LIBERALS VS. SOCIALISTS CLUB FED TONI MORRISON’S ORIGIN STORY

NOVEMBER 2017 RESIST/PERSISTRESIST/PERSIST

“Will surprise readers in "This flowing account of women, “A clear overview of America’s "A broad-ranging, showing how extensive and whose financial contributions, prejudices and limitations. evenhanded view of a tradition active pro-Nazi groups were in celebrity, style, and innovative A highly readable study whose honed into an art form in Southern California. strategies revitalized a cause historical accounts of sexism America: the use of dissent as 'a A fine, very-well- and changed history, will be and xenophobia bear repeated critique of governance'. Young documented study." welcomed by all readers." discussion." has a knack for finding obscure but thoroughly revealing —Publishers Weekly —Library Journal —Foreword Reviews moments of history to illustrate his points.”

—Kirkus Reviews

DRAWING ON THE CELEBRATED COLLECTION IN THE TAMIMENT LIBRARY’S POSTER AND BROADSIDE COLLECTION AT NYU, MAKE ART NOT WAR IS AN EXTRAORDINARILY VISCERAL COLLECTION OF POSTERS THAT REPRESENT THE PROGRESSIVE PROTEST MOVEMENTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY: LABOR, CIVIL RIGHTS, THE VIETNAM WAR, LGBT RIGHTS, FEMINISM, AND OTHER MINORITY ISSUES.

@nyupress/nyupress.org a contents NOVEMBER 2017

UP FRONT 6 The NRA’s New Scare Tactics 36 How the gun lobby is remaking itself as an arm of the alt-right. BY LAURA RESTON 8 Battle of the Plutocrats The Democratic Party’s odd choice for governor of Illinois. BY JUSTIN MILLER 9 The Trump Tweetometer Why Category 5 hurricanes may be the only thing that can save America. 10 Mother of All Bombers Trump is unleashing U.S. military might at a record pace. BY JENNIFER WILSON 12 Repeal and Replace How GOP legislators are trashing citizen-approved laws. BY CLIO CHANG

COLUMN 14 It’s the Culture, Stupid Why Democrats need to embrace identity politics. BY LEE DRUTMAN

The Return of Fascism REVIEW Across Europe, far-right nationalists are attacking 44 Long Divisions ­migrants, raiding mosques, and winning elections. Toni Morrison’s vision of exclusion and belonging. BY NELL IRVIN PAINTER TEXT BY SEYLA BENHABIB | PHOTOGRAPHS BY ESPEN RASMUSSEN 50 Art Brute The Square delivers a savage satire on the art world. BY CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN 52 Sunken Pleasures Jennifer Egan disconnects from modern life’s fractured nature. BY MICHELLE DEAN 16 26 32 55 Club Fed Why the government goes easy on States of Sibling Rivalry Made in corporate crime. BY DAVID DAYEN Liberals and socialists Denial America 58 Mom, Interrupted Trump insists that climate share a common For years, we’ve looked Pamela Adlon’s Better Things reinvents ideological inheritance. change isn’t real. From to China for cheap labor. the family sitcom. BY RACHEL SYME crop failures to killer Can they find a way to Now Chinese couples are 60 Cold War World storms, his Southern work together to defeat coming to the U.S. for a A new history redefines the conflict’s supporters are paying the Trumpism and forge new form of outsourcing: true extent—and costs. BY PATRICK IBER price. A journey to a deep- a more representative hiring American women red county on the front democracy? to produce babies. 68 Backstory lines of global warming. BY JEET HEER BY MOIRA WEIGEL PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK BROWN BY MATTHEW SHAER POETRY 57 American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin BY TERRANCE HAYES ESPEN RASMUSSEN/VERDENS GANG/PANOS PICTURES GANG/PANOS RASMUSSEN/VERDENS ESPEN COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM MAIDA

NOVEMBER 2017 | 1 contributors

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer professor of political science and Editor in Chief Win McCormack philosophy at Yale University, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century European social and political thought. She has written Editor and edited more than 15 books on subjects ranging from universal human Eric Bates rights to migration, Islam, and cosmopolitanism. Her next book, Playing Chess With History. Exile, Statelessness, Migration From Hannah Arendt to Literary Editor Digital Director Laura Marsh Mindy Kay Bricker Isaiah Berlin, will be published next year. THE RISE OF FASCISM, P. 36 Features Directors Executive Editor David Dayen is a columnist at the new republic, as well as a contributor Sasha Belenky Ryan Kearney Theodore Ross to The Intercept, The Nation, and The American Prospect. He is the author of Deputy Editor Managing Editor Ryu Spaeth Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Laura Reston Social Media Editor Foreclosure Fraud. CLUB FED, P. 55 Assistant Editor Eric Armstrong Moira Donegan Michelle Dean, a contributing editor at the new republic, received the Senior Editors Editor at Large Brian Beutler Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Bob Moser Jeet Heer Critics Circle in 2016. Her book, Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of News Editor Design Director Having an Opinion, will be published next year. SUNKEN PLEASURES, P. 52 Alex Shephard Siung Tjia Staff Writers Photo Director Patrick Iber is assistant professor of Latin American history at the Emily Atkin Stephanie Heimann University of Wisconsin–Madison. His book Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Clio Chang Production Manager Sarah Jones Cultural Cold War in Latin America won the 2017 Luciano Tomassini Book Josephine Livingstone Steph Tan Award from the Latin American Studies Association. COLD WAR WORLD, P. 60 Graham Vyse Contributing Editors Poetry Editor Justin Miller is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. He is currently a James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Cathy Park Hong Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, senior writing fellow for The American Prospect, where he covers labor, Siddhartha Deb, Michael Reporter-Researchers fiscal policy, and politics.BATTLE OF THE PLUTOCRATS, P. 8 Eric Dyson, Paul Ford, Ted Rachelle Hampton Genoways, William Giraldi, Suzanne Monyak Dana Goldstein, Kathryn Joyce, Rachel Stone Nell Irvin Painter is the Edwards professor of American history, emerita, Suki Kim, Maria Konnikova, at Princeton University, where she directed the Program in African-American Corby Kummer, Michelle Legro, Intern Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, Sharon Zhang Studies. She has served as president of the Organization of American Graeme Wood, Robert Wright Historians and the Southern Historical Association, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of numerous books, including The Director of Marketing Associate Director History of White People, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the and Revenue of Advertising Evelyn Frison Shawn Awan Progressive Era, and Creating Black Americans. LONG DIVISIONS, P. 44 Audience and Controller Partnership Manager Espen Rasmussen is an award-winning photographer based in Norway. David Myer Eliza Fish After documenting the European refugee crisis for much of 2015, he has Office Manager, NY Media Relations Manager Sarah Whalen spent the past year exploring the corresponding rise of right-wing populism Steph Leke in 14 countries. “What drives them?” Rasmussen wanted to know. “Why do Associate Publisher they hate?” THE RETURN OF FASCISM, P. 36 Art Stupar

Matthew Shaer is a contributing writer for The New York Times President and Publisher Magazine and a correspondent for Smithsonian Magazine. His work has also Hamilton Fish appeared in The Atlantic, Atavist, Wired, and GQ. STATES OF DENIAL, P. 16

Moira Weigel is a writer, scholar, and founding editor of Logic magazine, Published by Lake Avenue Publishing currently in residence at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She has published 1 Union Square West extensively on the intersections of sex, work, media, and technology. Her New York, NY 10003 book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, came out in paperback in Chairman August. MADE IN AMERICA, P. 32 Win McCormack

Jennifer Wilson is a foreign policy researcher specializing in national security, military policy, and international law. She holds a master’s degree For subscription inquiries or problems call (800) 827-1289 from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. For reprints and licensing visit www.TNRreprints.com MOTHER OF ALL BOMBERS, P. 10

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LAST FALL, not long after Donald Trump was elected, Chuck Schumer set off a panic among Democrats by suggesting the unthinkable: that he would work with the president. “Chuck’s a chicken!” protesters chanted outside the sen- ator’s Brooklyn brownstone. “Grow a spine, Chuck!” Schumer responded by recasting himself as a champion of the resistance, firing back at the president who dismissed him as the “head clown” of the Democratic Party. ✯ Now, however, there seems to be a budding bromance between the two political brawlers and lifelong New Yorkers. First, Schumer struck a deal with Trump to raise the debt ceiling. Then he got the president to commit to protecting immigrant “dreamers.” “This is great!” the president exulted after the debt deal. ✯ It’s too soon to tell whether Schumer is exploiting Trump’s political isolation or getting played. But whatever the outcome, such bargaining is in character for Schumer, who has long been willing to bend his ideals. In 1998, as Peter Beinart noted in the new republic, Schumer disavowed his reputation as a die-hard liberal, repositioning himself as a Clinton-style centrist. Whether he’s leading the resistance or palling around with the president, Schumer obeys the first rule of Washington: He goes whichever way the political wind blows. Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump strike a debt deal.

Peter Beinart Schumer or Later NOVEMBER 2, 1998

In a dimly lit ballroom on the third floor of early ’90s, Schumer has moved methodically mainly of Jewish and Italian middle-class New York’s Hilton Hotel, a voice rouses the to inoculate himself against the charges that neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens— crowd: “Introducing the next United States did in his liberal predecessors. He has aban- strongly backs Rudolph Giuliani. But most senator from the great state of New York.” doned his opposition to the death penalty New York Democrats see Schumer’s move Eyes turn to the podium. But Charles Schum- and outraged civil libertarians by voting to give to the right as the product of raw ambition. er isn’t there. He’s on a huge TV screen off the government greater wiretapping authority “I can’t think of a single issue in his entire to the side, apologizing for having to stay and to make it easier to deport suspected career on which Schumer would stick by his in Washington. Schumer, under fire from terrorists. He has also disavowed lavish social position after he concluded it was no lon- Senator Alfonse D’Amato for missing too spending, even proposing legislation to crack ger in his interest to do so,” says one former many votes, is determined not to give his down on the abuse of food stamps. In his first colleague. Staffers to New York Democrats opponent any more fodder. So he speaks policy speech of the campaign, he waxed coined the verb “to Schume” to describe the from a leather chair in the Capitol, and then Clintonesque, saying, “The old Democratic congressman’s tendency to take credit for Iris Schumer introduces the man who has view that government is the answer to all work done by other members. And several come to New York to help her husband—the problems is irrelevant.” New York politicos privately accuse him of president of the United States. Bill Clinton’s Schumer’s growing skepticism toward intimidating those who back his opponents. hopes of bequeathing his party a political government regulation has also proved lu- Still, they are in no position to be choosy. inheritance that transcends his personal crative. He has used his seat on the House In fact, the New York Democratic Party’s lack failures rest on disciples like the congress- Banking Committee to forge close ties to Wall of ideological purity gives Schumer the same man from the Ninth District of New York. Street’s large brokerage houses, repeatedly advantage over D’Amato that Bill Clinton had Schumer represents the New York Dem- parting company with liberals who sought over Bob Dole. He can jettison inconvenient ocratic Party’s third attempt to pry D’Amato to make it easier for investors to sue them. party dogmas. In his battles with Dole and from his seat. He is said to have studied these And Wall Street has responded generously. Newt Gingrich, Clinton masterfully positioned failures closely. And he has responded with Schumer’s evolution, like Clinton’s, can himself as a figure of moderation. Demo- a strategy that echoes the one Bill Clinton be interpreted in more or less benign ways. crats should be able to follow Clinton’s lead has long employed nationally. A decade ago, Schumer’s defenders maintain that he has al- and recapture middle-class suburbanites Schumer was a man who The New York Times ways had an intuitive understanding of the cul- throughout the North—permanently splitting said “wears his liberalism like a badge.” But, tural center. Schumer is not a Manhattanite. the blue-gray coalition that Richard Nixon and

ALEX WONG/GETTY ALEX since he began eyeing statewide office in the His congressional district—which ­consists Ronald Reagan built. a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 5 up front

WARNING SHOTS

The NRA’s New Scare Tactics With Trump in the White House, the gun lobby has transformed into a right-wing media outlet.

BY LAURA RESTON

FOR THE PAST eight years, Barack Obama provided Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing the National Rifle Association with the perfect end,” Trump thundered before cheering throngs at liberal bogeyman—an avatar of white anxiety the NRA’s annual meeting in April. “You have a true who wanted to deprive gun-toting Americans of friend and champion in the White House.” their constitutional right to bear arms. Annual But with Obama gone, and Republicans firm- gun production skyrocketed 239 percent during ly in control, the NRA is suffering. In the first six his presidency, and the NRA saw its membership months after Trump was elected, gun sales tumbled hit a record five million. Last year, the group bet by 9 percent. Vista, the firearms manufacturer that big on Donald Trump, pouring $30 million into owns brands like American Eagle and Bushnell, saw his campaign and millions more to stack Congress profits drop 27 percent in the first three months of with gun-friendly lawmakers. The gamble paid off: the year—a reversal the company called an “un- All but one of its Senate candidates was elected, precedented decline in demand for ammunition and Trump has publicly aligned himself with the lobbying group. “The eight-year assault on your ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARTIN ELFMAN

6 | NEW REPUBLIC and firearms.” Individual contributions to the NRA, lit on fire, and a Trump supporter beaten bloody, his THE NRA’S which account for roughly half its revenue, could face wrapped in bandages. Even the network’s motto ARMS RACE also take a sharp plunge; the last time a Republican echoes like a warning shot: “The truth is under fire.” occupied the White House, the NRA’s membership It’s a strategy sure to win supporters on the Americans who flatlined. “They need a demon,” says Robert Spitzer, far right. Like Fox News, nratv routinely parrots own a gun a political­ science professor at the State University of ­ultraconservative talking points, creating a familiar 30% New York and author of The Politics of Gun Control. echo chamber for its viewers. Even after a young Gun owners with Now, with no one in the White House to strike fear woman was killed at a rally of white supremacists more than one gun in the hearts of its members, the NRA is embarking in Charlottesville, hosts on the network continued 66% on a bold new strategy. Instead of sticking solely to to denounce the “violent left.” Grant Stinchfield, Gun owners with its pro-gun agenda—pushing for firearms in schools, one of nratv’s most strident voices, has called on five or more guns allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons police to round up Antifa members and teach them 29% across state lines—the group has joined the ranks of “what it’s truly like to live in a fascist community.” Breitbart and Fox News. Last fall, in the weeks before Such rhetoric marks a decided shift for the NRA. NRA members with five or more guns the election, the NRA launched its very own stream- Rarely has the lobbying group aligned itself so closely 52% ing service called nratv. Some of the 34 shows it with a single strand of the Republican Party. As produces—from Armed & Fabulous to Trust the Hunter recently as 2010, it was still spending hundreds of in Your Blood—are little more than infomercials for thousands of dollars to back conservative Democrats gun manufacturers, who sponsor the programs to who opposed gun control. (Even Bernie Sanders drum up business. But many of the shows focus on once received an NRA endorsement.) “Now that issues far beyond the NRA’s traditional purview, from there’s a president in office that their base likes, they immigration to the “fake news” media. have to make Americans afraid of one another,” says “We’re seeing the rise of a new NRA,” says Adam Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action Winkler, a ucla law professor whose latest book, for Gun Sense in America. “They’re exploiting fear Gunfight,chronicles the battle over gun rights. “It’s in America to sell guns.” long been committed to a die-hard approach to gun In the long run, however, the NRA’s new sales policy; they focused like a laser beam on Second strategy could backfire. As more and more Americans Amendment issues. Now it’s focused on immigration, earn college degrees and move to cities, support for race, health care. We’re seeing the NRA become an gun control continues to grow. Latinos—who will extreme right-wing media outlet, not just a pro- comprise more than 28 percent of the U.S. popula- tector of guns.” tion by 2060—favor gun control at a much higher rate than the rest of the country. “In a lot of ways, THE SWAGGERING HOSTS of nratv, clad in baseball the NRA is facing the same demographic problems hats and golf shirts, go after their opponents with a ferocity that would make Rush Limbaugh blush: Hillary Clinton (“emotionally hysterical, blind drunk”); Lena Dunham (“wants to make Many of the shows on nratv focus on issues far conservatives look bad”); Rolling Stone (“blinded by beyond the NRA’s traditional purview, from bias”); Don Lemon (“your lies push division, hatred, immigration to the “fake news” media. and violence”). Cam Edwards, a mild-mannered Oklahoman who hosts a three-hour talk show on weekdays, interviews writers from the Daily Caller, columnists from Town Hall, and owners of shooting that the Republican Party faces,” says Winkler, the ranges. Oliver North drops by to discuss North ucla professor. “You need to appeal to new demo- Korea’s latest nuclear launch. Jim Geraghty of The graphics in this changing America.” National Review calls in to discuss angry vegans. Appealing to new demographics, in fact, is part Other segments go a step further, portraying lib- of what made the NRA into one of America’s most erals as dangerous insurgents: activists who “openly powerful lobbying operations. Founded in 1871 as a call for the assassination of our president,” protesters marksmanship organization, the group has always who “set fire to buildings and attack people in the been careful to follow the market: It reached out to streets,” and “chaos creators who want to impose hunters as outdoor activities became popular in the their will upon us, through their violence and lies.” 1950s, and to homeowners terrified of urban decay nratv’s imagery only adds to the fearmongering; a and rising crime in the 1970s. “It was a new mes- controversial ad that aired in April featured grainy sage that fit the changing time,” Winkler says. “The black-and-white clips of torched buildings, trash cans NRA has been remarkably successful as a political

NOVEMBER 2017 | 7 up front

organization because of its ability to shift to reflect second term. But as Trump proved that the GOP changing demographics.” could still win elections by stoking the fear and But now, with its turn to the extreme right, the hatred of its core supporters, Noir, like the NRA as NRA is bucking America’s broader demographic a whole, has adopted the rhetoric of the alt-right. trends. In July 2016, for example, when Philando Once a supporter of Black Lives Matter, he now Castile was shot to death in the front seat of his car denounces it as a “weaponized race-baiting machine after telling a police officer that he was carrying a gun, pushing the extreme liberal Democratic agenda.” the lobbying group could have welcomed black gun As a marketing arm of the gun industry, the NRA owners, publicly defending their right to bear arms. has long understood that fear sells—but now it has After all, one-third of all African Americans have a a new media platform from which to broadcast a gun in their home, up from 19 percent just three years daily drumbeat of extremism and paranoia. “I’m not ago. “Here was a golden opportunity,” says Spitzer, even sure it’s a dog whistle anymore,” says Watts, the political scientist. “But they were dead silent. the gun control advocate. “It’s just a whistle—to They understood that they ran the risk of alienating anyone in their base who’s willing to listen. They their conservative white constituency.” see the future: They’re selling guns to fewer people. nratv does have one black host: Colion Noir, an Their demographic is older, white men. They have eloquent gun aficionado and former YouTube star to create a culture war—to make Americans afraid whom the lobbying group recruited during Obama’s of each other.” a

MONEY MEN

Battle of the Plutocrats Why are Democrats backing a billionaire venture capitalist in one of 2018’s most critical races?

BY JUSTIN MILLER

BIG MONEY FOR DEMOCRATS, ONE of the most important races for American politics, setting up a battle between two The most expen- governor next year is taking shape in Illinois. Bruce private-equity plutocrats. “Voters need to know there sive races for Rauner, the state’s venture-capitalist-turned-governor, is a clear distinction between what they have and governor in is a union-busting, Scott Walker wannabe whose what they need,” says Stacy Davis Gates, political U.S. history approval ratings have been wrecked by his obsession and legislative director for the Chicago Teachers 2018: Illinois with spending cuts and his failure to pass a budget Union. “I don’t know how that happens with Pritzker $300 million for more than two years. Rauner is perhaps the most and Rauner. They’re both billionaires and white guys.” (projected) vulnerable Republican governor running for reelection Pritzker is portraying himself as a liberal fire- in 2018—in one of the biggest and bluest states. If brand who will stand up to Trump. “I’m proud to 2010: California $252 million Democrats can win the governorship in Illinois and be part of the resistance,” he announced in front of maintain control in the state legislature, they could Chicago’s Trump Tower. “Illinois will be a firewall 2002: New York create a truly liberal stronghold in the Midwest. against Donald Trump’s destructive and bigoted $148 million But Rauner isn’t the only thing standing in the agenda.” But while Pritzker’s platform hits many of 1998: California way of a liberal victory in Illinois. Six months before the right notes—creating jobs, protecting health care, $119 million Democrats have even held their primary, party lead- supporting public schools—he’s a staunch defender ers have already lined up behind a venture capitalist of his wealthy friends, opposing state legislation to 1994: California $60 million of their own: J.B. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotel close the carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund fortune who, along with his wife, contributed nearly investors that costs the state $1.7 billion a year in tax $20 million to support Hillary Clinton last year. With revenues. “When it comes to the really tough fights, a net worth of $3.5 billion, Pritzker will certainly be Pritzker is nowhere to be found,” says Amisha Patel, able to compete with Rauner’s own war chest. But executive director of a coalition of unions and com- by backing one of the wealthiest candidates ever to munity groups called the Grassroots Collaborative. run for governor, the Democratic establishment is Like Trump, Pritzker has also used the tax code ignoring the rising tide of populism that has upended to his own advantage, buying a historic Gold Coast

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

MOST OF THE TIME, Donald Trump is all doom and his response. Harvey and Irma were “HISTORIC.” gloom: During his first seven months in office, The floodwaters were the most powerful in half he devoted more than one-third of his tweets to a millennium. First responders were “fantastic,” skewering people and policies he dislikes. But the spirit of the people “incredible.” At Camp after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, the president David, Trump was “focused on saving lives, not suddenly cheered up: He went on the attack swamp shenanigans.” The good news is that he half as often. That’s because he spent most of projected reassurance in a time of crisis. The the month in sales mode, pitching America on the bad news is that it may take more Category 5 awesomeness of its storms and the greatness of hurricanes to make the president great again.

“Epic!” Hurricanes Harvey and Irma brought out the pitchman in Trump.

‘Fantastic people on the ground’ ‘Unprecedented’ ‘The very best of America!’

‘Such cooperation & coordination!’

‘Spirit of the people is incredible’ ‘TEAMWORK!’

‘Largest ever recorded in the Atlantic!’

‘POTUS is focused on saving lives’ ‘Incredible HEROES in Texas’ ‘Amazing people working hard!’

