More than 3 billion phone coordinates collected by a US data broker expose the detailed movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany—and the Pentagon is powerless to stop it.

 https://www.wired.com/story/phone-data-us-soldiers-spies-nuclear-germany/?utm_source=twitter&mbid=social_twitter&utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=owned&utm_medium=social

Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking US Soldiers and Spies to Nuclear Vaults and Brothels in Germany

More than 3 billion phone coordinates collected by a US data broker expose the detailed movements of US military and intelligence workers in Germany—and the Pentagon is powerless to stop it.

 

 

Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron

21–27 minutes

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Nearly every weekday morning, a device leaves a two-story home near Wiesbaden, Germany, and makes a 15-minute commute along a major autobahn. By around 7 am, it arrives at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne—the US Army’s European headquarters and a key hub for US intelligence operations.

The device stops near a restaurant before heading to an office near the base that belongs to a major government contractor responsible for outfitting and securing some of the nation’s most sensitive facilities.

For roughly two months in 2023, this device followed a predictable routine: stops at the contractor’s office, visits to a discreet hangar on base, and lunchtime trips to the base’s dining facility. Twice in November of last year, it made a 30-minute drive to the Dagger Complex, a former intelligence and NSA signals processing facility. On weekends, the device could be traced to restaurants and shops in Wiesbaden.

The individual carrying this device likely isn’t a spy or high-ranking intelligence official. Instead, experts believe, they’re a contractor who works on critical systems—HVAC, computing infrastructure, or possibly securing the newly built Consolidated Intelligence Center, a state-of-the-art facility suspected to be used by the National Security Agency.

Whoever they are, the device they’re carrying with them everywhere is putting US national security at risk.

A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US companies legally collecting digital advertising data are also providing the world a cheap and reliable way to track the movements of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, from their homes and their children’s schools to hardened aircraft shelters within an airbase where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.

A collaborative analysis of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based data broker provides extraordinary insight into the daily routines of US service members. The findings also provide a vivid example of the significant risks the unregulated sale of mobile location data poses to the integrity of the US military and the safety of its service members and their families overseas.

We tracked hundreds of thousands of signals from devices inside sensitive US installations in Germany. That includes scores of devices within suspected NSA monitoring or signals-analysis facilities, more than a thousand devices at a sprawling US compound where Ukrainian troops were being being trained in 2023, and nearly 2,000 others at an air force base that has crucially supported American drone operations.

A device likely tied to an NSA or intelligence employee broadcast coordinates from inside a windowless building with a metal exterior known as the “Tin Can,” which is reportedly used for NSA surveillance, according to agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Another device transmitted signals from within a restricted weapons testing facility, revealing its zig-zagging movements across a high-security zone used for tank maneuvers and live munitions drills.

We traced these devices from barracks to work buildings, Italian restaurants, Aldi grocery stores, and bars. As many as four devices that regularly pinged from Ramstein Air Base were later tracked to nearby brothels off base, including a multistory facility called SexWorld.

Experts caution that foreign governments could use this data to identify individuals with access to sensitive areas; terrorists or criminals could decipher when US nuclear weapons are least guarded; or spies and other nefarious actors could leverage embarrassing information for blackmail.

“The unregulated data broker industry poses a clear threat to national security,” says Ron Wyden, a US senator from Oregon with more than 20 years overseeing intelligence work. “It is outrageous that American data brokers are selling location data collected from thousands of brave members of the armed forces who serve in harms’ way around the world.”

Wyden approached the US Defense Department in September after initial reporting by BR and netzpolitik.org raised concerns about the tracking of potential US service members. DoD failed to respond. Likewise, Wyden's office has yet to hear back from members of US president Joe Biden's National Security Council, despite repeated inquiries. The NSC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“There is ample blame to go around,” says Wyden, “but unless the incoming administration and Congress act, these kinds of abuses will keep happening, and they'll cost service members' lives.”

The Oregon senator also raised the issue earlier this year with the Federal Trade Commission, following an FTC order that imposed unprecedented restrictions against a US company it accused of gathering data around “sensitive locations.” Douglas Farrar, the FTC's director of public affairs, declined a request to comment.

WIRED can now exclusively report, however, that the FTC is on the verge of fulfilling Wyden's request. An FTC source, granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, says the agency is planning to file multiple lawsuits soon that will formally recognize US military installations as protected sites. The source adds that the lawsuits are in keeping with years' worth of work by FTC Chair Lina Khan aimed at shielding US consumers—including service members—from harmful surveillance practices.

Before a targeted ad appears on an app or website, third-party software often embedded in apps called software development kits transmit information about their users to data brokers, real-time bidding platforms, and ad exchanges—often including location data. Data brokers often will collect that data, analyze it, repackage it, and sell it.

In February of 2024, reporters from BR and Netzpolitik.org obtained a free sample of this kind of data from Datastream Group, a Florida-based data broker. The dataset contains 3.6 billion coordinates—some recorded at millisecond intervals—from up to 11 million mobile advertising IDs in Germany over what the company says is a 59-day span from October through December 2023.

Mobile advertising IDs are unique identifiers used by the advertising industry to serve personalized ads to smartphones. These strings of letters and numbers allow companies to track user behavior and target ads effectively. However, mobile advertising IDs can also reveal much more sensitive information, particularly when combined with precise geolocation data.

In total, our analysis revealed granular location data from up to 12,313 devices that appeared to spend time at or near at least 11 military and intelligence sites, potentially exposing crucial details like entry points, security practices, and guard schedules—information that, in the hands of hostile foreign governments or terrorists, could be deadly.

Our investigation uncovered 38,474 location signals from up to 189 devices inside Büchel Air Base, a high-security German installation where as many as 15 US nuclear weapons are reportedly stored in underground bunkers. At Grafenwöhr Training Area, where thousands of US troops are stationed and have trained Ukrainian soldiers on Abrams tanks, we tracked 191,415 signals from up to 1,257 devices.

At Lucius D. Clay Kaserne, the US Army’s European headquarters, we identified 74,968 location signals from as many as 799 devices, including some at the European Technical Center, once the NSA’s communication hub in Europe.Courtesy of OpenMapTiles

In Wiesbaden, home to the US Army’s European headquarters at Lucius D. Clay Kaserne, 74,968 location signals from as many as 799 devices were detected—some originating from sensitive intelligence facilities like the European Technical Center, once the NSA’s communication hub in Europe, and newly built intelligence operations centers.

At Ramstein Air Base, which supports some US drone operations, 164,223 signals from nearly 2,000 devices were tracked. That included devices tracked to Ramstein Elementary and High School, base schools for the children of military personnel.

Of these devices, 1,326 appeared at more than one of these highly sensitive military sites, potentially mapping the movements of US service members across Europe’s most secure locations.

The data is not infallible. Mobile ad IDs can be reset, meaning multiple IDs can be assigned to the same device. Our analysis found that, in some instances, devices were assigned more than 10 mobile ad IDs.

The location data’s precision at the individual device level can also be inconsistent. By contacting several people whose movements were revealed in the dataset, the reporting collective confirmed that much of the data was highly accurate—identifying work commutes and dog walks of individuals contacted. However, this wasn’t always the case. One reporter whose ID appears in the dataset found that it often placed him a block away from his apartment and during times when he was out of town. A study from NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence found that “quantity overshadows quality” in the data broker industry and that, on average, only up to 60 percent of the data surveyed can be considered precise.

According to its website, Datastream Group appears to offer “internet advertising data coupled with hashed emails, cookies, and mobile location data.” Its listed datasets include niche categories like boat owners, mortgage seekers, and cigarette smokers. The company, one of many in a multibillion-dollar location-data industry, did not respond to our request for comment about the data it provided on US military and intelligence personnel in Germany, where the US maintains a force of at least 35,000 troops, according to the most recent estimates.

Defense Department officials have known about the threat that commercial data brokers pose to national security since at least 2016, when Mike Yeagley, a government contractor and technologist, delivered a briefing to senior military officials at the Joint Special Operations Command compound in Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg), North Carolina, about the issue. Yeagley’s presentation aimed to show how commercially available mobile data—already pervasive in conflict zones like Syria—could be weaponized for pattern of life analysis.

