AMAZON GETS BIGGER WILL TRUMP GO TO WAR? THE NEW YUPPIES

SEPTEMBER 2017 Two Great Reviews, One Low Price

From now until the end of August, you can get a year’s subscription to both magazines for as little as $80. www.lrb.me/paris contents AUG/SEPT 2017

UP FRONT 6 Nuclear Summer 36 Will Washington’s bluster spark a war with Iran? BY COLIN H. KAHL 8 Rich Man, Poor City What Trump learned from New York City’s fiscal crisis. BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN 9 The Trump Tweetometer The president has found a surefire way to soothe his wounded ego: retweets. 10 The Real Voter Fraud With 99 bills in 31 states, the GOP aims to crush voting rights. BY ZACHARY ROTH 12 It Takes a Pillage How Trump is helping to revive the publishing industry. BY ALEX SHEPHARD

COLUMNS 14 The New Nation-States After the Paris accord, the political landscape is shifting. BY BILL MCKIBBEN 16 Back to Work How a bold new proposal could make America great again. BY BRYCE COVERT

REVIEW 58 European Disunion The Handshake What the rise of populist movements means for democracy. BY YASCHA MOUNK Why did a Florida businessman named Yousef Muslet 64 Phantom Pains face life in prison for an everyday gesture? Why is Casey Afeck so sad? BY CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN BY MATT WOLFE 66 Strange Seer David Lynch pushes TV to its limits in the new Twin Peaks. BY RACHEL SYME 69 The New Yuppies How the aspirational class expresses its

18 26 50 status in an age of inequality. BY J.C. PAN The Return of Trump’s The Crossing 72 The Austenista Monopoly Russian As a record number Does Pride and Prejudice hold subversive messages? BY ELAINE SHOWALTER With Amazon on the rise Laundromat of refugees brave the deadly voyage from 74 and a business tycoon How mobsters and Created Equal Libya to Italy, a rescue The economic divide has undermined in the White House, oligarchs used Trump’s vessel called the Topaz the Constitution. BY WIN MCCORMACK can a new generation of high-rises to clean Responder races to save Democrats return the dirty money and run an 80 Backstory migrants from perishing party to its trust-busting international crime ring. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX GARCIA at sea. PHOTOGRAPHS BY roots? BY MATT STOLLER BY CRAIG UNGER MATHIEU WILLCOCKS POETRY 62 Alike, Yet Not Quite BY JENNY XIE 78 Twists of Comb-Hair

) ( TRUMP VADON MICHAEL REFERENCE; ILLUSTRATION COVER REDUX; / SALTER JEFFERY BY PHOTOGRAPH COVER ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SEILER BY SHARON OLDS

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 1 contributors

Bryce Covert, a contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times, Editor in Chief specializes in writing about the economy. Last year her work was honored Win McCormack with an Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus. BACK TO WORK, P. 16 Editor Eric Bates Colin H. Kahl is an associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Literary Editor Digital Director Georgetown University. He has served as deputy assistant to President Laura Marsh Mindy Kay Bricker Barack Obama and national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, Features Directors Executive Editor and deputy assistant for the Middle East to Defense Secretaries Robert Sasha Belenky Ryan Kearney Gates and Leon Panetta. NUCLEAR SUMMER, P. 6 Theodore Ross Deputy Editor Politics Editor Ryu Spaeth Christian Lorentzen is the film critic for the new republic and the book Bob Moser Social Media Editor critic for New York magazine. He has been following Casey Afeck’s career Managing Editor Sarah Jones closely for decades. “I was born in Boston,” he says, “and have been Laura Reston Senior Editors watching the Afeck brothers since they were in plays at the Cambridge Assistant Editor Brian Beutler Rindge and Latin School.” PHANTOM PAINS, P. 64 Moira Donegan Jeet Heer News Editor Design Director Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in the Alex Shephard Siung Tjia Environment at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His first Staff Writers Photo Director novel, about a secession movement in Vermont, will be published this fall. Emily Atkin Stephanie Heimann Clio Chang “As the planet’s peril mounts,” he says, “we’re all thinking outside the box Production Manager Josephine Livingstone Graham Vyse about solutions.” THE NEW NATION-STATES, P. 14 Steph Tan Poetry Editor Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government at Harvard and a columnist Contributing Editors Cathy Park Hong at Slate. His second book, The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, Reporter-Researchers Welfare State, was published this spring. EUROPEAN DISUNION, P. 58 Siddhartha Deb, Michael Lovia Gyarkye Eric Dyson, Paul Ford, Ted Sukjong Hong J.C. Pan, a writer and critic in New York, has written on the vanishing Genoways, William Giraldi, Juliet Kleber Dana Goldstein, Kathryn Joyce, divide between work and leisure. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Suki Kim, Maria Konnikova, Interns Dissent, Jacobin, and The Fader. THE NEW YUPPIES, P. 69 Corby Kummer, Michelle Legro, Eric Armstrong, Sam Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, Fossum, Taylor Hartz, Graeme Wood, Robert Wright Joon Lee, Sagari Shetty Kim Phillips-Fein teaches twentieth-century American history at New York University. She is the author of Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and

the Rise of Austerity Politics and Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Director of Marketing Associate Advertising Against the New Deal. RICH MAN, POOR CITY, P. 8 and Revenue Director Evelyn Frison Shawn Awan Elaine Showalter is a professor emerita of English at Princeton Audience and Controller University and the author, most recently, of The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Partnership Manager David Myer Howe. THE AUSTENISTA, P. 72 Eliza Fish Office Manager, NY Media Relations Manager Tori Campbell Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Program at New America, Steph Leke where he is researching the history of anti-monopoly policy in the Associate Publisher twentieth century. He previously served as a senior policy adviser to the Art Stupar Senate Budget Committee. THE RETURN OF MONOPOLY, P. 18 Publisher Hamilton Fish Rachel Syme is the television critic for the new republic. She is currently working on her first book, about a love afair in Hollywood in the 1930s. She chose the new Twin Peaks for her inaugural column because “I Published by Lake Avenue Publishing knew David Lynch would make something that didn’t feel like anything 1 Union Square West, else. It actively resists snap judgment.” STRANGE SEER, P. 66 New York, NY 10003 President Craig Unger is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of Win McCormack several books, including House of Bush, House of Saud. Russia’s role in Trump’s ascent, he says, “may well turn out to be House of Trump, House of Putin.” TRUMP’S RUSSIAN LAUNDROMAT, P. 26 For subscription inquiries or problems call (800) 827-1289 For reprints and licensing visit www.TNRreprints.com Mathieu Willcocks is a photojournalist based in Scotland. Last summer he embedded aboard the Topaz Responder, a rescue ship in the Mediterranean, to document the dangerous voyage undertaken by refugees fleeing from Libya to Italy. THE CROSSING, P. 50

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PRESIDENTS ALWAYS GET flak for vacationing on the taxpayer dime—from FDR, who spent weekends fishing on the USS Potomac, to Barack Obama, who summered on posh Martha’s Vineyard. To counter the impression that they’re sleeping on the job, presidents usually try to manage the optics of their time of. Some vacation in swing states, like Richard Nixon in Key Biscayne. Others huddle with world leaders, like George H.W. Bush in Kennebunkport. And a few—as Ryan Lizza pointed out in the new republic in 2001—stage their getaways to create an illusion of folksiness, like George W. Bush at his ranch in Crawford. ✯ Donald Trump, as always, takes a diferent approach. His trips to Mar-a-Lago and his “summer White House” in New Jersey aren’t about politics at all. They’re purely personal—an excuse to escape a city he hates and a job he cannot manage. At his resorts, he’s in his element: showing of his wealth and status to like-minded elites. Trump is already on pace, in fact, to spend more taxpayer money on vacations in a year than Obama did in eight. And while other presidents worried about appearing out of touch, Trump sees nothing but the upside in his lavish jaunts. Every trip to his properties, after all, is a chance to burnish the Trump brand. George W. Bush on vacation at his Texas ranch in 2007

Ryan Lizza Bet the Ranch AUGUST 27, 2001

It’s the president’s first year in office. He has Today, by comparison, lefty pundits home before he entered the White House. just passed one of the biggest tax cuts in have pummeled the president for taking a But the third point, at least, is certainly un- history. In August he escapes Washington record - long vacation while ordinary Americans true. The ranch was bought just two years for a month at his Western ranch. His top were working harder and harder and while the ago, with Bush’s presidential campaign at full communications adviser, worried that the economy was leaving fewer and fewer with steam. Before then, Bush lived in the Texas long vacation is reinforcing a perception of the ability to take time off. So the Bushies governor’s mansion and spent vacations at a him as indolent, suggests the president spend moved aggressively to convince the press home he owned at a members-only lakeside less time on vacation. The president loses his that Bush was, in fact, working like a dog—a retreat in East Texas called the Rainbo Club, temper. “Look,” he says, “you can tell me to decision they underscored with his nationally which caters to the Dallas elite. His other do a lot of things, but you’re not going to tell televised stem-cell decision from Crawford. holiday destinations were the Bush family me when to go to the ranch.” It’s an admirable When Bush was asked about people who say compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, which moment. But the ranch is not Prairie Chapel his vacation is too long, he snapped, “They did so much to identify his father as an aloof in Texas. It’s Rancho del Cielo in California. don’t understand the definition of work, then. preppy, and the Gasparilla Inn, a luxurious And the president is not George W. Bush, but I’m getting a lot done.” Florida hideaway owned by an heir to the Ronald Reagan. But the White House vacation spin is DuPonts, where the Bush family went after Unlike Bush, when Reagan went off on va - about more than just how hardworking Bush the Florida recount. As one Texas newspaper ca tion, he told the world he was, well, on is. It’s also about his various other virtues. noted back when Bush purchased his ranch, vacation. The Gipper instructed his aides One of those virtues, it seems, is that— contra “Mr. Bush has no roots in the area.” But after to tell reporters not to refer to Rancho del Clinton, who famously spent his vacations seven trips there as president, Bush has Cielo as the “Western White House” because with the rich, the famous, and God knows most of the press convinced that he was the phrase connoted work rather than play. who else—Bush is happiest with his family. practically born and bred in Crawford. It’s White House aides “do not pretend that the The emphasis on Crawford also helps Bush a great political feat. Amazing as it sounds, president is spending large amounts of time maintain his image as a Washington outsider, the Bushies are proving more politically sav- on government business,” The Washington a useful persona since most of his potential vy about presidential vacations than their Post reported. When Reagan was asked if he 2004 opponents hail from the Senate. predecessors. The latest Gallup Poll, taken had done any work at his ranch, he laughed By showcasing the Crawford ranch, the about halfway through W.’s Crawford hol- and said, “Oh, sure—brought in some fire- Bush spinmeisters hope to show voters that iday? It puts the president’s job-approval

GETTY/ OMMANNEY CHARLES wood. Got rid of some more old dead brush.” the president had a life, an identity, and a rating at 57 percent—up two points. a

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 5 up front

DEAL BREAKER

Nuclear Summer Under Trump, the potential for a violent clash with Iran is real—and growing.

BY COLIN H. KAHL

DONALD TRUMP, IT appears, has never met an The stakes could not be higher. The deal—ofcially international agreement he wasn’t prepared to known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action— trash. On June 1, the president stepped to the places significant and verifiable constraints on Iran’s podium in the Rose Garden and announced his nuclear activities, efectively blocking its pathway to decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. an atomic bomb. If Trump exits the agreement, the This followed on the heels of his reluctance to prospects of a nuclear-armed Iran—or a major war reafrm America’s commitment to defend its nato to head of that outcome— would increase. allies, an obligation dating back seven decades, The Trump administration is in the midst of a com- and his decision to walk away from the Trans- prehensive review of the Iran deal, and the conclusions Pacific Partnership, the largest multilateral trade are likely to be harsh. Indeed, in a notoriously faction- deal in a generation. The next potential target alized administration, being hawkish on Iran is one of on the president’s hit list: the Iran nuclear deal, the few things that Trump ofcials seem to agree on. an agreement he has called “the worst deal ever negotiated” and has pledged to dismantle. ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAN BEJAR

6 | NEW REPUBLIC Hostility toward the Islamic Republic starts at Since m id-May, U.S. aircraft have carried out sev- RISING the top. Trump has consistently claimed that the eral strikes against Iranian-backed forces that were TENSIONS nuclear deal requires U.S. taxpayers to provide Iran approaching At Tanf, a desert garrison for anti-isis with a $150 billion “lifeline” in exchange for “noth- forces along the Syria-Iraq border. Tehran hopes to January 29 ing.” Both claims are false: The deal frees up around build a “land bridge” linking Iran to its Hezbollah Iran conducts $60 billion of Iran’s own money, and the nuclear allies in Lebanon, traversing Iraq and Syria. For missile test. constraints are considerable. The president has also that reason, Iranian-backed militias are racing February 3 accused Iran of “not living up to the spirit” of the to secure key crossing points on both sides of the Trump imposes new “terrible agreement,” even though his own State Syria-Iraq border. As U.S.-backed fighters approach sanctions, says Iran is Department certified in April that Iran is comply- isis’s last havens from the north and south, and “playing with fire.” ing with the deal. During his visit to Saudi Arabia Syrian regime and Iranian-backed forces approach February 4 in May, Trump singled out Iran for its support of from the west and east, the prospect of clashes Iran responds with terrorism, and even hinted at the need for regime between the United States and Iran will grow. further missile tests. change. And in June, after Islamic State militants Any dustup in Syria could easily spill over into April 18 attacked the Iranian parliament and the shrine of Iraq, where 6,000 U.S. troops operate in close prox- Trump orders review Ayatollah Khomeini, Trump noted that “states that imity to tens of thousands of Shia militia fighters of nuclear deal. sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they aligned with Iran. Since the counter-isis campaign May 18 promote”—implying that Iran was asking for it. began in 2014, these militias have avoided attacking Iran sanctions Trump’s hard-edged perspective is shared across U.S. forces because Washington and Tehran have been U.S. companies. his administration. His national security advisor, fighting the same enemy. But once Mosul falls, the Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, as well as key stafers on common cause against isis will rapidly dissipate. And the National Security Council responsible for Middle if the Iranians start taking casualties at the hands of East policy, forged their views of Iran at the height of U.S. forces in Syria or elsewhere in the region, Tehran the Iraq War, when U.S. troops were battling Iran’s could retaliate by unleashing Shia militias to target Revolutionary Guard and its Shia militia proxies. Americans. At that point, things could quickly get out Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, another notable of hand. In 2011, after Iranian- backed militias killed Iran hawk, commanded U.S. forces across the Middle more than a dozen U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Jim Mattis, East from 2010 to 2013—a time when his top job America’s commander in the Middle East at the time, was preparing for a possible war with Iran to thwart recommended launching retaliatory missile strikes its nuclear ambitions. This April, during a trip to Saudi Arabia, Mattis flatly stated: “Everywhere you look, if there’s trouble in the region, you find Iran.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has also expressed Trump’s aggressive posture toward Iran could hard-line views, decrying the nuclear accord as scuttle the nuclear deal—and increase the a “failed approach” that does little to address the likelihood of a military confrontation. threat Iran poses across the Middle East. So it would certainly come as no surprise if the Trump administration decides to walk away from yet another international accord. But even if Trump into Iran. In the end, he was overruled by President doesn’t torpedo the Iran deal directly, he could wind Barack Obama. But if Iran renews such attacks by up scuttling the agreement by pushing Iran into a its militia proxies, it’s easy to imagine Mattis making corner. In the coming months, the president is likely a similar recommendation to Trump. to embrace a much more aggressive posture toward To make things worse, two factors that helped Tehran, including more sanctions, more military exer- defuse tensions with Iran during Obama’s tenure are cises in the region, interdicting more Iranian vessels, now absent. First, the high-level diplomatic channel selling more arms to Israel and Arab states, and taking that Obama established with Iran no longer exists. direct action against Iran’s militant proxies— moves In January 2016, when two U.S. patrol boats drifted that could serve to escalate tensions and increase the into Iranian waters and ten American sailors were likelihood of a military confrontation. seized by Iran, urgent exchanges between Secretary The gravest risks will arise as the campaign of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister to defeat isis enters its final stage. Once U.S.-led Javad Zarif averted a potential crisis. The sailors were forces push the jihadists out of Mosul and Raqqa, returned within 24 hours, without a shot fired. In the the two largest cities still under their control, absence of such a high-level channel, however, it is Washington and Tehran could find themselves on hard to imagine the Trump administration peacefully a collision course over control of Iraq and Syria. resolving a similar incident today.

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 7 up front

Second, while Obama wanted to avoid a war escalating tensions could make the deal politically with Iran, Trump may have a diferent political unsustainable in either country. And while his deci- calculation. The one time Trump was almost uni- sion to withdraw from the Paris climate accord raises versally viewed as “presidential” by the Washington the long-term odds of an environmental catastrophe, establishment was after he ordered a missile strike exiting or undermining the agreement with Tehran on a Syrian airfield last April. Having internalized could unleash a far more immediate disaster. With that lesson, Trump may be tempted to ratchet up North Korea edging closer to an intercontinental hostility with Iran to distract from controversies ballistic missile, China expanding in the South China over his ties to Russia and his failure to advance Sea, and Russia hacking U.S. elections, a nuclear his policy agenda. crisis with Iran is the last thing the world needs. Whether or not Trump “rips up” the nuclear Yet Trump appears to be steering—or stumbling—in deal or launches an all-out war against Iran, rapidly precisely that direction. a

UNKIND CUTS

Rich Man, Poor City How the president’s budget proposal grew out of New York’s financial crisis in the 1970s.

BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN

TRUMP TO CITY: DROP IF A GOVERNMENT’S finances, as economist Joseph moment that seems to have shaped his thinking DEAD Schumpeter once wrote, strip away rhetoric to lay bare deeply. In the early 1970s, back when young Donald His budget slashes the true “spirit” of a people, then President Donald was busy running the outer-borough apartments his $3 billion in federal Trump’s first full budget proposal reveals a nation that father had built, the city had fallen on hard times. A aid for New York. is bombastic and fearful, grandiose and uncertain. recession, white flight, and the loss of industry were Regardless of what actually makes it through making it tough for the city to pay for its impressive $2 billion for transportation Congress, the suggested cuts—$616 billion from array of social services, including public hospitals health insurance for the poor, $140 billion from and libraries, cheap mass transit, and a citywide $150 million student loans, more than $190 billion from food university system. In the spring of 1975, when banks for affordable stamps—outline a vision of government based refused to continue marketing the city’s debt, New housing on the notion that the state should stand aside so York turned to the federal government for aid. But $40 million businessmen can work their magic. “This budget’s the city was stonewalled by the administration of to help the poor defining ambition,” the preamble states, “is to unleash Gerald Ford, who counted among his advisers Alan afford heat and the dreams of the American people.” Greenspan (fresh from the circles of Ayn Rand) and electricity As remarkable as the scale of the cuts is the way Donald Rumsfeld. $30 million Trump justifies them: the fear of debt. His budget For these rising conservative stars, New York’s for public schools message is threaded with dire warnings about our debt crisis was an opportunity to teach the country a “unsustainable” national debt, which is nearing lesson about fiscal responsibility. The possible risks $20 trillion. This mounting burden, he warns, will of bankruptcy—for the city, state, even the federal place the United States in “uncharted fiscal territory,” government—seemed less important than bringing leaving it vulnerable to “fiscal and economic crises.” New York to heel. The administration’s disregard for The country has “borrowed from our children and the dangers of default led to the famous Daily News their future for too long, the devastating conse- headline, “ford to city: drop dead.” ( Th e p a p e r quences of which cannot be overstated.” To stave of recently revived the line when Trump withdrew from a crisis, we must tighten our collective belts—which the Paris accord as “trump to world: drop dead.”) means cutting virtually every program designed to Ford eventually consented to provide the city with aid the most needy and marginal among us. short-term federal loans—but only if it agreed to Trump’s invocation of debt as a justification for downsize. New York was forced to slash more than austerity is oddly evocative of the fiscal crisis that one-fifth of all municipal jobs, through steep cuts to gripped New York City more than 40 years ago, a police, fire, sanitation, and schools. It closed several

8 | NEW REPUBLIC The Trump Tweetometer A highly precise quantitative analysis of every single presidential tweet.

AS DONALD TRUMP’S approval rating fell below GOP allies, family members, and YouTube fans 40 percent for the first time in his presidency, who were defending him from attack or patting he turned to his favorite medium to insulate him on the back. At the same time, he blocked himself in a soothing bubble of his own making. those who dared to criticize him: writers, As our Tweetometer shows, Trump’s retweets activists, even a group of 500,000 veterans. shot up in June—nearly matching the combined Twitter is not just the president’s bully pulpit— total for his first four months in ofce. The it’s his personal echo chamber. On Twitter, as messages he shared came from Fox pundits, in his own mind, Trump can do no wrong. a

Trump’s What Trump Hears Twitter Bubble 34 Retweets in first four months combined 26 Retweets in fifth month alone 36% From Fox News Retweeted Drudge Report (7) Fans (5) hosts, shows, and Fox (22) GOP allies (7) Republicans in Congress (3) contributors The White House (8) Other Trumps (6) World leaders (2)

What Trump Tunes Out Blocked Stephen King, writer Bess Kalb, writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! Lauren Wolfe, journalist VoteVets, a group of 500,000 veterans Jordan Uhl, March for Truth organizer Brandon Neely, ex-Guantanamo guard AJ Joshi, founder of Sivvr Rob Szczerba, former Lockheed Martin executive PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF TWITTER OF COURTESY PHOTOGRAPHS

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 9 up front

hospitals, along with many clinics. In the spring of pension obligations to teachers, firefighters, and 1976, after the City University of New York ran out police ofcers. At the federal level, the massive tax of funds and had to shut down before exams were cuts enacted under George W. Bush—and allowed completed, the system began to charge tuition for to stand by Barack Obama—have ballooned the debt the first time. Ford and his conservative acolytes and left the government scrambling to pay its bills. had succeeded in forcing the city to renegotiate the That’s why it’s deeply hypocritical of Trump to use social contract. the rising debt to justify slashing aid for the poor. But while the poor and middle class of New Far from “unleashing” America’s economic growth, York City were sufering, some people got richer— his budget proposal includes more tax cuts for the including Donald Trump. To make up the budget rich—a move that will only worsen any crisis. Indeed, shortfall, city ofcials redoubled their eforts to woo according to Bloomberg News, wealthy Americans developers and big corporations. In one of their first are deferring their tax payments in anticipation of marquee eforts, they extended a major tax break to future cuts to come. Trump to redevelop the decrepit Commodore Hotel Despite Trump’s dire warnings, an actual debt near Grand Central Terminal, working with the crisis is unlikely: Congress has raised the debt ceil- Hyatt Corporation. It was the youthful developer’s ing 14 times since 2001. But whether or not a crisis first sally into the world of Manhattan real estate. As materializes, the president is happy to use the specter of last fall, Trump and Hyatt had saved more than of public debt to inflict even deeper cuts to public $350 million in property taxes on the hotel. services. It’s a lesson he learned firsthand in his What began in New York has now spread far hometown during the 1970s: Hard times aford the beyond the five boroughs. Thanks to years of tax perfect opportunity to force through an ever more cuts, revenue-strapped cities and states across the constricted vision of government—one in which country are being forced to slash wages for pub- health care, schools, and food stamps matter less lic employees, privatize emergency services, close than tax cuts for developers to build shiny, glass- libraries and other public institutions, and reconsider wrapped hotels. a

BALLOT BLOCKERS

The Real Voter Fraud As Trump investigates “millions” of illegal votes, states are rushing to limit access to the ballot box.

BY ZACHARY ROTH

MYTH VS. FOR A WHILE there, it appeared that the GOP’s long- Since January, according to a recent report by the REALITY running assault on voting rights was finally losing Brennan Center for Justice, at least 99 bills to restrict steam. In recent years, federal courts have struck voting rights have been introduced in 31 states. Trump’s claim: down or significantly weakened several of the country’s “It looked like we had turned a corner in terms 3 to 5 million worst voting restrictions. At the same time, many of slowing down new restrictions on voting,” says illegal votes—all states—including red ones—have debated or passed Dale Ho, director of the aclu’s voting rights project. for Clinton bills to expand access to registration and polling places. “It turns out the pace has accelerated.” Documented But that was before Donald Trump was elected. Attorney General Jef Sessions moved quickly to cases of fraud in As president, Trump has refused to let go of his un- signal the new administration’s disdain for voting 2016 election: 4 hinged claim that “millions” of people voted illegally rights. In February, shortly after his confirmation, New voting last November—and has used his unsubstantiated the Justice Department withdrew its claim that a restrictions: accusation of voter fraud to lay the groundwork at voter ID law in Texas was intentionally designed At least 99 bills the federal level for a new round of voting restric- to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters. in 31 states tions. Republican legislators from New Hampshire The message to states was clear: Under Trump, they to Texas are also moving swiftly to enact a wave of would have free rein to enforce existing restrictions new laws that would make it harder to cast a ballot. on voting—and to enact new ones.

10 | NEW REPUBLIC In May, based on nothing more than the president’s wild claims, the White House announced a presiden- tial commission to investigate voter fraud—and then stacked the panel with some of America’s most no- torious opponents of voting rights, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Ohio Sec- retary of State Ken Blackwell. In his order creating the panel, Trump pointedly directed it to shore up the public’s “confidence” in elections— putting the emphasis on perception rather than reality. “It’s not designed to seek data at all,” Justin Levitt, a constitutional scholar at Loyola Law School and former Justice Depart- ment attorney who oversaw voting rights in the Obama administration, wrote online. “The commission’s job is to manufacture security theater— to confront manipulable fears about problems that don’t yet exist.” But some states aren’t waiting on the commission. They’re rushing to erect real and substantial barriers to voting. Since vote illegally. The new law requires anyone register- January, nine states have passed major new voting ing to vote within 30 days of the election, including restrictions that will hit minorities and students on Election Day, to provide proof of their address. hardest. Iowa reduced the early voting period, re- Those who don’t have proof of residency must get it stricted same-day registration, and ordered would-be to their town clerk within ten days of voting or risk a voters to show an ID at the polls—moves that will $5,000 fine. The efect will be to chill same-day voter disproportionately disenfranchise Democrats. Ken registration— which is especially popular among col- Rizer, the GOP state representative who led the efort lege students, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic. to pass the bill, admitted that it wasn’t crafted to address an actual problem. “It is true that there isn’t widespread voter fraud,” Rizer told The New York Times. “But there is a perception that the system can Since January, nine states have passed be cheated. That’s one of the reasons for doing this.” major new voting restrictions that will hit Georgia and Indiana made it easier to remove minorities and students hardest. voters from the rolls, and Montana passed a bill that, if approved by voters in a referendum next year, will ban civic groups from helping absentee voters cast their ballots. Texas, Arkansas, and North Dakota But no state has undermined voting rights more have also passed new voter ID laws, replacing earlier than North Carolina. In April, Republicans responded measures that were blocked by courts. to the election of a new Democratic governor, Roy New Hampshire passed a novel new voting law Cooper, by reversing the long-standing rule that after a sustained campaign by top Republicans in gives the governor’s party control of state and local the state to sow concerns about a supposed epidemic election boards. Under the new legislation, con- of out-of-state voters casting ballots—even though trol would alternate between the two parties from there is no evidence this happens at any kind of sig- one year to the next—but the GOP would control nificant rate. Trump also joined in, reportedly telling the boards in even-numbered years, during major Republicans in February that he would have won New elections. When Cooper vetoed the bill, Republi- Hampshire if it weren’t for “thousands” of people who cans used their legislative supermajorities—won via were “brought in on buses” from Massachusetts to an electoral map that’s been ruled an illegal racial

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 11 up front

gerrymander—to override him and muscle it into the Justice Department is now in the hands of an law. For good measure, GOP leaders plan to pass a administration that has openly sided with those new voter ID law to replace the one struck down looking to undermine the right to vote. last year when a federal court ruled that it “targeted It’s no surprise that last fall’s election has revived African Americans with almost surgical precision.” eforts to crack down on voting rights. “The elec- Taken together, the new laws represent the great- torate looked a little diferent in 2016, compared est threat to voting rights since Republicans seized to 2008 and 2012,” says Ho, the aclu lawyer. “It control of a host of state legislatures in 2010. But had fewer African Americans.” By making it more two things are diferent this time around. In 2013, difcult for black voters to go to the polls, he says, the Supreme Court invalidated the most important Republicans hope to secure their majority into the plank of the Voting Rights Act, meaning there are future. “If you want the electorate in the future to now fewer federal protections in place to help miti- resemble the 2016 electorate, one way to perpetuate gate the damage, especially in the South. In addition, that is to restrict access to the ballot box.” a

PLOT TWIST

It Takes a Pillage How Trump is helping to revive the publishing industry.

