What Sets Trump Apart from History's Worst Dictators

WHY TRUMP LIES THE END OF GIRLS THE GOP’S ANTI-PROTEST LAWS

APRIL 2017

What sets Trump apart from history’s worst dictators

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AtlasObscura_NewRepublicAd_3.indd 1 2/17/17 9:35 AM contents APRIL 2017

UP FRONT 6 Trump’s Fuzzy Border Math 18 Meet the far-right “think tank” pushing to ban immigration. BY LAURA RESTON 8 The Anti-Protest Backlash Republican lawmakers are trying to criminalize dissent. BY CLIO CHANG 9 The Trump Tweetometer A highly precise quantitative analysis of last month’s presidential tweets. 10 Why Lying Is So Easy for Trump For New York developers, deception is good for business. BY BEN ADLER 12 Trump vs. Warren Why is a so-called populist dismantling the cfpb? BY ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK

COLUMNS 14 Trump’s Brain Think Steve Bannon is calling the shots? Think again. BY MATTHEW PHELAN It’s Time for Bluexit 16 Don’t Stop the Press! Why the media should become a true What would the United States look like without us? “opposition party.” BY LEAH FINNEGAN A declaration of independence from Trump’s America.

BY KEVIN BAKER REVIEW 44 They Could Be Heroes Today’s biggest novelists are throwbacks to a simpler time. BY SAM SACKS 26 34 50 Girls, Interrupted How Lena Dunham defied expectations Before the Ban Amazing Disgrace and remade TV. BY SARAH MARSHALL One family’s journey from Iraq to How a thrice-married, biblically Ohio—and how their life has changed illiterate sexual predator hijacked 56 Voices of America Can podcasts tell us more than stories of under Trump. TEXT BY ATOSSA ARAXIA the religious right. individual obsession? BY MICHELLE DEAN ABRAHAMIAN | PHOTOS BY HOLLY PICKETT BY SARAH POSNER 58 Yes All Women Feminists do not have to be ideologically pure to be radical. BY MAGGIE DOHERTY 61 The Night Shift 38 52 The true cause of our sleeplessness The General and the All-American Tyrant epidemic. BY JACOB SILVERMAN Refugee It may be comforting to compare 64 Backstory PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTIA VACCA Police from four countries joined forces Trump to dictators like Hitler and to bring down a notorious human Stalin. But to understand the threat he smuggler. Here’s how they blew the poses, we must look more deeply into operation. BY ERIC REIDY our own past. BY JEET HEER PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: SHUTTERSTOCK ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERTO PARADA

APRIL 2017 | 1 contributors

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a Brooklyn-based journalist whose work Editor in Chief has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Dissent, and The Win McCormack Nation. She is the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Editor Citizen. BEFORE THE BAN, P. 26 Eric Bates

Kevin Baker is a novelist, historian, and journalist. He is known for his Executive Editor Literary Editor best-selling novels Dreamland, a tale of European immigrants arriving in Ryan Kearney Laura Marsh New York at the turn of the century, and Paradise Alley, which chronicled Politics Editor Features Directors the Civil War draft riots. His most recent book, America the Ingenious, Bob Moser Sasha Belenky Theodore Ross investigates the origins of 76 American inventions. BLUEXIT, P. 18 Deputy Editor Ryu Spaeth Senior Editors Brian Beutler Managing Editor Michelle Dean is a contributing editor at the new republic and this Jeet Heer Laura Reston year’s recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation News Editor Social Media Editor for Excellence in Reviewing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Alex Shephard Sarah Jones Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. VOICES OF Staff Writers AMERICA, P. 56 Design Director Emily Atkin Graham Vyse Siung Tjia Josephine Livingstone Maggie Doherty is a lecturer at Harvard University and the author of a Photo Director Poetry Editor forthcoming book about the intellectual friendships of a group of women Stephanie Heimann Cathy Park Hong artists at the birth of 1960s feminism. Her writing has appeared in The New Production Manager Yorker and n+1. YES ALL WOMEN, P. 58 Steph Tan Reporter-Researchers Clio Chang Contributing Editors Lovia Gyarkye Leah Finnegan has written for Gawker, The New York Times, The Awl, The James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Sukjong Hong Associated Press, and The Morning News. She is currently an editor at The Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, Juliet Kleber Nicole Narea Outline and the author of the meta-media newsletter Leah Letter. DON’T Siddhartha Deb, Michael Eric Dyson, Paul Ford, Ted STOP THE PRESS! P. 16 Genoways, William Giraldi, Interns Dana Goldstein, Kathryn Joyce, Eric Armstrong Suki Kim, Maria Konnikova, Jasmine Bager Matthew Phelan is a freelance writer and editor based in New York. He Corby Kummer, Michelle Legro, Demetria Lee Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, has been covering Breitbart and its affiliates since 2012. His work has Sagari Shetty Graeme Wood, Robert Wright previously appeared in Jacobin, Wonkette, Salon, and Gawker, where he founded the conspiracy vertical “Black Bag.” TRUMP’S BRAIN, P. 14

Holly Pickett is a New York–based photojournalist who worked in the Director of Marketing Director of Sales and Revenue Suzanne Wilson Middle East for nine years. She documented the Arab Spring uprisings in Evelyn Frison Associate Account 2011, and has been photographing Syrian refugees since 2013. She has been Audience and Executive following the Bahar family, the subject of her photo essay, for almost a Partnership Manager Shawn Awan decade. BEFORE THE BAN, P. 26 Eliza Fish Controller Media Relations Manager David Myer Sarah Posner has reported on the religious right for more than a decade. Steph Leke Office Manager, NY She is the author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade Associate Publisher Tori Campbell for Values Voters. Her reporting in this issue was supported by the Art Stupar Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. AMAZING DISGRACE, P. 34 Publisher Hamilton Fish Eric Reidy is an investigative journalist based in Beirut whose current focus is on migration and refugees. His reporting has taken him to nearly a dozen countries around the Mediterranean. THE GENERAL AND THE REFUGEE, P. 38 Published by Lake Avenue Publishing 1 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003 Sam Sacks writes the Fiction Chronicle for The Wall Street Journal and is President a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly, an online arts and literature Win McCormack journal. He last wrote for the new republic on the professionalization of fiction writing. THEY COULD BE HEROES, P. 44

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EVER SINCE THE first wave of Irish Catholics came to the United States in the 1840s, spawning the virulently xenophobic Know Nothing Party, nativism has been a fixture of American politics. It follows a predictable pattern. An economic crisis hits. Politicians exploit fears about newcomers stealing jobs. And eventually, the latest wave of refugees assimilates into American society, reaffirming that we are a nation of immigrants, founded on the promise of a better life. ✯ In 2002, as Jean-Marie Le Pen and other nationalists surged in Europe, new republic editor Peter Beinart observed that “nativism has been silenced as a political force” in America. The reason: Bill Clinton had created jobs for American workers, and George W. Bush had shown Republi- cans they could embrace immigration and still win the presidency. ✯ Today, far-right parties are once again ascendant in Europe. There’s another Le Pen in France—Jean-Marie’s daughter, Marine—as well as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Frauke Petry in Germany. Here at home, it’s clear that Clin- ton and Bush didn’t silence nativism—they temporarily muffled it. Donald Trump has placed white fear at the center of American political life. He is the new dog barking in the night, and no one has succeeded in muzzling him. ICE agents arrest an immigrant in California in February.

Peter Beinart Quiet Time MAY 13, 2002

In the short story “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock signed a welfare bill that denied food stamps its moral flaws—demolished that perception Holmes draws Inspector Gregory’s attention to legal immigrants. In the mid-1990s the in the United States. to “the curious incident of the dog in the night- United States was as nativist as France is Clinton fought nativism by changing lib- time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” now—perhaps more so. eralism. But George W. Bush has changed insists the confused Inspector. “That,” Holmes So what happened to silence nativism in conservatism, too. In 2000 the party chose responds, “was the curious incident.” the United States? The answer is a happy as its standard-bearer one of its most com- Last month in France, a dog barked at the and bipartisan story of political leadership mitted supporters of immigration. When top of its lungs: Jean-Marie Le Pen placed by two men: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Buchanan spoke in Dallas in August 1995, second in the first round of voting for the Clinton did not fight xenophobia on Bush went after him personally, declaring, French presidency. In Austria, Norway, Ger- principle; after all, he signed the virulently “It is easy for some to pick on our friends many, and Denmark, far-right parties have anti-immigrant welfare bill. But he cut off from the South ... and I don’t like it.” He even been gaining steam for several years now. the political oxygen on which nativism relies. opposed the repeal of bilingual education. Americans sometimes say that as a coun- In Europe, concerns about immigration Today many pundits consider Bush’s try of immigrants we are congenitally im- have always stemmed from widespread support for immigration a matter of politi- mune to the xenophobia that periodically joblessness. And that has fueled racist cal survival—he’s courting a Hispanic vote erupts in nations that define themselves in stereotypes of newcomers as lazy and par- Republicans desperately need. But the par- ethnic terms. But that’s a historical fallacy— asitic. But in the United States, Clinton has ty by no means shares that calculus. Last and I’m not talking about the 1920s. Less successfully boosted employment. The ’90s month, when Bush tried to restore food than a decade ago the United States would boom banished those economic anxieties— stamps to some legal immigrants who lost have fit perfectly into the grim litany and the resulting racial resentments. them in the 1996 welfare bill, most House described above. In 1996, Pat Buchanan— Furthermore, by signing welfare reform, Republicans opposed him. America’s Le Pen—won the Republican Clinton destroyed the racist belief that There remains a reservoir of anti- presidential primary in New Hampshire. immigrants were receiving handouts for do- immigrant sentiment among the GOP base— That summer the GOP adopted a positively ing nothing. Europe’s growing anti-immigrant and in the country at large. But with a pop- Buchananesque platform declaring that backlash is stoked by the perception that ular, pro-immigration Republican in the children born in the United States to foreign left-liberal political elites are allowing immi- White House, nativism has been silenced parents should no longer automatically be- grants to play hard-working native Europeans as a political force. The dog has not barked.

come citizens. And in August Bill Clinton for suckers. But the welfare bill—whatever And the sound is glorious. a PRESS ENFORCEMENT/ASSOCIATED CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION REED/U.S. CHARLES

4 | NEW REPUBLIC up front

ALTERNATIVE FACTS

Trump’s Fuzzy Border Math Meet the far-right “think tank” working to legitimize the immigration crackdown.

BY LAURA RESTON

“OH BOY,” DONALD TRUMP exclaimed on the that immigrants are “bringing drugs” and “bringing campaign trail last summer, as he hoisted a colorful crime” into the United States. After he implemented poster aloft for a cheering audience in Fort Lauder his controversial Muslim ban, CIS provided Trump dale. “You’re not going to be happy with this!” The with much-needed political cover: Media outlets poster showed soaring immigration numbers, from NPR to The Washington Post quoted the center’s highlighted in bright blood-red—a menace stream experts defending the policy. Most, in fact, portrayed ing unchecked into America. CIS as a respectable research institute—after all, the Those numbers were cooked up at the Center for group boasts that its board of directors includes a Immigration Studies, a small advocacy operation in mix of “active and retired university professors” and Washington that emerged, early on in the campaign, “civil rights leaders.” as Trump’s go-to source for research about migrants CIS, however, is far from a reputable scholarly and the dangers they pose. Trump repeatedly cited organization. It’s a far-right fringe group that was CIS studies in his TV ads and speeches, tweeted links to the group’s research, and used its data to argue ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARTIN ELFMAN

6 | NEW REPUBLIC founded on disturbing and discredited ideas about immigration, led by hard-line nativists like Pat Bu- HISTORY racial inferiority. Today, CIS churns out doctored chanan, and the foundations of wealthy right-wing OF HATE “studies” that portray an America under siege from donors—from thoroughbred breeder John Olin to The beliefs of CIS immigrants pouring over our borders, destroying garlic magnate Jaquelin Hume—began funneling founder John Tanton: our environment, and draining our coffers. millions into CIS. Although May died in 2005, Funded “American The group was the brainchild of John Tanton, a her foundation, Colcom, has donated more than Renaissance,” magazine Michigan ophthalmologist who developed an interest $76 million to block immigration reform in Congress. that portrays minorities in eugenics after hearing about “a local pair of sisters CIS provided the ammunition for that fight. as inferior to whites. who have nine illegitimate children between them,” From a nondescript office building on K Street, its Supported the Pioneer as he wrote in 1969. He believed in the debunked researchers churn out study after study laying out Fund, a supremacist theories of Thomas Malthus, a nineteenth-century the perils of immigration. Most follow a predictable group that advocates “race betterment.” British cleric and scholar who warned that the world pattern: They twist the numbers to show immigrants would run out of resources if the population were pushing Western civilization to the brink of disaster. Started Society for allowed to grow unchecked. For Tanton, “overpopu- One 2008 report blames immigrants for Ameri- Genetic Education “to lation” meant people of color. To prevent nonwhites ca’s “burgeoning street gang problem.” Another, condition the public” to “genetic manipulation.” from procreating, he endorsed birth control in the published two years later, argues that immigrants United States and sterilization efforts in Africa. are using up the water in the American Southwest, Publishes “The Social And to block what he called a “Latin onslaught” of making them the true threat to the environment. Contract,” which decries “dysfunctional Third immigration that threatened to subsume Western Yet another study, published in 2015, asserts that a World cultures.” culture, Tanton founded or funded 13 think tanks and whopping 51 percent of immigrant households are advocacy groups—a constellation of far-right organi- leeching off welfare—even though undocumented zations that form the core of the modern movement immigrants have been banned from receiving welfare to limit immigration into the United States. since 1996. CIS’s research methodology is so flimsy CIS, which Tanton founded in 1985, was spe- that even hard-core conservative organizations have cifically designed to give the nativist movement condemned it. “Simply put,” the Cato Institute wrote a semblance of legitimacy. According to a letter of the welfare report, “the CIS study does not com- buried deep in the bowels of the Bentley Historical pare apples to apples but rather apples to elephants.” Library in Ann Arbor, in one of 14 boxes of his cor- After Barack Obama took office and agreed to respondence open to researchers, Tanton imagined welcome thousands of Syrian refugees into the Unit- “a small think tank” that would be deployed to “wage ed States, CIS joined forces with the radical right, the war of ideas.” As a serious organization with a circulating links to white nationalist publications like respectable-sounding name, it would create policy vdare and American Renaissance. The group has also briefs for conservative candidates and members of Congress—and provide cover for the lobbying efforts of its rabidly xenophobic sister organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Founded on disturbing ideas about racial founded in 1979. inferiority, CIS churns out doctored “studies” that In search of funding to launch CIS, Tanton wrote portray an America under siege from immigrants. to a friend, Cordelia Scaife May, the reclusive heir- ess to the Mellon family’s banking fortune. An environmentalist obsessed with protecting birds, May shared Tanton’s fear that immigrants would embraced thinkers expelled from more polite con- overrun America’s “native” population. During the servative circles. Last year, CIS began publishing the 1980s, she became obsessed with The Camp of the works of Jason Richwine, a right-wing analyst who Saints, a controversial French novel about “kinky- was forced to resign from the Heritage Foundation haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised” Third World after it discovered that in his Ph.D. dissertation he immigrants who destroy Western civilization. May had advocated banning Hispanic immigrants because paid for U.S. distribution of the novel, which depicts their IQs were lower than those of whites. Even the mayor of New York City being forced to live in conservatives were appalled. “Now CIS is falling Gracie Mansion with families from Harlem. down the same Alt Right pit that Tanton for years With funding from May, Tanton founded CIS has denied courting!” the conservative news site a year before Ronald Reagan signed a sweeping Red State observed. CIS, it seemed, had become too amnesty bill that offered nearly three million immi- radical even for the mainstream GOP. grants permanent legal status in the United States. Trump, however, has made CIS respectable. “He The move sparked a Republican backlash against legitimized them in a very big way,” says Mark Potok,

APRIL 2017 | 7 up front

a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. inauguration crowd in history, or to justify new Thanks to Trump, the group is now routinely and travel restrictions based on a nonexistent terrorist respectfully cited by mainstream news outlets as attack in Kentucky, it’s easy to dismiss such claims a “conservative think tank,” with no mention of as ridiculous. But when anti-immigration screeds the kind of “alternative facts” it promotes about cooked up by CIS are presented as serious research immigration. When the president’s advisers go on reports, the lies are harder to spot—and play a far television to argue that Trump drew the largest greater role in shaping public policy. a

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

The Anti-Protest Backlash Republican lawmakers across the country are trying to criminalize dissent.

BY CLIO CHANG

IF THERE’S ONE thing that has emboldened anti- of opposition. In Washington, Doug Ericksen—a Trump activists in the early days of the new state senator who served as Trump’s deputy cam- administration, it’s the fact that their protests are paign director in the state—has introduced a bill working. The day after the inauguration, four million that would increase the penalties for anyone causing women and men took to the streets of Washington an “economic disruption,” such as blocking traffic. and a host of other cities in what proved to be the Ericksen told The Seattle Times that the legislation largest demonstration in U.S. history. The day after is specifically designed to punish environmentalists, Trump signed his Muslim ban, protesters flocked tribal activists, and others who have blocked oil to airports across the country—and they did so again and coal trains and pipeline projects—actions he the next day, and the day after that. To date, nearly denounces as “economic terrorism.” every one of Trump’s major decisions has been GOP lawmakers in other states are pushing similar greeted by loud and sustained resistance. bills. In Indiana, proposed legislation would empower The grassroots revolts have proven effective. The police officers to remove protesters obstructing traffic protests helped prod Trump to walk back part of his “by any means necessary.” In North Dakota, where travel ban, inspired Democrats to wage long and activists have blocked roadways to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, a bill granting immunity from prosecution to any driver who “unintentionally” hits and kills protesters—a measure detractors took to calling From Washington to North Carolina, new the “Mow the Protesters Down Bill”—narrowly failed. laws would impose stiff penalties for And in Minnesota, where Black Lives Matter activists blocking highways or yelling at politicians. have marched on the Mall of America and shut down I-94 to protest police shootings, two new bills would increase the penalties for obstructing highways and allow cities to sue protesters to recover the cost of vocal confirmation battles against Betsy DeVos and policing public demonstrations. Jeff Sessions, and even forced Trump to cancel a trip In North Carolina, protesters seemingly inspired to a Harley-Davidson plant in Milwaukee after dem- by Game of Thrones followed former Governor Pat onstrators threatened to greet him at the factory. In McCrory around during inauguration weekend perhaps the best litmus test for Trump’s discomfort, chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” In response, State the president took to Twitter to voice his outrage: Senator Daniel Bishop announced that he would “Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters introduce legislation to make it a crime to “threaten, are proving the point of the millions of people who intimidate, or retaliate against a present or former voted to make america great again!” North Carolina official” while they are performing Now, however, Republican lawmakers in at least their jobs. Bishop views such protests as a dangerous ten states are working to shut down such shows scourge, rather than a well-established and vital

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

TO UNDERSTAND A president, you must listen to will quantify and analyze every single message him speak. And President @realDonaldTrump from the tweeter in chief, to better plumb the makes his most revealing pronouncements 140 admittedly shallow depths of his ever-fluctuating characters at a time. Twitter is to Trump what mental and emotional state. From the time of quill and ink were to Jefferson—the medium in day he tweets to the words he uses most, we will which his genius can truly flourish. Each month trace the patterns of his Android use to discern in the Trump Tweetometer, the new republic what method, if any, lies behind his madness.