Midway through the presentation, Yeagley decided to raise the stakes. “Well, here’s the behavior of an ISIS operator,” he tells WIRED, recalling his presentation. “Let me turn the mirror around—let me show you how it works for your own personnel.” He then displayed data revealing phones as they moved from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and MacDill Air Force Base in Florida—critical hubs for elite US special operations units. The devices traveled through transit points like Turkey before clustering in northern Syria at a seemingly abandoned cement factory near Kobane, a known ISIS stronghold. The location he pinpointed was a covert forward operating base.

Yeagley says he was quickly escorted to a secured room to continue his presentation behind closed doors. There, officials questioned him on how he had obtained the data, concerned that his stunt had involved hacking personnel or unauthorized intercepts.

The data wasn’t sourced from espionage but from unregulated commercial brokers, he explained to the concerned DOD officials. “I didn’t hack, intercept, or engineer this data,” he told them. “I bought it.”

Now, years later, Yeagley remains deeply frustrated with the DODs inability to control the situation. What WIRED, BR, and Netzpolitik.org are now reporting is “very similar to the alarms we raised almost 10 years ago,” he says, shaking his head. “And it doesn’t seem like anything’s changed.”

US law requires the director of national intelligence to provide “protection support” for the personal devices of “at risk” intelligence personnel who are deemed susceptible to “hostile information collection activities.” But which personnel meet this criteria is unclear, as is the extent of the protections beyond periodic training and advice. The location data we acquired demonstrates, regardless, that commercial surveillance is far too pervasive and complex to be reduced to individual responsibility.

Biden’s outgoing director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, did not respond to a request for comment.

A report declassified by Haines last summer acknowledges that US intelligence agencies had purchased a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” about US citizens from commercial data brokers, adding that “in the wrong hands,” the data could “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.” The report, which contains numerous redactions, notes that, while the US government "would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times,” smartphones, connected cars, and web tracking have all made this possible “without government participation.”

Mike Rogers, the Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for Adam Smith, the committee's ranking Democrat, said Smith was unavailable to discuss the matter, busy negotiating a must-pass bill to fund the Pentagon's policy priorities next year.

Jack Reed and Roger Wicker, the leading Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, respectively, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Inquiries placed with House and Senate leaders and top lawmakers on both congressional intelligence committees have gone unanswered.

The DOD and the NSA declined to answer specific questions related to our investigation. However, DOD spokesperson Javan Rasnake says that the Pentagon is aware that geolocation services could put personnel at risk and urged service members to remember their training and adhere strictly to operational security protocols. “Within the USEUCOM region, members are reminded of the need to execute proper OPSEC when conducting mission activities inside operational areas,” Rasnake says, using the shorthand for operational security.

An internal Pentagon presentation obtained by the reporting collective, though, claims that not only is the domestic data collection likely capable of revealing military secrets, it is essentially unavoidable at the personal level, service members’ lives being simply too intertwined with the technology permitting it. This conclusion closely mirrors the observations of Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court, who in landmark privacy cases within the past decade described cell phones as being a “pervasive and insistent part of daily life” and that owning one was “indispensable to participation in modern society.”

The presentation, which a source says was delivered to high-ranking general officers, including the US Army’s chief information officer, warns that despite promises from major ad tech companies, “de-anonymization” is all but trivial given the widespread availability of commercial data collected on Pentagon employees. The document emphasizes that the caches of location data on US individuals is a “force protection issue,” likely capable of revealing troop movements and other highly guarded military secrets.

While instances of blackmail inside the Pentagon have seen a sharp decline since the Cold War, many of the structural barriers to persistently surveilling Americans have also vanished. In recent decades, US courts have repeatedly found that new technologies pose a threat to privacy by enabling surveillance that, “in earlier times, would have been prohibitively expensive," as the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals noted in 2007.

In an August 2024 ruling, another US appeals court disregarded claims by tech companies that users who “opt in” to surveillance were actually “informed” and doing so “voluntarily,” declaring the opposite is clear to “anyone with a smartphone.” The internal presentation for military staff presses that adversarial nations can gain access to advertising data with ease, using it to exploit, manipulate, and coerce military personnel for purposes of espionage.

Patronizing sex workers, whether legal in a foreign country or not, is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The penalties can be severe, including forfeiture of pay, dishonorable discharge, and up to one year of imprisonment. But the ban on solicitation is not merely imposed on principle alone, says Michael Waddington, a criminal defense attorney who specializes in court-marial cases. “There’s a genuine danger of encountering foreign agents in these establishments, which can lead to blackmail or exploitation,” he says.

“This issue is particularly concerning given the current geopolitical climate. Many US servicemembers in Europe are involved in supporting Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion,” Waddington says. “Any compromise of their integrity could have serious implications for our operations and national security.”

When it comes to jeopardizing national security, even data on low-level personnel can pose a risk, says Vivek Chilukuri, senior fellow and program director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Before joining CNAS, Chilukuri served in part as legislative director and tech policy advisor to US senator Michael Bennet on the Senate Intelligence Committee and previously worked at the US State Department, specializing in countering violent extremism.

"Low-value targets can lead to high-value compromises," Chilukuri says. "Even if someone isn't senior in an organization, they may have access to highly sensitive infrastructure. A system is only as secure as its weakest link." He points out that if adversaries can target someone with access to a crucial server or database, they could exploit that vulnerability to cause serious damage. “It just takes one USB stick plugged into the right device to compromise an organization.”

It’s not just individual service members who are at risk—entire security protocols and operational routines can be exposed through location data. At Büchel Air Base, where the US is believed to have stored an estimated 10 to 15 B61 nuclear weapons, the data reveals the daily activity patterns of devices on the base, including when personnel are most active and, more concerningly, potentially when the base is least populated.

Overview of the Air Mobility Command ramp at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.

Photograph: Timm Ziegenthaler/Stocktrek Images; Getty Images

Büchel has 11 protective aircraft shelters equipped with hardened vaults for nuclear weapons storage. Each vault, which is located in a so-called WS3, or Weapons Storage and Security System, can hold up to four warheads. Our investigation traced precise location data for as many as 40 cellular devices that were present in or near these bunkers.

The patterns we could observe from devices at Büchel go far beyond just understanding the working hours of people on base. In aggregate, it's possible to map key entry and exit points, pinpointing frequently visited areas, and even tracing personnel to their off-base routines. For a terrorist, this information could be a gold mine—an opportunity to identify weak points, plan an attack, or target individuals with access to sensitive areas.

This month, German authorities arrested a former civilian contractor employed by the US military on allegations of offering to pass sensitive information about American military operations in Germany to Chinese intelligence agencies.

In April, German authorities arrested two German-Russian nationals accused of scouting US military sites for potential sabotage, including allegedly arson. One of the targeted locations was the US Army's Grafenwöhr Training Area in Bavaria, a critical hub for US military operations in Europe that spans 233 square kilometers.

At Grafenwöhr, WIRED, BR, and Netzpolitik.org could track the precise movements from up to 1,257 devices. Some devices could even be observed zigzagging through Range 301, an armored vehicle course, before returning to nearby barracks.

Our investigation found 38,474 location signals from up to 189 devices inside Büchel Air Base, around a dozen US nuclear weapons are reportedly stored.Courtesy of OpenMapTiles

A senior fellow at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and head of its data brokerage research project, Justin Sherman also leads Global Cyber Strategies, a firm specializing in cybersecurity and tech policy. In 2023, he and his coauthors at Duke secured $250,000 in funding from the United States Military Academy to investigate how easy it is to purchase sensitive data about military personnel from data brokers. The results were alarming: They were able to buy highly sensitive, nonpublic, individually identifiable health and financial data on active-duty service members, without any vetting.

“It shows you how bad the situation is,” Sherman says, explaining how they geofenced requests to specific special operations bases. “We didn’t pretend to be a marketing firm in LA. We just wanted to see what the data brokers would ask.” Most brokers didn’t question their requests, and one even offered to bypass an ID verification check if they paid by wire.

During the study, Sherman helped draft an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that requires the Defense Department to ensure that highly identifiable individual data shared with contractors cannot be resold. He found the overall impact of the study underwhelming, however. “The scope of the industry is the problem,” he says. “It’s great to pass focused controls on parts of the ecosystem, but if you don’t address the rest of the industry, you leave the door wide open for anyone wanting location data on intelligence officers.”

Efforts by the US Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation have been stalled for the better part of a decade. The latest effort, known as the American Privacy Rights Act, failed to advance in June after GOP leaders threatened to scuttle the bill, which was significantly weakened before being shelved.

