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For many progressives, Jacindamania is waning, and its only natural to look around for a new champion. Some especially the young are looking to 25-year-old Green party MP Chle Swarbrick. There is talk across New Zealand of the Swarbrick effect, which saw a surge of young candidates in recent local government elections, supposedly inspired to stand for office by her political career.

The growing interest in Swarbrick comes as progressives have to watch Jacinda Arderns government struggle to fulfil the leftwing agenda many believed was promised at the election. From problems in housing, taxation, inequality, and the environment, the expectations of liberals and leftists have been repeatedly let down by a government making compromises, U-turns, or just failing to implement radical change.

Swarbricks rise to prominence was rapid. In 2016, at the age of 22 and entirely unknown, she ran for the mayoralty of Auckland, winning a creditable third place. This got her the attention of the Green party, which placed her at number seven on its party list. She was then elected as one of eight Green MPs in 2017, becoming our youngest MP for over 40 years.

Swarbrick is certainly capable of talking radically, and is willing to critique her own party publicly. In a recent opinion piece, she lamented the weakness of her partys own landmark Zero Carbon Bill (which passed in parliament last week), saying it was legislation a massive number of New Zealanders do not consider to be bold or progressive enough to deal with the problems of climate change.

Over her first two years in parliament, she has shone, being easily the most impressive of her 2017 intake of MPs. Shes also considered by many as the Greens top-performing MP, despite the fact that shes near the bottom of the caucus rankings, and her senior colleagues are government ministers.

Swarbrick led the public debate on drug law reform ahead of a binding referendum at next years election, and argued in favour of much greater government intervention and expenditure in the long-neglected area of mental health. She has talked openly about her own struggle with clinical depression.

Her star power got an unexpected boost when she hit the headlines across the globe for her sarcastic OK boomer retort to a political opponent in parliament. It underscored her status as some sort of new generational warrior.

Yet, the incident hasnt been entirely helpful for her credibility on the political left. Her new-found notoriety for being focused on generational politics might actually be detrimental to her progressive credentials. In time, it could be seen as a turning point in which Swarbricks political stock actually started falling.

Although it was a throwaway line, the use of the OK boomer meme does reflect a view of inequality and climate change through a generational lens. Some radicals and intellectuals on the left have pushed back strongly against this approach, pointing out that the problems of society arent going to be solved by millennials going to war with boomers.

They suggest Swarbricks approach is not only superficial, but dangerous and reductionist, obscuring some of the deeper and more important issues and divisions that are key to understanding whats wrong with New Zealand society.

Swarbrick is undoubtedly one of the more interesting politicians of the moment, and shes helping keep some progressive voters onside with a government that is otherwise disappointing them. Yet, she has said that she often considers leaving parliament, and she hasnt yet decided whether to stand again for election next year. If she remains, and the Greens stay in government, she will surely ascend to a ministerial position. That, of course, would be the true test of her radicalism.

If Swarbrick does step down, it will be another blow for those looking for more transformational or radical leadership than the Ardern-led Government is currently offering. Such expectations are probably unreasonable to put on a 25-year-old first-term MP. As Swarbrick has few actual achievements as a political leader to date, the expectations reflect more a view amongst progressives that the various Boomers and Gen-Xers making the big calls now including Ardern are not OK at all.

Bryce Edwards is a senior associate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University, Wellington

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Chle Swarbrick is the voice of young progressives but can she stay the distance? - The Guardian

About a month before Deadspin was throttled by its new private equity owners, those same owners shut down Splinter, the progressive politics website I contributed to for a little over a year. Last week, at an emergency all-hands meeting, G/O Medias editorial director, Paul Maidment, elaborated on the decision to kill Splinter. Progressive politics is a very, very difficult sector to operate in, he said, according to audio of the meeting provided to me. And its a sector thats essentially operating at a bigger and bigger deficit.