BY ALEX SHEPHARD

THE NO. 1 THE GLASS-ENCASED Javits Center in Manhattan, and New York. On the left, scholar Timothy Snyder’s BUSINESS where Hillary Clinton held her ill-fated victory party On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Cen- BOOK OF last November, now feels haunted by the ghosts tury, which ofers tips on how to resist authoritar- ALL TIME of the election. In early June, during BookExpo ianism, has sold more than 100,000 copies, while Copies sold since America, the publishing industry’s largest annual historian Allan Lichtman’s The Case for Impeachment Trump first ran for trade conference, Donald Trump is everywhere. sold 10,000 copies in its first seven weeks. president in 2000: Authors, booksellers, and attendees are all eager to “We are seeing more and more book publishers discuss the president’s latest assaults on democracy stepping up,” says Jenn Abel Kovitz, the associate ”How to Win Friends & Influence People” and common decency. Amid the banners promoting publisher of Catapult, Counterpoint Press, and Soft (1936) Dan Brown and John Grisham, a life-size cardboard Skull books. “They’re saying, ‘These are issues that 2.95 million cutout of Alec Baldwin doing his best Trump need to be handled with a complexity and depth impression promotes the actor’s forthcoming book: that an online hot take can’t provide.’” ”The 7 Habits of Highly Effective You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Trump’s rise has also sparked renewed interest in People” (1989) Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year dystopian fiction. To keep up with a spike in demand 2.18 million as President Donald J. Trump. For a moment, Clinton after the election, Margaret Atwood’s publisher re- herself manages to steal back the spotlight—she printed 150,000 copies of her novel The Handmaid’s ”Rich Dad Poor Dad” (1997) shows up at the conference to push a collection of Tale. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Sin- 4.1 million personal essays and a children’s version of her 1996 clair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here have shot up the best-seller, It Takes A Village. But it’s clear that the best-seller lists, while sales of George Orwell’s 1984 ”Trump: The Art of the Deal” (1987) book industry—like the rest of the country—is now skyrocketed by 9,500 percent following Trump’s 247,000 consumed by all things Trump. inauguration. Signet Classics, which publishes the Since the election, dozens of books about Trump mass-market edition, rushed out 200,000 additional have already hit bookstores—and they’re selling at a copies. “We’ve printed, just this week, about half of rapid clip. On the right, Trump adviser Roger Stone what we normally sell in a year,” Craig Burke, the has written The Making of the President 2016, an ac- publicity director for Signet Classics, told The New count of the president’s insurgent campaign that has York Times in January. sold nearly 20,000 copies. Newt Gingrich has jumped Trump didn’t always fuel such a frenzy on the in with Understanding Trump, which purports to ex- part of publishers. When Pulitzer Prize–winning plain Trump’s populist appeal to elites in Washington investigative journalist David Cay Johnston first

12 | NEW REPUBLIC pitched the idea of a Trump book, shortly after We Need. Fox News host Eric Bolling is publishing The Trump announced his candidacy, he was met with Swamp: Washington’s Murky Pool of Corruption and blank stares. “I tried to do a book when Donald Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It. msnbc anchor announced in June of 2015, and Alice Martell, my lit- Katy Tur, who became a media star after she tussled erary agent, called around,” Johnston told Publishers with Trump during the election, will publish a cam- Weekly last fall. “But nobody believed he would get paign memoir in September, while journalists Mark the nomination, so nobody wanted the book.” The Halperin and John Heilemann will churn out their Making of Donald Trump was eventually published inevitable take on the campaign sometime next year. by Melville House, a small independent press in The person who may gain the most from the Brooklyn, shortly after the GOP convention. It has surge of interest in Trump books, of course, is gone on to sell more than 30,000 copies and spend Trump himself. By the time the real estate mogul four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. launched his presidential campaign, his book Trump: By and large, however, the publishing industry— The Art of the Deal—“the number-one-selling busi- like so many others—was slow to recognize that ness book of all time,” he has falsely claimed—had Trump was a force to be reckoned with. It was a costly mistake: When Barnes & Noble released disappointing financial numbers last fall, the com- pany blamed the election. “The current trend can Trump’s presidency has created a huge market for be traced precisely to the current election cycle, everything from campaign memoirs to resistance which is unprecedented in terms of the fear, anger, manifestos to dystopian fiction. and frustration being experienced by the public,” chairman Len Riggio complained to investors. “The preoccupation with this election is keeping them at home, glued to their TVs and at their desktops.” If faded in popularity. But during the election, Trump it wasn’t about Trump, Americans weren’t buying. published a new paperback edition and encouraged Now publishers are scrambling to make up for lost fans at his rallies to purchase it. He even ofered time. A slew of Trump-related books have hit bookstore to sign copies for supporters who donated to his shelves in recent months, and more are on the way. campaign. The book has once again soared up the Naomi Klein recently rushed out No Is Not Enough: best-seller lists. In the first six months of this year, Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World it’s already sold more than 74,000 copies. a

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 13 battle lines

they will meet the targets set in the Paris accord on their own. A nation -state that already holds joint auctions with Quebec in its carbon cap-and-trade program. A nation-state that is convening hun- dreds of other “subnational actors” from around the world next year to pledge to keep the rise in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius. I remember, as a college newspaper re- porter, sitting next to Jerry Brown on his campaign bus in 1980, a few days before the New Hampshire primary. He spent 45 minutes explaining to me that it wouldn’t be long before we had wristwatch tele- phones à la Dick Tracy. That kind of time allocation may explain why Brown got just under 10 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, forcing him to drop out of the race. Still, calling the Apple Watch more than three decades out is a pretty good trick. It’s worth asking whether he’s ahead of the curve once more.

’VE LONG BEEN INTERESTED IN PO- litical decentralization, on the gen- Ieral principle that small is beautiful, or at least marginally beautifuler. Years The New Nation-States ago, I started work on a seriocomic novel How Trump’s rejection of the Paris accord is reshaping the political landscape. about the secession of my home state, Vermont. (I dusted of the manuscript BY BILL MCKIBBEN after Trump’s election; it will be published this fall.) Though no one can tell what a few more months of Trumpism will bring, HEN DONALD TRUMP PULLED But the Paris decision may also re- true secession still seems far-fetched. out of the Paris climate ac- shape the world for the better, or at Vermont’s actual, tiny efort turned into a Wcord, he may have achieved least the very diferent. Consider: A few rancid, racist farce, while a nascent push something few presidents ever manage: days after Trump’s Rose Garden reveal, for Calexit collapsed when its leader de- changing the way the world works. California Governor Jerry Brown was in camped to Russia. But the idea of simply Actually, he may have done it twice. China, conducting what looked a lot like bypassing national capitols when neces- The first way is both deceptively sim- an ofcial state visit. He posed with pan- sary seems less absurd all the time. ple and monumentally damaging. By das, attended banquets—and sat down It’s ironic that global warming might slowing the global momentum toward for a one-on-one meeting with President be the wedge issue for the rise of “subna- renewable energy, Trump has guaran- Xi Jinping, which produced a series of tionalism.” After all, if you ever wanted an teed that the Earth will become a hotter agreements on climate cooperation be- argument for world government, climate place to live—which means less ice and tween China and California. (Trump’s change provides it. But the United Nations coral, more drought and flood. The last secretary of energy, Rick Perry, was in has been trying to stop global warming presidential decision to show up on the Beijing the same week: no pandas, no since the days when we called it the green- geologic record was the atom bomb: sit-down with Xi.) It was almost as if house efect. And national governments, Testing the giant weapons has left a California were another country. Call it a hijacked by the fossil fuel industry, have layer of cesium and plutonium on the nation-state—a nation-state that has talk- intervened again and again to obstruct any planet’s crust that will last for millions ed about launching its own satellites to progress: The Kyoto treaty more or less of years. Assuming Trump refrains from monitor melting polar ice. A nation-state collapsed, as did the Copenhagen talks. dropping a nuke himself, it’s his climate that has joined New York and a dozen

policy that will leave a permanent mark. others in a climate alliance to announce ILLUSTRATION BY JOE DARROW 5) X ( GETTY

14 | NEW REPUBLIC Paris “succeeded,” but only if you squint: are starting to place their own bets: Days world’s economic output. And every prom- The world’s nations vowed to keep the after Trump’s Paris announcement, Ha- ise they make, sincere or not, provides planet’s temperature increase to under waii Governor David Ige signed a law that climate activists with ammunition to hold 2 degrees Celsius, but their promises ac- calls on the state to implement portions each government accountable. tually add up to a world that will grow of the accord on its own. “Hawaii is see- It’s true that California can’t force 3.5 degrees hotter. The real hope was that ing the impacts firsthand,” Ige declared. Texas or Ohio to act, the way Congress the accord would spur private investment “Tides are getting higher, biodiversity is can—but if California gets richer from in renewable energy: And as the price of shrinking, coral is bleaching. We must renewable energy, you can be sure that solar panels plummeted, in fact, China acknowledge these realities at home.” Texas and Ohio will feel pressure to follow and India started to exceed their pledges. suit. Under existing law, in fact, California Even that modest progress alarmed F YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO IS SE- can set its own standards for things like what energy expert Michael Klare calls rious about forging a new path on automobile mileage—which in turn forces the Big Three carbon powers: the United Iglobal warming, ignore all the airy Detroit to produce cleaner cars, since States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. (Trump’s proclamations about meeting the Paris they don’t want to churn out diferent foreign policy looks more coherent, by the targets—and instead pay attention to the models for diferent regions. Big business way, when viewed through this prism.) cities and states making the very real and doesn’t like a state like California dictat- The United States has now pulled out of measurable pledge to go 100 percent re- ing how much American industry can Paris, and an aide to Vladimir Putin has newable. California’s senate just passed pollute—which is why Trump wants to said the withdrawal makes it “perfectly such a commitment by a 2–1 margin. More end California’s powers under the Clean evident” the pact is now “unworkable.” dramatically, the day after Trump said he Air Act. (States, it appears, should not be So what’s a state like California to do? had been elected to serve “Pittsburgh, allowed to experiment with anything as It can’t ignore climate change, which not Paris,” Mayor Bill Peduto announced dangerous as breathable air.) And what threatens its very existence. An epic that Pittsburgh will run entirely on clean if Washington does outlaw clean cars in five-year drought wreaked havoc on its energy by 2035. “If you are a mayor and California? Well, as I said, secession is still farming; now record flooding is pushing not preparing for the impacts of climate far-fetched. But it’s worth remembering its infrastructure to the limit. (The state change,” Peduto said, “you aren’t doing that Jerry Brown oversees the fifth -largest evacuated nearly 200,000 people when your job.” All told, 27 cities in 17 states economy on the planet. If it chooses to, the Oroville Dam threatened to collapse, have pledged to go 100 percent renew- California could probably go it alone. and all the bridges to Big Sur remain able—a move that puts them at direct odds Thanks to Trump, new political powers washed out.) In April, a new study showed with federal policy. Call them “climate are emerging from unexpected places. that if sea levels keep rising, 67 percent sanctuaries.” San Francisco, Boulder, and In North America, for instance, Native of Southern California’s beaches may be Burlington won’t surprise you—but Atlanta Americans sit astride big hydrocarbon gone before the century is out. Pulling back on renewable energy also creates a dire economic challenge Sacramento and Albany, not Washington, are for the state: Ten times more people work emerging as the capitals most important to our in clean energy in California than mine energy future. coal in the entire country. Google and Apple are clearly making clean tech their next big conquest; Elon Musk is emerging and Salt Lake City and San Diego have reserves and pipeline routes, and their as the Henry Ford of the new millennium. done the same. sovereignty is making it harder for the It’s not that Governor Brown is perfect— The real test will come in September fossil fuel companies to proceed. Big he’s been unwilling to stand up to the next year, when “subnational” govern- corporations are feeling public pressure frackers exploiting Kern County—but he ments from around the world gather in to go green, and in turn they’re pushing can tell where the future lies. California to sign the “Under2 MOU,” back hard on recalcitrant states: Google And he’s not alone. New York Gover- an agreement committing them to up- recently used its plans to build a data nor Andrew Cuomo has also set his sights hold the Paris targets. Launched in 2015 center in North Carolina to pressure Duke on clean tech: A Tesla gigafactory should by California and the German state of Energy, a notorious polluter, into provid- be up and running in Bufalo this year, Baden- Württemberg, the movement now ing the company with vast amounts of and his ambitious utility-reform plan has includes everyone from Alsace to Abru- solar power. For years, whenever we’ve produced a new generation of startups zzo to the Australian Capital Territory; thought about politics and public policy, eager to monetize energy conservation. from Sichuan to Scotland to South Suma- our heads have swiveled automatically Sacramento and Albany, not Washing- tra; from Manchester City to Madeira to in the direction of Washington. Now, as ton, are emerging as the capitals most Michoacán. Altogether: a billion people, with so much else, Trumpism is changing important to our energy future. Others responsible for more than a third of the that tropism in unpredictable ways. a

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 15 body politic

Americans overwhelmingly want to work: Most people say they get a sense of identity from their job and would keep working even if they won the lot- tery. Joblessness is even associated with poorer mental and physical health for entire families—not working appears to make us sick. And there’s already strong support for a jobs guarantee: In a 2014 poll, 47 percent said they favor such a program. A jobs guarantee holds the promise not just of jobs for all, but of a stronger and more productive economy for everyone. The biggest obstacle, in fact, might be the Democratic Party’s own timidity.

JOBS GUARANTEE ISN’T NEW TO the Democratic Party. Huey Long Awanted one, Franklin Roosevelt called for one, and George McGovern proposed one when he ran for president in 1972. The promise to push the economy into full employment was a fundamen- tal Democratic theme for decades. But when McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide, the newly ascendant neolib- eral wing of the party blamed McGovern’s Back to Work populism for his defeat. They turned the How Democrats can win over Americans left behind in the new economy. party toward the center—supposedly the only way to win elections—and mostly BY BRYCE COVERT left it to the private sector to keep Amer- icans gainfully employed. Now, in the wake of Trump’s populism- N THE WAKE OF DONALD TRUMP’S small businesses and invest in infrastruc- fueled victory, Democrats may be ready to election, and amid the wilderness of ture, but she left it to voters to figure out circle back to the idea of a jobs guarantee. Iuncertainty surrounding the presi- how something as distant and program- The Center for American Progress, the dential race in 2020, one thing is for sure: matic as cutting taxes or building a bridge party’s informal policy shop that tends Democrats need to change the way they would get them a better paycheck. to tread in careful, centrist waters, just talk about the economy. Trump made If Democrats want to win elections, put forward its own plan. “Efective solu- sweeping promises about jobs that he they should imbue Trump’s empty rhet- tions must recognize the importance that almost certainly will not keep. “We’re oric with a real promise: a good job for Americans attach to the dignity of work,” gonna put our people back to work,” he every American who wants one. It’s time the CAP proposal observes. “Economic told his supporters. “I’m going to create to make a federal jobs guarantee the cen- frustrations arise when work at a living jobs, great jobs,” he vowed. “If you get laid tral tenet of the party’s platform. This wage becomes impossible to find.” of on Tuesday, I still want your vote. I’ll is the type of simple, straightforward The proposal highlights a key benefit get you a new job, don’t worry about it.” plan that Democrats need in order to to a jobs guarantee: It would improve Such vague and misleading assur- connect with Americans who struggle working conditions for all Americans, ances are almost impossible to combat— to survive in the twenty-first-century even those who are already employed. especially if Democrats stick to their economy. And while a big, New Deal– Fewer than 80 percent of people in their normal, inefectual script. Hillary Clin- style government program might seem prime years are currently employed, ton promised a “new bargain for the new like a nonstarter in this day and age—just and some five million people work part- economy”—but she never actually pledged look at the continuing battle over the time but want full hours. This ready and to give Americans what they need in this Afordable Care Act—a jobs guarantee one. She vowed to provide tax relief to isn’t actually so far-fetched. ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM

16 | NEW REPUBLIC willing pool of workers trying to get hired work. The New Deal even employed artists International Union—see it not as a sup- makes life more precarious for those with to write plays and paint public murals. plement to America’s tattered safety net, jobs. Wages have stagnated for decades, Above all, providing jobs to every Amer- but as a complete replacement for all so- and benefits are meager: 87 percent of ican would strengthen the entire economy. cial services. Charles Murray, co-author workers don’t get paid family leave, and When a recession hits and the private sec- of the notorious The Bell Curve, argues one-third of those in the private sector tor shrinks, the newly unemployed could that a UBI would eliminate the need for don’t get paid sick leave. A quarter of simply get public jobs that benefit their Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food Americans don’t even get paid holidays or communities. Families wouldn’t have to stamps, housing assistance, and “every vacation. But it’s hard to demand a raise go on unemployment benefits, and payroll other kind of welfare and social-services or better benefits when you’re perpetu- taxes would continue to flow into local, program.” A jobs guarantee, by contrast, ally afraid of being replaced by someone state, and federal programs. And when pri- would reduce the need for the safety net willing to work for even less. vate employers got back on their feet, there without replacing it outright. A jobs guarantee would efectively would be an army of well-trained workers A jobs guarantee won’t solve every- prevent private employers from pitting on the lookout for new opportunities. thing, of course. For one thing, it will make workers against each other. If the govern- it even easier for Republicans to smear ment ofered a job to everyone who wants HE IDEA OF A GUARANTEED JOB Democrats as big-government socialists to work, private-sector employees could faces some tough opposition—and looking to jack up taxes to pay for inef- demand adequate pay, humane sched- Tnot just from free-market zealots cient federal giveaways to the poor. A jobs ules, and more generous benefits with and corporate profiteers. A similar but guarantee comes with a pretty big sticker less fear of getting fired. In efect, corpo- competing proposal has been floated by price: Under the CAP proposal, the gov- rate America would be forced to compete some prominent thinkers: providing every ernment would need to spend $158 billion with the government for employees— citizen with a universal basic income, no a year just to cover wages. If you add in which would put pressure on private em - strings attached. Like a jobs guarantee, benefits and administrative costs, the total ployers to provide desirable jobs. If they the UBI would ofer Americans a baseline soars to $670 billion a year. But as with failed to ofer a living wage and good ben- of financial security and protect families universal health care, the steep upfront efits, people could simply leave for better, during economic downturns. It would price would be largely ofset by savings in government-funded work. also enable employees to take creative other government programs, and by the So how, exactly, would a federal jobs risks and fight back against America’s added economic activity that would come guarantee work? William Darity Jr., an culture of overwork. from full employment and decent wages. economist at Duke University who has In an ideal world, a UBI and a jobs Then there are the neoliberals to con- long advocated for guaranteed jobs, guarantee could coexist, with a guaran- tend with. The Democratic centrists who has proposed that employment come with teed basic income alleviating the worst ran from McGovernism, and who ridiculed a minimum salary of $23,000 a year— enough to push every American above the poverty line. The CAP proposal looks A jobs guarantee would boost the economy and similar, calling for each job to pay at least improve working conditions for all Americans— $15 an hour plus payroll taxes, or $36,000 even those who are already employed. a year. Even if the guarantee focuses only on increasing employment for workers without a college degree, CAP says, the poverty and giving those who can’t work Bernie Sanders for advocating a free college plan would create 4.4 million new jobs. a modicum of relief. But the current UBI education for all Americans, will do their The federal government could allow proposals don’t go far enough to provide best to shoot down any plan for guaranteed cities and states to determine which jobs a complete substitute for a jobs guaran- jobs. But those voices of caution are quieter are most needed in their communities. tee. For one, most plans focus on giving now than before Trump took ofce. Today, Flint might prioritize rebuilding its wa- each American $10,000 or less—leaving Democrats aren’t positioning themselves ter system, while Fort Lauderdale could many far below the poverty line. And with as the champions of incrementalism— deploy more home health care aides to the government supplementing incomes, they’re spoiling for a fight. And as they assist the elderly. A federal jobs program private-sector employers can keep do- look to rebuild the party after the fiasco could preserve public lands in Wyoming, ing what they’re already doing: ofering of 2016, they have no choice but to go big. install broadband in East Los Angeles, and crappy, low-paying jobs. Voters don’t want a “new bargain for a new build afordable housing in New Orleans. The other danger of a UBI is what it economy,” or tax relief for small businesses. Schools could get teaching aides; poor would destroy. Many of the most prom - They want a decent job with decent pay. neighborhoods could get grocery stores. inent supporters of a universal income— And Democrats—if they are bold enough The government could provide universal, from libertarians to Silicon Valley types to to support a jobs guarantee—can give afordable childcare so more parents could the former head of the Service Employees it to them. a

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 17 THE RETURN OF MONOPOLY WITH AMAZON ON THE RISE AND A BUSINESS TYCOON IN THE WHITE HOUSE, CAN A NEW GENERATION OF DEMOCRATS RETURN THE PARTY TO ITS TRUST-BUSTING ROOTS?

On July 15, 2015, Amazon marked the twentieth anniversary of its founding with BY a “global shopping event” called Prime MATT STOLLER Day. Over the next 24 hours, starting at midnight, the company ofered special discounts every ten minutes to the 44 mil- lion users of Amazon Prime, its members- only benefit program. The event was as- tonishingly successful: Amazon made 34 million Prime sales that day, nearly 20 percent more than it had on Black Friday, the traditional post-Thanksgiving buying bonanza. The company received almost 400 orders per second—all on a single, ordinary day in the middle of summer. THE RETURN OF MONOPOLY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HOU SOON MING Prime Day is now an annual event; last year it marked the of the $73 billion market in digital advertising. Most largest sales day in Amazon’s history. The sale has become a communities have one cable company to choose secular holiday, akin in its economic wallop and social ubiquity from, one provider of electricity, one gas company. to Super Bowl Sunday or the Fourth of July. Today, nearly half Economic power, in fact, is more concentrated than of the nation’s households are enrolled in Prime. That’s more ever: According to a study published earlier this year, Americans than go to church every month. More than own a half of all publicly traded companies have disappeared gun. And more than voted for either Donald Trump or Hillary over the past four decades. Clinton last November. Monopoly can sometimes seem like a good thing. The rise of Amazon, and its overwhelming market domi- When Walmart first began to take over the retail nance, has accelerated the collapse of traditional retail outlets. industry, for example, Americans embraced its Amazon’s stock has risen by 300 percent since 2012, and Wall “everyday low prices.” Mom-and-pop stores on Street analysts have compiled a “Death by Amazon” index Main Street may have been going out of business, to track the retail companies most likely to be killed of by but the savings at the new Walmart were just too the online giant. This year alone, three retail stalwarts— good to resist. Walmart, JCPenney, and Rite Aid—plan to shutter or sell But the lower prices ofered by monopolies come of nearly 1,200 stores, and nearly 90,000 Americans have at a steep cost. A corporate giant like Amazon is been thrown out of work since October. One of every eleven able to use its economic advantage to eliminate jobs is tied to shopping centers, which generate $151 billion jobs, drive down wages, dictate favorable terms to its suppliers, and even set the price the postal service is permitted to charge for the privilege of delivering its packages. In 2012, Amazon bought a robotics company MONOPOLY—THE that automates warehouse labor, and then ULTIMATE ENEMY blocked its competitors from using the technology. If robots are going to take all OF FREE-MARKET COMPETITION—NOW our jobs, Amazon wants to make sure it owns all the robots. PERVADES EVERY Then there’s the way Amazon exploits CORNER OF the conflicts of interest inherent in its business model. Writing in the Yale Law AMERICAN LIFE. Journal in January, policy analyst Lina Khan recounts the case of an independent merchant who used Amazon to sell Pillow Pets, a line of pillows modeled on NFL in sales taxes each year. All of which is rapidly being lost to a mascots. Sales were booming—until the merchant single company. In June, Amazon announced its largest-ever noticed that Amazon had begun ofering the exact acquisition, paying $13.4 billion to buy the Whole Foods same product on its own, right before the holidays. grocery chain. Such is the power of the “everything store” Undercut by Amazon, which gave its own Pillow Pets and its “one-click ordering.” featured placement on the site, the merchant’s sales Amazon did not come to dominate the way we shop because plummeted. Khan calls this “the antitrust paradox.” of its technology. It did so because we let it. Over the past three As one merchant observed, “You can’t really be a decades, the U.S. government has permitted corporate giants to high-volume seller online without being on Amazon, take over an ever-increasing share of the economy. Monopoly — but sellers are very aware of the fact that Amazon is the ultimate enemy of free-market competition—now pervades also their primary competitor.” every corner of American life: every transaction we make, every Increasing concentration of ownership has also product we consume, every news story we read, every piece of led to unprecedented levels of corporate crime. In data we download. Eighty percent of seats on airplanes are sold case after case, courts in Europe and the United by just four airlines. In 2015, the number of major health insurers States have ruled that giant companies are oper- shrank from five to just three. CVS and Walgreens have a virtual ating as “cartels,” engaging in illegal conspiracies lock on the drugstore and pharmacy business. A private equity among themselves to divide up their turf. As a firm in Brazil controls roughly half of the U.S. beer market. The result, they have been able to fix the price of al- chemical giant Monsanto is able to dictate when and how farmers most everything in the economy: antibiotics and plant its seeds. Google and Facebook control nearly 75 percent other life-saving medication, fees on credit card

20 | NEW REPUBLIC transactions, essential commodities like cell-phone unions and drove down wages, Democrats increasingly came to batteries and electric cables and auto parts, the rely on campaign contributions from the very corporations that rates companies pay to exchange foreign curren- were consolidating their control over the American economy. The cy, even the interest rates on the municipal bonds Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, that cities and towns rely on to build schools and declined to bring a single major monopolization suit against U.S. libraries and nursing homes. companies. Even The Wash- A single price-fixing scandal ington Post, that exemplar of by the world’s largest banks— political opposition to Don- fixing the global interest rates ald Trump, is now owned by known as libor—involved more TITLE DEED Jef Bezos. Dissent, brought than $500 trillion in financial AMAZON AVE. to you by monopolists. instruments. But with Republicans in But the price we pay for in- control of all three branches creasing monopolization goes Share of Online Retail of government, and with Market 46 percent far beyond such corporate the big business ethos rip-ofs. Monopoly increases Warehouse Space in espoused by Hillary Clin- income inequality by concen- Square Feet 120 million ton in tatters, Democrats trating wealth in major cities: may finally be returning to Spending Since 2014 to St. Louis, for example, has lost Buy Other Companies $15 billion their anti-monopoly roots. a long roster of hometown Leaders within the party are companies to mergers and ac- Retail Jobs Killed once again looking to the Since Its Founding 295,000 quisitions, including Anheuser- aggressive antitrust move- Busch, TWA, Ralston Purina, MARKET CAPITALIZATION $448 billion ment launched during the May Department Stores, A.G. Progressive era and extend- Edwards, and Panera Bread. Ru- ed through the New Deal, ral America has been especially which propelled America hard hit, as local stores and fam- into three of its greatest de- ily farms have been “disrupted” cades of rising prosperity by giant supermarket chains, seed companies, fer- and economic equality. The question now is: Can Democrats find tilizer giants, meat processors, and grain traders. a way to rechannel the popular outrage unleashed by Trump, And don’t blame automation: Corporate America’s and to repurpose the party’s traditional opposition to monopoly investments in workplace technology have plunged in the age of Amazon? by 30 percent over the past 30 years. Even robots are subject to the power of monopoly. EMOCRATS SCORED THEIR first major victory What drives monopolization is not business against corporate monopolies during the presidential know-how or technological innovation, but public election of 1912. That year, two candidates ran on policy—a political environment that permits or platforms that called for placing major restrictions even enables an investor like Jef Bezos to engage Don companies that attempted to dominate the market and thwart in a massive accumulation of economic power. Not competition. Teddy Roosevelt, running on the third-party “Bull that long ago in America, no company as large and Moose” ticket, believed that monopolies were inevitable and in destructive as Amazon would have been allowed to some ways even virtuous, and that the government should simply exist. Preventing and breaking up such corporate oversee them to make sure they operated in the public interest. behemoths, in fact, was at the very center of the Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, took a diferent approach: He Democratic Party’s agenda. “Private monopolies are argued that monopolies are a fundamental threat to political indefensible and intolerable,” the party’s platform liberty, and that the government should attack and disperse declared in 1900. “They are the most efcient means them to protect democracy from the corrupting influence of yet devised for appropriating the fruits of industry economic concentration. After his election, Wilson went on to to the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.” lay the foundation for the government’s anti-monopoly appa- In the late 1970s, however, the Democrats began ratus. He established federal oversight of corporate mergers, to abandon the idea that big is bad. Over the past four set up the Federal Reserve System to rein in Wall Street, and decades, the party has stood by as giant supermarket created the Federal Trade Commission to protect free commerce chains replaced local grocery stores and Too Big to Fail from anti-competitive business practices. Most important of banks replaced local lenders. As monopolies broke up all, perhaps, he placed Louis Brandeis on the Supreme Court.