Another current privacy bill, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, seeks to ban the US government from purchasing data on Americans that it would normally need a warrant to obtain. While the bill would not prohibit the sale of commercial location data altogether, it would bar federal agencies from using those purchases to circumvent constitutional protections upheld by the Supreme Court. Its fate rests in the hands of House and Senate leaders, whose negotiations are private.

“The government needs to stop subsidizing what is now for good reason one of the world's least popular industries,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “There are a lot of members of Congress who take seriously the severe threats to privacy and national security posed by data brokers, but we've seen many actions by congressional leaders that only furthers the problem. There shouldn't need to be a body count for these people to take action.”

Joe Did That [newyorker]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/04/bidenomics-is-starting-to-transform-america-why-has-no-one-noticed

Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?

The full effects of the President’s economic policies won’t be felt for years. That might be too late for Kamala Harris and other Democrats.

By Nicholas Lemann

October 28, 2024

Among Joe Biden’s afflictions and miseries, his wormwood and gall, there are the insults (about his diminished capacities), and then there are the compliments unpaid (about his achievements). We are exposed to more of the first, but it seems that to him the second are more painful. In his first interview after he withdrew as the Democratic Presidential nominee, Biden—wounded, proud, self-pitying, defiant—said, by way of defending his record, “No one thought we could get done, including some of my own people, what we got done. One of the problems is, we knew all the things we did were going to take a little time to work their way through. So now people are realizing, ‘Oh, that highway. Oh, that . . .’ ” He trailed off for a moment and then recovered. “The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying ‘Joe Did It.’ ” He ended this with a bitter chuckle. Biden isn’t wrong. Objectively, and improbably, he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt.

In the early weeks of 2021, very few people saw Biden as the obvious winner in the large field of potential candidates for the 2024 Democratic nomination. His victory over Donald Trump had not been overwhelming. The Democrats had lost seats in the House even while maintaining a narrow majority, and got to fifty votes in the Senate only after two runoff elections in Georgia broke their way. Then, with nothing close to a mandate, Biden passed domestic legislation that will generate government spending of at least five trillion dollars, spread across a wide range of purposes, in every corner of the country. He has also redirected many of the federal government’s regulatory agencies in ways that will profoundly affect American life. On Biden’s watch, the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.

All of this doesn’t represent merely a hodgepodge of actions. There is as close to a unifying theory as one can find in a sweeping set of government policies. Almost all the discussion of “Bidenomics”—by focussing on short-term fluctuations of national metrics such as growth, the inflation rate, and unemployment, with the aim of determining the health of the economy—misses the point. Real Bidenomics upends a set of economic assumptions that have prevailed in both parties for most of the past half century. Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. His approach to combatting climate change involves no carbon taxes or credits—another major departure, not just from his predecessors but also from the policies of many other countries. His Administration has been far more aggressive than previous ones in taking antitrust actions against big companies.

What would you call these policies? One apt label might be “post-neoliberal,” a term that does not resonate at all with the public. Another way of thinking about Biden’s approach is through terminology devised by the political scientist Jacob Hacker: it rejects redistribution as a guiding liberal principle, in favor of “predistribution,” an effort to transform the economy in a way that makes redistribution less necessary. Predistribution entails understanding the economy as something that structures the balance of power among institutions, rather than as a natural phenomenon that must be managed in order to lessen its harmful effects on individuals. So Bidenomics has overturned a number of unwritten rules that you previously had to follow if you wanted to be taken seriously as a policymaker: economic regulation is usually a bad idea; governments should balance their budgets, except during recessions and depressions; subsidizing specific industries never works; unions are a mixed blessing, because they don’t always promote economic efficiency; government should not try to help specific regions of the country or sectors of the economy.

At least in domestic affairs, nobody makes policy without thinking about politics. One grand ambition behind all the Biden economic initiatives is to usher in a political realignment that would make the Democrats competitive again in the more sparsely populated parts of the country, which have disproportionate political power. The idea is that Americans are not as motivated as you might think by notions of “opportunity” and “mobility”—that such liberal rhetoric has limited appeal among people who want to live safely and securely in the communities where they grew up, surrounded by strong institutions that are not subject to relentless economic and social disruption. (According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, ninety-two per cent of Americans say that financial stability is more important to them than upward mobility.) What people see happening around them matters far more than what the latest statistics tell us about the state of the economy. As Elizabeth Wilkins, who worked in the Biden White House, told me, “It’s national G.D.P. numbers versus how people feel about their lives, their families, their communities. It’s their job, the jobs of the people around them, what those jobs pay—not the aggregate numbers. We fully embraced that in our policy orientation.” And that meant shoring up specific places and institutions as a primary political strategy.

The irony of Bidenomics is the vast gulf between its scale—measured in money and in the number of projects that it has set in motion—and its political impact, which is essentially zero, even though a major part of its rationale is political. It has become a standard talking point of the engineers of Bidenomics that it will take at least five years, maybe ten, possibly even longer, for the public to understand its effects. “That’s the way it was with the New Deal,” Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving aides, said. “It wasn’t just three or four years of new programs. It was leveraged for twenty or thirty years into the future.” But the short-term politics worked out a lot better for Franklin Roosevelt; he carried all but two states in his first reëlection campaign. There is little evidence that the Democrats will be similarly rewarded in 2024. Only late in the race, when she was spending much of her time in the Midwest, did Kamala Harris begin speaking regularly about Biden’s major economic initiatives. It’s unclear how committed to them she will be if she becomes President. Trump has promised to repeal many of them. Still, President Biden can rest assured that many signs are being put up. They just don’t say “Joe Did It.” They say “Investing in America.”

Over the summer, I accompanied two Biden Cabinet members, Julie Su, the acting Secretary of Labor, and Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, as they travelled around the country promoting the Administration’s projects. These visits took place away from the coasts, mainly in small towns. Watching the Biden officials in action made me feel like a time traveller transported back to the social-realist days of the thirties and forties. At every stop, it seemed, we’d come upon a tall chain-link fence and drive through an open gate, past a guardhouse, and then down a long, lonely road leading to a factory. All around would be forklifts, cranes, pickup trucks, huge metal sheds, silos, and lengths of pipe so wide that you could stand up inside them.

On a Friday morning in July, I went to Fort Valley, Georgia, the seat of Peach County, to watch Su promote a new factory that will build electric school buses. If the over-all goals of Bidenomics sound abstract, this project makes for a good concrete example, because it unites all the major ideas. Fort Valley is a majority-Black town in a rural swing county, in a historically Republican state that the Democrats have targeted. The biggest business in town is the Blue Bird Corporation, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of school buses. During the next five years, nearly a billion dollars in grants will be awarded to dozens of school districts nationwide through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Program, some of which will go toward the purchase of Blue Bird’s electric buses, and Blue Bird will receive eighty million dollars from the Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In essence, the Administration is generously funding a private business. Because the money will go to electric vehicles, the plan is part of both the transition to clean energy and the Administration’s project of bringing manufacturing back to the American heartland—rather than letting it happen, in particular, in China. And Blue Bird, for the first time in its ninety-seven-year history, has coöperated with its employees’ effort to unionize, a development that aligns with Biden’s support for unions.

For the event in Fort Valley, there was a temporary canopy to protect the audience from the summer sun, a few rows of folding chairs, a makeshift podium in front of a yellow school bus, and “Investing in America” signs posted at every possible location. The mayor, Jeffery Lundy, opened the event by saying that he was “excited and ecstatic” about the new plant. He thanked the federal government, the Blue Bird Corporation, and God, and ended by quoting a few lines of Scripture. Then came Yvonne Brooks, the president of the Georgia A.F.L.-C.I.O. Finally, Su, who has a brisk, cheerful charm, took the podium and said that the plant would help solve the climate crisis, create jobs for the local community, and give schoolchildren a chance to breathe cleaner air.

After the ceremony, Su and I found a room where we could talk for a few minutes. She is a lawyer who started her career in civil-rights organizations and then worked in state labor agencies in California. (Her liberal past has made it difficult for her to be confirmed by the Senate, and that is why she is the “acting” Secretary.) She told me about the amount of effort that had gone into making the Fort Valley announcement possible. Phil Horlock, Blue Bird’s C.E.O., had been brought to the White House for a meeting with Biden. Then, this spring, Su had come to Fort Valley to urge Horlock to speed up his slow-moving negotiations with the United Steelworkers. Was the conclusion of the negotiations connected to the eighty-million-dollar grant to build the electric-bus factory? “I’m going to answer this way,” Su said. “The way you asked me implies conditions. Whether workers want to join a union depends on them. Politicians should not interfere. It is not a condition. What I said to Phil was ‘There’s no reason not to have a contract after a year of negotiations.’ They got that done. The company took it seriously. Phil said, ‘We heard the Julie Su challenge, and we accept.’ ”

How did this new era in economic policy come to pass? How did Biden, the most familiar of politicians, and previously not seen as someone with sweeping policy ambitions, become the organizer of such a big program? In retrospect, it’s possible to see what happened as the convergence of a number of forces that have been building for fifteen years. It’s a story line that seems clearer now than it did as it was unfolding.

