters of a Green New Deal. He could also stop all lease sales for coal, oil and gas extraction, uranium mining, and other forms of mining and logging on federal land. Finally, he could bar any company with environmental violations in the last ten years from securing federal contracts. Taken together, these executive orders would push American climate policy in a dramatically more sustainable direction, making it harder for business to degrade the planet for profit.




Foreign Policy

The United States has the most far-reaching military presence in world history. By executive order, President Sanders could “withdraw troops from countries around the world where they are deployed,” says Phyllis Bennis, Director of the New Internationalism project at IPS, including places where they are “carrying out assassinations and other so-called counterterrorism actions, which are in violation of international law and which are not keeping us safer and are not keeping people in other countries safer.

Sanders could issue an executive order declaring the official termination of the “Kill List,” a database of individuals that the Pentagon has flagged for capture or murder. He could also end all secret bombing campaigns. “In 2017 alone, there may be as many as six thousand civilians who have been killed in US-led coalition bombings in Iraq and Syria,” says Bennis. “It’s horrific. Secret bombings are clearly not secret to the people who are being bombed,” and yet they occur constantly, wasting money to destroy lives. As commander in chief, Sanders could end them unilaterally.

President Sanders could issue an executive order reestablishing the legitimacy of the War Powers Resolution, which requires Congressional consent to make war. Presidents have been violating this law for decades. The first successful assertion of Congress’s power to override executive warmaking since 9/11 came last year, when Sanders himself invoked the War Powers Resolution in a bill to end US support for Saudi intervention in Yemen. Sanders could issue an executive order establishing a policy of abjuring any military intervention not authorized by Congress, publicly affirming the antiwar and pro-democratic principles that would motivate his own compliance with the War Powers Resolution.

Sanders could also declare that no individual who has worked for a defense contracting company can be appointed to a federal agency. Issuing an order like this “would have the effect of redefining publicly what American interests are,” says Bennis. “Do the interests of the Pentagon reflect the interests of corporations, or of the US people?”

While the power of the purse belongs to Congress, Sanders could establish a commission to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the military budget, with a view to radically scaling it down. President Trump recently ordered a task force to identify bloat in the US Postal Service— why not create one to assess the most frivolous and destructive military the world has ever encountered?

Finally, the Pentagon currently has a program to provide free and low-cost military equipment to US law enforcement agencies. “That’s how you got an armored personnel carrier in the streets of Ferguson after Mike Brown was killed,” says Bennis. “And when they had it, they used it.” President Sanders could issue an executive order discontinuing this program, forestalling efforts to militarize domestic police and make war in American streets.

Criminal Justice

The structure of the criminal justice system poses unique challenges for the executive branch, since most of its activity occurs under state and local jurisdiction. Still, a president could chip away at the foundation of mass incarceration through certain executive orders, and could use others to send a powerful message.

Sanders could issue an executive order directing his Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to shutter federal private prisons completely, including immigrant detention centers, and cut all contracts with private prison companies.

Sanders could also issue an executive order directing the Department of Justice to abandon mandatory minimum sentences in federal prosecution, and to pursue non-carceral solutions for low-level offenders. The president also has the power to grant clemency to federal prisoners by executive order: President Jimmy Carter pardoned draft dodgers en masse in the wake of the Vietnam War, and Obama did the same for hundreds of drug offenders in his final days in office. Obama’s commutations applied selectively to inmates who had completed ten years of their sentence and who had behaved well in prison. Sanders could finish the job by pardoning every federally incarcerated drug offender sentenced under the draconian requirements of the War on Drugs, no matter how much of their sentence they’d served or whether they’d gotten a GED or held a job— criteria that were important to the Obama administration.

