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available wherever books are sold · www.tinhouse.com contents

JUNE 2017

UP FRONT 6 Russia’s Weaponized Fake News 22 Inside the Kremlin’s ongoing political influence campaign. BY LAURA RESTON 8 Trump the Job Killer Why is the self-proclaimed economic savior firing people? BY BRYCE COVERT 9 The Trump Tweetometer A highly precise quantitative analysis of last month’s presidential tweets. 10 The New Star Wars Our next global conflict may be fought in outer space. BY SHANNON STIRONE 12 Not So Fast, Blue Cities How Republicans are blocking efforts to raise the minimum wage. BY CLIO CHANG

COLUMNS 14 The Great Democratic Divide Can elite liberals learn to embrace middle America? BY MICHAEL TOMASKY 16 The Miseducation of Liberals Don’t like Betsy DeVos? Blame the Path of Most Resistance Democrats. BY DIANE RAVITCH The opposition to Trump is winning. But can it find a way to rebuild the Democratic Party? REVIEW 50 Pew Research BY JEET HEER How to divine the political power of American evangelicals. BY JEFF SHARLET 56 Out of Office Veep tackles the shock of losing the White House. BY SARAH MARSHALL 18 30 42 58 Floatopia The Rumble in “The Only The War on Can libertarians escape government by Richmond Good Muslim Hillbillies taking to the seas? BY RACHEL RIEDERER 61 A Woman’s March Tom Perriello’s insurgent Stripped of the region’s Is a Dead Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant path toward campaign against Ralph coal and ravaged by Muslim” feminist polemic. BY CHARLOTTE SHANE Northam for Virginia drugs, the people of A meatpacking town in governor is the biggest Appalachia are fighting 64 The Teeth Gap Kansas opened its doors Democratic title bout to survive. The devastating effects of dental to refugees. Then a group since Hillary vs. Bernie. TEXT BY SARAH JONES inequality in America. BY ADAM GAFFNEY of Trump supporters PHOTOGRAPHS BY ESPEN BY ALEX SHEPHARD 66 Shimmering Visions plotted to massacre them. RASMUSSEN BY TED GENOWAYS What F. Scott Fitzgerald shared with his era’s great theorists. BY SAM TANENHAUS 72 Backstory PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHELLE SIU

POETRY 70 Boardwalk Block

COVER PHOTOS BY GETTY IMAGES. ABOVE, PAUL MORIGI/GETTY COVER ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN MCCABE BY ADRIENNE RAPHEL

JUNE 2017 | 1 contributors

Bryce Covert is economic editor at ThinkProgress and a contributor at Editor in Chief The Nation. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Win McCormack Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2016 Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus. Editor Eric Bates TRUMP THE JOB KILLER, P. 8

Executive Editor Literary Editor Adam Gaffney is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School Ryan Kearney Laura Marsh and a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Politics Editor Features Directors Alliance. He’s a board member of the single-payer advocacy organization Bob Moser Sasha Belenky Theodore Ross Physicians for a National Health Program. THE TEETH GAP, P. 64 Deputy Editor Ryu Spaeth Senior Editors Brian Beutler Ted Genoways, a contributing editor at the new republic, has written Managing Editor Jeet Heer about the meatpacking industry and immigration disputes in Minnesota, Laura Reston News Editor Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas. “The issues dividing the nation,” he says, “are Social Media Editor Alex Shephard playing out in some of the least visible parts of the country.” His latest Sarah Jones Staff Writers book, This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm, will Design Director Emily Atkin Graham Vyse be published in September. This article was produced in collaboration with Siung Tjia Josephine Livingstone the Food and Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative Photo Director Poetry Editor news organization. “THE ONLY GOOD MUSLIM IS A DEAD MUSLIM,” P. 30 Stephanie Heimann Cathy Park Hong Production Manager Espen Rasmussen is an award-winning photographer and photo editor Steph Tan Reporter-Researchers based in Norway. Between 2014 and 2016, he drove thousands of miles Clio Chang Contributing Editors Lovia Gyarkye through America’s Rust Belt, from Detroit to Beckley, West Virginia, to James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Sukjong Hong document the lives of working-class Americans. “I wanted to go to the Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, Juliet Kleber birthplace of the American dream,” he says, “to ask people if they still Siddhartha Deb, Michael Eric Dyson, Paul Ford, Ted Interns THE WAR ON HILLBILLIES, P. 42 Genoways, William Giraldi, believe in it.” Eric Armstrong Dana Goldstein, Kathryn Joyce, Naomi LaChance Suki Kim, Maria Konnikova, Sagari Shetty Diane Ravitch is a historian and professor of education at New York Corby Kummer, Michelle Legro, University. She is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, Graeme Wood, Robert Wright Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. THE MISEDUCATION OF LIBERALS, P. 16

Rachel Riederer is co-editor in chief of Guernica. She writes about Director of Marketing Director of Sales and Revenue Suzanne Wilson science, the environment, culture, and policy. Her writing has appeared in Evelyn Frison Associate Account FLOATOPIA, P. 58 The New Yorker and The Best American Essays. Audience and Executive Partnership Manager Shawn Awan Jeff Sharlet is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Eliza Fish Controller Dartmouth College. He has written or edited six books on American Media Relations Manager David Myer religion, the most recent of which is Radiant Truths. His work has appeared Steph Leke Office Manager, NY in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and GQ. PEW RESEARCH, P. 50 Associate Publisher Tori Campbell Art Stupar Sam Tanenhaus is former editor of The New York Times Book Review. He is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. Publisher Hamilton Fish SHIMMERING VISIONS, P. 66

Michael Tomasky is a columnist for The Daily Beast, editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and frequent contributor to The New York Published by Lake Avenue Publishing Review of Books. THE GREAT DEMOCRATIC DIVIDE, P. 14 1 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003

President Clarification: An article in our April 2017 issue, “Trump’s Fuzzy Border Math,” stated that Jason Win McCormack Richwine’s Ph.D. dissertation “advocated banning Hispanic immigrants because their IQs were lower than those of whites.” It was not our intention to suggest that Richwine advocated banning all Hispanic immigrants. Rather, we meant to observe that his dissertation suggested there is a “genetic component” to lower IQ scores among Hispanics and other groups, and that he For subscription inquiries or problems call (800) 827-1289 advocated using intelligence tests to bar entry to those with lower IQs. The online version of the article has been altered to clarify his opinions, including his assertion that it is “difficult to argue For reprints and licensing visit www.TNRreprints.com against” the “prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren.” We regret any misunderstanding that our original phrasing may have caused about his views.

2 | NEW REPUBLIC COMING SUMMER 2017

Specially curated wines for New Republic readers, delivered to your door. from the stacks

AFTER DONALD TRUMP was elected president, journalists were quick to liken him to Hitler, Mussolini, and Vladimir Putin. But four months into his administra- tion, he’s starting to look more like a Georgia peanut farmer whose first term was mired in congressional gridlock. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. explained in the new republic in 1980, Jimmy Carter had cut himself loose from the core principles that had governed the Democratic Party since FDR. He was left ideologically rudderless, mired in foreign quagmires, his domestic agenda stalled on Capitol Hill. ✯ Trump, too, is a victim of his own incompetence. He can’t hold his party together. His health care and tax reform plans are floundering, even though he, like Carter, enjoys majorities in both houses of Congress. On foreign policy, he has flailed from isolationism to intervention- ism, railing against nato one minute and bombing Syria the next. ✯ But as Schlesinger pointed out, Carter’s incompetence actually helped rescue his presidency. By bungling a crisis that prompts Americans to rally round the flag, Trump could do the same. “There are,” Schlesinger concluded, “only two reasons to shudder at the thought of four more years of Carter in the White House. One is foreign policy. The other is domestic policy.” Carter’s foreign policy ineptitude boosted him in the polls.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The Great Carter Mystery APRIL 12, 1980

How does he do it? only by emergency treatment in New York. wistful hopes of those who thought he might Here is an administration in ruins. Here Carter let in the shah, and the Iranians, as learn on the job. 1980 has been his banner is a president who has nearly quadrupled predicted, stormed the American embassy. year for blunders; and what is finally destroy- the inflation rate at home; abroad he has If Carter had made intelligent decisions, the ing his immunity is less his confusion in grand kicked away confidence in the sobriety, shah probably would still be undisturbed strategy, than his incorrigible incompetence ­consistency, and reliability of American in Cuernavaca; the Canadian doctor who in detail. It is little wonder that no one in foreign policy. Six months ago he was no- operated in New York City would have flown the world can take a Carter foreign policy where in the polls. Today, Jimmy Carter instead to Mexico City to remove the royal move seriously, expecting, as they must, seems headed for renomination. Have we gallstones; and our diplomats would be go- that it will be reversed, recalled, disputed, turned into a nation of masochists? Has our ing about their business as usual in Tehran. or forgotten in another week. Even newspa- noble land fallen under some malign curse? Nonetheless, the indignation over the ap- pers and magazines that built Carter up over There are simpler explanations. In an palling Iranian action fed the genial but dopey Iran and Afghanistan can no longer contain ­irony not unknown to historians, Carter’s American instinct to rally behind presidents their concern: “error and crisis: a foreign very incompetence has been his salvation. in moments of adversity. Carter’s popular- policy against the ropes” (The Washington He owes his resurrection to two international ity soared. I could not but recall sitting in Post, March 16); “a u.s. foreign policy in deep crises—Iran and Afghanistan—that he himself President Kennedy’s office a few days after disarray” (The New York Times, March 21). helped bring about. the Bay of Pigs. A secretary brought in an Tactical zigzags against a background The first crisis was surely one of the advance on a new Gallup poll. As he read of strategic purpose are one thing; tactical most needless in American history. Brit- it, an expression of intense disgust came zigzags backed up by strategic incoherence ish diplomats in Tehran had warned their over Kennedy’s face. He threw it across his another. Carter has shown himself devoid of government that the admission of the shah desk to me and said, “Take a look at that. a consistent world view, incapable of con- to the United Kingdom would provoke re- The worse I do, the more popular I become.” ceiving or sticking by what Helmut Schmidt taliation. The British government heeded Then, Moscow obliged with a new crisis: calls “a coherent sustainable western policy,” those warnings. Carter received the same the invasion of Afghanistan. This brutal ac- and in consequence is buffeted hither and warnings from American diplomats—and tion too may be persuasively, if less directly, yon by emotional gusts of irritation, self­- rejected them. A specialist in tropical med- traced to Carter’s prior bungling. righteousness, and vainglory. Can the United icine employed by the Rockefeller interests Carter’s ineptitude in foreign policy has States—can the world—afford four more

claimed that the shah’s life could be saved grown each year, thereby confounding the years of this unsteady hand at the tiller? a CORBIS/GETTY

4 | NEW REPUBLIC GCTV GLOBAL CONNECTIONS TELEVISION Exploring international issues that have local impact

VISIT: www.GlobalConnectionsTelevision.com

HOSTED BY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SPECIALIST, BILL MILLER

Global Connections Television is an independently-produced talkshow focusing on international issues and how they impact people across the world. Programming provides in-depth analysis within a wide scope of current issues, topics and events including climate change, education, economic development and much more.

Watch interviews with prominant experts including UN leaders, CEOs, international relations specialists, academics, and journalists and many others that are working to create a better world.

GCTV is a pro-bono public service program that is available to any group. up front

RED SCARE

How Russia Weaponizes Fake News The Kremlin’s influence campaign goes far beyond Trump’s victory.

BY LAURA RESTON

DONALD TRUMP AND his top advisers have For years, the Russian propaganda machine—a spent the past four months under near constant loose network of hackers and state media outlets, scrutiny: Two congressional committees, the Twitter bots and bloggers—has pumped out a steady FBI and CIA—not to mention the entire news stream of digital disinformation aimed at drum- media—have launched separate investigations ming up support at home and destabilizing enemies into the role Russia played in orchestrating his abroad. But since Trump’s election, experts report, victory. Washington rarely sees such intense the Kremlin has doubled down on its dissemination intrigue surrounding a sitting president in his of fake news. Sometimes the stories are completely first 100 days, a time traditionally devoted to policy made up. More often they are simply misleading or initiatives, not police interrogations. But focusing biased, tidbits of real reporting repackaged to serve on the election obscures the true extent of Russia’s Russian goals. influence: Today, months after Hillary Clinton’s One of the most recent battles in the propaganda email were hacked, the Kremlin continues to deploy war took place on January 4, less than a week after a host of digital tools to sow doubt and discord in the United States on an almost daily basis. ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAN BEJAR

6 | NEW REPUBLIC President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in the Internet Research Agency have employed hun- RUSSIA’S retaliation for the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. elec- dreds of bloggers to mass-produce disinformation in TROLL ARMY tion. The Donbass International News Agency, a small the form of misleading tweets, Facebook posts, and The power of the wire service in Eastern Ukraine, published a short comments on web sites ranging from The Huffington Internet Research article online headlined “massive nato deployment Post to Fox News. “Since at least 2008,” Peter Pomer- Agency: underway.” Some 2,000 American tanks were assem- antsev, a Russian media expert, observes, “Kremlin Launched bling on the Russian border, the agency reported. The military and intelligence thinkers have been talking 2014 United States was preparing to invade. about information not in the familiar terms of ‘per- The story was a blatant fabrication. A brigade in suasion,’ ‘public diplomacy,’ or even ‘propaganda,’ but Annual Budget the 4th Infantry Division had, in fact, been deployed in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, $10 million from Germany to Poland. But the brigade, which is demoralize, subvert, and paralyze.” Employees comprised of only 87 tanks, was on a routine tour. Some of the most unsuspecting targets are Amer- More than 600 Even so, this nugget of fake news quickly went viral. It ican conservatives. During the Cold War, the KGB was shared 28,000 times on Facebook, and spawned worked almost exclusively with leftist groups around Daily quota per blogger 50 tweets posts on Kremlin-friendly blogs and web sites like the world—labor unions, socialist newspapers, and 18 Facebook posts therussophile.org, friendsofsyria.wordpress.com, other organizations sympathetic to the communist 50 online comments and the Centre for Research on Globalization—a site cause. With the fall of the Soviet Union, however, that peddles conspiracy theories ranging from Hillary Russia morphed into an equal opportunity meddler Clinton’s secret pedophilia cabal to the Defense De- that seeks to inflame everyone from Bernie bros partment’s poisonous aerosol program. Within days, to Trump deplorables. “The point of an influence the story made the leap from the shadowy recesses campaign is to get people involved who wouldn’t of the internet to the mainstream. One of the Krem- otherwise be involved,” J.M. Berger, a fellow at the lin’s official wire services cited the story, noting that International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, ­recently the United States seemed to be preparing for “another told ABC News. “A lot of people in the alt-right would cowboy-style geopolitical adventure.” not necessarily characterize themselves as being “This is a classic disinformation piece, trying to pro-Russian, but they’re receiving influence from demonize the United States and nato deployments this campaign.” with distorted figures,” says Ben Nimmo, a fellow at According to Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign the Digital Forensic Research Lab run by the Atlantic Policy Research Institute who tracks the Kremlin’s Council. “It shows that there’s really a globalized digital propaganda, Russia began targeting American market for fake stories. They don’t have to be credible audiences more aggressively in late 2014. Two news or local—they just have to have the right tone.” outlets on the Kremlin payroll, RT and Sputnik, Such tactics were pioneered during the Cold War, as the Soviet Union worked covertly to influence political dialogue in the West. From KGB rezidenturas scattered around the world, a small division called Russia has been ramping up its efforts to Service A planted false stories in newspapers, spread destabilize U.S. politics—and some of its most rumors, and worked to stir up racial tensions. In unsuspecting targets are American conservatives. 1964, a KGB front group helped Joachim Joesten, a former Newsweek reporter, publish a sprawling conspiracy theory about John F. Kennedy’s assas- sination, which later became the basis for Oliver churned out stories about chaos among Black Lives Stone’s JFK. In 1983, Russian operatives planted a Matter protesters and tensions during the B­ undy story in a small Indian newspaper claiming that the Ranch standoff in Oregon. They also worked to un- U.S. government had manufactured the aids virus dermine Clinton, fearing she would take a firm stance at a military facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland—and on Russian aggression in Ukraine. Russia’s network Soviet wire services then trumpeted the story all of online “hecklers” and conspiratorial web sites then over the world. As U.S. officials later explained in spread these Kremlin-financed stories through the a report to Congress, “This allows the Soviets to internet, inflaming American conservatives. “This is claim that they are just repeating stories that have the pattern,” Nimmo says. “Vilifying and amplifying. appeared in the foreign press.” You find unflattering information, and you get all the The internet has enabled the Kremlin to weaponize other parts of the machine to amplify the message.” such tactics, making propaganda easier to manu- As Watts explained in testimony before the Senate facture and quicker to disseminate than any guided Intelligence Committee, the goal of Putin’s ­fak­ e-news missile or act of espionage. Russian operations like operation is clear: to tarnish democratically elected

JUNE 2017 | 7 up front

leaders, deepen preexisting divisions, incite social­ Trump supporter who was the mastermind behind unrest, and conjure up a world on the brink of an- the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. Russian hackers nihilation. In short, Russia wants to create chaos. It have also targeted Norway, the Netherlands, and knows that when the lines between fact and fiction, Germany, where officials are worried that Russian real news and fake, begin to blur, the Kremlin benefits. agents are gearing up to smear Chancellor Angela Since Trump’s election, Moscow’s propaganda Merkel by releasing reams of stolen emails as she efforts have become increasingly obvious. In April, runs for reelection—the same strategy Russia used Russian social media accounts sought to dismiss the to debilitate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. well-documented chemical attacks by Syrian Pres- “Over the past three years, Russia has imple­ ident Bashar al-Assad as nothing but an elaborate mented and run the most effective and efficient hoax perpetrated by the United States to pursue its influence campaign in world history,” Watts told imperialist ambitions in the Middle East. Hours after the Senate panel. Armed with his digital propaganda Trump launched his retaliatory strike, #SyriaHoax machine, Putin can influence world politics without was the top topic trending on Twitter—helped along having to fire a shot. “The Kremlin,” Watts says, by Mike Cernovich, a popular alt-right blogger and “can crumble democracies from the inside out.” a

YOU’RE FIRED

Trump the Job Killer He campaigned as an economic savior. So why is the president handing out pink slips?

BY BRYCE COVERT

DEPT. OF IF THERE’S ANY key to Donald Trump’s electoral administration by calling for people to be fired. But DOWNSIZING appeal, other than his sheer entertainment value, Trump’s attack on the federal workforce makes com- it’s his pledge to be the biggest jobs president of all plete sense, given the overarching political goal laid Jobs being cut time. “I am going to bring your jobs back to America,” out by his strategist Steve Bannon: the “deconstruc- Up to 200,000 he promised a Michigan crowd last October. “A tion of the administrative state.” What’s more, the Trump administration will stop the jobs from leaving workers who will be most affected by Trump’s staff- Programs being eliminated America,” he assured an audience in Florida the ing cuts are women and minorities—­ c­ onstituencies 62 day before the election. “I will be the greatest jobs that make up the base of the Democratic Party. producer that God ever created,” he boasted just Trump, in essence, doesn’t see public-sector jobs Deepest cut before he was sworn in. All told, Trump has vowed to as real jobs. If they’re not held by white, blue-collar 3,200 jobs at EPA create an additional 25 million jobs within a decade. men in hard hats, working on factory floors or con- Since taking office, however, Trump has done struction sites, they don’t appear to count. nothing concrete to put more Americans to work, Trump’s hiring freeze was intended to reduce the beyond the deal he struck with air-conditioning size of the federal workforce through attrition, and giant Carrier to keep some 800 jobs from being that’s just what it has done. Since January, according outsourced to Mexico. Instead, he has moved in to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal gov- the exact opposite direction. On his third day ernment has shed more than 8,400 jobs, in many in office, Trump instituted a hiring freeze across the cases due directly to the freeze. And while Trump federal government. And in April, declaring that lifted the freeze in April, federal agencies are now there are “too many federal employees,” Trump’s preparing to start firing employees and developing budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told agency heads a long-term plan to slash the size of the federal gov- to “begin taking immediate actions” to reduce the ernment. “We think we could run the government government’s workforce dramatically. So far, God’s more efficiently than the previous administration, greatest jobs producer is starting out his term by and with fewer people,” Mulvaney says. “This is a destroying them. big part of draining the swamp.” It’s more than a little dissonant to hear a president The upcoming cuts will disproportionately hurt who paid such lip service to job creation ­kick off his women and minorities, who have benefited from the

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

UNTIL RECENTLY, Twitter was Donald Trump’s international affairs. But he still swings from playground sandbox, the place he went to air peevish to self-congratulatory in the time it petty grievances, praise his favorite CEOs, and takes to launch a ballistic missile at Damascus. blame everything on Obama. But in April, reeling In fact, the emerging Trump doctrine bears all from some bruising defeats at home, Trump the hallmarks of its namesake’s schizophre­ used Twitter to redirect America’s attention nic Twitter feed: plenty of bluster and sudden overseas. In his third month in office, 24 percent reversals, but no coherent narrative. Foreign of his tweets involved foreign affairs—up from leaders have taken notice: Governments from only 10 percent the previous month. As he London to Beijing are scrambling to mine threatened North Korea over its missile test Trump’s tweets for clues about how this volatile and complimented himself for his own missile new president views America’s place in the strike on a Syrian air base, Trump tried hard to world. After all, if he deploys armies as easily be more presidential: He used fewer exclamation as he fires off tweets, the rest of the world may points and capitalized words in his tweets about be in serious trouble.

Foreign Countries Trump Has Tweeted About Since Taking Office

EUROPE Russia (25) Denmark (1) ASIA Crimea (2) France (1) Insisted “I don’t know Putin.” NORTH AMERICA Germany (2) Ireland (1) Accused Hillary Clinton of tak- China (10) Canada (4) Sweden (2) United Kindom (1) ing money from Russia. North Korea (8) Mexico (3) Japan (7) Vietnam (3)

Said that North Korea is “looking for trouble.” If China doesn’t “help,” then “we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.” Claimed that Mexico has “taken MIDDLE advantage” of EAST the U.S. “Little AFRICA Iran (6) help on the very Libya (1) Egypt (4) weak border must change, NOW!” Somalia (1) Syria (4) Sudan (1) Iraq (2) Israel (2) Jordan (1) Yemen (1)

SOUTH AMERICA AUSTRALIA (3) Venezuela (1) Retweeted a Fox story about Praised a Fox News contributor Chided Venezuela, urging “grateful Syrians” reacting who claims he was “persecuted” it to release political to strike by vowing, “I’ll by the Obama administration; prisoner Leopoldo Lopez. name my son Donald.” called his book a “must read.”

JUNE 2017 | 9 up front

government jobs at a disproportionate rate. Trump’s supporters, who are overwhelm- ingly white and male, are far more likely to hold jobs in the private sector. Manufactur- ing, one of his favorite industries, is nearly three-quarters male and 10 percent black. Construction is more than 90 percent male and less than 6 percent black. For Trump, it appears, these are the only jobs worth saving. But even workers who wear hats that read make america great again stand to lose out under Trump’s plan to slash the federal gov- ernment. As studies have repeatedly shown, fewer public servants means less consumer spending and lower tax revenues, which hurts the entire economy. Employing fewer teach- ers has been found to reduce children’s future wages by billions of dollars. And gutting the federal workforce dampens job growth else- where: Between 2009 and 2012, one report shows, the failure to hire more government workers cost Americans some 500,000 jobs in the private sector. government’s commitment to fair practices in hiring It was never feasible that Trump would follow and promotions. Roughly one in five black workers in through on his pledge to resurrect American jobs all America are currently employed by the government; on his own. One-off deals like the one he struck with they’re 30 percent more likely than whites to hold such Carrier do nothing to alter the underlying forces of jobs. Women make up 60 percent of public-sector the U.S. economy. But Trump can single-­handedly jobs, and black women make up more than 20 percent decimate employment among federal workers. of the public-sector workforce, compared to less than Women and people of color who have found steady, 13 percent for white men. They also end up feeling the ­middle-class jobs working for the American people sharpest effects of layoffs: During the Great Reces- are about to be handed a pink slip by the biggest jobs sion, black workers, and especially black women, lost president of all time. a

FINAL FRONTIER

The New Star Wars Why our next global conflict may be fought in outer space.