In 2008, Barack Obama swept into office with three hundred and sixty-five electoral votes and firm control of both the Senate and the House. It seemed as if the Democrats were on their way to securing a lasting majority, as they did in the New Deal era, this time with a coalition of educated urban and suburban voters and racial and ethnic minorities. The last stage of Obama’s campaign and the beginning of his Administration took place against the backdrop of the worst financial crisis in eight decades, but Obama seemed well equipped to handle it. He and a team of experienced economic advisers got Congress to pass a large stimulus bill, aimed at preventing another Great Depression. But we wound up having a Great Recession. The unemployment rate rose to a peak of ten per cent in October, 2009; it took until 2017 for employment to recover fully. The recession generated populist revolts on the right (the Tea Party movement) and the left (the Occupy movement), and made what had appeared to be broad public acceptance of pro-market bromides seem like an illusion. In the 2010 midterms, the Democrats lost six seats in the Senate and sixty-three seats, along with the majority, in the House.

Democrats concerned with economic inequality began identifying what they saw as the Party’s original sins. There was the Clinton Administration’s enthusiastic embrace of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and its lengthy negotiations to bring China into the World Trade Organization. Bill Clinton delivered a healthy economy as measured by the standard national statistics, but inside it were large pockets of woe, thanks to rising inequality and the departure of manufacturing jobs for Mexico, China, and other locations abroad. “We saw that this approach—get government out of the way, don’t give business a reason to invest here—led to inequality and massive dislocation,” Lael Brainard, the head of Biden’s National Economic Council, who also worked in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, told me. “You saw a downward spiral of investment.” Deregulation of the financial system made it less risk-proof and helped to set the stage for the 2008 crisis. Some argue that, if Obama’s stimulus package—initially estimated at seven hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars—had been bigger, the Great Recession, and the resulting level of political discontent, would have been less severe.

Obama was reëlected easily, in 2012, but the Democrats’ bill came due in 2016. During the primary season, Bernie Sanders, a politician whom the Democratic establishment didn’t take seriously, performed unexpectedly well by running to the left of Hillary Clinton on economic issues. In the November election, Trump—another outsider, running as a right-wing populist—peeled off enough formerly Democratic voters, especially white working-class men, to win. It wasn’t just that the Republicans flipped contested states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; formerly competitive states, among them Florida, Iowa, and Ohio, now seemed to be moving permanently out of the Democrats’ reach. Hacker describes the mood around that time this way: “Trump gets elected. You can’t understate this. People woke up. Nothing concentrates the mind as much as the prospect of losing your democracy. We lost the heartland.”

After a defeat, parties often rethink their strategies. The 2016 election was such an extreme shock to the Democrats that the rethinking had a special urgency. “Sanders and Trump tapped into something,” Elizabeth Wilkins noted. “We had to speak to economic populism as we hadn’t before.” People who had expected to be working in a Hillary Clinton Administration “spent a lot of time coming up with policy proposals because after 2016 they had nothing to do.” There was an explicit focus on finding ways to address people’s problems in their own communities—particularly in the places where the political tide had turned against Democrats. As Hacker put it, “A lot of America had been devastated by trade and by inequality. You lose civic capital in places. It’s one thing to compensate the losers. But, if you don’t, it’s a total fucking disaster.”

In high-level policy circles, a number of Democrats took up efforts to reconnect with the working class and distanced themselves from past economic policies. Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national-security adviser, conducted a public self-examination after the 2016 election; he wrote an article in which he argued, “The American electorate as a whole is moving to embrace a more energized form of government—one that tackles the excesses of the free market and takes on big, serious challenges through big, serious legislation.” Even before 2016, John Podesta, another Clinton-Obama veteran now back in the White House, had co-founded a think tank called the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

The argument that the Democratic Party can win by moving to the center is a staple of op-ed pages, and it seems to be shaping the Harris campaign. But inside the political world the economic left had earned significant clout by proving that it could produce new policy ideas and win votes. In 2020, Sanders ran another spirited Presidential campaign, and his reward for dropping out of the race and endorsing Biden was the creation of two Unity Task Forces, one populated with some of his supporters and the other with some of Biden’s. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign had ended earlier, but the broad array of policy proposals that she put forth, generated by a network of young lawyers she had cultivated over the years, gave her a great deal of influence, too. The Unity Task Forces jointly released a hundred-and-ten-page set of potential policies in July, 2020. Biden didn’t wind up trying to enact everything in this document, but just about everything he has proposed is in there somewhere.

Also in July, 2020, Biden made a few economic-policy speeches that clearly signalled his retreat from neoliberalism—one on reviving American manufacturing, one on climate and infrastructure, one on racial economic equity, and one on the “care economy.” There was, at the time, a sense of forces within the Democratic Party and external events converging to yield a new political consensus. The COVID pandemic, and the high level of alarm about Trump throughout the Party, meant that the Biden Administration was coming to power during a dire national emergency. No prominent Democrats were arguing that it was a time for the government to exercise restraint. As one member of a rising generation of activists, who ended up working in the Biden White House, put it, “It’s not clear that there’s a neoliberalism to go back to.”

In 2020, Sanders ran another spirited Presidential campaign, and his reward for dropping out of the race and endorsing Biden was the creation of two Unity Task Forces, one populated with some of his supporters and the other with some of Biden’s. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign had ended earlier, but the broad array of policy proposals that she put forth, generated by a network of young lawyers she had cultivated over the years, gave her a great deal of influence, too. The Unity Task Forces jointly released a hundred-and-ten-page set of potential policies in July, 2020. Biden didn’t wind up trying to enact everything in this document, but just about everything he has proposed is in there somewhere.

Also in July, 2020, Biden made a few economic-policy speeches that clearly signalled his retreat from neoliberalism—one on reviving American manufacturing, one on climate and infrastructure, one on racial economic equity, and one on the “care economy.” There was, at the time, a sense of forces within the Democratic Party and external events converging to yield a new political consensus. The COVID pandemic, and the high level of alarm about Trump throughout the Party, meant that the Biden Administration was coming to power during a dire national emergency. No prominent Democrats were arguing that it was a time for the government to exercise restraint. As one member of a rising generation of activists, who ended up working in the Biden White House, put it, “It’s not clear that there’s a neoliberalism to go back to.”

One feature of this post-neoliberal period is that super-ambitious, impeccably credentialled Administration officials now feel the need to demonstrate that they have not become clueless creatures of the coastal élite. Jake Sullivan’s wife, Maggie Goodlander, another former White House official, is currently running for Congress to represent a district in northern New Hampshire, and if she wins he would presumably join her there. Buttigieg has moved to Traverse City, Michigan, the home town of his husband, Chasten Glezman Buttigieg.

Over the summer, I visited Brian Deese, another high-ranking official in the Obama and Biden Administrations, in his new home town, Portland, Maine. During the Obama era, Deese, a onetime aide of Larry Summers, was seen as a neoliberal; during the Trump years, he worked for BlackRock. Biden appointed Deese, then in his early forties, as the director of the National Economic Council, a business-facing unit of the White House which Bill Clinton created. I met Deese—a slight, bearded, blue-eyed man who has the informal manner and the intensity of a Silicon Valley executive—at a new graduate school created to promote the development of tech companies in Maine. He gave me his version of the origins of Bidenomics: “Two things were going on in the spring of 2020: Biden secured the nomination, and COVID. He did something that’s unusual in politics. He shifted his policy vision to be more expansive. Usually, it’s the other way around.”

The result was the American Rescue Plan, a $1.8 trillion bill—more than double the size of Obama’s stimulus legislation. It came only a year after Trump had signed a bill of equivalent size, in the early days of the pandemic, that was also meant to prevent a recession or a depression. And, indeed, the COVID recession was far shorter and less severe than the recession that followed the financial crisis. There were many items in the bill that signalled Biden’s priorities beyond just getting through the worst of COVID. Nearly ninety billion dollars went toward increasing the child tax credit, eighty billion went to shoring up union pension funds, eighty-eight billion went to infrastructure projects, and three hundred and fifty billion went to state and local governments.