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 21 Brandeis, who had cemented his reputation as “the prosecutor using the courts to defend the bedrock people ’s lawyer” during his six-year crusade to prevent bank- American principle of economic competition. By er J.P. Morgan from monopolizing New England’s railroads, 1942, he was widely considered the most popular was the chief intellectual architect of the New Deal. In 1933, figure of the New Deal, alongside J. Edgar Hoover. just days after Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, Brandeis The anti-monopoly principle that Arnold and issued a stirring dissent in Liggett v. Lee, which struck down Brandeis established—the idea that economic pow- a Florida law designed to protect local businesses from out- er should be decentralized and spread into many of-state chains. Reading from the bench, Brandeis blamed the hands—became the basis of a new social contract. For Great Depression on “the gross inequality in the distribution the next three decades, the federal government largely of wealth and income which giant corporations have fostered.” permitted big business only in segments of the econo- The government, he argued, had the right to regulate the my that required scale and technical know-how, such “concentration of wealth and power” if it threatened the public as cars, chemicals, and steel. Labor unions made sure welfare. Antitrust, as Brandeis saw it, wasn’t about protecting that workers were treated fairly, while stores, farms, consumers—it was a way to and banks remained relatively safeguard democracy. small and under local control. At the time, Brandeis The government also prevented was incredibly influential as electric utilities, phone compa- a public intellectual; a reis- TITLE DEED nies, airlines, and other “natural sue of his 1914 book, Other GOOGLE PLACE monopolies” from diversifying People’s Money, which de- into other businesses, and forced tailed how “trusts” were them to ofer everyone the same harming the economy, had Share of Market for services at the same price. Pro- Digital Search Ads 80 percent become a best-seller. He ductivity boomed, and America not only influenced FDR, Number of Active entered a golden age of egalitar- who had swept into the Gmail Accounts 1 billion ian prosperity, with a large and White House on a wave of expanding middle class. Number of Companies anti-monopoly sentiment, It Buys per Week 1 By the late 1960s, however, he placed his disciples the social contract had come un- within the administration. Record EU Fine for der attack from both the right Antitrust Violations $2.7 billion Roosevelt’s coalition com- and the left. At the University of bined both Brandeisians MARKET CAPITALIZATION $676 billion Chicago, the emerging group and Bull Moosers, who of conservative thinkers known waged a fierce intraparty as the Chicago School, which battle over how Democrats produced economists and law- should manage the econo- yers such as Milton Friedman, my. During the first years George Stigler, and Robert Bork, of the New Deal, the Bull Moose side held sway and even rebelled against what they perceived as the socialism suspended many of the existing antitrust laws. But starting of the New Deal. What was needed, they argued, was in 1935, with the Second New Deal, Brandeis’s faction gained less government intervention in the marketplace. In the upper hand and began to take apart the centralized power 1982, spurred by the theories of Friedman and Bork, of corporate monopolies. The Robinson-Patman Act protected Ronald Reagan gutted the federal government’s en- local retailers from the onslaught of chain stores such as A&P, forcement of antitrust laws, unleashing a massive the Walmart of its time, while the Glass-Steagall Act prevented merger boom in everything from airlines, retail, and Wall Street from gambling with other people’s money. oil to packaged goods and manufacturing. Democrats also unleashed the largest and most aggressive Scholars on the left had also begun to ques- wave of antitrust prosecution in American history. Thurman tion the antitrust achievements of the New Deal. Arnold, FDR’s head of antitrust enforcement, cracked down on The historian Richard Hofstadter argued that the some of the country’s biggest corporations and trade associa- anti-monopoly faction of the Democratic Party grew tions, from General Motors and Alcoa to the American Medical out of the “status anxiety” of the working class, Association and the Associated Press, which were engaged in paving the way for McCarthyism. The economist price fixing and other anti-competitive activities. Rather than John Kenneth Galbraith, meanwhile, theorized that railing against monopoly in political terms, Arnold was c areful to big business serves as a benevolent, “countervailing present himself as an impartial “cop on the beat,” a nonpartisan power” against the excesses of big labor and big

22 | NEW REPUBLIC government. His analysis of A&P, the monopo- Care Act kicked of a wave of consolidation among hospitals, ly supermarket chain broken up by Brandeis and pharmaceutical companies, and health insurers. Since 2008, the New Dealers, argued that large, concentrated there have been more than $10 trillion in mergers, as corporate businesses are actually good for consumers because giants went on a consolidation spree to buy up competitors and they drive down prices—the same argument made expand their dominance in the marketplace. In 2015, the year today in support of Amazon. “New Democrats” like before Trump was elected, America set a record for the most Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Michael Dukakis, and Bill mergers in a year. Clinton moved the party even further from its anti- The Democratic Party’s about-face on monopolies wasn’t just monopoly roots, embracing concentration, which bad for citizens and communities—it led to the disintegration supposedly ofered efciency and low prices, as a of the party itself. In 1994, two years into Bill Clinton’s first boon to the economy. term, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, In 1992, Clinton removed antitrust language from which it had held more or less continuously since 1930. Today, the Democratic platform and began bashing bank Republicans not only control all three branches of the federal regulators. Once in ofce, he gutted anti-monopoly government, they also hold majorities in 32 state legislatures, restrictions on broadcasters, laying the groundwork along with the governorships of 33 states. As monopolization for the media concentration that brought us Fox has returned in full force, the Democrats now hold less power News and Rush Limbaugh. He touched of an un- at the state and local level than they have at any point since the precedented wave of consolidation in the defense 1920s—the very decade that sparked the rise of the chain store industry; since Clinton took ofce, the number of “prime” defense contractors has plummeted from 300 to only five. He also repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, DEMOCRATIC which had been erected during the New Deal to separate big banks and investment ANTITRUST firms, and moved power into shadow POLICY BROUGHT markets free from regulation. The result was the worldwide economic collapse of ABOUT A GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN 2008, brought on by the megabanks and PROSPERITY, WITH A insurance giants created in the wake of the repeal of Glass-Steagall. LARGE AND GROWING Barack Obama, who took ofce at the height of the financial crisis, was present- MIDDLE CLASS. ed with a historic opportunity to reassert the government’s role in preventing and breaking up dangerous monopolies. Instead he and the onset of the Great Depression. By turning their back argued that the megabanks that Democrats had on the Progressive-era philosophy of Brandeis and his fellow unleashed on the marketplace were now so central reformers, Democrats have efectively rendered themselves to the economy that they could never be dismantled. indistinguishable from pro-business Republicans. “Today, Such thinking indicates just how far Democrats have while liberals and conservatives may argue about the size retreated from the trust-busting days of Brandeis, and scope of the federal government,” anti-monopoly activist who authored an influential book called The Curse Stacy Mitchell has observed, “support for breaking up and of Bigness. In the view of centrists like Obama, big- dispersing economic power finds expression in neither of the ness is no longer a menace to society—it’s essential major parties.” to the efcient functioning of the entire economy. Under Obama, the Justice Department prose- N MAY, DEMOCRATS gathered for an “ideas conference” cuted only one banker involved in the collapse of at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. the financial system, opting instead for negotiat- The daylong event was widely seen as the first audition ed settlements and inconsequential fines. Federal for 2020, as prominent Democrats lined up to try out regulators likewise stood by and did nothing as cor- Ifor the lead role of presidential candidate. But when Senator porate giants like Facebook and Google and Amazon Elizabeth Warren stepped up to give the conference’s keynote asserted a staggering level of control over America’s address, she delivered an antitrust speech that would have digital platforms. Even Obama’s signature policy been right at home at a meeting of FDR’s brain trust. “We wound up increasing concentration: The Afordable can crack down on anti-competitive mergers and existing

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 23 monopolies,” Warren assured the approving crowd. “We can Senator Amy Klobuchar, the ranking Democrat on break up the big banks.” the antitrust subcommittee, declared in March. It was unusually direct language, even for such a liberal “Tackling concentrations of power is a linchpin to gathering. For the first time in nearly half a century, Democrats a healthy economy and democracy.” So far, though, appear poised to restore monopoly power to the center of their Klobuchar has ofered only a few modest reforms agenda. Beginning with Occupy Wall Street and the populist that would help federal regulators better analyze campaign of Bernie Sanders, and accelerating since the wave of proposed mergers and acquisitions. nationalist victories from Brexit to Donald Trump, Democrats In the current climate, Democrats oppose anti- are undergoing a generational shift in how they understand trust measures at their own peril. During a recent the economy, away from the pro-trust accommodations of the debate over the budget resolution, Klobuchar and Clinton-Obama years and toward the Brandeisian interventions Bernie Sanders introduced a proposal to allow the that preceded them. importation of prescription drugs, a measure de- Warren is now the leader signed to introduce competi- of the emerging Brandeisian tion into the pharmaceutical wing of the Democratic Par- marketplace and reduce prices. ty. In 2015, she called for Several Democrats, including reimposing Glass- Steagall, Senator Cory Booker, worked the powerful anti- monopoly TITLE DEED with the Republicans to vote law passed during the New MONSANTO GARDENS the measure down. Grassroots Deal to separate investment reformers responded by send- and commercial banking. Share of Corn Market 80 percent ing out email alerts, and Booker In a speech last year, she was deluged by comments from directly criticized her par- Acres of Its Crops angry voters. A month later, Grown Worldwide 282 million ty’s pro-monopoly stance. Booker and Sanders proposed “Some people argue that Share of All Seed a joint bill to allow prescription concentration can be good, Companies 40 percent drug imports. because big profits encour- Even big business itself is Increase in Seed age competitors to get into Prices Since 2000 135 percent rising up against the monopo- the game,” she said. “This listic power wielded by the Big is the perfect stand-on- Three: Google, Facebook, and MARKET CAPITALIZATION $52 billion your-head-and-the-world- Amazon. All three companies looks-great argument. profit from the anti- competitive The truth is pretty basic— nature of their business models. markets need competition, Google and Facebook not only now.” Since then, Warren control massive content em- has co- sponsored a bill to pires, they own the large adver- bypass the monopoly on hearing aids by making them available tising networks that monetize that content. Amazon over the counter, sought greater transparency in fees charged is simultaneously a giant retailer, a marketplace for by airlines, and worked to block the proposed merger of Time other retailers, and a producer of goods and services. Warner and AT&T. It charges diferent people diferent prices for the Other Democrats are also leading the charge against mo- same items, and it manipulates what gets shown to nopolies. Senator Al Franken has used his seat on the Judi- users through control of the Buy button on its site. ciary Committee to help block the Comcast–Time Warner So the Big Three’s rivals are starting to fight back. merger, and has sought to restrict conflicts of interest in the Yelp has accused Google of stealing its content to credit- rating industry. Three Democratic congressmen—Ro build a shopping site, then manipulating search Khanna, Rick Nolan, and Mark Pocan—are setting up a caucus results to direct users there. News Corp recently to focus on questions of monopoly. And a new family-farm accused Google of creating a “dysfunctional and group led by Joe Maxwell, the former lieutenant governor socially destructive” environment for journalism of Missouri, is being organized to take on rural monopolies by profiting from fake news. Oracle is financing a like Monsanto and meat-processing giant JBS. Even mod- Google Transparency Project to expose the compa- erate Democrats are being forced to recognize the threat ny’s political influence. posed by monopoly. “The American people intuitively under- What is emerging, slowly but surely, is a new stand that there’s too much concentration in this country,” agenda—one that could once again make tackling

24 | NEW REPUBLIC the power of monopolies a core component of what from owning browsers and ad blockers. And Amazon should it means to be a Democrat. Americans recognize that not operate as both a marketplace and a competitor within corporate consolidation doesn’t just undercut free- that marketplace. It’s one thing, say, to run a big trucking dom in the marketplace—it undercuts the economic company—but if you’re allowed to own the highway itself, equality and free flow of information on which our other truckers won’t stand a chance. political system depends. “If we will not endure a Third, Democrats should move to split up or neutralize king as a political power,” Senator John Sherman the power of corporations that have the ability to dominate argued in 1890, advocating for the antitrust law and control entire realms of commerce. Amazon has forced that bears his name, “we should not endure a king publishers to ofer it steep discounts on books, Monsanto is over the production, transportation, and sale of any organizing the genetics behind much of our food supply, and of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to the Cleveland Clinic exerts power over doctors throughout an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat northeast Ohio. Such monopolies must either be regulated of trade.” Unchecked monopoly power, in short, is aggressively or broken up. simply not compatible with democracy. What is most needed is a new way of understanding how To succeed at breaking up today’s economic our political economy works, and for whom. Democrats, at overlords, Democrats must pursue three related last, are beginning to see the need to aggressively restructure approaches to antitrust. First, they must stop monop- the marketplace and decentralize both economic and political oly before it happens. That means using the antitrust power. To win elections on an anti-monopoly platform, how- ever, the party must abandon its penchant for technocratic prescriptions and frame its new agenda in broadly inspirational WE NEED A NEW terms. Here again, they should UNDERSTANDING OF take a page from Brandeis and the reformers of the Progressive OUR POLITICAL era, who couched their oppo- ECONOMY, ONE THAT SEES MONOPOLIES sition to monopoly in terms of economic common sense and AS SIMPLY NOT bedrock American values, like competition and community and COMPATIBLE democracy. To oppose monop- WITH DEMOCRACY. oly, by definition, is to support an independent citizenry against financial autocracy—and few things are more American than authority of the federal government to crack down on that. Antitrust means protecting the family farm from Monsan- mergers. “Monopoly is made by acquisition,” notes to, free speech from Facebook, the community from Citibank. Jonathan Taplin, the author of Move Fast and Break Economic power, as Supreme Court Justice William Douglas Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered observed in a 1952 landmark case against Big Steel, “should be Culture and Undermined Democracy. “Google buying scattered into many hands so that the fortune of the people will AdMob and DoubleClick, Facebook buying Instagram not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political preju- and WhatsApp, Amazon buying, to name just a few, dices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men.” The Audible, Twitch, Zappos, and Alexa. At a minimum, philosophy of antitrust, he explained, “is founded on a theory these companies should not be allowed to acquire of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so other major firms, like Spotify or Snapchat.” When it great that only a government of the people should have it.” As comes to stopping mergers and acquisitions, Demo- the Trump presidency, a government of the minority, implodes crats should become far more aggressive. in scandals of its own making, those who voted for him will Second, Democrats should work to rebuild join the millions of other Americans searching for genuine structural barriers to monopoly in a wide range of in- solutions to the political chaos and economic inequality that dustries, as they did in the 1930s with Glass -Steagall is fueled by corporate monopolies. This is the challenge facing in banking. A content distributor like AT&T should the Democratic Party. The goal is not just to oust Trump, but not be allowed to buy a content provider like Time to address the dangerous concentrations of power that drove Warner. Online ad companies should be barred so many citizens to vote for him in the first place. a

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 25 Controls and Monitors

Inlet Valve Drum

Trump Tower

Water Pump Leveling Feet Operating Instructions for Trump’s Russian Laundromat

How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.

BY CRAIG UNGER

ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM

N 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year- old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Ameri- Icans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.

NEW REPUBLIC | AUG/SEPT 2017 | 27 the government seized his five condos at sian mobsters. After he fled the country, Rus with scheme gasoline-bootlegging pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive tended the closing with Trump, Bogatin York that accepted anonymous buyers. it wasonly high-risesecond the Newin reportsin TowerDavidas Caybuilt, was Johnston them.”in living is one no When Trump high-rises where the units were sold but manyexplained whyso it arethere and money. It was done very systematically, a wayof dirty turning money cleaninto realestate values it wouldand rise, was ter that youbecause paidthe much, too didn’tmat “Itadministration. Clinton the in enforcement law international forstate secretary deputyof assistant launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a inals would use condos and high-rises to by sawcrim a which pattern repeatedly ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government the “During enterprises. criminal their moneyfrom launder to vehicleideal an ered f o which estate, real high-end in vest Russian mobsters were beginning to in there may have been a reason. At the time, money—much that on hands his put to who appeared to have no legitimate way buyersingle afor apartments multiple attended the closing, along with Bogatin. for Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal the attention of the owner. According to condos. The big check apparently caught lion to buy not one or two, but prices. The Russian plunked down $6 mil sky-high the or availability limited the months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by fewfirst the in sold had 263units its of the building was a hit—all but a few dozen growing empire. From the day it opened, Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his ous player in Manhattan real estate, and seri a as own his into coming just was a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump 38-year-old developer was something of brash, Its Loren. Sophia and Spielberg, Steven Carson, Johnny of likes the to uous consumption, the tower was home In 1987,at threeIn just he yearsafter If the transaction seemed suspicious— conspic and celebrity to monument A The

Village Voice, Village The Making The of Donald Trump, Trump personally personally Trump five five luxury ------fellow gangsters as “the most powerful most “the as fellowgangsters the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the stock scam with none other than Semion was convicted of running a $150 million brother His top: the to straight led fact, sian mob in New York. His family ties, in Bogatin was a leading figure in the Rus organizedintolaterrevealedcrime that assets.”hide and AinvestigationSenate chased them to “launder money, to shelter pur had he Trump Tower, that saying Kremlin. the from across hotel a luxury building discuss paid—to expenses to him Moscow—all flew Soviets The Ivana. with Palace Winter the Trump visited to trip In Russia, 1987, on first his - - Democrat on the House Intelligence Intelligence House the on Democrat ranking the , f Schi Adam Rep. empire. business his built president the how about questions pointed asking also is in Congress chorus A growing election. colluded to Russia with subvert the U.S. has centered on whether his inner circle which of most scrutiny, intense of cus his ties to Russia have become the fo syndicate into America. multibillion-dollar international criminal mobster in the world”—was expanding his Since Trump’s election as president, president, as Trump’sSince election -

MAXIM BLOKHIN/TASS Trump’s Russian Laundromat

Committee, has called for a deeper inqui- worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the ry into “Russian investment in Trump’s of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below lunch meeting with Dubinin that led businesses and properties.” one owned by Trump. Others provided to the trip. “One thing led to another,” The very nature of Trump’s businesses— Trump with lucrative branding deals that he wrote, “and now I’m talking about all of which are privately held, with few required no investment on his part. Taken building a large luxury hotel, across the reporting requirements—makes it difcult together, the flow of money from Russia street from the Kremlin, in partnership to root out the truth about his financial provided Trump with a crucial infusion with the Soviet government.” deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs of financing that helped rescue his empire Over the years, Trump and his sons and organized crime, by design, is shad- from ruin, burnish his image, and launch would try and fail five times to build a owy and labyrinthine. For the past three his career in television and politics. “They new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for decades, state and federal investigators, saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, Trump, what mattered most were the as well as some of America’s best inves- a former assistant U.S. attorney in the lucrative connections he had begun to tigative journalists, have sifted through Reagan administration who investigated make with the Kremlin—and with the mountains of real estate records, tax fil- ties between organized crime and Trump’s wealthy Russians who would buy so ings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and developments in the 1980s. many of his properties in the years to FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing It’s entirely possible that Trump was come. “Russians make up a pretty dis- ties between Trump and Russian mob- never more than a convenient patsy for proportionate cross section of a lot of our sters like Mogilevich. To date, no one Russian oligarchs and mobsters, with his assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a has documented that Trump was even casinos and condos providing easy pass- real estate conference in 2008. “We see aware of any suspicious entanglements in throughs for their illicit riches. At the very a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” his far-flung businesses, let alone that he least, with his constant need for new in- The money, illicit and otherwise, was directly compromised by the Russian fusions of cash and his well-documented began to rain in earnest after the So- viet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and Russians are a “pretty disproportionate corrupt government ofcials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in cross section of a lot of our assets,” oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Donald Trump Jr. boasted. “We see a lot Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded of money pouring in from Russia.” Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence efectively joined forces with the coun- try’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are troubles with creditors, Trump made an them to operate freely as long as they closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, easy “mark” for anyone looking to laun- strengthen Putin’s power and serve his when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, der money. But whatever his knowledge personal financial interests. According there is no smoking gun. about the source of his wealth, the public to James Henry, a former chief economist But even without an investigation by record makes clear that Trump built his at McKinsey & Company who consulted Congress or a special prosecutor, there is business empire in no small part with on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion much we already know about the presi- a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty in illicit capital has poured out of Russia dent’s debt to Russia. A review of the pub- Russians—including the dirtiest and most since the 1990s. lic record reveals a clear and disturbing feared of them all. At the top of the sprawling criminal pattern: Trump owes much of his business enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Be- success, and by extension his presidency, ginning in the early 1980s, according to a flow of highly suspicious money from to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian Russia. Over the past three decades, at RUMP MADE HIS first trip to was the key money-laundering contact least 13 people with known or alleged Russia in 1987, only a few years for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Broth- links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs before the collapse of the So- erhood, one of the richest criminal syn- have owned, lived in, and even run crim- Tviet Union. Invited by Soviet dicates in the world. Before long, he was inal activities out of Trump Tower and Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide other Trump properties. Many used his flown to Moscow and Leningrad—all racket of his own. Mogilevich wasn’t apartments and casinos to launder un- expenses paid—to talk business with feared because he was the most violent told millions in dirty money. Some ran a high-ups in the Soviet command. In The gangster, but because he was reputedly

NEW REPUBLIC | AUG/SEPT 2017 | 29 the smartest. The FBI has credited the judge to spring a fellow mob boss, were innocent. “I had no reason not to “brainy don,” who holds a degree in Vyachelsav Kirillovich Ivankov, from a call him,” Komarov told a reporter. economics from Lviv University, with a Siberian gulag. If Mogilevich was the The feds wanted to arrest Ivankov, but staggering range of crimes. He ran drug brains, Ivankov was the enforcer—a vor he kept vanishing. “He was like a ghost to trafcking and prostitution rings on an v zakone, or “made man,” infamous for the FBI,” one agent recalls. Agents spotted interna tional scale; in one characteristic torturing his victims and boasting about him meeting with other Russian crime deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to the murders he had arranged. Sprung by figures in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Mogilevich, Ivankov made the most of and Toronto. They also found he made Europe. He used a jewelry business in his freedom. In 1992, a year after he was frequent visits to Trump Taj Mahal in At- Moscow and Budapest as a front for art released from prison, he headed to New lantic City, which mobsters routinely used that Russian gangsters stole from mu- York on an illegal business visa and pro- to launder huge sums of money. In 2015, seums, churches, and synagogues all ceeded to set up shop in Brighton Beach. the Taj Mahal was fined $10 million—the over Europe. He has also been accused of In Red Mafiya, his book about the highest penalty ever levied by the feds selling some $20 million in stolen weap- rise of the Russian mob in America, in- against a casino—and admitted to hav- ons, including ground-to-air missiles vestigative reporter Robert I. Friedman ing “willfully violated” anti-money- laundering regulations for years. The FBI also struggled to figure out where Ivankov lived. “We were looking Trump Taj Mahal paid the largest around, looking around, looking around,” James Moody, chief of the bureau’s orga- fine ever levied against a casino nized crime section, told Friedman. “We had to go out and really beat the bushes. for having “willfully violated” And then we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.” anti-money-laundering rules. There is no evidence that Trump knew Ivankov personally, even if they were neighbors. But the fact that a top Russian and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He documented how Ivankov organized a mafia boss lived and worked in Trump’s uses this wealth and power to not only lurid and violent underworld of tattooed own building indicates just how much further his criminal enterprises,” the gangsters. When Ivankov touched down high-level Russian mobsters came to FBI says, “but to influence governments at JFK, Friedman reported, he was met by view the future president’s properties and their economies.” a fellow vor, who handed him a suitcase as a home away from home. In 2009, In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence re- with $1.5 million in cash. Over the next after being extradited to Russia to face portedly reaches all the way to the top. three years, Ivankov oversaw the mob’s murder charges, Ivankov was gunned In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian growth from a local extortion racket to down in a sniper attack on the streets intelligence agent who defected to Lon- a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. of Moscow. According to The Moscow don, recorded an interview with inves- According to the FBI, he recruited two Times, his funeral was a media spectacle tigators detailing his inside knowledge “combat brigades” of Special Forces vet- in Russia, attracting “1,000 people wear- of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. erans from the Soviet war in Afghanistan ing black leather jackets, sunglasses, and “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, to run the mafia’s protection racket and gold chains,” along with dozens of giant “have good relationship with Putin since kill his enemies. wreaths from the various brotherhoods. 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was Like Mogilevich, Ivankov had a lot of dead, apparently poisoned by agents of dirty money he needed to clean up. He the Kremlin. bought a Rolls-Royce dealership that was Mogilevich’s greatest talent, the one used, according to The New York Times, HROUGHOUT THE 1990S, untold that places him at the top of the Russian “as a front to launder criminal proceeds.” millions from the former Sovi- mob, is finding creative ways to cleanse The FBI concluded that one of Ivankov’s et Union flowed into Trump’s dirty cash. According to the FBI, he has partners in the operation was Felix Ko- Tluxury developments and At- laundered money through more than 100 marov, an upscale art dealer who lived in lantic City casinos. But all the money front companies around the world, and Trump Plaza on Third Avenue. Komarov, wasn’t enough to save Trump from his held bank accounts in at least 27 coun- who was not charged in the case, called own failings as a businessman. He owed tries. And in 1991, he made a move that the allegations baseless. He acknowledged $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with led directly to Trump Tower. That year, that he had frequent phone conversations a mind-boggling $800 million of it per- the FBI says, Mogilevich paid a Russian with Ivankov, but insisted the exchanges sonally guaranteed. He spent much of Trump’s Russian Laundromat

by a Treasury Department task force for mob-connected mon- ey laundering, bought a condo on the seventy-ninth floor, directly below Trump’s future campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway. A month later he sold his unit for a $500,000 profit. The following year, after ru- mors circulated that Nektalov was cooperating with federal investigators, he was gunned down on Sixth Avenue. Trump had found his mar- ket. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Rus- sian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s properties have Trump’s projects going forward. been linked to three top All he needed to do, it seemed, bosses of the Russian mafia (clockwise from was slap the Trump name on a upper left): Semion big building, and high-dollar Mogilevich, Vyachelsav customers from Russia and the Ivankov, and Alimzhan former Soviet republics were Tokhtakhounov. In 2013, guaranteed to come rushing in. police broke up a gambling and money-laundering Dolly Lenz, a New York real es- syndicate run out of the tate broker, told USA Today that Trump Tower condo of she sold some 65 units in Trump Vadim Trincher (left)— World Tower to Russians. “I had directly below a unit contacts in Moscow looking to owned by Trump himself. invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald.” the decade mired in litigation, filing for residential building on the planet. Con- To capitalize on his new business multiple bankruptcies and scrambling to struction got underway in 1999—just as model, Trump struck a deal with a Flor- survive. For most developers, the situa- Trump was preparing his first run for the ida developer to attach his name to six tion would have spelled financial ruin. But presidency on the Reform Party ticket— high-rises in Sunny Isles, just outside fortunately for Trump, his own economic and concluded in 2001. As Bloomberg Miami. Without having to put up a dime crisis coincided with one in Russia. Businessweek reported earlier this year, it of his own money, Trump would receive In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 bil- wasn’t long before one-third of the units a cut of the profits. “Russians love the lion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet on the tower’s priciest floors had been Trump brand,” Gil Dezer, the Sunny Isles and Russian banks to close. The ensu- snatched up—either by individual buy- developer, told Bloomberg. A local broker ing financial panic sent the country’s ers from the former Soviet Union, or by told The Washington Post that one-third oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to limited liability companies connected to of the 500 apartments he’d sold went to find a safe place to put their money. That Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia “Russian-speakers.” So many bought the October, just two months after the Rus- and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Trump-branded apartments, in fact, that sian economy went into a tailspin, Trump Debra Stotts told Bloomberg. the area became known as “Little Moscow.” announced his biggest project yet. Ris- Among the new tenants was Eduard Many of the units were sold by a na- ing to 72 stories in midtown Manhattan, Nektalov, a diamond dealer from Uzbeki- tive of Uzbekistan who had immigrat-

AP / PONOMAREV SERGEY GETTY; / EPSILON / KOROTAYEV DMITRY TOUR; POKER WORLD OF COURTESY BOTTOM: FROM COUNTERCLOCKWISE Trump World Tower would be the tallest stan. Nektalov, who was being in vestigated ed from the Soviet Union in the 1980s;