BY SHANNON STIRONE

THERE’S PLENTY TO criticize about Donald Trump’s on a pledge to avoid foreign entanglements. plans to massively expand the U.S. military. His Yet there’s one area of national security where requested $54 billion increase in defense spending, America might benefit from more spending: outer combined with his bellicose rhetoric, seems tailor- space. In recent years, China has demonstrated made to lead America into more violent conflicts. its ability to shoot down satellites that the United And aside from Trump’s obsession with owning States relies on for everything from processing credit “the best” of everything, it’s not clear that the card transactions and balancing the power grid to United States needs to boost military spending by collecting intelligence and directing troops on the 10 percent—particularly when Trump campaigned battlefield. The opening salvo came in 2007, when

10 | NEW REPUBLIC China launched a missile that destroyed one of its Advocacy Alliance, a lobbying group that promotes own satellites—a clear demonstration of military and anti-missile systems. technological prowess. Six years later, the Chinese The Trump administration also plans to revive the tested an anti-satellite weapon system that reached National Space Council, which used to help private a more distant orbit 20,000 miles above the Earth— industry develop military projects. The govern- right where America parks its GPS and national ment is currently working with defense contractors security satellites. The test served as a wake-up Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, for example, to call for the Defense Department, which suddenly develop a new fleet of GPS and military satellites realized that its national security apparatus was no that are less vulnerable to hacking—a project that longer secure. Such attacks could have a devastating impact. If another country were to take out U.S. satellites, our military would essentially be flying blind. “We are To counter foreign threats, the Trump entirely dependent on satellites,” says retired General administration is scrambling to weaponize Jim Armor, former head of the Pentagon’s National space on a scale not seen since Reagan. Security Space Office, the agency responsible for coordinating the military’s space operations. If an enemy were to attack America’s satellites, “it would put us back into the Industrial Age.” will take another decade to complete. Bringing back China is not the only country that poses a threat. the council “indicates that they want to improve Russia has launched satellites that intentionally coordination across the military” with nasa and bumped into their own rocket stages—demonstrating the private sector, says Todd Harrison, director that seemingly benign pieces of scientific equip- of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for ment can be turned into weapons, sent to crash Strategic and International Studies. “That was the into enemy targets. North Korea, meanwhile, has job of the National Space Council when it used to developed technology to jam GPS signals. Sophis- exist decades ago.” ticated ground-based lasers can now blind satellite Since China demonstrated its ability to tar- cameras and fry electronics, while malicious viruses get America’s national security satellites, the can wreak havoc on satellite systems. Pentagon has also worked to better coordinate To counter such threats, the U.S. military is space programs across the Defense Department. scrambling to weaponize space on a scale not seen since Ronald Rea- gan’s ill-conceived missile defense system. Last fall, Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Robert Walker resurrected Reagan’s pledge of “peace through strength,” prom- ising that their boss would “sig- nificantly expand” the military’s space budget. “We must reduce our current vulnerabilities,” they wrote in Space News, “and assure that our military commands have the space tools they need for their missions.” When Trump sat down for his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs on January 27, “we talked about space more than any other topic,” says General David Gold- fein, the head of the Air Force. That same month, Trump an- nounced he would place particular emphasis on missile defense, and he has held extensive consulta- tions with the­ ­Missile Defense

JUNE 2017 | 11 up front

­President Obama shifted $5 billion toward space While it’s not clear yet exactly how much of Trump’s defense, and agencies have begun participating military budget will go toward space defense systems, in war-game scenarios involving space combat at it’s a direction that enjoys strong bipartisan support. the ­recently activated Joint Interagency Combined Back in 1983, when Reagan first proposed a missile Space ­Operations Center. The Air Force has also defense system, the idea of using lasers, microwaves, created a new Space Mission Force, reorganizing and particle beams to shoot down incoming missiles crews in an effort to keep military satellites safe sounded like something straight out of science fiction. from potential adversaries. But the “Star Wars” initiative, however wasteful and Some Republicans, however, feel that such efforts misguided it proved to be, fit squarely within the gov- don’t go far enough. At the annual Space Sympo- ernment’s militarized view of outer space. America was sium in April, Representative Mike Rogers proposed forced into the stars, after all, by the fear of Sputnik, creating a new branch of the military called “Space and the space program has always retained a military Corps,” which would be devoted solely to space de- edge. The more we rely on satellites to operate the most fense. “My vision for the future is a separate space basic functions of our economy and infrastructure, the force within the Department of Defense,” Rogers more space will become a potential battleground. “The said, noting that the Air Force was originally created problems are not hypothetical and in the future,” says by splitting it off from the Army. “Simply put, space Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project. must be a priority.” “They are happening now.” a

PAYCHECK ROLLBACK

Not So Fast, Blue Cities How Republicans are blocking local efforts to raise the minimum wage.

BY CLIO CHANG

PREEMPTING SINCE DONALD TRUMP took office, many liberals Washington and Arizona have gone to court to block DEMOCRACY have looked to cities and states as central fronts in the November ballot initiatives, and lawmakers in Other issues the Democratic resistance. With a president hostile Maine have introduced a number of bills that seek where ALEC is to progressive policies of all kinds, the thinking goes, to roll back or weaken the wage increase. Second, in working to thwart state legislatures and city councils offer more hope violation of their much-lauded belief in decentralized local laws: for action on a wide range of issues, from regulating government, Republicans are moving aggressively • Paid sick leave carbon emissions to defending immigrant rights. to block more cities and states from boosting the • Fracking limits Nowhere has the “think local” strategy seemed minimum wage. In Arizona, GOP lawmakers have • Rent control more promising that in the fight to increase the approved bills that make it harder to pass citizen • Labor rights minimum wage. Since 2004, 34 localities from Mary- ballot initiatives, a democratic process enshrined • Pesticide rules land to New Mexico have raised the minimum wage in the state constitution for more than a century. above their state levels. In November, four states—­ And legislatures in 24 states have passed so-called Arizona, Maine, Colorado, and Washington—passed “preemption bills” to block cities and counties from ballot measures to raise the minimum wage above passing their own minimum-wage hikes. Many of its current federal level of $7.25 an hour. In a deeply the bills are the product of model legislation writ- divided country, it’s a policy that commands strong ten by the Koch-backed American Legislative Ex- bipartisan support: 74 percent of Americans say they change Council, which has made the fight against want to raise the minimum wage, and the Maine ­minimum-wage increases a top priority. measure passed with 420,000 votes—more than In March, Iowa became the latest state to pass a any ballot initiative in state history. preemption bill to block minimum-wage increases. But Republicans and their business allies are The legislation not only bars any more local wage fighting back with a two-pronged strategy. First, hikes, it also voids measures that already passed in they’re working to derail the minimum-wage in- four counties. The move was made possible by GOP creases that have already passed. Business groups in victories in November, which gave Republicans in

12 | NEW REPUBLIC Iowa control of both the state legislature and the Republicans defend the measures by arguing that governor’s mansion for the first time in almost two it’s too complicated to allow cities and counties to decades. “We’d heard rumblings last year, but noth- set their own wage levels. “This bill provides unifor- ing was even drafted,” says Bridget Fagan-Reidburn mity through the state on Iowa’s minimum wage,” of the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement ­Governor Terry Branstad declared after signing Action Fund, a grassroots organizing group. “But Iowa’s bill into law. Pat Garofalo, the Republican once Republicans won the state senate, this was one sponsor of Minnesota’s preemption bill, makes a sim- of their priorities.” ilar argument. “There are 854 cities in Minnesota,” The Iowa bill is particularly egregious because Garofalo says. “It is unrealistic and unproductive to it actually lowered the minimum wage for 65,000 have 854 labor laws across the state.” workers in the state who were already enjoying But businesses across the country are already hourly increases of up to $3 in their counties. accustomed to dealing with a complex range of lo- Those extra dollars make a huge difference to cal laws on everything from zoning and licensing ­working-class Americans. Mazahir Salih, a com- to taxes and construction. Preemption bills aren’t munity organizer with the Center for Worker Jus- tice in Iowa, recalls meeting one woman who was able to stop working on weekends after her county raised the minimum wage, enabling her to spend GOP lawmakers in 24 states have passed more time with her children. Now, thanks to the “preemption bills” to override the wishes of voters GOP’s preemption bill, things look a lot worse for and promote business interests. workers in the state. “A lot of people are really worried,” says Salih. “They tell me stories of how they were suffering at $7.25 and how they could not even make ends meet.” designed to reduce complexity—they’re intended­ Fighting for worker-friendly policies at the state to override the wishes of voters and promote the and local level got a lot harder under Obama; over the GOP’s business-first ideology, at the expense of course of his two terms, Democrats lost a staggering ­working-class Americans. “Conservatives tout the 960 legislative seats at the state level. All told, 32 virtues of local control all the time,” says Laura state legislatures are now fully under Republican Huizar, a staff attorney at the National Employment control, and GOP lawmakers are currently push- Law Project. “But when it comes to local actions ing preemption bills against the minimum wage in that raise wages for workers, that talk goes out the Minnesota, Missouri, and Illinois. window. It’s a completely hypocritical agenda.” a

JUNE 2017 | 13 body politic

­Francisco, and Los Angeles are too sus- picious of middle America. I thought this long before Trump came along, although he brought a new urgency to the task of making peace with those who live beyond our deep-blue enclaves. On Election Night, many liberal opinion-­makers who live on the coasts looked at the electoral map with horror: How could those people? Who are those people? I did, too. Some days I still do. And I understood the need for the post­-election “was it racism or was it economics?” de- bate. It’s essential that we explore the reasons for our defeat. But at a certain point—a point we reached weeks ago—the debate stopped being a debate and became little more than an ideological standoff, a kind of purity test. Each side is supported by a set of as- sumptions that brings it a measure of emotional reassurance. Those inclined to blame racism take a dark view of middle America; they’re often accused, by those on the other side of the partisan divide, of being too sheltered, too politically correct, too obsessed with identity politics. Those who argue it was mostly economics are im- The Great Democratic Divide plicitly saying that, the horrors of a Trump Can elite liberals learn to embrace middle America? presidency notwithstanding, the electoral situation isn’t really all that bad, that those BY MICHAEL TOMASKY people aren’t really all that bad; they’re typically accused by the other side of being soft on racism, or even racist themselves. O HERE WE ARE, FINALLY PAST THE But there’s one thing a lot of elite liberals There’s merit to both arguments. But hundred-day mark. What we’ve haven’t gotten around to deal­ing with yet: I’m mostly on the side that finds the entire Slearned about the president is They haven’t made their peace with mid- ­ debate pulverizingly counter­productive. self-evident—that the weight of the of- dle America. Which is a pretty big deal, Some of Trump’s vote was down to rac- fice has not changed him, and will not given that middle America is ex­tremely ism, some to economic anxiety. Do we change him. What we’ve learned about large, and encompasses most of the coun- really need to assign percentages to each? the Republican Party and conservatism is try, and generally determines the out- That’s the seduction of Twitter, and the ­unsurprising—that they’ve sold their souls comes of most presidential elections. folly of those who need to win Twitter to a demagogue, and will continue to do Before I go further, let me announce arguments. All we need to know is this: so. (Until his behavior threatens to cost that I myself am an elite liberal. I tick all Some percentage of Trump’s voters are them their majority.) But what exactly have the major boxes. I’m not religious. I have people whose support no self-respecting we learned about liberalism, in defeat? few Republican friends. I have deeply con- Democrat would want. But some per- One salutary thing: Liberals are fight- flicted feelings about patriotism. I would centage of them aren’t. We can even put ing in a way we haven’t seen in our life- never consider living anywhere other than a ballpark number on it: We’ve learned that time. From the Senate, where Democrats a major city, or at the very least a liberal 9 percent of Barack Obama’s voters flipped held the line on the Neil Gorsuch fili- university town where the odds are slim to Trump, including 22 percent of Obama’s buster, to the House, where they stood that I would end up next door to an actual non–college educated white voters. firm on Obamacare repeal, to the streets, racist. So if I’m hectoring anyone here, That’s what matters most. There are where people have made clear their deter- I’m hectoring a group that includes me. plenty of non-deplorables out there. mination to stand up and be counted, the I think a lot of liberals in places like opposition is behaving like an opposition. New York, Washington, Seattle, San ILLUSTRATION BY JASU HU

14 | NEW REPUBLIC HIS IS THE POINT AT WHICH I read a line not long ago—I wish I could are equally to blame for partisan rancor columns like this usually start remember where—that went something and congressional gridlock. Trattling off policies that will ap- like this: You could put a bunch of con- Third, their daily lives are pretty dif- peal to voters in middle America. But servatives in one room and a group of ferent from the lives of elite liberals. Few we already know those policies, from liberals in another and present each with of them buy fair trade coffee or organic affordable health care to tougher Wall a list of 100 items. If both groups came almond milk. Some of them served in the Street regulation. They’re all fine. to agreement on only three things, the armed forces. Some of them own guns, The issue of elite liberal suspicion of conservatives would emerge boasting that and like to shoot them and teach their middle America has nothing to do with they’d reached three triumphant points kids how to shoot them. Some of them policy. It has to do with the mindsets of of agreement. The liberals would come hold jobs in the service of global capital our two broad ideological factions. out grousing that they were hopelessly and feel proud of their work. It has been observed that today’s con- ­ deadlocked on 97 points. Fourth, they’re patriotic in the way servative movement, to use the old Lenin- that most Americans are patriotic. They ist vernacular, is a “vanguardist” move- HIS GLASS-HALF-EMPTY MINDSET don’t feel self-conscious saluting the flag. ment. The word referred to the revolution- must change, and it must change They don’t like it when people bad-mouth ary party, the one that was going to make Tmost dramatically with respect our country. They believe that America the revolution happen. (Its weak-kneed to how elite liberals view the rest of the is mostly good, and that the rest of the counterparts were the “spontaneists,” who country. There are plenty of liberals out world should look more like America. were going to sit around and wait for it there in middle America, and plenty of We need to recognize that in vast to happen, being alert to the moment.) liberalish moderates, and plenty of peo- stretches of this country, hewing to these Some conservatives welcomed the com- ple who lean conservative but who aren’t positions doesn’t make someone a con­ parison. In Blinded by the Right, David consumed by rage and who think Barack servative. We also need to recognize that Brock reports that Grover Norquist had Obama is a pretty cool guy and who might in many places, being a nonconservative a portrait of Lenin in his home. even have voted for him. These people are can be hard. At best, your friends poke fun A movement intent on hastening the potential allies. But before the alliance can at you. At worst, some nail-spitting ma- revolution develops certain habits of be struck, elite liberals need to recognize niac tries to run you off the road because mind. It has enemies, to be sure. But it a fundamental truth: All of these people in of your Hillary bumper sticker. Living knows that it’s an embattled minority, so middle America, even the actual liberals, in Dayton or Des Moines is just not the it welcomes new recruits, as long as they have very different sensibilities than elite same as living in Brooklyn or Belltown. agree on some basic principles. That’s why liberals who live on the coasts. I would go so far as to say that this every liberal who abandons liberalism to First of all, middle Americans go to chasm between elite liberals and middle join the right—from the Irving Kristol church. Not temple. Church. God and Je- America is liberalism’s biggest problem. neocons of days gone by, to David Mamet sus Christ play important roles in their It’s how we isolate ourselves. It’s one of and Donald Trump—is joyously embraced. So you’ve finally seen the light! Welcome! American liberalism is, of necessity, In trying to protect its territory against anti-vanguardist. It is counterrevolu- insurgencies on both the right and left, liberalism tionary, since liberals know well that the has become defensive and distrustful. only revolution that stands a chance of taking hold in this country is a right-wing one. At the same time, elite liberals are lives. Elite liberals are fine with expres- the reasons a lot of middle Americans regularly being smacked around by a left sions of faith among African Americans didn’t vote for Hillary. And bridging the that is stronger and more confident than and Latinos, but we often seem to assume gulf is on us, not them. It requires that it has been in 40 years. that white people who are religious are we accept certain realities. A person can As an anti-vanguardist movement, conservative. It’s not remotely the case. still be “on the team” even if they think liberalism thinks very differently than its Second, politics simply doesn’t con- the minimum wage should be raised only conservative opponents do. In trying to sume middle Americans the way it does to $10, or don’t consider the placement of protect its territory against insurgencies elites on the coasts. Many of these peo- the crèche on the courthouse square for on both the right and left, it becomes ple have lots of friends—and sometimes two weeks in December a constitutional defensive and distrustful. Whereas the even spouses—who are Republicans. They crisis, or haven’t yet figured out how they vanguardist movement that won is on don’t sit around and watch msnbc and feel about transgender bathrooms. If we the prowl for new comrades, the anti­- talk politics. They talk kids, and local gos- don’t find a way to welcome them, they’ll vanguardist movement that lost is looking sip, and pop culture, and sports. They go to the other side. That isn’t how ma- for people to blame. It’s not plotting a don’t have a position on every issue, and jorities are built. Unfortunately, it’s how revolution. It’s rehashing year-old fights. they think Democrats and Republicans elections are lost. a

JUNE 2017 | 15 battle lines

obscured an inconvenient truth: Demo- crats have been promoting a conservative “school reform” agenda for the past three decades. Some did it because they fell for the myths of “accountability” and “choice” as magic bullets for better schools. Some did it because “choice” has centrist ap- peal. Others sold out public schools for campaign contributions from the charter industry and its Wall Street patrons. What- ever the motivations, the upshot is clear: The Democratic Party has lost its way on public education. In a very real sense, Democrats paved the way for DeVos and her plans to privatize the school system. Thirty years ago, there was a sharp dif- ference between Republicans and Demo- crats on education. Republicans wanted choice, testing, and accountability. Dem- ocrats wanted equitable funding for needy districts, and highly trained teachers. But in 1989, with Democrats reeling from three straight presidential losses, the lines began to blur. That year, when President George H.W. Bush convened an education summit of the nation’s governors, it was a little-known Arkansas Democrat named Bill Clinton who drafted a bipartisan set The Miseducation of Liberals of national goals for the year 2000 (“first Don’t like Betsy DeVos? Blame the Democrats. in the world” in mathematics, for start- ers). The ambitious benchmarks would BY DIANE RAVITCH be realized by creating, for the first time, national achievement standards and tests. Clinton ran on the issue, defeated Bush, F ALL THE CORRUPT, UNQUALI- ­ignorance, money, and power.” Senator Al and passed Goals 2000, which provided fied, and extremist characters Franken grilled DeVos at her confirmation grants to states that implemented their ODonald Trump has tapped to lead hearing, drawing out her jaw-dropping own achievement metrics. his administration, none has generated ignorance of federal programs. Senator The Democrats had dipped a toe in the tsunami of liberal outrage whipped Michael Bennet called her nomination “school reform.” Before long, they were up by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. an “insult to schoolchildren and their completely immersed. After George W. And with all due respect to Jeff Sessions, families, to teachers and principals and Bush made the “Texas miracle” of im- there’s good reason for the backlash: The communities fighting to improve their proved schools a launching pad for the billionaire Amway heiress from Michi- public schools all across the country.” presidency, many Democrats swallowed gan, who long ago made “school choice” And when DeVos was confirmed by a vote his bogus claim that testing students every her passion project, is the first education of 51 to 50, over unanimous Democratic year had produced amazing results. In secretary in history to be hostile to the opposition, Senator Cory Booker went on 2001, Ted Kennedy, the Senate’s liberal very idea of public education. Facebook, “frustrated and saddened,” to lion, teamed with Bush to pass No Child Prodded by grassroots activists and sound a sorrowful note: “Somewhere in Left Behind. For the first time, the govern- what’s left of teachers’ unions, Demo- America, right now, there is a child who ment was mandating not only “account- crats went all out to defeat DeVos. George is wondering if this country stands up ability” (code for punishing teachers and Miller, the former congressman from for them.” schools who fall short), but also “choice” California, slammed her plan to create a Listening to their cries of outrage, one (code for handing low-performing public $20 billion “school choice” program that might imagine that Democrats were Am­ schools over to charter operators). would underwrite private and religious erica’s undisputed champions of public schools, calling it “a perfect storm of education. But the resistance to DeVos ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHEN SAVAGE

16 | NEW REPUBLIC When Barack Obama took office in its favorites have been those sharp DeVos low-income students better opportuni- 2009, educators hoped he would return critics George Miller, Michael Bennet, and ties. And kids using vouchers actually the party to its public school roots. By then, Cory Booker. Conservative funders like the lose ground in private schools. Support even Bill Clinton was calling No Child Left Walton Foundation also give generously for charters is paving the way for a dual Behind a “train wreck.” Instead, Obama to charter schools and liberal think tanks school system—one that is allowed to and Education Secretary Arne Duncan such as the Center for American Progress. choose the students it wants, and another doubled down on testing, accountability, The money had its intended effect. that is required to accept all who enroll. and choice. Their Race to the Top program When Andrew Cuomo decided to run for This is what Democrats should be was, in essence, No Child Left Behind II: It governor of New York, he learned that the yelling about. And if there’s ever a mo­- invited states to compete for $5 billion in way to raise cash was to go through the ment for them to reclaim their mantle as funds by holding teachers accountable for hedge funders at Democrats for Educa- the party of public education, it’s now. The test scores, adopting national standards, tion Reform. They backed him lavishly, misguided push for “reform” is currently opening more charter schools, and closing and Cuomo repaid them by becoming a being led not by Obama and Duncan, but low-scoring public schools. hero of the charter movement. Connecti- by Trump and DeVos, giving Democrats The Obama years saw an epidemic of cut Governor Dan Malloy, often cele- an opening to shift gears on education­ — new charters, testing, school closings, brated for his unvarnished liberalism, is though they’ll lose some of that hedge- and teacher firings. In Chicago, Mayor another champion of the charter industry; fund money. But if 2016 taught Democrats Rahm Emanuel closed 50 public schools in one day. Democratic charter ­advocates— whose ranks include the outraged Booker Their cries of outrage obscure an inconvenient and Bennet—have increasingly imported truth: Democrats have been promoting a “school choice” into the party’s rheto- conservative education agenda for three decades. ric. Booker likes to equate “choice” with “freedom”—even though the entire idea of “choice” was created by white South- some of its biggest funders live in his anything, it’s how unwise it was to al- erners who were scrambling to defend state. California Governor Jerry Brown low the demolition of organized labor—­ segregated schools after Brown v. Board vetoed a bill to ban for-profit charters in including teachers’ unions, once a great of Education. the state, and has resisted efforts to make source of money and grassroots energy. It’s fitting that Trump and DeVos rely charters more accountable. As mayor of The party needs strong teachers’ unions on the same language to tout their vision of Oakland, he opened two charter schools. and it needs their enthusiasm. reform. They’re essentially taking Obama’s There are plenty of reasons that Dem- The agenda isn’t complicated. Fight formula one step further: expanding ocrats should steer clear of the charter privatization of all kinds. Insist on an “choice” to include vouchers, so parents industry. Charter corporations have been evidence-b­ ased debate about charter can use public funding to pay for private repeatedly charged with fraud, nepotism, schools and vouchers. Abandon the ob- and religious schools. Democrats are up self-dealing, and conflicts of interest. session with testing. Fight for equitable in arms about the privatization scheme, Many charters make money on complex funding, with public money flowing to as they should be: It’s a disaster for public real-estate deals. Worst of all are the “cy- the neediest schools. Acknowledge the schools. But if they’re serious about being bercharters”: mega-corporations that importance of well-educated, professional the party that treats public education as offer virtual schools, with high attrition, teachers in every classroom. Follow the a cornerstone of democracy, they need low test scores, and abysmal graduation example of Virginia Governor Terry McAu- to do more than grandstand about the rates. The biggest cybercharter chain is liffe, who vetoed a bill to expand charters consequences they helped bring about. K12 Inc., started by former junk-bond in March. Or Montana Governor Steve They need to follow the money—their own king Michael Milken and listed on the Bullock, who insists that charters employ campaign money, that is. New York Stock Exchange. certified teachers, allow them to unionize, But it’s more than a matter of sleeping and fall under the control of local school S DEMOCRATS LEARNED YEARS with the enemy. School choice doesn’t districts. Democrats should take their ago, support for mandatory test- work, and “evidence-based” Democrats cue from Bullock when he declares, “I Aing and charter schools opens fat ought to acknowledge it. Charter schools continue to firmly believe that our public wallets on Wall Street. Money guys love are a failed experiment. Study after study education system is the great equalizer.” deregulation, testing and Big Data, and has shown that they do not get better There is already an education agenda union-busting. In 2005, Obama served as test scores than public schools unless that is good for children, good for educa- the featured speaker at the inaugural gath- they screen out English-language learners tors, good for the nation, and good for the ering of Democrats for Education Reform, and students with profound disabilities. Democratic Party. It’s called good public which bundles contributions to Demo- It’s well-established that school choice schools for everyone. All Democrats have crats who back charter schools: Among increases segregation, rather than giving to do is to rediscover it. a

JUNE 2017 | 17

OM PERRIELLO DRAWS A BERNIE CROWD. AT peace negotiator in Darfur and Afghanistan, he overcame a a town hall at the University of Mary Washington, 34-point deficit to unseat six-term Republican congressman bearded college kids in flannel buzz at the back of Virgil Goode in a conservative southern district. In Congress, the room, while older voters in khakis and checked he was a staunch supporter of Obama’s agenda, voting for cap- shirts occupy the folding chairs up front. They’re and-trade, economic stimulus, and the Affordable Care Act. Tall eager to hear Perriello, who’s running for governor of Vir- To sell Obamacare to his conservative constituents, he held ginia, rail against the corrosive influence of money in politics, more town halls in 2009 than any other congressman—and a political system rigged against workers—and, of course, the the following year he was rewarded as the only individual new president of the United States. House candidate for whom the president campaigned. If he “Donald Trump ran the most viciously racist campaign of wins, it will be a major victory for the left wing of the party, my lifetime,” Perriello says to applause, pacing back and forth which argues that the future lies not in cautious, Clintonesque in front of his audience like a hopped-up high school teacher. triangulation, but in forceful, Sanders-like appeals for economic “This is our chance to keep Virginia as a firewall against that equality. “People are looking for a progressive fighter who can kind of hate and division.” stand up and call Trump out for what he is,” Perriello says. Before Trump’s election, no one expected Perriello—who The party itself has been slow to adopt that view. After left Congress in 2011 after serving a single term—to return to Trump’s victory, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi blithely politics. Heading into November, the Democratic Party had a insisted that Democrats did not need to rethink their policies: seemingly foolproof plan in place: Tim Kaine would be in the “I don’t think people want a new direction,” she told Face White House as Hillary Clinton’s vice president, and Ralph the Nation. In February, Democrats selected Obama’s for- Northam, Virginia’s lieutenant governor, would take over the mer labor secretary, Tom Perez, to serve as chairman of the governor’s mansion from Terry McAuliffe. Much to Perriello’s DNC—beating out Representative Keith Ellison, a Sanders dismay, Trump’s victory didn’t seem to alter the party’s think- supporter who promised to put the party more in touch with ing. “The day after the election, the entire political landscape its populist roots. But in recent weeks, emboldened by their changed,” he says. “But everyone in the establishment was initial victories over Trump’s travel ban and the Affordable scared and wanted to run the same playbook and act like Care Act, Democrats have gradually begun to embrace their nothing had changed.” So two weeks before Trump was sworn role as the party of resistance. Even Perez acknowledges that in, Perriello shocked party insiders by announcing that he the status quo isn’t working. “We have to rebuild our party,” would run against Northam for the Democratic nomination. he told Meet the Press. “We also have to redefine our mission.” “The coronation was called off,” says Mark Rozell, a polit- Virginia, however, didn’t get the memo. While the party ical scientist at George Mason University. “Many of the party hasn’t been open about its opposition to Perriello, he ­faces an establishment types were very surprised—and very annoyed.” uphill fight. Since announcing his candidacy, he has criss- As the nation’s first election for a statewide office since crossed the state, appearing at anti-Trump protests like the Trump was elected, the June primary between Perriello and one outside Dulles Airport in the hours after Trump’s immi- Northam will reverberate far beyond Virginia. In essence, it’s a gration ban went into effect. He’s also been meeting with Hillary versus Bernie rematch—the Democratic Party’s old guard groups of Trump supporters every week, promoting his plans squaring off against its younger, grassroots base. Northam is to revitalize rural communities and fight the opioid epidem- the reliable and cautious party stalwart: A former Army doctor, ic. He talks about the threat of automation to Virginia’s man- he speaks in a slow, deliberate drawl, is wooden on the stump, ufacturing jobs and the need for free higher education, and and carefully calibrates his message around proven talking pitches a $15 minimum wage wherever he goes. When health points. An economic centrist, he sees little reason to overhaul care comes up, as it often does, he emphasizes his long-held a system that has brought jobs to the state. He even voted for support for a public option. “He’s the Bernie Sanders of the George W. Bush—twice. (“Politically, there was no question, Virginia Democratic Party,” says Rozell, the political scientist. I was under-informed,” he says now.) But he has millions of Such stances have endeared Perriello to the Sanders wing dollars in his campaign war chest—crucial to a run in Virginia’s of the party. Some of his most ardent supporters are young multiple media markets—and the endorsement of virtually every volunteers from Indivisible, which has emerged as perhaps the party heavyweight in the state, including Senator Kaine and leading grassroots organization against Trump. Leah Green- Governor McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic berg, one of the group’s founders, worked for Perriello in Con- National Committee and the living embodiment of a Clinton gress and now serves as his policy director; Perriello officiated insider. “The entire party apparatus is behind him,” says Quentin at her wedding. “It’s a situation where the energy within the Kidd, a Virginia pollster and political scientist. Democratic electorate is on the progressive side,” says Kidd, Perriello, by contrast, has made a name for himself as an the Virginia pollster. At a town hall in Manassas, one supporter energetic champion of social and economic justice who can hails Perriello as “not the chosen son of the establishment.” connect with voters in both blue cities and rural red districts. Another voices her disgust with politics as usual. “I’m sick of In 2008, after nearly a decade as a human rights lawyer and the Democratic Party,” she tells him. “But we’re with you!” In