The rap on the rescue bill is that it set off several years of inflation—now finally under control—which made Biden’s management of the economy widely unpopular. Jason Furman, who was Obama’s last chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and now teaches at Harvard, has been a persistent public critic of the bill, especially for its provisions authorizing more than four hundred billion dollars in checks to be sent to families with annual incomes of less than seventy-five thousand dollars. “Nobody could defend it as the right policy,” Furman told me. “The idea of sending people two-thousand-dollar checks was invented by Trump.” (Economists prefer tax credits.) “Nancy Pelosi and Biden adopted them to troll the Republicans and to win the Senate races in Georgia. People already had money in the bank because they couldn’t buy anything,” with stores closed and supplies short, on account of the pandemic. So the price of everything rose.

By that time, it was clear that more traditional economic voices like Furman’s would not be dominant in Biden’s White House. On economic policy, most of the people who served under Clinton and Obama had been, as Furman put it, “Robert Rubin”—a former head of Goldman Sachs and the first director of the National Economic Council—“and his children and grandchildren,” figuratively speaking. (He’s one of the grandchildren.) But the ferment of the years after the financial crisis had produced a new talent pool, associated especially with Elizabeth Warren. Former aides and allies of Warren’s, and former staff members at think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute, wound up on the Council of Economic Advisers, working for Deese at the National Economic Council, or at many of the federal regulatory agencies. Jobs that customarily had gone to economists, who are predisposed to trust in markets, went instead to lawyers (like Deese), who are trained to focus on rules and institutions.

I asked Deese whether he considers himself a repentant former neoliberal. He wasn’t willing to agree to that, but he did say that some of the ideas he was charged with implementing in the Biden Administration would not have been given serious consideration under Obama. “If you had said to me in 2010 that I would be supervising industrial strategy, I would have said, ‘That’s crazy. Nobody would listen,’ ” Deese told me. “If you wanted to say ‘industrial strategy,’ you couldn’t. It was ‘picking winners.’ ”

Deese said that his perspective changed when he was in the Obama White House, working to keep General Motors and Chrysler in business during the financial crisis. “That made me see the potential for government to shape the economy,” he said. “I gained a deeper and more ground-level sense of what it meant to have economic capacity and why it’s essential. Those ideas were made super real for me by seeing an industry in free fall. We have intervened time and again in the auto industry, including in the Reagan Administration. Saying we don’t do that is a wrong description of what we’ve done as a country.”

The Biden Administration passed three more colossal bills in 2021 and 2022: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($1.2 trillion), the CHIPS and Science Act ($280 billion), and the Inflation Reduction Act (originally estimated at $380 billion, now thought to have an actual cost of more than $800 billion). Together, these laws have hundreds of provisions. But, broadly speaking, the first is intended to fund bridges, roads, harbors, and other building projects; the second brings semiconductor production back to the United States; and the third finances the transition to non-carbon-producing energy sources. In our conversation, Deese argued that the three initiatives should be thought of as one big legislative package. They share the same goal: to rebuild and redirect the industrial capacity of the United States. “We don’t just want the economy to grow,” Heather Boushey, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, said. “Growing from the middle out means that what we make and how we make it matters.”

That idea animates many other things the Biden Administration has done (and one thing it hasn’t done: negotiate any new trade agreements). In addition to passing legislation, the White House has issued a number of significant executive orders. Probably the most important came in July, 2021—an order on competition which stands as the strongest Presidential statement on monopoly and antitrust in American history. Biden also filled the country’s regulatory agencies with appointees from the economic left of the Party. The best known of these is Lina Khan, of the Federal Trade Commission, but similar appointees are running the Justice Department’s antitrust division, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and all the environmental agencies. The Obama Administration opened an antitrust investigation of Google and then dropped it. The Biden Administration sued Google and won. Obama, after recruiting Elizabeth Warren to design the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, rejected her request to be nominated as its initial director. Biden appointed to the position Rohit Chopra, one of Warren’s aides from those days.

Then there are parts of the government that are practically unknown to the outside world—Biden remade many of those, too. One example is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which Clinton established in the first year of his Presidency, to reduce the number of federal regulations. Obama’s head of the O.I.R.A. was Cass Sunstein, a law professor and the co-author, with the behavioral economist Richard Thaler, of the book “Nudge.” That selection was a gesture in the direction of light-touch regulation. Biden reversed course by putting K. Sabeel Rahman, a Warren ally, in the job, and approving a new way for the government to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of initiatives, giving more weight to social benefits. Such considerations are embedded in the Biden legislation. The CHIPS Act allowed the government to mandate company-paid child care for the workers in the new factories it’s financing, and for the construction workers building them, too. Forty per cent of federally backed climate investments are required to be made in disadvantaged communities. “We were trying to fuse the realities of race and other structural inequities with economics,” Rahman told me. “Some people say, ‘Just talk about the economics of it.’ But we were trying to put these economic programs together in a way that would actually address structural inequalities.”

Biden’s most dramatic departure from past Democratic policy might be on climate change. For decades, incentive systems have been the dominant idea for reducing carbon emissions. Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who’s also a prominent climate activist, said, “It’s wildly unpopular to make fossil fuels more expensive. You put up the cost of everything.” The Obama Administration’s major climate initiative was based on cap-and-trade, which allows companies to buy and sell emission allowances. The proposal never came to a vote in the Senate, and Biden wound up abandoning these ideas entirely. John Podesta, who’s now responsible for climate policy in the White House, said that any Biden proposal “had to be politically viable, and to show a path forward for American workers. So we flipped the politics of it—shifted from ‘What do we need to shut down?’ to ‘What do we need to build?’ ”

The way this played out was determined in the summer of 2022. The American Rescue Plan had passed quickly, though with no Republican votes, and the infrastructure bill had followed, but another four trillion dollars in Biden proposals remained. Most of it was divided into two parts, called the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. The Democratic House passed a bill combining the two, called Build Back Better, but it died in the Senate. The senator with the key vote, Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, made it clear that he opposed the American Families Plan—which included child care, paid family leave, and free community college—because he considered it to be a series of handouts. But he opened negotiations on the American Jobs Plan, which was devoted mainly to business-friendly, globalization-skeptical clean-energy provisions. It was eventually renamed (actually, misnamed) the Inflation Reduction Act and passed that August. “It came together, and we were able to get it over the finish line,” Deese said.

The Inflation Reduction Act heavily bears Manchin’s stamp. At its core are generous tax credits to businesses, mostly but not entirely in clean energy, and West Virginia will do very well. Once you get past understanding it simply as a landmark piece of climate legislation, the act is a large, unkempt thing. With the exception of a couple of relatively minor provisions, it penalizes no one for anything. Some of its provisions will benefit fossil-fuel companies. More than eighty per cent of its projects are being built in Republican districts—partly because they have more empty land and looser regulatory environments. (Conversely, around the country, feuds have broken out between environmentalists who want to push the clean-energy revolution forward and environmentalists who are opposed to, say, establishing mines to extract the minerals used in electric-vehicle batteries.) The projects have been rolling out slowly. One reason that the law will cost so much more than was estimated when it passed is that some of its subsidies come in the form of uncapped tax credits—anybody below a fairly generous income ceiling who wants a seventy-five-hundred-dollar tax credit for buying an electric vehicle can have one, and the credits can’t be applied to cheaper Chinese E.V.s, because of the Administration’s ethic of “build American, buy American.” European allies are upset because the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits are so generous that they are enticing businesses in their own countries to build new factories in the United States.

The White House says that, by the end of this decade, the bill will reduce carbon emissions from 2005 levels by forty per cent, and that it has created three hundred thousand new jobs across more than three hundred projects. Deese told me that more than five per cent of all new investments in the United States are now being made in clean energy, up from about one per cent in 2018, because of how powerfully the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives change the economic calculus for private companies.

Back in the New Deal days, the Democrats were straightforwardly the party of labor, and the Republicans were the party of business. That simple division became much more complicated in the nineties. The Biden Administration showed its loyalties by doing a lot for at least some businesses, and for labor, and for all its other major constituencies and hoped-for constituencies. Whether that approach is sustainable, especially with Biden gone, is another question.