12:02 a.m. Earliest tweet 10:54 a.m. 6:35 p.m. (About North Korea’s Median time Angriest tweet missile launch) for all tweets (“SEE YOU IN COURT”)

1 a.m.–5 a.m. 8 a.m.–9 a.m. 6:00 p.m. 11:56 p.m. 187Total tweets Tweet-free zone Most active hour Daddiest tweet Latest tweet (From January 20 to February 20) (Praises Ivanka for handling (A thank-you after “abuse” from the media) his inauguration)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28% Criticized others

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Praised himself Exclamation points used: 126 47% Praised others

18% Praised his team 7% Most-Used Most-Used Insults Praise fake 21 great 22 bad/badly 14 thank 13 MOST ATTACKED Fake news (18), The New York Times (10), failing 8 enjoy 7 Democrats (8), Iran (6), Obama (6), CNN (5), Mexico (3) illegal 7 congratulations 7 MOST PRAISED CEOs (5), Prime Minister Abe (5), wrong 5 win/winning 6 Fox News (3), Ivanka (2), police chiefs and sheriffs (2) terrible 4 support 5 mess 4 wonderful 4 lost 3 good 4 weak 3 leading 3 Tweetstorm of the Month enemy 3 protect 3 FIRST PLACE On February 4, the day after the “so-called” dangerous 3 wow 2 judge in Seattle halted Trump’s travel ban, he tweeted from dishonest 3 honor 2 his personal Android ten times—the most in a single day. horrible 3 amazing 2 SECOND PLACE On February 15, after news broke that Trump’s campaign was in frequent contact with Russia, Most surprising word he never used: sad! he tweeted six times in 93 minutes about “this Russian connection non-sense.”

Words in All Caps FAKE NEWS MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN NOW THANK YOU ALWAYS COURT SECURITY 12 4 3 2 2 2 2

APRIL 2017 | 9 up front

PUNISHING part of the democratic process: In a statement to at worst unconstitutional. The real purpose is to PROTESTERS the Raleigh News & Observer, he characterized the discourage dissent. States have long tried to use legal A few of the GOP bills activists as a “chanting mob” of “ubiquitous leftist means to obstruct political protests, going back to the designed to limit dissent: rioters.” Criminalizing dissent is necessary, he added, civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antiwar Washington because “lines are being crossed.” protests of the 1970s. “It sends the wrong message Adds year of jail time for Bishop and other GOP legislators expressed no to protesters exercising their constitutional right to “economic disruption” such concerns, of course, when Tea Party activists be in public spaces, to assemble, and to speak,” says shouted down politicians during town hall meetings Jennifer Cook, policy director of the North Dakota North Carolina Makes it a crime to over Obamacare, or showed up armed at rallies to branch of the aclu. “intimidate” officials protest gun control. The current Republican desire The bigger question is whether the wave of to shut down protests is motivated by politics, not anti-protest legislation heralds a larger and more Indiana Enables police to use principles. “There are people who have this sense of dangerous backlash against free speech. Trump “any means necessary” decorum,” says David Meyer, a sociology professor himself has encouraged outright violence against to clear blocked roads at the University of California who studies protest protesters—during his campaign, he advised sup- North Dakota movements. “But it tends to be violated by their porters to “rough up” demonstrators at his rallies. Makes it illegal to wear political opponents, rather than people on their side The president’s personal vindictiveness, combined a mask; turns disorderly doing exactly the same thing.” with the repressive legislation being introduced at conduct into a felony The proposed laws are at best unnecessary—there the state level, are designed to frighten protesters. are already legal provisions, for instance, to protect But they are also the best indication yet of just how motorists who inadvertently strike pedestrians—and much the protesters have frightened Trump. a

FALSE ADVERTISING

Why Lying Is So Easy for Trump For New York developers, blatant deception isn’t just good for business—it’s completely legal.

BY BEN ADLER

POLITICAL PUNDITS, STAGGERED by Donald Trump’s But such dramatic theories miss the simplest exaggerated boasts, false promises, and outright explanation for Trump’s lying: He’s a real estate lies, have offered various theories for what’s wrong developer from New York City. Lying isn’t a personal with him. Does he suffer from mental illness? Is he failure. It’s a business model. experiencing early-onset dementia? Andrew Sullivan New York real estate, where Trump first learned recently argued in New York magazine that Trump’s the art of the con, is a line of work that’s built on chronic, stubborn dishonesty—unlike normal chicanery. Under state law, real estate developers have a de facto legal license to lie, and they use it with abandon. The marketing materials for a luxury condo might advertise top-flight amenities—on-site As one real estate broker and property SoulCycle, say, or valet stroller parking—but buyers manager in New York puts it: “Everybody have no legal recourse after they move in and dis- in this business is a fucking liar.” cover they have to haul their strollers up six flights like a tenement-dweller; as a matter of New York law, only the final sales contract is binding. And with land values so high and profit margins so slim, political fibbing—is “delusional” and “deranged,” developers have every incentive to hype the sales a frightening sign that the president is living in an pitch. “Real estate investors sell their product—and alternative universe. “There is no anchor any more,” in the process, they promise it will have benefits that Sullivan writes. “At the core of the administration may not ever be realized,” says Thomas Angotti, a of the most powerful country on earth, there is, professor of urban planning at Hunter College and instead, madness.” author of New York For Sale. Or as one real estate

10 | NEW REPUBLIC broker and property manager in New York puts it: approve 20 extra stories for Trump Tower by cre- “Everybody in this business is a fucking liar.” ating a fourth-floor “public garden” that is almost Bait-and-switch tactics are an everyday practice never open. He also replaced the lone bench in in Trump’s industry. The real estate mogul Bruce the public lobby with kiosks selling paraphernalia Ratner dangled star architect Frank Gehry before from his presidential campaign and The Apprentice. city officials when seeking approval for the arena that (Last summer, after losing a series of administrative would anchor his enormous Atlantic Yards develop- decisions by the city, Trump returned the bench.) ment in downtown Brooklyn. Once the deal was in His now-infamous habit of stiffing contractors is place, however, Gehry was booted off the project and common among developers. Trump has also lied a cheaper design was swapped in. And more than to preservationists, promising to preserve the Art four years after the arena opened, local residents Deco friezes from the façade of the Bonwit Teller are still waiting for the eight acres of parks that department store building that he demolished to Ratner pledged to create. To win approval for taller make way for Trump Tower. When he realized it luxury high-rises, developers frequently agree to would take two weeks to remove them undamaged, provide courtyards or other amenities for the public he instead jackhammered them to pieces. to enjoy. Then they save money by cutting corners Kate Wood, president of the preservation advo- on construction, making the spaces so inaccessible cacy group Landmark West, says New York devel- or unwelcoming that no one wants to use them. opers sometimes destroy architectural features on “If you’re maximizing profit, you’re going to an old building to prevent it from being subjected invest the minimum amount of money into what to landmark status. And she has seen developers gets you the most benefit,” says Eric Goldwyn, a understate the likely revenue of new buildings when TRUMP’S professor of urban studies at Barnard College and trying to get permission to build them. Some falsely TALL TALES Hunter College. “If it happens to be a trapezoid claim that certain floors will be used for community Boasted about brisk courtyard between two buildings that no one can instead of commercial purposes. “It kind of comes sales at Trump SoHo. really use, who cares? The public agenda isn’t what down to ‘alternative facts,’” says Wood. “There are Forced to return nearly they’re really looking to do, which is just to satisfy facts that we in the public and nonprofit advocacy $3 million to buyers. the zoning requirement.” sector see, and there’s how developers see the world.” Promised 6,000 jobs Trump is well versed in the dark arts of the New Given that real estate developers are mainly at Scottish golf resort; York mega-developer. In 1979, he got the city to salesmen—to investors, customers, local officials, employs only 95 people.

Billed Trump World Tower as 90 stories, but built only 72. Insists that, legally, his lie could have “gone higher.”

JAMES HUGHES/NY DAILY NEWS/GETTY DAILY HUGHES/NY JAMES Trump routinely inflates the number of floors in his properties, including his International Hotel and Tower in New York.

APRIL 2017 | 11 up front

and neighborhood advocates—lying is basically their a sleazy ambulance chaser; Mitt Romney as a heart- job. But even among his fellow developers, Trump less private equity predator. But Trump somehow excelled at misdirection. In a deposition in 2007, managed to present his background in one of the when Trump sued a journalist for reporting on un- world’s shadiest and most dishonest occupations as flattering truths about his business practices, lawyers a credential rather than a liability. This, at heart, is caught Trump in 30 separate lies. He inflated the the secret to his political success: He found a way to price of membership at one of his golf clubs, the fee apply the shameless ethos of his old profession to the he received for giving a speech, the magnitude of demands of his new one. his past debts, the size of his stake in a partnership, “I try and be truthful,” Trump explained in his the number of sales at a condo building, and the deposition in 2007, sounding like a kid who wants number of his employees. In real estate, as Trump to be graded on effort rather than accuracy. Then, in knows, there’s no detail unworthy of exaggeration. an eerily prescient moment, he drew a straight line Those who enter politics from other walks of life from his professional lying to his bigger ambitions. often confront the stereotypes associated with their “I’m no different,” he confessed, “from a politician chosen profession. John Edwards was caricatured as running for office.”a

BANK ACCOUNT

Trump vs. Warren Why is a so-called populist trying to dismantle America’s most effective consumer watchdog?

BY ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK

IN HIS SECOND week in office, Donald Trump huddled law’s most high-profile and effective creation: the at the White House with a group of leading Wall Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Street executives. Their goal: to unravel Dodd-Frank, It’s no surprise that a Republican president with the law passed in the wake of the global financial close ties to Wall Street would target the cfpb. The crisis to curb some of Wall Street’s most predatory watchdog has been a lightning rod for Republican practices. In front of assembled press, Trump pointed outrage ever since Elizabeth Warren first proposed the to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, which idea as a professor at Harvard Law School. As soon as had been forced by the Justice Department to pay a the agency was created, Republican lawmakers began trying to curtail its power or eliminate it outright. GOP ads depict the agency as a neo-Stalinist ministry that is the natural enemy of American consumers. In its short history, the CFPB has successfully “The cfpb supposedly exists to protect you,” House prosecuted more than 100 financial institutions Speaker Paul Ryan tweeted after the agency levied a and recovered billions of dollars for consumers. $100 million fine against Wells Fargo for incentivizing widespread fraud against borrowers. “But instead it tries to micromanage your everyday life.” As a self-styled defender of the little guy, Trump record $13 billion in 2013 for misleading investors should actually be working to strengthen the cfpb, about toxic securities. “There’s nobody better to tell not dismantle it. During his campaign, Trump railed me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie,” Trump declared. against the global financial elite who had enriched “We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank.” themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans. That afternoon, Trump signed a pair of executive The working class was devastated by the deep-seated orders that pave the way for rolling back many of corruption that caused the financial crisis, and Dodd-Frank’s financial reforms. It was not just a Trump’s electoral strongholds are high-density zones gift to “friends of mine,” as the president put it— of home foreclosures, subprime loans, and payday people, he said, with “nice businesses.” It was also lenders—exactly the sort of predatory schemes the the opening salvo in a full-fledged war to destroy the cfpb was designed to police.

12 | NEW REPUBLIC “The cfpb is the first federal agency to look out for Americans on these issues,” says Lisa Gilbert, who monitors Congress for the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen. “As the part of Dodd-Frank that people engage with every day, its work has been massive and essential.” Consider the cfpb’s track record. In less than seven years, the agency has successfully prosecuted more than 100 financial institutions—often refusing set- tlements, taking wrongdoers to court, and placing the worst offenders under ongoing supervision. It launches many investigations by following public complaints posted on its web site, which serves as a model for government transparency. “Unlike other agencies, the cfpb’s complaint system is public and searchable,” says Alexis Goldstein, a senior analyst with Americans for Financial Reform. “It’s become a great resource for anyone getting ripped off.” Thirteen million Americans have used the cfpb’s education and training programs, and the agency routinely helps consumers force lenders to reduce or erase fees and overcharges. All told, the agency has five-year term that runs until July 2018, and can chalked up nearly $12 billion in civil fines and con- only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or sumer refunds for 29 million Americans defrauded malfeasance in office.” by scams. It has returned another $8 billion to con- With Trump in the White House, however, Re- sumers by reducing predatory loans, or canceling publicans are already gunning for the cfpb. “It’s time them outright. to fire King Richard,” Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska DEFENDING In addition, no agency has done more than the declared in January. A few weeks later, Representative CONSUMERS cfpb to defend the rights of military veterans—those Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the chairman of the House The CFPB’s biggest fines: whom Trump extolled on the campaign trail as the Financial Services Committee, took to the pages of Wells Fargo archetypal “forgotten Americans,” discarded and The Wall Street Journal to call for Cordray’s head. $100 million betrayed by elites loyal to Wall Street over Main “The cfpb is arguably the most powerful, least ac- Created fake accounts Street. According to the Consumer Federation of countable agency in U.S. history,” Hensarling wrote. to bilk consumers America, the cfpb has returned $120 million to mil- A leaked memo drafted by Hensarling reveals the Citibank itary families cheated by illegal foreclosures, pred- Republican plan in detail: The cfpb’s rulemaking $35 million atory lending, and crooked loan schemes. It has authority and enforcement powers would be sharply Deceived customers visited 145 military bases across the country to in- curtailed, and its consumer education initiatives with hidden fees form soldiers of their rights, and in January it filed would be eliminated. The director, meanwhile, could Chase a lawsuit against Navient, the country’s largest ser- be fired “at will” by the president—turning the agency $30 million vicer of student loans, for intentionally ruining the into a lapdog rather than a watchdog. Sent debt collectors credit ratings of combat veterans suffering from If Republicans move forward with their assault, after paid-up borrowers “total and permanent disability.” In 2014, the agen- however, Democrats may finally find themselves in Capital One cy won a $60 million settlement against Navient for a battle they have a good shot at winning. According $25 million systematically charging illegal interest on the ac- to Americans for Financial Reform, 59 percent of Preyed on consumers counts of 78,000 active-duty military per sonnel—a Republicans—including a majority of Trump voters— with low credit scores practice the Justice Department described as “in- want to see the cfpb expanded, not undermined. If Wells Fargo tentional, willful, and taken in disregard for the he were true to his word, Trump would listen to the $24 million rights of service members.” voters who placed him in office, not Jamie Dimon. Profited off home It’s plain to see why the Wall Street interests “The cfpb is popular across the political spectrum buyers in illegal aligned behind Trump would want to shut down or because it has consistently delivered for consumers,” kickback scheme weaken the cfpb. But that may be easier said than Elizabeth Warren tells the new republic. “If Presi- done. As an independent agency within the Feder- dent Trump or congressional Republicans try to gut al Reserve, the cfpb is off-limits to congressional the agency to please payday lenders, debt collectors, budget cutting and White House interference. Its and big banks, Democrats will stand on the side of director, Richard Cordray, is currently serving a working families and fight back tooth and nail.”a

APRIL 2017 | 13 body politic

Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, writes in his tell-all memoir, Trumped! “The dam- age to our efforts to promote Trump Plaza in the Far East was incalculable.” Trump, it would seem, cared more about promot- ing his political opinions than protecting his bank account. Two years later, Trump again paid tens of thousands of dollars to make his knee- jerk opinions more widely known, this time weighing in on the infamous Cen- tral Park jogger case with a call to “bring back the death penalty” for its five sus- pects. (Despite the eventual exoneration of all five young men—four black, one Latino—after the real attacker belatedly confessed, Trump remains convinced they were guilty.) “What has happened to law and order,” Trump asked in his rambling, emotional ad, “to the neighborhood cop we all trusted to safeguard our homes and families, the cop who had the power under the law to help us in times of danger, keep us safe from those who would prey on innocent lives to fulfill some distorted inner need.” There was no question mark. But here, too, Trump suggested that America was being Trump’s Brain “laughed at”—this time by domestic foes. Think Steve Bannon is calling the shots? Think again. If there’s a lesson to be learned from these seminal moments in the evolution- BY MATTHEW PHELAN ary prehistory of @realDonaldTrump, it’s that the president does, in fact, have a relatively constant and unswerving matrix T HAS BECOME COMMONPLACE TO deadbeats and freeloaders. “Make Japan, of political beliefs. His ideology combines suggest that, whatever policy po- Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the pro- a distaste for multilateral constraints on Isitions or leadership priorities he’s tection we extend as allies,” Trump de- American military and economic might pursuing at any given moment, Donald manded. “Let’s help our farmers, our sick, with a stark vision of a white-majority so- Trump possesses no overarching political our homeless … end our huge deficits, cial order in near-terminal decline. Trump ideology of his own. His administration, reduce our taxes, and let America’s econ- has not only held these convictions for the thinking goes, is fashioned around omy grow unencumbered by the cost of decades, he is deeply passionate about his volatile temperament and his ever- defending those who can easily afford to them. And perhaps most disconcertingly, shifting array of advisers. His beliefs are pay us for the defense of their freedom.” he shares them with Steve Bannon, his as fleeting as his late-night tweets, and as He concluded with a rhetorical flourish White House chief strategist and an apos- subject to sudden shifts in direction. that foreshadowed his now-famous cam- tle of authoritarian political disruption But decades before Twitter existed, paign slogan: “Let’s not let our great coun- for its own sake. Trump was spending his not-so-hard- try be laughed at anymore.” In the years before joining Trump’s earned money to promote a range of A salient detail about the ad—besides presidential campaign, Bannon—a noted strong—and surprisingly consistent— the way it perfectly aligns with Trump’s Islamophobe, war enthusiast, and self- political positions. In September 1987, he current screw-you stance toward nato— described “economic nationalist”—had shelled out $94,801 to buy full-page ads is that it actually hurt Trump’s bottom successfully transformed Breitbart News in The New York Times, The Washington line. “Japanese wealth was a key to the into a daily “must read” for America’s Post, and The Boston Globe. Addressed marketing of his luxury condominiums most virulently racist and frightened “to the American People,” the ad harshly and his casinos in Atlantic City,” John depicted the nation’s so-called allies as O’Donnell, the former president of the ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ CARRILHO