‘I am closely watching’

Big Storm, Happy Trump Percentage of the president’s tweets that criticize others ‘HISTORIC rainfall’ 37% Before Harvey 17%

‘Once in 500 year flood!’ ‘So far, so good!’ Since Harvey

‘We love you!’ love ‘We ‘GREAT WORK!’ WORK!’ ‘GREAT

ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM MAIDA

NOVEMBER 2017 | 9 up front mansion next door to his own, letting it fall into also won the backing of the powerful Cook County disrepair, then arguing that it was “uninhabitable”—a Democratic Party, home to the largest bloc of party move that saved him $230,000 in property taxes. voters in the state. And like Trump, he is trailed by scandal. In 2008, at But his personal wealth aside, it’s hard to see how a time when then–Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich putting forward a billionaire investor who made his was under federal investigation for soliciting bribes, bones in private equity will do anything other than Pritzker was caught on tape urging Blagojevich to ap- reinforce the Democratic Party’s elitist image, while point him to political office. Four days after Pritzker undercutting several viable contenders who have gen- and his wife donated $100,000 to Blagojevich’s 2006 uine track records of public service and progressive reelection bid, the governor announced a $1 million reform. Ameya Pawar, a Chicago alderman, is carving grant for a Holocaust museum that Pritzker was out a position as a grassroots-powered underdog with raising money to build. his calls for aggressive tax reform, Medicare for All, But it’s the size of Pritzker’s wallet, not the and a $15 minimum wage. As is Daniel Biss, a state strength of his ideas, that has endeared him to senator from Evanston, who has raised $1.3 million party leaders. Since formally announcing in April, by building an impressive base of small donors. “We he has already pumped more than $14 million into have to decide if we want to have an election or if his own campaign—and says he’s willing to spend we want to have an auction,” says Biss. “The state’s “whatever it will take,” all of it out of his own pocket. problems won’t be fixed by a knight in shining armor His campaign web site doesn’t even give support- coming in and saving us. We have to build our own ers a “donate” option. That’s no small matter in an system to build progressive power.” election where total spending is on pace to surpass But now that Pritzker has won the support of the $300 million, making it the most expensive guber- party elite, it will be tough for grassroots candidates natorial race in U.S. history. Rauner and his GOP like Biss and Pawar to win the nomination. With allies, including Chicago hedge-fund magnate Ken a clear shot at retaking Illinois from an unpopu- Griffin, have already pumped more than $70 million lar businessman-turned-politician, at a moment into his reelection effort. when the White House is occupied by an unpopular The party establishment was quick to back the businessman-­turned-politician, the Democratic Party wealthiest candidate. Pritzker cemented his front-­ has decided to back … an unpopular businessman-­ runner status in June, just two months after announc- turned-politician. As a result, one of the most con- ing his candidacy, when he clinched the earliest-ever sequential elections of 2018 may have ended before gubernatorial endorsement from the state afl-cio. He it ever really had a chance to begin. a

FLYING BLIND

Mother of All Bombers Far from being an isolationist, Trump is one of the most hawkish presidents in modern history.

BY JENNIFER WILSON

WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP decided to commit my life, I’ve heard that decisions are much different additional troops to the war in Afghanistan—now when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.” entering its seventeenth year—he contradicted Despite Trump’s seeming reluctance to engage his own position on the conflict. After years of in foreign conflicts, however, he has zealously em- deriding the war as a “total disaster” and a “complete braced his role as a wartime president. Since taking waste,” and insisting that it was high time to get office, Trump has dramatically ramped up the use of out, Trump announced in August that he would U.S. military force in a wide range of international instead be deepening America’s involvement. “My hot spots, from Syria and Iraq to Somalia and Pa- original instinct was to pull out, and historically kistan. Far from being an America First isolationist, I like following my instincts,” the president told Trump has already established himself as one of the U.S. troops in his address on Afghanistan. “But all most hawkish presidents in modern history.

10 | NEW REPUBLIC Consider Trump’s dramatic in- crease in the use of air strikes. Through August, the United States dropped 2,487 bombs in Afghanistan—­more than Barack Obama dropped in his last two years as president combined. In Au- gust, more bombs fell there than in any month since 2012. Trump also dropped the so-called “mother of all bombs,” the largest nonnuclear weap- on in the U.S. arsenal, on an Islamic State cave complex—the first time the bomb has ever been used in combat. Trump has accelerated the pace of air strikes in other conflicts as well. In Iraq and Syria, the American-led coalition has unleashed more bombs each month under Trump than Obama did in any month through- out the entire campaign against isis, which began in 2014. In Yemen, Trump has carried out 92 strikes or raids against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—just shy of the number of attacks that Obama oversaw in his entire second term. In Somalia, the United States Likewise, by renewing America’s commitment in is carrying out an average of one strike against the Afghanistan and overhauling the U.S. nuclear ar- jihadist group Al Shabaab every 15 days—a sharp senal, Trump is following through on plans that his escalation compared to Obama. And in Pakistan, predecessors set in motion. Trump ended a nine-month pause in drone strikes Yet what sets Trump apart, and what is most with four unmanned bombings—more than Obama worrying about his hawkish foreign policy, is that conducted during his final year in office. he has put forward no coherent plan to guide his Trump is also putting more boots on the ground. In April, 300 Marines returned to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province to assist in the fight against the Taliban—their first deployment there since Through August, Trump has dropped 2,487 2014. The following month, Trump championed a bombs in Afghanistan—more than Obama $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia—reversing dropped in the past two years combined. the Obama administration’s decision to curb the sale of precision-­guided munitions to Riyadh out of concern over civilian casualties resulting from the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen. And hot on the unprecedented use of military force. Far from looking heels of Trump’s vow to unleash “fire and fury” to wind down conflicts, Trump seems to be acting against North Korea over its nuclear provocations, on whatever tough-sounding phrase pops into his the Air Force is working to replace America’s aging head, regardless of its effect in the real world. In stockpile of 400 Minuteman missiles and develop Syria and Iraq, Trump has made good on his vow a new nuclear cruise missile—a project estimated to “bomb the hell out of isis.” But with no plan to to cost more than $1 trillion. create security and stability in the region once isis Even if Hillary Clinton—or nearly anyone else, is defeated, his military aggression could wind up for that matter—were commander-in-chief, America rekindling sectarian conflict and opening up the would likely be ramping up many of its military op- United States to armed confrontation with Iran. erations overseas. Expelling isis from its stronghold Similarly, Trump has failed to spell out how many in Mosul, for example, would have required a signif- additional troops he will send to Afghanistan, or icant commitment of airpower from any president. how long they will stay there. “In the end, we will

NOVEMBER 2017 | 11 up front

TRUMP’S win,” he declared in August—without offering any adviser, H.R. McMaster, apparently helped persuade AIR WAR indication of what winning actually looks like. To Trump to remain in Afghanistan by showing him a How air strikes make matters worse, Trump has failed to fill a raft of 1972 photograph of Afghan women in miniskirts— are escalating senior posts in the State Department, hamstringing ridiculously suggesting that by sending more troops America’s ability to exercise the diplomatic power to fight the Taliban, Trump would be viewed as the LAST 2 YEARS necessary to broker peace and foster stability. hero who ushered in the return of Western norms OF OBAMA Afghanistan: 1,307 The consequences of Trump’s military aggres- to Kabul. Yemen: 61 sion can be seen in the number of civilians killed by Trump’s emphasis on “winning” on the military Somalia: 26 U.S. air strikes. Since taking office, Trump has over- front is especially dangerous for a president who Pakistan: 16 seen nearly 60 percent of all civilian casualties from has proved to be such a loser in Congress and the Total: 1,410 air strikes in Iraq and Syria since the air war began. courts. With his legislative agenda in disarray and FIRST 7 MONTHS In Afghanistan, civilian casualties skyrocketed by his administration mired in scandal, military action OF TRUMP 70 percent during the first six months of this year, is the only arena where Trump can portray himself Afghanistan: 2,353 compared to the same period last year. And in Yemen, as a decisive, powerful leader. Presidents have often Yemen: 92 Somalia: 15 Trump’s support for the Saudi-led bombing cam- resorted to using military strikes overseas as a way Pakistan: 4 paign has exacerbated what has become a staggering of distracting the public from their failures at home: Total: 2,464 humanitarian crisis. think Ronald Reagan in Grenada or Bill Clinton in Trump has repeatedly made clear that his for- the Balkans. But under Trump, these are not discrete, eign policy is not motivated by a desire to enhance one-off attacks; instead, he has made bombing other global security—it’s driven by his need to burnish countries a routine and defining element of his ad- his own image as a winner. “We aren’t winning. We ministration. The more he fails as president, the more are losing,” Trump reportedly complained to his Trump will deepen U.S. military involvement around generals in the weeks leading up to his Afghanistan the world—deploying more troops, wasting more tax announcement. It’s telling that his national security dollars, and killing more civilians in the process. a

SILENCED MAJORITY

Repeal and Replace In 2016, voters passed a raft of liberal ballot initiatives. Now Republicans are throwing them out.

BY CLIO CHANG

DURING BARACK OBAMA’S two terms in office, Nevada, they mandated background checks for gun Democrats lost ground at the state level—a lot of sales. In each case, citizens used ballot initiatives ground. Republicans now dominate state legislatures as a tool for direct democracy, using majority rule to a greater degree than at any time since the Civil to push through policies that lawmakers are unable War, making it nearly impossible for Democrats to or unwilling to enact themselves. enact any meaningful policies in large swaths of But such victories have proved short-lived. Re- the country. But in the midst of last year’s electoral publican legislatures responded to the surge in civic wipeout, there was one bright spot: Citizens took participation by using their power to effectively the law into their own hands, introducing 71 ballot overrule the will of the people—and to make it harder initiatives in 16 states—the most in a decade. to enact citizen-backed reforms in the future. In In Maine, citizens used ballot initiatives to in- South Dakota, state lawmakers simply repealed the crease the minimum wage and tax the rich to fund voter-approved limits on campaign contributions public schools. In South Dakota, they pushed through and lobbying. In Maine, the state legislature threw campaign finance reforms and restrictions on lob- out the voter-approved tax on the rich, and amended bying, as well as a system to create public funding the minimum wage increase to exclude workers who for political campaigns. In Oklahoma, they reined receive tips. The state’s GOP governor, Paul LePage, in the War on Drugs, reclassifying nearly all felony boasted that there is nothing to prevent lawmakers drug possession charges as misdemeanors. And in from tossing out any ballot initiative they dislike.

12 | NEW REPUBLIC “If you read the constitution,” he crowed, “the leg- “But ignoring them altogether is different. It defeats islature can just ignore it.” the purpose of having direct democracy.” It’s true that in twelve states, including Maine, In a preemptive strike, Republican legislatures there are no restrictions against such “legislative are also making it harder for citizens to place ini- tampering” with citizen initiatives. And there are tiatives on the ballot in the first place. Following sometimes good reasons for lawmakers to make the election, according to a report by Ballotpedia, adjustments to ballot measures, especially if voters use them to infringe upon the constitutional rights of minorities. Ballot initiatives aren’t exclusively progressive tools, after all. In the early 2000s, con- After the wave of citizen-backed measures servatives used them to ban same-sex marriage in last fall, lawmakers in 33 states introduced a number of states. 186 bills to change the initiative process. But the principle of direct democracy is a hall- mark of the U.S. political system, stemming from the earliest days of the country. Ballot initiatives picked up steam during the Progressive Era, as a lawmakers in 33 states introduced 186 bills to adjust means for voters to push through reforms in the face the ballot-initiative process—often making it more of inept and intransigent politicians. South Dakota restrictive. Both South Dakota and North Dakota became the first state to adopt a statewide initiative established task forces designed to “reform” the process in 1898, and many others soon followed. initiative process, and Arizona banned advocacy Veteran political observers say that the current groups from paying people for each signature they conservative backlash against ballot initiatives is collect to place an initiative on the ballot—creating ­particularly extreme. “This stands out in recent yet another hurdle in an already difficult process. history as one of the most brash years we’ve seen There are ways to protect ballot initiatives from in the response by legislatures,” says Josh Altic, a legislative tampering. In California, voters must project director at Ballotpedia, an organization that approve any move that legislators make to repeal tracks ballot initiatives. And while state lawmakers or substantively alter initiatives. Other states per- frequently amend ballot initiatives, it violates the mit repeal or amendment only by a supermajority spirit of political participation to repeal them out- vote of the legislature. And some states, like Ne- POWER TO right. “You should expect state legislatures to push vada, prevent lawmakers from tampering with THE PEOPLE back on these things, at least somewhat,” says Craig voter-approved initiatives until the measure has Citizen-backed Burnett, a political scientist at Hofstra U­ niversity. been enshrined in state law for a set number of ballot initiatives years. Voters in South Dakota and Mis- are on the rise souri are working to place similar pro- 2016: 71 tections on the ballot next year, in the form of constitutional amendments—­ 2014: 35 which can’t be overturned by the leg- 2012: 50 islature. “If those succeed,”says Altic of Ballotpedia, “you’ll see other states 2010: 46 doing it, for sure.” In an age of partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression, robust forms of direct democracy are more important than ever. Ballot initiatives give voters an essential means for passing laws that reflect the will of the majority, and Democrats should do whatever they can to protect the initiative process. But by definition, ballot initiatives are a tool of the powerless. If you have to try to pass a law yourself, it means your political party has failed. In the end, ballot initiatives are no substitute for Democrats finding a way to win control of state legislatures. a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 13 body politic

wall that ran through the Rust Belt came crashing down, and Trump walked over the rubble straight into the Oval Office. Since the election, Clinton has often been blamed for focusing too much on “identity politics.” But the suggestion that Democrats return to the populist econom- ic rhetoric that made them heroes of the working class ignores the current political reality. The cultural forces that swayed the election in favor of Trump are likely to remain. What doomed Clinton, in the end, was not that she appealed to racial and ethnic minorities, but that she paid them little more than lip service. As Dem- ocrats attempt to move forward, they must come to grips with the fact that many of the working-class whites who abandoned the party are likely gone for good. The sooner they accept that reality, the sooner they can win with the coalition they have.

ROM 1932 TO 1964, DEMOCRATS were America’s majority party. FThey consistently held the White House and Congress, with few interrup- tions, because they were the party of the working class, and millions of Americans It’s the Culture, Stupid directly benefited from the social welfare Identity politics isn’t the problem for Democrats. It’s the solution. programs they stood for. To maintain this majority, Democrats BY LEE DRUTMAN had to hold together a coalition of North- ern liberals and Southern conservatives who disagreed vehemently on civil rights. OR A LONG TIME IN AMERICAN POL- contrast, in the top 4 percent of income As long as racial equality took a back seat itics, you could pretty well guess distribution, just 42 percent of whites sup- to New Deal economic programs, the coa- Fhow someone would vote by their ported Trump. Among whites, millionaires lition held. But once the moral urgency of income. Poor people generally supported decisively rejected their fellow millionaire, the civil rights movement made desegre- Democrats; rich people voted Republi- while blue-collar voters embraced him. gation inevitable, the coalition split apart. can. This was true even among whites: What drove the vote in 2016 was not And after Ronald Reagan won the Oval In every presidential election since at income, but identity. Trump won by ap- Office in 1980 by appealing to blue-collar least 1948, wealthy whites have been no- pealing directly to the cultural anxieties whites, Republicans found they could pry tably more Republican than the rest of of downscale whites: He told them he’d the working class away from Democrats the white electorate. And throughout the do something about the immigrants who by emphasizing culture and race over eco- twentieth century, poor whites identified were stealing their jobs and the Muslims nomics. Over the next quarter-­century, much more strongly with the Democrats who were plotting to blow us up. Hillary the only times Democrats won the White than other whites. For decades, a good Clinton, meanwhile, appeared to dismiss House—in 1992 and 1996—came when rule of thumb was: The greener your bank working-class whites as “deplorables,” and Bill Clinton exploited his status as a white account, the redder your vote. put on a convention that was a paean to Southerner to neutralize the GOP’s em- Then came Donald Trump, and the multiculturalism. As both parties made phasis on cultural issues. equation shifted. In last year’s election, appeals based more on race and culture Democrats were further hurt by the according to an analysis by political scien- than on class and economic inequality, dramatic decline of labor unions. For tist Tom Wood, 61 percent of the poorest almost 10 percent of voters who cast their decades, organized labor had helped whites—those in the bottom third of in- ballots for Barack Obama in 2012 decided come distribution—voted for Trump. By to abandon the Democrats. The famed blue ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM

14 | NEW REPUBLIC the white working class see themselves to see Trump as their savior. And it’s decades. If every generation and race had as the white working class. But with- hard to imagine what that bold economic voted at the same rate, Democrats would out unions to identify and defend their agenda would even look like, given how have won in a landslide. economic interests, the white working deeply Democrats have come to depend If Democrats were serious about get- class became the white working class. As on a class of very wealthy donors who ting out the vote, they would begin build- Democrats came to rely less and less on would like to stay very wealthy. ing on-the-ground organizations today, union voters, and more and more on af- So: If neither of these options seems reaching deep into low-turnout commu- fluent urban cosmopolitans, their rhetoric feasible, can Democrats win by playing on nities. But that would require them to re- and policies increasingly came to reflect the turf of culture and identity? The short think their entire party apparatus, which the interests of a more highly educated answer is yes. But to do so, they’ll have prioritizes fund-raising at the expense of and diverse constituency. By 2008, this to overcome two obstacles: a geography everything else. Would-be candidates in coalition was big enough to help elect problem and a turnout problem. competitive districts are told that their Barack Hussein Obama, even though 59 Let’s start with the geography prob- first task is to raise millions of dollars percent of working-class­ whites voted lem. Thanks to our antiquated electoral from rich people so they can pay consul- Republican. But with a black man in system, areas of the country that are cul- tants and pollsters to produce ads and do the White House and immigration on the turally and racially conservative enjoy social-media targeting. There’s a lot more rise, the Tea Party and Trump were able outsize influence. At the presidential money to be made in buying TV time, it to fan the flames of racial and cultural ­level, Democrats have won the popular would seem, than in building meaningful resentment. In the end, Obama’s elec- vote in six of the last seven elections— connections to voters. tion helped accelerate what has been a yet a Republican still entered the White But campaign infrastructure alone isn’t long, slow shift in the political identity House after two of those defeats, thanks enough. To motivate their core constit- of blue-collar whites. The fact that the to the way the Electoral College favors ru- uents, Democrats also need to embrace change has occurred steadily, and over ral and suburban voters at the expense of a message that speaks more directly to a period of many decades, only makes it city dwellers. At the congressional level, their concerns. A truly progressive eco- all the more difficult to reverse. the increasing concentration of Demo- nomic and civil rights agenda would en- crats in a relatively small number of urban gage the constituencies that Democrats OW, THEN, SHOULD DEMOCRATS districts—combined with aggressive GOP need most—not working-class whites, but proceed? Democrats have tradi- gerrymandering—has enabled Republi- low-income minorities. Donald Trump Htionally fared better when they cans to hold a majority in the House for 18 won by appealing to the cultural anxieties emphasize class over culture, encourag- of the last 24 years. If Democrats get back of blue-collar whites. By the same token, ing white workers to vote their wallets. into power, they should fix their geogra- Democrats can win by appealing more Broadly speaking, this can be achieved by de-emphasizing racial and cultural issues, or by re-emphasizing economic issues. In For Democrats to win on the turf of cultural the current political landscape, however, identity, they’ll have to overcome two obstacles: neither approach is likely to work. a geography problem and a turnout problem. The first option, to de-emphasize race and culture, may simply be impossible at this point. Trump is waging an aggressive phy problem by passing electoral reforms explicitly to the hopes, fears, and dreams effort to crack down on immigrants and to render gerrymandering ­impractical of their broad coalition, and giving them a undercut civil rights laws, while offering and force candidates to appeal to a broad- reason to turn out on Election Day. unabashed support to white supremacists. er range of voters. As America becomes more and more Advising Democrats to tone down cultur- But Democrats can’t fix their geogra- diverse, issues of race and culture will al issues feels a bit like telling a kid who’s phy problem until they solve their turnout continue to dominate the political dis- being punched in the face by a bully that problem. It’s a matter of math: The GOP’s course. The good news is that Democrats, he should try to be a little less violent. core constituencies (older, wealthier, for perhaps the first time in modern his- The second strategy, to re-emphasize churchgoing) get to the polls at consis- tory, can actually turn that reality to their economic issues, also faces a significant tently higher rates than core Democratic advantage. The bad news is that, even if hurdle. In theory, if Democrats came out constituencies (younger, poorer, secular). they succeed, the discord and hatred that with a big, bold economic agenda, they In last year’s election, just 49 percent of the GOP is using to mobilize its base will might be able to convince blue-­collar millennials voted, compared to 69 percent continue to divide the country for decades whites that Democrats are still the party of baby boomers and 70 percent of the to come. The Republican emphasis on of the working class. But at this point, it “greatest generation.” Hispanics voted at race and culture poses a solvable problem may be hard to regain the trust of those a lower rate than whites, and black voter for Democrats. It poses a more difficult voters, given how solidly they have come turnout dropped for the first time in two problem for democracy. a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 15 States of Denial Trump insists that climate change isn’t real. From crop failures to killer storms, his Southern supporters are paying the price. BY MATTHEW SHAER

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TRAVIS DOVE

Freddy Bell, a peanut farmer in Levy County, Florida, doesn’t believe humans cause global warming—even as his harvest has been decimated by years of drought and extreme heat.

NOVEMBER 2017 | 17 Early in the summer of 1991, the conservation biologist Jack Putz received a peculiar call from the owner of a vacation home out in Yankeetown, a village on the Gulf Coast of Florida. According to the caller, there was something wrong with the cabbage palms on his property.

“They’re sick, you mean?” Putz asked. To size up the extent of the damage, the scientists used a “No,” the man replied. “They’re dead.” helicopter for an aerial tour of the coast. “As we flew up and Putz, a young associate professor at the University of down the Big Bend, we could see this band of dead trees, Florida in nearby Gainesville, was accustomed to local res- always fringing a salt marsh,” Putz says. “And so we thought, idents ringing him at all hours of the day. As an academic ‘Hey, maybe that has something to do with it: the salinity at a state institution, it was a hazard of the trade. “Most of levels, the proximity to the Gulf.’ And that’s how all this re- the time,” he recalls, “you just listened, and redirected the search got started.” person to someone else.” But this call resonated with him. What began that day in Yankeetown evolved into one of A few months earlier, he’d returned from a research trip to the lengthiest active investigations into the effects of climate Malaysia, where he’d seen firsthand the deleterious effects change ever undertaken in the United States. For the past 25 that climate change could have on a sensitive ecosystem. years, Putz and a cadre of scientists have shuttled between Even a quarter-century ago, it was clear that something big the university and a handful of sites in Levy County, mea- and dangerous was happening all over the world. Perhaps the suring the creep of the tide, the types of vegetation growing dead palm trees in Yankeetown represented another clue. Putz along the Gulf, and the salinity of the water. The findings were agreed to visit the man, arranging for two colleagues, a tree as unambiguous as they were startling: A dramatic spike in pathologist and a swamp specialist, to join him. the salinity of the water—which has been conclusively linked The drive from Gainesville to Yankeetown takes less than to global warming—was killing acres of trees. The rates of two hours, traffic permitting, but one might as well be trav- mortality among cabbage palms and red cedars was soaring; eling from one country to another. Gainesville is densely new vegetation, better suited to salt, was springing up in populated—built in concentric circles of strip-mall sprawl. Yankeetown, by contrast, is kaleidoscopi- cally, violently wild. Located in Levy County, on the 220-mile Big Bend of the Gulf Coast—the longest The impact of climate change will be stretch of undeveloped shoreline in the continental geographically uneven. Some of us are United States—it is a place of undulant seagrass and crooked timber, of pelicans and ruby-throated hum- going to be hit earlier, harder, and at a mingbirds. The winters are mild; the summers are much greater cost than others. prehistoric-jungle hot, with a humidity that envelops the county like a drenched quilt. Putz and his team found the right home without much trouble. It was modern and dun-colored and parked on their place. “We could see how fast it was happening,” Putz 400 acres of salt marshland. The owner, a plastic surgeon who says. “In these relatively short periods of time, we could see lived most of the year in Orlando, gave them a tour. Putz saw whole patches of forest on the coast, full of all these different immediately that the damage was much worse than the man species of plant life, become salt marsh.” realized. It wasn’t just the cabbage palms—famously durable In a peer-reviewed paper published in September, a col- trees that grow across the Southeast—that were withered and league of Putz’s, Amy Langston, reported that tidal flooding desiccated. It was the tall, proud red cedars, too. “The tree on Levy County’s coast has more than doubled since 1992. pathologist and I had a talk, and we figured that there were Some of the nearby islands are now continually swamped; on no diseases that would kill both trees,” Putz recalls. “It was others, a single live tree remains, alone in a cemetery of timber. obvious to both of us that something else was going on here.” “If the rate of sea-level rise continues increasing,” Langston

18 | NEW REPUBLIC warns, “even healthy stands will be replaced by salt-tolerant In a new paper published in June in the journal Science, a communities, potentially within a matter of decades. Forest team of economists and public policy analysts, incorporating islands, unique to a small portion of the coastal network of a wide range of climate-modeling data, quantified the eco- the United States, will completely disappear.” nomic damage that climate change could wreak on the United Over time, the water will almost certainly keep rising. At States in the years to come. What they found was a clear bi- first, it will chew at the fringes of Yankeetown, leaving the furcation: In the North and West, agricultural yields will stay downtown intact. Tourists will continue to flock to the area more or less constant, as will energy expenditures and direct to fish and kayak. Then one day in the future, whether in fits damage from storms. The South and Southeast—the region and starts or propelled by a Category 5 hurricane, the ocean stretching from South Carolina down through Georgia and will roar past the marina and the town hall annex and the Florida and out to Texas—are another matter. The electrical shed that houses the volunteer fire department, and all of grid will be overwhelmed by an increased need for air condi- Yankeetown will slip permanently under the surface of the sea. tioners. Crops will wither and die. Heat-related illnesses and deaths will soar: By the end of this century, the study predicts, mortality rates in parts of the South could surge dramatically. E TEND TO think of climate change as a vast What the heat doesn’t harm, the storms will. Exacerbated and monolithic force: a threat that will affect by warming waters, cyclones and hurricanes will pummel all corners of the globe equally, eventually the shorelines. Picture Texas after Harvey—the wide Hous- Wrendering the entire planet uninhabitable. ton boulevards converted to canals, the confused horses If current scientific projections are any indication, that may wading through the blue-gray floodwater, the shudder of well happen in a century or two. But in the meantime, the explosions at the flooded chemical plant, the three-year-old impact of climate change will be geographically uneven. girl who was found by rescue teams clinging to her mother’s Some of us are going to be hit earlier, harder, and at a much drowned corpse. Now picture the same scenes playing out greater cost than others. in city after city, several times a year. Billions will be spent

PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN DEPP FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC Rising salinity levels in the waters near Yankeetown have killed off acres of trees and other vegetation, turning vibrant wetlands into a salt marsh.