Maidment said, in my opinion, a lot of dumb shit during his seven-month tenure as editorial director. (He resigned last week following the Deadspin implosion he set off.) But hes not entirely wrong about progressive media, thanks in large part to pushing a largely anti-capitalist agenda in a ruthlessly capitalist industry.

This trend has been devastating across the journalism industry. Some 7,200 jobs have disappeared this year alone. I have been laid off. Almost all of my friends have been laid off, at least once. This has happened across mainstream networks, local newspapers, alt-weeklies, and online web empires, but its effects have been felt acutely in recent months by outlets writing from a defiantly leftist point of view.

When the mainstream press does cover contentious issues, it often paves over clear moral distinctions in favor of impartiality.

Salon, struggling for years, was forced in May to sell its assets to undisclosed owners for just $5 million. In September, ThinkProgress, one of the longest-running sources for progressive news online, was abruptly shut down by the liberal think tank behind it, Center for American Progress, as the Democratic machinery circled its wagons for the 2020 election. That was that: no more lefty blogging. Splinter followed the next month, ceasing publication in the middle of a Democratic presidential primary pitting two of the most progressive presidential candidates ever, including one democratic socialist, against the poster child for outdated centrism. Deadspin, which had for years incorporated irreverent, left-wing takes on politics, pop culture, and anything else its deranged writing staff chose to write about, was told to stick to sports, which promptly collapsed the site.

While leftist websites are far from the only publications struggling to adapt to the pressures of online capitalism, theyre one of the most endangered species in an extremely hostile ecosystem. For the past two centuries, there have been left-wing, radical, and pro-labor publications in the United States. These publications argued from across the spectrum of leftist ideology, but often pushed for progressive goals in the workplace and a rejection or skepticism of capitalism. Upton Sinclair worked stockyard floors undercover for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, publishing his work before it was turned into The Jungle andspurred the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. Ralph Nader launched his crusade for auto safety in a 1959 article for the Nation, years before Unsafe at Any Speed. In 1967, the new left magazine Ramparts published a blistering, full-color pictorial of the effects of U.S. napalm bombs on Vietnamese children, which Martin Luther King Jr. said convinced him to publicly oppose the war. In this century, Mac McClelland was one of the first reporters to expose grueling working conditions in Amazon warehouses for Mother Jones; her colleague Shane Bauer worked undercover in the private prison system for months on another expos. Amanda Sperber, writing for the Nation earlier this year, reported on a U.S. bombing campaign in Somalia causing widespread civilian casualties that Army leadership previously denied. These are investigations that most mainstream newspapers do as well, but often members of the leftist press got there first, because they know who the publics enemies are.

When the mainstream press does cover contentious issues, it often paves over clear moral distinctions in favor of impartiality, something a leftist press has always understood is not a necessary prerequisite for journalism. People mostly assume that the mainstream media leans left, but that only really holds up if you hold that Fox Newss open calls for a white ethno-state are the center. John F. Harris, a founding editor of Politico, realized this in a remarkably self-aware column last week: The mainstream media is biased toward status-quo centrism, not toward the left.

The problem with punching up is that the people above you have all the money.

Truly progressive or leftist publications dont fall into these traps, but in doing so, they often violate the norms that most of the mainstream press adheres to. In short, as Alex Pareene wrote for the New Republic, theyre fucking rude. The problem with punching up the core aspect of leftist writing is that the people above you have all the money.

And the people with the money dont tend to be all that leftist. Billionaires who do fund journalism, such as the Washington Posts Jeff Bezos and the Los Angeles Times Patrick Soon-Shiong, arent putting money behind work that threatens their net worth they own safe, mainstream publications. Pierre Omidyars support of the Intercept is the closest to crossing that line, but even then, a billionaires whims are fickle.

The right wing, unfortunately, does not have this problem. They are propped up by big-money donors who are content to let Breitbart News, National Review, the Federalist, and many others publish basically whatever they want. Charles Koch gives a massive amount of funding to right-wing media sources, including the Daily Caller News Foundation, which mostly churns out content that goes on the Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller. The Koch Institute also runs a private journalism fellowship that mostly funnels graduates into right-wing and libertarian think tanks, PR shops, and media outlets.

