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JULY 2017

UP FRONT 6 Blocking the Detectives 18 Firing Comey is Trump’s latest salvo in the war on oversight. BY LAURA RESTON 8 Trump the Union Buster For grad students fighting to unionize, time is short. BY MAX RIVLIN-NADLER 9 The Trump Tweetometer A highly precise quantitative analysis of last month’s presidential tweets. 11 Don’t Get Met—It Pays Did Trump use an executive order to aid a corporate backer? BY DAVID DAYEN 12 Life at Trump Pavilion A visit to the nursing home that bears the president’s name. BY MARY PILON

COLUMNS 14 The Loyalty Freak Why Trump’s obsession with fealty is a political necessity. BY JOHN B. JUDIS 16 First Family LLC How Trump made an archaic institution even worse. BY ADELE M. STAN

REVIEW 48 The Rise of the Thought Leader How the superrich have funded a new Trail of Fears class of intellectual. BY DAVID SESSIONS Forget Nixon. Trump is more like his hero Andrew 53 A Grief Observed Jackson, who ruled by fiat in a time of populist unrest. Memoirs of black mourning form a new literary genre. BY MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH BY KEVIN BAKER 56 Self-Made Woman Viewing Georgia O’Keefe through her personal style. BY RACHEL SYME 60 Invincible Reason 22 32 38 Czeslaw Milosz strove to transcend his The New One Meal a Day The Silence of troubled times. BY EDWARD HIRSCH 64 Nowhere Mag As Lake Chad vanishes Paranoia the Lambs Can Monocle’s globalist chic survive an and Boko Haram rises How Donald Trump has Evangelical churches are age of populism? BY KYLE CHAYKA turned us into a nation of in western Africa, seven being hit by widespread crackpots and conspiracy million people are on accusations of sexual 68 Backstory theorists—on the left as the brink of starvation. abuse. Are they covering PHOTOGRAPH BY GRISELDA SAN MARTIN well as the right. TEXT BY LISA PALMER up a Catholic-size scandal? PHOTOGRAPHS BY BY COLIN DICKEY BY KATHRYN JOYCE POETRY CHRIS DE BODE 63 Text Cloud Anthology BY KAZIM ALI GETTY/ AFP / NGAN MANDEL COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ CARRILHO

JULY 2017 | 1 contributors

Editor in Chief Kevin Baker is a novelist, historian, and journalist. The author of Win McCormack Dreamland and Paradise Alley, he was awarded a 2017 Guggenheim

Fellowship for The Invention of Paradise, a forthcoming history of the Editor United States between the world wars. TRAIL OF FEARS, P. 18 Eric Bates

Chris de Bode is an Amsterdam-based photographer and film director Literary Editor Digital Director who has reported from more than 70 countries. Earlier this year, he Laura Marsh Mindy Kay Bricker traveled to Cameroon with the British Red Cross to document the crisis in Features Directors Executive Editor Sasha Belenky Ryan Kearney the Lake Chad region, where climate change and the rise of Boko Haram Theodore Ross Deputy Editor have driven millions to the brink of starvation. ONE MEAL A DAY, P. 32 Politics Editor Ryu Spaeth Bob Moser Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland, Afterlives of the Saints, and The Social Media Editor Managing Editor Sarah Jones Unidentified, a forthcoming book about the history of conspiracy theories Laura Reston Senior Editors and what they say about our modern moment. “Most of us cling to Assistant Editor Brian Beutler conspiracy theories not because we’re gullible, but because they ofer Moira Donegan Jeet Heer psychological reassurance,” he says. “Which can be a powerful thing in News Editor Design Director Alex Shephard times of confusion and uncertainty.” THE NEW PARANOIA, P. 22 Siung Tjia Staff Writers Photo Director Edward Hirsch is a poet and critic. The president of the John Simon Emily Atkin Stephanie Heimann Clio Chang Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he is the author of nine books of Production Manager Josephine Livingstone Graham Vyse poems, including The Living Fire and Gabriel: A Poem. Steph Tan INVINCIBLE REASON, P. 60 Poetry Editor Contributing Editors Cathy Park Hong Kathryn Joyce is a contributing editor at the new republic and the James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, Reporter-Researchers author of The Child Catchers and Quiverfull. She was struck by how the Siddhartha Deb, Michael Lovia Gyarkye abuse sufered by Kim James and other children has gone virtually Eric Dyson, Paul Ford, Ted Sukjong Hong Genoways, William Giraldi, Juliet Kleber unnoticed outside of conservative missionary circles. “It’s an obscure Dana Goldstein, Kathryn Joyce, Suki Kim, Maria Konnikova, corner of fundamentalism,” she says, “but it sheds important light on how Interns Corby Kummer, Michelle Legro, abuse continues to be dealt with in the sprawling world of conservative Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, Eric Armstrong Graeme Wood, Robert Wright Sagari Shetty evangelicalism.” THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, P. 38

John B. Judis is the author of The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. He is an editor at Director of Marketing Associate Advertising and Revenue Director large at Talking Points Memo and a former senior editor at the new Evelyn Frison Shawn Awan THE LOYALTY FREAK, P. 14 republic. Audience and Controller Partnership Manager David Myer Lisa Palmer is a senior fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Eliza Fish Office Manager, NY Synthesis Center, a research organization focused on science and Media Relations Manager Tori Campbell scholarship at the interface of human and ecological systems. She is the Steph Leke author of Hot, Hungry Planet: The Fight to Stop a Global Food Crisis in the Associate Publisher Face of Climate Change. ONE MEAL A DAY, P. 32 Art Stupar

Mary Pilon is the author of The Monopolists and the forthcoming The Publisher Hamilton Fish Kevin Show. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times. LIFE AT TRUMP PAVILION, P. 12

David Sessions is a doctoral student in modern European history at Published by Lake Avenue Publishing 1 Union Square West, Boston College and a visiting student at the École Normale Supérieure in New York, NY 10003 Paris. He is a former editor at The Daily Beast, and his writing has appeared President in Jacobin and Newsweek. THE RISE OF THE THOUGHT LEADER, P. 48 Win McCormack

Mychal Denzel Smith is the New York Times best-selling author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, and a 2017 naacp Image For subscription inquiries or problems call (800) 827-1289 Award nominee. A GRIEF OBSERVED, P. 53 For reprints and licensing visit www.TNRreprints.com

Adele M. Stan is a columnist for The American Prospect and winner of the 2017 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. FIRST FAMILY LLC, P. 16

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WHEN DONALD TRUMP fired FBI Director James Comey, the historical par- allel seemed obvious. “This is nothing less than Nixonian,” declared Senator Patrick Leahy. “Not since Watergate,” added Senator Richard Blumenthal, “have our legal systems been so threatened and our faith in the independence and integrity of those systems so shaken.” ✯ But the similarities between Trump and Nixon go well beyond their penchant for obstructing justice. Over the years, writers from Henry Wallace and Irving Howe to Alexander B ickel—a preeminent legal scholar who influenced both John Roberts and Samuel Alito—reported on Nixon for the new republic. In 1952, a cover story entitled “who is richard nixon?” blasted him as “a tool of the great corporations.” John Osborne, the magazine’s White House correspondent, became a defender of the president—reportedly after Nixon, posing as an ordinary reader, personally drafted a letter to shame Osborne into providing favorable coverage. ✯ It’s impossible to read these stories today without thinking of Trump. The deep, wounded insecurity. The obsession with bad press. The coddling advisers. The talent for repackaging complex ideas as cheap slogans. America, it’s clear, has seen this president before. And the last time, we sent him packing. a Nixon, like Trump, translated all values into “saleability.”

Irving Howe MAY 7, 1956 The Editors OCTOBER 22, 1956 Reading through Nixon’s speeches, it Nixon leaves many people uneasy, and not all of them are Democrats. Millions of becomes clear that for him neither ideas words have been written trying to explain why. Surely the explanation is that we nor words have a claim to autonomous distrust a man who uses a knife in a fist fight. We don’t feel safe. dignity and significance: They are weapons with which to bloody opponents; tags and slogans to be utilized in political publicity. It is hard and perhaps impossible to say to John Osborne JANUARY 17, 1970 what extent this is the result of planned In 40 years of reporting, no public figure has repelled me as Nixon the candidate demagogy and to what extent he is himself repelled me in 1968. Nixon seemed to me to go far beyond the bounds of deception caught up in the fetishistic coils of the ad- allowed to politicians in our system. Tactics apart, the viewed Nixon—the sullen man’s rhetoric. mouth twitching on order into that spurious smile, the quality of cold and unceasing Here, I think, we get to the essential calculation to be seen in his little eyes—aroused in me a sense of ingrained and reason why so many eggheads find Nixon ineradicable cheapness. so disturbing. It is not merely because he It was incredible to me, all the polls and other indicators notwithstanding, that often seems to have been put together this man could be the President of the United States. at a sales conference, but also ... because Some of his closest associates in the campaign made his need for the kind of he seems to represent a potential of therapy that I have in mind very clear with their stories of the elaborate care taken American life far more threatening than to preserve his energies, to protect him from unexpected confrontations and crises, McCarthy himself—a potential of a fairly and—above all—to save him when they could from a renewal of the deep hurts prosperous, politically besieged, emotionally that the press and two public rejections, for the Presidency in 1960 and for the tight-lipped, rigidly conformist, suburban governorship of California in 1962, had caused him. America in which all values are transvalued The Nixon who clawed his way to the peak in 1968 was, if such stories were true, into saleability, all techniques have become a profoundly injured and fearful man, inwardly uncertain of his capacity to withstand devices for persuasion, and persuasion itself another climactic defeat and uncertain, too, of his capacity to deal with sudden is indistinguishable from a hidden bludgeon. troubles for which he had not prepared himself or been prepared by others.

Alexander Bickel NOVEMBER 3, 1973 Aside from the venality and abuse of powers that were its breeding ground, the Watergate affair has been characterized again and again by miscalculation, fumbling, impatience with the ways of the law (which is a more common form of disrespect for it than

GETTY/ SYGMA GOMEL / BOB outright defiance), and intense bursts of hysteria—all manifesting themselves in and out of the White House.

JULY 2017 | 5 up front

SIGHT UNSEEN

Blocking the Detectives Firing James Comey is just the latest salvo in the president’s war on oversight.

BY LAURA RESTON

WHEN DONALD TRUMP abruptly fired FBI Director ofce, he has quietly been waging war on inspector s James Comey, who was overseeing the investigation general—the federal ofcials charged with ferret- into Russia’s meddling in last year’s election, political ing out government waste, fraud, corruption, and observers were quick to denounce the move as a mismanagement. In a startling break with tradi- nearly unprecedented assault on the rule of law. Not tion, Trump has rescinded the nominations of four since 1973—when Richard Nixon fired Archibald inspectors put forward by Barack Obama without Cox, the special prosecutor looking into Watergate— ofering replacements, threatened to fire those al- had a president so obviously tried to shield himself ready in ofce, dragged his feet on filling vacancies, from scrutiny. “We are careening ever closer to a and left a dozen key departments without a perma- constitutional crisis,” Senator Edward Markey warned nent watchdog in the top job. Some of the depart- shortly after the news broke. ments that are now operating without independent But Comey is far from the only watchdog Trump has tried to silence. Since the day the president took ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARTIN ELFMAN

6 | NEW REPUBLIC oversight—including the CIA, the NSA, Defense, What makes the situation even worse under UNGUARDED and Interior—have harbored some of the biggest Trump—beyond his inability to tolerate criticism HENHOUSES scandals in American history, from Teapot Dome of any sort—is his penchant for turning public Days without to Abu Ghraib. “Trump is creating a politics of im- institutions into private piggy banks for his friends a permanent punity,” says John Wonderlich, executive director and allies. At the Department of the Interior, for inspector general of the Sunlight Foundation, a leading champion of example, the president is working to open up wide (as of May 24) government transparency. swaths of federal land to drilling and mining. It 3,012 Since the position of inspector general was cre- falls to the department’s inspector general to police Interior ated in 1978, shortly after Watergate, these inves- these government leases, ensuring that the energy tigators have ousted corrupt ofcials, protected industry doesn’t profit unduly at taxpayer expense. 844 CIA government whistle-blowers, saved taxpayers bil- As recently as 2008, the inspector general at Interior lions, and kept Congress informed about what goes discovered ofcials in the Minerals Management 603 on behind closed doors in 73 federal agencies. It Service steering lucrative contracts to favored oil Energy was the CIA’s inspector general who helped expose and gas companies, which showered them with gifts: 501 how the Bush administration was illegally torturing free golf trips, lavish ski vacations, tickets to Colo- Defense detainees being held without due process in “black rado Rockies games. Government bureaucrats were sites” scattered around the world. The NSA’s in- buying and selling cocaine in the ofce; one ofcial, 358 NSA spector general, meanwhile, investigated George while running the Denver ofce, allegedly coerced W. Bush’s unconstitutional program of warrant- two female subordinates into having sex with him. less wiretapping —an assault on civil liberties that Back then, Interior had a permanent inspector only became public when the inspector’s report was general who uncovered the abuse and presented leaked to the press in 2013. Inspectors general also his findings to Congress. But today, even as Trump serve as the frontline against government waste and readies himself to hand out new government leases, fraud: Studies show that for every dollar invested in the post has been sitting vacant for more than eight their ofces, they save taxpayers $14. years. And the recent hiring freeze implemented by “A dedicated and independent inspector general Trump has crippled the ofce even further. In March, is an invaluable resource not only for the agency the inspector general’s ofce warned the House Over- it serves or the Congress it reports to, but for the sight Committee that greater oversight on everything American people,” says Danielle Brian, executive from cybersecurity to fraud in oil and gas royalties is director of the Project on Government Oversight, “simply not possible at our current levels.” a nonprofit watchdog organization. “Often the un- The CIA has also been operating without an in- sung heroes, IGs are essential to a well-functioning spector general for more than two years—another federal government.” Trump isn’t the first president to push back against the independence and power of the inspec- tors general. Jimmy Carter imposed several federal Departments without inspectors general—from hiring freezes, which limited oversight work. Ronald the CIA and NSA to Defense and Interior—have Reagan, on his first day in ofce, summarily fired 16 harbored some of the biggest scandals in history. inspectors general he inherited from his predecessor. (Two months later, however, he reinstated five and promised to nominate replacements for the rest quickly.) Barack Obama left inspector general seats vacancy that could have far-reaching consequences. vacant for months and even years on end, setting a Without a top watchdog in place, for example, it dangerous precedent for Trump. would be far easier for Trump to make good on his Under Obama, in fact, many ofces were overseen promises to reinstate torture. (“Would I approve wa- by acting inspectors or deputies—underlings whose terboarding?” he told a cheering crowd on the cam- temporary status made them vulnerable to pressure paign trail. “You bet your ass I would, in a heartbeat.”) from above. “They become politically cautious, afraid To make matters worse, the president has repeatedly of sticking their neck out in any way that might be threatened to prosecute leakers who reveal damning seen as controversial,” Brian says. “That creates a information about his administration, making it less kind of chilling efect.” Had there been a permanent likely that government employees will come forward inspector general at the State Department, for ex- to report wrongdoing in the first place—especially ample, Hillary Clinton might have been barred from in the intelligence agencies, where there are few av- using a private email server. But Obama left the enues for protected disclosures. “When there aren’t position vacant for Clinton’s entire tenure. safe channels for whistle-blowers internally, they end

JULY 2017 | 7 up front

up going public,” says Brian. “Edward Snowden is our government,” DeLauro said recently. “Not even the perfect example of that phenomenon.” with Watergate in the Nixon administration or the If the government were fully stafed with inspectors Teapot Dome scandal in the Harding administration.” general, Trump himself would likely come under even Arthur Schlesinger, the Harvard historian, ob- greater scrutiny. Democrats in Congress have already served that major scandals wash over Washington asked the current inspectors general to look into every 50 years. The last was in 1973, when Watergate the president’s threats against whistle-blowers, as shattered the public’s trust in the executive branch. well as his overseas business holdings and the gov- If the pattern Schlesinger identified holds, the next ernment lease he was granted to turn the Old Post wave of corruption is fast approaching, and Trump’s Ofce Pavilion on Pennsylvania Avenue into Trump undermining of the inspectors general will only has- International Hotel. Representative Rosa DeLau- ten its arrival. “The Trump administration has created ro, a Democrat from Connecticut, has even called an environment that demonstrates that they don’t for a new inspector general to be installed within really care about ethics,” says Wonderlich. “And as the White House. “We have never seen such a level we all know from experience, this is the kind of en- of collusion and corruption in the highest levels of vironment where waste and corruption flourish.” a

LABOR PAINS

Trump the Union Buster For graduate students fighting to unionize, time is running out.

BY MAX RIVLIN-NADLER

STALLING FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS at some of the country’s nlrb, but Trump has two vacant seats to fill on the SCHOOLS most elite universities, the school year began with labor board, thanks to the GOP’s success at repeat- hope. Last August, the National Labor Relations edly blocking President Barack Obama’s nominees. Yale Board ruled that grad students who teach classes, Trump has reportedly homed in on a short list of Challenging union conduct research, and perform other paid work for conservative labor lawyers to fill the two seats and vote; refuses to their schools must be classified as employees—and tilt the board sharply to the right. The front-runners negotiate. are therefore allowed to form unions. The decision include Marvin Kaplan, a former Republican con- Harvard electrified union organizing campaigns on at least gressional stafer, and William Emanuel, an attorney Seeking to 15 campuses, as Ph.D. candidates from Columbia at the law firm Littler Mendelson, which has worked disqualify 300 and Yale to Duke and Penn fought for the right to on behalf of universities trying to block graduate student ballots. negotiate for better pay and working conditions. students from unionizing. Columbia But the optimism on college campuses came to Nationwide, only 2 percent of graduate students Accusing students an abrupt halt on November 8. With Donald Trump are currently unionized. But in recent years, grad of vote tampering. in the White House, both unions and universities students have watched tuition rise and tenure-track expect the nlrb’s decision to be reversed. As a result, positions disappear, along with the generous pay and both sides are now locked in a heated race—with benefits they might someday earn as full professors. grad students scrambling to hold union votes as Today, grad students earn about $20,000 a year, quickly as possible, and universities doing all they with some teaching as many as three courses per can to run out the clock. semester, all while working on their own research. “This is now very urgent for us,” says Ozan Kiratli, And Trump wants to cut federal funding for both a biology student at the University of Pennsylvania. university research and student aid—two primary “We’ve increased our eforts to organize in a way sources of support for grad students. Stipends for that it can be done quicker. We’re confident we’ll teaching assistants could disappear overnight, and win—Trump’s election just intensified the struggle.” entire departments studying politically charged For grad students, the timeline for unionization topics such as climate change could be shuttered. has suddenly plummeted from years to mere months. “The issues have shifted since the election,” says Democrats currently hold a 2–1 majority on the Elaine Lafay, a student organizer at Penn. “There

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

As scandal enveloped the White House in May, Blumenthal for exaggerating his Vietnam War Donald Trump resorted to his favorite weapon: record (this from a man who deferred from He lashed out on Twitter. The president fired of Vietnam five times), and he accused former 162 tweets—a fifth of them about Russia and FBI Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates of leaking Director James Comey. True to form, he pinned classified information (something he himself did the blame on everyone but himself, from Barack during a meeting with Russian operatives). In Obama to the “fake news” media. And as always, this month’s Tweetometer, play along with the many of his tweets were more distraction president as he navigates “the single greatest than defense. He blasted Senator Richard witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

The Blame Game Match those Trump blamed for the scandal to his tweet about them. 1. The media A. “Cried like a baby.” 2. The Obama administration B. “Will do or say anything in order to get attention.” 3. James Comey C. “Nothing but old news!” 4. Congressional Democrats D. “Find the LEAKERS.” 5. Richard Blumenthal E. “Acts so indignant.” 6. Susan Rice F. “Phony hypocrites!” 7. Sally Yates G. Gave General Flynn “highest security clearance.” 8. Chuck Schumer H. “Fake News.” 9. The intelligence community I. Gave Hillary Clinton “a free pass for many bad deeds!” 10. CNN J. “Refusing to testify.... Not good!”

“Witch Hunt” Hunt Who’s the Worst? Find the words Trump tweeted to describe the Russia investigation. Rank those Trump blamed most for the scandal. Fake Fraud Total hoax A. The intelligence community Excuse for losing Witch hunt Taxpayer-funded charade B. Congressional Democrats So sad Fabricated No evidence C. The news media D. Obama administration W F C N G N I S O L L A M F Z A T S W Q E L Q R H Y R M Scandal Solver Which of these actions did Trump actually propose S O E A V N G Y K O L A Q D to resolve the crisis? J S D E X C U S E F U N O K E A A C N P E A H D U V Q Z L D R D E T A C I R B A F E H L A T O T M Y N E N C U K O I H U J Z N M E E Q K A T A O C D E D N U F R D Z R J X W X K W I T C H O K I M V V Q A L S X N K Q J Y P V D

N F C Q K W I S E K A N O E

Scandal Solver: Scandal Worst? the Who’s Game: Blame The All of them. of All (5). C (6), D (6), A tweets), (11 B 10H. 9D, 8E, 7C, 6J, 5A, 4F, 3I, 2G, 1B, ANSWERS:

JULY 2017 | 9 up front

are certain groups who are now way more vulnerable, like international students and those who rely on funding from the government.” The impending takeover at the nlrb has forced students to kick their orga- nizing campaigns into overdrive—and so far, the results have been disastrous. At Yale, grad students held a unioniza- tion vote in February. The original plan was to organize every department at the university methodically—a process that could take years. Instead, the union decided to speed up the campaign by allowing each department to vote sepa- rately. In the end, only nine departments wound up casting ballots—and only eight voted to unionize. Even those meager gains are encour- aging compared to the outcome at Duke, where a campus-wide unionization vote in February failed badly, with 691 students voting against the union and 398 voting in favor. Duke played hardball during the campaign. It accused union organizers of intimidating international students— telling them that they could lose their visas if they likely to, overrule this recent decision and return to didn’t vote in favor of unionization—and it chal- the prior precedent that has served higher education lenged the eligibility of hundreds of students to well for decades,” the university said. participate in the vote. The high-powered law firm At Yale, university ofcials have challenged the Duke employed, Proskauer Rose, has also worked February vote on the grounds that it included fewer with Columbia and Yale on their own anti-union than 10 percent of all grad students—a reality that campaigns. “Given the outcome of the presidential was forced on union organizers by the need to rush election, we were hoping we’d be able to get it over the vote. In April, Yale students began a hunger strike in an efort to force the school to the bargain- ing table. (In response, campus Republicans held a barbecue next door.) “The Yale administration is The impending GOP takeover of the NLRB has facing a decision,” says Aaron Greenberg, a political forced students to kick their organizing campaigns science grad student who helped lead the union into overdrive—with disappointing results. drive. “Are they going to sit down and negotiate and collaborate with members of the Yale community, who want to improve their lives through collective bargaining? Or are they going to side with Trump in the time we had,” says Jess Issacharof, a fifth-year and his administration?” Ph.D. student. “But given the amount of money the Perhaps no university has leaned more heavily university was spending on union-busting law firms on stalling tactics than Columbia, which has been and the tactics they chose, we just fell short.” at the center of the unionization fight from the If Trump’s election put students under the gun, start. It was Columbia students who originally it has enabled universities to resort to a single tac- petitioned the nlrb to recognize grad students as tic: stall until the president stacks the nlrb with school employees. And support for unionization is anti-union lawyers. In a letter to graduate students higher at Columbia than at almost any other school: in February, Vanderbilt University made clear that In December, students voted almost 3–1 in favor of it expects the labor board to revert to the good old forming a union. Now, however, the university is days and once again bar students from organizing. challenging the results, accusing union organiz- “The nlrb and/or the federal courts should, and are ers of filming prospective voters and pressuring

10 | NEW REPUBLIC students at the ballot box. An nlrb ofcial overruled of semester. And if Trump is able to stack the labor the university’s objections in March, but Columbia board before then, students may not even get that appealed to the national board, which has yet to chance. “Delay, in general, helps employers,” says issue a ruling. Jefrey Hirsch, a law professor at the University of The delay means that grad students at Columbia North Carolina. “It lets enthusiasm wane—and that’s will be forced to vote all over again in the fall, be- especially true with many students, who turn over cause the bargaining unit turns over with the change every year.” a

LIABILITY INSURANCE

Don’t Get Met—It Pays Did Trump use an executive order to aid a generous corporate backer?