NEW REPUBLIC | AUG/SEPT 2017 | 31 her business was so brisk that she soon But it wouldn’t be Trump without a another big project. On the 2006 sea- began bringing Russian tour groups to better story than that. “It wasn’t always son finale of The Apprentice, as 11 million Sunny Isles to view the properties. Ac- so easy,” he confessed, over images of him viewers waited to learn which of the two cording to a Reuters investigation in cruising around New York in a stretch finalists was going to be fired, Trump March, at least 63 buyers with Russian limo. “About 13 years ago, I was seriously prolonged the suspense by cutting to a addresses or passports spent $98 million in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. promotional video for his latest venture. on Trump’s properties in south Flori- But I fought back, and I won. Big league. “Located in the center of Manhattan’s chic da. What’s more, another one-third of I used my brain. I used my negotiating artist enclave, the Trump International the units—more than 700 in all—were skills. And I worked it all out. Now my Hotel and Tower in SoHo is the site of bought by shadowy shell companies that company’s bigger than it ever was and my latest development,” he narrated over concealed the true owners. stronger than it ever was.… I’ve mastered swooping helicopter footage of lower Man- Trump promoted and celebrated the the art of the deal.” hattan. The new building, he added, would properties. His organization continues The show, which reportedly paid Trump be nothing less than a “$370 million work to advertise the units; in 2011, when up to $3 million per episode, instantly of art … an awe-inspiring masterpiece.” they first turned a profit, he a ttended a ceremonial mortgage-burning in Sunny Isles to toast their success. Last October, an investigation by the Miami Herald Russians spent at least $98 million found that at least 13 buyers in the Flor- ida complex have been the target of gov- on Trump’s properties in Florida—and ernment investigations, either personally or through their companies, including another third of the units were bought “members of a Russian- American or- ganized crime group.” Two buyers in by shadowy shell companies. Sunny Isles, Anatoly Golubchik and Michael Sall, were convicted for taking part in a massive international gambling revived his career. “The Apprentice turned Trump SoHo was the brainchild of two and money-laundering syndicate that Trump from a blowhard Richie Rich who development companies—Bayrock Group was run out of Trump Tower in New had just gone through his most difcult LLC and the Sapir Organization—run by York. The ring, according to the FBI, decade into an unlikely symbol of straight a pair of wealthy émigrés from the former was operating under the protection of talk, an evangelist for the American gos- Soviet Union who had done business with the Russian mafia. pel of success, a decider who insisted on some of Russia’s richest and most notori- standards in a country that had some- ous oligarchs. Together, their firms made how slipped into handing out trophies Trump an ofer he couldn’t refuse: The de- for just showing up,” journalists Michael velopers would finance and build Trump HE INFLUX OF Russian money Kranish and Marc Fisher observe in their SoHo themselves. In return for lending did more than save Trump’s book Trump Revealed. “Above all, Ap- his name to the project, Trump would get business from ruin—it set the prentice sold an image of the host-boss 18 percent of the profits— without putting Tstage for the next phase of his as supremely competent and confident, up any of his own money. career. By 2004, to the outside world, it dispensing his authority and getting im- One of the developers, Tamir Sapir, had appeared that Trump was back on top mediate results. The analogy to politics followed an unlikely path to riches. After after his failures in Atlantic City. That was palpable.” emigrating from the Soviet Union in the January, flush with the appearance of But the story of Donald Trump, self- 1970s, he had started out driving a cab success, Trump launched his newly bur- made business genius, left out any men- in New York City and ended up a billion- nished brand into another medium. tion of the shady Russian investors who aire living in Trump Tower. His big break “My name’s Donald Trump,” he de- had done so much to make his comeback came when he co-founded a company that clared in his opening narration for The narrative possible. And Trump’s business, sold high-tech electronics. According to Apprentice, “the largest real estate de- despite the hype, was hardly “stronger the FBI, Sapir’s partner in the firm was a veloper in New York. I own buildings all than it ever was”—his credit was still “member or associate” of Ivankov’s mob over the place. Model agencies. The Miss lousy, and two more of his prized prop- in Brighton Beach. No charges were ever Universe pageant. Jetliners, golf courses, erties in Atlantic City would soon fall into filed, and Sapir denied having any mob casinos, and private resorts like Mar-a- bankruptcy, even as his ratings soared. ties. “It didn’t happen,” he told The New Lago, one of the most spectacular estates To further enhance his brand, Trump York Times. “Everything was done in the anywhere in the world.” used his prime-time perch to unveil most legitimate way.” Trump’s Russian Laundromat

Trump, who described Sapir as court documents, the Financial Times a “great friend,” bought 200 televi- concluded that Trump SoHo had sions from his electronics company. “multiple ties to an alleged interna- In 2007, he hosted the wedding of tional money-laundering network.” Sapir’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago, and In one case, the paper reported, a later attended her infant son’s bris. former Kazakh energy minister is Sapir also introduced Trump to being sued in federal court for con- Tevfik Arif, his partner in the Trump spiring to “systematically loot hun- SoHo deal. On paper, at least, Arif dreds of millions of dollars of public was another heartwarming immi- assets” and then purchasing three grant success story. He had gradu- condos in Trump SoHo to launder ated from the Moscow Institute of his “ill -gotten funds.” Trade and Economics and worked as During his collaboration with a Soviet trade and commerce ofcial Bayrock, Trump also became close for 17 years before moving to New to the man who ran the firm’s daily York and founding Bayrock. Practi- operations—a twice-convicted felon cally overnight, Arif became a wildly with family ties to Semion Mogi- successful developer in Brooklyn. levich. In 1974, when he was eight In 2002, after meeting Trump, he years old, Felix Sater and his family moved Bayrock’s ofces to Trump emigrated from Moscow to Brigh- Tower, where he and his staff of ton Beach. According to the FBI, Russian émigrés set up shop on the his father—who was convicted for twenty-fourth floor. extorting local restaurants, grocery Trump worked closely with stores, and a medical clinic—was a Bayrock on real estate ventures in Mogilevich boss. Sater tried making Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. “Bay- it as a stockbroker, but his career rock knew the investors,” he later came to an abrupt end in 1991, af- testified. Arif “brought the people up ter he stabbed a Wall Street foe in from Moscow to meet with me.” He the face with a broken margarita boasted about the deal he was get- glass during a bar fight, opening ting: Arif was ofering him a 20 to 25 wounds that required 110 stitches. percent cut on his overseas projects, (Years later, in a deposition, Trump he said, not to mention management downplayed the incident, insisting fees. “It was almost like mass pro- that Sater “got into a barroom fight, duction of a car,” Trump testified. which a lot of people do.”) Sater lost But Bayrock and its deals quickly his trading license over the attack, Sunny Isles, Florida, became known as “Little Moscow,” became mired in controversy. Forbes thanks to Trump’s high-rises (top). “Russians love the and served a year in prison. and other publications reported Trump brand,” said developer Gil Dezer (left, with Trump). In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to that the company was financed One Florida tenant, Anatoly Golubchik (right), was busted racketeering—operating a “pump by a notoriously corrupt group of in a major money-laundering ring run out of Trump Tower. and dump” stock fraud in partner- oligarchs known as The Trio. In ship with alleged Russian mobsters 2010, Arif was arrested by Turkish that bilked investors of at least $40 prosecutors and charged with setting up covertly mob-owned and operated.” The million. To avoid prison time, Sater a prostitution ring after he was found company’s real purpose, the executives turned informer. But according to the aboard a boat—chartered by one of The claim, was to develop hugely expensive lawsuit against Bayrock, he also resumed Trio—with nine young women, two of properties bearing the Trump brand—and “his old tricks.” By 2003, the suit alleges, whom were 16 years old. The women then use the projects to launder money Sater controlled the majority of Bay- reportedly refused to talk, and Arif was and evade taxes. rock’s shares—and proceeded to use the acquitted. According to a lawsuit filed The lawsuit, which is ongoing, does firm to launder hundreds of millions of that same year by two former Bayrock not claim that Trump was complicit in the dollars, while skimming and extorting executives, Arif started the firm “backed alleged scam. Bayrock dismissed the alle- millions more. The suit also claims that by oligarchs and money they stole from gations as “legal conclusions to which no Sater committed fraud by concealing the Russian people.” In addition, the suit response is required.” But last year, after his racketeering conviction from banks

GETTYMCMULLAN/ PATRICK / FARRELL BILLY REDUX; / TIMES YORK NEW MANTEL/ MARSHALL JOHN GETTY; / AFP / WISE RHONA TOP: FROM CLOCKWISE alleges, Bayrock “was substantially and examining title deeds, bank records, and that invested hundreds of millions in

NEW REPUBLIC | AUG/SEPT 2017 | 33 Bayrock, and that he threatened “to kill to report meetings with Russian ofcials, an estimated $100 million out of the for- anyone at the firm he thought knew of Trump’s personal attorney r eportedly mer Soviet Union, through shell compa- the crimes committed there and might hand -delivered to Flynn’s office a nies in Cyprus, and into investments in report it.” In court, Bayrock has denied “ back-channel plan” for lifting sanctions the United States. The entire operation, the allegations, which Sater’s attorney on Russia. The co-author of the plan, ac- prosecutors say, was working under the characterizes as “false, fabricated, and cording to the Times: Felix Sater. protection of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, pure garbage.” In the end, Trump’s deals with Bay- whom the FBI identified as a top Russian By Sater’s account, in sworn testimo- rock, like so much of his business empire, vor closely allied with Semion Mogi- ny, he was very tight with Trump. He flew proved to be more glitter than gold. The levich. In a single two-month stretch, to Colorado with him, accompanied Don- international projects in Russia and Po- according to the federal indictment, the ald Jr. and Ivanka on a trip to Moscow at land never materialized. A Trump tower money launderers paid Tokhtakhounov Trump’s invitation, and met with Trump’s being built in Fort Lauderdale ran out of $10 million. inner circle “constantly.” In Trump Tower, money before it was completed, leaving Tokhtakhounov, who had been in- he often dropped by Trump’s ofce to behind a massive concrete shell. Trump dicted a decade earlier for conspiring pitch business ideas—“just me and him.” SoHo ultimately had to be foreclosed and to fix the ice-skating competition at the Trump seems unable to recall any of resold. But his Russian investors had left 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only sus- this. “Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think Trump with a high-profile property he pect to elude arrest. For the next seven about it,” he told the Associated Press in could leverage. The new owners con- months, the Russian crime boss fell of 2015. Two years earlier, testifying in a tracted with Trump to run the tower; as the radar of Interpol, which had issued video deposition, Trump took the same of April, the president and his daughter a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he line. If Sater “were sitting in the room Ivanka were still listed as managers of the suddenly appeared live on interna tional right now,” he swore under oath, “I really property. In 2015, according to the federal television—sitting in the audience at wouldn’t know what he looked like.” He financial disclosure reports, Trump made the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. added: “I don’t know him very well, but I $3 million from Trump SoHo. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, don’t think he was connected to the mafia.” just a few seats away from the pageant Trump and his lawyers say that he was owner, Donald Trump. unaware of Sater’s criminal past when he After the pageant, Trump bragged signed on to do business with Bayrock. N APRIL 2013, a little more than two about all the powerful Russians who had That’s plausible, since Sater’s plea deal in years before Trump rode the esca- turned out that night, just to see him. the stock fraud was kept secret because lator to the ground floor of Trump “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the of his role as an informant. But even af- ITower to kick of his presidential room,” he told Real Estate Weekly. Con- ter The New York Times revealed Sater’s campaign, police burst into Unit 63A of tacted by Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov criminal record in 2007, he continued to the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects insisted that he had bought his own ticket and was not a VIP. He also denied being a mobster, telling The New York Times that he had been indicted in the gambling In 2013, police burst into Unit ring because FBI agents “misinterpreted his Russian slang” on their Trump Tower 63A of Trump Tower and rounded wiretaps, when he was merely placing $20,000 bets on soccer games. up 29 suspects in a $100 million Both the White House and the Trump Organization declined to respond to ques- money-laundering scheme. tions for this story. On the few occasions he has been questioned about his busi- ness entanglements with Russians, how- use ofce space provided by the Trump in two gambling rings. The operation, ever, Trump has ofered broad denials. “I Organization. In 2010, he was even given which prosecutors called “the world’s tweeted out that I have no dealings with an ofcial Trump Organization business largest sports book,” was run out of Russia,” he said at a press conference in card that read: felix h. sater, senior condos in Trump Tower—including the January, when asked if Russia has any advisor to donald trump. entire fifty-first floor of the building. “leverage” over him, financial or other- Sater apparently remains close to In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly wise. “I have no deals that could happen Trump’s inner circle. Earlier this year, below one owned by Trump—served as in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. one week before National Security Ad- the headquarters for a “sophisticated And I have no loans with Russia. I have visor Michael Flynn was fired for failing money-laundering scheme” that moved no loans with Russia at all.” In May, when Trump’s Russian Laundromat

In 2007, Trump celebrated the launch of Trump SoHo with partners Tevfik Arif (center) and Felix Sater (right). Arif was later acquitted on charges of running a prostitution ring; Sater had a Trump business card (left) long after his criminal past came to light.

he was interviewed by NBC’s Lester Holt, but even as a base of operations for their his way around his criminal activities. Trump seemed hard-pressed to think of a criminal activities. In the process, they (Q: “Why did you set up companies in the single connection he had with Russia. “I propped up Trump’s business and enabled Channel Islands?” A: “The problem was have had dealings over the years where him to reinvent his image. Without the that I didn’t know any other islands. When I sold a house to a very wealthy Russian Russian mafia, it is fair to say, Donald they taught us geography at school, I was many years ago,” he said. “I had the Miss Trump would not be president of the sick that day.”) But when the exasperated Universe pageant—which I owned for United States. interviewer asked, “Do you believe there is quite a while—I had it in Moscow a long Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob’s any Russian organized crime?” the “brainy time ago. But other than that, I have noth- “boss of bosses,” also declined to respond don” turned half-serious. ing to do with Russia.” to questions from the new republic. “My “How can you say that there is a Rus- But even if Trump has no memory of ideas are not important to anybody,” Mogi- sian mafia in America?” he demanded. the many deals that he and his business levich said in a statement provided by his “The word mafia, as far as I understand made with Russian investors, he certain- attorney. “Whatever I know, I am a private the word, means a criminal group that ly did not “stay away” from Russia. For person.” Mogilevich, the attorney added, is connected with the political organs, decades, he and his organization have “has nothing to do with President Trump. the police and the administration. I don’t aggressively promoted his business He doesn’t believe that anybody associated know of a single Russian in the U.S. Sen- there, seeking to entice investors and with him lives in Trump Tower. He has ate, a single Russian in the U.S. Congress, buyers for some of his most high-profile no ties to America or American citizens.” a single Russian in the U.S. government. developments. Whether Trump knew it Back in 1999, the year before Trump Where are the connections with the Rus- or not, Russian mobsters and corrupt staged his first run for president, Mogile- sians? How can there be a Russian mafia in oligarchs used his properties not only to vich gave a rare interview to the BBC. Liv- America? Where are their connections?” launder vast sums of money from extor- ing up to his reputation for cleverness, the Two decades later, we finally have an

GETTY/ / WIREIMAGE HOLDEN VON MARK tion, drugs, gambling, and racketeering, mafia boss mostly joked and double-spoke answer to Mogilevich’s question. a

NEW REPUBLIC | AUG/SEPT 2017 | 35 The Handshake Why did Yousef Muslet face life in prison for an everyday gesture?

By Matt Wolfe Photographs by Jeffery Salter

36 | NEW REPUBLIC Yousef Muslet (opposite page) wound up on trial after a five-minute encounter with Hal Howard (above). On the Sunday before Christmas, in 2015, Hal Howard was pulling away from a party at his pastor’s house when he saw, standing in the street in front of him, a little girl. Howard slowed his pick- up truck to a stop and tooted his horn. The girl didn’t move. At the same time, the girl’s father, Yousef Muslet, was playing with one of his sons on their front lawn. Muslet’s house sits opposite the pastor’s, in a prim, suburban neighborhood of Belle Glade, Florida. When Howard began honking at his daughter, Muslet walked up to the truck and introduced himself.

The conversation between Howard and Muslet was brief, no unlawfully entering a vehicle with the intention of committing more than five minutes. At one point, near the end, the two men a crime.) Muslet had lived in Belle Glade since he was twelve. shook hands. Finally, Muslet gathered up his children and headed Now 51, he owned a local clothing store with his brothers. His inside. As Howard drove away, his friend Pat Lucey, who was criminal record showed nothing more serious than speeding sitting in the passenger seat, wished Muslet a merry Christmas. tickets. The handshake with Howard, Muslet insisted, had Nine days later, Muslet was at home, talking on the phone seemed friendly. Yet if he was found guilty of both charges, with his accountant, when he heard a knock at his door. He he faced a maximum sentence of life in prison. opened it to find a half-dozen deputies from the Palm Beach County sherif’s department. A deputy asked Muslet if he recalled a discussion from the previous week, one in which THE HANDSHAKE, IT is said, was a ritual conceived in mistrust, he had mentioned Allah. Muslet replied that he had a lot of for the purpose of making peace. Its origin dates at least to conversations and he talked about Allah a lot. Then Hal Howard classical antiquity, when Greek foot soldiers joined palms appeared on his sidewalk. He pointed at Muslet. “That’s the to demonstrate they carried no weapons. Gradually, shaking guy,” he said. Another deputy stepped forward with handcufs hands evolved into a ceremonial greeting between strangers. and informed Muslet that he was under arrest. He was placed The gesture, though, never quite lost its hint of threat. President in a police car and taken to jail. Trump, whose grasp is unabashedly combative, has managed Earlier that afternoon, Howard had walked into the sherif’s to bring the act full circle, transforming a sign of unity into a department and told the deputy on duty that he was afraid. His new form of warfare. talk with Muslet had left him deeply unsettled. His concern, When I meet Hal Howard outside his trailer in February, the he said, centered on the handshake. As Howard told it, Muslet first thing he does, naturally, is present his hand. “The proper had gripped his hand forcefully and yanked his arm, as if trying handshake,” writes Emily Post, “is made briefly; but there should to pull him through the driver’s side window. Howard, who be a feeling of strength and warmth in the clasp.” By this defini- was 75, struggled to let go, but Muslet had overpowered him. tion, Howard’s is textbook. His demeanor, though, is reticent, According to a police report, Howard said that Muslet “had a almost stoic. He has light blue eyes, sun-mottled skin, and thin, strange look on his face during the entire encounter.” Muslet white hair, high and tight, as he’s kept it since his Army days. also yelled “Allah! Praise Allah!” which left Howard even more On his right index finger he wears a big, gold ring marked with frightened. After a half-minute of grappling, Howard was finally a Latin cross—“just to let people know where I stand.” able to pry his hand free and speed away. Howard drives me in his truck, a shiny, white Dodge Ram Given his age and Muslet’s strength, Howard felt lucky he 1500, to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts. He lives in Clewiston, a hadn’t sufered more than a sore shoulder. At first, worried town over from Belle Glade. Both are in the heart of sugar that he was overreacting, he hesitated to report the incident. country, surrounded by acres of cane fields. During the harvest But more than a week later, at the urging of family and friends, season, the fields are regularly set on fire. Burning of the plant’s he decided to tell the police. leaves—known, in the industry, as the “trash”—eases access to Muslet was charged with two felonies: battery on an elderly its sucrose-rich stalk, which is then cut of and trucked to a mill

person and burglary. (Under Florida law, burglary includes for processing. In the distance, as we drive, a sloppy cloud of PICTURES REDUX / SALTER JEFFERY

38 | NEW REPUBLIC The Handshake brown smoke rises from a vast sea of green. Above the flames, According to Howard, one of the first things Muslet asked a cauldron of raptors hovers, waiting to snatch up fleeing rab- him was the name of his god. He readily replied that his bits and rats. When I mention Clewiston’s motto—“America’s lord and savior was Jesus Christ. This didn’t seem to satisfy Sweetest Town”—Howard frowns. “That’s a lie,” he says. “They Muslet, who continued to pepper him with questions about get that sugar cookin’, it smells like a pig farm.” his faith. After a minute, Howard realized that Muslet is As we sip cofee, Howard, who is originally from Kentucky, not actually Christian—he’s Muslim. At one point, he even tells me he used to own a construction business in Fort Lau- ofered to share the tenets of his own faith with Howard’s derdale. Now, in his retirement, he stocks shelves at the local fellow parishioners. supermarket. He lives a simple, abstemious existence, the orbit “He said he would like to come to our church and teach of which encircles his church. For two decades, Howard has everybody how to be a Muslim,” Howard recalls, incredulous. sworn of liquor, cigarettes, women, and other fleshly temp- “I said, ‘Well, you’re welcome to come to church, but we don’t tations. His chief indulgences are watching television and want to hear anything about a Muslim. We believe in Jesus.’ ” washing his truck. It was at a church in Clewiston that he met The longer the conversation went on, Howard says, the Pat Lucey—“my Christian brother.” Howard, a divorcee, and louder and angrier Muslet got. Howard wanted to leave, but Lucey, a widower, quickly became close. The two men now Muslet’s daughter was still blocking his way. When Muslet share a trailer and a dog, a Chihuahua–German Shepherd mix finally extended his hand, Howard took it eagerly, hoping the named Mr. Whitey. talk was drawing to a close. The violence of the handshake— In 2015, the church in Clewiston sufered a schism, and How- and what he saw as Muslet’s evident sadism—shocked him. ard joined some of the congregation in defecting to another, in “The whole time, he’s laughing and smiling,” Howard says. Belle Glade. He had only known his new preacher for a couple “Got a big smile on his face. And that really turned a button of months when he attended his party. Howard had stayed for on me.” As they struggled, Howard kept telling Muslet to let an hour, nibbling on finger foods, then left with Lucey, filled go. Howard thought about hitting him, but he was strapped with the Christmas spirit. He was surprised when Muslet ap- in his seatbelt and his left arm was pinned to his side. “I called proached his truck, but he only got nervous when Muslet began him a choice name or two,” he says. “It’s hard to be a Christian discussing religion. when you’re being mistreated.” Finally, Muslet backed away, “At first, I thought he just wanted to talk to somebody,” leaving Howard’s shoulder throbbing. Howard tells me. “But then, as the conversation went on, I Howard was mad. Still, he told himself he was making realized he was trying to get into my Christianhood.” too much of it. It was only after he discussed the encounter

Nine days after Muslet (left) shook Hal Howard’s hand (right), he was arrested and charged with two felonies that, together, carry a life sentence. with his sons and his co-workers at the supermarket that he At the front stands a handsome, polished man in his late forties, changed his mind. Muslet, they warned, could be dangerous. wearing a crisp, blue blazer with an American flag pin. Dr. Ultimately, Howard says, he went to the police out of fear that M. Zuhdi Jasser is a practicing physician who lives in Phoenix, Muslet might hurt someone else. Arizona, but he enjoys a second career as a political commen- I ask Howard whether Muslet’s being Muslim had anything tator on radical Islam who appears frequently on Fox News. to do with his decision to report the incident to police. Taking the podium, Jasser compares the religion of Islam “Before you go to the wrong place,” he says, “I don’t hate to a sick patient in need of urgent care. Terrorism, he says, is Muslims. And I can prove I don’t. Because, for the last three just a symptom of this disease. The bigger threat is ideological. years, my doctor was a Muslim. And I love the man.” Islamists—those who practice “political Islam”—don’t believe in Not long ago, Howard contracted throat cancer—a com- a separation between mosque and state. Instead, they advocate mon afiction, he says, in smoke-choked Clewiston. Friends the adoption of Koranic law, or sharia. Political Islam, Jasser recommended a Palestinian doctor named Abdel Kaki, who says, sends adherents down a “conveyor belt” of radicaliza- has won Howard’s trust through sound medical advice and tion. He cites the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston a patient bedside manner. While Howard has no objection marathon, as an example of the danger in assuming Muslims to “plain” Muslims—“the ones that come here to be part of are peaceful without interrogating their beliefs. America”—he believes the “radical” ones need to be watched. “The narrative about them is that they appeared to be normal Dr. Kaki, for example, is a plain Muslim, an upstanding citizen American Muslims,” Jasser says. “How do you know they were and asset to the community. normal? Do we know what they believed about the state, about “I think,” Howard says, “he might actually be a Christian the Constitution? No. The fact that they had a cell phone, or Muslim.” drove a motorcycle, or were trying to make the Olympics—that Based on his encounter with Muslet, though, Howard doesn’t make them normal.” guesses that he’s probably a radical Muslim. “You can tell ’em According to the most recent estimates, Muslims make up by what they do, the way they act,” Howard says. “If they’re approximately 1 percent of the U.S. population. In Palm Beach against Christians, that’s a pretty good sign.” County, they are more than twice that. Whether in spite of, or I ask Howard where he gets his information about radical because of, the local demographics, Palm Beach has become Muslims. He motions with his cup to a television mounted one of America’s most concentrated hotbeds of anti-Islamic above my head. I turn and see that it’s tuned to Fox News. sentiment. Until 2013, the county was represented in Congress “That’s my channel,” he says. by Allen West, a former Army ofcer who denounces all of Islam Before we part, Howard asks me if I go to church. I say I was as a “totalitarian theocratic political ideology.” The Southern raised Episcopalian, but am now agnostic. He looks alarmed. Poverty Law Center has identified three groups in Palm Beach “You need to go to church,” he says. “I’ll be real truthful County that espouse anti-Muslim views—including Citizens with you. He’s coming real soon. Read the Bible. Everything for National Security, the organization that is hosting Jasser’s in Revelations is happening now.” The culture, Howard says, appearance at the yacht club. Founded in 2008, the group growing animated, has lost God. The signs are everywhere. A believes that thousands of Muslims are seeking to infiltrate corrupt government. Gay marriage. Kids killing parents. Nearly American institutions to undermine them from within, and that naked women broadcast on network television. S alvation-wise, the Tsarnaev brothers were radicalized by a pro-Islam bias in it’s now or never. Howard tells me that for many years, he lived their history textbooks. In a recent YouTube video, the group in sin—“I did my thing, not God’s thing.” Then, in his early warns of a new “breeding ground for homegrown terrorists fifties, he had an afair with a married woman. The Lord did that few are aware of—American classrooms!” not approve. Howard tried to end it, but one day, the woman As the sociologist Christopher Bail traces in his 2015 book, called him again. Howard knew, in his heart, he shouldn’t see Terrified, organizations like Citizens for National Security have her, but he went anyway. As soon as he got home, his blood spread rapidly since the attacks on September 11—funded, in pressure shot up to 192 over 90, and it stayed like that for a his estimate, by at least $245 million in donations, much of it week. Then God came to Howard, in his mind. The blood pres- “dark money” from private, right-wing foundations. The money sure spike, the Lord said, had been a warning. He put matters has been used to bankroll an army of dubiously credentialed plainly: Howard was going to do God’s thing now. experts, who argue that Muslims are waging a “stealth jihad” “Yeah, He’s real,” Howard says, fingering his gold ring. “And against democratic institutions. In this mind-set, requests He’s going to hurt me if I don’t do what He says.” by Muslims for basic religious accommodation—foot baths at airports, say, or designated prayer rooms at work—are understood as covert attempts to implement sharia. Left un- AFTER SEEING HOWARD, I drive to the other, more famous checked, such incursions would, they fear, eventually usurp side of Palm Beach County—the Mar-a-Lago side—to an event the U.S. Constitution. at the Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club in Boca Raton. Inside The influence of these groups has helped, in little more than the club’s vast ballroom, a capacity crowd of mostly elderly a decade, to fundamentally reshape American views of Islam. couples sit at white linen banquet tables, snacking on canapés. In a poll conducted in 1993, nearly two-thirds of Americans

40 | NEW REPUBLIC The Handshake had no opinion, favorable or unfavorable, of Muslims. By 2011, As Muslet remembers it, when Howard started yelling at his a majority looked at Islam unfavorably. In one poll, only a third daughter to get out of the street, Muslet had sought to soothe of Americans considered Muslims in the United States to be him. “I’m like, ‘Just chill.’ The way he was trying to rush out “trustworthy.” Ten state legislatures have passed bills banning of there, and my kids are playing in the street? You can’t be sharia, and hate crimes against Muslims have reached a level driving through a neighborhood like that. Bottom line? I was not seen since 2001. A few weeks before Muslet’s arrest, a a concerned father.” 27-year-old man was charged with vandalizing an Islamic center Muslet denies being upset when he approached the truck, in North Palm Beach. Last November, a mosque in Boynton though he does admit, as Howard alleged, to bringing up Beach was defaced with the words fuck islam. religion. After learning that Howard was coming from his Jasser difers from much of Fox’s commentariat in that he neighbor’s Christmas party, Muslet asked him a question he is a practicing Muslim, one who has positioned himself as a likes to ask a lot of non-Muslims. Luther-like reformer, promoting a “spiritual,” apolitical inter- “I asked him, ‘What’s God’s name?’ And he said ‘Jesus.’ pretation of his faith. In his opinion, many Muslim -American And I said, ‘OK, but isn’t Jesus the son?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ groups are, in fact, fronts for political Islam. In Boca Raton, ‘OK,’ I said, ‘so, what’s the father’s name? What’s God’s name?’ he repeats again and again that his criticisms are not aimed at And he says, ‘Well, uh, God.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no—God is Islam as a whole, but at a certain, unspecified percentage of who he is. But what’s his name? Because I’ve learned his name, its adherents. The crowd seems fully with him; when a woman and I would like to share it with you.’ ” Muslet then revealed to with long blond hair asks Jasser why he doesn’t just convert to Howard that God’s real name is Allah. “And Hal says, ‘Well, my Christianity or Judaism, she is roundly booed. At the same time, lord and savior is Jesus Christ.’ ” I ask Muslet why he decided, at that precise moment, to try to educate a The far right has reshaped American views of Islam, 75-year-old Southern Baptist—one fresh bankrolling experts who argue that Muslims are from a Christmas party at his preacher’s house, no less—about Islam. Muslet says waging a “stealth jihad” on democratic institutions. he saw the encounter as a “teaching mo- ment.” Everyone, he explained, worships the same God. Giving dawah—inviting Jasser’s logic suggests that every Muslim American must be people into Islam—is an important part of his faith. viewed as an existential threat until demonstrated otherwise. At the mosque, Muslet introduces me to two of his sons—he The morning after Jasser’s talk, Fox News carries a short ar- has ten children in total, six with his current wife—and a man ticle noting that an arsonist has set fire to a mosque in Tampa— named Wayne Rawlins, whom he considers his best friend and the second such case in Florida in six months. On the radio, spiritual mentor. Rawlins—a tall, lanky black man with a loose, two local talk show hosts, after reviewing a new Mediterranean goofy smile—is the author of a book about Islam that Muslet restaurant—“I wasn’t in love with the baklava”— chat matter- found enormously inspirational. “Wayne’s the power, man,” of-factly about the Obama administration’s infiltration by Muslet says. “Me? I go more on impulse. But Wayne, he has a Muslim extremists. plan for everything.” After ablutions, we follow several dozen men into the mosque’s prayer hall. Muslet and Rawlins are the only peo- ONE OF YOUSEF Muslet’s attorneys described his client to me ple, besides the imam, wearing robes; the other men, wilting as a “visible Muslim.” As I watch Muslet pull up in front of in the late-winter heat, favor khakis and short-sleeve shirts. the Belle Glade mosque a few minutes before Friday prayer, As the imam delivers a brief sermon about the importance of I have a hard time believing that Hal Howard had mistaken being steadfast and straight in your faith—interrupted occa- him, even momentarily, for a brother in Christ. Muslet wears sionally by the faint beep of a smoke detector—Muslet and a blinding white thawb and a multicolored kefyeh; his face Rawlins sit just in front of the lectern, staring up, eyes alight, is dominated by a colossal salt-and-pepper beard, dense and like keen students, as Muslet’s children slouch against them. impeccable, like topiary. When Muslet sees me, he bounds up When the imam finishes, Muslet stands and faces the con- and, forgoing a handshake entirely, engulfs me in a bear hug. gregation. Seeking to become more involved in civic afairs, In Muslet’s version of his encounter with Hal Howard, he is running for city commissioner. the handshake was an attempt to defuse a tense situation. “I “Guys,” Muslet says, “some folks are going around whispering ofered my hand in peace, bro,” he tells me. Muslet was born that there’s a Muslim running for commissioner. Well, it’s true in Palestine but aggressively inhaled the idiom and drawled and, man, it’s a good thing. Belle Glade needs Muslim leadership. speech of his teenage years in Florida. This seeming mismatch Some of you might not want to be part of a corrupt system, has a disarming efect on strangers. “People sometimes get but it’s a Muslim’s job to lead. So make sure to get to the polls, nervous when they see me,” he says. “But when I start talking, vote, and get me in that seat!” Like a true politician, he then they usually calm down.” invites everyone to help themselves to free food—halal chicken.