14 | NEW REPUBLIC white citizens. Bannon grew up in a Daily Beast reported that Bannon had himself delegating detail-oriented ques- family of Irish Catholic Democrats who joked to a friend in an email that he tions that bore or flummox him “to his were swayed by Richard Nixon’s platform had secretly served as Trump’s hidden chief strategist, Steve Bannon, his son- of law-and-order Republicanism when “campaign manager.” Friends and col- in-law Jared Kushner, or House Speaker he was a teen. Together, Trump and Ban- leagues subsequently told The New York Paul Ryan.” If Bannon was a hidden but non successfully cribbed several big Times that Bannon had “quietly advised essential figure during much of Trump’s themes from Nixon’s campaign playbook. Mr. Trump throughout his campaign.” campaign, he is now merely essential, re- In his RNC acceptance speech—one of You can hear just how Bannon com- sponsible for so many key staffing choices many Trump star turns crafted under municated that advice in the one-on-one and convoluted procedural decisions that Bannon’s influence—the newly anointed interviews he conducted with Trump on he becomes more difficult to replace with nominee proudly declared himself “the Breitbart’s radio show on SiriusXM. In each passing week. law and order candidate,” and promised more than two hours of conversation, As a result, Bannon’s inner circle of that America under his rule “will also be from November 2015 to June 2016, an trusted underlings is fast morphing into a country of law and order.” oddly deferential and courtly Bannon Trump’s ideology squadron. Julia Hahn, The speech may have benefited from deployed an arsenal of leading questions, one of Breitbart’s most vocal Paul Ryan Bannon’s guidance, but it was completely aligned with the nostalgic, racist out- look of Donald Trump circa 1989. Back Bannon has found an improbable kindred spirit in a then, Trump was Travis Bickle with an wastrel Fauntleroy president who can’t make it to inheritance, a profiteer of Manhattan’s the end of his own intelligence briefings. post-“white flight” real estate crater, gliding around in the backseat of his silver Cadillac limo, nursing some internal shameless flattery, and subtle prodding critics, joined the White House right af- Taxi Driver monologue about how “a real to ingratiate himself with his future boss. ter the inauguration, as did Breitbart’s rain will come and wash all this scum off He complimented Trump on the size of national security editor, Sebastian Gorka. the streets.” But instead of attempting to his rallies, reminded him of just how ear- Even if Bannon were somehow to be ca- assassinate a presidential candidate, as ly on he had recognized Trump’s political shiered, the White House is now so deep- Bickle does, Trump became president of potential, and laughed unctuously at ly stocked with Bannonites—including the United States. Trump’s boasts, like his promise to have senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and billionaire “corporate raider” Carl Icahn Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom OME WHITE HOUSE KREMLIN renegotiate America’s trading partnership Bannon has singled out as the move- ologists foresee a breach between with China. But when Trump began to ment’s central ideological enf orcer— STrump and Bannon, given each sound too populist in his complaints that Bannonism will remain integral to man’s outsize ego and unquenchable am- about super PACs, Bannon gently steered Trumpism no matter what happens bition. But such forecasts badly misread him toward a defense of Citizens United, to Bannon himself. the true depths of the Trump-Bannon posing Socratic questions about the First Bannon, a former Navy officer ob- alliance. For starters, the various forces Amendment and political donations. sessed with military and political rooting for Trump to banish Bannon from Bannon also gave Trump openings by discipline—he has described his vision of his inner circle tend to misrepresent the floating batshit hypotheticals, asking political power as “Leninist”—has found intimacy and duration of their relation- whether climate change or “radical Is- an improbable kindred spirit in a wastrel ship, as if it dates back only to last August, lam” represents the bigger existential Fauntleroy president who can’t make it to when Bannon ascended to the role of chief threat. (Spoiler alert: Trump chose rad- the end of his own intelligence briefings. executive officer for the Trump campaign. ical Islam.) Small wonder that, in sever- But that’s the beauty of ideological alli- The reality is closer to years. In August al unguarded moments during the cam- ances: They make enthusiastic partners 2015, McKay Coppins at Buzzfeed pub- paign, Bannon alternately called Trump out of strange bedfellows. For Bannon, lished a shocking piece, in which three “an imperfect vessel” and “a blunt in- and for the rest of us, the ideological Breitbart employees and a conservative strument”; like all adepts at court politics, baggage is now loaded in the imperfect communications operative who’d worked he understands that each obsequious vessel; the blunt instrument is being closely with the site alleged that Trump audience with his king is crudely trans- wielded. The good courtier summed it had “provided undisclosed financial back- actional. But that doesn’t make those up best, characterizing just how close the ing to the outlet in exchange for glowing audiences any less genuine, or any less ideological bond is between Trump and coverage.” The communications operative ideologically driven. his innermost circle of advisers. “There’s claimed a staffer had seen documenta- For Trump, too, there is no going back, no daylight between us,” Bannon said, tion of the “pay for play” relationship—a and nowhere else to turn. As we’ve been “and there’s really no daylight with the charge Bannon denies. A year later, The informed by Politico, the president finds president.” a

APRIL 2017 | 15 battle lines

answer to dishonest or partisan journalism,” he assured readers, “cannot be more partisan journalism, which would only harm our credibility and make civil discourse even less possible.” Some in the media establishment, including The New York Times, have ven- tured so far as to use the word “falsehood” in headlines to describe the administration’s knee-jerk tendency to make shit up. When these fearless publications catch some Trump flunky in a brazen whopper, they want us to know, they will boldly break the decades-long precedent of treating factual distortions from on high with euphemisms like “controversial” or “disputed,” and bravely call an official falsehood a falsehood, a Trump lie a lie. But given that lying is pretty much the business model of Trumpism, and that a whole battery of senior White House aides, from Kellyanne Conway to Sean Spicer to Dark Lord Bannon himself, are enthusiastic masters of straight- faced deceit, it’s unlikely that this sort of semantic breakthrough will make much of an impression on the body politic. For Don’t Stop the Press! one thing, the sheer volume of Trumpist Can the media turn itself into an “opposition party” to take down Trump? prevaricating has created a perverse dead- ening effect; the news that the president BY LEAH FINNEGAN and his minions are systematically lying to the American public is no longer exactly news. Besides, a good deal of Trump’s ONALD TRUMP HAD OCCUPIED the press, journalists and media pundits political appeal stems from telling con- the White House for less than continued to preach the talismanic gos- servatives the kind of lies they most want Da month before he decided to pel of self-restraint and evenhandedness. to hear. When Trump declared at his Feb- launch an all-out attack on the easiest In The Baltimore Sun, columnist David ruary press conference that “the leaks are target possible: the media. The day after Zurawik bemoaned the media’s loss of real,” but “the news is fake,” he knew his he held the most unhinged press confer- centrist “balance” under Trump. “ ‘Down audience. Trump’s backers not only can’t ence since Richard Nixon went on na- the middle’ has been a favored journal- handle the truth; they don’t even want to tional TV to declare he wasn’t a crook, istic expression for decades,” he wrote. know what it is. Trump took to Twitter to blast the press “But that’s getting to be an increasingly In this sense, Bannon was right when as “the enemy of the American people.” lonely place for journalists like me who he declared that journalists “do not un- A few weeks earlier, the president’s chief still believe wholeheartedly in that value.” derstand why Donald Trump is president strategist had expressed the administra- On CNN, media gadfly Michael Wolff of the United States.” If Trump’s lies are tion’s attitude in equally bellicose terms: chastised the press for being in alarmist what got him elected, and what will keep “I want you to quote this,” Steve Bannon mode since Trump’s inauguration. “Ev- him popular, then the media’s allegiance told The New York Times. “The media here ery situation,” he groused, “seems to be to a noncommittal parsing of the blizzard is the opposition party.” provoking an overreaction.” Fred Hiatt, of falsehoods now issuing from the Oval The thing is, “opposition party” the longtime editor of the Washington Office is woefully inadequate to our post- is not a description that fits the self- Post editorial page, likewise counseled truth political environment—particularly conception of the establishment media. cool-headed impartiality, with the prim, since it’s now an article of faith among In the face of these unprecedented and purse-lipped certitude of a practiced ar- incendiary declarations of war against biter of elite political discussion. “The ILLUSTRATION BY ERIK RILEY

16 | NEW REPUBLIC the Trump faithful that it’s the media, considerably more mundane story. Barry more newspapers, and more newspapers not the president, that’s doing the lying. Sussman, the Post’s city editor who as- meant more advertisements. So here’s a crazy thought: What if, signed the Watergate story to a young That’s no small thing. The collapse of rather than reflexively assuming its defen- Bob Woodward, recalled years later that any viable business model to support the sive posture of “objectivity,” the press em- he thought the break-in was nothing ex- work of journalism has made many of its braced this opportunity to go full-offense? traordinary at first, and that there was self-appointed defenders distinctly pu- In declaring the media the “opposition internal hesitance among his colleagues sillanimous. In a universe of perennially party,” Bannon may have actually done it in covering it. “Be careful,” they warned shrinking revenues, strongly oppositional a great favor, tacitly casting it as a worthy him, “don’t go overboard. These things (or indeed merely strong) reporting of any adversary to Trump’s newfound power. If happen in all campaigns.” Even Wood- kind seems like a luxury our media can the press can find a way to conceptualize ward later downplayed his role in Nixon’s no longer afford. Rather than generating itself as a true opposition party, then per- downfall. “To say that the press brought additional ad revenues, it’s seen as eating haps American journalism might stand down Nixon, that’s horseshit,” he said. up resources. for something that would be of value to “The press always plays a role, whether It would be nice to think that the media readers and viewers. But to get a clearer by being passive or by being aggressive, could somehow relinquish its pompous fix on what that might look like, we need but it’s a mistake to overemphasize” the air of self-regard and lay into the Trump to revisit a time when the mainstream impact of media coverage. What mattered administration with Seventies-era gusto. media engaged in effective, adversarial to the journalists who took on Richard One could argue that Obama, a notorious journalism that served the civic good. Nixon wasn’t bringing him down—it was and talented media manipulator in his own getting it right. right, has set the stage for Trump, just as SK ANY JOURNALISM PROFESSOR Conversely, when reporters set out Johnson did for Nixon. But that would re- to name the era when the press to put a dent in someone and miss their quire the press to acknowledge the inherent Afunctioned most vigorously to mark, they risk public shame, accusa- flaws—passivity, narcissism, sycophancy, challenge the White House, and the tions of ethical wrongdoing, and costly the urge to cling to “objectivity”—that almost universal reply will be the 1970s. libel suits—as The New York Times did in stand in the way of it telling the govern- Those were the days when The New York 2008, when it ran a story that was thin on ment to go fuck itself. Until the news in- Times published the Pentagon Papers, sources and heavy on innuendo alleging dustry can find a business model to support and The Washington Post broke the story that then-presidential candidate John Mc- a more vigorous and adversarial approach of Watergate. Cain had an affair with a lobbyist. It’s hard to government scrutiny, our greatest civic But as those episodes from the golden- age-of-media lore suggest, the “opposition” part of the equation is tricky when Here’s a crazy thought: Rather than reflexively it comes to the actual practice of jour- assuming its defensive posture of “objectivity,” nalism. Journalists best do the work of what if the media went full-offense? the opposition when they don’t explicitly know that they’re doing it. Put another way: When you understand that it’s work, being the opposition party. And hope for disabling Trumpism resides in the actually your job to expose the govern- when you fail to do the work, it shows. supply side of the equation. Fortunately, ment’s misdeeds, crimes, and lies, being Effective media opposition needs to there’s no apparent shortage of alarmed the opposition means nothing more than arise from entrenched, institutional hab- officials within the Trump administration doing your job. This is what’s so frustrat- it. Watergate and the Pentagon Papers frantically leaking all the damning infor- ing about the reflexive centrist lullabies weren’t random scoops, but blockbuster mation they can about their boss. peddled by old-media savants like Wolff stories born of a long-simmering hos- In his memoir, Ben Bradlee, the Post’s and Hiatt: They mistake the work of re- tility between the press and the govern- editor during Watergate, thanked Richard porting for partisan cheerleading. And ment. The adversarial relationship began Nixon for his unintentional contribu- this is why they are playing directly into during Johnson’s presidency, when LBJ tion to the media’s societal standing. “It the hands of the Trumpists. pledged “maximum candor” but turned is wonderfully ironical that a man who In the history of Watergate, you can Vietnam into a bright, shining lie. By the so disliked—and never understood—the see the routine character of how jour- time Nixon rose to power and began a press did so much to further the reputa- nalists operate in the mode of a true, tradition of openly insulting the press, tion of the press,” Bradlee wrote. “In his public-spirited opposition. The movie the media was already on high alert for darkest hour, he gave the press its finest version of All the President’s Men paints deep-seated government malfeasance. hour.” Today’s press may likewise one day a heroic, swashbuckling narrative of the Even though he was mean to the leaders owe Donald Trump a debt of gratitude—if Post’s coverage of the break-in. But em- of the news industry, Nixon was very only it can rouse itself to remember what ployees who were there at the time tell a good for its business model. Scandal sold its historic role should be. a

APRIL 2017 | 17 BLUEXIT A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR SEPARATING BLUE STATES FROM RED

BY KEVIN BAKER

Dear Red-State Trump Voter,

Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.

For more than 80 years now, we—the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way—have shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in. We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike.

All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.

Some folks here in self-supporting America like to believe that there must be a way to bring you back to your senses and to restore rational government, if not liberal ideals, sometime in the foreseeable future. Everyone seems to have an answer for how to do this. Every day another earnest little homily finds its way to me over my internet transom: “Think locally, act globally,” or “Make art and fight the power,” or the old Joe Hill standby— “Don’t mourn. Organize.”

To which I say: Don’t organize. Pack.

18 | NEW REPUBLIC BLUEXIT A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR SEPARATING BLUE STATES FROM RED

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEX NABAUM

APRIL 2017 | 19 BLUEXIT

Not literally, of course. Not even the good people of Canada should have to stomach a mass migration of moping American liberals mumbling, “Live locally … make art.” What I mean is that it’s time for blue states and cities to effectively abandon the American national enterprise, as it is currently con- stituted. Call it the New Federalism. Or Virtual Se- cession. Or Conscious Uncoupling—though that’s already been used. Or maybe Bluexit. Truth is, you red states just haven’t been pulling your weight. Not for, well, forever. Red states are nearly twice as dependent on the federal government as blue states. Of the twelve states that received the least federal aid in return for each tax dollar they contribute to the U.S. Treasury, ten of them voted for Hillary Clinton—and the other two were Mich- igan and Wisconsin, your newest recruits. By the same count, 20 of the 26 states most dependent on federal aid went to Trump. Take Mississippi (please!), famous for being 49th or 50th in just about everything that matters. When it comes to sucking at the federal teat, the Magnolia State is the undisputed champ. More than 40 percent of Mississippi’s state revenue comes from federal funding; one-third of its GDP comes from federal spending; for every dollar it pays out in federal taxes, it takes in $4.70 in federal federalism, which you have vilified for the past century, aid; one in five residents are on food stamps—all national is officially over, at least in spirit. You want to organize highs. You people —your phrase, not mine—liked to bash the nation around your cherished principle of states’ Obama for turning America into what you derisively re- rights—the idea that pretty much everything except the ferred to as “Food Stamp Nation.” In reality, it’s more like U.S. military and paper currency and the national anthem Food Stamp Red America—so mething your Trump-loving should be decided at the local level? Fine. We won’t for- congressmen will discover if and when they fulfill their mally secede, in the Civil War sense of the word. We’ll still vow to gut the program. be a part of the United States, at least on paper. But we’ll Trump’s characterization of “American carnage” in our turn our back on the federal government in every way urban centers aside, cities now generate the vast majority we can, just like you’ve been urging everyone to do for of America’s wealth—the cities, that is, where blue folks years, and devote our hard-earned resources to building live. It’s true that Hillary Clinton carried just 487 counties up our own cities and states. We’ll turn Blue America in 2016. It’s also true that those 487 counties generate into a world-class incubator for progressive programs almost two-thirds of the nation’s economic activity. and policies, a laboratory for a guaranteed income and More than a century ago, William Jennings Bryan—a a high-speed public rail system and free public univer- real populist—assured angry rural citizens that if we sities. We’ll focus on getting our own house in order, burned down our cities, they would spring up again as while yours falls into disrepair and ruin. if by magic, fueled by the prosperity and providence of In short, we’ll take our arrogant, cosmopolitan, the nation’s farmers. Today, if we were to burn down liberal-elite football—wait, make that soccer ball—and our cities, the rest of the country would likely become a go home. wholly owned province of the People’s Republic of China. So here’s my modest proposal: You go your way, we go ours. SHOCKING AS your electoral victory felt to us in We give up. You win. From now on, we’ll treat the an- Blue America, we should have seen it coming. To para- imating ideal on which the United States was founded— phrase Virgil “the Turk” Sollozzo from The Godfather, out of many, one—as dead and buried. Federalism, true the Democrats, with all due respect, had been slipping.