BY DAVID DAYEN

IT’S PERHAPS THE most ubiquitous image of Trump’s one of his generous corporate backers: the insurance RULE BY administration to date: the president at his desk, giant MetLife. DECREE preening for the cameras as he afxes his jagged At issue is the Financial Stability Oversight Coun- Executive signature to yet another executive order. Since his cil, an unheralded panel of top banking regulators. orders in first first day in ofce, when he signed an order to roll back The fsoc was established in 2010, after Wall Street four months the Afordable Care Act, Trump has issued a flurry cratered the global economy, to monitor the finan- of commands on everything from education and the cial system for undue risk and the threat posed by Bill Clinton environment to immigration and sanctuary cities. financial institutions that are “too big to fail.” One 14 Not since Franklin Roosevelt has a president relied of the fsoc’s most important functions is to de- George W. Bush so heavily on administrative proclamations in his first cide which financial giants should be designated as 13 100 days—in Trump’s case, to create the appearance “systemically important”—large enough to threaten of forward motion amid legislative gridlock. the overall economy. Megabanks already fall under Barack Obama 20 Trump’s executive orders serve another purpose: this category, but the fsoc must decide which other They enable him to pursue a doctrinaire conser- institutions also deserve such a designation. So far, Donald Trump vative agenda outside the legislative arena. In a the fsoc has singled out three insurance companies: 36 direct contradiction of his campaign pledges, Trump AIG, Prudential, and MetLife. Given how important has sought to enrich private corporations at the these firms are to the country’s financial health, they expense of his blue-collar base. He has called for are required to raise more capital to safeguard against reorganizing or eliminating all federal agencies—a an unforeseen catastrophe, and are subject to more move that will create lucrative opportunities for stringent supervision from the Federal Reserve. private contractors. He has ordered government MetLife, however, has been fighting back against employees to lift “regulatory burdens” on American the increased oversight. In 2015, it sued the fsoc, businesses. He has signed decrees that would open claiming it had been improperly designated. The up millions of acres of federally protected land to insurance giant was represented by the notori- private development, promote oil and gas drilling, ous bank lawyer Eugene Scalia—son of the former fast-track infrastructure projects, and roll back Supreme Court justice. Last year, U.S. District Judge regulations designed to protect consumers against Rosemary Collyer, a George W. Bush appointee, Wall Street scams. sided with MetLife, overturning the designation For the most part, Trump’s orders are merely on two grounds. First, she ruled, the fsoc should aspirational: While they may require federal agencies have assessed the likelihood that MetLife would to start drawing up plans or reviewing procedures, experience financial distress and projected specific they’re largely powerless to set policy. But in one losses. Second, it should have considered the cost recent memo, Trump took his pro-business agenda of the designation to MetLife’s business. a step further. On April 21, the president issued an The fsoc appealed the ruling, and a federal ap- executive memorandum that could directly benefit peals court was on the verge of issuing its decision

JULY 2017 | 11 up front in the case. But then, in what looks like a blatant company lots of money in compliance costs, while attempt to protect MetLife, Trump stepped in with weakening the fsoc’s ability to protect the public. his memo to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “In modern history, this is the only executive order In the order, Trump instructs Mnuchin, as chair of that’s custom-designed to help a single company the fsoc, to review the process used to designate in litigation against the government,” says Dennis financial corporations as systemically important and Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, a nonpar- to recommend improvements. What’s more, Trump tisan Wall Street watchdog group. ordered the Treasury Department to analyze the Trump is hardly the first president to use ex- same criteria that Judge Collyer cited in her ruling: ecutive actions to get his way. The suspension of whether the fsoc should assess the likelihood of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment financial distress, include specific loss projections, of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the and consider the financial costs to companies. use of federal troops to enforce school desegregation Trump’s memo was issued on a Friday. The fol- in Little Rock all took place through executive or- lowing Monday, MetLife asked the appeals court to ders. But Trump is already averaging more executive delay its ruling until the Treasury Department com- orders than any president since Truman, according pletes its 180-day review. In its motion—large parts to data from the University of California, Santa Bar- of which consist of quotes from Trump’s memo— bara. More important, the nature of Trump’s fsoc MetLife suggests that a delay “will enable the new memo appears to be unique: According to Better administration to determine whether any of the Markets, the order represents “a carefully choreo- fsoc’s positions in this case should be reconsidered graphed dance between the Trump administration and whether it is appropriate for the government to and Wall Street’s lawyers and lobbyists”—an efort continue pressing this appeal.” Translation: Trump’s by MetLife to secure an ofcial-sounding pretext memo could kill the entire case against MetLife. The to tilt a court case in its favor. Justice Department, which is representing the fsoc There’s no guarantee that Trump’s memo will suc- in the case, quickly agreed to delay the ruling by 60 ceed at weakening the fsoc, or alter the MetLife rul- days while it reconsiders its position. The court will ing. Although Mnuchin chairs the fsoc, he must get take no further action until July. support for any rule changes from the ten-member At the very least, Trump’s order bought additional panel, which includes several Obama appointees. time for MetLife, which contributed $100,000 to his And the federal appeals court could still rule against inaugural committee. Trump also has direct ties to MetLife and uphold the company’s designation. But Scalia’s law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which Trump’s memo has efectively lowered the standard had two associates working on the president’s tran- for executive orders. They’re supposed to ensure that sition team. In addition to blocking an immediate the nation’s laws are faithfully executed—not that a ruling against MetLife, Trump’s order is saving the rich corporate ally gets bailed out. a

FAMILY BUSINESS

Life at Trump Pavilion How will the president’s budget affect the elderly? A visit to the nursing home that bears his name.

BY MARY PILON

WHEN MARYANN SONNENBERG voted for the man bingo, singing old pop tunes, and chatting with other whose name is on the nursing home where she lives, residents. She doesn’t pay much attention to politics, she didn’t think it would wind up harming her and but when she does, she generally leans Democratic: her fellow residents. A retired teacher’s aide from She voted for Barack Obama twice. But in 2016, after Queens, Sonnenberg lives at Trump Pavilion, a 228- following the presidential campaign on television, she bed nursing home located in the Jamaica Hospital decided to go with Donald Trump, who grew up in the Medical Center, the birthplace of our forty-fifth neighborhood. “He’s from around here,” Sonnenberg president. Sonnenberg, 88, spends her days playing says. “I figured, why not give him a chance?”

12 | NEW REPUBLIC push the country “back to the time” when the el- TRUMP VS. derly had far less access to care. THE ELDERLY Medicaid funding, in fact, was at the heart of a recent scandal involving Trump Pavilion. In 2012, the Americans who facility’s CEO was sentenced to three years in prison rely on Medicaid for for bribing three state lawmakers in exchange for long-term care: 4.8 million more government aid. In addition, the facility was completely renovated in 2009 with funding from the Total annual Department of Housing and Urban Development—a Medicaid spending federal department that is facing $6.2 billion in cuts on long-term care: $152 billion under Trump. Trump Pavilion isn’t named for Donald, but for Upper estimate of his mother, Mary, a Scottish immigrant who vol- GOP’s total cuts to unteered at the center for years before her death Medicaid by 2026: $1.4 trillion in 2000. Mary’s husband, Fred, was a member of Jamaica Hospital’s board, one of many health care charities to which the two gave time and money. Donald has long since extended the family brand beyond the gritty boundaries of his native borough, but Sonnenberg, who has lived in Trump Pavilion Sonnenberg, unfortunately, may soon have an since 2012, still claims the family as her own. “I answer to that question. Like nearly two-thirds of think I met one of them once,” she says. Americans living in nursing homes, she and most Residents at Trump Pavilion live comfortably; of her fellow residents rely heavily on funding from Sonnenberg shares a sun-filled room on the fourth Medicaid, the federal health care program for the floor with another woman. “The food here is great,” poor. Nationwide, the median cost for a private she says as she scoots her wheelchair through the room in a nursing home is $92,000—and the over- lounge and waves to some friends gathered around all cost for care can be four times higher than the a plastic card table. Known around the facility as annual income of Americans like Sonnenberg. As “Miss America” for her colorful bows and headbands, a result, Medicaid, along with Medicare, pays most Sonnenberg likes to teach the Pledge of Allegiance of the bills for long-term nursing facilities, which efectively operate as taxpayer-subsidized insti- tutions. Without federal assistance, most elderly Americans would be unable to aford long-term “He’s from around here,” says a resident who care—and most nursing homes would be unable supported Trump last fall after voting for Obama to keep the doors open. MediSys, the nonprofit twice. “I figured, why not give him a chance?” chain that runs Trump Pavilion, receives some $225 million a year in funding from Medicaid. Trump ran on a promise to protect residents like Sonnenberg. “Save Medicare, Medicaid, and to f ellow residents, some of whom are disabled and Social Security without cuts,” he said during the benefit from speech therapy as part of their long-term campaign. “Have to do it!” But the president’s re- care. Families say they are happy with the facility. “The ality has proved far diferent from his rhetoric. staf here is great,” says Sonnenberg’s granddaughter Trump’s proposed budget would cut $610 billion Jonna, who visits several times a week. “They really from Medicaid over the next decade. That’s on top care about people here and support families.” of the $834 billion in cuts to Medicaid proposed But if Trump succeeds at slashing federal funds in the American Health Care Act, which Trump for nursing homes—including the one named in pushed through the House in May. Under the bill, honor of his own mother—Sonnenberg may come the Congressional Budget Ofce warns, insurance to regret her vote for the president. As Sonnenberg premiums for the elderly poor would soar at least sees of Jonna and two of her great-grandchildren, eightfold, while the part of Medicare that pays for a nurse wrapping up her shift smiles and waves nursing care and hospices could run out of money goodbye to her. by 2024. Both the American Medical Association “See you tomorrow, Miss America!” and the aarp oppose the House cuts, calling them Sonnenberg waves back. “You know where to a “sweetheart deal” for special interests that would find me!” a

JULY 2017 | 13 battle lines

Comey told associates the trouble be- gan when he refused Trump’s demand that he pledge his personal fealty, as if he were a monarchal subject. Instead, Comey promised to be “honest”—and thus loyal to the duties of his ofce, rather than the whims of his boss. After the firing, Trump denied that he’d asked Comey for loyalty, but emphasized that it wouldn’t have been wrong if he had. “I don’t think it would be a bad question to ask,” he told his friends over at Fox News. “I think loy- alty to the country, loyalty to the United States, is important. You know, I mean, it depends on how you define loyalty.” We know how Trump defines it—and that’s the problem. This is a man who, at a campaign rally, asked his supporters to pledge allegiance not to the flag, but to him. This is a man who made his body- guard the head of Oval Ofce Operations, a key gatekeeper role. Every president needs a few die-hard loyalists around him; Trump needs everyone to be a die-hard loyalist. And since Trump already rivals Richard Nixon as the most dangerously isolated president in American history, it’s essential to understand why. The Loyalty Freak In some ways, the tunnel-vision in- Trump’s obsession with fealty isn’t a personal quirk—it’s a political necessity. sistence on loyalty is the least surprising thing about Trump’s presidency. After BY JOHN B. JUDIS all, the man has always been a self- described “loyalty freak.” Asked a couple of years back what he looked for most in ONALD TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY For once, there was actually nothing an employee, he shot back the “l”-word might be a catastrophe of epic to panic about. But the reaction spoke without pause. Some observers have Dproportions, but you have to grant volumes. Loyalty Day seemed to sym- chalked this up to Trump’s paranoid per- him one thing: He’s made Americans pay bolize the defining neurosis of Trump’s sonality and deep-seated insecurity. More attention to whatever the commander- presidency: his maniacal need for loyalty tangibly, it stems from his business past: in-chief is saying. On April 28, for in- above all else. It’s the reason he has failed Navigating the notoriously cutthroat, stance, the White House issued the to nominate anyone to fill hundreds of key mob-ridden, and litigious world of New kind of presidential proclamation that federal jobs. It’s the reason he has sur- York real estate, he naturally came to is usually the proverbial tree falling in the rounded himself not with “the best” advis- value personal allegiance above all else. forest, unheard and unseen. Like every ers, as he promised in the campaign, but When your business model orbits en- president since Eisenhower, Trump pro- with a gaggle of ego-stroking family mem- tirely around yourself, everyone else must claimed May 1 to be Loyalty Day—the oc- bers, hangers-on, profiteers, and rogue yield to your gravity. casion first invented during the Red Scare ideologues. And it’s why, the week after But Trump’s loyalty-mania can’t be of the 1920s to counter the traditional Loyalty Day, “loyalty” became the pretext chalked up solely to his personal quirks. pro-worker May Day. JFK had done it, for his decision to fire the FBI director who For all our armchair analysis of the pres- LBJ had done it, Obama had done it. But was investigating Trump’s own campaign. ident’s predilections, we’ve been miss- when Trump did it, half the country—and James Comey’s dismissal left little doubt ing a key reason for Trump’s destructive all the Twittersphere—went into panic that Trump’s preoccupation with personal obsession with loyalty: It’s a function of mode. What was this new Loyalty Day loyalty—even more than incompetence, his politics. that Trump had come up with? Another stupidity, or corruption—could be the step on the road to fascism? thing that wrecks his presidency. ILLUSTRATION BY SÉBASTIEN THIBAULT

14 | NEW REPUBLIC NY POPULIST WHO WINS THE since 178 of the 241 winning House Re- Abrams for a top role in the State Depart- presidency must face an inherent publicans outpolled him in their own ment because he hadn’t sided with Trump Acontradiction. To cast himself as districts. Trump also had no traditional during the campaign, and abruptly fired the candidate of the people versus the es- network of powerful lobbyists and donors an aide to Housing Secretary Ben Carson tablishment, Trump made radical prom- to back his agenda: Influential Republican in February after it surfaced that he had ises: overturn trade deals, carry out mass business interests like the Koch brothers written an op-ed critical of Trump last deportations of illegal immigrants, punish and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sat fall. But it’s impossible to staf an insti- runaway American companies, and replace out the election; the Club for Growth de- tution as vast and complex as the federal Obamacare with “insurance for everyone.” nounced Trump. It’s small wonder that, as government if the only people you can But such demands are unacceptable to the he sufered one frustration after another count on are those who have never dis- diverse array of forces required to enact in trying to impose his platform, Trump’s agreed with you. Trump has yet to nomi- major changes in public policy. impulse was to keep barnstorming the nate anyone for 455 of 557 key posts that Perhaps in Latin America, or in one country with campaign-style rallies. He require Senate confirmation, efectively of the newly minted Asian democracies, needed to manufacture a popular surge crippling his own administration. a winning candidate, with the army on behind his policies. In theory, there’s still time for Trump his side, could cow the legislature and But Trump has never commanded that to come to terms with the realities of judiciary into following his lead. But in level of public support. In November, power in Washington. His tax cuts and the United States, the presence of consti- fewer than 40 percent of his votes came deregulatory ambitions appeal to Repub- tutional checks and balances, a military from hard-core supporters who were lican business lobbies, and his get-tough subordinate to civilian authority, semi - devoted to Trump. The rest came from immigration politics enjoy the support of independent agencies like the FBI and the life-long Republicans, single-issue con- House Republicans. He’s already changed Federal Reserve, and a powerful nexus of servatives, and independent voters who federal abortion rules to please the reli- business and interest groups all combine either backed Trump with reservations or gious right. By courting key factions of to undercut any threat to the system posed loathed Hillary Clinton more than him. the establishment, he could conceivably by populism. Trump isn’t just lonely be- Trump is boxed in by his lack of sup- govern like a conservative Republican. cause he’s Trump; he’s lonely because his port both inside and outside Washington. But Trump appears too enamored of politics require him to govern that way. In stafng his administration, he cannot his own image as a billionaire populist After his surprise election, Trump could have tried to ingratiate himself with the GOP establishment the way Ronald Reagan Trump isn’t just lonely because he’s Trump. did after running as a far-right “maverick” He’s lonely because his politics require him to in 1976 and 1980. But Trump bought into govern that way. the notion, promoted by his chief adviser, Steve Bannon, and his ally Nigel Farage of the nationalist UK Independence Party, command loyalty in the various ways most to play by such rules. So he will con - that he could transform the Republicans presidents do. He can’t point to party, tinue to purge his administration of any into a “party of the American worker,” because he trashed the party to win the one he cannot control, as he did with Com- as he vowed at this year’s Conservative White House. He can’t call in the politi- ey. He will keep staging misguided shows Political Action Conference. His inaugu- cal favors he’s owed, because he hasn’t of strength, as he did by trying to bully ral address was a ringing endorsement done any. He can’t draw on his business House Republicans into rubber-stamping of populism: “For too long,” he declared, relationships, because he’s burned almost his initial replacement for Obamacare. “a small group in our nation’s capital has every business associate he’s ever had. And as his political isolation deepens, his reaped the rewards of government while Unable to attract experienced veterans need for unquestioning allegiance will only the people have borne the cost. Washing- from the political and business establish- grow more desperate. Operating as an ton flourished, but the people did not share ments, Trump can ofer newcomers to outsider, he cannot overcome the structure in its wealth. The establishment protected his court only one thing to kneel before: of checks and balances that is thwarting itself, but not the citizens of our country.” himself. Which explains the composition his radical agenda; that same structure, That’s not the kind of talk that wins of his inner circle—they’re the only peo- however, is unlikely to lead to his removal, you friends in Washington and corpo- ple who will join him. barring a Watergate-level scandal. But rate boardrooms. During the early GOP Under Trump, personal loyalty is the like those of the dictators he’d hoped to primaries, only a single senator—Jef sole qualification that counts. After taking emulate, his reign will one day come to an Sessions—endorsed Trump, along with ofce, Trump installed campaign toadies end. And when it does, he will leave ofce fewer than a dozen House members. After to monitor at least 16 key departments as he entered it—accompanied only by his the election, others in Congress had little and report heretics to a White House most loyal henchmen and enforcers, and incentive to bow down to the president, deputy chief of staf. He rejected Elliott thus utterly, irredeemably alone. a

JULY 2017 | 15 body politic

OWEVER ARCHAIC, THE INSTITU- tion of the first family carries real Hcultural and political force. Amer- ica looks to the White House for some sense of itself, for a reflection of what most of us aim to have in our lives: a unit of mutual afection and mutual responsibil- ity, a place of comfort and normalcy in a chaotic and frightening world. The tools of Madison Avenue were long ago applied to the shaping of the first family brand; it’s always been a focus -grouped projection of the country’s idea of its best self. We define our national selves, in part, by the cultural conversations that the first family stirs, the image it projects. The rest of the world also looks to the president and his family for a gauge of what America stands for: They’re the ambassadors of Brand America. The Trump family brand mirrors Amer- ica at its worst—a version in which capi- talism deforms all relationships, twisting everyone and everything to serve its basest needs. This is a family only in the Mafia sense of the word, ruled by a ruthless and imperious Don who ofers protection in return for fealty. Trump’s children are more than mere relatives: They are exec- First Family LLC utive vice presidents, the capo bastones How Trump updated an archaic institution—and made it even worse. of an organized racket. In the organiza- tional chart, there’s no box labeled First BY ADELE M. STAN Lady. Mother, wife, provider of counsel and comfort—these maternal roles have no place in the family business. Melania, IKE A LOT OF FEMINISTS WHO What we got instead was an even Marla, and Ivana have their gracious liv- hoped against hope for Hillary more radical restructuring of the first ings secured, mob-style, by their silence LClinton’s election, there was one family than Hillary herself could have and invisibility. thing I looked forward to with special, envisioned. As Father-in-Chief, Donald We’ve come a long way, in a short unqualified joy: The traditional model of Trump hasn’t simply introduced some time, from the days when we argued the first family was going to be turned on twenty-first-century version of The over whether First Lady Hillary should be its head at last. Goodbye to the impossi- Brady Bunch, with a herd of kids from baking cookies or running things, or pon- bly perfect exemplar of patriarchy we’ve three diferent mothers all thrown to- dered late at night how Laura Bush could come to expect, if not demand. No more gether in a big new house, complete with be a pro-choice ex-librarian and still play benevolent and hardworking dad who still maid service. He has scrapped any nor- the gracious hostess for a husband who somehow makes time. No more selfless mal notion of the family unit, organizing was so clearly her inferior. Despite my- mom with the over-scrutinized clothes his personal life around those who ad- self, I long for the days when first families and hair and civic-minded projects. No vance the same principles that drive the lived together in a place called the White more well-scrubbed children and adorable companies that bear his name—taking House, expressed discernible tastes in dogs and high-jinks-prone cats. America’s what you want, doing as you please, and music and culture, and gave every ap- archetypal family unit was going to be living of other people’s money. We’ve pearance of serving the country, rather organized around a powerful woman with traded the Bushes, the Clintons, and the than the other way around. a grown-ass daughter and an annoying, Obamas for First Family LLC. And in With the advent of First Family LLC, retired husband puttering around and the process, we’ve lost something of there is a gaping hole in American causing mischief. If not a smashing of the genuine value to the country, the world, patriarchy, it would have made a dent. and ourselves. ILLUSTRATION BY KIERSTEN ESSENPREIS

16 | NEW REPUBLIC culture where the president and his fam- the kind of spotlight that could deflect beyond. The music they celebrate, the ily used to be, in all their outdated glo- attention from her publicity-crazed hus- historical moments they commemo - ry. Even a patriarchy-smasher can feel band. Her public appearances as first rate, the art they elevate—all help shape their absence. The old model, at least, lady have been few, almost as though both the form and substance of our was built around recognizable human that’s the way President Trump likes national identity. A first lady is what needs, even if those needs were distort- it. If anything, her absence has served organizational experts call a “power cen- ed or limited by the structure imposed to underscore her husband’s misogyny ter,” however hampered she may be by on them. Once, we assumed, there was and inhumanity. the gendered nature of her role. But for love in the White House. Now there is The marginalization of the first lady’s Trump, apparently, even that much pow- only power and greed. Those who can- role strikes a blow against female power. er is too much to grant a woman. May- not produce—who do not serve an im- This might sound strange, given that the be when Barron enrolls in an elite Wash- mediate, utilitarian function—are no traditional role of the first lady has always ington school come fall, his mother’s longer welcome there. We feel what this been to stay in her place. “Good” first delayed move into the White House will tells the world about America. And may- ladies don’t overstep; they attach them- add a familial touch to the enterprise. be, we are forced to concede, the rest of selves to worthy causes that stem from But I doubt it. Barron is almost always the world was right about us all along. the kinds of things a mom would do: tell photographed wearing a suit and a you to eat your vegetables, read a book, scowl, a little Trump in training. HE ARRIVAL OF A FIRST FAMILY IN stay away from drugs, get up from the Washington has always served as computer and move. These are viewed as F YOU BELIEVE, AS I DO, THAT THE Tan opportunity to redefine Amer- less important than the manly things the Trump administration amounts to ican culture. Some families are avatars president does, in no small part because Ione big project of plunder, it makes of a rising region or a cultural trend—the they are woman things. perfect sense that the president would Bushes were both, with their transplanted But even a first lady who minds her fill the boxes on his First Family LLC Texas-ness come to D.C. The Obamas p’s and q’s can wield an awesome wand organizational chart with only those were harbingers of history. The Carters of soft power. Think Jacqueline Kennedy relatives he trusts to shepherd his inter- walked into the White House from the perched atop an elephant in India, ests and play all the angles: Ivanka, Don Deep South, while the Reagans gave con- charming Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, Junior, Eric, and, by afnity of spirit, servatism a Hollywood glow. The Clin- or taking Paris by storm. A first lady who Jared Kushner. These are the family tons brought Bubba-ness. There was a does not mince her steps, by contrast, members who share the president’s con- lot to talk about. can challenge the world from a rarefied fidence, who reveal his notion of the First families have always made a stab, platform. Think Eleanor Roosevelt exemplary family—an autocratic CEO in their own way, at promoting the best hosting civil rights leaders in the White served by loyal deputies who are the fruit of Americana. By the end of the Obamas’ House. Or Hillary Clinton going to Bei- of his loins, as well as one brought in second month in the White House, they jing to declare, “Women’s rights are through the bond of matrimony with the had celebrated Stevie Wonder with an human rights.” Or Michelle Obama chal- CEO’s favorite loin-fruit. East Room concert; early in their first lenging America’s tropes about race in This degenerate idea of family makes year, the George W. Bushes honored jazz ways both subtle (taking her White me miss the old-school first family—that great Lionel Hampton at a star-studded House portrait in front of a Thomas Jef- relic of the bad old days before the notion show. The Nixons were always showcas- ing country singers and Lawrence Welk and Up With People, those icons of the Trump’s children are more than mere relatives: “silent majority.” They are executive vice presidents, the capo As I write, there are no such events on bastones of an organized racket. the White House schedule—not one. The closest we’ve come to a cultural moment since the Trump clan took over was the ferson painting) and direct (saying she’d of equality between the sexes was even a West Wing visit by that classic-rock trio lived eight years in a house “built by thing. Compared with the new archetype Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, and Sarah Pal- slaves”). Another kind of first lady can of the first family as a soulless LLC led in. They took photos with the boss and elevate a significant concern through by a pussy-grabber-in-chief, I’ll take the mocked Hillary Clinton’s portrait. There the language of aesthetics, as Lady Bird softer bigotry of the old sexism. I know is no music in Trumplandia. Johnson did with her crusade to “beau- how to wage war against the bad parts And there is barely a first lady. Re- tify” America, a gently efective way to of it. And now, thanks to Trump, I know portedly reluctant to take up the role, raise environmental consciousness. how to appreciate the hidden virtues of Melania stayed in New York for Barron’s Above all, first ladies have been ar- the old model. At least it was familiar, in spring semester in prep school, avoiding biters of culture in Washington and every meaning of the word. a

JULY 2017 | 17 Illustration by ROBERTO PARADA

18 | NEW REPUBLIC By KEVIN BAKER

TRAIL OF FEARS

Forget Nixon. Trump is more like Andrew Jackson than Tricky Dick—and the consequences of his crimes will be far more devastating.

