Before 'Stop the Steal' there was 'Free, white and over 21'

Yvette Lagonterie, Salon
February 28, 2022

Trump supporters at Stop the Steal rally outside Minnesota State Capitol.

 (Photo credit: Chad Davis)

It was late when we returned to the hotel. We parked the rental cars in the back lot, nearest the entrance that opened to the shortest walk to our block of rooms. A sign posted on that door directed that the rear entrance not be used after 9 p.m. My coworkers were fatigued from a long workday followed by an evening out with drinks. One objected to walking around the building to the front of the hotel. While we all stood in the dark, she exclaimed that we should disregard the sign because, after all, "We are free, White, and over 21." The ease with which the phrase fell from her mouth left no doubt that she had uttered it comfortably many times before. However, on that occasion, her mouth spoke before her mind caught up.

I was the only one who did not fit her description. I was born with a permanent early summer tan and tight curl to my hair. Her declaration of privilege was based on her membership in a group to which I do not belong. Admittedly, after dusk and from a distance, my African ancestry might not be noticed. That was not the case that evening; these colleagues knew me. Everyone grew silent. The offender noticed the change in the group's disposition. Then, as responsible U.S. Department of Justice employees in town on official business, we all walked to the front door.

Thirty years later, the "free, White, and over 21" mentality was well represented among those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. After Trump told them "we will stop the steal" a mob broke through the doors of the Capitol Building with a fearlessness stemming from the belief that the rules do not apply to them. Jenna Ryan, who recorded herself participating in the insurrection, paraphrased this slogan when she proclaimed on her Twitter account that she would not go to jail because she is blond and has white skin.

"Free, white, and over 21" sought to overturn an election, to deny the majority of American voters their will. They failed. Their state-level elected adherents are now legislating restrictions calculated to diminish ballot access to minority voters. This is not a new assault on a multi-racial democracy; it is just the latest chapter.

The slogan "Free, white, and 21" was reportedly popularized in the 1820s during the movement to extend the vote to men who were not property owners. Including "white" in their chant was a pledge to white supremacy. In several states, free African American men who met the property requirements had the right to vote during the nation's early years. However, even as the white proletariat was gaining the franchise, it was being stripped from people of color in some of those states — New Jersey in 1807, Maryland in 1810, North Carolina in 1835 and Pennsylvania in 1838.

New York's original state constitution did not prohibit suffrage to free people of color. The Democratic-Republican party was concerned that free Negros overwhelmingly voted for the Federalist party. In 1811, an act to prevent fraud at elections was passed. Section III specified onerous and costly documentation requirements specifically for Negros. Ten years later, in 1821, New York State reduced the property requirement for White males, but increased it for African Americans

The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1870, prohibited the denial or abridgment of any citizen's right to vote based on race, color or previous condition of servitude. Nevertheless, those who were "free, white, and over 21" in the Southern states quickly established repugnant clauses that did not mention race or servitude, but used other text to precisely deny African Americans their right to vote.

Judicial and legislative initiatives failed to overcome the Southern insistence on preserving white supremacy through voter suppression, fierce segregation and mob violence. The infamous white supremacist, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, hypocritically argued against federal laws to outlaw discrimination at the polls and elsewhere, saying that it was not the government's place to regulate human behavior. Thurmond knew well that the South was firmly in the business of policing human behavior through thousands of racially oppressive Jim Crow laws.

It took a brilliant organizer, thousands of activists, the martyrdom of too many, and the mettle of one president to finally achieve the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. The VRA was Dr. Martin Luther King's great legislative accomplishment. Its impact has been monumental. Dr. King famously said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. But justice's opponents sometimes manage to twist the arc. We must not let it bend back in the direction of injustice.

"Black Americans vote at the same rate as Americans." When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made this Freudian slip on January 19, 2022, his mouth may have been speaking before his mind caught up. Who does McConnell view as Americans? Besides, the rising African American voting rate appears to be the "problem" many of Senator McConnell's GOP colleagues across our nation are trying to "solve." That was the finding of the federal appeals court in 2016 when it struck down the North Carolina voter identification law. The court's decision stated that provisions of the North Carolina law deliberately "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision" in order to suppress Black voter turnout.

McConnell's impolitic reasoning was his justification for opposing the John Lewis Voting Rights bill. But his claim is incorrect. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 62.6% of the Black American electorate voted in 2020, compared to 70.9% of White Americans. The eight percentage point gap is the widest difference between White and Black voter turn-out in a presidential election since 1996. The gap is even wider when the 70.9% White voter turn-out is compared to the 58.4% for all non-white voters (Black, Latino and Asian).

Black voter turnout swelled in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected. A surge of restrictive legislation and electoral changes were introduced by many states in response. The 1965 Voting Rights Act included a formidable provision requiring that electoral changes in states with a history of discouraging African American suffrage be cleared by the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) before implementation. Shelby County, Alabama, did not want its desired changes subject to clearance, thus sued the U.S. Justice Department. The U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder struck down the 1965 Act's essential preclearance requirement. Following the removal of that DOJ review, the surge became a storm. For example, over 1,000 polling sites have been selectively closed in the states once subject to oversight.

Who deserves to vote? Everyone who is eligible. How should elections be administered? By making it as easy as possible for every eligible citizen who wants a voice in the nation's future to vote. What do you think? Honest and accurate information should be widely available to help each of us make our decisions. What is not democracy is the effort to limit the franchise to only those who agree with you — or look like you.

From the mid-1800s through the 1950s, "Free, white, and over 21" was a catchphrase commonly included in books and movie scripts. In the 20th century, white protagonists frequently claimed these three attributes as the evidence of their freedom to do as they please. In the 1959 apocalyptic film, "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil," Harry Belafonte's character Ralph and Inger Stevens' character Sarah found themselves the last survivors of a nuclear blast. At one point, Sarah declared to Ralph "I am free, white, and over 21." Belafonte's Ralph replied to his new friend that her carefree toss of that expression "was like an arrow in my guts."

Although the phrase has gone underground, the sentiment has not. The discriminatory intent of many recently enacted and proposed state laws and directives is transparent. The right to vote must be protected from those who strive to limit it, again.

Biden should channel Reagan, 

ask Putin about UFOs at summit

Marik von Rennenkampff, Opinion Contributor 

In a little-known historical twist, a lighthearted comment about UFOs and alien invasions helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful end

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© Getty Images Biden should channel Reagan, ask Putin about UFOs at summit

Winter, 1985. Tensions are high between the United States and the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan and new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agree to hold their first summit in Geneva, Switzerland.

