Book Review: Authoritarian Contagion: The Global Threat to Democracy by Luke Cooper

In Authoritarian Contagion: The Global Threat to Democracy, Luke Cooper explores the rise of ‘authoritarian protectionism’ across the globe. This book is an excellent introduction to authoritarian politics and will prove highly informative for readers wanting to strengthen their understanding of contemporary events, writes D. Kaan Akcay.

Authoritarian Contagion: The Global Threat to Democracy. Luke Cooper. Bristol University Press. 2021.

The Rubicon has been crossed for liberal democracies around the globe. Human history, already plagued by authoritarian governments and movements, faces another wave of authoritarianism with a splash of ethno-nationalism. With his extensive knowledge and scholarship on Europe, Luke Cooper defines this new iteration as ‘authoritarian protectionism’ in his latest book, Authoritarian Contagion.

‘Authoritarian protectionism’ is a novel political concept that rehashes some authoritarian characteristics of old. Cases like Turkey have already experienced deep levels of democratic backsliding, while the US shows early signs of decay through the tenure of President Donald Trump. Hegemonic politics, where political and economic gains can only be earned at the expense of others, reflects the idea of a zero-sum game, as observed in the 2021 Capitol insurrection. ‘Real’ Americans devastate the democratic process for their own gain. Cooper positions this mindset as the belief that ‘the world will end for others but not us’ (6): a powerful idea that acts like a ‘contagion’.

To explain this phenomenon, Cooper explores the historical process of authoritarian politics, with special regard to the authoritarian individualism of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former US President Ronald Reagan. Cooper argues against the idea of a post-politics period where the neoliberal mode of operation and democratic systems are the convergence points of human civilisation, proposed by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History among other works. Cooper claims that events such as 9/11, the 2008 recession and now COVID-19 show that this is not the case. Protectionism and the narrative of a corrupt elite are being normalised through anti-globalisation sentiments and ‘America first’ rhetoric.

Authoritarian Contagion suggests that once this school of far-right authoritarian thought is normalised, gaining a foothold in mainstream politics, it is hard to dislodge (12). Furthermore, the political movements and parties that combine nations’ historical experiences with this new politics are proving especially transformative through such normalisation (21). This new protectionist agenda thrives on the idea that the collective is of importance, rather than the individual. Fighting for Christianity, fighting for America, getting ‘the man’s job’ done: these are all elements that define the authoritarian protectionism of Trump and many others. There are heteronormative, ethno-nationalistic and militaristic masses living in an alternative reality (30).

Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

For Cooper’s conception, these factors, combined with a sense of immediate crisis, are the basis of the new wave of authoritarianism that the book explores in detail. It can be said that ‘authoritarian protectionism’ captures the convergence of populism and racism. Although underemphasised in the book, elements of the ‘us versus them’ rhetoric and references to a corrupt global elite and taking back the power for ‘ordinary people’ are all well-established aspects of populist movements. Today, proposed by Cooper as diverging from previous examples, there is a layer of racism on top (43).

Authoritarian Contagion explains the context of nationalism and authoritarianism adequately to give the reader all the necessary information, effectively showing the rise of the far right in combination with authoritarian politics and hybrid regimes, which are in between full democracies and full authoritarianism on the spectrum of political systems. As Cooper suggests, these are not necessarily new phenomena, but they threaten the future of democracies. Furthermore, while democracies seem to be the dominant system across the globe, especially in the West, liberal democracy is fairly new. Universal suffrage and civil rights were lacking in most of the old democracies up until the 1960s. Cooper clearly illustrates the need to fight and protect the formal and substantive aspects of democracy, arguing that there is no perfect setting in which democracy thrives without problems (68).

The greatest strength of Cooper’s work is his competence in capturing all the aspects, concepts and developments of authoritarian politics applicable to different cases. Protectionism can be observed in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the US, China, France, the UK and beyond. All these states have suffered from repeated attacks on the liberal qualities of democracies.

As Cooper suggests, authoritarian protectionism also damages inclusive global efforts to solve many of the biggest problems humanity is facing, including global warming, pandemics and energy crises. In the last chapter, ‘Authoritarian Futures?’, Cooper explores how politics shapes the relationship between nature and humans. The mercantile nature of protectionism prevents cooperation between states. Only their people and nation will survive, in lieu of others. The climate crisis, income inequality and other global concerns become a tool that fuels authoritarian policies that fail to offer any solutions (133). Many issues, including climate change, require a global effort, yet there can be no collective action in a zero-sum game.

The main weakness of the work comes from overlooked details in the analysed cases. In the chapter ‘Sino-America’, we read a comparative analysis of authoritarian protectionism in China and the US. The bleak outlook on China’s assimilation policies towards minorities, especially the Uyghurs, presents a strong case of ethno-nationalism; comparable evidence for the US is lacking. While the book presents a variety of voter data, it is difficult to isolate the causes of the success of Trump without further evidence, leaving much to be desired regarding possible takeaways. While comparisons can provide some general findings about the state of the world, examining vastly different polities may be unhelpful for the purposes of the book. In sum, the lack of detail in the analyses impedes the aim of understanding ‘authoritarian contagion’ in greater depth.

The notion that ‘the Rubicon has been crossed’, proposed by Cooper in the opening of the book, is one that I strongly agree with. Democratic backsliding and the rise of this new iteration of authoritarian politics are not new phenomena. Yet, in line with the book’s premise, they are spreading in a highly contagious manner. Having lived in a country ahead of this curve, I found the book to be an excellent introduction to authoritarian politics with an emphasis on contemporary ethno-nationalistic protectionism. It is a great research primer for all scholars in the field, and an informative work for curious readers who want to strengthen their understanding of contemporary events with robust knowledge.

• This review first appeared at LSE Review of Books.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. 

