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MARCH 2017

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UP FRONT 6 Trump’s Big Agenda 26 Conservatives are poised to privatize everything in sight. BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN 8 The Populist Ploy Decades ago, predicted Trump’s rise. BY WIN McCORMACK 10 Trump’s Think Tank How is shaping his playbook. BY ALEX SHEPHARD 12 The Art of the Con What Trump shares with America’s best swindlers. BY CLANCY MARTIN

COLUMNS 14 All the President’s Phantoms Trump isn’t the first conspiracy theorist in chief. BY JESSE WALKER 16 Feminist Fail It wasn’t America’s rampant misogyny The New Opposition that doomed Clinton. BY JESSA CRISPIN

From Occupy to , the left has been REVIEW reborn. Can it harness the discontent fanned by Trump? 54 A View to a Kill BY JEDEDIAH PURDY How nature documentaries obscure more than they reveal. BY COLIN DICKEY 60 Look Back in Anger The origins of today’s global upheavals lie in Western history. BY SAMUEL MOYN 18 32 63 The Eye of the Beholder Obama’s Lost Army The Fight Ahead Rorschach’s inkblots turned personality testing into an art. BY MERVE EMRE The untold story of his biggest John Lewis, plus nine leading activists mistake—and how it paved the and scholars, on the best ways to take 66 The Big Short way for Trump. BY MICAH L. SIFRY on Trump, from Congress to the streets. Why are ambitious writers turning to the power of aphorism? BY RACHEL SYME 68 Only Human Silicon Valley’s high-tech obsession with living forever. BY ANNA WIENER 38 46 72 Backstory Hate in the Inside the PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY MILLER Age of Trump Recount Across America, Klan and neo-Nazi Jill Stein and a ragtag team of computer POETRY groups are not only flourishing—they’re experts decided to take America’s 59 Love Poems in the Time of joining forces. TEXT BY VAN JONES elections to court. Here’s how it all Climate Change PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY MILANO went wrong. BY STEVE FRIESS BY CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ

COVER PHOTO BY ANDY OMEL MARIO TAMA/GETTY MARIO

MARCH 2017 | 1 contributors

Jessa Crispin is the founder of Bookslut and the author of Why I Am Not Editor in Chief a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. She admires radical feminist saints like St. Win McCormack Teresa and St. Hildegard for confronting society’s love of money and Editor power: “The #resistance is not going to be about directly fighting Trump. It Eric Bates has to be about transforming our culture.” FEMINIST FAIL, P. 16 Executive Editor Culture Editor Merve Emre is assistant professor of English at McGill University. Her Ryan Kearney Michelle Legro first book,Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, will Politics Editor Features Directors be published this fall by the University of Chicago Press. Her second book, a Bob Moser Sasha Belenky Theodore Ross cultural history of personality testing, is forthcoming from Doubleday. Deputy Editor Ryu Spaeth Senior Editors THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER, P. 63 Brian Beutler Story Editor Jeet Heer Laura Marsh Steve Friess is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The News Editor Managing Editor New York Times, , and Time. In 2000, as a staffer at the Alex Shephard Laura Reston South Florida Sun Sentinel, he broke the story of the chaos ensuing from Staff Writers the badly designed “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County. Design Director Graham Vyse Josephine Livingstone INSIDE THE RECOUNT, P. 46 Siung Tjia Poetry Editor Photo Director Cathy Park Hong Van Jones is the former green jobs adviser to President Stephanie Heimann and founder of the Dream Corps, a accelerator. He is a CNN Production Manager Social Media Editor political commentator and author of The Green Collar Economy and Rebuild Steph Tan Sarah Jones the Dream. HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP, P. 38 Contributing Editors Reporter-Researchers James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Clio Chang Johnny Milano is a New York–based photographer whose work has Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, Lovia Gyarkye appeared in , CNN, and . He Siddhartha Deb, Michael Sukjong Hong Eric Dyson, Paul Ford, Ted Juliet Kleber spent five years capturing the rise of white supremacy groups in the United Genoways, William Giraldi, Nicole Narea Dana Goldstein, Kathryn Joyce, States. HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP, P. 38 Suki Kim, Maria Konnikova, Interns Corby Kummer, Jen Percy, Kim Phillips-Fein teaches twentieth-century American political, Jamil Smith, Graeme Wood, Eric Armstrong Robert Wright Jasmine Bager business, and labor history at and is the author of Demetria Lee Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. Her Sagari Shetty history of New York in the 1970s, Fear City, is forthcoming from Metropolitan Books. TRUMP’S BIG AGENDA, P. 6 Director of Marketing Director of Sales and Revenue Jedediah Purdy is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke Suzanne Wilson Evelyn Frison University and the author, most recently, of After Nature: A Politics for the Associate Account Audience and Executive Anthropocene. He has written for , The Atlantic, The New Partnership Manager Shawn Awan York Times, n+1, and Jacobin, and is on the editorial board of Dissent, where Eliza Fish Controller he is a frequent contributor. AMERICA’S NEW OPPOSITION, P. 26 Media Relations Manager David Myer Steph Leke Office Manager, NY Micah L. Sifry is co-founder and executive director of Civic Hall, a Associate Publisher Tori Campbell community center for civic tech and innovation. In 2004, energized by the Art Stupar potential of the internet to democratize politics, he co-founded the Publisher Personal Democracy Forum. A decade later, he wrote The Big Disconnect: Hamilton Fish Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet). OBAMA’S LOST ARMY, P. 18 Published by Lake Avenue Publishing Jesse Walker is books editor of Reason magazine and author, most 1 Union Square West, recently, of The of Paranoia, a history of American conspiracy New York, NY 10003 theories. The politician who most reminds him of is Pappy President O’Daniel, a bandleader and radio star whose fame and populist rhetoric got Win McCormack him elected governor of . ALL THE PRESIDENT’S PHANTOMS, P. 14

Anna Wiener is a writer in whose work focuses on life in For subscription inquiries or problems call (800) 827-1289 Silicon Valley. A frequent contributor to the new republic, her articles have For reprints and licensing visit www.TNRreprints.com also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, n+1, and Pacific Standard. ONLY HUMAN, P. 68

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SINCE ANDREW JACKSON descended on Washington in 1829 and purged the federal government to make way for his cronies, incoming presidents have always remade the capital in their own image. In early 2001, as George W. Bush prepared to take office, new republic editor Andrew Sullivan observed that Washington was suddenly populated with “fat, white, straight guys in their fifties,” determined to return the city to the more dignified days before Whitewater and that blue dress from the Gap. The Bushies were boring, sure, and they made Washington boring, too, but they were a welcome change from the “ceaseless psychodrama” of the Clinton years. ✯ Today, as Donald Trump assumes office, Washington may forfeit the cultural renaissance it underwent during the Obama era. The first family ate at trendy restaurants and attended SoulCycle classes, while their young staffers helped spur urban revitalization. It’s hard to imagine Trump out on the town, enjoying hip eateries or visiting local bookstores. He favors charred steaks and tomato juice, wide ties and Florida winters. In Trump, America is getting the worst of both George Bush and : a stodgy administration full of old, straight, white guys, and a “blabberer-in-chief” already immersed in scandal. Donald and Melania Trump at an inaugural ball in January.

Andrew Sullivan Sounds of Silence JANUARY 15, 2001

Like a giant Valium descending on Dulles drawing to a close. The first sign is the silenc­ e. such an assembly of superiors. My gut tells International Airport, the Bush transition has Listen: the air is no longer quite so filled me it’s the former—and that this shrewdness come to Washington. Many of us are already with the incessant circumlocutions of the is far more important in politics than any sedated by the sheer grown-upness of it all. blabberer-in-chief. Whatever other qualities sort of bookish intelligence and may lead Compared with the Clintonistas, yapping into he has, the man can surely talk. The sheer to small increments of progress. cell phones at the Dupont Circle Starbucks volume of verbiage he has expelled over There will surely be plenty of reasons to at all hours of the day and night, the Bushies eight years is enough to make John Updike be irritated by the W. culture soon enough: seem preternaturally calm. Where we once look blocked. the sense of entitlement, the narrowness had a permanent campaign, we now have But now we have the wonderfully inar- of vision, the stuffiness, the dynastic pre- intermittent naps. Where transitions once ticulate George W. Bush. As Dianne Wiest sumptions, and so on. But for now the new involved endless ruminations on nannies whispered to her lover in the movie Bullets culture of Washington, perhaps because it and gay soldiers, we now get to ponder the Over Broadway, one can only enjoin, “Don’t is also an old one, seems worth celebrating. unbearable whiteness of . speak! Don’t speak!” And this is not merely Politics as tedious but effective manage- It’s not as if the Bushies have no style. out of concern for what’s left of the English ment is an ancient conservative doctrine— It’s just that it isn’t, er, immediately visible. A language. W.’s inarticulacy is the point. After but, these days, a strikingly fresh one. Such a city once run by twentysomethings has now the interminable blather of Clinton, W.’s ver- politics does not need, as the Clintons did, to been surrendered to fat, white, straight guys bal void is a balm, an oasis, a spa for the spun infiltrate every part of our lives, to mesh the in their fifties. A town previously mesmerized soul. After all we have endured over the past exigencies of statecraft with the tawdriness by definitions of “sexual relations” is now eight years, are there words to describe the of Hollywood. It is a politics that does not pondering the résumé of . rapture this relative mute evokes? need to be permanently in on For Stairmasters substitute angioplasty. For Then there’s the executive style. We have the national stage and is often content to op- Georgetown substitute McLean. For Gold- gone from a Cabinet of yea-saying lawyers erate quietly behind the curtain. The promise man Sachs substitute Alcoa. To be sure, the to a Cabinet of grown-up CEOs. Bush has of Bush is to make politics boring again, to Bushies don’t quite generate the buzz of produced a Cabinet of people so obviously return it to the prose of government rather lower TriBeCa, but hey, we’re in Washington. more skilled and experienced than he is that than the drama of private life or the poetry We don’t do buzz here. it is pretty close to embarrassing. It either of the broader culture. After eight years of There is, of course, the small question of takes an extraordinarily secure man or a ceaseless psychodrama, we will be deeply,

relief. The era of the Clintons is mercifully completely clueless one to have gathered permanently grateful for the change. a KEVIN DIETSCH - POOL/GETTY

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PROFIT CENTER

Trump’s Big Agenda Reagan started it. Bush expanded it. Now conservatives are poised to privatize everything in sight.

BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN

ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, Donald Trump famously least for the moment. Or, perhaps more accurately, portrayed himself as a populist. His campaign ads Trump has come around to theirs. At the center took aim at sinister elites governing the United of his ever-shifting agenda, Trump has placed a States, and his ability to target the frustrations single, overarching goal that he shares with the oil and fears of Rust Belt communities helped propel billionaires from Wichita: turning as much of the him into the presidency. But many of those same government as possible over to the private sector. positions—especially his criticism of —put The push for privatization—long a conservative him squarely at odds with decades of conservative dream—is most evident in Trump’s cabinet picks. orthodoxy. The Koch brothers, for their part, refused Tom Price, his choice for secretary of health and to support Trump, freezing him out of their donor human services, wants to replace Medicare with a network and declining to share voter data with him. system of private health accounts that would hand blasted Trump’s call for a Muslim over millions of taxpayer dollars to private insurance registry as “reminiscent of Nazi Germany,” and said companies. Betsy DeVos, his nominee for secre- that choosing between Trump and tary of education, is a leading advocate for charter was like choosing between “cancer or a heart attack.” schools, which are designed to channel much-needed Now, of course, the Kochs and most of the GOP establishment have come around to Trump’s side, at ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNA BARCZYK

6 | NEW REPUBLIC resources away from public education and into pri- from convinced that public schools are the only way PUBLIC vate enterprises. Trump has expressed interest in to make education available to our people.” GOES turning the Department of Veterans Affairs into a In the 1970s, the idea of privatization became PRIVATE “nonprofit corporation”—an idea that emerges di- closely linked to hostility toward public-sector un­ Federal jobs Obama rectly from Concerned Veterans for America, a group ions, which conservatives viewed as a “covetous” turned over to for- backed by the Kochs—while Ben Carson, his choice bureaucracy that would give labor too much power. profit companies: to head up the Department of Housing and Urban The Carter administration flirted with the notion, but † Managing gas and Development, has spoken of simply dismantling fed- privatization gained a true champion in Washington water systems for eral health care for veterans entirely. Even Trump’s under Reagan, whose Commission on Privatiza- U.S. military proposals for modernizing the nation’s infrastructure tion pushed to allow for-profit interests to operate are centered not on carefully coordinated federal ef- everything from low-income housing and air traffic † Printing nautical charts for federal forts, but on giving tax breaks to for-profit companies control to prisons, Amtrak, and the Post Office. oceanographers to erect new bridges and repair the nation’s roads. There’s little evidence that privatization actually At the heart of the conservative faith in privat- improves government services. Privately run fire † Modernizing and ization is the idea that the public sector is inherently departments have been a disaster, for-profit prisons expanding cumbersome and inefficient. The public good, the are rife with cost overruns and human rights abuses, border crossings thinking goes, can best be served not by inflexible and charter schools don’t consistently outperform † Conducting airport government bureaucrats, but by enlightened busi- their public counterparts. But since the 1970s, the security screenings nessmen who function as “trustees for the poor,” push to hand public funds over to private compa- as the philanthropic steelmaker Andrew Carnegie nies has gained traction well beyond the far right. † Inspecting poultry once put it. This worldview has its roots deep in Strapped for cash, many liberal cities have sought safety for USDA the conservative movement that took shape in the out public-private partnerships and other ar­ United States after World War II. The growth of the rangements that outsource such basic government federal state during the New Deal was met by strong ­responsibilities as maintaining parks, cleaning city resistance from business leaders, who feared the rise streets, enforcing parking regulations, dispatching of the only centralized authority powerful enough ambulances, and educating school kids. As Donald to counter their own interests at the national level. Cohen, a leading critic of privatization, has pointed They organized vigorously against both labor unions out, liberals at the national level also embraced and the welfare state, funding think tanks that were privatization as a way to “reinvent” the Democratic incubators for free-market ideas. The American Lib- Party. Under Bill Clinton, the federal government erty League, for example, a business organization began handing out contracts to for-profit prisons, financed by the du Pont brothers (of the DuPont allowed private companies to determine who was Chemical Company), argued that the New Deal eligible for welfare benefits, and even toyed with the was “a vast organism spreading its tentacles across idea of investing Social Security in the stock market. the business and private life” of America, and that the state should stop providing economic assistance to the destitute, leaving such efforts to the Red Cross. In the decades that followed, many corporate Deep down, Trump shares with Andrew Carnegie executives grudgingly came to accept Keynesian the belief that corporate leaders alone have the economics and the larger role for the state it implied, right, the power, and the obligation to rule. and they tolerated bargaining with labor unions that represented their workers. But some business conservatives never stopped working to upend the New Deal, to restore what they saw as the proper The election of George W. Bush advanced the balance between the private and public sectors. In agenda further. Early in his presidency, Bush sug- 1955, economist wrote an essay gested that about 850,000 federal jobs—almost half arguing that the state should turn public schools the federal workforce—should be outsourced to the over to “private enterprises operated for profit.” private sector. He enjoyed his biggest success, sur- Providing parents with taxpayer-funded vouchers prisingly, in the armed forces. During the War, to pay for private schools, he said, would help re- private military contractors actually outnumbered verse the “trend toward collectivism.” In the wake of U.S. troops, and companies like KBR, a subsidiary of Brown v. Board of Education, white conservatives in Dick Cheney’s old firm Halliburton, raked in billions the South loved the idea of school reform. As Jesse of dollars in federal contracts providing services that Helms put it in 1957, when he was still the head of were once the province of the U.S. military. Obama the Bankers Association, “We are far continued the trend, allowing for-profit companies

MARCH 2017 | 7 up front

to run immigrant detention centers, and doing lit­- Deep down, Trump favors turning state functions tle to stem the spread of private charter schools. over to private firms because he shares with Andrew Yet what makes Trump’s version of privatization Carnegie an underlying belief that corporate leaders different is not just its ambition, but the alone have the right, the power, and the obligation to of business superiority that guides it. If the new make decisions for society. Their financial success, president and his cabinet picks have their way, some in his mind, is all the proof that’s necessary. “I have of the biggest and most central functions of the made billions of dollars in business making deals,” federal government—education, housing, infrastruc- he declared at the Republican National Convention. ture, health care for veterans and the elderly—could “Now I’m going to make our country rich again!” wind up being managed by for-profit corporations. Now that Trump and his inner circle of conser- Trump’s own businesses, after all, have benefited vative businessmen are in charge of the state they from public subsidies, including the tax breaks that have long despised, they are poised to rule it as New York doled out to for-profit developers as part they do their own companies: uncontested by—and of its effort to woo investors after the city’s fiscal unaccountable to—those who will be most deeply crisis in 1975. affected by their decisions.a

NEOCON NOSTRADAMUS

The Populist Ploy Meet the conservative thinker who predicted Trump’s rise.

BY WIN McCORMACK

IT IS SOMETHING of an understatement, at this nation’s liberal elites. What’s more, Kristol argued, point, to say that no one saw Donald Trump coming. such an uprising was an absolute necessity to sal- Initially opposed by almost every Republican official, vage America from what he had come to see as the Trump went over their heads to galvanize a working- pernicious effects of the Enlightenment principles class base that none of them understood existed. In on which it had been founded. the process, he exposed the party’s underbelly of Kristol, a Trotskyite-turned-antiliberal intellec- bigotry and xenophobia with deliberately provoc­ tual, was at first repelled by the emerging populism ative rhetoric, and went on to make a mock­ery of of the 1970s, much of it tied to the religious right. both the mainstream media and the liberal political In a 1972 article in his magazine The Public Inter- establishment. est, he described populism as “the belief that the world is being misdirected by a kind of mischie- vous conspiracy against the common man,” and noted with obvious condemnation the “tendency Kristol believed the country needed a strong toward xenophobia and racism” of American populist leader who could rally the masses to reclaim movements of the past. American democracy from the liberal elites. By 1985, however, after swept into office with strong support from the , Kristol had done an about-face. If there was any potential danger to republican government that But one right-wing luminary did, in fact, see concerned the Founding Fathers, he acknowledged in Trump coming—a full three decades before his ar- the Journal, it was that of populism, which he defined rival. In 1985, Irving Kristol, the leading founder of as “democracy at its least rational, least sensible.” the neoconservative movement, wrote an article in The Founders knew from reading their Plato that a The Wall Street Journal called “the new populism: sudden upsurge in anti-elitist, popular passions— not to worry.” In it, Kristol foresaw the possibility legitimate or not—often ended in the triumph of that a conservative posing as a populist could one demagogic tyranny, a common phenomenon in the day lead a successful democratic uprising against the ancient world of small city states. That’s why they

8 | NEW REPUBLIC built into the Constitution mechanisms like the objected to the fact that the Enlightenment, and the DISASTER Electoral College—which Kristol hailed as a true philosophy of that constituted its political FORETOLD “republican remedy for the diseases of republican expression, privileged reason over religious faith, “What is going on is government.” (How ironic that it was this supposedly which he thought was the glue that held society something very strange fail-safe constitutional provision that put into office together; without that glue, he believed, the social and without precedent. the first genuine demagogue in American history to order would descend into Nazi-style barbarism. To put it simply: The common sense of the accede to the presidency.) Through his reading of Strauss, Kristol was also American people has But unlike the old kind of populism that struck influenced by the ideas of Carl Schmitt, who served been outraged … by the terror in the hearts of the Founding Fathers, the as the legal-political philosopher of the Nazi regime persistent un-wisdom “new populism,” as Kristol dubbed it, was nothing in its early years. Schmitt considered the whole of their elected and appointed officials. to worry about. In his view, the sentiments of the idea of parliamentary democracy, with its naïve and To the degree that we people now represented a “common sense” reaction romantic notion of accommodation among political are witnessing a crisis against the “un-wisdom” of the elites. What was rivals, as absurd and futile. The key to politics, he in our democratic needed, he believed, was a strong leader who could believed, was adopting a “friend/foe” mentality of institutions, it is a crisis of our disoriented rally the masses to reclaim American democracy identifying your political enemy and then bringing elites, not of a blindly from the clutches of liberal , institute about his political destruction. And the enemy, in his impassioned populace.” a faith-based government, and bind the nation view, was liberalism itself, in all its manifestations. — Irving Kristol, 1985 together by preaching an assertive nationalism. But the most important idea Kristol took from As political scientist Shadia Drury has pointed Strauss and Schmitt may have been what Drury out, Kristol’s evolving view of populism was heavily calls the “populist ploy”—playing on the inherent influenced by the reactionary political philosopher weakness of democracy itself to defeat the enemy of , a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. liberalism, just as Hitler came to power by winning Though atheistic in his own personal views, Strauss the popular vote in 1932. Kristol believed that the

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE BRODNER

MARCH 2017 | 9 up front

American people were not as liberal as their ruling certainly laid the groundwork for Trump’s suc­ overlords, and that the right leader could use the cess by wholeheartedly embracing Carl Schmitt’s democratic process to overthrow them. This new “friend/foe” tactic of identifying and crushing their leader, in keeping with the views of Schmitt and enemies—a strategy that also enabled them to win Strauss, would then impose a national religion on majorities in both houses of Congress. Intentionally America, thus unifying the country and saving it or not, the GOP has effectively implemented the from the moral disintegration of liberalism. populist blueprint laid out by Irving Kristol and his Has Donald Trump successfully carried out Kris­ philosophical forebears. In the final paragraph of her tol’s “populist ploy”? To a large extent, he has. Af­ book Leo Strauss and the American Right, published ter using the democratic process to repudiate and in 1997, Shadia Drury offers a description of the vanquish the elite of the Republican Party, he de­ neoconservative movement birthed by Strauss that feated Hillary Clinton, a veritable exemplar of the doubles, virtually unaltered, as a prescient summa­ liberal class despised by Kristol. Trump tion of : accomplished this feat with the strong support of conservative evangelicals, an alliance he cemented It echoes all the dominant features of his by choosing one of their own as his vice-presidential philosophy—the political importance of religion, candidate, as well as alienated working-class voters the necessity of nationalism, the language of in the Midwest. What’s more, he has nominated for nihilism, the sense of crisis, the friend/foe ment­ secretary of education a woman whose life mis­ ality, the hostility toward women, the rejection sion is to turn the American school system into a of modernity, the nostalgia for the past, and the state-funded training ground for the Christian right. abhorrence of liberalism. And having established Although no one in the American conservative itself as the dominant ideology of the Republi­­ ­- movement went looking for a populist demagogue can Party, it threatens to remake America in its to pick up their banner, congressional ­Republicans own image. a

RIGHT IDEAS

Trump’s Think Tank After years of being on the outs with conservatives, the Heritage Foundation is back on top.

BY ALEX SHEPHARD

HERITAGE’S IN EARLY DECEMBER, took the stage in the party where Pence delivered his remarks. “I’m INFLUENCE the Presidential Ballroom at the Trump International trying not to be too giddy,” Jim DeMint, the foun­ Hotel in Washington, D.C. “We did it,” the incoming dation’s president, confessed that night. Elaine Chao, vice president told the cheering crowd. Donald The Heritage-Trump alliance is one of the more Transportation Former Heritage fellow Trump, he said, had secured a mandate. “It was a improbable developments in an election season that victory,” Pence insisted, “that was born of ideas.” was full of them. A year ago, Heritage’s political arm Betsy DeVos, Education That may seem far-fetched, given that Trump’s dismissed Trump as a distraction, with no track Heritage donor worldview relies more on bravado than briefing record of allegiance to conservative causes. Today Andrew Puzder, books. But in fact, the new administration is pur­ the group’s fingerprints are on virtually every policy Labor suing a right-wing agenda that rests squarely on Trump advocates, from his economic agenda to his Heritage donor a long tradition of conservative ideas: repealing Supreme Court nominees. According to , , Obamacare, rolling back government regulations, Heritage employees acted as a “shadow transition policy adviser tightening immigration laws, tilting the Supreme team,” vetting potential Trump staffers to make sure Heritage founder Court to the right. And no group is more responsible the administration is well stocked with conservative for helping to craft Trump’s agenda than the Heritage appointees. At a Heritage event shortly after the Foundation, the conservative think tank that hosted election, John Yoo, author of the notorious Bush-era

10 | NEW REPUBLIC memos authorizing torture, trotted out a series of one-liners about the foundation’s influence. “I’m surprised there are so many people here, because I thought everyone at Heritage was working over at transition headquarters,” Yoo joked. “I asked the taxicab driver to take me to Trump transition head- quarters, and he dropped me off here instead.” The partnership between Trump and the Heritage Foundation represents a return to prominence for the conservative think tank. For decades, Heritage was the preeminent policy shop in Washington. Founded in 1973 by and Edwin Feulner, two Republicans who were tired of organizations that refused to get their hands dirty by meddling in pol- itics, it pioneered a new approach, one specifically oriented around right-wing advocacy rather than nonpartisan research. The agenda-shaping worked. “Of a sudden,” the Democratic senator observed in 1980, “the GOP has become a party of ideas.” To a large extent, those ideas came directly from the Heritage Foundation. In January 1981, it released Mandate for Leadership, a book-length compendium as the foundation’s president. The operation became of more than 2,000 policy recommendations cover- so pro–Tea Party, in fact, that many establishment ing nearly every aspect of the federal government. ­Republicans began to complain about its lack of Ronald Reagan famously passed out copies at his first loyalty to the conservative orthodoxy. “They’re de- Cabinet meeting, and 60 percent of the Mandate’s stroying the reputation and credibility of the Heritage ideas—from tax policy to missile defense—were Foundation,” declared Mickey Edwards, a former adopted in the first year of his administration alone. congressman who served as a founding trustee of the Reagan himself later credited Heritage for the suc- think tank. Senator Orrin Hatch went even further. cess of his presidency, and Heritage followed up on “Right now, I think it’s in danger of losing its clout Mandate with two sequels that helped script foreign and its power,” he told Meet the Press. “There’s a real policy under George H.W. Bush, the Contract with America under , and welfare reform under Bill Clinton. Under George W. Bush, Heritage’s influence be- Under Obama, Heritage came roaring back as a gan to wane. Unlike his father, the younger Bush prominent supporter of the Tea Party—a move that favored the neoconservative ideas of the Project for positioned it well for its alliance with Trump. Century and the American Enter- prise Institute. Although a few ex-Heritage staffers went to work for Bush—most notably incoming Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao—the founda- question in the minds of many Republicans now: Is tion excoriated some Bush policies as insufficiently Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn’t conservative. Tom DeLay famously banned Heritage amount to anything any more?” from reserving rooms in the Capitol, for example, As it turns out, such conflicts with the GOP after it opposed Bush’s expansion of Medicare. ­establishment­ helped position Heritage to serve With the election of Barack Obama, however, as a much-needed bridge between Trump and con- Heritage came roaring back. It sprang into action servatives. Although the group initially opposed as a prominent supporter of the Tea Party, paying Trump, DeMint quietly reached out to the candi- for demonstrations and staging town hall outbursts date last year, offering his group’s assistance. Last that fostered an intense anti-Obama mood among spring, the foundation aided Trump with his list of Republicans. In 2010 it created Heritage Action, a potential Supreme Court nominees that helped him nonprofit entity that could engage in more explic- dampen conservative dissent and begin the long it political work, and in 2012 it hired DeMint, the process of winning over Republicans of all stripes. fierce Tea Party congressman from , Another major turning point came in July, when

MARCH 2017 | 11 up front

Trump picked Pence, a longtime friend of Heritage give “long leashes” to his secretaries—some of whom, and DeMint, to be his running mate. “The campaign like education nominee Betsy DeVos, have contrib- and the transition knows that many of these issues uted millions of dollars to the Heritage Foundation. that Donald Trump ran on—repealing Obamacare, In pushing for government deregulation and lower securing the borders and preventing amnesty, and taxes for the rich, the think tank will be wielding draining the swamp—those are things Heritage has its newfound influence on behalf of its donors, who been building support for for years,” DeMint said rank among America’s wealthiest citizens. “Victory in December. goes to those who are prepared,” DeMint boasted in Now, two decades after it fell from conservative December. “Heritage is not looking for attention or grace, Heritage has regained its standing in the White credit, but what we do want to do—on behalf of our House. Over the next four years, the think tank will supporters—is reinvigorate our country with good play a key role in steering domestic policy, particular- policy ideas. It turned out to be a very good match ly in government departments where Trump plans to with what Donald Trump wanted to do.” a

FLIMFLAM MAN

The Art of the Con What Trump shares with America’s best swindlers.