JUNE 2017 | 19 April, a town hall at the University of Virginia had to be moved fides, Perriello called the NRA a “nut-job extremist organi- mid-speech because so many college students showed up to zation.” The Northam campaign has seized on the issue: At hear Perriello that it violated the fire code. another town hall, I watch as a woman in the audience chal- Such grassroots support has enabled Perriello, like Sand- lenges Perriello about his views on guns. Afterwards, a veteran ers before him, to make up ground quickly. Despite entering Democrat who is not affiliated with either campaign tells me the race nearly two years—and millions of dollars—behind that she recognizes the woman as another Northam operative. Northam, Perriello was tied with his opponent by mid-­February, Northam’s allies and supporters “have been raising unfair and the candidates have remained in a dead heat ever since. and inaccurate characterizations of Tom’s record for some time In the first month of his campaign, Perriello raised more than now,” says Perriello’s communications director, Ian Sams. “It’s $1.1 million, and he doubled that amount by the end of March. unfortunate that the Northam campaign is allowing that to A Sanders-like 86 percent of his donations were $100 or less. stand, and in some cases promoting it themselves. We would It’s a sign “that Perriello is competitive—that this is a real race,” much prefer it be a positive campaign where both candidates says Jennifer Duffy of theCook Political Report. lay out their positive visions for the state and let people decide based on that. But some of his allies and supporters have taken T’S CLEAR THAT THE PARTY ESTABLISHMENT ISN’T a different tack, and we certainly wish that the lieutenant gov- thrilled about Perriello’s late entry into the race. “They ernor would ask them to knock it off.” Asked about the town were angry then, and they’re angry now,” says Univer- hall incidents, the Northam campaign declined to comment. sity of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato. “They’re While such candidate-tracking is standard practice in politi- puzzled and hurt, and they feel betrayed.” A former Vir- cal races, efforts by the Northam campaign to disrupt Perriello’s Iginia governor recently complained to Sabato about Perriello’s town hall meetings underscore the lengths to which the party decision to run. “That was one of the most selfish things I’ve establishment will go to tamp down enthusiasm for a grass- ever seen in politics,” the ex-governor groused, “and politics roots candidate. And Northam’s focus on social issues comes is a selfish profession!” straight out of Hillary Clinton’s playbook for taking on Bernie While both candidates have agreed to the standard pledge Sanders. In the final debate of the Democratic primary, Clinton not to attack each other during the primary, it was clear at attacked Sanders for supporting a bill that prevents victims of several town halls I attended that the Northam campaign gun violence from suing gun manufacturers. “We hear a lot has adopted a somewhat loose interpretation of the cease-fire. from Senator Sanders about the greed and recklessness of Wall At the Mary Washington event in February, a young woman Street, and I agree,” she said. “Well, what about the greed and in the audience asks Perriello about his stance on abortion. recklessness of the gun manufacturers?” As a congressman, Perriello had voted to block federal mon- The similarities between Perriello and Sanders are far from ey from going to abortion providers—a position for which he precise. In terms of style and temperament, Perriello is more has since apologized. “You used to say that you were not pro- jovial than Sanders, fond of corny jokes and the minutiae of pol- choice,” the woman says, “and now you are pro-choice.” How icy. While he speaks passionately about corporations screwing could Perriello explain the flip-flop? “I’ve always been pro-choice,” Perriello replies, practical- ly sighing with exasperation. “I marched for Roe 25 years ago. I had a 100 percent naral rating my second year in Congress and supported funding for Planned Parenthood. After Congress, instead of taking a big lobbying job, I ran a progressive non- profit organization”—the political action fund at the Center for American Progress—“that was central in fighting back against the war on women.” I notice that the woman who asked the question is record- ing Perriello’s responses and carrying a spiral notebook. As- suming she’s a reporter, I approach her after the event and middle- and working-class Americans, he lacks Bernie’s blunt suggest that we compare notes. It turns out, in fact, that she’s outrage—he’s more Adlai Stevenson than William Jennings an operative for the Northam campaign, dispatched to ask Bryan. And while his campaign manager, Julia Barnes, served as Perriello embarrassing questions about abortion. By early the national field director for Sanders, Ian Sams was a member April, Northam had made the issue a centerpiece of his cam- of Clinton’s rapid response team. Perriello has also received paign, touting his endorsement by the pro-choice group naral endorsements from John Podesta and Neera Tanden—close and even holding rallies inside abortion clinics. allies of Hillary who worked with Perriello at the Center for Gun control has also been a weak spot for Perriello. As a American Progress—as well as Jennifer Palmieri, Teddy Goff, congressman, he opposed a federal ban on assault weapons and other senior members of Clinton’s campaign staff. If the and boasted about having an “A” rating from the National Rifle race between Perriello and Northam exposes the rift between

Association. In January, seeking to bolster his pr­ ogressive bona the party’s establishment and its grassroots, it also suggests PREVIOUS SPREAD, PHOTOILLUSTRATION: (RALPH NORTHAM) STEVE HELBER/AP; (TOM PERRIELLO) DANIEL LIN/DAILY NEWS-RECORD/AP; (BOXERS) GETTY

20 | NEW REPUBLIC that the establishment can get behind an insurgent—provided year. “Virginia seceded from the South in 2016,” laughs Kidd, the insurgent is affable rather than angry. the Virginia pollster. Clinton won the state by five points, “I’m not sure that the gap between the wings of the party is largely by running up the score in the wealthy, more liberal actually as big as people think that it is,” Perriello says. He has areas of suburban Washington. taken to calling himself a “pragmatic populist”—someone who But particularly in the aftermath of the 2016 debacle, a Dem- shares Bernie’s outrage over economic inequality, but who is ocratic candidate for governor must perform well throughout intent on finding workable solutions. He has endeavored to pitch the state—including in the coal-country counties of southwest himself as a successor not so much to Sanders as to Obama: Virginia that were dominated by Trump. Perriello’s campaign a young political outsider working to shake up the establish- is an experiment: Can a left-wing candidate win back blue-­ ment, free of any personal or political baggage from the often collar and rural voters without sacrificing liberal votes? Is full-­ throated progressivism the best strategy for combating Trumpism? The idea that voters will rally behind a populist Democrat has yet to be tested, especially in a state like Virginia, and many veteran political observers are convinced that Northam’s down-home style will trump Perriello’s liberal substance. After all, much of Perriello’s fund-raising has come from outside Virginia, whereas 90 percent of Northam’s donations are from within the state. “Northam has a Virginia accent,” Sa- bato says. “He is rural by nature—grew up on the eastern shore. He went to the Virginia Military Institute. There’s no question in my mind that if anyone can draw in some conser- vatives, it’s Northam, not Perriello. They’re very suspicious of Yale-talking candidates.” If Perriello loses, it will be seen as proof that the party establishment is right when it insists that left-wing policies don’t win elections. But if he wins, it will be yet another While not a direct Bernie Sanders stand-in, Perriello has picked up his populist mantle. sign that the Sanders wing—and its more inclusive economic message—represents the party’s best hope for the future. In Novem- acrimonious battle between Hillary and Bernie. Like Obama, ber, the winner of the primary will likely square off against he’s dynamic on the stump—though he lacks Obama’s trade- Ed Gillespie, a former adviser to George W. Bush who served mark charm. At 42, Perriello is both single and single-minded, as chair of the Republican National Committee. a man who gives the impression of being married to his job. The high stakes aren’t lost on the people at the center of Still, despite resisting comparisons to Sanders, Perriello Perriello’s campaign. At his election headquarters, located in has enlisted Bernie’s digital outreach firm to shape his own an office park in Alexandria, the walls smell of fresh paint, fund-raising strategy. And in April he gladly accepted the and the only decorations are a few haphazardly hung sheets support of Our Revolution, the nonprofit group that grew of easel paper marked with illegible scribblings. Until recently, out of the Sanders campaign—as well as the endorsement of the campaign had been working out of Perriello’s Alexandria the senator himself. “We need to elect progressives at every home. There’s no receptionist, so I just walk in and wander level of government if we are going to beat back the dangerous around until I find Julia Barnes and Ian Sams, the political agenda of the Trump administration and its Republican allies,” odd couple who have helped engineer Perriello’s swift rise. Sanders said. “Now more than ever we need people in elected After their stints with Bernie and Hillary, both contemplated office who will fight for middle-income and working families.” getting out of politics. But inspired by what Perriello could Whatever happens in June, the outcome of the primary is mean for the party’s future, they signed up for one more round. likely to inform the party’s direction going forward. Virginia The campaign, Barnes says, will determine whether “the is shaping up to be the kind of state Ohio used to be: a mi- establishment in Virginia—and, by proxy, the establishment crocosm of the nation itself, albeit one with a significantly in the country—is going to be brave enough to set aside their higher number of people who work for the federal govern- fear and judgment.” The Democratic Party may be scared of ment. Virginia is a purple state that’s tracking blue—the only change—of “being shaken to our core,” she says. “But we’ve

COURTESY OF TOM PERRIELLO CAMPAIGN former Confederate state to throw its lot behind Clinton last got to shake a little to get there.” a

JUNE 2017 | 21 22 | NEW REPUBLIC The promise—and THE RESISTANCE, as it’s come to be known, was born of anger and abandonment. perils—of the fight The anger began the day after the election. Donald Trump, against Trump. rejected by a decisive majority of voters, had been declared the next president of the United States. Republicans controlled all three branches of the federal government, as well as 32 state legislatures and 33 governor’s mansions—their strongest lock BY JEET HEER on power in nearly a century. Liberalism had been dealt its most stunning and consequential defeat in American history. But around sunset that evening, the protests began. In New York and Chicago, demonstrators stormed Trump’s buildings. In Los Angeles, they beat orange piñatas to a pulp and spray-­painted anti-Trump obscenities on the Los Angeles Times building. In Oakland and Portland, fires and fights broke out; dozens were arrested on riot charges. In at least 50 cities and towns, protesters blocked traffic, burned Trump in effigy, and scuffled with his defenders. And night after night that first week, they just kept coming out. “We! Reject! The ­president­-­elect!” they chanted. In a display of partisan fury, they took their hashtag slogan—#Notmypresident—from the Tea Party’s racist campaign to discredit Barack Obama. The abandonment, like the anger, was swift. At the very mo- ment that the burgeoning opposition needed stalwart leadership, the Democratic Party opted for obedience to the political norms that Trump and the Republicans had so openly flouted. Hillary Clinton delivered her concession speech and disappeared into the woods. President Obama tried to gently tutor his succes- sor and persuade the left to chill. Bernie Sanders said he’d be “delighted” to work with Trump on trade. Even left-leaning senators like Sherrod Brown of Ohio sounded less like commit- ted members of the opposition than a conquered people suing for peace. “Vichy Democrats” became a common jibe. Liberals determined to oppose Trump, it was clear, would not only have to fight the president at every turn—they would also have to rebuild the Democratic Party from the base up. But it is these twin elements—the unanticipated upswell- ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM ing at the grassroots and the disarray at the top—that offer

JUNE 2017 | 23 Democrats their most promising opportunity since the New politics: They can help a party win, but they also fuel its rage Left forced the party to embrace a broader and more inclusive and hamper its ability to think clearly. agenda in the Sixties. For the first time in decades, liberalism The first 100 days of opposition to Trump could not have has been infused with a sense of energy and purpose that goes gone better if liberals had scripted them. Democrats desper- far beyond the vague “hope and change” that Obama promised ately need a movement like the Resistance to shake things up in 2008. Ever since January, when Michael Moore called for and mobilize neglected constituencies and experiment with “100 days of resistance” to counter Trump’s first 100 days in a variety of new approaches. But to harness the wrath and office, the Resistance has been winning on virtually every front. discontent that inevitably accompany such movements, the It has emboldened wobbly Democrats in Congress and helped left must take stock of what has been accomplished so far, and beat back the initial push to repeal Obamacare. It dispatched where the pitfalls lie. Unless we find a mechanism to resolve a cabinet nominee and Trump’s national security adviser, and the very real differences within the party and turn our initial forced his attorney general to recuse himself from the most success into coordinated action, the Resistance will prove as significant and far-reaching investigation since Watergate. fleeting as Occupy Wall Street or the Rainbow Coalition. It is It has mounted successful legal challenges to Trump’s travel up to us, in short, to determine whether the Resistance will ban and punishment of “sanctuary cities.” And through it succeed where so many other uprisings have failed. all, it has given birth to a host of dynamic new organizations H H H determined to mobilize grassroots activists, fashion a more progressive and effective agenda, and rebuild a liberal majority FROM THE START, the Resistance knew how to do one thing at the state and local level, precinct by precinct. After three supremely well: disrupt Trump. In January, when the Women’s short months, the Resistance is shaping up to be one of the March in Washington drew twice the crowd of his inauguration signal political forces in American history. the day before—and a history-making four to five million pro- The movement, however, is not without peril. To begin with, testers worldwide—the entire spectacle sent the new president there’s the name. “The Resistance” is admittedly melodramatic, and his administration into a tailspin during its crucial first if not downright grandiose. It calls to mind partisan guerrilla week. While Trump’s lavish promises of action on Day One soldiers fending off the Nazis, not a progressive campaign for went unaddressed, he and press secretary Sean Spicer babbled fairness and equality. Forged largely in reaction to a single about fake news and crowd photos, warring with both the man, it is by its nature reactionary, organized around what it’s media and plain, observable truth. against without being entirely sure what it’s for. And like the Protests quickly became the symbol of the Resistance. When Tea Party before it, it’s prone to conspiracy thinking and purity Trump signed an executive order banning travel from seven tests, which will only serve to widen the ideological divides predominantly Muslim countries, thousands of demonstrators that have hampered Democrats for decades. Social movements stormed airports across the country. When he opened up the

like the Resistance are the performance-enhancing drugs of Dakota Access Pipeline, thousands more rallied at Trump Tower ALL PHOTOS FROM GETTY. LEFT TO RIGHT: THEO WARGO; CHIP SOMODEVILLA; JASON REDMOND/AFP; MICHAEL LOCCISANO

100 Days of Winning Women’s marches draw four By almost any measure, the opposition to to five million worldwide. D.C. Trump enjoyed more victories in his first Hillary Clinton’s protest is larger 100 days than the president did. In the email director than Trump’s process, as these milestones show, the launches Run swearing-in. Resistance disrupted the GOP agenda for Something; Tough questions by Democrats 8,000 millenn­ and laid a new foundation for rebuilding reveal ignorance of Education ials pledge to the Democratic Party. nominee Betsy DeVos. run for office.

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Liberal outcry On MSNBC, Grassroots group forces House Michael Swing Left launches Republicans Moore calls to help Democrats to drop for “100 in 2018 midterms; effort to gut days of 300,000 share site independent resistance.” on Facebook. Inauguration Day protests ethics break out against Trump watchdog. in cities around the world.

24 | NEW REPUBLIC voters in swing districts. Veteran groups are also pitching in: The Working Families Party organized the Tax Day rallies, Social movements are like while Daily Kos has already raised record-breaking totals for performance-enhancing drugs: Democratic challengers running in 2017’s off-year elections. But the Resistance’s biggest victory—and the most persua- They can help a party win, but sive evidence for its potential as a political movement—came hamper its ability to think clearly. in the fight against Trump’s effort to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Like the Tea Party before it, the Resistance mobi- lized to confront members of Congress at town hall meetings during the February recess. The first big target was Represen- in solidarity with the Standing Rock tribe in South Dakota. tative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, a rising-star Republican who Everything, it seemed, sparked a protest—and when Trump had vowed to investigate President Hillary Clinton from Day didn’t provide a theme, the Resistance made up its own. Presi- One. Chaffetz returned home to find 1,000 furious constit- dents Day became Not My President’s Day. On Tax Day, demon- uents waiting to express their rage at him for giving Trump strators in more than 200 cities demanded that Trump release a pass, chanting: “Do your job!” The experience reduced the his tax returns. Five months after his election, Trump still media-savvy Chaffetz to a bout of Trump-like whining. “I couldn’t stop obsessing. “I did what was an almost impossible thought it was intended to bully and intimidate,” he com- thing for a Republican—easily won the Electoral College!” he plained. “The last four elections in Utah in a row, I’ve won tweeted on April 16. “Now Tax Returns are brought up again?” the widest margin of anybody playing at this level.” By April, But from the start, the new movement was determined Chaffetz—considered a shoo-in for reelection—announced he to do more than simply take to the streets. In the first three would not be running for a sixth term. months of Trump’s administration, the Resistance has made Other Republicans who returned home got the same treat- the early days of the Tea Party look like a tea party. A host of ment, increasingly focused on Obamacare. The town halls be- new organizations is working to reverse the tide of right-wing came a sign that all the anti-Trump energy could be effectively victories at the state and local level. Some, like Swing Left, are targeted on congressional politics. The demonstrators weren’t directing volunteers to House seats that could “swing” from red the “professional protesters” that Trump and Fox News were to blue in 2018. Others, like Run for Something—founded by constantly fuming about, but they hadn’t just shown up, either. former Clinton aide Amanda Litman—are recruiting millennials They had been organized by groups like Indivisible, the most ef- to run in down-ballot races. There’s a group training environ- fective and innovative of the new anti-Trump efforts. The group’s mentalists to run for local office, and another running progres- co-founders, two former Democratic congressional staffers, began sive women in Illinois. #Knockeverydoor, a Sanders-inspired by creating an online manual to teach liberals how to make Tea

MARK WILSON; LEAH PUTTKAMMER; JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP; SCOTT OLSON; ADAM BERRY; BRYAN BEDDER; PETE MAROVICH effort, is using “deep canvassing” to reconnect with skeptical Party tactics their own. After the Indivisible Guide became the

Citizens for Responsibility Thousands Protests against Trump’s and Ethics in Washington march on Muslim travel ban break sues Trump for accepting Trump Tower out at airports across payments to protest Senate the country. Taxi drivers 1,000 State from foreign opening launches in New York City halt Department governments. of Dakota investigation into service in solidarity. officials sign Pipeline. Russia’s efforts to sway “dissent cable” election to Trump, one against day after House. Muslim ban.

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Cenk Uygur and Mayors from Acting Attorney former Bernie “sanctuary” General Sally Sanders staffers cities denounce Yates fired after launch Justice Trump order announcing that Democrats Defying requiring them Justice Department to challenge Trump to cooperate will not defend “corporate- “gag order,” National Park with immigration the ban. backed” Service employees tweet enforcement. Democrats in facts about climate change. primaries. viral sensation of the Resistance, the group expanded its reach, There was one area, though, where the new movement, like the linking up with hundreds of local activists to organize the town party establishment, failed to confront Trump. When the president hall confrontations. To find out where to go and how to protest, bombed Syria in response to its chemical attacks, Democratic all angry constituents had to do was punch their zip codes into leaders expressed near-unanimous support, while grassroots Indivisible’s web site. By April, some 5,800 local groups—at activists largely confined themselves to the usual carping online. least two in every single congressional district—had signed up The Resistance organized bigger marches to protest Trump’s tax to work with Indivisible to organize and resist Trump. returns than his decision to unleash the Mother of All Bombs. The pressure campaign forced even some of the most ar- Rather than drawing on the lessons of the anti-war movement, dent Tea Partiers in Congress to reverse themselves on re- from Vietnam to Iraq, grassroots activists more or less ignored pealing Obamacare. Two weeks after being accosted by irate Trump’s foreign aggression—and for the first time since his elec- constituents in Arkansas—“What kind of insurance do you tion, his poll numbers spiked. It’s a worrisome sign for the future: have?” demanded a woman whose husband is suffering from If Trump can outmaneuver the Resistance just by dropping a Alzheimer’s—Senator­ Tom Cotton called on the president to few bombs, how can the movement hope to prevail in the end? withdraw his health care plan. When Representative Rod- H H H ney Frelinghuysen refused to attend town hall meetings in New Jersey, his constituents created a cardboard cutout of the THE RESISTANCE DID not spring out of nowhere; it’s the prod­- 70-year-old lawmaker and proceeded without him. Wounded uct of long-running and deep-seated tensions within the Dem- by the bad publicity, and worried about holding on to his seat ocratic Party. Two important precursors were the Rainbow in a swing district that Trump barely carried, Frelinghuysen Coalition that Jesse Jackson assembled in the 1980s, and the also broke with the president on “repeal and replace.” netroots activism that arose during the presidency of George When Trumpcare went down in flames in late March, W. Bush. Both represented separate wings of the Democratic Chuck Schumer laid the defeat at the president’s doorstep. left that were less broad-based than the Resistance, which in- “Ultimately,” he said, “the Trumpcare bill failed because of two cludes as many Clinton supporters as Sanders fans. But both traits that have plagued the Trump presidency since he took contributed directly to the rise of the current movement—and office: incompetence and broken promises.” But Republicans both serve as warning signs of what could go wrong. hadn’t just blundered their way to defeat. The Resistance had During the Eighties, a fissure opened up among Democrats effectively spread the message and mobilized the opposition, between the grassroots activists that Jackson energized and successfully focusing the left’s anger and frustration on the the party elite, which was torn between reviving the old model GOP’s single most important priority. It was a warning not of labor-union liberalism (in the form of Walter Mondale) only to Republicans, but to congressional Democrats as well: and recreating itself as a technocratic party of expertise (in This time, the Resistance made clear, there would be no bar- the form of Michael Dukakis). The Rainbow Coalition offered

gaining with the enemy. Democrats an alternative: build a broad and diverse “coalition FREDERICK M. BROWN; EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ; BRYAN R. SMITH /AFP; WILL HEATH /NBC PHOTO BANK; CHIPSOMODEVILLA SOMODEVILLA; ALEX WONG; CHIP

Thousands rally at historic Under pressure from grassroots Rep. Jason Stonewall Inn to protest activists, Senate Democrats Chaffetz draft order permitting unanimously oppose Betsy DeVos. confronted discrimination against gays by 1,000 and lesbians Lawmakers vote protesters Seattle on religious to make New at town hall, judge lifts grounds. York an official demanding the travel “sanctuary investigations of Trump and ban. state.” chanting, “Do your job!”

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Nordstrom The New York Melissa McCarthy debuts devastating caricature “Nevertheless, Federal drops Ivanka Times gains of press secretary Sean Spicer on SNL. She Persisted” appeals panel Trump’s 276,000 becomes unanimously clothing line. subscribers battle cry for rejects Trump’s since Trump’s the resistance. Muslim travel win—more than ban. in all of 2015.

26 | NEW REPUBLIC of the future” organized around a message of economic pop- Over the past 15 years, party elites failed to prevent three major ulism. But after three straight presidential losses, the party disasters: the Iraq War in 2003, the global financial meltdown establishment opted instead to fend off Jackson’s insurgency in 2008, and the rise of Trump in 2016. Every elite institution and reconstitute itself around Clintonian centrism. Unable that was supposed to stop Trump failed: the GOP, the media, to take control of the party apparatus, the Rainbow Coalition the Democrats. So ordinary citizens concluded that they could faded away after Jackson gave up his presidential ambitions. no longer count on the people running the party. If they wanted The netroots movement—which grew out of anti-war blogs to stop Trump, they would have to do it themselves. that flourished during the Bush presidency—also flamed out Although the Resistance is a direct descendant of both the after enjoying some initial success. Netroots activists pushed Rainbow Coalition and the Sanders campaign, its early efforts, the Democrats to the left, helped the party retake Congress in ironically, draw as much on Hillary Clinton’s demographic as 2006, and prefigured Obama’s use of social media. But com- they do on Sanders millennials. Middle-aged women helped pared to the Resistance, the netroots movement was narrowly based in online activism. Once Obama won, it left behind legacies like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo, but stopped being a driving force in American politics. This is the best way to understand That was partly Obama’s fault: He won by harnessing all the Resistance: as a repudiation the energy at the grassroots, then quickly shuttered the social movement that brought him into office, allowing the DNC to not just of Trump, but of the take over where his campaign left off. He governed as a trans- Democratic Party. actional politician who attempted to mediate between elite institutions and popular discontent. As a result, activist energy during the Obama years tended to avoid the Democratic Party, flowing instead through groups like Occupy Wall Street and organize the biggest marches to date, and they are the con- Black Lives Matter. Those groups, in turn, provided Democrats stituency most likely to call their congressmen. This, in fact, with a sharp reminder of the power of street protests, while the is one of the most encouraging things about the Resistance: activists who coalesced behind Bernie Sanders formulated both the way it has brought together disparate strains of the left an agenda and a fund-raising model that provided voters with that have long been at odds with each other. Under the banner a viable alternative to the party establishment. The Resistance, of the new movement, Clinton supporters are taking up the in a sense, represents the resurgence of the social movement tactics of the Sanders campaign, as well as those of the Tea that Obama promised, but failed, to create. Party, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter. This is the best way to understand the Resistance: as a Democrats in Congress have been forced to take notice and

LISA LAKE; CHRIS KLEPONIS/AFP; MARK RALSTON/AFP; GETTY CREATIVE; ALEX WONG; JIM WATSON/AFP repudiation not just of Trump, but of the Democratic Party. respond accordingly. Prodded by the grassroots, Democrats

National Security Top lawyers Jeff Sessions Adviser Michael Flynn from the Obama forced to recuse resigns after The administration himself from Washington Washington launch United investigations into Post reports Post adds to Protect Russian meddling he concealed front-page tag: Democracy in the election after contacts “Democracy to contest revelations that he with Russian Day Without Immigrants Dies in Trump ethics concealed contacts ambassador. strike nationwide. Darkness.” violations. with Russians.