Just this August, Splinter reported on leaked emails that showed several journalists at well-known right-wing institutions, including the Daily Caller News Foundation, were participating in a close network of white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Some of the people Splinter exposed lost their jobs, but the outlets they worked for are doing just fine. The left, in other words, is getting its ass kicked by the worst people in the country, who have the financial support and moral flexibility to abuse Americas fucked-up relationship to a free press.

Things are not yet so dire that the left lacks for choice. The Young Turks has developed a loyal following online by embracing new mediums, from podcasts to Twitch streaming, and mainstays like Democracy Now! still chug along on public radio stations. Putting out the level of content required to keep up with the daily news cycle, however, requires resources usually outside of many outlets reach. Magazines are perhaps slightly more healthy: The New Republic, traditionally liberal, went on a poaching spree of leftist writers earlier this year, including Pareene. The Baffler, a 30-year-old leftist standby, just started a labor column called Working Stiff written by labor journalist Kim Kelly. Jacobin has quickly become a must-read for the generation of young people who swelled the Democratic Socialists of Americas ranks following the 2016 election. Mother Jones veers a bit toward mainstream liberal sensibilities, but is a home for electric advocacy reporting, andthe Nation continues to reliably publish leftist writers at length. But theyre all vulnerable to the same crises facing every magazine in the country.

The leftist press cant rely on ranks of billionaires to dump in funding. Instead, we need to look for new ways to support the tradition in all its rude, flippant, and profound glory. These could be worker-owned collectives, nonprofit newsrooms, or publicly owned, editorially independent media networks or some combination of all three. It also needs electoral measures and elected leaders that support journalism or candidates who have a plan to break big tech and finances grip on the industry.

If the medias lesson from the Trump era is to retreat into a shell of flavorless, craven impartiality, taking both sides to the clear injustices at play, the right will continue to eat up every inch of space its given. Its every progressives job to make sure their own press doesnt get left behind.

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The Progressive Press Is Facing Mass Extinction - Common Dreams

On Oct. 4, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted his support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. In that moment, Morey placed in jeopardy the NBAs success in cultivating an estimated 500 million Chinese basketball fans and may have derailed efforts by Tencent, its Chinese partner, to regain its luster. Tencent paid $1.5 billion for the rights to carry NBA gamesgames that it may no longer be able to broadcast.

Welcome to the world of Chinese market power. Beijings response to the NBA may appear particularly crude, but it fits a broader pattern. China routinely conditions market access, most notably by requiring foreign firms to partner in joint ventures with Chinese businesses. U.S. firms complain about how this requirement facilitates the theft of their intellectual property, but many simply cannot resist the allure of Chinas large and growing domestic market.

Even with slowing growth, Chinas market will remain a powerful force in international affairs. The Chinese internal retail market has already overtaken, or will soon overtake, that of the United States. But even the fact of such comparisons underscores the degree to which the U.S. marketclocking in at roughly $5.5 trillion this yearremains large and lucrative. The United States, however, is becoming less effective at using its market power to pursue crucial policy goals. Washington has, particularly under Republican leadership, degraded the regulatory infrastructure necessary to make the most of that market power. The result is that, in too many areas, Washington is starting to punch below its weight.

For progressives, in particular, reinvigorating U.S. market power holds the promise of transforming foreign economic policy. Since the end of the Cold War, globalization has helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But in the United States, stagnant wages, growing inequality, and new economic competitors in Asia have led a number of prominent politicians on both the right and the left to sour on the whole project. Whether President Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders (to whose 2016 campaign one of the authors of this piece, Daniel Nexon, previously provided policy advice), or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, they often reach for a similar diagnosis: the failures of free trade. This leads some commentators to see little difference between the two sides, to argue that we are seeing a new left-right axis emerge around protectionism and isolationism.