As a series of lengthy meetings grinds on, Reagan and Gorbachev slip out for a private walk. Reagan, an avid science fiction fan, spontaneously asks the Soviet leader, "What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?"

"No doubt about it," Gorbachev responds, to which Reagan says, "We too."

"So that's interesting," Gorbachev remarks as the two leaders share a chuckle.

After decades of mistrust, such lighthearted exchanges build confidence between the two leaders, upon which Reagan and Gorbachev develop a deep and enduring friendship.

Ultimately, the rapport that the two leaders build in Geneva alters the course of history.

In the years after the summit, Reagan softens his harsh rhetoric towards the Soviet Union. Reduced hostilities help Gorbachev ignore the Kremlin hardliners demanding larger Soviet military budgets to match Reagan's defense buildup. More importantly, the détente gives Gorbachev the political latitude to enact the economic and political reforms that usher in a peaceful end to the Cold War.

Thirty-six years after Reagan and Gorbachev's first summit meeting, a new American president is set to meet his Russian counterpart. The setting, once again, is Geneva. As in 1985, tensions between the two nuclear-armed powers run high.

The odds of a Reagan-Gorbachev-style breakthrough are slim. For one, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not the pragmatic leader that Gorbachev was. President Biden, for his part, has sent stern pre-summit messages to Putin. Moreover, a litany of thorny issues is on the agenda.

But Gorbachev and Reagan showed that bitter adversaries can set aside hostile rhetoric and mistrust to cooperate on critical global security matters.

While the threat of nuclear war loomed large in 1985, the Biden-Putin summit comes as the U.S. government grapples with a perplexing national security issue.

Intelligence analysts and scientists appear genuinely stumped by more than 100 encounters with mysterious objects, many flying in restricted airspace. According to a former top intelligence official, some of the unidentified craft move in ways that "we don't have the technology for."

The U.S. government has reportedly ruled out the possibility that the objects are highly classified American aircraft. Moreover, at least one former top official believes that ultra-advanced Russian or Chinese spy planes are not plausible explanations for the more perplexing incidents observed by the military.

Analysts and NASA scientists also appear to doubt that mundane factors are behind many of the encounters. According to reports, several objects were observed by multiple sensors - such as satellite, radar, infrared and optical platforms - making balloons, distant jetliners or equipment malfunctions unlikely explanations for some of the phenomena.

To be sure, a highly anticipated report on these incidents appears to have found no evidence that aliens are visiting earth. But the fact that the U.S. government, with its near-unlimited investigatory capabilities, is considering "non-human technology" as a plausible explanation for some of the incidents is a remarkable development.

Recent comments by former presidents Obama and Clinton heightened speculation that the government is entertaining extraordinary theories about these phenomena. When asked about the encounters, Obama and Clinton openly speculated about extraterrestrial life. Similarly, Obama's CIA director mused about "different form[s] of life" when discussing the incidents.

Make no mistake: Former presidents and CIA directors - who continue to receive top-level intelligence briefings - do not suddenly speculate about aliens on a whim. Indeed, one can safely assume that Clinton and Obama asked their intelligence briefers some probing questions about what is known about UFOs before speaking publicly about otherworldly life.

Moreover, according to President Trump's former director of national intelligence, such encounters are occurring "all over the world."

Following revelations that China is "overwhelmed" by similar sightings, this phenomenon appears to have global implications. To that end, Biden must raise the issue with Putin.

Amid what promises to be a tense summit in Geneva, a lighthearted, Reagan-style question or comment about UFOs from Biden may yield a surprising response from the Russian leader. It might even alter the course of history.

Marik von Rennenkampff served as an analyst with the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as an Obama administration appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense. Follow him on Twitter @MvonRen.

Joe Biden knows about the existence of aliens and UFOs ...

https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1442009/joe-biden-aliens-ufo...

1:36

2021-05-28 · President Biden was recently asked by the press whether he knows about the existence of UFOs. While the current White House incumbent did not reveal the rumours to be true, he also did not deny them.

• Author: Sean Martin
• 
  

Joe Biden Has Hilarious Response To Fox News Question ...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-fox-news-ufo-question_n_60a...

0:43

2021-05-22 · Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy attempted to ask Joe Biden about UFOs, and the president’s response might best be termed a “Uniformly Funny Observation.”. Doocy’s question came up because of recent …

• Author: David Moye

As UFO buzz enthralls D.C., believers and skeptics agree: The truth is out there

Stephen Bassett
Alex Seitz-Wald
Sun, June 13, 2021

WASHINGTON — Stephen Bassett and Mick West don’t agree on much. Bassett has devoted much of his adult life to proving UFOs are helmed by aliens, and West has devoted much of his to proving they are not.

But they both agree on one thing: It’s good that, after nearly 75 years of taboo and ridicule going back to Roswell, New Mexico, serious people are finally talking seriously about the unidentified flying objects people see in the skies.

“If you look at the level of public interest, then I think it becomes important to actually look into these things,” said West, a former video game programmer turned UFO debunker. “Right now, there is a lot of suspicion that the government is hiding evidence of UFOs, which is quite understandable because there's this wall of secrecy. It leads to suspicion and distrust of the government, which, as we’ve seen, can be quite dangerous.”

Later this month, the Pentagon is expected to deliver a report to Congress from a task force it established last year to collect information about what officials now call "unexplained aerial phenomena," or UAPs, from across the government after pilots came forward with captivating videos that appear to show objects moving in ways that defy known laws of physics.

While those who dabble in the unknowns of outer space are hoping for alien evidence, many others in government hope the report will settle whether the objects might be spy operations from neighbors on Earth, like the Chinese or Russians.

The highly anticipated report is expected to settle little, finding no evidence of extraterrestrial activity while not ruling it out either, according to officials, but it will jumpstart a long-suppressed conversation and open new possibilities for research and discovery and perhaps defense contracts.

“If you step back and look at the larger context of how we've learned stuff about the larger nature of reality, some of it does come from studying things that might seem ridiculous or unbelievable,” Caleb Scharf, an astronomer who runs the Astrobiology Center at Columbia University.