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About the reviewer

D. Kaan Akcay – Bilkent University
D. Kaan Akcay is an MA student in Political Science at Bilkent University. He is interested in the fields of political economy and comparative politics. His research currently focuses on the relationship between populism and democracy, and economic policy with an emphasis on the effects of international priorities of states.

Book Review: Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis by Eve Darian-Smith

In Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis, Eve Darian-Smith connects wildfires to the broader economic, social and political issues underlying climate change, exploring how they have become important signifiers of an unfolding global calamity. This is a timely and thought-provoking book that shows that there will be no magic solution to our current predicament until we collectively embrace a fundamental rethinking of human-nature relations and life beyond capitalism, writes Sibo Chen. 

Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis. Eve Darian-Smith. Stanford University Press. 2022.

In recent years, catastrophic wildfires, as evidenced by viral video clips depicting burning forests, billowing smoke and evacuees, have sparked growing public concern around the globe. What are the causes and consequences of this environmental crisis and what can be done to prevent it? These are the main subjects addressed in Eve Darian-Smith’s Global Burning, a book that connects wildfires to the broader economic, social and political issues underlying climate change. Through theoretically grounded reflections on the intersections of wildfire, climate change and capitalism, Darian-Smith emphasises how out-of-control wildfires have become important signifiers of an unfolding global calamity that urges the public to challenge the status quo.

The book’s theoretical framework is outlined in Chapter One, ‘Fire as Omen’, which also introduces the cases examined in the following chapters — namely, the wildfires in California, Australia and Brazil. Wildfires are particularly violent and terrifying threats to people because of their immediate danger, which contrasts sharply with the ‘slow violence’ of many other environmental disasters. The devastating impacts of wildfires ‘underscore people’s vulnerabilities and total dependence on others for water, shelter, and the basics of survival’ (3).

Image Credit: Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Although wildfires appear to burn without discrimination, they impact low-income, marginalised and racialised communities far more than others. Accordingly, Darian-Smith argues that wildfires, like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, need to be studied from the perspective of systemic injustice. This leads to the following chapters’ critical inquiry into ecologically destructive industries and their political allies (mostly ultranationalist, antidemocratic and male leaders) and how their policies are responsible for the upswing in catastrophic wildfires.

Chapter Two, ‘Fire as Profit’, elaborates the connection between climate change and capitalism’s exploitation and extraction of natural resources. This chapter’s central argument is that the economic system is increasingly seizing control of the political system in accordance with the prevailing neoliberal logic of late capitalism. As a result, there is an intensifying shift of power from democratically-based state institutions to corporations. To substantiate this argument, Darian-Smith discusses the cases of PG&E (an investor-owned public utility company) in California, the mining industry in Australia and the agribusiness industry in Brazil, linking their reckless pursuit of profit to massive wildfire devastation. These cases collectively underscore ‘the violence, callousness, greed, shortsightedness, and deliberate ignorance in denying climate science by those involved in extractive capitalism’ (66).

Chapter Three, ‘Fire as Weapon’, discusses the rise of ‘free-market authoritarianism’, which, as evidenced by the prevalence of right-wing populist leaders, demonstrates how neoliberal capitalism and antidemocratic practices go hand in hand. The analysis centres on three common features shared by free-market authoritarian governments worldwide: namely, ultranationalism; international isolationism; and anti-environmentalism.

Given the book’s analytical focus on wildfires, Darian-Smith pays special attention to anti-environmentalism, a direct consequence of the convergence of free-market authoritarianism, extractive capitalism and extreme-right political actors. Empirically, this chapter focuses primarily on the United States under the Donald Trump administration. By deregulating environmental protections and politicising climate change, Trump’s presidency exemplifies how the global drift toward antidemocracy paves the way for extractive capitalism to continue, ignoring climate science consensus and global environmental injustice.

Further details of what has been brought about by the increasing collaboration between extractive corporations and authoritarian leaders are discussed in Chapter Four, ‘Fire as Death’. This chapter considers violent environmental racism as both a tool and consequence of free-market authoritarianism. What distinguishes contemporary environmental racism from earlier historical periods is the extensive use of military force by far-right leaders against their own citizens to secure land grabs and defend the toxic practices of extractive industries. As evidence, Darian-Smith discusses the plight of Indigenous peoples in Australia and Brazil as well as the danger posed by wildfires to racialised immigrants in California. These cases are ‘indicators of deep structural injustices that impose the heaviest toll on those least able to bear the burden’ (122).

Chapter Five, ‘Fire as Disruption’, concludes by reflecting on the proliferation of environmental movements in response to the destruction caused by wildfires. Darian-Smith argues that resolving catastrophic wildfires requires us to not only think about fires (their causes, effects and solutions), but also think with and through fires. This demands that we adopt alternative conceptual frameworks that deconstruct the human/nature divide and ‘move beyond framing environmental crises in ways that speak to bankers, financiers, CEOs, and their authoritarian political partners’ (133).

Global Burning offers a timely examination of the economic, social and political roots of wildfires. It is thought-provoking, especially considering how ubiquitous extreme weather events have become. Even though the book’s key messages can be found elsewhere (for example, in Ending Fossil Fuels by Holly Jean Buck and Planet on Fire by Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton), the concept of ‘thinking through fire’ is of critical importance because it highlights how the status quo of global capitalism is economically and socially unsustainable. While some may criticise the absence of policy prescriptions or strategies for wildfire prevention in the book, I believe this highlights the inconvenient reality of climate change mitigation: there will be no magic solution until the world collectively embraces a fundamental rethinking of human-nature relations and life beyond capitalism.

• This review first appeared at LSE Review of Books.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. 

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About the reviewer

Sibo Chen – Ryerson University
Dr Sibo Chen is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University’s School of Professional Communication. His research areas of interest include energy-society relations, environmental communication, critical discourse analysis, communication and identity, and instructional communication.