20 | NEW REPUBLIC Twenty years ago, could any organization as stone- damned thing we can do about it, at least for the moment. cold crazy as the Tea Party have gotten to them? The It will take decades of patient work and deep investment staggering defeats that Democrats sustained, at every to rebuild the party and reassert its dominance in state level of government, in the midterm elections of 1994, legislatures. Richard Mellon Scaife and the Koch brothers 2010, and 2014 have now reduced them to the largely and alec and other right-wing pioneers spent years in the impotent, makeshift, regional party they were from the conservative wilderness before they were able to cement Civil War all the way to the Great Depression. their control of the nation’s political apparatus. And the That string of unrelenting electoral catastrophes demographic shifts that Democrats so patiently—and should have tipped us off that there was something deeply, foolishly—counted on to change everything will now alarmingly wrong at the core of the party. Losses of that be stalled and undermined at every turn. A few years magnitude, over that period of time, are like a bright red of Republican border and refugee policies, and we’ll be dashboard light you’ve never noticed before that suddenly headed back to the ever-whiter America that preceded starts flashing insistently. Accompanied by a shrill beep- Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 immigration reforms. The federal ing sound. And a voice repeating, “Warning, warning!” and state judiciaries—which, thanks to this election, And a plume of smoke pouring from under your hood. Republicans will now fill with far-right ideologues—will Yet the party elites drove blithely on, chatting on their rubber-stamp every one of the voter suppression tactics cell phones about their demographic advantages and the the GOP currently employs, along with any new devilry imminent demise of the Republican Party, until the air that Trump and his insurgents dream up. And once the bags had deployed, the steering wheel had come off in president delivers on his campaign promise to Jerry Fal- their hands, and the rims of their tireless wheels were well Jr. and other evangelical leaders by making it legal grinding sparks off the curbside. At this point, there’s for churches and other nonprofit organizations to funnel no retooling this burnt-out Chevy Cruze into a vehicle tax-deductible donations directly to political candidates, still capable of going coast-to-coast. we can expect a fresh Niagara of cash to pour into our This letter is not intended as one more postmor- elections, one that will make Citizens United look like a tem on what went wrong: on how the media should dry crick during climate change. have done a better job, or how Hillary Clinton was a As it stands, your empire of Trump States now ex- bad, bad, terribly bad candidate, the worstest candidate tends from Brownsville, Texas, to the Upper Peninsula that ever was. Granted, it was Clintonism as a political philosophy, as practiced not only We give up. You win. From now on, we’ll treat the by both Clintons but also by President Obama and many animating ideal on which the United States was others, that put the final stake in the heart of the Democratic founded—out of many, one—as dead and buried. Party as a national entity. The Clintonist project of taking the oldest and most diverse political coalition on earth— of Michig an; from Coeur d’Alene to Key West. Future one organized around liber al economic principles that historians, if there are any, will be amazed to learn that had held it together for generations—and re-centering just eight years after President Obama’s bailout of the it around conservative economic ideas and a hodge- auto industry—against the united and adamant oppo- podge of social ideas that nobody could agree on, was sition of the Republican Party—saved Michigan, Ohio, probably the worst political move since the Republicans and maybe Pennsylvania from being reduced to large, tried to pretend in 1932 that the Great Depression was smoking holes in the ground, all three of those once- already over. (wasn’t the depression terrible? read blue holdouts voted to join Trump territory. Most of their billboards lining the rail tracks between New York our country, at least as measured by physical terrain, City and Washington, D.C.) It seems clear now that only has adopted your worldview. Your incessant self-pity the personal integrity, wit, eloquence, and thoroughly and sense of injury on behalf of white people, and white lovable family of Barack Obama kept the Democratic people only. Your insistence that you remain the strong- Party stumbling along, gut-shot, for this long. hold of “traditional values,” even as you adopt the most Throughout much of the country, particularly any- radical of ideas, and elect the most openly irreligious where outside a city in your Trump States, the Demo- and irreverent president in our history. Your penchant cratic Party barely exists anymore—and there’s not a for flushing any and every inconvenient truth down

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the memory hole of your favorite media complex, run fires, and—all new!—Oklahoma fracking-earthquakes by a gaggle of foreigners and cynics up in your hated you always seem to be having. New York. What’s the matter with Kansas? Who cares! This is But let’s be clear: The problem isn’t that your guy the good thing about a divorce—the chance to get all of won. It’s that he has made it obvious he intends to rule your crazy, deadbeat in-laws out of the house. How can without any regard for the Constitution, let alone the we save Detroit? Hey, she’s your baby now. Didn’t you say majority of Americans who voted against him. When a something about the private sector, or maybe casinos, sitting U.S. senator like Cory Booker can show up at or that mortgage loans guy who owns the Cleveland Dulles Airport armed with an order from a federal judge Cavaliers? I’m sure that’ll work out just fine for you. to defend the rights of detained U.S. residents and be With all the extra money we’ll have, we can set up met with the equivalent of an airline flight attendant our own Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid sys- “buh-bye” from Customs officials, who now seem to tems once Paul Ryan manages to “privatize” them for consider themselves part of The Donald’s Praetorian you Trump Staters. And what city is all that privatized Guard—well, it’s time to rethink our role in the govern- money likely to come to, on its way to the markets? Oh, ment the president is creating in our name. right, New York, which you hate so much! All those extra Wall Street bonuses and dividends will really help the local economy. SO: WHAT are we in Blue America going to do about What’s more, as a quick glance at the electoral map it? What would it mean to remove ourselves as far as will tell you, almost all of blue-state America is now possible from the federal government? concentrated in three contiguous clusters: the East For starters, we now endorse cutting the federal inc ome Coast from Maine down through Virginia; the West tax to the bone—maybe even doing the full Wesley Snipes and abolishing it altogether. We now endorse cutting the federal income tax We will raise our state and local taxes accordingly to pay to the bone. All we want is our money, and you for anything we might need or want. We ask nothing more can keep yours, dollar for dollar. from you and your federal government. Nothing for infrastructure, or housing, or the care of the poor and Coast, along with Nevada and Hawaii; and the Rocky sick—not that you gave us much, anyway. All we want Mountain zone of Colorado and New Mexico. Disas- is our money, and you can keep yours, dollar for dollar. trous as this allocation is when it comes to winning our No more Obamacare? Hey, that hot mess was tricked country’s fatally antiquated Electoral College (is there out the way it was mostly to appease you in the first place. another republic in the world, or indeed the history of Since we have nearly all of the country’s leading hospitals, the world, where a party has won a national election medical schools, and medical research institutes—and by nearly three million votes and still lost everything?), a much healthier population, one that’s happily short it’s perfect for developing highly efficient, cutting-edge on automatic weapons—I’m sure we’ll come up with regional networks in everything from transportation something better. to clean energy to health care. Go ahead, keep on voting against your own economic Under the New Federalism, you won’t have to en- interests to satisfy your need to control other people’s gage in political convolutions to try and reconcile your bodies, sex lives, and recreational habits. We’ll be creating conservative ideology with your extortionate demands cities and states that will defend gay marriage, a woman’s for yet another federal handout. Take Amtrak’s “Acela right to choose, and sensible gun control against your corridor,” which your commentators like to deride as intrusive federal judiciary. the route along which we elitist liberals all supposedly Still think fema is some kind of liberal welfare scam? live. Fact is, the Northeast Corridor is the only part Poof—it’s gone! We will never again beg the people you of our national train system that makes an operating elected to office to help us in the wake of what should profit. But every year, your Trump State congressmen have been considered national tragedies, such as Sep- threaten to pull the plug on Amtrak unless it continues tember 11 and Hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, best of to guarantee daily, money-losing service to all the little luck with all those tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, forest towns out on the prairie, in empty, SUV-loving red states

22 | NEW REPUBLIC like Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, and Kansas. Then you be to recruit those Russian hackers to create shiny new go right back to fulminating about how much Amtrak web sites extolling how wonderful things are in, say, costs. This is the legislative equivalent of Cleavon Little West Virginia, or rural Arkansas. Perhaps, in a historic in Blazing Saddles holding himself hostage at gunpoint reversal, it’s time for a mass migration from urban North to fend off a lynch mob. to rural South, of Trump voters flocking to Red America Go ahead, end your federal Amtrak subsidies. In their in search of a better life for themselves and their families. place, we will build fantastic, new high-speed rail systems Whether you stay or go, we’ll be reaching out around of our own. They’ll run past our state-of-the-art wind the globe to recruit the most talented, intelligent, and farms, fiber-optic networks, and highways that recharge ambitious individuals we can find to come toour America. our self-driving cars as we travel. We also don’t want you Actually, we already do this, thanks to institutions from to bother us about money to repair your Trump State Silicon Valley to the University of Chicago, MIT to Wall airports since, as you always claim, we will just be flying Street, Hollywood to Broadway. Oh, and be forewarned: over them anyway. We will also be coming for your best and brightest in Red There are still a few kinks to work out, of course. America, offering them free rides at many of the finest What to do, for instance, about the likes of Illinois and universities and research centers in the world. But don’t Minnesota, blue states adrift in a red sea? Or all those worry: You’ll still dominate college football! individual “blue cities” trapped in red states, like Phil- adelphia and Pittsburgh, or Cleveland and Columbus? We’ll need to reach cooperative agreements with them YOUR OWN Trump State secession from reality is to exchange goods and services as needed. They will likely to hurt us most in foreign policy, where reality become stops on our new information superhighways, has a way of coming back to bite you in the ass very or on our superfast rail networks, or self-driving high- quickly. Your avowed policies will not only fail to contain ways. Our cool new trains and cars will glide past you global climate change but will accelerate it irrevocably, all the faster, now that we don’t have to stop in between. which will be catastrophic. Under the New Federalism, Be sure to wave! our blue regions will at least be able to make their own A much weightier problem will be ridding ourselves of preparations for the deluge. But separating ourselves the Trump States within, our own rural counties full of an- from the rest of your dealings with the world will be gry right-wing voters, convinced that their money goes more difficult. to support welfare queens in the cities even as their last, Since you want to quit policing the world and make visible means of support crumble away. Considering how everyone in Europe go back to defending themselves, we susceptible they are to fake news, one strategy might could easily cut the army to, say, the 125,000 soldiers we had just before the start of World War I, along with a much reduced air force and navy. And with a president who doesn’t feel he needs to take security briefings, and who genuinely does not seem to know why we don’t just go ahead and use our nuclear missiles, I think it’s safest to say, Ix-nay on the eapons-way. But since your Trump administration now boasts more generals than Pinochet’s junta, it’s likely that, isolationist noises aside, the White House will soon be up to its usual shenanigans around the globe. Who can say what these might be, in light of our new president’s one-man alliances with assorted global strongmen, au- tocrats, and wing nuts? Blue states and cities will do our best to publicly disassociate our America-within-America from whatever new international follies you people may be persuaded to embark upon. And we will continue to take to the streets to defend the rights of immigrants and refugees and anyone else threatened by your

APRIL 2017 | 23 BLUEXIT

saber rattling and isolationism. To quote St. Augustine, a legitimate news source is, as the rise of all those fake “When there is no justice, what is the state but a rob- news sites has demonstrated. Two-thirds of you believe ber band enlarged?” We respectfully decline to join the that unemployment rose under Obama, even though he Trump-Putin robber band. actually cut it by more than half; just 17 percent of you I realize that this all sounds like a terribly pessimistic acknowledge that Obamacare has driven the percentage view of the future. It will leave behind millions of our of Americans without health insurance to a record low. fellow Americans most in need of the kind of assistance Exactly what is the messaging strategy to win over those that only the federal government can provide—Americans of you willing to believe that Hillary Clinton and John whose only crime was to have the misfortune of resid- Podesta are running a secret child-sex-slave ring out of ing in a Trump State. I actually love Mississippi, an a Washington pizza parlor? Or that President Obama incredible place that, along with so much else, gave us is a secret Kenyan? Or that a routine military training Medgar Evers, William Faulkner, and Robert Johnson. exercise is a UN attempt to conquer Texas? Or any of I would love nothing better than to see Detroit, one of the other bizarre and inane conspiracy theories that are our greatest cities, restored to its former glory. But such now promulgated daily as the gospel truth not just by a hopes and dreams mean little now. The moment re few, fringe elements but by leading members of our new quires us to put aside, for now, the liberal ideal, which government’s security apparatus? at its core was always about nurturing new shoots of enlightenment—which are as likely to spring up in a lonely farmhouse, or on a ghetto block, as at some great THIS, SADLY, is not a time for connecting or reach- center of power or finance. The promise of liberalism ing out. It is a time for retrenchment and rebuilding. was that we would never stop reaching out toward one If we in the blue states want to make America great another, always building and connecting, until all of again, we must first demonstrate that we can make America and the world was covered with diverse, dem- our own states into models of civic participation and ocratic, and yes, brilliant societies, “the broad, sunlit economic equality. uplands” that Churchill envisioned, or Dr. King’s “nation America’s original liberal, Louis Brandeis, famously that will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” advocated for the role of the individual states as “labo- Many of my fellow blue staters, of course, would prefer ratories of democracy.” And so they have proven to be, to persuade you to come around to our way of think- with nearly all of our great reforms first attempted on ing. That is, after all, what elections are supposed to be the state or local level: the abolition of slavery (Massa- about—instead of, say, suborning the head of the FBI, or chusetts, 1783); the right of women to vote (Wyoming getting foreigners to commit felonies on your behalf. It’s true that even the most dom- It is a tragedy that so much of the work to make inant powers can be dissolved by the right idea, carried for- this a better country, and a better world, has been ward by enough people who believe in it. The national ma- thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril. jority that Democrats enjoyed before the Civil War collapsed in the face of the demand for “Free Soil, Free Speech, Territory, 1869); the regulation of workplace safety Free Land, and Free Men.” The Republican landslides of (Illinois in the 1890s and New York in the 1910s). A ban the 1920s were reversed nearly overnight when they ran on monopolies was written into the constitution of Tex- up against the liberal program of the New Deal. as when it was still an independent republic in 1845, Unfortunately, nothing like that is going to happen now. and converted into one of the first state antitrust acts A political sea change takes place only when you can get in 1889—a statute that checked the power of that rapa- people on the other side to come over. But you can only cious Eastern corporation Standard Oil, and helped set get them to switch if you can get them to listen to what off a Texas oil boom. “The Wisconsin idea,” advocated you have to say, and you can only get them to listen if you by Robert La Follette in the first decades of the twenti- share something resembling the same idea of objective eth century, was that public universities should devote reality. This is the bleakest new reality of all: That common themselves to research improving the lives of the people ground is gone. You Trump Staters don’t read or listen to in the states that sponsor them. New York State’s sem- the same news sources we do. You don’t even care what inal Ives-Quinn Act of 1945 banned discrimination in

24 | NEW REPUBLIC his time, he faced combinations of the money power and the political machines that were just as puffed up with their own arrogance and ignorance as so many of you are in the Trump States today. They would not hear him then, just as you will not hear us now. What Brandeis devised, along with Florence Kelley, a leader of the National Consumers League, was “the Brandeis Brief,” a revolutionary legal instrument that opened up the courtroom to the real world. It stressed actual social conditions and proven scientific realities over detached and absolute legal theories. Employed first to limit how many hours a day women could be forced to work in a laundry, it would eventually be used as a legal foundation for Brown v. Board of Education, along with countless other groundbreaking cases through the years. But that was the past. It is a tragedy that so much of the work that so many men and women toiled at for so long to make this a better country, and a better world, has been thrown away, leaving us all in such needless peril. To fall to this place, with this hollow man assuming the leadership of the world’s greatest republic, may be in itself a refutation of the greater liberal hope that sustained human progress is possible and will prevail. But all that remains for us is to regroup, to salvage what we might, and to begin again where we can. This is why our separation in all but name is employment on the basis of race, creed, color, or na- necessary. There is only one way that we can counter all tional origin. And so it goes, all the way down to the of your fantasies about what this man you have elected health care reform law in Massachusetts in 2006, which is, and what he—or the assorted moneyed interests, was the model for Obamacare whether Mitt Romney ideological fanatics, and foreign dictators he so fecklessly wants to admit it or not. shields—will do for you. Since those of you in the Trump Originally, all of these great steps forward were States will not listen to us, or to anything that smacks seen as outliers, as dangerous or risky, as harebrained of rationality, we will have to create new facts on the social experiments. All wound up transforming our ground—“alternative facts,” as you folks have taken to nation for the better—and all are models for the hard saying. Since you will not hear our words, we will need work we must do, in countless places, and in the face to convince you by our actions. We will need to run our of massive opposition. Every time and place in our states and our cities so well, in such an effective and nation’s history has known people of noble mind, with enlightened manner, that we can make you understand advanced ideas and dreams. This is a good thing, but it all over again what every page of our history should al- availed us nothing if they could not bring those ideas ready tell you. Through our own example, we must win and dreams to practical application. you over, American by American, town by town, state by Brandeis himself formulated what should become state, until we are once more in a position to mitigate all the catchphrase for our own time. Appropriately unim- of the foolish, cruel, and wasteful things you are about pressed during a previous mania for a certain corrupt to inflict on the rest of us, and to move forward once eastern empire, he asked: “Why visit Russia when you again, as American states united. can go to Denmark?” Brandeis knew something about Yours, the challenges of putting liberal ideals into practice. In A Blue State Patriot a

APRIL 2017 | 25 ↑ Six-year-old Karar Bahar struggles to make out a drawing without his glasses (top). In 2006, the Bahars fled the war in Iraq: Their car had been blown up by a suicide bomber, and their shop was looted by extremists. In Cairo, doctors were unable to treat Karar’s eyesight, and the family sank into debt. One day, while the children were napping, Shaimaa broke down in tears (above). “She was tired, tired,” recalls her husband, Haider. “The money was gone, and we didn’t have insurance.” Worse, the Bahars didn’t know where they’d be in a week, a month, a year.

→ The Bahars depart Cairo International Airport with all their belongings on December 9, 2009, bound for Ohio. That year nearly 50,000 Iraqis were referred to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. With the help of a legal aid group in Cairo, the Bahars were among the 25,238 granted approval to start a new life in America.

26 | NEW REPUBLIC TEXT BY PHOTOGRAPHS BY ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN HOLLY PICKETT BEFORE THE BAN One family’s journey from Iraq to Ohio—and how life has changed under Trump.

APRIL 2017 | 27 BEFORE THE BAN

← On their first morning in Hilliard, a suburb of Columbus, the Bahars pile on hats and coats to ward off the freezing Midwestern cold. They had never seen snow before. To make things worse, Haider had caught a cold during the layover in Germany. Neither he nor Shaimaa spoke English.

↑ Thanks to a tip from his landlord, Haider soon found work in the meat department at a Kroger supermarket. He now delivers medicines to local pharmacies, earning $6 a stop. Money is tight, but little by little, the family has managed to buy used furniture and even take vacations.

→ Karar, with a new pair of glasses, sits close to the teacher in his second-grade class. “I was lost,” he recalls. “I came in barely knowing numbers. But people weren’t rude—they were helpful.”

28 | NEW REPUBLIC America drove the Bahar family from their country. Then it gave them a new one. The Bahars fled Iraq in 2006, at the height of the U.S. invasion. They left because of the things their of interviews, background checks, and reams of eldest son saw—the bombings and shoot-outs, the paperwork, the family landed in Ohio on December kidnappings, the everyday horrors of life in a war 10, 2009. They caught their first glimpse of snow zone—and because of the things he could not see. dusting the wings of airplanes grounded on the run- Karar was born in 2002 with an eye condition that way, and waded into the Midwestern frost wearing caused his retinas to develop too slowly. But with all the layers they had. A local charity set them up hospitals in Baghdad overrun with wartime casu- with an apartment, but it came sparsely furnished, alties, doctors had no time for a tottering little boy so they had their first American dinner of spaghetti who could barely make out cartoons on television. and chicken fingers sitting on the floor. The family moved to Cairo, but specialists there “I didn’t know anything about America,” recalls were unable to help. So the Bahars decided to ap- Haider, Karar’s father. “I didn’t speak English, I ply for asylum in the United States. After a year didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know if I’d find a job or not.” With the help of his landlord, Haider got a job in the meat department at a Kroger supermarket in Columbus. His colleagues were kind and corrected his English; the local mosque was next to a church, and Haider didn’t meet anyone who had a problem with the family’s Muslim faith. His wife, Shaimaa, learned to navigate the school system and get medical help for Karar, now a typical American teenager who loves the Ohio State Buckeyes and fried chicken and hanging out with his friends. Photographer Holly Pickett has spent nine years following the Bahars from Cairo to Columbus. In 2015, they became U.S. citizens. “When I got citizenship, I felt different,” Haider recalls. “I finally saw a future, and felt sure that my kids would have a good life.” Last year, he and Shaimaa voted in their first American election. She backed Hillary Clinton, because of her support for women, Medicaid, and refugees. Haider picked Donald Trump, because of his promises to bring back jobs to the area. If Trump had been president when the Bahars sought asylum, they might never have become U.S. citizens. And if Trump succeeds at imposing his travel ban on Iraq, they could be permanently separated from their family in Baghdad. Haider’s father still hasn’t met his youngest grandchildren—Renad, five, and Mustafa, six months. Haider, now a patriotic American, admits he is worried. But he’s willing to give the new president a chance. “I wish my family could come here,” he says. “But it’s only for three months. Donald Trump knows what’s going on.” a

HOLLY PICKETT/REDUX

APRIL 2017 | 29 BEFORE THE BAN

↓ Shaimaa and Haider crammed for the U.S. citizenship exam together. Shaimaa took the oath on January 14, 2015, and Haider followed three months later. “I finally saw a future,” he says. During the ceremony, the judge let Karar sit in one of the jury seats. “That made me feel wonderful,” he recalls.