BY CLANCY MARTIN

WHEN I WAS a teenager, I learned the jewelry In the literature on fraud, this is called “social business from the most gifted swindler I would proof,” a crucial aspect of lowering the mark’s skepti- ever know. This was in Dallas-Fort Worth in 1983, cism about “buying in” to a con. The second setup is when Texas was drunk on the high price of oil. what’s known as the “representativeness” heuristic: Precious metals had been booming; the Hunt If a store looks like a place where the best people Brothers were trying to corner the silver market; shop, buyers will assume it is trustworthy. Ron- and I—16 years old and freshly expelled from high nie’s store had walnut-paneled walls and a Baccarat school—was working the buy counter at a jewelry chandelier. When you walked through the brass and store, the Fort Worth Gold & Silver Exchange. We lead-paned front doors, the first thing you saw was had lines around the corner when we opened the a Louis XV table next to an enormous chair made of bull horns. When Ronnie came down from his upstairs office in his three-piece suit and Hermès tie, he bestowed prosperity upon us all. Trump is a gifted huckster. Yes, every gaudy Donald Trump has fashioned his worldview by the surface is unbelievably tacky—but it’s also representativeness heuristic. The same year I began somehow both irresistible and convincing. working the jewelry counter, Trump opened Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets. The skyscraper was widely expected to be not unlike its owner, pompous and shoddy. There had been doors in the morning. People took a number, just squabbles about the height of the building—Trump like at a deli, to wait for a salesperson. My old boss, advertised it as ten stories taller than it was, due to Ronnie Cooper­—who eventually did five years a lavish public atrium on the ground floor. “It has in federal prison for mail fraud—ran full-page ads in not been difficult to presume that the Trump Tower Texas Monthly announcing fine jewelry routinely would be silly, pretentious, and not a little vulgar,” 50–80% below retail! “Anything to pack the store,” wrote Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The he told me. His idea was to create a feeding frenzy, New York Times. “After all, what New York building to use the crowd to convince each new customer has been surrounded by so much hoopla?” that he or she shouldn’t wait to buy or what they But upon its unveiling, even Goldberger was wanted would be gone. impressed: “What is truly remarkable about this

12 | NEW REPUBLIC widely holds. “Corruption, embezzlement, fraud. These are all characteristics which exist everywhere,” said Alan Greenspan in 2007 on the radio program Democracy Now! “What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.” Despite nearly a century of government regu- lation, we are still living in a world in which caveat emptor remains the , one that takes a certain pride in its American past. The lesson of Bal- leisen’s study is that when we trust businesspeople to be honest, and when we trust the market to regulate itself, the market, and the businessper­­ son, will take advantage of our trust. Depending on whom you ask, this trust is either the cornerstone of American innovation or the crumbling foundation of a Con- stitution that does little to protect its citizens from economic inequality. On January 11, the press attempted to ask the president-elect of the United States what he thought of his own new advantage—a role that fea ­tures, by constitutional design or default, a “no- six-story atrium is the Breccia Perniche marble that conflict situation” for the commander-in-chief to covers its walls and floors, a rich, lush Italian marble engage in business interests with unprecedented with an absolutely exquisite color that is best de- insider trading. “It’s a nice thing to have,” Trump scribed as a mixture of rose and peach and orange. reminded the press, the public, and himself during It is not like any stone that has been used in such the chaotic press conference. Trump, and most quantity anywhere else in New York, and it gives off of America, had discovered this loophole only a ALL THAT a glow of happy, if self-satisfied, affluence.” few months before, a flaw in a system that was GLITTERS Trump replicated the con on the campaign trail. supposed to elevate a person with a certain level How architecture Anyone who walked into a Trump rally—and likely of human shame to serve a public that holds that critics greeted every public event he will hold as president—was shame accountable. Trump then kindly reminded Trump’s properties: confronted with a fold-out table covered in Trump the press that Vice President Pence might also enjoy Trump International steaks, bottles of Trump vodka, cases of Trump wine, this luxury, even though “I don’t think he’ll need Hotel & Tower and still-wrapped Trump water, a cornucopia of it,” a sly dig at the underwhelming business hold- ”A 1950s International Style glass skyscraper meat and booze worthy of a Dutch still life. Yes, it’s ings of the former governor of Indiana, a longtime in a 1980s gold lamé all unbelievably tacky—but it’s also somehow both public official and salary man with a net worth of party dress.” irresistible and convincing. There is at the heart of under $1 million. But why wouldn’t he use it? In the Trump Tower every gaudy surface an isolated shimmer of some- Trump administration, as in the nearly 300-year on Fifth Avenue thing beautiful: the glint of a diamond, the clink of history of our country, it would be un-American A “pink marble a wineglass, the hue of a marble surface. This is a to not even try. maelstrom” of “pricey superglitz.” part of the draw of a fraud, the self-satisfied affluence The most dangerous thing about Trump’s rise that holds up amid so much hoopla. to the presidency is that the extraordinary web of Trump World Tower There are few fraudsters who aren’t worthy of lies he weaves will continue to be seen as its own at the “Aggression and desire, American admiration in some sense of the word, Ed- kind of American success, impressive for those who violence and sex … ward J. Balleisen reminds us in his new book, Fraud: can no longer distinguish the forest from the trees, undeniably the most An American History from Barnum to Madoff. Career the foyer from the marble. President Trump will primal building New York has seen in quite grifters like P.T. Barnum, Charles Ponzi, and Bernie be encouraged by a population that voted for him, a while.” Madoff are heroes so long as they are in the game; often against their best interests, because economic we only turn on them when they become goats. mobility has always been a hustle—to leapfrog over After all, the American Revolution was won by clev- seemingly impossible social obstacles requires a erness, with a dependence on spycraft, smuggling, certain amount of luck, cleverness, and a cavalier and guerrilla warfare. The least extraordinary thing willingness to lie. As inequality widens, so does about the early republic was its ambivalence toward admiration for the swindler, while playing the sys- fraud, and the most extraordinary thing about our tem has become synonymous with achieving the current, late republic is that this ambivalence still American dream. a

MARCH 2017 | 13 body politic

that we’re entering an unprecedented era of presidential paranoia. Mother Jones dubbed Trump the “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,” declaring that he has “made the paranoid style of American politics go mainstream.” But the paranoid style was already mainstream. The sorts of sinister stories that Trump favors have never been the exclusive preoccupation of marginalized political opponents. Indeed, there’s a long history of presidents and their inner cir- cles obsessing about malevolent cabals. What’s different about Trump isn’t the fact that he talks about dubious conspir- acies. It’s the way he talks about them.

UR LEADERS’ FEAR OF CONSPIR- acies predates the birth of the Ocountry. The Founding Fathers declared independence in part because they believed that England’s effort to tight- en control over its colonies concealed a more malicious agenda. In the words of president George Washington, there was “a regular Systematick Plan” to make the colonists “tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary All the President’s Phantoms S way.” Trump isn’t the first conspiracy theorist in chief—just the most shameless. This mindset continued after the Founders came to power. While Wash- BY JESSE WALKER ington was in office, Vice President John Adams’s son fretted to his father that domestic subversives working with the RESIDENT DONALD TRUMP HAS elements of the political opposition. But French were planning the “removal of an impressive track record as a Trump shows no sign of ceasing his con- the President,” to “be followed by a plan Pconspiracy theorist. He claimed, spiracist commentary now that he’s presi- for introducing into the American Consti- without evidence, that “millions” of dent. He may even get some help from his tution a Directory instead of a President.” people voted illegally for Hillary Clin- inner circle, having spent the transition (The Directory was France’s ruling com- ton. He offered dark speculations about recruiting a long roster of conspiracy- mittee.) That son, John Quincy Adams, the deaths of Vince Foster and Antonin minded figures to his administration. Mike later became president himself—and Scalia. He intimated that ’s father Flynn, tapped to be national security advi- spent the last decades of his life obsessed was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, citing sor, believes that Islamist infiltrators are with the alleged evils of Freemasonry. the National Enquirer as his source. He poised to subject America to sharia law. In more modern times, Lyndon John- sees sinister forces directing the flight of , Trump’s chief strategist, son was convinced that the Communist Syrian refugees and Mexican immigrants. helped establish the Breitbart web site as bloc was behind the race riots of the 1960s. He has praised talk-show host , the go-to wellspring for paranoid right- once asked an aide to “get a man whose elaborate demonology in- wing memes. Prospective HUD secretary me the names of the , you know, the corporates everyone from the Bavarian Ben Carson blames “neo-Marxist” plotters big Jewish contributors of the Demo- Illuminati to Justin Bieber. Trump’s rise for subverting the traditional heterosexual crats.... Could we please investigate some to power even began with a conspiracy family, while Flynn deputy K.T. McFarland of the cocksuckers?” When Bill Clinton theory: the accusation that Barack Obama once accused Hillary Clinton of sending was elected, he instructed an appointee hid the true circumstances of his birth. helicopters to spy on her home. “to find the answers to two questions for We generally expect conspiracy theo- All this high-level fearmongering has

ries to take hold among the more excitable prompted many in the media to suggest ILLUSTRATION BY EDDIE GUY RICHARDS/AFP/GETTY J. PAUL PHOTO: REFERENCE ILLUSTRATION

14 | NEW REPUBLIC me. One, Who killed JFK? And two, Are could be intertwined with policy-­making. his political rise, he congratulated himself there UFOs?” The man who once cracked that the “con- for having “finished” the controversy, Conspiracy theories in the Oval Off­ - cept of global warming was created by without acknowledging that he’d argu- ice can be more than private opinions. and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. ably done more than anyone to fan it in They can shape policy. George W. Bush manufacturing noncompetitive” isn’t the first place. put a conspiracy theory at the center of likely, for instance, to lead a push for new While he was fanning the birther his approach to global terrorism, declar- carbon regulations. flames, Trump claimed to have dis- ing that Iran and Iraq—two of the Middle Yet Trump seems poised to transform patched private investigators to Hawaii East’s most bitter and bloody rivals—were presidential paranoia into something to dig into Obama’s origins. His detec- working together in an “” to new, thanks to two of his most distin- tives, he declared, “cannot believe what sponsor jihadist groups. During World War guishing qualities: his shamelessness and they’re finding.” And then he dropped II, fears that Japanese-Americans were his cynicism. the subject, refusing to discuss it when covertly aiding the enemy led Franklin Conspiracy theories tend to be disrep- prodded. The content was beside the Roosevelt to imprison more than 100,000 utable. Indeed, in most circles of respect- point. Ever the showman, Trump un- people in internment camps. able opinion, the very phrase conspiracy derstands that making an accusation Conspiracy-fueled policies sometimes theory is used as a pejorative. So when and holding out the promise of more to last far longer than the fears that fed them. high-level officials embrace a position come can be more important than ac- Entire federal bureaucracies owe their considered to be taboo, they often prefer tually delivering on the promise. That’s reach and power to long-dead conspiracy not to talk about it. has long what happens when shamelessness and panics. The FBI, for example, underwent rejected the official story about JFK’s cynicism combine. its first big expansion in the 1910s because assassination, but when Meet the Press They combined again at the weirdest officials were eager to stop “white slav- brought up the subject in 2013, the sec- moment in last year’s final presidential ery” cabals that supposedly controlled the retary of state clammed up. “I just have debate. When Hillary Clinton claimed that prostitution trade. The bureau got further a point of view,” Kerry demurred. “And Trump would be Russia’s “puppet,” Trump boosts in its resources and authority from I’m not going to get into that.” responded with a blast of absurdity: “No the fears of communist conspiracies that Our new president, to the delight of puppet. No puppet. You’re the pup­pet!” It erupted after World War I, from anxiety his supporters, presents himself as a wasn’t clear who Clinton’s puppet­ -master about fascist plots in the late 1930s and man unshackled by such mores of polite was supposed to be. It’s unlikely that early ’40s, and from the return of the Red society. Richard Nixon may have been Trump even had a marionettist in mind: Scare after World War II. Throughout his prone to seeing plots everywhere, but it’s He just needed an accusation in the long career atop the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover invoked conspiracies, both real and imag- ined, to build a bureaucratic empire. The A president’s conspiracy theories can be more than ever-present threat of those cabals served, in the logic of the die-hard plot-spotter, private opinions. They can shape public policy. as a sturdy justification for Hoover’s own conspiratorial behavior. In short, conspiracy theories haven’t hard to imagine him publicly promoting moment, and he settled for I know you are just coexisted with executive power. They a transparently phony theory tying Rafael but what am I? It sounded ridiculous, but have served as a rationale for both the ap- Cruz to Lee Harvey Oswald; it’s harder still only to someone with a sense of shame. plication and the expansion of executive to picture him backing up his claims by During the run-up to the American power. As many presidents before Trump citing the National Enquirer. For Trump, Revolution, Thomas Jefferson justified his have understood, few things mobilize neither the story nor the source is some- conspiracy theories about the English by popular opinion or a recalcitrant Con- thing to be ashamed of. insisting that he had detected a pattern gress more than fear itself. There’s a strong chance, of course, in his opponents’ actions. An isolated act that Trump doesn’t actually believe the of oppression, he conceded, “may be as- OME OF THE INCOMING ADMINIS- Enquirer story, and that he only brought cribed to the accidental opinion of a day.” tration’s anxieties fit easily into the it up because Ted Cruz happened to be his But “a series of oppressions, begun at a Stradition of paranoia. chief political foe that day. That’s where distinguished period and pursued unalter- Mike Flynn’s anti-Islamic theories, for his cynicism comes in. Trump doesn’t just ably through every change of ministers,” example, could slot snugly into the ex- spout unsubstantiated accusations; he was sufficient proof of “a deliberate and ecutive branch’s history of social scape- often drops them as quickly as he brings systematical plan.” Trump turns Jefferson goating. (Just ask the survivors of FDR’s them up, as though it never really mat- on his head. Show him an enemy’s opinion camps.) It’s not hard to imagine a host of tered if they were true. When he finally of a day, and he’ll conjure up a conspiracy areas where Trump’s conspiracy chatter gave up on the birther BS that launched that explains it. a

MARCH 2017 | 15 battle lines

over the last 40 years, many feminists have taken a cue from Trump and gone on an aggrieved blaming binge of their own, chalking up the colossal political failures before us to the entrenched misogyny of America’s voters. But that, too, is a fashionable distraction. The fault here lies with mainstream feminism itself.

VER THE PAST SEVERAL DECADES, the gap between mainstream Ofeminists and the daily realities of most American women has grown wid- er and deeper. Feminism, as our most prominent, mediagenic feminists prac- tice it, does little to address the struggles of poor women, rural women, working women—women, in short, who live out- side the sophisticated urban bubbles that mainstream feminists inhabit. That gap was embarrassingly obvi- ous in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Performance artist and feminist commentator Amanda Palmer, for one, proclaimed that the Trump presidency would be really, really great for art- ists. “Having studied Weimar Germany extensively—I’m like, ‘This is our mo- Feminist Fail ment!’ ” she exulted, right before an- It wasn’t America’s rampant misogyny that doomed Hillary Clinton. nouncing that she was moving to Aus- tralia. Girls star and feminist pundit Lena BY JESSA CRISPIN Dunham hit the rock bottom of elite fem- inist cluelessness by cavalierly dismiss- ing the emotional and physical suffering N PAPER, AT LEAST, 2016 LOOKED Like all fashions, it passed. And like all of many women who have terminated to be a banner year for feminism. fashions, it turned out to be a frivolous, unwanted pregnancies. “I still haven’t OAs the GOP primary field suc- cosmetic change, completely divorced from had an abortion,” Dunham said on her cumbed to Donald Trump’s insurgency, the actual lived experience of most women. podcast, “but I wish I had.” Hillary Clinton’s march to the White Instead of the first female president, we Feminist commentators like Lindy House seemed all but inevitable. Dis- now have an accused sexual predator in the West, Jessica Valenti, and Sady Doyle of- cussions about rape on college cam- highest office in the land and a proud -mi fered up a nonstop litany of mass recrim- puses, workplace harassment, pay dis- sogynist homophobe as his deputy and de ination, insisting that Clinton lost solely parity, and other feminist issues finally facto head of domestic policy. Even more because of our culture’s deep-seated rac- broke through to the mainstream. A-list startling, in a way, are the exit polls show- ism and misogyny. “Half of the country,” celebrities began embracing the word ing that 53 percent of white women voted concluded in New York, feminism—a significant shift after decades for Trump—and that many of those same “would prefer to return to the Founders’ when feminists were little more than women consider themselves feminists. original vision, with people of color and pop-culture punch lines, derided for their How did we get to this point? How women on the margins and white men humorlessness, earnestness, and ideo- could a majority of white women choose restored to their place at the center.” This logical single-mindedness. Seemingly Trump over the first woman to serve as the line of argument conveniently overlooks overnight, feminism had become fash- presidential standard-bearer for a major the more than 29 million women who ionable. Pop stars used the word to sell political party—and call themselves fem- voted for Trump—women who felt they records, guys used it to get laid, models inists while doing so? would be better served by a preening used it to push product, writers used it Now that we appear poised to lose to advance their brand. much of the ground women have gained ILLUSTRATION BY LUBA LUKOVA

16 | NEW REPUBLIC beauty-pageant purveyor than by the change in her 1992 self-esteem tract Rev- EREIN LIES A PARTIAL ANSWER most accomplished female politician of olution from Within, and Oprah Winfrey to the question of how Trump her generation. expertly transmuted feminist political Hwon a white female majority. The root of the problem is that fem- grievance into soft-focus nostrums of Rightly or wrongly, the women who inism has abandoned its core insight. ­self-acceptance, using her own life story voted for Trump decided that it was in Radical feminists traditionally believed as a didactic case study in the miracles their self-interest to do so. And under the that the patriarchy was inextricably in- wrought by a gospel of female self-help. current logic of mainstream feminism, tertwined with : that the entire In 2010, when COO Sheryl a vote for Trump can easily be depicted structure of our society was based on Sandberg launched the Lean In franchise, as a feminist act. “I have the right and the exploitation of the poor, women, and her individualist handbook of corporate capability to make my own decisions, nonwhite races. The liberation of women success, with a viral TED talk, she was and live the life I choose for myself,” entailed nothing less than the overthrow mainly offering C-suite variations on one female Trump supporter told The of old systems based on competition, what was by then a generation’s worth Guardian. “A feminist does not blindly do greed, and power. There is still a radical wing in femi- nism. Every day, activists and organizers The pro-woman power elite peers deeply into the are working to improve women’s access savage inequalities of American life and asks, in to family planning services, mounting essence, “Where’s my half of the profits?” nonprofit efforts to counteract the steady rollback of the welfare state, and com- bating the neoliberal policy consensus of self-healing feminist counsel aimed at what she is told—she thinks and makes that consigns women—and men and getting ahead and staying there. her own choices.” ­children—to acute conditions of inequal- Under the sway of “self-empowerment,” Well, of course—but this banal line of ity and precariousness. But all that slow, feminist progress began to be measured reasoning points to the very failures of the thankless work has been eclipsed by the accordingly: how many women serve as moral imagination that have locked main- more prominent voices of mainstream CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, or enjoy stream feminism into its present privileged feminism. bylines at male-dominated magazines like dead-end. When feminism can be used as a To reclaim the truly radical spirit of The Atlantic, or gain admission to elite way to justify support for a candidate who American feminism, we should call business schools. Much of mainstream boasts about groping women without their mainstream feminists something more feminist discourse likewise focuses on consent, and when broader female access anodyne: “pro-woman.” The designation how best to empower yourself via money to executive perches in Wall Street and seems fitting, since mainstream feminists and work. The pro-woman power elite Silicon Valley gets treated as some sort of work to shore up the status quo, seeking peers deeply into the savage inequalities movement-wide victory, then something equal access to the system of oppression. of American life and asks, in essence, clearly has gone wrong in our understand- That explains why one of the buzzwords “Where’s my half of the profits?” ing of what feminism is and can do. favored by pro-woman commentators It was this single-minded pursuit that Society progresses reluctantly, only is self-empowerment—a term that gained propelled Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer after a small group of the dedicated and currency on the right in the 1980s to char­ into the state of corporate abjection the idealistic insist on it. Women won the acterize the individual’s obligation to take that she now cites as a feminist para- right to vote in part because a handful of responsibility for her position in life. ble: While at Google, she recounts, she suffragists endured imprisonment and Like much of the policy rhetoric of the was so hell-bent on besting her male torture. During the heyday of second-wave Reagan and Thatcher ­revolutions, “em- competitors that she took to sleeping feminism, while most women’s ambitions powerment” provided a ­feel-good eva- under her desk. But once she became were confined to becoming wives and sion of the consequences of a society-wide the boss, she put a stop to employees mothers, radical thinkers and reformers breakdown in solidarity—and an excuse working from home—thus making it took up the fight against unequal pay and for overlooking all the ways that the social harder for working moms to balance sexual harassment in the workplace order sets women and racial minorities up employment and parenthood. Within and limits on abortions. Today we must to fail. As the rest of the political main- this cloistered, corporatized worldview, continue that fight—not to place more stream shifted in concert with the callow there’s precious little attention paid to women in the boardroom, but to construct bootstrap social mythologies of Reagan- what power should be used for, once ways of living and working that are mea- ism, so, too, did feminism: Workplace it’s won, or what values we want to see sured by something greater than money issues like equal pay and parental leave governing our world. Working in your and success. After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, took a backseat to enlightened self-care own self-interest is mistaken for a polit- it may look like women lost because we and success. Second-wave feminist icon ical act, and accruing money and power dreamed too big. In fact, women lost be- Gloria Steinem signaled this political­ sea becomes an unquestioned feminist goal. cause we dreamed too small. a

MARCH 2017 | 17 OBAMA’S LOST ARMY

BY MICAH L. SIFRY CREDIT TK

18 | NEW REPUBLIC He built a grassroots machine of two million supporters eager to fight for change. Then he let it die. The untold story of Obama’s biggest mistake— and how it paved the way

CREDIT TK for Trump.