Once again, accusations of Satanism and sex abuse loom large in American politics 

 

Right wing politicians and media figures have been increasingly expressing concerns about the “grooming” of children into sexualized lifestyles and satanic activity in America. Joseph E. Uscinski and Casey Klofstad write that such concerns are a repeat of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and 90s. And while there is no evidence to support the concerns of conservative figures, through a new national survey, they find that over a quarter of Americans share these fears. They also find that, on some debunked claims, Democrats are just as likely to be believers as Republicans. 

Accusations involving ritual sex abuse and the sexualization of children have surged into the mainstream of American politics over the past year. In particular, conservative politicians and opinion leaders have increasingly expressed concerns about Satan, Satanists, sex “grooming”, and the supposed “agenda” by public schools and entertainment companies to indoctrinate children into sexualized lifestyles or to turn them gay or trans.

Such discourse is not new. In the 1980s and 90s, a Satanic panic led Americans to see Satan “in every heavy metal album, Smurfs episode, and Dungeons & Dragons game.” Even the Proctor and Gamble corporation was supposedly “in league with the devil.” As the panic wore on into the 1990s, it became a vehicle for expressing fears over social change, and in particular how children would be exposed to liberalized views on sexuality.

These mass panics are not without real-world consequences. Innocent people were accused and imprisoned for fictitious crimes against children in the 1980s and 90s, and the hysteria took attention away from actual victims of abuse. After the panic subsided, little evidence of widespread satanic cult activity, ritual abuse, or organized Satanic grooming emerged. Regardless, today these fears appear to be a motivating factor behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Republicans’ attacks on Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearings in March, and recent calls to boycott Disney.

How many Americans believe ideas regarding Satanic cults, widespread child “grooming” and trafficking, and coordinated “agendas” to sexualize children? We ran a nationwide poll in cooperation with Qualtrics from May 26 to June 30 to gauge Americans’ views toward these topics. Our opt-in poll included 2001 respondents and was representative of the US population based upon race, gender, education, income, and age.

Large numbers of Americans agree with ideas about widespread Satanic activity, grooming, and sex-trafficking 

We first asked respondents to provide their level of agreement with the statement, “Satanic ritual sex abuse is widespread in this country.” Using a 5-point scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, 25 percent of our respondents strongly agreed or agreed with this proposition. Thirty-three percent strongly agreed or agreed that “Members of Satanic cults secretly abuse thousands of children every year,” While these ideas about Satanism are not believed by majorities, they are believed by troubling percentages of Americans.

We provided two additional statements to assess Americans’ beliefs about child “grooming.” Twenty-six percent of Americans strongly agreed or agreed with the statement that “The Disney Corporation ‘grooms’ children into sexualized lifestyles.” In addition, 28 percent our respondents agreed or strongly agreed that “There is a secret ‘gay agenda’ aimed at converting young people into gay and trans lifestyles.”

We also asked respondents about sex trafficking. Thirty percent strongly agreed or agreed that “Elites, from government and Hollywood, are engaged in a massive child sex trafficking racket.” To measure Americans’ views towards the amount of child sex trafficking in the US, we told respondents that “Some groups claim that around 300,000 children in the United States are currently victims of sex trafficking,” and then asked if the actual number of child sex trafficking victims in the US was more, less, or about 300,000. We used the 300,000 number because several members of Congress have shared this number despite it being fact checked and found to be a gross exaggeration. Sixty percent of our sample agreed that the number of trafficked children in the US is currently about, or more than, 300,000 children. These beliefs may be due in part to the large number of false or unsupported claims about sex trafficking made by politicians and activists. While any number above zero is unacceptable, exaggerated claims do not serve actual victims.

“mysterious conspiracy” by Tim is licensed under CC BY SA 2.0. 

The Partisan Breakdown 

Our survey also measured respondents’ partisanship with the question, “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or something else?” We found that of the above beliefs queried in our survey, two were believed far more by Republicans than by Democrats. Thirty-six percent of Republicans strongly agreed or agreed that “The Disney Corporation ‘grooms’ children into sexualized lifestyles,” but only 23 percent of Democrats did. Thirty-nine percent of Republicans strongly agreed or agreed that “There is a secret ‘gay agenda’ aimed at converting young people into gay and trans lifestyles,” but only 25 percent of Democrats did. These two ideas have attracted much attention from conservative leaders and pundits, which may explain the partisan differences.

However, the other questions we polled show more partisan symmetry. Twenty-six percent of Republicans and 29 percent of Democrats strongly agreed or agreed that Satanic ritual sex abuse is widespread; 36 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of Democrats strongly agreed or agreed that members of Satanic cults are secretly abusing thousands of children, and 32 percent of both Republicans and Democrats strongly agreed or agreed that government and Hollywood elites are running a massive child sex trafficking scheme. Sixty-three percent of Republicans and 61 percent of Democrats believed the debunked claim that 300,000 or more children are currently victims of sex trafficking in the US These numbers suggest that these types of beliefs transcend typical partisan divisions.

Why are these beliefs popular and why might they be entering mainstream discourse? 

Given that such beliefs are only starting to be polled on, it is hard to know what makes them popular. Even during the Satanic panic of the 1980s and 1990s, there were few polls taken of the beliefs animating that panic. That said, there are likely numerous factors driving these beliefs. Rumors about widespread Satanic cult abuse and widespread elite sex trafficking have been around for decades and are often given credence by government officials who make exaggerated and false claims about these topics.

Accusations of involvement in Satanism, abuse, and secretive sexual agendas, or of being “soft” on such things are also powerful cudgels with which to attack political enemies and score cheap points. The question remains of whether the rhetoric currently used by conservatives is designed to activate members of the Republican base or reach beyond it given the large and sometimes symmetrical numbers of believers among Democrats.