Kamala Harris hasn’t spent a lot of time on the campaign trail visiting Biden Administration-funded infrastructure projects. That duty falls primarily to her former rival in the 2020 Presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg. He is the public face of the infrastructure bill, which got sixty-nine votes in the 50–50 Senate, partly because it’s hard for politicians to oppose noncontroversial building projects in their districts. (By contrast, no Republicans voted for the Inflation Reduction Act.) Buttigieg has held public events at infrastructure sites in all fifty states. I spent the better part of a week touring the Midwest with him, visiting Administration-funded projects.

In Menominee, Michigan, we went to a small, privately owned port on Lake Michigan that often ships large wind turbines. It got a twenty-one-million-dollar grant, its first ever from the federal government, to deepen and upgrade its shipping channel. In Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a local malt company is applying for an infrastructure grant that would help it ship products from the city’s small port. In Milwaukee, the port got nine million dollars in federal funds to help Wisconsin farmers send their crops through waterways to markets around the world. In Kokomo, Indiana, an auto manufacturer showed off facilities for its transition to producing electric vehicles, one of which has been awarded a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar grant from the Department of Energy. In each of these cases, the project bundled multiple Biden goals: clean energy plus working with business plus unionization plus rebuilding the Midwest’s industrial base.

Buttigieg—crewcut, trim (he’s a triathlete), dressed in a dark-blue suit, a white shirt, and a tie—is very good at being the Midwestern boy who left and then decided to come home. He’s polite, punctual, respectful, and fully briefed, scrubbed of all traces of the attitudes that Midwesterners find suspect in people from the coasts. At each stop, he found a way to mention his local roots and his military service in Afghanistan—but not the Republican-zinging appearances that he’s been making on Fox News. On the south side of Milwaukee, Buttigieg met a group of farmers at a restaurant—mainly beefy guys with beards who, while they were waiting for him, chatted about the upcoming state fair. Buttigieg walked in at 7:45 A.M. and shook hands. “Thanks for stayin’ up late to see me,” he said. (Farmers wake up well before dawn.) Then he sat down at a long table and spent an hour hearing from everybody. In the background, on a wall-mounted television with the sound turned off, an ad came on for Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin’s more-popular-than-you’d-expect Democratic senator, pointing to her role in instituting price caps for inhalers. Buttigieg and the farmers talked about five-axle versus six-axle trucks, the economic potential of processed soy meal, and Port Milwaukee’s ability to handle non-containerized cargo. A couple of times, Buttigieg tried gently to steer the conversation toward the larger themes of the Biden Administration, specifically climate change and antitrust efforts. The farmers were polite, but these issues obviously didn’t resonate with them at the same level as immediate, practical matters. After the breakfast, Buttigieg went to the port for a public event, where, in front of a pair of enormous corrugated-metal silos and an “Investing in America” sign, flanked by local dignitaries, he told a small audience about the eight hundred thousand manufacturing jobs that the Administration had created.

Afterward, Buttigieg and I met in an empty conference room in the port’s office building, and I asked how he explains the long-running industrial decline that the Administration is working to reverse. “I think in most accounts the familiar culprits are globalization and automation,” he said. “I would put it a little differently, though. More than anything, it was an unwillingness to invest in the kind of industrial policy and the kind of infrastructure development that made our original industrial economy possible.” Brian Deese had made a similar point: industrial strategy is a venerable American tradition, going back to the days of the Erie Canal, one that was forgotten for a few decades, with terrible effects, and is now being revived. As Buttigieg said, Biden’s economic policies recover “some of the things we were wrong to walk away from, like industrial policy, support for labor unions, support for big investments in shared things like infrastructure.”

I asked Buttigieg whether he could offer a single rubric that would encompass all the Administration’s economic policies. He said that he’d been thinking about this. “What I landed on,” he said, “was the idea that we’ll one day come to remember this as the Big Deal. There’s the New Deal. There’s the Square Deal”—Teddy Roosevelt’s name for his domestic programs. “Now we’ve got the Big Deal, because in some ways its bigness is the defining factor.” In infrastructure-building, at least, “the prior examples were more one mode at a time. The interstate highway system was massive, but that was confined to highways. The transcontinental railroad was massive, but that was about one mode: railroads. The Big Deal is more multimodal.”

That brings us back to the question of why the world hasn’t thought to call the Administration’s programs the Big Deal, or even to consider them a big deal. In Kokomo, I had another conversation with Buttigieg, in an empty classroom at a community college that trains people to work in electric-vehicle production, and I asked him about this. He gave the standard argument of Administration officials who are leading the implementation of the new economic programs: it will take a while for their political effects to arrive.

“Two things I think are going to happen in terms of political impact,” Buttigieg said. “They’re totally separate and apart from ‘Oh, you did the bridge, we’re going to support you now.’ I don’t just mean project-level political impact. The two things I would point to are more subtle, but I think very powerful. One of them is public trust. If you look—as we often do as Americans on the left and center left—to the Nordic countries, one of the things you find there is a high level of confidence that the system is fair, partly because they use tax revenue to deliver services that people appreciate. And so you have a higher level of social and political trust, because things are delivered. There’s a virtuous cycle where, if people see something for their tax dollars, they’re more likely to be confident that they can and should support public things with their tax dollars.”

He went on, “The other is when you reduce inequality, and especially when you reduce inequality across social lines, like racial wealth gaps, that is conducive to a better political environment for everybody. Tony Judt, in ‘Ill Fares the Land,’ put forward some data showing that, even on the same average income, the society with more inequality will have worse public-health outcomes, more violence, you name it. So, for example, the data we’ve seen on the reduction in the racial wealth gap between 2019 and 2022 is really important. I’m not saying that a voter consciously gives the elected official who engineered that credit twenty years down the line, but I do think it just creates a better environment for all of our political processes to play out.”

If you squint, you can see the outlines of a new post-neoliberal Democratic coalition. Fast-growing clean-energy industries—wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, electric vehicles—could join Hollywood and Silicon Valley in supporting the Democratic Party. Purple-tinted states, such as Georgia and Arizona, which are getting lots of clean-energy projects (Georgia is in the “battery belt,” Arizona in the “hydrogen belt”), could turn bluer. (The Biden Administration even has plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars reviving the steel industry in J. D. Vance’s home town of Middletown, Ohio.) The Administration’s insistence on union labor in its building projects could begin to reverse the long decline of private-sector unionization. (The national rate is currently six per cent, down from about a third in the fifties.) A more successful push for the policies that were part of the American Families Plan could bolster not just family incomes but also the care industry and its employees’ unions. All these policies would help Black and Latino families, and so might shore up their wobbling loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Here’s a specific example of the way Democrats are hoping things work out politically. On January 23, 2017, the first full workday of the Trump Administration, Sean McGarvey, the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions—a muscular, heavily male zone of the labor movement which the Republican Party has been wooing intermittently for decades—stood in front of the White House, at the head of a platoon of union leaders and members in the construction industry, and made a brief, exuberant public statement: “We just had probably the most incredible meeting of our careers with the President, and the Vice-President, and the senior staff. . . . The respect that the President of the United States showed us—and when he shows it to us he shows it to three million of our members across the United States—was nothing short of incredible.” Five years later, McGarvey took the podium at a convention of the building-trades unions and offered up half an hour of ardent love for the Biden Administration. I asked McGarvey what happened. Trump, McGarvey said, “never did anything he said he was going to do. He never did infrastructure. His National Labor Relations Board was laden with anti-labor ideologues. He never did pensions. Pretty much you name it. That first meeting was all the things he was going to do. And then we had four years of a knife fight in a phone booth.” The Biden Administration, by contrast, had “delivered every possible thing we could ever possibly ask for or imagine. There have been things they did for us that we wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to ask for.” Partly because of the Administration’s projects, the building-trades unions have added fifty thousand new members in the past year—their most significant growth since the fifties.

In the view of the designers of Bidenomics, this kind of shift would be just the beginning, because, once you put into place the idea of the government remaking the economy, policy and politics will begin to operate together in a continuous self-reinforcing loop. But that’s far closer to being a hope than a certainty.