MONTH 2017 | 19 OBAMA’S LOST ARMY

N JULY 20, 2008, Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus political machine had already amassed more than 800,000 1-2-3 and a longtime denizen of Silicon Valley’s in- registered users on My.BarackObama, its innovative social net- Otellectual elite, dialed in to a conference call hosted working platform. “MyBO,” as it was known, gave supporters by Christopher Edley Jr., a senior policy adviser to Barack the ability—unthinkable in a traditional, top-down political Obama’s presidential campaign. Joining them on the line campaign—to organize their own local groups, campaign events, were some of the world’s top experts in crowdsourcing and and fund-raising efforts. Its potential for large-scale organizing online engagement, including Reid Hoffman, the billionaire after the election was vast—and completely without precedent co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mitchell Baker, the chairman in American politics. By Election Day, Obama’s campaign of Mozilla. Drawing on Kapor’s influence, Edley had invit- would have 13 million email addresses, three million donors, ed them to join a “Movement 2.0 Brainstorming Group.” and two million active members of MyBO, including 70,000 Together, they would ponder a crucial question: how to people with their own fund-raising pages. This wasn’t just “sustain the movement” should Obama, who was still a some passive list of campaign supporters, Edley realized—it month away from accepting the Democratic nomination, was an army of foot soldiers, seasoned at rallying support for go on to win the White House. Obama’s vision of change. Edley had been a personal friend of Obama’s since his days “As the primary season wound down, it struck me that the teaching him at Harvard Law School. Their kinship had been campaign’s broad-based engagement via the internet could underscored the previous summer, when Obama had invited evolve into a powerful tool to shape progressive politics at the Edley to the Chicago apartment of , the candi- national, state, and local levels,” Edley recalls. “One goal would date’s closest confidant, to deliver a stern lecture to the sea- be to support an Obama presidency. But the agenda would be soned political operatives who were running his underdog far broader.” bid for the presidency. The campaign team had Obama on a After discussing his idea with his wife, Maria Echaveste, relentless pace of town halls and donor calls, and Hillary who had served as White House deputy chief of staff under Clinton had been besting him in the early primary debates. Bill Clinton, Edley turned to his friend Kapor, a digital pioneer Both Barack and Michelle Obama were unhappy. According and progressive activist who was widely seen as a folk hero to and Mark Halperin’s account in Game of the computer revolution. “I knew that Mitch would be an Change, Edley urged Obama’s campaign managers to sched- ule fewer rallies and fund-raisers, and allow the candidate more time to think and develop innovative policy ideas. The idea was audacious: What if The intervention, delivered with a full-blown harangue Obama could become not only telling the troika managing the campaign—David Axelrod, the first black president, but the , and —to “get over yourselves,” was deeply resented by the political professionals; in his first president to organize an memoir, Believer, Axelrod would later call Edley “system- enduring grassroots movement? atically antagonizing.” But Jarrett and Michelle Obama, who was also in the meeting, hung on Edley’s every word. “He’s channeling Barack,” Jarrett thought, according to . Jarrett told Axelrod she thought Edley’s fiery presentation had been “brilliant.” indispensable partner to judge the merits of the general idea Now, a year later, Edley had been moved over to Obama’s and help figure out some details,” Edley says. “I also realized, still-secret transition team, helping to map out policy and quite quickly, that Mitch had amazing contacts in that world personnel on education, immigration, and health care. It whom we could enlist for the project.” was a better fit for Edley, a dapper and soft-spok­ en law Opening the July brainstorming session, Edley framed professor with a salt-and-pepper beard, who had served the stakes sharply, according to notes he prepared for the in senior policy-making roles under and Bill meeting and a summary he wrote afterward. “On the morn- Clinton. “Although I have worked in five presidential cam- ing of N­ ovember 5,” he told the assembled tech leaders, paigns,” he told me recently, “I hate them because there is “imagine saying to millions of donors, new voters, volun- never enough emphasis on policy.” But Edley found himself teers: ‘Thanks for everything; so long.’” Instead, he urged, newly motivated by a single big political idea, born in part “Imagine a way to transfer/transmute all of that involvement from his past experience trying to win policy fights. What into a new mechanism or set of instrumentalities through if Barack Obama could become not only the first black which people can feel a heightened and more powerful kind man elected president, but the first president in history to of civic engagement with each other and with Obama and organize an enduring grassroots movement that could last other leaders. And vice versa.” beyond his years in office? Edley echoed what many progressives were beginning to By that point in the race, there was every reason to think believe was possible with a President Obama: “There is a

that Obama could build a lasting grassroots operation. His opportunity to have a citizen movement heading in the same PREVIOUS SPREAD: MATT MALLAMS/AURORA

20 | NEW REPUBLIC N THE MIDST of the 2008 cam- paign, the idea for Movement 2.0 Iseemed both obvious and inevita- ble. Obama himself recognized that he was sitting atop an organizing juggernaut. Speaking to hundreds of his core staffers in June, Obama praised them for building a campaign machine that had just taken down Hillary Clinton. “Collectively, all of you—most of whom are I’m not even sure of drinking age—you’ve creat- ed the best political organization in America, and probably the best po- litical organization that we’ve seen in the last 30 to 40 years,” Obama told them. “That’s a pretty big deal.” Movement 2.0 gathered steam quickly. In the wake of the initial brainstorming­ call, Edley connected Obama joins volunteers in Brighton, , a week before Election Day in 2008. He had built an Mitch Kapor with law professor Mark unprecedented army of foot soldiers, but the future of his campaign machine was still uncertain. Alexander, a senior Obama adviser, and gave them the job of chairing the project. Kapor was excited. “Mark progressive direction as an incumbent president.” According and I are exchanging email brain dump to try to surface big to his notes, the Silicon Valley luminaries on the call agreed. question and big priorities overall, speaking by phone, and “Most felt it would be an unacceptable loss not to take advan- meeting all day next Tuesday in New Jersey to do Vulcan mind tage of the rare alignment of an incumbent President with a meld,” he emailed two colleagues. “Already Mark and I have progressive agenda, and an online constituency of donors and shared vision it’s huge, and will go far beyond normal January supporters who can press for change against the inevitable end of transition.” upsurge of entrenched special interests which will resist it.” Kapor and Alexander dived into the task. They spoke with As we now know, that grand vision for a postcampaign Bob Bauer, the campaign’s legal counsel, about how to structure movement never came to fruition. Instead of mobilizing his a new organization after November. They had several meetings unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist with the architects of Obama’s online operation, including lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his Slaby, the chief officer; his boss, Joe Rospars, the vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his cam- new media director; and Chris Hughes, the online organizing paign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National director. They dug into the details of how the campaign had Committee. It was the seminal mistake of his ­presidency—one built and managed its online network, and sketched out a way that set the tone for the next eight years of dashed hopes, and to transition it forward. helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up With barely three months left until Election Day, Kapor—a demand for change Obama had unleashed. veteran of many tech startups—knew that time was short for “We lost this election eight years ago,” concludes Michael such an ambitious effort. “Coordination is going to be vital,” Slaby, the campaign’s chief technology officer. “Our party be- he emailed Edley on July 23, “and I know campaign time and came a national movement focused on general elections, and attention is going to be very limited, so the sooner we can we lost touch with nonurban, noncoastal communities. There figure out what the ‘bridge’ is between campaign and tran- is a straight line between our failure to address the culture sition with respect to online community, and whether it’s a and systemic failures of Washington and this election result.” footpath or a highway, the better. I am worried that as each The question of why—why the president and his team failed day goes by without knowing anything about what we on the to activate the most powerful political weapon in their ­arsenal— transition side might be building and how it does or does not has long been one of the great mysteries of the Obama era. Now, connect, the deadline pressure to actually deliver on time gets thanks to previously unpublished emails and memos obtained worse and worse.” by the new republic—some from the archive A few weeks later, on August 18, Edley sent a progress report released by WikiLeaks, and others made available by Obama to John Podesta and the other two co-chairs of Obama’s tran- insiders—it’s possible for the first time to see the full contours sition board, Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse. “Campaign folks

SCOUT TUFANKJIAN/POLARIS SCOUT of why Movement 2.0 failed, and what could have been. are joined at the hip with this effort (Rospars, Slaby, others),”

MARCH 2017 | 21 OBAMA’S LOST ARMY

Edley assured them. “The technical discussions about the HE PROPOSAL HAD started with the campaign’s tech- software platform, etc., are moving quite well.” While he nology team and true believers, but now it had landed acknowledged that “the Senator” would ultimately have Tin front of two consummate Washington insiders. Hil- to sign off on the plan, Edley—confident that he was still debrand came to like the idea; creating a movement free from channeling his old friend’s wishes—said he didn’t “see any the DNC, he believed, would put more pressure on Congress to particular hurry about it.” The candidate, he understood, implement Obama’s agenda. But where others had seen great had a few other things on his mind. possibility, Tewes saw potential disaster. Four days later, he Edley attached the initial concept document for Move- wrote to Rouse and his colleague Hildebrand: ment 2.0. It outlined an audacious vision: to create “a new ‘home place’ for Obama supporters” that would be ready As both of you know, I have many concerns about this..... to go, the day after the election. The new entity would be as a lover of “Party” I really don’t like this. closely aligned with Obama but independent of the party I think the decision needs to be made and discussed on and his re-election campaign. “Think of it for now as AFO “this vs. party” or “this and party.” The discussion should (Americans for Obama),” the memo declared, envisioning focus on—What is best for Barack Obama, his politics, his it as the “principal means for continuing the active partic- agenda and his future. ipation of people in the Movement.” AFO would not simply If the first step is to move outside the party with your orga- whip up support for Obama’s legislative agenda—it would nization, the political ramifications and “future” ramifications “gather the input to help shape it.” It would “be a place where need to be thought through. Further, a discussion should be Obama supporters can come together, affiliate and organize had of party over this—why and why not? for change using cutting-edge online tools that will create Marching into this seems premature and secondly creating and support a new and deeper form of civic engagement.” something before hand (before e-day) has appearance prob- Critically, the Movement 2.0 team envisioned AFO as lems in my opinion. a tax-exempt organization that would operate free of the I would ask that we postpone any of this till after the con- Democratic National Committee. “Mitch and I argued that to vention and do a little gathering where we can discuss. Please. make the movement ‘authentic’ and entrepreneurial,” Edley says, “it would have to be built outside of the DNC—which Rouse forwarded Tewes’s response back to Podesta. Podesta, in has institutional commitments and incumbent allegiances turn, sent it along to Edley with a pithy comment: “Let’s discuss that will always be a fact of party life.” The team concluded Monday. Obviously some heartburn with the political crowd.” by asking for permission to raise $250,000 to set up a staff There was plenty in Movement 2.0 to inspire heartburn in that crowd. In Silicon Valley terms, Obama 2008 had “disrupted” presidential campaigns, demonstrating how an underdog can- In Silicon Valley terms, Obama didate could defeat a more experienced opponent by changing had “disrupted” presidential the terms of the game and empowering millions of people in the campaigns; now, it seemed, process. Now, it seemed, the Obamaites and their tech wizards wanted to disrupt the Democratic Party, diverting money and his true believers wanted to control from the DNC into an untried platform, while inviting disrupt the Democratic Party. “input,” and possibly even organized dissent, from Obama’s base. Earlier that summer, activists unhappy with Obama’s flip-flop on warrantless surveillance had used MyBO to build a group of more than 20,000 vocal supporters, earning national press and compelling a response from the candidate. What if Obama’s base infrastructure and develop the web site. The founding board didn’t like the health care reform he came up with, and rallied would include Edley, Kapor, Alexander, and Podesta. independently around a single-payer plan? Besides, grassroots Podesta decided to circulate the concept document to movements, no matter how successful, don’t reliably yield what higher-ups in the campaign. He asked Pete Rouse, Obama’s political consultants want most: money and victories for their Senate chief of staff and key political consigliere, to forward candidates, with plenty of spoils for themselves. For insiders the memo to Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, partners in like Tewes, Movement 2.0 was a step too far. a political consulting firm who had risen to positions at the Edley knew that Tewes’s blowback spelled trouble. On Au- top of Obama’s organization. Hildebrand was the deputy gust 24, the day before Obama’s triumphal convention began national campaign manager, and Tewes, after directing in Denver, he emailed Podesta to express hope that it was just Obama’s Iowa campaign, was now running the DNC on the a “misunderstanding.” He asked Podesta to keep the issue off candidate’s behalf. Podesta had a simple question for them the agenda of the transition board’s next meeting until they about Edley’s plan: He wanted to “see if they care whether figured out what to do. Podesta agreed. “I think we should this goes forward to a planning stage.” [n]ot raise at all tomorrow,” he told Edley, “and come up with That was the moment when Movement 2.0 began to stall. seperate [sic] plan on how to proceed.”

22 | NEW REPUBLIC Looking back, Edley says now, Podesta made a tactical for Congress and statehouses—“should be filtered through the error by sharing the plan with party regulars like Tewes and DNC. This all serves the agenda of one person, Barack Obama.” Hildebrand before it had garnered more high-level support in The original backers of Movement 2.0 had been sidelined. the campaign. “John should’ve realized that of course the DNC “I had nothing to do” with the new memo, Edley says. “I guess would have competitive objections,” he says. “Our proposal they liked our name for it, but chose to pervert the idea to would’ve created, at least in our dreams, yet another set of po- something quite conventional and, forgive me, trivial. To me, litical forces and policy energy. At the time, I just didn’t realize real movement building had to be about defining and advanc- the powerful pull that the architects of the Obama ‘movement’ ing progressivism, not a communication strategy from the would feel away from movement building and toward paranoid West Wing basement costumed as faux movement. The kind possession of the conventional trappings of political power. If of movement we wanted would have helped Obama a great you’re not really that committed, as a matter of principle, to a deal, without making it all about him. After all, even Obama’s bottom-up theory of change, then you will find it nonsensical campaign wasn’t only about him or his policy platform.” to cede some control in order to gain more power.” Edley and his cohorts weren’t finished yet. The idea of keeping Obama’s online loyalists involved and active had T WOULD BE five long weeks later, on October 2—just a not entirely died; the new memo called for moving quick- month before Election Day—before any reference to Move- ly to enable the campaign to keep engaging its grassroots Iment 2.0 would surface again in Podesta’s emails. By that supporters after the election. “Steps should be taken now to time, radical revisions had been made to appease the “politi- ensure this possibility does not evaporate, leaving no vehicle cal crowd.” , the transition team’s executive director, for community in the short-term,” the memo read. But there circulated a revised concept memo to Podesta and its board, was no proposed budget for that to happen—just a call for the formation of a new working group for Movement 2.0, to pull all the stakeholders together. That group never materialized. The revised memo was not the only post­ election plan being considered. Julius Gena­ chowski, co-chief of the transition team’s “Tech- nology, Innovation, and Government Reform” group, wanted to launch a White House web site aimed at engaging the public in policy discussions. The tigr group was a powerhouse of wonks, many of whom were headed into top positions in govern- ment, and its planning memo ran to 12,500 words, compared to just 1,500 for the revised Movement 2.0 proposal. The result—in the middle of a heated campaign and a global economic meltdown—was widespread confusion about what would happen to Obama’s campaign machine after Election Day. On October 10, Edley told Kapor and Alexan- Obama huddles with his inner circle, days before his big win in Iowa. Some, like political der by email that Pete Rouse had “agreed to try consultant Paul Tewes (right), opposed the plan to launch a grassroots movement. to arbitrate all of this.” But five days later, Edley reported that he was getting nowhere. “I am frus- trated beyond words on this. Will work it hard in preparation for an all-day meeting. It was a far cry from today. I think since the campaign team has rigged something Edley’s original call for a “citizen movement.” Instead, the memo for the transition period they just keep back-burnering the explained, “we recommend a new, integrated approach to the longer run issue.” A day later, Kapor reported back that Rouse Movement 2.0 work, in complete coordination with the ongoing was “too busy (w/ debate prep and all) to deal with M2.0.… I efforts of the DNC, to plan for the continued growth and devel- think fundamentally it’s not going to be a priority until after opment of the online-offline community in support of Barack the election.” Obama and the Democratic Party, our candidates and issues.” Ultimately, the transition team agreed on only one project: Gone was the idea of a new organization, independent of the build a simple postelection site, to be called Change.gov, as DNC. “A key working assumption,” the memo stated, “is that we a place where people could learn more about the transition’s should affirmatively empower Barack Obama as the head of the plans and job-seekers could submit their résumés. In the end, Party, and in the process strengthen both him and the Party. All there would be no “footpath” or “highway,” as Mitch Kapor had Obama politics should be filtered through the DNC, and all Party envisioned, for transitioning Obama’s two million supporters

CHARLES OMMANNEY/GETTY CHARLES politics”—including existing organizations that support candidates on MyBO into a new platform. There wasn’t even a rope bridge.

MARCH 2017 | 23 OBAMA’S LOST ARMY

But Kapor didn’t give up. In late October, he spoke to Jim do in their local communities. And at the very least, we have Messina, chief of staff to campaign manager David Plouffe, to give them the opportunity to stay involved and in touch. and came away convinced that both Plouffe and Rouse now They gave their heart and soul to us. This shouldn’t feel like backed the original vision for the movement. “Importantly, a transactional relationship, because that’s not what it was. I Messina said Plouffe is not only on board but wants his sole want them along for the ride the next eight years, helping us responsibility after the election to be getting M2.0 going,” deliver on all we talked about in the campaign.” Kapor emailed Edley and Alexander on October 23. Even if Three days later, Kapor emailed Edley and Alexander, frus- it was too late to build on the momentum from Election Day, trated that no progress was being made. “What is needed there was still a chance that Movement 2.0 would take wing. now,” he wrote, “is for the President-elect and his designees to decide how to move forward with Movement 2.0.” Would the N NOVEMBER 5, the day after Obama’s victory, his group be independent or part of the DNC? Who would run it? headquarters in Chicago was deluged with phone How would it interact with the White House? “I don’t see how Ocalls and emails from supporters asking for guid- anything can happen until the project is given a green light and ance on how to keep going. Exactly as Edley had feared, the basic issue of structure and leadership is settled by those no answers were forthcoming—not even about whether with the power to do so,” Kapor concluded. “In other words, the tens of thousands of volunteers who had built personal someone please just make a decision.” fund-raising groups on MyBO would be able to continue Plouffe led Obama’s supporters to believe that the decision them. “We’re all fired up now, and twiddling our thumbs!” was in their hands. On November 19, he emailed a survey to wrote one frustrated volunteer from Pennsylvania. “ALL everyone on the campaign’s list. “You’ve built an organization the leader volunteers are getting bombarded by calls from in your community and across the country that will continue volunteers essentially asking: Nowwhatnowwhatnowwhat?” to work for change,” Plouffe told them, “whether it’s by build- It wasn’t until three days after the election that Chris ing grassroots support for legislation, backing state and local Hughes, the campaign’s director of online organizing, put candidates, or sharing organizing techniques to effect change up a post on his personal MyBO page. “The site isn’t going in your neighborhood. Your hard work built this movement. anywhere,” he promised supporters. “The online tools in Now it’s up to you to decide how we move forward.” My.BarackObama will live on. Barack Obama supporters Obama’s army was eager to be put to work. Of the 550,000 people who responded to the survey, 86 percent said they want- ed to help Obama pass legislation through grassroots support; The grassroots discontent 68 percent wanted to help elect state and local candidates who that Obama had harnessed so shared his vision. Most impressive of all, more than 50,000 skillfully in 2008 would soon said they personally wanted to run for elected office. But they never got that chance. In late December, Plouffe belong to the right. and a small group of senior staffers finally made the call, which was endorsed by Obama. The entire campaign machine, renamed Organizing for America, would be folded into the DNC, where it would operate as a fully controlled subsidiary will continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact.” of the Democratic Party. Plouffe stayed on as senior adviser, As a stopgap, that was reassuring to grassroots organizers and put trusted field organizers Mitch Stewart and Jeremy who had used the site to build strong local networks. But Bird in charge of the new group. Bird says the OFA team was it wasn’t a plan. There was no plan. never even told about the idea for Movement 2.0. “None of One person, however, seemed to understand that such these documents were even shared with us,” he says. “I’m not half-measures wouldn’t be enough: the president-elect. sure the senior staff on the campaign even knew they existed.” The same day Hughes posted his message, Obama reached Obama unveiled OFA a week before his inauguration. out to David Plouffe. Unlike other top operatives from the “Volunteers, grassroots leaders, and ordinary citizens will campaign, the campaign manager had decided not to fol- continue to drive the organization,” he promised. But that’s low Obama into the White House, but to take time off to not what happened. Shunted into the DNC, MyBO’s tools for be with his family before returning to political consulting. self-organizing were dismantled within a year. Instead of calling His daughter was born in the early hours of November 7, on supporters to launch a voter registration drive or build a and Obama called him that morning. network of small donors or back state and local candidates, OFA “I know you’re disappearing for a while to change diapers deployed the campaign’s vast email list to hawk coffee mugs and play Mr. Dad,” Obama told Plouffe, “but just make sure and generate thank-you notes to Democratic members of Con- you find time to help figure out how to keep our supporters gress who backed Obama’s initiatives. As a result, when the involved. I don’t think we can succeed without them. We political going got rough, much of Obama’s once-mighty army need to make sure they’re pushing from the grassroots on was awol. When the fight over Obama’s health care plan was Washington and helping to spread what we’re trying to at its peak, OFA was able to drum up only 300,000 phone calls

24 | NEW REPUBLIC THE DREAMERS Representative Dick Armey, and , funded by the Koch brothers, quietly coordinated hundreds of nationwide demonstra- tions designed to look like a spontaneous popu- list uprising. When members of Congress went home for the summer to hold town hall meetings with their constituents, they were confronted by well-organized and disruptive protests over Christopher Edley Jr. Mitch Kapor Mark Alexander health care reform. The grassroots discontent Obama’s senior adviser Silicon Valley legend who Campaign adviser tapped that Obama had harnessed so skillfully in 2008 and former law professor; teamed up with Edley. to co-chair project. His now belonged to the right. came up with idea for a Generated support from “Vulcan mind meld”with “Killing OFA reduced the possibility of com- grassroots movement to the tech world; fought for Kapor generated a “huge” build on the campaign. independence from DNC. vision for Movement 2.0. peting for the hearts, minds, and votes of the Tea Party disaffected,” says Lester Spence, associate THE INSIDERS professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. It also “killed the one entity possible for institutionalizing the raw energy created by the Obama campaign in 2008.” Edley, for his part, still can’t get over the ­opportunity that was lost. He admits that he pro ­bably alienated Obama’s top campaign brass with his earlier intervention, but he doesn’t think Valerie Jarrett John Podesta Pete Rouse that’s why his idea for Movement 2.0 died. Mostly, Obama confidant who co- Transition co-chair who Obama’s Senate chief of he believes, it was an issue of control. “Our pro- chaired transition team. seemed to support M2.0, staff; after he forwarded posal would have required that members of the Called Edley “brilliant,” but warned Edley that it an early draft of the idea political team who had just won the nomination but may not have shared caused “some heartburn to two D.C. insiders, it his idea with Obama. from the political crowd.” quickly ran into trouble. be willing to cede control of the grassroots move- ment and turn it more in the direction of policy THE CONSULTANTS advocacy and progressive advocacy,” he says. Even today, Edley doesn’t know if Obama was ever told of the idea, and he regrets not bypassing the campaign operatives and reaching out to him personally. “I was loath to go around them and try to reach Barack directly,” Edley says. “That is probably one of the biggest mistakes of my professional life, given the dismal disappoint- Steve Hildebrand Paul Tewes David Plouffe ment that OFA became.” Deputy campaign chief Political consultant who Told by Obama to “keep Ultimately, of course, the failure to keep the and top D.C. consultant; ran the DNC for Obama. our supporters involved,” grassroots movement going rests with Obama. argued that keeping M2.0 His reaction to the idea the campaign manager It was his original, and most costly, political out of the DNC would put was swift and decisive: bottled up the movement more heat on Congress. “I really don’t like this.” inside the DNC. mistake—not only a sin of omission, but a sin of imagination, one that helped decimate the Dem- ocratic Party at the state and local level and turn to Congress. After the midterm debacle in 2010, when Democrats over every branch of the federal government to the far right. suffered their biggest losses since the Great Depression, Obama In December, in an exit interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, essentially had to build a new campaign machine from scratch Obama himself sounded haunted by it. “You know, when I in time for his reelection effort in 2012. (Plouffe and Messina came into office, we were just putting out fires,” he said. “We declined requests to speak about Movement 2.0; Axelrod, Po- were in a huge crisis situation. And so a lot of the organizing desta, and Rouse said they had no comment.) work that we did during the campaign, we started to see right Republicans, on the other hand, wasted no time in building away wasn’t immediately transferable to congressional candi- a grassroots machine of their own—one that proved capable dates. More work would have needed to be done to just build of blocking Obama at almost every turn. Within weeks of his up that structure. And, you know, one of the big suggestions inauguration, conservative activists began calling for local that I have for Democrats as I leave, and something that, you “tea parties” to oppose the president’s plan to help foreclosed know, I have some ideas about is: How do we do more of that

LEFT TO RIGHT FROM TOP: PAUL SAKUMA/AP IMAGES; TOM HERDE/THE KOVAC/WIREIMAGE/GETTY MICHAEL BOSTON ECONOMIST; GLOBE/GETTY; CALL/THE ROLL CQ OF COURTESYCOURTESY OF CBS; SAUL LOEB /AFP/GETTY; CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY; WASHINGTON POST/GETTY; JAMES NORD/AP IMAGES; homeowners. FreedomWorks, an ­antitax group led by former ground-up building?” a

MARCH 2017 | 25 FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET TO BLACK LIVES MATTER, THE LEFT HAS BEEN REBORN. CAN IT FIND A WAY TO HARNESS THE POPULIST UPRISING THAT BROUGHT TRUMP TO POWER?