Regardless, language about Satanism, grooming, and abuse has become so ubiquitous that some social media platforms have banned this language, in particular, that which seeks to malign the LGBTQ community. Acts of vigilantism and violence show that leaders are playing with fire when using such rhetoric to motivate political support.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

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About the authors

Joseph E. Uscinski – University of Miami
Joseph E. Uscinski is professor of political science in the University of Miami’s College of Arts & Sciences. He is coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford University Press, 2014). @joeuscinski

 

 

Casey Klofstad – University of Miami
Casey Klofstad is professor of political science in the University of Miami’s College of Arts & Sciences.

African rhino poaching falls but illegal hunting still threatens species


More than 2,700 killed in past three years in Africa – mostly the vulnerable white rhino

Jane Dalton

Numbers of white rhino in Africa plummeted by almost 12 per cent
(AFP via Getty Images)

African rhino poaching rates have fallen since 2018, figures show – but thousands are still being illegally hunted, threatening the species’ future, experts warn.

In 2015, killings hit a peak of 5.3 per cent of the species’ population, but last year they dropped to 2.3 per cent, according to a report.

Covid-19 lockdowns meant poaching rates in 2020 dramatically reduced in several African countries, the report authors say.

However, at least 2,707 rhinos were still poached across Africa between 2018 and last year.

“The overall decline in poaching of rhinos is encouraging, yet this remains an acute threat to the survival of these iconic animals,” said Sam Ferreira, scientific officer with an African rhino specialist group.

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“To support the growth of rhino numbers, it is essential to continue active population management and anti-poaching activities for all subspecies across different range states.”

The report, by specialist groups for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and conservation organisation Traffic, looked at changes in populations from 2018 to 2021. It says nine in 10 poaching crimes were in South Africa, mostly of white rhinos in Kruger National Park, home to the world’s largest population of white rhino, which is “vulnerable” on the IUCN red list of threatened species.

As a result, white rhino numbers in Africa plummeted by almost 12 per cent – from 18,067 to 15,942 – between 2018 and last year.

By contrast, populations of the rarer critically endangered black rhino rose from 5,495 to 6,195 – just over 12 per cent.

Overall, Africa’s rhino population declined from an estimated 23,562 in 2018 to 22,137 at the end of 2021.

South Africa lost 394 rhinos to poaching in 2020, while Kenya recorded no rhino poaching that year. It’s thought lockdowns helped rein in illegal hunting.

But as Covid travel restrictions lifted, some range states reported an increase in poaching. Last year, South Africa reported 451 cases and Kenya six.


In Asia, estimates of numbers of the critically endangered Sumatran rhino dropped from between 40 and 78 to 34 and 47.

But the report says there were no reports of illegal killings of Sumatran rhinos despite the large drop in numbers.

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Some 11 rhino poaching cases were recorded in Asia – 10 in India and one in Nepal – all of which involved vulnerable greater one-horned rhinos.

The report will go to a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) in Panama in November.

U.S. To Spend More Than $500 Billion On Climate Over A Decade Under Three Laws, Study Says

By Peter Henderson

08/22/22 

A volunteer holds a placard during a news conference on the climate crisis and the Inflation Reduction Act at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 12, 2022.

The U.S. government will spend more than $500 billion on climate technology and clean energy over the next decade under three recently enacted laws, an analysis by non-profit RMI found.

The tally is based on this month's Inflation Reduction and CHIPS acts and last year's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Together they fund climate-related research and pilot studies and support manufacturing.

"Together they form a coherent green industrial policy, in the sense that there are strategic industries that they focus on and a set of tools designed to accelerate production up and down the supply chain," said Lachlan Carey, co-author of the report, published on Monday.

The estimated $514 billion total includes $362 billion from the IRA, $98 billion from the infrastructure act and $54 billion from the bipartisan-supported CHIPS law, although Congress will have to pass further legislation for some of the funding to be released. The analysis excludes additional agriculture and land-related climate spending.

The CHIPS bill, for instance, will fund climate-related efforts in materials science such as developing new battery chemistry and more efficient solar panels.


Annual federal spending on climate and clean energy over the next five years will be roughly 15 times that of the 1990s and early 2000s and about triple that of recent years, the study said.

U.S. government estimates show renewable energy is becoming a bigger part of production.

But study authors said climate action needed to speed up.

"It's a long process that we don't have time to be that long. Like solar and wind took 40 years - we have 10 years," said Jun Shepard, another co-author.

How Sonia Sotomayor Became the Conscience of the Supreme Court
The former prosecutor was never a liberal firebrand. But now it is she, more than any other justice, who puts progressive outrage into words.

By Elie MystalTwitter

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TODAY 

Illustration by Tim O’Brien.

LONG READ

While the rest of the country was reeling from the Supreme Court’s decision in June to take away the right to abortion, Justice Sonia Maria Sotomayor was working. As her conservative colleagues planned victory tours and dinners at Morton’s, Sotomayor crafted dissents. She and her team of clerks worked to the last moment of the court’s term, laying out a case against the conservatives’ manipulation of laws and perversion of justice. And she did this despite the fact that the cases on which she was laboring may never even make it to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The cases in question were among a series that her colleagues had decided not to hear. The Supreme Court gets to choose its own cases, sifting through between 7,000 and 8,000 appeals every year to accept a tiny fraction of them. It takes just four affirmative votes for the court to decide to hear a case, or, in the official parlance, grant certiorari. This means that any four justices can effectively control the docket of the Supreme Court, determining which issues it considers. When alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh replaced the more moderate Anthony Kennedy in 2018, he, along with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, formed a powerful four-vote bloc to breathe life into whatever cockeyed challenge to established law and precedent conservatives could dream up. You can think of them as the Four Bro-men of the Apocalypse, busting open seals like some people open beer cans, unleashing horrors upon our world.