Suddenly, senators and scientists, the Pentagon and presidents, former CIA directors and NASA officials, Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley investors are starting to talk openly about an issue that would previously be discussed only in whispers, if at all.

“What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are," former President Barack Obama told late-night TV host James Corden.

The omertà has been broken thanks to a new generation of more professional activists with more compelling evidence, a few key allies in government and the lack of compelling national security justification for maintaining the official silence, which has failed to tamp down interest in UFOs.

In a deeply polarized country where conspiracy theories have ripped apart American politics, belief in a UFO coverup seems relatively quaint and apolitical.
'Truth embargo'

Interest in UFOs waxes and wanes in American culture, but millions have questions and about one-third of Americans think we have been visited by alien spacecraft, according to Gallup.

But those questions have been met with silence or laughter from authorities and the academy, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by conspiracy theorists, hoaxsters and amateur investigators.

West, the skeptic, thinks the recent videos that kicked off the latest UFO craze, including three published by the New York Times and CBS’ “60 Minutes,” can be explained by optical camera effects. But he would like to see the U.S. government thoroughly investigate and explain UFOs.

The government has examined UFOs in the past but often in secret or narrow ways, and the current Pentagon task force is thought to be relatively limited in its mission and resources.

In a new, leaked video, an unidentified object flies around a Navy ship off the coast of San Diego. (U.S. Navy via Jeremy Corbell)

West pointed to models from other countries like Argentina, where an official government agency investigates sightings and publishes its findings, the overwhelming majority of which are traced to unusual weather, human objects like planes or optical effects.

“This is something that we could do here,” West said. “But right now we're left with people like me, who are just enthusiasts.”

John Podesta, a Democratic poobah who has held top jobs in several White Houses, has called on President Joe Biden’s White House to establish a new dedicated office in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, which would help get the issue out of the shadows of the military and intelligence community.

Podesta, who has harbored an interest in UFOs since at least his days as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, recently told Politico, “It was kind of career-ending to basically talk about this subject. That has clearly switched, and that's a good thing.”

Believers are unsurprisingly thrilled by the culture shift.

“The ‘truth embargo’ is coming to an end now,” said Bassett, the executive director of Paradigm Research Group and the only registered lobbyist in Washington dedicated to UFO disclosure. “I am elated to finally see this movement achieving its moment.”

Bassett is convinced the government is covering up proof of extraterrestrial life and that everything happening now is elaborate political theater to make that information public in the least disruptive way possible — a view, of course, not supported by evidence or most experts.

“This is the most profound event in human history that's about to be taking place,” he said.

But you don’t have to be a believer to believe that poorly understood things should be investigated, not ignored.

"We don't know if it's extraterrestrial. We don't know if it's an enemy. We don't know if it's an optical phenomenon," said new NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut and Florida senator, in a recent CNN interview. “And so the bottom line is, we want to know."

Two former CIA directors — John Brennan, who served under Obama, and James Woolsey, who served under Clinton — recently said in separate podcast interviews that they’ve seen evidence of aerial phenomena they can’t explain. John Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence under then-President Donald Trump, told Fox News in March there were “a lot more sightings than have been made public.”
Cold War and fish farts

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, pushed the government to conduct the UFO report. For him, it’s a question of national security and understanding whether rivals like China or Russia have developed advanced technology we don’t know about.

“I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” Rubio told “60 Minutes.”

For others, like Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, a research scientist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, it’s about discovery.

"For too long, the scientific study of unidentified flying objects and aerial phenomena — UFOs and UAPs, in the shorthand — has been taboo," they wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "If we want to understand what UAP are, then we need to engage the mainstream scientific community in a concerted effort to study them."

Scharf looks for life on other planets and is a bit tired of people asking him if alien life has visited us on ours, but he said looking more at the skies could yield information about how our own world works.

A mysterious object hovers over a Navy ship in night vision video. (U.S. Navy via @JeremyCorbell)

“Stuff like this has a scientific interest not because we're necessarily thinking we're going to find aliens, but maybe there's an unknown phenomenon or a collection of phenomena that are giving rise to some of these sightings,” he said. “There's never been a systematic effort to categorize and catalog stuff that people see, and from the past, we know that some of this stuff sometimes turns out to be interesting.”

The history of science is filled with accidental discoveries and incidents where the hubris of religious or scientific authorities dismissed something as ridiculous that later proved true. Scientists didn’t believe meteorites really came from space until the early 1800s, for instance.

Government secrecy can lead to confusion and misunderstanding that might be cleared up with the help of a wider circle of experts and investigators.

Sweden spent years futilely chasing what it thought were Russian submarines off its coast. But when the navy let civilian researchers listen to a recording of the alleged submarine, they figured out it was actually the sound of schools of fish farting.

Important people have had an interest in UFOs for a long time; they just didn’t really talk about it.

Former President Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen a UFO while he was governor of Georgia and even filed two formal reports of his observations. Former President Ronald Reagan allegedly told people he saw one too while riding in a small plane, according to the pilot, who was quoted in a book by John Alexander, the former Army colonel whose paranormal investigations were featured in the book and movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s, U.S. officials worried the Soviet Union would use a UFO hoax to drum up fear in the American public. Civilians started seeing what they believed were UFOs but were actually secret spy planes, like the U-2, so the government settled on a policy of silence and denial.

''Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights,” according to a secret CIA study that was declassified in the late 1990s, The New York Times reported then. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.''

The very real government stonewalling fed bogus conspiracy theories, which came to dominate the study of UFOs and made the topic even more off-putting to serious scholars.

A new generation

In recent years, though, a newer generation of activists has been at center of recent high-profile disclosures thanks to a more professional, careful and credible approach. They include people with serious national security credentials like Christopher Mellon, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, and Luis Elizondo, the former Army counterintelligence special agent who led an earlier Pentagon team to investigate UFOs.

The budget for Elizondo’s team — a modest $22 million in the scheme of defense spending — was secured by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a powerful ally who has helped drive the resurgence of interest in UFOs.

An unidentified aerial phenomenon in a U.S. military video. 

(DoD via To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science)

The newer activists have worked with mainstream news outlets to deliver evidence and eye witnesses that meet their high editorial standards and are careful when speaking to general audiences to avoid talking about aliens — though Mellon and Elizondo have appeared on controversial podcaster Joe Rogan’s show as well as "Coast to Coast A.M.," a long-running radio program devoted to conspiracies and the paranormal.