ONALD TRUMP’S STUNNING decision to fire independent investigation into the Russian influence D FBI Director James Comey brought inevitable on our government. “Not going to happen,” said Sen- comparisons to the “Saturday Night Mas- ator John Thune. “Suck it up and move on,” added sacre,” that evening in October 1973 when President Senator Chuck Grassley. Richard Nixon, enmeshed in the throes of Watergate, Today, with ideologues in the Tea Party and money ordered independent special prosecutor Archibald men like the Koch brothers in control of the Republican Cox fired, and then accepted the resignations of both Party, the center has fallen out of American politics. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attor- The political middle ground between the two parties, ney General William Ruckelshaus when they refused which was essential to stopping Nixon, no longer to carry out his instructions. With Nixon (and future exists. What worked back in the 1970s to bring down Trump) henchman Roger Stone unavailable, Solicitor a renegade president is unlikely to work today. It was General Robert Bork was carted over to the White the times that took down Nixon, perhaps even more House by limousine to do Nixon’s wet work. But it was than the crimes. The center still held, despite the too late. The White House tapes that Nixon was trying roiling years of protest, war, and assassinations that to keep Cox from hearing would out, and the damning preceded Watergate. evidence on them would force the president from ofce. To understand what can happen when the country is Beyond the mechanics of the Saturday Night Mas- too divided for any common sense of justice to prevail, sacre, though, is what Watergate tells us about what we should look not to Nixon but to a president from America was and is, then and now. The prevailing a more divided and chaotic era. Like Trump, Andrew goal for congressional Democrats, over the nearly Jackson was a populist wrecking ball who set out to ten months it would take to expose Nixon’s crimes upend a Washington establishment that considered and drive him from ofce, was to bring the people him a crude and inept barbarian. Before Steve Bannon with them. Their mantra, coined by Peter Rodino superimposed Jackson on Trump’s psyche, it’s doubt- of the House Judiciary Committee, was simple: Im- ful that our president could have picked Old Hickory peachment “has to come out of the middle.” That is, out of a police lineup, even in full epaulets. But ever Nixon would only be impelled to step down if enough since he took ofce, Trump has been on a Jackson jag, moderate Republicans could be persuaded to support hanging his newfound hero’s portrait in the Oval Ofce it. The articles of impeachment, when they came, were and even laying a wreath at the Hermitage, Jackson’s drawn up not by the committee’s liberals but by three thousand-acre slave plantation in Tennessee. conservative Democrats and four moderate Repub- Jackson was a very diferent man than Trump. A licans. In the end, a remarkable seven out of 17 Re- supremely talented individual, he was a United States publicans on the committee voted to impeach Nixon. senator by 30; a self-taught lawyer who became a state Such a scenario is unfathomable today. Seven Supreme Court judge; and a general who, with no for- Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voting for mal military training, conquered most of the southeast- impeachment? A few days after Comey went down, ern United States and scored perhaps the single most only seven Republicans from both houses of Congress lopsided victory in American history, over the British could be induced to join Democrats in calling for an army at New Orleans. Ferocious, visionary, and almost

JULY 2017 | 19 TRAIL OF FEARS insanely tenacious, Jackson headed a large to time, scandalizing the political sen- failures of his radical policies—and his and coherent political movement—one sibilities of the day every bit as much as refusal to submit to our constitutional that, for all its faults, embraced despised Trump’s hectoring campaign screeds have. system of checks and balances—would immigrants and extended the vote to all Like our current president, he told his have terrible consequences, for his follow- white men, regardless of income. supporters they were victims of a “cor- ers and the nation, long into the future. Yet Trump’s similarities with Jackson— rupt bargain” swung by the political and By the time Jackson took ofce, there and the wider forces marshaled by both financial elites, and they loved him for it. were 17,000 or so members of the Cher- men—are more instructive than the com- If Jackson’s opponents could not fathom okee Nation who still resided in the East, parisons to Nixon’s obstruction of justice. the nature of his appeal, his supporters—an clustered mostly in northern Georgia. The constituency that brought Jackson to unwashed, uncouth “King Mob”—tended They had become as “civilized” as George power consisted of working people and to grossly overestimate just how interested Washington had once urged them to be. small farmers drawn predominantly from their hero was in their welfare, as opposed They adopted Western modes of dress, the West and the South. Much like today, to his own. Jackson, like Trump, always agriculture, and commerce; invented a these aggrieved white men found them- associated his own fortunes with the coun- written language of their own; inter- selves increasingly anxious in a country try’s, using his public service to carve out a married freely with whites; converted that was rapidly industrializing. Every- personal empire of land, cotton, and slaves to Christianity in growing numbers; even where, it seemed, new technologies were that likely made him the fourth richest wrote a constitution and instituted a sys- transforming how Americans lived and man ever to hold the White House. He tem of government closely modeled on worked: cotton gins and textile mills, the was not guided by “the norms of society,” our own. A “Cherokee Regiment” had rotary press and the telegraph, steam- as Steve Inskeep observes in his brilliant fought beside Jackson, at his request, in boats and railroads. Much as in today’s history, Jacksonland. “He took counsel of defeating the British and the Creek Na- digital revolution, Americans could either what he wanted, what his friends desired, tion, and been indispensable in his vic- adapt or be swept aside in the rushing and what he felt to be right.” tory. They had even, under his bullying, onslaught of the future. sold of large chunks of the land they had Unsurprisingly, many ordinary Ameri- IKE TRUMP, JACKSON SEEMED been guaranteed by treaty—land Jackson cans came to see themselves as victims of L to address his supporters in a used to personally enrich himself. perfidious conspiracies, channeling their shared, coded language. They Yet Jackson wanted them gone, and he energies into indignant rebellions like loved him for saying what they were think- was willing to negotiate only the cost of the Anti-Masonic Party. “It was a vague ing: “What a country God has given us!” their removal. The missionaries bringing but widespread discontent,” explained Us. Not some foreign king, or the Mex- them to Christ stood by the Cherokee, Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun, ican farmers who would soon be driven making their removal a cause célèbre in “caused by the disordered circumstances from the land like the British before them. liberal circles throughout the Northeast. of individuals, but resulting in a g eneral Not African slaves, who were allowed to In a harbinger of the abolitionist move- impression that there was something stay only as property, so their converted ment, the likes of Catharine Beecher, Wil- radically wrong in the administration of souls would go to heaven, out of the good- liam Lloyd Garrison, and Ralph Waldo the Government.” ness of our white Christian hearts. Not Emerson spoke out for them, and deluged These disillusioned Americans chose Native Americans, even though they had Jackson’s legislative allies with petitions— Jackson as their champion. Much as been here for millennia. Us. It was clear the congressional phone lines of the Trump’s supporters do, they loved the enough who Jackson was talking about. day—bearing thousands of names. superlatives with which he described And he didn’t mean a bunch of schem- All to no avail. Jackson held enough America, devoid of complications and ing Eastern bankers. They were another votes in Congress to force a vote on re- doubt. “What a country God has given sort of alien influence, with their love of moval of the Cherokee. Even moderates us!” Jackson once exclaimed, after an worthless, “shinplaster” paper money over who acknowledged the overwhelming appearance before his adoring fans. “We “hard money”—good, solid coins—and the rightness of the Cherokee’s cause refused have the best country, and the best insti- tangible things it could buy: a plot of land, to cross the White House. “It is expected tutions in the world. No people have so a horse, a sharp-edged plough. A man. that men will vote by platoons, in regular much to be grateful for as we.” He was only Jackson took these grievances and rank and file, according to party drilling, six characters over the limit for a tweet. assembled them into a potent agenda. on this question of public faith,” lamented Jackson’s supporters gathered at riot- A white supremacist, he sought to push Jeremiah Evarts, the missionary who bat- ous campaign barbecues and marched, America’s borders all the way to the Pacific, tled most fervently and selflessly on behalf singing, in huge torchlight parades and to clear as much of the land as possible of the Cherokee. “I have never before seen designed—like Trump’s screaming, vi- of Native Americans, whom he believed such a commentary on human depravity.” olent, media-penned rallies—to intimi- to be an inferior race. Like Trump, he did Evarts, described by historian Jon date as much as to inspire. Jackson even not seduce his followers into an ything they Meacham as “one of the great American showed up at the festivities from time did not already believe, or want. But the moral figures” of his time, wore himself

20 | NEW REPUBLIC out in the Cherokee’s cause, dying of tu- During the journey, some 4,000 to 8,000 Andrew Jackson may not have per- berculosis before their fate was decided. died of disease and exposure along what sonally blocked investigations into his His willingness to champion justice in the became known as the Trail of Tears, one own crimes, as Richard Nixon did, and as face of power would later be picked up of the most reprehensible episodes in our some now believe Donald Trump has. But by his great-great-great-grandson, who history. Jackson, by then retired, com- in his defiance of the Supreme Court and also exited the stage before the dramatic mented only to complain about how much Congress, he was guilty of something far conclusion: Archibald Cox. money it cost to remove the Cherokee. worse than mere obstruction of justice. If Jackson’s allies were no more inter- Jackson, like Trump, held our entire sys- ested in standing up for the Cherokee than ACKSON’S OTHER VICTORY tem of checks and balances in contempt. congressional Republicans are in inves- J over the political establishment Swept into ofce by a populist rebellion tigating Trump’s ties to Russia, the judi- of his era wound up hurting that he stoked to a fever pitch, he ruled ciary stepped in to uphold the law. The his own supporters. In 1832, playing on his more as a monarch than an elected exec- Supreme Court ruled 6–1 in favor of the constituency’s widespread fury at Eastern utive. If he wanted to build a geographic Cherokee, efectively ordering Jackson to bankers, Jackson killed the Second Bank of wall between white America and people of cease and desist with his plans to remove the United States—the country’s primitive color, or rearrange the nation’s financial them from their land. “The acts of Georgia central bank of the time. Both Congress system to his personal liking, there was are repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and the Supreme Court had afrmed the no one to stop him. He had helped to and treaties of the United States,” declared constitutionality of the bank, which played destroy the political center, deepening John Marshall, the chief justice who had a pivotal role in installing a stable national the partisan divides that would eventually first established the court’s power. “They currency. But in what became known as erupt into civil war. Donald Trump operates in a political landscape that is far more similar to An- drew Jackson’s than to Richard Nixon’s. Jackson, like Trump, held our entire system of Like Jackson, he is a wealthy Washington checks and balances in contempt. Swept into outsider posing as a champion of the peo- ofce by a populist rebellion, he ruled more as ple. He does not recognize the legitimacy of the political system, as Nixon did, be- a monarch than an elected ofcial. cause he is not a creature of it. He will not go quietly, if it comes to that. We may interfere forcibly with the relations estab- the Bank War, Jackson mobilized his base, be fast approaching another “question of lished between the United States and the vetoed the bank’s charter, and breezed to public faith,” in the words of Archibald Cherokee Nation, the regulation of which, reelection. When supporters of the bank Cox’s great-great-great grandfather. But according to the settled principles of our tried to keep it alive, Jackson destroyed it as in Jackson’s time, there is no political Constitution, are committed exclusively by decree, issuing an executive order to re- center to curb the power of the president. to the government of the Union.” move its federal deposits and transfer them There is only extremism and chaos. The Cherokee, in other words, were an- into private banks favorable to his cause. During Watergate, to their lasting swerable only to the federal government, The move proved to be a disaster. credit, conservatives in both the legis- which in turn must honor its treaties with Two months after Jackson left ofce, the lative and judicial branches of our gov- the Native Americans and protect them on economy collapsed in the Panic of 1837, ernment, loyal to something greater than their lands. That, in our constitutional sys- setting of the worst and most sustained the whims of their president, wielded tem, was supposed to be that. But then, as depression the country had ever sufered. their constitutional power to preserve now, the political center no longer existed. Jackson, who knew of finance only what it the rule of law in America. When the final In an America consumed by the anxieties suited him to know, had in the course of his “smoking gun” tape emerged, it was three of its white working classes, there was career created and burst a land bubble, and leading Republicans—the minority lead- no longer any commonly accepted idea destabilized the nation’s currency. While ers of the Senate and the House, Hugh of democracy abroad in the land—and he retired in comfort on his enormous Scott and John Rhodes, and Barry Gold- Jackson knew it. plantation, his own followers sufered water, tribune of the modern conserva- “John Marshall has made his decision,” the brunt of the depression. Their idol tive movement—who went to the Oval the president was said to have responded. had destroyed the only government in- Ofce and told Richard Nixon that it was “Now let him enforce it.” stitution that might have been able to over. Who in today’s Republican majority In direct defiance of the court, Jackson restore confidence to the markets, just would have the integrity to make that forcibly transferred the Cherokee from as he had steadfastly opposed any “inter- walk? Whose sense of decency, whose Georgia to what is now Oklahoma. In nal improvements”—large infrastructure belief in patriotism over politics, could the process, they were robbed of most projects like building roads and digging we count on? And what calamities will of the wealth they had accumulated. canals that would benefit the public. befall us if there is no one? a

JULY 2017 | 21

Democrats have always prided themselves on being a voice of political sanity. So why has Trump’s election turned the left into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories?

BY COLIN DICKEY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEX NABAUM ate on Election Night in 2012, the nation watched as Karl Rove panicked on live L television. Fox News, his post–Bush administration sinecure, had just called Ohio—and, by extension, the country—for Barack Obama. While the network broadcast images of jubilant crowds in Chicago, Rove refused to concede. “This is premature,” he insisted, ticking of various precinct figures from Ohio counties and warning that everyone needed to be “very cautious about intruding into this process.” For an embarrassingly long half-hour, Rove argued with the entire network, demanding that Fox retract its call on Ohio, to no avail.

What did Karl Rove know that no one else did? Why For the most part, this kind of conspiracy theory—the was he so certain that the numbers from Ohio were idea that sinister forces are secretly engaged in a host of wrong? The left-wing web site Truthout thought it had elaborate plots to manipulate virtually every aspect of our the answer. A few days after the election, the site pub- lives—has been fairly rare on the American left. Sure, liberal lished an article asserting that Rove had been working nut jobs have engaged in all kinds of far-fetched theories behind the scenes to rig Ohio’s electronic voting ma- over the years, wild ideas about the Trilateral Commission chines, monkeying with the software to tilt the count and the JFK assassination, that the government created to Mitt Romney, as part of a conspiracy to rob Barack aids to destroy the black community, or that George W. Obama of a second term. He’d done this before, the Bush had advance warning of the terrorist attacks on site charged, back in 2004, to assure Bush’s reelection. September 11. But most of these theories have remained That’s why Rove appeared “genuinely shocked” when cordoned of from mainstream media; the Truthout story, Obama took Ohio, “because he knew the fix was in, just for example, never circulated much beyond a few fringe like in 2004, and there was no way President Obama web sites. The left has generally presented itself as the was going to win reelection.” sober, rational half of our political discourse, eschewing So why hadn’t Rove’s ratfucking scheme worked? paranoid fables and histrionic bloviaters in favor of rep- Because, Truthout claimed, the hacker collective Anon- utable, fact-checked reporting. ymous had learned of his conspiracy, and had secretly The right, on the other hand, has not only incubated out-ratfucked the ratfucker. Citing a YouTube video conspiracy theories, it has thrived on them, become released before the election, Truthout described how dependent on them, built entire media ecosystems and Anonymous had warned Rove not to act: “We want you political careers around them. Glenn Beck, at his peak, to know that we are watching you, waiting for you to commanded a daily television audience of more than make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election three million viewers by arguing that the Obama ad- to your favor.” Truthout, if correct, suggested an awful ministration had secret plans to implement a Second truth about our political system: A shadowy organization Bill of Rights, that the Arab Spring was the beginning of superhackers was the only thing standing between of a worldwide Muslim caliphate, and that Woodrow us and a stolen election. Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt orchestrated a 100-year

24 | NEW REPUBLIC conspiracy to establish a “socialist utopia” in America. are actually based on a single, unverified source. In May, Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, has become an influ- Palmer reported that Supreme Court Chief Justice John ential voice on the right by insisting that the Sandy Hook Roberts had ordered Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch to massacre was a government-led false flag operation to recuse himself from all Trump-related Russia hearings. implement gun control, that same-sex marriage stems His source? A single tweet from an anonymous Twitter from a “eugenicist-globalist” worldview, and that Hillary account under the name “Puesto Loco.” Clinton and John Podesta ran a child sex– trafcking ring Long quarantined in the furthest corners of the in- out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. None of this ternet, these left-wing rantings have begun to find their stopped Donald Trump from calling Jones for advice and way into mainstream political discourse. In March, appearing on his show. After all, the two men helped Louise Mensch was inexplicably given space on the New promulgate what is perhaps the right’s most influential York Times op-ed page to trumpet her theories, rattling conspiracy theory—that Barack Obama was born in of a list of Russian operatives she believed should be Kenya, a racist fantasia that launched Trump’s political called to testify before Congress—a list that included career and helped land him the presidency. Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg. Her tally of agents But since the election of the Birther-in-Chief, both has since expanded to encompass everyone from Black the nature and the source of conspiracy theories has Lives Matter to Sean Hannity to Bernie Sanders. In shifted dramatically. In recent months, the left has be- April, msnbc’s Laurence O’Donnell echoed a Palmer gun to rival Trump himself as an incubator for sinister Report theory that Syria’s chemical weapon attack had musings and crackpot accusations. And like Trump, been orchestrated by the Russian government, so that left-wing conspiracists are using Twitter to gestate and Trump could appear to distance himself from Putin. (Like market-test their most outlandish forms of political a true conspiracy theorist, O’Donnell ofered no proof insanity. Leading the charge has been Louise Mensch, for the claim, insisting instead that “you won’t hear ... a British former MP who seemingly overnight has be- proof that the scenario I’ve just outlined is impossible.”) come the main spokesperson of the paranoid resistance. On Twitter, the Democratic Party’s deputy communi- Mensch has attracted more than 284,000 followers on cations director retweeted Mensch’s unsubstantiated Twitter, legitimate journalists among them, by posing hypothesis that Russia had some form of blackmail on ever more elaborate and ludicrous theories of the Russian Representative Jason Chafetz, chairman of the House conspiracy to elect Trump. She claims, for example, that Oversight Committee, who has since announced that Andrew Breitbart was assassinated by Russian agents he would resign. On May 10, Senator Ed Markey told to allow for the ascendancy of Steve Bannon, who took CNN that “a grand jury has been empaneled up in New over the Breitbart web site after its founder’s death in York” to investigate Russian meddling in the election; 2012. Anthony Weiner’s sex scandal with a minor was, pressed by The Guardian, Markey’s staf said he got the likewise, the work of Russian intelligence: Mensch claims information from Mensch and The Palmer Report. (A later that they invented a fake profile for a 15-year-old girl to press release claimed he’d received it from a “briefing” entrap Weiner, planted files containing Hillary Clinton’s that was “not substantiated.”) When Ned Price, a former emails on his computer, and leaked the existence of spokesman for the National Security Council, was asked those files to the FBI. why he retweeted a Palmer Report story, he insisted that Another left-wing node of conspiratorial difusion a retweet was not an endorsement, but professed an can be found at The Palmer Report, a once relatively ob- openness to conspiracy theories. “Every once in a blue scure pro-Hillary blog that has built a large following moon,” he said, “the tin hat can fit.” with its wildly speculative theories about Trump. According to the site, Trump himself had Russian agent Sergei Mikhailov killed in December to prevent the release of the now infamous “pee tape” that purportedly The left has begun to rival Trump himself shows the president-elect urinating on a bed the Obamas slept in. Vladimir Putin, as an incubator for sinister musings the site maintains, is using the video to and crackpot accusations, with Twitter blackmail Trump—and the president “may have already acted on it in a manner which used to market-test the most outlandish would be both treasonous and murderous.” The site’s founder, Bill Palmer, routinely forms of political insanity. blasts out stories that sound serious but

JULY 2017 | 25 Why has Trump’s election driven the left to embrace such trans- parent nonsense? Part of the reason lies in the public’s loss of faith in the mainstream media, which predicted an all- but-certain victory for Hillary Clinton. Part of the reason also lies in Trump’s willingness to lie in direct contradic- tion of the known facts, an extension of the right’s long- running assault on the very notion of objective, verifiable truth. But above all, conspiracy thinking has gained traction among liber- als for a more prosaic reason: Liberals are human beings, and hu- man beings get rattled when they’re afraid. If the left is succumbing to conspiracy theories, it’s because f there’s an aesthetic hallmark of this brave conspiracy theories are a way to manage anxiety. new world of left-wing conspiracy theo- Conventional wisdom has long held that there would I rists, it’s the long, connect-the-dots Twitter never be a left-wing rival to Glenn Beck or Alex Jones, thread. The purest and most overelabo- because liberals are just too damn smart to fall for that rated example of this new genre of paranoia debuted kind of stuf. “We believe in subtlety,” Mario Cuomo on December 11, with the publication of an unreadable, once explained. “We believe in telling the whole truth. 127-tweet thread known as “Time for Some Game The- We don’t want to exaggerate. Look, they write their ory.” Written by Eric Garland, a previously obscure message with crayons. We use fine-point quills.” figure who describes himself as a “futurist, keynote As it turns out, though, the left wasn’t smarter than speaker, author, intelligence analyst, columnist, and the right; it simply wasn’t terrified enough. Waking up bassist,” the thread veers between the sort of groundless to a country run by a man who openly boasts of sexual conjecture and outright gibberish that form the basis assault, who has systematically targeted immigrants of President Trump’s own late-night Twitter epistles. and Muslims for deportation, whose every utterance (“The Russians f**king rule at covert shit,” reads one seems to bespeak some form of mental instability, lib- Garland tweet. “Always have. Ask a cold warrior. Mucho erals suddenly find themselves adrift in a world they respect for our adversaries. They do clever work!”) Yet never imagined possible. In a landscape this dysto- “game theory” thread spread through the internet like pian, conspiracy ofers a salve. It promises an order measles in an undervaccinated population, garnering behind the madness, some sort of rational explanation widespread praise and driving Garland’s following from for the seeming chaos. It validates your paranoia, which 5,000 to 30,000 overnight. paradoxically confirms you’re not paranoid. And most Garland’s thread depicts how the Russians, reduced dangerous of all, it afrms your sense that things are by the end of the Cold War to “Drunk Uncle status,” hopeless, while absolving you from having to do anything systematically used everything from George W. Bush’s about it. Conspiracy theories may temporarily allay our recklessness in Iraq to Edward Snowden’s revelations fear, but they ultimately exacerbate the very conditions about the NSA to undermine confidence in the U.S. intel- that created that fear in the first place. ligence community. “DID YOU KNOW YOUR TOASTER

26 | NEW REPUBLIC IS SPYING ON YOU?” Garland tweeted, parodying the additional 10 tweets of “notes”) that began: “The plot mind-set of an American duped by the diabolical Russian to sell America’s foreign policy for foreign oil _and_ conspiracy. “THE GUBMINT! IT IS EVERYWHERE! steal an election in the bargain began”—wait for it—“at THEY SPY ON (*controls snickering*) ALLIES! ALL the Mayflower Hotel.” The venue for Trump’s first major BAD!” According to Garland, Russia’s long con led di- foreign policy address, Abramson notes, was switched rectly to our current political predicament: “Trump says at the last minute from the National Press Club to the he don’t need no stinkin’ intel agencies. Russia (BWA Mayflower. In Abramson’s analysis, it was changed HAHAHAHAAAA) blames Ukraine! LOLOLOLOLZZZ.” because the hotel has “restricted, VIP-only areas” that The only way forward, Garland concludes, is to embrace enabled Trump to meet in secret with the ambassadors his “game theory” in all its intricate zaniness. “To be for Russia, Italy, and Singapore, who jointly negotiated American,” he tweets, “is to accept that unflinchingly the sale of 19 percent of Russia’s state oil company. and to soldier forth for future generations, and DO Here, behind closed doors, is where Trump agreed to BETTER, GODDAMN IT.” do Russia’s bidding in return for a cut of the oil: “The Other Twitter-threaders were quick to follow in Gar- Mayflower Speech,” Abramson concludes, “should get land’s paranoid footsteps. Adam Khan, a Silicon Valley the most attention in Congress.” The entire thesis is marketing consultant, linked to a report about a Treasury founded on the simple fact of a hotel booking; in the Department probe into real estate deals in Miami and conspiracy mind-set, even the most mundane logistical New York, which noted that shell companies making details reveal a deeper, preordained plot. all-cash ofers sometimes serve as fronts for corrupt For further evidence, conspiracy theorists routinely ofcials or drug smugglers looking to launder money. rely on unnamed and untraceable sources. Everyone, Khan, however, takes this indisputable fact one step fur- it seems, has an unnamed contact in the intelligence ther: Because some Trump properties have been bought community these days. Andrea Chalupa, the author of by anonymous shell companies, he must therefore be a book on the “untold story” of Animal Farm, recently in cahoots with Russian oligarchs. Tweet-annotating tweeted that an “Active IC agent told me Russia devel- the report with conspiratorial red arrows, Khan insists oped Trump for over decade, could have arrested him for that he has discovered the “mechanism used by foreign sex crimes, instead collected kompromat”—the Russian money launderers to park ill-gotten gains in Trump term for compromising material. Claude Taylor, a former properties, funnel money to him.” Such a conclusion is, aide to Bill Clinton turned travel photographer, tweeted in fact, quite plausible, and raises legitimate questions in March that Trump was on the verge of resigning, and that should be investigated. But a shell company does seconded Mensch’s claim that a “Grand Jury under aus- not automatically mean money laundering. This form pices of fisa court” had issued a “sealed indictment … of internet sleuthing is little more than garden-variety to serve as the basis of Impeachment.” Never mind that inductive fallacy: While the underlying premise is true, fisa courts don’t issue indictments, or that impeachment the conclusion could well be false. But like Trump’s leaps begins in the House of Representatives, not with a grand of illogic, such left-wing conspiracy thinking is a hit on jury. This is a former White House aide—he must have Twitter: Khan has 154,000 followers. some form of inside intelligence. Then there’s Seth Abramson, a poet at the University It should come as no surprise that Twitter is the of New Hampshire, who has 119,000 followers. In one medium of choice for left-wing conspiracy theories. As long-winded and breathless Twitter thread, published Trump himself has demonstrated, Twitter cares about in March, Abramson rattled of 40 tweets (plus an only one thing: whether content is sensational enough to go viral. Twitter enables conspiracy thinkers to unfold their crazy scenari- os in incremental, isolated blasts, each “fact” as disconnected from the others In a sea of bullshit and misinformation, as it is from reality. What matters isn’t the background or experience of the the- Twitter threaders appear with orists, or whether any of their claims their grim certainty, rearranging are substantiated. Much like adorable cat GIFs or Ellen DeGeneres selfies, coincidence and nonsense into clear, conspiracy tweets play not to our de- sire to understand the world, but to our readable patterns. deep-seated need to share the things we find most comforting.