There is another important number that shapes the court’s docket, and that is six. With six votes, justices can deny appeals of lower court rulings that are clearly wrong, without drawing the kind of attention that comes when they hold hearings and issue rulings that proactively change the law for the worse. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, conservatives gained their crucial sixth vote to stop meritorious appeals from ever getting a hearing in front of the court.

What the Supreme Court hears, and what it denies, is a hidden lever of power for today’s conservative majority. It goes largely unremarked on by establishment forces, who have accepted the prospect of generational conservative control of the court. But Justice Sotomayor was having none of it, spending her final hours of the term writing a series of pointed dissents against the court’s refusal to hear appeals of unjust rulings from the lower courts.

It’s not unusual for a justice to dissent from a certiorari denial here and there, but Sotomayor dissented in five cases, all on the last day. In general, the cases were all focused on criminal justice and the use—and abuse—of state power against suspected criminals. The court refused to hear a case in which police officers used Tasers on a man after he had doused himself with gasoline, knowing full well that if they shocked him, he would catch on fire. Sotomayor dissented. The court refused to hear a case in which a prisoner killed himself while correction officers watched, never once trying to intervene. Sotomayor dissented. The court refused to hear three cases involving capital punishment. Sotomayor dissented and dissented and dissented. In each dissent, she retold the defendant’s story for the public record, maybe for the last time.

What’s remarkable about these dissents is that if the court had agreed to hear the cases, Sotomayor likely would have found herself on the wrong end of a series of 6-3 decisions. But she didn’t write these dissents because she relishes the opportunity of losing even more spectacularly down the road. Ginsburg once said that dissents are written for a “future age”—meaning that dissents are supposed to help inspire the next generation to oppose the wrongs committed by the present court. But I believe Sotomayor’s flurry of end-of-term dissents suggests she doesn’t want to wait that long. The fire set by conservatives is raging right now, and Sotomayor’s opinions read like the ringing of an alarm bell. Her dissents serve to put the other branches of government on notice that the court is out of control.

Almost justice: Sotomayor answers questions during her confirmation 

hearings for the Supreme Court, July 2009. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)


Sotomayor’s willingness to expose what the court is doing has made her the most important liberal on the bench in recent years. Other liberals have seemed more interested in finding common ground and compromise with conservative justices or voting strategically to mitigate even greater harm, and there is value in those approaches. But Sotomayor is the one who can be relied on to point out the legal and moral failures of her conservative colleagues. She’s the one who puts progressive outrage into words.

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Next term, she will be more important than ever. With the retirement of Stephen Breyer in June, Sotomayor has become the senior liberal justice on the court. That status is important because, by Supreme Court convention, the justices responsible for assigning the task of writing opinions include the chief justice and the senior justice advocating for the opposing position. In cases where the court splits 6-3 along partisan lines, Sotomayor will either be writing the main dissent or assigning it to one of her colleagues.

That prerogative alone makes Sotomayor the anchor liberal in the judicial system; she’s essentially the “minority leader” of the judicial branch of government. But unlike elected Democrats or officials appointed by Democratic presidents, Sotomayor is not constrained by the latest polling projections or the media’s fascination with white folks who eat at diners. She’s not the most powerful liberal official in America, but she is among the most free. She can use her position to tell the truth about what is happening to our country, without regard to how she will be talked about on Fox News.

The role of truth teller is one she’s grown into over time. Before Covid, when the Supreme Court conducted all of its public business in person, in a room full of onlookers and reporters, justices would occasionally “dissent from the bench.” That means they would read aloud all or part of their objection to whatever ruling the court had issued to make sure people knew they disagreed. Sotomayor didn’t use this prerogative for the first five years of her tenure. But in 2014, she dissented from the bench in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, a case in which the majority ruled that Michigan’s ban on affirmative action didn’t violate the US Constitution’s equal protection clause. In her dissent, while making a positive case for affirmative action, Sotomayor directly questioned her conservative colleagues’ skepticism toward the policy and argued that they fundamentally misunderstood racism in society.

It was a bracing rebuke, so much so that the written version likely inspired Chief Justice John Roberts to write a concurrence that was really just a rebuttal of her argument.

Sotomayor didn’t stop with affirmative action. During oral arguments this past December in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the case the court would eventually use to revoke the right to an abortion, Sotomayor took advantage of the opening provided by her first question to lay into the court’s embrace of the GOP’s forced-birth orthodoxy at the expense of legal precedent. She started with statistics. She pointed out that over the past 30 years, 15 justices from all kinds of political backgrounds had supported the right to an abortion before fetal viability. She reminded listeners that the law at issue in Dobbs—a total ban on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation—was invented by Mississippi Republicans who, by their own admission, had designed the ban to take advantage of the new anti-abortion justices appointed by Donald Trump: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

Then she asked a question: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?”

Her question was a warning. The Supreme Court has no power to tax or to enforce; its power relies entirely on the public’s belief in its legitimacy. Sotomayor was warning the court that it was at risk of squandering the only currency it has.

Curve ball: Before she joined the court, there were few signs that Sotomayor, pictured throwing the first pitch at a Yankees game, would become a key liberal justice. (Getty Images)

While the corporate media portray Chief Justice Roberts as the man most concerned with the Supreme Court’s standing in the eyes of the public, his alleged concern has amounted to little more than a few year-end reports in which he pats himself on the back and tells the press the court is doing a good job. His approach reminds me of Kevin Bacon’s character at the end of Animal House, hysterically screaming “All is well!” while all hell breaks loose around him.

In practice, it is Sotomayor, not Roberts, who is most concerned with the institution’s legitimacy. We know this not only from her questions during the Dobbs hearing but from her actions: She is the one who, again and again, has been trying to stop the court from doing illegitimate things. Nowhere is this commitment to the restrained and transparent use of judicial power more evident than in her opposition to the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.”