Both the skeptics and the believers don’t expect the Pentagon report to settle anything. Instead, they hope it will start something new.

“The idea of some super powerful aliens coming to visit us is a very compelling story,” West said. “So if you get even a tiny little taste of something like that, it really spices up the story.”

UFOs and search for alien life: Science and popular culture take on the mission

By Gregory McNamee, CNN

If you're ever studied astronomy, you've probably been exposed to something called the Drake equation

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© Department of Defense/AP This image from 2015 video provided by the Department of Defense, labeled Gimbal, shows an unexplained object at the center.

One side of the equation posits the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which it might be possible to communicate. The other side gives all the variables that add up to that number, including the average rate of star formation, the number of planets around those stars that have developed intelligent life and the ability to send radio signals.

© Alistair Heap/Alamy Stock Photo UFO spotters use flashlights to look for stars and aliens in the night sky in South Wales, Australia, in 2008.

"Depending on how you calculate it, the answer can be none, or it can be a billion," said theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack, author of the recent book "The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)."

© NASA Does Martian soil hold proof of life on other planets? We've sent the Perseverance rover to find clues.

Astrophysicist Frank Drake, who formulated the equation way back in 1961, said it's really a way of showing "all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it's going to be to detect extraterrestrial life."

Mack put it more directly: "The point of the equation is really to show how little we know."

If it's hard for professional scientists to run the numbers, it's harder still for us mere-mortal Earthlings to do the work.

That's where the imagination comes in. So for generations we've been putting our creative minds to work in guessing if extraterrestrials exist, what they might look like and how we've going to greet them and they us, whether with a sign of peace or a ray gun.

© Mike Windle/Getty Images Frank Drake speaks at a conference exploring the possibility of life on other planets at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on October 7, 2015.

UFOs: Have we been visited?

"It's a curious thing that for as long as we've imagined extraterrestrials, they look pretty much just like us," observed Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.

"A couple of centuries ago, they came in galleons in the sky. When zeppelins were invented, the aliens flew in dirigibles. After World War II, they came in flying saucers, the latest and greatest technology we could imagine."

© 1982 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved. While we're waiting on the science about UFOs and signs of alien life, entertainment fills the gaps with movies such as "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."

The anthropomorphism — putting things that are not human in human form — is a constant. So, too, is the belief in alien life forms to begin with.


Strong beliefs in alien visitations


Video: Astrophysicist on UFO sightings: It looks terrestrial, not alien (CNN)




According to a 2018 Chapman University study, 41.4% of Americans believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth at some time or another, and 35.1% believe that they have done so in recent times.


There are understandable reasons for such beliefs, Impey noted.

For decades, some people have been convinced that the US government has been harboring secrets about visitors from afar ever since 1947, when they believe an alien spacecraft supposedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.

"When you know that people aren't telling you everything they know, you start filling in the blanks yourself," said Impey. "The videos, the stories of Air Force and Navy pilots seeing mystery spacecraft, all of these things add up. It's just that people connect the dots way too quickly."

Both scientists and many civilians hold to the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

As a recent CNN story revealed, for years government and military officials alike ignored sightings of UFOs reported by both military and civilian pilots — just the sort of extraordinary evidence that might substantiate the reality of ETs. The Pentagon, which refers to UFOs as unidentified aerial phenomena, has confirmed the authenticity of videos and photographs accompanying those reports.

Before that recent and still-unfolding news appeared, though, a hard-to-penetrate cone of silence has surrounded the whole question of UFOs, at least as far as the US government and military have been concerned.


Fiction fills in the gaps

Popular culture filled in the blanks, giving expression to UFOs and their otherworldly passengers in vehicles such as ComicCon, movies such as "Independence Day" and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and the classic television series "Star Trek" with its bold search for new life and new civilizations.

Beyond that, there's a host of conspiracy theories — some benign, some full of foreboding — with dark warnings of abductions and unwanted experiments.

Impey called the question of UFOs "a cultural phenomenon, not a scientific one."

For all that, he cited the late astronomer Carl Sagan's call for all sides in the discussion to keep an open mind — "but not so open," as Sagan said, that "your brains fall out."


Searching the skies

"From time immemorial, humans have wondered about whether we're alone," said Stephen Strom, former associate director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

Just because the popular imagination diverges from the scientific one doesn't invalidate our hope to encounter lifeforms from other worlds.

After all, the question isn't just whether we're alone, but also whether other civilizations have done a better job of taking care of their planets than we have of taking care of Earth.

It's a matter, then, of "whether it is possible for putative complex civilizations to avoid self-destruction," as Strom put it, and whether we can learn from them before it's too late. Those are among the most pressing questions we can ask these days.

Granted, most space scientists don't share the view that extraterrestrial life is going to arrive on Earth via spacecraft in humanoid form. One who did, the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking, worried that if ETs did arrive that way, they'd likely be on a mission to destroy us.

That doesn't mean that space scientists aren't serious in their search for extraterrestrial life.

"Do we think aliens are out there?" asked Mack. "We don't know where, but there almost certainly are.

"It's very unlikely that life has evolved in only one place in the entirety of the cosmos — the sorts of physical processes that had to occur on the early Earth are probably things that have happened countless other times on distant worlds."

We're likely to learn about other life forms from rovers, spectrometers and chemical analyses of distant atmospheres, she added. When we do, the news will spread fast.

As Mack said, "People really do want to know."

Can Social Movements Realign America’s Political Parties to Win Big Change?
Groups such as Sunrise and Justice Democrats are reviving the old idea of realignment, with hopes of provoking new political transformations.

March 30, 2021 Mark Engler and Paul Engler

Activists rally in support of proposed 'Green New Deal' legislation outside of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) New York City office, April 30, 2019 in New York City. , Drew Angerer/Getty Images

In the second week of November 2018, the Sunrise Movement made a sharp transition. Throughout the prior year, the youth-based climate organization had clocked long hours working in support of Democratic candidates in an array of selected districts — walking miles to knock on doors, identifying sympathetic voters and getting people to polls. Now, dozens of Sunrise members sat on the floor in the Washington, D.C. office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Scores of others spilled out into the hallway, lining the walls of the office corridor and carrying signs in the group’s signature yellow and black that read “Green Jobs for All” and asked “What Is Your Plan?” The demand of the sit-in was that the Speaker of the House endorse the Green New Deal, an ambitious legislative program to decarbonize the economy — something Pelosi was hesitant to embrace. In short, Sunrise had abruptly gone from campaigning hard for the Democratic Party’s members to fiercely protesting its leaders.

