Are we screwed, p.25
Are We Screwed?, page 25
But Saba’s ambivalence toward political engagement came to an end the night she attended a Democratic meeting that her friend was hosting at her home in Iowa City. “I had kind of not been involved in politics for the past two or three years at college, so I thought ‘I’ll go check out this meeting and see what happens,’” she recalled. There were about thirty people. They talked spiritedly about the upcoming 2016 presidential election. Saba enjoyed herself. When the meeting was over, her friend came up to her with a proposition: would Saba be interested in applying for a campus organizer job with the liberal group MoveOn.org? “I think you’d be really good at it,” the friend said. Saba “didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, but I thought, ‘Why not?’”
The worldview that she brought to the position was typical of her generation. Like millions of other people her age, she was fed up with an economic system that operated as if making money were life’s only worthwhile pursuit. She had grown up witnessing the destructive consequences of this logic. The oil-driven invasion of Iraq was but one example, as was the 2008 financial collapse and the steady accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Saba knew that unless we transformed our means of generating wealth, her generation would suffer the consequences. “Our physical environment is getting damaged, and I think it comes from how closely our system is tied to the corporations,” she said. “I’m not saying that relationship needs to be completely dismantled, but I think there needs to be a lot more accountability.”
Saba shared the global worldview of many people her age. As someone who had grown up with intimate family connections to two continents, it would have been hard not to. She saw herself first and foremost as an American, but her identity ultimately transcended borders—and so did her perspective on the threats facing her future. Saba knew that the Middle East is much more complex and human than the terrorist training ground depicted in much mainstream media. But political leaders rarely acknowledge that reality. “When candidates are asked what they think is America’s biggest threat, a lot of the responses are ISIS and terrorism—things like that,” she said. She knew that the more accurate answer was the global threat of climate change. She longed for a leader who “takes the science seriously.”
To Saba, that was more important than the party they belonged to. Though she had supported Obama back in 2008 and considered herself to be a progressive, she shared the political independence of many people her age. She could never imagine voting for a Republican like Donald Trump. But she believed that for too long Democrats had been reluctant to stand up to corporate influence. Which is to say that when you really got down to it, she was more interested in social progress than partisan allegiances: “I think Millennials are seeing that the political system is not working in a lot of ways. It’s not working to help fulfill the human potential.” Often elections came down to two candidates who were more interested in gaining and holding on to power than in transforming society for the better: “We all have choices, but our choices are heavily influenced in unfair and disadvantaging ways.”
Those were some of the reasons Saba Hafeez decided in the summer of 2015 to do everything she could to get a seventy-three-year-old Democratic socialist senator from Vermont elected president. Most mainstream observers were shocked at the record numbers of Millennial supporters that Sanders ultimately won over to his campaign. But Saba knew something about people her age that many older people had yet to realize: that after growing up in a broken political and economic system, they badly wanted change. They were hungry for a leader willing to provide it. When that person came along, he gave them a platform to challenge the prevailing structures of our society—and to threaten the vested interests perpetuating them. Sanders helped turn her generation into a potent political force. He didn’t conjure this revolution out of nothing. He tapped into one that was already well underway. And though his campaign was eventually defeated, its radical ideals will persist without him.
Bernie Sanders entered the race for president without much fanfare. In April 2015 he simply sent out a short e-mail to his supporters: “I am writing to inform you that I will be a candidate for President of the United States. I ask for your support.” His statement was an indictment of our modern era. It touched directly on the themes that we’ve been exploring throughout this book. He attacked an economic system that valued “new wealth and income” for “the top 1%” more than societal progress. He argued that America must look outside its borders to confront the “peril of global climate change.” He declared that our political system was more beholden to “billionaires” and insiders than to the people it claimed to represent.2
The consensus among most observers was Sanders didn’t stand a chance against Clinton. “The 73-year-old, second-term senator faces long odds against [her] fund-raising might and name recognition,” read a story on Reuters.3 The New York Times agreed that “Mr. Sanders’s bid is considered a long shot.”4 CNN described him as an “unlikely candidate for the Democratic nomination.”5 Sanders didn’t even have the support of large left-leaning groups like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America—they had been trying to get Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to enter the race instead. Sanders was undeterred. “People should not underestimate me,” the self-described “democratic socialist” told the Associated Press. “The message that has resonated in Vermont is a message that can resonate all over this country.”6
By the summer it seemed that Sanders’s message was resonating with young people all over America. A poll from YouGov and the Economist conducted in July 2015 suggested that 44 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds supported him as the Democratic nominee. Clinton still appeared to have a slight lead among Millennials, with 45 percent support.7 But as the months went on, more and more young people seemed to defect to Sanders. In mid-October an NBC poll suggested this age cohort was twice as likely to support Sanders as Clinton: “[Her] rating among the group aged 19 to 29 has steadily fallen.”8 By early 2016, poll after poll was reaching the same conclusion: a righteously angry old man was killing it with Millennials. “I know I have some work to do, particularly with young people,” Clinton admitted.9
Clinton was certainly trying. She got Lena Dunham, the young creator of the New York–based TV show Girls, to campaign for her. Clinton guest-starred on an episode of Broad City. She got a Snapchat account. Yet in cities like Brooklyn, “whose name has become a global buzzword for everything young and cool,” Vice reported, Sanders was clearly leading among Millennials.10 It wasn’t difficult to understand why. As we saw in Chapter 2, Bradley Johnson moved to Brooklyn to become an artist instead of working in the tar sands because he desired more from life than simply a paycheck. When Sanders railed against “a fossil fuel industry whose greed has put short term profits ahead of climate change,”11 he tapped into a generational rejection of an economic system that treats money as society’s highest pursuit.