“Shadow docket” is the now-infamous name that has been given to the set of cases for which the Supreme Court hears and grants emergency appeals. In the past, the shadow docket was used rarely, mainly for death penalty appeals—that is, for cases in which there is a true need for emergency intervention because the state is about to kill somebody. But during the Trump years, the court increasingly granted emergency relief to the administration’s cases, overruling lower courts that had tried to stop Trump’s illegal or unconstitutional policies.

Sotomayor was arguing against this use of the shadow docket before it was cool. Wolf v. Cook County was a 2020 case about a challenge to Trump’s updated “public charge” policy, which made it even easier than it already was to exclude low-income immigrants from this country. In its “emergency” shadow docket decision, the court ruled to allow Trump’s policy to move forward. Sotomayor wrote, “It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.” Sotomayor went on to accuse the court of “upend[ing] the normal appellate process” in order to put a “thumb on the scale” on the side of the administration.

This past March, in Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court used the shadow docket to summarily overrule new electoral maps proposed by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor and approved by the state’s own Supreme Court. In dissent, Sotomayor called her colleagues’ decision “unprecedented,” “extraordinary,” and also “unnecessary.”

Sotomayor reserved her deepest rebuke for when the court allowed Texas’s Senate Bill 8 to go into effect last September. That bill outlawed abortions after six weeks and deputized private bounty hunters to sue pregnant people and abortion providers, effectively abolishing the right to an abortion in that state—and the court approved it on the shadow docket. In dissent, Sotomayor wrote, “The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

Sotomayor’s dissent from these and other opinions are dense with statutory analysis and applications of the relevant precedents and legal rules. But she never hides the ball on what the conservatives are really doing; she doesn’t blunt the reality of what’s happening with an overreliance on legal jargon. She doesn’t play it for a laugh, and she doesn’t engage in faux comity. She writes like she doesn’t care if conservatives’ feelings are hurt on their way to the opera.

She is quotable by design. The New York University law professor Melissa Murray, a former clerk for Sotomayor, described her as relentless when it came to pruning her opinions of unhelpful legal jargon. “Her principle concern, beyond getting it right, was that opinions were explained in a way ordinary people will understand.”

Motley crew: Sotomayor and fellow Supreme Court justices Stephen Breyer, John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito attend Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. (Brooks Kraft LLC / Corbis via Getty Images)

The Bronx-born Sotomayor—she’s earned the appellation “Sonia from the block”—has been subjected to all the predictable dog-whistle insults people use to denigrate women in power, especially women of color. She’s been called “abrasive,” a “bully,” and “not that smart” over the course of her career. A number of the attacks launched against Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court, during her recent confirmation hearings were also deployed against Sotomayor, who was the first Latina nominated to the court. Many of the same Federalist Society pundits and conservative law professors who attacked Jackson this year also attacked Sotomayor when she was nominated by Barack Obama in 2009. Republicans and even some Democrats suggested that she had been nominated only because of her Hispanic heritage and that she wasn’t as qualified as other, white judges. There was a contingent of white men in particular who were apoplectic because Sotomayor was unashamed of her background and had suggested that her lived experiences might actually make her a better judge.

Obama shrugged off those attacks and stuck with her nomination, his first to the Supreme Court. The Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed Sotomayor by a vote of 68-31, which included nine votes from Republicans.

I don’t know that Obama or the rest of the country knew what they were getting in Sotomayor. In fact, her career leading up to the Supreme Court was full of jobs and titles that progressives consider to be demerits: She graduated from an elite law school, Yale, where she was an editor of its law review. She worked as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office under Robert Morgenthau. She went into private practice and represented multinational corporations. She was appointed to the federal bench by George H.W. Bush, and during her time as a trial court judge, she was not known as being particularly lenient in sentencing or easy on defense attorneys.

Sotomayor presents herself as a classic first-generation American Dream success story. Her autobiography is largely a tale of bootstraps and hard work, and she’s leaned into a wise-auntie public persona, even writing a number of children’s books.

But Sotomayor is a case study in not judging a book by its cover. There’s a famous legal-insider story about her, one retold by Irin Carmon in her excellent New York magazine profile of the justice. During her confirmation hearings, Sotomayor’s answers were careful and restrained; even her nail polish was muted in soft tones. But during a reception following her appointment, she asked President Obama if he noticed anything different about her. Then she flashed her nails, which were painted bright red: her true colors shining through.

Those colors are not necessarily ideological. Some justices show up to the court as zealots, committed to a certain ideology or method of constitutional interpretation, determined to shove their intellectual projects onto every case, regardless of the facts or problems at hand. Clarence Thomas, for instance, doesn’t believe that the federal government should have the power to do much of anything other than kill convicts and harass immigrants (I’m paraphrasing). Neil Gorsuch wants to destroy the administrative state (I wish I were paraphrasing more). These men are willing to ignore the practical impact of their decisions in furtherance of their ideological fever dreams. In the just-completed Supreme Court term, we saw the nihilism of that approach as the conservatives ignored the realities of climate change, gun violence, and health care for women, girls, and pregnant people.

Sotomayor takes a nearly opposite approach, focusing on the people involved in a dispute instead of on the ideological and political goals of the litigants. Cristian Farias, a legal journalist and longtime observer of the court, said that Sotomayor’s driving “ideology” was simply to make sure that everybody’s case gets access to the courts and a fair hearing. “All these [Supreme Court] cases that turn on arcane operations of law have real people behind them,” he explained. And while some justices seem to ignore that truth, “Sotomayor cares about the human impact of the law. She’s the people’s justice.”

Sotomayor’s direct style and substantive concern with real people harmed by the law comes together in a lot of her criminal justice decisions. The former prosecutor has been the most stalwart defender of the rights of the people against the excesses of the police since she joined the bench. In a 2016 case, Utah v. Strieff, Sotomayor dissented from a Thomas opinion in which the conservative majority allowed an illegal warrantless traffic stop to be deemed constitutional after the fact because the cop eventually found unpaid parking tickets. “Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language,” Sotomayor wrote. “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong.” Again, she is writing for the benefit of people out on these streets today—even going so far as to address them directly (“you”)—not law students sometime in the future.