30 | NEW REPUBLIC ↑ The Bahars have made an annual tradition of celebrating their arrival in America. “We all remember,” Haider says. “It’s like a birthday.” For their fifth anniversary, they went to a fried-chicken restaurant in Columbus (top). “The best thing is the sauce,” says Karar. “It’s not spicy, but it has a punch.” The family uses Viber to stay in touch with their relatives in Iraq. Every week, Haider calls his brother and elderly father, neither of whom have met the family’s newest addition, six-month-old Mustafa (above). The Bahars do not know when—or if—their relatives will ever be allowed to visit them in Ohio: Since his first week in office, Trump has been trying to ban all travel from Iraq.

APRIL 2017 | 31 BEFORE THE BAN

↑ Shaimaa braids Renad’s hair at the family’s home in Dublin earlier this year (top). The five-year-old loves to dress up as Minnie Mouse and to wear a blue toy crown. Karar, now 15, attends middle school in Dublin (above). “Last semester I got out with 4.0, honor roll, all the good stuff,” he says. He still struggles with his eyesight—“I’m basically blind,” he jokes—but he dreams of playing basketball and attending college. He has no desire to return to Iraq. “When you see something scarring,” he says, “it’ll last for a whole lifetime.”

32 | NEW REPUBLIC ↓ Haider, who voted for Trump, watches the president defend his ban on immigration, while Mustafa sleeps. “I feel bad for guys like me,” Haider says. “I feel what these guys who want to come here are feeling.” He and Shaimaa didn’t argue over her support for Clinton. “I can’t tell her who to vote for,” he says. “That’s American freedom.”

APRIL 2017 | 33 ACK IN AUGUST 2015, WHEN DONALD TRUMP’S PRESI- white evangelicals were playing into the hands of a new, alt- dential ambitions were widely considered a joke, Russell right version of Christianity—a sprawling coalition of white B Moore was worried. A prominent leader of the Southern nationalists, old-school Confederates, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denom- and social-media propagandists who viewed the religious ination, Moore knew that some of the faithful were falling right, first and foremost, as a vehicle for white supremacy. for Trump, a philandering, biblically illiterate candidate The election, Moore warned in a New York Times op-ed last from New York City whose lifestyle and views embodied May, “has cast light on the darkness of pent-up nativism and everything the religious right bigotry all over the country.” professed to abhor. The month Those who were criticizing before, a Washington Post poll Trump, he added, “have faced had found that Trump was al- threats and intimidation from ready being backed by more the ‘alt-right’ of white suprem- white evangelicals than any acists and nativists who hide other Republican candidate. AMAZING behind avatars on social media.” Moore, a boyish-looking Trump, true to form, wast- pastor from Mississippi, had ed no time in striking back positioned himself as the face against Moore. “Truly a terrible of the “new” religious right: DISGRACE representative of Evangelicals a bigger-hearted, diversity- and all of the good they stand oriented version that was for,” he tweeted a few days lat- squarely opposed to Trump’s er. “A nasty guy with no heart!” “us versus them” rhetoric. In the end, conservative Speaking to a gathering of Christians backed Trump in re- religion reporters in a hotel HOW DID A cord numbers. He won 81 per- ballroom in Philadelphia, cent of the white evangelical Moore said that his “first pri- THRICE-MARRIED vote—a higher share than ority” was to combat the “de- George W. Bush, John McCain, monizing” and “depersonaliz- BIBLICAL or Mitt Romney. As a result, ing” of immigrants—people, he the religious right—which for pointed out, who were “creat- ILLITERATE decades has grounded its po- ed in the image of God.” Only LIKE TRUMP litical appeal in moral “values” by refocusing on such true such as “life” and “family” and “gospel” values, Moore be- HIJACK THE “religious freedom”—has ef- lieved, could evangelicals ap- fectively become a subsidiary of peal to young people who had RELIGIOUS RIGHT? the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s been fleeing the church in white nationalist agenda. Evan- droves, and expand its out- gelicals have traded Ronald reach to African Americans and Reagan’s gospel-inspired de- Latinos. Evangelicals needed BY piction of America as a “shin- to do more than win elections— SARAH POSNER ing city on a hill” for Trump’s their larger duty was to win dark vision of “American car- souls. Moore, in short, wanted nage.” And in doing so, they the Christian right to reclaim have returned the religious the moral high ground—and Trump, in his estimation, was right to its own origins—as a movement founded to maintain about as low as you could get. the South’s segregationist “way of life.” “The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to “The overwhelming support for Trump heralds the religious fall for hucksters and demagogues,” Moore wrote in Onward: right coming full circle to embrace its roots in racism,” says Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, a book he had Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion at Dartmouth just published at the time. “But too often we do.” College. “The breakthrough of the 2016 election lies in the fact As Trump continued gaining ground in the polls, Moore that the religious right, in its support for a thrice-married, began to realize that the campaign represented nothing short self-confessed sexual predator, finally dispensed with the fic- of a battle for the soul of the Christian right. By backing Trump, tion that it was concerned about abortion or ‘family values.’ ”

NEW REPUBLIC OR MORE THAN A GENERATION, THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT in Alabama, “the average evangelical, not-too-religious South- has sought to portray itself as a movement motivated erner who’s sort of a populist” was drawn to Trump primarily F principally by opposition to abortion and the defense “because they like the attitude.” Besides, he adds, many on of sexual purity against the forces of secularism. According the Christian right don’t necessarily describe themselves as to its own creation myth, evangelicals rose up and began to “evangelical” for theological reasons; it’s more “a tribal marker organize in opposition to Roe v. Wade, motivated by their for a lot of these people.” duty to protect “the unborn.” Albert Mohler, a prominent Before the election, Griffin worried that white evangelicals Southern Baptist theologian, described Roe as “the catalyst would find his “Southern nationalist” views problematic. But for the moral revolution within evangelicalism”—the moment Trump’s decisive victory over Russell Moore reassured him. that spurred the coalition with conservative Catholics that “It seems like evangelicals really didn’t follow Moore’s lead still undergirds the religious right. at all,” Griffin says. “All these pastors and whatnot went in In fact, it wasn’t abortion that sparked the creation of the there and said Trump’s a racist, a bigot, and a fascist and all religious right. The movement this, and their followers didn’t was actually galvanized in the listen to them.” 1970s and early ’80s, when There is no way of know- the IRS revoked the tax- ing how many Americans exempt status of Bob Jones consider themselves to be University and other conser- alt-right Christians—the term vative Christian schools that is so new, even those who refused to admit nonwhites. agree with Spencer and Grif- It was the government’s fin probably wouldn’t use it actions against segregated to describe themselves. But schools, not the legalization there is plenty of evidence of abortion, that “enraged the that white evangelical voters Christian community,” Moral are more receptive than non- Majority co-founder Paul evangelicals to the ideas that Weyrichhas acknowledged. drive the alt-right. According By openly embracing the to an exit poll of Republican racism of the alt-right, Trump voters in the South Carolina effectively played to the re- primary, evangelicals were ligious right’s own roots in much more likely to support white supremacy. Richard banning Muslims from the Spencer, president of the Na- United States, creating a da- tional Policy Institute and the tabase of Muslim citizens, and alt-right’s most visible spokes- flying the Confederate flag at man, argued during the cam- the state capitol. Thirty-eight paign that GOP voters aren’t percent of evangelicals told really motivated by Christian pollsters that they wished values, as they profess, but the South had won the Civil rather by deep racial anxieties. “Trump has shown the hand War—more than twice the number of nonevangelicals who of the GOP,” Spencer told me in September. “The GOP is a held that view. white person’s populist party.” That’s why white evangelicals were the key to Trump’s Until now, the alt-right has presented itself largely as an victory—they provided the numbers that the alt-right lacks. irreligious movement; Spencer, its outsize figurehead, is Steve Bannon, Trump’s most influential strategist, knows an avowed atheist. But with Trump as president, the alt-right that the nationalist coalition alone isn’t big enough “to ever sees an opening for its own religious revival. “A new type compete against the progressive left”—which is why he made of Alt Right Christian will become a force in the Religious a point of winning over the religious right. If conservative Right,” Spencer tweeted on the morning after the election, Catholics and evangelicals “just want to focus on reading the “and we’re going to work with them.” Bible and being good Christians,” Bannon told me last July, To alt-right Christians, Trump’s appeal isn’t based on the “there’s no chance we could ever get this country back on kind of social-issue litmus tests long favored by the religious track again.” The alt-right supplied Trump with his agenda; right. According to Brad Griffin, a white supremacist activist the Christian right supplied him with his votes.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRIAN REEDY 35

APRIL 2017 OR ALT-RIGHT CHRISTIANS, RUSSELL MOORE IS THE League, “uses the Bible as one of the main texts for its beliefs,” embodiment of where the religious right went wrong— offering a powerful validation to white supremacists for their F by refusing to openly embrace racism. Throughout his racism and anti-Semitism. Strickland sees kinism as a succes- youth, Griffin says, he felt alienated by Christians like Moore sor to Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic movement who were intent on “condemning racism.” He was only drawn dating back to the 1960s that played a key role in the rise of back into Christianity when he married the daughter of Gordon Christian homeschooling. The movement’s primary goal was Baum, a far-right Lutheran leader who co-founded the white to implement biblical law—including public stonings—in every supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, described by facet of American life. the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a virulently racist group.” After Trump’s victory, Edwards ferociously attacked the Griffin says he joined the CCC, as well as the white nationalist president-elect’s critics, Bible in hand. “The Bible says, ‘There League of the South, because both groups embody the ele- shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ and I want there to ments he views as integral to his faith: They are “pro-white, be that,” he said on his show. “Now is the time for retribu- pro-Christian, pro-South.” tion, and I want them to suf- Moore has become a pop- fer. I want them to feel the ular target among alt-right righteous anger of a good and Christians. The white suprem- decent people. I want Trump acist and popular alt-right to drive them into the sea.” radio show host James Ed- He called on the “degenerates, wards, himself a Southern perverts, and freaks,” and Baptist, regularly disparages other “criminals who shilled Moore on his program, call- for Hillary” to “make good on ing him a “cuck-Christian.” In your promise to leave the June, after the Southern Bap- country.” He added: “They can tist Convention banned dis- take Russell Moore with them plays of the Confederate flag, on the way. That’s for sure. Edwards hosted Nathanael Good riddance. Please leave.” Strickland, proprietor of the Alt-right Christians like Faith and Heritage blog. In a Edwards see their movement recent post, Strickland had as part of a global battle for argued that white Southerners ethnic nationalism. Days be- “have faced a widespread and fore the election, neo-Nazis determined assault on our assembled at a rally in Harris- heritage, symbols, monu- burg, Pennsylvania, to show ments, graves, and identity by their support for Trump. Mat- secular and governmental thew Heimbach, an alt-right forces,” and likened such sup- Christian leader who founded posed attacks to what Hitler the Traditionalist Worker claimed in Mein Kampf: that Party, told the crowd they were Germans faced “cultural ex- in a worldwide struggle for termination and ethnic cleansing.” Edwards seconded that the preservation of “ethnic, cultural, and religious integ- analysis, declaring the Confederate flag “a Christian flag,” and rity,” a battle that has been joined by “nationalists around arguing that to attack it “is to deny the sovereignty, the maj- the world that are fighting the same enemy.” That enemy, esty, and the might of Lord Jesus Christ in his divine role in Heimbach said, is made up of “Jewish oligarchs and the Southern history, culture, and life.” capitalists and the bankers” who “want to enslave the entire Strickland recently told me that alt-right Christians see “racial world.” He ticked off some of the movement’s international differences” as “real, biological, and positive,” a view he insists allies: President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who is “merely a reaffirmation of traditional historical Christianity.” has overseen a Hitler-inspired campaign of extrajudicial He argues that many on the alt-right who consider themselves killings, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has atheists or pagans only lost their faith in Christianity “due to the displaced and slaughtered millions of his own citizens. To antiwhite hatred and Marxist dogma held by the modern church.” Heimbach, Assad “is fighting to defend his people against Strickland considers himself a “kinist,” part of the new white the globalist hydra of Saudi Arabia, of the terrorist state of supremacist movement that, according to the Anti-Defamation Israel, and United States interests.”

NEW REPUBLIC Heimbach, who made headlines last March for shoving To Schenck, the religious right’s support for the appointment a Black Lives Matter protester at a Trump rally, also draws was another “screaming alarm to American evangelicals that inspiration from the far-right Russian writer Alexandr Dugin, we must do some very deep soul-searching.” whose book, The Fourth Political Theory, he considers “sug- But such soul-searching does not appear to be forthcom- gested reading” for all Traditionalist Worker Party members. ing. So far, President Trump has drawn little but praise from Dugin’s writings reinforced Heimbach’s belief, he says, that religious right leaders. From his first days in office, he moved “we must reject the failed and flawed concepts of democracy, swiftly to shore up their support. He quickly brought back capitalism, equality of ability, and multiculturalism.” To alt- George W. Bush’s “global gag rule,” signing an executive order right Christians like Heimbach, democracy itself is a failed that bars federally funded groups not only from providing and flawed concept. abortions to pregnant women, but from even discussing Some, in fact, believe that Trump does not go far enough in abortion as an option. And his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to defending the faith. Strickland, for example, views Trump as the Supreme Court thrilled even Russell Moore, who hailed merely a “civic nationalist,” not the selection of “a brilliant a full-blown racial and ethnic and articulate defender of nationalist like those on the Constitutional originalism.” alt-right. “There are four legs Trump’s strategy makes sense: supporting the table of civiliza- He’ll keep evangelicals happy tion,” he says. “Blood, religion, and unified by moving some of culture, and language. Civic their key priorities forward— nationalists only acknowledge and use their support to push the last three of those.” In for what is ultimately an alt- Strickland’s view, the alt-right right agenda. must now become Trump’s Schenck fears that “Trump “loyal opposition,” prodding and his gang” have exposed the president even further to the an evangelical culture “that right. “The alt-right’s job in doesn’t know itself.” Sitting the coming months and years in his Capitol Hill townhouse, will be to solidify nationalism’s Schenck picks up his copy of place in the Republican Party Ethics, by the anti-Nazi theo- and push the importance of the logian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. fourth leg—blood.” Bonhoeffer, he says, argued that because Jesus was a “man ITH THE RELIGIOUS for others,” Christians are right now at the called “not to hold the other Wservice of the alt- in contempt, or to be afraid right, conservative evangel- of the other, or contemptu- icals who opposed Trump ous of the other.” Yet when find themselves at odds with Schenck visited evangelical the movement they helped to churches during the Obama build. Reverend Rob Schenck was one of the leaders of the years, he lost count of how many times he was asked, quite religious right’s war on abortion, famously getting arrested earnestly: “Is the president the Antichrist?” in 1992 at a women’s health clinic while carrying “Baby Tia,” Schenck still holds out hope, as does Moore, that a new a preserved fetus he claimed had been aborted. Through his generation of evangelicals will ultimately reject what Trump organization, Faith and Action, Schenck has long provided and the alt-right represent. “I do think something is going to spiritual counsel to top Washington officials, including -Su emerge out of this catastrophe,” he says. “It’s going to help us preme Court justices and members of Congress like Mike to define what is true evangelical religion and what is not.” Pence. Trump, he says, has no spiritual side whatsoever. “He But for now, he concedes, the religious right has forfeited has no facility in the language of faith,” Schenck told me in its moral standing by aligning itself with the alt-right’s gos- November, a week after the election. “At all. It’s not natural pel of white supremacy. “Evangelicals are a tool of Donald to him. It’s not even known to him. It’s alien.” Trump,” Schenck says. “This could be the undoing of American Two days before we spoke, Trump had announced his se- evangelicalism. We could just become a political operation in lection of Steve Bannon as his chief White House strategist. the guise of a church.” a

APRIL 2017 When an overcrowded vessel capsized off the coast of Italy in 2013, killing 360 migrants, it sparked an

international manhunt for a smuggling kingpin. PUGLIA/GETTY M. TULLIO

38 | NEW REPUBLIC BY ERIC REIDY

Police from four countries joined forces to bring down a notorious human smuggler. Here’s how they blew the operation—and why the crackdown on immigration is making things worse. The General and the Refugee

he Asmara Corner Café sits It has reportedly raked in more than the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, on a dusty main road in Khar- $1 billion from its criminal activities. have made the perilous journey across T toum, the capital of Sudan. Authorities in Europe had been track- the Mediterranean in overpacked, often With its weathered red façade ing Mered since October 2013, when a unseaworthy boats, struggling to escape and bright interior, the coffeehouse is a smuggling boat belonging to one of his war, brutal repression, and economic popular hangout for refugees from neigh- associates broke down near the Italian hardship. More than 16,000 have died boring Ethiopia and Eritrea. On May 24 island of Lampedusa. A fire, believed to along the way, putting political pressure last year, a young Eritrean man with a have been set as a rescue signal, quickly on European governments to stem the mop of curly, untamed hair was sitting raged out of control. Overloaded with unprecedented influx of migrants. Com- in the Asmara when Sudanese police and desperate people, the wooden boat was bating illegal migration has become a intelligence forces suddenly stormed into soon engulfed in flames and sank to the central focus of police and prosecutors the café and arrested him. bottom of the Mediterranean, killing at across Europe, who have been ordered Working together to track his cell least 360 migrants. International outrage to crack down on the smugglers who phone, authorities in England and Italy over the tragedy was swift, and Mered ferry refugees seeking a better life for had identified the man as Medhanie became a prime target in the investigation themselves and their families. So far, au- Yehdego Mered, believed to be one of that followed. thorities have taken down some low-level the most powerful and ruthless human On phone intercepts that authorities operatives in the smug gling syndicates in smugglers operating in the Mediterra- used to track Mered, he was heard laugh- Europe, but top bosses like Mered have nean. The leader of a massive criminal ing about the fatal overloading of migrant eluded their grasp. syndicate, Mered routinely smuggled ships. He boasted about underfeeding the Operating from his base in Libya—a asylum seekers from Africa into countries migrants staying in his warehouses, and failed state with no extradition treaties throughout Europe. For every boat he brushed off the idea of providing them with European nations—Mered seemed sent out loaded with migrants, Mered’s with life jackets. Over the past six years, untouchable. Nicknamed “the General,”