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More congressional John McCain says Trump’s In organized Republicans return home to denunciations of the media are rebuttal of Trump’s angry voters, organized by new “how dictators get started.” first address groups like Indivisible and old to Congress, stalwarts like MoveOn. lawmakers in 30 Carl’s Jr. CEO Andrew Puzder states roll out withdraws as Trump’s Labor legislation to nominee over his employment of an benefit working undocumented housekeeper and families. domestic abuse allegations.

JUNE 2017 | 27 in the Senate have fashioned themselves as the party of Nev- Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who plans to challenge ertheless She Persisted. Not a single Senate Democrat voted Ted Cruz for his Senate seat in 2018, has already pledged to to confirm Education Secretary Betsy DeVos or Tom Price at rely on small donors. And most of the money that Democrats Health and Human Services, and just one (West Virginia’s Joe used to contest April’s congressional election in Kansas was Manchin) backed Attorney General Jeff Sessions. When Repub- raised not by the party itself, but by activists at Daily Kos. If licans tried to prevent members of the public from testifying the Resistance can prove itself as effective at attracting small against Trump’s nominees, Democrats held hearings of their donors and winning elections as it is at organizing town halls own. And in April, Democrats filibustered the nomination of and mobilizing protests, the party elites will have no choice Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, forcing Republicans to but to listen. resort to the “nuclear option.” H H H

UNFORTUNATELY, BEYOND ITS show of opposition in Con- gress, the Democratic establishment has indicated that it has Democrats must resist the urge no intention of embracing the politics of discontent. Rather to tamp down the Resistance than reassessing its agenda and strategy after Trump’s elec- tion, the party engaged in a three-month feud over who would and reduce it to a tally sheet of chair the Democratic National Committee, choosing Obama electoral wins and losses. insider Tom Perez over Resistance favorite Keith Ellison. In addition, centrist mega-donors have formed an alliance behind Clinton consigliere David Brock, founder of Media Matters, signaling that the consultant wing of the party won’t surrender All of which underscores the Resistance’s biggest ­challenge— control without its own resistance. and its greatest promise. Can it bring the party’s centrist Even when the two sides have tried to make a show of unity, elites more in line with the grassroots activists they have long the strains have been all too evident. In April, when Sanders shunned? Indivisible, in particular, is creating a smart, decen- joined Perez for a barnstorming “Come Together and Fight Back tralized organization that is focused on mobilizing groups in Tour,” the senator made headlines not by attacking Trump, but every congressional district—effectively building a party ma- by at first declining to endorse Jon Ossoff, a young Democrat chine from the ground up, in rural areas too often neglected who was on the verge of winning Newt Gingrich’s old seat in by the Democratic establishment. And the rise of small-donor Georgia. It would have been a monumental breakthrough in fund-raising, which propelled Bernie Sanders’s campaign, the Deep South, and the surest sign yet that Trump’s unpop- offers an end run around all the corporate money and political ularity could demolish Republicans at the polls in 2018, even

consultants who have long controlled the party apparatus. in conservative, white districts. Yet even though Sanders’s KATOPODIS/AFP TASOS MCNAMEE; WIN SULLIVAN; JUSTIN THAYER; ERIC NGAN/AFP; MANDEL MCNAMEE; WIN NIMANI/AFP; ARMEND WONG; ALEX

Chuck California Schumer upholds calls on strict auto Senators Richard Ex-Intelligence Democrats emissions Burr and Mark Director James to boycott standards, Warner pledge to take Clapper shoots Neil Gorsuch setting up bipartisan Senate down Trump’s claim that House Democrats use confirmation. face-off investigation into Obama wiretapped him. procedural fights to thwart with EPA. Russia “wherever the progress on Obamacare repeal. intelligence leads.”

MAR. 5 MAR. 8 MAR. 15 MAR. 20 MAR. 21 MAR. 24 MAR. 29

Women in FBI Director James Comey Trump and 50 countries confirms that Trump team Paul Ryan stage is under investigation for forced to one-day Judges in ties to Russia. pull vote on strike in Hawaii and Obamacare honor of Maryland repeal. International block Women’s Trump’s Day. second Muslim ban. AL DRAGO/CQ ROLL CALL; FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP; TIME LIFE PICTURES; DREW ANGERER (X2); ERIC THAYER; ULLSTEIN BILD; JIM WATSON/AFP MAR. 30 to local office. elect environmentalists Lead Locally launches to law. bathroom anti-transgender state’s controversial lawmakers repeal CarolinaNorth force in American politicslike the Tea Party—or justanother the opposition to Trump will turn out to bea revolutionary ocratic Party will bea key elementindetermining whether real andsubstantive issues. The reconstruction of the Dem only be healed by an honest, and perhaps bruising, fight over differences; there are significant divides in the party thatcan a buffoon, and resistance to theestablishment.” means two things: resistance to Trump, who isa monster and within the Democratic Party soon. To progressives, resistance to work,” Uygur says. “There isgoing to bea major, major clash nothing buta demandfor the left to capitulate.“It isnotgoing party ofits lingering centrism. In their eyes, calls for unity are former Sanders supporters, Brand New Congress, to purge the Uygur’s group is teaming up with another startupfounded by every “establishment” Democrat in the 2018House primaries. Democrats, a Sanders campaign spin-off thataims tochallenge says Cenk Uygur, hostof our heads to the establishmentandgo back to the statusquo,” with the party elite.“Unity isa slogan meant to get us to bow into a cautionary tale for the Resistance. electoral sign for Democrats since Trump’s election had turned top Republican vote-getter. What hadlooked like the brightest short of the 50percent heneeded to avoid a runoff with the none previously existed.” Ossoff wound upfalling two points imposed by Sanders threatened “tocreate divisions where explained, “and someDemocrats are not.” by the newcomer. “Some Democrats are progressive,” Sanders Ossoff’s upstartcampaign, Sanders himself wasn’t impressed own supporters hadraised muchof the $8million that fueled Some in the Resistance reject any notionofjoiningforces It’s a healthy sign that Democrats aren’t papering over their As option.” invoke the“nuclear Republicans to Gorsuch, forcing filibuster of Neil Democrats attempt The

Washington Post APR. 3 immigration authorities. cooperation withfederal local police to limittheir sanctuary state, ordering California becomes a APR. 4 The YoungThe Turks andfounder ofJustice noted, the ideologicallitmus test APR. 6 investigation into Russia. from heading House forced to step down Rep. Devin Nunes offering free college tuition. New York passes landmarklaw APR. 10 - to Assad. Hitler favorably comparing to resign for Sean Spicer secretary calls for press Coffman joins GOP Rep. Mike mitments (No. 5:Raise the minimum wage to $15). This, in president to show his tax returns) with forward-looking com combine anti-Trump outrage (No. 1:Pass a law requiring the gents to take control ofCongress in1994. The contract would liberal spinon the ten-point platform that enabledGOP insur ­crats of all stripes. Call it the New Contract With America—a agenda that isgenuinely capable ofbringing together Demo “unity” and to work with the Resistance to hammer outan party, infact,is to drop all the vague andcontentless talk of erupted in the wake ofhisrise. The bestpath forward for the mistake wouldbe totryhas downactivism that and tamp the pick upseats in the midterms, thanks to Trump. But itsgreatest sheet of electoral wins and losses. The party will almost surely But we mustresist the urge to reduce the Resistance to a tally likely to sway even some liberals who are now feeling defiant. ranks to retake Congress—will only grow louder. Such talk is moment, butunable to forge lastingchange. Rainbow Coalition or Occupy Wall Street, effective in the the opposition’s first 100days. For now, thatis all we need. where they need to. That is the promise and the potentialof best ideas prevail. Let them notlook like the oldones,except Give itsome time. See what works and what doesn’t. Let the old grievances, try outunproven strategies, test new messages. world laboratory for democratic action. Allow it to hashout future, Democrats mustuse the Resistance asa kindofreal- finding their voice andfinding eachother. To formulate their box.fromstreetsballot the tothe Trump, to force the party to embrace a message that resonates can seizeon the bestof the Sanders agenda, and the worst of essence, will be the true measure of the Resistance: whether it APR. 12 For the first timeinhalf a century, liberals andleftistsare As 2018grows closer, the calls for “unity”—for closing release hisreturns. to demandTrump Marches in150 cities Protesters holdTax APR. 15 APR. 18 Gingrich’s oldHouse seat. Ossoff tops primaryfor Newt After raising $8 million,Jon based policy-making.” rallies to champion“evidence- includes 600teach-ins and First-ever March for Science APR. 22 Day marches. People’s Climate day withglobal Trump’s 100th groups mark Environmental APR. 29 a - ­ - -

“The Only Good Muslim Is a Dead Muslim”

Somali residents at the Garden Spot Apartments, home to scores of immigrant families in Garden City, Kansas. The complex was the target of a foiled terror attack by white supremacists in November.

30 | NEW REPUBLIC A meatpacking town in Kansas opened its doors to Somali refugees. “The Only Good Muslim Is a Dead Muslim” Then a group of Trump supporters plotted to kill them after Election Day.

BY TED GENOWAYS

MONTH 2017 | 31 N OCTOBER 11, 2016, LESS THAN Soon after, Liberal’s police chief was a steady stream of customers for local a month before Election Day, po- contacted by the FBI. It turned out that businesses. “Garden City saw ethnic di- Olice in Liberal, Kansas, sat in their the bureau had been tracking Allen and versity as a commodity they could exploit,” cruisers outside G&G Home Center, wait- Wright, as well as a third suspect named says Donald Stull, a professor emeritus of ing for Curtis Allen to emerge. The mobile Patrick Stein, for months. The three men anthropology at the University of Kansas home dealership where Allen worked was were the founders of a new anti-Muslim who led a study for the Ford Foundation nothing more than a prefab trailer hauled white supremacist group that called it- of the town’s shifting demographics. onto a patch of scrub grass along a remote self the Crusaders. As their inaugural act, The Crusaders didn’t see it that way. stretch of Highway 83 on the outskirts of the FBI said, the men were plotting to Curtis Allen, who had served in Iraq and town. His GMC Yukon was sitting in the carry out a Timothy McVeigh–style bomb- returned with ptsd, sank into a hatred parking lot, so the officers felt certain that ing in Garden City, Kansas, about an hour of Muslims. He worked at a tire shop in he was one of two men they could see north of Liberal. Their plan was to deto- his hometown of Ashland for a while be- moving around inside. When the men left nate two cargo vans loaded with massive fore drifting west to Liberal, where he in separate vehicles, police believed that amounts of ammonium nitrate in the fell in with a series of militia groups. He Allen was in the ­Yukon—but it was getting parking lots of the Garden Spot Apart- also met Wright, who had gone from dark and they had to be sure. After the ments, a sprawling complex straddling working at a meatpacking plant to sell- trucks turned onto the highway, the offi- both sides of West Mary Street. The drab, ing mobile homes to house the influx of cers signaled for both drivers to pull over. one-story units were inhabited primar- new immigrants. Last summer, when The police had reason to be cautious. ily by Somalis and other refugees, who Allen planted a make america great Less than an hour earlier, Allen’s girlfriend had come to Garden City to work at the again sign in front of his mobile home, had called 911 to report that he had beat- nearby Tyson meatpacking plant. his neighbors—most of them Hispanic en her during an argument. When Ser- When the Somalis first began arriving, immigrants—couldn’t help but notice. geant Jeffrey Wade from the Liberal Police back in 2006, they had been hailed as the Allen told them he was angry at Muslims. Department arrived to take a statement vanguard of a more diverse and tolerant He allegedly voiced outrage over the Mus- at the mobile home park where she and era. “America’s future arrived early in lim terror attack at the Pulse nightclub Allen lived, the woman showed him some- Garden City,” declared the Wichita Eagle. in Orlando and was angry that “Crooked Hillary” was “openly running on disarm- ing the American people.” He told anoth- er neighbor that the Somalis at the Na- The Crusaders worried that the attack might tional Beef packing plant in Liberal were “taking all our jobs” and needed to be help Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances. gotten rid of. “We cannot let Hillary back into the White What his neighbors didn’t know was that Allen was getting ready to put his House,” Stein told an undercover agent. words into action.

HE FBI HAD A DECISION TO MAKE. thing unexpected: a room packed with NPR described the town of 27,000 as a Patrick Stein, the unofficial leader handguns, gunsmithing tools, and boxes hopeful bellwether—“a meatpacking town Tof the Crusaders, was scheduled of ammunition stacked to the ceiling. Po- that embraces its new cultures.” The So- to meet with an undercover agent the lice later estimated that the trailer con- malis joined earlier waves of Cambodian, day after Allen was arrested. Believing tained nearly a metric ton of bullets. Vietnamese, Burmese, and Hispanic ref- that the agent was a crime boss who had Now, with their lights flashing, officers ugees drawn to the region’s beef-packing experience building massive bombs using warily approached the two vehicles on plants, and the town had gone out of its cell phones as remote-control triggers, the highway shoulder. A search of Allen’s way to welcome the newcomers, rezoning Stein had arranged the meeting to dis- Yukon turned up magazines for AR-15s, lots for new housing, providing city ser- cuss payment in the form of cash and AK-47s, and Glock handguns. Allen, who vices, and incorporating the workers into methamphetamines. But now that Allen had an earlier conviction for domestic the life of the community. On the town’s was in jail, there was a chance that Stein battery, was barred from possessing guns main street, Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal would be too spooked to show. Should or ammunition; Liberal police arrested Church, Bad Boyz Boxing Club, and Lam agents wait to see if he stuck to the meet, him on the spot. The other driver, Gavin Gia Thai Restaurant all shared a parking or arrest him and Wright immediately? Wright, Allen’s boss at G&G, was asked lot. The new residents provided cheap and Allen’s girlfriend told agents that Al- to submit voluntarily to a search of his uncomplaining labor for the beef industry, len had been learning to manufacture

Dodge Ram. He refused and was released. a source of tax revenue for the town, and ­explosives by studying videos on YouTube. ANDREI ANNE MARY SPREAD: PREVIOUS

32 | NEW REPUBLIC or rising for morning prayers at their mosque, when the bombers made the deadly calls on their cell phones. After the explosions, they would swoop into the wreckage and shoot any survivors. “There’s no leaving anyone behind, even if it’s a one-year-old,” Stein said. “I’m se- rious. I guarantee if I go on a mission those little fuckers are going bye-bye.” Two days later, Stein met again with the undercover agent, this time at a Mc- Donald’s in Dodge City. He loaded 300 pounds of ammonium nitrate into the agent’s car, then went inside for break- The Crusaders, a terrorist group formed by (from left) Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Patrick Stein, thought of themselves as patriots resisting a Muslim takeover of the United States. fast. The FBI arrested him, and picked up Gavin Wright outside G&G Homes. A search of a storage locker Wright had At G&G, she had watched him stir up hy- apartment,” Stein said in a conversation rented turned up bomb-making materials drogen peroxide and fuel ­tablets to make recorded by the FBI. There was even an in- and a safe full of semiautomatic rifles and hexamethylene triperoxide ­diamine—a formal mosque in one of the units. “That’s handguns. When an agent asked if Stein common homemade explosive used to all it is, fucking goddamn cockroaches.” had any misgivings about killing children, make blasting caps to detonate larger The Crusaders had initially planned he expressed no remorse. Most of his bombs. The Crusaders already had the to carry out the attack on September 11, targets, he insisted, were “fighting age.” means to detonate a large blast, but but then called it off, worried that a mass On October 21, Stein appeared at a not reliably, and apparently only if they murder might help Hillary Clinton’s bail hearing in Wichita. His attorney, Ed were willing to serve as suicide bombers. chances in the presidential campaign. “We Robinson, offered a provocative defense: During an exchange of text messages to cannot let Hillary back into the White A steady stream of fake news, spread on set up the meeting, the undercover agent House,” Stein told the under­ cover agent. social media, had convinced the Crusaders had asked Stein what weapons the group So they decided to wait—until the night that America was in a state of emergency. was hoping to acquire. “High explosives,” after the election. Under cover of dark- Stein believed that the presidential elec- Stein replied, “automatic weapons RPG ness, the Crusaders would ease the cargo tion was rigged against Donald Trump, shit brother if I could get a hold of a wart- vans into place. The Somali­ workers would and that the Muslim Brotherhood had hog or Apache helicopter I would be after be sleeping after the second shift at Tyson seized control of the government. Even if that too.” The Crusaders, it appeared, had more ambition than actual firepower. The FBI decided not to arrest Stein or Wright, gambling that they still believed Allen was being held only for domestic abuse. The next day, October 12, under­ cover agents met Stein as planned in a remote rural area outside of Garden City. To bol- ster their cover as mobsters, the agents offered him his pick from a cache of weapons. Stein selected an AR-15 and an AK-47, each converted to full-auto, then eagerly directed one of the agents to the Garden Spot Apartments. As they drove into town, Stein couldn’t stop talking about the residents of the com- plex. At almost any time of day, Somali women gathered outside the units, draped in brightly colored dresses, most with their heads covered by hijabs. Their chil- dren chased each other in the grass. They Patrick Stein’s trailer near Dodge City, Kansas. Stein told an FBI informant he wanted to “go to

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BO RADER/WICHITA EAGLE/TNS/GETTY (X3); OLIVER MORRISON/THE WICHITA EAGLE/PARS were everywhere. “Literally every fucking Garden City, start kicking in the doors of the Somali apartments, and kill them one by one.”

JUNE 2017 | 33 Trump somehow managed to win, Stein was certain that President Obama would immediately invalidate the results and declare martial law. United Nations tanks had already been sent into southwestern Kansas to subdue the populace. Everyone was in on it—from Obama to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “even getting down to the local government.” Such conspiracy theories, Robinson observed, weren’t just emanating from fake-news outlets. In the days before the election, the Republican Party had been mailing out election flyers in Kan- sas attacking Democratic candidates for “moving terrorists to Kansas.” In a high-profile speech on August 4, Trump himself warned that terrorists from So- malia and other Muslim countries were scheming to gain entrance to the United States by posing as refugees, calling it An immigrant worker at a slaughterhouse in Garden City. Refugees and other immigrants “the great Trojan horse of all time.” In make up most of the workforce at meatpacking plants in the Golden Triangle. the face of a coming revolution, the Cru- saders saw themselves as a special breed of patriot, a self-chosen few unwilling to than they could find in other low-skill near-zero unemployment, could provide. stand by while Muslim foreigners took lines of work. So IBP turned to a new immigrant pop- over the country. In the words of Stein’s Midwestern cities thrived on the ulation eager for work: refugees fleeing attorney, they decided to put together strength of immigrant labor; the stock- life-threatening oppression around the a plan to “deal with that mosque and yards in Kansas City grew into the world. In 1980, Jimmy Carter had tripled those people.” second largest livestock exchange and the number of political refugees who could meatpacking district in America. But the be admitted to the United States. Over the remote, southwestern corner of Kan- next decade, the population of Garden MMIGRANTS HAVE LONG BEEN sas remained largely unpopulated until City soared, from 18,000 to 24,000. Two- the backbone of American meatpack­ the 1960s, when advances in irrigation thirds of the newcomers were Southeast Iing. At the dawn of the twentieth technology suddenl­ y made it possible Asian or Hispanic. ­century, just as skilled, small-scale butch- for ranchers to grow enough corn to Garden City was completely unpre- ering operations were being replaced by sustain ­industrial-scale cattle feedlots. pared for the sudden influx. Workers large, factory-style slaughterhouses, the Within a decade, livestock trailers load- were forced to live out of cars, tents, and United States was opening its borders to ed with cattle from Oklahoma, Texas, hotels. IBP lobbied the city to rezone, mass immigration. Jews targeted by the and Colorado were streaming into three allowing the construction of mobile home pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia, vast beef-processing plants in Garden parks. Before long, a trailer park on the Italians and Greeks displaced by crop City, Dodge City, and Liberal, forming eastern edge of town swelled to more failures in the southern Mediterranean, what came to be known as the Golden than 500 units, accounting for nearly Mexicans fleeing violence during the rev- Triangle of American beef packing. And 10 percent of the town’s entire popula- olution, and Armenians escaping geno- as the meatpacking industry surged west, tion. Crime and fires were rampant, and cide in Turkey all poured into New York immigrant workers came with it. almost none of the new residents had City and then migrated west along rail- By the 1980s, when Iowa Beef Pack- access to essential services. road lines. Few of the new arrivals spoke ers announced it would open the world’s In an effort to improve conditions na- English, and many were illiterate in their largest beef plant just outside Garden tionwide, the Ford Foundation sponsored native languages. But meatpacking jobs City, the region was already feeding and studies of communities across the country required little in the way of language slaughtering roughly a quarter of all that were grappling with the arrival of skills, and immigrants were often given the cattle processed in North America. large numbers of new immigrants. Gar- the most demanding and dangerous po- IBP needed thousands of workers to get den City was selected as the sole case sitions on the cut line. If they were ex- its new production lines running—far study for small towns in middle Amer-

ploited, they at least ­received better pay more than the area, which was already at ica. Spurred by Ford’s involvement, the REYNOLDS/REDUX ADAM

34 | NEW REPUBLIC community came to see its growing di- have legal status, which protects their there were stories that Somali women versity as good for business. Town police employers from immigration raids. They who refused to use tampons had dripped worked with new arrivals to ease crime; can’t afford to complain about the heavy menstrual blood through the local Wal- local leaders helped refugees set up their and dangerous workloads they’re given. Mart, that a riot of Somali men had bro- own businesses. For a small Kansas town And they’re less likely to unionize than ken out in a local parking lot, that a gang in the middle of nowhere, Garden City American-born workers. In 2007, em- of Somalis wielding machetes had been had the feel of a bigger, more progressive ployees at the Tyson plant, many of them seen outside the Dairy Queen. The Ayan city. “We described Garden City as a cos- refugees, voted to reject a unionization Café, a Somali-run market and restaurant mopolitan place,” says Donald Stull, the effort by a margin of 3 to 1. After trying in Emporia, was frequently vandalized; anthropologist who conducted the Ford to recruit African Americans in Chicago in January 2007, armed gunmen attacked study. “But it became, in some ways, a and Puerto Ricans in Cleveland, meat- the store. Patty Gilligan, a spokesperson self-fulfilling prophecy.” Even when ten- packers in the Golden Triangle zeroed in for the town, viewed the resistance to the sions gradually emerged over the town’s on refugees from the Twin Cities—most Somalis as more than religious. “I can’t shifting demographics, he says, many of them from Burma and Somalia. “They help but think their skin color had some- local leaders remained convinced that have been recruited in poultry and beef thing to do with it,” she told reporters. all was well: “These folks came in from plants quite systematically,” Stull says. Officials from the city, the school dis- outside with Ford Foundation money and At meatpacking plants in Kansas and trict, and the state held months of com- said we’re really cosmopolitan, and, by elsewhere, long-simmering tensions munity meetings, trying to allay the fears golly, we must be.” over immigrant labor soon boiled over. and resentment of angry residents. Fi- The unease was exacerbated by a wave ­American-born job applicants sued the nally, in January 2008, Tyson announced of consolidation in the beef industry. As companies, claiming discrimination in that it was closing its Emporia slaughter- more and more meatpacking companies hiring. Muslim workers were fired for tak- house, eliminating the 1,500 jobs it had merged, American-born workers were ing unauthorized prayer breaks. Fistfights created barely a year before. The 400 systematically replaced by immigrant broke out among workers on the line. But Somali workers at the plant were offered labor. The situation worsened in 2000, Tyson, which had taken over the massive bonuses to relocate to Garden City, and when the local ConAgra plant burned IBP plant outside Garden City, went out the rest of the Somali community in Em- to the ground on Christmas Day, put- of its way to make Muslim workers feel poria decided to go with them, including ting nearly 10 percent of Garden City’s at home. The company provided Somali the owners of the Ayan Café. “If there’s no Tyson,” one of the café’s employees told the Emporia Gazette, “our business is going down.” Refugees provide an almost ideal workforce The workers who moved to Garden City felt like they had traveled to ­another for slaughterhouses. They have legal status, planet. While all of the meatpacking can’t afford to complain about dangerous towns in the Golden Triangle had re- cruited Somalis, none was as diverse as jobs, and are less likely to join unions. Garden City, where Somalis now make up nearly the entire second shift at Tyson. When the refugees arrived and began moving into the Garden Spot apartments, residents out of work overnight. The sud- employees with two prayer breaks per shift, city officials were ready to receive them. den spike in unemployment, combined in dedicated prayer rooms at its plants. “If you want to buy a house, if you want with the anti-immigrant sentiment that Bathrooms were retrofitted with foot-­ your own company, nothing can stop arose in the wake of the September 11 washing stations, and workers were even you,” says Mursal Naleye, a Somali refu- attacks, began to undercut Garden City’s given prayer rugs outfitted with a compass gee who moved to Garden City in 2011 to welcoming posture. Tensions only in- to allow them to pray toward Mecca. work for Tyson. “You can do everything creased in 2006, when George W. Bush In some towns, however, such accom- you want in Garden City.” unleashed a nationwide crackdown on modations only served to further stoke By the time Naleye arrived, howev- undocumented Hispanic immigrants. the anger of American-born employees. er, the climate was already starting to Many meatpacking plants were forced to At the Tyson plant in Emporia, Kansas, change. “There were always whispers,” a replenish their workforce—but instead of wild rumors began to spread—that the local elementary school teacher told CNN. turning to the local labor pool, they dou- Somalis were carrying tuberculosis and But after the election of Barack Obama bled down on their reliance on refugees. contaminating the meat, that a group of and the rise of the Tea Party, the whis- Refugees provide an almost ideal Somali men had raped a female co-worker pers grew louder. In 2010, new census work ­force for meatpacking plants. They in an equipment closet. Outside the plant, numbers r­evealed that white residents