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 41 Call out Beaquatio. Itatiasperia voluptatur molupta temporibus comnisquis ut aut harum, ullaccus sincillesti apide molores ad millant facepudi dollesc iendigent et eos

Muslet and his daughter in front of their home in Belle Glade. The handshake, he says, was nothing more than an attempt to defuse a tense situation. The Handshake

Leaving the mosque, Muslet drives to work. That day, he Nothing about Muslet suggests a propensity for violence. and his two brothers are opening a new clothing store called Nor does he seem to meet Howard’s definition of radicalism. Krave, located in the city’s humble downtown. Outside, on Muslet is both hopelessly American and an asset to his com- the street, a chef flips halal burgers and a DJ booms Kodak munity. He appears to embody everything the United States Black songs out of refrigerator-size speakers, as young men asks of its immigrants. As an entrepreneurial young man, he muster under shady awnings, waiting for the doors to open. co-owned two profitable gas stations in northern Virginia, A new clothing store is an event in Belle Glade. The closest with his eyes on acquiring more. He wore snakeskin cowboy mall is 35 miles away, and the town’s main commercial strip—a boots and coached his son’s T-ball team, the Exxon Tigers. grim mix of storefront churches, pop-up tax refund shops, and Then, in 1999, he and his first wife took a vacation to Myrtle dimly lit discount stores—has seen better days. When the Muslet Beach. One sunny afternoon, as Muslet was nudging a rub- family arrived from Palestine in the 1970s, the area was flush ber inner tube into the water, it dawned on him that he was with money from the sugar industry, and the Muslets opened a unprepared for death. department store catering to the Jamaican workers shipped in “I suddenly wondered, ‘What if a wave came over me right to cut cane. In the early 1990s, the cutting became automat- now?’ ” he recalls. “I was happy, but I wasn’t ready to die, man. ed, devastating the local economy. Soon, Belle Glade boasted So, I said, ‘OK, Allah, just get me back to shore and I’ll live the the nation’s second-highest rate of violent crime. Adjusting to the rest of my life for you.’ ” changing times, the Muslets opened a street-wear boutique called Safely delivered, Muslet sat on the sand and thought about Addiction; Krave, just across the street, specializes in high-end all the people who had ever hurt him. He asked Allah to forgive sneakers. Both stores are decorated past the point of functionality, them. Then, he thought of all the blessings—family, money, like ornamented temples. Inside Addiction, a giant, two-story America—the Almighty had bestowed on him. Finally, he began trompe-l’oeil mural mimics the wall of a New York City brick ten- to think of all the bad things he’d ever done, every person he’d ement, while in Krave, the entire floor has been designed to look ever wronged, and asked Allah to forgive him. All at once, he like an aubergine-colored cosmos, stippled with stars, planets, was visited by a breathtaking sense of relief. He arose and and wispy nebulae. Observed from Belle Glade, both realms feel equally distant. As customers stream into the store, A football player in high school, Muslet had little Muslet’s brothers, Faisal and Adam, work interest in Islam. “Guys who wore robes?” he says. the register, while his mother, an octo- genarian in a long, black robe, sits in a “You know what I used to call them? Taliban.” folding chair by the door, sipping a Coke and worrying a string of prayer beads. Muslet, who has changed out of his thawb into strategically walked into the ocean, and there, out past the sunbathers and ripped jeans and a white t-shirt bearing the graftied Krave the paddleboarders and the beer-bong enthusiasts, he felt, logo, bounces around the store, tending to customers. A former for the first time in his life, truly clean. football player and track star at Glades Central Community Muslet was not, up to that point, a devout Muslim. He smoked High—his nickname was “the Arabian Horse”—he still retains Marlboro Lights and drank cranberry vodka and had once im- an athlete’s lazy grace. Many of his clientele he has known for pregnated a woman to whom he was not married. (“Guys who years, and he greets them with a brotherly clinch or a dap. wore robes?” he says. “You know what I used to call them? The DJ’s hype man, Charles Askew, tells me he has known Taliban.”) After his saltwater baptism, he immediately set about Muslet his entire life. He admires the fact that the Muslet broth- making some changes. For starters, he explained to his wife, ers always hire in the community, usually from among their who was wearing a bikini, that she was dressed inappropriately. customers. A few months before, a Palm Beach County sherif’s (“They call it a bathing suit,” he says. “But my wife was basically deputy—one of the ofcers who arrested Muslet—had shot and in her underwear.”) Muslet was excited to share his spiritual killed a young black man. Muslet and his brothers had attended awakening with his partner, but she didn’t seem to get it. Two a march in the victim’s honor. days later, on the drive back to Virginia, she asked for a divorce. “That spoke volumes,” Askew says. “They could sell us When he got home, Muslet took the Koran of his fireplace clothes, go home to a big old house, not care what’s actually and began reading it. His taste for alcohol and cigarettes left happening here. But they don’t do that.” him. Dressed in a Nike sweat suit and Nautica boots, he got into his Toyota Supra and headed west. For almost 40 days, he drove around the country, reading the Koran at night and I WANT TO ask Muslet more about his case, but every time I giving dawah during the day. Then he moved back to Belle try to talk with him, he gets interrupted by requests from cus- Glade, joined the family business, and became involved in the tomers or employees. At one point, I find him in the back of local Muslim community. Addiction, behind a shelf of cargo shorts. He and Wayne Raw- Muslet grew out his beard, adopted the habit of wearing a lins are kneeling on unfolded polo shirts, murmuring prayers. thawb, and married a woman who loved Islam as much as he did.

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 43 Then, in 2014, he met Wayne Rawlins. Their bond, Muslet says, He laughs. “It’s just the beginning, though. Yousef and I, we’ve was instantaneous. Rawlins had written a book titled America got plans. We want people to become Muslim. There’s a lot of 2064: Islam in America Over the Next 50 Years. For Muslet, it stuf we want to do together.” felt like the perfect embodiment of his own philosophy of Islam. “It was the book I had always dreamed of writing,” he says. America 2064 begins with a short biography of its author. NOT LONG BEFORE his arrest, the FBI began taking an interest Rawlins, it notes, served as a consultant for the Justice De- in Muslet. For some years, Muslet had been friendly with a partment on anti-gang initiatives. The FBI once honored him pair of agents from the Miami bureau, who used to drop by with an award for community leadership. “Rawlins is not a the Belle Glade mosque occasionally, to check in. As part of terrorist, extremist, or radicalized fundamentalist,” the bio its counterterrorism eforts, the FBI has developed a massive assures readers. “Nor is he an anarchist or traitor. He is a network of confidential informants. The imam who spoke at Muslim born in the USA.” Muslet’s Friday prayers, Foad Farahi, is currently suing the America 2064 is short—only 208 pages—but its ambitions FBI for trying to deport him after he refused their request to are enormous. In his preface, Rawlins explains that the book work as an informant. Muslet shows me an email from one is meant to serve as a kind of blueprint—“a strategic frame- of the agents in December 2014, thanking him for passing work to change our country’s political, social, and economic along his contact information. At the time, Muslet was finish- landscape” over the next half-century. All of America’s social ing construction on Krave. “I know you are a leader in your problems, he argues—poverty, crime, violence, out-of-wedlock community and someone who we can reach out to,” the email births, pornography, homosexuality—can be solved by apply- reads. “Hope all goes well with the opening of the new store!” ing the Koran. Islam, in his view, is the answer to everything. Then, in the summer of 2015, Muslet flew to Palestine to At one point, Rawlins cites a Republican congressman who visit relatives. Not certain how long he wanted to stay, he denounces Islam as a political and legal system seeking world bought a one-way ticket to Jordan. He was joined by Wayne domination. “He is right!” Rawlins declares. “Islam is intended Rawlins, who wanted to pray in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jeru- for all mankind and provides a total way of life.” salem during Ramadan. Seven weeks later, when Muslet flew Rawlins does not seek to force Islam on anyone. Every back into Miami, federal agents were waiting for him at the individual, he believes, must be free to choose his or her own gate. They took him into a room where he was questioned about religion. The way to spread Islam, he believes, is through good his time in the Middle East. Had he really gone to Palestine? deeds. The only weapon is dawah, which is every Muslim’s Or had he gone into Syria, to meet with isis? duty. As more and more Americans convert to Islam, Rawlins Muslet pointed out to the agent that his passport showed hopes, the U.S. Constitution will be amended to reflect the that he crossed into Israel two days after arriving in Jordan. commandments of Allah. In place of our existing system of Besides, he had posted photos on Facebook of everywhere secular law, Americans would decide to be ruled by Islamic he visited. Muslet grew angry, explaining that he is a Muslim law—sharia. “By 2064,” Rawlins concludes, “Islam will dom- and that isis is not Islam. The beheadings? The stoning? The inate the American landscape, Insha Allah.” throwing people of buildings? In Muslet’s understanding of Muslet enthusiastically embraced his friend’s vision for an Islam, terrorism and the taking of innocent life is forbidden. America united under Allah. After all, Islam had saved his life. Muslet gave the agents dawah. At one point he took a copy of America 2064 out of his bag and passed it to one of the agents. “Read this,” he Muslet embraced his friend’s vision for an America said. “This is my plan. This is what I united under Allah. Islam had saved his life. Why plan to do.” After five hours, the FBI let Muslet couldn’t it solve Belle Glade’s problems, too? go. Two weeks later, though, his brother Faisal was stopped at the Israeli border and refused entrance. He had never been Why couldn’t it solve Belle Glade’s problems, too? In 2010, arrested and had no dealings with the FBI. Muslet contacted to help bring social services into disadvantaged communities, one of the FBI agents who used to visit the mosque and asked Rawlins had started a program called Walking One Stop. Today, if there was anything he could do. She suggested he come to flanked by activists and community leaders, he and Muslet often a meeting at the FBI’s ofce in Palm Beach. This time, agents go door to door, helping people sign up for unemployment asked him about his association with Wayne Rawlins. Muslet insurance, food stamps, and other public benefits without the again explained about his plan to peacefully Islamicize America. hassle of calling on multiple bureaucracies. He also made a date to meet them in Belle Glade. He would “We’re just trying to gain the pleasure of the Almighty,” bring Rawlins, so they could talk to him themselves. Rawlins says. “The Walking One Stop is an embodiment of Ever since the September 11 attacks, the FBI has devoted spe- Islam. By doing good deeds with Muslim leadership, it softens cial attention to Palm Beach County. Twelve of the 19 attackers the hearts of the people towards Muslims and towards Islam.” either lived in or had connections to the area. The ringleader,

44 | NEW REPUBLIC The Handshake

Nekia converted to Islam in high school after being raised in a strict Christian household. “I actually really wanted to fall in love with Chris- tianity,” she says, “but I just couldn’t grasp going through Jesus to talk with God.” Now, as her husband was placed in a patrol car, she told herself it had to be a case of mistaken identity. She gathered her children in the bedroom and explained to them that the police were confused. “I told them that Allah wanted baba to be in jail for the night because he could talk to the people there,” she says. “And that calmed them down.” Muslet actually knew many of his fellow inmates. Some were customers at Addiction. Greeting him warmly, they hooked him up with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sheets for his bunk. Muslet, in turn, gave dawah. The next morning, the judge released him on his own recognizance. The threat of a long sen- tence, though, still loomed. Muslet at Krave, one of his two clothing stores in downtown Belle Glade. The closest mall The evidence that led to Muslet’s arrest is 35 miles away, and the town’s commercial strip has seen better days. was, by any measure, thin. At 12:40 p.m. on December 29, 2015, Hal Howard walked into the sherif’s ofce in Belle Glade. According Mohamed Atta, took flight training at Palm Beach County Park to court records, the dispatcher told the deputy on duty, Kurt Airport. In 2013, the Palm Beach sherif’s department started Castaldo, that Howard was looking to report “a Muslim that Community Partners Against Terrorism, a program designed to is getting pretty active.” Castaldo sat down with Howard, who encourage residents to report activities they deem suspicious. told him about the incident with Muslet. At the time, Howard In a video produced by the department, Sherif Ric Bradshaw couldn’t recall Muslet’s name—only his address. Castaldo notes that “one person’s observations ... can save thousands decided to proceed to Muslet’s house to identify the suspect of lives.” As an example of suspect activity, the video shows and get a statement. He summoned five deputies, including a woman taking a picture of a bridge; suspicious persons are a canine unit, as backup. He also requested that Howard tag defined as individuals who “just don’t fit in.” along to identify Muslet. The ofcers drove of in squad cars, Before meeting the FBI, Muslet and Rawlins arranged to followed by Howard in his truck. rendezvous at the mosque. When they got there, a Palm Beach According to Castaldo, when Muslet first answered the sherif’s car was already parked across the street. As they drove door, he seemed friendly and shook hands. But when Cast- to their meeting spot, a seafood restaurant called Mr. Shrimp’s, aldo began asking about his encounter with Howard, Muslet they saw sherifs’ cars dotting the route. A helicopter from the grew “belligerent and confrontive.” In a deposition taken sherif’s department hovered overhead. At lunch, after Muslet three months after the arrest, Castaldo insisted that Muslet made introductions, he says the FBI asked him and Rawlins if kept interrupting him in a hostile tone—“talking over me, they were interested in working with the bureau. not letting me speak.” But another deputy recalled Muslet “We’re working with you right now,” Muslet said. The agents remaining calm during the questioning. Even when Howard finished their tilapia and left. appeared, Muslet seemed more confused than angry. After Two months later, Muslet was arrested for shaking How- being told that he was under arrest, however, Muslet lost his ard’s hand. temper. One ofcer said that by the time he “had to go hands on” with the suspect, Muslet was speaking “in his native tongue in a boisterous manner.” ON THE DAY of the arrest, Muslet’s wife, Nekia, was in the According to Castaldo, Muslet threatened the deputies before bedroom with one of her children. As soon as she realized what he was placed in a squad car. “You guys fucked up now,” he was happening, she ran to put on her head scarf. By the time says Muslet shouted. “I am going to get all of you!” she got outside, Yousef was being escorted down the street Muslet admits that he exchanged undiplomatic words with in handcufs and her mother-in-law was screaming. “I think the deputy who cufed him. (“I told him, ‘Man, you need to go the ofcers were worried she was going to pass out,” Nekia get yourself some breakfast or something, because you’re not recalls. Both women were panicked as they watched Yousef eating me for breakfast.’ ”) But he denies physically resisting being taken away. the arrest, or threatening the ofcers in any way.

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 45 Later, at the trial, Castaldo testified that he decided to arrest Muslet because the sus- pect “had put himself at the scene” of the encounter with Howard. At the moment of the arrest, though, his sole evidence that Muslet had been violent was Howard’s state- ment. Only after Muslet was placed in jail did Castaldo attempt to corroborate the crime. He contacted Pat Lucey, Howard’s friend who was riding in the truck with him during the incident, and recorded a seven-minute statement about what he witnessed. Then he went back to Howard and recorded a ten- minute statement. No medical examination of Howard was ever conducted, even though Castaldo’s report listed his injuries as “seri- ous.” This—the statements from Howard and Lucey about the incident, and the statement from Muslet about his arrest—comprised the entirety of the Palm Beach sherif’s investi- gation into the supposed crime. It’s not uncommon for law enforcement, erring on the side of public safety, to be hasty in making an arrest. It’s up to the local pros- ecutor’s ofce to review the evidence and de- termine whether it is sufcient to file charges. J.D. Small, the prosecutor who brought the case to trial, says he found Hal Howard’s account “credible,” and that it was corrobo- rated by Pat Lucey. On the recording, a nervous-sounding Howard ofers an account similar—though not identical—to the one he gave me. As Castaldo questions him, he speaks slowly and sounds genuinely shaken. Two moments Worried that Muslet might hurt someone, Howard decided to report him to the police. “It’s stand out. At one point, Howard describes the hard to be a Christian when you’re being mistreated,” he says. instant he realized that Muslet was Muslim. “I knew he looked a little weird because I’m not used to a full-face beard,” Howard says. “Then it dawned Besides, he adds, Howard’s account was backed up by Pat on me that this is not a Christian. He’s got to be a Muslim. Lucey, who had witnessed the incident. Right then my fear just doubled, because of all the things that Listening to Lucey’s short statement, however, this is far are happening in the United States and overseas.” from clear. Lucey does confirm some aspects of Howard’s ac- Later, Howard describes seeing Muslet’s daughter, who was count. He acknowledges that Muslet leaned into the window five at the time, on the street in front of his truck. and was “very loud” and “aggressive,” to the point where the “And this girl was standing in the middle of the road,” he two men felt intimidated. “I guess if we’d said much more, says. “And I’ll tell you what—I’ve never been scared of an one of us would have got slapped probably, because he was eleven-year-old, twelve-year-old girl, whatever she was, but that aggressive,” Lucey says. “I thought he was literally going this girl had evil in her eyes. You could just see it. The hate. to come through the window probably.” And the hair on the back of my neck raised up.” But at no point in the statement does Castaldo ask Lucey I ask Small whether these statements—admitting a fear about a handshake. Nor does Lucey mention one. Lucey, in of Muslims and believing a five-year-old girl was evil—made fact, never clearly describes any kind of physical contact Howard appear less credible to the prosecution. between the two men. The closest he gets is toward the end “I think that’s editorial,” says Mike Edmondson, a depart- of the statement, when he ofers an ambiguous, fragmentary ment spokesman sitting in on the interview. Whatever Howard’s description of how the encounter ended. Muslet, he says, personal views, he explains, they were irrelevant to the case. “finally let go of his hand. Hal pulled back, if I remember

46 | NEW REPUBLIC The Handshake right…. I mean, he had his hand…. I thought he was going “Battery?” he sputters. “Where? Where, brother?” to shake his hand, but when he started doing the sign lan- “Based on the statement by the victim,” a deputy replies. guage….” Lucey then talks about Muslet performing a gesture “Who’s the victim?” in which he spells “Allah” in the folds of his palms. (Muslet “Hal.” later demonstrates this to me, with great pleasure.) Castaldo “Mr. Hal? I touched Mr. Hal? I ofered to shake Mr. Hal’s never asks Lucey to clarify what he means and, a minute later, hand!” the recorded statement ends. As a deputy tries to calm him down, Muslet, his voice in- Two weeks later, based entirely on this evidence, the pros- creasingly loud and strident, begins rambling. ecutor’s ofce filed charges. “You can’t charge me with that because you have no proof of that! He is a liar! I have witnesses! There were a hundred witnesses! A thousand witnesses! Burglary? What do you mean MUSLET’S TRIAL WAS originally set to be held in early Septem- burglary? How do you come up with this bogus charge? What, ber 2016. But Flynn Bertisch, Muslet’s lead attorney, argued do you think I’m ignorant? I have rights! You have no right that the proximity to September 11 might put the jury in a prej- to have me in this car right now! Because you have no—show udicial frame of mind. Ultimately, though, the prosecution and me the evidence that you have! Other than some lying, crazy the defense agreed to skip a jury altogether and hold a bench Islamophobic.” For the next 20 minutes, Muslet cycles rapidly trial, in which a judge hears evidence and renders a verdict. through confusion, righteous anger, respectful deference, and In his opening argument, Bertisch contended that the case threats of a lawsuit. “I’m a Palestinian, wears a rag on his head,” was not really about the handshake at all. “This case,” he said, he continues, “wears a thawb, I mention Allah—Allah’s the name “is really about God”—how a diference in religious opinion of the almighty creator, Allahu Akbar—that’s his name. And blew up into something much bigger. The state, meanwhile, you don’t even know his name. What’s God’s name? Walking chose mostly to ignore religion and focus on proving that a around, taking orders, shooting people. Who’s in charge?” At genuine assault had taken place. Small, the prosecutor, called one point, Muslet denounces the sherif’s deputies as “a bunch Pat Lucey to the stand as his first witness. of Islamophobic racists.” A bald, bespectacled man with an endearingly bubbly dis- Watching this in court, the judge chuckled. “I’m going to position, Lucey didn’t ofer much to support the state’s case. teach a class,” he said. “What not to do if you’re arrested.” After Muslet began talking about Islam, he testified, he basically The last person to testify was Hal Howard. He sat with his ignored him, seeing any argument as hopeless. hands folded neatly in his lap, hunched slightly forward, like “I just kind of tuned him out,” said Lucey, who is partially someone in church. His account of the confrontation with deaf. “I felt like he has his point of view and I have mine. Muslet difered, in certain key details, from the version he gave Maybe all his french fries wasn’t lining up in his Happy Meal.” me, as well as from the one he first ofered Deputy Castaldo. As for a handshake, Lucey testified, he simply didn’t see one. Now, instead of Muslet shaking him with his right hand, Asked for more details about what he did see, Lucey confirmed Muslet used his left hand to grab him by the wrist. Instead of that Muslet was gesturing expressively and touched Howard Howard having to pry their hands apart, Muslet let go on his on the arm a few times while he was leaning in the window. own. Instead of Muslet leading his children silently into the Asked whether this seemed like assault, Lucey equivocated. house, Muslet told them, “Get out of the road before he kills you.” Despite all the inconsistencies, Howard seemed to genuinely believe “This girl had evil in her eyes,” Howard told the his own account of events. He again police. “You could just see it. The hate. And the said—somewhat touchingly—that Lucey would corroborate his version of events. hair on the back of my neck raised up.” The prosecution, for its part, tried to avoid any mention of religion. But the topic kept working its way into the trial. “Did I see a belligerent pulling of him?” he responded. “No.” At one point, Small asked Howard why the conversation with What stayed with Lucey most about the encounter was Muslet had scared him. the avidity with which Muslet sought to convince them of the “Well, I’m a Christian, number one,” Howard replied. “I rightness of Islam. believe Jesus Christ died for my sins. And I have a father in “The man was zealous about what he believes,” Lucey said. heaven. And none of them has even a nickname called Allah.” “He’d make a good Baptist evangelist.” Small quickly tried to steer the line of questioning back Next, the state showed a video of Muslet in the backseat of on course. “But what was it about the, uh, defendant’s the squad car after his arrest, clearly agitated. At this point, demeanor—” Muslet did not know why, precisely, he was being taken to jail. “I felt like he was trying to force Allah onto me,” Howard When told he was being charged with battery and “burglary interrupted. “He wanted to come to my church and teach of a conveyance,” Muslet was incredulous. everybody about Allah.”

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 47 The defense, by contrast, sought out this angle wherever it are upon us. Two men in dying towns, residents of a burning could find it. Toward the end of questioning, Bertisch noted world, had found a path to eternal life. When they met, their that Lucey had wished Muslet a merry Christmas. disagreement struck at the very center of who they are. Howard nodded. “God-blessed him, too.” There was no evidence to suggest that Hal Howard was “Did you find that weird?” lying. He clearly believed that something violent had been “No. He’s American. Ninety percent of us believe in God. done to him. And, in one sense, something had. Whatever What’s wrong with saying God bless you? It’s on the dollar bill.” the handshake had been like, Muslet had, consciously or not, “But you have an individual here who believes in a diferent taken a jackhammer to the bedrock of another man’s identity. god, correct?” Such a gesture, though conceived with peaceful intentions, “I don’t know what he believes in,” Howard said. “I guess could not have failed to feel threatening. it’s a god.” The question of what, precisely, happened between Howard “Well, he told you he wanted to come to church to enlighten and Muslet can’t be answered with any certainty. But what people about his god.” came afterward was clearly shaped in large part by the wider “I don’t know about ‘enlightening’ anything.” political battle being waged over Islam. It’s possible that Mu- “You just thought,” Bertisch ventured, “he was going to slet’s religious beliefs played no role in his prosecution. But in force his god on you?” Palm Beach—once the training ground for the September 11 “After he got through talking, yes,” Howard says. “That’s attackers, now a center for anti-Islamic hate groups—Howard’s what I thought he wanted.” account was deemed more plausible than Muslet’s. Though In the course of his testimony, Howard comes across as both uncorroborated by any evidence, Howard’s version of events deeply averse to being preached at by a Muslim and commit- seemed correct to police and prosecutors, enough to pursue a ted to doing what he thinks is the right thing. At one point, case to trial and force a local businessman and civic activist to he repeats that it was his sons and friends who urged him to consider, for almost a year, the possibility that he would be taken report the handshake. But he also notes that he was inspired, away from his family and placed in prison for the rest of his life. in part, by a public service announcement he saw on television. In his ruling on the case, Judge Peter Evans made clear that “I told them,” Howard said, referring to the sherif’s ofce, his ability to render a verdict was hindered by a lack of clear “what I heard on the TV, about the FBI saying that no matter evidence. “There was no investigation” he said. “I mean, what how small it is, you got to report it.” The judge interjected. “So, when you say, ‘You should report things,’ was it, It’s easy to see Muslet and Howard as spiritual you know, he was an Arab or Muslim twins. Men in dying towns, residents of a burning or something?” “Anything suspicious,” Howard said. world, they both found a path to eternal life. “When that—I guess it was the bombing or the killing down in California—they said those people had seen them supplying bullets and stuf. investigation? They went and talked to a couple guys.” He then And anything you see that’s suspicious, or anything that hap- ruminated aloud for several minutes about how best to weigh pens suspicious, should be reported.” the need of law enforcement to protect public safety with the After further questioning, it became apparent that How- rights of citizens not to be the target of undue suspicion. ard was referring to the mass shooting that took place on “It’s unfortunately the society that we live in,” the judge December 2, 2015, when a Muslim couple killed 14 people at said. “A little nothing turns into a case where I’m supposed an ofce Christmas party in San Bernardino, California. The to convict this guy and send him to prison for life. Because he shooting had occurred less than three weeks before Howard shook a guy’s hand too hard? I don’t know. Since 9/11, every encountered Muslet after the Christmas party at his pastor’s time there’s an incident involving a Muslim, everyone’s on red house. Reporting Muslet was his way of trying to prevent such alert. But there’s incidents every day.” The judge sighed. “How things from happening in Belle Glade. do you deal with this stuf? Right? All kidding aside, to me, this “That’s the only way we’re going to find out what’s going is really just sort of a fascinating societal issue. Because I see it on,” he told the court. every day in here. So how do you deal with it? On the one hand, you have the government, saying ‘Hey, you see any Muslim do something, you should report it,’ because, you know?” DURING THE TRIAL, it was hard not to see Muslet and Howard At the same time, the judge said, Muslet should be slow to as spiritual twins. Their faith followed similar, classical lines. call people bigots. Both are men who, lost in sin, had undergone a sudden, un- “Instead of Mr. Muslet, for example, talking about ‘This is expected conversion—delivered from doubt into what William racism, you’re picking on me’—doesn’t there have to be some James called a “state of assurance.” They remain devout in their kind of understanding on the other side? These cops—well, faith, live self-denying lives, and believe that the end times maybe this isn’t the best example of a great investigation—but

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streets are dotted with campaign signs for Muslet’s opponent for city commissioner. Muslet hasn’t had time to put up any signs of his own, but he remains optimistic about the election. “I think people are ready to take on Big Sugar,” he says. “The sugar companies, they’ve been making millions for years, and what do we get back?” He is quiet for a while, staring out the window. “I just wanna see people come up, man. Live good lives.” When we reach Muslet’s house, his kids are playing in the backyard. His wife smiles and waves. Muslet points at the roof of the home of Howard’s pastor, Eric Stevenson. On the apex sits a big, plastic nativity scene. Muslet’s kids and the pastor’s kids play together, but the two men aren’t friends. Shortly after the pastor moved in, he threw a lawn party whose guests included young teenagers. “The girls are wearing these short shorts and there are young men out there, too,” Muslet frowns. “And they’re doing things like kissing and—intimate things.” During the party, Muslet walked over to Stevenson’s house. “I said, ‘Hey Eric, I wanna ask you a question….’ He said, ‘Yeah?’ Muslet at midday prayers at the mosque in Belle Glade. When he ran for I said, ‘Eric, what’s your God’s name?’ ” The conversation fol- city commissioner, he received just 12 percent of the vote. lowed a predictable trajectory. It strikes me that giving dawah seems to be something Muslet does when he feels annoyed. “Everyone gets dawah—Muslim, Jew, Christian, police, FBI,” what are the cops doing? They’re doing their job. It’s their job Muslet says. “It’s what I do.” to go arrest someone on a felony. Whether they should have I ask Muslet whether he understands why people who are or not is another issue. But they do what they do.” used to a secular form of government might be alarmed at the The judge turned to Muslet, sitting in his thawb. “Meanwhile, prospect of sharia. he’s screaming, what? Islamo—” “I understand separating church from state, and I agree with “Islamophobia,” Muslet said. it,” he says. “Separating mosque from state? I agree with that. “Islamophobia! So, yeah, it’s kinda got to go both ways, But you can’t separate God from state, because God is a way of right? I don’t know.” The judge threw up his arms. “Good luck life. I don’t have a choice. I really don’t. I can’t force anyone to solving this one!” In the matter of the criminal case, though, be Muslim, but it’s my obligation to share it with people. Now, he declared Muslet innocent. will sharia law ever be—.” He stops. “Actually, it is going to be Muslet, overcome, stood up. implemented, because Allah is gonna implement it. Eventual- “Can I—can I shake your hand, judge?” ly. I want the Messiah to come, to confirm to the people. I’m There was an awkward silence, then laughter in the court- ready for him, because he’s the one they’re going to believe. room. The judge looked uncertain. Finally, he motioned to his Everything that’s happened, all the signs. He’s coming back.” judicial robes. “Well, we’re both wearing dresses,” he said.