NOVEMBER 2017 | 19 on relief, rebuilding, and prevention efforts. In the space of liberal elites, turning to a steady diet of right-leaning media for a decade, according to the Science study, direct damage from reassurance. “In the official meteorological circles, you have storms may cost many Southern counties at least 10 percent an abundance of people who believe that man-made climate of their GDP—annually. By the last years of this century, an change is real,” Rush Limbaugh, a resident of Florida, scoffed unprecedented redistribution of wealth could take place, as in September. “And they believe that Al Gore is correct when climate refugees flee north. “People living in the South are he has written—and he couldn’t be more wrong—that climate going to be much poorer, and people in the North are going change is creating more hurricanes and stronger hurricanes.” to be much richer,” says Solomon Hsiang, the lead researcher One week later, the strongest hurricane ever recorded swept on the study. “That will lead to a widening of inequality. In across the Atlantic and slammed into Florida, putting more essence, one group will get a big boost.” than 90,000 people in shelters, and knocking out electricity Hsiang stresses to me that he is not in the business of politics. to nearly two-thirds of the state. “As researchers,” he says, “our aim is to get people to understand what’s coming down the road. We provide the information, and society looks at it, and discusses it, and makes a decision on EVY COUNTY—locals pronounce it lee-vee—is named how to move forward as a country.” Still, one does not have to after David Levy Yulee, a railroad man and slave owner be a policy analyst to see the contradictions raised by Hsiang’s of Sephardic Moroccan origin, who in 1845 became work: The counties marked in red on his map—those that will Lthe first Jew to serve in the United States Senate. pay the highest price for climate change—are also the deepest The area is sparsely populated (roughly 40,000 people), red politically. In locations ranging from the tiny coastal towns relatively poor (per capita income hovers around $20,000), of South Carolina to the sprawling suburbs of Arizona, those and geographically bifurcated. Inland, along a phalanx of rip- who support Donald Trump are the very Americans who will be pled hills, residents tend cattle or raise timber and legumes; the farm town of Williston, near the center of the county, hosts a popular Peanut Festival each year, In Levy County, residents will lose up complete with a contest to crown a Little Peanut King and Queen and Baby Peanut. But nearer the to 28 percent of their GDP to global coast, in small villages like Yankeetown, the main warming every year—one of the trade is in tourism and shellfish. One afternoon in late August, as the sun is setting highest rates in the nation. over the Gulf, I follow Route 24 out to a place called Cedar Key, the center of the county’s oyster and clam operations. Connected to the mainland by a narrow hurt the most by his climate denial. In Levy County, according bridge, the island is less than a mile across, and surrounded to the Science study, residents could lose more than 28 percent on three sides by apparently endless shallow sea. In the four- of their GDP to global warming every year—one of the highest square-block downtown, the buildings are salt-flecked, their rates in the nation. Last November, 71 percent of those same flanks bowed from years of moisture. A sign outside the Eagles residents cast a ballot for Trump. Lodge advertises a “We Survived Hermine Party,” a reference Nowhere is this “red-red” paradox more pronounced than to last year’s hurricane that swamped the town, nearly de- in Florida, a hurricane-prone state with a Republican legis- stroyed the only grocery store, burst into restaurants on the lature and a staunchly conservative governor. Although Rick pier, and caused about $10 million in damage. Scott likes to frame himself as a defender of the environment, This afternoon, the Marathon gas station is bustling, full his administration has ordered staff at the Florida Department of locals making their end-of-day beer run. In a fishing town, of Environmental Protection not to use the terms “global people talk about the ocean the way farmers keep tabs on warming” or “climate change” in official communications. the rain. At the register, a clam farmer named Troy regales Scott declared as recently as 2011, in fact, that he does not me with a story about how he had almost burned the skin believe in man-made climate change. He has since taken to off his ankles in the ocean the other day. “It was like you telling reporters that he “is not a scientist,” a sly riposte so was over in Daytona, with the 92 degree water,” says Troy, popular among Republicans that it has its own Wikipedia who’s wearing jeans and a loose-necked camouflaget -shirt. page. (Mitch McConnell, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio have “It’s like you put Epsom salt in your tub and got in it.” And all used the line at one time or another.) hot water, he adds, isn’t good for the clams. “When the heat Republicans like Scott know how to cater to their base: Polls and the freshwater from the storms combine, it’s trouble,” he show that just 15 percent of Republicans believe that humans explains. “Everyone out here, in the spring, I bet they lost 15 are responsible for climate change, compared to 79 percent of to 20 percent of their business.” Democrats. If conservatives are aware of the scientific con- The next morning at seven-thirty, I head down to the sensus, they simply dismiss it as some sort of conspiracy by marina to board a clamming boat captained by Ed Stokes, an

20 | NEW REPUBLIC business is likely to remain in good shape: Rising seas won’t harm the leas- es, and flooding is likely to claim Cedar Key before it destroys the area’s booming business in farmed clams and oysters. But the same can’t be said for wild oys- ters, which have long been a major indus- try on the Big Bend. “What we’re seeing with wild oysters is just a tremendous, frightening decline,” says Peter Frederick, an ecologist at the University of Flori- da who has been har- Ed Stokes and his crew harvest shellfish off Cedar Key, Florida, where wild oyster reefs have plunged by two-thirds. vesting oysters on a recreational basis for years. Twenty years employee of the shellfish company Southern Cross. Stokes, ago, he began noticing a substantial dip in the local oys- who is in his early sixties, has silver hair and creased skin ter population. “One of the most mysterious things about the texture of hardened resin. Since graduating from high oysters, once they die, their shells disappear quickly,” he school, he’s had all sorts of jobs: contractor, photographer, says. “And I’d get out to these places where there’d once captain of a charter fishing boat. But he’d fallen in love with been a lot of oysters, and there were just big holes blown the freedom of farming shellfish, the small joys it affords him. in the reefs. Just mud.” According to one study, oyster reefs Holding the wheel with one hand, he jams a Marlboro in his in the Big Bend have declined by 66 percent since the 1980s. mouth and holds out his phone for me to inspect. On the A massive die-off is underway. screen is an image that looks like a garish abstract painting: Together with Bill Pine, another scientist at the University a sprawl of cotton-candy pastels and burnt blacks. of Florida, Frederick conducted a series of field studies. The “That’s a sunset!” Stokes shouts above the motor roar. problem, they concluded, lay with the saltiness of the water: “No filter!” The oysters in this region need a very specific grade of salinity The boat scuds out across the Gulf and veers west toward to thrive, a balance historically achieved on the Big Bend by the the horizon. After 15 minutes, the two junior members of the mixture of the salty Gulf and the freshwater discharge from crew, Tim Beville and Bryan Holm, holler for Stokes to slow the rivers and streams that spill into it. But now the discharge down: We are drawing close to the lease. Last year, Stokes is decreasing, an issue Frederick attributes to increased water explains, Southern Cross deposited hundreds of spats—young usage by inland farmers and residents, as well as drought clams—on the ocean floor, draping them in a nylon bag to keep conditions across the state. “It’s a pie,” he says. “Less rainfall away fish and crabs. Now the clams are ready to be retrieved. takes away some of the pie, and increased water usage takes For the next hour, Stokes mans a winch, bringing up the away more.” At the end, all the wild oysters are left with is a dripping and encrusted bags for Holm to spray free of debris. tiny sliver of the freshwater they need to survive. After the clams are clean, Beville stacks the bags amidships, Frederick and his colleagues were recently awarded an one after another, distributing the weight so the boat won’t $8.3 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foun- tack. The haul today is 80 bags, hard and straining work. Once dation to help rebuild the reefs off the shore of Cedar Key, the last bag is on board, Holm leaps into the sea to rinse off. to protect the oysters. But increasing salinity of the water Around us churn a handful of boats, some affiliated with throughout the region has set off a chain reaction: In re- Southern Cross, others run by competitors. Even as Levy cent years, harvesters from other bays have encountered the County begins to feel the effects of climate change, the clam same die-off, and have started to poach from the waters of

NOVEMBER 2017 | 21 Cedar Key. As climate change kills off the oysters, everyone his focus. Peanuts were where the real money was—the legumes is fighting over the few that remain. “You’ve got arguments were well suited to the county’s damp soil and they didn’t re- over harvests, you’ve got young guys going up into the creeks quire much fussing. You planted them in the spring, harvested trying to find more oysters—the old rules are going out the them a few months later, and sent them off to Georgia to be window,” Frederick says. “It’s a Wild West situation, and it’s shelled. Every year, the crop got bigger. Bell bought more land. difficult for everyone.” Today he owns 6,500 acres, more than the bottom third of the island of Manhattan. Spitting a chunk of Red Man tobacco on the ground, Bell RISSCROSSING LEVY COUNTY, I repeatedly hear an leads me into the warehouse he constructed not long ago to argument I take to calling the Cycle Theory. There hold his crop. The structure, which cost $3 million to build, are variations, but generally, the Cycle Theory goes is the size of a commercial airplane hangar. At its peak, Bell’s C something like this: The climate may be changing. peanut harvest was 12 tons per year, enough to fill the ware- But people don’t have anything to do with it. And sooner or house and then some. Today the building is almost empty. later, things will swing back around again, I promise—just give Over the past few years, Levy County has grown sharply it a little time. hotter and drier. This spring, according to the National Oce- The appeal of the logic is hard to deny: If climate change anic and Atmospheric Administration, two-thirds of Florida isn’t influenced by man, then there is no need to alter your experienced a drop in rainfall, with many towns suffering daily habits or routines. The weather changes naturally, so from extreme drought, a condition characterized by major at some point it will change back naturally. There’s no need crop losses and widespread water shortages. “For growing to curb carbon emissions or reduce water usage or submit to peanuts, you want rain,” Bell explains. “They need an inch the kind of regulations that you, as a conservative Trump of water a week.” Without it, the crop winds up being much, supporter, are constitutionally inclined to view as “govern- much smaller than normal. “The heat hurts, too,” Bell adds. ment overreach.” As we walk back outside, Bell pulls the bill of his hat further Even as the residents of Levy County grapple with the very down on his head. The afternoon sun is ferocious. Anticipating real and costly effects of climate change on a daily basis, they my question, Bell dismisses global warming before I can even cling ever more fiercely to the Cycle Theory. Freddy Bell, a raise the subject. “Now, I don’t want you to think that I don’t 76-year-old peanut farmer in Williston, traces his roots in the believe in climate change somewhat,” he says. “But to me it’s area all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century, around nothing like they want to make out.” the time Florida achieved statehood. “My people came down I remind him what he has just said about the heat. “Yes,” he concedes, “but it’s a natural occurrence as far as I’m concerned, over a period of years. I bet if you look “That Paris thing,” Dan says, referring back in history, it was hotter in 1900 than it is now.” His peanut crop may be roasting in the midst of a to the international climate accord. brutal drought, but there’s nothing to worry about. “Trump got us out of that, and I think It’s all explained by the Cycle Theory. Since there’s no man-made cause at work—no way, in short, to that’s good. It was really smart.” slow or stop climate change—Bell contents himself with adapting to what he sees as the normal vicis- situdes of nature. For now, he has converted some from the Carolinas,” he tells me one afternoon. “Florida is of his peanut pasture for use by a few hundred head of cattle, where the money and the land were.” When Bell was growing trying to make up for his lost income. He hasn’t come this far up, his father and mother managed a small plot of peanuts, to give up what he built, or to abandon land that has been in just a few acres, that were harvested and fed directly to their his family for centuries. hogs. Bell studied to be a mechanic, and took a job in a local Later that day, I stop for a drink at a nearby canteen. Gun- repair shop after high school. But he was growing vegeta- smoke is playing on the television; the darkened bar is busy bles on the side, and in 1970, married with a couple of kids, with contractors on their way back from Gainesville. Outside, he decided he was better with the crops than he was with at a motel across the street, sit two men. The older one iden- the machines. tifies himself as Dan. He manages the motel’s 16 units, many “I’m living proof you can start from absolutely nothing and of which are occupied by long-term tenants. succeed if you just make up your mind,” Bell says. “I know “Where do the tenants come from?” I ask. you won’t believe this, but the day I quit my job, I had $62 in “They’re local people on disability,” Dan replies. “And my pocket. One week’s pay.” they’re getting like $800 a month. So they come here for The early years were lean. Bell grew everything he could, $400 in rent, and all their electricity and cable and trash and warehousing the stuff in rusted sheds. Gradually, he narrowed stuff, it’s all paid for. It’s a deal.”

22 | NEW REPUBLIC Hot for Trump GOP strongholds in the South will be hit the hardest by climate change.

Who Gets Burned Counties projected to lose 10 percent or more of their GDP to climate change Levy County Voted for Trump Voted for Clinton

A new study in Science quantified a starkly inconvenient spots for climate damage are also the reddest when truth: Climate change is going to hit some parts of it comes to politics: All but 107 of them voted for America far harder than others. By 2099, according Trump over Clinton. One of the hardest hit will be Levy to the study, 601 counties could lose at least 10 County, Florida, where climate-related deaths are percent of their GDP to global warming through loss of projected to rise eight times faster than the national jobs, soaring energy costs, and rising mortality rates. average. Climate denial may play at the polls, but it In a cruel twist, the counties marked as deep-red hot will cost Trump voters dearly in the long run.

Dan’s friend is named Shawn. His arms are laced with China won’t?” he says. “In my mind, it’s making me pay for elaborate tattoos, and he wears a pentagram around his neck. a problem that no one can fix.” He makes his living as a short-order cook and uses his weekly That, in a nutshell, is how many residents in Levy County paycheck of $300 to support his wife, his wife’s parents, and see it: Even if climate change is real, it can’t be solved. And his three small children. As convicted felons, neither Shawn even if it could be solved, it would only result in a bunch of nor Dan can vote. But they don’t have much use for politics foreigners getting rich off the backs of hardworking Americans. anyway. “Politicians don’t give a shit about us,” Shawn says, “and so we don’t give a shit about them.” Dan recalls, with approval, a story he recently saw on Fox RONSON, THE SEAT of Levy County, is a town of News. “That Paris thing,” he says, referring to the interna- Spanish-moss-draped oaks and aging churches. The tional climate accord that sought to reduce greenhouse gas business district is clustered around the intersec- emissions. “Trump got us out of that, and I think that’s good. B tion of East Hathaway Avenue and Route 24, which It was really smart.” connects directly with Gainesville. The local court and the Shawn nods. “I mean, why are you asking ordinary Amer- offices of the county commissioner sit nearby, flanked by a

GRAPHIC BY DAVE FOSTER icans, working Americans, to do something that people in massive relief of the Ten Commandments.

NOVEMBER 2017 | 23 “We’re being sued for that,” says Wil- bur Dean, the county coordinator, reclin- ing in a chair in his office. The pride is evident in his voice: The lawsuit was filed by a local atheist group; Dean is rooting for it to fail. “To me,” he explains, the Ten Commandments “say a lot about the values that America originated from, if you get me.” Dean is tall and affable, with grayish-­ white hair he wears swept across his head. A seventh-generation resident of Levy County, he started off as a farmer and still keeps almost 100 head of cat- tle and a pine tree farm. “But that’s just messing around,” he says. There’s no- where in the world, he adds, where he would rather have grown up. “This is a rural area,” he says, his gaze wandering to a display case of fishing lures he built himself. “An area with very independent County Coordinator Wilbur Dean, a seventh-generation Levy resident, disputes climate people who are very set on home rule. science and considers federal environmental regulations to be “overreach.” The people here, we’re just against the state or the feds interfering.” Historically, Dean points out, Levy did not always sway red: more, he tells me, I could try John Meeks, the chair of the Up until 2012, registered Democrats outnumbered Republi- Levy County board of commissioners: “He’ll talk your ear off.” cans. But things changed during the Obama administration, I find Meeks in the back room of the local Ace Hardware, when many residents of Levy found themselves at the receiving where he works as a floor manager. He had run for office in end of what they saw as government overreach. “You had 2008, as a Democrat. “I actually got defeated,” he laughs. things like regulations on surface water treatment,” Dean In 2011, he switched parties, and “the man who defeated says, “on farming and fishing. And that just wasn’t accepted me, he got indicted by a grand jury for bribery, so here I am.” very well.” Last year, eight in ten voters in the county cast Meeks has a good handle on the climate-related threats their ballots for Trump. And those voters made their distaste facing Levy County. “Seems like when I was a kid, in the for government regulations clear. summer it rained at least every other day in the afternoon,” Did that distaste extend to laws that would combat cli- he says. “It would get hot and rain and that kind of cooled mate change? Dean flashes me a wry smile. It was a smile things off, and it would be humid.” Now the periods of drought that said, I know what you’re thinking, and I’m not going to let routinely last, unbroken, for weeks on end. Meeks is eager to you condescend to me. “Look,” he says, “I accept that there’s meet the threat head-on: Under his watch, Levy County has erosion happening. I accept that there’s some drought.” But joined Resiliency Florida, a statewide conservation network, the science hasn’t been established to his satisfaction. “You and he has taken part in a conference call with the group. know, in the 1970s, they were saying it was fixing to be an “I’m interested in hearing what they have to say,” he says. Ice Age.” (Forty years ago, a small number of scientists did “Because there’s money out there, there’s grants out there, forecast global cooling, but that theory had nowhere near the there’s technology we can use in Levy.” He also supported a law consensus that global warming does today.) passed by the state legislature last year that requires Florida’s Why act on a wild theory? As far as Dean is concerned, the environmental regulators to monitor and shield natural spring local economy is on the upswing. Undeterred by the threat waters from pollutants. “That was a prime example of a policy of hurricanes and the decline in local fisheries and the emp- that was designed to protect what you’re trying to protect,” ty peanut warehouses, people are building more houses in Meeks says, “but while still not handcuffing private citizens Levy County. “We’re not exactly seeing as many as I’d like,” and businesses from being able to do what they need to do.” Dean says. “But after the 2008 recession, new businesses are The problem with climate change, he argues, is that the opening, older businesses are expanding. People are spending conversation about its causes has gotten so damn politicized, money again on homes.” it’s hard for him to separate the reality from the politics. Dean stands up. It’s a Monday, and there’s a line of residents “These stories, are you telling me them because they’re true, waiting outside his office to speak with him. But if I want or because they further your agenda?” Meeks says. “I had this

24 | NEW REPUBLIC friend, and he told me something I’ve never forgotten. He “With Hermine, quite a few people here lost their houses,” said, ‘Figures don’t lie, but sometimes liars do the figuring.’ ” Gardner recalls. And Hermine was a Category 1 storm. With a What Meeks fears most is “overreach.” “The thing that bigger and more destructive hurricane—like Harvey (­Category drives me nuts is when someone moves into an area and sets 4) or Irma (Category 5)—the damage in Levy County could be about trying to change it,” he says. “See that bar over there? catastrophic. “We’d be more or less flattened,” Gardner says. It would be like if someone moved next door to that bar, and A native of California, Gardner used to create digital con- then complained the bar was open too late. Well, it’s a bar. tent for colleges and textbook companies. A few years ago, Bars stay open late. Don’t come here and try to change things he moved down to Yankeetown with his wife to care for his to the way you want them. Don’t come here and regulate the mother-in-law. Now he spends his time capturing footage hell out of us. When you overregulate, you put our businesses for what he calls a “virtual preserve”—an interactive web site at a competitive disadvantage.” that will allow users to navigate through imagery of the area and click on icons to learn about native flora and fauna. In that way, the digital ghost of Yankeetown will survive long HE DAYS I spend in Levy County run concurrent to after the tides wash it away. the arrival of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, and Gardner hefts his tripod and camera and leads me out to everywhere I go, in bars and restaurants and hotel a nearby stream. In the sand, fiddler crabs are busy digging Tlobbies, images of the destruction play out on a thousands of holes, depositing the leftover dirt into small continuous, muted loop. Most locals are deeply sympathetic. piles. The ground seethes; it is alive. They’ve been through bad hurricanes before; they’ve learned While we walk, I mention the Cycle Theory I’ve been hear- to appreciate the violence such storms can wreak. And they ing from other residents of Levy County—the palpable fear of understand that sooner or later, if they stay in Florida, they’ll government regulation and federal intervention, the fact that be smacked again, whether it’s an oblique hit, as was the case this hugely vulnerable region is, in so many ways, resistant with the electric-grid-crippling Irma, or something direct and much more devastating. On my last day, I drive out to Yankeetown, to visit Standing on the observation post, the salt marshes that ignited Jack Putz’s interest in the Big Bend decades earlier. In late 2002, the mansion looking at the miles of flat marshes, I owned by the plastic surgeon who called Putz had can’t help but think how little stands been sold back to the county, which converted it into a visitors center for the Withlacoochee Gulf Preserve, between Yankeetown and disaster. a 413-acre parcel of undeveloped wetlands. On this particular day there are no visitors—but that’s prob- ably because the heat is so brutal: It’s a heavy and relentless to the only type of intervention that might ultimately save it. thing that weighs on your shoulders, a breeze-free torridity Gardner nods. Climate change doesn’t come up that much that the mosquitoes and black flies seem to find pleasant. Every in conversation here. “What’s disheartening is a lot of these few moments I feel a new bug bite into my flesh. Or maybe it’s folks are investing in a party, in politicians, that if anything just the same bug, refueling. It’s difficult to tell. are going to make their lives worse,” he says. “They’re voting Together with Kent Gardner, a volunteer at the preserve, against their own interests.” I climb to the top of a wooden observation post overlooking And so Gardner focuses on his volunteer work, on the the marsh. From that height, I can see the islands of dead preservation of this little undeveloped parcel of wetlands trees that have been studied for so many years by Putz and the along the coast. You can’t change everyone’s minds, so you do scientists who followed in his footsteps. The sun has bleached what you can, for as long as you can do it, and hope you made the trunks to a bony, gnarled white. In recent years, a team a difference. In the meantime, Donald Trump and Rick Scott led by David Kaplan, an environmental engineer from the and all the other climate deniers in the Republican Party will University of Florida, has been monitoring an incursion of a continue to make things as easy as possible for America’s big new type of plant: The mangrove, which traditionally grows polluters and developers, hastening the storm to come. And much further south, appeared to be making its way up the when it arrives, it will descend first, and most brutally, on the Gulf as a result of the overheating climate. residents of Yankeetown and all the other “red-red” counties The link between climate change and hurricane frequency across the South who have placed their faith in the president. has not been firmly established by scientists, but rising seas After saying goodbye to Gardner, I climb in my car and and scorching heat seem to worsen the damage the storms drive back along the sinuous dirt track, toward the paved incur. Standing on the observation post, looking at the miles road that bisects Yankeetown. Near the gates of the preserve, of flat, shallow marshes, I can’t help but think how little stands I spot a sign that was invisible to me on my way in. Its tone is between Yankeetown and disaster. plaintive, pleading: please tell your friends. a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 25 26 | NEW REPUBLIC Liberals and socialists share a common inheritance. So why can’t they find a way to work together to defeat Trump? BY JEET HEER ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERTO PARADA