Casual observers could be forgiven for being confused or thinking there had been a sudden change of strategy. There hadn’t.

The action reached a climax when one of the newly elected congresspeople that Sunrise had supported, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, decided to join them. It created a striking image: a member of Congress who had not even been sworn in, standing in the center of a circle of nonviolent dissenters, confronting her own party’s leadership. The civil disobedience became a media sensation, propelling the Green New Deal into the spotlight of national politics and markedly changing the terms of debate over climate policy.

One might ask what the thinking behind Sunrise’s unusual two-step might be: What big idea would lead the group to doggedly support Democratic candidates one week, then stage a protest in the office of the party’s most senior official the next? And could such a maneuver lead down a coherent path toward political progress?

In a word, the idea in question is “realignment.”

The concept of realignment is not new. It has a history that runs through the works of some of the country’s most renowned mid-century political scientists, as well as through the careers of figures such as legendary organizer Bayard Rustin, eminent socialist Michael Harrington and conservative culture warrior Newt Gingrich. It runs today through Ocasio-Cortez and other social movement-oriented Congressional Democrats who announce the intention, in AOC’s words, of “bringing the party home” — and who in fact may take it places it has never gone before.

“Realignments happen when a long-term social transformation, a crisis, and the right leader converge to change the landscape,” writes political journalist George Packer in The Atlantic. The word often resurfaces with the inauguration of new presidents. Particularly with his 2008 election, which brought a super-majority for his party in the Senate, Barack Obama was seen by some commentators as ushering in a permanent Democratic majority. That is, until Donald Trump broke through the Democrat’s “Blue Wall” in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and flipped at least some voters in the white working class, giving rise to speculation that his win was the realignment of lasting consequence. Biden’s election has been seen as less historically weighty than those of his predecessors. Nevertheless, his success in passing the landmark $1.9 trillion recovery bill led New York Times columnist David Brooks to dub him a “transformational president” and prompted New York magazine’s Eric Levitz to contend that “the law could plausibly mark a leftward realignment in American policymaking.”

Such claims are not unique. Left scholar Mike Davis notes that, while it is mostly old-timers who remember when the idea of realignment was at the peak of its popularity, the notion that certain moments represent fundamental ruptures, reshaping what ideas parties stand for and what constituencies they represent, has a stubbornly persistent appeal. Even as academics debate the theory’s validity, he writes, “the thesis of the ‘critical election’ that durably realigns interest blocs and partisan loyalties remains the holy grail of every actual presidential campaign.”

Outside of presidential elections, realignment has another meaning for social movements promoting far-reaching change. For groups like Sunrise and Justice Democrats — known for its critical role in recruiting Ocasio-Cortez and propelling her insurgent primary campaign in 2018, as well as for helping to support other members of “the Squad” — it is a way of thinking big. Rather than being content to remain in the role of always pushing from the outside or supporting a few handpicked politicians, the concept encourages them to aspire to a more fundamental shift in power relations. It is part of a strategy to form and advance a bloc that can become a dominant force in the U.S. political system. It means, effectively, building a bold new party within the shell of the old.

Could such a feat be possible? What lessons can we learn from realigners of the past? And what is the practical consequence of movements naming this as a key strategic goal today?

A once and future dream

The academic theory of electoral realignment has been called “one of the most creative, engaging and influential intellectual enterprises undertaken by American political scientists during the last half century.” It was first advanced by Harvard professor V. O. Key, Jr. in his 1955 article “A Theory of Critical Elections.” Later, it was developed by scholars including Walter Dean Burnham, a student of Key’s, and James Sundquist, a former speechwriter for Harry Truman. The theory proposed that America’s political party system has evolved in punctuated bursts — often 30 to 40 years apart — and that certain vital elections end up defining their eras by mobilizing fresh groups of voters and putting new issues at the fore of the public agenda. For the likes of Burnham and Key, “critical realignment” involves intense, disruptive moments in which partisan allegiances are reshuffled, majority coalitions fall, and previously uncompetitive minority parties gain new acceptance of their politics.

Think of contests such as the election of 1860, which marked the ascendance of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party and presaged a civil war over slavery; or 1896, when business-funded Republican William McKinley defeated populist-aligned William Jennings Bryan; or 1932, which gave rise to the New Deal order. These elections had generational consequences. They set the mold for the type of governance that followed in subsequent decades: After New Deal liberalism became dominant, even its critics were forced to govern within its core assumptions about the role of government. Likewise, after the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, even Democrats acquiesced to the idea that “the era of big government is over.”

Each of the major claims of academic realignment theorists has been disputed, with a variety of other scholars arguing that American party development is in fact more gradual and that punctuated 30-year cycles cannot be reliably predicted. But even as this academic debate unfolded over the decades — and indeed even before many of its key entries were written — the concept of realignment took on a life of its own both in popular commentary and in the world of political organizing.

In the early 1960s, a number of leaders on the democratic socialist left, including Michael Harrington — whose 1962 book, “The Other America,” helped to animate the Kennedy administration’s War on Poverty — set out to intentionally fracture the Democratic Party in order to build it into something better. Southern Dixiecrats had been an important part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, but their inclusion had proven to be a devil’s bargain. Today, it is well known that powerful racist senators maintained Jim Crow by obstructing civil rights legislation for decades; less well-remembered is the critical role the “Southern Vote” played in pushing anti-union legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act. As historian Paul Heideman explains, “Figures from Walter Reuther to Martin Luther King, Jr. noticed that the Democratic Party contained within it both the most liberal forces in official American politics, like Hubert Humphrey, and the most reactionary, like Strom Thurmond … [T]he Dixiecrats had prevented the Democrats from assuming a coherent political identity as the party of American liberalism.”

Harrington and others believed that, if “Southern racists and certain other corruptive elements” could be pushed out, the Democratic Party could resemble something like a mainstream European social democratic party. Harrington argued in 1962 that a union of welfare state liberals, organized labor, Black voters empowered by the civil rights movement, peace movement constituencies, and other progressive “conscience” voters could “forge a dynamic new coalition which will force a basic realignment in American politics.” From that time until his death in 1989, Harrington and the organizations he would help form — first the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and later the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA — would be associated with this realignment strategy.