Sotomayor has also been the most outspoken justice in recent years against the death penalty and the way the current ruling conservatives apply it. In a 2018 case, Irick v. Tennessee, Sotomayor dissented from the court’s denial of a stay of execution to a death row inmate who argued that the state’s cocktail of death would be excruciatingly painful. She described the likely “horrific” final moments of Irick’s life and wrote that if the government permitted this, “then we have stopped being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism.” In 2021’s Johnson v. Precythe, a case in which Ernest Johnson requested to be killed via firing squad rather than suffer the excruciating pain of a pentobarbital injection, Sotomayor called out Kavanaugh for his “empty gestures” in death penalty opinions.

Her most important dissent might be in the case U.S. v. Higgs, in which the Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings staying the execution of Dustin John Higgs. Some might remember that near the end of the Trump administration, Attorney General Bill Barr resumed the practice of federal executions, something the government hadn’t done in almost 20 years, initiating a killing spree by the Department of Justice. Sotomayor tried to get people to see what Trump and Barr were doing. In her dissent, she wrote that the federal government had executed three times as many people during the final six months of Trump’s term as it had in the previous six decades—and she listed the names of all the executed. She explained how the court had made a habit of ignoring credible appeals and even removing stays of execution granted by the lower courts. “This is not justice,” she concluded. “After waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully. When it did not, this Court should have. It has not. Because the Court continues this pattern today, I dissent.”

The only sitting justice to have served in a district attorney’s office is now frequently the only one willing to give voice to the last pleas of the condemned.

On the cusp: Sotomayor outside the Supreme Court following her investiture ceremony in September 2009. (Jewel Samad / AFP via Getty Images)

Sotomayor has yet to receive the mainstream media attention and “icon” status of the justice she’s most often compared to: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That’s despite the fact that Sotomayor writes in an approachable style, has appeared at many public-facing events, and, in many ways, is more progressive in her opinions than Ginsburg was.

Comparing people from different eras is generally best left to the realm of barroom sports debates. I have no horse in the race between judicial Billie Jean King and judicial Serena Williams. But there is one area where Sotomayor has clearly outdone her Hall of Fame former colleague: in her hiring of law clerks. Justices typically hire four clerks a year, and becoming a Supreme Court clerk is generally the capstone on a legal résumé, opening doors to academia, the bench, and high-dollar jobs in private practice. In fact, only three of the current justices have not clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and they are Thomas, Alito, and Sotomayor.

Ginsburg served on the Supreme Court for 27 years yet managed to hire only one African American clerk in all that time. It was a blind spot in her thinking, a demerit on her legacy, and it is a mistake Sotomayor has not repeated.

Sotomayor’s clerkship tree is large and diverse. David Lat, a longtime chronicler of Supreme Court clerks and the judicial process, told me, “Since joining the court in 2009, Justice Sotomayor has been the leader on the court in hiring diverse law clerks…. By my rough calculations, around a third of her clerks have been people of color—about twice the historical percentage for Supreme Court clerks generally. Her hires have included the first Native Hawaiian to clerk for the court [Kamaile Turcan], and the first Black woman to serve as the president of the Harvard Law Review [Imelme Umana].”

New York University’s Melissa Murray said that the justice also takes chances on people who don’t follow the traditional path of going to one of the country’s top law schools. One hire that stands out is Sparkle Sooknanan, who became the first-ever Supreme Court clerk from Brooklyn Law School when she was hired by Sotomayor in 2013

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Becoming Sotomayor: The justice as a baby with her mother and father (center); graduating from Yale Law School (right); and reading from her children’s book, Turning Pages: My Life Story (left). (left: Paul Morigi / Getty Images)

There is another aspect of Ginsburg’s legacy that people hope Sotomayor improves on: retirement. On the politics and culture website Lawyers, Guns & Money, Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado, has already called on Sotomayor to retire “no later than the summer of 2024” should Democrats retain control of the Senate in the upcoming midterms.

It is, sadly, not a crazy suggestion. Sotomayor is 68 years old and has lived with Type 1 diabetes since she was a child. As Covid continues to ravage our nation, everybody knows that she is at a higher risk, but not everybody cares. While Sotomayor has so far remained masked when she has appeared in person at Supreme Court hearings, Neil Gorsuch, who sits right next to her on the dais, could not be bothered to wear a mask for much of the past term or concern himself with the health of a colleague. Sotomayor is forced to work with Republicans, and their lack of decency could well diminish her life expectancy.

I think calls for Sotomayor to retire now are a tad premature. She’ll be 70 by the time the next presidential election rolls around, and even if a Republican should win it, absent accident or tragedy, we can expect Sotomayor to live to see the 2028 election, when she’ll be 74 (the age Thomas is now), or hang on until the 2032 election, when she’ll be 78.

But if Biden should win reelection in 2024 and have a Senate willing to let him pick federal judges, retirement could be the better part of valor. Sotomayor is an extraordinary voice, but her vote is the thing that is indispensable. She can’t let that vote fall into conservative hands, even if it means losing her voice a little earlier than she might like.

Sotomayor has long placed the people of this country over her personal ideology. When it comes to her retirement, Murray expects that she’ll continue on that path. “She will make a decision, but she will have no vanity about this. She understands that this is bigger than her.”

Until that time, Sotomayor may not be able to stop the injustice wrought by conservatives all by herself, but she can expose it. She can explain it. And she can inspire people to take it on—not in the far-off future, but in the here and now.


Elie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. His first book is the New York Times best-seller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution. He can be followed @ElieNYC.