T A TOWN HALL meeting in New York has worn thin. But Pelosi assured Hill that City early this year, Nancy Pelosi Democrats, aided by enlightened capitalists, fielded a thorny question about the can solve such problems. The alternative—­ ­direction of her party. Trevor Hill, a introducing socialist-oriented policies such as dapper New York University sopho- universal health care or free college education Amore sporting a light purple shirt and suspend- for all—is unthinkable. “I don’t think we have ers, wanted to know where the House minority to change from capitalism,” Pelosi concluded. leader stood on the question of socialism. A “We’re a capitalist system.” recent poll had shown that more than half of The contrast between Pelosi, a centrist all American voters younger than 30—not just liberal, and Hill, a young leftist, is emblematic Democrats—no longer support capitalism. This of deep fissures within the Democratic Party. statistic felt true to Hill’s own experience, not These divisions—which flared up during last just among his NYU classmates but also from year’s brutal primary race between Hillary what he’d seen in polls and on television. He Clinton and Bernie Sanders and have only was glad that Democrats had moved to the left intensified since Donald Trump’s victory—are on social issues, like gay marriage. So why, often seen in narrowly partisan terms, as a he asked Pelosi, couldn’t they move left on lingering quarrel between rival Democratic economic issues? Could she see Democrats factions. But it’s a grave mistake to dismiss embracing a “more populist message—the way this dispute as nothing but postelection in- the alt-right has sort of captured this populist fighting. In truth, Clinton and Sanders are strain on the right wing?” proxies in a long-standing ideological bat- After politely thanking Hill for his ques- tle between the two major camps within the tion, Pelosi was quick to shoot down any talk Democratic Party: liberals and socialists. of left-wing populism. “We’re capitalist,” she If the battle seems intense, it’s because the told him firmly, “and that’s just the way it is.” two camps are so closely related. Liberalism To be sure, Pelosi acknowledged, there are and socialism are best understood as sibling serious flaws in the system: CEOs are making rivals. Both were born of the common inheri-

CREDIT TK too much money, and the social safety net tance of the Enlightenment and the democratic

NOVEMBER 2017 | 27 revolutions of the nineteenth century. Norman Thomas, won only 0.29 percent Both are committed to secular ameliora- of the vote as the Socialist Party candidate tion of the human condition. Their family in 1948. Over the course of a century, feud is waged over the central issue of socialism in America transformed from to record levels, and socialist magazines the nature of capitalism. Liberals see it mass movement to die-hard sect to an both new and old (Dissent, n+1, Jacobin) as a flawed but worthy system that needs eccentric hobby. In his book Blood of the hum with lively debates over s­ ingle-payer reform, while socialists push for its ul- Liberals, the journalist George Packer health care and universal basic income. timate (if distant) transformation into a provided a dispiriting account of what For the first time since the 1960s, the left system where major economic decisions it was like to be a member of the Dem- wing of the American political­ spectrum are brought under democratic control. ocratic Socialists of America, the major doesn’t end at left-­liberalism, but extends As with all sibling rivalries, competi- organ for socialist politics after Debs’s to socialism. tion brings out the best and the worst in party dissolved, during the 1990s. “The In the realm of political theory, if not both sides. Over the past century, liberals organization acquainted me with the pa- in the messier realities of practice, it has and socialists have engaged in rancorous thos of left-wing activism in twilight,” long seemed logical and necessary that debate, bitter recrimination, and even Packer recalled: liberalism and socialism should con- political repression. Yet Democratic pres- verge. In the nineteenth century, John idents from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon It was marginal, pedestrian work, Stuart Mill, the foremost heir to classical B. Johnson won their most consequen- based on the eternal postponement liberalism, concluded that liberalism’s tial victories when they faced strong of gratification: three-hour board commitment to private property and left-wing challenges. Liberals’ greatest meetings in a narrow room in a church limited government, born of an age when basement; a two-year fund drive to achievements—­including child labor laws, suffrage was still restricted to proper- buy a used computer; a snowbound Social Security, and Medicare—­were all tied men, would have to be modified in forum on the Canadian left, whose based on ideas that socialists agitated for. announcement reached most of the the age of mass democracy, when both The most radical phase of Franklin D. membership too late because the non- women and working-class men had won Roosevelt’s presidency—­the Second New profit mailing wasn’t sorted properly. the vote. The newly enfranchised mass- Deal period from 1935 to 1936, when the The word “Sisyphean” is misleading, es would make material demands that federal government guaranteed workers since we never pushed our rock any- couldn’t be met by the minimal state en- the right to organize and enacted a large- where close to the top. dorsed by classical liberalism. The liberal scale public works program—­took place ideal of individual freedom could only against the backdrop of intense organiz- Given this disarray, the most enduring become real to most people if it were ing by socialists and communists. It was legacy of 2016 might not be Donald bolstered by socialist economic policies. widespread fear of this working-class Trump’s presidency, but the rebirth of “The social problem of the future,” militancy that allowed FDR to push American socialism. Sanders, a demo- Mill explained in 1873, was “how to through a far-­reaching agenda. cratic socialist, won 43 percent Going forward, the crucial question of the vote in the Democratic for Democrats is whether socialists and Party primaries and has, polls liberals can overcome their rivalry show, become the most popu- The most enduring legacy of and find ways to work together. In an lar active politician in America 2016 might not be Donald age of nationalist fervor and populist since Trump’s election. Trump’s presidency, but the unrest, neither can succeed alone. As The Sanders campaign was any child knows, there’s nobody hard- the crest of a larger socialist rebirth of American socialism. er to get along with than a member of wave that began with the global your own family. But that is what it will financial crisis. The ensuing re- take for liberals and socialists to re- cession, coupled with the manifest failure unite the greatest individual liberty of claim their common inheritance, defeat of either Democrats or Republicans to ad- action, with a common ownership in Trumpism, and forge a more egalitarian dress the crisis ­adequately, sent more and the raw materials of the globe, and an and representative democracy. more Americans in search of explanations equal participation of all in the bene- and solutions that establishment politics fits of combined labor.” Mill’s project of OCIALISM HAS BEEN in eclipse in did not offer. On the right, this contrib- creating a liberal socialism (or a socialist America for so long that we don’t uted to the rise of the Tea Party, Breitbart liberalism) was taken up by such distin- normally think of it as a major News, and Donald Trump. On the left, guished successors as Bertrand Russell ideological force. While Eugene Occupy Wall Street critiqued the pred- and John Dewey. “The cause of liber- SDebs presided over a vibrant third party atory one percent in a new vocabulary, alism will be lost,” Dewey observed in in the early twentieth century, becoming while Rolling Jubilee attempted to salve 1935, “if it is not prepared to go further the most popular left-wing insurgent the crushing burdens of student and med- and socialize the forces of production ever to run for president, his successor, ical debt. DSA membership has surged now at hand.” Dewey was writing at the

28 | NEW REPUBLIC implacable critic of the New Deal, which he felt did not go far enough in reforming capitalism. In the ’60s, LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War similarly derailed the possibility of a socialist-liberal alliance, driving many young idealists away from mainstream politics into political ex- tremism or apolitical self-indulgence. Po- litically engaged young people who might have become Democratic Party activists instead joined the Weather Underground or retreated into communes where they cultivated their organic gardens. In his survey of American socialism, Irving Howe came to the surprising con- clusion that the most promising model for liberal-socialist cooperation came not from the party of Debs but from a move- Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs was declared a traitor for his opposition to World War I. ment even further to the left: the Popular Front forged by the American Communist height of the Great Depression, when Debs a “traitor to his country” for his Party between 1935 and 1939. During European business elites were openly opposition to America’s entry into World this period, the party demonstrated a supporting fascism as a means to counter War I, the Wilson administration banned skill for realpolitik that Debs and Thomas working-class militancy. Bourgeois liber- socialist publications and jailed party were incapable of. Instead of opposing al society, it was clear, could not defend activists—including Debs himself, who the Democrats, the Communists became its own achievements unless it accepted was convicted of sedition in 1919. The their junior partners, forming anti-fascist social democratic reform. following year, when Debs ran for pres- front groups that pitched communism In practice, however, relations be- ident from his prison cell in the Atlanta as a patriotic movement. Repackaging tween liberals and socialists have been Federal Penitentiary, he received nearly themselves as “liberals in a hurry,” the tense and sometimes bloody. Consider a million votes. Communists worked hard to emphasize the fate of Debs, who received nearly the shared goals of a broad left. 6 percent of the vote as the Socialist HILE RELATIONS between To be sure, the Popular Front’s at- Party candidate for president in 1912. liberals and socialists would tempts to make socialism as American Under his leadership, the party won over never get so low again, certain as apple pie sometimes sounded absurd. a thousand local races across the country, patterns would recur. Socialist In 1938, the Young Communist League electing socialist mayors in 24 states. Wenergy and activism continued to push at the University of Wisconsin put out Debsian socialism was broad and inclu- liberals toward their most far-reaching a pamphlet that read: sive, attracting immigrants in New York reforms, ranging from Social Security and Oklahoma farmers. His party stood under FDR to the War on Poverty un- Some people have the idea that a YCLer also at the forefront of the feminism der LBJ (which took inspiration from is politically minded, that nothing out- of the time, supporting female suffrage Michael Harrington’s The Other Ameri- side of politics means anything. Gosh and the legalization of birth control. ca). Yet time and again, socialists came no. They have a few simple problems. Yet the Socialist Party was ultimately away disappointed by the way such There is the problem of getting good men on the baseball team this spring, undermined by Woodrow Wilson, who reforms were weakened or derailed by of opposition from ping-pong teams, of both stole its ideas and suppressed its the persistent power of big business. dating girls, etc. We go to shows, parties, leaders. As Irving Howe observes in This sense of betrayal contributed to the dances and all of that. In short, the YCL Socialism in America, many of Wilson’s marginalization and isolation of the par- and its members are no different from major reforms were drawn directly from ty’s left, steadily reducing the influence other people except that we believe in the “traditional socialist legislative pro- that ­socialists were able to exert on the dialectical materialism as a solution to gram,” including “a graduated income liberal establishment. all problems. tax, the Clayton Act to limit labor in- Norman Thomas, who had been active junctions, a child labor law, several laws in organizing sharecroppers during the But however strained its sales pitch may helping farmers, the direct election of 1920s and 1930s, was furious that farm have been, the Popular Front embraced senators.” Having stolen socialism’s thun- relief under FDR funneled taxpayer mon- a key insight that had eluded socialists. der, Wilson used the powers of the state ey to big planters, a key c­ onstituency of In The Heyday of American Communism,­

BETTMANN/GETTY to quash the Socialist Party. Declaring the Democratic Party. Thomas became an published in 1984, historian Harvey

NOVEMBER 2017 | 29 Klehr argued that the Communists had envisioned liberalism as inhabiting “discovered just how open and perme- the “vital center” between “fascism to the able American political parties were.” right, communism to the left.” Clinton As Communist official Terry Pettus told adopted Schlesinger’s term—speaking Depression, refused to crack down on the Klehr, “You are a member of whatever of the “vital American center”—but he big banks responsible for the crisis, and you say you are.” Just by working with- located his midpoint on a very different tinkered with health care markets rather in the system, Pettus and his comrades spectrum. Clinton positioned himself a than pushing for a single-payer system. discovered, a small group of activists centrist standing between the conserva- Whatever success Obama achieved, his “could win control of a large segment tive extremism of Ronald Reagan and the brand of liberalism remained well to the of the Democratic Party.” By forging older liberalism of FDR and LBJ. right of that of FDR. a successful alliance with liberals, the Third Way politics moved the center But while Obama worked to protect Popular Front enabled the Communist rightward. Clintonism wasn’t just to the liberalism from any whiff of socialism, Party to become a significant political right of New Deal liberalism on specific extremists on the right were forging a force in states like New York, Minnesota, policies, like welfare reform and balanced powerful alliance of their own. With and Washington. budgets—he urged Democrats to em- Obama’s election, the Tea Party—a move- For Howe, the lesson was that social- brace the right’s underlying ideological ment that cloaked its fanaticism in the ists like Debs and Thomas might have framework. “The era of big government language of patriotism—staged a coup profited from creating their own version is over,” he declared in his State of the of the Republican Party. At the same of the Popular Front. Rather than estab- Union address in 1996, abandoning any time, the legacy of a quarter-century lishing a third party—a strate- of Third Way policies, from free trade gy doomed to failure in Amer- to financial deregulation, supercharged ica’s winner-take-all electoral Liberals need the energy the wealth of the one percent and drove system—socialists­ should try millions of Americans into joblessness, to become an influential fac- and ideas of socialism, while insecurity, and debt. To respond to these tion within the Democratic the left needs the access to crises, liberals need the energy and ideas Party, winning elections on the of socialism, while the left needs the ac- party ticket and shaping pol- power only the Democrats can cess to power that only the Democrats icy from Washington State to provide in a two-party system. can provide in our two-party system. As Washington, D.C. That’s what a result, the possibilities of a successful Jesse Jackson attempted with alliance between liberals and socialists the Rainbow Coalition, expanding the commitment to bringing the economy is greater today than at any point since range of ideas and constituencies that under a modest degree of democratic LBJ’s creation of the Great Society. were welcomed within the party. That’s control. In the place of government how the Tea Party transformed itself into regulation, Third Way liberals now ex- O FORGE a modern-day Popular the dominant force within the Repub- tolled the market as the solution to all Front, both liberals and socialists lican Party in the space of a few years. of society’s problems. Government itself will have to give a little, making a And that’s the strategy Bernie Sanders had to be brought under the discipline variety of ideological compromises pursued when he ran as a Democrat in of market economics, made leaner and Tin the interests of political unity. Take 2016, injecting socialist ideas directly more entrepreneurial. Instead of large, foreign policy: Democrats like Hillary into the liberal mainstream and forcing universal programs like Social Security Clinton have supported the American the party further to the left. and Medicare, Third Way liberals sup- wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and don’t ported targeted, market-friendly ideas treat Israel’s occupation of the West Bank OCIALIST STRATEGY isn’t the like privatization and welfare reform. If as a pressing problem. Socialists, by con- only thing that has prevented there had to be more government spend- trast, tend to oppose U.S. intervention the emergence of a new Pop- ing, it would be means-tested. overseas, and DSA has backed the cam- ular Front. While Democrats Third Way politics returned Demo- paign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanc- Sunder Wilson and FDR embraced and crats to the White House—but it also tions against Israel. Daniel Biss, a Demo- even implemented ideas from the left, laid the groundwork for the rise of both cratic state senator running for governor today’s liberals have worked hard to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. of Illinois, recently demonstrated the distance themselves not only from so- Barack Obama won by promising hope limits of liberal tolerance in foreign pol- cialism, but also from liberalism. The and change, but he governed by hewing icy when he dropped his running mate, historic cooperation between the two to the market-friendly version of lib- DSA member Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, over broke down with the rise of Bill Clinton eralism staked out by Bill Clinton. He his involvement in BDS. and the New Democrats, who cham- was wary of implementing public-works Another hurdle is money. Social- pioned Third Way politics in the ’90s. programs even in response to the worst ists hold that a party reliant on big In an earlier era, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. economic catastrophe since the Great donors isn’t free to fight forec­ onomic

30 | NEW REPUBLIC actual working class, which is increas- ingly nonwhite and female. Despite such hurdles, though, there is good reason to think that socialists and liberals can forge a Popular Front, one motivated by the need to confront a com- mon enemy: a capitalist system that has returned America to the stark inequality of the Gilded Age. In recent years, there’s been a dramatic shift in liberal thinking about the nature of capitalism itself. As tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon increasingly exert their influence on all aspects of public life, activists like Barry Lynn have played a major role in reviving anti-monopoly politics among liberals. Documenting the concentration of corporate power, the Open Markets Initiative has pushed for a revival of an- titrust laws, a powerful tool and central tenet of the Democratic Party until the rise of Third Way liberalism. In the cur- rent political landscape, liberals are being forced to reexamine the systemic nature of the crisis, which means finding blame not just in a baleful individual (Trump) Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, 1995: Third Way liberals like Clinton moved the center rightward. or even his party (the Republicans) but also in the larger social forces that made equality. You can’t run on lowering a distraction from the goal of economic the crisis possible. drug prices, say, when pharmaceutical equality. In the wake of the 2016 elec- For the first time in decades, liberals companies are funding your campaign. tion, Sanders continued to emphasize are starting to see entrenched capital as Fortunately, socialists appear to have class above all else: “It’s not good enough the primary foe. What were once hereti- come up with an alternative funding to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.’ cal positions are now becoming litmus model that could help overcome this I have to know whether that Latina is tests for politicians on the national stage. obstacle: Last year, Sanders raised going to stand up with the working class When Sanders introduced his Medicare $220 million mostly from a broad base of this country and is going to take on for All proposal in early September, al- of individual donors, who contributed big money interests.” most a third of all Democrats in the Sen- an average of $27 each to his campaign. To overcome the sharp divide over ate signed on as co-sponsors. Notably, If the Sanders model can be replicated class and identity, socialists must devel- the list included many of the politicians in congressional races and elect a Dem- op a new generation of politicians—one considered most likely to run for pres- ocratic president, then liberals need no that can speak to such issues in a more ident in 2020, including Cory Booker, longer be beholden to Wall Street and sophisticated way. Since economic in- Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand. big corporate interests. equality is deeply intertwined with both Whether or not Sanders himself runs A final obstacle to an alliance of so- race and gender, it’s reasonable for so- again, he’s clearly setting the agenda for cialists and liberals is identity politics. cialists to argue that focusing on income policy debates that have long been the For most of the past century, socialists redistribution will disproportionately exclusive domain of liberals. Democrats have been well ahead of most liberals help women and people of color. But are once again listening to the ideas and in opposing racism and sexism. But politics isn’t just a matter of pursuing vision of the socialist left. The limits of socialists have done themselves no fa- the right policy—it’s about voice and the possible—the best working measure vors by insisting that class must take representation. For socialism to suc- of politics—have expanded enormously. precedence over issues like race and ceed, it can’t come from a white male Both sides recognize that democracy gender—a position that comes across as demanding that women and people of cannot function as long as moneyed in- dismissive of the concerns of women and color choose between their class interests terests go unchallenged. Which means people of color. Certainly Sanders made and their racial and cultural identity. The that Nancy Pelosi’s response to the hope- himself vulnerable on this front by treat- political face of socialism—the leaders ful NYU student—“We’re capitalist”—is

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/GETTY J. PAUL ing identity politics as little more than who represent it—must resemble the no longer the final answer.a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 31 Andrea, a surrogate mother from Cleveland who carried twins for a Chinese couple. The stuffed animal was a gift from the parents.

32 | NEW REPUBLIC BY MOIRA WEIGEL

PHOTOGRAPH BY MADDIE MCGARVEY MADE IN AMERICA For years, we’ve looked to China for cheap labor. Now Chinese couples are coming to the U.S. for a new form of outsourcing: hiring American women to produce babies.

