The Prophet in the Sinking Rowboat

James Devine is an odd choice for a hero. He's stubborn, blunt, and full of himself.

He calls Chuck Schumer a servant of Wall Street and Hakeem Jeffries a man who preaches "pragmatism," so he never has to offend the plutocrats who fund his campaigns. He says the Democratic Party is a rowboat with two oarsmen pulling in opposite directions—a young, strong rower up front straining toward economic freedom, and a donor-class rower in back who barely dips his oar because he doesn't want the boat to go anywhere.

Subscribe

He is not, in other words, a man given to understatement. But his confidence comes from something solid: the conviction that America—and the world—is in deep trouble, and that human beings already have everything we need to halt democracy's collapse, repair the economy, and pull ourselves back from the existential threats closing in on us.

That conviction animates two new books that function as companion volumes in a single argument: From Reagan to Rollerball: The Corporate Coup Against American Democracy and Escaping Gilded Cages: Breaking the Cycle of Concentrated Wealth & Rebuilding the Common Good.

The first is diagnosis. The second is prescription. Together they form one of the more ambitious attempts in recent years to connect the dots between climate catastrophe, economic inequality, and democratic decay—and to insist, against the prevailing mood of fatalism, that the connections are not only real but actionable.

The Diagnosis: From Powell to Rollerball

From Reagan to Rollerball traces the century-long arc from what Devine calls "the Enlightenment promise to its betrayal," comparing fifty years of progressive advancement under the New Deal with a roughly equal period of reckless decline fashioned by plutocratic parasites.

His analytical framework draws on Thomas Piketty's concept of the "trifunctional order"—the recurring division of society into warriors, priests, and workers—and applies it to American political history from the New Deal to the present. The book's central claim is that the democratic interlude of the mid-twentieth century, when organized labor won genuine concessions from capital, was not the norm but the exception to human history.

The Powell Memorandum of 1971, written by corporate attorney Lewis Powell two months before Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court, was a declaration of class war: a blueprint for a fifty-year institutional campaign to reverse the New Deal settlement and restore the pre-New Deal balance of power between capital and labor.

Devine argues that the campaign largely succeeded. He documents the mechanisms: the think tanks (Heritage, Cato, AEI), the legal pipeline (the Federalist Society), the lobbying industry, the dismantling of union power through the PATCO firing and the transformation of the NLRB, the tax cuts that shifted the fiscal burden from the wealthy to everyone else, the deregulation that produced the savings-and-loan crisis and then the 2008 financial collapse, and the campaign finance architecture culminating in Citizens United.

The result, Devine writes, is an America in which the preferences of ordinary citizens have "essentially zero independent influence on policy outcomes"—a finding he attributes to the Princeton-Northwestern study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which he treats as the political science confirmation of what the Powell program had achieved.

The Rollerball metaphor is not incidental. Norman Jewison's 1975 film depicted a world in which corporations had absorbed the functions of the state, entertainment spectacle managed public consciousness, and democratic self-governance had become literally unimaginable. Devine argues that the distance between that fictional future and the American present has been closing steadily for fifty years.

The book's most chilling chapters trace the mechanisms: the collapse of local journalism, the algorithmic amplification of outrage, the Fox News epistemological universe, the privatization of everything from prisons to water systems, the surveillance capitalism that makes privacy a practical impossibility. In Devine's reading, we are not approaching Rollerball's world; we are living in its antechamber.

The book's intellectual scaffolding is impressive, drawing on Piketty, Jack Rasmus, Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, with a foreword by human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who won a $9 billion verdict against corporate polluter Chevron. But its real power lies in the synthesis—the way it connects the Powell Memorandum to the PATCO firing to the opioid epidemic to the deaths of despair to the collapse of local news.

Devine is at his best when he is tracing the specific mechanisms of class war, as in his chapter on "Grand Theft Capital," which catalogs wage theft, worker misclassification, noncompete clauses, and algorithmic wage suppression with the precision of an indictment.

The Prescription: Escaping Gilded Cages

If From Reagan to Rollerball is the autopsy, Escaping Gilded Cages is the treatment plan.

It is a policy book in the tradition of the Economic Policy Institute's Agenda for Shared Prosperity, updated for the crises of the 2020s. Its structure is encyclopedic: twenty chapters covering climate, healthcare, labor, retirement security, infrastructure, poverty, paid leave, education, reparations, immigration, trade, democracy reform, technology, nuclear risk, and veterans' affairs. Each chapter ends with specific policy recommendations. The book is not a manifesto; it is a manual.