Similarly, while presidents can’t decide on absolute funding amounts, they can set priorities for how that funding is used within agencies. “The Department of Justice can say we’re not going to spend this billion dollars that would otherwise go to the Drug Enforcement Agency for law enforcement on pursuing and prosecuting drug dealers,” says Kara Gotsch, Director of Strategic Initiatives at The Sentencing Project. “Instead we want that money to be shifted. We want to take a billion dollars and invest in an intervention program trying to divert people with substance-use disorders into treatment, a community health-based approach. There’s so much that can be done at the administrative level to reprioritize strategies on how we address crime.”

Sanders could issue an executive order directing all agencies to stop civil asset forfeiture, the practice of seizing someone’s property merely on the suspicion that they’ve committed a crime. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, placed limits on it, but they were rolled back. Sanders could declare an immediate end to the civil asset forfeiture across agencies, from the DEA and the FBI to the Department of Homeland Security.

By executive order, Obama “banned the box,” meaning the tick-box that compels federal employment applicants to disclose their criminal records. Trump has not rescinded the order yet, but he’s likely to get around to it sometime. If he does, Sanders can reissue the order with an extra provision: ban the box for federal contractors as well, since they are nearly as many of them as there are direct federal workers.

Finally, Sanders could take some risky moves with executive orders in an attempt to break new ground around criminal justice issues. For example, last year Sanders introduced a bill in the Senate to withhold federal anti-crime funding from cities that use a cash bail system. While funding is primarily the jurisdiction of Congress, an executive order could be a powerful gesture to legitimate the movement to end cash bail. In 2017, Trump issued a comparable order stripping sanctuary cities of eligibility for federal grants. Though it was swiftly declared unconstitutional by the courts, it had a major impact on the political atmosphere, escalating anti-immigrant sentiment and validating the idea that undocumented immigrants endanger US citizens.

If Sanders were to try the same tactic for cash bail, it might get struck down— but it would put the injustice of the cash bail system in the national spotlight, strengthening congressional efforts to pass a bill like his No Money Bail Act.

Economy

The United States is full of places that banks have decided it’s unprofitable to serve. This forces people to turn to predatory payday lenders and check-cashing operations, spending an average of 10 percent of their income on the exorbitant fees that “alternative” financial services charge. There’s a solution to this problem within our reach: federal law already requires the US Postal Service to have a brick-and-mortar post office in every zip code, and 60 percent of them are in zip codes with only one or no bank branches. President Bernie Sanders could issue an executive order directing the post office to begin offering public banking, ensuring that nobody will be kept from traditional financial services.

Besides simply avoiding certain neighborhoods, banks also engage in discriminatory lending. While they’re no longer allowed to deny loans to African Americans on racial grounds, for example, they can run complex risk-assessment algorithms that perpetuate racial bias, and simply hide behind the numbers when the fairness of their lending policies is questioned. Sanders could issue an executive order requiring all financial supervisory agencies to prioritize documenting and combating lending discrimination, not only reaffirming the spirit of the Fair Lending Act but also leaving a paper trail of disparate outcomes and potential corporate violators.

The Volcker Rule, which prohibits banks from using depositors’ money for the kind of risky speculation that led to the 2008 economic collapse, made Wall Street angry. Under Trump, federal bank regulators were put to work rewriting the rule to give bankers more leeway. Sanders could issue an executive order instructing all of these agencies— the Fed, the SEC, and the FDIC— to leave the Volcker Rule intact. And while he’s at it, Sanders could issue an order prohibiting Obama-style appointments of Wall Street bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists to agencies tasked with overseeing the finance sector.

In 2014, Obama issued an executive order setting the minimum wage for federal employees and contractors at $10.10 per hour— four dollars less than what analysts at MIT determined constituted a living wage. Sanders could issue an executive order correcting the problem, establishing a task force to determine the real living wage across the United States and setting the federal worker minimum accordingly.