HE NEW HOPE Fertility Center occupies two The influx of Chinese citizens seeking surrogates in the floors in a sleek office building across from Cen- United States reflects, in part, the growing wealth and mobility tral Park, a block from the Trump International of urban professionals in China. It has also been spurred by Hotel. Upstairs, couples who want children but China’s decision to rescind its One Family One Child policy are struggling to conceive sit in a well-appointed last year, allowing straight, married couples to pursue larger waiting room. On the wall, an LCD monitor families. But it can take months to get into a fertility clinic in Tcycles through a presentation of the clinic’s specialties: in vitro China, and both egg donation and surrogacy remain illegal. fertilization, egg freezing, genetic testing. Some of the couples, At the same time, countries like Thailand and India began to though, are pursuing a different and controversial reproductive prohibit foreigners from hiring surrogates or outlawed the service: surrogate pregnancy. practice altogether. So Chinese couples in search of a surro- One flight down is a separate waiting room, both smaller gate followed the inexorable logic of globalization: They went and louder. “Carriers”—the women who will carry the ba- looking for a ready supply of labor overseas. bies for the would-be parents upstairs—watch as their own With surrogacy banned throughout the EU and heavily children frolic in a small, glass-walled playroom. Toddlers regulated in the U.K., Canada, and Australia, the best source climb over soft blocks, roll around on rubber mats, and clutch of “carriers” became the United States. Americans are accus- stuffed animals. Children are not allowed on the top floor: Their tomed to the idea of paying for cheap goods made in China. presence might upset clients who are unable to conceive. But But in this case, money flowed out of China and into America. downstairs, children are a credential. They offer proof that a Agencies sprang up across China promising to help Chinese carrier can do her job. parents find blonde, blue-eyed American women to bear their Because paying someone to work as a surrogate is illegal children. “They basically do everything,” says Gloria Li, the Asia in New York, many of the carriers come from poorer parts specialist for Donor Concierge. “Transportation, translation, of the United States: Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsyl- help you to find a clinic, make the appointment for you. When vania, Alabama, North Carolina. Reproductive labor is a you have the baby, they even provide a house in the United growth industry, and the workers downstairs are lining up States where you can stay—all in one package.” At the very to apply for the job. Upstairs, by contrast, the wealthy cou- moment when Donald Trump is vowing to take a hard line ples who will employ them often come from China, one of with China and to bring working-class jobs back to America, the fastest-growing markets for surrogate pregnancies. No Chinese couples are employing American women to perform one knows precisely how many Chinese citizens travel to the the world’s original form of labor. United States each year for surrogacy, but fertility specialists say the demand is skyrocketing. “I’ve never seen anything NDREA IS FIVE-FOOT-TWO and weighs 135 pounds. like it,” John Weltman, the founder of Circle Surrogacy, told She is not religious but is “into signs.” She grew CNN. “It’s like an explosion.” Fertility Source, a California up in a suburb of Cleveland, where she still lives. agency, has hired a full-time employee to handle Chinese travel She is 32 and has two sons, ages ten and twelve. and translation. “Everyone is doing that,” says Gail Sexton TheyA like video games. (“Dude, I don’t know if I can play!” Anderson, who runs Donor Concierge, an organization in she tells them when they interrupt a phone call to ask her to California that connects carriers and families. join them.) When her dachshund barks, she treats him with

NOVEMBER 2017 | 33 the same amiable patience. (“One minute, boy!”) Andrea got is born. “Surrogates typically don’t want to carry for Chinese married last year to a man whom she had been dating for five couples, because they want a relationship with the parents,” years. He is older and has a 17-year-old daughter of his own. explains Janae Krell, the founder of the advocacy group All Andrea has carried twins for a Chinese couple before; when Things Surrogacy. we meet, she is pregnant with her third surrogate child. The Around twelve weeks in, Andrea began chatting with her I.P.s money she earns is “not a survival thing,” she says, but it has over WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app that includes a improved her life. She got the idea after seeing the movie Baby simultaneous translation function. Andrea “would send them Mama, with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. At the time, she was pics of the baby bump as it grew and keep them updated.” Around working as the general manager of a men’s hair salon. She week 18, the couple flew in for a visit. They brought Andrea a found the job exhausting; some weeks, she was working every pearl necklace, and they brought her sons toys. While they were day. When Andrea’s brother and his wife were struggling to get in Cleveland, Andrea took them to a keepsake ultrasound shop pregnant, she offered to carry a child for them; they declined. to make DVDs and a recording of the heartbeat. She bought That’s when Andrea realized that she wanted to become a them a teddy bear that you could put the heartbeat recording surrogate. She went online and found an agency in New Jersey in; when you squeezed the bear, the recording thump-thumped. called New Beginnings, which refers clients and surrogates to “I helped them pick out strollers and car seats and clothes,” she New Hope. She filled out a questionnaire, and they contacted recalls. “They needed help—they didn’t know what they needed.” her the next day. The families got along so well that Andrea invited them to It took five months for New Beginnings to place Andrea with stay with her when they returned for the delivery. They arrived a family. In July 2013, she flew to New York to meet with the at 34 weeks. Three weeks later, Andrea’s doctor induced her. agency’s surrogacy coordinator and be evaluated by a psychol- She gave birth to both boys vaginally, and the second was born ogist. “They give you a really long ques- breech. (“That was the worst nine min- tionnaire and the answers are: Never, utes of my life,” she says. “I think I saw Sometimes, or All the time,” Andrea tells the light.”) Afterwards, the I.P.s wanted me. “Would I want to keep the baby? Do If you do the math, Andrea to zuo yuezi—observe the month I drink or do drugs? How much? How of rest that Chinese tradition prescribes often? If I get mad, what do I do? They the standard after childbirth. But before long, she ask 20 different ways if you are thinking surrogacy fee was up and about again. “They didn’t of killing yourself.” Andrea was proud to know how to do anything,” she laughs. hear that she was “one of the best surro- works out around They were “new to the newborn thing,” gates that the psychiatrist had ever met.” $5 per hour for and with two babies it was doubly hard. Two months later, Andrea returned Andrea’s mother came over. “We would to New Hope to have an embryo from the duration of the take shifts sleeping and caring for them the “intended parents”—known as pregnancy. and stuff. I was kind of like their nanny.” I.P.s—transferred into her uterus. For She pauses for a moment. “I literally weeks after the procedure, she gave was a nanny,” she says. herself progesterone injections. (“My husband can’t handle Andrea returned to New Hope to be implanted with another needles, so I did it all myself.”) Still, the transfer failed. So did embryo last October, at the height of the presidential campaign. the next four. The process was “exhausting,” she says. “It took I call her in June, just days before she is scheduled to give birth, a whole year.” Finally, the I.P.s switched to using an egg donor. and the conversation turns to politics. Andrea says she “wasn’t On September 11, 2014, the doctors at New Hope transferred a Trump voter,” though she didn’t like Hillary Clinton much, male twins into Andrea. She knew that the twins took when she either. When I ask her about Trump’s get-tough stance on started feeling “emotional.” (“A Whitney Houston song would China and the upsurge in anti-foreign sentiment in the United come on the radio and I’d cry.”) After her doctor confirmed that States, she ruefully acknowledges that both are affecting her the fetus had a heartbeat, she received her first stipend. The work. She says the hate she sees in America makes her proud same day, she gave the hair salon two weeks’ notice. to be carrying a nonwhite baby. “It proves that we are all the Gestational surrogacy costs around $100,000. Of that, same,” she explains. “When I’m pregnant, nobody knows I’m surrogates take home an average $30,000 to $35,000, with pregnant with a Chinese baby, so it doesn’t matter. Blood is a bonus if they carry multiple pregnancies. The remainder of blood and DNA is DNA and cells are cells.” the money goes to the middlemen involved in the transaction, covering agency fees, legal fees, counseling services, and health IN AND HER husband, Kai, are professionals in insurance. If you do the math, the standard surrogacy fee works their forties who work in Beijing: Min in finance, out to around $5 per hour for the duration of the pregnancy. Kai in cybersecurity. In the winter of 2014, they Surrogates are often paid higher fees to work with foreign told their families that they were taking a vaca- I.P.s—particularly from China, where the language barrier Mtion in New York. They visited friends, and Min raved about and distance make it difficult to stay in touch after the child the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But they kept the real reason

34 | NEW REPUBLIC MADE IN AMERICA

for their trip a secret: They had come to do a round of IVF, in very good education,” Zhang tells me. “Basic training in China. the hope of making embryos that an American woman could Special training in Cambridge. Clinical training in New York. carry for them. The best combination you can have.” Min and Kai had been trying to have a child “the natural New Hope, which Zhang founded in 2004, is now one of way” for several years, but they had encountered problem America’s busiest fertility treatment centers. Its five doctors after problem. Eventually their doctor encouraged them to perform more than 4,000 cycles of IVF each year, creating try surrogacy in the United States. They began the IVF cycle several times that many embryos. They also coordinate a grow- in China and then timed their trip to New Hope to coincide ing number of surrogate pregnancies. Business is booming: with Min’s ovulation. The trip was a success: They created According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, several viable embryos. Then they went home and waited to births through surrogacy have more than doubled since 2004. be matched with a surrogate. I speak with Zhang in his corner office at New Hope, over- From the profiles they received from the referral agency, looking Central Park. It is October of last year, a few weeks New Beginnings, they picked Emily, a woman from Kentucky. before the election, and the leaves on the trees are turning In the photograph, Emily was posing with her two children. red and yellow. Zhang himself looks slightly green, due to a When Min and Kai spoke with her on the phone, they peppered cold, and wears a surgical mask throughout our interview. He’s her with questions: What’s your job? Why do you want to help determined to get better before hosting a medical conference us through this process? What’s your family’s attitude about the following week. it? Emily accepted, and became pregnant with their daughter On the wall of his office are several photographs. One shows in the summer of 2015. Zhang with his dissertation supervisor, Dr. Twink Allen, and That fall, Min and Kai traveled to Kentucky to attend the the bloody bodies of several large rhinos and elephants on 22-week ultrasound and to meet which they performed experimental Emily and her children in person. IVF. The ones on his desk show his “Min was incredible with those wife and son. The wife looks much kids,” Emily told Jane Groenendaal, younger than Zhang, who is 55; he the surrogacy director at New Be- tells me she comes from Ukraine. ginnings. “She was like a new aunt They were married a few years ago. to them.” Min and Kai returned in When I ask if he had been married March 2016 to be with Emily during before, he guffaws: “I needed to her labor. Afterwards, Min stayed work!” In these ways—the Central on for three months, to arrange an Park view, the wife from Eastern American passport and a Social Se- Europe, the boastful confidence— curity number for her daughter, he is not unlike Trump: a highly Sarah. Then mother and child flew successful salesman of himself. On home to Beijing. Min and Kai had Dr. John Zhang, founder of New Hope Fertility Center, my way out, Zhang asks my age. told their parents what they’d been says he isn’t worried about Trump’s anti-China rhetoric. When I tell him, he tries to con- through. But they have kept the sur- vince me to let him freeze my eggs. rogacy a secret from their friends. When I demur, he offers a discount. When Sarah turns five or six, Min and Kai plan to emigrate When we speak again in June, Zhang is as confident as ever. to the United States. As the parents of a surrogate “anchor He is betting that Trump, for all his protectionist rhetoric, won’t baby,” they harbor the kind of immigration hopes that Donald stop the flow of capital—financial or genetic—across borders. Trump has used to whip his base into a frenzy. They want Sarah “Based on my very conservative estimation,” he says, “China has to attend school here, to improve her chances of getting into three million couples that could come to the United States for an American university. They want a second child and hope treatment.” He does not think the election will hurt his business. to convince Emily to carry it. When I ask Min why she wants “Donald Trump was hostile to China during his campaign,” he another child, she answers in terms any parent can understand. notes, “but afterwards he was more friendly. Very few countries “I think one child is too lonely,” she says. “If she has a sister or can get along with our president, but China is one of them.” brother, it will be better for her growth.” Zhang admits to a brief moment of trepidation after the election, about Trump’s proposed travel ban. “I thought that HE FOUNDER OF the New Hope clinic, Dr. John many patients wouldn’t be able to come any more,” he says. Zhang, emigrated to America in 1991. Born in Zhe- “But most of our Chinese patients who can afford to pay for jiang Province to a family of doctors—his mother was all the treatments get a ten-year visa to the United States, no a renowned obstetrician, and his two sisters both problem. Why would you want to be difficult on these people Tpractice medicine in China—he earned his medical degree in if they come here and spend money?” Zhang seems to have 1984 and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Cambridge University grasped the fundamental truth about Trump’s America. “In

COURTESY OF NEW HOPE FERTILITY CENTER before accepting a residency at New York University. “I have a the end,” he says, “money talks.” a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 35 THE RETURN OF FASCISM

36 | NEW REPUBLIC THE RETURN OF FASCISM From Norway to Greece, far-right nationalists are attacking migrants, raiding mosques, and winning elections.

BY SEYLA BENHABIB PHOTOGRAPHS BY ESPEN RASMUSSEN

↑ GERMANY pegida, a group of “patriotic Europeans,” stages a protest in Dresden against immigrants and Muslims. One million new refugees arrived in Germany in 2015. The following year, hate crimes hit a record high.

NOVEMBER 2017 | 37 ← SWEDEN Police in Stockholm wield batons to break up a violent rally by 600 members of the Nordic Resistance Movement, a neofascist group with branches across Northern Europe. At the rally, leaders of the group declared that Donald Trump’s election was a sign that “a world revolution is beginning.”

38 | NEW REPUBLIC THE RETURN OF FASCISM

n July 22, 2011, a Norwegian extremist Onamed Anders Behring Breivik shot off an email to more than a thousand people. A self-­identified fascist, Breivik attached a 1,500-page screed attacking Islam, cultural Marxism, feminism, and immigration. Titled ↓ GREECE Christos Pappas, a member of parliament, is “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” a leader of Golden Dawn, one of Europe’s most violent the manifesto demanded the forced deportation of political groups. Since the onset of Greece’s debt crisis, the group has perpetrated more than 300 attacks on all Muslims from Europe. An hour and a half later, migrants. It is now Greece’s third-largest political party. Breivik set off in a Volkswagen van to kill 77 people, first by detonating a fertilizer bomb in Oslo, then by gunning down teenagers at a summer camp on the island of Utoya. It was the bloodiest attack on Norwegian soil since World War II. Breivik belonged to a group called the Norwe- gian Defense League, one of the many openly fascist movements that have cropped up across Europe over the past decade. In part, the rise of far-right nationalism is a reaction to the European Union, which sparked a backlash from an older generation of people who fear the loss of their identities as white Christians. As refugees streamed into Europe, those diffuse sentiments for a vanishing past have found easily identifiable targets. Pundits and politicians on the right have placed Islamophobia firmly at the center of the new movements. In Italy, the journalist Oriana Fallaci popularized the phrase “Eurabia” to demonize the continent’s growing population of Muslim immigrants. Even in Germany, which has engaged in an exemplary reckoning with its fascist past, the economist and politician Thilo Sarrazin wrote a runaway best-seller called Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab—Germany Is Destroying Itself—arguing that the upsurge in immigration has created a lower class that is dumber and more dependent on the state. Photographer Espen Rasmussen has spent almost two years documenting the rise of far-right extrem- ists, from the Golden Dawn in Greece to neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Some, like the National Front in France and Britain First in the United Kingdom, have entered the political mainstream. Many sit in the EU Parliament, using the funds of an organization whose destruc- tion they seek. And all draw from the memories of Europe’s fascist past, in the period between the two World Wars, seeking answers to Europe’s contem- porary problems. By putting the Nazi paraphernalia of these groups so vividly on display, Rasmussen’s

= photographs force us to confront the reality that there are forces that want Europe to fall apart rather than pull together. It is sobering to realize how far and fast such hatred can travel. a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 39 ↑ ITALY Fascist groups congregate at Mussolini’s tomb in Predappio, to commemorate his March on Rome. Support for the dictator has gone mainstream: Silvio Berlusconi­—who merged his ruling party with the neofascist Alleanza Nazionale—has praised Mussolini for doing “some good things.”

↑ DENMARK Flyers at a rally for an ultranationalist political party. The country’s xenophobic right, long a fringe movement, now commands one-fifth of the Danish Parliament. “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” says Daniel Carlsen, the party’s founder. ESPEN RASMUSSEN/VERDENS GANG/PANOS PICTURES GANG/PANOS RASMUSSEN/VERDENS ESPEN

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↓ UKRAINE Evgenij Stojka, a member of the country’s increasingly dangerous insurgency of neo-Nazis, playing with his daughter at home. As a young skinhead, Stojka “used to beat up immigrants. Didn’t matter if it was Jews, Muslims, Chinese, or leftists. I still hate them.”

↓ NORWAY Kjersti Gilje, a member of the anti-immigrant Norwegian Defense League, prays for God to protect Norway against Islam’s “ideology of evil.” The group published a list of shopkeepers and cab drivers it suspected of being Muslim— much as Nazi sympathizers targeted Norwegian Jews before World War II.

NOVEMBER 2017 | 41 ↓ FRANCE Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of the National Front. Elected to parliament at age 22, she is considered even more of an anti-immigrant zealot than her aunt, Marine Le Pen. ENGLAND Members of Britain First, an ultranationalist party, leave court after their deputy leader was fined for heckling a Muslim woman. The party, which conducts “Christian patrols” and invades British mosques, saw its social-media profile soar during Brexit.

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↓ SLOVAKIA Far-right nationalists stage a mock kidnapping to dramatize how the European Union has taken Slovakia hostage. In response to the migrant crisis, the EU required its member states to accept refugees—a move that has sparked a fierce anti-Muslim backlash.

← HUNGARY The 64 Counties Youth Movement, a far-right nationalist group, wants to reclaim territories the country lost after World War I. The group is allied with Jobbik, a nationalist party that has urged the government to “tally up people of Jewish ancestry” who “pose a national security risk.”

← RUSSIA A member of the ppdm, a group of Nazi extremists, bathes in a Moscow lake. The group—which shuns drinking and smoking in its campaign to “purify” the Russian people—talks openly of attacking gays. Far-right extremists have killed over 600 people in Russia since 2004.

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ESSAY

Long Divisions Toni Morrison’s historic vision of exclusion and belonging.

BY NELL IRVIN PAINTER

A GENERATION AGO, as the culture wars raged, Toni Morrison black. On her arrival, MacTeer looked at Toni and her sister, two often stood at the front lines, demanding the desegregation of girls with light skin, and pronounced them “tampered with.” the American literary canon. In her Tanner Lectures in 1988, Colorism ordinarily refers to black people’s denigration of dark and later in her book Playing in the Dark, she argued against a skin and preference for people who are light, but in this case monochromatic literary canon that had seemed forever to be it meant, more broadly, a judgment based on skin color. “It naturally and inevitably all-white but was, in fact, “studiously” became clear,” Morrison writes, “that ‘tampered with’ meant so. She accused scholars of “lobotomizing” literary history and lesser, if not completely Other.” Deemed “sullied, not pure” criticism in order to free them of black presence. Broadening as a child, Morrison finds that Othering, as well as the racial our conception of American literature beyond the cast of self-loathing of colorism, begin in the family and connect to lily-white men would not simply benefit nonwhite readers. race, class, gender, and power. Opening up would serve the interests of American mental as Morrison’s history of Othering represents an intervention well as intellectual health, since the white racial ideology that in history on several fronts. Although the theme of desegre- purged literature of blackness was, Morrison said, “savage.” gating the literary canon reappears in The Origin of Others, She called the very concept of whiteness “an inhuman idea.” times have changed since Playing in the Dark. Surely thanks In her new book, The Origin of Others, Morrison extends to the more multicultural, multiracial canon that Morrison and sharpens these themes as she traces through American helped foster, no respectable version of American literature literature patterns of thought and behavior that subtly code who today omits writers of color. Morrison herself has received belongs and who doesn’t, who is accepted in and who is cast nearly all the honors a novelist can win: the Pulitzer Prize for out as “Other.” She has previously written of how modernist fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Presidential Medal novelists like William Faulkner (who saw race) and Ernest of Freedom, and the French Legion of Honor, among many Hemingway (who did not) respected the codes of Jim Crow by more. The Origin of Others is the result of her lectures in the dehumanizing black figures or ignoring the connotations of prestigious Charles Eliot Norton series at Harvard University, blackness in their nonblack figures. But the process of exiling where she is only the fourth woman and the second black some people from humanity, she observes here, also ranges lecturer in the 92-year history of the series. beyond American habits of race: One need only look at the Within the Norton Lectures’ tradition of wisdom, and among treatment of millions now in flight from war and economic its tellers, Morrison represents a novelty by virtue of her gen- desperation. Othering as a means of control is not just the der, her race, and her American subject matter. Historically practice of white people in the United States, for every group the series has shown a preference for European topics and for perfects its self-regard through exclusion. British scholars as avatars of learning. Not until 2014, when Morrison anchors her discussion of these complexities in her Herbie Hancock addressed “The Ethics of Jazz,” did the Norton personal experience, recounting a memory from her childhood recognize wisdom in the humanities as both pertaining to in the 1930s: a visit from her great-grandmother, Millicent MacTeer, a figure of enormous power whose skin was very ILLUSTRATION BY ENAM BOSOKAH

44 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW REFERENCE PHOTO: JEAN-CHRISTIAN BOURCART/GETTY JEAN-CHRISTIAN PHOTO: REFERENCE

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American culture and emanating from a black body. Morrison’s disgust: black as ugly, black as polluting. Definitions of color, lectures and book are a historic achievement, as they confirm Morrison says, define what it means to be an American, for the impact of her intellectual tradition in American thought—a belonging adheres to whiteness. The possession of whiteness tradition that links her to James Baldwin, and in a younger makes belonging possible, and to lack that possession is not to generation Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the critique of whiteness. belong, to be defined as something lesser, even something not fully human. Neither possession nor lack is natural or biological. MORRISON’S EARLIEST witnesses of Othering are two women Something has to happen; a process needs to get underway. who had been enslaved, Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs, both Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Artificial Nigger,” set in of whom later recorded their physical and mental torture at the 1950s Georgia, well after the end of the slavery that kept peo- hands of their owners. In her 1831 memoir, Prince described ple in place, exemplifies how Othering and belonging work her owner’s reinforcement of hierarchy through beating; her in tandem. A white man, Mr. Head, and his grandson Nelson master “would stand by and give orders for a slave to be cruelly visit Atlanta for the day. Mr. Head, a poor and sad old man, whipped … walking about and taking snuff with the greatest undertakes to tutor Nelson in racial hierarchy. On the train composure.” Thirty years later, Jacobs wrote of how slavery to the city, a prosperous black man passes by. At first, Nelson made “the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent sees “a man.” Then, under Mr. Head’s questioning, “a fat man and licentious.” Within slavery, the process of Othering is … an old man.” These are wrong answers. Nelson must be physical, and is meant to work in only one direction, from educated. Mr. Head corrects him: “That was a nigger.” Nelson the slaver to the slave. must undergo the process of unseeing a well-dressed man Morrison asks instead, “Who are these people?”—focusing and reseeing a “nigger,” to understand the man as Other and not on the victimized enslaved, but on the victimizing owners. himself and his uncle as people who belong to society. “The definition of the inhuman describes overwhelmingly the punisher ... the pleasure of the one with the lash.” Rendering BLACKNESS REMAINS THE great challenge to writers of fiction the slave “a foreign species,” Morrison concludes, “appears to on all sides of the color line, for the central role of race in be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal.” American Othering affects us all, white and nonwhite, black and Humanity links the enslaved and the enslaver, no matter how nonblack, not just writers who are white. Morrison describes viciously owners seek to deny the connection. Torture, the crucial her own struggles with color codes in her work, notably in her ingredient of slave ownership, dehumanizes not the slave but novels Paradise (1997) and Home (2012), and her story and play the owner. “It’s as though they are shouting, ‘I am not a beast! Recitatif (1983). “Writing non-colorist literature about black I’m not a beast!’ ” Neither side escapes unscathed. people,” she writes, “is a task I have found both liberating and Even when physical force is used, the people doing the Othering can also bolster their self-definition through words. Thomas Thistlewood, an English planter and rapist who Blackness remains the great moved to Jamaica in 1750, documented his assaults on the challenge to writers of fiction on women he owned, categorizing those that took place on the ground, in the fields, and in large and small rooms, when- all sides of the color line, for the ever, wherever he wished. He noted the rapes in his journal central role of race in American in Latin. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin Othering affects us all. takes a very different tone, defining the Other by making a romance of slave life. Stowe presents a slave’s cabin through dulcet description that Morrison calls hard.” Non-colorist literature does not make racial identity do “outrageously inviting,” “cultivated,” the work of character creation. Characters may have racial “seductive,” and “excessive.” Here, a identities—in the USA, race is too salient a part of experience white child can enter black space with- to overlook. But race should not decide how a character acts out fear of the dark, the very sweetness or thinks or speaks or looks. of the language reinforcing the Other- Morrison articulates her determination “to de-fang cheap ness of places where black people live. racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available Othering is expressed through codes color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself.” But it is of belonging as well as difference. Most far from easy. The actors in Recitatif, like editors and many commonly, pronouns convey the bound- readers, want to identify characters by race—a crucial ingre- THE ORIGIN OF OTHERS aries between “we” and “them” through dient of American identity, but one defined by generalizations BY TONI MORRISON Harvard University Press, the use of first- and third-person plurals. rooted in the history of slavery and too facilely evoked through 136 pp, $22.95 “We” belong; “they” are Other and can- recognizable stereotypes. Racial identification, invented to serve not belong. Those who are “them” can needs of subjugation, can diminish a character’s individual be described in the negative language of specificity, that hallmark of Morrison’s brilliance.