Sanders appealed to the global worldview of young people. This was evident in his views on climate change. While Clinton called global warming a “defining challenge” and promised to make America a “clean energy superpower,” her position on new fossil fuel projects was sometimes difficult to sort out. She came out against the Keystone XL pipeline, for instance, but also pushed for an expansion of natural gas and was unclear about future oil and gas drilling leases on public land.12 People like Phil Aroneanu (who, as we saw in Chapter 3, helped lead the successful campaign against Keystone XL) preferred the consistently global outlook of Sanders. The Vermont senator not only attacked Keystone XL, he deemed climate change the “single greatest threat facing our planet” and vowed to keep much of America’s oil, coal, and gas underground.13 In doing so, Sanders was rejecting the idea that the U.S. national interest is separate from the global interest. So it shouldn’t be surprising that after leaving 350.org, Phil Aroneanu took a leadership role in the Sanders campaign.
Young people also liked that Sanders had been a political independent for his entire career. Clinton made a big deal out of her connections and experience, the fact she’d been secretary of state, and her ability to get things done. But the flipside was that she was firmly entrenched in a partisan establishment. As we saw in Chapter 4, Millennials like Andrew Frank have become distrustful of our political system because they think it’s more concerned with partisan gain than with societal progress. Sanders’s disdain for party politics tapped right into that belief. Which helps explain why in Canada, where a surge of young people voted independently to topple Stephen Harper’s petrostate, “Sanders is more popular on … millennial Facebook feeds than cats and puppies combined,” according to Metro Views.14
Sanders wasn’t only rejecting our society—he campaigned on building a new one. Clinton did too, yet her vision of change was slow and incremental. She agreed with Sanders, for instance, that our economic system is too focused on short-term profits. Yet her solution was to tweak corporate law to reward “wealth creation for the long term.”15 As we saw in Chapter 5, though, the economic system that people like Chloe Maxmin desire is radically different from our current one. It’s much more akin to the “moral economy” described by Sanders, where social progress is valued just as much as financial returns. “As a world we are rich enough to … meet our needs and to protect the planet,” he said.16 After Chloe graduated from Harvard, she decided to intern on the Sanders campaign, seeing it as a “movement for a better future.”
The new America that Sanders wanted to build was in many ways more global than Clinton’s. The former secretary of state had years of foreign policy experience. She had connections all over the globe. Yet her focus was on the protection of American interests and security—on preventing nuclear material, for instance, from falling “into the wrong hands.” Sanders tapped into the global worldview that young people like Morgan Curtis and Erlend Knudsen brought to the Paris climate negotiations in Chapter 6. Not only did Sanders think climate change was a much more threatening issue than terrorism, he looked abroad to countries like Denmark for a new economic model that could better address it. His adherence to the borderless warnings of climate science led Morgan to add her name to a list of activists supporting his campaign.
Sanders didn’t just call himself a political independent, he proved it by building a new model of campaign finance. Whereas most of Clinton’s political contributions came from large corporate fund-raisers, Sanders’s fund-raising, which outpaced his rival’s at several points in the campaign, consisted mostly of small donations from regular people. His independence from the political establishment appealed to the type of young tech innovators whom we met in Chapter 7, who built “dozens of websites, tools, and apps” supporting his campaign, Politico wrote.17 But unlike tech leaders such as John Zimmer and Mark Zuckerberg who claimed inspiration from indigenous culture, Sanders hired a young native adviser, Tara Houska, to help him actually put native values into practice. “[He is] the only candidate who has shown a commitment to Indian Country,” wrote Gyasi Ross.18 Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is among his many indigenous supporters.