JULY 2017 | 27 ot every wild-eyed claim about Trump is speech to Congress last February, during which he man- born of paranoia. Chris Cillizza, writing for aged to sound momentarily presidential, as “a technique N CNN, recently proclaimed that the pres- straight out of the autocrat’s playbook.” Anything that ident is turning “liberals into conspiracy doesn’t fit the narrative of imminent authoritarianism, theorists.” As evidence, he cited two examples: a tweet in Kendzior’s view, is just a head-fake—a sure sign of a by a VICE News reporter that GOP congressmen were deeper conspiracy. carting in cases of Bud Lite to the Capitol to celebrate At its most extreme, conspiracy accounts for—and the repeal of Obamacare, and the widespread claim even celebrates—facts that outright contradict one’s that the House-passed replacement will treat rape as a premise. Presented with overwhelming evidence that preexisting condition. Trump is acting rashly, conspiracists simply treat his The beer, it turned out, was ordered for an unrelat- erratic behavior as further proof that he’s working the ed event. And the claim about rape is little more than a long con, that the seeming chaos is a canny form of remote, worst-case possibility of a bill that is still a long misdirection, that the administration is engaged in some way from being implemented. But neither of these, form of three- or four- or eleven-dimensional chess. The strictly speaking, are conspiracy theories. Instead, chess metaphor, initially floated as a reference to the sup- they’re examples of confirmation bias—the tendency, posedly inscrutable brilliance of Obama’s foreign policy, as defined by psychologist Morton Hunt, to “look for has been repurposed to suggest that Trump’s apparent and remember those instances that bear out our beliefs, incompetence is actually a cover for an extremely com- but not those that do not.” It is neither unique to liber- plex and sinister plot that’s going completely according als nor new to the Trump era. Both the left and the right to plan. On Medium, one Jake Fuentes, a technology have long been guilty of it, partisan web sites have executive at Capital One, recently suggested that the thrived on it for decades, and it will continue to flour- botched roll-out of the first Muslim travel ban was, ish long after Trump’s administration ends. in fact, a means of testing “the country’s willingness Sarah Kendzior, a researcher and author with a Ph.D. to capitulate to a fascist regime.” Yonatan Zunger, an and 247,000 Twitter followers, is a pure example of engineer at Google, concurred, calling Trump’s constant confirmation bias: She relies heavily on comparisons missteps, mistakes, and retractions evidence of “a trial that are technically plausible but far from definitive. For balloon for a coup d’état against the United States.” Kendzior, virtually every action taken by the Trump When you begin to treat evidence supporting one administration is evidence that we’re in the early throes conclusion (that Trump’s administration is stafed with of an authoritarian takeover. She has compared Trump ideologues and novices who don’t know what they’re to Saparmurat Niyazov, the deceased dictator of Turk- doing) as though it supports the exact opposite conclu- menistan, who renamed months of the year after himself sion (that this apparent incompetence is a masterpiece of and his family members, instituted a new alphabet, ban- misdirection), you have moved away from logical fallacy ished dogs from the capital, and outlawed lip-synching. and into deep-seated paranoia. Whereas confirmation She has suggested that Trump hopes to team up with bias simply ignores or downplays contradictory details, Vladimir Putin to launch a nuclear war against “as-yet conspiracy embraces them as further proof—of false flag unknown shared enemies.” She has tweeted that the operations, of the unreliability of the reporting source. Republican repeal of Obamacare was “ominous” because “An infuriating feature of conspiracy theory,” the journal “you don’t pass something this unpopular thinking there Skeptical Inquirer notes, “is its propensity to take the will be free and fair elections.” She even cited Trump’s standard of evidence that skeptics value so highly and turn it on its head: Extraordinary claims no longer require extraordinary evidence; rather an extraordinary lack of evidence is thought to validate the extraordinariness Conspiracy promises an order behind of the conspiracy.” Confirmation bias lets us overlook the madness, a rational explanation inconvenient truths. But when forced to for the chaos. It validates your paranoia, confront reality, most of us, rationally, will accept it. Conspiracy, on the other which paradoxically confirms you’re hand, involves not simply picking and choosing among facts, but doubting the not paranoid. very substance on which they’re based. When someone like Leah M cElrath, a

28 | NEW REPUBLIC THE FRINGE GOES MAINSTREAM more likely to see images that do not exist, develop superstitions, and per- ceive conspiracies. “The less control people have over their lives,” one re- searcher explained, “the more likely they are to try and regain control through mental gymnastics.” The term for this phenomenon is “illusory pat- tern perception,” and it goes a long way toward explaining the paranoid mind- set. Conspiracists, fundamentally, be- Eric Garland Louise Mensch Bill Palmer lieve that malevolent order is prefera- Futurist and bassist Former British MP Founder, Palmer Report ble to chaos. Those who assert that THEORY Rupert Murdoch THEORY Andrew Breitbart THEORY Trump handed Trump and Steve Bannon are sinister is a highly-placed Russian was murdered by Putin to over contents of Comey’s masterminds who secretly control the operative. make way for Bannon. computer to Russia. world from behind the scenes find FOLLOWERS 109,761 FOLLOWERS 284,499 FOLLOWERS 23, 292 FAMOUS FAN Newsweek FAMOUS FAN Ted Lieu, FAMOUS FAN Ex-governor the prospect more reassuring than the writer Kurt Eichenwald GOP congressman Jennifer Granholm idea that they are rapacious, half-assed con men who have bumbled their way into more power than they can handle. That bumbling—the fact that Trump won the presidency even though a sizable majority of Americans voted against him—contributes to the cur- rent spike in conspiracy thinking. The repeal of Obamacare was polling at 37 percent when a Congress with an approval rating of 20 percent passed a House bill with the help of a histor- Seth Abramson Claude Taylor Scott Dworkin ically unpopular president who had Poet Photographer Political consultant lost the popular vote. Conspiracies THEORY CIA confirmed to THEORY FISA court issued THEORY Putin is using BBC that Putin has sex a sealed indictment to Trump to destroy health about the elections of Bush in 2004 tapes of Trump. impeach Trump. care to kill Americans. and Obama in 2012 didn’t take hold, FOLLOWERS 119,869 FOLLOWERS 170,347 FOLLOWERS 146,272 in part, because the losers understood FAMOUS FAN Actor Wil FAMOUS FAN Rick Wilson, FAMOUS FAN Actor Mark and accepted that their side had ac- Wheaton GOP consultant Ruffalo tually lost. For many Americans, it defies belief that in a democracy, the will of the people could be so brazenly ignored. (People of color, of course, are intimately acquainted with de- senior writer for the liberal web site Shareblue, can mocracy’s shortcomings, which is perhaps why this describe an unhinged Twitter rant from Trump as “Rus- new wave of conspiracists is overwhelmingly white.) sian active measures,” it’s clear that the fantastical Conspiracy thrives when authority fails. While we elements of conspiracy have overtaken any objective find ourselves swimming in a sea of ofcial bullshit and consideration of the data before us. misinformation, Twitter threaders appear with their grim certainty, proclaiming the inevitability of Reichstag fires, and rearranging coincidence and nonsense into onspiracy works diferently from confirma- clear, readable patterns. They reduce the big, scary world tion bias because, at its root, it’s addressing to a single axis, promising that there exists somewhere C a diferent psychological need: to assert au- the one hidden fact, the one shattering revelation, that thority or control over an increasingly out- will undo everything at a stroke. Such assurances not of-control situation. According to a 2008 study published only soothingly oversimplify life’s messy complexity, in Science, individuals who lack control in a situation are they absolve us from having to question our own

JULY 2017 | 29 ideological assumptions: If you buy The Palmer Report’s sifting through the noise and chaos to distinguish be- evidence-free allegation that Trump’s victory in Penn- tween what is and isn’t a threat, what does and does sylvania had to have been rigged, you don’t have to face not call for reaction. Trump makes no efort to win ar- the difcult work of rebuilding a Democratic ground guments with logic or demographics; he simply sows as game in the Rust Belt. The magic bullet theory—a term much fear and confusion as possible. The administration that itself was coined by conspiracists to belittle the rules by noise; conspiracy theories seek to silence it. ofcial story of the JFK assassination—is a means by which you get to pick and choose your trauma, discard- ing any explanation you find unpleasant or inconvenient. ust because you’re paranoid, of course, In an oft-cited analysis of conspiracy theories pub- doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. lished more than two decades ago, researcher Ted J History has had more than its share of false Goertzel found a direct correlation between conspir- flags, fifth columns, and Reichstag fires. acy thinking and a trio of beliefs: that things are get- We are not living in Nazi Germany in 1933, but there ting worse for average people, that the world is too are enough echoes to be a cause for concern: Trump’s screwed up to bring a child into, and that public ofcials admiration for authoritarian strongmen is matched only don’t give a shit about their constituents. It used to be by his disdain for democratic processes. As dictators apocalyptic-minded Christians who most acutely felt have consolidated power in Russia and Turkey, and that the world was an inhospitable place in which to with fascist movements gaining strength throughout raise children; now that feeling is shared by progressives Europe, these are unquestionably dangerous times, and worried about the impact of climate change. Similarly, turning back this wave of nationalist fervor will require while it was once rural whites who were most likely to a concerted efort and a variety of tactics. feel ignored by politicians, now it is urban liberals who It may yet be the case that conspiratorial thinking watch in horror as GOP politicians mock them at every will have a place in our arsenal of resistance. Viewing turn. The left is the new silent majority, resentful and coincidences skeptically and connecting seemingly powerless and paranoid. random dots is precisely what exposed the conspiracies Conspiracy, Goertzel found, also tracks closely with of Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal. And in the being part of a racial minority; hence the belief among wake of Trump’s firing of James Comey, we may well be some black Americans in the 1990s that aids was created on the verge of uncovering a similarly vast conspiracy. by the government. But minority status can also be What once was the stuf of John le Carré novels— Russian a matter of perception, however misplaced: Though dead drops, traitors at the highest levels—may, in time, conservative white men remain in the majority, their reveal itself to be the story of the 2016 election. feelings of persecution have left them vulnerable to con- In other words, it is not the methodology of con- spiracy theories because it helps explain such things as a spiracy that’s the problem. When paranoid thinking black president, gay marriage, and feminism. Now, under opens up possibilities, it can serve a useful function. Trump, it is liberals who feel excluded and frightened. The danger comes when conspiracists remain wedded The Muslim bans, the cruel and draconian crackdown to their theories in the face of conflicting information, on immigrants, the war on women’s rights—all have when they refuse to do the hard work of confirming succeeded at terrorizing America’s most marginalized and substantiating their own assumptions and beliefs. citizens. Even the simple act of following the day’s news Woodward and Bernstein did not simply point to a trail has come to feel like an exercise in constant vigilance: of shady campaign contributions and tweet that Nixon was behind it all. They followed the facts, step by painstaking step, all the way to the Oval Ofce. Goertzel, helpfully, casts con- Conspiratorial thinking may yet have a spiratorial thinking as either “mo- nological” or “dialogical.” The former place in our arsenal of resistance. Russian is invested in a single, preordained dead drops, traitors at the highest understanding of the world; every scrap of evidence, no matter how levels—all may, in time, be revealed to be inconsequential or contradictory, is marshaled on behalf of the monolith- the story of the 2016 election. ic perception. Mensch’s ever -growing list of suspected Russian agents is a

30 | NEW REPUBLIC Conspiracy theories spread like measles: First they infect the weak and vulnerable; then they spread like wildfire among the entire popula- tion. Researchers have found that if a person believes in one conspiracy, he or she is more likely to believe in others—even those unrelated to the initial theory. Which is to say, once conspiracy becomes part of our be- liefs, it can be harder to see the world as it truly is. Conspiracy depends on a rejection of the world as it appears to be. Once this belief takes root, it becomes harder and harder to dif- ferentiate truth from fiction. This is an important moment for the left. If we give credence to the wild fantasies spreading virally through Twitter, we open ourselves up to further infection by a new generation of liberal birthers and truthers. What’s worse, believing in conspiracy also makes us less likely to take action: In one study, par- ticipants who were shown a video claiming that global warming was a hoax were less likely to believe sci- entific studies about climate change or sign a petition to reduce carbon emissions. “Exposing the public to conspiratorial thoughts about a spe- cific issue”—no matter how briefly, the researchers concluded—“may even decrease general pro-social tendencies.” Conspiracy theories, for all their crazy whiteboards and textbook example of Goertzel’s monological thinking: doomsday mentality, make the world seem simpler— There is nothing that can’t be twisted to fit into her pre- and in doing so, they urge us to reject the hard work existing matrix. Dialogical thinking, by contrast, is open of organizing and activism, of knocking on doors and to ambiguity and conflict. It looks for unexpected angles, registering voters, of staying informed and showing up new approaches, and unexplored nuance; hypotheses are to town halls, of participating in local and state govern- tested and conclusions are discarded when they are con- ment, of reestablishing the basic principles of electoral tradicted by the facts. “The key issue is not the belief in politics that are so desperately in peril. the specific conspiracy,” Goertzel observes, “but the log- The promise of conspiracy—that it will assuage our ical processes which led to that belief. As with other belief anxiety—is a false one. Watching Donald Trump from systems, conspiracy theories can be evaluated according the social media sidelines, expecting at any minute to their productivity.” There’s nothing wrong with con- that the Deep State will appear and fire a single magic spiracy theories, in other words, if they provide illumi- bullet from the Grassy Knoll and put everything right nation. Looking for hidden clues is essential to bringing again, is a dangerous delusion. It ofers false assurance secrets to light. But conspiracists like Louise Mensch and that you, as one lone individual, can’t do anything, The Palmer Report ofer us nothing but trash fires, and we even though American democracy has never needed need to be wary of giving them any more oxygen. you more. a

JULY 2017 | 31 ↑ A stick of red maize. With nearly 200,000 people displaced from their homes in northern Cameroon, farmers are struggling to produce staple crops like millet, sorghum, and maize. The government has forbidden the distribution of some fertilizers, which can be used to make explosives, in an attempt to prevent the conflict with Boko Haram from spilling over from neighboring Nigeria.

→ A bowl of fish bones—all that remains of a meal. Grains are also in short supply because the government has banned farmers from allowing their crops to grow more than three feet tall along Cameroon’s highways. Militants had been hiding in the fields in order to ambush passing convoys.

32 NEW REPUBLIC JULY 2017 As Lake Chad vanishes, seven million people are on the brink of starvation.

BY LISA PALMER PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS DE BODE ← A bowl of super cereal, the emergency food given to refugees as a protein supplement to prevent nutritional deficiencies. A third of Cameroonian children suffer from stunted growth.

↓ A bag of niebe beans. Aché, 80, tucked it into the wall of the small home where she lives with her four daughters and their children. All the men in their family were taken away or killed during a nighttime attack by Boko Haram.

34 NEW REPUBLIC JULY 2017 ot so long ago, Lake Chad was one of the Nlargest bodies of water in Africa. The thick reeds and vital wetlands around its basin provided vast freshwater reserves, breeding grounds for fish, fertile soil for agriculture, and grasslands where farmers grazed their animals. In 1963, it spanned almost 10,000 square miles, an expanse roughly the size of Maryland. But as climate change has taken its toll, the lake has shrunk by 90 percent. Today, only 965 square miles remain. Wetlands have given way to sand dunes. Farmers have abandoned their fields. Those who still live by the lake struggle to survive, beset by chronic drought and the slow onset of eco- logical catastrophe. This looming crisis has only worsened with the rise of Boko Haram, which has driven some 74,000 Nigerians into neighboring Cameroon. In response, Cameroon’s government has banned farmers from using some brands of fertilizer, an ingredient used in homemade explosives, and has ordered that sta- ples like maize, millet, and sorghum growing along roadsides be no higher than three feet, to prevent Boko Haram from hiding in planted fields. More refugees and fewer crops have proven to be a deadly combination in a region already ravaged by ↑ A half-eaten meal of ground climate change. More than seven million people red maize, white rice, and around Lake Chad are now sufering from severe crushed mango leaves. This hunger, including 500,000 children wracked by acute is the only meal Ramata malnutrition. Some huddle in makeshift shelters Modou, 58, and her six they have erected; others forage in the woods. Those children will eat today. They gathered the ingredients fortunate enough to be granted a spot in a refugee by begging from house to camp often receive no more than one meal a day. house in a village near the Food, even in the most minute quantities, has become makeshift camp for women scarcer than hope. and children where they live. We often turn away from images of the starving and hungry, from the skeletal profiles and h ollowed - out eyes that attest to the misery and sufering. But photographer Chris de Bode has found a way to focus our attention on this forgotten crisis. A single vege- table, a dried fish, a bowl of red maize—sometimes this is all a mother has to divide between her children each day. She may have to choose to feed her two youngest and send the teenagers to a village to beg for food. These images do not ask us to look into their eyes and see ourselves. They ask us to look at the emptiness of their bowls and reflect on the fullness of our own. We see their hunger through what little they have. We measure their sufering in the most universal unit of all: a single meal. a ↑ Some 74,000 Nigerian refugees have poured into northern Cameroon over the past two years, fleeing Boko Haram with whatever they can carry. Clockwise from top left: A battered spoon that was given to Amina, a pregnant mother of two, after she fled her village; foraged firewood that is burned or bartered for food in the camps; an old sardine tin that Aichadou, six, and Ibrahim, four, found in a garbage dump. Eating sardines is a distant memory for the siblings; they use the tin as a prop in their pretend kitchen. PANOS PICTURES PICTURES PANOS / BODE DE CHRIS

36 NEW REPUBLIC JULY 2017 → Vegetables are a rare luxury in northern Cameroon. Most refugees survive on one bland meal a day, seasoning their food with whatever spices they can find. Clockwise from top left: A tomato from the only stall in Mémé where they are sold; a small, brittle, dried fish used to season boiled maize porridge; a bag of dried potato leaves, a specialty of the region, sold for less than a dime. Evangelical churches are being hit by widespread accusations of sexual abuse. But as one 13-year-old victim discovered, church leaders often cover up the crimes rather than punish the perpetrators. Are Protestants concealing a Catholic-size scandal?

BY KATHRYN JOYCE The remote Baptist mission seemed like paradise to Kim James (foreground) and her younger sister, Anne. IT WAS A HOT DAY IN JULY, A SATURDAY fundamentalists, abwe is among the The 50 or so missionaries and children afternoon, and Kim James was bored. Her largest missionary groups in the United at the compound all seemed like one big older sisters had taken her to a church States, deploying more than 900 Baptists family. Adults were called “aunt” and event in their small hometown in Indi- to 70 countries. His father’s legacy made “uncle”; the kids were “cousins.” Presid- ana, where the girls were spending their Ketcham a sort of prince within the world ing over the mission was Uncle Donn summer. Her parents were back in Ban- of abwe: the doctor with the “magical Ketcham, who had moved to Bangladesh gladesh, working at the remote Baptist name,” as one missionary later put it, with his wife, Kitty, in the early 1960s. missionary compound where the fam- much beloved by the family of churches A handsome man, with sideswept hair ily had lived, on and of, for five years. that supported the group. He’d been the and a trim mustache, Ketcham cut a dash- For an adventurous and high-spirited undisputed patriarch of the Bangladesh ing figure as he rode his motorcycle on 13-year-old like Kim, Indiana seemed dull mission for almost three decades. the jungle roads around the compound. compared to Bangladesh. She missed her Kim gave the pastor only a partial, He wasn’t just the medical authority, but friends, the dozen or so missionary kids fuzzy account of what had happened to a spiritual authority too, often leading everybody called “MKs.” She missed the her; as a child raised in a fundamental- the group in worship. “He was the ideal menagerie her parents let her keep: goats, ist “haven,” she lacked the vocabulary to missionary,” Richard Stagg, an abwe of- cows, a parrot, a monkey. She missed describe sex acts, let alone understand ficial and a friend of Ketcham, would the jackals that called in the distance at them. But rather than call Kim’s parents recall years later. “He was a good surgeon. night, and the elephants that sometimes or contact the police, the shocked cler- If your car broke down, he could fix it. If crashed through the compound fence. ic turned to a higher authority, placing the generator broke, he could fix that. He As she thought about the mission, an urgent call to abwe headquarters in was also my favorite preacher. He was though, Kim felt troubled. Something Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. smooth as silk. He had everybody fooled.” was weighing on her mind. So she decided That, Kim would realize many years Around the compound, it was an open to skip out of the church event—it was later, was when the cover-up began. secret that there had been “extramarital for little kids, anyway—and go see the afairs” involving Ketcham and missionary pastor. She found him in his ofce, trying women. Mission ofcials back in Penn- to compose the next day’s sermon. Kim sylvania had been receiving troubling ambled around his desk, picking things KIM’S PARENTS, KEN AND SUE JAMES, up, putting them back down. Eventually, moved to Bangladesh with their four with feigned casualness, she pointed be- daughters in 1982, driven by a humble call- tween her legs and said, “Is it wrong when ing. Their life had always revolved around “He was the ideal someone does this—touches you here?” the church. When Ken was a boy, his family missionary,” a church The pastor dropped his pen and looked had hosted Baptist missionaries in their ofcial recalled. “He up. “Kim,” he asked, “has this happened home, and he’d heard them talk about to you?” having to interrupt their work as doctors was also my favorite At first, Kim said no. But as the pastor to re-roof a building or do other manual preacher. He had gently persisted, she began to sob. Yes, labor on their compounds. So when Ken everybody fooled.” she had been touched, there and there, grew up and became a handyman, he saw lots of times. a role for himself at the mission. “We’re The pastor asked Kim who had not pastors or preachers,” says Sue, “but he touched her. always wanted to have his hands to help.” reports since 1967, and had disciplined Uncle Donn, she said. It took years for the family to raise the Ketcham for inappropriate relationships Donn, the pastor would soon learn, money they would need in Bangladesh — on multiple occasions. At one point, abwe was not really Kim’s uncle. He was Donn $4,000 a month—to cover travel, living had issued a directive that single women Ketcham, the 58-year-old chief doctor expenses, insurance, and contributions at the compound were forbidden from at the mission hospital in Bangladesh. to abwe. They spent their Sundays and riding with the doctor on his motorcycle. His father had co-founded the Baptist Wednesdays driving to conservative Bap- “Watch out for this man,” one missionary denomination that sponsored the mission- tist churches across Indiana and sever- couple later recalled being warned when ary group, the Association of Baptists for al other Midwestern and Northeastern they arrived at the mission. “He’ll sweep World Evangelism; its goal was to create a states, giving presentations about the you of your feet.” “militant, missionary-minded, Biblically missionary work overseas. It was a long But despite Ketcham’s obvious pattern separate haven of Fundamentalism.” Lit- slog, but when they got to Bangladesh, of misconduct, abwe seemed more inter- tle known outside the world of Christian they knew it had been worth it. ested in silencing the women involved