TULLIO M. PUGLIA/GETTY PUGLIA/GETTY M. TULLIO network took in an estimated $1 million. some two million people, mostly from after former Libyan dictator Muammar

APRIL 2017 | 39 The General and the Refugee

Gaddafi, he was rumored to enjoy riding around the streets of Tripoli in a tank. The reach of his smuggling operation reportedly extends far beyond Europe, into Canada and the United States. According to documents compiled by prosecutors in Italy, Mered was an “untiring organizer of boats from the Libyan coast.” He “worked frenetically in Tripoli” to round up refugees from all across Africa and “organize their departure for Italy.” Investigators in Italy, supported by authorities in England and Sweden, began to collect detailed information about Mered’s personal life and criminal activities, listening in on his phone calls and building up a trove of evidence they could use against him in the event of his Facebook photos show that Berhe (left) bears no resemblance to Mered, the smuggler. capture. Hunted by the police and wary of jealous rivals, Mered grew paranoid: He text messages on the phone that discussed criminal matter, rather than a humani- spoke of needing to go into hiding, and preparations for Mediterranean trips, tarian crisis—was botched from the very talked about transferring his wealth to along with internet searches for weather start. The reason was simple: The police bank accounts in the United States. Once conditions in the area, and for terms like had arrested the wrong man. he could secure his money, he said on the “Sahara” and “Libya.” phone intercepts, he wanted to move to “I will leave to Libya soon,” the man on Sweden, where his wife and son lived. the phone texted, according to transcripts n 2014, a year after the Then, in the summer of 2015, Mered later compiled by prosecutors. “I lost the Lampedusa tragedy turned suddenly dropped off the radar. The year 2015; I did nothing. But 2016 will I Mered into one of Europe’s phones that investigators were listening be different.” The following day, with the most wanted smugglers, a to went silent, and his Facebook profile support of British authorities, Sudanese 27-year-old Eritrean named Medhanie became inactive. No concrete informa- police tracked the user of the cell phone to Tesfamariam Berhe snuck across the tion surfaced about his whereabouts until the coffeehouse in Khartoum and swooped southern border of Eritrea into Ethio- November 2015, when Swedish prosecu- in to make the arrest. pia. Berhe was part of an exodus from tors received information that Mered was Two weeks later, on June 7, Italian Eritrea, a brutal dictatorship that engages now in Sudan. The Swedes passed what prosecutors took possession of the sus- in torture and forcibly conscripts young they believed was Mered’s new cell phone pect and flew him to Rome, where news men like Berhe into the military. Up to number to a unit of prosecutors in Italy, photographers captured his first steps on 5,000 people flee Eritrea every month, who had been tasked with targeting the Italian soil. The images show a slender typically via Sudan and then Libya, mak- smuggling trade. A few months later, man with disheveled hair being led down ing the country one of the largest sources the National Crime Agency in London — the airplane stairs in handcuffs by two of asylum seekers flooding into Europe. known as Britain’s FBI—said they had stone-faced Italian police officers. Mered, Berhe grew up in a middle-class neigh- intelligence confirming that Mered was authorities triumphantly proclaimed, was borhood in Asmara, the Eritrean capital. in Khartoum, and that the Sudanese were the first smuggling kingpin to be arrested After he finished high school in 2010, he willing to collaborate in his arrest. and brought to Europe to stand trial for took an apprenticeship with a carpenter The big break came last year, on his crimes. “He no doubt thought he was and then worked briefly as a dairyman’s May 23, when the Italians intercepted beyond the reach of European justice,” assistant, delivering milk and keeping three calls on the cell phone number declared one British official. “But we were track of accounts. But his primary worry provided by the Swedes. According to a able to support the Italians by tracking was dodging conscription. “The govern- summary of the calls compiled by pros- him down to Sudan.” ment was picking up the people who were ecutors and obtained by the new repub- But the success of the operation was not serving at the time,” recalls his sister, lic, Mered could be heard talking about soon cast into doubt. It now appears that Seghen Tesfamariam Berhe. “So he had his smuggling operations and arranging the biggest arrest to date in Europe’s to run away.” payment for people in Libya who were crackdown on illegal migration—the After a few months in Ethiopia, Berhe waiting to be transported to Europe. The centerpiece of government efforts to made his way to Sudan. His plan was to

prosecution’s forensics expert later found treat the massive influx of migrants as a find a smuggler who could get him into (X2) FACEBOOK

40 | NEW REPUBLIC Libya and then across the Mediterranean home. “They’ve definitely got the wrong be resolved. But the emphasis on law to Italy. In 2015, Seghen joined her broth- guy,” said one man. “He’s not a human enforcement only serves to deepen the er in Sudan, but she did not want him to trafficker—he’s just a simple refugee.” inequities and repression that are spurring go to Europe. The trip was too dangerous; Both Berhe and Mered are from Er- millions to flee their homelands and seek she was afraid he would drown at sea or itrea. Both are slender, and they share asylum in Europe. Instead of providing be kidnapped by isis, which was gaining a the same first name. But the similarities a safe haven to people fleeing brutal dic- foothold in Libya. The group had recently end there. Berhe is six years younger than tatorships, European governments have released one of its sleek propaganda vid- Mered. He looks nothing like the man in partnered with some of those very same eos showing the decapitation of dozens a Facebook photo that prosecutors iden- dictatorships—exacerbating the root caus- of Ethiopian and Eritrean Christians on tified as the smuggler. Even more striking es of the mass migration from Africa to a beach. “When I came from Asmara, I is the testimony of Mered himself, who Europe and forcing desperate people into stopped him from going to Libya,” Seghen appears to be still at large. According to the hands of smugglers. says. “I begged him, please don’t go.” a private Facebook log obtained by Ber- In 2015, the EU Commission for Inter- Berhe initially gave in. But he soon he’s attorney, Mered referred to Berhe’s national Cooperation and Development grew despondent. As a Christian and a arrest in an online chat. “They made a awarded $270 million in aid to nine African foreigner in an Islamic country, he was mistake with his name,” Mered says in nations, including the brutal regime in often harassed by the police. “He wasn’t Tigrinya, one of the main languages spo- Eritrea. Bolstering the Eritrean econo- doing anything,” his sister recalls. “He ken in Eritrea. “Everyone knows he’s not my was intended to slow the outflow of just was sitting at home. In the evening a smuggler. I hope he will be released, asylum seekers. Instead, human rights he would go out and watch football and because he hasn’t done anything.” advocates say, the money effectively re- come back home. He couldn’t accept the But despite the clear-cut evidence wards Eritrea’s military dictatorship for its life in Sudan.” After living for more than a that they made a mistake, Italian and abuses—virtually guaranteeing that more year on money sent by friends and family, British authorities continue to insist refugees will be driven to flee the country. Berhe was determined to get out. that they have the right man. “This is “Many young Eritreans are fleeing the gov- Then last year, on May 24, he suddenly a complex multipartner operation,” ernment’s policy of indefinite and abusive disappeared. His friends told Seghen that they had seen him being arrested at the Asmara Corner Café. But no one knew It now appears that the biggest arrest to date what happened to him after that. in Europe’s crackdown on illegal migration “I searched everywhere in Khartoum,” Seghen says. “I told the police that my was botched from the very start. Police had brother was missing and that he was ar- arrested the wrong man. rested. They told me that they don’t know anybody with that name. For two weeks, I didn’t know if he was alive or dead.” Then, on June 9, Seghen was stunned said a spokesperson for the National military service,” says Leslie Lefkow, depu- to see a photo of her brother on the BBC Crime Agency. “The NCA is confident ty Africa director of Human Rights Watch. News. He was on the tarmac in Rome, in its intelligence-gathering process.” “Unless there are human rights reforms, being led off an airplane in handcuffs. Berhe—still identified by Italian pros- they will continue to flee—irrespective In dozens of news stories and television ecutors as Mered—is currently on trial of what development aid is provided to reports, Berhe was identified as Medhanie in a courtroom in Palermo, Sicily. He the government.” Yehdego Mered, the notorious smuggler. stands accused of international human Last April, a month before Berhe was “When I saw his picture, I was smuggling and running a transnational arrested in Sudan, the European Com- shocked,” Seghen says. “My brother is criminal organization. If convicted, he mission announced it was providing not a human trafficker.” faces up to 50 years in prison. $107 million to the Sudanese government Berhe’s friends rallied to correct what to help stem the flow of illegal migration. was clearly a case of mistaken identity. Omar Al Bashir, the president of Sudan, Meron Estefanos, a well-known Eritre- erhe’s arrest—and the refusal currently stands accused by the Interna- an broadcaster based in Sweden, began of authorities to admit that tional Criminal Court of genocide and speaking to the media. “I have almost B they got the wrong man— crimes against humanity. In May, Der 400 people writing to me saying: ‘I know underscores the fundamen- Spiegel reported that the EU planned to this guy, he grew up with me,’” she told tal problem with Europe’s crackdown on help Sudanese border police build two The Guardian. “This is the wrong person.” undocumented migration. Immigration is detention centers for migrants attempting The newspaper also interviewed Eritreans being treated as a crime to be pr evented, to flee Sudan. And in August, Italian and in Europe who knew Berhe from back rather than a humanitarian crisis to Sudanese police signed an agreement to

APRIL 2017 | 41 The General and the Refugee collaborate more closely in the crackdown he political pressure on police on incomprehensible. What’s more, pros- on smuggling, paving the way for Italy and prosecutors to stop mi- ecutors apparently cherry-picked terms to repatriate tens of thousands of failed T grants from reaching Europe like “money” and “sea” and translated the asylum seekers to Sudan. has trapped Medhanie Tesfa- sections of conversations that contained In effect, Italy is attempting to wall mariam Berhe in a kind of legal limbo. those words. What emerges from the full off the Mediterranean, stopping as many Because the authorities are not willing to transcript is not a smuggler arranging refugees as possible from getting out of admit they made a mistake—a confession nefarious deals, but a man stuck in Sudan Africa and the Middle East, and ship- that would call into question both their and desperate to get out. ping back the few who do make it. The competency and their strategy—Berhe In one untranslated intercept from rest of the European Union is following remains in prison while his trial proceeds. January 2016, Seghen tells Berhe that she suit. The EU recently secured the right “If his name is Medhanie Tesfamariam found him a job and asks him to attend a to return an unlimited number of refu- Berhe or Medhanie Yehdego Mered, it training session for the position. “Never!” gees to Afghanistan, and it is pursuing doesn’t change anything,” insists Calogero he replies. He says that he plans to “leave similar “repatriation agreements” with Ferrara, one of the Italian prosecutors. to Libya soon”—a quote that makes Berhe countries across Africa and South Asia. “What’s important is to link the person the refugee sound like Mered the smug- What’s more, at least seven European with the crime, not the name.” gler. Later in the transcript, Berhe goes countries have begun building or have The Italians are confident that they can on to reveal the desperation he feels, and completed border walls and fences to prove that the man they have in custody the danger he faces. “It is either cross the close down migration routes. is the smuggler they were listening to on sea,” he says, “or be prey for the sharks.” “Europe can, at the moment, say the wiretaps in 2014. “He says he is not So if Berhe is not Mered, why did his nothing to Mr. Trump about the wall Mered,” says Maurizio Scalia, another phone include conversations and texts with Mexico,” says Michele Calantropo, prosecutor working on the case. “We say about organizing payments for people a Sicilian attorney representing Berhe in he is Mered.” As evidence, prosecutors waiting to be smuggled? The explanation, court. “Europe did the same thing.” point to their forensic analysis of the cell Seghen says, is simple: One of Berhe’s The EU’s emphasis on securing bor- phone Berhe was carrying at the time of his cousins had left Sudan for Libya and ders has not only failed to slow the out- arrest. Three numbers saved on the phone needed someone to make a payment to flow of people from Africa, it has put were also intercepted during the wiretap- a smuggler on his behalf. Berhe was help- refugees at even greater risk. Migration ping of Mered’s communications in 2014. ing him out. “When you are an Eritrean, we help each other in these things,” says Seghen. “Everybody calls a smuggler.” Treating migration as a crime has effectively Berhe’s family gave the Italian court enabled governments to shift attention away a notarized copy of his Eritrean national identity card, which shows that he was from their own responsibility for the crisis. born in 1987—six years after the birth date for Mered that appears on an official Swedish registry for the birth of his son. The dairyman Berhe worked for in “has become much more dangerous,” says There were also photos on Berhe’s phone Asmara also wrote a letter confirming that Linn Biörklund, a humanitarian adviser that show him shopping for a blazer and Berhe was employed by him in 2014, at with Doctors Without Borders. “People sitting at a table with a Nikon camera— the same time Italian prosecutors were need to travel on much harder routes. So images the prosecution hails as evidence eavesdropping on Mered in Libya. And the ones who actually need protection of the riches he enjoyed as a smuggler. Berhe’s lawyer has lined up more than and safety the most are the ones who get It is unclear why Swedish authorities a dozen witnesses—including friends stuck and die along the way.” believe that the phone number they gave of Berhe and clients of Mered—who are In addition, treating migration as a to the Italians belonged to Mered; the ready to testify that this is indeed a case crime has effectively enabled European Swedish Prosecution Authority declined of mistaken identity. governments to shift attention away from to comment on the case. But the trans- Prosecutors, however, seem intent on their own responsibility for the crisis. “No lation provided by Italian prosecutors ignoring any evidence that proves they one is looking at EU policies, which are of Berhe’s phone intercepts and chats got the wrong man—including evidence restricting the ability of people to apply appear to be taken out of context, and that they themselves have presented. for asylum, or to have safe passage,” says are at times wildly inaccurate. The new Early in the investigation, the Italians cir- Reece Jones, an expert on border secu- republic conducted its own translation of culated a photo from a Facebook account rity and the author of Violent Borders: the phone records and found the official they identified as belonging to Mered. It Refugees and the Right to Move. “Instead Italian version so riddled with errors of shows a man with an angular jaw wearing they put all of the blame on smugglers.” language and grammar that they border a blue shirt with thin, red stripes and a

42 | NEW REPUBLIC country from which he was desperate to escape. Or they could allow him to apply for asylum in Italy, a process that typically takes a year and a half or longer. Either way, as a refugee caught up in Europe’s legal system, his prospects do not look good. Nor has the controversy surrounding the case spurred authorities in Europe to reconsider their crackdown on migration. Quite the contrary: The wrongful arrest of Berhe and his sister Seghen (top left). She only learned Berhe is being held up as a blueprint for that her brother had been European police and prosecutors to work arrested after a photo of him hand in hand with African dictators. “The arriving in Rome, handcuffed arrest of Mered was surely an example of and flanked by Italian police, investigative and cooperative success,” made international news boasts Carmine Mosca, the head of the (above). Now on trial in anti-smuggling unit in Palermo. “If we Palermo, Berhe confers with his lawyer and translator (left). continue to get cooperation from African If convicted, he faces up to states, such as we got from Sudan, the 50 years in prison. likelihood of arresting more smuggling bosses is very high.” Whatever the fate of Berhe, his story points to the central contradiction of Europe’s attempt to wall itself off from large, silver cross around his neck. This, Italian authorities “haven’t been able immigrants. The European Union, like they announced, was “the General,” one to provide any kind of evidence,” says Es- the United States, is a political project of the kingpins of international human tefanos, the Eritrean broadcaster. “They built on the values of liberalism and smuggling. The problem is, the man in would rather prosecute an innocent man universal human rights. Yet faced with the photo looks nothing like Berhe. But than admit they were wrong.” Cracking a perceived risk to its borders—and the when I point this out to Ferrara, he breez- down on smugglers, he observes, doesn’t rise of nationalist forces eager to lock ily dismisses the relevance of the photo, address the root cause of the migrant the gates—Europe has been quick to even though it was produced as evidence crisis—oppr essive governments and abandon its core values in the name of by his own team. crushing poverty. “Even if they had security and counterterrorism. “The picture was never an official pic- found the real Mered,” Estefanos says, Unlike other refugees, Berhe wound ture,” the prosecutor says, leaning back in “it wouldn’t stop the smuggling business.” up reaching European soil without having his chair behind a large wooden desk and to risk his life crossing the sea. But the puffing on the stub of a thin cigar. “That security and opportunity he dreamed of picture is someone we thought could be n December, I attended the remain further away than ever. A victim the guy. But then again, it’s a picture on trial of the man accused of of misplaced fears, he is more isolated Facebook, like millions of other pictures.” I being Medhanie Yehdego and terrified now than he was in Sudan, But prosecutors in Rome, who are Mered. He sat in a glass awaiting a fate over which he has no con- pursuing a separate case against Mered, enclosure in a courtroom in Palermo, trol. The experience is taking a toll. “The aren’t so quick to dismiss the Facebook with three guards at his back and an longer the trial takes,” Calantropo says, photo. When they showed the image to interpreter at his side. As he leaned in “the more he is depressed.” a former client of Mered, he immediately to listen to the proceedings, he bit his Since his arrest last May, his sister has identified the man in the blue shirt. “This lips and shook his head. He looked like only been able to speak with him once. In is Mered,” he said. “He is the king in the man in a photo that Seghen had Italy, only family members are allowed Libya, very respected by everyone.” Based sent me of her brother, only anxious to communicate with inmates. And ac- on the eyewitness account, the Roman and fatigued. cording to Italian authorities, the man in prosecutors concluded that the photo The trial could drag on for another prison is not her brother. “I don’t know does, in fact, show “the real physical as- year. Even if the court concludes that how they made this mistake,” Seghen pect of Medhanie Yehdego Mered.” The police arrested the wrong man, Berhe’s says. “It’s not him. The truth will come man in the photo, in other words, is not future is uncertain. Italian authorities out sooner or later. But I don’t know why

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: HANDOUT (X2); PHOTOGRAPH BY VALENTINO BELLINI I FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe. could try to send him back to Sudan, a they are still saying it’s him.” a

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ESSAY

They Could Be Heroes Today’s leading novelists are throwbacks to a simpler time. But what do their fantastical visions tell us about the present?