A FEW WEEKS after I leave Florida, the election for commis- MUSLET WAS DEEPLY relieved at his acquittal. He claims, how- sioner is held. Muslet receives 124 ballots, or approximately ever, never to have been in doubt about the outcome. “Allah 12 percent of the vote. He calls it “a valuable learning expe- wouldn’t do that to me,” he says. Then he pauses. “Unless, of rience.” His plans to Islamicize America with Wayne Rawlins course, that was what he wanted. But I don’t think it was.” remained undiminished. Not long after the trial, Muslet stopped by the home of Howard was disappointed at the verdict. “I didn’t expect Dr. Kaki, Hal Howard’s beloved physician. The two men hail them to send him to prison or nothing, but I thought they’d from the same village in Palestine, and have known each other find him guilty,” he tells me. “Because he was guilty.” Howard for years. “I told him ‘Hey, one of your patients tried to put isn’t worried about his own safety, however. “I don’t think God me away for life,’ ” says Muslet. “He was pretty surprised.” would let him hurt me.” Just before I leave Belle Glade, Muslet gives me a tour of the A month later, Howard felt severe chest pains. When he town. He shows me where, on the main street, he wants to install visited Dr. Kaki, the physician told Howard to go to the emer- a storefront mosque, to call the Muslim shopkeepers to prayer, gency room, immediately. When he arrived, doctors discovered and where he wants to open a halal restaurant. Farther out, we a clogged artery in his neck. A three-inch stent was placed in his pass the leviathan sugar mill, its stacks spewing white smoke. carotid artery. He credits Dr. Kaki with saving him from a stroke. In the distance, poppy-yellow crop dusters buzz the fields. The “I love that man,” he says. “I truly do.” a

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 49 → Libyan fishermen throw a life jacket toward a rubber boat carrying 139 migrants. It takes three days to cross from Libya into Italy, a dangerous voyage that a record 181,000 people undertook last year, fleeing poverty, war, and rising unrest in Africa and the Middle East.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATHIEU WILLCOCKS

50 NEW REPUBLIC AUG/SEPT 2017 THE CROSSING A record number of refugees are braving the deadly voyage from Libya to Italy. he churning waters of the Mediterra- Tnean hide many bodies. As the Middle East and Africa have exploded in chaos, racked by war, famine, and ethnic conflict, the middle passage between Libya and Italy has become a graveyard for migrants who attempt the perilous crossing into Europe. Last year alone—the deadliest on record—4,579 refugees died on the journey, the victims of unscrupulous smugglers who dispatch them into the turbulent seas on decrepit boats with no navigational instruments, food, or water. Many images of the migrant crisis, by necessity, depict only the end of the voyage: weary refugees be- ing detained in Italy after their arrest at sea. Mathieu Willcocks, a photographer based in Scotland, set out to capture the reality of the crossing itself. Last year Willcocks spent almost six months aboard the Topaz Responder, a rescue vessel that patrolled the choppy waters of the Libyan coastline. Each morning, its crew would rise at 4 a.m. to gaze at the ship’s pinging red radar in the darkness, searching for signs of a boat in distress. Some days the Responder would complete half a dozen rescue missions, hauling more than a thousand refugees out of the water, before sailing the 30 hours back to Sicily. Other days were harder. “We would get there too late,” Willcocks says, “and could only call a time of death and put bodies in the morgue.” Nationalist politicians on the rise in both Europe and America cast these refugees as the cause of ev- ery problem facing the West, from unemployment to terror. Their tales of heartache and sufering are dismissed as nothing but a ruse; their real aim, we are told, is to infiltrate and destroy Western society. They are, in the words of Donald Trump, “the great Trojan horse of our time.” But Willcocks’s photos force us to confront the human toll of the refugee crisis. An inflatable boat collapses slowly into the Mediterranean’s dark wa- ters, its occupants grasping at life jackets. A corpse stifens on the salt-washed deck of a battered fishing trawler. A woman rejoices aboard the Responder, rescued from a harrowing nighttime crossing. A Bangladeshi man, wrapped in a thermal blanket at dawn, hours before Mount Etna would rise in the distance. “People would sing and dance as it came into view,” Willcocks says. “For some, it had been three or four years since they had left home. Their joy was palpable. Their journey to Europe was over. They’d made it, and nothing that came next would stand in the way of their dream of a better life.” a ↓ Refugees from Eritrea, stuffed in the hold of a rickety fishing boat headed for Italy. Trapped below decks, passengers often pass out or die from the engine fumes. At least two of every hundred migrants who attempt the crossing perish en route.

53 NEW REPUBLIC AUG/SEPT 2017 ↓ A rescue worker takes an Eritrean infant off a wooden vessel carrying the child’s mother and hundreds of other refugees. Some 25,000 children tried to reach Europe in 2016—more than double the previous year. Ninety percent made the journey on their own.

← A Bangladeshi man sits on the deck of the Responder, wrapped in a thermal blanket. He and 27 other migrants were rescued from a tiny wooden boat. Smaller vessels are often better equipped than larger ones, outfitted with life jackets, food, and water. ↑ When the Responder found this boat collapsing into the ocean, there wasn’t a single life vest on board. Smugglers often cram passengers into unseaworthy vessels—without food, fuel, life jackets, or navigational tools.

55 NEW REPUBLIC AUG/SEPT 2017 ↓ An Eritrean man grieves over the body of his brother. When the rescue team boarded their ship, four lifeless bodies were carried up from the hold. Last year, the death toll on the sea route between Libya and Italy reached 4,579—the highest on record. → A woman prays and weeps with joy on board the rescue ship the Responder after a harrowing nighttime crossing.

↑ Christian Jensen, a Danish Red Cross doctor on board the Responder, stitches up a gash in a woman’s foot. Rescue boats often carry medical teams to provide emergency care and conduct health checks on rescued migrants.

57 NEW REPUBLIC AUG/SEPT 2017 REVIEW

ESSAY

European Disunion What the rise of populist movements means for democracy.

BY YASCHA MOUNK

IN 1830, THE King of France sent a young engineer to England proportion of Americans who express approval for military to study a sensational invention: a steam train that ferried rule has more than doubled. Last October, a month before passengers from Manchester to Liverpool. Once he arrived, the election, another survey showed that 46 percent either as Tony Judt recounts in The Memory Chalet, the engineer “never had faith” or have “lost faith” in American democracy. Had you asked a group of pundits and political scientists sat by the track taking copious notes as the sturdy little engine two years ago whether they would revise their most basic faultlessly pulled the world’s first railway train back and forth assumptions about American politics if Donald Trump were between the two cities. After conscientiously calculating what elected president, most would have answered with a resound- he had observed, he reported his findings back to Paris: “The ing “yes.” But by the time Trump was moving into the White thing is impossible,” he wrote. “It cannot work.” House, those same people had already found a way of fitting his victory into their long-standing narratives. Scholars who It is tempting to scof at the engineer who disregards the made their careers by arguing that America was becoming evidence barreling in front of him at 30 miles an hour. But I more liberal, for instance, now explained Trump’s victory by must admit to having a soft spot for him. For it was, I think, suggesting that the shrinking of the GOP’s electoral base makes not the mathematical equations in his notepad that misled it easier to mobilize. Their theories failed to predict Trump’s him, but rather his all-too-human refusal to believe that victory—and yet it turns out they are vindicated by it. his understanding of the world could so swiftly prove mis- A desire to downplay threats to democracy extends beyond taken. So it is hardly surprising that, as one political shock American politics. In coverage of the recent presidential elec- has followed another over the last year, people who once tions in France, commentators were intent on emphasizing seemed perfectly rational have come to resemble the young the signs of continuity and disregarding the signs of change. French engineer. Neither the candidate of the historically dominant center-left For decades, political scientists have claimed that “dem- party nor the candidate of the historically dominant center- ocratic consolidation” is a one-way street. Once a country is right party managed to qualify for the run-of. With 33.9 afuent and has been ruled in a democratic fashion for a long percent of the vote in the second round, Marine Le Pen gained time, they argued, democracy becomes “the only game in more votes than any extremist candidate in French postwar town.” Citizens become deeply supportive of democracy and history, nearly doubling the record set by her father 15 years reject other regime forms out of hand. Major politicians accept earlier. Young people were far more likely than older people to the need to play by democratic rules. Extreme candidates are vote for her. Yet much of the media celebrated Emmanuel Ma- rejected at the ballot box. It should be clear, however, that this cron’s victory as a triumph over populism, and intimated that is no longer the case. Many Americans now believe that de- the populist wave was finally cresting. The defeat of Austria’s mocracy is a bad system of government, and a striking number far-right Freedom Party last December brought s imilarly are even open to authoritarian alternatives. Over the past two decades, according to data from the World Values Survey, the ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS FUCHS

58 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

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demonstrative sighs of relief. “The thing is impossible,” one institutions. But instead of acknowledging the danger he posed, article after another seemed to say. “It must not be.” Orban’s supporters celebrated his policies as a sign that he was The instinct to reach for the consolation of the ordinary is truly determined to put the “real people” in the driver’s seat. as touchingly human today as it was in the nineteenth century. For this very reason, Müller points out, it is naïve to assume But it is just as dangerous. If we take seriously that the populist that populists lack the discipline to govern. Far from leading a moment may turn into a populist age, we need to analyze the chaotic or inept government, Orban successfully went about evidence barreling in front of us. A recent spate of books on the business of destroying Hungarian democracy. Since then, the rise of populism, especially in Europe, ofers some ini- governments from Poland to Serbia have followed suit—and tial answers: The authors enumerate the defining features of populist leaders from Spain to Sweden are now waiting in the populism across the continent; they attest to the danger that wings to reenact his script. populists, on both the right and the left, pose to the survival of liberal democracy; and they explain why there is real reason FOR SOME PEOPLE to count as the “real” people, others have to doubt the resilience of seemingly stable political systems. to be excluded. But just as populists difer on their policy pre- But they barely begin to explain the underlying reasons for scriptions, so, too, do they difer on the exclusionary principles the populist resurgence—or to show how liberal democracy they deploy. They can draw distinctions between people along might survive it. economic, religious, or moral lines. They can pit producers against parasites, the devout against the blasphemous, or the THE LIST OF movements that have historically been called heterosexual against the homosexual. But over the past 20 populist is strikingly long and varied. There are the populares years, by far the most salient division has been ethnicity. All of Ancient Rome, the agrarians of nineteenth-century Wis- over Europe, countries that have long defined themselves as consin, and the Peronists of twentieth-century Argentina. monoethnic and monocultural have experienced mass mi- Even today, the populist label is applied to Turkey’s Recep gration, and are now struggling with the slow and painful Tayyip Erdogan as well as to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, to transition to a new model of membership in the nation. Italy’s Beppe Grillo as well as to France’s Marine Le Pen. Yet Many Europeans have accepted that their societies will need the movements they lead are united by no clear policy agenda. to become truly multiethnic, and that they should regard people Some favor state ownership of the means of production, while others want to privatize prisons; some seek to put politics under religious tutelage, while others are stridently secular. A politician’s ability to speak But all these populists do share one important trait: a common English now suggests he is likely political imagination. In What is Populism?, Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of to abandon his people as soon as political science at Princeton, argues that populists have a times get tough. unique way of describing the political world, setting a “morally pure and fully unified” people against elites “who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.” Anyone who has followed the recent politics of the United States and Eu- rope will recognize both the populists’ claim to represent the of diferent ethnicities or skin colors as compatriots; but a silent majority of “real” Americans (or Germans, or Turks) and sizable number have not. Many immigrants, meanwhile, have their attacks on elites as corrupt traitors—as globalists, who, learned the local language and adopted the basic values of their in the contemporary American parlance, inhabit a swamp the new societies; but a significant minority have not. The resulting populist hero promises to drain. While most politicians claim tensions have, for the past decades, opened up the most decisive to speak for the people, or seek to remedy the injustices of the political cleavage in much of Western Europe. status quo, populists alone claim that they have what Müller Eight years after its first publication, Christopher Cald- calls a “moral monopoly of representation.” well’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe remains the most According to Müller, it is this posture that makes populists insightful and infuriating treatment of this challenge. Accord- inherently dangerous. Because they see themselves as the only ing to Caldwell, the United States largely succeeds in turning legitimate political actors, they seek to take over the judiciary, successive waves of immigrants into “true Americans.” It is not to gain control of the media, and to co-opt other institutions. clear whether the reason for this success is America’s cultural And while other political forces might, to varying degrees, en- self-confidence, or its greater diversity of immigrant groups, gage in similar practices, only populists can “undertake such or even the higher pressure to succeed on the job market in colonization openly.” The openness of the populists’ challenge to the absence of a comprehensive welfare state. But the upshot pluralism makes them much more dangerous than more covert is unambiguous: The children of newcomers do not behave enemies of democracy. When Viktor Orban, the prime minister much diferently than the children of natives. “Mass Hispanic of Hungary, started to colonize the state, his opponents warned immigration,” Caldwell writes, “can disrupt a few local habits,

that he was trying to undermine the independence of key state and the volume of the influx can cause logistical headaches for YORGOSKARAHALIS /BLOOMBERGGETTY/

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Europe. But though I disagree with the extent of their pessimism about the gulf between immigrants and natives in Europe, I fear that their real miscalculation lies elsewhere: As the recent surge of far-right popu- lists shows, Europe might turn out not to be quite as self-abnegating as Caldwell and Houellebecq assume. On the contrary, the danger facing Europe is as likely to stem from the scapegoating of minorities as from its submission to them. When push comes to shove, Europe is likely to choose a far-right extremist over an Islamist—and the ultimate outcome could be far more bloody than Houellebecq imagines.

AMONG THE MOST puzzling of recent political devel- opments on the continent is that anti-immigrant sen- timent has been just as ferocious in Hungary, Bulgaria, Athens, 2015: Youth unemployment has buoyed the left populist party Syriza. and Romania as in Western Europe, even though the number of immigrants to Central and Eastern European schools, hospitals, and local governments. But it requires no fun- countries is much lower. Orban’s popularity in Hungary, for damental reform of American cultural practices or institutions.” example, was waning over the course of 2015—until an influx Progress in Europe, by contrast, has been limited. Although of refugees began to dominate the political debate, and Orban countries such as Germany and France have difered sig- took extreme measures to keep them out of the country. nificantly in their approaches to immigration policy, they This is one of many riddles that Ivan Krastev—a Bulgarian and other European nations have mostly failed to assimilate political scientist who casually wields the dialectical wit to newcomers. Across the continent, immigrants have very high which Slavoj Zizek so desperately pretends—solves in After unemployment rates. Many of them speak the local language Europe. “Since the Berlin Wall fell,” he observes, “Europe has poorly and refuse to adopt the country’s customs. They are put up, or started to erect, 1,200 kilometers of fences expressly twice as likely as natives to say that they do not feel a sense designed to keep others out.… Attracting tourists and rejecting of connection to their country. There is strong segregation migrants is the short version of Europe’s desired world order.” and self-segregation: More than half of Europeans admit that While most nations in Western Europe retain some hope they don’t have a single friend of a diferent race. And most that they will be net beneficiaries of this new order, the resi- of these divisions actually seem to deepen from generation dents of Central and Eastern Europe have come to take a very to generation. bleak view of the future. The two best hopes that Bulgarians For Caldwell, these observations imply nothing less than a have of escaping economic and cultural stagnation, Krastev slow-moving cultural revolution: quips, are Terminal 1 and 2 of Sofia’s international airport. A lot of Bulgarians have taken his joke to heart. Over the past Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance quarter-century, one in ten has left the country. By 2050, of its newcomers. For now, Islam is the stronger party in that the Bulgarian population is projected to shrink by more than contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious a quarter. The demographic trend is similar in many other philosophical way. In such circumstances, words like “major- countries in the region. As a result, ity” and “minority” mean little. When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, alarm over “ethnic disappearance” can be discerned in many and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the of the small nations of Eastern Europe. For them, the arrival of former that changes to suit the latter. migrants signals their exit from history, and the popular argu- ment that an aging Europe needs migrants only strengthens The horror scenario that Caldwell stops short of describing is the growing sense of existential melancholy. When you watch fully realized in the plot of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, on television scenes of elderly locals protesting the settlement Submission. Faced with the choice between a far-right candidate of refugees in their depopulated villages where not a single of Le Pen’s ilk and the leader of a moderate Islamist party, the child has been born for decades, your heart breaks for both French political establishment decides to back the Islamist—who, sides—the refugees, but also the old, lonely people who have of course, turns out not to be so moderate after all. In the end, seen their worlds melt away. the narrator, a scholar of French literature, happily converts to Islam and, even more happily, takes three young wives. A few decades ago, Central and Eastern European politi- Critics of both Caldwell and Houellebecq have largely fault- cians frequently boasted of their language skills. Their ability ed them for their sensationalist description of contemporary to speak fluent English signaled that they could represent

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 61 REVIEW the modern face of their nation and bring home the benefits Michigan, Middlesbrough, and Mecklenburg- Vorpommern of globalization. But as the national mood has turned more as well as in Macedonia. somber, the ability to succeed away from home has turned from an electoral asset into a liability. A politician’s ability to IF THE DIFFERENCES between Eastern and Western Europe speak fluent English, or to garner a degree from a prestigious are sometimes overstated, those between Northern and South- American university, now suggests that he is likely to abandon ern Europe are often underestimated. Across the continent, his people in search of greener pastures as soon as times get growing inequality and the stagnation of living standards tough. “At the very heart of the populist challenge,” Krastev have hit young people especially hard. Yet in the North, the suggests, “is the struggle over the nature and obligations of basic promise of an afuent society remains open to the bulk elites. Unlike a century ago, today’s insurgent leaders aren’t of young people: If you manage to get a good education, and interested in nationalizing industries. Instead, they promise to are willing to work hard, you are likely to find a decent job nationalize their elites. They don’t promise to save the people and to lead a materially comfortable life. but to stay with them.” That same promise is now routinely broken in the continent’s Western Europeans tend to discount the political similar- South. The figures tell a stark story: In countries like Greece ities between the parts of the continent that were once sepa- and Spain, up to a quarter of the total population—and up to rated by the Iron Curtain. By showing that the Eastern half of half of young people—have been out of a job at some point the continent often acts on the same anxieties as the Western over the past decade. That bitter reality has generated wide- half (or indeed, the United States), Krastev makes clear just spread skepticism of the fundamental premise of meritocracy: how much self-flattery is involved in that assumption. As the belief that it is worth trying hard at something because the last months have shown, the fear of cultural loss and the hard work will meet material reward and social recognition. desire to renationalize elites are powerful political forces in It has also fueled the rise of left-wing populist movements— including Greece’s Syriza, Spain’s Podemos and Italy’s Five Star Movement— which propose that meritocracy was always a con, the system is rigged, and rewards should be shared more equally among the population. Especially popular among the young and downwardly Alike, Yet Not Quite mobile, these movements share an irreverent style that can be inspiring. Back when Silvio Berlusconi held ofce in Italy, After Li Shangyin no politician, journalist, or entertainer channeled righteous BY JENNY XIE anger at his outrages more efectively than Beppe Grillo, who delivered multihour, expletive-laden rants at huge rallies across the country. At the time, it was as hard to dislike Grillo as it Thin fish bones arranged on the bone plate, a bracelet would be to dislike John Oliver. Whereas the far-right populists of Northern Europe direct much of their anger against the Blushing after wine and high sun most vulnerable scapegoats, Grillo and other populist leaders The Buddhist nun, like a tipped glass, emptying in the South tend to reserve their fury for a “political caste” through the mouth that really is deeply corrupt. John Judis, in The Populist Explosion, captures something of Smell of shadows in both March and October the diference between Grillo and Le Pen when he distinguishes Solitude and coarse wanting, wedged stubbornly between “dyadic” and “triadic” forms of populism. Left-wing populism, he argues, tends to set up a dichotomy between the The railway conductor’s face, blank as the underside people and the elite, pitting the bottom of society against the top of a river in a clean match-up. By contrast, right-wing populism sets up Paper gown at the gynecologist’s office, onion skin, a triadic antagonism between the people, the elite, and a third easy to part segment of the population that is supposedly being coddled by the political establishment: Muslims, immigrants, efete Unhurried, the knife against the vegetable or the meat intellectuals, and so on. Astonishment of being left and of choosing to leave The implication seems obvious: While triadic populism is pernicious, dyadic populism is benign. But reality, unfortunate- ly, is a little more complicated than that. Many populists who seemed benign at the beginning of their political rise quickly Jenny Xie is the author of EYE LEVEL (Graywolf Press, 2018) and NOWHERE TO ARRIVE (Northwestern University Press, 2017). proved just as willing to scapegoat vulnerable minorities as their right-wing counterparts. Grillo, for example, was long regarded as a hero by the left, and the Five Star Movement was originally animated by progressive ideals. The five stars

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that gave his movement its name each symbolized a leftist political demand: to keep water utilities in public own- ership, to improve mass transit, to prioritize sustainable development, to grant Italian citizens a right to in- ternet access, and to protect the en- vironment. Yet Grillo has increasingly turned his considerable rhetorical skill against immigrants. (“Now is the moment to act,” he wrote on his blog last December, a few days after the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin. “The migrant situation is out of control.”) Greece’s left-wing prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has mean- while entered government in coalition with a far-right nationalist party and has quickly begun to undermine the country’s free press. Beppe Grillo, the leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement, has turned to anti-immigrant rhetoric. The problem with the left populists is not just the inflammatory rhetoric to which they increasingly wrote in Ill Fares the Land. “They generate internal division stoop. While their diagnosis of society’s problems is often and, sooner or later, internal strife—usually with undemo- accurate, and their passion for economic justice genuine, cratic outcomes.” And since Judt was deeply worried about their solutions are just as simplistic as those propagated by the fate of social democracy, there is also little doubt that he the populist right. Like their counterparts, they promise their would have put a lot of his hope in a programmatic renewal voters that politics is simple, and that all of society’s problems of left-wing parties. “Social Democrats all across Europe,” he could be solved if only somebody who truly represents the lamented briefly before his death, “are hard-pressed to say people were elected to high ofce. And like their counterparts, what they stand for.” It is perhaps unsurprising that this programmatic renewal has barely advanced. For decades, the battle lines of economic While left populists correctly policy—more or less taxation; a bigger or smaller welfare diagnose society’s problems, their state—seemed deeply entrenched, while the language of politics narrowed and atrophied. It is only since the shock of the global solutions are just as simplistic as financial crisis, as we have experienced an unlikely intellectual those propagated by the right. renewal of the far left and an equally unlikely political renewal of the far right, that this language has started to lose its hold. Like a sea of fog that slowly retreats as the sun rises, its dis- appearance has revealed vistas both riveting and terrifying. The range of ideas that can now be seriously entertained, they are likely to disappoint their followers if they actually both in politics and economics, has radically expanded. But gain power. In fact, what is truly notable about these move- our eforts to grapple with the political crisis we face have ments is that, on both politics and economics, the new crop not been sufciently ambitious. We’ve made real progress in of populists ultimately wants to overthrow rather than to fix understanding the nature of populism, moderate progress the current order. in analyzing its causes, and barely any progress in identify- ing its potential remedies. The fate of liberal democracy may THERE IS ANOTHER reason why the story of the young French now hinge on whether we are able to formulate a reformist, engineer has been on my mind over the past few months: forward-looking vision for a better politics—one that unites I’ve been wondering what Tony Judt, who told the story in a citizens in pursuit of a more tolerant and prosperous future, posthumously published essay collection, would have made rather than pitting groups against one another or concluding of the present political crisis. that our political system is beyond remedy. But to mount an It seems clear that Judt, who passed away from Lou Geh- efective defense against the false promises of populism, we rig’s disease in 2010, would have been willing to contemplate will have to do more than define the threat: We will need to the possibility that democracy might now be in real peril. formulate the ideas, the slogans, and the policies that are

REDUX / LUZ / ONESHOT / MINNELLA MATTEO “Grotesquely unequal societies are also unstable societies,” he capable of renewing liberal democracy. a

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FILM At the hospital, M breaks down while viewing C’s corpse and runs out of the room in tears. We linger on the body under the white sheet. It rises. It walks. The sheet that covers it has acquired two black holes for eyes. It strolls the halls of the hospital unseen by the sick and the well, until it comes to a wall where a door of light appears. This must be the way to heaven. C’s ghost doesn’t pass through. Instead it walks out of the hospital and slowly advances across many a field back to the ranch house, which it will proceed to haunt. C’s haunting mostly takes the form of standing around. Is that Afeck under the bedsheet, or a coat rack? It’s often Phantom Pains impossible to say. Did Afeck use up his store of dolorous The spirit of wounded masculinity winces in Manchester by the Sea? In Ghost Story, he is an absent presence; the ghost might as well be saying “I’m still here.” As haunts America in A Ghost Story. Lowery lingers on the black eyes of the bedsheet, they pack nearly as much pathos as Afeck on a good day, though perhaps BY CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN not enough to win Afeck (if he’s under there) another Oscar. (Eddie Redmayne did, however, win Best Actor for a perfor- mance as Stephen Hawking that largely consisted of blinking.) Is all this silent stillness spooky or silly? A little of both: The AS THE CURRENT avatar of American white male woe, Casey spookiness leans heavily on the score’s crashing organs and Afeck is underused in David Lowery’s new film, A Ghost Story. In jarring strings, and some of the silliness isn’t unintentional. C last year’s Manchester by the Sea, Afeck was mopey, self-loathing, stands at the window looking at the house next door. There, and seized with guilt, whenever he wasn’t punching a stranger in the window, he sees another ghost, this one a little shorter at a bar after one too many bottles of Sam Adams Boston Lager. and wearing a floral-print bedsheet. Subtitles show that they There are Trump voters in liberal Massachusetts—I’m related to can speak to each other across the yard. The ghost next door some—and though few bought tickets to Manchester by the Sea, says it’s waiting for someone but has forgotten who. it’s about them. The screenplay piled sorrow upon sorrow on Afeck’s character, Lee Chandler: dead brother, estranged wife, AFTER THE DENSELY plotted Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Low- children dead in a fire sparked by his own coked-up negligence. ery, who’s 36 years old, wrote and directed Pete’s Dragon In its profile of the exemplary self-destructive, working-class for Disney, and A Ghost Story blends the latter’s magic with white guy circa 2016, the only box the movie left unchecked was the former’s tragedy, mostly leaving out the action. Lowery a painkiller addiction. It could have been called Masshole Elegy. edited the moody, metaphysical mystery Upstream Color in Redemption wasn’t quite possible for Lee, but there was 2013, and this year he co-wrote the screenplay for Alexandre expiation for the actor. After I’m Still Here, the widely loathed Moors’s adaptation of the Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds. (and scandal-plagued) prank documentary he directed about His next project is a remake of Peter Pan. He veers with ease Joaquin Phoenix becoming a rapper, Afeck showed he’d cleaned between the multiplex and the art house, mixing whimsy and up and gotten serious. The role of Lee, which won Afeck a Best melancholy—not always the happiest of bedfellows. The title Actor Oscar, consolidated his persona as the Sensitive Damaged of A Ghost Story is a statement of point of view: We can see the Guy, a variation on his previous turns as the Sensitive Detective ghost, but we can’t see much the ghost doesn’t see, so we end (Gone Baby Gone, Triple 9) and the Sensitive Outlaw (The Assas- up seeing a lot of the silent, often-empty house. A classic ghost sination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)—all cousins story like The Turn of the Screw takes up the point of view of of the Bostonian noble savage, the mythic figure propagated by the spooked and tends to leave the reality of the ghost, and the Ben Afeck and Matt Damon’s Good Will Hunting, with Casey sanity of the one seeing ghosts, an open question. Not so here. as the rascal apprentice in the ensemble. Before C dies, we see C and M as comfortable rural bohe- You can hear echoes of Afeck’s career in A Ghost Story. As mians, less twangy and less desperate than the Texans Afeck in his 2013 prison-break tearjerker, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and Mara played in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Their house is Lowery pairs Afeck with Rooney Mara and then tears them cozy and tastefully decorated, though the exterior is peeling apart. Early on, Afeck’s C fatally crashes his car just outside the and could use a paint job. C is a musician, and M wants to ranch house he shares with Mara’s M. Just why he’d crash his car move out of the house. It doesn’t seem that she wants to leave on this pleasantly lonely strip of bluegrass is a mystery, but the him, but the possibility isn’t closed of. Although the move is point of C’s death is that it’s pointless—shades of the house fire a point of disagreement, in the early scenes the pair do a lot in Manchester by the Sea. And as in that film, Afeck’s character of nuzzling and look as if they could go on nuzzling into their spends the rest of the movie moping around and lashing out. Only here he’s an actual ghost, not just a ghost of his former self. ILLUSTRATION BY ELENOR KOPKA