Finally, Sanders could issue an executive order establishing new priorities across federal agencies that administer social programs. Last April, Trump issued an order stating that “many of the programs designed to help families have instead delayed economic independence, perpetuated poverty, and weakened family bonds” and instructing agencies to adhere to what it called the “Principles of Economic Mobility”: strengthening work requirements, reserving benefits only for the poorest (means-testing), reducing “wasteful spending by consolidating or eliminating Federal programs that are duplicative or ineffective” (austerity), and empowering the private sector to step in and solve problems currently delegated to the federal government (privatization).

Sanders could immediately reverse that order and issue one of his own, instructing agencies wherever possible to operate according to “Principles of Economic Equality,” such as universal program design instead of means-testing, decommodification instead of privatization, and redistribution instead of austerity.

Canceling Student Debt

Americans hold more than $1.5 trillion in student debt. It keeps tens of millions of people from buying homes and starting families, and locks them into jobs they don’t want, often more than one at a time, scrambling to make payments before interest gets out of control. What could a President Bernie Sanders do by executive order to address this crisis? For one thing, he could issue an executive order directing his secretary of education to erase all debt from fraudulent for-profit colleges.

During Obama’s tenure, activists pressured his education secretary, Arne Duncan, to cancel all the federally held debt incurred by students who pursued degrees at fraudulent for-profit colleges like Corinthian and ITT. But Duncan demurred. One of the rationales he gave, according to Ann Larson of the Debt Collective, was that the Department of Education didn’t have a mandate for such a dramatic move, since its leaders aren’t elected. An executive order from Obama would have undermined that rationale— but none materialized.

But that would still be only a drop in the bucket. What about students with degrees from typical nonprofit universities who are struggling to find a foothold due to their student debt burden? In 2015, 70 percent of college seniors graduated from nonprofit colleges with student debt.

Larson says a president could do something about that, too. “When Congress was first given the power to issue and collect student loans in 1958, the Department of Education also received a power from Congress called ‘compromise and settlement,’ which allows them to waive the right to collect on them,” says Larson. “And then the Higher Education Act in 1965 solidified that power in the hands of the secretary of education.”

Sanders could issue an executive order directing his secretary of education to immediately write off all student loan debt for which the federal government is the creditor, which is the majority of student loan debt in the United States. The executive order could also direct the Department of Education to assume all the debt of borrowers who owe money to private lenders, and write that off too, reducing Americans’ student loan burden from $1.5 trillion to zero.

According to economists’ estimates, immediate cancellation of all student debt would deliver a major windfall to the American economy, reducing unemployment by roughly 0.3 percent and boosting GDP by almost a trillion dollars over the next decade.

Democratic socialists have a far-reaching program for political change that needs to be measured in decades, not years. We can’t expect this change to happen overnight, nor for it to be enacted by a single politician. As Eugene Debs said, “I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else would lead you out.”

But much can be done in the present to both ameliorate suffering and pave the way for future transformations.

We know that reactionary measures from the top can sow division and resignation among working people, and present formidable material obstacles to resistance. By the same token, bold progressive action from the top can foster the emergence of socialism from below— as long as it is undertaken in the spirit of a slogan Sanders used during his 2016 campaign: “Not Me, Us.”

And, in the meantime, we’ve got to do everything we can to elect a Congress that shares progressive Democratic values. That starts with primaries, replacing the heirs to the American Liberty League— the conservative Democrats who sold themselves to the business elites to fight FDR and the New Deal— with Democrats who embrace the values espoused by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie. How about Briana Urbina in and Steny Hoyer out? Marie Newman instead of Dan Lipinski? Shaniyat Chowdhury instead of Gregory Meeks (NY), Eva Putzova instead of Tom O’Halleran (AZ) and Michael Owens instead of David Scott (GA)? And there are plenty of others we’re looking at now— Henry Cuellar, a reactionary in south Texas, Eliot Engel in the north Bronx and Westchester, who does more for the Likud Party than for the Democratic Party… See that ActBlue thermometer on the right, that’s where you can help move the political revolution inside Congress along— primaries first and then replacing Republicans with progressive Democrats after.