BY JEDEDIAH PURDY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEX NABAUM

In late October 2011, I was volunteering at the Occupy Wall Now that Donald Trump occupies the Street library in lower Manhattan. Tucked into a corner of White House, it’s easy to feel that we are all castaways in historical time. There Zuccotti Park, the library was staffed mainly by anarchists is talk in some quarters of leaving the of an exceedingly orderly bent. If society were suddenly freed country, of turning blue cities and states into sanctuaries, not just for the undocu- from coercive institutions like libraries, these people would mented, but for disillusioned liberals—a gladly spend the morning sorting donated books by Dewey response that amounts to giving up on decimal number—as they were doing in the mild fall weather. creating a just and inclusive democracy in this divided land. But such feelings of I was there for only a few days, but one conversation with a despair miss the deeper and perhaps more book borrower has stayed with me. He was having trouble lasting political transformation that has understanding why he kept returning to the encampment. He taken place in the five years since Zuccotti Park. Indeed, the irruption of wondered: Had anything like this happened before? Were there at Occupy turned out to be prophetic. For books that could tell him who had done it, and why? I felt I the first time in decades, the left regained was meeting a victim of a political shipwreck. In my mind, its focus and put down new roots. Fight for $15, the campaign for a higher mini- he became emblematic of a left that felt itself so unmoored mum wage led by fast-food workers, made from any shared past that it was puzzled by its own existence. gains in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle,

26 | NEW REPUBLIC CREDIT TK

MARCH 2017 | 27 to the same thing: They held that dem- ocratic capitalism, plus the defense of and San Francisco. Rolling Jubilee, found- to mount a convincing opposition to human rights, was the only theoretical ed in 2012, bought and canceled almost Trump, and to engage with the forces framework left standing for making sense $32 million in medical and student debt. that brought him to power. With its fo- of human life. Black Lives Matter has forced America cus on economic inequality and collec- This serene confidence left liberals in to reckon with police violence against tive action, the left knows things that the United States and Europe totally un- black men and highlighted the economic liberals have been reluctant to acknowl- prepared for the present wave of populist isolation of many black communities. edge, or in any event to say—knowledge insurgencies by millions of people who, Last year, Bernie Sanders won more than that is necessary to embrace the populist whatever their other grievances, do not 13 million votes. And recent polls show moment, push back on its reactionary feel secure or dignified in their economic that a majority of Americans under the age inclinations, and seize its progressive lives. At home, populism currently en- of 30 now prefer socialism to capitalism. potential. The left is able to diagnose compasses both the left-wing version of While it is unclear just what they mean by the malfunctioning of our democracy Bernie Sanders, with its calls for universal that, a renewed openness to radical ideas is unmistakable among young people. At the very moment when establishment pol- itics have been severely undermined—the A political party, as Trump and the Tea GOP hijacked by Trump, the Democrats Party have both demonstrated, is well confounded by Hillary Clinton’s loss—the American left has been reborn. worth fighting to take over. For most of the 2016 election cycle, however, the left was told, implicitly or explicitly, that while they might be because, unlike the Democratic estab- health care and a regulatory crackdown charming or admirable, they should leave lishment, it starts from the premise that on Wall Street, and Donald Trump’s blend real politics to the adults of the Demo- American democracy as it is currently of atmospheric anti-elitism and a large- cratic National Committee and the liberal constituted is profoundly insufficient. ly right-wing economic agenda. Abroad, commentariat. There was one candidate, The Sanders campaign recovered Marine le Pen’s ethno-nationalist populism we were assured, and one web of institu- eclipsed ways of talking about politics is building in France, and Narendra Modi’s tions and experts who understood how to and the economy, and began reinventing Hindu nationalism has swept India. We are get things done: They were battle-tested them; in resisting Trump, left ideas can living through a return of history. and ready to win, then to hit the ground help to make sense of our shared experi- Over the past year, two competing governing. The rest of us had pretty sen- ence, suggesting how life came to be as it is, explanations for the populist wave have timents; it was sweet that we thought the and how it might be different. None of this emerged. On the one hand, journalists word democracy could refer to something guarantees political success, of course. But like John Judis and Nate Cohn have traced larger in ambition and imagination than it does mean that, far from being dreamily political discontent to economic inequality the current version of the Democratic irrelevant, the left must place itself firmly and insecurity. In The Populist Explosion, Party; but politics means putting away at the center of the fights ahead. Judis argues that Democrats in the United childish things. States and Europe’s social-democratic par- In the wake of Trump’s victory in No- T ITS HEART, THE NEW POPULISM ties gave up the traditional working-class vember, the present leadership of the is a revival of themes that many vote when they embraced free trade, failed Democratic Party has failed to grasp the A well-intentioned liberals thought to acknowledge class conflict, and with- lessons of its own defeat. “I don’t think had been stamped out long ago, drew from their traditional alliances with people want a new direction,” Nancy Pe- at least in the world’s rich, culturally unions. By contrast, writing in The Atlantic, losi insisted on Meet the Press just after avant-garde countries: nationalism, bat- Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that Republicans the election. The DNC doubled down on tles over international trade, the relation- won by mobilizing voters who rejected a that position in early January, announcing ship between democracy and capitalism. black president. At Vox, Dylan Matthews the creation of an anti-Trump “war room” The liberal elites of the Clinton-Obama reviewed polling data and concluded that staffed with Clinton operatives who will years believed that history itself was the concerns of Trump supporters are continue attacking Trump’s ethics, char- over, and that they were charged with “heavily about race.” acter, and speculative ties to Russia. This supervising the eternal present that fol- It is perfectly clear that both econom- is the same strategy that failed to win the lowed. Whether they had read Francis ic inequality and racism fueled support presidential election against a palpably Fukuyama’s The End of History and the for Trump. Only the left is equipped to flawed and eminently beatable candidate. Last Man, or simply absorbed a version of explain how these two factors are entan- Though fragmented and incipient, his ideas through liberal think tanks and gled, by looking at the experience of life this nascent left is now best placed Thomas Friedman’s columns, it comes under capitalism. In this economy, most

28 | NEW REPUBLIC people lack important forms of security The left presents an alternative view: hollowing out American industry, but he and control over their lives. They answer We simply don’t know what kinds of sol­ often failed to follow this deeper economic to bosses, who answer to investors, who idarity people would be capable of if they logic to its conclusion. Restricting im- answer to global flows of goods and cap- felt control and security in their lives. ports would not, by itself, bring back some ital. As Marx pointed out long ago, the Historically, xenophobia and racism have twentieth-century idyll in which work- system assigns the roles, and people fill been inseparable from enslavement, ers shared the fruits of robust economic them. An investor need not be a greedy imperialism, economic domination or growth. Yes, American industries might person, nor a boss a bossy one; but if ­competition, and fear of losing one’s gain a greater portion of global expendi- they do not maximize returns in the face place. At the same time, people have ture. But that would merely increase prof- of competition, they will be replaced by shown enormous flexibility and resil- its at the top—so long as investors like Mitt someone who will try harder, so they ience when they encounter changing Romney and bosses like D­­ onald Trump can had better be prepared to act greedy, notions of national identity (a concept hold automation or mass ­firings over the or bossy, or—in the case of the line that hardly existed in present form a heads of recalcitrant workers. worker—diligent and subservient. few centuries ago), religion (witness To understand how the U.S. econo- When no one talks about how the rising secularization and syncretism), my is changing, you have to understand system itself produces economic not just trade but property law insecurity and a loss of control, that gives workers no claim on ­scapegoating falls on the groups and the wealth they help to produce; individuals closest at hand. Immi- labor law that makes firing easy grants particularly get scapegoated and union organizing hard; and because often they are willing to corporate law that helped Don- take low-paying jobs or lack legal ald Trump stay rich while leav- authorization to work. When no ing indebted municipalities and one in politics talks about brutal investors in his wake. Turning economic realities—including a these features of the market into merciless and de-unionized labor political issues would help show market, the unfettered mobility of economic life not as a natural- capital, and the investor-driven im- seeming struggle for survival, but perative to squeeze every possible as a legally constructed competi- “efficiency” out of people—then tion as arbitrary as the rules of the your competitor for wages on the Hunger Games. building site becomes the only The left needs to get better at economic rival you can actually talking about how the economy see. Racism and xenophobia are affects the way workers view them- not merely symptoms of economic selves and their ­political options— anxiety, and are not to be morally their sense of what they deserve or politically excused on account and what is possible. The Rolling of hard times. But they are likely Jubilee gets at these themes by sug- to be stronger and more politically gesting that debt is not necessarily effective when there appears to be a deep moral obligation, that there no other way for people to address their and gender identity (where our notion is justice in eliminating it. Calls for a uni- sense of helplessness. of “human nature” is turning out to be versal basic income reflect the idea that Liberals tend to ignore this analysis, full of new expressions). There is no rea- people deserve some share of the world’s and to personalize racism and xenopho- son to assume, as conservatives tend to good things, some elementary security, bia as moral failings, because they think conclude, that what we already know just for showing up—that not everything the necessary preconditions for a decent marks a natural limit of human behavior has to be earned on the market or inher- cosmopolitanism are already in place: or potential. ited from one’s parents. Likewise, in the markets and multiculturalism. Conserva- On the national stage, however, the Sanders campaign’s insistence on social tives from Edmund Burke to Ross Douthat left has not always made these ideas clear. entitlements as a right of citizenship, not a have argued almost the opposite. They The Sanders campaign lacked a political shameful badge of dependence, there was posit that people are basically tribal, and vocabulary for talking about the complex a glimpse of the older, social-democratic therefore all forms of cosmopolitanism, realities of capitalism. On the issue of idea that the economy should produce not from liberal humanitarianism to social- trade, for example, Sanders roundly criti- simply abstract efficiency, but security and ist solidarity, are utopian fantasies that cized liberal agreements such as nafta for dignified work. will reliably fall apart in the harsh light of human nature.

MARCH 2017 | 29 making shared decisions with concrete consequences. The essential links between HE CURRENT RESURGENCE OF a complex world, untangle the politics of opinions and consequences are, in daily populism is linked to a crisis in the Middle East and the South China Sea, life, very weak. T the functioning of democracy it- renegotiate trade agreements, and see This weakened sense of what it means self. Trump won the election by behind the obfuscations of intelligence to participate in a democracy comes at scorning the political system and vandal- agencies. This is a bizarre view of what it the same time as a crisis of shared truth. izing its norms. But he did not create the means to act in politics. It combines the Rough-and-ready American success once conditions for his chaotic campaign; he epistemic amateurism of the conspiracy bolstered the notion that a rich country merely fed on them. In much-­discussed theorist with the virtual self-assertion of with a “ of ideas” should be recent work, political scientists Yascha a first-person-shooter video game. It is able to sustain a good-enough democracy Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa found an approach to politics tailored to people more or less automatically. It is increas- that young people across Europe and for whom politics is a domain of fantasy. ingly clear, however, that the market for the United States are increasingly skep- Who could expect political judgment to ideas works much like the market for rec- tical of democracy and sympathetic to arise spontaneously in a world that does reational drugs: People consume the ones strong-man rule, even military govern- not afford many people the experience of that relieve them of their ordinary mis- ment. People may not be clear what they participating in actual self-rule? Political eries and make them feel special. Thanks are rejecting when they say they to the proliferation of ideological don’t care about democracy, but media, citizens now enjoy the same the air of indifference and hostility range of choice in facts as in ideas. is unmistakable. Liberals and those further to the In the months since the election, left differ sharply over how to res­ many have struggled to understand pond to these threats to democr­ acy. why voters behaved the way they The Democratic Party professionals did. Some centrist commentators who circulated among the Clinton have expressed misgivings about campaign and its affiliated institu- democracy ­itself, arguing that it tions tend to accept Schumpeter’s becomes self-­indulgent and de- pessimism about democratic ir- structive unless responsible elites rationality. Instead of appealing step forward to guide political pas- to voters’ reason, their campaigns sions. Joseph Schumpeter, the Aus- slice and dice voters into marketing trian émigré economist, provided categories. They then make target- a memorable slogan for these wor- ed moral and emotional appeals ries when he wrote, in 1942, that to them (Trump is a bad man; be “the typical citizen drops down to a with Hillary), and use canvassing lower level of mental performance technology to prod swing-state as soon as he enters the political voters who, their data models in- field.… He becomes a primitive form them, will likely support the again.” In democracies, Schum- Democrat. Clinton canvassers in peter continued, political judgment , where she narrowly lost, is “unintelligent and irresponsible,” and judgment, like any other skill, is trained in were instructed not to engage in “per- “may prove fatal” to any country that practice. The decline of unions has meant suasion,” but just to make yet another it governs. Writing in New York maga- fewer opportunities for workers to vote, phone call or flyer drop to beleaguered zine after the election, Andrew Sullivan debate, and even strike over issues that folks who showed up on party lists as seemed to agree, arguing that support for directly affect them. At the same time, the likely Democrats. Clinton counted on the Trump was “absolute and total … not like consolidation of businesses into large, political rationality only of an elite class that of a democratic leader but of a cult integrated operations has meant that the of technocrats, whom she expected to leader fused with the idea of the nation.” ordinary experience of work for many bring in a victory. There is some truth to these argu- people involves taking orders in a one-way By contrast, there is a swath of activists ments. We know from our everyday lives and often remote hierarchy. The decline of to the left of the Democratic establish- that much of our decision-making is not voluntary civic and political organizations ment whose politics center on fostering entirely rational. But Trump has played has made opportunities for democratic self-rule. Labor organizers try to shore up on a deep sense of unreality about the participation scarcer still. Although people the power of workers in workplaces from political process. His candidacy reflected can express themselves loudly online, or fast-food chains to universities that run the peculiar idea that someone “strong” at concerts, sports events, and Trump on the labor of underpaid and overworked and “smart” could singlehandedly master rallies, they have few chances to practice adjunct faculties. In places like Durham,

30 | NEW REPUBLIC North Carolina, activists from Black Lives politics can avoid the underlying eco- For now, the left should follow the Matter have gone beyond street protests nomic reality. Pundits like David Brooks lead of Bernie Sanders, and that of many to craft alternative municipal budgets may still get away with regretting, as he activists who have entered state and local that would redirect new expenditures on recently did, that “globalism” suffers politics, by fielding candidates for elected police into more inclusive and produc- only from being “despiritualized.” In office. In the two-party system of Amer- tive forms of community investment. The the years ahead, perhaps it will finally ican elections, the Democratic Party is Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of become impossible to talk about glo- the natural vehicle for campaigns like groups within Black Lives Matter, has balism without talking about capitalism those of anticorruption activist Zephyr called for community oversight boards and democracy. Teachout, who ran for Congress in up- to supervise police departments. Two caveats are terrifically important. state New York, and Occupy veteran These activists reject the idea that our First, none of this will be easy. That is in ­Jillian Johnson, who won a seat on the city current political crisis will be resolved by large part because the Democratic Party council in Durham, North Carolina. The technocratic solutions or get-out-the-vote establishment believes in the rightness party exists to maximize political pow- strategies alone. Over the past 50 years, and adequacy of its ideas and is com- er and to support a network of consul- low-information, low-energy democ- mitted to maintaining its power. From tants, think tankers, friendly journalists, racy has limped through a period when the Democratic National Committee to and patronage seekers. The left wastes technology and elite institutions kept Clinton-friendly commentators such energy when it vents its indignation at disagreement within a workable range as Paul Krugman, mainstream Demo- the Democratic Party for being an ordi- of opinion. Today, however, technology crats mocked and belittled the Sanders nary party in these respects. By the same and markets will produce increasing- ly self-indulgent and nihilistic forms of politics, unless our response goes beyond trying to restore the familiar consensus, The nascent left rejects the idea that and pushes toward deeper forms of dem- our current crisis will be resolved by ocratic power. The Sanders campaign showed that technocratic solutions alone. it is possible to connect this sort of ground-level­ democracy-building with demands for a larger-scale renovation campaign and its supporters. Many will token, however, the left owes nothing to of democracy. Sanders campaigned on continue to denounce anyone to their everyday partisanship. A political party, overturning the Supreme Court decision left as naïve at best, dangerous at worst. as Trump and the Tea Party have both in Citizens United, which gives corpora- The left must respond with ambitious demonstrated, is well worth fighting to tions the power to invest unlimited sums but rigorous argument. We will need to take over; beyond that, there is nothing in political campaigns, and on moving challenge the establishment to address in it that deserves loyalty or deference. toward a system of public financing for the threat of rising nationalism and the Nor should the left take its blueprint elections, breaking the undue influ- crises of inequality and democracy, while entirely from the Sanders campaign, as ence of private wealth altogether. He also building power that the mainstream extraordinary as it was. Back in October also advocated easing ballot access and cannot ignore. 2011, in the convivial shipwreck that making Election Day a national holiday— Second, none of this criticism of lib- was the Occupy library, it would have effectively halting Republican efforts to erals means jettisoning or demoting the seemed impossible for a self-described deny the vote to minorities and other core liberal commitments to personal democratic socialist to become the coun- Democratic-leaning constituencies. freedom, especially free speech and oth- try’s most popular politician, as Sanders er civil liberties. The point of the left’s was in October 2016. In Zuccotti Park, T WOULD BE IMPLAUSIBLE TO SUG- criticism of liberals is that these sorts of it seemed utopian to imagine that the gest that the American left is on the rights are not enough to secure digni- young activists who shut down Wall I cusp of any great victory. It remains fied lives or meaningful self-rule under Street would wind up reviving gen- far from most concrete forms of po- capitalism, inherited racial inequality, erations of work for economic justice litical power. Yet its intellectual clarity and an ever-deepening surveillance and democracy. Now their insights and can help guide and coordinate the work state. Liberal values are not enough; but efforts, once derided as hopelessly in- of grassroots activists, open up new al- they are essential. A broader left pro- sufficient, serve as our starting point, ternatives for voters, and raise the bar of gram would work to deepen people’s however tenuous and endangered in public argument. Five years ago, when lived experience of liberty, equality, and this bizarre and chauvinistic political Occupy set up in Zuccotti Park, talk of democracy—values to which liberals moment. Who can say what will economic inequality had long been con- and the left share a commitment. come over the horizon next? a descended to as “class warfare.” Today, no serious argument about American

MARCH 2017 | 31 10 Ways to Take On Trump WHAT WE CAN DO, FROM CONGRESS TO THE STREETS

Some may even change their positions 1 Copy the Tea Party or public statements. Angel Padilla and Leah Greenberg, former Democratic congressional staffers Progressives aren’t accustomed to and authors of Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda this type of organizing. We like to talk about what we’re for: a clean climate, Immediately after the election, progres- an election coming up, and lawmakers are economic justice, universal health care, sives began forming groups dedicated to squeamish about losing their seats. If a racial equality, gender and sexual equal- resisting Trump. But they didn’t know what local newspaper reports that protesters ity. That’s what galvanizes us. But now would be most effective. Liking something at a town hall barraged Congresswoman we have to come to terms with the fact on Facebook isn’t going to move your X with questions about corruption in the that for the next four years, we’re not member of Congress. We want to provide infrastructure bill, or if a group of constit- going to set the agenda; Trump and the better tools. As former Democratic con- uents on social media calls Congressman Republicans in Congress will. The best gressional staffers, we know how powerful Y unresponsive and untrustworthy, that way to respond at the federal level is local action can be, because it’s been used makes them nervous. Some will go to to go on defense, protect each other, against us—by the Tea Party. So let’s use great lengths to avoid those outcomes. and stick together. That’s what the Tea the Tea Party model for progressive goals. Party did, and that’s what made them The Tea Party recognized that they had so effective. the most leverage when they organized Adopting the same strategy will force around issues that were in the national Congress to redirect energy away from conversation, mobilized at the local level, their priorities. It will sap their willing- and targeted individual lawmakers. They ness to support reactionary change and knew how each member of Congress had deprive the Trump administration of any voted and never let them forget that they semblance of legitimacy. Remember: We were accountable to their constituents. won the popular vote by an enormous Everything lawmakers did was being margin. Trump is not coming in with a watched. People came into our offices mandate for change, and he has demon- and were mean, aggressive, even vio- strated a disrespect for democratic val- lent. One weekend in 2010, there was a ues. That’s categorically different from big Tea Party rally against the Affordable anything we’ve seen before. It’s not a Care Act, and we had to lock our doors. situation we can treat as normal politics. At town halls, it seemed like every other question was really hostile. It reflected a level of organization and preparedness we had rarely, if ever, seen. If we use the same approach, we can stall the Trump agenda. To be clear, we do not endorse the Tea Party’s rac- 2 Play Hardball in Congress ist or violent tactics. But some of their Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution efforts—calling congressional offices and attending town hall meetings—can be Republicans were united in opposition their Social Security and Medicare. So exceedingly effective. to Obama, but it’s much tougher to stay ’s budget is a tough sell, and The strongest lever you have is your united on offense. There are a lot of it’s clearly an area where Democrats may local member of Congress. There’s always working-class Republicans, for exam- see an opportunity to drive a wedge be- ple, who don’t believe the government tween the president and congressional ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEX NABAUM has any business messing around with leaders. Democrats should look for these

32 | NEW REPUBLIC kinds of vulnerabilities. They should not be deferential at all when it comes to the confirmation process. And they should try 3 Look to Cities and States to derail a quick repeal of the Affordable , lieutenant governor of California Care Act. The idea for Democrats should be to slow things down. We’re not a monarchy. We’re a represen- impediments and sovereign Native Amer- The obvious model, of course, is the tative democracy, so we have agency, we ican lands on which a lot of the fencing Republican effort that began the day have a voice. We have the ability not just would need to be constructed. But if he WHAT WE CAN DO, FROM CONGRESS TO THE STREETS Obama was inaugurated. It was a com- to navel gaze, but to act, to be engaged—to does try to build a wall, there is legislation plete strategy of obstruction and delegit- resist. We’ve got to dust ourselves off and in California to challenge the administra- imation of the governing party. In pursu- step up, and not just roll over and act as tion, by requiring the construction of the ing that strategy, however, Republicans if we don’t have a very potent role to play wall to be put to a vote of the people of were willing to say things that just weren’t in our democracy, particularly at the city California. There are also many hurdles true. For Democrats who aspire to use level. At the end of the day, 80 percent of that could be put in the way of procuring government in a positive way, it would be us live in metro areas. The economic en- the contracts for construction permits. a mistake to follow the precise example gines of this country are its cities: They California is also very resilient when that the Republicans set. It was much too account for 85 percent of the GDP. If it comes to climate policy. We survived cynical, and much too destructive of our Trump wants to go to war with cities, he’s the Reagan years, we survived the Bush democratic system. Democrats shouldn’t committing economic suicide. years. We are prepared to be very adapt- take the position of “opposition now, op- Here on the West Coast, we’re prepar- able now in the Trump years. The state position forever.” But they do have to play ing for the worst. We are taking Trump’s has identified all the ways we can expect hardball in resisting the Republicans— rhetoric both literally and seriously. San the Trump administration to assault our while still standing up for truth and evi- Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities environmental rules and regulations. We dence, science and democracy. That will are preparing to push back on immigra- have mitigation strategies—plans A, B, serve them well over the long run. tion, on the environment, on health care, and C—and we are preparing a very ag- The congressional strategy should be on education. Cities have passed supple- gressive countereffort. As the governor followed by a larger effort to communicate mental appropriations to fund legal aid to said, if the federal government stops col- that what the Republicans are proposing undocumented residents, and the state of lecting climate data from satellites, we’ll to do has nothing to offer those who voted California is doing the same. We are doing build our own damn satellite. If they want for Trump. The diminished prospects for everything to protect and preserve the to roll back EPA protections, we have our realizing the American dream are certainly privacy rights of our Dreamers—not just own state EPA. at the root of the GOP’s success, but the at the state level, but also on campuses at So even though it’s difficult right now policy proposals in their agenda aren’t the University of California. And we’re to determine exactly where the Trump responsive to those concerns. And a lot working with superintendents of public administration will begin and end on all of their proposals will make new Repub- schools—there are over a thousand school of this, there are a lot of backstops in lican voters feel very uncomfortable. The districts in California—to do the same. California, and we will happily assert our Democrats can take advantage of that, by When it comes to the border wall, it’s autonomy and jurisdictional authority. getting people engaged and angry about self-evident that Trump cannot achieve We’re not going to be timid. We are going what’s going on. They need that inten- that goal. It’s laughable, because logis- to remind the administration that there sity. They need to replicate the way they tically that wall will never be built as he will be consequences for trampling the opposed changes to the Office of Con- has described it. There are geographic rights and values that we hold dear. gressional Ethics: using social media to mobilize interest groups and raise the alarm at the local level. It’s also important for Democrats not to be distracted. This is not the time for reconsidering what the Democratic Party stands for. No unnecessary battles over, 4 Learn From History “Do we stick with our core constituents Seyla Benhabib, professor of political science and philosophy at or appeal to white, working-class voters in the industrial states?” All that is be- There is a certain typology that cuts across established institutions. “Democracy has side the point now. This is not the time to both time and space. Authoritarian lead- failed you,” they say, “but have faith in me, frighten or discourage core constituents— ers ask the people to believe in them and and I will take care of you. I will get it it’s the time to mobilize them. The focus their sole capacity to accomplish great done.” It’s a very paternalistic style. We has to be on what the Republicans are things. They attempt to forge a direct bond have seen this with Mussolini and Berlus- trying to do. with the public, often at the expense of coni in Italy, Erdogan in Turkey, Franco

MARCH 2017 | 33 of caring for civic institutions, caring for the Constitution, caring for making in Spain, Perón in Argentina, Modi in In- enough just to call him “fascist,” “pa- democracy better. You have to instill a dia. And we see it with Trump, as well. triarchal,” “white,” “reactionary.” He is sense that this may really be the end of There’s always a lot of subliminal all that. But to mobilize people against a certain kind of republicanism, with a sexual politics in authoritarian person- him—especially people who might not small r. The art of the deal has to be op- alities. Every television image of Trump, necessarily agree with a progressive, left posed by a language of civic commitment for example, is Trump the family. Three agenda—you have to create a language and solidarity. wives, five children—by American puri- tan standards, it’s an unusual family. But it’s also the image that he’s projecting: I’m a strong man. These are my children. This is what I brought to the world. I’m not a wimp. We have to be careful, however, about 5 Use Vivid Language throwing around the language of fas- Geoffrey Nunberg, linguist at the University of California at Berkeley cism. Yes, Hitler was also elected. But Trump does not represent a strong fas- One of the interesting things about Trump a grotesque. I don’t know that it helps cist movement. We are not living in a is the utter absence of ideological lan- to call him a fascist—he’s menacing and dictatorship—not yet! It’s going to be a guage. Even when he’s going on about creepy in his own Trumpy way, and you rough ride, but let’s avoid the exaggerated Obamacare, the problem is that it costs have to call him out on his deceptions examples. Trump is sui generis. too much, not that it’s a socialistic in- and fabulations. But resistance calls for I prefer to call what Trump is engaged trusion on American liberty. That’s not a broader linguistic strategy. You want in “autocratic presidentialism,” meaning something Trump would say. Instead, he to build solidarity among your partisans, I’m the one who lays down the rule of law. makes emotional appeals. He plays on cul- but you have to reach the voters you lost To what extent is he going to respect the tural insecurities and fears of violence and in November, the people who know that division of power laid out in the Con- offers a restorative anger in their place. Trump is an asshole but voted for him stitution? Are our public institutions— Democrats have to rediscover language Congress, the Supreme Court—going to that can channel a sense of anger about be strong enough to prevent the country social and economic inequity, though not from sliding toward a kind of presidential so nihilistically. I don’t think that it helps dictatorship? To oppose these tendencies, to call this sort of language “populist”— we need as many moments of resistance that’s a word that Trumpism has emptied as possible. We need to hold politicians’ of any vestige of its meaning. But Demo- feet to the fire. crats in the past have found language that There’s another way in which Trump connects with popular emotions. Think of differs from authoritarian leaders of the Bill Clinton in 1992—“I’m tired of seeing past. He has tried to use the language of the people who work hard and play by the nationalism: triumphal whiteness, “Make rules get the shaft.” Even Obama spoke America Great Again.” But what we are this way for a while in 2011 and 2012, really hearing from Trump is the corpo- though it isn’t his natural register, the rate language of business success—­the way it is for . language of “making deals.” He and the Hillary Clinton was clearly uncomfort- Republicans are likely going to move to- able with this kind of language—she had anyway out of frustration or dislike of the ward privatizing everything. That is not trouble conveying her anger about social Clintons—as opposed to the people who something you can say about past au- injustice and establishing a visceral con- voted for Trump because he’s an asshole, thoritarian movements. Most authori- nection with her listeners. So that’s the who are really a minority of his supporters. tarian leaders believe in a strong state. challenge. As Obama said in December, This is likely to play out in terms of Trump doesn’t. For Trump, the state is a “The problem is that we’re not there on resistance not just to Trump himself but to corporation—and he is going to treat it the ground communicating not only the the radical programs and rollbacks the Re- as such. In that sense, he’s almost more dry policy aspects of this, but that we publicans are going to be implementing—­ dangerous than previous authoritarian care about these communities, that we’re on the environment, wages, unions, im- leaders. If the government is like a big bleeding for these communities.” migration, education. These issues are corporation, we are clients, not citizens. So: How do you respond linguistical- going to be fought out one by one in the How are we to oppose this? We need ly to Trump and Trumpism? On the one linguistic trenches, by deploying language a new, constructive vocabulary. It’s not hand, you focus on the man himself as that makes the stakes clear.