The range is extraordinary. Devine proposes a $25 minimum wage indexed to productivity, a cap on wealth, a national insurance pool modeled on Medicare, Guaranteed Retirement Accounts with a 3 percent guaranteed real return, a $200 billion just transition fund for displaced fossil fuel workers, $800 billion in international climate finance as payment of America's "carbon debt," a wealth tax of 2–3 percent on fortunes over $50 million, a financial transaction tax, restoration of Glass-Steagall, structural antitrust remedies against Google and Meta, a federally funded public search engine, universal pre-K, tuition-free public higher education, postal banking, publication of the Equal Rights Amendment, reparations for slavery, and Supreme Court expansion to thirteen justices with eighteen-year staggered terms.

What distinguishes Escaping Gilded Cages from the usual progressive wish list is Devine's insistence that none of these proposals is novel or utopian.

Each has historical precedent—the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) brought electricity to rural America; Glass-Steagall worked for sixty-six years; the 1968 minimum wage, adjusted for productivity, would be worth more than $24 today—or is functioning in comparable democracies, or commands majority public support.

The gap between these proposals and current policy is not a gap of persuasion. It is a gap of power.

And the final section of the book, "Building the Organized Majority," is devoted to closing it.

Devine's organizing philosophy draws heavily on Ella Baker and the relational organizing tradition. He cites the research showing that face-to-face canvassing is three to eight times more effective than digital outreach, that relational organizing produces more durable engagement than single-contact mobilization, and that the loneliness epidemic is not merely a public health crisis but an organizing emergency.

The book's penultimate chapter is a call to rebuild the institutions—unions, civic associations, cooperatives, community organizations—through which working people have historically exercised collective power. "The platform is the map," he writes. "The organized majority is the vehicle. The covenant is the commitment to drive it."

The Prophet's Limits

Devine is not without his blind spots. His treatment of the Democratic Party's failures, while largely accurate, occasionally flattens distinctions that matter. The book acknowledges that the two parties are not identical but devotes far more energy to documenting Democratic complicity than to analyzing the structural constraints that shape it.

His heroes are the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor organizers, the civil rights workers—figures whose moral clarity he clearly aspires to emulate.

But moral clarity is easier in retrospect than in the moment, and Devine's impatience with those who counsel patience sometimes reads as a failure to reckon with the genuine difficulty of building majorities in a system designed to prevent them. On the other hand, his argument that Democratic Party leaders are not delivering what their electorate wants is a point hard to dismiss, and his explanation of this as a consequence of capture makes sense.

His economic analysis, while well-sourced, occasionally overstates the case.

The claim that the median worker would earn $50,000 more per year under the 1975 income distribution is drawn from RAND Corporation research, but the counterfactual is contested, and the number—which Devine repeats in both books—carries more rhetorical than analytical weight.

His treatment of nuclear power as a "false solution" is defensible but one-sided; the same is true of his dismissal of carbon capture. These are not fatal flaws, but they are reminders that Devine is a polemicist as well as an analyst.

More significantly, the books are stronger on diagnosis than on the mechanics of change. The final chapter of Escaping Gilded Cages describes the what of organizing—relational conversations, coalition-building, permanent electoral infrastructure—but says less about the how: the specific strategies, the institutional forms, the funding models, the leadership development pipelines.

Devine knows that the Powell network built its infrastructure over fifty years with patience and discipline. He is less clear on how the left builds its own, even as he strikes a hard chord asserting that the work must begin now.

The Prophet's Achievement

And yet. There is something bracing about Devine's refusal to accept the terms of the current debate. He writes with the conviction of a man who believes that the crises we face are not natural disasters but political choices—and those political choices can be reversed. He is not interested in mourning the past; he is interested in organizing the future. His books are not elegies but weapons.

The description of Devine as a "working-class prophet" is apt, but not because he claims special insight. It is because he insists on naming things that the political class prefers to leave anonymous: that the donor class is waging a class war, that the Democratic Party has become a fundraising apparatus for the wealthy, that the road to freedom is not paved with compromise but with the broken chains of those who refused to wait. He writes with the anger of a man who has watched his country be hollowed out and is not willing to pretend otherwise.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand," Frederick Douglass wrote. "It never did and it never will." Devine quotes Douglass repeatedly, and one suspects he takes the lesson personally. His books are demands—specific, evidence-based, historically grounded, and politically achievable. They are not, as he says, aspirations. They are demands.

Whether anyone will read them is another matter. Devine himself seems to wonder. "I honestly do not know if anyone is going to read this, let alone take initiative to save the world," he writes in the final pages of Escaping Gilded Cages. "I just know that we can do that, and we should do it."

That is the prophet's predicament: to speak the truth whether or not anyone is listening, to act whether or not anyone is following.

Devine's books are a reminder that the work of democracy is not a spectator sport—and that the only thing worse than losing is not trying.

Recognizing that the window is narrow for successful action, Devine quotes Robert Swan, who said, "The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it."

If enough readers pick up these books, and if some of them take the lessons to heart, perhaps humanity has a chance to survive…