BY SAM SACKS

IMAGINE A CONVERSATION stitched together across time. imprisonment that literature needed to resist. To Chabon, TV On one side of the table, it’s 1993 and David Foster Wal- represented the things that had helped him escape the boredom lace is hunched, do-ragged, gesticulating: “I probably didn’t of his middle-class suburban childhood: Superman, Sherlock watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily Holmes, spaghetti westerns, magic acts, and baseball games. megadose, believe me. And I think it’s impossible to spend that By the end of the decade, Chabon’s view had mostly won many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front out. Consider the breakout titles of 1999 and 2000: a reality of commercial art without internalizing the idea that one of television–inspired memoir (Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking the main goals of art is simply to entertain, give people sheer Work of Staggering Genius), a Chandleresque noir story (Jon- pleasure. Except to what end, this pleasure-giving?” athan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn), a tongue-in-cheek riff Across from him is Michael Chabon in 2005, natty, boyish, on Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delany (Colson Whitehead’s and smiling: “I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. The Intuitionist), a collection of Westworld-like short stories Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive (George Saunders’s Pastoralia), and a novel that wanted to be motivations and explanations.… But in the end—here’s my a comic book (Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier point—it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its and Clay). Galvanized by the enthusiasms of their youth, these suave henchman, pleasure.” five writers ushered in a literary aesthetic that was loose and In both these proclamations, Chabon and Wallace were unwieldy, gleefully looting popular genres and mixing the confronting the state of art in a period when commercial en- highbrow with the low. To be the proverbial writer on whom tertainment enjoyed unparalleled dominance over American nothing is lost, one suddenly needed to be knowledgeable culture. Through the 1990s, cable television exploded, with about horror movies, Robert A. Heinlein, and the differences subscriptions hitting their peak at the millennium. Oprah between DC and Marvel comics. Winfrey’s book club, launched in 1996, wielded the power to These five writers also turned out to share an elusive trait: boost the sales of a book by a factor of 40. There was more staying power. While other cultural touchstones of the era now television than ever, and television helped choose the stories feel irredeemably passé (Dave Matthews Band albums; DVDs Americans would read. In the economic prosperity and relative of Fight Club and Titanic), these writers and their fiction have calm of the Nineties, pop culture felt like not just a pleasant only gained in prestige. They continue to produce acclaimed accompaniment to reality, but like reality itself. new work: Eggers’s Heroes of the Frontier, Lethem’s A Gambler’s American literary fiction, however, had failed to respond to Anatomy, Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Chabon’s this sea change. So-called realist fiction still reigned, whether Moonglow, and Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo all appeared in Raymond Carver’s stylized minimalism or John Updike’s in the past year, and were heralded as “timely and necessary,” lyricized suburban boredom. Chabon and Wallace both sought “witty and sexy,” “wondrous,” and much more from the the- an alternative, though their impulses led them in opposite di- saurus of praise. Eggers and Whitehead were among the five rections. Wallace equated entertainment with binge-watching junk television. Its addictive nature fostered a form of mental ILLUSTRATION BY NATHAN FOX

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APRIL 2017 | 45 REVIEW writers President Obama invited to lunch before his second term expired. Lethem has just sold his personal papers, including random doodles, to the rare book library at Yale. But while these authors continue to be celebrated, the world around them has changed dramatically. Today we are less troubled by the homogenizing effects of entertainment than by our deep partisan divisions in both politics and art. And the cultural shift that today’s literary writers struggle to parse is not the impact of TV sitcoms, but of social media and the internet. Even the notion of escape means something very different in the age of Trump than it meant during the Clinton years. In response, some of these writers have shifted their narratives into a safer, more myth-friendly past; others continue to deliver the hopeful feelings of a simpler time. You might call them the last escapists: If their books still resonate, it is not because they reflect the zeitgeist, but because they run so profoundly against it. And as long as their brand of exu- berant nostalgia holds appeal, there’s a danger of being left with a literature that tells us only what we already know, however enchantingly.

THE LATE-NINETIES AESTHETIC didn’t seem, from the outset, built to outlast its moment. It laid its foundations, after all, on the fleeting and disposable. Michael Chabon came to Jonathan Lethem’s novels gleefully mash together a range of esoteric enthusiasms. genre hybrids with the zeal of a born-again, but the slogan he adopted—“All novels are sequels; influence Still, a repertoire that draws from old books rather than real is bliss”—didn’t make them sound very original. Descriptions life will have trouble staying fresh, and in its latest resurgence, of Lethem’s early books, meanwhile, bring to mind chemistry there are indeed some signs of weariness and repetitiveness. experiments. His 1994 debut, Gun, with Occasional Music, was Lethem’s new novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy, has fewer pyro- a compound of Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick; 1998’s technics than his early books but otherwise abides by the same Girl in Landscape was a John Ford western reenacted in outer grab-bag philosophy. The book is about the misadventures of space. His quintessential piece of writing may be “The Ecstasy a telepathic backgammon hustler who’s forced to wear a mask of Influence,” an essay made up entirely of citations. after a tumor is removed from his face; it mixes, matches, and It was Lethem who demonstrated how writers could mash sometimes goofs on elements from the James Bond franchise, together esoteric genre enthusiasms to show readers parts George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, The Big Lebowski, of their world not portrayed in the literary fiction that came and, for a few gruesome chapters, TV medical dramas. Like before. Fundamentally a pastiche artist, Lethem made himself all of Lethem’s books before it, it’s a culture junkie’s house impossible to categorize, the Quentin Tarantino of the book of mirrors, busying the eye with endless reflections of other world. Tarantino famously worked at a video store, and his touchstone works, but having little else to show you. films, composed entirely of Hollywood clichés, are the cinematic This may be by design; Lethem clearly feels more comfort- equivalent of a passionate rental clerk riffing about his favorite able where he started out, on the fringes of respectability. His films. The inspiration forPulp Fiction, wrote Roger Ebert, “is 2003 novel, The Fortress of Solitude, is sometimes touted as one old movies, not real life.” Lethem, a former bookseller and now of the young century’s most important works of fiction, but a used-bookstore owner, put nostalgia to similar uses. These for all its soulful fellow feeling for adolescent loners, the book Gen-Xers, the critic John Leonard grumbled, believed that is more pleasurable than profound, as crammed with trivial “anything that ever mattered to them must be profound.” Yet odds and ends as the junk-filled apartment of a compulsive Lethem was able to reanimate hoary old genre conventions by hoarder. The most liberating aspect of Lethem’s fiction—his way of surprising juxtapositions, a somewhat schizoid prose refusal to think very hard about why certain things are being

style, and a genuine zeal for the literature of his childhood. thrown together and what the juxtapositions might mean—is TIMES/REDUX YORK NEW HEISLER/THE TODD

46 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW also its most limiting. Lethem has said that his narrative impulse literal underground train network for fugitive slaves—is an comes from “the dreaming brain attempting to make sense of unsparing, documentarian account of chattel slavery. But the the dream,” which suggests a surrealist effect. But while his story is wrapped inside the kind of plucky, against-the-odds books are odd, they’re never disorienting. His creative process adventure yarn found in popular Young Adult novels. As the works less by instinct and more by whim. novel switches between genres, it becomes a kind of running This is certainly the case with A Gambler’s Anatomy, which argument between hope and disillusion, granting us a view of has all of Lethem’s trademarks. There is the brooding solitary unsalvageable evils through the idealistic lens of a simpler age. hero, the antic array of side characters, the partially digested The balancing act, however brilliantly Whitehead achieves research on obscure topics (backgammon and facial menin- it, cuts right to the central dilemma of the nostalgist’s aes- giomas, in this case), the sporadic dips into social issues like thetic: Can a novelist both recapture the innocent pleasures gentrification, and the endless connoisseurial riffing on the of storytelling and at the same time illuminate the complex books and movies and music behind it all. “Bruno had imagined realities of experience? In stable and prosperous times, truth a day when he’d outgrow distractibility,” Lethem writes of his and entertainment can overlap. But periods of crisis wedge backgammon hustler. “Instead, approaching 50, the window them apart, and being faithful to one compromises the other. of interest had widened.” The line refers to Bruno’s habit of collecting women, but it speaks to the weakness of Lethem’s PERHAPS THE MOST appealing aspect of the Nineties writers’ method of assemblage. The books themselves could be summed aesthetic was their sincerity, their openheartedness. Where- up by another of Bruno’s passing thoughts: “Nothing made as today’s cult authors, like Ben Lerner or Sheila Heti, are enough sense to matter.” inward-turned and intellectual, Dave Eggers believed that books The eclectic approach pioneered by Lethem proved more and journals should create welcoming, affable communities. He powerful for a writer like Colson Whitehead, who had to defy adorned his autobiography, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering stereotypical categories in order to gain creative freedom. Genius, with footnotes and appendices and amiable little gags Literary tradition has meant that Whitehead has often been for his friends. The journal he founded, Timothy McSweeney’s expected to serve as his generation’s spokesperson for the Quarterly Concern, was idealistic, affirmational, and adorably African American experience. He has quipped that no matter nonthreatening. Its exemplary authors were people like Ste- what he publishes—even his debut, The Intuitionist, a noir phen Elliott, Neal Pollack, and Arthur Bradford, who each parable about elevator inspectors—it’s going to be likened enjoyed moments of minor stardom. Although the winsome, to Ralph Ellison. His solution has been to make his books so confessional mode they mined hasn’t held up, for a time they, dependent on his own affinities that they’re impossible to like Eggers, generated an emotional connection with their classify. “Anything I find interesting goes in the hopper and readership that few current American writers have matched. becomes an influence or inspiration to some degree,” he told Pretty quickly, though, the limits of that sensibility—studied an interviewer. “At various times, that’s been comics, film, TV, irony combined with a yearning for emotional validation— became clear. It couldn’t point to anything that was urgently or desperately wrong with the world. Eggers himself has sub- To be the proverbial writer on sequently bridled against the persona he worked so hard to whom nothing is lost, one suddenly establish. It’s almost as though he decided to leave the preco- cious youth shtick behind and refashion himself as a model of needed to know the differences world-weary adulthood. What Is the What, published in 2006, between DC and Marvel comics. was his first politically conscious book, confronting the plight of Sudanese refugees. He followed with Zeitoun in 2009, a non- fiction account of a Syrian-American man who acts heroically after Hurricane Katrina only to face discrimination and brutality from the authorities. Unmoored from his youthful affability, music. And books—can’t forget books!” Like Chabon, he has sanctimony crept in from the edges. In his autobiography, professed that it was the beloved pop culture of his childhood Eggers had celebrated the radical transparency of a generation that made him want to write: “X-Men and Spider-Man comics, determined to transform the world through earnestness and then science fiction, horror, and fantasy novels.” candor; but in his 2013 Silicon Valley cautionary tale, The Circle, An eclectic style also allowed Whitehead to tell more he caricatured over-sharing millennials as brainless apparatchiks complex stories than the settings and plots themselves could of digital totalitarianism. promise. His vision is fundamentally dark, and his novels pit His new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, is marked by the lonely, existential heroes against powerful, absurdist systems. same cranky disillusionment. Here a beleaguered American The worlds he builds are monochrome and depressing. Yet by everywoman takes her children on a voyage to Alaska, but finds casting these stories in the conventions of genre fiction, he her quest for transcendence thwarted by oppressive social leads the reader to expect more surprising possibilities from and economic realities. The writing is plain, impersonal, and his narratives. The Underground Railroad—which imagines a lightly patronizing—a reversal of the style Eggers did so much

APRIL 2017 | 47 REVIEW to foster. His newfound moralizing is a bit rich from someone supermen. It’s difficult to plausibly imagine such characters who a dozen years ago was the country’s leading exponent of in the present day. The closest Chabon comes is in Telegraph twee naïveté, but it has been extremely well received in most Avenue, in 2012, which features a cameo by Barack Obama. liberal quarters, where its mixture of political talking points But even here he depicts the young and dynamic Illinois state and straightforward narrative drive satisfies a notion that senator, not the graying president, used to grappling with the good fiction should be relevant and topical. Eggers continues compromises of governance. Set in 2004, Telegraph Avenue to demonstrate his knack for relating to his readership. That is Chabon’s ode to Berkeley’s vanishing heyday in the Nine- readership is simply older now, has more money, and reads ties, before the city became corporatized, and its objects of The New York Times. cultural reverence turn back even further, to soul music and In the work of George Saunders, too, you can see the limits Blaxploitation flicks. The novel recalls only what’s vibrant that an enthusiastic, quirky authorial persona places on nov- and glamorous about the past. elistic insight. Behind its bizarre trappings, Saunders’s fiction Chabon finds the potential for heroism in World War II. It’s is defined by a rather traditional sentimentality, connected to in this period that he set The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & his Buddhist beliefs. “When you read a short story, you come Clay, as well as Moonglow. The new book’s main character is out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world apparently modeled on Chabon’s grandfather, but he fits the around you,” he has said. “What I want is to have the reader bygone romantic mold of characters from the author’s previous come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.” Many of fiction: a tough, hotheaded Jew whose foibles are as exaggerated Saunders’s stories—including “Sea Oak,” “The Falls,” and “The as his ambitions and bravery. The grandfather—like a fairy tale Tenth of December”—nudge you toward pity by centering on figure, he’s given no name—is a hardscrabble pool shark and endangered children. His trick is to make the situations weird jailbird, a World War II intelligence officer who travels alone and funny enough that you don’t notice the manipulation. through Germany hunting hidden V-2 rockets, and a preternat- But Saunders’s spell flickers when he starts to address urally brilliant aerospace engineer instrumental to designing real-world events. Political allegories like “The Brief and Fright- nasa’s spaceships. His story is also America’s story: He helps ening Reign of Phil” and “The Red Bow,” both set in the George defeat the Nazis and launch humanity into the space age. W. Bush era, are thin on humor and far too transparent in their The book, made of spellbinding, utterly seductive tall tales, messaging. (“The Red Bow” is an Orwellian allegory, in which a is an unabashed valentine to the Greatest Generation. Its view neighborhood dog is thought to have killed a child; it concludes of the past is mythological. That is to say, it puts more stock in picturesque stories than in textbook history. It’s also rich in allusions. The grandfather’s search for V-2 rockets echoes the Earlier writers subverted the operatic plot of Gravity’s Rainbow, which is loosely built around country’s origin myths; today’s libidinous anti-hero Tyrone Slothrop’s quest to infiltrate Germany and find the rocket with the serial number 00000. novelists enlarge them. Indeed, Thomas Pynchon is name-checked at length in Moonglow—but then somewhat abruptly dismissed. You would think that Pynchon and his lunatic alternate histories would have served as a fountainhead for the novelists who emerged at the turn of the century. Yet his influence is surprisingly shallow. Lethem takes from Pynchon a predilection for zany proper with a mob being commanded to “kill every dog, every cat.… names. Saunders shares his satirical impulse, but it’s offset by Kill every mouse, every bird. Kill every fish. Anyone objects, kill an underlying spirituality. The essential difference is that these them too.”) For Saunders’s stories to work, they need to give writers lack Pynchon’s conspiratorial worldview. The Cold War, free rein to the ludicrous and the fantastical. Vietnam, Watergate, and the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s So, where does a writer go when reality begins to overtake fertilized the fiction of professional paranoiacs like Pynchon and his absurdist visions? Don DeDillo, and of the so-called “dirty realists” like Raymond Carver. These writers spoofed or subverted the country’s origin THE ANSWER APPEARS to be: the past. The main action of myths. Having come of age during the peace and prosperity Chabon’s new novel, Moonglow, is set in the mid-century; of the 1990s, today’s novelists enlarge them. Whitehead’s Underground Railroad goes back to the 1850s; Writers less preternaturally optimistic than Chabon are and Saunders’s debut novel—following four short-story guilty of the same tendency. Saunders’s intensely weird Lincoln collections—is a supernatural historical tale about Abraham in the Bardo derives from the apocryphal story that during the Lincoln. All three accomplish a similar feat: They imbue stories Civil War, Abraham Lincoln made “midnight visitations” to about America’s past with a feel-good vibe. the crypt of his deceased son, Willie, during which he would The interpretation of history that Chabon favors is the open the eleven-year-old boy’s coffin in order to keep him Great Man theory, in which momentous events are dictated company. A reprise of the theme of children in peril, the by outsize heroes—prodigies, innovators, comic-book-like novel imagines that Willie is trapped inside the cemetery in

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to the betrayed democratic principles on which the country was founded. At an abolitionist settlement in Indiana she listens to an oration about the enduring relevance of the Declaration of Independence, and the analogy is clear: The fugitive slave’s resistance against the slaveholder mirrors the resolute, freedom-loving republic’s fight for independence from the British crown. Reading Whitehead’s book awakens a sensation that sounds virtually anachronistic. It makes you feel patriotic.