It is true that Trump and the new conservative nationalists offer a crudely mercantilist economic policy based on old-fashioned tariffs. For them, the wealth of nations is a matter of trade deficits and surpluses: The greater the deficit, the weaker the country. In this vision, tariffs facilitate import substitution and force trading partners into better deals in which they agree to buy more U.S. goods. Trade wars, as Trump famously claimed, are good and easy to win. Most economists dispute the ultimate value of such an approach; Trumps policies have already generated a wide range of negative spillovers, from trying to compensate farmers with massive bailouts to undermining relations with long-standing U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan.

Trump has polarized discussions of international trade. Pundits do their part by framing the debate in terms of more or less trade. This presents Americans with only two choices: an open economy or protectionism. And if those are the only options, then its easy to treat Trumps trade agenda as essentially the same as that of, say, left-wing Sens. Sanders and Warren. As the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy professor Daniel Drezner argues, Warrens trade policy would actually be more protectionist in its effects than Trumps.

Such framings are misleading. Across the ideological spectrum, the question is not whether the United States should engage in the international trading system but how it should pursue overseas economic relations. Even the Trump administration, for all the presidents own strange ideas about trade deficits, has pursued negotiations with the aim not of ending, but rather restructuring, the terms of bilateral and multilateral trade. Blending arguments from Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton up through President Ronald Reagan, Robert Lighthizer, who currently serves as the United States trade representative, argues for the strategic and pragmatic use of protectionism.

But while Trump focuses on specific sectors and corporate interests, progressives in the Democratic presidential primary race favor approaches that protect U.S. workers by improving conditions abroad. Thus, Warren calls for the United States to use its leverage to force other countries to raise the bar on everything from labor and environmental standards to anti-corruption rules to access to medicine to tax enforcement. Sanders similarly wants a complete overhaul of our trade policies to increase American jobs, raise wages and lift up living standards in this country and throughout the world. Another Democratic candidate, Pete Buttigieg, puts it bluntly, Globalization is not going away. So we must insist on policies that ensure that working families in cities like mine can play a more appealing role in the story of globalization than the role of victim.

Unfortunately, the focus on tariffs and trade agreements obscures a key promise of progressive foreign economic policy. Progressives can, and are already starting to, offer a larger strategy for securing key goalsone that turns globalization itself into a source of strength. As Warren argued in July, the United States enjoys enormous leverage because America is the worlds most attractive market. By conditioning access to that market, Washington can influence not only international negotiations over standards and the terms of trade but also the decisions made by firms themselves. Rather than employ such regulatory standards as forms of stealth protectionismones that allow corporations to extract rents from American consumersprogressives can use them to help craft a more just and sustainable global economy.

Companies that do not want to lose access to a market have strong incentives to meet regulatory standards. They are also more likely to push for similar rules at home, because harmonization standardizes production costs and eliminates competitive pressure from domestic manufactures. But this is not simply a matter of market size. To really affect the global economy through such standard-setting, a government requires the necessary regulatory expertise to identify and enforce market rules. Quality regulators understand the key pressure points for firms, as well as how they might try to evade penalties. These rules define not only the terms of competition but also exit options. The United States possesses both one of the largest markets in the world and extensive experience in the creation and enforcement of market regulations. This makes it a true market great power.

For the last 20 years, Washington has largely used this power to advance a neoliberal agenda of open markets, intellectual property protection, deregulation, and the use of sanctions to advance national security goals. As a result, Washington has usually played only a secondary role in addressing critical challenges, such as the threat posed by climate change, economic inequality, corporate tax evasion, and offshoring.

Things could be very different. A progressive administration could get started right away, using executive action, as well as reentering the Paris climate agreement and reinstating President Barack Obama-era tailpipe standards, which shape not only U.S. auto- manufacturers but also their global competitors, which want access to the U.S. market. The U.S. Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control could bolster these efforts through what are known as green sanctions, targeting carbon-intensive sectors. Such sanctions would raise the cost of financing carbon-intensive sectors in the United States and, because of the central position of U.S. banks in the global economy, would raise these costs worldwide.