Where we are now, near the conclusion of the 2024 campaign, is profoundly strange. People love to complain that politics organizes itself around perception, not reality. Here’s the reality: one party, the G.O.P., ditched its establishment, embraced a form of economic nationalism and populism, and surprised everybody by winning a Presidential election. This wasn’t just a freak event; versions of the same thing happened around the world. In the United States, the Trump Administration, once it was in power, mostly pursued not what it ran on but an old-fashioned Republican program of tax cuts and deregulation. Meanwhile, the Democrats began competing for the voters Trump had attracted, and, after this helped lead to a victory in 2020, they enacted an ambitious program aimed at the economic lives of working- and middle-class Americans. And still, outside a limited cadre of activists and policymakers, none of this is the dominant narrative of American politics. Another complaint that people make about politicians is that they are all talk, no action. With Biden, on these issues, it has been almost the opposite: lots of action, very little talk. As Harris’s campaign wore on, she began speaking more about economic issues, especially during her visits to Midwestern states, but her language has been quite different from that of other Biden officials. If Biden’s actual economic policies were the main topic of the campaign, perhaps the outcome of the election would determine their future. Their absence from the election makes their fate more of a mystery.

If Harris wins, will she stay the course that Biden has set? Biden hasn’t been articulate enough lately to lay out his economic vision, and Harris’s instinct is to present all her ideas, including economic proposals, in specific, tangible, personal terms. Rohini Kosoglu, a former policy director for Harris, told me, “Sometimes she tells people who work for her to imagine going to someone’s wedding and then being invited to their house and seeing the wedding album on a table. If you open it, what are you going to be looking for? A picture of yourself at the wedding. The American people want to know that we see them when we think through our policy.” Harris’s earliest economic proposal, a ban on price gouging in supermarkets, meets the wedding-album test—you can see yourself in the policy—but nobody thinks of it as a major economic reimagining. Her economic background and Biden’s bear little resemblance. He comes from a downwardly mobile family who had to relocate to the declining blue-collar city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and who lost everything after the Second World War. Her parents were upwardly mobile immigrants, and her home ground is the booming, innovation-celebrating Bay Area. People who work with Biden say that he has an instinctive mistrust of economists, especially those from élite universities. Harris is the daughter of successful academics; her father is an economist who worked for years at an élite university.

Harris’s career has not centered on economic issues, as Sanders’s and Warren’s have, and she has strong ties to Silicon Valley, which is skeptical of Biden’s economic policies, especially on antitrust, trade, and unions. (Her brother-in-law Tony West is a senior executive at Uber, now on leave to work on the campaign.) Economically oriented Democratic policymakers have been obsessively parsing her every move for clues about how post-neoliberal she will or won’t be. Having become the nominee much later than Biden did in 2020, she hasn’t had time to set a full policy agenda or to create a cadre of future officials for her Administration. Gene Sperling has left the White House and joined her campaign full time—but Karen Dunn, the lead lawyer for Google in one of the Administration’s lawsuits against the company, was on the small team that prepared her for her debate with Trump. Harris frequently says that she wants to create an “opportunity economy,” which isn’t language that post-neoliberals would use—they’d prefer “shared prosperity.” She has ratcheted down a Biden proposal on capital gains and corporate taxes, to lower the rates, and she has been notably silent on the activities of regulatory agencies, such as the S.E.C. and the F.T.C., that are intensely unpopular with business. Warren, in an interview on a Boston radio station back in January, declined to say whether she thought Biden should renominate Harris as his running mate; it seems unlikely that Harris would use Warren as an informal personnel director the way that Biden has. On the other hand, Harris is obviously enthusiastic about care-oriented policies like the child tax credit and paid family medical leave. She gives no hint of being a limited-government person on principle.

Harris rarely talks about antitrust, or industrial policy, or trade, or the larger idea that the government should actively structure the market economy. Because these are rather technical issues, she can promise to help the middle class without being very specific. In the debate, she was vague about her economic plans, but she took pains to mention that Goldman Sachs, the Wharton School, and many prominent economists prefer her plans to Trump’s. That wasn’t a very Bidenesque message. In Harris’s first major economic address as the Democratic nominee, in North Carolina in August, she attacked Trump for levying tariffs that would “in effect” raise taxes on the middle class. This seemed to imply that she accepts the standard view of economists that tariffs are taxes and are a bad idea. But Biden has imposed heavy tariffs on, for example, Chinese electric vehicles. (As Buttigieg put it in one of our conversations, “There is a legitimate national interest in insuring that these programs create American jobs, even if that interest is not free of charge.”) Will Harris keep these tariffs? Will she retain Lina Khan, the bête noire of the Democratic donor class, at the F.T.C.? Did Harris’s one anodyne line about unions in her first speech—“you should be able to join a union if you choose”—signal a loosening of Biden’s intimate embrace of organized labor?

If Trump wins, will he dismantle Bidenomics? Maybe not, or not entirely. Trillions of dollars’ worth of tax cuts that Trump passed during his Presidential term will expire at the end of next year. If Trump gets another term, he will likely try to extend them, and that will constrict what the government can do. But Biden’s major legislation is designed to be difficult to repeal. The money is legally committed, and there are quiet efforts under way to speed up the slow pace of project launches, and to make project cancellations legally difficult, in order to Trump-proof the Biden program. Because so much of the spending is going toward the kinds of projects that elected officials love, and is in Republican-held political territory, and is aimed at the voters Trump claims to represent, it’s meant to be difficult for Republicans to abandon.

Also, underneath the bluster, threats, and theatrics, Trump is running on an economic program that would have been unimaginable coming from any previous Republican nominee, including him. He is now officially devoted to preserving Obamacare, which he spent his previous term trying to overturn. He has promised not to cut Medicare, to increase Social Security by making its benefits tax-free, and to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay. He wants to impose new tariffs that would be much larger than the ones he put in place when he was President. J. D. Vance has proposed more than doubling the child tax credit, to five thousand dollars, a move that would cost trillions. The most vulnerable of the major Biden bills is the Inflation Reduction Act, but Trump has stopped short of promising to repeal it. Its largest provision is a subsidy for domestically produced electric vehicles, and one of Trump’s richest and most vocal supporters is the leading manufacturer of them, Elon Musk. Consistency has never been Trump’s hallmark.

A great deal depends not just on who is elected President but on whom that person puts in key economic positions, and on the results of the House and Senate elections. A divided Congress and a sense that the country isn’t immediately in crisis would not make for favorable weather for major changes. Still, American politics feels very different from the way it did at the turn of the millennium—we have been through the political version of climate change. In his 1996 State of the Union Address, Clinton declared, “The era of big government is over.” Inside the daily chaos of politics, there seems to be a new invisible foundation: the era of the era of big government being over is over. Both parties have accepted the premise that the government has failed voters without a college degree, especially in the middle of the country, and both are actively wooing them—partly because they determine the balance of power in American politics. (That’s why Trump and Harris chose the running mates they did.) Both accept that the wrong to these voters was done through excessive faith in unfettered markets. That faith isn’t miraculously going to reappear as the controlling principle of American politics anytime soon, but that hardly leaves matters settled. The parties have radically different ideas—different in substance, different in values, different in methods, maybe also different in sincerity—about how to achieve what they present as the same goal. The question that will dominate the years to come is whose version of the new, enlarged role of government will prevail. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 4, 2024, issue, with the headline “The Big Deal.”

The Ambience Of Information [newyorker]

 https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/republican-victory-and-the-ambience-of-information

 Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information

For years, Democrats have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed facts. What if the secret is big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide?

 

By Nathan Heller

November 13, 2024

 

Dawn had not yet broken on the election results last week when Democrats began their favored ritual of falling out of love. Reasons were enumerated why Kamala Harris, the candidate who weeks earlier had been a magnet for enthusiasm, was an obvious poor choice to run for President. She was too coastal, it was suggested, too centrist, too un-primaried, too woke, too female. What were they thinking? The remorse is familiar, regardless of the outcome. When Joe Biden ran for President in 2020, many Democrats lamented that the Party hadn’t produced a stronger option—but Biden went on to receive more votes than any candidate in American history. Hillary Clinton transformed, in the Party’s view, from a historic nominee to a terrible candidate almost overnight. Barack Obama was widely acknowledged as a great candidate—even a once-in-a-generation one—who barely made it to a second term. John Kerry, a “legitimate, good candidate,” lost the popular vote; Al Gore, almost universally considered to be a terrible candidate, won it. One might conclude that the Democrats’ ability to hold the heart of the American public has amazingly little to do with the ideal dimensions of the candidate they put forth, and that their perennial trying and failing to find the perfect figure, followed by rites of self-flagellation, is a weird misappropriation of concern. The Republicans don’t lament the inadequacies of their candidates, clearly. The Republicans have thrice sent Donald Trump.