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furthers racist habits of thought, it was just barely. Throughout her career, Morrison has confronted those habits and broken them down, not just in her own writing but also in her work as an editor. In her 19 years at Random House, Morrison made known the stories of a variety of specific lives and their individual identi- ties. She published biographies of the writer Toni Cade Bambara, the activist-scholar Angela Davis, and the athlete Muhammad Ali. In 1974, she published a nonfic- tion anthology: The Black Book, a scrapbook of black history drawn from the collection of Middleton A. Harris, who also served as its edi- tor. There readers discovered pho- tographs of black soldiers in im- peccable uniforms, black families in their Sunday best, patents for Among the first to critique whiteness, James Baldwin serves as an intellectual ancestor to Morrison. typewriters and laundry machines, and early black movie stars, along Where Morrison identifies race, she struggles against the with postcards of smiling white people at a lynching. The expectations of race. Paradise begins with color—“They shoot abundance and variety of material relating to the history of the white girl first.” But she never says which of the women people of African descent in The Black Book opened millions in the group under attack is white, and offers almost no clues. of eyes to diversity within blackness, a crucial step in loosening (“Some readers have told me of their guess,” Morrison reveals in the grip of American apartheid. The Origin of Others, “but only one of them was ever correct.”) One of Morrison’s major novels was inspired by an 1856 Paradise turns to themes of black colorism’s purity requirements article she found in The Black Book. Titled “A Visit to the Slave and misogyny, the deadly means of Othering that Morrison’s Mother Who Killed Her Child,” the article presented an in- characters employ. Colorism appears early on in the novel terview with the fugitive slave Margaret Garner, who had with wealth; in 1890, members of an established black com- murdered her youngest child after she and her family were munity turn away a group of freedmen deemed too poor and captured in Ohio. Garner’s mother-in-law did not condemn too dark. The freedmen go on to found the town of Haven the infanticide. Rather she condoned an act that saved a child and its successor, Ruby, and from that moment up to the novel’s from enslavement. The figure of the supportive mother-in-law present in the 1970s, they pride themselves on their unadul- fascinated Morrison and formed the basis for the character terated blackness. Nearby, a group of women, seeking refuge Baby Suggs, the un-churched folk preacher of black self-love, from unhappy pasts, move into an old convent. One source of in her 1987 novel Beloved. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for the Ruby men’s murderous hatred of the women is their racial fiction and the American Book Award; Oprah Winfrey made heterogeneity—their utter lack of racial purity. But that is not the novel into a movie. Embedding the emotional costs of the only source: In Paradise, misogyny fuels the hatred that kills. enslavement in Morrison’s powerful language, Beloved spoke Looking back on Home, Morrison admits to misgivings. It American history at the level of heart and gut, transforming was a mistake, she concludes, to accede to her editor’s request the institution of slavery into tragedy with resonance for every for color-coding the main character, Frank Money. A minor reader and moviegoer. The novel and the movie communicated mistake, for Money’s race only appears obliquely, after a two- to everyone who loved their family the anguish of enslavement, page description of the hospital he is leaving. A reader would of knowing your children were not yours at all. have to know that in the tiny AME Zion church that succors Money, AME means African Methodist Episcopal. A few pages WHAT PLACES The Origin of Others in this very moment of later, the reader would need to grasp the meaning of he “won’t twenty-first-century American history—a moment that, be able to sit down at any bus stop counter.” If Morrison lost sadly, bears much in common with earlier awful times—are the struggle between individual characterization and racial two texts Morrison quotes at length. One is a testimony

RALPH GATTI/AFP/GETTY RALPH ­identification, which not only flattens out characters but also of lynchings committed in America in the early twentieth

NOVEMBER 2017 | 47 REVIEW century. The other comes from Baby Suggs’s sermon to her the deep and long tradition of black hating and black murder. people in Beloved. And in doing so, they address a persistent theme in the writing The testimony of lynchings continues for the better part of of two other authors who play a part in The Origin of Others, two pages. This is only a small portion of it: one by name, one as a presence. Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, the Ed Johnson, 1906 (lynched on the Walnut Street Bridge, in phenomenally best-selling personal statement in the guise Chattanooga, Tennessee, by a mob that broke into jail after a of a letter to his teenage son, provides the foreword to The stay of execution had been issued). Origin of Others. Toni Morrison provided a blurb for Coates’s Laura and L.D. Nelson, 1911 (mother and son, accused of book: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual murder, kidnapped from their cell, hanged from a railroad void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is bridge near Okemah, Oklahoma). Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Coates says Morrison’s endorsement was Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, 1920 (three the only one he craved. Morrison recognized in Coates, the circus workers accused of rape without any evidence, lynched cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson has written, a quality that in Duluth, Minnesota; no punishment for their murders). she prized in Baldwin, and that we can see in her own work: Raymond Gunn, 1931 (accused of rape and murder, doused with “a forensic, analytical, cold-eyed stare down of white moral gasoline and burned to death by a mob in Maryville, Missouri). innocence.” Coates cites Baldwin’s 1963 essay The Fire Next Time as a crucial inspiration, in form and in tone, to Between Here is Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law figure in Beloved, as the World and Me. quoted in The Origin of Others: Born in 1924, Baldwin serves as the intellectual ancestor to both Morrison and Coates, as tribune of the themes of “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, violence against black people and of the process by which laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it ­European immigrants came to see themselves as white people hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They in America. Baldwin began The Fire Next Time with a letter to don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more his 15-year-old nephew, James, accusing his fellow Americans do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O of the unforgivable crime of having destroyed and continu- my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, ing to destroy thousands of black lives without knowing and bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them.” without wanting to know. Coates in 2015 writes to his then 15-year-old son that “in America, it is traditional to destroy To these, I would add a list currently circulating on Facebook the black body—it is heritage.” Morrison in 2017 adds, as I of police shootings for which no one has been convicted of quoted above: “The necessity of rendering the slave a foreign murder. As of late summer, the list looked like this, but, as we species appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s know, it is tragically subject to additions at any time: own self as normal.” Both echo Baldwin’s 1984 short essay, “On Being White … and Other Lies,” first published in Essence, #PhilandoCastile = No Conviction a magazine for black women. Refocusing black discourse from #TerenceCrutcher = No Conviction black subjects to whites, Baldwin made an early contribution #SandraBland = No Conviction to what would become whiteness studies at the end of the #EricGarner = No Conviction twentieth century. #MikeBrown = No Conviction It’s perhaps inevitable that such prominent authors would #RekiaBoyd = No Conviction come to be seen as representatives of the entire community of #SeanBell = No Conviction black Americans. Coates says he speaks only for himself. Still, #TamirRice = No Conviction his vast audience demands spokesmanship from him. Morrison #FreddieGray = No Conviction embraces the responsibility, and welcomed the message that #DanroyHenry = No Conviction her Nobel Prize belonged not only to her, but to black women #OscarGrantIII = No Conviction writers generally. Certainly Baldwin embraced the role of #KendrecMcDade = No Conviction black spokesman in the 1960s with a passion that sometimes #AiyanaJones = No Conviction moved his audiences profoundly—as in a Cambridge Univer- #RamarleyGraham = No Conviction sity debate with the conservative William F. Buckley in 1965. #AmadouDiallo = No Conviction When Baldwin appeared, impassioned, on the The Dick Cavett #TrayvonMartin = No Conviction Show in 1968, the host and other guests remained stolid and #JohnCrawfordIII = No Conviction inert, even looking away in discomfort. The video is painful #JonathanFerrell = No Conviction to watch, but instructive in the history of white American #TimothyStansburyJr = No Conviction willful unknowing. American culture has changed: Whether writing as oneself These lists, and Baby Suggs’s sermon, capture the physical alone—Coates—or speaking for a people—Morrison—these peril of existing in the United States in a body that is black, of two black writers have reaped the named and remunerated

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In Paradise, Morrison touches on the scapegoating of the women who live in the Convent. But the murder described in the opening pages is a murder of women by men, a brutal act of woman-hating that cannot be explained purely by race or by the line—“They shoot the white girl first”—that opens the book so sensationally. A Mercy begins and ends with a moth- er’s relinquishment of her daughter to the American domestic slave trade that tore more than a million people, many of them children, from their families. The mother’s act can be partially explained by the history of the Atlantic slave trade, for the mother, an African captive, had been raped on her arrival in Barbados. Historical explanation, however, neglects the child’s emotional meaning and the centrality of women in Morrison’s work. In the novel, the child becomes the protagonist. Only at the end does she seem to understand the circumstances of her abandonment and drop the bitter thread running through the narrative. Morrison’s depiction of women, of motherhood, of misog- Beloved, adapted for film in 1998, helped open up the literary canon. yny, of hatred and self-hatred within and around race con- stitutes the foundation of her genius as a writer and thinker. honors that are their due. Baldwin, who died in 1987, did not Nearly all Morrison’s protagonists are women whose identities share their good fortune, despite informal recognition of his and narrative trajectories fill entire fictional universes. A work’s fundamental importance and utter necessity. Between universe of women emerges most clearly in Paradise, in the Baldwin and Coates, Morrison forms the keystone in an arch community of lost and broken women who come together from neglect to celebration. This is not by accident or automatic in the Convent and heal themselves, free of men’s oversight. recognition of genius. Historical agency, the action of protest, disrupted the withholding that was Baldwin’s fate. Activism hoisted Morrison’s reputation into its rightful place. Between James Baldwin and In the aftermath of Baldwin’s death in 1987, 48 promi- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Morrison forms nent black poets, novelists, and scholars took note of his fate and demanded redress. In a letter published in The New York the keystone in an arch from Times, they protested Baldwin’s neglect and insisted it not be neglect to celebration. repeated. They focused attention on the literary establishment’s ongoing habit of ignoring black writers, and pointed to the need to support another distinguished black author who had been denied commensurate honors: Toni Morrison, whose Beloved had recently lost the National Book Award. After the The women in the Convent are Othered through race, but letter appeared in the Times, things did start to change. Be- as women, they create their own belonging, which proves loved received the Pulitzer Prize, and Morrison’s work was their undoing. Free women enrage the men of Ruby, whose never again disregarded. Morrison, in that moment, became “pure oil of hatred” clarifies the “venom” they feel towards a historical event. With the recognition of her writing and her them. Bent on murder, the men attack with “rope, a palm whole tradition, America was opening up and offering black leaf cross, handcuffs, Mace and sunglasses, along with clean, Americans and black authors belonging. handsome guns.” The Origin of Others combines Toni Morrison’s accustomed IN THE HISTORY that connects Baldwin to Morrison and Morri- eloquence with meaning for our times as citizens of the world. son to Coates, much has been gained in terms of literary recep- But the breadth of her humanist imagination emerges most tion. At the same time, however, something that distinguishes gloriously from her magnificent fiction, in which women play Morrison’s fiction has been diminished: women and gender. leading roles, in which social and racial identities influence Not entirely lost, for in The Origin of Others, Morrison discuss- but never determine individual character; her novels guide our es her novels of women—notably Paradise and A Mercy. (She understanding of how both race and gender inflect experience might well have added another of her major women-centered without diminishing psychological uniqueness. Although her works, Sula.) She also cites the woman-to-woman relationship lectures and the race-centered tradition of James Baldwin and of motherhood that binds Sethe and Baby Suggs in Beloved. Ta-Nehisi Coates are crucial to understanding her thought, they But to the extent that they complicate the racial Othering that cannot contain her extraordinary vision of human Othering

TOUCHSTONE PICTURES/PHOTOFEST the two male writers also treat, these themes lose sharpness. and belonging. a

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FILM front of a white neon sign mounted on the wall that reads: you have nothing. Earlier in the film, he endures an onstage interview discussing the influence of Robert Smithson on his work while an audience member with Tourette’s syndrome repeatedly shouts “Garbage!” and other, more profane words. The dinner isn’t any more pleasant: Oleg the ape-man chases Julian from his chair and out of the dining room. Soon after, the scene departs from the confines of realism. Oleg jumps on top of a table and turns his attention to a young woman in a pink gown. At first, he just plays with the woman’s hair. The dinner guests stare into their laps, ignoring him. But then he pulls her from her seat and throws her on the floor. As he assaults her, her cries for help go unheeded. Östlund lets this go on long enough that we think we’re about to witness a rape. But then a crowd of men descends, pulls Oleg off his victim, piles on top of him and beats him, and the scene is cut. The assaults at the gala dinner seem to transpire outside the rest of the film. But like The Square’s many other plots, the scene is concerned with what constitutes transgression: What is arresting, and what is merely good cause for someone to be arrested? The art world is a soft target for satire, not least because the art world’s appetite for satire of itself is limitless. Artists are constantly sending up tradition and the scene through their art, only to see the cycle repeat itself as their own work becomes staid and canonical. It’s unreasonable to expect any satire of the art world to be fresh, since knowingness is the first requirement to get in the door. The Square won the Palme d’Or at Art Brute Cannes this spring not because it lashes the art world in a new The Square delivers a savage satire on way, but because Östlund delivers his lashings so exquisitely. the international art world. OLEG’S SHENANIGANS ARE followed by another scandal at the museum: A video to promote a bloodless piece of conceptual BY CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN art called The Square has gone viral, for the simple reason that the video is in bad taste. The Square itself is a cutout of cob- blestones from outside the museum that has been transferred to a gallery inside; an artist’s statement says that the piece is A COUPLE OF times during Ruben Östlund’s The Square, we a space of mutual care and equal rights. A pair of millennial see a darkened gallery in a contemporary art museum in Stock- marketers charged with drawing media attention to the piece holm, with a floor-to-ceiling video projection of the head and see it as a tough sell. Reasoning that content about marginal- shoulders of a shirtless, muscular man. The man is growling, ized groups tends to be widely shared on Facebook, they hit almost a whisper of a growl that induces a chuckle from the on the idea of making a video of a blonde beggar girl walking audience. The video is presumably an artist’s self-portrait, onto The Square and then exploding. high-concept but also self-consciously silly. Later, at a gala The video garners hundreds of thousands of views on You- dinner to mark the opening of a new exhibition, the man Tube, attracts reams of hate mail, and sparks heated debates shows up in person. Still shirtless, he’s wearing black pants about free speech and the attitudes of elite cultural institutions with a pair of braces on his arms. His name is Oleg, and he’s toward the poor. It leads to the resignation of the chief cu- played by Terry Notary, an actor and stunt coordinator who’s rator, Christian (Claes Bang)—the film’s handsome and well-­ worked on Hollywood movies such as Avatar and War for the intentioned but vain and beleaguered hero—because it was Planet of the Apes. He walks around stooped over, stalking his negligence that allowed the video to be made: Preoccupied the dinner tables and behaving like a chimp. with his own personal and professional problems, he skipped Oleg’s performance bothers some of the dinner guests, the meeting where the marketing scheme was conceived. who don’t like him petting their hair as if grooming fellow In its study of muddled, liberal, middle-class, white chimps. Then he comes to Julian, an American artist played masculinity, The Square recalls Östlund’s breakout ­international by Dominic West. We’ve seen Julian and his work before. His installation at the museum consists of a few piles of gravel in ILLUSTRATION BY AAD GOUDAPPEL

50 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW hit, the 2014 feature Force Majeure. There, the focus was on users that it both sorts and unifies.” In reality, any reporter family: Tomas is on a weeklong ski trip in the Alps when an in a position to interview a museum director like Christian avalanche rolls toward him and his wife and children as they’re would probably ignore the promo copy and ask him savvy eating lunch. Panicked, he runs away without picking up his questions about the market. But Östlund isn’t doing realism. children, even as they scream for him in fear. His wife, Ebba, Christian explains Duchamp’s concept of the readymade to loses faith in him and their marriage falters, until she gives Anne, using the example of her handbag, which would become him an opportunity to play the hero on their last day in the an art object if they put it on display in the gallery where they mountains. The film is a tense and occasionally comic study of are sitting. She shrugs—end of interview. the crisis through Ebba’s revulsion at Tomas, his shame, and Moss plays against type here as an apparent ditz. But when their mutual fear of splitting up. Östlund’s acute attention to Anne takes Christian home after a dance party at the museum, minor marital slights and parental failings made it easy to think she reveals unknown depths of weirdness: She’s the owner of a of him as a cinematic fellow traveler of the Norwegian novelist pet chimp, who roves freely through her apartment and makes Karl Ove Knausgaard. use of her lipstick. Christian and Anne have a comic row over In The Square, the crises that afflict Christian are more who should dispose of the condom after they’ve had sex. She obviously farcical, and intersect with his professional life. later shows up at the museum and confronts him about the On the way to work one morning, he comes across a woman one-night stand: Was she just another conquest to him? Was he being chased by a menacing man and helps her fend him off. exploiting his position of power? Does he even remember her The encounter gives him a rush and leaves him smiling—until name? His way of copping to being a cad is also a backhanded he realizes it was a setup. Checking his pockets, he finds his compliment: He’s proud of making a catch of her. phone and wallet are missing. Before the scam, we’ve just The Square is full of gorgeous set pieces and well-tuned per- seen him ignore an earnest woman pleading with commuters formances. Bang, in particular, manages to generate sympathy to “help save a human life.” In exterior shots of the neigh- for Christian even as he behaves like a lout. As an essay on the borhood, Östlund is constantly calling our attention to the art world, however, the film mostly confirms popular assump- homeless on the street—striking a fairly obvious contrast tions: that museums prop up a lot of work by second-rate artists between the wealthy donors who fund the museum and the poor who surround it. Christian gets his wallet and phone back by locating the Artists are constantly sending up phone’s GPS signal and sticking fliers in the letter boxes of all tradition and the scene through the apartments in the building. To his astonishment, it works. But he also gets a note from someone who, angry at being their art, only to see the cycle accused, demands an apology. This turns out to be a little repeat itself. boy, played with a fierce rage by Elijandro Edouard. He stalks Christian, who is eventually forced to fish the kid’s scrawled message out of a dumpster—a scene that, shot spectacularly from above, signals not so subtly that Christian has hit rock bottom. Christian films a message to the boy on his phone: He by resorting to empty theoretical language; that many visitors apologizes for being “prejudiced” with his flier scheme, and think a lot of the work they’re seeing is shit but are too polite moans about society’s “structural” inequalities. But he soon to say so; that many men in power are cads and frauds; that starts to boast that he’s personally acquainted with one of the the art world makes a cynical pretense of concern for social 291 individuals who collectively possess half of the world’s justice when it’s completely indifferent to the homeless people wealth. That guy could solve all the problems of the Swed- down the block; that wealthy donors are rapacious capitalists ish poor by himself, if he decided to. Even when Christian is who like to see artists behave like apes until the act crosses the apologizing, his vanity gets the better of him. line, in which case they’re happy to punish them. We know all this, and it’s still funny. But The Square’s most WE ALREADY KNOW, from the platitudes he spouts to donors dazzling scene takes place at a far remove from the museum— about The Square, that Christian hasn’t thought through any a sly and elegant counterpoint on Östlund’s part. It’s a cheer- problems of class. The way he thinks and talks about art is leading routine Christian takes his daughter to see after he’s distorted by the demons of money and publicity. The film opens been sacked. The cheerleaders are not sexualized or sent up. with Christian being interviewed by an American journalist We just watch them throw each other in the air and catch named Anne, played by Elizabeth Moss. She quotes him a bit each other on the way down. The camera zooms in on their of pretentious boilerplate from his museum’s web site about faces, which are full of fear, intensity, and a kind of glory. the “topos” of meaning when an object is placed on view in an Cheerleading may be the most naturally risible thing in the exhibition. It’s the sort of opaque language that the sociologist whole film, but it also simply is what it is, without, at least in Alix Rule and the artist David Levine have called “International Christian’s experience, a theoretical apparatus, a budget, or a Art English”—a way of talking that serves “a community of jargon. It’s the sort of beauty you can’t find in a museum. a

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BOOKS fame and meaning without—a problem that seems to plague your average, isolated novelist—sounding totally disc­ onnected from or condescending toward the phenomenon being de- scribed. Goon Squad includes, for instance, a fake celebri- ty profile that at once lampoons the form and pays tribute to the slavering a journalist must do in order to write one. At the outset, the starlet is described as “human bonsai,” about as good a metaphor for female celebrity as I’ve ever read. By the end of the interview, she’s stabbed the journalist with a Swiss army knife. So it comes as a surprise that Egan’s new novel, Manhattan Sunken Pleasures Beach, contains not one tiny measure of any of the things de- Jennifer Egan disconnects from the scribed above. It is set mostly in the 1940s, before any of these problems of fractured meaning seemed as striking or urgent fractured nature of modern life. as they do now. It begins at the beginning, with a girl headed to the Atlantic Ocean, and ends at the end, with the same girl BY MICHELLE DEAN headed towards the Pacific. Whereas her other novels invited comparisons to the postmodernists—say Don DeLillo—here we’re closer to the realm of lyrical realism, something more like a novel by Colm Tóibín that quietly works through Egan’s EVEN THE BEST novelists are rarely congratulated on the particular concerns. While there are breaks and loop-backs in quality of their observations about contemporary life. Realism its narrative timeline, Egan has put together a rather unchar- is all well and good, but, it seems, there can be too much of it. acteristically ordinary book. There is something a little vulgar about writing a novel that is too close to the present, too concerned with current events, MANHATTAN BEACH’S Anna Kerrigan is twelve when we meet too eager to critique technological advancements. Imagine, her, and we are told, right off, that she comes from a deprived if you will, a novel that was actually, directly, about Donald background: In the novel’s opening pages, she can’t help but Trump. Too on the nose, we reviewers would sniff. Too much covet the doll of a rich little girl she has just met in a home like an internet think piece. steps away from the titular beach. She is accompanying her Jennifer Egan has invariably escaped such critiques. Her last father on a mission to this house for reasons that aren’t revealed three novels have all, to some extent, presented commentaries on to us. But it is made clear that Eddie Kerrigan is involved in technology and its discontents. Look at Me (2001) explored the shady business and that, as the Depression slides towards psychosis inherent in the reality TV era’s obsession with public World War II, his ability to meet his obligations is slipping. image, while The Keep (2006) kicked off its refashioning of the Anna has a disabled sister, Lydia, whom Eddie can barely Gothic with the loss of a protagonist’s portable satellite dish. stand to look at. Lydia cannot speak or care for herself and her And, if you believe the reviewers, the entire achievement of her illness inspires revulsion in him. When she hypersalivates, he last book, A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), lay in its perfect feels “a flash of fury, even a wish to smack her, followed by a rendering of the fractured conditions of modern existence. convulsion of guilt.” Goon Squad, a decentralized, nonlin- A couple of chapters in, Eddie does what men in romantic ear book in which an entire chapter took novels always do when they face an emotional challenge they the form of a PowerPoint presentation, can’t easily resolve: He flees the scene. Anna and her mother distilled the very essence of a culture are left to care for Lydia, largely on their own, laboring under that—we know now, we didn’t know the presumption that Eddie is dead, and surviving on money then—was about to find a dreadful new periodically doled out by Eddie’s wayward spinster sister. level of meaning in the term “disintegra- When World War II arrives, 19-year-old Anna finds gainful tion.” Marrying the splintered format of employment in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We get an introduc- the novel to the intelligence of her nar- tion to the training procedures for new hires—“six weeks of ration and the gracefulness of her prose, instruction”—and we are also immediately informed that Anna Egan achieved something of a paradox: is special, singled out by her boss for special responsibilities She elegantly presented the inelegant, in the Yard. It’s not clear why she might be so. MANHATTAN BEACH the confusing, the vulgar, and the cheap. In these early portions of the book, Egan finds much pleasure BY JENNIFER EGAN She has a way of sending up the flimsier in looking around the Yard itself. She presents the setting as a SCRIBNER, 448pp., $28.00 aspects of modern life without seeming fantastical place, as well-ordered as clockwork, and seems to glib. Her novels take on the disconnection of online connectedness, the ­mismatch of ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIANO PONZI