In the mid-1960s, things seemed to be on track. With Lyndon Baines Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, decisive Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and organized labor at the peak of its postwar power, it seemed realistic to think that a strong social-democratic majority could be assembled without the reactionary Dixiecrats.

Bayard Rustin, another important backer of the strategy made this point in his famous 1965 essay, “From Protest to Politics.” A prodigiously talented organizer who was kept out of the spotlight due to homophobia but nevertheless served as an advisor to King and a lead planner for the March on Washington, Rustin wrote: “It may be premature to predict a Southern Democratic party of Negroes and white moderates and a Republican Party of refugee racists and economic conservatives, but there certainly is a strong tendency toward such a realignment” — a tendency, he believed, that would only grow stronger as millions more African Americans in Southern states were registered to vote.

Elsewhere, Heideman notes, Rustin further explained his thought: “If we only protest for concessions from without,” the strategist reasoned, “then [the] party treats us in the same way as any of the other conflicting pressure groups. This means it offers us the most minimum concessions for votes.” However, he concluded, “if the same amount of pressure is exerted from inside the party using highly sophisticated political tactics, we can change the structure of that party.”

The right realigns

The logic was sound. But in hindsight it is clear that things didn’t quite go as planned. While the Dixiecrats did flee the party after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, social democrats struggled in the wake of the Southerners’ departure. The Vietnam War was one big reason for this. Many establishment liberals proved themselves all too willing to follow LBJ into the morass of the conflict, permanently alienating themselves from the rising New Left.

Secondly, on the labor front, realigners had envisioned backing from unionists in the mold of Walther Reuther of the United Auto Workers — a stalwart progressive who lent active support to civil rights struggles. They instead ran up against an AFL-CIO under the direction of George Meany, a bureaucratically-minded labor leader who prided himself on never leading a strike and never walking a picket line. The labor federation backed hawkish foreign policy, and in 1972 the AFL-CIO declined to officially endorse the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee George McGovern. For his part, Meany was seen golfing with Nixon and members of his cabinet. Tragically, by the end of his life, Bayard Rustin had become ensconced in defending such labor officialdom; once a prominent pacifist, he took on the role of scolding radical critics of the Vietnam War.

Through the following two decades, Harrington and other leftists continued their push to empower progressives within the Democratic Party. But, in the end, it was conservatives who were able to capitalize on changing social conditions.

“Like us, the New Right believes in realignment,” wrote historian and future Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee national director Jim Chapin in 1975. Although slowed somewhat by the crisis of Watergate and then by the Democrats’ move to nominate a Southern evangelical, Jimmy Carter, in 1976, the Republicans were able by the 1980s to realize a version of the “southern strategy” famously articulated by Nixon aide Kevin Phillips. A newly aggressive assault on organized labor helped. With profit margins declining in the 1970s, segments of capital that had previously tolerated New Deal policy revolted. They joined with other corporate interests to break the unions — an attack fully backed by the White House once Ronald Reagan took office. Meanwhile, operatives such as Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, deftly brought apolitical religious conservatives into the Republican fold under the banner of the “moral majority.”

At times, realignment rhetoric figured explicitly in this work. As one example, Weyrich acolyte Newt Gingrich convened a two-day conference of conservative leaders in 1989 devoted to discussing how to lock in a right-wing majority with a strategy of confrontation rather than bipartisanship. Responding to the event’s doubters, Gingrich argued in a letter to the Washington Post that the meeting had been an important step in bolstering a Republican Party that could “drive realignment from the presidency down to the precincts,” spreading conservative dominance “to Congress, governorships, state legislatures and local government.”

In 1976, Harrington wrote, “[T]he nation is at one of those turning points which then fix the outlines of an entire era to come.” And while hopes for realignment within the Democratic Party dimmed in the decade that followed, they did not vanish entirely. Early in the Reagan era, Frances Fox Piven, the great theorist of disruptive power, argued that mass voter registration of people on social welfare rolls could “force a party realignment along class lines” — particularly if accompanied by defiant protests over voting rights. Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson’s insurgent campaigns in 1984 and 1988 presented the possibility, albeit fleetingly, that the Democrats could be remade in the image of a multiracial, class-conscious “Rainbow Coalition.”

Looking back, it is undeniable that the era’s organizers did not prevail in realizing such a prospect. And yet the failure of progressive realignment in the United States at that time was hardly unique. Social democratic efforts throughout much of the world suffered dramatic setbacks, and alternate strategies — such as creating a “Citizens Party” or building up radical factions within industrial unions — also did not yield particularly hopeful outcomes. Ultimately, the left was entering into a period of decline. In 1992, when Democratic candidate Bill Clinton captured the presidency, he would consolidate the Reagan revolution by declaring the kind of “big government” programs of the New Deal and Great Society obsolete. A generation of neoliberal, “New Democrat” leaders followed his lead and compromised their way to the center.

An age-old debate, settled?

Much has transpired since to reset the table of political calculation, but possibly nothing as immediately consequential as a 2016 campaign that defied all predictions. Prior to that time, virtually no one in America’s class of professional political commentators could have imagined that a 74-year-old, Jewish, self-described socialist who had built his political career as a Vermont independent would come shockingly close to defeating Democratic Party insider and presumptive Obama successor, Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders, addressing crowds with a pronounced Brooklyn accent and calling for a political revolution against the billionaire class, rose to win 23 states in the presidential primaries — including Oklahoma, West Virginia, Michigan, North Dakota and Idaho, all states later claimed by Donald Trump. Well after the election year ended, Sanders polled for a time as the most popular active politician in America. Then, in 2020, he made another impressive run, emerging as a frontrunner in a crowded Democratic field. Sanders won the vote in key early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada before falling to Joe Biden’s “Super Tuesday” surge.

The Sanders campaign of 2016, in particular, reinvigorated left debate about electoral strategy. At the same time, it represented something of a paradox: By running within the mechanisms of the Democratic Party, Bernie had remarkable success in mainstreaming progressive ideas, providing an attractive alternative to the marginalization typically associated with third-party bids. And yet, his failure to secure the nomination — and a perception that he was unfairly robbed by the party establishment — left many supporters nursing bitter resentment toward the Democrats, whom detractors claimed were morally bankrupt. “They have always been, they always are, and they always will be,” wrote one disaffected Berniecrat.