34 | NEW REPUBLIC In a funny way, Trump may actual- undermines a lot of the language that Re- Democrats, or rail about “makers and ly have made the linguistic job easier publicans traditionally use to justify their takers.” And the rhetoric of trickle-down for Democrats than it was a few years approach. Would-be populists like Trump sits uneasily with attacks on the elite— ago. His own ideological indifference can’t play the “class warfare” card against even if you bellow.

social welfare. Barack Obama, by contrast, 6 Revamp the Democratic Party didn’t restructure the economy when he Matt Stoller, fellow at New America, a nonpartisan think tank had the opportunity to, in 2009, when banking was on its back and everyone was Beginning in the 1930s, Democrats were People will vote for you if you deliv- asking “What do we do now?” Instead the party of the working class. Their vi- er something concrete—as long as they he said, “We’re going to re-empower the sion of social justice involved protections know that you did it and it’s simple to same people who destroyed the econo- for workers, small businesspeople, family understand. Instead of throwing bankers my and disempowered the middle class.” farms, and independent retailers. In the in jail and stopping foreclosures, Dem- That’s what the bailouts and amnesty for 1970s, however, Democrats decided to ocrats did very complex, weird things, bank executives were. Dodd-Frank is es- adopt a new ideology that viewed Wall like Dodd-Frank. Obamacare allowed sentially a 2,000-page note to regulators Street as useful and efficient, rather than the concentration of hospitals and in- that says, “The 2008 crisis was really awk- as a threat. They began to allow big busi- surance companies and Big Pharma, and ward, so try not to let that happen again.” ness to make important technological and ignored the fact that millions of people If you look back at history, there was political decisions that affect all of us. got shifted from mediocre insurance to this whole other antimonopoly tradition Right now, Democrats are just panick- terrible insurance. that Democrats ran on aggressively for ing and whining and saying, “You have to During the New Deal, Democrats a really long time—you can trace it all say mean things about Trump on Twit- smashed the power of the trusts, which the way back to the Revolutionary War ter,” as if that’s a strategy. Instead, you cleared the road for improvements in period. We need to get back to that. should fight Trump on economic populist grounds. Today, farmers face monopoly power in the form of Bayer, Monsanto, ADM, and Tyson. People in urban areas face other monopolies, but they’re driven by the same concentrated financial power. The ideology of Democrats should be to 7 Reinvent Labor break up that power. Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance You can fight Trump by saying, “It’s outrageous that he wants to allow the The interests of working-class people Today a lot of work is service-based, merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, be- have not been at the center of the Demo- and a lot of it is disaggregated and fissured cause that’s going to raise our cell phone cratic Party agenda the way they should and isolated. The traditional image of a bills and put our telecom infrastructure be. The question going forward now is: union member is that of a factory worker, in the hands of a guy who might be in- How do we build a labor movement that but in reality, today’s worker looks much terested in censorship.” You can fight him truly embodies the hopes and dreams of more like a nanny. One of the fastest-­ the way Bernie Sanders has on the Carrier a diverse electorate? growing occupations in the entire econ- deal, by saying, “We’re going to deny you The labor movement needs to be out omy last year was home care. We’ve found federal contracts if you’re offshoring jobs there fighting tooth and nail for policies that it’s incredibly powerful to organize and you’re profitable.” When it comes to that allow workers to live and work with people with the broadest possible sense the trillions of dollars that corporations dignity in this economy. For immigrant of what “we” means. We’re trying to bring are holding in offshore bank accounts, workers, that means living free from raids together all caregivers—everyone from Democrats could strike a deal to allow and registries and deportation. For black nurse’s aides to family members caring that money to come home tax-free. Or workers, that means living free from for loved ones with Alzheimer’s. Rather they could fight it by saying, “This money racial exclusion and profiling. And for than saying this is the worker’s interest is just going to be used to pay off share- workers in the Rust Belt, it means living and this is the family’s interest and this holders and pay for more mergers and free from corporate cronyism and deals is what workers of color need and this is acquisitions so that companies can lay that get cut without working people’s what immigrants need, we’re saying that you off.” That’s the right way to fight it. interests at the table. this is an American challenge.

MARCH 2017 | 35 ­community—kind of an aarp for workers. We’re building our own benefits plat- The labor movement needs to lead the economy. We need to take risks and try form for gig workers, and we’ve created way toward economic solutions that lift new things as a movement—like using a web site to help women understand all boats. We need to enable immigrants social media and texting platforms to their rights. We’re going to be setting up to fully integrate into the workforce, do meet-ups, create groups, and enable committees around the country to help provide training for everyone, and im- people to self-organize. Coworker.org has people know where to go for help and prove the quality of these jobs so people created an online platform that’s a good how to defend their communities against can support their families. To do that, example of this kind of experimentation. things like raids. It’s not just worker soli- we need new forms of organizing and We’ve built a membership associ- darity; it involves everyone who believes new ways to connect people. We need to ation that provides domestic workers that America is meant to be a multira- organize entrepreneurs and technologists access to benefits and social services, cial democracy, where everyone has the to reflect the new forms of work in our and the ability to feel connected to the ­opportunity to live and work with dignity.

That is a better, more visceral argument 8 Utilize the Courts to make than, “Gee, Wilbur Ross still Eliot Spitzer, former governor and attorney general of New York owns 2 percent of this coal company.” There are other areas where it’s going The federal government’s capacity to rules relating to federal officials are -en to be much harder for states to retain their undercut rights granted by the states is forced by federal officials. In terms of power, though. If the federal government very limited. When it comes to issues like actual enforcement actions, not much wants to wield its full authority on immi- lgbt rights, voting rights, immigration, can be done there. And more importantly, gration, for example, it will be hard for financial regulations, and the environ- those things won’t win the public back to states to object, because that’s an area ment, a state can increase the rights it our side. All the shouting about Trump’s where the courts have said the govern- affords its own citizens. lgbt rights are business structures certainly didn’t reso- ment has a clear capacity under the Con- easiest to conceptualize: We recognize nate. So how do you win people back? By stitution to do what it wants. Another same-sex marriage, we decide who gets making the case that regulations actually problem is that over the past decade, we’ve to vote in our states. Our ability to expand help people. If Republicans try to roll argued in court in favor of administrative those rights to universal status across the back the Clean Air Act, Democrats should latitude in decision-making. Now, by as- nation may be limited, given the chang- say, “They want dirty coal to be belched serting the primacy of states rights, we’re ing makeup of the Supreme Court. But into the jet stream in Ohio, but it will flipping that argument on its head. How the Constitution will not be interpreted come down in New York, Pennsylvania, do we go back to all these cases where in a way that denies a state the right to and New Jersey. So our kids are getting we’ve been arguing for executive discre- extend marriage rights or voting rights asthma, and acid rain is killing our trees.” tion and say, “Oops, we didn’t mean it”? to certain individuals. Financial regulation and the environ- ment, same thing. The federal govern- ment could pass laws exempting certain ­institutions from state regulations or consumer claims. But no court would uphold a federal statute that said a state 9 Organize a Moral Resistance cannot pursue a fraud action against Rev. William J. Barber II, architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement banks or require power plants to limit emissions. So if Trump does something On Election Day, we rejected our deepest Party can get any better until we have a dubious on policy grounds and there’s a moral and constitutional values for a cam- moral movement that calls all people— plausible legal argument to be made paign rooted in hyperbole and outright regardless of their party or faith—to lean against it, governors and state attorneys distortions. When someone can create in to their better angels. general should say, “No, we’re not going this fear—class fear, race fear—and rev In 1967, Dr. King looked at America to let you tell us how to run our state.” people up almost into a frenzy, it’s not after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting This is a much better way to fight just about political parties or ideology. It’s Rights Act. When he saw how militarism, Trump than to focus on ethics violations about the morality of our politics. Neither materialism, classism, and racism still had or conflicts of interest. For one thing, the Republican Party nor the Democratic such a hold on the body politic, he began

36 | NEW REPUBLIC to organize a poor people’s campaign. Moral Mondays started in North Carolina blaming ourselves. This is in our DNA. As People forget what he said: that America in 2007, when Democrats were in office. the Princeton historian Nell Painter says, needs “a radical revolution of values.” We looked at issues of poverty, health without Obama there’d be no Trump. It’s That’s what we need now. care, education, and we said, “Uh-uh. part of our history: The call of justice goes You don’t change things tweet to We’re still not living up to our highest forward, and then there’s a response, a tweet. You need a sustained movement, values.” We challenge even Democrats. pushback. It’s always been there, and it not a moment. You have to reimagine That’s not partisan. It’s moral witness. keeps rising back up, and in every age, what hope means. You have to hook up What we’re seeing in this country somebody has to meet it. Every despot with unlikely allies. You have to build a has always been there; we can’t make and demagogue in history has ultimately voting strategy. And you have to have a the mistake of just blaming Trump, or met a moral resistance. It’s just our time. legal strategy for challenging unconsti- tutional acts. It all has to flow together. We need moral movements led from the bottom up—from the states, not the top down—because a lot of the prob- lems are in the state legislatures. We need ­fusion coalitions that are antiracist, 10 Don’t Give In to Despair antipoverty, and pro-labor. I talk about Rep. John Lewis, Democratic congressman and civil rights leader “fusion politics” instead of “populism,” because in the South, populism can be a My message is very, very simple: You The election results were shocking. I lynch mob; it used to be. Populism can cannot give up. You cannot give in. You truly believe that something went wrong, be whatever’s popular. Segregation was cannot get lost in a sea of despair. You that outside forces intervened. I believe popular. So, now, is Trumpism. have to be hopeful and optimistic. Keep the Russians played a major role in influ- We’ve got to get people to see that pushing, keep pulling, keep organizing, encing the outcome of the election, and something is wrong when power is used keep believing. This too shall pass. one day the truth will come out. But this to create oppression and injustice. In the Since the election, I have seen so many should also serve as a teaching experi- Moral Monday movement, we’ve brought people saying, “I don’t know what we’re ence. The lesson is that we’ve got to be going to do.” A young woman came up stronger. We’ve got to do more. I believe to me and started crying. I told her, people will emerge from this period more “I’ve cried, too.” I cried the night of the organized and more inspired to be engaged election, and for two or three days after in American politics. that. But I stopped crying. I shed all of As a younger man, during the March the tears that I wanted to shed. We have on Washington, I said, We cannot wait, we got to stand up. We have got to fight. Be cannot be patient; we want our freedom, unafraid. Don’t let anybody or anything and we want it now. That sense of urgency get you down. must still be there—the feeling that ev- At the height of the civil rights move- ery day we must work to bring about the ment, we were beaten and jailed, but we changes we desire. But it’s important to never lost faith. When we were first ar- recognize that our struggle is not a strug- rested, some of us felt free. We felt that gle that lasts a few days or a few weeks or we had been liberated. We had been told even a few years. It is a lifetime struggle. over and over again, by our mothers There may be setbacks, but in the final and fathers and grandparents, never to analysis, we are going to achieve victory. ask questions about the signs that said Now is the time for Americans of whites only and colored only. They goodwill—it doesn’t matter whether together people who don’t even believe would say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t they’re black or white, Latino, Asian in faith, but they believe in the moral arc get in the way. Don’t get in trouble.” But American, or Native American—to get in of the universe. They look at our Con- individuals like Rosa Parks and Dr. King good trouble, necessary trouble; to push stitution, at those inalienable rights and and thousands of others inspired us to and resist what is happening. We should values, and say, “Well, I might not be a get in the way, to get in trouble. We got do it in an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent Christian, but this is unjust.” And they’re in what I call “good trouble,” “necessary fashion, but people must stand up and not willing to go to jail to stand up against it. trouble.” Somehow, we believed that we be silent. To be silent is like going along, Remember: Even if Trump had not had the ability to make things better; saying it’s OK, it’s all right. We cannot won, we would still have millions of peo- that we could succeed. I almost died on do that. But we will get there, I truly be- ple in poverty, millions of people without that bridge in Selma. I thought I saw lieve that. I think that sense of hope is in health care. The movement that spawned death. But I never lost that sense of hope. our DNA. You have to be optimistic. a

MARCH 2017 | 37 INTRODUCTION BY VAN JONES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY MILANO

HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

→ A Klansman’s daughter in Buchanan, , watches an old- style cross-burning with a new addition: a flaming swastika. “Christian” Klansmen have long clashed with neo-Nazis, but they’re now staging joint rallies in the name of white solidarity.

38 | NEW REPUBLIC HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP All across America, Klan and neo-Nazi groups are not only flourishing—they’re joining forces.

MARCH 2017 | 39 HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

40 | NEW REPUBLIC We are forced to confront many things in the images that photographer Johnny Milano spent five years capturing. The ceremonial burning of a cross and a swastika in an open field. The sil- houette of a child, a young and defenseless observer of hate, situated between the flaming structures. The Nazi symbol on shirt and skin. Some of the images look modern; others seem straight out of an earlier era. They represent a people striving to keep with tradition, while simultaneously looking to rebrand their beliefs and appeal to new followers. Membership spreads not simply through inheri- tance, but through outreach. Taken together, Milano’s images make it impos- sible to deny that white supremacy is alive and well in this country. Powered by social media platforms, and encouraged by the rise of Trump-as-champion, America’s hate groups have emerged from the fringes with a newfound sense of respectability. In 2015 alone, the number of homegrown hate groups jumped by 14 percent—a proliferation un- precedented in recent times. These groups—Klansmen, neo-Nazis, white nationalists—did more than talk and meet and march. They plotted to turn their hatred into vio- lence. “They laid plans to attack courthouses, banks, festivals, funerals, schools, mosques, churches, synagogues, clinics, water-treatment plants, and power grids,” reports the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They used firearms, bombs, C-4 plastic explosives, knives, and grenades.” It would be all too easy to turn away from this reality, or consign it to the distant past. But Milano turned his camera lens directly toward it. For many, these images will be shocking. Others will be more saddened than surprised. But thanks to his work, we are all met with the direct evidence that white supremacist groups are thriving in America. Let these photographs serve as proof that we are far from the postracial ideal that many Americans have been clinging to. And let them remind us not to be fooled: The spread of white supremacy is not confined to the South, to states like Tex- as, Georgia, and Tennessee—­ it extends deep into the heartland, to Pennsylvania and Maryland and Ohio and Indiana. Hate groups exist all across the United States—coming soon, quite possibly, to a neighborhood near you. a

← A Klan rally near Versailles, Indiana, last spring included a raffle for a “custom-made” robe and hood. Although the Klan remains small—with fewer than 8,000 members nationwide—the group has gained a newfound momentum and respectability with the rise of Trump.

MARCH 2017 | 41 HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

← A swastika armband—part of the “battle dress uniform” of the National Socialist Movement—laid out in preparation for a rally at the Georgia State Capitol on Hitler’s birthday. Last year, in a makeover designed to “mainstream” neo-Nazis, the group dropped the swastika and replaced it with an Odal rune worn by Nazi troops in World War II.

↑ Members of the Confederate White Knights get dressed, and armed, for a rally in rural Maryland. While organized Klan violence is rare, a recent study found that Americans are seven times more likely to be killed by homegrown right-wing extremists than by Islamic terrorists.

42 | NEW REPUBLIC ↑ Children watch family members stage a march at a farm in rural Indiana last May. Klan rallies feature a mix of patriotic symbols and emblems of hate; the group’s oft-chanted slogan urges devotion “for God, for family, for country, for the Klan.”

MARCH 2017 | 43 HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

↓ A young woman is fitted for a Klan hood before a cross- burning last year near Danville, Virginia. White supremacist groups—traditionally all-male, with a strong patriarchal bent— are recruiting women as a sign of their new “inclusiveness.”

← A member of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which calls for Christians to take up white supremacy, before a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, three days before Trump’s election. The group’s co-founder, Matthew Heimbach, calls Trump a “gateway drug” for white nationalism.

44 | NEW REPUBLIC ↑ Members of the National Socialist Movement kick back after a rally in rural Texas. The group aims to unite America’s white nationalists in a single movement. “They always attempt to silence us,” says Jeff Schoep, the organization’s leader. “But they always fail miserably. Thankfully, we still have freedom of speech here.”

MARCH 2017 | 45 INSIDE THE RECOUNT

46 | NEW REPUBLIC Jill Stein and a ragtag team of computer experts decided INSIDE THE RECOUNT to take America’s elections to court. Here’s how it all went wrong. BY STEVE FRIESS

MARCH 2017 | 47 INSIDE THE RECOUNT

“rigged.” The final vote diverged sharply from the predictions of pre-election polls in a handful of swing states, and the FBI days after Donald Trump was elected president, later uncovered evidence that Russian hackers had launched a FIVE Alex Halderman was on a United Airlines flight from coordinated effort to defeat Clinton. “If there was ever going Newark to Los Angeles when he received an urgent email. A to be an election where we should double-check the results,” respected computer scientist and leading critic of security Halderman says, “this was it.” flaws in America’s voting machines, Halderman was anxious to Podesta wasn’t entirely convinced. Did the computer scien- determine whether there had been foul play during the election. tists, he wanted to know, have reason to believe the election had Had machines in Wisconsin or Michigan been hacked? Could been turned? Simons, Rao, and Jefferson acknowledged that they faulty software or malfunctioning equipment have skewed had no such evidence, and that a recount would be unlikely to the results in Pennsylvania? “Before the election, I had been change the result. What was needed, they argued, was a limited saying I really, really hope there’s not a hack and that it’s not “audit” of the results in a handful of voting districts. That way, close,” he says. “Afterwards, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, there’s everyone would know for certain if the outcome could be trusted. enough reason here to be concerned.’ ” After more than an hour, the call was adjourned with no Now, wedged into a middle seat on the cross-country flight, specific agreement other than for more conversation to fol- Halderman stared in disbelief at the email from Barbara Simons,­ low. For his part, Halderman was encouraged. “My God,” he a fellow computer scientist and security expert. Working with whispered to his traveling companion on the plane. “Podesta is Amy Rao, a Silicon Valley CEO and major Democratic fund-­ seriously considering the possibility of a recount. That would raiser, Simons had arranged a conference call with John Podesta, be enormous.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, to make the case for taking In reality, the call exposed the underlying fault lines that a closer look at the election results. Could Halderman be on ultimately doomed the recount effort before it even began. the call in 15 minutes? For Halderman and his colleagues, reviewing the election United’s wi-fi system didn’t allow for in-flight phone calls. results was never intended to put Hillary Clinton in the White But Halderman wasn’t fazed. “I’m blocked,” he emailed Simons, House. They were scientists, and they thought like scientists: “but I can try.” They wanted to review the ballots to gather evidence and test Within minutes, Halderman had circumvented the wi-fi and a hypothesis. To them, the recount was a sort of real-world, established an interface with computers at the University of live-wire experiment. “This wasn’t about sowing doubts or Michigan, where at 36 he is the youngest full professor in the pushing for any particular outcome,” Halderman says. “It was history of the computer science department. He dialed in to about proving something about election security.” the call but did not speak, afraid of drawing attention to the The problem, as they would soon discover, was that the fact that he was violating the airline’s phone ban. Clinton campaign and the courts weren’t interested in sci- As he listened in, Podesta came on the line. Simons and ence. Before they would authorize a costly and extensive Rao—along with David Jefferson, a computer scientist at recount, judges and politicians wanted to know if there was the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—then laid out any evidence to suggest that such an undertaking was nec- the reasons that Clinton’s campaign should call for an official essary. “We were going to need something pretty concrete,” review of the election results. The tech experts explained that a high-ranking Clinton aide later told me. “They didn’t have America’s elections are fundamentally unsound, thanks to a anything to hang a hat the size of this sombrero on.” Within new generation of electronic voting machines and tabulators days of the Podesta call, in fact, events would spiral beyond installed after Florida’s “hanging chads” debacle in 2000. The the control of Halderman and the scientists. The measured, machines are prone to malfunctions and miscounts, and many have back The recount “wasn’t about sowing doubts or pushing doors that can enable attackers to alter the outcome by infecting them for any particular outcome,” Halderman says. “It was with malware. The performance of the machines is often verified only about proving something about election security.” by the companies that profit from them, while maintaining the equip- ment falls to underfunded and under-trained county officials. impartial audit they envisioned was quickly swept up into a And because many voting districts create no paper record of chaotic and high-profile partisan battle—an effort that may have electronic votes—more than 80 percent of ballots in Pennsyl- actually wound up undermining the cause of election security. vania are cast without a paper trail—there is no way to confirm “It’s bothersome that there are claims made when there independently whether the tallies are accurate. does not appear to be evidence, because it tends to undermine To Halderman, the 2016 election seemed like the perfect people’s confidence in the election,” says Michael Haas, who opportunity to review concerns about America’s voting sys- serves as the top election official in Wisconsin. “We were

tem. After all, Trump himself had warned that the election was all surprised by what was motivating the requests for the PREVIOUS SPREAD, LEFT TO RIGHT: RACHEL WOOLD/GETTY, REBECCA COOK/REUTERS, ANDY MANIS/GETTY

48 | NEW REPUBLIC Alex Halderman speaks to reporters with Jill Stein in Philadelphia on December 9, after testifying in the most dramatic legal battle of the recount.

recount, because we had not seen anything raising red flags. the A-Team—statistician Philip Stark from the University of And now, because it went as well as it did, it will probably be Cal ­­i­­­fornia, and cryptographer Ron Rivest from MIT—spelled out much harder for anyone to try to do this again.” the benefits of an RLA. Hand-checking a total of 700,000 ballots in the 29 states won by Trump, they explained, would provide “95 percent confidence that the results are correct.” after the phone call, while he At the time, the computer experts were optimistic that IMMEDIATELY was still in the air, Halderman Podesta would ultimately sign on, and they focused on pre- logged on to a secure online chat service called Slack and cre- paring for an RLA. The problem was that the A-Team had no ated an invite-only channel he named “Voting.” The encrypted idea how to actually go about conducting an audit. conversations, which were obtained by the new republic, pro- “What would it take to conduct a statewide RLA for a state vide a minute-by-minute log of the seven weeks of the recount that is not prepared for it?” Jefferson, the scientist from Law- effort and its aftermath. Halderman deputized Matt Bernhard, rence Livermore, asked in Slack on the first day. “How can one of his doctoral students, as a co-administrator, and the two we select random ballots from across the state when they are men began assembling a group of 30 that included some of the held in many separate counties? We would need either the world’s foremost computer scientists and statisticians. There were extraordinary cooperation of all county election officials, or a academics from top universities, expert advisers to the Defense federal court order, no?” Department, and activists who have spent years decrying vulner- “Are counties even allowed to do this voluntarily?” Hal- abilities in electronic voting machines. None of the participants derman asked. was a political player or professional partisan. Their goal was not “Good question,” Jefferson replied. He suggested focusing to bring down Trump, but to study and strengthen America’s on a single state where turnout was lower than expected, then election system. Some in the group dubbed it the “A-Team.” arguing that the anomaly could have been the result of “tech- From the start, the Slack conversations made clear that the nical attacks” on electronic scanners. “This is a technically A-Team never wanted to conduct the full statewide recounts stretched argument,” he conceded, “but I am looking for an that would eventually be pursued in Pennsylvania, Wiscon- argument a court might buy to justify an audit order.” sin, and Michigan. Instead, they preferred what is known as “Sounds reasonable,” another expert interjected, “but I’d a “risk-­limiting audit,” or RLA. Writing in USA Today five prefer to focus on what will help technically and let the cam-

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARC MCANDREWS FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC days after the Slack channel was created, two members of paign figure out legal and strategy angles.”

