Basic income pilot programs are proliferating throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The goal is to empower poor families with unconditional cash grants. But there’s a catch: You aren’t eligible if you’re white.

Last week, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced the launch of the Oakland Resilient Families partnership, which will provide 600 families with a $500 monthly cash stipend for the 18 months.

“The poverty we all witness today is not a personal failure, it is a systems failure,” said Schaaf. “Guaranteed income is one of the most promising tools for systems change, racial equity, and economic mobility we’ve seen in decades.”

The program—modeled off of a similar pilot in Stockton, California—will be eligible to families with at least one child under 18, who are making no more than 50 percent of the area’s median income ($59,000 for a family of three), and who are black, indigenous, and/or people of color (BIPOC).

The Resilient Families partnership, while endorsed and promoted by Schaaf and the city government, is funded entirely by philanthropic donations. It will be run by a collection of community groups, including the nonprofits Family Independence Initiative, Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, and Oakland Thrives, a public-private partnership.

A recent study of Stockton’s basic income pilot program found that recipients saw their financial security and reported mental well-being rise, reports NPR.

Eligible families will apply online to participate in the program and will be chosen at random. The program is scheduled to start this spring.

It’s similar to another basic income pilot being launched in nearby Marin County. That program, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, will provide a $1,000 monthly stipend to 125 low-wage women of color with at least one child over the next two years.

The program will be administered by the Marin Community Foundation, a nonprofit, which is also contributing $3 million to the endeavor. The Marin County Board of Supervisors voted last Tuesday to spend $400,000 on the program.

Oakland’s program is probably the better-designed out of the two, says Max Ghenis, founder and president of the UBI Center, a think tank that researches basic income policies.

“Oakland set up smaller amounts and used the budget to expand the population that’s being reached, so that’s a pretty smart step,” he tells Reason, saying that research on cash transfer programs shows that smaller amounts provided to a larger number of people do a better job of alleviating poverty.

The same is true of programs that target families with children, which both Marin and Oakland counties do. “The impact [of a cash stipend] on the future well-being and development of those kids is much stronger than alleviating the poverty of adults,” Ghenis says.

Transfer programs with strict income cutoffs often discourage recipients from earning more money, as additional wages could cost them even more in benefits. These pilot programs should be able to avoid that perverse incentive, given that once participants are selected, they’ll remain eligible for the monthly cash stipend even if their income rises.

Limiting eligibility of these programs by race could well prove legally problematic, says Walter Olson, a legal expert at the Cato Institute. The U.S. and California constitutions, he notes, generally prohibit race-selective programs and public services.

This is particularly true of Marin County’s decision to award public funding to its local basic income pilot program.

“The structure of the program is racially discriminatory. It will probably not make it over the threshold for when government is allowed to discriminate,” Olson says, telling Reason that governments can generally only discriminate along racial lines when implementing programs narrowly aimed at righting past discriminatory behavior by that same government.

The legal issues around Oakland’s basic income pilot are harder to parse, he says, given that it is privately funded and administered, but also heavily promoted by city officials.

“The issue that comes out is, is there state action?” says Olson.

Much of the fleshing out what counts as state action stems from court cases in the post–Jim Crow South, where local and state governments would nominally privatize government services like schools or libraries in order to maintain racially discriminatory rules about their use.

Oakland’s basic income pilot could be found to be unconstitutional on similar grounds depending on how active of a role city officials take in administering or directing people toward the program, says Olson.

At the same time, he says, libertarians should be wary of defining state action too broadly.

“By libertarian standards, there ought to be quite a bit of leeway for local government to talk up things, endorse things,” says Olson, giving the example of a city closing off streets for a parade honoring a local same-sex college.

While the local government would be prohibited from operating a same-sex college, it shouldn’t be so constrained as to not be able to promote it. That’s separate from the political question of whether local officials should be endorsing race-selective programs the way Schaaf has.

“The legal controversy is only part of it. I think it’s appropriate to have a controversy about what our mayors are getting into when they seem to put a city’s endorsement behind these kinds of things,” says Olson.