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golden years. After C dies, his ghost lingers over M, gazing at levitating. The ghost ruins dinner by chucking shelves of her as she changes the sheets, rushes of to work, sleeps diagonal plates against the wall. Finally, some traditional poltergeist on their bed, lies on the floor, and listens to C’s music (actually stuf. The family is spooked and moves out. The place becomes Dark Rooms’s “I Get Overwhelmed”) on her headphones. She the setting for middle-aged hipster debauchery, and one reaches out and we see she’s touching the hem of C’s bedsheet, night there’s a party. One of the partygoers, played by Will but she doesn’t seem to realize it. He caresses her while she’s Oldham—the alt-country star, who has rarely acted since sleeping, but she doesn’t seem to feel it. What does it mean for his teenage turn as a coal miner–preacher in John Sayles’s a ghost to haunt someone who can’t tell she’s being haunted? Matewan—delivers a trite but charming speech about how M’s grieving takes the form of extreme stress eating. She all life ends in death and dust and not even most art will sits barefoot on the floor of the kitchen in the late afternoon survive. The ghost makes the light bulbs go haywire. Hipsters with the lights of, eating a whole pie from the middle without shouldn’t be so strident in their materialism. the formality of slicing it up, like a semi-feral creature (she Soon the house is abandoned and demolished by a does use a fork). By the time she runs to the bathroom to puke, bulldozer— a surprise attack from the ghost’s point of view we’ve barely noticed that the ghost has been in the frame all and, as the claw crashes through the ceiling unannounced, along like a floor lamp. This sadness can only last so long, and the film’s most thrilling scene. First, what seems to be an in- soon comes the inevitable night when M returns home from a dustrial park goes up on the lot, and in Lowery’s idiosyncratic date with a new man and kisses him goodnight. The surprise telescoping of time, the high-rises get higher until this corner is that when she finally moves out, having left what’s probably of what seems like Kentucky has become a megalopolis that a love note painted into a crack in the doorframe—she must looks a little like Shanghai and a little like Las Vegas. The ghost somehow believe in ghosts—the ghost doesn’t muster the energy doesn’t like it, and throws himself from the roof of a tower. to sneak into her car. Whose story is this? M’s or the ghost’s? By Lowery’s loopy metaphysics, this sends the ghost back to the time of European settlement of the American frontier. A MOTHER (Sonia Acevedo) moves into the house with two Among the many questions C’s time travel raises is: Why doesn’t children (Carlos Bermudez and Yasmina Gutierrez). They the ghost protect the first settlers who arrive at his future home speak Spanish, and the lack of subtitles signals that the ghost when they’re attacked by natives with arrows? Would he rather can’t understand what the children are yelling as they play watch their corpses rot? Why don’t their spirits don tablecloths with their toys on what used to be his living room floor. Is or wagon covers and keep him company? Apparently, the ghost’s this a metaphor for the diminished authority of the American powers of intervention in the realm of the living extend only to white male amid demographic shifts? Even though the chil- plate-smashing and bulb-tampering. Otherwise, after waiting dren are cute, it must be galling for a ghost to have strangers for many years to pass, he might be able to prevent his own for roommates, and now the real haunting begins: The ghost death. A Ghost Story isn’t coherent or profound, but it’s pretty picks up a glass of milk and it appears to the family to be and strange—sad in its quirky way, and blessedly short. a

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TV and the waking mind. But his dreams can also feel like looping nightmares. Perhaps a woman who should have a complete face only has half a jaw, perhaps a mirror warps and contains a demon, perhaps an old man drooling in the corner can see the future. Pauline Kael called Lynch’s vision “the work of a genius naïf ... you feel that there is very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche.” Lynch’s work passes through the “so bad it’s good” wormhole and out the other side, often obliterating the question of quality altogether. It asks you to wonder what the hell you just watched, and then to wonder whether or not you had the powers of perception to grasp Strange Seer it. And it all begins with the eerie truths that lurk beneath David Lynch pushes television to its “normal” American life. The Marilyn fable contains flashes of the ordinary: Norma limits in the sinister new Twin Peaks. Jeane Mortenson was, after all, once just a foster child from the skids of Los Angeles. But there was already a lot of mythology BY RACHEL SYME baked into her tale, and Lynch and Frost’s collaboration on Goddess fizzled in the script stage. Lynch wasn’t yet ready to splash around in the seedy noir shadows of L.A. (That would come later, in 2001’s Mulholland Drive.) Perhaps he wanted to TWIN PEAKS WAS born, at least as legend has it, in a small conjure up another beautiful dead blonde who could serve as a room in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, where two men sat fresher cipher, a Marilyn without the baggage, an undiscovered contemplating a malevolent, banal mill town in the Pacific starlet onto whom an entire village projected their fantasies of Northwest. The director, David Lynch, and the writer, Mark goodness and sin. Lynch and Frost’s Marilyn may have withered Frost, had first met in 1986 to plan a film about Marilyn Monroe, on the vine, but in her place, they came up with Laura Palmer. based on Anthony Summers’s blockbuster biography, Goddess. Laura’s story also fit the proportions of television back in Summers, a former BBC reporter, interviewed more than 600 1987, which Lynch saw as “restricted.” After making movies, subjects for the book and concluded that not only was Robert working in television was, he said, “like going from a man- Kennedy implicated in Monroe’s death by barbiturates, but that sion to a hut.” Twin Peaks is a town made of dumpy corners: he cleaned up the crime scene, scrubbing any ties to the scions musty honky-tonks, faded Formica diners, drab municipal of Camelot. Rather than tearing down this fringe theory, The conference rooms. And yet Lynch mapped a bizarre glamour New York Times’ reviewer, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, praised onto the place by force. It was the discord between the prosaic Summers for weaving together such an “extraordinary welter and the glittering—Audrey Horne’s otherworldly jukebox of detail” about the Monroe case that he seemed to summon dance, the alpine grandeur of the Great Northern Hotel, Kyle up the dead. “The ghost of Marilyn Monroe cries out in these MacLachlan’s smooth complexion and hyperarticulate mono- pages,” he wrote. “Who will put her spirit to rest?” logues—that gave Twin Peaks its carbonation. The surreal Red It makes sense that Lynch and Frost were both drawn to Room, where Laura Palmer whispered murderous secrets to the same menacing, glamorous source material. Frost came Agent Cooper in his dreams—and where she promised to see from Hill Street Blues, a cop procedural that relished an in- him again in 25 years—felt almost natural amid the carnival tricate mystery. Lynch was fresh from making Blue Velvet, a of oddities Lynch brought into viewers’ living rooms. cryptic art-house thriller that features, early on, a close-up of a rotting human ear. That shot of severed cartilage is what TWENTY-FIVE YEARS later, Laura Palmer is back, in Twin Peaks: filmheads refer to as an iconic “Lynchian” image—a term that The Return, and the “hut” has become culture’s hottest real has expanded into an accordion of meanings since the world estate. Lynch himself has argued that television is now the first listened to a deformed baby crying in Eraserhead in 1977. medium that can best transmit an auteur’s cinematic vision David Foster Wallace came closest to nailing its essence in 1996: to the largest number of people. “The art houses are gone,” “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the he told New York magazine in May. “So cable television is a very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s godsend.” The idiosyncratic high-low shimmer that Lynch perpetual containment within the latter.” pioneered has become the standard for premium drama. Even Lynch revels in the shudder of creepy proximity that comes the most mediocre shows now borrow from the Twin Peaks over the viewer when the everyday turns sinister, when the playbook. The gloaming setting, the dead girl at the heart of wallpaper peels back to reveal the insects skittering under- the narrative, the casual use of the gory or grotesque, even the neath. Many refer to Lynch’s work as dreamlike—the result ominous synth theme (ahem, Stranger Things)—these have all of twice-daily Transcendental Meditation sessions that, he claims, break down the barriers between the subconscious ILLUSTRATION BY JEREMY ENECIO

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AUG/SEPT 2017 | 67 REVIEW become familiar tropes. What could Lynch put on Showtime once destabilized an insular community, Lynch now shows the in 2017 that would recreate the jarring sensation of first en- efects of her demise rippling through the entire world—even countering the show on a grainy screen on ABC? outer space—in an interconnected, hyperglobal age. Lynch almost didn’t return for The Return. In 2015, he briefly pulled away from the project, claiming that Showtime LYNCH HAS ALWAYS resisted discussing his own work. He wouldn’t grant him a large enough budget to make all 18 hours told the critic Dennis Lim that “as soon as you put things in exactly the way he saw them in his head. The show’s origi- words, no one ever sees the film the same way. And that’s what nal cast—including Sherilyn Fenn, Mädchen Amick, Kimmy I hate, you know. Talking—it’s real dangerous.” The new Twin Robertson, and Sheryl Lee—responded with a campaign to Peaks makes those conversations particularly difcult. The first #savetwinpeaks. Twin Peaks without Lynch, they insisted, episodes of The Return show us sights that make little to no was like “pies without cherries” or “a sherif’s station without sense. We get a glossy, ominous Manhattan high-rise where a donuts.” The actors knew that he was the new season’s best young man has been hired to watch over a giant, empty glass chance of success among a field of shows that had been weaned box (an unsubtle metaphor for television, if ever there was on, well, Twin Peaks. To stand out once again, they would have one). We get an as-yet-unrelated crime in Buckhorn, South to follow Lynch’s loopy subconscious to some place entirely Dakota, where a woman’s severed head has been placed onto new and as discordant as the original show. a bloated male body. We get Kyle MacLachlan spread out into They were right. Twin Peaks: The Return does not feel like three diferent bodies: Agent Cooper talking backwards in the anything else on television. Nor does it feel like any Twin Peaks Red Room, his evil doppelgänger wearing a lizard-skin shirt, we have seen before. It plays like a David Lynch film stretched and a louche Vegas huckster named Dougie Jones. out into episodes, a continuation of the slow-burn abstraction Lynch loves to double characters (he cast Sheryl Lee both as that he played with in his last feature, the three-hour-long Laura and as Maddy, Laura’s cousin) and to work with actresses Inland Empire. Sure, the old gang is here: In the first four ep- who look alike (as Sherilyn Fenn and Lara Flynn Boyle did in isodes, we’re reunited with Agent Cooper, Lucy, Andy, Bobby, the early 1990s) in order to disorient viewers and break down James, Hawk, Ben Horn, Norma, Log Lady, Shelly, Laura, the their notion of a “TV character” with distinct physical and per- Arm, and even Lynch’s own character, FBI agent Gordon Cole, sonality traits. Lynch forces his audience to think more fluidly as well as his transgender boss, Denise, still played by David about personae—if Agent Cooper is now three people, was he Duchovny in drag. (In a rare nod to changing gender politics, ever really even one?—and about the borders of the fictional Cole tells Denise how he stood up for her when she transi- world he creates. When blondes from Lynch’s earlier works tioned: “I told all your colleagues—all those clown comics—to appear in The Return—both Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) fix their hearts or die.”) and Laura Dern (Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart) make cameos—the The trademark Peaks-ian absurdist humor, the feeling of viewer wonders whether they’ve crossed over into Twin Peaks being trapped in the misty wilds with a gaggle of weirdos, is from another contiguous territory of the Lynchian universe. also back. When we finally meet the grown-up son of Lucy The point of all this is to keep us dazed and wanting. (the sherif’s ditzy secretary whose pregnancy was a major The Return is obtuse and jarring, even a bit alienating, plotline in season two) and Andy (the dimmest, dopiest cop on and yet it seems to tilt toward some cohesive whole that only the force), the baby has inexplicably aged into Michael Cera, David Lynch and Mark Frost know about. By the fifth epi- sporting a beret and a leather jacket. Cera calls himself Wally sode, the new world they created starts to make some kind of Brando and waxes philosophical about the Great American strange sense: that evil, once unleashed among the Twin Peaks West. We have no idea why he speaks like a bad actor doing a pines, has expanded into a web that covers the entire country monologue from On the Waterfront. But in its broad comedy like an arterial map. If the reboot lacks the same commercial and eccentric atonality, the scene is one of the most tradition- watchability of the initial series, perhaps it is because Lynch ally Twin Peaks of the reboot. Such moments are tinged with and Frost want to emphasize the ways in which the world has sentimentality, as if they are full-hearted outtakes from the become ever more complex since they first envisioned their lovable ragtag universe of season one. Bobby tenderly weeps frozen teenage Marilyn. When they showed Laura Palmer in a over an old photograph of Laura Palmer (his first love); Shelly body bag, they created a new template for prestige television: moons over James’s chiseled jawline at the Bang Bang Bar. It needed to shock, to impress, to mystify. Now, to do it again, But very little of this new season takes place in Washington they need to be even more oblique. state. In the last quarter-century, Laura Palmer has become a The fifth episode ends with Kyle MacLachlan as the zonked- kind of tragic Marilyn of the small screen, a celebrity in her own out Dougie, staring at a bronze statue of a cowboy outside an right. A copy of her “secret diary” became a New York Times ofce complex for so many hours that a policeman has to tell best-seller—and was recently reissued in paperback—and doz- him to stop loitering. But he just stands there, as the sky grows ens of books, including cofee-table homages, novelizations, and dark, a fool in lime green trying to make sense of the American academic treatises, have been published about Laura and her idea. Lynch has asked viewers to follow him yet again into the world. To find truly new material, Lynch and Frost had to look dark, with only the vaguest of promises that the naïf will once outside the small town they had created. Whereas Laura’s death more turn out to be a genius. a

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BOOKS constellation of college-educated, white-collar, and creative workers (doctors, lawyers, journalists, artists, academics, and so forth) that hovered somewhere between the ruling class and the traditional working class. More than 30 years later, in their 2013 essay “Death of a Yuppie Dream,” the Ehrenreichs reported that the once-ascendant PMC was on its last legs, fractured by decades of technological advances, job outsourcing, and attacks on labor. Increasingly, its members have either peeled of to join a tier of exorbitantly compensated CEOs and supermanagers or sufered the collapse of their chosen professions, from the decline of newspaper journalism to the elimination of tenured academic jobs. In this bleak new landscape, strivers haven’t disappeared— they have simply reoriented themselves around a new set of values that bolster their class position in less noticeable ways. In his new book, The Complacent Class, the economist Tyler Cowen argues that the afuent have actually doubled down on stubborn self-satisfaction—a complacency that he sees as symptomatic of a wider malaise gripping the country. By contrast, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a scholar of public policy, maintains that today’s PMC is no less ambitious than the yuppies of yore, but that in an age of deepening inequality and precarity they are less openly hedonistic. Her book The Sum of Small Things ofers a rich anthropological portrait of the “aspirational class”—a type of neo-yuppie that defines itself through understated modes of consumption and an emphasis on the accrual of cultural capital. The New Yuppies This new elite is typified by the brownstone-dweller traipsing How the aspirational class expresses through Whole Foods with a yoga mat peeping from the top of her NPR tote; the new Prospect Heights mother who stops its status in an age of inequality. in at the lactation consultant before her Y7 class; the tech startup employee with the neatly trimmed beard and Everlane BY J.C. PAN button-down who announces on Facebook that he’s “bumping the new Kendrick.” They buy green cleaning products, ethically made clothes, and small-batch everything. They aspire, says Currid-Halkett, “to be their version of better humans in all THE TERM “YUPPIE” now feels so dated that it occasionally aspects of their lives.” seems an entire social class has vanished. If the suit-wearing On its face, this approach to conscientious living may look Patrick Batemans of the 1980s no longer embody afuence, like a rejection of the uninhibited greed associated with the what has come to replace them? “Hipster” reigned, briefly, as ’80s. But the new aspirational class shares more with its prede- the label of choice for certain irritating would-be members cessors than it wants to admit. As populist surges in the United of the bourgeoisie. But while hipsters were, like the yuppies States and Europe make clear, rising economic inequality before them, young and urban-dwelling, they weren’t exactly has made it more critical than ever to rethink and uproot the professional. Often rumored to be living of their trust funds, status quo. Yet, as Cowen and Currid-Halkett both find, for all they spent their time as layabout musicians or bike messengers, the new elite’s well-intentioned consumption and subsequent milling in cofee shops and craft cocktail bars. Yuppies, on the self-assurance, they have no intention whatsoever of letting other hand, were seasoned careerists who owned yachts and go of their status. luxury SUVs and talked in public about their stock portfolios. Yuppiedom described a specific oily demeanor and pattern of ACCORDING TO CURRID-HALKETT, the aspirational class isn’t consumption as much as it implied afuence. limited to billionaires. Rather, it includes people of varying The waning of the yuppie’s particular brand of ostentatious income levels who share a belief in meritocracy and, conse- upward mobility, and the rise of its aesthetically scrufer hipster quently, desire to express their acquisition of knowledge. It cousin’s, demonstrate the ongoing erosion of what Barbara encompasses both the well-of partner in the law firm and the and John Ehrenreich have called the “professional-managerial class.” The Ehrenreichs coined the term in 1977 to refer to the ILLUSTRATION BY DOLA SUN

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 69 REVIEW liberal arts school graduate working as an unpaid publishing form socially and environmentally conscious values that sets intern, so long as both know to consume the same organic them apart from everyone else—which is why a $2 heirloom farmers market berries, discuss the latest Rachel Maddow tomato purchased from a farmers market is so symbolically segment, and quote lines from the musical Hamilton. Exact weighty of aspirational class consumption and a white Range cultural references may vary: In her book, Currid-Halkett names Rover is not. Serial as the aspirational class’s go-to podcast, while today we might easily swap it for S-Town. The point is that members Even forms of inconspicuous consumption undertaken in of the aspirational class trade in the semi-secret handshake of one’s ostensible downtime (attending a SoulCycle class or knowing the “right” things to consume at a given time. watching Stranger Things) can increase one’s cultural capital. While consumption has always served as a way to display “How else can an individual seem informed (and intellectually one’s status, the style of consumption favored by the rich has productive) at a dinner party if he’s not spending free time changed significantly. On the eve of the twentieth century, the doing things that make him seem smart and culturally aware?” social critic Thorstein Veblen published his famous indictment asks Currid-Halkett. of the Gilded Age’s idle rich, whom he called the “leisure class.” While a desire to buy organic root vegetables might seem As owners of the means of production, they did not need to innocuous enough, there is a disquieting side to inconspicuous work for a living and displayed their high status through the consumption. Aspirational-class parents reproduce their class conspicuous consumption of brazenly nonfunctional luxury position for their children in ways that are even less visible, goods. The apparent uselessness of these purchases signaled but far more significant and expensive, than dressing them in their owners’ extravagant indolence. Women of the leisure artisan-made organic cotton tees. They buy their kids boutique class wore constricting corsets that did not permit a great deal health care, take them on enriching trips to the Galápagos, of movement, let alone strenuous labor; their male counter- and—most importantly—equip them with every educational parts often carried gratuitous canes that suggested a physical advantage, from high-end preschools to SAT tutors to Ivy inability to work. League tuition. In 2014, the top one percent spent 860 percent Today, mass production and an abun- more than the national average on education. dance of cheap knockofs have rendered For the aspirational class, the moral consumerism of buying conspicuous consumption unremarkable the heirloom tomato provides a handy cover for the fact that at best and gauche at worst. If criticisms their inconspicuous consumption reinforces their own eco- of conspicuous consumption were once nomic privilege. As a result, members of this elite often come rooted in anti-materialism or antipathy to- to view their station in life as ethical and deserved, unaware ward the rich, today they are more likely to of the ways in which their spending patterns exacerbate class carry undercurrents of sexism and racism. stratification. “At the very least,” Currid-Halkett points out, We have a clear idea, for example, of who “they do not see themselves to blame.” is being maligned when social critics re- mark upon the tastelessness of seven-inch IT IS HERE that The Sum of Small Things dovetails with The THE COMPLACENT Louboutin platforms, or expensive rims Complacent Class, which sets out to indict a comparable mind-set CLASS BY TYLER COWEN on Cadillacs. Consumption habits are also of self-satisfaction. Among the causes of stagnation in America, St. Martin’s Press, invoked to upbraid the poor for their bad Cowen contends, is the “Not in My Back Yard” attitude of af- 256pp., $28.99 budgeting, as when Representative Jason fluent city-dwellers, who protest the construction of homeless Chafetz recently suggested that the un- shelters and methadone clinics in order to “preserve” their insured would be able to buy health care neighborhoods. Like Currid-Halkett’s aspirational class, to which if they didn’t blow their earnings on “that most of them belong, NIMBYers cluster in densely populated new iPhone.” metropolitan areas. “Quite frankly,” writes Cowen, “those are Now that conspicuous consumption parts of America where people feel very good about themselves.” has lost its prestige, today’s elites express But according to Cowen, complacency extends far beyond their status through inconspicuous con- the urban elite. The great problem of our time, he believes, sumption. Their understated expendi- is that we’ve abandoned the spirit of restlessness that was tures signal that they are knowledgeable once a central tenet of the American experiment. He points and moral—most often to other members to sluggish rates of productivity, the decline of geographical of the same class. “Rich oligarchs and the and socioeconomic mobility, and the increase in segregation middle class can both acquire ‘stuf,’ ” by income, education, and ideology each as symptoms of our THE SUM OF SMALL notes Currid-Halkett, collective inertia. Cowen’s titular class is, in fact, composed THINGS BY ELIZABETH CURRID- of several diferent classes—each of which, he argues, sufers HALKETT but, for the aspirational class, it is from its own specific form of complacency. Princeton University Press, members’ eagerness to acquire knowl- At the top there is the cosmopolitan, highly educated “priv- 272pp., $29.95 edge and to use this information to ileged class,” who are mostly content with the status quo. Next

70 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW are “those who dig in,” the middle-class families struggling by their own—rather than of the many who find themselves on the precipice of downward mobility in the face of spiraling disadvantaged by segregated neighborhoods and schools. costs for education, housing, and health care. Finally, there are In his eforts to portray a nation of sleepwalkers, Cowen “those who get stuck,” the working poor and the underclass— overlooks or downplays recent research that demonstrates how Americans who have been incarcerated or chronically unem- a great deal of stagnation is actually imposed and maintained ployed or otherwise mired in poverty with no clear way out. by a narrowing elite, who have gradually perfected their meth- In other words, the complacent class covers almost everyone. ods for discouraging those below from rising up. Cowen doesn’t Indeed, Cowen argues, it is our complacency that unites us: spend much time, for instance, pondering why political en- “Despite the divergences in their situations,” he writes, these gagement among the poor—those who would most benefit from groups share “a certain level of social and emotional and indeed an upheaval of the current order—is so dismal. But consider a ideological acceptance—a presupposition—of slower change.” study of voter turnout by political scientists Jan Leighley and This is a stirring provocation, to be sure. Complacency, Jonathan Nagler, which found that one reason for low turnout Cowen argues, explains almost everything about our national among poor Americans is that they don’t perceive significant character: why we’ve become less likely to riot, why we aren’t as ideological diferences between Republicans and Democrats. willing to move across the country for better work or lifestyle, (If this sounds ridiculous, recall that Obamacare was originally why a majority now agrees that a chill-out, feel-good drug like Romneycare.) Add to this Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s marijuana ought to be legalized. Yet the very case studies he finding that the top 10 percent of earners so dominate politics cites tend to contradict his own theory. Take Cowen’s chapter that the average citizen’s influence on policy-making is now on why Americans no longer participate in large-scale riots. “near zero,” and moribund political participation among the By his own account, it’s not that the down-and-out are less poor begins to look less like complacency than captivity. disposed to smash windows than they were in the 1960s. It’s that policing and crowd management techniques have evolved FOR ALL THEIR carefully curated political and cultural capital, significantly over the past few decades. Authorities now employ the aspirational class members face an uncertain future. As global a host of sophisticated approaches to prevent unrest from capitalism continues to immiserate millions and systematically sparking, and to defuse it quickly when it does, requiring per- destroy the planet, Barbara and John Ehrenreich argue, the mits for protests, creating “free speech zones,” and increasing remnants of the PMC will have to make a choice. They can make common cause with the traditional working class and attempt to break the power of capital, or they can cling to what little Members of the aspirational class status they have left. The debt-ridden college graduates who trade in the semi-secret handshake joined Occupy Wall Street or voted for Bernie Sanders appear to have made a gamble for the former. But as Currid-Halkett’s of knowing the “right” things to portrait of the aspirational class shows, there are plenty who consume at a given time. will keep treading bad water so long as their own stay afloat. No portion of the PMC has been more blinded by its righ- teous self-image than the Democratic Party establishment, which failed to foresee a devastating loss in last year’s elec- tion. In their abandonment of the working class, Democrats surveillance of would-be troublemakers under the Patriot Act. validated the old saying that Republicans fear their base while When riots do break out—like the Ferguson uprising over Democrats despise theirs. “For every blue-collar Democrat we the police shooting of Michael Brown—local ofcials often lose in western Pennsylvania,” Senator Chuck Schumer boasted bring in sympathetic authority figures (black clergy and police last summer, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in chiefs) and organizations like Amnesty International to broker the suburbs in Philadelphia—and you can repeat that in Ohio peace and prevent disorder from spreading further. and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Hillary Clinton went on to trade Likewise, Cowen’s analysis of the reemergence of segregation campaigning in Wisconsin for an appearance on Broad City, reveals little about national complacency. As he shows, segre- an interview in Lenny Letter, and a shout-out to Hamilton in gation by income and education in major metropolitan areas her speech at the Democratic National Convention. has increased dramatically over the past half-century, even at Clinton’s was a campaign tailor-made for and by the as- a time when few people would openly profess to want it. His- pirational class, which is why its members, notably those torically, segregation has been the result of income inequality, settled on prestigious media perches, were blindsided when sky-high rents, and discriminatory policies such as redlining. the so-called “blue wall” crumbled last November. When Tyler But according to Cowen, it is also the result of “the increasing Cowen dreams of restoring America to some prior state of ability of Americans of means to sort with people who are like innovative glory, his book can sound like an extended rif on themselves in terms of education and income and social class.” Donald Trump’s now-infamous campaign slogan. But it was In other words, if complacency has helped fuel segregation, it’s the Democrats’ pitiful rejoinder to Trump that could serve as a the complacency of the elite few who wish to be surrounded mantra for the complacent class: “America is already great.” a