On the fiscal side, market power could be turned to end global tax evasion. Warren, for example, has proposed a country-by-country minimum tax, which would prevent firms from hiding their cash in countries with zero corporate tax. Instead, firms with U.S. sales would have to pay the difference between the foreign tax rate and that in the United States, guaranteeing that corporations pay their fair share. To avoid future regulatory whiplash, Congress could legislate stronger parameters for using standards to combat climate change, money laundering, offshoring, and other major challenges.

There are two standard objections to marrying more aggressive standard-setting to market power. The first argues that any attempt to do so will drive wealth out of the countryadvocates of low taxes routinely raise this objection whenever anyone suggests raising taxes on the rich. But policymakers can manage this problem by setting the terms of exit. As of now, too many anti-tax and pro-deregulation politicians find it useful to invoke the specter of capital flight to block progressive policies, all the while opposing steps that would keep it from happening in the first place. In short, people can only hide their money in Panama or the Cayman Islandsor, for that matter, Delawarebecause the U.S. government allows them to. If Washington can decouple Irans economy from the global financial system, it certainly could do the same for tax havens.

The second stems from neoliberal ideology: the idea that such efforts undermine market efficiency. The contemporary rise of rentier capitalism, however, underscores that, in practice, neoliberalism tends to shuffle the deck chairs of regulatory capture rather than deliver libertarian utopias. Markets will always be distortedthe question is, who benefits? Such abstract arguments also ignore the degree to which the United States already sets transnational standards through its market power. As we noted earlier, the United States has successfully pushed intellectual property rules globally, for example, that generate tremendous wealth for content owners in Hollywood and the pharmaceutical industry. Pitting no regulation against too much regulation creates yet another false choice. Standards can be more or less progressive and more or less effective. The experience of the interwar period, the postwar period, and, most recently, the Great Recession all demonstrate that well-regulated markets, especially when guided to produce social goods, are the most stable and sustainable.

Washington is not the only player in international standard-setting. Other major economic great powers know this game very well. In areas such as trust-busting, environmental protections, and digital privacy, U.S. companies must comply with a variety of European Union rules. In many cases, these rules have precisely the effects one would expect: They change the practices of firms in their operations beyond EU borders, leading to global standardization of their operations.

In a meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, for example, Nadella urged Canada to forgo Canadian-based rules and adopt European privacy standards so as to minimize Microsofts corporate compliance burden. On the aggregate, however, Americas roughly $5.5 trillion market means that it is, and will continue to be, an economic leviathan. Even as U.S. GDP growth slows, its overall economy will hardly be dwarfed by Chinas in the immediate future.

Moreover, activating market power through regulations and standards has major advantages over the more ham-handed approach represented by tariffs. In trade wars, differences in relative market size and specific patterns of bilateral trade play a central role in the shape of the ultimate bargain. When it comes to standard-setting, the absolute market size of key sectors or platforms takes on comparatively more importance. In typical trade negotiations, the locus of bargaining is government-to-government. In standard setting, its often government-to-firmat least in the absence of major disputes over whether the standard is in fact a stealth nontariff barrier. In other words, the power of U.S. rules resides in the fact that companies themselves want access to American consumers, the U.S. financial system, or other critical U.S. markets.

The rise of Chinese economic leverage, including through market power, is profoundly reshaping international politics. But one of the major threats to U.S. market power comes not from the relative decline of the overall economy when compared to China or other fast-growing countries, but instead from the Trump administrations assault on American regulatory infrastructure. The Trump administration threatens U.S. regulatory expert capital through its efforts to hollow out American regulatory agencies to facilitate their (further) capture by corporate interests. More broadly, the administration has actively politicized regulatory agencies to provide cover for presidential and corporate interests, compromising those agencies ability to provide impartial oversight of market rules. Consider the U.S. Federal Aviation Administrations attempt to keep the Boeing 737 Max flyingeven as the plane was dropping out of the skyor the infamous National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration diagram that Trump modified with a sharpie to cover for a mistaken tweet about the path of Hurricane Dorian.

