But that’s not to say she doesn’t see opportunities for the country to reverse course. “I’m very hopeful with young people, and our students in particular,” said Gautney, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

The book, published by Oxford University Press this month, is billed as a companion piece to C. Wright Mills’ iconic The Power Elite (Oxford University Press,1956), which Gautney says drew back the curtain on the belief that 1950s America was a bastion of democracy. Her goal in writing a sequel of sorts was to “hopefully provide some explanation for how we got to this place with Trump, January 6th, and all this political unrest.”

Mills wrote at a time when inequality was at its lowest and there was consensus that America was the best of all countries. He argued that in reality America was more authoritarian, with  a consortium of corporate, political, and military elites, driven by greed, holding all the power and manipulating public opinion. Mills warned of “the military industrial complex,” a term made famous by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech. Mills also has been cited as an inspiration for the 1960s counterculture, Gautney said.

Such sweeping analyses are rarely written these days, which is a part of why she felt compelled to pick up where Mills left off. “It’s a lack of historical memory that is how we got where we are. I had our Fordham students in mind. They are so smart, but [because they’re young]they don’t have the historical references.”

Gautney has personal experience in politics at a high level: she was a senior policy advisor for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and served as an advisor in his Senate office and as co-chair of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Education. She also has connections to the film industry, in which her husband works. She says both have opened her eyes to how things really work.

The country now has enormous wealth in the hands of a few who are able to control policy through their billions, Gautney said, and political institutions and the military have been largely subordinated to the corporate sphere. Couple that with the merging of politics and celebrity, and America is fundamentally undemocratic, she argued.

“Celebrity has become a huge corporate conglomerate,” she said. “Now we have celebrities who wield corporate power and are billionaires.”

Mills wrote of the manipulative posturing of mass media. Gautney says today it’s far worse.  “Fox News can make a president now, obviously. It feels like it is an institution that is so far gone, and yet it is so fundamental.”

“It’s Chapter 1 in the authoritarian playbook—manipulating thought,” she said.

Gautney has some ideas for what can be done and hasn’t lost hope, even though she didn’t conclude the book that way. “It would be trivializing to try to summarize how to reverse course,” she said.

She did, however, share some of her thoughts for change in an interview. “Reclaiming the media: setting standards and decommodifying it. We need to start to recognize that certain things should be public goods, like health care and education. They cannot be accessible to only certain strata,” she says.

The way to accomplish all that is by creating and fostering spaces for thinking about systemic changes and how to separate the influence of money, said Gautney. “It is the job of academics to think of alternatives at a broad level.”

She believes students are coming in more well-read and publicly engaged nowadays, but they tend to be engaged more locally—in issues such as the environment or race issues. Building solidarity with other movements is imperative, she said. “You can’t afford to silo and diffuse this power. Young people interested in change need to bring in other groups. That’s vital.” 

Fordham’s service learning initiatives, Gautney believes, are valuable for exposing students to experiences different than the ones they inhabit, which is also key.

“Then you have potential for big impacts,” she said. “That’s how the world changes.”

Progressives “crashed the party by sort of becoming part of it, but also fundamentally changing its course,” said Heather Gautney, associate professor of sociology, in regards to her book Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement. “In the book, what I do is outline the development of the new Democrat model in which the Democratic Party was shifting rightward.” 

Gautney and Zephyr Teachout, associate professor of law, discussed the progressive movement and their respective books for Fordham Law’s Behind the Book series, organized by the Maloney Library and moderated by Todd Melnick, clinical associate professor of law and director of the library.

In the Nov. 16 event, the two professors offered thoughtful analysis of the future of the progressive movement, punctuated by details from their many active years in politics. 

Teachout, who has been at Fordham Law since 2009, ran for governor of New York in 2014 and for the United States House of Representatives in New York’s 19th congressional district in 2016. She published her antitrust book Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money this past May. 

Gautney, who published her book in 2018, has worked on both Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns—as a senior policy adviser in 2020 and a volunteer organizer and researcher in 2016.

Defining Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism comes up in both books, Melnick noted. Gautney said for her, the definition of neoliberalism is less about what it is, and more about what it has accomplished and defeated. “I don’t have the exact words, but the concept is that neoliberalism has achieved the successful removal of working-class resistance,” she said. She gave the example of Reagan firing thousands of air traffic control workers who were on strike in 1981, saying “It was a message to labor: ‘Hey, you’re not safe anymore. The protections that you think that you enjoy, you don’t enjoy anymore.’” 