JUNE 2017 | 35 now made up only 43 percent of Garden planned attack later that day. Then he unflappable air. It takes a lot to make him City, leaving many feeling outnumbered picked up the phone and called Mursal nervous, but something about Utz’s ur- in their own community. Whites are also Naleye, whom he knew was respected by gency communicated the seriousness of a minority in four neighboring coun- his fellow refugees. the situation. He asked the chief what ties, including the towns of Dodge City “Hey, why don’t you come down to time he wanted to meet. “I need you here and Liberal. the police department—you, with all of by one o’clock,” Utz replied. White residents who felt anxious or the leaders from the community,” Utz said. Naleye checked his watch. It was al- aggrieved over the demographic shifts “We need to have a meeting right away.” most 20 past noon. His anxiety grew. No didn’t have to look very far for support. Utz had been interacting with refugee one trusts the police in Somalia. There, Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state families since he was a rookie officer in a call like this would most likely be a who had risen to national prominence the 1980s. “I mean, we’re all immigrants trap—a setup to demand a bribe, the pre- after he delivered a speech at the GOP in some fashion,” he told me. There were lude to a kidnapping, or worse. convention in 2004 calling for the mil- cultural differences, of course, but he had But Naleye knew Utz. “OK, Chief, I itary to be deployed along the Mexican found that if he learned and respected trust you,” he said. “We’ll make it happen.” border, was openly working to prevent those differences, the job got easier for In a rush, Naleye started dialing, ­tell­- many voters of color from casting ballots. him and more effective for the people he ing everyone he reached to be ready in One group in particular, he claimed, was was sworn to protect. So when he was five minutes. He picked up several people guilty of widespread voter fraud: Somali­ named chief in 2015, Utz orga- refugees. “We don’t know the entire num- nized ­monthly meetings with a ber,” Kobach told the Wichita Eagle in group of leaders from the lo- 2010. “We just know people have been cal African community. Most observed registering people outside the Somalis still respect the clan meatpacking plants.” system, deferring to elders and Kobach claimed that a Kansas City members of honored families to race for the state House had been “stolen” make collective decisions. While when J.J. Rizzo, a Democratic candidate, Utz conferred with clan lead- received “about 50 votes illegally cast by ers, police officers played soc- citizens of Somalia.” Although Rizzo’s own cer with the kids and volunteers aunt and uncle later pleaded guilty to ille- from a local nonprofit asked the gally voting in the election, there was no women about social services evidence of any wrongdoing by Somali their families might need. The refugees. But that didn’t prevent Kobach clan leaders were wary at first, from repeating the claim in an op-ed for or perhaps just unconvinced of The Washington Post. “The Somalis, who the sincerity of the gesture. But didn’t speak English, were coached to vote after nearly a year of outreach, for Rizzo by an interpreter at the polling Utz had managed to win over place,” Kobach insisted. “Rizzo ended up some support. He had also met Police chief Michael Utz worked to reassure Somalis winning by one vote.” The message from Naleye, who had been promoted they were safe in Garden City after the foiled attack. the state’s top voting official was clear: The by Tyson to train new Somali newcomers from Somalia were being used workers and served as presi- to subvert American democracy. dent of a community center that assisted in his car and told the rest to meet at African immigrants. the African Shop, a few blocks west of the Utz wanted Naleye and other leaders Garden Spot Apartments. The store sells N OCTOBER 14, WHILE FEDERAL of the community to learn of the planned comforts from Somalia—bolts of cloth for agents were still busy searching attack directly from him, rather than dresses, spices, and packaged sweets—but Othe ­weapons-laden storage unit hearing about it on the news. “It was im- in the back, an old storage area has been belonging to Gavin Wright, the FBI con- portant that we, as a department, reach converted to a kind of meeting place, still tacted Michael Utz, Garden City’s chief out to the folks that live in the two apart- open and breezy enough to fill with the of police. Utz had been briefed on the ment complexes,” Utz says. “I felt that stench from the Brookover Feed Yard case the day before, so when the bureau they needed to know what was going on. when the wind is right. Most days, the notified him that it had made its final two My concern was the fear factor: people room is abuzz with the sound of inter­- arrests, he was ready to move. First, he not going to work, not going to school, national soccer games on television and called together his staff and told them and wanting to get out of Garden City.” an espresso maker blasting steam. But that an FBI field officer would be speak- Naleye was troubled by the call. now, Naleye ­commanded silence. “There’s

ing to the Somali community about the Though he’s only 27, he exudes a calm, an emergency meeting,” he told everyone. TELEGRAM CITY GARDEN NADING/THE BRAD

36 | NEW REPUBLIC begun dropping pins at various locations for possible attacks. Each pin was given the label “cockroaches.” The men then discussed what kind of attack they might carry out, including kidnapping and rap- ing the wives and daughters of refugee workers, setting fire to their mosque during prayer time, and even shooting them with arrows dipped in pig’s blood. “The only good Muslim is a dead Mus- lim,” Patrick Stein had told his fellow Crusaders. “If you’re a Muslim, I’m going to enjoy shooting you in the head.” Now, after hearing from Utz and the FBI, the clan leaders were stunned. But the respect that Chief Utz had shown by calling them together had prevented a panic. “If they wait until the news says something and they don’t let us know, people would get shocked and just run away,” Naleye says. Instead, he was able to leave the meeting and head to the Tyson Mursal Naleye, a Somali worker at the Tyson plant and president of the African Community Center in Garden City, was the first person Utz called after the FBI arrests. plant. By now, everyone would be arriving for the night shift.

“Why do we have to go to the police contacted school officials, who would be department?” one leader asked in Somali. sending counselors to classrooms and the BDUKADIN YUSUF WAS LESS “Is something wrong?” asked another. apartment complex. And he had asked than an hour into the B shift at the “I don’t really know,” Naleye told one of his police officers who is Somali to ATyson plant, but it was time for them. “But don’t be nervous. Don’t be translate a letter into his native language him to take a break from the rib line and afraid. Nothing is going to happen to explaining that the meeting would be a pray. Yusuf has worked at Tyson for a de- you guys.” show of support. Officers would be going cade, transferring to Garden City in 2007 At one o’clock, Naleye arrived at the door to door to distribute the letter, Utz after almost a year in Emporia. He refuses police station with a van-load of clan lead- told the clan leaders. to talk about his time in Emporia; he pre- ers. With little time to change, the men Not wanting to alarm them, the FBI fers to focus on how much better every- arrived in street clothes—­­tight-fitting­ officer shared only the most basic details thing has been since he arrived in Garden t-shirts and jeans for the younger men, of the plot. But in the coming days, the City. He is grateful to Tyson for allowing the elders in slacks, with embroidered clan leaders and their families would him to move there. “It’s a good company,” koofiyads on their heads. As each entered the station, Utz was there to shake hands and welcome them. Once everyone was assembled in the conference room, the Clan leaders were stunned when the FBI chief chose his words carefully. “There has been a threat against your briefed them on the planned attack. “If part of our community,” he said. “All three you’re a Muslim,” one Crusader had said, suspects are in custody—and there is no- body else involved. You are safe.” He told “I’m going to enjoy shooting you in the head.” the group that an FBI field officer would explain the nature of the threat to them, so they could share it with their families and friends. But he also wanted them to learn many graphic details from the he says. “They take care of the workers.” gather the community together the next media and the criminal complaint sub- At more than a million square feet, the day, so they could hear directly from the mitted to the court. One evening at G&G Garden City plant is one of the world’s police that they were going to receive Home Center, the plotters had pulled up largest slaughterhouses—­processing some

ORLIN WAGNER/ASSOCIATED PRESS additional protection. Utz had already Google Maps on an office computer and 6,000 cattle every day. The morning shift

JUNE 2017 | 37 is nearly all Hispanic workers, and the afternoon shift, roughly 600 people, is entirely Somali and Burmese. Yusuf, after a decade of working in slaughterhouses, earns $40,000 per year. On the rib line, men grasp old­ fashioned meat hooks in their left hands, pulling racks of beef ribs onto individual cutting trays, where they execute a few quick cuts with a straight knife in the other hand, removing excess meat before returning the racks to the conveyers. The meat is often tough, and has to be pried from the bone using the hook and free fingers on the knife hand. Yusuf had been working at Tyson for only a few months when he started experiencing stiffness and numb­ ness in his hands. He tried wearing gloves to keep his hands warm and City officials gave residents at the Garden Spot Apartments permission to convert an unused unit into limber in the freezing cold of the a makeshift mosque, taping the floor to indicate the direction of Mecca. cutting -room floor, but it was no use. The tendons in his middle and ring fingers on his right hand were soon Naleye to train workers to prevent repet­ the Justice Department and announced so swollen that they would click and lock itive stress injuries. Most importantly that an eight-month FBI investigation had in a closed position—a condition known to Yusuf, the company allows Muslim taken agents “deep into a hidden culture as trigger finger. workers to take breaks according to their of hatred and violence.” He explained that Despite all this, Yusuf insists that he prayer schedule. “The supervisors let us three men had intended to detonate car loves working for Tyson. For refugees like work it out ourselves,” he says. “There bombs, one of them less than 50 feet from him, the dangers of the production line are no problems about the breaks.” the one-bedroom apartment where Yusuf and his wife live. The men, Beall said, harbored “hatred for Muslims, individuals of Somali descent, and immigrants.” Utz told refugees they would be protected— Yusuf had lived in Garden City for nearly a decade, and had never once felt as members of a nation built by refugees. any hint of resentment, much less a threat “You are safe in Garden City,” he said, “and of violence. Who were these men who wanted to kill him and his wife and ev­ safe in the United States of America.” eryone they knew? “Why would they do this?” he demanded, his hands cramping, fingers locking against his palms. “Why would they do this?” pale in comparison to life in ­Somalia— Now, as Yusuf returned to work from Seeing the reaction from Yusuf and with its clan warfare, piracy, government his prayer break, he noticed Naleye other Somali workers, the plant man­ corruption, and terrorist groups like Al- talking to several plant supervisors in the agers turned to Naleye for help. “Go de­ Shabaab. Besides, the company paid for lunch room. Another Somali worker told partment to department, and talk to the the surgery on his hands. His supervisor­ s him about the attacks, and they went into people,” they said. “Tell them they are gave him time off to go to Kenya twice— their supervisor’s office to watch the FBI safe. Don’t be afraid.” the first time to marry his fiancée, Ifrah press conference on his television. “We Yusuf’s wife, Ifrah, was at home. He Farah, the second to finalize her visa ap­ stand in the office and see it,” Yusuf says. wanted to leave to be with her. But Naleye plication and bring her to Garden City. Acting U.S. Attorney Tom Beall stood was already spreading the word to the

The plant manager had hired leaders like before an American flag and the seal of workers that the police were guarding the REYNOLDS/REDUX ADAM

38 | NEW REPUBLIC apartment complex. They should all finish “The individuals involved in this plot that you can’t go to your homes because the shift, and not lose a day’s wages, too. are all in custody,” Utz assured them, his you are afraid. But we and the sheriff and When the shift ended at 11:45 that words translated by the Somali police the FBI are here to say that you are safe night, Yusuf and other workers found officer. “You are safe, and we will con- in Garden City, and safe in the United the police waiting for them, lined up tinue to make every effort to make sure States of America.” outside the plant in their cruisers. Other you are safe.” officers were stationed at the Garden Utz started to introduce several rep- Spot. By the time Yusuf got home, it was resentatives from the FBI team who had HEN STEIN APPEARED BE- midnight, and he woke Ifrah up to talk. foiled the plot, as well as the county sher- fore a judge on October 21, he She had seen the police lights flashing iff, whose office has jurisdiction over the Wrocked back and forth in his outside earlier that evening, but didn’t Tyson plant. But before he could finish, chair at the defendant’s table as Anthony go to the door when police officers had several Somali residents pressed f­orward. Mattivi, assistant U.S. attorney for Kan- knocked, handing out flyers to explain They knew and trusted the chief and sas, presented the government’s case. the situation. Now, as Yusuf talked her wanted to hear directly from him. Why Mattivi reminded the court that Stein through what was happening, her fears had these men chosen them? Why were could be heard on FBI recordings vowing only grew. She wanted to pack their they targeted? that the apartment bombing would be simply the first of a series of attacks he intended to carry out as a response to the election, now just two weeks away. Mattivi read another text from Stein to the undercover agent, regarding Hillary Clinton. “If she was to be elected,” Stein wrote, the bombing “would be very soon after the election, ‘game on.’ ” Ed Robinson, Stein’s attorney, coun- tered with his fake news defense: His client’s fears about Somalis were a by- product of screeds on Facebook and conspiracy theories not only from right- wing web sites, but from Donald Trump himself. At a rally in August, Trump had warned supporters in Maine that efforts to resettle Somali refugees had created “an enclave of immigrants with high un- employment” that was straining state re- In several inflammatory campaign speeches, Donald Trump singled out Somali refugees as a sources, and quoted a Washington Times national security threat—fueling the fears of homegrown terrorists like the Crusaders. article claiming that this was creating “a rich pool of potential recruiting targets for Islamist terrorist groups.” The United ­minivan and leave Garden City right away, Utz had decided to be as straight with States, he said, was accepting “hundreds driving until they reached Minnesota, the Somalis as possible. There was no of thousands of refugees, and they’re where Yusuf had family. point in pretending that there were any coming from among the most dangerous “Nobody is above the law,” Yusuf re- motives other than hate and bigotry. But territories and countries of anywhere in assured her. “Only God knows when it he also wanted them to know that he and the world. A practice which has to stop.” is time for us to die.” his officers were there to protect them— Even after the arrests in Kansas, That night, they lay in bed together that they were members not just of the Trump continued to issue dire warnings but barely slept. They rose with the sun community, but of a nation that had been about the influx of Somali refugees as a to pray, and then Yusuf returned to bed, created by immigrants and refugees. regular part of his stump speech. In the tired after working the night shift. Ifrah “The only answer I can give you is that final days of the campaign, Trump spoke went to the meeting that afternoon, when they wanted to attack your religious be- to a crowd in Minneapolis, the city with Chief Utz arrived. Hundreds of people— liefs,” Utz told the assembled residents. the nation’s highest number of S­ omali Somalis, Burmese, Mexicans, Malaysians, “But you need to know that whether refugees. “You’ve seen firsthand the Vietnamese, Sudanese—­gathered in the you are an immigrant or not, you are all problems caused with faulty refugee large parking lot on the north side of Garden Citians. Some of you have said vetting,” he said, “with very large num-

DEREK DAVIS/PORTLAND PRESS HERALD /GETTY Mary Street. you can’t go to your mosque to pray, or bers of Somali refugees coming into your

JUNE 2017 | 39 state without your knowledge, without your support or approv- al.” He claimed that “large num- bers” of Somalis were “joining isis and spreading their extrem- ist views all over our country.” He described how Dahir Adan, a 22-year-old Somali college stu- dent who had come to Minneso- ta as a refugee, had stabbed ten people at the Crossroads Center shopping mall in St. Cloud, before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer.isis later claimed credit for the attack. “It’s hap- pening, it’s happening, you see it happening, you read about it,” Trump told the crowd. Whatever impact Trump’s rhetoric had on the Crusaders, it has little basis in fact. A study conducted by Nora Ellingsen, a Harvard Law School student, identified a total of 97 terrorism suspects arrested as part of FBI Somalis in Garden City celebrate the election of a Somali president who was once a refugee himself. counterterrorism investigations Despite the terrorist plot—and Trump’s huge win in local counties—no Somali families have left town. over the past two years. Only two involved refugees from ­countries on Trump’s list of majority-Muslim against British rule to start the Revolu- single-year increase since the September countries. (Ellingsen omitted two vio- tionary War. Stein was part of a Facebook 11 attacks. In a new report on the rise of lent attacks carried out by Somali ref- group called the III% Security Force of anti-Muslim groups, the Southern Pov- ugees in 2016—the mall stabbings by Kansas, and his username for an encrypt- erty Law Center describes 2016 as “an Dahir Adan and another mass stabbing ed communication app with the FBI un- unprecedented year for hate. The country by Abdul Razak Ali Artan in Colum- dercover agent was “orkinmanIII%”—a saw a resurgence of white nationalism bus, Ohio—because in both cases the reference not only to the movement but that imperils the racial ­progress we’ve perpetrators were killed rather than ar- to his plan to “exterminate” Muslims, made, along with the rise of a president rested.) “Since January 2015,” Ellingsen whom he considered “cockroaches.” whose policies reflect the values of white concludes, “the FBI has arrested more Miles Evans, the state commander of nationalists.” anti- ­immigrant American citizens plot- the Kansas Flatlanders Militia, which is In court, the judge denied Stein’s bail ting violent attacks on Muslims within part of the III% movement, confirms that request. the United States than it has refugees, Stein and Wright had contacted him or former refugees, from any banned about joining the group. But Evans insists country. The empirical data indicate that that he turned them down. “They were URSAL NALEYE SAYS HE STILL foreign nationals simply aren’t plotting just very extreme with the way they go feels optimistic about life in attacks within U.S. borders at the same about things,” he told the Kansas City MGarden City. He sees progress rate as U.S. citizens. Indeed, the rates Star. “Too extreme for us.” After the all around him—especially since the aren’t anywhere close to comparable.” Crusaders were arrested, another militia bomb plot was uncovered. “Nobody Over that same span of time, accord- called the Kansas Security Force posted moved out,” he says. Every family has ing to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a message on its Facebook page: “Our decided to stay; in fact, the response by there was a “near-tripling of anti-Muslim group is not at all about HATE, or by any Chief Utz and the police made Somalis hate groups—from 34 in 2015 to 101 last means about extremism. Should any one feel even more welcome. “From that day, year.” Much of the increase has come from feel differently about this please leave.” it opened their minds,” Naleye says. the III% movement, so named because Despite such disavowals, FBI statistics “They don’t have to be scared of the po- its adherents say that it took just 3 per- indicate that hate crimes against Muslims lice no more. From that day, we started

cent of American colonists taking up arms rose by 67 percent in 2015—the largest monthly meetings.” ANDREI ANNE MARY

40 | NEW REPUBLIC In a sense, the bomb plot backfired. The still captured roughly two-thirds of the political science from American universi- bridge between the Somali community popular vote. ties, went on to work on several local po- and the police force—as well as fears over After Trump’s inauguration, one of litical campaigns, and eventually landed Trump’s proposed travel ban—has actually the accused conspirators—he was not a job in the Buffalo office of the New York encouraged Somali workers at the Tyson identified in the article—contacted a re- Department of Transportation,­ ­enforcing plant to bring their families over from So- porter for The Guardian. After professing ­nondiscrimination requirements among malia. “If you live in a city and you don’t his innocence, he did admit to feeling state contractors. He returned to Somalia really like it, you don’t bring your family,” “encouraged” by Trump’s victory. Stein in 2010, served briefly as prime minister, Naleye says. “But if you really like it, and meanwhile applied for reconsideration of and had now been chosen as Somalia’s you want to be here, you start bringing his detention—but was denied a second first progressive president in three de- your people out.” The city has continued hearing after authorities at the Butler cades. Naleye points to Mohamed’s suc- its support, allowing residents of the County Detention Facility uncovered love cess as evidence of what an enlightened apartment complex to open an English­- letters he had been writing to a prison refugee policy could achieve. language training school in one unit and an guard. A subsequent search of Stein’s At the celebration, in a rented party urgent-care clinic in another. “We feel like cell phone revealed plans for “a small space in a strip mall on West Mary Street, we have people helping us,” Naleye says. man team” to cut power to the jail and posters of Mohamed and a large Somali The planned attack on the apartment overtake the facility. Stein and his co-­ flag were taped to the wall. Under the complex, Naleye insists, was not simply defendants are scheduled to stand trial glare of fluorescent lights, the party start- an outrage against Somalis, or even Mus- in federal court in Wichita on June 13. ed quietly, with everyone dressed in their lims. “There’s a lot of different commu- As for President Trump, he has made formal clothes and stiffly sharing a pot- nities there,” he says. “There’s Hispanic, good on his promise to attempt to block luck of traditional Somali foods eaten on other African people, Asian people—­ immigration from Somalia and five other paper plates. But near midnight, as the Vietnamese, Chinese, Burmese, Indian. Muslim-majority nations. Although his older members of the community went We’re not going to say we were the only policies have been tied up in court, he re- home, the younger Somalis turned up the target, as Somalis. We’re not going to say mains committed to instituting a 90-da­ y portable DJ machine, its lone speaker that. We were all targeted.” He points to ban on people from those countries, as pumping African club songs and flashing multicolor lights. Ahmed Ali, an exuber- ant young man with a quick smile, start- ed ushering everyone onto the dance FBI statistics indicate that hate crimes floor. “It’s a new president, a new hope, a new era!” Ali shouted over the pound- against Muslims have risen by 67 percent— ing bass. He elbowed Naleye toward the the largest single-year increase since the edge of the bouncing circle, where he fell into clapping with everyone else. September 11 attacks. And suddenly, in a strip mall on the very street where the Crusaders planned to unleash their grim attack, the bobbing and clapping turned into joyous danc- the FBI estimate that the bombs would well as a 120-day ban on all refugees, re- ing, the tile floor swaying under leather have been large enough to blow up sur- gardless of their place of origin. But So- shoes and bare feet with hennaed toes. rounding houses, many occupied by old- malis hoping to enter the United States The dancers now stepped, two at a time, er white residents or white families with often come directly from refugee camps, to the center of the circle, the women small children. “Thanks to God, nothing where they have spent years undergoing gripping and swinging the hems of their happened,” he says. rigorous screening. The American people, dresses, the men flapping their sports Still, there are other signs that Gar- it would seem, have little cause for fear. jackets and passing a hand-knit scarf that den City is not as progressive and c­ osmo-­ Over President’s Day weekend, Naleye read i love somalia, waving it like a flag. politan as its leaders imagine. On Election organized a party to honor the election Naleye himself slid to the center of the Day, only 24 hours before the Crusad- of a different president—Mohamed A. circle, smiling shyly at the applause, and ers were planning to massacre hundreds Mohamed of Somalia. Mohamed’s ascent then shook his hips. For the moment he of local residents, voters in Garden City is a parable of the promise and possibility felt light, buoyed by hope and, perhaps, and the surrounding county turned out of America’s refugee program. In 1988, the sense of a second chance. He should in record numbers—and they voted for Mohamed, then a secretary in the Somali be asleep, he thought, but who could Trump over Clinton by a margin of more embassy in Washington, was granted asy- sleep now? He was wide awake, there than two to one. In the four local counties lum to avoid returning to Somalia’s civil in the middle of nowhere, in the middle where whites are now a minority, Trump war. He earned degrees in history and of America, wide awake and dancing. a

JUNE 2017 | 41 ↑ As music blares and the crowd cheers, two women fight for a share of a $12,000 pot in the Toughman Contest, one of the year’s biggest events in Beckley, West Virginia. More than 20 percent of local residents live in poverty.

42 | NEW REPUBLIC STRIPPED OF THE REGION’S COAL AND RAVAGED BY DRUGS, THE PEOPLE OF APPALACHIA ARE FIGHTING TO SURVIVE.

BY SARAH JONES PHOTOGRAPHS BY ESPEN RASMUSSEN

MERICANS HAVE LONG VIEWED APPALACHIA Amore as stereotypical fiction than actual place—a doomed and backward land that remains both geo- graphically and temporally isolated from the rest of the nation. “It is not of the twentieth century,” the authors of Hollow Folk, a derisive book about hillbillies, wrote in 1933. A “forgotten land,” Saturday Review declared in 1968. If we wished to believe in the Amer- ican dream, we had to view the poverty and despair of Appalachia as somehow separate from our national aspirations: an American nightmare of its own making. The region and its people remain poor for a simple reason: They were shaped by a legacy of extraction and exploitation. As Appalachia has been systematically

JUNE 2017 | 43 THE WAR ON HILLBILLIES

44 | NEW REPUBLIC stripped of its coal and timber and other resources— the wealth of an entire region converted into energy and capital for industrial America—the poverty rate has soared to 35 percent in mining communities like McDowell County, West Virginia. Many residents lack access to basic necessities like health care and transpor- tation, let alone broadband internet. If some turn to an easy and self-destructive alternative, be it conservative politics or opioid painkillers, it isn’t because they lack the intelligence or strength of character to improve their own lot. It’s because false promises and cheap drugs are the only things the rest of America exports to Appalachia in plentiful supply. When a place becomes fiction, the people who live there become characters. Photographer Espen Ras- mussen set out to look beyond the two-dimensionality­ that has been forced upon the region. His haunting images show us what we expect to see in Appalachia— miners, addicts, white men with rifles. But they also jolt us into the present by capturing an unexpected complexity—a noisy club scene, a quiet fiddlemaker, a young female fighter. I left my corner of Appalachia in 2013. There are so few jobs available that I am not certain when—or if—I’ll return. But the longer I am apart from it, the more it feels like home, the distance clarifying what proxim- ity obscured. In an increasingly homogenized world, Appalachia remains truly distinctive—in its culture, its idioms, its struggles. Its problems, though, are still American problems, albeit sharper and more extreme. Appalachia is not some mythic land out of time; it’s a living place, as independent as it is impoverished. And—as its people reminded us last November—it will not be forgotten. a

← A miner labors underground in Wyoming County, West Virginia. Since 2011, the state has lost more than a third of its coal jobs, thanks to thinning seams, decreased demand, and increased automation. Unemployment rates in the area are double the national average.

JUNE 2017 | 45 ← Young women compete for prize money by dancing onstage during a party at the Muncheez Bar and Grill in Beckley. Those who can are fleeing the region: West Virginia is losing residents at a faster rate than any other state—some 10,000 in the past year alone.

↑ String players gather for a down-home jam session. “Music is the backbone of the Appalachians,” says mandolin player Jamie Smith. “It’s history and culture, present and past, war and peace, battles in the mines, everything all at once. It’s who we are, set to tune.”

46 | NEW REPUBLIC THE WAR ON HILLBILLIES

↓ A young woman and her friend smoke drugs before going out to a Halloween party. West Virginia has the country’s highest death rate from overdoses—so many that the state has already exhausted its indigent burial fund for the current fiscal year.

JUNE 2017 | 47 THE WAR ON HILLBILLIES

↓ Robert Davis, a chiropractor in Sophia, West Virginia, spends his spare time making violins by hand. It takes 250 hours to build a single instrument. “There’s a proudness to being West Virginian,” he says, “despite its trials and tribulations.”

← Henry Hayes, a retired logger, didn’t seek medical care after he injured his eye in an ATV accident. “I don’t need a doctor,” he says. “Not unless a limb breaks off.” Thanks to Obamacare, the number of uninsured West Virginians has plunged from 21 percent to 9 percent.

48 | NEW REPUBLIC ↑ Jessie Boggess sits at the window of his home outside Dry Creek. A decorated Vietnam vet, he lives by himself deep in the woods and takes medication for PTSD. Nearly one in ten West Virginians served in the armed forces—one of the highest rates in the country. ESPEN RASMUSSEN/PANOS PICTURES RASMUSSEN/PANOS ESPEN

JUNE 2017 | 49 REVIEW

ESSAY

Pew Research To understand the political power of evangelicals, we must look beyond the pulpits.