JULY 2017 | 39 than in punishing their abuser. A few she’d been taught? Ketcham reassured next room. Her gave her pills that made years after Kim’s family arrived at the her. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” her drowsy. He told her how special she compound, a female missionary wrote she recalls him telling her. “In fact, this was, and gave her afectionate nicknames, directly to abwe ofcials, recounting how is how a guy does it.” And then he pro- like “Mugwamp,” to prove it. Ketcham’s own daughter suspected he ceeded to demonstrate. The Bangladesh compound was its was having an afair; she’d caught him Kim was embarrassed. “I’d never seen own small world. Everybody noticed how in his ofce, door locked, with a woman. a penis in my life,” she says. “I didn’t close Kim was to Uncle Donn, and some When questioned, Ketcham claimed that know what it was. I just saw this foreign were worried—though they never report- he had been “trying to help” the woman thing and I was shocked.” ed their suspicions. One day, a missionary and insisted that “there was NOT an im- She tried to protest. “What are you who’d been watching the James girls for moral relationship.” At Ketcham’s request, doing?” she said. But Ketcham insisted Ken and Sue found Ketcham leaving Kim’s abwe resolved the situation by banning it was fine. “This is normal,” he told her. bedroom after an in-home visit; later, the woman from the mission. “This is what guys do.” when she checked on Kim, she found her In a culture where sex was only dis- “I don’t think this is normal,” she said. crying. Another adult, passing by Ket- cussed in whispers, and where submission “Because my dad has never done this.” cham’s house one day, saw Kim sitting to authority was paramount, Ketcham’s Ketcham encouraged her to touch on the doctor’s lap in his bedroom. A few privileged status remained unquestioned. him. Kim “didn’t know what to do,” she minutes later, Kim came bolting out of Besides, he had a way of making others recalls. “All I kept thinking was, ‘This is the house, begging: Please don’t tell my feel thrilled to receive his attention— a doctor, the most godly man here. He mother. Other missionaries blamed Kim especially the kids. “If he saw you coming, for what they were seeing; the girl, some he’d light up and smile and say ‘Hi,’ and said, had a reputation as “boy-crazy,” with maybe give you a hug,” recalls Kim’s sister, a “habit of clinging to men.” Diana Durrill. “I don’t ever remember it Silence and submission Kim’s confusion only grew. “My body being creepy. That was the scariest thing make fundamentalist likes it,” she thought, “so either I’m a bad about him: We weren’t aware of what he Christians a ripe person or it’s OK.” The biblical teachings was doing, because he was too good at it.” she’d grown up with, in a culture that Kim quickly became Ketcham’s favor- target: “Church people preached abstinence and the sinfulness ite. Donn tutored her in math; Kitty gave are easy to fool,” boasts of sex, told her it was wrong. But Un- all the MKs art lessons. When Kim’s par- one sexual predator. cle Donn was a close friend of her par- ents had to travel for missionary training, ents, and the holiest man she knew. He they often left their daughters with the wouldn’t do anything that’s not right, she couple. Ketcham let Kim hang around thought. Ketcham told her God was us- the hospital after school, allowing her wouldn’t do anything that’s not right.’ ing him to help her. If she told her par- to visit patients, change bandages, even Then I thought, ‘Kim, just accept it. It’s ents, he warned, her entire family would hold newborns after birth. “I think that’s OK.’ That’s everything that was going be banished from the mission, “where how he got his hooks into me,” Kim says. through my mind.” God wanted them to be.” Kim was old “Going up there every day and seeing After that incident, Ketcham began enough to understand the implicit threat: what was happening really intrigued me. conducting regular breast and pelvic ex- By speaking up, she would be ruining Overseas, there were really no rules.” aminations on Kim when she stopped by God’s purpose for her family. And the Like most fundamentalist families, the hospital or came to his house for math blame would be no one’s but hers. the Jameses never talked about sex. Sue tutoring. At first, she’d ask questions, chal- In the spring of 1989, when Kim was and Ken rarely even kissed in front of the lenge him a little; Kim had never been shy. 13, Ketcham raped her at the hospital. As girls. On the cusp of puberty, Kim was “What’s wrong with me, what are you she lay on an exam table—“like a corpse, clueless. “I knew I was going to start my feeling for?” she wanted to know. waiting for him to get of”—she had only period, but I never knew why,” she says. “Nothing,” he would reply. “Just check- one way to understand the assault: Love, “I thought you could get pregnant from ing.” Although the exams were medically she thought. This must be love. kissing a guy.” So when, at twelve, she had unnecessary—breast and cervical cancers questions about her body, she turned to are extremely rare in preteen girls—they Ketcham. “He was like a cross between a became an almost daily occurrence. father figure and a grandpa,” she says. “I In the months that followed, Ketcham FOR EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS LIKE thought the world of him—that he could escalated his abuse. He kissed Kim. He Ken and Sue James, bringing up kids in do no wrong. He was perfect.” asked her to touch his penis. He had her a close-knit fundamentalist community Kim wanted to know about mastur- over to his house while his wife was away, feels like blessing them with the ultimate

bation: Was it as harmful, as wrong, as and sometimes when she was there, in the “safe space” from the moral laxity of the FAMILY JAMES THE OF COURTESY SPREAD: PREVIOUS

40 | NEW REPUBLIC network of “neo-Calvinist” churches, has been facing multiple allegations of child molestation and sexual abuse. In 2014, a new republic investigation found that school ofcials at Patrick Henry College, a popular destination for Christian ho- meschoolers, had routinely responded to rape and harassment claims by treating perpetrators with impunity, discourag- ing women from going to the police, and blaming them for dressing immodestly. Allegations of sexual misconduct have also engulfed four of fundamentalism’s most venerated patriarchs. Doug Phillips, a prominent leader of the Christian home- schooling movement, was forced to step down in 2013 from his nationwide min- istry, Vision Forum, after he was sued by a former nanny who claimed he groomed her as a teenager to be his “personal sex object.” The following year, Bill Gothard, founder of the influential Institute in Basic Life Principles, resigned amid more than 30 allegations of sexual harassment and molestation by former stafers, interns, and volunteers. In the first case to cross over into the cultural mainstream, Josh Dugger, the beloved eldest son of reality TV’s favorite fundamentalist family, fell into disgrace in 2015 with the revelation that he had molested five underage girls, including four of his sisters. And this July, the chief of another fundamentalist The James family (above) spent years raising funds to join the mission. Nobody told them reality-TV clan, Toby Willis, is scheduled women and girls had been abused at the compound hospital (top) since the 1960s. to stand trial on four counts of child rape. This burgeoning crisis of abuse has received far less attention than the well- larger culture. Sexual abuse is something abuser tells clinical psychologist Anna documented scandal that rocked the that happens in the secular world, not Salter in her book Predators: Pedophiles, Catholic Church. That’s in part because among the God-fearing. This, after all, Rapists, and Other Sex Ofenders, “Church the evangelical and fundamentalist world, is the universe of abstinence pledges and people are easy to fool.” unlike the Catholic hierarchy, is diverse old-fashioned courtship, where parents Over the past five years, in fact, it has and fractious, composed of thousands build their entire lives around shielding become increasingly clear—even to some of far-flung denominations, ministries, their children from worldly temptations. conservative Christians—that fundamen- parachurch groups, and missions like Yet the potential for sexual abuse is talist churches face a widespread epidemic abwe. Among Christian evangelicals, actually exacerbated by the core identity of sexual abuse and institutional denial there is no central church authority to of fundamentalist groups like abwe. Like that could ultimately involve more victims investigate, punish, or reform. Groups Catholics, fundamentalists preach strict than the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic like abwe answer only to themselves. obedience to religious authority. Sex is Church. In 2012, an investigation at Bob The scale of potential abuse is huge. not only prohibited outside of marriage, Jones University, known as the “fortress of Evangelical Protestants far outnumber but rarely discussed. These overlapping fundamentalism,” revealed that the school Catholics in the United States, with more dynamics of silence and submission make had systematically covered up allegations than 280,000 churches, religious schools, conservative Christians a ripe target for of sexual assault and counseled victims to and afliated organizations. In 2007, the

COURTESY OF ABWE / COURTESY OF THEsexual JAMES FAMILY predators. As one convicted child forgive their attackers. Sovereign Grace, a three leading insurance companies that

JULY 2017 | 41 provide coverage for the majority of Prot- and ofcial, and immediately set about The next thing Kim knew, she was estant institutions said they received an determining whether Kim’s story was flying back to Bangladesh with her two average of 260 reports per year of child true or merely “the exaggeration of an interrogators. Ebersole and Lloyd had de- sexual abuse at the hands of church lead- immature teenager,” as Lloyd put it in cided to confront Ketcham by surprise, to ers and members. By contrast, the Cath- “Journey to Bangladesh,” a diary he kept prevent him from concocting a cover story olic Church was reporting 228 “credible about the case. in advance. However much they blamed accusations” per year. For the next two days, the Russes Kim for the “afair,” they knew the doc- “Protestants have responded much interrogated Kim with only the pastor tor would have to leave the mission if he worse than the Catholics to this issue,” and his wife present, and without the couldn’t exonerate himself. On the long says Boz Tchividjian, a former child sex- knowledge or consent of her parents, who flight, they sat Kim between them and abuse prosecutor who is the grandson of were still in Bangladesh. “It was nothing continued to drill her with questions. At legendary evangelist Billy Graham. “One like, ‘Kim, we’re going to be talking about one point, when she got up to go to the of the reasons is that, like it or not, the some things,’ ” she recalls. “No taking bathroom, Kim weighed whether to tell a Catholics have been forced, through three time to get to know me—just point-blank, flight attendant that she’d been kidnapped. decades of lawsuits, to address this issue. we have to do this fast.” Ebersole and The Russes “strongly encouraged” Kim We’ve never been forced to deal with it Lloyd asked questions involving terms to sign a statement, styled as a confession, on a Protestant-wide basis.” that Kim didn’t understand. Did Ket- in which she apologized for her role in a To investigate and expose sexual abuse cham have intercourse with her? Had “relationship” that “transgressed God’s in evangelical churches, Tchividjian he touched her clitoris? “What’s that?” word.” She didn’t understand much of it, founded grace, short for Godly Response she responded, bewildered. “I think I was but she signed it anyway. “I did exactly to Abuse in a Christian Environment. In what I was told,” she says. “I think I was 2011, the group was hired to look into trying to protect Donn, because I cared what had happened on the Bangladesh about him. So I said whatever responsi- compound. While the abuse itself took “Protestants have bility I have is fine. I guess that’s the way I place long ago, abwe’s denial and cover- responded much worse was raised: You accept your responsibility, up spanned more than two decades—a than the Catholics,” and I wanted to accept mine.” pattern that eerily replicates the Cath- Across the world, her parents were in olic scandal. The authoritarianism that says the grandson of a panic. All they had received was a cryp- often prevails in fundamentalist circles, Billy Graham, a former tic message that their youngest daugh- Tchividjian says, is what sets the stage for sex-abuse prosecutor. ter would be flying back from Indiana widespread abuse—and for the systematic alone with abwe ofcers. Unable to reach mishandling of reported cases. “When their other daughters back in Indiana, you have so much concentrated authority, the Jameses came to fear that something in so few fallible individuals, problems in shock. I’m 13, and I’m being taught the awful had happened to everyone but Kim. percolate,” he says. “And when they do, whole story of sex by these men.” Had their other daughters been in an ac- they’re not often addressed. Because the The Russes already knew that Uncle cident of some kind? Were they dead? leaders who hold all the authority decide Donn had a sketchy past; Ebersole had When the plane touched down in what to do with them.” personally fielded a complaint involving nearby Chittagong, Ken James was al- one of his afairs with an adult woman at most beside himself. “Are my other two the mission. But now Ketcham was being kids alive?” he asked the Russes. Assured accused of molesting an underage girl— that their other daughters were safe and IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR KIM TO WISH the first time abwe ofcials had heard an sound, the Jameses were almost relieved that she had never said a word to her pas- allegation of child sexual abuse. As Kim to hear the actual news: There had been tor. Two days after his emergency call struggled to answer their questions, the some inappropriate touching, the Russes to abwe headquarters in Pennsylvania, Russes became convinced that she was told them, between Kim and Dr. Ketcham. two high-level stafers from the organi- telling them the truth about Ketcham Nothing was said about a rape or a signed zation landed in Indiana. Kim came to touching her. What they couldn’t believe, confession. Sue and Ken wouldn’t know think of them as “the Russes.” Russell given fundamentalist precepts about the about any of that for many years to come. Ebersole was abwe’s executive adminis- nature of sex and women, was that she was “They said it was fondling,” Sue recalls. trator for the Far East. Russell Lloyd was an innocent party. “It was lust in its most “We thought, ‘We can handle that.’ ” a prominent counselor for the missionary base form, uncontrolled in the body of a But the parents were given no oppor- group, eschewing traditional psychology spiritually immature woman,” Lloyd wrote tunity to “handle” the situation. abwe was for “Bible-based” therapy methods. They of the 13-year-old in his diary. Ketcham, in charge, and Ebersole and Lloyd refused arrived at her pastor’s home looking grim he wrote, had become Kim’s “secret lover.” to leave Kim alone with her parents. The

42 | NEW REPUBLIC plan, the Russes explained, was to drive Russes had finished praying over the Ket- wrong, and she was sorry. Then they were back to the compound and confront Ket- chams, they brought them to the James instructed to give her a hug. The children cham in person. If Ketcham was caught home for a healing visit. Tearfully, as Lloyd did as they were told. “Some even pri- of-guard when they arrived, however, he recounts in his diary, Kim told Uncle Donn vately ofered unsolicited forgiveness,” recovered quickly. The doctor blithely she was sorry. As Kitty held a weeping wrote Lloyd. He was “encouraged.” Kim owned up to what he called a “bittersweet Kim in her arms, Donn asked for the girl’s was numb. “I don’t remember feeling relationship” with Kim, characterizing it forgiveness as well. At Lloyd’s prompting, anything,” she says. as one in a long line of extramarital in- he praised her courage and integrity in Finally, to complete the façade of heal- discretions. Saying he wanted to start coming forward. After a second prompt- ing, the Russes convinced Kim’s parents at “the real beginning” and confess it ing, he told Kim not to worry that “she to invite the Ketchams over for dinner all, Ketcham recounted “illicit sexual alone was responsible for Donn’s ruined before their departure. That evening, Kim relationships with other women” dating missionary career.” It was not, in other was bundled of to another family’s home, back to his college days and stretching words, all her fault. while Ken and Sue shared a meal with through his nearly three decades at the The matter was now closed, the Russes their daughter’s assailant. Ketcham—to compound. Lloyd was impressed by told everyone. There would be no need Sue’s astonishment and relief—was “his the accused man’s poise. Ketcham’s “sense to talk about this unfortunate episode usual, laughing, carefree person.” But of humor was intact,” he wrote. “His cre- again. As everyone hugged and cried, Kim looking back, she can’t believe that she ative wit and clever use of words were went to embrace Uncle Donn. But Lloyd and her husband were “dumb enough” still laced throughout his comments. He and Ebersole stopped her—to her “great to agree to the make-believe. “I know it even laughed on occasion. It was as if he sounds like we weren’t were describing someone else!” good parents,” she says. Still, the Russes told him, he’d have to “But in a compound sit- leave the mission. After Ketcham excused uation like that, where himself to go home and tell his wife what you eat, go to church, and was happening, the men from abwe were work together, it’s like surprised to see the couple return in less one big family. So when than half an hour. According to Lloyd’s everyone is telling you to diary, he and Ebersole assured Kitty that do this—and he did ask her husband had not “seduced” the forgiveness—that’s what 13-year-old, that Kim had been “a willing God wants you to do.” partner.” And when they told the Ketchams Ken and Sue wanted they would have to leave the mission af- Kim James in Bangladesh with “Uncle Donn.” Church officials to take Kim home to the ter nearly three decades, Kitty seemed as already knew Ketcham had a reputation for sexual misconduct. United States to get help. unaccountably unrufed as her husband. The Russes talked them “Interestingly,” Lloyd wrote, “her only out of it. Bangladesh was notable question pertained to how long dismay,” Lloyd wrote in his diary, inter- where the family’s support system they would have to pack and be of the preting this as yet another sign of Kim’s was, they said. It would be healthier field, and to the severance package that “strong sexual bonding to Donn Ketcham.” for the Jameses to stay put. abwe would give.” He chalked this up to As the Ketchams packed their belong- Donn and Kitty Ketcham flew back to “unspeakable shock,” predicting that “tor- ings, the Russes took pains to contain the States and settled down in Allendale, ment, rage, bitterness, resentment, be- the story. They held what they called an Michigan. abwe ofcials rallied around the trayal, shame, embarrassment, grief—if “Extraordinary Meeting” to give adults couple. On their advice, Ketcham wrote not present then—would soon visit her.” at the compound a euphemistic account a letter to the churches that had spon- The Russes, so indignant over Kim’s “lust of what had happened, telling them Ket- sored him, confessing to “sin,” but not to in its most base form,” were brimming cham was leaving and not to discuss the child sexual abuse. Ebersole sent his own with sympathy for the Ketchams. “How matter further. (A nurse who attended letter, explaining that Ketcham had left we ached for both of them!” Lloyd wrote. the meeting recalled years later that the the mission over “immoral conduct”—a missionaries complied, in part, because vague charge that most interpreted as of their strong belief in a verse from the mere adultery. Ebersole asked the church- Bible: “For it is shameful to mention what es to keep funding the Ketchams for two THE RETURN TO BANGLADESH HAD the disobedient do in secret.”) Next the more months, until they’d resettled and been a big blur to Kim. But as dazed and Russes called together the MKs. Kim had found jobs. “A beloved brother has fallen!” terrified as she was, one thing was clear: had an inappropriate relationship with Ebersole wrote. “May God help us to bib-

WOOD TVWOOD It was her job to apologize. As soon as the Uncle Donn, the kids were told. It was lically restore him and to help bear the

JULY 2017 | 43 deep burden that he and his dear wife, But when the abuse happens in a church recalled going on a trip with Ketcham Kitty, carry at this time.” setting, there’s an additional burden—a and blacking out, leading her to wonder Because no one from abwe alerted kind of spiritual abuse, the sense that whether she had been drugged and mo- police or the state medical board that religious leaders have betrayed the pow- lested. abwe ofcials, the women told Ketcham had confessed to sexually abus- er bestowed on them by God. “It really Loftis, had “always protected Uncle ing a child 45 years his junior, he was rattles people at their core in terms of Donn”—and poor Kim James had been able to return to practicing medicine and faith,” says Diane Langberg, a psycholo- blamed for her own abuse. teaching Sunday school. He would go on gist and seminary professor who serves Loftis seemed shocked. He promised to see patients for another 23 years. For on the board of grace. “People walk away to launch an investigation and pay for years after their departure, abwe presi- thinking that God is a perp or complicit.” any treatment the MKs needed. But the dent Wendell Kempton continued to write That’s precisely how it felt to Kim. investigation went nowhere, and abwe the Ketchams warm letters, sending “love “God,” she prayed, “you’re a sick God to still neglected to report Ketcham to the and prayers.” allow this to happen.” But she was losing authorities. Loftis did take action on one more than her faith; she was losing her front, though: He called Kim and invit- entire world, the close-knit missionary ed her to come to abwe headquarters in community that had served as her ex- Pennsylvania for free medical assistance BACK AT THE COMPOUND, KIM BECAME tended family. abwe was her whole life— and counseling. Kim, who was unem- increasingly withdrawn and isolated. “I the only one she had ever known. So ployed and living with her boyfriend at the wasn’t allowed to talk about it,” she says. time, had heard of a program for eating “We were told it was over and done with: disorders that she wanted to try. What Move on.” The other missionaries blamed did she have to lose? Kim and her family for driving away the In a bizarre reprise of the events 13 compound’s most revered leader. “Donn years earlier, Kim’s parents had no idea is needed here,” a few told Kim to her what was happening. One Sunday morn- face. “You aren’t.” ing in July, Sue got a call from their pastor. Worst of all, Kim felt betrayed by her “Kim’s in Harrisburg,” he told her. “Russ own parents. “It almost killed me to see Ebersole wants to call you.” Later that my mom and dad hug Donn and Kit, like day, when the family reached Ebersole nothing had ever happened,” she recalls. and Russell Lloyd in Pennsylvania, the She tried telling herself they were just two Russes told them that Kim was once being dutiful Baptists, “doing what they again with them. And she had something thought God would do: God wouldn’t slap to say. Then Kim’s voice came on the line. the crap out of him. God would turn the “I got saved!” she told her parents. other cheek.” But deep down, it was hard abwe, they feared, had taken over not to wish they had come to her defense. Ketcham, now 86, is facing a life sentence for Kim’s life again. The Russes told the She stopped talking to them. She stopped molesting a six-year-old patient. family to meet them a few days later at eating. In 1991, two years after she told the airport; they were flying to Indiana her pastor about Ketcham, she attempted when the or ganization finally reached with Kim to go to her boyfriend’s apart- suicide, taking an overdose of the Paxil out and ofered to help her, Kim jumped ment when he wasn’t home and clean she’d been prescribed. “I just felt alone,” at the chance. out her possessions. When they showed she says. “I told God if I could talk to him, In the summer of 2002, unbeknownst up, Ken and Sue thought their daughter I’d rather be there with him than down to the Jameses, a group of Bangladesh looked dazed, out of it. They couldn’t here not able to talk.” MKs gathered for a reunion in Pennsyl- understand why she was being rushed The family returned to Indiana, but vania. Nine of them asked to meet with out of her apartment, but the Russes were Kim’s downward slide continued. She re- Michael Loftis, abwe’s then-president, adamant. “Kim,” her father told her, “you peatedly cut herself, requiring emergency to discuss Donn Ketcham. The meeting don’t have to go. I’ll tell them you’re not runs to the hospital. She developed multi- lasted for three hours, until 1:30 in the going.” But Kim said she wanted to. ple eating disorders, at one point shrinking morning. Seven of the women told near- This was the start of what the family to 96 pounds. She tried repeatedly to kill ly identical stories of how Ketcham had refers to as the “Bermuda Triangle years.” herself. She enrolled in community col- molested them as children, often under For nearly two years, abwe blocked almost lege, but couldn’t keep up. She couldn’t the same guise that he used with Kim: all contact with Kim. When she arrived in hold a job. She couldn’t make a life. breast and pelvic exams, sometimes Harrisburg, Kim says, ofcials took away Sexual abuse often derails the lives of conducted with their mothers sitting her cell phone, telling her not to contact

its victims in painful and lasting ways. unaware in the room. One former MK her family so she could focus on getting TV /WOOD KOLKER KEN

44 | NEW REPUBLIC well. When her parents tried to check on documents it had on her case. Not sur- foggy-headed and troubled by strange her, she was only allowed to speak to them prisingly, ofcials resisted at first. But dreams, with symptoms of a urinary tract with the church’s staf or lawyers moni- Kim told them that her counselor needed infection. Soon thereafter, she began to toring the call. They begged her to come to have her history to help her. “If you experience insomnia, depression, and home, but the abwe handlers would cut want to talk to my lawyer,” she added, severe anxiety—symptoms of ptsd that in, telling them not to interfere with Kim’s “feel free.” That did the trick. abwe didn’t would last into early adulthood. “recovery.” Then the calls stopped. send all the documents, but they did in- abwe ofcials were undone by the Kim remembers little about the next clude portions of Lloyd’s diary, a copy of public revelations on the blog. They post- 22 months. She was bounced between Kim’s “confession,” and the correspon- ed their own “confession,” acknowledging Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where dence that allowed Ketcham to reestablish that “a precious 14-year-old should never she lived at one point with Lloyd and his himself in the United States. abwe, for all have been asked to sign a confession,” family. Ken and Sue James received oc- its eforts to bury Ketcham’s crimes, was and asking—nine times—that the MKs casional letters, which didn’t sound like finally losing control of the story. “please, please forgive us.” They held a they were written by Kim. Then the letters In 2011, Kim helped Baker launch a bizarre “sackcloth and ash” ceremony, stopped, too. Ken tried to track her down blog, Bangladesh MKs Speak. They be- captured on video, in which Loftis, the in North Carolina, to no avail. Finally, in gan publishing testimonies of those who abwe president, prostrated himself be- a panic, he called abwe and threatened to had sufered sexual abuse at the hands of fore a representative MK and cut his hair “get in the pulpit of every church in the Ketcham —and, most explosively, the abwe and clothes as he confessed the church’s country and say what’s going on” unless documents Kim had obtained. Within the failure to protect children from Ketcham. he heard from Kim immediately. first week, the blog attracted some 1,600 (The MK to whom he confessed later That week, Kim called. She was in comments, including stricken responses called the episode a “freak show,” and a homeless shelter in Asheville, North said she just sat there “frozen in shock Carolina. Her sister Diana was living and horror, disbelief.”) More import- about 70 minutes away in South Carolina, ant, abwe finally reported Ketcham to and a shelter worker drove Kim to her The mission’s leader, the Michigan Medical Licensing Board. house. She was disheveled and confused. undone by the blog’s Twenty-three years after he’d admitted to She didn’t want to talk about what had revelations of abuse, child sex abuse, Ketcham, who was still happened—partly out of embarrassment, practicing medicine in his early eighties, Diana suspected. The next day, Kim called held a bizarre “sack- forfeited his license. her old boyfriend back in Indiana, who cloth and ash” ritual But abwe wasn’t done with the cover- bought her a plane ticket home. to beg forgiveness. up. To placate the Jameses and the MKs, the group hired grace to dig up the whole story. Then, when grace was only two weeks away from publishing its report, OVER THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, KIM from abwe parents and former MKs, and a abwe abruptly fired the group. The MKs continued to struggle. She still cut her- horrified testimony from Ketcham’s pastor and their families were livid. abwe an- self, still had eating problems. Whatev- in Michigan, who said abwe had grossly nounced it had hired a private investi- er had happened to her during her time misled him about why Ketcham had left gative firm, Professional Investigators with abwe, it hadn’t helped. She had not the mission. International, to replace grace. But PII, been saved. The blog sparked new allegations of the MKs quickly discovered, had been Then, one day in 2010, Kim got a abuse. One day, as it was preparing to founded by a Mormon couple who also call from a former MK named Susannah launch, Diana called an old missionary ran an image-consulting business. The Beals Baker. The gathering at the reunion friend to talk about how best to be sup- former missionaries were convinced eight years earlier hadn’t forced abwe to portive of her sister’s project. As they that this “investigation” would amount reform itself—but it had gotten former chatted about Ketcham, Diana recalled the to nothing more than a whitewash. Kim MKs talking about Donn Ketcham and time she’d stayed at Uncle Donn’s house and Diana declined to be interviewed. remembering things that they thought while her parents were away. She was in Last spring, however, PII published were similar to what happened to Kim. bed, fading in and out of consciousness. 280 pages of findings, drawn from 204 Talking to Baker, Kim knew for the first Ketcham, leaning over her, told her she interviews. Even for the MKs, the re- time in her life that she hadn’t been the had typhoid fever. The rest was a blur. port was a bombshell. Donn Ketcham, only one. It gave her an unfamiliar burst Her friend was stunned. “The same the firm found, had been molesting girls of empowerment. thing happened to me,” she said. Left with and women at the Bangladesh mission At the urging of a new counselor, Kim the Ketchams, the friend had also been as far back as the 1960s. Investigators demanded that abwe hand over all the diagnosed with “typhoid.” She woke up identified at least 23 missionaries who