“We’ve just gone through ten years of agitation about how you should be allowed to have medical studies” that select for race, he says. There’s no reason that social experiments should be immune from that same scrutiny.

Ghenis says that race-based eligibility requirements could also undermine public support for basic income proposals.

“I do worry that something like this could be spun as something closer to reparations than [universal basic income]. The polling is much stronger for semi-universal cash relief than it is for reparations,” he says. “I think there’s a political case and also an external validity case. If ultimately, we want to get to UBI, we need to see how more inclusive programs fare.”

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This article originally appeared at Public Discourse. 

If there’s one thing the “post-liberal” conservatives can agree on, it’s that 2016 should have been a wake-up call for the Republican Party. According to the new conventional wisdom within the conservative movement, Donald Trump’s shocking electoral victory four years ago represented a blue-collar economic revolt against GOP elites, who had lost touch with their base. Rural and small-town Americans, disillusioned with the globally integrated modern economy, were desperate for a hand up. Trump alone noticed, and they rewarded him with their energetic support.

These basic assumptions undergird a push by many conservative commentators—and a concomitant pivot by a number of Republican officials—to reimagine the GOP as the party of workers, comfortable with much more direct government intervention into the economy than ever before. As Florida Sen. Marco Rubio put it in a 2019 speech, “Our challenge is an economic order that is bad for America.” As columnist David Brooks wrote last year, “over the long term, some version of Working-Class Republicanism will redefine the G.O.P.”

The post-liberals take great satisfaction in labeling the libertarian economic agenda of open trade, low taxes, and deregulation with sneering epithets like “zombie Reaganism” and “market fundamentalism.” They are persuaded that voters overwhelmingly share their disdain for the free market economic regime. The empirical evidence for that belief, though, has always been thinner than they appreciate. To the extent that the Trump coalition was unified and energized by anything, survey data suggest that it was cultural issues, not economic ones.

A New Nationalism Emerges

In an August 2020 essay for The New York Times, Brooks explored three possible paths forward for Republicans. Notably, he insisted that each option begins with the Trumpian presumptions that “the free market is not working well” and “economic libertarianism is not the answer.” He’s not alone. Both money and attention have been lining up behind a new conservative nationalist element in the last few years. In July 2019, a multi-day conference convened in Washington, D.C., to hash out a better conservative economic program. As I reported at the time:

Practically speaking, the nationalist agenda is largely focused on the need for a federal “industrial policy.” For Breitbart’s John Carney, that means tariffs, and lots of them. Americans need to be willing to pay higher prices to protect the jobs of their fellow citizens, according to [activist David] Brog. For American Affairs founder Julius Krein, “protectionism is not sufficient. . . . It’s not radical enough.” The Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass laid out a plan involving research and development subsidies, infrastructure investments, preferential tax rates for favored firms, punitive taxes on companies that move jobs overseas, “trade enforcement” to make other countries play according to our rules, and more. “We should have a National Institutes of Manufacturing just as we have a National Institutes of Health,” he said.

It’s true, of course, that President Trump was a free trader’s nightmare, surrounding himself with radical protectionists and slapping import levies on goods not just from China but from many of our closest allies, often with devastating effects. He also embraced a sort of economic strongmanism in which a president may dictate business decisions to private companies and use the full arsenal of federal powers to compel their submission—you know, for the common good. All of this is pretty far from the libertarian economic ideal.

At the same time, the Trump years saw one of the largest tax cuts in American history, alongside some noteworthy efforts to roll back the federal regulatory burden—two archetypally Reaganite policy moves. More to the point, these years also saw mixed support—at best—for top-down management of the economy.

Broad Support for Free Enterprise

The new economic nationalists posit that, to remain competitive, the Republican Party must learn from 2016 and jettison its crippling commitment to economic libertarianism. Yet public polling suggests that America is still a country of people who broadly support free enterprise. In the fall of 2019, Gallup found that just 28 percent of Americans (and just 7 percent of GOPers) think there is too little government regulation of business and industry. But a desire for greater oversight of market actors—stronger fetters, if you will—is at the core of the nationalist alternative that people like Cass are articulating.