How increasing administrative burdens and means testing in the US safety-net punishes the poor

Millions of Americans rely on safety-net programs such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Medicaid. In recent decades, these programs have been reformed with the aim of better targeting those most in need by creating rules and eligibility assessments. In new research. Ashley Fox, Wenhui Feng and Megan Reynolds find that the introduction of these rules has created substantial barriers and often reduced the enrolment of those who need the programs’ support the most. They argue that if we want needy individuals to access benefits, then we need to make it easy for them to do so by relaxing or removing the burdensome rules that serve as barriers to access.

The logic of “means-testing” in safety-net programs seems simple and straightforward – social spending should go towards those who need it and not to those who can afford to pay out of pocket. However, in our recent research, we largely find the opposite: that the nearly three-decade quest to better target benefits to only those most in need in the United States has ironically made benefits harder to access in ways that may systematically exclude those who need them the most.

While the principle that public spending should be targeted to those most in need sounds logical, in practice, means-testing social programs requires the development of an elaborate set of bureaucratic rules and procedures to determine eligibility, prove the need is involuntary and that the benefits are “deserved.” An emerging body of research has begun to shed light on the ways that these burdensome administrative rules add social costs to claiming benefits in ways that are counterproductive. We show how varying degrees of burdensome administrative rules in three of the US’s largest safety-net programs- cash assistance (aka, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF), food assistance (aka, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), and public health insurance (aka, Medicaid)- have been designed in ways that either restrict or enhance access.

How rules can curtail a program

Cash assistance (TANF) serves as a cautionary tale of how excessive rule burden can gut a program and increase the cost of claiming beyond a recipient’s willingness to pay. The US once had a vibrant cash assistance program- Aid for Families with Dependent Children. Millions of women and children living in poverty were kept afloat by the program. In 1996, these same women and children became the targets of social reform efforts that used racist dog-whistles to claim that “welfare queens” were living on the dole and needed to be disciplined into moving from welfare to work. The funding for the program was turned into a block grant that was given to states enabling them to essentially design their own program with little federal oversight. What emerged was a Frankenstein-like assortment of program rules that vary considerably from state to state. These rules include various types of work requirements, behavioral conditionalities and strict definitions of who is considered a member of a household. Enrollment in cash welfare plummeted.

Welfare reform also severed the previously integrated enrollment mechanisms between cash assistance, food assistance and public health insurance, as well as adding additional barriers to immigrants otherwise eligible for social services. Enrollment in these other programs began to fall as well as they became harder to access. However, whereas cash assistance got tougher to access, over time, policymakers have endeavored to make it easier for families in need to access food assistance and Medicaid by easing administrative burden.

Image credit: USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

We show how the introduction of program rules that affect learning costs (how easy it is to find out about a program and enroll), compliance costs (how easy it is to remain enrolled) and psychological costs (e.g., how stigmatizing it is access benefits) have affected program use by needy Americans over time (see Figure 1). We find that each program contained numerous rules that limit program access and impose substantial costs, though generalized cash assistance (classic welfare) remains the most burdensome with the greatest number or rules and lowest enrollment among the needy. We additionally find that rules that put the burden of proof on the individual to demonstrate their eligibility, rather than assuming they are eligible until proven otherwise (what we term “innocent until proven guilty”) reduces benefit uptake.

Relaxing rules has led to rising enrolment

To give a few concrete examples of program rules that can ease rule burden, many states have relaxed “asset tests” requiring extensive resource verification beyond documentation of income, as well as replacing stigmatizing paper “food stamps” with an electronic benefit card similar to a credit card and removing a requirement that applicants get fingerprinted. For public health insurance, states have begun allowing children and pregnant women to be enrolled on the spot with just a simple statement of income and allowing eligibility to be verified later as well using information from program participation in other areas to assume eligibility. These and other rules, including those that relax recertification requirements and promote continued coverage, have contributed to rising enrollment among low-income individuals across states over time in food assistance and Medicaid whereas enrollment in cash assistance, which has persisted in its rule burden over time, has stagnated and declined (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Trends in program participation in Medicaid, SNAP, TANF, and administrative rules

Previous research has found that individuals with the fewest resources face the highest burdens in claiming benefits, suggesting that those who are excluded may in fact be the most vulnerable. Paradoxically, in the quest to make sure that only those in need are accessing benefits, policymakers increase the chances of excluding those very same individuals.

Concerningly, policymakers in the United States are currently trying to replicate the experience with cash assistance by putting forward legislation that would block grant food assistance and public health assistance as well. Understanding how means testing produces rule burden can assist policymakers in considering ways to reverse the burden of proof required to access benefits, or even move away from means-testing towards more universalistic programs. The implications of this research suggest that if we want needy individuals to access benefits, we need to make it easy for them to do so by relaxing or removing burdensome rules that serve as barriers to access.

• This article is based on the paper, ‘The Effect of Administrative Burden on State Safety-Net Participation: Evidence from SNAP, TANF and Medicaid’, in Public Administration Review.

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Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

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About the authors

Ashley M. Fox – Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy
Ashley M. Fox is an Associate Professor of Public Administration and Policy at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. Her research focuses on comparative health politics of policy, inequality, and health and the effects of social policies on health outcomes. Her recent work explores variations in state safety-net generosity and the effects of administrative burden in safety-nets on program enrollment.

Wenhui Feng – Tufts University
Wenhui Feng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University. Her research investigates how state and local health departments shape policies and their effectiveness on individual health. She is primarily interested in policies that work towards the prevention of non-communicable diseases, with a focus on the feasibility and effectiveness of policies.

Megan M. Reynolds – University of Utah
Megan M. Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Utah. Her research examines health and health inequalities in order to understand processes of stratification and their consequences. She is particularly interested in the role of power, politics, and policy in influencing well-being and in how these factors condition the meaning of individual characteristics, such as nativity and gender, for health.