JULY 2017 | 45 had been molested or raped, 18 of them children. “Donn Ketcham engaged in a wide range of sexual misconduct,” PII determined, including “sexual harass- ment, consensual extramarital afairs with adult women, sexual abuse of minors and adults under the guise of medical care, rape, and statutory rape.” In exhaustive detail, the investigators confirmed both Kim’s story of abuse— finding she had “a minimum of 10 to 15 sexual encounters” with Ketcham—as well as her subsequent mistreatment by abwe, which “treated the victim as if she were complicit.” Other former missionaries told stories that were sickeningly simi- lar to Kim’s. Several said that Ketcham had started giving them breast and pelvic exams when they were as young as three. In 1969, an eight-year-old girl had come down with a bad case of shingles—rare among children—after seeing Ketcham and possibly having sexual contact. In 1970, one victim said Ketcham raped her during a physical. In 1975, an MK ran away to another family’s home rather than go to her physical with Ketcham. And over the years, several former MKs had said they’d received injections from Ketcham and blacked out during exams; medical staf at the mission’s hospital had speculated that Ketcham might have administered ketamine, a powerful anes- thetic, and molested the girls. The hos- Like many evangelical victims, Kim James, now 42, felt abused not only by her rapist, but by her pital eventually stopped using ketamine, church. Her name is now on federal legislation to require overseas organizations to report abuse. in fact, because multiple women had re- ported that after surgical procedures, they “dreamed” they had been raped. Bengali men—Ketcham went unpunished. refused to comment for this story (Russ The investigators were unsparing in Instead, abwe kept missionaries silent Lloyd could not be reached for com- their description of Ketcham, a “confessed about his abuses by requiring an “unques- ment). The group’s current president, Al pedophile” who expertly practiced “ma- tioning compliance with authority”—an Cockrell, responded to questions by is- nipulation, deceit, and sociopathic be- approach that drew on the “prevailing suing a statement. He suggested that PII’s haviors.” But they came down hardest on attitude toward authority in evangelical report may include unspecified “misin- abwe, which gave Ketcham “preferential circles.” To cover up the scandal, the group terpretations or errors,” but acknowl- treatment,” blamed his victims, and failed had burned files related to Ketcham, and edged that it contains “absolute facts” to dismiss him from the mission field years redacted huge portions of the documents showing that “past abwe leadership failed sooner. By 1974, they found, abwe ofcials it did turn over. abwe administrators had to act with integrity and accountability had more than enough evidence to war- even proposed creating a “Dark Informa- in our handling of abuse perpetrated by rant Ketcham’s removal, “which would tion Book” to hide similar scandals. As Don Ketcham,” and “utterly failed in our have preempted his access to many of his a result, PII concluded, “children were response to his victims.” victims.” While other missionaries were ‘sacrificed’ so that the ministry would not The report was undoubtedly incom- banished for minor infractions—one man be ‘discredited.’ ” plete; the number of Ketcham’s victims for being “cocky,” a woman for showing a abwe ofcials who dealt with Ket- had almost certainly been higher, and in-

“lack of essential reserve” in dealing with cham, including Loftis and Russ Ebersole, vestigators made no attempt to interview LEVY RACHEL MORGAN BY PHOTOGRAPH

46 | NEW REPUBLIC the Bengali “nationals” who were his The Kimberly Doe Act, drafted by grace Twenty-eight years after he raped Kim. main patients at the hospital. But for the founder Boz Tchividjian and conservative Eighteen years after he allegedly molested MKs and their families, it was enough. activist Michael Reagan, would hold U.S. a six-year-old. “I was frankly shocked that abwe actu- citizens overseas to the same requirement Within that timeline is a world of ally released the report,” says Diana. “It to report suspected child sexual abuse blame—and warning. Sexual abuse a mong was accurate for the most part, as far as that applies stateside. (If such a law had the nation’s thousands of evangelical de- how the mission covered it up, how they existed in 1989, abwe ofcials, doctors, nominations may never come into focus treated our family.” nurses, and parents would have been ob- the way it has in the Catholic Church. But For the Jameses, the report under- ligated to report what happened to Kim.) more and more cases will inevitably come scored just how much they’d been kept The bill would also hold organizations to light—revelation by revelation, report in the dark for decades. They never saw like abwe responsible if they don’t train by report, headline after headline—even Kim’s “confession” until it was posted their employees to report sexual abuse. as conservative churches cling to their on the blog, and didn’t know that Ket- “Someone asked me: Are you more happy-family images, no matter who cham had raped her until they read her mad at abwe or Donn?” says Sue James. gets hurt. Boz Tchividjian, the founder account of what happened. “We saw it “Donn Ketcham, yes, we’re very angry of grace, says his fellow fundamental- when everybody else did,” Diana says. ists should reject the impulse to view the “It was absolutely, completely devastat- scandal the way many Catholics did for ing.” But after the initial shock, Diana years: as a matter of a few bad apples started asking Kim questions about what While ofcials covered being belatedly punished. “Protestants Ketcham had done to her. It was the first up his crimes to are going to have to accept the fact that time the two sisters had discussed it in protect the church, we have many more similarities than dif- detail. “She started answering and we ferences with our Catholic brothers and just cried,” Diana recalls. “She thought Ketcham had molested sisters when it comes to how we have our parents knew.” or raped at least 18 failed to protect and serve God’s chil- Now Sue and Ken finally understood girls at the mission. dren,” he says. why their daughter had struggled so Kim, who’s now 42, still can’t bring much. “Kim thought we were choosing herself to read the PII report. Her parents God’s work and the mission over her,” she can only manage to digest small portions says. abwe had lied to them. If only they’d at him. But in some ways it’s a diferent at a time. But the family can talk now. known, perhaps Kim could have moved anger at abwe. All these kids would have “My daughter and I are mending for the on. “The knowledge of that would have been safe if they’d taken the guy of the first time, because the truth came out,” changed the last 22 years,” Diana says. “It field when these things first happened. says Sue. Kim still struggles. This past would have changed her life if my parents Think how many MKs would have not summer, she cut deep gashes in her legs. had been told the truth.” been hurt.” (Ketcham, who refused to She doesn’t have full-time work, but she cooperate with PII’s investigation, did helps her boyfriend with his car-detailing not respond to repeated requests for business and volunteers in the doctor’s comment for this story.) ofce where her mother works—a small THE EXPLOSIVE FINDINGS ABOUT Even if Kim’s law passes, it won’t en- way, she says, of finding her way back to Donn Ketcham’s serial abuse, and abwe’s able her or other MKs to hold Ketcham the medical field that she loved as a child. role in covering it up, did not make big accountable for his crimes in Bangladesh. Not long ago, Kim’s sister Diana was headlines. Such stories rarely do. It’s an- But the accounts from the blog and the back in Indiana to attend a wedding. She other product of the sprawling, disparate PII report may yet result in the doctor and her two daughters, ages twelve and world of Christian fundamentalism: Even receiving a measure of justice. Last Au- 14, took Kim out to eat. Staring at her two the ugliest story about a relatively obscure gust, Ketcham was charged with abusing young nieces, she was suddenly struck by Baptist denomination isn’t going to get a six-year-old patient in Michigan while a thought: Do you realize this girl here is the Catholic scandal–level attention. But the conducting a medical exam. The alleged age you were when Donn started molesting report that finally emerged, almost three abuse, which took place in 1999, came to you? And the girl next to you is 14—the decades after Kim James was raped in light after the patient’s mother happened age you were when you brought it to light? Bangladesh, added to the growing ev- on the blog and read Kim’s documents. In The moment had the impact of a rev- idence of a widespread crisis of sexual February, Ketcham was ordered to stand elation. “I looked at the twelve-year-old abuse in conservative Protestantism. trial in Michigan District Court. At 86, he and I was like: I was that young? It just Kim’s name is now on legislation faces a life sentence for first-degree sexual hit me.” It really hadn’t been her fault. “I that would close the legal loophole that assault—half a century after he started never saw that before, I never did. It’s a helped Ketcham evade punishment. abusing women and girls in Bangladesh. shame it took me this long.” a

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ESSAY

The Rise of the Thought Leader How the superrich have funded a new class of intellectual.

BY DAVID SESSIONS

WRITING IN ONE of Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, the Ital- and growing economic inequality. He correctly identifies the ian Marxist Antonio Gramsci jotted down the fragments that last of these as the most important: the extraordinary rise of would become his theory of intellectuals. New classes, like the American superrich, a class interested in supporting a the European bourgeoisie after the Industrial Revolution, he particular genre of “ideas.” proposed, brought with them their own set of thinkers, which The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind he called “organic intellectuals”—theorists, technicians, and of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the administrators, who became their “functionaries” in a new much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public society. Unlike “traditional intellectuals” who held positions intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are in the old class structure, organic intellectuals helped the skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Fried- bourgeoisie establish its ideas as the invisible, unquestioned man and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens conventional wisdom circulating in social institutions. to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview Today, Gramsci’s theory has been largely overlooked in to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals trafc the ongoing debate over the supposed decline of the “public in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the intellectual” in America. Great minds, we are told, no longer evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, captivate the public as they once did, because the university is Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the too insular and academic thinking is too narrow. Such laments complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash frequently cite Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (1987), in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for which complained about the post-1960s professionalization of thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and academia and waxed nostalgic for the bohemian, “independent” a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own intellectuals of the earlier twentieth century. Writers like the brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof attribute this sorry celebrities, and athletes.” state of afairs to the culture of Ph.D. programs, which, Kristof Drezner does his best to take an objective view of the thought claims, have glorified “arcane unintelligibility while disdaining leader as a new kind of intellectual who fulfills a function dif- impact and audience.” If academics cannot bring their ideas to ferent from that of the public intellectual, though an equally a wider readership, these familiar critiques imply, it is because legitimate one. “It is surely noteworthy,” he writes, optimis- of the academic mindset itself. tically, “that a strong demand has emerged for new ideas and In his book The Ideas Industry, the political scientist and vibrant ways of thinking about the world.” But he seems to foreign policy blogger Daniel W. Drezner broadens the focus portray this thirst for new ideas as a positive development to include the conditions in which ideas are formed, funded, even while conceding that the ideas currently thirsted for are and expressed. Describing the public sphere in the language at best shallow and banal, at worst deeply anti-democratic, of markets, he argues that three major factors have altered and at times outright fraudulent. the fortunes of today’s intellectuals: the evaporation of public trust in institutions, the polarization of American society, ILLUSTRATIONS BY SUE COE

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THE CASE AGAINST thought leaders, The Ideas Industry shows, “disrupters”—c ompanies that upend their industries with new is damning. As Drezner notes, some of the marquee names in technologies and business models—gain a competitive advan- thought leadership are distinguished by their facile thinking tage over companies that grow by gradually improving their and transparent servility to the wealthy. The biggest idea in product. Airbnb might be considered a disrupter in the hotel Thomas Friedman’s best-known book, The World Is Flat, is, industry, for instance, since it has grown rapidly by attracting Drezner summarizes, that “to thrive in the global economy, one a large base of users who rent their homes to guests, instead of needs to be ‘special,’ a unique brand like Michael Jordan.” It is acquiring and operating hotels. The idea of “disruptive inno- more of a marketing principle than a philosophical insight. But vation” caught fire in Silicon Valley, Drezner argues, because it “businessmen adore Friedman’s writings on how technology “conformed to a plutocratic worldview in which success favors and globalization transform the global economy,” Drezner the bold, risk-taking entrepreneur.” Atop this enthusiasm, explains, because his message reinforces their worldview. Christensen built a lucrative brand, producing eight books and Like Friedman, thought leaders Parag and Ayesha Khanna founding the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard, proclaim the world-historical power of technological innova- his own consulting company, and a boutique investment firm. tion, preaching that technology with a capital “T” is replacing In 2014, however, nearly two decades after Christensen economics and geopolitics as the engine of global change. As debuted disruptive innovation in the Harvard Business Review, Evgeny Morozov has observed, Parag Khanna believes that historian Jill Lepore eviscerated the theory in a widely read essay “democracy might be incompatible with globalization and in The New Yorker. Lepore found that Christensen’s case studies capitalism,” arguing that we should thus embrace authoritarian, were ambiguous and overblown: Seagate Technology, a company Chinese-style capitalism. In his own review of Khanna’s Con- that was supposed to have been “felled by disruption,” had in nectography, Drezner characterized his thinking as “globaloney” fact thrived, doubling its sales the year after Christensen ended and likened his prose style to “a TED talk on a recursive loop.” Drezner traces how the pursuit of money in the new cor- porate ideas industry—through television shows, high-dollar While public intellectuals trafc in speeches, and lavish book advances—pushes thought leaders complexity and criticism, thought to bloat their expertise and hustle in so many markets that they end up selling fakes. The most notorious example is Fareed leaders burst with the evangelist’s Zakaria, the CNN host and columnist who has been caught desire to “change the world.” lifting passages from other writers to feed his multiplatform output. Similarly, the historian Niall Ferguson leapt headlong into brand-building: crafting books intended as scripts for TV series, giving lucrative speeches, and writing for a dizzying array of publications. Like other overstretched thought lead- his study. Disruptive companies whose successes he heralded ers, Ferguson landed in trouble when his Newsweek cover had meanwhile gone out of business. Lepore’s essay prompted story on President Obama in 2012 turned out to be riddled an even more damning critique of Christensen in MIT Sloan with errors and misleading claims. Interviewed for The Ideas Management Review, and sparked a backlash in Silicon Valley. Industry, Ferguson is frank about his transformation from Drezner seems to view this case study as a prime example of Oxford don to thought leader: “I did it how the market for ideas regulates itself: A public intellectual all for the money.” checked a thought leader, popping an “asset bubble” in the Despite Drezner’s impatience with the process. The two types of thinker, in Drezner’s view, balance delusions of thought leaders, he shrinks each other. But just as in economics, the market metaphor from the darker implications of his ev- brings with it a quasi-theological belief that everything even- idence. When it comes time to render a tually evens out—an ideology that is deliberately blind to the verdict on whether the Ideas Industry way the largest players in the capitalist system rig that system is “working,” he conjures an economic in their own favor. After all, disruptive innovation survived metaphor: “For good and ill, the modern unharmed for two decades as a theory of everything, and to marketplace of ideas strongly resembles this day disruption proceeds apace. Billions of dollars are still modern financial markets. Usually, the pouring into business schools to inspire similar claptrap, while system works. On occasion, however, university science departments—less-direct conduits to frenetic THE IDEAS INDUSTRY: HOW PESSIMISTS, there can be asset bubbles.” moneymaking—scramble for funding, and the humanities PARTISANS, AND PLUTOCRATS ARE Nowhere is the inadequacy of this torturously ride out a planned obsolescence. TRANSFORMING THE metaphor more evident than in his MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS case study of the rise and fall of Har- THE INFLUX OF plutocrat money has done much more than BY DANIEL W. DREZNER vard Business School professor Clay- produce a handful of hollow thinkers. The institutions that OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, ton Christensen’s theory of “disruptive enable intellectuals to conduct meaningful research are also 360 pp., $27.95 innovation.” Christensen proposed that being radically remade by their new sponsors. Over the past

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long-standing academic prohibitions against industry -influenced research have been swept aside. Even prestigious universities now open their doors to industry-intertwined research: At the University of California, Berkeley, for example, research spon- sored by BP produced the widely reported conclusion that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill hadn’t been as bad as everyone thought. As the historian Philip Mirowski details in Science-Mart: Privatizing Amer- ican Science, universities have eagerly taken up the research-and-development operations of corpora- tions, which no longer deem it cost-efective to do their research in-house. And because they are subject to competitive pressure, corporations are far less likely to invest in basic research, which leads to major scientific breakthroughs, than in applied research, which makes them money faster. Corporate sponsors, in turn, have grown bolder, pressuring scientists to steer their research away from conclusions that might threaten profits, and working to discredit those who insist on following the facts where they lead, particularly in climate science. This is to say nothing of the corporate money pouring into universities—even the most elite ones—to fund pro- pagandistic courses on the virtues of capitalism and research on the flaws of the welfare state. As Michael Massing reported in The New York Review of Books last year, Columbia University’s Teachers College accepted a multimillion-dollar grant to produce a few decades, as funding from government sources and philan- high school curriculum on “the fiscal challenges that face the thropic organizations has dried up, think tanks have tried to nation”—code for “why we need to cut entitlements”—while make up the deficits by courting donations from corporations, the financial services company BB&T has donated to dozens foreign governments, and politically minded elites. These of colleges to promote the “moral foundations of capitalism” donors, however, are less interested in supporting intellectually and the thought of Ayn Rand. prestigious, nonpartisan work than they are in manufacturing political support for their preferred ideas. In other words, they THE EVIDENCE IN Drezner’s book contributes to a startling want a return on their investment. picture of a country in which the superrich actively seek to As a result, think tanks have become increasingly partisan. sabotage institutions that have formed the backbone of consen- As Drezner recounts, when former Senator Jim DeMint was sus and public trust for a large part of the twentieth century. appointed president of the Heritage Foundation in 2012, it Because their wealth comes largely from finance and is no pivoted from research to activism in an attempt to satisfy its longer attached to the country’s material infrastructure—they donors. (DeMint was ultimately ousted, Politico reported in are not steel magnates or railroad barons—modern plutocrats April, for making the think tank “too bombastic and political— no longer use their fortunes to secure a legacy of contributing to the detriment of its research and scholarly aims.”) In 2012, to public needs. Instead they weaponize their wealth, with the the Koch brothers sued the Cato Institute to gain more control aim of creating even more capital and remaking society ac- over the organization, whose research sometimes clashed with cording to their own, unrepresentative political beliefs. “Only Republican orthodoxy. Liberal think tanks, meanwhile, have 35 percent of wealthy Americans support spending what is surrendered to corporate influence that is less nakedly partisan necessary to ensure good public schools,” Drezner notes, “a but equally compromising: The Brookings Institution recently sharp contrast to 87-percent support from the general pub- made a real estate developer a senior fellow, while accepting lic.” The wealthy also support cuts to government spending $400,000 to lobby for his company’s redevelopment plans and social programs much more strongly than the rest of the in San Francisco. public—which fits with their compulsion to spend millions on A similar efect is at work in the university. As the govern- trying to buy academic legitimacy for unregulated capitalism. ing boards of universities become increasingly dominated by The intellectual institutions of postwar America were bankers, hedge fund managers, and real estate de velopers, far from perfect; universities and think tanks accepted

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military -oriented funding from the U.S. government and kind of organic intellectual. The one percent’s attempts to often provided the intellectual foundations for American im- disrupt the media and universities have had the unintended perialism. Nevertheless, the three decades after World War consequence of radicalizing a generation of young writers II—when corporate power was checked by a strong labor and academics on the left—those recently dubbed “the new movement, higher education became broadly accessible, and public intellectuals” in The Chronicle for Higher Education. social services were expanded—were the most democratic in Facing dim job prospects in the academy, leftists who might American history. Universities and think tanks were able to once have become professors increasingly define themselves establish a baseline of public trust, in part because their pro- as writers or political organizers. Bad times, historically duction of knowledge was not directly beholden to the whims speaking, are good for ideas, and our moment is no exception. of idiosyncratic billionaires demanding that their “metrics” be We’re arguably living in a new golden age of little magazines: met and their pet political ideas be substantiated. Not only have publications like n+1, Jacobin, the Los Ange- Surveying this new landscape, it is clear that the true role les Review of Books, and Current Afairs appeared in recent of the thought leader is to serve as the organic intellectual of years, but older ones like The Bafer and Dissent have been the one percent—the figure who, as Gramsci put it, gives the resurrected or revitalized. emerging class “an awareness of its own function” in society. Gramsci’s conception of the organic intellectual was not The purpose of the thought leader is to mirror, systematize, merely meant to describe the prophets of the European bour- and popularize the delusions of the superrich: that they have geoisie and its industrial capitalism. The organic intellectual earned their fortunes on merit, that social protections need was above all a concept for the left: a name for those who, to be further eviscerated to make everyone more flexible for emerging from working-class conditions, had the inclination and ability to express their vision of society and organize it into action. He envisioned not a savior swooping down from If the marketplace of ideas is the elite, but thinkers sharing an experience of economic pri- flooded with cheerleaders for the vation, translated into both an intellectual and social struggle. Already these new intellectuals on the left have begun to next big thing, it is because that’s emerge as editors, authors, organizers, and gadflies in the what billionaires want to hear. new social media ecosystem. They have a greater presence in the public sphere than at any point in the last half century, and have shown themselves willing to expose the prattle of thought leaders, to attack the rhetorical smoke screens of the liberal center, and to defend working-class voters against “the future,” and that local attachments and alternative ways of accusations of incurable racism and mindless populism. The living should be replaced by an aspirational consumerism. The intellectual world is an important dimension of a broader thought leader aggregates these fundamental convictions into struggle; the self-serving theories and empty buzzwords a great humanitarian mission. Every problem, he prophesies, of today’s thought leaders must be not only denounced but can be solved with technology and rich people’s money, if we replaced with rich concepts that help all kinds of people make will only get our traditions, communities, and democratic sense of the world as it is. No less than other forms of orga- norms out of the way. nizing, this intellectual work requires significant personal Whether it’s a foreign policy expert insisting on military courage—to reject the posture of scholarly detachment and intervention, a business-school prophet proclaiming the vir- the conventions of civility that discourage criticism of ideas tues of disruption, a Silicon Valley genius reducing politics to that enjoy elite support. engineering, or a Times columnist championing the ineluctable But intellectual intervention alone will never be enough. march of autonomous technology, today’s thought leaders all The same conditions that gave us the Ideas Industry over- share a core worldview: that extreme wealth and the channels whelmingly favor concentrated economic and political power. by which it was obtained are not only legitimate but heroic. Even as we cast a critical light on the connections between This is why the Ideas Industry, as Drezner efectively shows, one percenters and thought leaders, we must organize in the favors the thought leader over the more critical, skeptical physical and social world where the “ideas” of the economic public intellectual: Academics tend “to dismiss the ‘Great Man’ elite have their most pernicious efects. The new energy be- theory of events.” If the marketplace of ideas is flooded with hind the unionization of the academy and the media are an hucksters evangelizing the next big thing and the importance of excellent start, but only a start. What intellectuals need is the billionaires for “making the world a better place,” it is because same as what everyone else needs: a society that prioritizes that’s what billionaires want to hear. human flourishing over private profit, and strong political networks that guard public goods against the prophets of an HOWEVER DEEPLY THE superrich have degraded American atomized, high-tech future. However difcult that society may intellectual and political discourse, the Ideas Industry has be to achieve, one thing about the present gives hope. We are also created an opening—albeit a very slim one—for a diferent finally getting clear about who its enemies are. a

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BOOKS kind of facial hair a boy anxious for the world to call him a man may be a little too proud to show of. And then there’s the most famous photograph of Till, one in which none of these features can be distinguished because they no longer exist. Lying dead in his casket, his face is recog- nizable as a face only because we know where eyes, ears, nose, and mouth are supposed to be. It is this photo that his mother wanted published in Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender, leading black publications of the time. “People had to face my son and realize just how twisted, how distorted, how terrifying race hatred could be,” she wrote in her memoir. “The whole nation had to bear witness to this.” It is also this photo—evidence of Till’s lynching at the hands of two white men from Money, Mississippi—that helped to launch the civil rights movement. “I thought of Emmett Till,” Rosa Parks said in 1956, “and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back, I just couldn’t move.” Mamie Till-Mobley’s memoir keeps company in a small literary subgenre alongside books by Myrlie Evers-Williams and Coretta Scott King, the widows of assassinated civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. In 2013, the year after Trayvon Martin was killed, Jesmyn Ward published her gorgeous memoir, Men We Reaped, which chronicles the lives and deaths of five young black men, including Ward’s brother, in her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi. In the wake of Trayvon’s death and the acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman, Ward’s stories of these unrelated black men served as a stand-in for Trayvon’s story. Now his parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, have published their own book about his life and death, while Lezley A Grief Observed McSpadden has told the story of her son, Michael Brown, and From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, his killing at the hands of a white police ofcer in Ferguson, Mis- souri. These works are an outlet for grief, but also part of what the power and pain of black mourning. has become an obligation for black families to mourn in public. In an America where mass shootings are a common occur- BY MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH rence, there is no shortage of white people who have lost loved ones in a highly publicized tragedy. But the responsibilities foisted on them are not the same: Relatives of white victims MAMIE TILL-MOBLEY wrote her memoir, Death of Innocence: can choose to become activists—they might take up, say, the The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, in 2003, cause of gun control—but they aren’t required to, and they the same year she died of heart failure, and 47 years after the never have to, prove that their very lives have value. Their grief lynching of her son, Emmett Till. “When I am out and about,” is their own. Black grief belongs to the world, and is regulated she explained, “people recognize me and they want to talk by the same forces that caused such deep pain in the first place. about him, what his death meant to them, what I mean to Black families become advocates, activists, and spokespeople, them still. They just can’t help it.” historians, journalists, and policy experts, while also being the If the public’s curiosity about Till-Mobley’s sufering had gatekeepers of the legacy and humanity of those they’ve lost. come to seem natural over the years, it was in part because she And they must somehow do all of this while comforting established a tradition of victims’ families publicly grieving for a society that both produced the conditions for these tragic the lives taken in brutal racist attacks. It is thanks to Till- Mobley deaths and still refuses to acknowledge its role in them. If the that those of us who are familiar with Emmett Till’s story know condition of black life is one of mourning, as Claudia Rankine him through a few select images, those she decided to make has reflected, we should at least be able to own our own tears. public after his death. In the first of these photos I ever saw, a 13-year-old Till sports a wide-brim hat and the kind of nonsmil- IN THE FIVE years since George Zimmerman, a neighborhood ing smile of the reluctant subject of a photograph. In another, watchman, shot and killed Trayvon in Sanford, Florida, Tray- taken that same Christmas Day in 1954, he is faintly grinning, von has often been referred to as this generation’s Emmett and if you look hard enough at his round, unblemished face you

GETTYMCNAMEE / WIN can see the outline of a mustache growing above his lips—the Top left: Sybrina Fulton at a Senate hearing on Stand Your Ground laws.