BY JEFF SHARLET

EVERY FOUR YEARS, American political journalists, who rarely of modern evangelical politics, which she has chronicled for interest themselves in spiritual matters outside of election cy- four decades—most famously in her novella-length profile of cles, act out their own sort of religious ritual: foretelling “the Jerry Falwell, one of the preeminent warlords in the Christian evangelical vote.” Think back to February 2016, after Donald Right’s crusade for political power. Her massive accounts of Trump had won his large victory in the Republican primary the Vietnam War (Fire in the Lake) and the Cold War (Way Out in New Hampshire, but before South Carolina had voted. He There in the Blue) have been praised for FitzGerald’s ability to was not supposed to win that state, because there are a lot wed the “inner histories” of complex political events, as the of evangelicals there, and evangelicals, our soothsayers told historian Alan Brinkley put it, with their cultural contexts. us, did not like Donald Trump. They did not like him because The promise of this similarly vast, new history—all 752 pages he was Donald Trump, and we all know that story, but also of it—lies in its subtitle: The Struggle to Shape America. Here, because he mistakenly referred to “Two Corinthians” instead it suggests, is a book that will speak to our times. of “Second Corinthians” when he spoke to evangelicals at But despite its size, the scope of FitzGerald’s history is Liberty University. oddly narrow. Like many historians, she sees the 1980s as the As it turned out, Trump’s biblical mishap didn’t matter. moment when the Christian Right “reintroduced” religion He won South Carolina handily, and went on to capture into politics—a focus that makes it difficult to persuasively 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in November, beat- connect recent events, like the rise of Trump, with the long and ing the previous high of 78 percent for George W. Bush in extraordinary history of compromises and shifting allegiances 2004. (By comparison, Ronald Reagan won only 67 percent among evangelicals. For her, Trump’s victory reflects the waning of evangelicals, and Jimmy Carter—a Southern Baptist whose power of the Christian Right’s leaders more than the actual candidacy marked for many secular observers the emergence priorities of millions of evangelical voters. Her story follows of evangelicalism as a political force—won even fewer.) The a single path through evangelical history, from the big men outcome called into question plenty of assumptions about of the Great Awakening to the big men of today’s Southern evangelicals and their political agenda. How could the so- Baptist Convention. As a survey of the political inclinations of called “Christian Right,” believed to vote according to a evangelical white male leaders, The Evangelicals is a valuable fiercely moral agenda, embrace the most impious presidential book, but it leaves out too many other people to yield much candidate in American history? insight into the state of American politics, much less the va- Frances FitzGerald’s new book, The Evangelicals, would seem rieties of evangelical experience. A tradition rooted in a belief to be one that might explain to secular readers this puzzling in a personal Jesus and an intimate—if sometimes terrifying— turn of events. She opens with Carter as the beginning of the divine can’t be defined by its pulpits alone. To understand “the modern evangelical presidential era, and concludes with Trump, evangelicals,” even just within the context of politics, means whose very nomination was supposed to be that era’s tomb- exploring what it feels like not just to preach, but also to sit stone. In between she sweeps through nearly three centuries of American religious history. She draws on her long experience ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER

50 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

JUNE 2017 | 51 REVIEW in the pews. It requires us to examine evangelical Christianity souls.”) Then there’s Francis Asbury, who rode a 5,000-mile as a religion lived by people who are also concerned with race circuit each year during the early nineteenth century’s Second and class, art and music, fear and ambition. Great Awakening to make Methodism a major Christian current in America, and William Miller, who persuaded some 50,000 FITZGERALD BEGINS HER history in the 1730s, with the First souls that the Bible foretold the end of the world in 1844. Many Great Awakening—the revival that did much to give American of his believers, disappointed to find themselves still among the evangelicalism its intertwined public fervor and personal living, went on to found the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. ­intensity—and its most notable figure, Jonathan Edwards.The Such men relied on fervent preaching that would inspire Evangelicals devotes only two pages to this most central of spiritual feeling in their listeners. By encouraging congregants early figures, and FitzGerald spends them mostly on the “vivid to display those feelings publicly, they created a style of worship rhetoric” of his “most quoted sermon, ‘Sinners in the Hands that, while deeply personal, would exert a strong influence on of an Angry God.’” Preached in 1741, “Sinners” is vivid in its national politics. That’s particularly true in the life of Charles blistering account of human unworthiness, its description of Grandison Finney, the best-known and most significant figure “the God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds of the Second Great Awakening. FitzGerald offers a succinct a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, account of Finney’s “new measures,” crowd-pleasing preaching and is dreadfully provoked.” Edwards, writes FitzGerald, was innovations that anticipated the megachurches of the latter half “telling people what they already believed.” of the twentieth century and laid the foundation for much of Yet by focusing on the ferocity of his sermons, FitzGerald contemporary evangelicalism’s performativity. When someone understates the influence of Edwards, one of the most learned in the congregation was “on the verge of conversion,” FitzGerald men of his day. He was responsible for turns both bold and writes, Finney made them sit “on an ‘anxious bench’ in the subtle in American Protestant thought, imbuing its blend of front of the church, where the whole congregation could see sentiment and “heart” with a kind of empiricism of the su- them when they felt the spirit and stepped forward.” pernatural. Still taught in Christian academies and studied by pastors, Edwards is channeled in ways obvious and implicit Prayer and conversion thus became public, intensely social into contemporary church life. His sense of storytelling can events, where men and women expressed their deepest feelings be seen in contemporary evangelicalism’s concern for “rele- before a crowd. After people had humbly asked for mercy and vance,” a buzzword that animates churches large and small, watched many others do the same, they found a new sense of with sermons that might pass muster on The Moth, and his trust in one another. Family ties were strengthened, enemies sense that “science” served to create a godly community can made up, and strangers found a sense of community. be seen in science-flavored “messages” among evangelicals about “creation care” and “intelligent design.” These strands Out of this “spiritual democracy” sprang much of what would are essential in understanding how evangelicalism thrives become the abolitionist movement. This early history, widely in the twenty-first century as a broad faith—one not only of known within evangelical circles, if not beyond, is essential moral control, but also of curiosity about a world that so many to understanding the sense of righteousness that continues to evangelicals say they are “in but not of.” propel evangelical politics, even in its embrace of a man such as In her sketches of early American Protestant evangelists, Trump. He might be a sinner, but so, too, was Finney before he FitzGerald emphasizes two arguments uncontroversial in was saved; and so, too, was the biblical David, even after God American religious history: the centrality of revival to early made him king. God uses who he will to achieve his virtuous American life, particularly the ways in ends, and it is the job of the believer to follow, not to lead. which it fostered a kind of raw democ- racy, and the winnowing down of Prot- THERE WAS, OF course, plenty of self-interest within the church estant intellectualism into “a simplified in Finney’s day, just as there is in ours. Finney’s works were religious system well adapted to fron- made possible by major American financiers, who saw in his tier communities.” For every Jonathan religion not just righteousness but also an answer to the labor Edwards, there’s a George Whitefield, troubles of the era, when workers were responding to indus- a revival preacher most famous not for trialization with the angry stirrings that would give rise to his thought but for the loudness of his the labor movement. It’s too simple to say that Finney urged voice, or a Gilbert Tennent, who, called to them to wait for their pie in the sky, but not by much. Like arms by Whitefield’s bellow, launched an many moral leaders, Finney was both a friend to the poor and attack on milder clergymen. (He argued, an enemy to their efforts at self-organization. THE EVANGELICALS: THE SRUGGLE TO SHAPE as FitzGerald puts it, that only minis- Such antecedents help explain the continued closeness AMERICA ters who had “undergone a conversion between evangelical politics and moneyed interests. Just as BY FRANCES FITZGERALD experience”—rather than those whose merchants funded Finney, big oilmen backed the National As- SIMON & SCHUSTER, 752pp., $35.00 calling was a matter of choice or intellec- sociation of Evangelicals and Billy Graham in the 1950s. They tual ­attraction—“had the po­ wer to save were bound together by what Max Weber famously described­

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have complicated this familiar narrative—elements, in short, that might have helped readers understand how the evangelical surge for Trump, a philandering celebrity businessman, fits into the longer history FitzGerald tells. That’s not all that’s missing. FitzGerald makes clear from the beginning her intention to write a history of white evan- gelical politics, but is there really any such thing as a white American history without black history? Can we speak of evangelicalism, slavery, and abolition without mentioning figures such as Sojourner Truth, or Maria W. Stewart, another black woman who, in 1831, just as Finney was coming to fame, published an influential abolitionist pamphlet titled “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality”? In 1957, or even 1967, well-­intentioned white historians evidently thought we could. But in 2017, with race at the heart of the politics that gave rise to Trump and what may well be the most fundamentalist cabinet in history, any account that seeks to place our religious past in “contemporary history,” as FitzGerald puts it, must make race central to its concerns. Curiously, FitzGerald skips the Civil War, a conflict in which religion provided a powerful undercurrent to the more visible crises of race and region. And in her account of the years that followed, she considers class more closely than race. Funda- mentalism, she shows, emerged not, as Marx and cliché would have it, as the consoling religion of the poor, but as a faith of Jonathan Edwards was not just a fiery preacher but a subtle thinker. ambition for those less concerned with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount than with the theological currents that decades later as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a kind of became known as the “prosperity gospel.” Dwight L. Moody—a theological myth of wasp thrift combined with a fear of atheist nineteenth-century revivalist who preached to crowds of tens communism. Christian best-sellers of the last century glorified of thousands—appealed not to “the wretched factory laborers,” big business, from Bruce Barton’s 1925 book The Man Nobody FitzGerald writes, “but to people much like his younger self: Knows, which presented Jesus as a modern CEO and his apostles rural-born Americans with Protestant backgrounds who were as his executives, to Dennis W. Bakke’s 2005 self-help guide Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job, which urges faith in Jesus but not unions. Major American financiers Students of American religious and business history increas- saw in evangelicalism not just ingly emphasize how evangelicalism has served capitalism—a relationship touted by some believers as “biblical capitalism,” righteousness but an answer to in which the “Protestant ethic” is whittled down to the convic- the era’s labor troubles. tion that scripture prophesies supply-side economics. Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise and Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America are two recent works that explore the sincerity of such a seemingly self-serving making their way in the cities in white-collar jobs.” Evangelical- faith and the ways in which “business conservatism” and “social ism is nothing if not aspirational in its theology. If its explicit conservatism” are not at odds so much as they are entwined commitments once hewed to that of an “old-time religion,” strands of Christian nationalism. its aesthetic has always been shaped by a keen sense of the But FitzGerald relies for her synthesis on a number of re- new, the fresh, and the modern—terms which can be read, in spected but increasingly dated sources. As I read, I began mak- America at least, as euphemisms for the middle class. ing a list of the dates of publication of her sources: 1957, 1967, Partly because of this class anxiety, efforts to lump evangel- 1966, 1975, 1962, 1977. More recent publications were much icals into the very voting bloc the political class now describes rarer, and many were from evangelical or conservative intel- were not so simple. In 1942, a group of evangelicals formed the lectuals. As FitzGerald uses them, these sources emphasize the National Association of Evangelicals, hoping to escape the label formal theological and political decisions made by e­ vangelical “fundamentalist,” which had gained low-class connotations as

CORBIS/GETTY elites. What’s missing from her account are elements that might rural and uneducated, even though in its origins it was an urban

JUNE 2017 | 53 REVIEW and intellectual phenomenon. “The term ‘evangelical’ didn’t did in the 1980s and ’90s. But it’s also where her work is at mean very much,” FitzGerald observes, “because liberals also its weakest: Exceptional as her reporting was in its day, it regarded themselves as evangelicals, [and] fundamentalists used remains embedded in the logic of its moment, mistaking the the terms ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘evangelical’ interchangeably.” sensation of a strident new generation of evangelical political The NAE, for that matter, defined itself in fundamentalist leaders for an authentically new development. terms. Created to oppose “the terrible octopus of liberalism,” FitzGerald describes, for instance, televangelist Pat Robert- the group wanted political influence, but its elite leadership son as a figure “who didn’t fit any of the old categories,” even had not been very effective at directing, via its many member as she neglects the fact that Robertson’s father, a right-wing denominations and their many pastors, the hearts and minds of Democratic senator, had long led attempts to push evangelical the evangelicals in their pews—not to mention the evangelicals values in national politics. A board member of a fundamentalist who sat in pews beyond the organization’s reach. organization known as International Christian Leadership, the The best-known evangelist of the twentieth century, Billy elder Robertson met with President Harry Truman in 1947 Graham, was more effective than most at influencing large to ask him to attend the organization’s meetings, comprised swaths of evangelicals. Born on a farm in North Carolina almost exclusively of political, business, and military leaders. in 1918, he combined evangelical class anxiety with funda- Truman didn’t take him up on the offer, in part because the mentalist theological certainty, the myth of the country boy Moral Re-Armament movement already provided him with a with the reality of the Washington sophisticate. Graham was similarly powerful network. Six years later, though, Interna- a synthesizer. Among his many gifts was an ability to build tional Christian Leadership bagged its first president when Billy ­coalitions—between fundamentalists and evangelicals, between Graham and Senator Frank Carlson persuaded a newly elected urban and rural conservatives and moderates. But while he President Dwight Eisenhower to attend the first occasion of jettisoned the fundamentalist emphasis on separatism that what became known as the National Prayer Breakfast. Just would have obstructed the growth of his influence, the faith one year after that, as President Trump noted at this year’s he made was ever the “old-time religion,” which was really a modern creation, a synthesis itself of theology, nationalism, and capitalism as authentically old-fashioned as Cracker Barrel’s The old-time religion was a front-porch rocking chairs. modern creation, as authentically FitzGerald, however, mostly hews to the school of thought that sees Graham as somehow more moderate than the Chris- old-fashioned as Cracker Barrel’s tian Right that emerged in the late 1970s. Graham, she insists, front-porch rocking chairs. “wasn’t a racist.” As evidence, she quotes his banal statement in 1950 that “all men are created equal under God.” But while Graham integrated his revivals, he also believed that Martin Luther King Jr. had gone too far with the civil rights movement and should have “put on the brakes a bit.” That duality—a sin- Prayer Breakfast, Carlson and other members of Congress cere denial of racism, accompanied by its thinly euphemized sent Eisenhower a joint resolution that added “under God” to perpetuation—is essential to the Christian Right politics that the Pledge of Allegiance. (“It’s a great thing,” Trump added.) thrived after Graham withdrew from politics in the 1980s, and Conservative evangelicalism has been an essential part of forms the evangelical backbone of Trumpism today. American politics going back much further than 1980. Inter- national Christian Leadership was the Christian Coalition of THE POLITICAL FORMATION known by news magazines its day, less visible mainly because its aesthetic was establish- as the “Christian Right”—the lifespan of which occupies as mentarian. By contrast, Robertson and his peers, following much space in FitzGerald’s book as the previous 200 years the example of Reagan, emphasized the populist aesthetic of combined—might be fairly said to have emerged in the ’70s their tradition—even as they encouraged their followers to or ’80s. FitzGerald, following the conventional wisdom of cling ever more fiercely to the corporate economics that had American political history, calls it a “reintroduction.” And once been more of a concern of the men who paid for revivals yet the very evidence of her book, as well as much recent than for the men and women who attended them. scholarship, suggests that the “Christian Right” was more of What did change with the rise of the Christian Right was a revolution in branding, coinciding with regional realign- its emphasis on the politics of the body. Not so much actual ments of the Democratic and Republican parties, than it bodies as imagined ones: particularly those destroyed by what was, as FitzGerald puts it, an “eruption.” Evangelicalism had some evangelicals came to call the “holocaust” of abortion. been engaged in conservative political action since the last Towards the end of The Evangelicals, FitzGerald pays special major rebranding in 1942, which emerged from the embrace attention to the case of Terri Schiavo, whose brain-dead body of the term “evangelicalism” over “fundamentalism.” Still, became a cause célèbre for evangelicals in the 2000s. The why it’s here that The Evangelicals is at its strongest and most of this turn toward the body—beyond the past interventions of detailed, relying on the excellent reporting that FitzGerald fundamentalist intellectuals like Francis Schaeffer and Chuck

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1954: The best-known evangelist of the twentieth century, Billy Graham forged coalitions between urban and rural, conservatives and moderates.

Colson—remains an important question in evangelical history. with sermons. Millions voted for Trump because, like Mike FitzGerald would certainly be excused for failing to come to any Pompeo, Trump’s pick to head the CIA, they see Islam not strong conclusions. But she explores neither the significance of as a world religion but as America’s enemy number one—a Schiavo’s fate in the lives of believers, nor the ways in which, threat “not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq,” as for evangelical leaders, it was as much a stylistic change as Pompeo has said, “but in places like Coldwater, Kansas, and a substantive one, a substitution of one jeremiad of cultural small towns throughout America.” Evangelicals also voted collapse for another. for Trump because of what religion scholar Jason Bivins calls Before its current obsession with the body, as FitzGerald the “politics of horror in conservative evangelicalism”—a observes, evangelicalism expressed itself politically through theological strain that predisposed them to support a can- extreme and often paranoid anti-communism. My favorite didate who could portray the current low ebb in the national example is the 1958 horror filmThe Blob, which told of a crime rate as nothing short of “American carnage.” Others carnivorous mass of red Jello. Conceived at the Presidential gravitated to Trump because, after half a century of the Prayer Breakfast in 1957 by Shorty Yeaworth, an evangelical prosperity gospel, they saw his gold-crusted campaign as filmmaker, the movie was widely viewed as either pure kitsch evidence of God’s blessing. or an anti-communist metaphor free of religious overtones. Such is the complexity of evangelicalism in the pews—a American evangelicalism before the 1980s was no less political spiritual tradition deeply intertwined with American ambitions in its theology; its theology just happened to align with the and American fears. If FitzGerald misses the deeper historical anti-communist beliefs of the secular sphere. undercurrents of evangelicalism, it is in no small part because Today, the political expression of evangelicalism seems the leaders she focuses on—the white men in the pulpit—are strongest in its opposition to Islam. In this sense, it may be equally blind to the lives and beliefs of those who worship in aligning, once again, with widely held secular anxieties. their churches. The preachers of religious conservatism would During last year’s campaign, evangelical elites confidently be wise to remember their own sermons. We are, as evangel- assured FitzGerald and other journalists that evangelicals ical leaders are fond of observing, a revival nation. Which is would not back Trump, even as the rank and file roared its another way of saying that in America no politics—or maybe

CHARLES PAYNE/NY DAILY NEWS/GETTY NEWS/GETTY DAILY PAYNE/NY CHARLES support for him at his huge rallies, many of which opened just no theology—ever truly dies. a

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TV forgotten in her bid for the presidency remember the promises she had made to them and then reneged on. The election of a brand-new—prettier! younger! allegedly Hispanic!—woman in her place amounted to a communal backstabbing, with Selina in the role of Caesar. To add insult to injury, Selina’s bid to free Tibet, meant to be her October surprise, came to fruition minutes into Laura Montez’s inauguration. So now, at the start of season six, Selina has also had to watch her successor undeservedly claim the Nobel Peace Prize that Selina hoped to claim (undeservedly) for herself. This final blow, however, is about as close as the new sea- son comes to portraying the workings of the democratic pro- cess. Instead of following the victor back into the chaos of the White House, Veep sticks with Selina in her loss. Facing the end of her political career, she hates Washington, hates Amer- ica, and hates D.C. insiders maybe slightly more than she hates “regular Americans,” whatever they are. Wrenched out of a world that, despite her misery in it, was still the only world she really ­understood—the only game she knew the rules to, even if it was one she could never win—Selina doesn’t know how to function as a regular person, greeting her ex-­husband (who is also her current lover) as if he’s an anonymous ­caucus-­goer. (“Well, I know you!” she chirps when she sees him on the street.) Selina is figuring out how to be human, and she doesn’t like it much. Watching that struggle—and the struggle of those around her not only to find their own footing in this brave new Out of Office world, but to aid her journey in whatever ways they can—is A new season of Veep tackles the the most captivating part of the new season of Veep, just as Selina Meyer’s troubled relationship with her own humanity shock of losing the White House. has always been the most surprising and revealing aspect of the show. It is the story that many of the post-election photo- BY SARAH MARSHALL graphs of Hillary Clinton walking in the woods of Chappaqua tried to piece together—the picture of a life long shaped around politics, suddenly absent its animating force.

A YEAR AGO, the idea of an election culminating in a presi- TAKING SELINA OUT of the White House is a wise move on dency that no one saw coming seemed, to me, like pretty good showrunner David Mandel’s part, though perhaps as disap- television, but also a story that had little to do with American pointing to some viewers as it is to Selina herself. When Veep democracy as we knew it. Veep’s fifth season hinged on a series premiered in 2012, critics hailed it as a mordant satire that of unprecedented reversals, beginning when President Selina was, if anything, just a bit too broad and nihilistic to adequately Meyer’s bid for reelection ended in a tie in the Electoral College. reflect the complexity of American politics. Along with shows That triggered a House vote between the two candidates—a like House of Cards, its appeal lay in identifying the Washing- process that also resulted in a tie and ultimately forced Selina ton archetypes of our time, however crudely sketched. Veep, (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to cede the Oval Office to Laura Montez Carina Chocano wrote in The New York Times, captured “our (Andrea Savage), her opponent’s running mate. In its need to post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, 24-hour tabloid news keep pushing its characters into one unpredictable situation and internet-haterade dystopia.” after another, it seemed at the time, Veep had depicted an al- Like its creator Armando Iannucci’s previous comedies The ternate version of the 2016 election that was far too outlandish Thick of It and In the Loop, Veep painted a grim world where for reality ever to keep up with. no one ever accomplished anything, where all power was What a difference an election makes. By November, the illusory, where every promise of progress was used cynically emotions we saw in Veep’s fifth season looked a lot like the real to manipulate voters or (worse) was rendered impossible to outrage that Hillary Clinton’s supporters felt at her defeat. As execute by a hopeless political system. “We all know the White Selina’s fate hung in the balance, she was forced to watch every senator and staffer she had intimidated, manipulated, and then ILLUSTRATION BY JOAN WONG

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House would work so much better if there wasn’t a president,” chance to play—either in prime time, or in the ongoing 24-­ hour Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn), the White House chief of staff, reality series we know as the presidency—and Veep is a reminder wearily reminds Selina in season two. “But there is, so we that women don’t need equal power to be equally corrupted. work around that.” Most gratifying of all is what Julia Louis-Dreyfus does with While this sensibility proved a rich seam for satire in the the material. Selina’s finely-honed political persona, the shards Obama years, White House politics as usual have now yielded of which painfully work their way even into the moments when to something altogether more chaotic. With the real-world she is actually trying to be genuine, is a performance within a targets of Veep’s first five seasons ushered off the stage, the performance—one that, by now, viewers probably understand show reckons with the disappointed personal ambitions of better than Selina herself does. That’s partly because Tony those who surrounded Meyer. Her staffers are all dramatically Hale’s performance as Gary, Selina’s emotional punching worse off than they were when we saw them last, forced to bag, is no less stunning than Dreyfus’s. His, by necessity, is a weather the kind of disorder and humiliation that generates quieter role; as in pairs figure skating, he’s the stem that holds the most riveting character drama. Amy (Anna Chlumsky) is the flower. Selina projects her persona so relentlessly that her managing a gubernatorial campaign for her Nevadan fiancé, interior life sometimes seems like a void, but Gary has the op- for whom she exhibits almost as much open contempt as she posite problem: After years of delivering his most meaningful does for his constituents; Dan (Reid Scott) is co-hosting a communications in a manner inaudible to anyone but Selina CBS morning show, limited to terrorizing his rivals through (“Wife, not his daughter! Wife not daughter!” he croons in puff pieces instead of attack ads; Ben is hired, then quickly her ear as she greets a party guest in a first-season episode), ousted, by the millennials at Uber. But there is good news for Gary struggles to speak in a way the rest of the world can hear. the Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons) fans out there: Jonah, who Hale communicates his character in large part through a began the series as a powerless underling, is now a freshman masterful array of inarticulate sounds. His repertoire includes congressman—the sole political survivor of the Meyer era. the groan of half-concealed disgust, elicited when he’s shocked In the year since she left office, Selina herself has spent by Selina’s vulgarity; the grunt of repressed nay-saying; the some time at the spa (a Meyerism for a psychiatric facility), whinny of apprehension, which Selina seems to register almost launched an obligatory foundation, and started work on her subconsciously when she’s about to embark on a disastrous memoir. Only her body man, Gary (Tony Hale), and former Ryan staffer Richard Splett (Sam Richardson) remain by her side—the two Fools left to care for their exiled Lear. They do Veep has always been about the their best, which doesn’t count for much, because all Selina human anxieties and desires really wants is to be president again. Before the season premiere is over, she announces her plans for another run, then scraps that are the smallest unit of any them just as quickly. One thing seems certain as we embark political system. on Veep’s sixth season: Selina Meyer will remain, at least for now, a private citizen. Which leaves us to confront what is, by now, the only rea- son for watching the show: not to spy on the imagined (and authentically filthy) inner workings of our nation’s capital, but track while speaking to someone, and occasionally uses to her to follow the characters and relationships we already know advantage; and the mortified laugh of theatrical indignation, so well. In this shift, Veep reminds us that it has always been always on Selina’s behalf, but called off in a split second if about the human fears and anxieties and desires that are the Selina doesn’t require his outrage after all. smallest but most recognizable unit of any political system. It’s in these relationships that Veep’s new season offers the Relieved of its original, insidery focus, Veep feels not like it defeated some small redemption. Maybe Jonah will get a heart, has drifted away from its center, but as though it has stripped maybe Mike will get a brain, maybe Gary will grow in courage, away everything but its core. and maybe Selina will do something more than simply returning to her electoral roots in Kansas, as she did in a particularly DURING VEEP ’S RUN, we’ve been given the tools to understand arresting moment last season. In that episode, Selina wandered Selina as a power-hungry, capricious, and ultimately sympa- out of the Oval Office and into the path of a White House tour, thetic character—in no small part due to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s soaking up the opportunity to be ­surrounded by people who nuanced portrayal. Dreyfus may have taken home five Emmys adore her—a vivid reminder that a persona developed over for her work in what the awards define as a comedy series, many years can still mean something to voters. but her performance evokes the darkness at the heart of all “I love you!” a Kansan woman tells Selina, and the tour group dramatic tales of the deaths of kings: laying claim to all the applauds, and Selina drinks it in, looking at her people—are power you can dream of; discovering that it isn’t enough to these the American people?—with a combination of gratitude make you whole; and then, even more painfully, losing it. This and despair. Because after decades of training herself to con- kind of role is, simply put, not one that women often have the nect with the public, she knows this is as good as it gets. a