Progressives will have their work cut out for them at home when it comes to restoring and expanding U.S. market power. But internationally, they will be pushing on an open door. When it comes to many progressive concerns, Americas European allies are already there. In addressing climate change, digital policy, and antitrust policy, politicians in European capitals share many similar sensibilities. While a revised trans-Atlantic trade pact might be useful, a market-power strategy that focuses on harmonizing and improving regulatory standards does not require cumbersome international trade agreements or the likely impossible hurdle of Senate ratificationand the combined might of U.S. and EU standards would put huge pressure on other markets.

The Trump administration pushes walls, tariffs, and trade wars. It seeks to damage the EU and other allies rather than reinforce their sometimes superior standards. It undermines the goodwill needed to advance more ambitious anti-corruption, environmental, antitrust, and privacy efforts. Progressives have an opportunity to leave behind the unproductive debate about whether trade is good or bad. Instead, they can use U.S. market power to shape the global trading system to work better for ordinary Americans without resorting to Trump-style protectionismby turning globalization and interdependence toward progressive ends.

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If the United States Doesn't Make The Rules, China Will - Foreign Policy

I'd like to personally bop over the head the next Democrat who says that Michael Bloomberg shouldn't be running for president because he's a billionaire. Let's give thanks that a simple-minded dismissal of rich candidates didn't sink FDR's chances.

Billionaires are not the enemy. If you believe that those raking in astronomical incomes should be paying higher taxes -- and Warren Buffet and I do -- that is a job for our elected representatives who write the tax code.

Bernie Sanders is currently rattling his tongue about striking fear in the hearts of the "billionaire class." (It was millionaires until he became one.) The news that Bloomberg may vie for the Democratic nomination has displeased him. "You ain't gonna buy this election," he thundered.

Lost in the tussle over Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax are assertions by several billionaire critics that, actually, they wouldn't mind paying higher taxes. They don't like how her proposal is being portrayed as a kind of punitive measure to control bad people, rather than a means to raise revenues.

Also, a wealth tax is a crazy way of funding government. Warren would levy a 2 percent tax on assets above $50 million. Who is going to place a value on art collections, yachts and jewelry?

The sensible way to raise this group's taxes is the traditional way: Increase marginal rates applied to the top incomes.

Sweden tried and then gave up on a wealth tax. Sanders should know that his beloved social model of Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the United States. Their billionaires pay plenty of tax on their incomes.

It's wise to judge a rich candidate by what that person has done other than accumulate wealth, how the money was made and whether the skills involved are applicable to holding office. Some fortunes require not a day of work. Ask the seven Walmart heirs on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.

After making his first billions, Bloomberg labored in the urban trenches as a successful mayor of New York City. He started shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when people were afraid to come into town and businesses were reeling.

The city's revenues plummeted, so he raised real estate taxes to maintain essential services. This was also no time to lay off public workers, who had performed so valiantly throughout the crisis.

Conservatives went straight for Bloomberg's throat. His "tax-and-spend liberalism will cost a fragile New York many thousands of jobs and make its recovery uncertain," the right-leaning City Journal opined. The opposite happened.

Bloomberg checks most of the progressive boxes. He's been a tiger in the fight against global warming. He backs gun control and reproductive rights. And he has long credited immigration with "keeping New York City and America at the front of the pack." Despite some controversial policies, he won election three times in one of the planet's most racially and ethnically diverse cities.

It would be amusing to see President Donald Trump try his tycoon swagger on a debate stage with Bloomberg. Bloomberg built a great media empire from nothing. Trump parlayed a $413 million inheritance (in today's dollars) from his father into six bankruptcies.

Forbes puts Trump's net worth at about $3.1 billion. Bloomberg's is almost 17 times that at $52.3 billion. Those who see mere wealth as an emblem of greatness have some comparing to do.

Bloomberg is certainly not the Democrats' only attractive moderate. Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg are all highly impressive. But Bloomberg belongs in the mix.