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Till. That’s a heavy distinction to bear, for reasons beyond the Some of this work of grieving is undeniably gendered: loss. Branding a black child’s death as the latest incarnation Fulton and Martin’s memoir is an anomaly in that Martin, of Till’s recognizes that there exists a 60-year period during as the father, is a participant in telling Trayvon’s story. He which the conditions that produced Till’s brutal killing have recalls what their attorney told him in the early days of media remained relatively unchanged. coverage: “We have to get Sybrina involved. She’s the mother, Till-Mobley waited until the end of her life to tell her and and people need to hear from her.” His voice, in short, will her son’s story. “It took quite a while for me to accept how resonate less than Sybrina’s. It is the mother’s pain we want, his murder connected to so many things that make us what the mother’s tears and anguish. When racist violence kills their we are today,” she wrote, but she came to see that “there was children, black women are called forth to perform a version an important mission for me, to shape so many other young of womanhood that is meant to convince white people they minds as a teacher, a messenger, an active church member.” value motherhood and to soothe white fear. Black women Her responsibility, as she saw it, was to children like Trayvon, must be devastated, but not angry. They must stand up for who would be able to read what happened to Emmett—or Bo, their children, but never question the system. They must fight as she called him—and to see what white supremacy is capable for justice, but forgive everyone when none is delivered. And of. In their joint memoir, Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of when the dust settles, and white people have decided that the Trayvon Martin, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin—they write “race conversation” has run its course, the mothers must quiet alternating chapters—describe how, in fact, they raised their themselves and fade away, until white people decide it’s time son to stay on guard in this very way. Tracy Martin writes: for the families to perform their grief once more. It is no doubt because of the fraught nature of grieving I knew good and well that if there was that people reacted so strongly to Dana Schutz’s painting of a racial confrontation, no matter the Emmett Till at the Whitney Biennial earlier this year. Some right and wrong of it, the black person said that Schutz, as a white artist, could never understand the involved would be saddled with the nature of the racial violence that her painting depicted. She presumption of guilt…. A generation defended herself by shifting the focus from race to gender. “I later, I had to give my sons the same don’t know what it is like to be black in America,” she said, instructions my mother gave me. “but I do know what it is like to be a mother.... The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Education and vigilance were, of course, Their pain is your pain.” On one level, that may be true. But as not enough. “Progress,” Trayvon’s father Fulton’s chapters underscore, there are aspects of motherhood adds, “is sometimes hard to find.” that an artist not connected to this history would struggle to Martin and Fulton stepped into the notice, much less convey in a work of art. REST IN POWER: THE responsibility they felt to tell Trayvon’s Rest in Power is difcult to read, in part because Sybrina ENDURING LIFE OF TRAYVON MARTIN story much more swiftly than Till - Fulton and Tracy Martin did not ask to become authors. The BY SYBRINA FULTON AND Mobley, but clearly not without their own pain of their obligation hangs over every page, every sentence. TRACY MARTIN Spiegel & Grau, 352pp., reservations. “How can I show you the They are not professional writers choosing to make beautiful $26.00 hole in my heart?” Sybrina Fulton asks sentences out of the darkness as their vocation—as Jesmyn Ward in her introduction to the book. “How does brilliantly in her memoir. In Men We Reaped, Ward sets do I write about the death of my son?” out to help us understand what makes her stories important For Fulton, this is a question about how for the rest of us—that acknowledging who killed these young to communicate an insurmountable men is a vital part of the healing process: emotion— grief—but it’s also about the extraordinary difculty of grieving amid I write these words to find Joshua, to assert that what happened so many public responsibilities. How can happened, in a vain attempt to find meaning. And in the end, she relive her pain over the course of I know little, some small facts: I love Joshua. He was here. He writing a book? How can she sit still for lived. Something vast and large took him, took all of my friends. long enough to process it all, between Roger, Demond, C.J., and Ronald. Once, they lived. We tried speaking engagements and presiden- to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are noth- tial endorsements, between foundation ing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL: THE fund-raisers and media interviews, be- repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I LIFE, LEGACY, AND LOVE tween eating and sleeping and breathing am nothing.... There is a great darkness bearing down on our OF MY SON MICHAEL BROWN her way back to normal? These obliga- lives, and no one acknowledges it. BY LEZLEY MCSPADDEN tions are work: labor that is necessary to WITH LYAH BETH LEFLORE preserve the meaning of Trayvon’s death Where Ward’s was a private grief made public, Fulton and Regan Arts, 272pp., $26.95 for generations to come, but that weighs Martin’s grief was never fully their own. They are charged with on those who grieve nonetheless. taking a story that many of us feel connected to and filling

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In polite society today, of course, no one would actually say those words aloud. (Though in a day and age when a candidate can be elected president after referring to “bad hombres” and “nasty women” on the campaign trail, it’s not hard to imagine that “bad nigger” is only biding its time until it is once again socially acceptable.) But the same narrative repeated itself in killing after killing. Eric Garner’s death at the hands of an nypd ofcer in Staten Island earlier that year became an indictment of Garner’s illegal activity of selling loose cigarettes; Sandra Bland’s mysterious death in a Texas jail cell in 2015 was reduced to her “mouthing of” and failing to comply with an ofcer during a trafc stop. In Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil: The Life, Legacy, and Love of My Son Michael Brown, McSpadden sets out to make clear that while her son may have been “no angel,” he was human. He was a person with goals. He was kind, gentle, a caring friend, and a son she loved with all her heart. Not only Mamie Till-Mobley urged America to face the reality of her son’s death. was his life taken from her, but in death he was defined as something other than the son who brought her joy. And now in the personal details we did not know. Their son’s death it has become her responsibility to set the record straight. gripped a nation and sparked a movement. There is a built- “I wasn’t there when Mike Mike was shot,” she writes. “I in understanding of what is important about their story; the didn’t see him fall or take his last breath, but as his mother, function of their grief is not to illuminate. What is being asked I do know one thing better than anyone, and that’s how to tell of them is to turn their personal pain into a healing process for my son’s story, and the journey we shared together as moth- the rest of the country. The same nation that denies that the er and son.” Her book, which includes a foreword by Myrlie problem of racist violence even exists asks the most vulnerable Evers-Williams, largely recalls Brown’s life before he was killed. to diagnose and treat it. She writes lovingly of his afnity for music from an early age, Over and over again, Tracy Martin reiterates that he is a and less so about her struggles to raise him as a teenage mother truck driver. In other words, he is an ordinary man, with an who faced abuse at the hands of his father. Mostly, what she ordinary job, trying to lead an ordinary life. He didn’t set out strives to get across is that before Wilson killed her son, Michael to be an activist or an expert on the Stand Your Ground policy Brown was working hard to live a normal life. Even if the rest that allowed Zimmerman to escape any legal responsibility for of the world never comes around to embracing Michael Brown Trayvon’s death; Martin wanted only to provide a decent life as human, with all of the contradictory and complex charac- for himself and his children. “All I wanted was to be a mother, teristics implied by the term, his mother now owns her own to work at my job and raise my kids and live a normal life,” narrative of his life. In these pages, he exists, whole and loved. Fulton writes, echoing her ex-husband’s sentiment. “Then my Yet it should never have been Lezley McSpadden’s job to son was killed and that world went with him.” Her new world reclaim the story of her son’s death. Part of owning the narrative is one in which she must perform her grief, not only because must be the ability to grieve on your own terms. On April 29 of a public desire to know, but because of a public penchant this year—the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day four lapd for distorting the victims’ characters. ofcers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, an act of injustice that ignited the L.A. riots—15-year-old Jordan IF FULTON AND Martin’s book lays bare the work of grieving, Edwards was shot and killed by Roy Oliver, a white police Michael Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, has taken on an ofcer in Balch Springs, Texas, who fired his rifle into a car even bleaker task: the labor of rehabilitating her son’s image. full of teenagers leaving a party. In a statement released ahead “Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no of Edwards’s funeral, his family wrote: angel,” The New York Times wrote less than three weeks after he was shot by Ferguson police ofcer Darren Wilson. After At this time, we ask that you please be respectful of our family, much outrage, Margaret Sullivan, the newspaper’s public editor and allow us the opportunity and space to grieve. This entire at the time, acknowledged that it was an “ill-chosen phrase.” ordeal has been inescapable. But the piece accurately reflected a narrative that had formed about Brown. Video had surfaced that showed him aggressively And in a second statement: “Though we understand what handling a cashier at a convenience store and allegedly stealing his life and death means symbolically, we are not ready to a pack of cigarillos shortly before he was shot in the street by make a martyr of our son.” In the absence of justice, perhaps Wilson. That was enough to convict Brown—not of stealing progress is simply returning to black families their right to

GETTYBETTMANN / or assault, but of the higher crime of being a “bad nigger.” grieve in peace. a

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O’Keeffe, photographed by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, 1918: Staring down the camera, she was less an object of his work than a conspirator in it. NY RESOURCE, ART / CHICAGO OF INSTITUTE ART THE

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ART He said that O’Keefe never did this, that she had received the rarest of opportunities, that she was blowing it. Merrill made the one-hour appointment for an August morning. She and O’Keefe sat in the artist’s sitting room, with its giant, raw, wooden ceiling beams and big picture window that looked out onto lilies, stones, and salt cedar trees, and discussed health food. Long before it was in vogue, O’Keefe was juicing daily and sourcing hearty, minimalist soups from her garden, and sending a local man on a 90-minute hunt to procure farm-fresh milk every other day. Though her eyes were going, O’Keefe was determined to keep her body strong. She lived to be 98, and was able to speak in lucid terms about her work almost until the day she died, in March 1986. Self-Made Woman Merrill’s hour-long visit turned into a part-time job; she Viewing Georgia O’Keeffe’s art and became O’Keefe’s in-house librarian, organizing the art- ist’s rare books—a first edition of Ulysses, obscure volumes legend through her personal style. of E.E. Cummings—in a chilly yellow room of the house’s main courtyard. Her role eventually expanded to cook, sec- BY RACHEL SYME retary, and companion. She read to Georgia from her favorite books, including biographies and the Taoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower. They drank orange blossom tea together. Merrill also kept O’Keefe’s secrets: For the sake of the art IN 1972, CAROL Merrill, a graduate student at the University market, no one could know that the artist was going blind. of New Mexico in her early twenties, sent a letter to Georgia They walked together, a lot. The New Mexico desert is made O’Keefe at the artist’s adobe house in Abiquiú. O’Keefe was for extended meandering; it’s never humid, and it is easy to 85 years old and an international celebrity. She had been find a comfortable pace on the soft sand of the foothills. When showing her paintings for over five decades, and due to macular she thinks of O’Keefe, Merrill recounts in her memoir, she degeneration, had set aside her oil paints to begin a series of likes to think of her “walking in beauty beneath the ancient abstractions in watercolor. Merrill’s letter was short and to clifs at Ghost Ranch.” the point. “Dear Georgia O’Keefe,” she wrote. “I want to meet I found myself thinking a lot about Merrill recently, when you. I do not want to intrude on your privacy—your solitude. I walked through “Georgia O’Keefe: Living Modern,” the new I would like to see you, be near you for just a few moments blockbuster exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The show, cu- and learn if I have the strength and power to proceed in my rated by modernist scholar Wanda Corn, will live in Brooklyn work by witnessing your will.” Merrill, who worked at the through July before hitting the road for a nationwide tour; university library, enclosed a photograph of herself sitting in the demand has been so great that the museum is issuing front of a typewriter. timed tickets for the exhibition to manage the crowds. “Living O’Keefe received dozens of such letters each month, often Modern” is not so much a show about O’Keefe’s art as it is accompanied by trinkets her admirers thought she would about her mythological, heroic image—the undefinable “will” appreciate: smooth stones, snippets of poetry, snapshots of that fascinated and inspired admirers like Merrill. The show is landscapes. She had no reason to reply to Merrill’s note in primarily about how others viewed O’Keefe: It includes her particular. But it just happened to land in the hands of her clothes, personal artifacts like her collection of mother-of-pearl secretary on the right day, at the right time, and that was buttons, and nearly 100 photographs of her, from those taken that. According to biographer Nancy Hopkins Reily, “The by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, to a Polaroid shot by Andy brevity and simplicity of Carol’s letter attracted Georgia’s Warhol in 1980. But the exhibit is also about O’Keefe’s role in attention and she must have recognized a nonconformist these images—how she styled and accessorized her own legend. thinking.... In a rare gesture Georgia invited Carol to visit her on a Sunday but to stay for only one hour.” I AM NOT of the opinion—posited by some critics in response to Merrill did not respond to the invitation for six months. this show—that clothing is a distorting lens through which What do you do when one of your heroes responds from the to view an artist’s life work, especially in the case of O’Keefe, void? Merrill kept the reply folded up in her backpack, like who extended her powers of creativity to her self-presentation. a gremlin she was trying to prevent from escaping. But it I can, however, see the logic in the argument that an exhi- kept glowing from whatever pocket she put it in: Answer me, bition like this one is essentially gendered: Of course we would answer me. When Merrill finally told an artist friend about it want to see a woman’s clothes; of course that’s what unlocks over spaghetti, she recounted, he “scolded me strongly and the key to who she is. Writing in the new republic in admonished me to write an answer or call her immediately.” 1925, the critic Edmund Wilson praised O’Keefe’s work, but

JULY 2017 | 57 REVIEW also seemed intent to reduce her genius to her personal style. 1970s. She liked to tie them the “Western way,” overlapping He wrote: “Where men’s minds may have a freer range and the left side over the right. In the show catalog, Corn concedes their works of art be thrown out further from themselves, that there is a “touristic” quality to O’Keefe’s kimono obses- women artists have a way of appearing to wear their most sion, and that she participated in the appropriative wave of brilliant productions—however objective in form—like those “Japonisme that swept across the Western world at the turn other artistic expressions, their clothes.” of the twentieth century, popularizing kimonos among pro- It’s hard to imagine, say, a show made up entirely of Marcel gressive artists, female college students, and any woman who Duchamp’s long black neckties and overcoats doing as well gravitated to clothes that showcased her modernity.” Still, Corn as “Living Modern,” or at least that anyone would accuse writes, O’Keefe primarily favored the garment because she felt him of wearing his work like an outfit. But O’Keefe’s playful it was simple, streamlined, and comfortable. She liked clean engagement with her own image is worth exploring, even if lines and muted colors, precise tailoring and careful pintucks, she would have rejected the impulse to define or limit herself with an aesthetic that tilted toward minimalism and function. by it. She wore pink wrap dresses and raw denim dungarees; Many photographers—including Cecil Beaton, Ansel Adams, both served a practical, daily function in her desert life. To an Mary Nichols, Laura Gilpin, and Bruce Weber—shot O’Keefe outside observer, it may have seemed as if she were winking throughout her life. If “Living Modern” has a major thesis, it’s at traditional femininity. But while she consistently skirted that Georgia loved to sit for the camera. The images are all so labeling herself as a feminist artist (even though she was the carefully composed, so architectural, so full of her returned only living artist to have a place set for her in Judy Chicago’s gaze, that it is difcult not to feel her willpower guiding every The Dinner Party), she refused to be demoted because of her frame. Although Stieglitz took several nudes of the young art- gender. In her first show in 1917, where she was the only woman ist, the way she aggressively stares down the camera in these on display, she rejected any attempt to separate herself from images suggests that she was less an object of his work and more a conspirator in it. She knew how she wanted to be seen, and she sculpted her A yearning impulse to be in own fame. Her paintings made her wealthy and famous. She the artist’s presence drives the was the highest-paid woman artist in New York City within a decade of moving there from Texas. But her self -presentation— exhibit and, I would argue, a new the high priestess of the high desert in crepe dresses and dirty generation of O’Keefe fanaticism. work boots—made her an icon. She was a wisp of a woman making paintings that were often larger than herself, pulling hyper-saturated turquoises and fuchsias out of the dull earth. She put together the hardy and the delicate and the efores- cent in a way that no one had before, and just like that, the “the boys,” as she always referred to male artists. At the same world shifted. time, she wasn’t unaware of her beauty or how her striking physical aesthetic afected others. She knew what she looked NOTABLY ABSENT FROM the show are O’Keefe’s most popular like, in her impeccable wool suits, her flowing head scarves, paintings—the dilated, pillowy florals that critics insisted on her black Stetson hat, her enormous Calder brooch twisted reading as some sort of yonic symbology, despite her stern into the letters “O” and “K.” protestations that they were wrong. She always took more of The bulk of the exhibit, and one of the reasons it has been a “made you look” approach to her decision to paint flowers: so popular, is a collection of O’Keefe’s clothes, many of which In 1939, the artist, who was never a woman of many words, she sewed herself. The first room displays a selection of her decided at last to clarify the purpose of her giant blooms. “I loose cream silk tunics, which would not look out of place in made you take time to look at what I saw,” she wrote. “And an Eileen Fisher boutique. Moving through the show, viewers when you took time to really notice my flowers you hung all get to see O’Keefe’s black woolen cloaks, her collection of your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write sharp, tailored designer suits from Knize and Balenciaga, her about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see button-down work shirts and blue jeans, her pastel cotton wrap of the flower—and I don’t.” dresses from Neiman Marcus (one comes in dusty millennial “Living Modern” contains a scant number of paintings, pink), a display case of her petite Ferragamo ballet flats in a glorious though they are (my favorite is Pelvis II from 1944, variety of colors (when she found an item she liked, she repur- a close-up image of a cow bone gleaming stark white against chased it in many fabrics), and, in the second-to-last gallery, a the Taos sky, blue as a chlorinated pool). Like many modern- selection from the 20 or so kimonos she favored later in life, ists, O’Keefe loved shapes most of all; the rigid and pliable when Merrill was reading to her from Taoist texts. edges of what can be seen. Her boxy blouses and fitted suits O’Keefe acquired some of her kimonos in the United States underpin her devotion to form as the wellspring of creativity; in the 1910s, later bought them in Asia, and finally purchased her body was a minimalist canvas, and she took the time to a large number from a store called Origins in Santa Fe in the swaddle it in unexpected proportions. Her self-presentation

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her paintings, but her entire self lived in these garments; she sweated in them, walked in them through mud, cooked chicken enchiladas and green chiles with eggs. In a world where we feel less and less corporeal, living through screens and feeds, there is an urgent quality to encoun- tering someone’s intimate, daily choices—what they wore, what they ate, what they smelled. In 1995, Merrill published a volume of poems she wrote about O’Keefe called O’Keefe: Days in a Life, which you can purchase at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe. I’ve had a bat- tered copy for years—I am from Albuquerque, where visiting the museum is a regular, almost religious, practice—and my favorite poem from it is number 21, from 1974, which describes what O’Keefe eats for breakfast. It ends:

...the bread a meal in itself whole wheat and soy flour, wheat germ, ground flax seed, sunflower seeds, and butter, mixed with safower, then savory jam maybe ginger and green tomato or sweet raspberry. One day she said what do you write about me? Are you going to tell what I eat for breakfast?

O’Keefe apparently gave her blessing to Mer- rill’s poetry (her glowing review was, “It will do,” according to Nancy Hopkins Reily), as did Pelvis II: O’Keeffe loved shapes, the “rigid and pliable edges of what can be seen.” Allen Ginsburg, who read the manuscript and praised it as “sacramentalizing everyday life in skewed quieter, however, than the operatic flowers of her best- a world of genius.” known artwork. Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 from 1932, In New Mexico, the O’Keefe enchantment starts young; for instance, has a touch of the baroque, all curling petals and the quotidian world becomes sacred under the overwhelming almost Technicolor pigmentation. One senses that O’Keefe sunsets and watermelon mountains and the constant smell of kept her clothing simple so that she could infuse drama into burning piñon and cedar in the air. With her choice to move her art. “Living Modern” encourages the viewer to make this West, she consecrated the land with her paintbrush, and her calculation: She lived with few embellishments so that her paintings became shorthand for understanding a state for art could be bold; she did not need accessories when she was those who have never been there. And yet O’Keefe did not capturing the walloping adornment of the land. want to belong to New Mexico. She wanted her image spread “Living Modern” feels like an extension of Merrill’s first wide. She courted celebrity even as she claimed to eschew swooning letter to the artist four decades ago. It is that yearning it; she played hard to get so that people would keep coming impulse to be in the artist’s presence, to be near “for just a few around trying to find her. Because if they came to find her, moments” to see if any of her strength might rub of by osmosis, they also encountered her work. They saw the twists in the that drives the exhibit—and, I would argue, a new generation river just the way she did, they saw the odd bend of a weather of O’Keefe fanaticism. (Between the touring exhibition and vane, they saw stamens blown up into architectural spectacle. a hulking new cookbook of her favorite recipes, we are in the O’Keefe laughed at the idea that anyone would care what she midst of a highly Instagrammed Georgia revival.) Nothing ate for breakfast, yet she also understood that the mythology illuminates a person’s bodily presence like the body’s absence surrounding an artist’s practice was useful material. It keeps

ART RESOURCE, NY RESOURCE, ART / ART OF MUSEUM METROPOLITAN THE in clothing they once wore. Yes, O’Keefe’s hands are all over people looking, long after you’re dust. a

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BOOKS task of poetry surpassed being a witness. His 1953 exposé of totalitarianism, The Captive Mind, has often been compared to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s 1984, which is probably why its sales once again spiked after Trump won the election in November. Yet Milosz shrank from didacticism in literature. He believed that history held many lessons for us, but also viewed it as a backdrop of eternity. We can now trace these tensions through his extraordinary life in Milosz, the excellent full-length biography by the Polish critic Andrzej Franaszek. Capably edited and translated by Alexsandra and Michael Parker from the significantly longer Invincible Reason Polish edition, Franaszek’s work moves gracefully between the In his poetry, Czeslaw Milosz strove to events in Milosz’s life and his obsessive writing about it. Along with historical maps, its chronology enables us to pinpoint the liberate himself from troubled times. fateful intersection between Milosz’s experience and historic events, showing a poet who was determined both to embody BY EDWARD HIRSCH and to transcend his own historical circumstances, who longed to liberate himself from the times that entangled him.