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BOOKS itself—sunny, windy, huge, empty, full of waves and algae and temperature gradients and fish—and the technologies that will spin those assets into city-state gold. The seasteading movement has already garnered consider- able backing for its unlikely-sounding vision. When Friedman launched the Seasteading Institute in 2008, the organization received early funding from libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel. Not all seasteads are marvels of design, like Fuller’s plans for Tokyo Bay; they can be anything from a modified cruise ship to an abandoned oil rig. The first floating city, in fact, may soon become a reality: In January, the Seasteading Institute signed Floatopia an agreement with French Polynesia to begin work on a floating Can libertarians escape government island project that will ultimately have its own “special govern- ing framework” and “innovative special economic zone.” by building city-states on the seas? Independence—political and financial—is a central goal of seasteading. The movement doesn’t just strive to utilize the BY RACHEL RIEDERER empty expanse of the ocean for human habitat—it seeks to create a space for new kinds of societies to spring up. And while the promise of technology is at the heart of their vision of a better life, seasteaders also argue that government would IN 1968, THE inventor and environmentalist R. Buckmin- work better on the high seas—that the ocean, like all frontiers, ster Fuller wrote an essay in Playboy envisioning the city would foster a new and unexpected form of politics. of the future. The new metropolis would consist of a giant ­tetrahedron—a pyramid made of equilateral triangles—a shape ACCORDING TO THE authors of Seasteading, the movement that Fuller, the popularizer of the geodesic dome, admired for began when Friedman, an engineer at Google, concluded that its stability and symmetry. Each edge of the pyramid would land itself was getting in the way of his father and grandpar- be two miles long; each face would accommodate dozens ents’ vision for the world. His father is David Friedman, an of detachable housing units, with sky-facing windows and economist and theorist who advocates anarcho-capitalism; his ­terraces. Inside the pyramid, in the vast space formed by its grandparents were the economists Rose and Milton Friedman, base, a public garden would be illuminated by shafts of sun- whose 1980 best-seller Free to Choose provided the intellectual light from openings on the pyramid’s sides. A funicular would underpinning for the New Right’s case that free markets and deliver residents up and down the giant structure. And the personal choice would ease society’s woes. “The Friedmans whole thing would float on the open ocean. proposed that humanity rethink society from the ground up,” “The depth of its foundation would go below the turbulent write Quirk and Friedman fils. “Unfortunately, all ground was level of the seas,” wrote Fuller, “so that it would be, in effect, a claimed by existing governments.” floating triangular atoll.” Commissioned to design a pyramidal Quirk and Friedman spend a lot of time demonstrating that city to float in Tokyo Bay, Fuller envisioned spacious and sunlit the sea is a viable alternative to land, detailing cool technologies living quarters, but also radical efficiency: The floating struc- and sketching out the abundance they could provide for the ture would be powered by nuclear reactors, whose excess heat future’s salty, maritime utopias. The authors introduce us to a would desalinate seawater for use by its inhabitants. The project cast of colorful characters, including Neil Sims, a pescatarian offered freedom from life on dry land, the chance to build an aquaculture expert who makes a disdainful face every time he ideal society out of nowhere. Technology, Fuller believed, was mentions “land animals.” Sims walks readers breezily through the only path toward a better life: “If humanity succeeds,” he the technical details of his plan for open-water fish farms. “I wrote, “its success will have been initiated by inventions and mean, really, from a humanitarian, empathetic perspective,” not by the debilitating, often lethal biases of politics.” Sims says, “I want to eat fish that have actually swum in the The project wasn’t to be: When Fuller’s financial backer died ocean, that have tasted raw saltwater, rather than something in 1969, the plans were dropped. Yet they weren’t entirely lost. that’s just kept in a feedlot.” So Sims invented a system of Today a new set of futurists is envisioning the next iteration of submerged fish pens, geodesic spheres that bob just below the floating city. They call their movement “seasteading”—and, the surface of the water; as the fish inside swim around, their as Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman outline in their new book of cages swim along with them. the same name, Fuller’s heirs believe their ocean utopias will Another visionary, Patrick Takahashi, introduces a technol- allow humanity to “feed the hungry, enrich the poor, cure the ogy that straddles the border of quirky and genius: harnessing sick, restore the environment, power civilization sustainably, the resources of the deepest parts of the ocean to create sea- and live in peace.” These lofty goals will be made possible, steads that are completely self-sustaining. While the ocean they reason, by the particular characteristics of the ocean floor can be dark and cold, it abounds in organic nutrients

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“Artisanopolis,” a winning entry in the Seasteading Institute’s contest to design a floating city, where residents could try out new forms of self-rule.

that fall from the life-filled shallows above. “The oceans are own customers.” You can see the conclusion on the horizon mostly a barren desert overlying a superabundance of fer- line, churning toward the shore: The governance industry is tilizer that the sunlight never reaches,” Quirk and Friedman ripe for disruption. explain. Takahashi proposes pumping this fertile material up Here on land, the seasteaders propose, ideas about how to to the surface, where seasteaders can use it to grow their own govern societies have stagnated. Politics is too entrenched; food. In a similar bid for independence, he envisions supply- societal change comes slowly, if at all. “Our terrestrially trained ing power to floating cities through a process called Ocean minds are blind to the terrifying potential for tyranny in the Thermal Energy Conversion, which uses the temperature power to claim land—fixed, immobile, where people have no difference between warm surface waters and cold deep waters choice but to live,” write the authors. Seasteads would upset to generate electricity. “Someday, perhaps,” Takahashi wrote this dynamic, since each floating city would be small enough in a 2011 paper, “a thousand otec-powered Blue Revolution and modular enough that individuals could come and go freely, nations could well be plying our oceans, providing clean shopping for governments and social structures. If residents and sustainable resources for humanity in harmony with the didn’t like one utopia, they could simply sail off to a new one. ocean environment.” There’s something seductive about this idea. It’s the in- verse of Francis Fukuyama’s proposition, in his 1992 book The BUT SEASTEADING IS about more than the development and End of History and the Last Man, that global liberal democracy dissemination of new technologies. Quirk and Friedman’s book was the end point of politics and the world would seethe no also serves as a manifesto for the movement. The projects they more—a notion at once comforting and deflating. The Sea- describe, and those the Seasteading Institute currently has in steaders imagine the opposite: an endless flowering of new the works, are suffused with a Silicon Valley ethos, one that power structures. At a TEDx talk in 2012, Friedman likened values innovation, novelty, efficiency, and independence over the seasteading movement to the Cambrian Explosion—a the protections traditionally provided by governments and moment in evolutionary history when the globs and mollusks employers. “Think of seasteads as the hardware … for creating of the primordial soup gave way to a diverse array of complex new societies,” the authors advise. They treat government as organisms. “Not only humans, but human societies evolve,” little more than a failed business model: “When viewed as an Friedman asserted. “We need new places to try new rules.” industry, governance is the largest in the world.” It’s also in- The authors don’t say which new rules, exactly, they hope

COURTESY OF SEASTEADING INSTITUTE SEASTEADING OF COURTESY efficient. Worse yet, “some of the poorest performers kill their to try, and the Seasteading Institute makes clear that it will not

JUNE 2017 | 59 REVIEW be operating the cities itself. The particulars of each seastead’s might still act free from any government restriction or reg- political system should be determined by its inhabitants—or ulation. “Unlike the world of politics, in the world of tech- an oligarch, if that’s the way it turns out. “Any set of rules nology the choices of individuals may still be paramount,” he is OK,” the organization’s FAQ page emphasizes, “as long as opined in his essay. “The fate of our world may depend on the residents consent to it voluntarily and can leave whenever the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the ma- they choose.” chinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.” Quirk and Friedman insist that their movement is apo- This is more or less what Quirk and Friedman have in mind litical: “Seasteading is less an ideology than a technology,” with their vision of life at sea. “We don’t trust people with they claim. But the ability to choose among societies at sea power,” they write. “We trust them with freedom.” is itself political, the expression of a belief that free mar- In 2011, Thiel funded Blueseed, which was to be a floating kets are the ultimate guarantee of happiness. What’s more, tech incubator based in international waters off the coast of the pitfalls of the free market seem even more dire when the Northern California, a short ferry ride from Silicon Valley. The commodity being produced is governance itself: In a world idea was to provide a base of operations for entrepreneurs who where ­citizen-consumers can move between societies as wanted to bypass the hassle of U.S. immigration laws—“an they choose, the poorest and most vulnerable could easily immigration hack,” as Atossa Abrahamian put it in a Quartz be priced out and left adrift. As with so many consumption op-ed. The idea eventually fizzled out when Blueseed was un- choices on the free market, the “choice” is only available to able to raise enough money to get its business hub for cruise those with means, while those with limited purchasing power ships off the ground. The company’s final missive, in January are constrained and even coerced. 2015, was a retweet: “When 99% of people doubt your idea, This might sound silly: Seasteading, of course, would be an you’re either gravely wrong or about to make history.” It closed, option, an add-on to land-based societies, and those who don’t touchingly, with “#inspiration” and “#start-up.” want to go could simply stay on the shore. But if seasteading is For all its failures, Blueseed did achieve one thing: It exem- also a grand thought experiment about decentralizing power plified the impracticalities and contradictions of the seasteading and increasing mobility, it has to consider how those dynamics movement’s anti-political vision. To dream up a cruise ship work for everyone. And that, by definition, means the nature business hub that parks just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and of the endeavor is inherently political. sails under a Bahamanian flag, allowing for easy international movement free of immigration laws, is both truly innovative IT IS NOT hard to see why this free-market vision appealed to and deeply political. It’s political to value open borders and libertarian backers like Thiel. Libertarianism prizes freedom internationalism, and to strive to create a center for innovation and autonomy, expressing skepticism of taxes, regulations, and that would benefit from a particular system of governance. any other version of state power that impinges on individual The same can be said of the whole seasteading project. A sovereignty. In 2009, with the world reeling from the subprime nation where citizens can come and go freely, detaching their mortgage crisis that ballooned into a global banking meltdown, modular floating living quarters and sailing off to a better Thiel wrote that the crisis had been caused by “too much debt floating town, untethered by anything but their means and and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against their free will, is not an island without politics—it’s an island all sorts of moral hazards.” The response, he warned, would with a very particular set of politics. I am, for instance, all for be even more government intervention; believers in the free a carbon-negative island that floats over the ocean, clearing market were “screaming into a hurricane.” The essay, “The marine dead zones with its vibrant, submerged kelp forests and Education of a Libertarian,” is also an elegy, lamenting the lack aquaculture structures, producing its own food in towering of “truly free places left in our world.” hydroponic gardens and recycling its desalinated seawater—all Democracy did not strike Thiel as a ideas put forward by Quirk and Friedman. But that’s because path to the freedom he seeks. At the Sea- of my politics. steading Institute’s conference in 2009, Technology can do many things, many of them verging on he spoke about his own intellectual de- the miraculous—but it cannot bypass values, commitments, velopment. Where he once saw political interests, and beliefs. Hearing the language and philosophy argument as a way to solve problems, he of tech disruption applied to government—when so many of now viewed it as a problem in itself. It is the amazing technological advances that have fueled recent not only ineffective at making the world disruptions have done so at the expense of labor rights and freer, it’s also unpleasant: All the fighting individual privacy—we landlubbers are right to be wary. Gov- over political ideals reminded him of ernment is not simply an albatross around the neck of otherwise “trench warfare.” As he had put it in his free individuals. When it works, it protects the vulnerable and SEASTEADING essay, he wished to “escape, not via pol- guards the commons—essential tasks at which the free market BY JOE QUIRK WITH PATRI FRIEDMAN itics, but beyond it.” so often fails. Ocean dwellers will also need those protections. FREE PRESS, For Thiel, seasteading represented one Much as we might like to, we can’t escape the political, even 384pp., $27.00 of the few arenas in which ­individuals by walking into the sea. a

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BOOKS and actually registered correction. The moment wasn’t simply ­resonant—it generated a host of new ways to describe sexism. The term “mansplaining”—a man talking down to a woman about a subject she knows as well as or better than he does—made its first known appearance on a LiveJournal blog one month after Solnit published her piece, and has passed into common use, along with “manspreading”—sitting with knees wide apart on a crowded subway—and other under-examined “man-” behaviors. Despite her canny take on gender dynamics, Solnit did not exactly set out to become a prominent feminist figure. The author of 20 books and hundreds of essays, she didn’t make her name from years of blogging or op-eds on “women’s issues,” which is partly why her writing retains a mercifully non-pundit- like quality. One year she releases a collection of environmen- talist essays and the next, a biography of a nineteenth-century photographer. Aside from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it’s difficult to think of a living writer who is quite so adored for her advocacy of women’s rights without having fashioned an entire career around it. Solnit was initially “ambivalent” about the coinage “mansplaining,” she told The Guardian, because she worried “about typecasting men with the term.” It was only after a female student convinced her “how much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience every wom- an has but we didn’t have language for” that she embraced it. The Mother of All Questions, Solnit’s newest collection of essays, reads like a second offering to the passionate contingent of female readers she never expected to have. This time, the A Woman’s March book’s opening salvo confronts the way childless women are Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant, meandering regularly called upon to justify their state, whatever they have otherwise accomplished. Solnit recalls giving a talk on Virginia path toward feminist polemic. Woolf: During the subsequent question-and-answer session, she’s stunned that the audience focuses not on “the magnificent BY CHARLOTTE SHANE questions” posed by Woolf’s novels, but on a “soporific and pointless detour” into whether Woolf “should have had children.” It’s a question Solnit herself has been asked by journalists more than once during interviews about her books—none of which THE OPENING SCENE of Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain center on the subjects of parenting or conception. Things to Me” is, by now, a familiar one, not only because it’s The piece is resonant, but it lacks the “yes!”-evoking elec- repeated so often whenever Solnit is written about, but because tricity of “Men Explain Things to Me,” perhaps because the it describes a type of encounter that has become, for most opening incident, while irritating, is not quite as ridiculous women, routine. At a party, a bloviating man approaches Solnit as the scenario with the pompous man—and because women, and, upon learning that she just wrote a book about early film too, are guilty of the intrusive interrogations Solnit details. pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, begins to lecture her on a “very As the currency of “mansplaining” suggests, it’s simpler and important Muybridge book.” While ostensibly educating her, so much more satisfying to rail against individual men than it he assumes “that smug look I know so well in a man holding is to challenge systems of sexism and oppression. This is the forth,” she writes, “eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his irony embedded in Solnit’s tremendous success: that a writer so own authority.” The book he’s going on about is Solnit’s own. dedicated to illuminating systemic injustices, whose interests When this fact finally dawns on him, his face goes “ashen.” are so eclectic and wide-ranging, has in some circles become Female readers who endured a lifetime of being similarly synonymous with complaining about a banal male habit. diminished, both in and out of academia, online and in person, in their homes and in their workplaces, greeted “Men Explain SOLNIT WAS BORN in 1961 to a family she identifies both as “far Things to Me,” and Solnit’s essay collection of the same title, Left” and “violent.” She assiduously avoids many specifics, in with a mixture of gratitude and glee. Lots of women have ex- part to protect her three siblings’ privacy, but both her writing tensive knowledge on various topics, but few have written the books to prove it; here, at last, the offending man received ILLUSTRATION BY KIERSTEN ESSENPREIS

JUNE 2017 | 61 REVIEW and her interviews make it clear that her parents’ behavior was abusive. Growing up in California, she was a “scrawny, miserable, impoverished, marginalized, unpopular teenager” who left home with a GED at 17, briefly escaped to Paris, where she was sometimes too poor to eat, came home to graduate from San Francisco State University, then earned a master’s in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. She found work as an editor and art critic; her first book, now out of print, profiled six Californian visual artists of the 1950s. Growing up, Solnit’s “feminism waxed and waned,” she wrote in 2014. Her mother’s Ms. magazine subscription sparked her interest, and as a teen she felt anger at being harassed on the street. But her early works established landscape and wandering as her major themes. With her second book, Savage Dreams, she explored the history of Yosemite National Park, the Nevada Test Site, and America’s ongoing war on indigenous people. Her third book detailed her travels through Ireland, tracing the country’s “tides of invasion, colonization, emigra- tion, nomadism, and tourism.” A fourth, Wanderlust, recounted the “history of walking,” from the moment early man learned to stand on two feet, through the Romantics, to urban walkers like Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. The prose is slow and contemplative, New York City, 2009: Solnit’s writing inspired the term “mansplaining.” as if to conjure a steady, ambling pace. “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned,” moments—a drug experience (“the metallic taste of poppies in Solnit writes, “as though they were three characters finally in various states of refinement”), a dream about her childhood conversation together.” bedroom—but also with polymathic curiosity: incidents in the lives of historical figures such as Yves Klein, a sketch of the The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, tortoise’s tenuous survival. Critics termed her “rambling” and and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the “meandering,” but usually with approval: For her ability to draw passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd connections between far-flung subjects, The Guardian praised consonance between internal and external passage, one that her as “an intellectual nomad.” She cast her 2013 book The suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and Faraway Nearby as an “anti-memoir,” an investigation of sto- that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often rytelling and narrative-making. Like Maggie Nelson—another seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, adamant non-memoirist whose idiosyncratic personal writing as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so is similarly worshiped by young women—Solnit gains her mo- one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking mentum from erudition rather than confession. made concrete—for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, “We learn from therapy to tell stories in a way that’s lonely: but those of the feet can. Look what happened to me,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2013. “But I think stories are inherently empathetic, that Solnit’s early books garnered comparisons not with the we give ourselves these things, and see each other through ­consciousness-raising of Betty Friedan or the literary acumen of them.” She often takes on the persona of an engaged citizen: Kate Millett, but with Thoreau, the connoisseur of the American She wrote Hope in the Dark during George W. Bush’s first term wilderness, and Benjamin, the theorist of urban wandering. At to rally radicals who felt nothing they did made an impact on the same time, her observations were imbued with an activist an increasingly belligerent administration. In “moments of spirit formed specifically in opposition to the corporatiza- rupture,” she affirmed in a TomDispatch post, “people find tion and homogenization of the late twentieth century: Her themselves members of a ‘we’ that did not until then exist…. depiction of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in New possibilities suddenly emerge.” Collective actions matter, Seattle, one reviewer complained, was too kind: “Solnit’s role even if they do not achieve their immediate goals. “Public life model, the writer and activist Henry David Thoreau, insisted enlarges you,” Solnit has said. It “gives you purpose and context, on nonviolent civil disobedience and would never have made saves you from drowning in the purely personal.” an exception for throwing a rock through a window.” It’s this tendency to look outward and analyze the structures With A Field Guide to Getting Lost, in 2005, Solnit experi- of society that has made Solnit’s feminist writing particu- mented with the textures of prose, in discursive, autobiograph- larly potent. A lack of civic-mindedness has lately troubled

ical writing. The collection of essays is studded with personal mainstream feminism, with its emphasis on leaning in to seek HERRINGTON JIM

62 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW individual gain and validation. “Men Explain Things to Me” downfall of Bill Cosby’s reputation. “Violence against women does the opposite: The point of the piece is not to convey how is often against our voices and our stories,” Solnit writes. “It is insulted Solnit personally felt, but to show that men are en- a refusal of our voices, and of what a voice means: the right to couraged and empowered to talk down to women by a society self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent, that refuses the value of women’s knowledge, experience, and to live and participate, to interpret or narrate.” testimony. It encourages us to think in big categories. “Cred- There is, however, a playful hopefulness that occasionally ibility is a basic survival tool,” Solnit writes. “Violence is one surfaces throughout the book. Solnit seems to have spent the way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, past few years immersed in the feminist internet and emerged to assert your right to control over their right to exist.” Men invigorated by what she found there: women sharing their need not be accurate or wise in order to outweigh a woman’s histories of assault on social media, writing blog posts shaming perspective; they need only be men. rapists, and mocking the CDC’s sexist guidelines for alcohol consumption. She sees Aziz Ansari’s embrace of the “feminist” THE MOTHER OF ALL QUESTIONS unites some of Solnit’s sharp- label, part of the wider phenomenon of vocal male feminism, as est feminist polemics with her decades-long preoccupation with a sign of how far we’ve come. These new fixtures in the land- crafting narrative. The essays here, all but two of which were scape of public debate speak, to her, of progress too established previously published, each deal with the subject of women in and widespread to be beaten back. Through viral hashtags like the public sphere. This is how “Escape from the Five-­Million- #YesAllWomen, the allyship of celebrity men, and women’s Year-Old Suburb,” a thoroughly enjoyable trouncing of misog- unwillingness to shut up about rape, the female condition, ynist tropes in the worst evolutionary biology (e.g., cavemen she proposes, is finally improving. Women will never again hunted and provided all food while women stayed home and stop telling their stories. provided all child care), appears alongside “Giantess,” her ode In some cases, Solnit is too quick to declare victories and to an unexpectedly progressive film from 1956. The book is overstates them in her enthusiasm. But after so many years divided into two sections: “Silence is Broken” and “Breaking spent “waiting for” this moment—as she puts it in the essay the Story.” The first offers up what Solnit sees as evidence of “An Insurrectionary Year”—her relief, however premature, is major social shifts regarding women’s place in the world, while understandable. It took decades for the teenager distressed by the second points to specific cultural artifacts that exemplify either sexist or feminist sentiments. Her essay “A Short History of Silence” is her broadest con- An adamant non-memoirist, tribution to feminist theory yet, sketching out a condensed Solnit gains her momentum from history of the mainstream movement for women’s rights from the first wave onward, alternately calling upon familiar flash erudition rather than confession. points (the assault of Kitty Genovese) and largely forgotten ones (a 1982 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Louisiana law allowing a husband to dispose of jointly owned property without informing or obtaining consent from his wife). The theme she weaves through these events is silence and suppression, and she arrives once again at the importance of “stories”: who, public indifference to rampant street harassment to wake up socially speaking, says what, and what that act of saying means. in a world of the international anti-harassment campaign In The Mother of All Questions, as in Hollaback, and unstoppable feminist hashtags. If younger Men Explain Things to Me, Solnit exam- women find less in Mother’s exuberance than they did in Men’s ines how violence deprives women of the bleakness, it’s because the gulf between here and where we chance to speak, to define themselves. She were never looks as wide as the gap between here and where frequently takes as her subjects domestic we hope to arrive. abuse, the murder of pregnant women by The Mother of All Questions is best understood as Hope in the their current or former partners, and rape Dark retooled for young feminists. Where Hope spoke to activ- in the military and on campus. In Men, ists at their most defeated, Mother appears in the first months she viewed Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s of Trump’s presidency, armed with purpose and reason. “It’s sexual-assault scandal as an episode in always too soon to go home,” Solnit counseled in Hope. “The France’s fraught and unequal relationship task of calling things by their true names,” she now writes,

THE MOTHER OF ALL with the people of the countries it colo- “of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing QUESTIONS: FURTHER REPORTS FROM THE nized. She also used the 2012 gang rape how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have FEMINIST REVOLUTION and murder of Jyoti Singh in New Delhi been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit BY REBECCA SOLNIT to explore the appalling regularity of rape together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have Haymarket Books, 192pp., $14.95 around the world. Mother touches upon been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of the Isla Vista murders in 2014, and the our tasks.” And so the storytelling continues. a

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BOOKS the untreated tragedies of the present. Mary Otto’s heartrending and incisive book, Teeth, builds on her Washington Post story on Deamonte Driver, a black twelve-year-old from Maryland who “died of a toothache” in 2007. His life could have been saved, she wrote, if his family had insurance, or if they had not been stripped of Medicaid for a time when they were homeless, or if Maryland’s underfunded Medicaid program had provided ad- equate access to dentists. “By the time Deamonte’s own aching tooth got any attention,” Otto reported, “the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain.” Surgeries and no doubt much suffering followed, but it was too late. Deamonte Driver’s death was the direct result of a system of commoditized dental care. Some 114 million people lack any sort of dental coverage in the United States, and about half of children on Medicaid did not receive a single dental service in 2012. We could implement a system of universal coverage that would make treatment available on the basis of health needs, not means. But we have not. As Otto traces the history of modern dentistry, from eighteenth-century surgical experiments to the founding of the first American school of dentistry in 1840, she explains how the United States instead developed a “carefully guarded, largely private system,” one that is “enormously difficult to reach for those without mobility or money.” The state of our teeth, she argues, reveals—and reinforces—deep inequalities in society.