MARCH 2017 | 49 There was also discussion of arranging a security briefing at the White House, Congress, or the Defense Department, to secure their support for an audit. “I reached Podesta via text,” Simons wrote. “He said he’s willing to ask about a security briefing but he’s not opti- mistic. I asked if perhaps someone higher in government than he might be able to make it happen. (I’m not shy.) He hasn’t responded.” The briefing never happened. The Slack conversations are filled with technical debates about how to analyze precinct and voting data to identify an anomaly that could be explained only by malfeasance. At one point, the A-Team created a spreadsheet with 20 different ideas for lines of inquiry, involving ten states. “We appear to be having some strange data coming out of Wisconsin,” Bernhard wrote at one point. Trump had outperformed by nearly 20 percent in some counties, while Clinton Halderman diagrams ways that hackers can infect voting machines with malware. underperformed Barack Obama by almost 30 percent. “It could be that these are just swing-y counties,” he allowed, Planning for an RLA continued, without much progress, “but those are *huge* swings.” until November 16, when a veteran activist jumped in and hit Discussions also focused on the countless ways someone the A-Team with an overdue dose of reality: No state had laws might execute an election-altering hack. Last summer, the that allowed for a limited audit. “Doing an RLA is not a thing, FBI notified election officials in Arizona and Illinois that not legally and not as a strategy pursued by any of the parties Russian hackers had infiltrated their voter registration sys- committed to pursuing a recount,” the activist informed the tems, stealing voter data and the username and password team. “A recount is a process defined by law and carried out of at least one election official. The A-Team theorized that by the election officials. It’s not carried out by the third party attackers could have used such voter records to cast absen- and the third party has no standing to say, ‘Oh we only want tee ballots in swing states. There was precedent for their to count the votes like this now.’ There is no path to ask for a concern: In 1994, a state Senate race in Pennsylvania was recount and do an RLA, please don’t represent to anyone that invalidated after Democrats were caught using the names there is.” The whole idea was a legal nonstarter. of Puerto Rican residents to cast absentee votes. “So the hy- The A-Team had hit a dead end. They couldn’t do an audit, and pothesis is that someone registered a whole mess of people, the Clinton campaign wasn’t going to participate without the kind and then requested absentee ballots for them,” one scientist of evidence that could only be acquired after a recount. Even if said. “That’s certainly possible (absentee ballots are a weak the scientists somehow managed to convince a state to conduct link, especially now that it’s feasible to request them by the a full recount, it would likely cost millions of dollars—a sum far truckload via online systems).” beyond the reach of the A-Team, which was unable to meet its Much of the debate centered on where to conduct the goal of getting 110,000 people to sign an online petition calling RLA. Members of the A-Team tried to “think like an attacker,” for an audit. To make matters worse, in one of the states they as Halderman put it, to figure out which states they would wanted to pursue, Wisconsin, only a presidential candidate could most likely have targeted. “Who has done the calculations call for a recount. And the A-Team had no presidential candidate. about possible paths for fraud making a difference?” he asked. Not, that is, until Jill Stein got involved. “What’s the smallest fraud in the smallest number of states “History came knocking,” Stein later told me. “Who was I that would have flipped the outcome?” Bernhard offered to to say no to this effort to verify our vote?” crunch the numbers, but Stark disagreed with the premise of the question. “I don’t think the ‘minimal path’ is the best question because I don’t think that’s the computation an ad- was drawn into the recount effort by John Bonifaz, versary would do,” Stark wrote. “I’d meddle where it’s hard to STEIN a Massachusetts attorney who tried and failed to find because there’s little or no paper, e.g., PA, and/or where stage a recount in 2004, after George W. Bush narrowly won it would be written off to bad election administration, such Ohio. He was also upset by the 2016 election results, and had as FL has had historically.” spoken with Barbara Simons about voting “anomalies.” But he Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania soon emerged as didn’t know about the N­ ovember 13 phone call with Podesta, the prime targets. In falling to Trump, all three had defied nor was he invited to join the Slack channel. both the polls and their own electoral histories. Taken togeth- Still, Bonifaz had his own contacts. When a friend pointed er, they also included enough electoral votes to change the out to him that any candidate who could foot the bill was enti-

outcome, which made them worth attacking. tled to demand a recount in Michigan and Wisconsin—both of PHOTOGRAPH BY MARC MCANDREWS FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC

50 | NEW REPUBLIC INSIDE THE RECOUNT which were so close that their vote totals had yet to be officially on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as announced—Bonifaz went to work to recruit Stein, the Green many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000.” Party candidate. The narrative that Stein was “simply a puppet The Slack logs show that Halderman and other members for the Clinton campaign is completely false,” says Bonifaz, a of the A-Team believed no such thing. While there was some recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant for his legal work on speculation about possible anomalies in Wisconsin vote totals, behalf of voting rights. “I took the information that she could no one ever suggested that there was “persuasive evidence” do this to her.” of manipulation. From the start, the argument was only that On the same day that Simons and Halderman were on the there were worthwhile reasons to take a closer look. Weeks phone with Podesta, Bonifaz called Stein. He knew it would be later, Halderman remained irate. “I’m furious about it,” he better if Clinton led the recount, since her campaign had far more said. “I never would have said that.” resources, but he also knew Stein would be eager to get involved. The numbers, it turned out, came from Bonifaz. He admits Bonifaz suggested that the effort wouldn’t require much that he spoke to Sherman, but insists that he never mentioned from Stein. “You can take a minimalist role if you want,” she Halderman by name. “The question was presented to me as to recalls him saying. “If you want to just be the plaintiff of record, what data was being presented,” Bonifaz says. “That was one you could do that.” of the points I made, but I never attributed it to Alex.” “No,” Stein told him. “If I’m going to do it, I want to come But the damage was done. The message was clear: Computer out swinging and really fight on the issues that I think are really scientists have evidence that could save the world from Donald important. I’m not just going to be a name.” Trump! Minutes after Sherman’s piece was posted online, Bonifaz didn’t give up on Clinton. On November 16, he Halderman was besieged by calls and emails from journalists spoke with Jake Sullivan, a longtime Clinton adviser. The next around the world. He quickly stopped listening to them. Only day, he was included on another conference call that Simons weeks later, after the recount was over, did he discover that he arranged with Halderman, Podesta, Sullivan, and Marc Elias, had missed a voicemail from his congresswoman, Represen- the general counsel of the Democratic National Committee. tative Debbie Dingell, who had reached out to offer her help. By then it was clear that the campaign was not interested in “I would love to hear what you’re willing to share about what participating unless a recount would change the election results. you’ve found out,” she told him. “I’m so sorry I didn’t call her “They gave reasons why they saw obstacles,” Bonifaz says, “but I didn’t The A-Team had hit a dead end. Even if they find any of them convincing.” Hal- derman, too, was frustrated. “They convinced a state to conduct a recount, it would kept asking us what evidence we had that something had happened, cost millions—a sum far beyond their reach. and I kept saying the evidence is in the ballot box.” Two days later, on November 18, Stein’s name entered the back,” Halderman told me. Having a member of Congress on Slack discussion for the first time. his side might have helped. “*Oh boy.* I just had a phone call with an attorney who’s … The next day, Halderman published a response to Sherman now representing Jill Stein,” one of the scientists wrote. “He’s on Medium, entitled, “want to know if the election was keen to go to court and file election challenges in Stein’s name. hacked? look at the ballots.” He denied having knowledge This could well be the ‘public face’ of the lawsuits that every- that could turn the election, but stood by his assertion that the body’s been talking about, but it’s also something that’s going results should be verified. “The only way to know whether a to require some coordination.” There was never any debate cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the avail- about whether turning to Stein, a candidate who had received able physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in only one percent of the vote and was widely seen as a spoiler, critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania,” he was a good public face for the recount. wrote. “Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that Four days later, news of the recount effort broke inNew York evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next magazine. Relying on anonymous sources, reporter Gabriel several days, to petition for recounts.” Sherman published a story entitled, “experts urge clinton Stein, in her many interviews about the recount, largely stuck campaign to challenge election results in three swing to Halderman’s message, expressing concerns about security states.” Sherman named Bonifaz and Halderman as leaders vulnerabilities and talking about the importance of making sure of a recount effort that had “found persuasive evidence that that every vote was counted. But many observers, including her results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have own supporters, wondered why she was suddenly going to bat been manipulated or hacked.” According to Sherman, the group for Clinton, a candidate she had vilified during the campaign. believed that “Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in coun- Stein’s own running mate, Ajamu Baraka, told CNN that the ties that relied on electronic voting machines compared with recount effort made it look like Stein was “carrying the water counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based for the Democrats.”

MARCH 2017 | 51 The way Stein handled her fund-raising efforts didn’t help recount in Michigan after only three days, ruling Stein was matters. On November 23, she told supporters that she needed not an “aggrieved candidate” because she had no chance of to raise $2.5 million to cover the initial filing fees for recounts. winning. Pennsylvania was the last chance. After the initial goal was reached in less than 12 hours, the figure Both sides put their own experts on the stand. The state rose to $4.5 million. Then, on November 25, Stein boosted it called Michael Shamos, a computer scientist from Carnegie to $7 million, saying she planned to cover the total cost of the Mellon who has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from recounts, including legal fees. The rapid pace of donations ta- voting-machine companies to testify that election hacking is pered off as the Thanksgiving weekend came to a close, but on virtually impossible. “Shamos is the guy who is responsible November 30, Stein again increased the goal, to $9.5 million. as much as anybody in the tech community for all these lousy Each time, Stein cited unexpected expenses; eventually, systems that are used all over the place,” says Jefferson, the her team had lawyers deployed in all three states fighting legal scientist from Livermore. “So, of course, he had to be there in battles to defend the recounts. But the ever-increasing demand order to defend his past work.” for more money had the odd effect of uniting Republicans After first admitting that “a machine of any kind” could be and Democrats. Trump called it “the Green Party scam to fill hacked, given time and unfettered access, Shamos walked the up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts,” while co- court through a detailed explanation of why he believed that median Samantha Bee responded to a clip of Stein defending would have been essentially impossible to do in Pennsylvania. the recount with an earnest plea: “Oh, fuck off!” The A-Team, Even hacking a single machine, he testified, would take far too true to form, wondered whether the online counter that kept long to be practical: track of all the fund-raising pledges was working properly. “I very much hope that it’s not somehow falsified,” one scientist One has to break seals, do things to the machine and then wrote on the Slack channel. apply counterfeit seals back to the machine in such a way that nobody notices what is going on. And to do this to any significant number of machines requires an incredibly long late November, Halderman and the A-Team had become time. I did a calculation earlier this year and found that it BY completely dependent on Stein’s willingness to proceed, would take four months to do it for the DRE machines that and her surprising ability to raise money. There would be no are used in my county, Allegheny County. Nobody has un- recount without her. But in a sense, the scientists were also fettered access to the machine warehouse for four months using Stein for their own purposes. “What we’re doing right without being observed. now is clearly a hack,” Halderman told me at the time. “It’s a hack in the other sense of the word—a creative way to use the When Halderman took the stand, his testimony didn’t go existing rules to get some necessary thing done.” The effort, as well. “Am I correct,” the state’s attorney asked him, “that as as he saw it, was a “historic moment in American democracy. you sit here today, you have no evidence that any machine in For the first time since we’ve had computer voting machines, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was compromised in such we’re going to make sure they’re producing the right result in a way as to alter any vote?” a national election.” Over the next two weeks, the re- By raising the alarm when there was no sign of count battle shifted from the Slack channel to the courts, where the smoke, security activists may have made it harder Trump campaign and the states themselves were resisting efforts to to force recounts when they’re really needed. reexamine the outcome. The prima- ry legal issue was Stein’s standing: Since the recount wasn’t going to make her president, did she “That is indeed what the forensic examination I’m talking have the right to force a recount? “The law says nothing about about would seek to find,” Halderman answered. having to prove that you’re aggrieved in any way,” insisted Judge Paul Diamond, an appointee of President George W. Hayley Horowitz, Stein’s attorney. “The statutes presume that Bush, interjected. anyone who runs in an unfair election has suffered an injury.” “Is that a yes or a no?” he asked. On December 9, Halderman traveled to Philadelphia for “Yes,” Halderman replied, acknowledging both his lack of what turned out to be the most dramatic legal battle in the evidence and his view that a hack was, indeed, unlikely. recount fight. Stein had filed suit in federal court in Penn- When the state’s attorney concluded his questioning, the sylvania to allow a team of computer scientists to conduct a judge continued to cross-examine Halderman. “Doctor,” he forensic assessment of the state’s voting machines. By that pressed, “is there anything that you have testified to this af- point, a recount that had been authorized in Wisconsin, which ternoon, other than the result of the vote on November 8, would end up shifting a few hundred votes to Trump, was anything at all you have testified to today that you did not underway. A federal court, meanwhile, had shut down the know before November 8?”

52 | NEW REPUBLIC INSIDE THE RECOUNT

permitted to conduct a forensic examination of Pennsylvania’s machines, Bernhard declares himself “probably the most con- vinced person in the world that Donald Trump won Wisconsin.” Bonifaz and Halderman remain less certain. In early ­December, when President Barack Obama declared that he was confident that no voting machines had been hacked,­Bonifaz was incredulous. “How can he know that?” he growled. Later that month, during a presentation at a computer security convention in Germany, Halderman said that because the recounts weren’t completed, scientists can’t conclude that the 2016 election was hack-free. In the end, it’s not clear that anyone benefited from the recount. Trump gained a handful of votes in Wisconsin, and Clinton picked up a few in Michigan. Other than that, nothing of consequence was resolved. As countless investigations Ballot workers in Wisconsin, the only state to complete the recount. have shown—and recent events have confirmed—the threat of malicious hacking and machine error remains a very real Halderman’s answer was startling. “No,” he told Diamond. “I threat to our democratic process. If election results can’t don’t think so.” After spending $7 million to force hundreds of be trusted, then the legitimacy of the representative system county officials across three states to inspect millions of ballots, itself is called into question. Yet despite all the expense and recount advocates could not provide a single piece of evidence the drama and the partisan bickering over the recounts, that the election results had been manipulated or miscounted. Halderman and his colleagues failed to advance public un- Three days later, the judge dismissed Stein’s lawsuit and derstanding of the serious risks posed by electronic voting ended the recount. machines. Indeed, the argument could be made that by raising the alarm when there was no sign of smoke, advocates for election security may have made it harder to force recounts days before Christmas, Matt Bernhard, Halder- when they’re really needed. THREE man’s doctoral student, sat alone in an office at “People will be wondering whether all of this was neces- the University of Michigan, tapping on a computer. The semes- sary,” Halderman says. “I hope the outcome is positive policy ter had ended a week earlier, and the computer science building change—that people won’t go back to state capitals and make was dark and silent. But Bernhard was hard at work poring recounts harder to do.” In fact, the Michigan legislature did over the data from the recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan. just that during the recount fight, introducing a bill that would “It would be incredibly hypocritical to spend all this time significantly increase the costs of a recount sought by a candi- saying you need to do a recount because you need to check that date who lost by as much as Stein. The measure was dropped there was no fraud, and then not check the recount to make after the recount ended, but it’s likely that Republicans will sure there was no fraud,” he says. “That’s what most people use their dominance in state legislatures to make it harder to did. They said, ‘Well, we did the recount, the results were the scrutinize the outcome of questionable elections. same, let’s go home.’ That’s not the point.” “I don’t think the whole process was particularly productive,” Unfortunately, the data doesn’t make the point of the re- says Michael Slaby, who served as chief technology officer for count any clearer. The Michigan data set is so incomplete—just Obama’s presidential campaigns. “It cost millions of dollars, 40 percent of the state’s 4.8 million votes were recounted be- and President Trump ended up with more votes in Wisconsin. fore the process was halted—that it provides little insight one That doesn’t seem like a good result.” way or the other. In Wisconsin, the only state that finished the For his part, Halderman remains baffled by such reasoning. process, there was no evidence to indicate that anyone stole To him, proving that the process worked is just as valuable the election. The hand recount did find that three percent of the as showing that it erred. As a scientist, he believes that the 13,800 ballots scanned using an Optech III-P Eagle machine democratic experiment must yield verifiable results if it is to were miscounted. That’s less than 400 votes changed—but be accepted as valid. What matters isn’t proving that there was the errors followed no apparent pattern, and did not favor wrongdoing in any given election. What matters is subjecting either Trump or Clinton. “That indicates that these are just our system of elections to constant and careful scrutiny, to crappy voting machines and we shouldn’t be using them,” ensure that our voting technology stays one step ahead of Bernhard says. those who seek to disrupt it. Bernhard insists that he is comforted by these results. The “The machinery of democracy should be answering the country’s election system, he concludes, produced a true and questions we’ve asked,” Halderman says. “We are further from accurate reflection of the people’s will. While there is no way to a safe system than I thought we were before the election. That

ANDY MANIS/GETTY ANDY know what security experts might have found if they had been bothers me. That’s not the way democracy should work.” a

MARCH 2017 | 53 REVIEW

ESSAY

A View to a Kill By focusing on high-definition thrills, nature documentaries obscure more than they reveal.

BY COLIN DICKEY

WHAT IS A LEMMING, exactly? Most of us, I’m guessing, could grip. After a series of fantastic leaps, still dodging a tangle of name few of its basic biological attributes. (It’s a rodent weighing snakes, the iguana finally makes it to safety. one to four ounces and measuring three to six inches in length “He made it!” DeGeneres exulted. “That little baby iguana that lives in the Arctic.) The primary thing we think we know got away!” The audience cheered. Then DeGeneres made the about lemmings—that they throw themselves off cliffs in inex- moral of the story explicit for her viewers, who found them- plicable mass suicides—is actually false. This myth originally selves living, suddenly, in Donald Trump’s America. “And that’s arose as a folk explanation for the wide variances in lemming what we’re gonna do,” she assured everyone. “No matter what populations from year to year, and was cemented by White your snake is, there is hope for your little iguana.” Wilderness, a nature film produced by Walt Disney that won the The clip was part of a promotion for Planet Earth II, which Academy Award for best documentary in 1958. In one sequence, has its U.S. premiere this month on BBC America. It’s the lemmings are shown leaping off a cliff into the Arctic Ocean, much-anticipated sequel to Planet Earth, the groundbreaking destined to drown. “They’ve become victims of an obsession,” BBC documentary from 2006 whose calming narration by David intones the narrator. In reality, the lemmings were flown to Attenborough and vivid, high-definition sequences of migrating Alberta by the film’s producers and herded off the cliff. birds, shark attacks, swimming elephants, bat-catching snakes, The popular conception of a lemming blindly rushing to and polar bear hunts became a favorite of stoners everywhere. its death does a poor job of describing the animal’s nature, Five years in the making, Planet Earth was produced and but an excellent job of describing human nature—lemmings released before climate change became Oscar-winning enter- has entered the vernacular to denote any group of unthink- tainment. The sequel, by contrast, was prepared after David ing followers hastening their own demise. To paraphrase Cameron rode to victory as prime minister in part by arguing Voltaire’s chestnut on God, since no animal that regularly that global warming is “one of the biggest threats facing the commits mass suicide exists, it was necessary to invent one. world.” Planned for release ten years after the original series, We turn to nature documentaries not to understand nature, Planet Earth II was supposed to arrive, triumphant, as a rising but to see our own behavior reflected back at us. The natural tide against the rising tides of climate change. world—wild, chaotic, mutable—can be endlessly recut to tell Instead, the nature documentary is being released at a mo- whatever story we need to tell ourselves. ment when the future of nature itself seems unbearably bleak. Last November, two days after the election, Ellen DeGeneres Had Brexit been defeated last summer, and had Hillary Clinton played a clip for her viewers that had recently gone viral on been elected in November, Attenborough’s soothing voice the internet: A group of baby marine iguanas in the Galápagos would have joined an empowered chorus of sane environmental make their way from the sand to the safety of the rocks, but stewards, reminding us of our shared accomplishments and are suddenly beset on all sides by racer snakes. As the iguanas shared commitments. Instead, one of Prime Minister Theresa are picked off and devoured, one sprints for cover, only to run May’s first post-Brexit acts was to abolish the Department into an ambush. Then, just as a snake coils around its body, the iguana miraculously breaks free, squirming out of the death ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS BUZELLI

54 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

MARCH 2017 | 55 REVIEW for Energy and Climate Change, and Donald Trump named a though this is how many animals spend most of their time. climate change denier to head the Environmental Protection Instead, creatures in the wild are filmed hunting or being hunt- Agency. Attenborough’s voice now no longer soothes, but rather ed, playing or being played. Wild Kingdom, Mutual of Omaha’s intones from the wilderness as an admonishing Cassandra. wildly successful TV series that premiered in 1963 and ran for “Our planet is still full of wonders,” Attenborough recites in 25 years, showcased breathtaking chases and exotic animals the closing to the original series. “As we explore them, so we gain engaged in life-or-death struggles. (The show’s sponsor, a not only understanding, but power. We can now destroy or we life insurance company, may have had a perverse incentive in can cherish. The choice is ours.” Unfortunately, Planet Earth II featuring these memento mori of the animal world.) offers no such choice. Instead, the documentary’s emphasis The second tactic nature documentarians employ is to use on advances in film technology inadvertently reinforces the animals as metaphors for human behavior. In Disney’s True- rhetoric of climate change deniers: that nature is immutable, Life Adventure documentaries, produced between 1948 and that what we see is what we get. It brings the natural world into 1960, nature is unthreatening and often silly: a woodcock brilliant focus but leaves the biggest threat to that world—homo dances to a samba in Nature’s Half Acre, seal cows come ashore sapiens—out of the picture almost entirely. The stories it tells in Seal Island to strains of “Here Comes the Bride.” (This is are ancient and unbroken; nature is portrayed in conflict only the same series in which the lemmings took their awkward, with itself. The most dangerous and destructive animal on semi-comical dives.) Other filmmakers turned to the natu- the planet is left, for the most part, unseen and undisturbed, ral world for more overt political commentary. The World content to glide silently over the landscape, entertained by our War II–era film High Over the Borders used migratory bird god’s-eye view. patterns to forge a sense of international unity in the Western hemisphere. Nazi Germany, meanwhile, depicted insects for THE MOVING IMAGE itself was born from our need to document propaganda purposes in The Bee Colony, in which the narrator nature—to see, at last, the invisible world all around us. When employs military jargon while highlighting the importance Eadweard Muybridge stumbled into creating the motion picture of every worker doing its allotted role without question or in 1878, he was trying to settle a bet about an animal: Does a dissent. Conversely, the 1950s American TV show Adventure horse gallop with all four feet off the ground? To answer the aligned bees with communism: According to the film’s narra- question, Muybridge devised his series of successive cameras, tion, the footage was actually produced by Russian scientists, each attached to a trip wire. He captured a flip-book of motion because when “Russian scientists think of bees, they think of that saw the previously unseeable: a horse in mid-air, all four themselves.” In 2005, when March of the Penguins became the legs hovering above the ground. second-highest-grossing documentary in history, conservative It didn’t take long for this new art form to stumble upon viewers saw the tale of monogamous, family-oriented emperor another truth: When it comes to attracting viewers, nature itself penguins shielding their young against harsh Antarctic blasts isn’t enough. In 1926, William Douglas Burden traveled to the as a thrilling vindication of the Christian right in the natural island of Komodo to document a newly discovered giant reptile. world. (Emperor penguins, in fact, are only monogamous for The documentary he produced, featuring some of the first images a season, and sometimes kidnap the eggs of others.) of the Komodo dragon, failed to secure distribution because, The third tactic of nature documentaries, beginning in the 1960s, was overtly political: As the natural world depicted on-screen became increasingly threatened, the documentary Planet Earth’s emphasis on new became a tool of the environmental movement, a means to technology reinforces the rhetoric focus on the importance of human stewardship. The diver and explorer Jacques Cousteau became the face of that stewardship of climate change deniers: that for nearly three decades with shows like The Undersea World nature is immutable. of Jacques Cousteau, which brought viewers face to face with seldom-seen creatures like octopuses, sharks, and whales, as well as the pollution that threatened their habitat. The success of the original Planet Earth stemmed from its ability to synthesize all three of these strands into one seamless in the words of one producer, it was “without sufficient dramat- product. Produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit—it was the ic or adventure interest.” A few years later, Burden’s friend—the most expensive nature documentary ever made, at $25 million, aviator, explorer, and director Merian Cooper—fictionalized and the first to be filmed in high-definition—the series combined his story, this time with an ape instead of a lizard. The result, entertaining animals, thinly veiled metaphors for human be- King Kong, offered stark proof that animal fiction is often better havior, and a gentle environmental theme. The original eleven entertainment than animal fact. episodes aired in 2006 in two parts: five in the spring (“From Since Burden’s failure, nature documentarians have more Pole to Pole,” “Mountains,” “Freshwater,” “Caves,” “Deserts”) and or less stuck to three tried-and-true tactics. First, they cut the another six in the fall (“Ice Worlds,” “Great Plains,” “Jungles,” boring parts: Rarely does one see an animal sitting or sleeping, “Shallow Seas,” “Seasonal Forests,” “Ocean Deep”).

56 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

A cameraman with a gyro-stabilized rig films a swarm of locusts in Madagascar. Despite its advanced technology, Planet Earth II feels frozen in time.

In between these two halves, however, the entire landscape tourism. About the snake-evading baby iguanas, Attenborough of environmental documentaries changed dramatically. In the tells us that “when the hatchlings emerge, they’re vulnerable,” summer of 2006, An Inconvenient Truth was released in the- without mentioning that the species as a whole is also classified aters and went on to become one of the top-grossing docu- as “vulnerable”—nor that their antagonists, the Galápagos racer mentaries of all time, and won the Academy Award that year. snakes, are even more threatened, considered “endangered” by Focusing not on visual beauty but on a wonky, –­hosted the Galápagos Conservation Trust. To Ellen DeGeneres and her slideshow—its most dramatic flourish was the use of a cherry audience, the baby iguanas may seem like innocent victims, but

picker to point out the dramatic rise in CO2 emissions—it it is the vilified snakes whose survival is more at risk. ushered in a new age of uncompromisingly didactic nature It’s difficult to feel too deeply for the iguanas, however, documentaries: Gasland, Blackfish, The Cove, Chasing Ice. These for as soon as they have scampered to safety, Planet Earth II films focused not just on the natural world but on the direct moves on to the next impossibly lush and exotic location. By consequences of human action on that world, offering stark switching rapidly from scene to scene, the series obscures the depictions of animal cruelty, habitat destruction, and ecolog- individual life cycles of the creatures it showcases; they become ical disaster. It was too late for Planet Earth to respond, but a nothing more than passive participants in larger geographical year later, footage from the series was recut for the feature-­ concerns: islands, mountains, rivers. Attenborough’s narration length documentary Earth, which offered a more environmen- itself is minimal and riven with clichés—the Komodo dragon’s talist agenda than that of the original series—and ended up teeth, we’re told, are “sharp as steak knives.” The series can grossing almost twice as much as An Inconvenient Truth. be watched without sound to little detriment. The episodes specialize in depicting the extreme lengths THE YEARS SINCE have only brought more dread and uncertainty to which many animals must go to acquire food or to keep about the environment—yet Planet Earth II seems strangely from becoming food: hunting prey up vertical cliffs, migrating frozen in time. The series is almost entirely free of an environ- over Himalayan peaks, running for their lives. Sometimes the mental perspective, failing to inform its audience that many of camera sides with the predator, sometimes with the prey, but its showcased species are threatened or endangered. The first it always sides with the desperate. The net effect is to present episode opens with the charismatic and languid pygmy three- a natural landscape in which individuals are under constant toed sloth; we are told that it lives on the Isla Escudo off the threat, but the ecosystem as a whole is stable. Animals are in

ED CHARLES, COURTESY OF BBC AMERICA coast of Panama, but not that it’s critically endangered due to danger, but not endangered.