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NOVEMBER 2017 | 53 REVIEW delight in depicting all the moving parts of this world. When gloss Hollywood likes to layer on a historical film, removing Anna goes to lunch, Egan observes how she “synchronized her layers of dirt and grime and, above all, moral complication. wristwatch with the large wall clock.” The bike Anna borrows from a friend is not just a bike, but a spur to her imagination: YET EGAN DOESN’T suffer the ailment that typically afflicts “Motion performed alchemy on her surroundings, transform- literary novelists who venture into history: She isn’t nostalgic. ing them from a disjointed array of scenes into a symphonic Nor is she vague, not exactly. You will leave Manhattan Beach machine she could soar through invisibly as a seagull.” Anna knowing a lot about diving equipment. One gets the impression eventually finds her way onto a diving team, and the intrica- that Egan found herself with piles upon piles of research. The cies of early deep-sea diving form a central part of the book. acknowledgments explain that she has been researching As she fits into the heavy “dress” that allows her to breathe the divers and the Navy Yard since at least 2004—which would hundreds of feet underwater, she relishes the qualities of the mean she started this project before her last two novels were equipment, finding transcendence even in the gloves, “her published—and then had difficulty knowing how to turn all hands delivering her to a purely tactile realm that seemed to that information into fiction. Research can be a boon to a exist outside the rest of her life.” novelist—there are more things in heaven and Earth than Egan has always been something of a sensualist, an ­unusual can be dreamt of in a single writer’s philosophy—or it can characteristic in a novelist who is also frequently deemed become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down “cerebral.” Her lush use of language has often distinguished the storytelling. Egan’s wartime divers, for all their breathing her from DeLillo or Pynchon, as well as other writers who apparatus, threaten to sink Manhattan Beach. share her concerns and interests. Her characters have a habit After we’ve learned everything there is to know about div- of getting lost in their feelings, as when the protagonist of her ing, the focus shifts to Eddie Kerrigan. His disappearance first novel, The Invisible Circus, becomes sexually enthralled by gives Anna something to long for, an explanation to seek. her dead sister’s boyfriend. Even when the experience is not Gradually, predictably, she finds herself caught up with the pleasurable, Egan often describes it as though it were. The car same gangsters who ensnared Eddie. One dashing man, who crash that opens Look at Me is like a fairground ride, “a slow goes by the 1940s-noir name Dexter Styles, may be able to tell loop through space like being on the Tilt-A-Whirl.” Anna what happened. And if the climax of her entanglement In Manhattan Beach, there’s pleasure—but it comes less with Styles feels a little neatly assembled—the diving dress is often from the visceral experience of the characters than from involved, and a boat anchored off Staten Island in the middle their experience of the technology they are using. For a while, of the night—it comes as a relief to see that all that stuff we it works. It’s relatively easy for us to marvel over the brass bolts learned about the equipment has a narrative purpose, not just an expositional one. A lesser writer would have frozen up. But it is barely clear what any of this is about, in a way unusual Research can be a boon to a for an Egan novel. She likes to have a big, overarching purpose novelist or it can become a going, some governing metaphor, even if it’s executed in frag- ments and dazzling bits of narrative fireworks. Much of her work hindrance, a thick layer of algae sustains itself not so much on the kind of cinematic structure and that weighs down the storytelling. imagery we’re given here, as on the quality of her insights into the conditions of modern life. And Egan seems to have known she wanted or needed to do something like that here. In 2011, when Goon Squad won the Pulitzer and Egan was at the top of the literary world, she gave an interview to The Guardian about of a 1940s diving dress or the wheels of an ancient Schwinn. her next novel, clearly Manhattan Beach. “One big question I We have none of the qualms about those objects that we might have with the book is how to write a historical novel in a way have, say, about a smartphone. There is something wondrous that’s more playful than just setting it in the past,” she said. “That about the technologies that the characters in Manhattan Beach doesn’t work for me. I’m going to have to mix it up a little more.” have at their disposal. They don’t seem to carry any real costs. Here we have no playfulness, only the deep and the ocean. That, of course, is the rub. The novel so elegantly represents An epigraph from Herman Melville opens the book: “Yes, as the past that it doesn’t have any sense of friction or edge. The every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” social conditions are scarcely fleshed out, with little sense of The deep sea is indeed very quiet, an oasis from all the activity how race and class shape the characters and their wartime on the surface, a place where the normal rules of movement, work. Gender is clearer: Unmarried but sexually active, Anna and even of breathing, don’t apply. The slow, meditative pace inevitably gets pregnant. She has had to fight to get her spot of Manhattan Beach was perhaps meant to mimic this, the on the diving squad. But we never learn the real purpose of the entire book a vacation from the frantic everyday onslaught of diving operation at the Navy Yard. No one worries much about disconnected information that Egan has usually been so eager rations. And we hear little about the war or anyone actually to chronicle. But maybe that’s it: Maybe Egan, in this book, fighting at the front. Egan’s polish can come off as the kind of needed a break too. a

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BOOKS to prosecutors, defense lawyers have presented themselves as members of the same team, eager to cooperate with the investi- gation. “We’ve been helpful to him,” Dowd said of Mueller, “and he’s been straight with us.” Kushner’s lawyers, for their part, were the ones who provided prosecutors with the notorious emails about Donald Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer and a lobbyist. According to USA Today, Trump’s lawyers have even passed messages of “appreciation and greetings” from the president to Mueller. This is part of a familiar dance between government law- yers and their colleagues in the defense bar. Far from being entrenched opponents, prosecutors and defense attorneys are often colleagues who have spent years working together in the same white-shoe firms—and who fully expect to do so again in the future. The coziness, in fact, goes a long way toward explaining why the government has failed to indict and pros- ecute corporate criminals at the highest level. According to a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, federal prosecutions for corporate crime plunged by 29 percent between 2004 and 2014—a time that saw a massive housing bubble and collapse built on uncon- scionable fraud. How did this happen? Close relationships on both sides of the negotiating table create not only a disinclination to play hardball but also career incentives for leniency. Add to this legal rulings over the past decade that have effectively placed handcuffs on prosecutors, and it’s easy to see why no major bank Club Fed executive saw the inside of a jail cell after the financial crisis. Why the government goes easy on But the biggest constraint on indicting corporate criminals lies in the minds of the men and women of the Justice Department. corporate crime. Jesse Eisinger’s terrific book, The Chickenshit Club, explains how we got here: how prosecutors lost their tools and, more BY DAVID DAYEN importantly, their nerve. While Eisinger focuses mostly on the missteps of law enforcement agencies under Bush and Obama, it’s a sobering read for anyone eagerly anticipating the demise of the Trump cartel. In recent history, America has dealt with WHEN ROBERT MUELLER was tapped to investigate Russian grifters like Trump with kid gloves. In fact, that’s part of the meddling in last year’s presidential election, white-collar reason he’s in the White House today. ­defense attorneys in Washington pumped their fists and readied their invoices. Donald Trump and his inner circle have hit up EISINGER’S NARRATIVE FEATURES several luminaries from the practically every white-shoe law firm in town: Covington & Trump-Russia investigation. The book’s title comes from former Burling, Miller & Chevalier, Morgan Lewis, Hogan Lovells, FBI director and Trump dinner companion James Comey, who Norton Rose Fulbright. For decades, veteran litigators from used the term “chickenshit club” to refer to prosecutors these firms have defended everyone from George W. Bush and who never lose a case because they never take a risk. Later, Jack Abramoff on the right to Bill Clinton and John Edwards on Comey showed a hint of the same cowardice when he asked the left. More lawyers might have offered their services if their subordinates to negotiate with auditing firm kpmg instead bank clients had not already been subpoenaed for information of filing suit in a tax evasion case. There’s also Mueller, who related to potential money-laundering charges. co-chaired the Enron Task Force, which Eisinger holds up as The initial attorneys for Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, a model of how to go after corporate wrongdoing. two of the Trump insiders most implicated in the scandal, came Beginning in 2002, the well-funded, well-staffed Enron from WilmerHale, the same firm that Mueller left to become Task Force engaged in five years of “pick and shovel work,” special counsel. Trump’s hires—Ty Cobb and John Dowd—have unearthing every aspect of the failed energy trader’s accounting known Mueller for years. Despite rumors that Trump would scandal. They flipped lower-level employees to reach the bad fire Mueller, Cobb and Dowd have praised the special counsel’s honesty and professionalism. Rather than act as adversaries ILLUSTRATION BY LUBA LUKOVA

NOVEMBER 2017 | 55 REVIEW actors above; they even interviewed one subject three times to evidence. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission referred break him down. To get to the chief financial officer, Andrew numerous cases to the Justice Department for criminal pros- Fastow, they indicted his wife for tax fraud. And the task force ecution, but no action was taken; officials never even brought didn’t confine the investigation to Enron but attempted to track in high-profile targets such as former Citigroup board member down every Wall Street banker and accountant who facilitated (and Clinton Treasury Secretary) Robert Rubin for an inter- the deception. In the end, their diligence led to convictions for view. A massive scandal involving millions of false documents nearly every top executive at the firm, including the chairman, presented to courts in foreclosure cases garnered a Justice Ken Lay (who died before sentencing), and CEO Jeffrey Skilling. Department settlement for pennies on the dollar. Persistent pressure and solid lawyering proved that you could Eisinger reveals this story of backpedaling and cowardice take on corporate crime and win. through the eyes of the few who resisted it. There’s Stanley But the Skilling conviction would later get partially reversed Sporkin, the legendary slob who ran enforcement at the SEC by the Supreme Court, which restricted prosecutions under in the 1970s, and his protégé Jed Rakoff, later a federal judge, the “honest services fraud” statute to explicit cases like bribery who would raise a lonely voice to ask how accountability or kickbacks. A conviction against Enron’s accounting firm, had vanished. There’s Paul Pelletier, the Justice Department Arthur Andersen, for shredding evidence also got overturned attorney who spent years chasing malfeasance at insurance on a technicality. More important, the Andersen case prompted giant AIG, only to have higher-ups squash the case. There’s monumental pushback from the business lobby against the James Kidney, a 26-year SEC veteran beaten down by weak entire notion of corporate accountability. Arthur Andersen enforcement. Most corporate defendants, his boss Reid Muoio collapsed shortly after its conviction, likely because it did told him, are “good people who have done one bad thing.” such a bad job monitoring Enron and WorldCom, another Muoio was a shining example of the new career path for accounting fraudster. But the business lobby argued that it prosecutors: a graduate of Yale Law, several years in private was the government’s rush to judgment that brought the practice, then rotating into government. As deputy chief of company down, sending thousands of low-level accountants the SEC division responsible for going after fraud involving to the unemployment line. Since then, corporate America and its defenders have been quick to cite Andersen as a cautionary tale whenever a corporation has found itself in trouble. The Every prosecutor knows that in the costs to blameless employees, they argue, are too high. end, those who take the easier path Business lobbyists never mentioned that many Andersen employees simply got jobs with other accounting firms. But will enjoy rewards, and those who over time, the Justice Department internalized the critique. challenge power won’t. Both Mary Jo White, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Obama, and Lanny Breuer, who led the Justice Department’s criminal division, labeled the Andersen prosecution a mistake, because individual employees were the ones who suffered the most. Consumed with such con- complex financial instruments, Muoio whittled down cases siderations, white-collar prosecutors revised their policies that involved widespread criminality in an organization—like on corporate accountability. They talked Goldman Sachs scheming with hedge funds to knowingly sell themselves out of hard-charging inves- investors garbage mortgage securities—into a single civil suit tigations, precisely at the moment when against one midlevel staffer. Proving conspiracy in such cases, the global financial crisis revealed an orgy Muoio argued, was simply too difficult. Like other high-level of wrongdoing throughout the financial enforcers, he viewed such investigative hurdles as dead ends, sector. “Andersen had to die,” Eisinger rather than challenges to overcome. writes, “so that all other big corporations Eisinger is truly damning on how the Obama administration might live.” handled white-collar crime. The Justice Department became little more than a way station for once and future partners WHEN THE FINANCIAL crisis hit, Obama at top law firms like Covington & Burling; Attorney General and Congress did create a financial fraud Eric Holder had a corner office waiting for him at Covington’s enforcement task force, but it became new headquarters when he stepped down. That corporate law THE CHICKENSHIT little more than a press release factory, a background brings with it a comfort with power, a courtesy and CLUB: WHY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT repository for existing cases rather than respect for the good people who might have done one bad thing. FAILS TO PROSECUTE EXECUTIVES an investigating force. After the Justice This merger of prosecution and defense, plucked from the BY JESSE EISINGER Department bungled a major case against same talent pool, influences how cases are conducted. Lacking Simon & Schuster, two Bear Stearns traders in 2009, pros- resources at the SEC, Sporkin invented the internal investi- 400 pp., $28.00 ecutors preemptively decided they just gation, where defense attorneys are tasked with gathering couldn’t beat Wall Street, no matter the facts about their own clients. But outsourcing white-collar

56 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW investigations makes prosecutors overly reliant on whatever the defense chooses to give them, and deprives the Justice Department of institutional knowledge. Today, federal prose- cutors rarely question the targets of their own investigations, AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY instead trading evidence and queries with defense attorneys. PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN Findings in cases are negotiated, not discovered; frontal as- saults on high-powered law firms are eschewed. To launch one, BY TERRANCE HAYES Eisinger writes, would create “social discomfort.” Prosecutors would have to take on their mentors, their friends, and their future bosses. I’m not sure how to hold my face when I dance: If it’s easier to get a corporate plea bargain than to win a In an expression of determination or euphoria? conviction against a top executive, that’s the path prosecu- And how should I look at my partner: in her eyes tors will favor. If it’s easier to design a deferred prosecution Or at her body? Should I mirror the rhythm of her hips, agreement than to take down a company abusing its investors Or should I take the lead? I hear Jimi Hendrix or customers, that’s the path. If it’s easier to make headlines Was also unsure in dance despite being beautiful with seven-figure fines than to undertake the painstaking work And especially attuned. Most black men know this of obtaining justice, that’s the path. If there isn’t 100 percent About him. He understood the rhythm of a delta certainty of a conviction, then discretion—some would say Farmer on guitar in a juke joint circa 1933, as well spinelessness—argues for settlement. Every prosecutor knows As the rhythm of your standard Negro bohemian on guitar that, in the end, those who take the easier path will enjoy re- In a New York apartment amid daydreams of jumping wards, and those who challenge power won’t. Eric Holder got Through windows, ballads of footwork, Monk orchestras, a corner office and a lucrative partnership. James Kidney, who Miles with strings. Whatever. I’m just saying, pushed for aggressive prosecution at the SEC, got a small re- I don’t know how to hold myself when I dance. Do you? tirement party, where he said, in a speech that leaked, “For the powerful, we are at most a toll booth on the bankster turnpike.” Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including AS MUELLER’S CASE against Trump has developed, it has clearly HOW TO BE DRAWN in 2015. evolved into an investigation of financial fraud. Mueller wants to know whether Russian oligarchs used Trump and his network of businesses to liberate cash and evade taxes, and whether they returned the favor by meddling in last year’s election. Paul Manafort’s real estate transactions and involvement off the battlefield. A well-sourced Daily Beast story in July with pro-Russian interests in Ukraine involve classic signs reveals how prosecutors thought they might lose because the of money laundering. So do large loans by German financial jury wouldn’t understand complex transactions involved in giant Deutsche Bank to Trump and Kushner’s real estate in- the scheme. So they punted. terests, also potential money-laundering vehicles, and deals In the Trump probe, Mueller has displayed flashes of dog- with the Bank of Cyprus, where Commerce Secretary Wilbur gedness that recall the Enron Task Force. His team impaneled Ross was once vice-chairman. Mueller and his all-star team a grand jury to gather evidence. They subpoenaed banks that of prosecutors are scrutinizing purchases of Trump properties worked with Paul Manafort and questioned his son-in-law by Russian nationals, partnerships between Trump and Rus- Jeffrey Yohai, applying pressure to get Manafort to flip. The sia in a New York housing development and a Toronto hotel, FBI even raided Manafort’s home, not trusting Trump’s former and even Trump’s choice of site for the 2013 Miss Universe campaign manager to cooperate with document requests. pageant in Moscow. Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, responded by complaining that This shift into financial crime drops the probe into the Mueller hadn’t exhausted other, less invasive options to obtain same accountability-free zone that has offered nothing but the documents and suggesting that the Trump team might try disappointment over the past decade. Consider the recent to suppress the information in court—the type of threat that case involving the Russian-owned real estate firm Prevezon can ward off a timid prosecutor. Holdings, which was accused of laundering money from a Eisinger recently argued that Mueller learned from the Enron tax-fraud scheme into luxury apartments in Manhattan. In Task Force how to slowly build a case, let investigators do their May, right before it was scheduled to go to trial, the case was job, and take the most aggressive line possible. But ultimately, abruptly settled for $5.9 million, with no admission of guilt. he’ll be working within a structure committed to protecting the And contrary to rumors that the Justice Department meddled powerful from prosecution. Frustration with a special justice in the case to assist Prevezon (whose lawyer was the one who system for elites helped create the rage that fueled the rise of met with Donald Trump Jr.), it appears the U.S. attorney for Trump. But a special justice system for elites might be exactly the Southern District of New York, Joon Kim, simply walked what the president needs to escape his Russia problem. a

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TV her to the running of the bulls. (He doesn’t.) The pair show up to a party at Sam’s large, Spanish-style bungalow. Mother and daughter scowl at each other for several minutes, until Max pulls Sam into the laundry room and admits that she’s in way over her head. Sam duly sees off the unwanted suitor, threatening to call the police. For Sam, who is a single mother of three daughters, navigating the balance between control and protection is both a daily practice and a survival tactic: Push them and they pull away, but fail to protect them and everyone loses. Better Things is, above all, a very funny show about motherhood and the mundane, the snarl of tedium and tenderness that fills the waking hours of a parent’s life. If this mood-board displays shades of Louie, another half- hour comedy on FX, it’s because Louis C.K. is one of the show’s executive producers and co-creators. Adlon and C.K., longtime friends, began collaborating on HBO’s Lucky Louie, where she played his wife, and continued to work together on Louie, where she played Louis’s friend and unrequited love interest Pamela. When Adlon decided to make a show of her own, she chose, like C.K., to begin at home, mining her own life for material and then building out a fictional world on top of her own experience. Like Sam, Adlon is a single mother raising three daughters alone while carving out a life in show business (her most notable role, prior to Louie, was the voice of 12-year-old Bobby on King of the Hill). Better Things isn’t completely autobiographical: Adlon’s real family serves as more of a writing prompt than documentary subject. The show Mom, Interrupted falls more into the category of autofiction: an auteur playing a Pamela Adlon’s Better Things version of herself run through a fun-house mirror. Autofictional sitcoms have been floating around sinceThe reinvents the family sitcom. Dick Van Dyke Show, but the genre has become truly dominant in prestige comedy over the past decade. There are the shows BY RACHEL SYME starring men who play bizarro versions of themselves: Louie, Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, and Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. And then there is Insecure, Issa Rae’s crackling HBO comedy, which grew out of her semi-autobiographical SAM FOX, PAMELA ADLON’S television alter ego on FX’s Better web series, Awkward Black Girl; British playwright Michaela Things, is not like a regular mom. She’s a cool mom. You know Coel’s Chewing Gum; Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi; and comedian this because she dresses like Patti Smith, all steel-toed ranch Rachel Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Families and love interests boots and distressed canvas blazers, with a smudge of kohl drift in and out of these shows, but ultimately they aim to say around her eyes. She sometimes calls her three daughters something hyperspecific about their creators: what it is like to “dude.” One night, after a Joe Walsh concert, she comforts be a comedian, a young black woman in Los Angeles, a child her 16-year-old daughter’s friend, who has had a run-in with of immigrants, or in Larry David’s case, a hapless narcissist. an ex-boyfriend. “If it is any consolation,” she counsels, “I Adlon’s show traffics in this same specificity, but because it see people I blew all the time.... You can either live with it, or puts five women—Sam, her three daughters, and her mother, not go out, or blow less people.” Sam’s daughter Max (Mikey Phyllis—at the heart of the narrative, its universe feels both Madison) is mortified. To be the progeny of the cool mom is more complex and far less claustrophobic. It is less Louie both a blessing and a curse. It brings the freedom to wear a and more like the work of Jenji Kohan or Jill Soloway, who crop top to a church service (as Max does), but it can prevent with Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, and I Love Dick your adolescent transgressions from playing out with the have embraced a broad spectrum of female experiences—and operatic drama you desire. ages. Better Things is grounded in the minutiae of family life. In the first episode of Better Things’ new season, Max has It may be the most hyperrealist, purposefully casual portrait tried to shock her mother by dating a 36-year-old man named of teenage girls and aging women on television right now. Arturo. They meet when he is dating Sam’s friend Macy, but he soon switches his attentions, promising Max he will take ILLUSTRATION BY MEGHAN WILLIS

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THE MULTIGENERATIONAL, all-female household on Better would unload on her—Mom, where are my socks, or whatever—­ Things looks like Lauren Greenfield’s iconic “Girl Culture” because I needed to give her some of my pain, because I knew photographs come to life. We see Max lazing around the den of she could carry it when I couldn’t.” We know Frankie is in the bungalow like a pampered cat, scrolling through Snapchat pain, as any teenager moving through the world is in pain, and when asked to help carry a suitcase. We see her, with a pert Adlon—who directed every episode of this season—finds a way hair flip, tell her mother to stay out of her life, only to turn to show it without resorting to either pathos or overanalysis. into a puddle of anguish when she is gripped by insecurities. We see Phyllis (Celia Imrie), whose entitlement runs from IF THE FIRST season of Better Things had too much of any- charmingly batty to totally exasperating, pestering Sam to buy thing, it was gravity. It reveled in the prosaic heartbreaks of her a lavender suit at the hardware store—even though both day-to-day life, without much surrealism or fanciful reprieve. women know that the hardware store will carry no such thing. And while it was always propelled by Adlon’s charisma, which Phil, as Sam calls her, gets her own dedicated episode in is radiant, the show felt moored to Sam’s maternal struggles the second season. After she is found trying to steal a priceless in a way that didn’t allow viewers to appreciate her prismatic ancient artifact from the museum where she docents, Phil flees qualities. We seldom saw her doing her job, or out on a date, or the property but cannot locate her car. Feeling embarrassed with friends, without her daughters around. The second season and out of control, she decides to leap into a manhole to cause provides a bit of a corrective: The majority of one episode is an injury. Laid up in a hospital for five days, Phil finally has her devoted to watching Sam in her work as an actor, teaching a daughter’s undivided attention, which is frequently laced with scene study class and filming a car commercial. She also takes distraction and cruelty. (A devastating moment from the first more romantic risks this season. The second episode features a season involves Sam bailing on a road trip with her mother caustic breakup scene in a parking lot that, on its own, should after five minutes.) earn Adlon another Emmy nomination. In another scene, Phil taunts a young child in a bookstore It’s in showing Sam in love, with all the complication it for wearing a fake mustache and then proceeds to lose control brings, that Better Things really does something new with of her bladder in the aisle. Her aging is not pathologized, but motherhood on television. In a scene that begins with Sam in it’s still played for tragicomedy; as Phil is losing her grip on bed in the morning, we see flashbacks from the night before, her body and her mind, Sam doesn’t suddenly soften to her when Sam met a man named Robin, a weathered but handsome mother’s whims. Instead, she plays the relationship with as divorced dad, at a depressing book reading. As Sam stares at much realism as I’ve seen. Having a parent in decline is often the ceiling, we see a replay of their night together, including a as frustrating as it is mournful: It’s logistics and patience and walk under street lamps and getting a drink. This all appears effort. There is, of course, love at the base of all this work, but Adlon never sugarcoats aggravating family moments with a group hug. That Sam loves her kids, and loves her mother, is The show falls into the category widely apparent: The entire show is about how she grapples of autofiction: an auteur playing with being the center of gravity for four separate, insatiable maws of need. a version of herself run through a Adlon likewise gives the adolescent dramas space to breathe fun-house mirror. without taking them so seriously that they feel maudlin. Sam’s middle child, Frankie (Hannah Alligood), is a sardonic, self-righteous teen who wears baggy clothes and goads her sisters ruthlessly. When Frankie is sent home from school in the first season for using the boys’ bathroom, she tells Sam like a montage from a rom-com, even as—back in reality—Sam’s that it’s not because she wants to be a boy, but because she two oldest daughters start to paw at her feet for attention. Their was disgusted by the behavior in the girls’ bathroom, where squabbling and silly jokes play underneath Sam’s daydreams like one classmate “stuck her finger up her pussy.” In season two, a soundtrack. Even as the mother allows herself to fantasize, Adlon doesn’t dwell on Frankie’s gender identity as a major her family is always there, clinging to her legs. plot point—just as a teenager living in a bohemian Los Angeles The scene is beautiful, almost meditative. Adlon allows us to enclave in 2017 likely wouldn’t. Frankie’s life doesn’t turn into a conceive of a world in which a single mom isn’t torn between Very Special Episode due to one unjust school punishment, but her Romantic Desires and her Mothering Responsibilities. She rather continues apace, with microdramas that have nothing finds a way to reconcile these parts of herself, conveying all the to do with how she wears her hair. ways in which most of the people she meets are trying (and In one episode, Sam feels underappreciated and lashes often failing) to reach the same balance. Everyone in Better out at her two oldest daughters, demanding that they stage a Things is a little bit damaged, which means that the mother faux-funeral for her so she can hear their eulogies while she’s is not the only frazzled mess on screen. In granting all her still alive. Frankie, in her tribute, hints at how she has relied on characters a brokenness, Adlon breaks open the stereotype of Sam to help her through emotional tumult, admitting that “I a working mother and shows her in full relief. a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 59 REVIEW