THE STORY OF our privatized dental system runs parallel to the The Teeth Gap more familiar story of America’s health care system. Over Tracing the devastating effects of the past century or so, right-wing political forces have again and again impeded efforts to create some sort of national dental inequality in America. health insurance system. In the early postwar era, when many countries in Europe were creating or expanding systems BY ADAM GAFFNEY of national health care, a health insurance plan proposed by President Truman was famously sunk by a vitriolic cam- paign of red-b­ aiting, spearheaded by the American Medical ­Association—a historical episode Monte M. Poen relates in his THAT OUR TEETH are in our heads seems natural, though the book Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby. “Would so- location is something of a liability. The trouble starts with cialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of Amer- tooth decay, which permits the usually harmless bacteria in ican life?” an AMA pamphlet asked in the late 1940s. “Lenin our mouths to enter the spongy, supportive core of the tooth thought so,” it groundlessly answered. (the “pulp”). Something untoward can then unfold. The germs The American Dental Association opposed dental care reform proliferate, white blood cells amass, pus accumulates, and a with equal vigor. Otto quotes ADA leaders who went to Wash- dental abscess is born. Hence the liability: It’s not good to have ington to testify against the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill before all this happening so close to one’s brain. the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1946: “Because An untreated dental abscess can invade the tissues of the of the limited number of dentists,” they argued, “it is impossi- head and chest. It can infect and clot the veins of the neck, ble to carry out any program that promises complete dental and spread between the skull’s many sinuses. If it reaches the care to both children and adults.” What these medical profes- brain, it can result in a brain abscess or meningitis. This is now sionals lacked in compassion, they at least balanced with frank- a rare event, but it wasn’t always. In the seventeenth century, ness: They were effectively admitting that much of the nation “ ‘teeth’ were continually listed as the fifth or sixth leading should be allowed to have their teeth rot. At the same time, the cause of death,” a 1999 article in the Journal of the History of ADA and other dentists’ groups, then and now, have fervently Dentistry asserts. Two hundred years ago, the author notes, opposed the expanded use of auxiliary dental pr­ ofessionals— tooth pain was a killer. mainly dental hygienists—to shore up the gap in care. But here’s an unfortunate rule in medical history, at least in

the United States: The untreatable conditions of the past become PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TRENT MONK MARY EVANS/THE IMAGE WORKS

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The victims of the profession’s obstruction are exactly who in the British Medical Journal, titled “Austin Powers Bites Back,” you would expect: the poor and—disproportionately—racial found that England enjoyed dental health that was, overall, as minorities. In her impressively wide-ranging reporting, Otto good as America’s. Americans actually had more missing teeth describes firsthand the effects of dental deprivation on impov- than the English, but scored somewhat better on an oral health erished indigenous communities in Alaska and impoverished survey. At the same time, the study noted that “there are con- white ones in Appalachia. She visits the town of Jonesville in sistently wider educational and income-related oral health in- Virginia, a municipality so neglected that a nonprofit known equalities in the United States compared with England.” In short, for delivering medical care to remote communities in the tooth problems in America disproportionately affect the poor. developing world decided it needed humanitarian assistance. While socialized dental care may seem a long way off in The whole town, it seems, shows up to the new clinic to our political moment, Otto’s book sympathetically explores a have teeth yanked out. Otto speaks to a disabled miner who range of ideas for improving the current system. She describes lost his dental insurance when he was no longer able to work. efforts to expand the use of auxiliary dental professionals in He seems to be on the verge of losing a leg, and only recently neglected areas of the country, sending dental hygienists or managed to pay off $1,500 in dental debt for three tooth ex- “dental health aide therapists” to do tooth cleanings and other tractions. Now he shows up to have a fourth tooth pulled. “I’m routine sorts of dental work. She notes how dentists could a good person,” he tells Otto, “but I sure have been tested.” take a more preventive—and less surgical—approach. And she He is in better shape, however, than one woman Otto meets waiting in line before sunrise outside a clinic in Maryland. She is looking to have no less than eleven teeth pulled. The Toothlessness spells joblessness, woman, Otto says, has been slitting her own infected gums which means lack of access to to “relieve the excruciating pressure.” And while economic inequality—whether through poor dental care, which in turn leads to diet or lack of access to dental services—can result in dental more suffering. inequality, bad teeth also reinforce economic disadvantage. Work in heavy industry may, for instance, require a strong hand, but the service worker of today increasingly needs a sweet smile. Service workers are expected to perform what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has termed “emotional details attempts to expand access to dental services for those labor” in their jobs, transmitting happiness to the consumer—a using Medicaid. task that demands a degree of oral health. At a time when Although there is a lot of sense in such suggestions, they service jobs are the predominant working-class occupation, would not completely alleviate the current crisis. No doubt missing teeth make it harder to get hired. Toothlessness spells non-dentist dental professionals could be more widely em- joblessness, which means lack of access to dental care, which ployed, but a system in which the well-off see dentists and in turn leads to more suffering. the poor see dental professionals with lower levels of train- ing would be fundamentally inequitable. And no amount of CAN DENTISTRY BE decommodified? Of course it can. To prevention—not even the reduction of socioeconomic in- some extent or another, it already has been in other coun- equality itself—would eliminate the need for dental care, any tries. The United Kingdom’s National more than it would eliminate the need for the care of cancer Health Service—implemented in 1948, or heart disease. Another world is possible, as the leftist slogan just as Truman’s national health insur- goes, but that world would still need universal dental coverage. ance plan collapsed—included access to We have, of course, known this for decades. In 1943, Harper’s dental care, which was initially free at profiled a left-wing dentist named Maurice William who wound point of use. When fees for dental care up having a profound impact on the political philosophy of Sun were introduced a few years later, the Yat-sen. Raised by Russian immigrants in Brooklyn, William Labor health minister, Aneurin Bevan, was a fierce socialist from a young age. He had entered law resigned in protest. While America’s pri- school, but his legal studies increasingly seemed inconsistent vate dental industry makes it difficult with his political ideals. One day, he visited his dentist—who, to institute universal care, the option as it happened, was himself a socialist—to have a tooth pulled, remains the only salve for our country’s and a serious conversation about William’s future ensued. TEETH: THE STORY OF BEAUTY, INEQUALITY, dental inequality. “I can’t see any purpose in my going to college, in all my AND THE STRUGGLE Some may counter that universal cov- studies,” William pondered aloud. “What can an honest so- FOR ORAL HEALTH IN AMERICA erage would lower quality. That’s simply cialist do in this world?” BY MARY OTTO not true of NHS dentistry, even despite “Become a dentist, comrade,” his dentist responded. THE NEW PRESS, 304pp., $26.95 the cuts and privatization it has suffered “Under the most perfect system of society there will still be in recent decades. A 2015 study published rotten teeth.” a

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BOOKS David S. Brown, in his biography Paradise Lost, is the latest Fitzgerald admirer to seek a larger national significance in his myth. Brown’s field is American history, not literature (he is the author of the intelligent Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography), and in his view Fitzgerald was a historian, too. The laureate of the Jazz Age was also, he proposes, a prophet of economic and political transformation. Even as Fitzgerald partied with snobs in Princeton eating clubs and got smashed with plutocrats in swanky Manhattan hotels, he stood apart, Brown tells us, and should be seen “ideologically as a man of an Shimmering older, precapitalist Right.” This put him in august intellectual company. Like the declinists Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler, Fitzgerald “doubted whether older pre-Enlightenment notions Visions of art, creativity, paternalism, and worship would survive the What did F. Scott Fitzgerald share onset of what we have since come to call ‘modernity.’ ” With Frederick Jackson Turner, he explored “the meaning of a fron- with the great theorists of his age? tierless America”; with Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen, he “interpreted” the excesses of the boom years; and with BY SAM TANENHAUS John Maynard Keynes, he intuited the collapse of the global economic order. But these mighty guns, once wheeled out, fall more or less silent, and that’s a good thing, because when Brown does deploy THE LEGEND OF F. Scott Fitzgerald has flourished for so long them we get misfires like this: “Only the fact that Fitzgerald that we forget how much of it was the creation of Fitzgerald almost certainly never read Veblen prohibits us from seeing himself, with help from some of the highest cultural priests the novel”—The Great Gatsby—“as a parody of Veblen’s ideas.” of midcentury America. Foremost among them was Edmund Or: “Beard, of course, was a trained historian who visited Wilson, a friend since their Princeton years, who shepherded archives, sampled secondary materials, and appealed to his Fitzgerald’s final, uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon, into profession by putting forth hypotheses backed by evidence and publication in 1941, and then assembled the pieces of The footnotes. Fitzgerald in his own way did much the same. His Crack-Up, which included the classic title essay on Fitzgerald’s archives were any number of bars, newspapers, beaches, and nervous breakdown in the mid-’30s. Its reviewers included cities.” It begins to feel not so much wrong as beside the point. another eminence, a plainly infatuated Lionel Trilling, who In truth, while Fitzgerald read a bit in the major theorists compared early Fitzgerald to the author of The Sorrows of of his time, including the fashionable prophets of doom, he Young Werther, “both the young men so handsome, both win- was “extraordinarily little occupied with the general affairs ning immediate and notorious success, both rather more in- of the world,” as Wilson reported in 1922. His thinking went terested in life than in art, each the spokesman and symbol of chiefly into his craft; he prided himself on being “a worker in his own restless generation.” the arts.” Brown’s depiction of Fitzgerald as stern defender Wilson admired Fitzgerald, and worked to revive his reputa- of a vanished age and grim diagnostician of “a larger cultural tion, which had sunk low at his death in 1940. But even he was illness corrupting the West” encumbers a writer whose power startled to see Fitzgerald, in all his liveliness, humor, and wit, as of enchantment begins in swift movement and lightning ob- well as his ruinous alcoholism, resurrected within a few years servation, irradiated by delicious humor and also the dreamy as “a martyr, a sacrificial victim, a semi-divine personage.” As moonglow of his charming, musical prose. early as 1951, Fitzgerald had assumed “a national or American significance as well as a literary one,” wrote Delmore Schwartz, AND YET BROWN is right in one important way. Fitzgerald really himself an expert in the wages of misspent talent. “He can be did create a kind of history. He did this out of his uncanny feel regarded as a toy, puppet, and victim of the zeitgeist [and] for the excitement of his moment and of how fleeting it was. will certainly be invoked as a witness of how America destroys Being “the historian of his generation and for a long time its its men of genius by giving them a false and impossible idea most famous symbol” made him “in some ways inherently of success.” Neither Wilson nor Schwartz foresaw—but then more interesting than any other [writer] in his generation,” who could have?—how far it would all go: the Scott-and-Zelda Alfred Kazin argued in On Native Grounds. Fitzgerald him- Amazon serial Z: The Beginning of Everything, with a miscast self recognized that he was as much the “typical product” as Christina Ricci clad in a Gorgon’s-head merkin; or the “Great “spokesman” of his time, lit by the same competitive fevers Gatsby Package”—$14,999 for three nights in a hotel suite as so many others: He wanted to make money, be a “big man,” ornamented with a magnum of Champagne and a “personal and get “the top girl”—only he elevated those banal ambitions note” from the hotelier’s daughter—yes, Ivanka Trump. into romance. Better than anyone else, he grasped that America

66 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

MONDADORI PORTFOLIO/GETTY MONDADORI F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925: Alfred Kazin argued that Fitzgerald was “the historian of his generation and for a long time its most famous symbol.”

JUNE 2017 | 67 REVIEW in the post–World War I boom “was going on the greatest, the novel over, say, musical comedy, because, as he told his gaudiest spree in history,” as he wrote with a gold prospector’s daughter, he wanted “to preach at people in some acceptable confidence, “and there was going to be plenty to tell about it.” form.” His excess was bound with guilt and shame, as it is for It is this thrill of news that gives Fitzgerald’s work its special all good American puritans. hush even as it discloses, or seems to, the secret meaning of Hemingway’s pages on Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast, for his time. It hit with the force and authority it did because, as all their cruelty, capture the true source of Fitzgerald’s appeal Brown rightly says, Fitzgerald was a Midwestern moralist, even as both person and writer—in his guileless compulsion for a prude, with “ultra-conventional views on sex, marriage, and intimate, at times embarrassing, disclosure. As soon as they child rearing.” The war between appetite and judgment was a met, Fitzgerald interrogated Hemingway on his marital sex source of tension in his work, as it so often has been for American life and before long poured forth the history of his troubles writers who combine social striving with literary ambition. The with Zelda. The same candor deepens his writing, too, and moral judgment comes, but it is the tender, rueful judgment makes him seem less a romantic fabulist than a spiller of dark, of the morning after, with the strong cold light pouring in and thrilling secrets—his own, in essays like “Early Success” and the empty bottle on the nightstand. “The Crack-Up”—but also other people’s. “He was always on Brown’s biography is best when he simply tells the story, which the outside looking in,” said his first major crush, the debutante he does well once he gets going. With a surer sense than more Ginevra King. This could describe a wide-eyed social climber or gossipy writers, he fits Fitzgerald’s life into the broader American poor relation on the make. But it could also describe a Peeping history of his time and also into its geography. Born in St. Paul, Tom, furtively peering into hidden worlds. Fitzgerald was both. Minnesota, and educated in the East—at a Catholic boarding The innovation in Gatsby comes, of course, in Fitzgerald’s school in New Jersey, and then Princeton—­Fitzgerald spent time narrator, Nick Carraway—an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s in the Deep South (Montgomery, Alabama, where he met and wooed Zelda Sayre) and the Border South (Baltimore, where they lived for a time in the 1930s). Add to these his spendthrift years Fitzgerald is less the heir of Veblen in Manhattan, the long expatriate sojourn in Paris and on the than of Marx, who theorized about French Riviera, and his bleak final days in Holly­wood, and the result is a privileged life but also an expansive one. the fetishizing of commodities. The surprise with Fitzgerald, who died at the age of 44, is how quickly he matured. The same author who drew a repug- nant picture of immigrants (“aliens” with their “exceptionally ugly faces” and their “smells”) in The Beautiful and Damned soon captured, with brilliant precision, the Nordic-race drivel of the upper classes in Gatsby (“it’s all scientific stuff; it’s been Marlow, who establishes a triangulating distance between the proved”) and still later invented a plausible Jewish mogul reader and the story. This allows Fitzgerald to withhold simple modeled on Irving Thalberg. facts of Gatsby’s biography and of his criminal activities, and Like most romantics, Fitzgerald was as much a boat going so drape him in mystery, giving “largeness to what might be with the current as against it, and he was borne as much into small if it were known,” as John Updike once wrote. It also the future as the past. Even his callow early work is true to the correlates with Fitzgerald’s theme. Gatsby’s mysterious empire mood of change. It is filled with the cosmopolitan busy-ness of bootlegging “drugstores” quivers with the same mirage-like of crowded cities and skyscrapers—no falseness as the paper fortunes built on credit in the boom one ever wrote better of Manhattan’s years, and like them is primed for collapse. glamour and its loneliness (see “My Lost Narratively it all works, and satisfies us as readers, because City”)—and the excitements of jazz and Fitzgerald’s withholdings are offset by a larger drama of illic- film, to which he responded with the ex- itness, each disclosure (Jordan Baker’s golf cheating, Gatsby’s uberance of a very young writer growing shadowy partnership with Meyer Wolfsheim, Tom Buchanan’s up in public. In the 1920s, when he was mistress) unfolding in an atmosphere of sneaked glances and both heartthrob and literary man, Fitz- ­peekings-in, of continual eavesdropping, conversations not gerald fascinated his fellow writers as heard but overheard. Carraway, the Midwestern visitor renting much as he did his fans, with his well- a small cottage next door to Gatsby’s colossal “factual imitation cut clothes and chiseled Silent Screen of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy,” is like his author—like profile; his drunken antics in expensive us—the outsider looking in. PARADISE LOST: A hotel suites; plus the rich-folk trappings LIFE OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD of valet, butler, chauffeur, governess, and THE HIDDEN STORY of Gatsby is sex—as crime, as dangerous BY DAVID S. BROWN even a secondhand Rolls-Royce. He made lure, as destructive habit. And the criminals are women, be- Belknap Press, 424pp., $29.95 no excuses for the rich, but he didn’t san- cause they hold the power to seduce. Fitzgerald found this itize his own actions either. He chose theme early, in the scandalous passages on “petting” in his

68 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

being satirical, but so is Fitzgerald when Gatsby gives Daisy a tour of his mansion and begins pulling his tailored clothing from “two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-­ gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.” Daisy is overwhelmed with emo- tion. “‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.’ ” Fitzgerald’s New York “owed little to Wharton’s aristocratic acre of ducal families,” Brown observes. “He focused instead on the new money, the fresh sources of cul- tural power.” True enough, but he also saw that in America even pa- tricians will affect the demeanor of the self-made. The fortune must Fitzgerald’s passport: Brown’s biography shows an expansive, well-traveled life. seem earned anew by each gener- ation, the purity of the initial con- first novel. The phenomenon had been written about, with quest kept fresh. This, in turn, breeds an almost fanatical ma- alarm, since 1915. What was new in Fitzgerald’s treatment was terialism. The glamorous Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, too, that the aggressors often were young women, chaste hunt- coveted the talismans and tokens of success. “I don’t mean that resses making conquests one after another. This was the lib- money means happiness, necessarily,” Zelda said in an interview erating break with Victorianism: the corset ripped away to in 1923. “But having things, just things, objects makes a wom- reveal a deeper self-possession. He merged this discovery with an happy. The right kind of perfume, the smart pair of shoes.” the theme of sexual transaction pioneered by Edith Wharton Her husband, hovering near, piped in to clarify, “Women care and Theodore Dreiser, older novelists he admired and met. for ‘things,’ clothes, furniture, for themselves … and men, in Wharton’s imprint, especially, is stamped on the early story so far as they contribute to their vanity.” What Fitzgerald once “The Rich Boy,” with its card-playing idle rich gathered at their described as his peasant’s “smoldering hatred” of the rich vacation spots; and Bloeckman, the Jewish movie producer in began in his knowledge, gained from the shabby gentility of The Beautiful and Damned, is a descendant of the predatory his youth, that status was measured in dollars. Rosedale in Wharton’s The House of Mirth. And yet Fitzgerald, for all his knowingness, seems oddly Fitzgerald’s women remain economically imprisoned, but childlike. Critics from Trilling to James Mellow—in Invented enjoy the sexual advantage. The action in Gatsby is driven by Lives, his stylish portrait of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage—have its femmes fatales, each a variation on the kept woman: the noted the old-fashioned chivalry, or reticence, in Fitzgerald’s upper-class Louisville belle, Daisy, languishing in her gilded discussion of sex. Born in the last gasp of the Victorian age, cage; the tomboy athlete, Jordan Baker, who sponges off he cherished its standard of feminine purity and its worship of wealthy friends as she travels from one golf tournament to pristine childhood. His ideal heroine—in life and in art—was the next; the adulterous housewife, Myrtle Wilson. For Gats- the “wise, even hard-boiled, virgin who for all her daring and by, Daisy is the “top girl,” and her allure feels monetary. “It unconventionality was essentially far more elusive than her excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy— mother,” Arthur Mizener wrote in The Far Side of Paradise, the it increased her value in his eyes.” We almost hear the whir first Fitzgerald biography and still the best. Ginevra King was of the adding machine, and finally we do, when Gatsby blurts, all of 16 when Fitzgerald met her on a Christmas break from “her voice is full of money.” With that she morphs from per- Princeton. Zelda, when he met her, had just turned 18, “so son to price tag. young that she had not put up her hair and wore the frilly sort of Fitzgerald is less the heir of Veblen, perhaps, than of Marx, dress that used to be reserved for young girls,” Mizener writes. who described the fetishizing of commodities, manufactured Nymphets flit through Fitzgerald’s fiction. The heartbreaker objects created by human labor yet somehow “abounding in in the early story “Winter Dreams” seems in almost total pos-

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY PRINCETON metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Marx was session of her sexual self at age eleven. “There was a general

JUNE 2017 | 69 REVIEW ungodliness in the way her lips twisted down at the corners Cecilia Brady in The Last Tycoon, written when Fitzgerald was when she smiled, and in the—Heaven help us!—in the almost in his early forties, pines for the mogul Monroe Stahr yet also passionate quality in her eyes. Vitality is born early in such wishes time could be turned back to when “I would have been women.” Even as Fitzgerald grew older his heroines remain nine.” This yearning, we feel, is Fitzgerald’s own. He, too, would children. The 17-year-old starlet Rosemary in Tender Is the like to recover his virginity. Zelda was the first and up to that Night, whose “body hovered delicately on the last edge of time the only woman he had ever slept with, he told Hemingway childhood,” was based on the actress Lois Moran, also 17 when in the mid-’20s. There is little reason to doubt so unusual a boast. Fitzgerald met her. (“You … engaged in flagrantly sentimental It’s not surprising that Fitzgerald’s heroes included relations with a child,” Zelda later accused him.) The 19-­year-old T.S. Eliot—the poet of impotence in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and of sterility in The Waste Land—and that Eliot should have called Gatsby the “first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Fitzgerald would never advance beyond it—but neither would anyone else. Gatsby remains the classic every American knows, just as everyone once knew Huckleberry Finn. Both can be read either as pas- toral hymns for a lost America or as unsparing critiques of a false innocence. The famous last page in Gatsby, the lament Boardwalk Block for the denuded virgin land—“Its vanished trees, the trees BY ADRIENNE RAPHEL that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams”—turns on the image of procurement. Carraway’s role in the drama is Big Bop Pop’s got his five-buck shop literally that of the go-between Pandarus, who arranges the Chock-a-block stocked with stuff that’s hocked, star-crossed lovers’ trysts. Sexual transaction has become a Watches stopped at the two o’clock, metaphor for the marketplace of the American dream. Hockey puck hermit crabs, legs pock-marked. “MY WHOLE THEORY of writing I can sum up in one sen- Big Bop Pop’s got a lemon-pie grin tence,” Fitzgerald once explained. “An author ought to write for For the ring-a-ding pinball crowd reeling with gin, the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the For the pinstriped belly boys, lips pasty thin, schoolmasters of ever afterward.” At the time he was 23. This They stop by the shop but they never come in. Side of Paradise was already in its third printing, two months after its publication in March 1920. Things would never be Big Bop’ll trade a B flat for a B, so good again. “The compensation of a very early success is a A neck for a neck, a tooth for a tee, conviction that life is a romantic matter,” he later wrote. “In the A downy quilt bedbug for a fur cap-fat flea– best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love A kickline of one, knobbly-kneed. and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I Big Bop Pop’s got an arcade Claw can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea.” That prized up the filling from the hole in his jaw, The carnival was the Cap d’Antibes, where the glorious Bobbled around like a brassy gumball, opening pages of Tender Is the Night are set. The novel, pub- And dropped it again near a rabbit’s foot paw. lished in 1934—nine years after Gatsby—was a struggle to complete and is riddled with missteps, but it remains a classic, Big Bop Pop’s got a nose like the flu, more readable than almost any other American novel of the Loose elbows goosed with stale Krazy Glue 1930s. The story of Fitzgerald as a wastrel and a victim of his If you need eyes, he’s got some that’ll do– own indiscipline is attractive but exaggerated. He worked They used to be blue, but he’s secondhand new. steadily, diligently, almost continually. In 21 years as a profes- sional writer, he completed four novels, was midway through a fifth, finished a full-length play, and brought out four closely pruned short story collections, as well as essays like “The Adrienne Raphel is the author of WHAT WAS IT FOR (Rescue Crack-Up,” which helped invent the modern confessional Press, 2017). memoir. And he left behind so much other writing that at this late date some is coming to light for the first time—including the 18 “lost” stories, almost all of them written in the 1930s, in the new collection, I’d Die for You. Even Fitzgerald’s final days in Hollywood were more productive than we may suppose. He went there for a most

70 | NEW REPUBLIC pragmatic reason, to get his finances in order—Zelda was now institutionalized, their daughter was at Vassar—and he succeeded. In his 18 months at MGM, “Fitzgerald earned nearly $90,000—about $1.4 million in contemporary dollars,” Brown reports. Once you add “freelance work at 20th Century-Fox, Miłosz Columbia Studios, Goldwyn, and Paramount Universal, the A Biography figure jumps to some $125,000, or about $2 million in current Andrzej Franaszek earnings.” He also began a relationship with a prominent Hol- lywood journalist, Sheilah Graham, who kept him on course EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY Aleksandra Parker • with his work and to whom he seems to have been devoted Michael Parker (even if he scrawled “portrait of a prostitute” on the back of ★ the framed photo he kept of her). He was a flop at writing A Literary Hub Books to Read Selection for the movies, but he learned a great deal about them. The script-writing and -editing scenes in The Last Tycoon, one “Tolerant, perceptive, of the handful of really good Hollywood novels, vividly de- beautifully written and utterly scribe the techniques and mechanics of filmmaking and show objective . . . The Parkers’ its power as a narrative medium. translation is not only elegant, Wilson was justified in saying, in his foreword to the pub- but also generally faithful to lished draft, that it promised to be Fitzgerald’s “most mature” the original . . . Magniicent novel. The conjuror of “The Ice Palace” and “The Diamond as (and) sensitively translated.” Big as the Ritz” and the “rose-colored hotel” rising up from —Donald Rayield, the Mediterranean haze found in the “dream factory” of the Literary Review great Hollywood studios his most congenial subject. “Under Belknap Press $35.00 the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland,” Fitzgerald writes, with his magician’s touch, “not because the locations The Invention of really looked like African jungles and French châteaux and Humanity schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they Equality and Cultural looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments Di erence in World History of stories dancing in an open fire.” The leap from private fantasy to the Ages of Man is too fluent, but that is Fitzgerald’s point, Siep Stuurman the illusion of permanence and depth beneath the shallow sur- “[A] splendid book . . . faces. The make-believe sets, like Jay Gatsby’s flimsy mansion, Stuurman’s panoramic vision tremble in the gusts of an invading realism. of discovery and invention, Fitzgerald accurately guessed that the world brought alive in reiterated in many different The Last Tycoon was already headed for extinction in 1940. For cultural and religious idioms this reason he set the action earlier, in 1935, the near-bottom of across a vast expanse of the Depression, when, as he explained to an editor, Hollywood time and space, makes for a had given the public “an escape into a lavish, romantic past dramatically original history.” that perhaps will not come again into our time.” It also gave —Michael Walzer, The Nation Fitzgerald one last shimmering frame in his moving picture of $49.95 the despoiled American dream, bared in all its “meretricious beauty.” In the end his delicate instrument has proved just as durable as he hoped—“as if,” like Gatsby, “he were related to Theory of the Novel one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten Guido Mazzoni thousand miles away.” a TRANSLATED BY Zakiya Hana­i “The sharpest philosophical treatment of the novel since Lukács’s Theory of the Novel . . . Mazzoni’s study stands THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 6, Issue 5,004, June 2017. Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and Aug/Sep 2017) out as a masterpiece of literary criticism . . . Beyond by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone (202) 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage being a pleasurable read, Mazzoni’s book is a paragon and handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: of scholarship, which will give its readers a deeper 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 appreciation of ictional worlds born of life itself.” Number 7178957. Send changes of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies —Alberto Comparini, Los Angeles Review of Books to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be emailed to [email protected]. $39.95 For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our web site at newrepublic.com/customer-service.

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JUNE 2017 | 71 backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHELLE SIU

LOCATION LAKE ST. MARTIN, MANITOBA DATE JUNE 8, 2013

IN 2011, KASSIDY PELLETIER was washing dishes at her kitchen childhood home looted, the valuables gone. Walking into her sink when she heard that the Canadian government was evacu- ­kitchen, she covered her face with her sweatshirt to mask ating everyone in her community of Lake St. Martin. Extensive the stench. flooding had swept the region, and the government had decided Lake St. Martin’s council recently broke ground on a new to protect the predominantly white city of Winnipeg by redi- community for the displaced residents, not far from their recting the waters to Lake St. Martin, a First Nation reservation. original home. But the 280 houses the Canadian government Within days, some 1,300 indigenous residents were evacuated has agreed to fund are just half of what the community needs. from their homes, their entire community destroyed. The displacement has taken the biggest toll on the teenag­ ers. The evacuees were initially relocated to hotels in Winnipeg. “They’ve come of age when their sense of belonging and identity Six years later, they’re still there, living in temporary government have been stripped,” says photographer Michelle Siu, who has housing. Unable to return to their ancestral lands, a generation documented the community’s ordeal. “I wonder now, as they get of elders has passed away; teenagers who grew up in hotel rooms settled on new land, how many teens will return to a place that was have begun giving birth to children of their own. once their entire world, but now must feel like a world away?” a Two years after the flood, when Pelletier returned to Lake St. Martin to salvage her family’s belongings, she discovered her See more of Michelle Siu’s work on newrepublic.com.

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