If the problem this year wasn’t the person, was it policy? Our distance from the close of the polls is still measurable in days, and yet voices have settled into hot debate about which issues Harris undersold, at the cost of the election. She leaned too much on reproductive freedom, we hear, or gave fatally little attention to concerns about immigration or the Palestinian cause or the Israeli cause. The campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps particularly Black men, or Latino men—or was it women? Also, not enough about the kitchen-table economy.

To anyone who studied the Harris campaign up close, many of those accounts don’t track. The Vice-President talked about illegal immigration, and her work to curb it, all the time. Mobilizing Black men in swing states was among the campaign’s most deliberate projects. The Democrats were faulted for hazy policy long after they released a ninety-two-page party platform and an eighty-two-page economic chaser filled with figures, graphs, footnotes, and detailed plans. Harris spoke at length about taxes and the kitchen-table economy all across the country.

Why didn’t the speeches register? Why did people persist in thinking that Harris was short on policy; that Trump’s programs would boost the American economy, despite a widely broadcast consensus from sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists to the contrary; or that he would lower taxes for working people, though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that he would increase them? Even many of Trump’s critics think his first term marked a high point for border patrol, though more unauthorized migrants have been forced to leave under Biden. (Why was Biden’s Presidency widely dismissed as desultory, when, in fact, as my colleague Nicholas Lemann recently put it, “he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt”?) How did so many perceptions disprovable with ten seconds of Googling become fixed in the voting public’s mind? And why, even as misapprehensions were corrected, did those beliefs prevail?

Democrats, during their hair-shirt rituals, gaze into their souls and find “bad messaging.” There is talk of a poor “ground game,” an élite failure to “connect.” But the Harris campaign set records or near-records for fund-raising, volunteer enrollment, and in some districts voter registration; it is hard to imagine what a better ground game or a closer connection might have looked like in three months. And the messaging, which hewed to the middle-class experiences of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, neither of whom is Ivy-educated or grew up rich, was hardly misguided in a race that ostensibly came down to the economic and exclusion anxieties of working people. Yet Democrats did make a crucial messaging error, one that probably (as the line goes) lost them the election. They misjudged today’s flow of knowledge—what one might call the ambience of information.

Harris’s approach this year was distinct from her failed effort to run a more identity-centered campaign in the Democratic primary of 2020. Instead, it leaned on strategies that had carried her toward her two most improbable electoral victories: her first race, for San Francisco district attorney, which she entered while polling at six per cent, against a powerful progressive incumbent and a well-known law-and-order centrist, and won by more than ten points; and her election as California’s attorney general, which at least one major California paper initially called for her opponent on Election Night, before Harris gained ground in the continuing count and, in a reputation-making vindication of her strategy, pulled ahead. Her magic in those elections had come largely through micro-targeting—a focussed, intensely local effort to engage voters on tailored terms and to mobilize small communities that traditional campaigning missed. In the early two-thousands, this was the cutting edge of ground strategy. Harris’s political peers regarded her as one of its first virtuosi.

On the trail with the Vice-President, reporting a profile for Vogue, I was struck by how reflexively her mind and methods ran to the local frame. When I noted, in an interview, that one of her policy signatures seemed to be investing in community-development financial institutions (C.D.F.I.s)—which offer capital access to struggling communities—Harris lit up and elaborated a neighborhood-centered theory of market-based improvement. She touted C.D.F.I.s’ contributions to “the economy of the community.” Laying out her middle-class economic-opportunity programs, she invariably talked about a woman who had run a nursery school on her block.

If Americans still arrive at a theory of the world through their communities, the boundaries of those communities have broadened and diffused. Harris’s micro-targeting home run in San Francisco came before the iPhone. Her second unlikely victory, in the race for California attorney general, roughly coincided with Facebook’s introduction of a proprietary sorting algorithm for its News Feed. In the ensuing years, there were major changes to the channels through which Americans—rich Americans, poor Americans, all Americans—received information. As early as 2000, the political scientist Robert Putnam, in his landmark study “Bowling Alone,” noted that technology, not least the Internet, had an individuating, isolating tendency that eroded the network of civic bonds—he called it social capital—that joins and holds people in groups.

It is wrong to suggest that people now relate only through digital screens. (People still show up at cookouts, dinner parties, track meets, and other crossings.) But information travels differently across the population: ideas that used to come from local newspapers or TV and drift around a community now come along an unpredictable path that runs from Wichita to Vancouver, perhaps via Paris or Tbilisi. (Then they reach the cookout.) Studies confirm that people spend less and less time with their neighbors. Instead, many of us scroll through social networks, stream information into our eyes and ears, and struggle to recall where we picked up this or that data point, or how we assembled the broad conceptions that we hold. The science historian Michael Shermer, in his book “The Believing Brain,” used the term “patternicity” to describe the way that people search for patterns, many of them erroneous, on the basis of small information samplings. The patterns we perceive now rise less from information gathered in our close communities and more from what crosses our awareness along national paths.

The Democrats didn’t look past national-scale audiences—Harris sat with both Fox News and Oprah. But she approached that landscape differently. The campaign, it was often noted, shied away from legacy-media interviews. It instead used a national platform to tune the affect, or vibes, of her rise: momentum, freedom, joy, the middle class, and “BRAT” chartreuse. When she spoke to wide audiences, her language was careful and catholic; one often had the sense that she was trying to say as little as possible beyond her talking points. The meat and specificity of her campaign—the access, the detail, and the identity coalitions—were instead concentrated on coalition-group Zooms, and on local and community audiences. Harris micro-targeted to the end.

Donald Trump did the inverse. He spoke off the cuff on national platforms all the time. He said things meant to resonate with specific affinity or identity subgroups, even if they struck the rest of listening America as offensive or absurd. (“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!”) As my colleague Antonia Hitchens reported, his campaign was boosted by a traditional get-out-the-vote ground effort late in the game—despite this apparently not being a priority for Trump—but the canvassing was less about delivering policy information than about tuning voters’ ears like satellites to the national signal. (Election fraud was a theme.) Trump’s speeches at rallies, many people noticed, had a curious background-music quality: they went on forever, aimlessly, and people would come and go at will. The actual speeches didn’t seem to matter; they existed simply to set a vibe and keep certain broad suggestions (immigration big problem! Biden Administration so corrupt!) drifting into the ether. Trump seemed to think that much of the voting public couldn’t be bothered with details—couldn’t be bothered to fact-check, or deal with fact checkers. (“Who the hell wants to hear questions?” he asked at a town hall in October before deciding to dance and sway to music for more than half an hour.) Detail, even when it’s available, doesn’t travel widely after all. Big, sloppy notions do.

Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age. And national media is key. Trump’s command of the ambience of information wouldn’t have been possible without his own platforms, such as Truth Social, as well as allies such as Fox News’ C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, who in 2020 excoriated her team after they fact-checked Trump, and Elon Musk, who, hoping for executive-branch power over his own sector, largely funded more than a hundred and seventy-five million dollars’ worth of pro-Trump outreach, was read into early voting data, and tweeted lies, conspiracy theories, and mistrust of media on his network, X, which boosts his posts. The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.

This is the opposite of micro-targeting. The goal is for voters to meet ideas coming and going so often that those notions seem like common sense. The pollster and political-marketing-language consultant Frank Luntz assembled a focus group of men who had previously voted for a Democratic nominee but were voting for Trump this year. Many of their rationales were based on untrue information settled deep in the ambience of information. “Nothing against people from California, but the policies in California are so bad I wouldn’t be surprised if the state goes bankrupt,” a participant in Indiana said. (California has the largest economy in the U.S.) “Kamala from California is too radical . . . she’s too far left.” (Biden’s policies tended to be to the left of Harris’s, when they didn’t align.) These are not convictions that someone acquires from a specific source, neighborhood, or community.

Of all the data visualizations that were churned out in the hours following the election, the one that struck me most was a map of the United States, showing whether individual areas had voted to the left or to the right of their positions in the Presidential race in 2020. It looks like a wind map. And it challenges the idea that Trump’s victory in this cycle was broadly issues- or community-based. The red wind extends across farmland and cities, young areas to old, rich areas to poor. It is not the map of communities having their local concerns addressed or not. It’s the map of an entire nation swept by the same ambient premises.

In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. They have corrected misinformation and sought to drop data to individual doors. This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong. A majority of the American public doesn’t believe information that goes against what it thinks it knows—and a lot of what it thinks it knows originates in the brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America. And, until Democrats, too, figure out how to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but what the public holds to be self-evident truths. ♦