Courtesy USPS
The new stamp featuring Pete Seeger.
In February 2021 the US Postal Service announced its plans for an $11.3 billion contract with a military contractor called Oshkosh Defense for a new generation of mail trucks—powered by gasoline. The 150,000 new vehicles would have gotten 8.3 miles per gallon, about the same as the three-decade-old ones they were replacing, and would have produced pollution equal to that of 4.3 million passenger cars.
This week, succumbing to pressure from Congress, the White House, and lawsuits from 16 states and four leading environmental groups, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a notorious Trump holdover, backed down and revised the contract so that the Postal Service's new trucks will be mostly electric.
By 2023, the fleet of 217,000 vehicles, the civilian government's largest, will be about 40 percent electric. The two leading Democrats in the House who have pressed for this reversal, Jared Huffman of California and Carolyn Maloney of New York, want the fleet to be close to 100 percent electric.
It's the kind of incremental progress that progressives are occasionally winning. Meanwhile, President Biden's larger climate and social investment agenda remains totally blocked, and the future of democracy itself hangs by a thread.
By coincidence, the Postal Service today released a stamp honoring Pete Seeger. Despite the reign of DeJoy, postage stamps have continued to feature occasional lefties. Other progressives recently featured on stamps include James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Woody Guthrie, Yip Harburg, Harvey Milk, Paul Robeson, and even Malcolm X.
Could this be the work of some lefty mole buried deep in the administrative state?
When Joe McCarthy was at the peak of his power, he went after an obscure army dentist named Irving Peress, who served as a captain during the Korean War. Peress had leftist leanings. In October 1953, he was routinely promoted to major.
One of McCarthy's lunatic raves became, “Who promoted Peress?” If we ever become a full-blown Republican police state, one can imagine a future Congressional investigation demanding to know, “Who honored Pete Seeger?”
I'm reminded of one of Todd Gitlin's most witty and prescient lines, recoiling against the political energy that went into arcane cultural battles in academia. He wrote, “While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department.”
The right is now on the verge of destroying American democracy. We get some EVs at the Postal Service, and Pete Seeger on a stamp.
May Pete's memory inspire us to larger struggles, bolder visions, and political coherence.