“All of these forces kind of coming together and pushing down working people and moving resistance aside—and fundamentally neoliberalism is about the primacy of the market.”

Similarly, Teachout defined neoliberalism as “the belief that markets are the best mechanism for allocating goods and services as opposed to publicly elected officials.” She said this depends on the fantasy that markets exist before people, and is an attempt by neoliberals to “naturalize what is wholly unnatural,” by framing market regulation as hampering the growth of something natural.

“Laws that enable workers to organize are absolutely essential,” Teachout continued, tying back to her book. “And the key tool to prevent capital from organizing is antitrust.” 

The Impact of the Sanders Campaign

According to Gautney, neoliberal identity politics also played a role in the end of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Neoliberals considered diversity within the “1%” enough, she said, and they tried to paint Sanders as someone who didn’t care about diversity when what he really cared about was dismantling the 1% and helping the less fortunate. 

Gautney said both she and Sanders himself were surprised about his appeal to young people, since a good chunk of his political career was spent fighting for social security and working with seniors. But she believed that young people flocked to him because he ran a “very counter-cultural” campaign in 2016 when people were disillusioned with what the democratic party had become. And, she said, young people aren’t afraid of socialism the way that older generations are.

Gautney pointed out that even though Sanders lost, progressives who were inspired by his campaign like Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were elected. 

“In a way he didn’t lose because he shifted the horizon of possibility back,” she said. “We have people who clearly were running on the same agenda that Bernie had injected in 2016… having a substantial appeal. … I would consider that big wins.”

The Future of the Progressive Movement

In terms of the future of the progressive movement, Gautney said that Sanders had negotiated a number of task forces with the Biden campaign after the primary, one of which she co-chaired on education. These task forces, which in her view are “pretty darn good,” coupled with the possibility of a Democratic Senate due to the Georgia runoff, means that the progressive movement could have power in the Biden administration.

Teachout offered the next steps for the progressive movement from both an antitrust and a non-antitrust perspective. On the non-antitrust front, she said organizational work within Congress is essential. 

“Use the power you have,” she advised congressional leaders. “Use subpoena power. Take on those hospitals that are merging and overcharging people. Do the investigations. Show that you are fighting for people against the middlemen that are squeezing them. And you can do that even without the Senate.” 

On the antitrust side, Teachout said that Biden has the power to revive the economy using anti-monopoly policy. “And it’s not just that he should. It’s that I think, eventually, he’s going to have to, because if you are running into a wall on a Senate that will not pass a stimulus package, you know what a stimulus package is? Anti-monopoly. There’s recent research showing that $15,000 a year is being taken away from workers per year, from each worker per year, to investors, because of concentration in our society.”

When asked by Melnick about whether she felt optimistic moving forward, Gautney replied, “I’m somewhere in the middle, I have to say.”

But she believes Sanders’ influence on this Senate will make a big difference. “[Bernie] is running around with the manifesto and really trying to make sure that the Democratic party and Biden in particular sticks to it.” She said his pragmatic attitude, the force of the movement, and his popularity is what’s made him so successful. “I think he’s ready to go.”

Watch the conversation in full here.

Heather Gautney, Ph.D., felt the “Bern.” And now she wants to share what she learned from it.

In her just-published book, Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement (Verso, 2018), Gautney, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham, detailed what it was like to work with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as he campaigned for the 2016 Democratic party presidential nomination. Gautney had previously worked for Sanders when she was an American Sociological Association Fellow during the 2012-2013 academic year and joined his campaign in 2015 as a researcher.

She described the book as half policy analysis, half op-ed, with a particular emphasis on the lessons the Democratic Party should take from Sanders’ surprisingly strong showing in the primaries and the triumph of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Although Sanders ultimately lost the nomination to Clinton, Gautney said his candidacy exposed what she called the contradictions of the Democratic Party’s platform for the last four decades.

Shifting Attitudes Among Voters

“What his campaign did was expose that at least half of the Democratic Party are really people who identify as progressives or support a progressive agenda, and since he ran, I think we’ve been seeing a real shift toward supporting that agenda,” she said.

As evidence, she pointed to proposals to expand Medicare to all U.S. citizens. Sanders has been promoting the idea for years with little success, but this past year, the plan had 16 co-signers, including Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

To some extent, Gautney said she feels that the fact that Trump won is evidence that the party should reconsider issues that Sanders and Democratic leaders butted heads on, such as trade, free education, and universal healthcare.

A “neoliberal agenda that promotes growth, prosperity for all, the wonders of globalization and consumerism and the high-tech future” has left many people behind and cost Democrats voters in places like Wisconsin, she said.