"Do we need another billionaire in the White House?" some progressives ask dismissively. One like Bloomberg? Quite possibly.

Froma Harrop (fharrop@gmail.com) is a syndicated columnist and a former member of The Providence Journal's editorial board. She can be followed on Twitter: @FromaHarrop.

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My Turn: Froma Harrop: Bloomberg checks the progressives' boxes - The Providence Journal

Last weeks elections delivered an overwhelming victory for progressives in Virginia, where Democrats solidified a majority in the General Assembly and candidates in local races followed suit. In Charlottesville, where the deadly white nationalist Unite the Right rally took place two years ago, voters elected a slate of progressive candidates to the city council, including an activist, Michael Payne, who is endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America.

But the gap between electing progressive officials and enacting progressive policies is a wide one. An ongoing court battle over the Confederate statues at the center of the white nationalist rally shows how a little-known legal rule has been used to hamstring local democracy across the state.

On September 13, 2019, Charlottesville, Virginia Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore overruled the Charlottesville City Councils decision to remove its public statues of the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

The council had voted to remove the Lee statue in February 2017 and later voted to remove the Jackson statue. As the council voted to remove the monuments, the racist legacy of the Southern generals came into focus.

A national movement to remove Confederate monuments was gaining momentum after Dylann Roofs 2015 Confederacy-inspired massacre at the African American Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Following the white supremacist killings, statutes of Lee were targeted for removal. Many of the monuments had been erected by reactionaries in the early 1900s, by a movement to justify the Confederacy and reframe the Souths defeat in the Civil War. However, the myth that Lee somehow abhorred slavery has by now been intensely challenged. A piece in the The Atlantic in 2017 effectively debunked the myth, by making clear he held white supremacist views and treated his slaves brutally.

Two months after the councils decision to remove the Lee statute, a small group of local residents sued the city of Charlottesville, arguing the local government had overstepped its authority.

That August, white nationalists violently marched on the city at the Unite the Right rally to defend the statue. The rally would lead to the death of 32-year-old protester Heather Heyer, and two state officers who died in a helicopter crash while patrolling the rally.

In this context, Judge Moores ruling dealt an obvious blow to those seeking to challenge the rising tide of white supremacy. But theres another, critical implication that has received less attention. This lawsuit reaffirms a rule thats been thwarting progressive policy-making by cities and counties across the country.

Under Dillons Rule, there is no check on how far a state can go in usurping local democracy.

A lesser-known element of the lawsuit against the city is its argument that the city resolutions violated a century-old legal doctrine referred to in Virginia, as the Dillon Rule. That rule, also referred to as Dillons Rule, is named after a corporate railroad attorney and eventual judge named John F. Dillon. To this day, he is credited with pioneering a judicial attack on municipalities at the peak of post-Civil War Reconstructiona time of heightened African American electoral participation following the emancipation of slaves and expansion of suffrage to African American men.

Dillon became well-known for a legal treatise he wrote in 1873 called The Law of Municipal Corporations which raised alarms about local governments that were trying to redistribute wealth and expand democratic participation in local public services. Populations of urban immigrants were booming. At the time, there were numerous legal battles over local governments powers to tax property owners who were overwhelmingly whiteand set labor standards for city contractors. In a Yale University lecture, Dillon called laws that tax property discrimination legislation that infringes on property rights, and urged his audience to fear and guard against the despotism of the many,of the majority.

Similar arguments that upheld the rightful enjoyment of property, as he wrote, were at the time also being used to protect property owners rights to discriminate in private places, and shield them from taxation. His treatise arguedin reactionary fashionthat local governments only possess those powers which states explicitly grant them.

This idea has morphed into a legal doctrine that blankets the nation.

In 1891, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively applied Dillons Rule to all American communities by citing it in a ruling that said an Indiana town didnt have the authority to sell bonds. The Court later reaffirmed and broadened Dillons Rule in 1907. Since then, its been used to undermine community democracy in many states.