All this suggests that Sanders was tapping into a political and economic revolution that young people were leading even before he announced his candidacy for president. The reason he was able to reach so many different types of young people—from Brooklyn hipsters to Harvard activists, and from Muslim feminists to indigenous filmmakers—was that he gave voice to a generational anxiety at the heart of this revolution. “[It’s] the sense that the [leaders] who are currently in charge of making decisions that affect us are not being as effective as they can be,” said Joelle Gamble from a youth-led think tank known as the Roosevelt Institute. In 2016 she led a study of one thousand Millennials across the country and found that what united them was a distrust of the ruling class—a desire, she said, for “reform of who gets to rewrite the rules.”19
When you get down to it, that’s what all the struggles I’ve described in this book have really been about. Young people know that our political and economic system is fundamentally broken. They’ve seen the evidence their whole lives. They know that the most damning piece of it is accumulating in our atmosphere. They know that if we don’t make profound and immediate changes to our society, the survival of their entire generation could be at risk. And yet they see our leaders fighting against making those changes. They know that our leaders won’t have to live with the consequences. Sanders channeled that anger and frustration into a single focused movement. He was the vessel containing the radical values of a new generation. He proved just how powerful they could be.
The injustice at the heart of the Sanders campaign for president, the one he invoked over and over again, was that corporations are using their immense money and political influence to maximize their profits while leaving everybody else to suffer the consequences. This is particularly true for climate change. “Right now, we have an energy policy that is rigged to boost the profits of big oil companies like Exxon, BP, and Shell at the expense of average Americans,” Sanders said. “The wealthiest industry in the history of our planet has bribed politicians into complacency in the face of climate change.”20 Was it hyperbole? A bit. But I knew firsthand how much truth it contained.
I knew because oil lobbyist Tom Corcoran had explained to me how political and economic power really works over coffee at the most exclusive Republican hangout in America. I had been in Washington to interview the lobbyists and politicians we met in chapters 3 and 4. I’d already spoken to Corcoran for an earlier story, and so when I told him I was coming to town, he invited me to spend a Monday morning with him at the Capitol Hill Club. He had served four terms as a Republican congressperson for Illinois in the 1970s and 1980s. His latest job was as the leader of a lobbying group known as the Center for North American Energy Security, which was, he later explained, funded “by all the major oil and pipeline companies.”21
We met outside a stately white building that for over sixty years had been a “refined and elegant” hangout for presidents, vice presidents, governors, congresspersons, and “influential Republicans everywhere,” according to its website. The fossil fuel billionaire David Koch had hosted a party here just a few months earlier.
“How was your trip to Washington?” asked Corcoran, who was in his early seventies when we met. “Come on, let’s go inside.”
As we walked into the Capitol Hill Club, it was hard to miss the wood-carved elephants—the official GOP mascot—flanking the entrance. Beyond them, in the front lobby, was a large painted portrait of George W. Bush. I followed Corcoran past a shoeshine station, then down one floor to the Auchincloss Grill, which resembled a cross between a sports bar, a Legion hall, and a rich friend’s dad’s basement den.
What I wanted to learn from Corcoran was how much influence the corporations that he helped represent actually have on Capitol Hill. I wanted to know whether companies like ExxonMobil really are rigging our system in their favor, if they are using their power to remove any restrictions on their profits, and in so doing, if they are blocking our shift to a safer and more stable future.
According to Corcoran, it was all true, but he would never describe it the way I just did. To him, what is good for Exxon is also good for America. So when fossil fuel companies write the rules, it means our society is working exactly as it should. As we sipped our coffees, he led me through an example to show exactly what he meant.
Several years earlier Congress had made one of the first attempts in U.S. history to limit the use of high-polluting fossil fuels. These were the worst of the worst, stuff like tar sands from up in Canada. It did so by proposing something known as a “low carbon fuel standard.” First adopted by California, the standard imposed restrictions on road fuels that have a particularly bad contribution to global warming, while encouraging clean energy solutions that don’t. If enacted on a national level, it could be equal to taking 30 million cars off the road, according to research once cited by Obama. It could signal “the end of the petroleum age and the beginning of the low-carbon fuel age,” the Natural Resources Defense Council said.22
Corcoran and his allies quickly realized that such legislation was an unacceptable threat to the business that was making them rich. The intent of the law, after all, was to help create an economy where protecting the planet was valued as much as financial returns. The companies that Corcoran helped represent—oil and gas behemoths like Chevron and Exxon—knew their business model was the exact opposite, that if they were ever held financially accountable for all the greenhouse gases they released into the atmosphere, then they would no longer be profitable. “Once we’d learned about [the law], we worked against it,” Corcoran said.23 Rather than help build a less destructive future, they chose to reap profits instead.
Corcoran was soft-spoken and friendly. He’d served three terms in Congress. He didn’t strike me as an immoral person, yet his actions were literally threatening my future. How did he justify them? A story he told me about his upbringing in the Midwest appeared to offer a clue. Corcoran was born in 1939 in the tiny rural community of Ottawa, Illinois. Growing up, he rode a yellow school bus each day past farmers’ fields. The oil powering that bus, Corcoran later realized, was the “lifeblood” of America—it was what made the country powerful and free. Oil helped “people do what they want,” he saw.24