“There’s been lots of glossy language about the wonders of free trade, and yet this was a huge issue in 2016 for people [who opposed it]in Midwestern states,” she said.

A Revival for Ideas Past

Gautney said she was as surprised as anyone else that Sanders got as far as he did and viewed his popularity with millennials as proof that the time is right to promote his agenda. This would have been true even in the event of a Clinton victory, which Gautney assumed would be the case when she started writing the book. To those who say the notion that free education is a radical idea, she noted that City College of New York, her alma mater, was once tuition-free.

“These are things that in some way or form have existed, so Bernie’s goal has been to say that. We are the wealthiest country on earth, we can achieve these things, and we can take care of our people,” she said.

“We can rebuild the middle class in this country. It’ll be like the middle class that existed in the 1950’s, except this time it’ll be a more diverse middle class, and women and people of color will be included.”

Gautney devoted a chapter to the schisms between the Sanders and Clinton camps that were never fully healed. In another, she elucidates the difference between social movements and elections. She also delved into the outreach efforts that Sanders embarked on after the November election to help him get a better handle on why former Barack Obama voters in battleground states then voted for Trump.

It was sobering, she said, because so many of the promises that Sanders had campaigned on—like more money for social security and stronger support of Medicare and Medicaid—were ones Trump embraced as well, and these voters chose to support Trump. She contends that class has a lot to do with it.

“Over the last three or four decades, a class perspective has increasingly been taken off the table, and one of the things that this 2016 election did was put it firmly back on. I argue that class is really a fundamental organizing principle of this election season, on both the right and left,” she said.

The takeaway of the book should be of interest to partisans on both sides of the aisle, she said.

“I think it’ll be interesting as a sort of historical accounting for this kind of moment, and one that reaches back into the 1970s and then reaches forward to 2020 and maybe even beyond.”

Gautney will discuss her book with Adolph Reed Jr. and Cornel West on May 16 at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. For more details, visit the event website.

Plant-Based Meat. Garrett Broad, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies and author, More Than Just Food (University of California Press, 2016)

There has been tremendous growth in the plant-based food sector over the last several years, and there are a number of reasons why 2018 could be the biggest year yet for this emerging market. First and foremost, concerns about health, the environment, and animal welfare have led to increased public demand for plant-based alternatives to meat and animal products that are tasty, affordable, and convenient. At the same time, there has been an explosion of entrepreneurial initiative and innovation, as well as organizing and advocacy, in an effort to get these products in stores, restaurants, and other food service locations across the country and around the world. The meat industry has certainly taken notice—some companies are concerned about the threat that plant-based products represent to their bottom line, but others are actually investing in plant-based foods to get in on the action at this early stage.

Protest Demonstrations. Heather Gautney, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology and budget committee advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

In 2018, look for large-scale demonstrations and targeted protest activity outside the White House and in the halls of the U.S. Capitol, especially over immigrants’ rights. Following last year’s Women’s March, there remains a core group of women activists who continue to organize. A few months ago they put on a large-scale conference, and have an ongoing, committed project of movement-building around women’s issues.

[And] there are lots of ways for people to protest besides tens of thousands of people assembling in the street. On immigration round-ups and the issue of sanctuary cities, I think there may be widespread local demonstrations and acts of mass disobedience—protecting people from being taken away. There are all sorts of micro forms of resistance that can take place within communities. When the health care debates were happening in Washington D.C., when demonstrators where showing up at town hall meetings and shaming their congressmen and senators, I think that made a substantial impact on what happened to the outcome.

Internet Service. Olivier Sylvain, associate professor of law and director, McGannon Center for Communications Research

Now that the Federal Communications Commission has repealed “network neutrality” regulations that prohibited internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon from privileging some content over others, we will all want to closely monitor the quality of our internet service.  The FCC Chairman claims that the prior rules made it difficult for providers to invest in novel new services.  Those rules, however, barred service providers from exploiting their coveted gatekeeping market position to discriminate against disruptive competitors; they prohibited, for example, providers from making it costlier for then-emergent start-ups–with names like Amazon and Netflix–to become market-makers in video distribution.

Now that network neutrality is gone, we should keep our eyes on the quality of video on Amazon and Netflix.  We should also watch for subscription fees increases for those services.

Mergers and Acquisitions. Sris Chatterjee, Ph.D., professor and chair of global security analysis finance and business economics, Gabelli School of Business

2017 has been a very good year for M&A. With the economy continuing to show strong fundamentals and the new tax law, 2018 is most likely to continue this upward trend in merger activity.