MARCH 2017 | 57 REVIEW

We never form a full picture of any of the various species wider world. For the filmmakers, the natural world is a sublime on display in Planet Earth II; by the series end, the only thing landscape of awe and terror that offers the pure enjoyment of we have a clear understanding of is its true star: the camera front-row seats to a previously unseen universe. Until the final itself. Because animals inhabit a realm that is not only beyond episode, “Cities,” hardly any humans appear in the series at our understanding, but beyond our perception, the series all, because our presence would break the spell; we might as serves as a testing ground for innovative new developments well be witnessing some entirely alien planet. in film technology. As a result, Planet Earth II comes off as the This extreme aestheticization of nature represents a par- world’s most expensive film loop for selling high-definition ticularly dangerous stance in our present moment. Donald televisions at Best Buy: The camera is dunked underwater, lashed to high-flying drones, and strapped to the DJI Ronin, a three-axis gimbal stabilizing unit that allows for long, steady In Planet Earth II, individuals are tracking shots. The animals are not so much the subject of the under threat, but the ecosystem camera as its measure. In a sense, the Planet Earth series pulls off a marvelous as a whole is stable. Animals are in trick: It allows us to see a world under almost constant threat danger, but not endangered. of extinction without ham-handedly calling our attention to conservation issues. By chronicling in minute detail a world that could fall apart at the slightest disturbance, the series aims to passively foster an ethos of stewardship among its viewers without calling overt attention to it. In identifying with the Trump has chosen Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. As attorney baby iguanas over their snake predators, we’re relieved of any general of Oklahoma, Pruitt worked tirelessly to protect the obligation to understand the greater ecological complexities oil and gas lobby, sued the EPA, and dismissed the debate of nature. In this telling, the baby iguana is not threatened by over climate change as “far from settled.” Trump’s pick for us, it is us—and, as with the iguana, our resilience ultimately energy secretary, Rick Perry, wants to dismantle the entire overcomes all odds, fending off the dangers and horrors of the agency, along with its regulation of the fossil fuel industry.

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When ­Attenborough recorded his opening monologue for Planet Earth II, intoning that “never have those wildernesses been as fragile and as precious as they are today,” he surely had no idea how ominously his words would ring by the time Love Poems in the Time the episode aired. of Climate Change Nor does Attenborough seem to understand how ill-suited­ BY CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ his chosen métier is to face these new disasters. Trump’s cab- inet picks spell potential doom for any number of species, but the animals most threatened probably won’t include the Sonnet XVII charismatic creatures favored by Planet Earth. The American I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals, diamonds, pika—a small cousin of the rabbit that lives high in the west- or reserves of crude oil that propagate war: ern mountain ranges of the United States—is one of the first I love you as one loves most vulnerable things, animals that will likely succumb to climate change, but it has urgently, between the habitat and its loss. little of the grandeur of the snow leopard or the polar bear. The nature documentary has been conditioned for decades I love you as the seed that doesn’t sprout but carries to focus on the same stock setups—the drama of migration, the heritage of our roots, secured, within a vault, the thrill of the hunt—but extinction is far more difficult to and thanks to your love the organic taste that ripens photograph, requiring narratives that forgo the usual struggle from the fruit lives sweetly on my tongue. of life and death for storytelling that lays bare the existential shift into nothingness. I love you without knowing how, or when, the world will end— I love you naturally without pesticides or pills— Don’t expect this from Planet Earth II, which ends in the I love you like this because we won’t survive any other way, British version with Attenborough himself atop a London sky- except in this form in which humans and nature are kin, scraper, making the same decades-old plea for empathy with so close that your emissions of carbon are mine, the natural world. “Looking down on this great metropolis,” he so close that your sea rises with my heat. tells us, “the ingenuity with which we continue to reshape the surface of our planet is very striking. But it’s also sobering. It reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world. Yet it’s on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world depend.” In the world of Planet Earth, do humanity and the natural world Sonnet XII actually depend on each other? As we are largely absent from Global woman, waxy apple, record heat, the series, it’s hard to know for sure; Attenborough relies, as thick smell of algae, burnt peat and sunset, always, on a belief that mere exposure will produce empathy; what rich nitrogen opens between your native trees? a risky gambit at best. What fossil fuels does a man tap with his drill? And one likely to be unsuccessful. Filmmaker and scholar Derek Bousé, who attempted to catalog the impact of wildlife Loving is a migration with butterflies and refugees, films on public policy and the environment, concluded in his with overcrowded boats and no milkweed: 2000 study, Wildlife Films, that there is a “great deal of op- loving is a clash of petro-states, and two bodies detonated by a single drone strike. timistic presumption but a dearth of real evidence about the power of wildlife films to ‘save’ nature.” Indeed, he suggests, Kiss by kiss I walk across your scarred landscape, nature documentaries tend to “ratify and legitimize status your border walls, your dam, your reservations, quo values,” and he points out that the golden age of wildlife until our little extinctions transform into peak oil documentaries, from the 1960s onward, coincided with in- creasing rates of extinction and habitat destruction—hardly and push through the narrow pipelines of our veins, an indication of their success at fostering conservation. until we bloom wide, like water hyacinth, until we are The filmmakers of Planet Earth II may know this already. and we are more than a fracture in geologic time. Perhaps they have already given up on conservation; the very name of the series sounds like a hopeful exoplanet waiting in the wings. With its emphasis on camera work over education, Craig Santos Perez is the author of FROM UNINCORPORATED the series comes across more like a desperate cataloging of TERRITORY [GUMA’] (Omnidawn, 2014). soon-to-be-extinct animals than a well-intentioned effort to save the vanishing world it seeks to document. What Plan- et Earth offers us, in the end, is less a documentary than a high-definition menagerie: a lush and stunning collection of final glimpses and last looks.a

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BOOKS youth experienced between “large, passionate, but imprecise longings” and the “slow, steady shrinking of horizons.” The European bildungsroman addressed what has become a world- wide situation in our time. Mishra’s novel went on to diagnose the consequences of such a mismatch. After the students witness some rioting on campus, the friend explains with “a new vehemence” that the perpetrators were mainly “young men with nothing to do, nowhere to go, with no future, no prospects, nothing, nothing at all.” The bookish young man is clearly Mishra in another guise, down to their common birth year and education. His friend, who is more familiar not simply with politics but also with criminality and violence, is also based on a real person; they met the year Mishra moved from Allahabad to Benares and fell in love himself with the literary criticism of Edmund Wilson. Mishra has not published another novel since. But in his admirable career writing on politics, he closely identifies with the lesson of his erstwhile friend (who later became a contract killer): If people are exposed to grandeur and then their horizons shrink, the results can prove dangerous. While Mishra long ago recognized the uses of Western thought in understanding the causes of global rage, in his new book, Age of Anger, he turns to intellectual history to counter civilizational or theological explanations for that rage in its more recent forms. After September 11, 2001, a crew of special- ists arose to designate Islam the cause of hatred and violence; their essential goal was to immunize our own way of life from Look Back in Anger blame and scrutiny. Such analysts could never anticipate how The origins of today’s global upheavals their own states and cultures gave rise to a broader discontent— including in Europe and the United States. After votes for Brexit lie in Western history. and Donald Trump, it turns out it was not just “radicalized” Muslim youths who resented elites and resorted to violence BY SAMUEL MOYN as a means of revenge. Instead, Mishra argues that the European past was a dry run for our global present. In the German and Russian populists IN HIS YOUTHFUL first book, an enthusiastically received and terrorists of the nineteenth century, Mishra finds avatars novel called The Romantics (2000), Pankaj Mishra portrays of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the Muslim young men from provincial India who immerse themselves radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. In the “Frenchmen who in modern intellectual history. Like many students from the bombed music halls, cafés, and the Paris stock exchange” in provinces before him, Mishra’s main character seeks his place the 1880s and ’90s, he sees forerunners of today’s “English largely through reading. But unlike those earlier generations, and Chinese nationalists, Somali pirates, human traffickers, and he explores who to become not just in his new city, but in anonymous cyber-hackers.” Understanding political and eco- globalized modernity. nomic inequality is vital to understanding these convulsions; Mishra’s hero reads Gustave Flaubert’s coming-of-age novel, but we also have to examine how the ideals we live with—of Sentimental Education, and Edmund Wilson’s interpretation capitalism and liberalism—have long produced unbearable of it as a commentary on exclusion and its consequences. disillusionment. To grasp the fear and desire behind violent He shares his reading with a more politically aware friend, reaction, Mishra contends, we need not just and almost embarrassed by his own bookishness. But when they Thomas Piketty, but also analysts of the psyche and spirit. meet again years later, it turns out that his friend has taken Wilson’s essay very seriously. For in nineteenth-century Eu- AGE OF ANGER traces today’s discontent back to the beginning rope and its struggles, he discovered an environment much of modernity, when Europe underwent commercial and later like his own. Although a new world of moral and material industrial revolutions, toppled its aristocratic elites and some- possibilities seemed to open up before the young men of his times kings, and trumpeted freedom and equality, even as it generation, now, as then, only a few would actually succeed in their strivings. Flaubert captured the mismatch that a modern ILLUSTRATION BY PETER HORVATH

60 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW redoubled the prestige of luxury and the lure of hierarchy. It from industrial modernity or even political unity—had failed was the start of the process of building a world of plenty and to keep pace with the power and wealth that made Britain self-transformation, but also of distinction and envy. Philos- and France so opulent. Educated young Germans shared a ophers of the eighteenth century diagnosed the likely outcome sense of being belated, peripheral, and weak. They looked to of this divide; the nineteenth century experienced that out- France as “the home of the worldly, elegant, and sensuous come, in furious, violent responses to it. philosopher, who spoke a language of unparalleled clarity Mishra starts with a set piece on Voltaire and Jean-Jacques and precision.” Yet when they arrived there, they perceived Rousseau, who offer us two opposing views of modernity and the same shallowness that Rousseau had seen before them. how to think about its shortcomings. Voltaire, the mainstream In 1769, the incisive philosopher J.G. Herder set out from rationalist, embraced commerce and progress; he saw little the Baltic port of Riga to Paris, hoping to become gallicized. daylight between the celebration of the one and the inevitability He left the next year, acutely disappointed, and convinced of of the other. He endorsed individual freedom and pluralistic the need to formulate a sturdy alternative to what he saw as tolerance up to a point. Compared to the democratic mob, hollow cosmopolitanism. hereditary rulers—especially if well tutored by freethinkers Building on Rousseau, German poets and philosophers such like Voltaire himself—were less likely to become oppressive. as Herder and Friedrich Schiller introduced a profound diagno- He held a low opinion of Rousseau, the rebellious son of a sis of their own alienation. A feeling of being divided from the Genevan watchmaker. Rousseau returned the compliment, world, and even from one’s very self—as well as from one’s own writing to Voltaire in 1760, “I hate you.” work, as their follower Karl Marx added—was the worst thing Rousseau, on the other hand, thought modernity was bring- about modern consciousness. Along with J.G. Fichte, Herder ing about not progress but tragedy. Modern men and women proposed a nationalist cure for this sense of estrangement. learned to envy the magnificence of the winners and to define Herder extolled the popular genius of German Kultur, as well their ends in a triangular process of assessing what others as the ineffability of particular cultures across the board. It was valued first. In hisDiscourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rous- the opposite of the French idea of civilisation. Instead of seek- seau depicted how enraging it is to subordinate oneself to the ing justification for their culture in progress and the promise desires of others, in a state of exclusion from Voltaire’s opulent of the future, Germans looked to the distant past to confirm civilization. Because Rousseau had experienced the life of a social climber himself, he understood “the many uprooted men” who failed to “adapt themselves to a stable life in society,” and Out of the gap between expected began to see that failure as the product of a larger “injustice liberation and experienced limits, against the human race.” Enslaved by manufactured desires, most Europeans experienced merely the frustration of never fury boils. seeing them realized. Commercial modernity imprisoned the rich as much as the poor in a syndrome of “envy, fascination, revulsion, and rejection.” It is Voltaire’s vision of modernity, however, that has been the more seductive one throughout much of history. His theory fueled the first age of before World War I, and their sense of national greatness, elevating folklore and myths has gained currency again in the enthusiasm for markets that to the pinnacle of high art. Whereas civilisation was centered burgeoned after the end of the . “As Louis Vuitton on commerce, luxury, and urbanity, Kultur infused local ties opened in Borneo,” Mishra observes sarcastically, “it seemed and traditions with fervent spirituality, and idealized the Volk. only a matter of time before the love of luxury was followed In the nineteenth century, such ideas drove German unifi- by the rule of law, the enhanced use of critical reason, and cation and national awakenings across Europe, and found their the expansion of individual freedom.” But in part because the nadir in Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the twentieth century. Not results benefit only a few, in part because modernity is a cage only did nationalism give the world’s peasantries an outlet for for everyone, Rousseau’s heirs await the moment to strike. their rage, but it now tempts those countries once at the apex of civilization toward populism. The Brexit vote and Trump’s THE QUESTION IS: What are those left behind to do with their unexpected win illustrate that when stagnation sets in at the frustration? They can convert it, as Rousseau did, into insight center, anger can drive nationalist backlash. A nostalgia for into the limits of modernity, even for those who win the game. “little England” takes revenge on cosmopolitan and diverse Or, sensing that there will be no chance of winning for all, London, while calls to “make America great again” imply xeno- especially as the competition goes global, they can wreak phobic and militaristic policies. Even Voltaire’s France is now a vengeance on the system. battleground in liberalism’s fight for survival against explosive Mishra sees an early example of such revenge in the German nationalist resentment. Romantics, whom he calls “the first angry young nationalists.” Mishra also lavishes attention on Russia, the first global By the start of the nineteenth century, Germany—decades away hinterland where the Enlightenment’s liberatory wave crashed

MARCH 2017 | 61 REVIEW against the wall of a massive peasantry—sparking the invention their classes but missed the incandescent fire and penetrating of nihilism and terrorism. Since the Enlightenment, Russia’s insight in canonical texts. Yet his narrative of the outcasts of ruling class had debated whether to westernize, and foreign modernity has been told before, at different times and with kibitzers were divided over whether and how to extend civ- different emphases, to explain earlier episodes of revolt and ilization to Russia’s feudal society of aristocrats and serfs. revolution: He is not the first to locate the origins of fascism (While Rousseau doubted it made sense to “tutor” Russia, in nineteenth-century German malcontents, and it was once Voltaire advised Empress Catherine the Great, and she bought popular to tag Rousseau for paving the way for communism his library after he died, hoping it would help.) But as the and the student movement. nineteenth century dragged on, autocratic rule did not bring Nor is Mishra ready to offer solutions. Though he looks at forth progress fast enough to forestall its critics. the bleak record of commercial modernity in propagating itself When you start so far behind, the very attempt to catch up across the world and marks its self-defeating expansion, he breeds self-hatred. Your “conscience murmurs,” Fyodor Dos- holds out no defined alternative. It is unclear whether Mishra toevsky lamented, that you are “a hollow man,” condemned in feels the chief flaw lies in modernity’s failures—its false promise advance to a “state of insatiable, bilious malice.” But whereas to liberate everyone—or in its successes, and the devastation Dostoevsky only wrote about this discontent, other Russians that has accompanied them. took the route of terroristic deeds. The activist and thinker Of course, true freedom and equality beckon, which is why Mikhail Bakunin argued for the need to bring the system down Mishra shows an occasional soft spot for lone wolves—including in one swift stroke; he believed that “heroic acts” could “trans- Timothy McVeigh—who hope a spectacular blow will shatter form the world from an authoritarian cage into an arcadia of the glass. But ultimately he does not hold up such anarchists as human freedom.” Battling against Marx for intellectual lead- models. Indeed, even though they unceremoniously dismiss the ership of Europe’s working classes, Bakunin spawned a coun- “gaudy cult of progress,” it seems to Mishra nonetheless that tercultural tradition of “lethal individualism,” whereby vivid “the men trying to radicalize the liberal principle of freedom destruction, instead of patient creation, would serve to define and autonomy, of individual power and agency, seem more a self. His fellow critics of capitalism and empire were trans- rootless and desperate than before.” In a world that can no national. They bombed cities and assassinated political leaders longer count on progress, and that fears its consequences for across the Atlantic, inaugurating “the first phase of global the planet, Mishra praises Pope Francis’s exemplary moral jihad,” and anticipating the long-distance networks of lone stances on behalf of the environment and the poor—if only wolves and terrorist cells of today. because no one else is offering hope. Yet he also acknowledges “Large parts of Asia and Africa,” Mishra concludes, “are there is no going back to a premodern metaphysics or economy, now plunging deeper” into their own “fateful experience of when ambition has come to seem everyone’s birthright, first that modernity.” They are told they live on a flat earth, but find in Europe, later everywhere. it impossible to claw their way forward on what feels like a If intellectual history matters in this parlous situation, then vertical cliff of hierarchy. Westernization destroyed existing getting Rousseau right does, too. Interpreting him, as Mishra beliefs and institutions in these countries, promoting instead does, as nostalgic for ancient liberty or protective of interior a culture of individual freedoms and rights. But, as Mishra freedom in the face of the modern catastrophe will ultimately points out, “Most newly created ‘individuals’ toil within poorly not work. After all, Rousseau also rejected the viability of re- imagined social and political communities and/or states with viving the Sparta he sometimes idealized. For that reason, he weakening sovereignty,” narrowing the opportunities for thought carefully about how to bring about free communities personal flourishing. Western modernity of equals in our economic and political circumstances. opens up fault lines that “run through And he also wrote The Social Contract, a text Mishra barely human souls as well as nations and so- addresses. After reading The Social Contract’s commitment to cieties undergoing massive change.” Out modern freedom and equality, a fellow Enlightenment think- of the gap between expected liberation er, Immanuel Kant, early saw that Rousseau’s main impulses and experienced limits, fury boils. between a lamentation for modernity and an emancipatory program for it have to be reconciled at all costs. There is no A SELF-PROCLAIMED HISTORY of the way to sever Rousseau’s critique of painful exclusion and “glit- present, Age of Anger also feels like a tering misery”—now, as Mishra shows, applicable across the blast from the past. In its literacy and world and into its smallest byways—from a political attempt literariness, it has the feel of Edmund to answer it. Wilson’s extraordinary dramas of modern “Rousseau,” Kant remarked, “was not far wrong in prefer- AGE OF ANGER: A HISTORY OF THE ideas—books like To the Finland Station— ring the state of savages—so long, that is, as the last stage to PRESENT but with a different endpoint and a more which the human race must climb is not attained.” Starting BY PANKAJ MISHRA global canvas. Mishra reads like a brilliant from his remote corner in the Benares library reading Edmund Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp., $27.00 autodidact, putting to shame the many Wilson, no one has discerned better than Mishra just how far students who dutifully did the reading for we still are from the top. a

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BOOKS Over the past century, Rorschach would have seen his inkblots morph from an obscure therapeutic instrument into a nearly universal cultural meme, at once a familiar touchstone for art, music, film, and fashion, and a controversial test for assessing job applicants and prosecuting criminal defendants. Perhaps he would have wondered why his inkblots, once re- served for the assessment of patients with serious mental illnesses, should have emerged as the preeminent metaphor for the relativity of all acts of perception and the flexibility of all personalities. “I am like a Rorschach test,” Barack Obama proclaimed in a 2008 interview. “Even if people find me dis- appointing ultimately, they might gain something.” “I tell people that Donald Trump is a Rorschach test,” echoed , Trump’s son-in-law, last year. “People see in him what they want to see.”

DAMION SEARLS TRACES the long arc of Rorschach’s influ- ence in his scrupulously researched new book, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing. Equal parts biography and cultural history, The Inkblots tra- verses Rorschach’s short and undramatic life in Switzerland, Russia, and Germany, and his inkblots’ far longer and more interesting afterlife in the United States, where they came to play a crucial role in postwar organizational psychology. It was impossible for Rorschach to know, or even to dream, that his blots would play the outsize role that they did in the modern cultural imagination. When he first attempted to publish The Eye of the test in 1918, he encountered a staggering series of obstacles: money (the publishers he approached wanted him to pay to the Beholder reproduce the blots), a wartime paper shortage, and skeptical How Rorschach’s inkblots turned colleagues. When the blots finally appeared in Rorschach’s book, Psychodiagnostics, in 1921, they were rejected by German personality testing into an art. academic psychologists as crude and insufficiently theorized. Shortly thereafter, at the height of his professional uncertainty, BY MERVE EMRE Rorschach died. The inkblots would have died with him, were it not for the child psychologist David Mordecai Levy, who, in 1923, trans- JUST AFTER APRIL Fools’ Day in 1922, Hermann Rorschach, a lated Psychodiagnostics into English and taught the first U.S. psychologist who used a collection of symmetrical inkblots to seminar on the Rorschach. Gradually at first, and then with a treat patients with manic depression and schizophrenia, died rapidity that shocked the psychiatric community, Levy’s stu- of appendicitis in Herisau, Switzerland, at the age of 37. Had he dents and colleagues adopted Rorschach’s inkblots for test- lived, he would have been 40 when his inkblots made landfall ing the psyches of patients, college students, artists, army in the United States in 1925; 55 when they emerged as a helpful officers, and the “strange and mysterious” people of far-flung tool for profiling college applicants; 62 when the Pentagon used African and Asian nations. It was not long before everyone them to fashion a line of tropical shorts for World War II veterans; knew, more or less, the Rorschach protocol: A psychologist and 99 when Andy Warhol poured paint onto a canvas in 1984, would quietly pass her subject Rorschach’s inkblots, one at a folded it in half, and opened it to reveal his first inkblot-inspired time; first the five black-and-white cards, then two with large painting. Rorschach would have been 121—unlikely, but not splotches of red, and finally three multicolored ones. “Tell me impossible—when Gnarls Barkley released his 2006 music what you see,” she would say, and wait for an answer. video for “Crazy,” which featured a series of liquefied inkblots What makes Rorschach’s test so intriguing is that, unlike that morphed into threatening or reassuring shapes, depending questionnaires and other language-based approaches to on one’s perspective. And he most certainly would have been personality assessment, the inkblots present the test subject dead by 2016, when the film Arrival imagined a world in which with a visual task. The images, Searls explains, are designed aliens could communicate with humans by means of a visual to get “around your defenses and conscious strategies of

ORLANDO /THREE LIONS/GETTY /THREE ORLANDO language written in a mysterious, inky pattern. self-presentation”—to clear a direct path from perception to

MARCH 2017 | 63 REVIEW the expression of personality. Upon seeing the blots for the first time, many people gasp. Others look away, ashamed. Some stammer secrets they have long repressed. For Searls, the blots are not only a helpful pseudoscientific instrument, they are also a testament to the power of the aesthetic in the Romantic sense of the word: a state and study of heightened perception, one that exists somewhere in between feeling and cognition. Searls places the Rorschach test and its creator in the cross- hairs of art and science, impressionism and empiricism, ob- jectivity and subjectivity. Its language of interpretation is essentially a painterly language: The most important features of one’s response to the inkblots are Form (F), Movement (M), and Color (C). Form refers to the shape the test subject sees: a bat, a bear, two women standing back-to-back eating turtle soup. Movement registers how much motion the client ascribes to these forms. The more Movement suggested in the answer—the bat shrieking, the bear dancing, the women lifting the spoons to their lips—the greater a person’s “psychic inner life,” Rorschach claimed. Color measures a test subject’s The Rorschach test’s ten inkblots, five in black-and-white and five in reaction to the sudden appearance of red, blue, and green in color, are designed to reveal conscious strategies of self-presentation. the last five blots. Subjects whom Rorschach considered ex- aggeratedly emotional—hysterics, neurotics, artists—tended Searls writes. The point was neither disordered inspiration (as to react more strongly to the colors. Some even experienced it was for Binet) nor spiritual connection (as it was for Kerner), “color shock,” a near-catatonic state. The science of the Ror- but technical perfection. There could be no trace of the artist’s schach, to the extent that one can refer to it as a science, is a hand in the thickness of the brushstrokes or the shading of the science of artistic response as the key to personality. ink; nothing to rouse suspicion among Rorschach’s paranoid To achieve their desired responses, the blots themselves had patients that the inkblot had been created to elicit a particular to function like works of art—an unusual ask for a psycholog- response from them. There could be no captions, no border, ical test. Rorschach was not the first or even the second to try nothing to distract respondents from the lines, the curves, the his hand at designing inkblots. Klecksography, the study of colors. Only the aesthetic impersonality of the blot could reveal inkblots or “blotograms” as they were once called, originated the personality of its viewer. with the German poet and physician Justinius Kerner. Unlike To some degree, all personality assessment, whether visual Rorschach, Kerner was neither a scientist nor an artist but a or verbal, stalls at the uneasy intersection of art and science. mystic. He believed his inkblots to be “incursions of the spirit A stylized language is designed, tested, altered, and retested world,” magical images that spoke to him in the voices of the until it evokes a consistent and verifiable response from its test dead; voices he ventriloquized in the gloomy poetic captions he subjects. The work of the personality assessor is not unlike the added to his blots. More popular than Kerner was the French work of the writer or the editor or the artist, even if their ends psychologist Alfred Binet, who drew his inspiration for his are vastly different. Yet Rorschach was the first to imagine inkblots from Leonardo da Vinci, who, that the test itself might be an art form, that it would exhibit it was said, had once thrown a bucket of a “pictorial quality” that would transcend the genre of the test. paint at a wall and divined his next paint- ing from the shapes he saw before him. WHEN THE RORSCHACH test burst onto the American scene In keeping with this backstory, Binet’s in the 1940s, it seemed wholly different from other personality inkblots—messy, asymmetrical things— tests, or “people-sorting instruments,” as they were then called were used to measure a person’s imagina- without a trace of irony. With the rise of the labor force during tive capabilities: the greater the number of and after World War II, corporations had warmed to the idea distinct forms the respondent saw in the of using cheap, standardized tests to fit workers to the jobs that inkblots, the greater his creative powers. were right for them, a match made under the watchful eyes of By contrast, the power of Rorschach’s executives eager to keep both profits and worker morale high. inkblots derived in large part from their In this late-capitalist pursuit, they were guided by tests like the THE INKBLOTS: painstakingly crafted designs, refined Personality Inventory, the Personal Audit, the Myers-Briggs HERMANN RORSCHACH, HIS ICONIC TEST, AND through much clinical trial and error to Type Indicator, and the Humm-Wadsworth Scale, all of which THE POWER OF SEEING give them the appearance of naturalness— promised to help corporations manage the influx of millions of BY DAMION SEARLS as if the shapes had not been crafted at new workers into the workforce, most of whom were women and Crown, 416 pp., $28

all, but rather “had made themselves,” veterans who had enrolled in college after the GI Bill passed in SSPL/GETTY