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BOOKS The Bank of England will even issue a ten-pound note with Austen’s picture on it. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, a new book by Oxford lec- turer Helena Kelly, shares the Janeites’ obsessiveness, but not their fondness for the novels’ genteel settings and closely ob- served manners. Insisting that Austen’s work has always been misread as “an undiferentiated procession of witty, ironical stories about romance and drawing rooms,” Kelly promises to reveal a hitherto unknown and unrecognized Jane Austen. This “radical” Austen meticulously constructed her books to show a “complicated, messy” world, “filled with error and injustice.” To uncover this subversive text, Kelly argues, “we have to read carefully.” Austen couldn’t be “too explicit, too obvious” in her writing, because she lived in a society “that was, essen- tially, totalitarian.” Instead, Austen planted clues and codes, trusting her readers “to mine her books for meaning, just as readers in Communist states learned how to read what writers had to learn how to write.” In Kelly’s view, Austen’s novels are a kind of samizdat, concealing radical messages beneath their conventional surfaces. Kelly never says, however, what she means by “radical.” Is Austen’s radicalism a political agenda, a feminist critique, a theological question, or just feminine self-assertion? Kelly provides very few clues. At one point, she describes Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice as “a radical” because she “knows her own mind” and “reserves the right to decide questions for herself.” Does accepting the idea that Austen was a secret The Austenista radical, who wrote, according to one reviewer, “about the Does Pride and Prejudice contain burning political issues of the time,” make reading the novels any more pleasurable or interesting? Or is it necessary for subversive political messages? us to redefine Austen as politically engaged and indignant in order to respect her as a serious woman writer? BY ELAINE SHOWALTER KELLY IS FAR from the first critic to engage with political issues in Austen’s fiction. In her 1987 study Jane Austen and the State, Mary Evans called Mansfield Park a “radical critique of bour- MANY YEARS AGO, I went to a conference of the Jane Austen geois patriarchy.” For at least 30 years the novel has been at the Society of North America. We met in the Fairmont Chateau center of a controversy about how much Austen knew about at Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies, which was said to slavery and what she thought about it, as the heroine’s uncle, Sir be the original of the hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. Thomas Bertram, owns not just Mansfield Park but also a sugar But this time it was the setting for a diferent kind of eerie plantation in Antigua. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said displacement: nearly 600 Austen enthusiasts, many wearing accused Austen of indiference to the slave trade and, because Regency costumes, decked out in ribbons and bonnets, and of her silence about it, complicity. Said’s interpretation inspired carrying reticules, fans, and parasols. the 1999 film of Mansfield Park, in which Harold Pinter plays While Janeites love partying and cosplay, they are inter- Bertram as a bullying, belligerent, slave-owning patriarch. ested in much more than cream teas. Most have an expert Yet Kelly does not credit or address these scholars and their knowledge of Austen’s six novels, as well as two centuries of critiques. Her case for the radicalism of the novels rests instead scholarship, and their conferences include panels and talks by on a mixture of psychological interpretation and political learned Austen scholars, alongside the balls and excursions. hypothesis—sometimes ingenious, but more often speculative This year is an especially big one for Austen devotees. The and circular. She loves solving “word games and anagrams” bicentennial of her death brings the release of annotated that she alone has detected in Austen’s fiction, all of which anniversary editions of her novels and critical studies such somehow turn out to support her argument. She finds a polit- as The Making of Jane Austen by Devoney Looser and Reading ical theme in each of the novels, and they all make the comedy Austen in America by Juliette Wells. There will be dozens of exhibitions and commemorations from America to A ustralia. ILLUSTRATION BY KIM HOFFNAGLE

72 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW darker and the happy endings questionable. Northanger Abbey secret political meanings, but also to her intentions. In nov- is about the “terrifying risk” of marriage and childbirth for elistic introductions to each chapter, she recreates several women. Sense and Sensibility is a world in which “love and periods in Austen’s life, even channeling her deathbed musings. family, honor and duty, have hardly any meaning.” “She has done them justice, to the best of her poor ability, her When we get to Austen’s most sunny and beloved novel, Pride books, her children,” Kelly imagines Austen thinking. “What and Prejudice, Kelly admits that a radical reading is more difcult. will become of them all, after she’s gone?” Still, she maintains, “any reader fully sensitized to the loaded Kelly’s claim to have read each of the six novels “as Jane language of revolution and counterrevolution would have read intended us to” is a bold one, but it’s undermined by her own Pride and Prejudice for what it is—a revolutionary fairy tale.” In writing and perspective. She describes Austen as “an author- Austen’s many references to soldiers, Kelly sees “images of a rebel- ess,” an antiquated feminine form that, like “poetess,” serves lious populace, of government repression, and, more distant but to trivialize Austen as a woman writer. And throughout the insistent nevertheless … of mutiny.” Austen’s novels show English book she refers to her subject as “Jane”—a strange usage in a society is as snobbish, class-determined, cruel, and unequal as work that seeks to present Austen as a great artist. No critic, prerevolutionary France, but rebellion against a repressive class after all, writes about Charles’s critiques of injustice, Henry’s system, Kelly concludes, is symbolically prevented in the plot complex style, or Joseph’s revolutionary ideas. by the “radical marriage” across class diferences of Elizabeth Some Austen experts, while critical of Kelly’s methods, (moderately wealthy gentry) and Darcy (very wealthy gentry). have been amusedly tolerant of what John Mullan calls her Unlike Said, Kelly views Mansfield Park as commenting in- “divertingly unlikely” discoveries. Indeed, Kelly is an inge- tentionally on the hidden evil of slavery in Britain. The book’s nious and entertaining critic, and an engaging writer. She title, Kelly argues, recalls the name of William Murray, Lord asks a lot of rhetorical questions and disarmingly admits to Mansfield, a judge who ruled in 1772 that English law did not uncertainty. What did Jane Austen write between 1803 and permit the ownership of slaves. “It would have been unfor- givably careless of Jane,” Kelly writes, “to attach Mansfield’s name, out of all the names she could have chosen, to this novel The “radical” Austen meticulously unless she meant her readers to think about him and about slav- constructed her books to show a ery.” She proposes that Austen left a series of such clues linking the “unforgivable sin” of slavery to the Church of England, which “complicated, messy” world, “filled gave it “a veneer of Christian respectability.” Yet the evidence with error and injustice.” is hardly persuasive: Since the novel was not reviewed when it was published, we have no idea whether a contemporary reader thought of Lord Mansfield in connection with it, or noticed any critique of slavery in Austen’s satire of the clergy. Kelly finds a much more elaborate political scenario in the spring of 1809? “Maybe she was working on preexisting Emma, which she reads as a coded attack on enclosure of drafts or on pieces that were later incorporated into the common land by the gentry. Recalling a scene in which gypsies other novels. Maybe she was writing something she later are camped by a roadside, she views Emma as a novel about destroyed. We simply don’t know.” Kelly also points out the the hardship, desperation, and need of the poor, whose access sexual subtexts of Austen’s decorous prose, from the “thinly to the common land has been stolen. Mr. Knightley, far from veiled description of female masturbation” in Northanger being a perfect partner for the heroine, Kelly contends, is an Abbey to the “close, rough, forcible” hug that Fanny Price’s exploitative, hard-hearted lord of the father imposes on her, “a pressing together of bodies” im- manor with pedophilic inclinations. (In plicitly illicit and intimate. a “shocking moment,” he confesses to Writing in The Times Literary Supplement, Devoney Looser Emma that he has been in love with her compares Kelly to Virginia Woolf, who also speculated wildly since she was 13.) Likewise, Kelly insists about Jane Austen: “Both are skilled, provocative literary that the allegedly happy reconciliation critics who make lousy, error-ridden literary historians.” The of two long-estranged aging lovers in comparison to Woolf is a big stretch. Woolf grasped the fun- Persuasion is a romantic illusion. The real damental concerns of the novels—unsentimental acceptance message of the book, less Shakespearean of the economic realities that forced women into marriage; comedy than existential despair, is that respect for the natural aristocracy of intelligence, humor, history is “random, chaotic, filled with and kindness; social satire; and the subtle morality of human death and destruction.” So much for the relationships—whereas Kelly’s book leads us away from them. JANE AUSTEN, THE SECRET RADICAL delights of the Jane Austen book club. Austen’s novels have survived for 200 years on her art, her BY HELENA KELLY characters, her wit, and her profound portrayal of women’s Knopf, 336pp., $27.95 KELLY PRESENTS HERSELF as an lives. That should be sufciently radical to sustain her repu- authoritative guide not only to Austen’s tation a while longer. a

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BOOKS In his new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, Ganesh Sitaraman proposes that America in the eighteenth century represented the first instance in history of a country with a middle class large enough to permit the realization of a commonwealth. Two-thirds of white Americans owned land, compared to only one-fifth of the population in England. “Con- ditions approaching the slums of London,” Sitaraman observes, “were unknown in America.” White colonists also enjoyed remarkable equality of wealth: The top 1 percent of Americans possessed 8.5 percent of total income in 1774, compared to 19.3 percent in 2012. (Sitaraman deals only glancingly with Created Equal slavery, acknowledging that “economic equality and economic opportunity did not extend to everyone.”) Even six decades How the divide between rich and poor later, Alexis de Tocqueville found a country where the people has undermined the Constitution. were “more equal in their fortunes ... than they are in any country in the world and than they have been in any century BY WIN MCCORMACK of which history keeps a memory.” Not only were American statesmen of the era keenly aware of the uniqueness of their economic situation, but they were also guided by Harrington’s vision of a republic of equals. IN 1656, IN the aftermath of the English Civil War, the po- Harrington, John Adams wrote, “has shown that power always litical theorist James Harrington outlined an ideal form of follows property.” The only way to preserve “equal liberty and government. In The Commonwealth of Oceana, he imagined a public virtue” in a republic, Adams reasoned, would be to “make country that, like his own, had overthrown its monarch and the acquisition of land easy to every member of society.” If a was now governed by its own people in their common inter- majority of people owned land, they would also hold the balance est. Harrington recognized that it would be hard to divide of political power. The Founding Fathers, however, were also power equally throughout this new society. In “class warfare” aware of the inverse: that the republic could not withstand dras- constitutions —those that split power between the nobility and tic inequality. Sitaraman begins his book, in fact, by identifying the people—one group inevitably came to dominate the other, the collapse of the middle class in our time as the greatest single “as the people did the nobility in Athens, and the nobility the threat to America’s constitutional government. As the middle people in Rome.” The result was tyranny or anarchy. class has declined—from 61 percent of the population in 1971 Harrington’s major insight was that popular government to less than 50 percent in 2015—the power of the superrich has could only be stable if the people were political equals, which soared. The 20 richest Americans are now wealthier than half meant they must also be economic equals. Political power, of the country’s entire population combined. And economic he saw, was precisely correlated with wealth: When property power translates directly into political power: Between 1983 is concentrated among the few, landowners can wield undue and 2012, corporations’ expenditure on lobbying soared from influence and distort the balance of power. A true common- $200 million to $3.3 billion. Amid such extreme imbalances, wealth, Harrington argued, required that “the whole people Sitaraman argues, we are now faced with a choice—to accept be landlords” so that no one group could “overbalance” the our current state of oligarchy, or to attempt to restore the rest. The people of his imaginary Oceana are each granted a equality on which the republic was founded. parcel of land, thus breaking up large fortunes and estates. Harrington was not the first to envision a society ruled by THE FOUNDERS FORESAW threats to equality in the repub- neither rich nor poor. Donato Giannotti, a leader of the Florentine lic from its earliest years, particularly in the transformation Republic in the sixteenth century, saw promise in the mediocri, of America into an industrial economy. James Madison and his city’s new and expanding middle class. If the mediocri could Thomas Jeferson believed that the preservation of American grow larger than rich and poor put together, he speculated, equality and liberty depended on maintaining an economy of they could hold the balance of power and ensure a degree of yeoman farmers and small merchants, and that industrialization stability. Aristotle saw similar promise in the “middling” stratum would inevitably undermine America’s unique social order he observed in the fourth century B.C. in Athens. Because they by creating a European-style economic and political elite. In shared neither the overwhelming burdens of the extremely poor, Democracy in America, Tocqueville warned of “How Aristocracy nor the all-consuming vices of the very rich, they were uniquely Could Issue from Industry.” “As the principle of the division of positioned to mediate between the two extremes. But Aristotle labor is more completely applied,” he explained, “the worker did not make more of this line of thought, because the middle becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent.” Over class was not yet large enough to form a majority. That would have to wait for the founding of America. PAINTING BY MICHAEL BROPHY

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COURTESY OF RUSSO LEE GALLERY LEE RUSSO OF COURTESY / BROPHY MICHAEL BY SERIES WOBBLIES THE FROM Industrialization concentrated great wealth in the hands of a few, eroding the relative equality that had prevailed at the time of the founding.

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 75 REVIEW time, the gulf between workers and employers could come to … [and] hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be resemble the relation between peasants and lords. sometimes out of work. In 1791, Madison and Jeferson attempted to scuttle Alex- ander Hamilton’s proposal to create a national bank, fearing The “closing of the American frontier” was ofcially her- the commercial development it would underwrite. When alded in the year 1890, and by that time the United States Andrew Jackson became president and refused to renew the was well on its way to becoming a predominantly urbanized bank’s charter in 1836, he condemned the bank as a “concen- and industrialized nation. The country was also riven with tration of power in the hands of a few men irresponsible to widespread labor unrest. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent the people” who would “put forth their strength to influence in federal troops to quell the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, elections or control the afairs of the nation.” Ironically, it and in 1894, when the Pullman strike shut down most of the was the American promise of equality of opportunity that country’s railroad trafc, Henry Demarest Lloyd, the muck- laid the groundwork for a new class hierarchy based on raking journalist and early Progressive activist, deemed the outsize achievement. crisis “greater than that of 1776 or 1861.” With the Supreme As Sitaraman explains, the wage-labor system itself posed Court disinclined to enforce antitrust laws, the “great merger a direct challenge to the very idea of republican government. movement” from 1895 to 1904 produced a set of monopolies Citizens of a true republic must be free political thinkers and such as DuPont, General Electric, and American Tobacco, each actors, not dependent on anyone else for their economic sus- of which controlled up to 90 percent of its industrial sector. tenance. This was true of a yeoman farmer who sold what he The disparity between the working class and its corporate grew, but not of wage-laborers forced to work long hours in masters was now so pronounced that President Hayes, from factories to aford the bare essentials of life. As historian Eric his retirement, made an astounding statement. “This is a Foner has observed, many nineteenth-century adherents of republicanism believed that “a man who remained all his life dependent on wages for his livelihood appeared almost as Citizens of a true republic must be unfree as a southern slave.” free political thinkers and actors, Although the Founders (with the notable exception of Ham- ilton) worried about the rise of manufacturing, they contented not dependent on anyone else for themselves with the thought that industry would not replace their economic sustenance. agriculture as the dominant mode of production in America so long as there remained land to settle and farm in the West. Benjamin Franklin argued that land was so plentiful that any “labouring man, that understands husbandry” could quickly save up enough money to buy a “piece of new land sufcient government of the people, by the people, and for the people no for a plantation, whereupon he may subsist a family.” In Amer- longer,” he proclaimed. “It is a government by the corporations, ica anyone could, in theory, still become a landowner, as the of the corporations, and for the corporations.” citizens of Harrington’s Oceana were. In 1829, Madison con- jectured that it would be another 100 years before America CLEARLY, JAMES HARRINGTON’S formula that political power would grow so crowded that its citizens would be “necessarily follows land had become outdated. Political power now fol- reduced by a competition for employment to wages which lowed capital. The structure of Harrington’s commonwealth, aford them the bare necessities of life.” in which equality was underpinned by an even distribution That estimate proved overly optimis- of real estate, would need to be revamped for the new age of tic. In 1857, four years before the out- capitalist enterprise. break of the Civil War, the conservative The Knights of Labor—not a labor union per se, but more a English historian Thomas Babington lobbying organization for working people in general—took up Macaulay issued a dire prediction of the the challenge with its plan for a cooperative commonwealth. inequality to come. “As long as you have “Our rulers, statesmen, and orators have not attempted to a boundless extent of fertile and unoc- engraft republican principles into our industrial system,” cupied land,” Macaulay wrote, George McNeill, who co-authored the Knights’ constitution, charged in 1887. “Republican institutions are sustained by the your laboring population will be far ability of the people to rule.... The foundation of the Republic more at ease than the laboring popu- is equality.” He also complained that corporate power was THE CRISIS OF THE lation of the old world…. But the time now a “greater power than that of the State.” Business had MIDDLE-CLASS CONSTITUTION will come when New-England will be become a kind of “State within a State” that was “quietly yet BY GANESH SITARAMAN as thickly peopled as Old England. quickly sapping the foundations of majority-rule.” Knopf, 432pp., $28.00 Wages will be low…. You will have The cooperative commonwealth that the Knights envisioned your Manchesters and Birminghams was premised on “joint ownership and control over industrial

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that “there can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy,” and that “there can be neither political nor industrial democracy unless people are reasonably well-to-do.” The central challenge of the Progressive era was to restore the balance of economic equality on which, in Sitaraman’s account, the American Constitution was predicated. To cur- tail the unbridled power of the new, behemoth corporations, Progressives strengthened antitrust measures and created regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission. They also addressed the problem of income inequality head- on, authorizing a federal income tax in 1913 and passing an estate tax in 1916—a category of taxation that Founders such as Jeferson and Madison had wanted to impose in a form severe enough to block the transfer of substantial fortunes from one generation to the next. Progressives also passed reforms to mitigate the ability of the new money interests to influence the political system: They banned corporate contributions to federal political campaigns, allowed voters to elect U.S. senators directly, and established primaries and ballot initiatives. In addition, they worked to create and expand the reach of a wide range of public insti- tutions, from schools and parks to libraries and playgrounds (there was a full-fledged “playground movement”). What all James Harrington’s vision of a republic of equals inspired the Founders. of the Progressive reform eforts had in common was that they sought to strengthen the res publica—the “public thing”—and enterprises.” Unlike some radical reformers of the era, such as were therefore profoundly republican in nature. Eugene Debs, the Knights were not partial to the idea of state ownership of corporate entities. For them, the term “cooper- IN 1932, WHEN Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers swept ative” meant that employees would share in the ownership and into ofce, they believed that radical structural reforms needed management of private companies. The cooperative structure, as to be made in the capitalist system if it was to be saved from its Sitaraman observes, “transformed each industrial organization own deep-seated and self-destructive flaws. But over time, as into a mini-republic of its own.” Sitaraman notes, this enthusiasm waned, and the New Dealers For this principle, the political scientist Alex Gourevitch has ultimately failed to safeguard democracy from the corrupting termed the Knights “labor republicans,” who showed how to influence of wealth. adapt republican principles for an industrial age. The purpose One reason was the rise of new economic theories promul- of reforms such as the eight-hour workday and the cooperative gated by British economist John Maynard Keynes. Under the organization of industry was to bring workers into the middle New Deal, the National Recovery Act focused entirely on reg- class, so they could fulfill the Aristotelian notion of mediating ulating production to create jobs. But as Keynesian economics political power between the extremes of rich and poor. The labor gained adherents, the aim of altering the structure of capitalism republicans also took seriously the concept of “civic virtue,” was gradually replaced by the narrower goal of using public which in the cooperative commonwealth would necessarily spending to augment consumer purchasing power. In addition, involve “habits of cooperation and collective action.” They estab- Roosevelt himself underwent a personal transformation from a lished reading rooms and educational centers, and campaigned would-be structural reformer at the beginning of the New Deal for maximum-hours laws, so that workers could gain the level to a passionate advocate for what political philosopher Michael of education required of well-informed citizens in a republic. Sandel calls “egalitarian liberalism.” In the face of increasing Such bottom-up eforts at revitalizing the republic met with industrialization, FDR proposed a second bill of rights “to assure limited success. In his 1914 book, Drift and Mastery, Walter us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” This included the right Lippmann proposed that the nation had entered a period of to a job, a decent home, medical care, education, and protection alarming “drift” because it had not figured out how to “master” from the economic fears of old age, sickness, and unemployment. the forces unleashed by industrialization. The American people, By focusing on rights, Sitaraman comments, Roosevelt could Lippmann saw, lived in a “fear economy.” Workers could lose “preserve democracy without having to reform the structure their jobs at any moment, or find themselves insolvent in old of corporate capitalism.” age, or sufer a serious illness without afordable health care. The labor movement, too, largely moved away from tra-

GETTY/ HISTORICAL CORBIS Theodore Roosevelt, who read Lippmann’s book, concluded ditional ideals of republican government toward egalitarian

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 77 REVIEW liberalism. On the eve of World War II, labor leader Walter The five-year agreement—known as the “Treaty of Detroit”— Reuther proposed a plan whereby the big car companies would boosted the standard of living for GM employees by 20 percent. begin building military aircraft by pooling their resources and It efectively moved autoworkers into the middle class—but, setting up industrial councils with worker participants. The as Sitaraman notes, it also marked “the end of an era whose auto companies reflexively opposed Reuther’s plan. But after aspiration was to structure corporations to create a ‘republic’ the war, Reuther received a surprise peace ofering from Char- or ‘democracy’ within industry.” Gone was Reuther’s vision of lie Wilson, the head of General Motors, who recognized that industrial councils and worker participation. From now on, work- greater stability of labor would enable the company to engage ers would get their benefits from their employer, not the state. in long-range planning. Wilson ofered workers a two-year The treaty’s provisions became standard throughout industry, contract with much-improved salaries and benefits, followed even among white-collar workers in manufacturing plants. All by a five-year contract with even better terms. in all, Sitaraman observes, it “established the basic framework for American social policy, led to a generation of broadly shared economic growth, and helped build the postwar middle class.”

THE PART OF Sitaraman’s book describing the Treaty of Detroit falls within a section titled “The Glorious Years.” It is a very Twists of Comb-Hair short section—only 15 pages—and its length is appropriate, BY SHARON OLDS since the so-called Glorious Years did not last long. If you take the Treaty of Detroit as their starting point—1950—and accept as their impending end point the year when productivity began Ankh, & ampersand, & small to stagnate and wages to fall—1970—this period spanned little doll-braid; treble clef; lasso; more than two decades. double half-hitch; woven ring; The years since 1970 have been characterized by a precip- picasso mass of pubic squiggle; itous decline in union membership. This deterioration was faerie basket; fly to catch caused, in part, by trends in the global economy. But it was also a freshwater fish; riffle in moonlight; the result of a deliberate, systematic campaign by American ichneumon; question mark; business to reduce union bargaining power. In Sitaraman’s growth circles of a silver pine; view, the efort was sparked in 1971 by future Supreme Court mouse-fur-rich long-tailed weasel Justice Lewis Powell’s militant letter to the U.S. Chamber of scat; wild sewing creel; Commerce calling for aggressive, coordinated action against nematode; letter of my name: the business community’s perceived enemies. In 1978, when I pull them out of the pockets of the quilted business lobbyists succeeded in killing a modest labor reform vanity pouch I travel with— bill, United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser proclaimed hair from my comb in Toronto, Red Hook, that “the leaders of industry, commerce, and finance in the Hudson, Hoboken, Rye, Muskegon, United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten Portland, Mississauga, and now compact previously existing during a past period of growth the valley below Granite Chief— and progress.” The Treaty of Detroit, which the UAW had and instead of taking it back with me to bury it pioneered, was now efectively dead. with coffee grounds under a hydrangea so my The waning power of labor has both worsened inequality old shock, from under the ground, can stand and eroded the republican political tradition. At the core of straight up, and blossom as the republican political ideal is responsible civic engagement. my mother’s young breasts, when I loved her, Tocqueville, after his travels in America, theorized that what when she was social scientists now call “intermediary institutions” or “civil my life as I knew it, I can walk over society”—small associations that mediate between the indi- the shed needles of the timberline pines and vidual and the state—are crucial to the exercise of American let, fall, democracy. “The formative aspect of republican politics,” one by one, these Michael Sandel observes, “requires public spaces that gather script letters from near my brain, these citizens together, enable them to interpret their condition, not quite words, this language I will and cultivate solidarity and civic engagement.” Labor unions, leave here, when I am gone. in particular, provide their members with a social structure within which they can develop the skills necessary to participate in public afairs outside the union hall. The business estab- Sharon Olds lives in New York City. Her latest collection is ODES. lishment, by taking direct aim at the power of labor unions, has succeeded not only in breaking the principal connection between the working class and the American political system,

78 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW but in fostering a level of anomie and social despair among Democratic Party establishment felt no need to include the blue-collar workers that threatens the stability of the nation’s masses in its plans for the country. social and political order. Now, with a faux-populist installed in the White House— As the economic gulf between rich and poor widens, the and with the rest of the government under the control of a perspective of members of the wealthiest class becomes more Republican Party whose platform bears little if any resemblance and more distorted. In Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, to the actual wishes and needs of the public—the left has a political scientist Robert Putnam describes how the middle rare opportunity to organize a new and genuine grassroots class has all but vanished in his hometown of Port Clinton, movement. In its present circumstances, in fact, the left has Ohio. In stark contrast to his own experience growing up there little choice but to organize from the ground up, if it is to in the 1950s, the rich and poor now lead completely separate move forward at all. lives: geographically, educationally, and socially. In situations There are encouraging signs that such a process is already of such radical socioeconomic division, studies show, the underway, principally in the raucous town meetings that groups rich eventually lose their sense of empathy for people unlike like Indivisible have spawned across the country. Better still, themselves, and become less inclined to make investments the organizing is being done mainly by young people, many of in their communities or support public programs unless they them entering the political arena for the first time. But mere primarily benefit members of their own class. resistance to the diabolical schemes of the enemy is not sufcient. The situation most feared by Aristotle and other philosophers To rally the American public in the long term, the left must craft of the republican tradition—the ascendance of an oligarchy a comprehensive, alternative political program that addresses devoted mainly or solely to its own interests—is now firmly in economic inequality and restores the broad parity essential for place. The political wishes of the American people are rarely the efective functioning of America’s constitutional system. translated into legislation by Congress, and then usually only Sitaraman provides us with a much-needed reminder of how economic inequality has been adjudicated in the past—and how it can be more efectively alleviated in the future. He raises the The situation feared by Aristotle possibility of passing tougher inheritance laws, but absent an and Harrington—the ascendance actual revolution, that doesn’t seem any more feasible today than it did in the time of Madison and Jeferson. He rejects of an oligarchy devoted to its own outright the idea of a “class warfare constitution” to divide interests—is now firmly in place. power between rich and poor. His most powerful suggestion for change lies in a return to the cooperative commonwealth and the rise of a new labor movement—one focused not purely on collective bargaining within the workplace, but more broadly on the empowerment of workers. At a time when full-time em- when popular preferences on an issue happen to coincide with ployment is rapidly being replaced by short-term and contract those of the elite—a phenomenon that political scientist Martin work, unions must adopt new tactics and organize a wider range Gilens calls “democracy by coincidence.” The key to republican of workplaces and workers. Only long-lasting, structural change government is the participation by all citizens, at least to some will reestablish the level of equality that both Harrington and degree, in the governmental process; but a large portion of the Founding Fathers saw as necessary for a republic. the American population—and in many elections, a majority— In The Folklore of Capitalism, Thurman Arnold—who over- doesn’t even vote. They stay home on Election Day because they saw the antitrust division of the Justice Department during don’t think their votes are going to make a real diference in the last years of FDR’s presidency—took stock of capitalism’s the conduct of public afairs—and according to the data cited triumph over republicanism. If only there had been a “great by Sitaraman, they are not wrong in that assessment. Donald cooperative movement” back in the original Progressive era, Trump was elected president, in no small part, because he gave Arnold lamented, it “might have changed the power of the many working-class Americans the feeling that they could finally industrial empire.” Perhaps the American left should consider make a strong impact on the political system, for good or for ill. the possibility that it still could. a It seems clear that many did not much care which.

THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 8 & 9, Issue 5,006, Aug/Sep TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY, LIKE many catastrophes, bears a silver 2017. Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and Aug/Sep 2017) by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone lining. Before the election, when a victory by Hillary Clinton (202) 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage was widely seen as inevitable, many so-called “progressive” and handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing ofces. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: organizations were trumpeting their plans to reform the entire www.TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. Box 6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post Agreement American political system from the top down—an approach Number 7178957. Send changes of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited sometimes referred to as managerial liberalism. Little if any manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be emailed to [email protected]. mention was made of seeking the involvement or support of For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our web site at newrepublic.com/customer-service. the American public. With Clinton’s triumph assumed, the

AUG/SEPT 2017 | 79 backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX GARCIA

LOCATION O’HARE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, CHICAGO DATE JANUARY 27, 2009

ONLY FIVE DAYS after taking ofce, Donald Trump issued an The flights—known as ICE Air—deported millions who had executive order unleashing a nationwide crackdown on un- lived and worked in the United States for years. “I remember documented immigrants. Arrests leapt by nearly 40 percent, seeing looks of fear and resignation on people’s faces,” says flooding detention centers with nonviolent ofenders and tearing photographer Alex Garcia, who was at O’Hare International families apart. But the sprawling enforcement apparatus that Airport that day. “Some had bravado, of course, but that was Trump deployed was actually built by Barack Obama, who likely just to cope with the uncertainty of what was to come.” ramped up the border patrol and expelled a record three million Garcia was able to photograph the scene for a simple reason: immigrants, earning him the title “deporter in chief.” The Obama administration strove to be open about deportations. Like Trump, Obama began his crackdown just after his inaugu- “It’s our goal to be transparent,” an ICE ofcial explained at ration. On a frigid January morning in his adopted hometown of the time. Under Trump, such scenes are rarely, if ever, pho- Chicago, 53 immigrants bound for Juarez, Mexico, were frisked, tographed. The president may enjoy unleashing public tirades handcufed, and placed on a 737. “This is the life we have,” said about Mexican “rapists,” but the work of arresting and deporting Mario Barradas Rodriguez, a 34-year-old from Veracruz, Mex- millions of immigrants now takes place largely in the shadows. a ico, who was arrested for driving without a license. “Nobody

here knows I’m leaving, and nobody there knows I’m coming.” See more of Alex Garcia’s work on newrepublic.com /TRIBUNE TCA CHICAGO

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