FinTech and digital technology represent a major disruptive force that will shape many mergers in 2018. We have already started to see this trend in 2017 when many companies across different industries outside the tech-sector acquired firms with the desired digital capabilities. This trend will also continue in 2018. Acquisition of American or European companies with an established brand name and market by firms in China, India and other non-Western countries has been another feature of M&A activity in recent times. This is also likely to continue.

These positive aspects of a stronger M&A outlook in 2018 need to be balanced against other factors that may have a restraining effect. The first factor that comes to mind is the effect of the U.S. government’s decision to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger. AT&T is fighting this decision in court and the outcome will have an important effect on M&A activity in 2018. The second factor to consider is that market multiples are already high, perhaps too high in light of meager growth. This, coupled with the high average premium that we witnessed in 2017, means that deals, on average, are going to be pricey.

Vatican Fashion. J. Patrick Hornbeck, Ph.D., associate professor of theology and department chair

Of late, the fashion world has been demonstrating increasing interest in things religious: consider, for instance, Alexander Wang’s 2016 show at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. But the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art will take this trend a step further with its 2018 exhibition, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” The exhibition pairs liturgical and ceremonial vestments and artworks from the Met collection with designer garments inspired in some way by Catholicism. Traditionalist Catholic groups have sometimes responded with alarm to artistic displays that appear to mock or satirize their faith. The new Met exhibit (which opens in May) may encounter resistance from such quarters, but local Catholic leaders were consulted in the planning process. And the Vatican itself loaned more than 50 of the pieces that will be on display. In the end, the Met may more than anything else showcase the manifold ways in which the Catholic tradition continues to inspire artists of all stripes.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Shannon Waite, Ed.D., clinical assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education

In 2018, I predict that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will become more diverse and that the conversation will broaden from being focused on race and ethnicity to include socio-economic status.  I would pay attention to how the cuts to programs and initiatives that indirectly support HBCU’s and/or the students they serve impact the student’s access to higher education. I also expect the conversation about whether these institutions can continue to fulfill the role they have historically played and remain viable options for the demographic of students they traditionally serve to become more prominent.  I expect questions about whether HBCUs still have a place in our society today to become a part of the conversation that will spark a national debate.  Finally, I would pay attention to how the current administration responds to the criticism that the commitment made to bolster HBUCs has not been honored.

Bitcoin. Giacomo Santangelo, Ph.D., senior lecturer of economics

Much like international currencies, people trade Bitcoin to exploit arbitrage opportunities (buy low, sell high) in the market. However, today the bitcoin has more in common with Beanie Babies from the 1990s than with international currencies. The market for Bitcoin is being driven by speculation, not investment. Speculators buy an asset, often taking huge risks, in the hopes of making ’a quick buck.’ It would have been ill-advised to invest your retirement in Beanie Babies or Pokemon cards in the 1990s; although, at the time, you could make fast money buying/selling on eBay . . . until you couldn’t. Whether Bitcoin will eventually settle at $20k, $1 Million, or $1, the volatility of the recent weeks indicates that when speculators lose interest in Bitcoin, the bubble will burst. The bitcoin will only continue to have ‘value’ if people continue to believe it has value. At the moment, people have no rational reason to do so. It is unlikely Bitcoin will continue a meteoric rise, uninterrupted, in 2018.

Helicopter Parenting and Hovering. Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology and head of Fordham’s Pediatric Psychology & Health Behaviors group

We are in an era where parenting styles—such as helicopter, or hovering— are raising concerns about our children’s ability to develop independence and advocate for themselves. Indeed, in the medical community during the last decade there has been a push for adolescents to learn early how to self-manage their special health care needs.

My colleagues and I have been studying this process among a large sample of adolescents from around the country. We found that adolescents who say they are self-managing (versus those having more parental involvement) and those who say they are doing more than their parents think they are, have worse outcomes. This includes difficulty managing their medications. These findings perhaps signal that for some adolescents, it is critical to work with their parents rather than move them into the background. So [going forward]maybe a little hovering is okay.

Real Estate’s Downward and Upward Trends. Hugh F. Kelly, Ph.D., special advisor to Fordham’s Real Estate Institute in the School for Professional and Continuing Studies

The 2018 outlook for commercial properties in New York is mixed. Tenant demand for office space is strengthening on the basis of strong job growth in finance and business/professional services. These job gains are timely, as a new generation of offices is coming to market in significant volume. Lateral movement amongst corporate users should continue, creating vacancy in some older buildings. But high prices and low cap rates will keep overall transactions on a downward trend.