BOOKS entirely rob people of the power to revolt, but it certainly constrained political choice and limited sovereignty. Despite its global scale, historians of the Cold War tended to focus on diplomatic decision-making in the U.S. and the USSR. Since the beginning of Cold War studies, two basic schools of thought contended to define the narrative. The first school, based in the United States and essentially nationalist, held that Stalin was primarily responsible for the conflict. His was an evil, totalitarian regime that America was morally bound to oppose. Herbert Feis and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., both of whom had worked for the U.S. government, set down Cold War World these lines of analysis in the 1950s and ’60s. This “orthodox” A new history redefines the conflict’s interpretation has never really disappeared: The opening of Soviet and Chinese archives in the 1990s brought renewed true extent and enduring costs. focus on Stalin’s paranoia. The Cold War’s end with the ap- parent victory of the United States and liberal capitalism gave BY PATRICK IBER the orthodox view a boost, in works like John Lewis Gaddis’s 2006 history, The Cold War. The second school of thought, almost as old, is critical of American behavior rather than Soviet actions. In this “revision- “CONSIDERING HOW LIKELY we all are to be blown to pieces ist” interpretation, blame for the conflicts of the Cold War lies by it within the next five years,” George Orwell wrote in late with capitalism and its defenders. America’s need to restore 1945, “the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion global markets after World War II, and to control the extraction as might have been expected.” Orwell was grappling with the of natural resources, led it to encroach on Soviet defenses. political implications of the new weapon, about two months America assumed it would emerge from the war as the domi- after the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more nant global power, and in its efforts to engineer that outcome than 100,000 people. If atomic bombs were cheap to build, he created the Cold War. William Appleman Williams pioneered thought, they might level differences in power between nations. this interpretation in 1959. It rose in influence during the But since the costs of production were so high, he anticipated Vietnam War and can still be seen, for example, in the writings instead the creation of only a few atomic superstates. In fact, of Noam Chomsky. To simplify enormous and complex bodies of Orwell reasoned, the atomic bomb might actually serve to scholarship to their barest essences, orthodoxy held communism intensify political inequality, primarily responsible, while revisionism blamed capitalism. But the Cold War, as Orwell foresaw, would reach far beyond by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to the two principal actors. While historians have been pushing revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb beyond the “orthodox” and “revisionist” binary for some time, on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, it is Odd Arne Westad, a professor at Harvard University’s they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and Kennedy School of Government, who has most successfully it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow constructed an account of the Cold War that is truly global in and unpredictable demographic changes. its scope. In his Bancroft Prize–winning book, The Global Cold War, published in 2005, Westad contended that the conflict It was a situation of “cold war,” he wrote, in one of the first shaped the internal politics of every country in the world. uses of the phrase. And, he concluded, “it is likelier to put an Any advance for U.S. interests, no matter how far-flung, was end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely seen as a setback for Soviet interests, and vice versa. For many a ‘peace that is no peace.’ ” countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the Cold War Orwell’s imaginings eventually took him to the world he heralded the final stage of European colonial control. Civil fictionalized in1984, but his analysis of the coming Cold War wars in Korea, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua took on international proved cogent. Only a few countries gained atomic weapons. dimensions and attracted international support. At every table Hostile powers, principally the United States and the Soviet of government in every country around the world, there was Union, did not attack each other directly, fearing mutual de- an empty chair, potentially to be occupied by the power of the struction. They did, however, develop semipermanent war U.S. or the USSR. The Cold War belonged to the whole world, economies, as they vied for influence in countries across the not just the superpowers armed with atomic weapons. world. What came to be called the “Third World” experienced With his latest book, a wise and observant history titled these power struggles as a continuation of European imperi- simply The Cold War, Westad aims to bring this global view alism. The Cold War, as it was fought in Korea, in Indonesia, in Cuba and Chile and Angola, was hardly “cold.” It did not ILLUSTRATION BY GUY BILLOUT

60 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

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CODE: TNRWINES15 REVIEW of the conflict to a wider audience. The new book provides a never carried out with much trust, deteriorated into postwar more comprehensive account of the Cold War than his earlier conflict as the USSR expected capitalism to experience a cri- work, tracking its repercussions in every corner of the world, sis, and America feared the same. Tensions heightened as the and spends less time in debates with other historians. It also United States attempted to contain Soviet expansion, and arrives at a moment when we must grasp the dynamics of the the USSR constructed a defensive perimeter in Eastern Europe. Cold War if we want to understand some of today’s most urgent The new states of the Soviet bloc excluded hostile forces from developments, from North Korea’s acquisition of long-range government—which meant suppressing the right, splitting nuclear missiles to the rise of socialist movements in West- the left, and putting loyal Communists in charge of minority ern democracies. Although the Cold War is receding into the governments that would necessarily have to depend on Mos- past—roughly half the world’s population is too young to have cow and rule by force. memories of it—we are still living in its shadow and trying to In Western Europe, the United States faced a similar chal- discover the possibilities created by its end. lenge. Needing to ensure a return to viable capitalism, ad- ministrations from Truman on also split the left, ignored UNLIKE A SHOOTING WAR, with an opening battle and a closing the crimes of the right, and worked to bar Communists from treaty, the Cold War’s beginning and end have always been power. The United States, however, could accommodate a shrouded in mist. There is general agreement that it started broader range of outcomes in Europe than the Soviets could. between 1945 and 1948, and ended between 1989 and 1991. It tolerated countries in which the moderate left operated Tensions ran especially high from the end of World War II in 1945 to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, then relaxed somewhat, only to rebound in the 1980s. But throughout those four-plus We are still living in the shadow decades, the threat that atomic warfare would destroy human of the Cold War and trying to life loomed large. Westad has long argued that we should take a broader view discover the possibilities created of the roots of the Cold War. For him, its distinctive feature by its end. was the competition between capitalism and communism. In his earlier book, he placed the beginning of the Cold War in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In this sense, Westad’s concept of the conflict mirrors what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm described as the “short twentieth century”—the period, lasting democratically and built up the welfare state, because doing from 1914 to 1991, marked by global competition between so undermined the appeal of communism by proving that capitalist and communist states. In Westad’s view, capitalism capitalism could provide public services and a social safety and communism presented two opposing visions of moder- net. But if Communists threatened to gain too much influ- nity, each rooted in the transformation in the early twentieth ence in Western Europe, America attempted to undermine century of the United States and Russia into empires with their success through covert action—as it did in elections in international missions: France in 1947 and in Italy in 1948. Meanwhile, the dictators and military governments that the United States propped up The competition was for the society of the future, and there in Greece and Spain burnished their “democratic” credentials were only two fully modern versions of it: by appealing to anti-communism. the market, with all its imperfections and Throughout the emerging “Third World,” by contrast, the injustices, and the plan, which was rational United States allowed governments very little leeway to exper- and integrated. Soviet ideology made the iment with even non-Communist paths to social democracy. In state a machine acting for the betterment 1953 and 1954, when elected governments tried to nationalize of mankind, while most Americans resent- British-owned oil in Iran and distribute American-owned ed centralized state power and feared its land in Guatemala to peasants, they were overthrown by the consequences. The stage was set for an CIA. Similarly, the Soviet Union could not abide political re- intense competition, in which the stakes forms within its sphere of influence: A more open socialism were seen to be no less than the survival in Hungary was crushed in 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled of the world. into Budapest. In this, Orwell’s predictions of the nature of Cold War

THE COLD WAR: A With its early start date and its focus on conflict were imperfect. In general, the superpowers did not WORLD HISTORY ideology, Westad’s new history of the threaten poorer countries with nuclear annihilation: They BY ODD ARNE WESTAD Cold War follows many familiar beats, simultaneously courted them in a battle for allegiance and Basic Books, 720pp., $40.00 but includes some unexpected fills. Co- undercut efforts at reform that threatened the superpowers’ operation between the United States and interests. Some of our present global inequalities, as well as the Soviet Union during World War II, the political instability of poorer countries, can be ­attributed

NOVEMBER 2017 | 63 REVIEW to Cold War superpo­ wers force- fully vetoing attempts by the world’s poorer nations to solve their national problems through democratic means.

BY DEFINING THE Cold War so widely, both geographically and chronologically, Westad invites questions about what the “war” does and does not encompass. Surely not everything between 1917 and 1991 can be described as the result of the Cold War; that period, after all, includes the World War II alliance between the U.S. and the USSR. Nor did all historically sig- nificant changes that occurred in the period of the “high” Cold War after 1945—such as the destruction of European empires and the pro- liferation of postcolonial states— directly result from the conflict. But Westad’s argument might be summarized by insisting that the Cold War needs to be understood as a struggle for hegemony, not just power. Both superpowers attempt- ed to gather influence and to secure commitments to their way of seeing and interpreting the world. And that means that even the phenom- Khrushchev and Nixon, 1959. Earlier histories of the Cold War tended to overlook its global scale. ena that are not reducible to Cold War tensions were affected by it. ­protect ­capitalism. When the CIA overthrew the government Consider the process of decolonization that accelerated in of Guatemala in 1954, for example, was the agency doing the the years after World War II. The United States nominally took bidding of the United Fruit Company, the U.S. corporation an anti-colonial position. It supported decolonization—as it did whose holdings were being confiscated? Or did it fear that in Dutch Indonesia—if it thought the brutality of colonial rule Communists, who had gained administrative and advisory might make communism look attractive by comparison. But roles in Guatemala’s new government, were building up too in other cases, such as Vietnam, a French colony until 1945— much power in America’s sphere of influence? Westad argues America simply took over colonial projects from weakened that the purpose of U.S. foreign policy was not the defense European allies. The Soviet Union, for its part, generally lined of particular American companies and their interests, but up behind forces of national liberation (except in its sphere of a much larger project: “the expansion of capitalism” itself, influence), if only because they had the potential to undermine which would “promote access to raw materials and future its rival. Some countries, like India, tried to reject Cold War markets for the United States and its allies.” To this end, politics altogether, mixing democratic elections with economic America was willing to sacrifice short-term economic interests planning and formally establishing the Non-Aligned Movement and the defense of particular companies; soon after the CIA in 1961. Decolonization, in short, was not specifically a Cold staged its coup in Guatemala, for example, United Fruit was War phenomenon, but the way it played out in many countries subjected to antitrust rulings at home. was certainly shaped by Cold War tensions. Cold War tensions, though reduced in the 1970s, rose again In a work as sweeping as The Cold War, even major events in the 1980s. But they did so against a background of continued and controversies get passed over relatively quickly. But consumer shortages in the Soviet sphere. (There are a few Westad brilliantly reduces topics that have generated books decent Communist jokes in the book: “A woman walks into upon books to their most essential qualities. Take the question a food store. ‘Do you have any meat?’ ‘No, we don’t.’ ‘What

of the extent to which U.S. foreign policy was designed to about milk?’ ‘We only deal with meat. The store where they COLLECTION/GETTY SOCHUREK/THE PICTURE LIFE HOWARD

64 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW have no milk is across the street.’ ”) At the same time, economic recovery in the capitalist world, combined with increasingly globalized telecommunications, advertised the West’s advan- tages far more effectively than any propaganda. Soviet reforms intended to open up the Communist system instead brought it down. For the people of the Soviet bloc, it really was a moment of liberation. But for who else, and for how long?

IF THE COLD WAR has a weakness, it’s simply that it adds little to its groundbreaking predecessor, and lacks some of the older work’s most thrilling analysis. Published in 2005, The Global Cold War was deeply entwined with the idea that the conflict was fundamentally ideological. It devoted two brilliant opening chapters to explaining the self-conception of the major play- ers. America’s vision centered on a belief in personal liberty, inseparable from private property, and a skepticism toward centralized power; while the Soviet Union’s vision was based on a rejection of the market. Each side believed that following its model would better humanity. This reading of the Cold War reflected its own ideologically embattled times: Four years after the attacks of September 11, and near the peaks of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States was once again embroiled in a conflict that it presented as an ideological clash, this time between Western liberalism and “radical” Islam. The rhetoric of the “war on terror” wasn’t just an analog to the rhetoric of the Cold War: It

The war was waged over great ideas, but it was won, Westad argues, on the fields of production statistics.

allowed the United States to continue pursuing a neocolonial agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia. Westad reminds the reader that September 11 was a form of foreign intervention in the West—a reversal of the traditional pattern, and one that was likely to continue into the future. If there has been a shift in Westad’s reading of the Cold War since 2005, it is toward the view that the West won because it was materially, not ideologically, stronger. The battle was waged over great ideas, but it was won on the fields of pro- duction statistics. It was capitalism’s ability to outpace Soviet growth at key junctures that made ideological victory possible. Certainly Westad’s subtle shift in emphasis makes sense in our era of heightened inequality and growing anxieties about capitalism’s stability. It used to be heterodox and radical to argue that the prosecution of the Cold War was underpinned by America’s desire to spread capitalism: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described William Appleman Williams as a “pro-Communist scholar” for his critiques of U.S. diplomacy. But if you take

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MAGAD_NEWREPUBLIC_8X10_ISSUE_NOV2017.indd 1 9/7/17 2:15 PM REVIEW STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, Westad’s long view, it’s clear that the Cold War was always MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION defined by the struggle between capitalism and communism 1. Publication Title: THE NEW REPUBLIC 2. Publication number: 382-020 3. to allocate global resources. This perspective makes the old Filing Date: October 1, 2017 4. Issue Frequency: Monthly, with 2 double issues orthodox and revisionist debates about “who started it” in the published. Number of Issues Published Annually: 10 6. Annual Subscription Price: $79.97 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: The New 1940s seem just that: old. Republic, 1620 L Street, NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036 8. Complete The victory of American capitalism over Soviet commu- Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Offices of Publisher: The nism did not, however, bring an end to the struggle over the New Republic, 1620 L Street, NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036 9. Full global distribution of wealth. Among U.S. allies, those who Names and Complete Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Hamilton Fish, The New Republic, 1620 L Street, NW Suite 300C, conformed to American conceptions of free markets did not Washington, D.C. 20036 Editor: Eric Bates: The New Republic, 1620 L Street, fare equally. It was a bargain that worked out relatively well for NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036 Managing Editor: Laura Reston, The Western Europe, as well as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. New Republic, 1620 L Street, NW, Suite 300C, Washington D.C. 20036 10. But it didn’t work out well for most postcolonial nations, or Owner: TNR II, LLC 1620 L Street, NW, Suite 300C Washington, D.C. 20036 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Hold- for most post-Soviet states, where living standards fell along ing 1% Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: with the Soviet Union. As the USSR dissolved, a kind of market None 12. Tax status: n/a 13. Publication Title: THE NEW REPUBLIC 14. Issue messianism led the United States to overlook the complexities Date for Circulation Data Below: October 2017 15. Extent and nature of circula- of postwar planning. It would do the same again in places like tion: Average No. of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 months: a. Total Iraq and Afghanistan, which it expected to be able to remake number of copies (Net press run): 42,906 b. Paid Circulation (By Mail and Out- side the Mail): (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form in its own image. The Cold War has ended, but this kind of 3541: 27,049 (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: hubris remains. 0 (3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and At the same time, the end of the Cold War has left us with a Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside range of new political possibilities. The Cold War engaged the USPS: 1,882 (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS: 0 c. Total Paid Distribution: 28,932 d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail United States in a struggle between capitalism and socialism and Outside the Mail): (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included around the globe, while suppressing it strenuously at home. on PS Form 3541: 5,660 (2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies included on But nearly 30 years later, popular support for socialism is PS Form 3541: 0 (3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through emerging as a serious political force in the West. A 2016 survey the USPS: 0 (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or found that only 42 percent of millennials in the United States other means): 1,033 e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 6,693 f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15e): 35,624 g. Copies not Distributed: 7,282 h. said they supported capitalism, versus 51 percent who say Total (sum of 15f and g): 42,906 i. Percent Paid (15c/15f x 100): 81.2% No. Cop- they reject it. Many young Americans today feel no visceral ies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: a. Total number of copies connection to the Cold War equation of capitalism-as-­freedom. (Net press run) : 44,837 b. Paid Circulation (By Mail and Outside the Mail): (1) What form the socialism of the future will take, if any, re- Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 27,871 (2). Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 0 (3) Paid Distri- mains the subject of intense political struggle. But it will be bution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street worked out in a fundamentally post–Cold War environment, Vendors, Counter Sales and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: 2,155 (4) Paid in which the nightmarish aspects of Soviet communism no Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS: 0 c. Total Paid Distri- longer exist—either as a bogeyman to be used to suppress the bution: 30,026 d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail) (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: left, or as a goad to inspire capitalism to defensive reforms. 5,710(2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 0 The political terrain has changed dramatically, opening up a (3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS: 0 space for ideas and movements that were unthinkable in the (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): paranoia of an earlier era. 1,949 e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 7,659 f. Total Distribution (Sum Westad, like any good historian, is aware that his analysis of 15c and 15e): 37,685 g. Copies not Distributed: 7,152 h. Total (sum of 15f & g): 44,837 i. Percent Paid (15c/15f x 100): 79.7% 16. Total circulation includes elec- of the past is situated in its own place in history. He wonders tronic copies. 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: November 2017 18. I whether future scholars may de-emphasize the Cold War as certify that all information on this form is true and complete. I understand that the most notable feature of the second half of the twentieth anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits century, in favor of the economic rise of Asia, or some other material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanc- tions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil historical development we have yet to recognize. One likely penalties) (signed) David Myer, Controller, October 1, 2017 candidate, as seen from the present, is the climate change that imperils humanity’s future. In their competition for resources, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States bothered to THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 11, Issue 5,008, November take care of the environment; but because capitalism won, 2017. Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and Aug/Sep 2017) by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone (202) it will be held responsible for the adverse consequences of 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage and handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and its success. Even if historians of the future find other aspects additional mailing offices. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: www. of the twentieth century more important than those that we TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. Box 6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post Agreement Number emphasize today, they too will be grappling with the complex 7178957. Send changes of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited legacies of the Cold War. Perhaps they will see it as that time manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be emailed to [email protected]. in the twentieth century when human beings whistled past For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our web site at newrepublic.com/customer-service. one graveyard while digging another. a

NOVEMBER 2017 | 67 backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK BROWN

LOCATION COX’S BAZAR DISTRICT, BANGLADESH DATE SEPTEMBER 7, 2017

THE FIRST BOAT arrived at 9:30 a.m., charging onto the beach. arson. The United Nations human rights chief calls the conflict Passengers plunged into the surf, then disappeared onto the shore, “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” seeking shelter and a chance to sleep. In the distance, plumes By mid-September, not long after this boat arrived in Ban- of smoke drifted up from the horizon: Myanmar was burning. gladesh, nearly 400,000 Rohingya had fled the violence. Every Seven years after Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house day, 18,000 more sought refuge. Most had trekked for days to arrest, heralding a tolerant new age for Myanmar, the former the Burmese coast, where fishing boats lurk in the darkness each British colony has once again been plunged into ethnic con- morning, waiting for passengers. The final leg of the journey flict. Fires have raged for weeks across Rakhine State, home to takes five hours over choppy waters. roughly a million Rohingya Muslims, razing entire villages Australian photographer Patrick Brown was on the beach to the ground. Government officials have suggested that the when the boats arrived in Bangladesh. The last time he saw such Rohingya—a long-persecuted minority who are treated as illegal suffering, he says, was in Indonesia, following the tsunami in 2004. immigrants, despite having lived in Burma for generations—are “It’s hard to put it into a photograph,” Brown says. “In their faces, setting their own homes ablaze. But humanitarian groups tell I see exhaustion, terror, and a lot of anxiety about their future.” a a different story: Burmese soldiers are roving the countryside,

carrying out an orchestrated campaign of murder, rape, and See more of Patrick Brown’s work on newrepublic.com PICTURES BROWN/UNICEF/PANOS PATRICK

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2017_NewSchool_Milano-NPM_NewRepublic_8X10.5.indd 1 8/23/17 12:33 PM “READING BEYOND TRANS IS LIKE HAVING ONE’S WINDOW SHADES THROWN OPEN AFTER ARISING FROM A LONG NIGHT OF SLEEP: THE SUNLIGHT BURNS THE EYES, BUT IT AWAKENS THEM.” -POPMATTERS.COM

“WE WILL SOON BE READING BOOKS THAT ARE TRULY NEW, INDEED REVOLIUTIONARY, IN ARGUING THE FUTURE OF GENDER WILL BE THE END OF GENDER BINARIES ALTOGETHER. BEYOND TRANS [IS] ONE OF THE FIRST.” - -TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

“DAVIS TIME AND AGAIN SHOWS THE IMPORTANCE OF UNDERSTANDING TRANSGENDER RIGHTS AS A MATTER OF ALL RIGHTS.” -FOREWARD REVIEWS

“REFRESHING. SHOWS HOW REMOVING INSTITUTIONAL BARRIERS TO LIVING BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY CAN HELP EVERYONE LIVE FULLER, FREE LIVES.” -REASON MAGAZINE

“DAVIS ARGUES WE CAN ALL WORK TOWARD A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE. DEMANDING THAT PEOPLE CONFORM TO STEREOTYPES OF MASCULINITY OR FEMININITY DOES EVERYONE HARM.” -QUARTZ.COM

BEYOND TRANS: NYUPRESS.ORG DOES GENDER MATTER? @NYUPRESSa HEATH FOGG DAVIS #BEYONDTRANS