The Bradlow Report — 10 February 2019
10 February 2019
Volume 1, Issue 2
A couple years ago, I helped launch a city-wide organization in my city of Somerville. By the end of the year, we achieved a super-majority of our organization’s candidates on the city council, which caught the attention of local and some national press. I missed a lot of this first year of work while I was focused on field research for my dissertation in São Paulo and Johannesburg. But I was proud to have helped get the organization off the ground, and immediately jumped back in upon my return to the US.
Before the formal launch of the organization, we held three preparatory meetings. One was to discuss the potential structure of the organization. Another was on the grassroots organizing strategy for the organization. The third meeting was to deliberate over the possible issues that should be the focus of the organization.
This last meeting ended up being the only one that generated any real spark of contention. Everyone wanted to emphasize that their issue was the most important. It did not take long for us to realize that we needed to allow room for people to work on their pet issues — housing, labor, climate change, immigration, etc — while building the organization on the basis of an encompassing narrative. If we wanted our organization to grow strong enough to be able to achieve results on any of these issues, we needed to organize around that larger narrative.
I wrote about the 2017 municipal election results in Somerville for the Massachusetts political newsletter, CommonWealth.
“Somerville’s turn to ‘sewer socialism’: City election dominated by left-leaning wave”
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/opinion/somervilles-turn-sewer-socialism/
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This story brings me to the new global politics around climate change that have emerged over the past few months in wealthy countries. In France, the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement first coalesced around anger at the imposition of gasoline tax hike. The movement took the name from the yellow vests that all French drivers are apparently required to have in their car in case they get into an emergency. The tax was intended to be a first step for France to realize its commitments in the Paris Climate Accord. Residents of smaller cities, towns, and rural villages predominated in this loosely-organized movement. The protests continue, even though President Emmanuel Macron has offered some concessions. It seems clear that while the gasoline tax was the immediate spark for the protests, the grievances that perpetuate the movement are many and sometimes contradictory.
French geographer Christophe Guilluy has been documenting the conditions that have given rise to the gilets jaunes, and the first English translation of his work was published in January, Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France. The basic argument is simple (and written in an aggressive, polemic style). The economic and social life of the peripheries of large cities, and smaller towns and villages have become totally disconnected from the main economic and political centers of the country. None moreso than the great citadel of Paris. Those rich in economic and cultural capital, Guilluy suggests, have walled themselves into a feelgood, cosmopolitan fortress surrounded by growing malaise and resentment.
When Macron made his first move on climate change policy, he took what has become the now-paradigmatic issue concern of bourgeois liberals — the environment — and doubled down on its reactionary class politics. The political reaction — the gilets jaunes — represented the deepening of the social, cultural, and economic polarization that Guilluy has been documenting over the past two decades.
I wrote into the Financial Times in December, shortly after the protest began, arguing that the gilets jaunes protests, “represent a failing grade for [Macron’s] “radical centrist” politics. His approach has only deepened anti-elite anger and, far from saving the planet, has increased the fundamentally political threats to its survival.”
“Self-styled global defender of the Paris agreement is facing blowback”
https://www.ft.com/content/de9421d4-f7f5-11e8-8b7c-6fa24bd5409c
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In the FT letter, I pointed to an alternative approach to climate change gaining currency on both sides of the Atlantic: the Green New Deal. The advantage of this larger narrative, I argued, is that it “would bind workers and climate activists together in a common political project.”
This week New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, increasingly known simply as AOC, and my state’s junior senator Ed Markey, introduced a framing resolution for a Green New Deal. Vermont Senator and likely presidential candidate Bernie Sanders plans to release legislation on the basis of this resolution in the next couple of months, according to a report by Osita Nwanevu in the New Yorker.
Though the details are still coming together, what seems clear about the Green New Deal approach is that it leads with the larger narrative. It aims to fuse the elements of a “just transition” — eg. decoupling health care from work and establishing it a human right; guaranteeing work and housing; etc. — to a carbon-free future.
Carbon taxes appear to be necessary (or at least useful), but, pace Macron, they are clearly an insufficient intervention to actually address our warming planet. The Green New Deal approach explodes the narrow “issue” of climate change to something far beyond technical changes to prices. As The Economist’s “Free Exchange” columnist wrote this past week, “For the moment, economists have lost the chance to lead the fight against climate change.”
Instead, the Green New Deal approach internalizes a lesson that anyone who wants to build organizations with power eventually has to learn. It’s all about building the majoritarian coalitions that can make policy a reality. In short, this is about politics. ///