In retailing, especially storefront properties on high-traffic avenues, vacancy is quite high, as asking rents have tended to exceed the price that can be economically supported by stores sales. I’d expect capitulation from landlords if that trend intensifies; low returns are better than no returns.

The residential market is sorting out an excess of luxury development while dealing with the ongoing crisis of affordability. As a result, multifamily construction in the outer boroughs may be 2018’s most significant trend.

(Patrick Verel, Tom Stoelker, and Tanisia Morris contributed to the article.)

Street protests that disrupted the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 in Seattle are widely credited with sparking the anti-globalization movement.

While the movement began taking shape years before the “Battle in Seattle,” media coverage that accompanied the protests thrust the issue of global justice into the spotlight, according to Heather Gautney, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology.

Gautney’s research focuses on contemporary social movements and globalization. Much of what she studies is how the broad-based global justice movement has grown and changed, and whether it has a future. She said she thinks it does, although it will move away from the anti-war platform it espoused earlier this decade and return to some of its anti-globalization roots.

“Now that we’re dealing with the economic crisis, the war is starting to fade and the economy is becoming the primary issue,” she said. “Positions the movement had in the late 1990s—being against deregulation, for example—are now popular. Even mainstream politicians are saying, ‘We didn’t regulate corporations and look what happened.’”

Gautney first took an interest in the topic while accompanying fellow graduate students to meetings and protests. When global justice activists created the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 as a platform to discuss economic, political and social alternatives to globalization, Gautney found a focus for her dissertation and much of her post-doctoral research.

“I thought the World Social Forum should be studied and tracked,” she said. “I was involved in going to meetings for about eight years. I was able to learn things you wouldn’t find out otherwise.”

The WSF, which was held to coincide with the World Economic Forum that occurs annually in the posh city of Davos, Switzerland, drew 20,000 participants to Porto Alegre, Brazil, in its inaugural year.

It received global press coverage and was the primary organizing body for worldwide anti-war demonstrations. At its peak in 2005, the conference boasted 160,000 participants from more than 120 countries.

Since 2006, however, WSF participation has steadily declined. The reason, Gautney said, is that it has lost its radical edge.

“In an effort to avoid politics and be as inclusive as possible, the World Social Forum started to attract groups that were not really opposed to neoliberalism and institutions like the World Bank,” said Gautney, who has attended WSFs in Brazil, Venezuela and Kenya. “A movement can be political and still remain independent and open. The trick is in redefining politics itself.”

She researched three major groups that participated in the WSF—anarchists, political parties and non-governmental organizations—and found that differences between the groups provided some insights as to why the WSF was losing ground.

Similarities between the groups operated as a strong basis for action. They all critiqued large-scale institutions that promoted neo-liberal globalization. And they all wanted to see a more grassroots form of democracy become the norm.

“Very easily summed up, these institutions put profits before people and [the three activist groups]want to reverse that,” Gautney said. “But when forced to articulate a vision of social change, then things would get hairy.”

The vision for social change espoused by members of these groups sometimes conflicted with their actions, which led to criticism, Gautney said.

“I might desire to be free of party influence or corporate influence, but in the real world how do I realize that goal? It’s a huge conflict,” she explained. “The anarchist groups that were the protagonists in Seattle began to contend that the WSF was trying to dilute them or depoliticize them.”

Others criticized WSF organizers for inviting big-name intellectuals and state actors, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to speak.

There was even debate as to how much protest was too much after someone was killed at an anti-globalization rally in 2001 in Genoa, Italy.

“So there were big fights within the movement about dangers associated with waging these kind of protests,” Gautney said. “Shortly after that, you have the attacks of Sept. 11, which added to their concerns.

“Is it offensive to disagree with government at a time when everyone is so vulnerable? It became very divisive between these groups. Some of them thought the United States had a right to retaliate against the terrorists and others didn’t. These are fundamental differences.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw the movement adopt an anti-war focus.

“But with Iraq, almost the entire left was on the same page,” Gautney said. “With the anti-globalization movement, you can say that 250,000 people were on the same page. For the anti-war movement, world records were broken. At an anti-war protest in Italy, there were more than a million people. So it wasmuch more of a social movement.”

Gautney defines a social movement as something that arises organically from some kind of fracture in, or dissatisfaction with, the realm of social relations.

“The anti-war movement was very organic and had a very simple goal—we need to stop the war,” she said. “Now the anti-war movement has become a popular position, so there’s no need for a movement anymore. The economy, especially housing and employment, will be the next field of contestation.”