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1944. Next to these tests, the Rorschach seemed to be something existence,” as Michel Foucault would have it. Should one choose else entirely: not a mechanism for sorting people, but an occa- to believe in it, the psychological knowledge that the test offers sion for self-expression—more like “art therapy,” observed an provides a way of caring for the self, of managing one’s thoughts, early Rorschach adopter, than a multiple-choice questionnaire. feelings, conduct, and way of being to attain a certain state of We do not tend to think of personality tests as akin to works perfection, happiness, or well-being. By this measure, what is of art: unique, complex, irreducible, infinitely signifying. The important is not exclusively the Rorschach test’s aesthetic pre- opposite is often the case. Since their efflorescence in the 1940s, sentation, but what happens in the process of administering it: personality tests have often been used to identify individuals a dialogue between a psychologist and her subject in which the as specific “types,” initiating them into vast systems of social subject can articulate her impressions, listen to the psychologist’s bureaucracy. Individuals were encouraged to think of themselves interpretation, and upon hearing this interpretation—“You are as examples of more general and generic models of human be- introverted, imaginative, stable”—embrace the language of the ings, who, taken together, made up a well-ordered social whole. self with which she has been presented. She can feel comfort- There was a darker side to “people sorting” as well. By the able dwelling in her imagination, eschewing drama, embracing time the Rorschach test was a cultural icon in America in the late quietude. With the help of the test, she can accept this version 1930s, German authorities had begun planning the sorting and of herself as her true self. deportation of Jews from the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno con- In a sense, the Rorschach may be more hospitable to an art centration camp. Theodor Adorno would make the connection of existence than tests with sternly categorical schema, like between the management of minorities and the management the Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, insofar as of workers explicit in The Authoritarian Personality, which it does not slot the individual into a predetermined and fixed offered a blistering critique of personality typing and testing. “It cannot be doubted that the critique of psychological types expresses a truly humane impulse, directed against that kind of Personality tests were used to subsumption of individuals under preestablished­ classes which identify individuals as specific has been consummated in Nazi Germany, where the labeling of live human beings, independently of their specific qualities, “types,” initiating them into vast resulted in decisions about their life and death,” Adorno wrote. systems of social bureaucracy. “The rigidity of the construction of types is itself indicative of … the potentially fascist character.” Of course, personality testing did not create this state of af- fairs, it only consecrated it. For Adorno, type and its “people- sorting instruments” were not the real problem, they were mere- set of categories, but seems to offer a looser, less constrained ly a symptom of a more invasive psychological disease: social assessment of one’s personality. This may explain its appeal modernity. The rise of industrial capitalism and the division to creative types. The fantasy of the expressive creation of the of people into classes—owners versus workers, white-collar self has become so naturalized by writers, poets, musicians, versus blue-collar—had left an indelible imprint on the souls and painters that the Rorschach test must strike them as a of men and women, stamping a standardized way of thinking, totem of artistic freedom. feeling, and behaving onto their psyches. Those who believed In Searls’s preoccupation with the Rorschach’s aesthetic in the sanctity of the individual had been conditioned to do so valences, a second-order truth emerges. Writing about the Ror- by their class position. If you worked a managerial job, the kind schach test is itself a projective exercise; one that often reveals that stressed creativity and gumption and “thinking outside of as much about the writer as it does about the test. Searls seems the box,” you would be more inclined to think of yourself in such to have no interest in either confirming or disproving the test’s individualistic terms. A line worker, a mere cog in the machine, validity as a diagnostic tool. He is not a cynic; The Inkblots is not had not been initiated into this language of self-actualization an exposé. He is an aesthete, and to him the greatest value of because he had no profitable use for it on the factory floor. the blots is as art objects. “The blots look great,” he proclaims “There is reason to look for psychology types because the world again and again throughout the book, as he details how their we live in is typed and ‘produces’ different ‘types’ of persons,” forms inspired visual artists from Warhol to Alan Moore, from Adorno wrote. “The critique of typology should not neglect Barkley to Jay Z. “They just look good.” At moments, Searls’s the fact that large numbers of people are no longer, or rather words fail him and a sort of mysticism takes over—a feeling of never were, ‘individuals’ ”—people who enjoyed real “freedom pure aesthetic bliss emanating from the blots. “You can feel for action.” (One cannot imagine the existence of the BuzzFeed the answers coming at you from the image. There’s something quiz in a world without such mass cultural artifacts as fast food, there,” he insists. There is something there, of course. Yet it is Friends, Harry Potter, and Taylor Swift.) difficult, maybe impossible, to know ultimately whether that The Inkblots, however, does not take its critical cues from something is in the blots or in his mind. Intended or not, the Adorno. Searls wants to redeem the Rorschach test, whether history of the Rorschach test that emerges from Searls’s account scientifically valid or not, as a technique of the self—an “art of is, ultimately, a Rorschach test. a

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BOOKS mentioned “an old Irish saying” without knowing anything about its actual provenance—aphorisms stay tethered to their creators, dragging their voices along through history. Aphorisms are linguistic memes. They were, in essence, an attempt by Greek philosophers to go viral 2,500 years before the internet existed. Hippocrates, who is credited with origi- nating the genre, understood that his best hope for would be to fling self-contained thoughts into the future, little literary vessels that could travel independently across borders and generations. Aphorisms migrate to places where bigger books cannot, and most stay more or less intact over time. 300 Arguments, a collection of new aphorisms by the es- sayist Sarah Manguso, performs much of the same feat: Man- guso ties her eccentricities to brief statements that are in- tended to outlive her. Her book is only 90 pages long, and can be digested in a single sitting, but it also beckons the reader to return, to read a sentence, and put it down again. Each argument is meant to stand alone, yet there is an arc: This is a woman grappling with heartbreak and ambition and decep- tion and through it all, questioning her own decision to write so concisely. Are such small writings enough? Perhaps she is demonstrating that despite her inner emotional turmoil, she is able to exercise some level of control over her prose. Perhaps it is about mastery over chaos and how to find it—harness the lines first and then the self.

THE APHORISM HAS come back into vogue, or at least into the The Big Short cultural conversation, because we are currently enmeshed in How ambitious writers are turning to short-form writing, which is flourishing on and in the proliferation of political sound bites, both true and false. We the power of the aphorism. are engaged in big cultural battles for truth and where to find it, and we are all searching for verified phrases that we can BY RACHEL SYME repeat over and over in order to maintain a sense of sanity as facts shift beneath our feet. Some of Manguso’s arguments are only one sentence long, I FIND MYSELF thinking a great deal lately about Mary Sve- and these read like ancient koans. “Vices have much in common vo, the character from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with their corresponding virtues,” “People congregate according who has had her memory erased but who loves quotations. to their relative levels of luck,” “Happiness begins to deteriorate She rattles off lines from Bartlett’s compendium when she once it is named,” “Worry is impatience for the next horror.” has nothing else to say. These quotations cling to her cortex, These statements feel like they have maybe always existed; like forming a bridge between confusion and clarity. By repeating they came from an oracle. What makes Manguso’s book feel the wisdom of others, she manages to reconstitute some sense so surprising, however, is that she quickly veers away from of holistic identity. Everyone in the film believes that her these more decisive observations into idiosyncratic personal obsession is silly; but is it? A mind in need of answers seeks memories: “I fret about my lost scarf. Then I miss my flight. them out in small kernels that it can repeat, build upon, and The scarf is no longer a problem.” Or: “I’ve taken on bad habits constitute itself around. in order to grow closer to certain others—watching an inane The technical definition of an aphorism is a “pithy ob- television show, playing a video game, drinking. The habits servation that contains a general truth,” and it is the pith lasted, but I never minded because they weren’t mine. They that gets us more than the truth; it is the tone that seals the were just affectations of other people’s.” writer to the words. The voices of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Manguso is not on Twitter, and this is a conscious choice. Parker and Benjamin Franklin still feel electrically alive to As she wrote in an essay in Harper’s last year, “The brevity us because they managed to bake their personas into their of fragments, scraps, the collective brain lint of the internet, brief observations. While proverbs and adages (cousins of is one thing; the brevity of the best aphorisms, which are the aphorism, to be sure) often lose their authorship and become orphaned—think about how many times someone has ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL BEJAR

66 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW complete in themselves, quite another.” Twitter was perhaps one is effectively choosing failure. This cultural pressure to intended to foster lucid nuggets, our best selves boiled down, think big—to equate size with ambition—is especially burden- but sometimes it can feel like a jumble of incomplete thoughts some for writers who cannot follow, or choose not to follow, in by incomplete souls. Which, of course, we all are. Faced with the footsteps of Great Men.” This is not to say that Manguso— the 140-character container, which is inherently social but and Nelson, and Solnit, and writers of their ilk—are not writers also fragmented, Manguso chooses an alternate form that is, of tremendous ambition; there is ambition leaking out of every as she puts it, more complete. page of 300 Arguments. But it is this ceaseless desire to be great, Some may see this as a turning away from the world—a to reach the other shore, that keeps us ceaselessly borne back. cloistering of the self—but I see it as Manguso’s attempt to It is a very individualist and deeply ingrained cultural desire, communicate with her readers outside of the chattering and this need to capture the entire world in a book, to straddle it often heart-numbing melee of the web. 300 Arguments is one with one’s words. of many short, intensely personal works by women that have Manguso is, instead, a memoirist who works in miniature. in recent years blurred the boundaries between poetry and Before 300 Arguments, she wrote four much-admired short prose—Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Rebecca Solnit’s Men Ex- books about segments of her life, including The Two Kinds of plain Things to Me come to mind. The phenomenon of women Decay, which explored her years-long battle with a debilitat- writing in short form is not new: The remaining fragments ing autoimmune disorder, and Ongoingness, the story of the of Sappho’s works show that she wrote brief odes, built to travel the seas of time. But this new crop of writers brings to the form an unusual urgency and density. Their works are Manguso’s statements feel like they short but saturated with research and references and layers have maybe always existed; like of experience. In Bluets, Nelson chronicles her descent into madness following a breakup by charting the aesthetic and they came from an oracle. literary history of the color blue, which she has become fixat- ed on as a palliative idea. In Men Explain Things to Me, Solnit weaves her own stories of being talked down to by pedantic men with stories from myth, the scandal around Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the words of Virginia Woolf. These are expansive narratives, but ones that take place journals she has kept for years. Compulsively recording her inside compact vessels. It is as if these writers feel they need to experiences in a diary became an unmooring compulsion, but pack as much into as little space as possible. It can be powerful the book itself rescues aphoristic fragments from the whole. In to grab a form of condensed wisdom—one that is, however, it, she writes looping, cryptic sentences such as, “I reread my often full of cliché—and attempt to infuse it with a new reso- favorite books to make sure they’re still perfect, but rereading nance and weirdness, with something human and desperate. them wears away at their perfection.” She is always mining her own experiences for material, but she is not confessional; “A FAIR NUMBER of aphorisms seek to justify or explain the she uses terseness and brevity as weapons. If no word is out of form itself,” Manguso observes in her Harper’s essay, defend- place, then it is much more difficult to question or undermine ing her preference for the short. She notes throughout that her truth. concision has been her obsession since she was a child; she If there is any point at which I bristle at Manguso’s lifelong has always been preoccupied with cutting the fat. Yet she also enthusiasm with being brief, it is that she regularly equates acknowledges this need to pare down has been the cause of excess with vulgarity. She talks often about “rescuing sen- her anxieties and depressions. “I used to tences” from bloated books, and refers to her own project as write these while playing hooky on what “a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a I hoped would be my magnum opus,” she long book’s quotable passages.” There is a romance in this—the writes. “Assigning myself to write 300 perfect book, with no gristle on it—but also it implies that of them was like forcing myself to chain- there is something obscene about writers who choose to give smoke until I puked, but it didn’t work. I in to their hunger and go long on a subject. It can be daunting didn’t puke.” Her arguments, which are to read a book like Manguso’s, because you walk away from it crystalline and often walloping, were not thinking, I am almost certainly doing too much. meant to be Manguso’s great work. She Manguso’s need to write short has sharpened her lines into thought her calling was elsewhere, and diamonds, but it has also driven her slightly mad, and it has these were just distractions. caused her to perseverate over words to the detriment of her 300 ARGUMENTS: ESSAYS But what if the small work is the great happiness and, as she admits, her health. These arguments are BY SARAH MANGUSO work? As Manguso writes, “I’m weary forged out of hard work and sustained effort, and also out of Graywolf, 104 pp., $14.00 of the American idea that unless one is pain. It is impossible to read them without feeling for her; for reaching toward the next, greater goal, what it took to write on such a tight leash. a

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BOOKS Inc. reported last summer.) Google co-founder Larry Page has invested $750 million in Calico, a laboratory for anti-aging . And in 2012, Google appointed , a futurist who believes will soon allow humans to transcend biology, as an engineering director. It’s easy to take these ambitions more seriously than those of the Extropians. It’s harder to know where they will lead us. In To Be a Machine, the Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell infiltrates groups of transhumanists with the aim of discov- ering how they think and live. A literary critic for Slate and a former academic, O’Connell is less interested in evaluating Only Human technology than in the people who make it and its philosophi- Why the tech industry is obsessed cal implications. As he places the quest for immortality under the microscope, he follows the individuals—tech visionaries, with living forever. billionaires, and futurists—who are trying to eradicate, or dramatically postpone, death. “I wanted to know,” he writes, BY ANNA WIENER “what it might be like to have faith in technology sufficient to allow a belief in the prospect of your own immortality.” This might be another way of saying that the idea of living forever is as influential as the actual possibility of living forever. IN OCTOBER OF 1994, Wired magazine ran a feature about a new Immortality is a long shot. But why is it such big business now? Californian subculture, cheerfully titled “meet the extropians.” , the article enthused, was a philosophy of tran- THE FUTURE, AS A CONCEPT, has always been lucrative; the more scendence. With technology and the right attitude—aggressive abstract, the better. Though O’Connell doesn’t focus strictly on individualism, cool rationalism, and other vaguely libertarian Silicon Valley—transhumanists dot the globe—­ ­ leanings—followers of the movement would “become more is a distinctly Californian project. The state has a long legacy than human.” They would become , possessing of self-improvement programs, exercise crazes, and faddish “drastically augmented intellects, memories, and physical diets, amounting to a unique brand of bourgeois spirituality. powers,” or maybe even . They envisioned a future California is a pusher for freedom. Lifestyle is supreme. in which human brains would be downloaded and preserved for These days, this utopian futurism can take the shape of New posterity. So, too, would the human body, through cryogenics. Age management philosophy, corporate wellness, or the annual These transcendental technologists took the word extropy conference Wisdom 2.0, which brings together tech luminaries to mean the opposite of entropy, the process by which all things and the spiritual leaders of industry, from Eileen Fisher and eventually decay, and they imagined a way of life to match. Alanis Morissette to the CEOs of Slack and Zappos. Recent The Extropians invented an exuberant handshake to greet each years have seen an uptick in venture capital–backed products other, and referred to themselves as VEPs, or Very Extropian that carry the promise of not just a better, more productive Persons. When they gathered, they called it an “Extropaganza.” you, but a better life overall. From Soylent (a meal-replacement An article from Extropy magazine, published in the mid-­ drink) to nootropics (capsules that purportedly level-up one’s Nineties, laid out their vision for existence. “You can be any- cognitive ability), investors are pursuing extended youth, thing you like,” Extropy promised. “You can be big or small; neurological enhancement, and physical prowess. you can be lighter than air, and fly; you can teleport and walk Of course, much of this is less new than it feels. In Silicon through walls. You can be a lion or an antelope, a frog or a fly, Valley, there are no new ideas, only iterations. Soylent looks a a tree, a pool, the coat of paint on a ceiling.” The Extropy In- lot like SlimFast, a protein drink marketed to dieting women stitute, which shuttered in 2006, defined its work as “a sym- since the 1970s. Nootropics tend to contain ingredients like bol for continued progress.” l-theanine—found in green tea—and caffeine. These companies’ In their early days, the Extropians looked quaint enough: a web design has a lot to do with this illusion of newness—sexy group of technophilic counterculturists clustered in a hot tub. front-end design signals trustworthiness and hints that there But they helped set the stage for a sector of the tech industry is something technologically impressive happening on the back that has, of late, been flooded with money from philanthropists end. Their products get a boost from their association with work-­ and venture capitalists alike. , artificial intelli- addicted engineers, who turn to them as high-tech solutions gence, , and other posthuman ambitions are still very to self-created high-tech problems. But this promise is bigger much a part of the techno-utopian agenda, in a way that’s more than Silicon Valley, and carries with it a distinctly Californian mainstream than ever. Venture capitalist is looking air of self-improvement, of better living through technology. into blood transfusions as an anti-aging treatment. (“peter thiel is very, very interested in young people’s blood,” ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL

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MARCH 2017 | 69 REVIEW

It is tempting to see transhumanism, too, as merely the latest like the kayak is physically an extension of his lower body, and rebranding of a very old desire. Many of O’Connell’s subjects it just totally feels natural,” he tells O’Connell. “So maybe it specialize in the hypothetical. is a biomedical wouldn’t be that much of a shock to the system to be uploaded, gerontologist who sees death as a disease to be cured. Anders because we already exist in this prosthetic relationship to the Sandberg, a neuroscientist working on , wishes physical world anyway, where so many things are experienced literally to become an “emotional machine.” He is also an artist as extensions of our bodies.” who creates digital scenes resembling early-web sci-fi fan art, Aubrey de Grey is in the second, body preservationist group, and gives them dreamy names such as Dance of the Replicators whose efforts tend to be slightly more modest: Rather than and Air Castle. , a former journalist who claims solving death, they focus on extending life. His nonprofit, to have invented the sport of “volcano-boarding,” ran a pres- Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, focuses on idential campaign that saw him travel across the country in research in heart disease and Alzheimer’s, and other common a coffin-shaped bus to raise awareness for transhumanism. illnesses and diseases. (sens, like many organizations the trans- He campaigned on a pro-technology platform that called for humanists are involved with, has received funding from Thiel.) a universal basic income, and promoted a Transhumanist Bill De Grey’s most mainstream contribution is the popularization of Rights that would assure, among other things, that “human of the concept of “longevity escape velocity,” which O’Connell beings, sentient artificial intelligences, , and other explains as such: “For every year that passes, the progress of advanced sapient life forms” be “entitled to universal rights longevity research is such that average human life expectan- of ending involuntary suffering.” cy increases by more than a year—a situation that would, in Then there’s , a co-founder of Extropianism, theory, lead to our effectively outrunning death.” One might who runs the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, dismiss such transhumanist visions as too extreme: so many Arizona. Alcor is a cryopreservation facility that houses the men, so much hubris. And yet, at a time of great cynicism about bodies—or disembodied heads, to be attached at a later date humanity—and the future we’re all barreling toward—there is to artificial bodies—of those hoping to be reanimated as soon something irresistible about transhumanism. Call it magical as the technology exists. The bodies, O’Connell writes, “are thinking; call it radical optimism. considered to be suspended, rather than deceased: detained in some liminal stasis between this world and whatever fol- A QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY may be the ultimate example of lows it, or does not.” Alcor is the largest of the world’s four overpromising and under-delivering, but it will still deliver cryopreservation facilities, and houses 149 “patients,” nearly something. Indeed, plenty of the Extropian dreams of anti-­aging 70 percent of whom are male. (Alcor also cryopreserves pets.) have already been realized, though these ­accomplishments now Its youngest patient is a two-year-old who died due to a rare form of pediatric brain cancer; her “case summary,” posted on Alcor’s web site, shares that her parents, both living, also At a time of great cynicism, there intend to be cryopreserved. “No doubt being surrounded by is something irresistible about familiar faces of loving relatives will make the resumption of her life ... easier and more joyful,” the case summary ends hope- transhumanism. Call it magical fully, heartbreakingly. To date, science has not suggested that thinking; call it radical optimism. reanimation will ever be possible; the dream of re-uploading one’s mind into a new, living body, at a yet-to-be-determined date, remains just that: a dream. Those working on immortality are long-term thinkers and fall, broadly, into look less futuristic than we previously imagined. Thanks to two camps: those who want to free the improved health care, sanitation, and education, we are living human from the body, and those who aim longer than our ancestors could have imagined. We sleep with to keep the body in a healthy condition our cell phones. Prosthetics have become increasingly per- for as long as possible. Randal Koene, like sonalized and affordable. Roboticized microsurgery blurs the Max More, is in the first group. Instead of lines between human and machine skill. In more staid quarters , he is working toward “mind up- (where most of the money is), the quest for transhumanism loading,” the construction of a mind that is simply biotech. can exist independent of the body. His O’Connell’s focus is on the more extreme transhumanists, nonprofit organization, Carboncopies, those committed to eternal life. But he also meets a few aims for “the effective immortality of the of the transhumanists taking this more incremental ap- TO BE A MACHINE digitally duplicated self.” Koene compares proach, edging us closer to longer and healthier lives. Miguel ­ BY MARK O’CONNELL mind uploading to kayaking. “It might Nicolelis, a neuroscientist working on brain-machine in- Doubleday, 256 pp., $26.95 be like the experience of a person who terface technology, created a robotic exoskeleton that can is, say, really good at kayaking, who feels be controlled by brain activity. He exhibited it at the 2014

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which transhumanism’s wildest desires are realized is a heady thought experiment, one that quickly devolves into a vision of dystopia: too little space, too many bodies, and—if brains are uploaded from centuries past—obsolete software. As exciting, ambitious, fantastical, or practical as the trans- humanists’ aims may be, they neglect to offer a fully fledged vision for society should they be successful. It would hardly be the first time that actors in Silicon Valley, with an emphasis on speed and scale, innovated first—then scrambled to address the repercussions after they had already arrived.

THIS IS BOTH a core promise and the fundamental problem of transhumanism: It exempts those involved from their debt to the present. As Bill Gates put it in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.” O’Connell finds it odd, too, that “billionaire Aubrey de Grey’s nonprofit focuses on extending life indefinitely. entrepreneurs” are more interested in developing AI than in eradicating “grotesque income inequality in their own coun- World Cup, to give a sense of how human and robot might try.” Of course, experimentation is essential to progress, and work together in the future. A clear practical application of researchers claim their work will benefit all of humanity in the his work would be to help paraplegics increase their mobility future. But it raises the question: What future and for whom? and activity. It’s technology that doesn’t demand that we There is something deeply sad about transhumanism, too—a radically overhaul our idea of reality. It allows us to make yearning, one that perhaps harks back to the self-improvement minor adjustments. doctrines that have so colored California since the halcyon Nicolelis does not seem to share the technologist’s pas- days of the midcentury. The promise of a better world—a sion for scalability; though he has proven that brain activity better you—is hard to turn away from these days. We are not can be translated into data—and that data can be translated more than human; we have not found a way to transcend. In into movement—he is not drawn to large-scale projects like the weeks between the election and the inauguration, our whole-brain emulation. “I don’t think we will ever be able collective visions of the future adjusted to accommodate the to broadcast from one brain to another the essence of the possibilities of rampant corruption and the rapid perversion human condition,” he told Popular Mechanics last year. “We of constitutional freedoms, among many other things. It feels love analogies, metaphors, expecting things, and predicting indulgent to fantasize about a future in which humanity is things. These things are not in algorithms.” optimized for immortality; it feels indulgent to fantasize about As transhumanism gradually alters the length and quality a future at all. of human life, it will also alter political and cultural life. If the Yet I cannot fault the transhumanists for wanting more: average human life were to span 100 healthy years, then so- more from life, more of life itself. In How We Became ciety, the economy, and the environment would be drastically Posthuman—published in 1999, and now a touchstone of transformed. How long would childhood last? What would the writing on transhumanism—the literary critic N. Katherine political landscape look like if baby boomers were able to vote Hayles detailed her ideal version of a posthuman world: for another 50 years? O’Connell’s foray into transhumanism comes at a moment when our democratic institutions look If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by who weaker than ever. Wealth is increasingly concentrated among regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the a small group of people. The future, while always uncertain, ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman looks, for many, particularly bleak. Envisioning a future in that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality … that understands human life is THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 3, Issue 5,001, March 2017. Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and Aug/Sep 2017) embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone (202) 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage which we depend for our continued survival. and handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: www.TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, To focus on the extremes of posthuman ambition is, it seems to P.O. Box 6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post Agreement Number 7178957. Send changes of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies me, to miss the point. As a species, we are slowly nudging to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be emailed to [email protected]. along a spectrum. Hayles’s vision is solidly in the middle with For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our web site at its mortality and fallibility, rendered not obsolete but more newrepublic.com/customer-service.

PETER SEARLE/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX manageable—more human. a

MARCH 2017 | 71 backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY MILLER

LOCATION PRIMROSE, SOUTH AFRICA DATE JUNE 8, 2016

IN MAKAUSE, A SPRAWLING settlement of overcrowded shacks Today, the residents of Makause live sardined in small shacks built on an abandoned gold mine, some 30,000 residents face constructed from corrugated tin, scrap metal, and wooden the leafy streets and gracious homes of Primrose, an affluent planks. The ground is contaminated with toxic chemicals. Water suburb of Johannesburg. Separated only by a narrow highway, was not available until 2008, when two pumps were installed. the two neighborhoods offer a stark reminder that, 22 years Fires are common. One, in 2012, destroyed 18 homes before fire after apartheid was abolished, South Africa is still defined by trucks lingering across the street in Primrose finally arrived. massive inequality and stark segregation. Photographer Johnny Miller moved to South Africa that This is where apartheid was born. When British financier year and set out to chronicle the country’s segregation from Barney Barnato arrived in Johannesburg, not long after miners the skies. “Drones have an incredible ability to transform how struck gold there in 1886, it was little more than a tent city, we see the world,” he says. “There is an electricity in the air with a single hotel and a handful of saloons. The following year, in South Africa right now, a nervous tension. People are tired Barnato founded his first mine just outside the settlement, and of relying on platitudes and promises from 22 years ago. They named it after his daughter, Primrose. The city’s fault lines were want to see change.” a quickly established: Black Africans lived in cramped barracks, set apart from affluent whites. See more of Johnny Miller’s work on newrepublic.com.

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