Pollsters also found support for foreign trade increasing over the course of the Trump presidency. According to Pew Research Center, the proportion of Americans who thought free trade agreements have been a good thing for the country jumped from 45 percent in 2016 to 65 percent in 2019. According to Gallup, 58 percent of Americans said in February 2016 that free trade represented an opportunity for increased economic growth, compared to 34 percent who saw it as a threat to the American economy. Three years later, 74 percent said it was an opportunity (a 16-percentage-point increase), compared to 21 percent who saw it as a threat (a 13-percentage-point decline).

These numbers all predate the COVID-19 crisis. Amid a once-in-a-century event, it should come as no surprise that support for emergency spending would be sky-high across the board—and so it is. Still, recent data reinforce the supposition that something other than broad disapproval of limited government and free market capitalism animates today’s Republican coalition. A January survey commissioned by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) found that only 35 percent of 2020 Trump voters thought the United States should reduce trade with foreign countries. Meanwhile, 93 percent agreed that “government doesn’t create wealth; people and businesses do.” Again, these figures are among self-identifying Trump supporters. Ask yourself: Does this sound like a cohort mobilized primarily by disgust with “zombie Reaganism”?

While the evidence is mostly anecdotal at this point, it has even been posited—including in the left-wing Mother Jones—that the Democratic Party’s socialist turn explains the unexpected gains for Trump in places like South Florida last year. Where there are sizable pockets of immigrants from countries with less than rosy experiences of state-controlled economic systems, people may have shifted toward Trump out of a last-ditch desire for relatively more economic freedom.

Cultural Anxieties Are the Real Driver

There was always good reason to suspect that cultural anxieties, far more than economic anxieties, were driving support for Trump. His success was indeed evidence of a backlash. But voters, rather than retaliating against supposedly stale GOP talking points on NAFTA, likely were acting on something more primal: a strong feeling that people like them are under attack from powerful cultural institutions in America. Under such conditions, it is tempting to conclude that extreme medicine is warranted.

This sense of being besieged is epitomized by two issue categories that every journalist and congressional staffer knows garner disproportionate, and disproportionately passionate, attention from the public: the perceived dual threats of runaway political correctness and legal assaults on religious liberty.

Immediately following the 2016 election, Reason‘s Robby Soave drew attention to the former phenomenon. “Ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries,” he wrote, “I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it.” Soave acknowledged the phrase is difficult to define but argued that “the segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as ‘an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness’ think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren’t up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society.”

On the religious liberty front, I too speak from experience. After four years of writing about the Obama administration’s efforts to make evangelical Christian colleges pay for their employees’ birth control, state and city governments’ efforts to forbid wedding vendors from opting out of same-sex marriage celebrations, and the ACLU’s efforts to force Catholic hospitals to provide elective abortions and gender transition services, I had no trouble understanding why conservative voters might feel radicalized, even if I reacted with equal horror to the man they appointed to do something about it.

Last month’s EPPC poll bears this theory out. While a mere 2 percent of Trump voters thought the federal government was too small, 89 percent said “Christianity is under attack in America today”; 90 percent said “Americans are losing faith in the ideas that make our country great”; and 92 percent said “the mainstream media today is just a part of the Democratic Party.” Only 20 percent agreed that “white people have an advantage in today’s America because of their skin color,” while a staggering 87 percent were worried that “discrimination against whites will increase a lot in the next few years.”

Here, not on economic questions, is the overwhelming consensus. Many Republicans—and even some non-Republicans—feel that people who look like them and believe what they do have been unjustly branded as enemies by Hollywood, academia, the mainstream media, and the tech sector. More than a few of them are prepared to strike back in any way they can.

A quick aside: It’s clear that most Trump supporters are highly skeptical of immigration. The EPPC poll found, for instance, that 86 percent support building a wall on America’s southern border, 89 percent support a federal requirement that employers verify their workers are here legally, and 65 percent think the United States should reduce the number of people it allows to come here from abroad. What’s less clear is the extent to which these views are rooted in cultural concerns (e.g., a fear that white Americans are being replaced by ethnic minorities) or economic ones (e.g., a fear that an influx of workers are driving down wages). Although I suspect the latter concerns are often used as cover for the former, the data are not particularly clear on this point.