By the 1990s, DSA had already moved away from the traditional realignment position pursued by Harrington, and it had declined to officially endorse presidential candidates including Bill Clinton and later Al Gore in 2000. And yet, the dilemmas that the strategy sought to address have not disappeared. Chris Maisano, an editor at Jacobin, writes: “The debate over whether … electoral action should be waged on Democratic Party ballot lines is perhaps the most persistent controversy on the U.S. left.” The strong grip of corporate Democrats dampened hopes that the party could ever be remade and kindled dreams of an independent political formation — a Green, Worker’s, Progressive or Labor Party. And yet, entrenched barriers to third parties, most notably the lack of proportional representation and notoriously stringent ballot access requirements in many states, has made the American two-party system largely impervious to outside assaults for a half-century or more.

The Sanders campaign swelled the ranks of DSA and gave rise to new initiatives including Justice Democrats and Our Revolution. Moreover, the combination of anger at the Democratic establishment and recognition of the party’s primaries as fertile ground for outsider candidates to contest — and sometimes win — has prompted a new wave of progressives to enter these elections at all levels of government, with some candidates openly identifying as democratic socialists. In the U.S. House of Representatives, this has resulted in the formation of the Squad, a group initially made up exclusively of women of color — Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — who unabashedly promoted a policy agenda far to the left of party leadership. In some instances, such as Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, its members ousted powerful incumbents while articulating a new vision for the party.

While many activists may not think of themselves as realigners, a broad practical consensus has emerged around doing electoral work largely through the Democratic Party ballot line. Georgetown historian Michael Kazin argues that “as a consequence of his two national campaigns, Sanders and his legion of admirers embedded a growing social-democratic movement inside the heart of the Democratic Party.” Meanwhile, Maisano writes, “the political developments of the last few years have effectively settled the Democratic Party question, at least for now.” He adds: “Whether we like it or not, working-class organizers will continue to use major party primaries so long as they exist and bear fruit.”

To be sure, there remain strategic differences and debates. Among DSA members, some see a rupture with Democrats as inevitable. They advocate for building an identity and infrastructure that is as independent as possible from the Democrats, in preparation for an eventual “dirty break.” Others within DSA are comfortable with the prospect of laboring within the Democratic Party structure for the foreseeable future and even attempting to gain power over internal party machinery — moves consistent with realignment strategies of the past. As one example of this tendency, a leftist slate in the southwest recently succeeded in sweeping the top five elected positions of the Nevada Democratic Party, prompting the whole of the state party’s centrist staff to resign in dismay. Activists working in this vein often ally themselves with a wide range of other groups seeking to promote left-of-center candidates. These include newer, Sanders-inspired groups, but also others such as the Progressive Democrats of America, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, MoveOn, People’s Action, and the Working Families Party — not to mention more progressive unions, community and civil rights groups.

Each organization possesses its own orientation with regard to the future of the Democrats. But their leaders may well overestimate their ability to determine the long-term impact of their work. As trade unionist and DSA activist Dustin Guastella observes, on a certain level ideas such as “realignment” and “break” are not actually strategies. “Rather, they are outcomes of political struggle,” he writes. “They depend on how the major parties react to shifts in the electorate and organized political action: either the party is unable to heal an internal divide, resulting in a ‘break’ (like the Whig moment in the 1850s) or the party adopts the policies of insurgents in order to consolidate a new constituency (like the New Deal moment in the 1930s).”

Despite some differences among them, a robust collection of groups opposed to the Democratic Party’s centrist old guard and corporate donor base are now seeking to build independent infrastructure that can allow them to recruit and run dissident candidates. They are looking to build the social base for left ideas. And they are working to craft appeals that will allow them to draw together powerful majorities. The more successful they are, the more they will make a mark on the landscape of American party politics — even if the exact shape of that mark might be difficult to predict.

Who are today’s realigners?

Many within this social movement ecosystem do not use the language of realignment. But a few groups, such as Sunrise and Justice Democrats, evoke the idea as an important part of their vision of change. Strategists in these organizations are today’s realigners.

For Justice Democrats Executive Director Alexandra Rojas and Communications Director Waleed Shahid, the Sanders campaign offered only a taste of “what was possible in transforming the Democratic Party into a vehicle for lasting social change.” Meanwhile, Sunrise co-founder Will Lawrence expresses confidence in the usefulness of reclaiming realignment as a strategy. “It’s the secret sauce,” he said. “We couldn’t have done what we have without our understanding of alignments and factions guiding how we navigate political choices.”

So what significance does the idea of realignment have for how these organizations behave?

The lessons that can be derived from the concept’s history are filled with caveats. The academic literature on realignment is largely descriptive — seeking to understand past developments in American political history — rather than prescriptive. It does not offer a clear path forward for those seeking to organize social movements. Guido Girgenti, the media director for Justice Democrats and a co-founder of Sunrise, reflects on this challenge in the 2020 Sunrise book “Winning the Green New Deal.” “Realignments are messy, rare and big,” he contends in an essay written with Shahid. “No single person or group has their hand entirely on the rudder, and there’s no step-by-step method to succeeding.”

These concerns notwithstanding, the concept of realignment has some important practical effects for the groups that use it, giving them language to highlight a set of strategic considerations that arise as they craft an “inside-outside” approach to politics. Three of these effects are especially worth highlighting.

First, as Rustin suggested long ago, thinking about realignment encourages movement organizations to express large ambitions that go beyond forever functioning as outside pressure groups or single-issue lobbies. Instead of aiming merely to extract concessions by being the thorn in the side of elected officials and other powerholders, realigners are vying for power. Echoing Mike Davis, Girgenti and Shahid write, “The project of an era-defining realignment is perhaps the biggest goal a movement can aspire to in American politics.” In their pursuit of policies such as the Green New Deal, Sunrise and Justice Democrats seek not only to alter the accepted common sense about the solutions our society needs, but also to back up such cultural change with a reorientation of the political forces that can pull the levers of state power.

Second, the concept orients the realigners toward working within the Democratic Party, but also toward being in conflict with others inside the party’s big tent. Maintaining a majority that can defeat reactionary Republicans is important. But just as critical for these groups is the objective of advancing a specific faction within the Democratic coalition, with the aim of making that arm of the party into the dominant one. This orientation creates a marked distinction between Sunrise and a group like, say, the League of Conservation Voters. The latter generally works to get more Democrats elected (and occasionally endorses Republicans with nominally pro-environmental voting records), without pushing for a wider ideological shift in the party. Meanwhile Sunrise adopts a more confrontational strategy, focusing on electing champions and — in line with Piven — retaining direct action as a core part of its repertoire. It is willing to use both door-knocking and sit-ins as ways of influencing the party’s composition and ideology.