MILOSZ WAS BORN on June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, Lithuania, “WHAT OCCURRED IN Poland was an encounter of a Euro- on the impoverished estate of his mother’s family, who were pean poet with the hell of the twentieth century, not hell’s minor Polish gentry. His family spoke Polish, which is how he first circle, but a much deeper one,” the Polish writer Czeslaw became a Polish poet, but he always felt the pull of the “red soil” Milosz declared in his 1983 collection of lectures, The Witness of Lithuania, which he called “a country of myths and poetry.” of Poetry. “This situation is something of a laboratory, in oth- His first memories came with war. His father, a civil engi- er words: It allows us to examine what happens to modern neer, was mobilized to build roads and bridges for the Rus- poetry in certain historical conditions.” What Milosz meant sian army, and his mother followed, dragging her son along, by “historical conditions” was the complete disintegration traveling behind the battle zone, living nomadically, never of European culture—“the sudden crumbling of all current staying anywhere more than a few months. It gave him a life- notions and criteria”—between 1939 and 1945. Like other long feeling that nothing is stable, everything is temporary, Polish poets, Milosz felt the need to respond in a radical way even governments and political systems. When he returned to to the disgrace of Europe—its sinking into inhumanity, its Lithuania in 1918, the European hell was replaced by a calm complicity in genocide—by trying to remake poetry from the idyll in the countryside, a respite from history, childhood ground up. It was starting over again after what seemed like regained. But the mark of war was lasting: He would become the end of the world. a writer of dislocation and exile. The poet in Poland, Milosz argued, experienced history on Milosz spent his high school and university years in Vilnius, his pulse. By writing his own experiences he was also writing the capital of Polish Lithuania, a baroque city of Roman Catholic the experiences of others, speaking the unspeakable. “What churches and many synagogues, the Jerusalem of the North. can poetry be in the twentieth century?” he wondered. “It He learned the Latin liturgy, Catholic dogmatics, Roman law, seems to me there is a search for the line beyond which only a the history of old Poland. It was there that he began writing zone of silence exists, and that on the borderline we encounter poetry. He co-founded Zagary, a group of pessimistic young Polish poetry. In it a peculiar fusion of the individual and the poets who later would be deemed catastrophists due to their historical took place, which means the events burdening a apocalyptic view of history. There would always be in his work whole community are perceived by a poet as touching him in an element of catastrophism, a doomed sense of the horrors a most personal manner. Then poetry is no longer alienated.” to come. With the rise of Nazism in Germany and Stalinism Part of Milosz’s lifelong project was to write as if poetry “is in Russia, he felt special kinship with T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste no longer a foreigner in society,” to make a poetic model out Land,” which he translated, and its vision of ruined cities and of shared trauma. a collapsing European civilization. Times of upheaval also enable us to examine what happens Milosz worried that there was something icy, calculating, to certain poets. The conditions Milosz experienced and even- and even remote in his temperament. He gestured toward this tually fled were for him a source of contradictions that would in the titles of his first two books of poetry, A Poem on Frozen play out in the rest of his life and work. As he lived through Time (1933) and Three Winters (1936). Though he matured in periods of war, totalitarianism, and exile, he became a political some of the most blood-soaked precincts of Europe, he was by thinker who didn’t like politics, a memoirist who distrusted confessional literature, a poet of witness who believed that the ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID A. JOHNSON

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symbolist poet Oskar Milosz. He was especially influenced by his cousin’s philosophical writings about time: Even before Einstein, Milosz observed, Oskar Milosz had intuitively conceived “a cos- mology of relativity—a moment when there is no space, no matter, no time; all three are united in his imagination with movement.” Mi- losz had always harbored a strong antipathy to the Catholic Church, which in Poland had been closely aligned with rabid right-wing and anti -Semitic nationalists, but Os- kar Milosz presented him with a new kind of spiritual thinking. Po- etry must be aware of its “terrible responsibilities”—it is not purely an individual game—but it could also blend historical with mystical concerns. Milosz’s poetry would seek an “eternal moment” lifted from the river of time. It would try to understand our human re- lationship to the divine. In 1937, Milosz moved to War saw, where he worked for Polish Radio and began his re- lationship with Janina (Janka) Cekalska, whom he eventually married in a Parisian church. During the perilous war years, he joined the socialist resistance and was often on the move, evading both the Nazis and the Soviets. His poems and sequences from this time, such as “The World: A Naïve Poem,” and “Voices of Poor People,” have a deceptive simplicity, akin to that of William temperament a robust and maybe even hopeful catastrophist, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. He was translating who figured out how to survive and was dogged by guilt over his into his own Central European terms the mythic states that own wily capabilities. “A sly and angry poet / With malevolently Blake had reformulated from Milton: first the eternal wonder squinted eyes,” he called himself in his enraged 1944 poem, of Paradise, the protected innocence of childhood, and then “The Poor Poet,” but one to whom “a cynical hope is given.” the horror of the Fall, the brutality that comes afterwards, the As he told an interviewer nearly 40 years later, “It’s difcult corruptions of history. to be a poet only of despair, only of sadness. An element of Milosz’s early- and post-war poems are haunted by survi- joy, located somewhere in an imaginary future, is the other vor’s guilt, the poignancy of living after what was, for so many side of catastrophism.” others, the world’s end. “Of those at the table in the café / where Milosz received a law degree and then spent a year on a on winter noons a garden of frost glittered on windowpanes / I scholarship in Paris. (“I had left the cloudy provinces behind,” alone survived,” he writes in his poem “Café,” which describes he would remember in his poem “Bypassing Rue Descartes”: returning to a café where he once met with friends, all of whom “I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.”) There, he ap- are now dead. His book Rescue (1945) contains his most iconic prenticed himself to his older cousin, the French-Lithuanian early poems, such as “Campo dei Fiori,” a civic-minded poem

JULY 2017 | 61 REVIEW about people’s indiference to the deaths of others, and “A Poor Galczynski—authors well-known enough in Poland to be easily Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” part of a six-poem sequence identified by readers there. of moral outrage and mortal loss. Devastated by guilt, he The Captive Mind was a devastating blow to the communist concludes the book with “Dedication”—which explains why mentality. Its success brought Milosz international acclaim, but he is writing in the plain style. also condemnation from many leftist poets and intellectuals, “Try to understand this simple speech as I would be such as Pablo Neruda and Jean-Paul Sartre, who naïvely con- ashamed of another,” he avows. “I swear, there is in me no tinued to embrace Soviet communism. Milosz considered his wizardry of words.” own book a struggle with the demon of the twentieth century, which he called “the Hegelian belief in historical necessity, They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds that history develops along preordained lines.” Milosz never To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. considered himself a political writer. The Captive Mind was a I put this book here for you, who once lived bid to liberate himself—and us—from that kind of thinking. So that you should visit us no more. He held that history is not preordained, as Hegel and Marx believed. Rather, it is a result of human errors and choices. It Poetry served as an ofering to the dead, a form of expiation, is shaped by fallible human beings. a hope for redemption. Stylistically, Milosz distrusted verbal excess, high Romanticism, pure poetry, which was cut of IN 1960, AFTER nine difcult years as an émigré in Paris, Milosz from life. Rather, he sought verbal precision and clarity, a returned to the United States at the age of 50. Now famous humane art. in Europe, he found himself isolated and unrecognized in his new country. Having accepted a position in the Department of MILOSZ NEVER PLACED much faith in the utopian promise of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, communism, especially under the Soviet occupation. But the Berkeley, he was for many years primarily known in America state of things in Poland, the country he identified as “the most agonizing spot in the whole of terrorized Europe,” inclined him toward the political left. After the war he made what he would Milosz aimed “to move constantly call a “pact with the devil” and entered the Polish diplomatic between a poetry of social and service, posted first to New York, then to Washington and Paris. When he was recalled to Europe, Janka stayed in the United historical reality” and ethereal States, afraid that they would be permanently trapped in Poland. questions about time and eternity. His dissident thinking, meanwhile, aroused suspicion. While he was on a short visit to Warsaw, the authorities temporarily confiscated his passport. Finally, he was posted back to Paris and, in 1951, he broke for good with the Polish Communist regime, seeking political asylum in France. as the editor of the anthology Postwar Polish Poetry, and the Lonely and unmoored in Paris, Milosz kept himself from co-translator of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems. His Selected Poems succumbing to despair by writing about his experiences in was published in 1973, but it wasn’t until the 1980s, when he Poland. He sought to understand what had happened to his had already retired from teaching, and after he won the Nobel generation. In 1953, he published The Prize, that he came to wider notice. Captive Mind, his most famous book, a A clear-eyed opponent of two totalitarian governments, study of the allure of communism and the Milosz articulated a determined embrace of freedom that dangerous appeal of totalitarian thought. resonated during the cultural cold war. In essay collections Written out of great inner turmoil, it is in such as Visions from San Francisco Bay (1969) and The Emperor part a portrait of friends seduced by au- of the Earth (1977), he warned Americans about our painful thoritarianism. The four central chapters indiference to European experience. He wanted us to con- each portray a talented writer who capit- sider historical categories—not the idea of history reduced ulated to the State. They are not named by Marxism to economic phases, but something deeper and but identified as archetypes: Alpha, the more complex, more sustaining; the feeling that mankind is Moralist; Beta, the Disappointed Lover; memory, historical memory. He was obsessed with the idea of Gamma, the Slave of History; and Delta, our collective human destiny, with what he called “the riddle MILOSZ: A BIOGRAPHY the Troubadour. In the English edition of Evil active in History.” He was considered a “witness,” a BY ANDRZEJ FRANASZEK EDITED AND of Franaszek’s biography, the editors historical truth-teller. But he was also much more than that. TRANSLATED BY do not provide us with the names of the Milosz showed genuine ambivalence about the notion of a ALEKSANDRA AND MICHAEL PARKER real-life models for these figures—Jerzy poet as a witness to history. He called his Charles Eliot Norton Harvard University Press, Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Borowski, Jer- Lectures at Harvard The Witness of Poetry, but he also wrote a 544 pp., $34.00 zy Putrament, and Konstanty Ildefons letter to The New York Review of Books objecting to a positive

62 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW review by A. Alvarez that was titled “witness.” In Milosz’s view, the label narrowed the meaning of his poetry and implied that his poems were a kind of journalistic response to events. He was keenly interested in exploring the nature of reality Text Cloud Anthology beyond the dictates of history. He aimed “to move constantly BY KAZIM ALI between a poetry of social and historical reality, and the purer reaches,” he told an interviewer in 1983. What he meant by “the purer reaches” was ethereal questions about time and Afternoon alive angel Ali eternity, the nature of morality, the essence of religion. In an Belted by birds age of profound relativism, he pursued an ongoing search for Blue boat of your body immutable values. Breaks in breath Toward the end of his life, something else began to enter Broken brother come in Milosz’s work: a sense of survivor’s wonder. His poetry showed dark disappear down moments of unexpected happiness. He understood the cruelty Don’t exist of nature and yet remembered that the earth merits our af- The empty editor echoes fection. He thought about the rise and fall of civilizations, Eternal fast find me forgotten and yet praised the marvels of the earth, the sky, the sea. The garden glass hasn’t heard yet “There is so much death,” he wrote in his poem “Counsels,” To hollow its horizon higher “and that is why afection / for pigtails, bright-colored skirts Inside Kazim in the wind, / for paper boats no more durable than we are....” Kazim knew His work is filled with radiant moments of wonder and being, Learned light a deep tenderness toward the human, as in his 1971 poem “Gift”: Listened Lived lost A day so happy. Limited himself to matter Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden. His memoir of morning Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. Mother mountain mouth There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. Never night this orifice open I knew no one worth my envying him. Orating to ovation Whatever evil I had sufered, I forgot. Plucked pot pieces of plot To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me. His prayer pulled quickly from rain In my body I felt no pain. Recitation of rain rejoining the rocks When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails. Rocks rushed to remembering the secret series Of sun wonders, silence on the shore Milosz had established a solid life in America. He had a Silence someone sounds strong connection to younger American poets and cosmopoli- Speaking through stone tan translators (Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Leonard Nathan, The sunset stringing us along Lillian Vallee, Renata Gorczynski, and Richard Lourie, among Students of the task that of thirst others), which is how I came to know him. But he continued A thousand trees to teach this trick to us to long for Poland, and moved back to Krakow for good in the To understand the voice the verse the version early 1990s with his second wife, the American historian Carol of vanishing Thigpen. He died in 2004. That waits and wants and wonders One comes away from this biography with a fuller sense Wheel window wander of Milosz’s struggles and his complexity. He was a seeker, a Yesterday you yearned in the yews sensual mystic, a fierce moralist who didn’t want to be known You know then who you were as a moralist, a partly historical, partly metaphysical poet. Who you gathered yourself to be He felt fragmented and longed to be whole. He loved nature Zamindar of zinnias and quarreled with its ruthless indiference. He was a philo- Zephyr through the zoo sophical poet who insisted that his poetry was dictated by a daimonion, an occult power. Milosz wrote, “Human reason is beautiful and invincible,” and called the poem “Incantation.” He asked, “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or Kazim Ali’s new book of poems INQUISITION will be published people?” and insisted on the social and historical relevance in early 2018. of literature. And yet he also believed that the deepest work of poetry is “the passionate pursuit of the real,” by which he meant the ongoing quest for God, who is unfathomable. a

JULY 2017 | 63 REVIEW

LETTERS While Monocle projects confidence in the march of global- ization, it barely hints at the growing threats to the world of open borders and free-flowing capital it depicts. The magazine’s globalist chic contrasts sharply with the nationalist movements in the United States and Europe seeking to limit immigration, including visa programs for the skilled workers in tech and finance who might read Monocle. Yet the publication shares with the right a faith in free-market economics; Brûlé himself is less a citizen of the world than a shopper in its gigantic, globalized mall. His magazine, which built its brand by iden- tifying the world’s hippest (and most profitable) trends, feels Nowhere Mag increasingly out of touch. Can Monocle’s globalist chic survive in JAYSON TYLER BRÛLÉ’S long, careful path to world domination an age of populism? began in rural Winnipeg, where he was born in 1968 to a Ca- nadian football player father and an artist mother. His parents, BY KYLE CHAYKA rumor has it, did not include accents over their last name. In interviews, Brûlé likes to say that his international sensibility formed during his childhood, inspired perhaps by his mother, an Estonian immigrant. News and decorating magazines were AN AIRPLANE IS the perfect, and perhaps the only, place to plentiful in the homes the family passed through in Ottawa, actually read Monocle, the globe-trotting lifestyle magazine Montreal, and Toronto, as was Danish furniture. Aspiration founded in 2007 by Tyler Brûlé, a Canadian editor and erst- came early. When he was 14, Brûlé cleaned yachts for a summer while war correspondent. Its logo, an “M” with a twisted loop job and bought a Rolex with the proceeds. inscribed in a circle, lurks at airport terminal bookstores all Idolizing his fellow Canadian, the ABC news presenter Peter over the world, the magazine’s glossy black cover—which Jennings, Brûlé aspired to be an anchorman himself, and in the late David Carr likened to “a slab of printed dark Belgian his early twenties worked in London for the BBC. He reported chocolate”—conveying a placeless, easily translated sort of freelance from Afghanistan for several years, and in March 1994 luxury. Inside, one encounters articles on Canadian soft power, he was shot twice in a sniper attack, leaving him with little Latin American soap operas, and Finnish domestic architecture: use of his left hand. While recuperating from surgery back in the casual reading of an armchair diplomat. London, he read home decor and cooking magazines and con- Over the years, Monocle has become as much a status symbol templated, as we all must, how to live. In 1996, Brûlé took out a as reading material. Its editor is one of the world’s foremost small-business loan to launch Wallpaper, a design and lifestyle lifestyle auteurs, a tastemaker of late capitalism and “a Martha magazine. Its polished photo shoots and furniture-as-fashion Stewart for the global elite,” per New York magazine. Brûlé has aesthetic paved the way for commercially and critically suc- promoted his personal version of the good life via high- profile cessful publications such as Dwell and Apartamento. columns in T magazine and, more recently, the Financial Times, Brûlé’s description of the ideal audience for Wallpaper is where he reflects on travel etiquette and philosophizes about often quoted: “I call them global nomads,” he told The New “relaxation” for the one percent. Monocle’s tote bags, which York Times in 1998, before the term had become a technology - come with the $130 annual ten-issue subscription price, mark inflected cliché. “Whether they’re a West Coast snowboarder, an itinerant tribe of 80,000 who may identify more with the a copy writer for a hot advertising firm in Stockholm, or a magazine than with the country on their passports. grunge kid working in an indie record shop that suddenly As older titles like GQ, Vanity Fair, and The Economist lose got a film deal, there’s a degree of afuence all of a sudden.” their grip on millennials, the Monocle Man—spot him by his In other words, bohemians made good who could suddenly sharp suit that ends at bare ankles, glasses with prominent spend a lot of money, anywhere, fast. They were a new ar- frames, and wide, unbuttoned collar, just like Brûlé himself—is chetype, with taste, capital, and mobility in equal measure. alive and well. In 2014, Nikkei, the Japanese media conglomer- The magazine’s hopeful globalism, meanwhile, fit with the ate, bought a minority share in Monocle at a purported valuation end-of-history triumphalism that permeated the late ’90s, in of $115 million. Although the company is private and doesn’t the wake of the Cold War but before September 11. release metrics, it has only grown since then, launching new The concept was a hit. In 1997, after only four issues, Time- publications and opening several retail spaces. The editors Warner acquired Wallpaper for $1.6 million. Brûlé was all of celebrated their 101st issue this March with an understated 29 years old. He stayed on as editor in chief until 2002, when, redesign. You can’t overhaul a classic, so not much has changed: chafing at corporate leadership, he left. (Another version of The header logo is a little bigger and the layouts less cluttered. It’s more of a victory lap than a pivot. ILLUSTRATION BY JOAN WONG

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JULY 2017 | 65 REVIEW the story says that he and TimeWarner clashed over his habit and London that serve up a wan, placeless cuisine of Monocle of indulging in “private helicopter rides.”) Having signed a chicken katsu sandwiches and Monocle taco salad bowls. The noncompete that prevented him from starting another mag- magazine is essentially a giant branding opportunity, an omni- azine, Brûlé launched Winkreative, an advertising agency for present advertisement for the true product: the Brûlé lifestyle. clients that might have bought pages in Wallpaper: tourism It’s a way of life that has increasingly come under fire from boards, airlines, and luxury condo developments. political leaders. “If you believe you are a citizen of the world,” After his noncompete expired, Brûlé assembled a few British Prime Minister Theresa May pronounced last year, “you wealthy investors for Monocle, “a briefing on global afairs, are a citizen of nowhere.” May became prime minister in no business, culture & design,” according to its cover slogan for small part because she argued that the people of her country the first hundred issues. In some ways, the timing did not seem couldn’t trust the Monocle class—not just the Eurocrats in opportune: The first issue appeared in February 2007—on the Brussels, but also the global financial elite and PR gurus like eve of the financial crisis, and at the start of a sharp decline in her predecessor, David Cameron—who were too untethered the fortunes of print media. But Monocle performed a crucial to act in the best interests of the nation. The rise of May, the function for the wealthy and those who market to them: Its con- vote for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump—all represent tent provided the global elite with a fresh definition of luxury a conscious renunciation of the globalist ideal that Monocle and a renewed sense of confidence in the material rewards of has helped to cultivate. the economic system that had just failed. A recurring column When Brûlé was recently asked about May’s observations on in the magazine analyzes a world leader’s personal style, and “citizens of nowhere,” he neither engaged with the discontents each year Monocle prints a Quality of Life Survey that suggests of globalization—the real-world worries over lost jobs and which city you might move to if you could move anywhere. (Tokyo was the 2016 winner. The same city also won in 2015. In 2014, it placed second.) Monocle gave its readers—and those Monocle views the world as a single, who aspire to be like them—a way to define themselves and utopian marketplace, bestridden recognize each other, making Brûlé’s company an influential, if unlikely, force in publishing. by compelling brands and their executives. MONOCLE HASN’T JUST given globalized capitalism a hip aes- thetic; it has also operated skillfully as a business in the many markets it both covers and covets. In the magazine, it’s next to impossible to discern what space is paid for as advertising and what is not. In the March 2017 redesign issue, for instance, the erosion of local identity—nor did he make the case for his there are “collaboration” ad packages with the nations of magazine’s brand of enlightened cosmopolitanism. He simply both Thailand and Portugal; each package appears next to dismissed critics like May as “silly people.” “This is the way of unpaid Monocle editorial content about said countries. These the modern world,” Brûlé told the South China Morning Post. are less evenhanded appraisals than buoyant travel guides to “It’s not just nationalism, it’s petty.” In other words, putting new resorts, museums, and shopping districts—the flows of up barriers is more than a political mistake, it’s tasteless—a creative capital, broadly speaking, that one might experience cardinal sin in the Monocle theology. while doing business in such places. This murkiness stems directly from Monocle’s business WITH THE RECENT redesign, some glimmers of political reality structure. Under an umbrella entity incorporated in Switzerland are beginning to enter the magazine’s editorial voice. The new called Winkorp, Brûlé’s ad agency, Winkreative, sells creative page layouts are more text-heavy, with longer articles and services to companies that also often buy ads in Monocle. Both fewer glossy photos and twee spot illustrations. The content firms share a London headquarters that Brûlé, a Japanophile, has a new seriousness, though it remains ever-optimistic. has branded Midori House. The model is similar to that of the In an interview for the March issue, the CEO of Lufthansa T Brand Studio at The New York Times, The Washington Post’s says he is confident that globalization “cannot be stopped or Brand Studio, and other recent in-house creative agencies de- slowed down, even though some people are trying hard.” The veloped by legacy media brands. Winkreative, which predates president of Portugal, adopting the vocabulary of a start-up them by a decade, must inspire jealousy both for its financial founder, pitches his country as “a platform between cultures, success and for its weak business-editorial divide. civilizations, and seas.” (“We were an empire,” he reassures Brûlé has positioned himself at the head of a vertically readers, “but not imperialistic.”) integrated and ever-expanding media empire. On top of the Monocle views the world as a single, utopian marketplace, Winkorp cake, he has added Monocle-branded clothing lines linked by digital technology and first-class air travel, bestridden that can be bought through the magazine; hardcover books by compelling brands and their executives. Diversity is part about home decoration and nation building; a 24/7 streaming of the vision—the magazine’s subjects are from all over the radio station; retail stores around the world; and cafés in Tokyo world, and its fashion models come in every skin color—but

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itself, places that Monocle takes pains to identify and share. In 2015, in fact, the magazine hosted its very first Quality of Life Conference—in Lisbon.

IT’S AS EASY to be charmed by Monocle as it is to hate it. Who doesn’t like a good Japanese leather origami bag? But if nationalists have a point in decrying the “global citizenship” that Monocle epit- omizes, it lies in the magazine’s subtle approach to cultural homogenization. Brûlé’s stylistic vision has reproduced itself to the point of banality: Whether due to his own eforts or to the changing tide of taste, Danish furniture, clean cafés, shared ofces, and artisanal food and clothing can now be found everywhere, attracting a floating tribe of interna- tional consumers the way flowers attract bees. The magazine’s worst ofense may be that it is boring. Now that Monocle has helped make the global lifestyle so ubiquitous, giving it up is hard, even if you don’t believe in it. British Home Secretary Amber Rudd wants to implement “barista visas” post-Brexit, to enable Europeans to work in U.K. bars and cofee shops for two years, without claim to housing or other benefits. The Brexiteers want strong borders, but not at the expense of their Monocle’s founder, Tyler Brûlé, has become a tastemaker of late capitalism. daily flat whites—which are, in fact, an Australian innovation. Mobility to travel, consume, and work this diversity is presented, in a vaguely colonialist way, more is a luxury primarily available to the wealthy; the poor and as a cool look to buy into than a tangible social ideal. Cities disenfranchised find themselves blocked on every front. Ref- and countries are written up as commodities and investment ugees and asylum seekers don’t number among Brûlé’s “global opportunities rather than real places with intractable problems nomads,” nor do itinerant workers who can only travel at the that require more than a subsidy to resolve. If London is too mercy of ever more stringent visa regulations. expensive, Brûlé proposes, why not found your next business The challenge confronting globalization is not, in the end, in Lisbon, or Munich, or Belgrade? If you don’t, someone else one of individual style. It is one of inclusion and indepen- will, and you might just get priced out again. dence. Is it possible to form a truly global community without The magazine doesn’t idealize homogeneity of race or gender sacrificing local identity and self-determination? While the norms, but rather a global sameness of taste and aspiration. vision formulated by Monocle may have been profitable, it no Every Monocle reader, regardless of where they live or work, longer looks plausible. In the first century A.D., the Roman should want the same things and seek them out wherever they philosopher Seneca wrote, “One should live by this motto: go in the world, forming an identity made up not of places I was not born to one little corner—this whole world is my or people but of desirable products: German newspapers, country.” Today, to the satisfaction and benefit of Monocle’s Thai beach festivals, Norwegian television. The end result of globe-trotting readership, the whole world may indeed be this sameness is that a country can pitch itself to the monied our country. But we’re still deciding what kind of country it Monocle class simply by adopting its chosen signifiers, or hir- is, and whether Brûlé’s target audience will be the ones who ing Winkreative to do it for them in a rebranding campaign. ultimately control it. a In this way, the magazine warps the real world in its own editorial image. THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 7, Issue 5,005, July 2017. A recent article in The Guardian about Lisbon described the Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and Aug/Sep 2017) by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone city as embracing “Monocle urbanism,” a shorthand for all that (202) 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage the magazine glorifies: plentiful local culture, a relaxed pace of and handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing ofces. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: life, modernized airports, and co-working spaces. The new Lis- www.TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. Box 6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post Agreement bon resembles “a speeded-up east London,” as the city transforms Number 7178957. Send changes of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited from of-the-grid backwater to Airbnb-infested production hub manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be emailed to [email protected]. of the international creative elite. Capital, and with it cultural For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our web site at newrepublic.com/customer-service.

TOM STODDARTGETTYTOM/ capital, floods to the place where it can most efciently reproduce

JULY 2017 | 67 backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY GRISELDA SAN MARTIN

LOCATION PLAYAS DE TIJUANA, MEXICO DATE APRIL 30, 2016

PLAYAS DE TIJUANA, a bustling Mexican beach town on the Roughly once a year, the towering steel gates in the wall are American border, has long been a place of reunion for immi- thrown open for a ceremony organized by the Border Angels, a grants and the families they left behind. In 1971, when Pat Nixon nonprofit group in San Diego. Five or six families are ushered dedicated the Friendship Park there, the border wall was little into a large steel paddock—a kind of no-man’s-land between two more than a flimsy chain-link fence, and people could talk to nations—where they are permitted to embrace for a few minutes. their loved ones on the other side whenever they liked. Today, Then they must part once again, the gates closing behind them. the fence has been transformed into a hulking steel barricade, Last year, Gabriela Esparza was among the immigrants se- guarded by border patrol ofcers; reunions are limited to a lected to reunite with her family. Only eight years old when she handful of visiting hours on Saturdays and Sundays. crossed the desert into the United States, she was able to hug Griselda San Martin, a Spanish photographer, has been her mother, Maria, who remains in Mexico, for the first time documenting the park since 2013. She has watched a father in nine years. “It’s the most intense thing I’ve photographed,” sing to his young daughter through the wall, married couples San Martin says. “A single moment of joy—but then it’s back pressed up against the metal slats, and children, now grown, to reality, because they are not together.” a filling their parents in on their own kids. “It’s surreal in a way,” San Martin says, “like visiting someone in prison.” See more of Griselda San Martin’s work on newrepublic.com

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