Against Grievance Politics

History books are full of reasons to be exceedingly nervous when identity-based grievance politics finds a foothold in your country. This is no less true when it happens on the right, among “regular folks,” than when it happens on the left, among “historically disadvantaged groups.” It’s also just as true when, as is virtually always the case, there’s some validity to the underlying grievance.

I think many conservative elites know that cultural resentment has the potential to take the Republican Party in an ugly direction. That’s why so many of them cling to the alternative explanation: It wasn’t racism or misogyny that was motivating Trump voters! It was righteous anger that their government hasn’t done more to protect them from the ravages of globalization!

Cass and the other new conservative nationalists are trying to offer a constructive policy agenda that reflects this alternative story. But in doing so, they’re building on a foundation of sand. The data just don’t support the idea that most Republicans reject free markets or free trade. And the further the GOP moves in a big-government, economically interventionist direction, the more it risks losing fusionists like me.

If the 2016 election was a wake-up call, it was for the left, not the right—a warning to the Democratic Party that dabblings in socialism and critical theory are suited to college dorm rooms, not the national political stage. We saw in 2016 that pushing past the electoral center of gravity will provoke a backlash you probably won’t much like.

Now that I think of it, that might be a lesson both sides need to hear.

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In 2018, students at CUNY Law School tried to shut down my lecture on free speech. Prior to the event, Dean Mary Lu Bilek refused to cancel the event. But after my event, she said the “non-violent, limited protest was a reasonable exercise of protected free speech, and it did not violate any university policy.”

Dean Bilek never reached out to me. Indeed, not a single faculty member CUNY ever said a word to me. I briefly considered litigation, but ultimately decided against it. Based on my analysis of the events, the Dean followed controlling First Amendment caselaw, albeit grudgingly. I did submit requests under New York’s Freedom of Information Law. Nothing meaningful turned up. I know that Bilek retained a crisis management firm, but nothing of substance was discussed over email. I let the matter go.

A few months later I attended a small conference of law professors. Dean Bilek was there. I walked over to her and introduced myself. She said hello, pretended not to know me, and briskly walked away. I surmised that she was in a tough spot. I understood the type of institution she taught in. And I recognized that if she showed me even the slightest courtesy, her students would rebel. I can’t fathom what teaching at CUNY Law is like.

I gave Dean Bilek very little thought over the past few years. Fast forward to the present. By now, Dean Bilek’s self-cancellation has made national headlines. I encourage you to read the summary in the New York Times. I won’t even try to summarize the surreal circumstances. I’ll admit it. I had a brief moment of schadenfreude, but then my libertarian wheels started spinning, and I rallied to her cause.

I write in defense of Mary Lu Bilek. I truly feel bad for her. Dean Bilek spent her career promoting the cause of social justice and anti-racism. She did everything in her power to address the unique concerns of the CUNY community. But then she slipped. Once. She made a mistake. Who knows why she said what she said. Maybe she was having a bad day. Maybe she was under a lot of stress. Maybe she thought she was making a more profound point that was lost in translation. Whatever the reason, she said what she said.

That one comment ruined her career. In our current culture, there is no room for error. And, no one knows ex ante what those errors will be. We live in precarious times. There is no longer any margin of errors. Apologies are meaningless. If a dyed-in-the-wool progressive can be shunned for a single errant comment, none of us are safe. I fear the legal academy will become something of a circular firing squad. Anyone who crosses an ill-defined line will be subject to summary cancellation. And anyone who disagrees with that sentence will be charged with bystander liability. At bottom, the most aggrieved students will have the power to control any aspect of the institution. Universities will no longer be places where truth and knowledge can be pursued. Rather, Universities will first and foremost be designed to pursue social justice, as defined by the vacillating whims of societal revolution. Dissidents will be excluded.

I’m sorry we had to witness Bilek’s decanal self-immolation. But I must defend her, even if she wouldn’t defend me.

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