In his classic 1942 study on democratic politics, E. E. Schattsneider described a political party as “an organized attempt to get control of the government.” Contemporary political scientist Daniel Schlozman adds, “Because political parties organize social conflict … they also structure the possibilities for movements to achieve ongoing influence.” But in America, the peculiarity of the party system means that these opportunities are structured in unusual ways. In countries with parliamentary systems, the dynamics of realignment largely play out in debates between different political parties with distinct ideologies. These parties might then have to decide whether or not to enter into coalition governments with one another. However, in the United States, the ingrained two-party system means that tension between different factions commonly takes place within the major parties. “In any other country Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” Ocasio-Cortez has stated. “But in America, we are.”

Given this reality, an often-cited maxim holds that organizers should not think about the Democrats as a coherent collection of like-minded individuals. Rather, they should see the party as a terrain of struggle. As Rojas and Shahid write, “It’s not a team, it’s the arena.”

In an interview with Dissent magazine, Shahid further elaborated on this reasoning: “A good way of thinking about the situation in American politics today is that the left wing of the party — whatever label you want to use for it — is a junior partner to a senior partner in a coalition government,” he said. “The senior partner is the party of Pelosi and Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Dianne Feinstein. They have more power. But we are in a coalition together to get over 50 percent and keep the Republicans out of power.”

Long term, the idea is to shift the balance of power so that the left becomes the dominant faction, reversing the current roles. At that point, risk-averse political pragmatists seeking to stake out “mainstream” and uncontroversial positions will model themselves after progressives, rather than the Clintonian “New Democrats” of the past. “If you look at U.S. history,” Shahid argues, “it isn’t just ideologically driven figures like [anti-slavery champion] Thaddeus Stevens or [New Deal-era labor advocate] Robert Wagner that drive politics, but also … people who come from the old guard of the party but see history changing beneath them. That is a really good sign for the broader trend of realignment. At least in my reading of history, that’s how change has happened: not only does the party co-opt you, but you also co-opt the party.”

Reading the clock of the world

A third consequence of thinking in terms of realignment is that it encourages activists to carefully take stock of the amalgam of social forces at play on the American political scene. Realigners often cite the late, storied Detroit organizer Grace Lee Boggs, who urged advocates of transformational change to ask, “What time is it on the clock of the world?”

One can fault past strategists like Rustin and Harrington for miscalculating how segments of capital, labor or the right would respond to dynamic social conditions. But their political plans, unlike too many liberal projects, were not rooted merely in idealism or wishful thinking. Rather, they were based on a hard look at the fault lines in the dominant parties and on a plausible vision of how a majoritarian grouping could have formed amid the social movement upheavals of the 1960s. A similarly deliberate probing of the currents flowing through America’s electorate is surely needed now.

Could there be a structural basis for realignment today? Current realigners tend to endorse the left-populist analysis that the 2008 economic crash and the lingering insecurity faced by working people has created a crisis of legitimacy for neoliberalism. In many parts of the world, traditional parties offer no adequate solutions, and so they have lost ground to insurgent groups that rally public resentment against established elites.

Of course, it is not only progressives attempting to fill the void. As in the past, the right believes in realignment, too. Conservative ethno-nationalists, playing especially on racial grievances, have shown that they can also ride the wave of disaffection; Donald Trump is by no means the least among them. Currently, fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and the mounting crises of climate change have only furthered the destabilization of the previous order.

Neoliberal “New Democrats” may have once gained momentum within their party. But even arch-centrist Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and advisor to several Democratic presidents, acknowledges the terrain has since shifted. “Admittedly,” he stated in early 2020, “today’s landscape is much friendlier for progressive ideas than it was when either Mr. Clinton or Mr. Obama was running for office.” In part, this reflects the hard work that movements have already done in shaping public opinion. But it is also aided by demography. As Shahid contends, “One of the signs of realignment happening today is the generational shift. Millennials self-describe as very ideologically left compared to other generations.”

The country is also growing more diverse, with the power of older, white voting blocs eroding in the face of demographic movement toward a “majority-minority” country. These trends give hope for revival of the kind of alignment envisioned by the Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s. Along these lines, Rojas and Shahid quote historian Barbara Ransby, who writes of the Squad: “They are wisely acting as if they represent the demographic and political majority that their generation will become.”

“They are not only the future of the Democratic Party,” Ransby added. “They are the future.”

Nevertheless, Shahid warns, “I’m not someone who thinks demographics are destiny. You still have to do politics.” That means making tough decisions. While realignment might give groups like Sunrise and Justice Democrats a defined orientation in crafting their response to present political conditions, it leaves many important questions unanswered. For instance, strategists must weigh the relative importance of “mobilization” and “conversion” — whether a faction aspiring to power should focus on more aggressively activating its own base or on peeling off people previously devoted to other groups. “If the mobilization analysts are right, new voters are the key to realignment,” Piven explains in her book “Challenging Authority.” On the other hand, “if the conversion analysts are right, changing party loyalties among existing voters are the key.”

Other questions include: How to formulate a “race-class narrative” with widespread appeal? How much should left groups target moderate incumbents in strongly “blue” Democratic districts and try to replace them with progressive champions, versus pursuing a 50-state strategy and trying to win in unexpected places? Should insurgents embrace the goal of representing the true “soul of the party,” or should they reject partisan language and attack moribund Democratic Party structures as part of the establishment? How “coalitional” should they be with other groups at a given moment — including those they might not agree with fully — and how confrontational?

Even as they consider these dilemmas, the organizers can take solace in having a clear view of the task they face. “The common sense in the country is fracturing,” Sunrise teaches in its activist trainings. “We have a generational opportunity to shape it. If we don’t, the right will. Inclusive populism is about uniting the largest ‘we’ possible and winning [over] common sense beyond our own movements and issues.” Could the urgency in such a perspective drive a reordering of American politics? While some view history as a cautionary tale, today’s realigners take inspiration from past organizers who have wrestled with this grand ambition and sometimes, improbably, succeeded.

Research assistance for this article provided by Akin Olla.

Can Social Movements Realign America’s Political Parties to Win Big Change? | Portside