Just as it was used in the late 1800s, Dillons Rule was a tool the State of Michigan used to successfully defend dissolving the power of half a dozen majority African American city governments after the financial crisis of 2008 (including Detroit and Flint). It has been used to defend the Alabama State Legislatures restrictions on the governing powers of Birmingham, a majority-African American city, and other cities. Everywhere, it defines fundamental power dynamics. The rule is rigorously defended by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative corporate-led, state-level policy network.

In communities across the nation, local movements are stymied from raising the minimum wage, governing the fossil fuel industry, heightening civil rights protections, and otherwise weighing in on key societal questions.

Some states, such as Michigan, identify as Home Rule states. There, local governments enjoy some assumed local self-governing authority. However, this authority is superficial compared to the deeper influence Dillons Rule wields, which allows state legislators to unilaterally redefine and restrict what those Home Rule powers are, at their whim. Home Rule did not protect the power of the Detroit and Flint city councils from being gutted.

Thats because, under Dillons Rule, there is no check on how far a state can go in usurping local democracy.

The impact of Dillons Rule in Charlottesville is not limited to the fight over statues. Following the white nationalist Unite the Right rally there was an effort to ban assault weapons in public spaces. That too was prohibited by Dillons Rule.

A local movement also successfully lobbied the city to pursue racial justice reforms. This activism led the city to consider affordable housing reforms that were seen as a benefit to the African American community. It was a concrete response to the white nationalist rally.

But, according to Dillons Rule, the city had limited power to enact meaningful affordable housing measures. The Virginia General Assembly hadnt granted the city authority to pass something as simple as an inclusionary zoning ordinance to require developers set aside a percentage of new developments as affordable. That reformmuch less anything strongeralso never went forward.

Charlottesville community members also mobilized to establish a stronger civilian review panel to process complaints against local police officers. These efforts were also stymied by the legislature, which, thanks to Dillons Rule, does not allow subpoena powers for Charlottesvilles review board.

This form of repression is not unique to Virginia, Alabama, or Michigan. In communities across the nation, local movements are stymied from raising the minimum wage, governing the fossil fuel industry, heightening civil rights protections, and otherwise weighing in on key societal questions.

However, despite the racially-disproportionate impacts of Dillons Rule, demands for more local democracy are often misunderstood and confused with demands for racist libertarianism. Thats why communities that work with Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which I work for, challenges Dillons Rule in a way that maintains a commitment to state and federal protections for civil and human rights, while fighting for local communities rights to increase and expand those protections.

CELDF works with local governments and local grassroots groups that aim to make fundamental change to state constitutional law, including abolishing Dillons Rule. This means redefining state law as a floor that local governments have a right to build upon, in order to heighten protections for civil and human rightsjust as federal law acts as a floor upon which states can increase protections. It means recognizing some constitutional democratic powers for local democracy, and moving away from the system we have todaywhere states remain unconstrained in their repression of local laws.

This means redefining state law as a floor that local governments have a right to build upon, in order to heighten protections for civil and human rights.

CELDF has worked with nearly 200 municipalities and Native nations across ten states that have adopted laws that embody this vision. Our partners are advancing state constitutional change and have passed and advanced local laws that challenge Dillons Rule.

Opposition to Dillons Rule is gaining some momentum in Virginia, where CELDF has organized with communities. The new Democratic majority has made some promises about allowing local governments more authority to take down racist statues. However, its support for structural change to reverse Dillons Rule is far from clear. And it will take more than a simple electoral majority to make such transformative change.

In Charlottesville, the battle over statues continues. Supporters of the Confederate monuments are pressing the city to spend money to protect the statues from vandalism. The city on the other hand is now appealing Judge Moores ruling, arguing the statues send a racist message. They will likely get some help from the new legislature.

One Charlottesville activist I spoke to told me, I wish a thousand locals and [University of Virginia] students would put a chain over [the statutes] and pull them down.

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Progressive wins in Virginia are limited as long as Dillon's Rule is on the books - scalawagmagazine.org