IT’S NO SMALL thing to tell a familiar story well, and it’s no small thing to make the familiar entertaining and exciting again. Today’s crop of leading novelists looked to fiction for a mirac- ulous escape from the boredom and disillusion of everyday existence, and their success in part reflects the fact that readers share their sentiment. Most of the escapists have stayed faithful to their pledge to provide enjoyment even as they’ve grown better, in middle age, at facing tragedy and loss. The best of the books achieve an emotional immediacy that makes up for the fact that they almost never take place in the present, and they rarely present a particularly demanding or critical view of the past. I admit, though, that reading these works, I find myself missing ambivalence—a quality that Colson Whitehead’s tale of chattel slavery is wrapped in a plucky adventure yarn. rarely squares with entertainment. There must be precious few readers who don’t already feel purgatorial agony, unable to release himself to the unknown well disposed to tales of World War II heroes, fugitive slaves, of death while his father continues to visit him. and Abraham Lincoln. Few of the books by these five writers Saunders’s depiction of the Great Emancipator comes to are likely to unsettle anybody’s assumptions about anything. us straight from the pages of hagiography, a Christlike man The question that these writers—that all writers—have of sorrows whose dramatic mourning ritual embodies the had to consider since last November, of course, is whether grieving of the country at large. Saunders makes us question enchantment can still suffice. When, inThe Amazing Adventures our place in the universe, but not the national myths we were of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon imagined a Houdini-esque taught in childhood. This has the opposite effect of nearly all comic book character called the Escapist, he proposed that political fiction, which is designed to provoke critical thinking wondrous feats of imagination could be an act worthy of a and dissent. At a time when skepticism is the default setting hero. When the most pressing problems writers faced were for most readers, Saunders wants to give us a political leader conformity and cynicism, their higher calling was to awaken we can fall in love with. readers to the forgotten thrills of storytelling. Even Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, the bleakest But the sense of imminent peril that has already begun to novel of this crop, is strangely affirming on the subject of define the Trump era is different in kind and magnitude than America’s founding story. Whitehead’s heroine, Cora, makes the discontents of the Nineties. Literature that flees toward a northbound flight toward freedom, bringing her through more welcoming, invented worlds runs the risk of rendering states whose different laws and conditions carry different itself unserious at the moment when seriousness is most called symbolic resonance. In South Carolina she encounters a sin- for. There is a great deal of beauty and inspiration to be found ister eugenics scheme similar to the Tuskegee experiment; in these recent novels of these writers, but they take for granted in North Carolina blacks have been banished by law and are a vision of the past that no longer adequately accounts for the executed on sight; the whole of Tennessee has been blighted present. To better come to grips with our moment, however by a plague of biblical proportions. ugly or uncomfortable it may be, we need the opposite of es- But because Cora continues to run toward the vague promise capist art: We need works that engage, fully and deeply, with

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX YORK NEW HEISLER/THE TODD of freedom and equality, the narrative always faithfully returns the challenges of the here and now. a

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TV free spirit; Marnie was the control freak; Shoshanna was the comic relief; and Hannah was—well, Hannah was Hannah. She never fell neatly into any category, and the show’s other characters soon followed her, moving out of their comfortable enclosures and into a space rarely depicted on television. If Girls faced criticism as its seasons wore on, it was often because the characters were seen as too entitled, too selfish, too unlikeable to fit neatly into the tradition of shows about single girls in the city—a tradition, ultimately, of uplift. Even worse, Girls’ plot suggested something other than the characters’ inexorable development toward purpose, stability, and effortlessly fulfilling relationships. “You watch … examples of the zeitgeist-y, early-20s heroines of Girls engaging in, recoiling from, mulling, and mourning sex,” Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times, “and you think: Gloria Steinem went to the barricades for this?” Characters on Girls were—and still are—prone to becoming suddenly inscrutable in ways that hinted the writers didn’t quite confidently understand their inner workings. When, in season five, Jessa calls Hannah her “dearest friend,” you try to remember the last time they even shared a scene together, let alone whether they ever seemed truly close. Trying to make sense of the way Jessa suddenly falls for Hannah’s off-and- on-again guy, Adam, The A.V. Club’s Joshua Alston pondered the show’s apparently hidden dynamics: “Has [Jessa] felt this way about Adam all along? Is that why the friendship between Jessa and Hannah has always seemed to be more about shared Girls, Interrupted history than shared lives?” From the end of the first season How Lena Dunham’s sitcom broke onward, it has been almost impossible to understand how the characters on Girls actually relate to each other, what their the mold for prestige television. relationships are, or whether they even see themselves as sharing relationships anymore. BY SARAH MARSHALL Girls wasn’t good at providing a whole generation with a simple, relatable set of stories, as Friends or Seinfeld had a generation before. For one thing, the concept for Girls sprang not from a focus group or a committee of producers, but from THERE WAS GOING to be a show about us. A show about people Lena Dunham, who wrote, acted, directed, and more. From the just like us, going through things just like the things we were beginning, it was the TV show as auteur vision, in the tradition going through! This was, at least, how I interpreted it, and how of Deadwood’s David Milch and The Wire’s David Simon and all of my millennial friends interpreted it, when Lena Dun- The Sopranos’ David Chase—all the Davids who made it OK ham’s Girls premiered on HBO in early 2012. Dunham all but to love TV. By now, it’s clear that Girls wasn’t about injecting predicted this reaction in the show’s very first episode, when female-driven sitcom with millennial relevance, but about her character, Hannah Horvath, is suddenly cut off from her redefining prestige television and the kinds of lives it can parents’ financial support at age 24, and is forced to find a job. make us care about. She begs them to subsidize her a little longer. How else will she write her memoir? “I think I might be the voice of my gener- EARLY PRESTIGE DRAMAS all greeted viewers with the same ation,” Hannah pleads. “Or at least, a voice of a generation.” premise: Watch a man torn between good and bad. Watch a This was a promise that Girls—whose final season con- man who has lost his soul try to regain it. Watch a man sell cludes in mid-April—could easily have made good on. And his soul, and look for the moment when he passes the point at first, it seemed to. The show’s first season took a familiar of no return. The anti-heroes of shows like The Sopranos, Mad sitcom formula (four single friends, New York City), and gave Men, and Breaking Bad obeyed no higher god than the accrual it some shrewd updates. The pilot episode nodded to this, of power, and believed, either resolutely or unwillingly but when Shoshanna attempts to describe Jessa using Sex and the always irreversibly, that life held no greater meaning. The City archetypes (“You’re definitely a Carrie, with like, some Samantha aspects, and Charlotte hair”). In Girls, Jessa was the ILLUSTRATION BY KIERSTEN ESSENPREIS

50 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW first great prestige dramas were about frontiers and organized a moment, the rest of the characters, and their world, disap- crime and corporate America, but they were also, above all pear. Hannah’s posing and wit have kept her afloat in New else, about being a man, about men’s tortured relationships York, but now she is suddenly, newly vulnerable. As we watch with masculinity. In contrast, the male characters on Girls— her struggling through conversation with an old high school who have become more and more central to the series since classmate, and phoning her sort-of boyfriend, we see a new its first season—often find themselves questioning the roles side of her character: the confused and startlingly resilient they have been handed, and learning that the only thing more lost girl we will soon follow into far more complex territory, frightening than failing to act like a man is seeing what you even—especially—when she has no idea where she’s going. become when you do manage to act like one. Taken as stand-alones, these single-character episodes Even when showrunners started constructing prestige series have the precise, sure-handed power not of a great novel, around female leads, the masculinity paradigm still lingered. but of a gemlike short story. They are by definition slight. Showtime’s Nurse Jackie centered on a nurse hiding various parts They don’t strive for the epic; they don’t even necessarily of her life from everyone in it, wrestling with a pill addiction, depict their characters gaining wisdom they will take back and holding her ER together almost single-handedly. From the to the main story line. A character doesn’t have to be enact- same network, Weeds featured a suburban mother who turns to ing a clearly delineated portion of their arc—here is where pot dealing to keep her family afloat after her husband’s sudden I become callous, here is where I become empowered, here death. Prestige TV was stuck with a clear template: Focus on is where I become myself—to be worthy of attention. Girls one person with a lot of secrets, and explore the ways their insists that even the most halting kind of progress is worth transgressions also make them feel more powerful and alive than trying to understand—and, in fact, it may be the only kind ever before. Girls helped to break open that paradigm for good. of progress that exists. Girls was addicted not to secrecy but to openness—or “over- “I’m not here to change you,” Marnie tells her ex-boyfriend share.” And rather than focus on one clear, troubled protagonist, in “The Panic in Central Park,” a fifth-season short-story ep- Girls centered on something more lifelike: four young women isode that belongs entirely to her. “I don’t need to change who live in relatively tight formation, then gradually drift apart, anybody anymore.” We don’t know how Marnie got here, their lives spiraling outward as the seasons progress. At various or why this is the moment when her need for control finally points, Hannah moves to Iowa to start an MFA, Shoshanna breaks. But by now, we’ve spent five years watching her trying heads to Japan for work, Jessa checks into rehab, and Marnie tries to lose herself in marriage. Although they each come back, the series no longer depicts an unshakable quartet, but Girls validated a strikingly new the random, tenuous sorts of ties that connect us in reality. It idea: that people want to watch shows not the community we sometimes wish ourselves a part of (the TV version of community, where everyone is always lives just as confusing as their own. the same forever), but community as we actually experience it. This central breakthrough of Girls has rippled through the best new television, from Insecure to Broad City to Divorce to High Maintenance. The act of simply depicting an unresolvable fight between friends, or a realistically awkward sex scene, has grown infinitely easier since the show premiered five years ago. again and again to arrange her life into the shape she wants, Girls validated a strikingly new idea in television: that people only to realize—again and again—that what she thought she want to watch people whose lives are just as confusing and wanted is suffocating her. Marnie’s growth seems to come not nonlinear as their own. through any newly philosophical approach to life, but from the desperate knowledge that she has to reject the way she’s WE’RE TRAINED TO approach the prestige drama as if we’re lived so far, even if she isn’t sure what to reach for. Growth, reading a novel: Character growth is supposed to be visible and in this episode, and in so many others, is ugly and sudden. ongoing; characters’ stories remain reliably interdependent; we It doesn’t leave us with much dignity. But don’t worry, Girls can trust that we will always witness the crucial moments in says: Nor does anything else. a love affair, a tragedy, a dream won or lost. But from its first By refusing to speak for a generation, Girls has done exactly season, Girls presented some of its most arresting storytelling that. Being a millennial is nothing more or less than coming by emulating not the novel, but the short story. Each season of age in a world that can no longer offer easily-won jobs or has contained at least one episode that focused on just one or clear-cut career paths or well-defined family roles—the plots two characters, separating them from the rest of the group, that previous generations could be forgiven for confusing with often revealing more about a character’s emotional state than reality. By depicting characters deep in the work of jettison- the rest of the season’s episodes combined. ing the narratives they have done their best to live by, Girls is The series first took this approach with season one’s “The telling the only story that can be told about a generation in Return,” in which Hannah visits her parents in Michigan. For search of one. a

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BOOKS called on to reflect the disturbing nature of Trump’s victory. For many, his rise defies a certain conception of American- ness: World War II and the Cold War, the two existentially threatening events of the previous century, determined the types of society America opposed and defined itself against. Only in those societies, so the thinking goes, could the abuses Trump proposes have been carried out, and only from those other societies could we learn how to resist him. This version of history assures us there is no need to look too deeply into America’s own past for the origins of an authoritarian president or his supporters. To liken Trumpism to Nazism is to Horrible Histories lament, somewhat helplessly, that we are becoming as bad as The perils of comparing Trump to the forces we once fought. twentieth-century dictators. ON TYRANNY STARTS from a salutary impulse. Snyder is right to think that the discipline of history has special value in strength- BY JEET HEER ening democracy and combating authoritarianism. Too many academic historians suffer from the vice of antiquarianism. Having a narrow focus on describing the particularity of the past, they resist linking their research to today’s most pressing LIKE MANY PEOPLE around the world, Yale historian Timothy issues. University-based historians, in fact, are prone to see Snyder responded to the election of Donald Trump by fuming “presentism”—the active drawing of connections between on social media. “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans the past and present—as antithetical to true scholarship. But who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism,” historical consciousness, no less than the scientific method or he lamented in a Facebook post on November 15. Drawing on philosophical reasoning, is a mode of thinking with practical his field of expertise—Europe in the era of Stalin andHitler — applications. As history involves trying to figure out the minds Snyder went on to offer 20 “lessons” for how to resist a dicta- of those who lived in a very different time, it fosters intellec- torship. His post went viral, amassing more than 13,000 likes. tual empathy. And the forensic scrutiny that historians apply He has now expanded that post into On Tyranny, a curious to evaluating historical documents is an invaluable skill for mixture of historical anecdotes and self-help bromides, pre- recognizing propaganda and “fake news.” mised on the idea that America is at the dawn of a tyrannical Snyder is superbly positioned to bring historical thinking age, and that the past offers clues for resistance. to bear on the current political scene. A prolific scholar and The ominous overtones of his project closely match the proficient writer, he’s written powerful books on the Soviet public mood of recent months. After Trump’s win, dystopian Union, Hitler’s Germany, nationalism, and the Holocaust, each novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t of which has accomplished the rare feat of winning both a large Happen Here sprang to the top of best-seller lists, and Americans popular audience and the respect of his peers. The book that discovered a newfound interest in theorists of dictatorship Snyder and the late Tony Judt collaborated on, Thinking the and authoritarianism. Warning of NSA surveillance, Snyder Twentieth Century, demonstrates the power of the historical reminds us that Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany, de- imagination as a tool of social analysis. In that book, Judt fined totalitarianism as “the erasure of the difference between warns of an “American nationalism” based on “the politics of private and public life.” In The New Yorker, Alex Ross argued fear”—an eerily exact forecast of the rise of Trump and other that “the Frankfurt School knew Trump was coming.” Arendt demagogues. and Theodor Adorno are now discussed not as relics of the It’s also commendable that in On Tyranny, Snyder counsels last century and its horrors, but as seers whose works speak taking action rather than merely taking refuge in historical afresh to our moment. comparison. His Facebook post, and now the book, includes Nor is Snyder the first commentator to compare Trump’s the recommendation to “stand out.” He reasons: “Someone America directly to the twentieth century’s most oppressive has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say regimes. For months before the election, writers at Vox, The something different.” These unpretentious words remind us Atlantic, and Slate debated whether the president could truly that political resistance isn’t a matter of action-movie heroics, be deemed a fascist. In September, New York Times book critic but starts from a willingness to break from social expectations, Michiko Kakutani reviewed a biography of Hitler, emphasizing as Rosa Parks did when she refused to go to the back of the his Trump-like qualities: Without mentioning Trump himself, she bus. And Snyder’s advice to “be calm when the unthinkable evoked a “pathetic dunderhead” of a leader with a “big mouth.” arrives” is undoubtedly wise: These comparisons with history’s darkest moments are deliberately drastic; their powerful emotional resonance is ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERTO PARADA

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protect oneself from the punishment of a regime—a necessary Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist and laudable goal, but one insufficient to creating an effective attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events mass resistance. If Martin Luther King Jr. had heeded the self- in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires help advice of On Tyranny, there might have been no “Letter the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition From a Birmingham Jail.” parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. SNYDER’S ADVICE TO Americans is, he tells us, based on his study of repressive regimes. Yet he never explains exactly Yet many of the directives Snyder urges on his readers are how he thinks the experience of an American today is com- a little vague and mystifying. There is a strange disjunction parable to the experience of a Russian in the Soviet Union between the gravity of the situation Snyder warns against or a German living under the Third Reich. Nor does he look (Hitler-style tyranny) and the banality of his advice. His rec- too closely at the ways these regimes resemble—or do not ommendations range from the Zen-like (“Believe in truth”) resemble—one another. to the nationalistic (“Be a patriot”). There’s no clear guiding A tendency to lump together many disparate historical principle behind each of them. “Read books,” Snyder suggests. phenomena lies at the core of On Tyranny, as Snyder strains to OK, sure—reading is always good. But after listing off the apply the term “tyranny” to a huge variety of political problems. familiar classics of anti-totalitarianism by Orwell and Milan Tyranny is, he tells us, “the circumvention of law by rulers for Kundera, Snyder adds a more recent work: Harry Potter and their own benefit.” Hitler and Stalin were tyrants. But Amer- the Deathly Hallows, which he presents as a novel “known by ican society has also seen tyranny “over slaves and women, millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny for example.” These two examples of tyranny in action are not and resistance.” Snyder counsels, “If you or your friends or your alike at all: In one case we are talking about political leaders; children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears in the other, we have entrenched social systems, instigated reading again.” While it makes sense to meet people where by no single person. This broad usage of the term renders it they live, the hero in a moral tale will always win, especially when he has a talent for magic on his side. Political realities, by contrast, call for specific strategies. To compare Trump to Hitler Considering that this volume started as a Facebook post, rather than to George Wallace is Snyder’s ninth rule—“Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet”—is perhaps the most puzzling. He is wary to nurture a reassuring myth that of the internet partly because it can be used to spread false Trump is un-American. information, and partly because it could allow a dictator to gather information about his or her subjects. “Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around,” Snyder writes. “Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less.” This virtually meaningless. The injustices imposed by the will of feels like an oddly antiquated view of the digital tools at our a tyrant belong to a different category than those suffered by disposal. Yes, those tools can be used as weapons against us slaves (at the hands of not just their masters but white society) (just as print can be used to spread fake news, and telephones or by women (at the hands of men). These last were inequities can be used to collect data on behalf of deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life. an aspiring tyrant). But Snyder makes no Historical analogies are tools if they are used carefully; when mention of the potential of the internet they come too easily, they can be dangerous. To compare Trump for resistance, or the fact that activists to Hitler and Stalin rather than to Barry Goldwater, George used social media to summon thousands Wallace, and Ronald Reagan is to nurture a reassuring myth to protests at airports and courthouses in that Trump is un-American. This is a consoling fantasy, since the first days of Trump’s administration. it implies that Trump doesn’t have deep roots in the American Much of Snyder’s advice is not, in fact, experience; if we simply get rid of Trump, all will be well. It’s a aimed at actively opposing tyranny. Few way of turning the current political tragedy into a fairy tale, in of his rules will help citizens oppose the which a scary monster threatens us, but once he is quickly van- use of torture in the war on terrorism, quished, normality is restored, as if it had all been a bad dream. or restrictions on immigration from pre- In truth, there is nothing foreign or even original about ON TYRANNY: TWENTY LESSONS FROM THE dominantly Muslim countries, or even a Trump’s politics. America is not just the land of immigrants TWENTIETH CENTURY transgression as simple as the president’s but also the land of nativism, a worldview that the children and BY TIMOTHY SNYDER TIM DUGGAN BOOKS, use of Twitter to bully judges, journalists, grandchildren of immigrants often adopt as a way of moving 128pp., $7.99 and businesses that defy his authority. up the social ladder themselves. Trump’s father was arrested His rules are mostly aimed at ways to at a Ku Klux Klan march and, in his career as a landlord, he

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downfall. The only new thing about Trump is that for the first time, the authoritarian wing of American politics has stepped into power undisguised and unashamed.

SNYDER’S PREFERRED WORD, tyranny, has ancient origins. It’s a curiously static, ahis- torical and depoliticized term, coined before the age of mass politics. Tyrants like Caligula didn’t need ideologies or energized political movements. As such, Snyder sees no need to explore the ideological contents of Trumpism. Unfortunately, this means Snyder has no political answers to Trumpism. He doesn’t discuss the need to mobilize the constituencies most likely to fuel a countermovement—women and people of color—or to win over the white working class. Aside from a smart paragraph about marching, Snyder has nothing useful to Trump learned to smear his opponents from Roy Cohn, an architect of the Red Scare. say about such democratic resistance. If Americans are to fight Trump, however, the was sued by the government for discriminating against black best models are not the tactics used by dissidents to fight people. Beyond his family heritage, Trump came of age in a the police states of Stalin and Hitler, but rather the techniques period when politicians in both the South and North rose used by earlier activists working within the American system. to power on the backlash against the civil rights movement. Soviet dissidents, in a state built on tight censorship, relied on From George Wallace and Richard Nixon, Trump learned samizdats; today, in a landscape of overabundant online media, the language of “law and order” as a racist dog whistle; from such underground publications seem unnecessary. Conversely, Charles Lindbergh, the popularity of the slogan “America First”; Americans have long found in the courts a bulwark against from his mentor Roy Cohn, the effectiveness of smearing op- authoritarianism, which continues in the aclu’s successful ponents; from General George Patton—or the version of him efforts to get a stay on Trump’s executive order on immigra- in the George C. Scott film—the appeal of roughneck milita- tion. The techniques used by the naacp to fight the Klan, by rism; from Ross Perot, the potency of complaining about free the aclu to fight McCarthyism, and byThe Washington Post to trade and freeloading allies; from Pat Buchanan, the strength fight Nixon—political organizing, litigation, and investigative of nativism. In sum, Trump’s ideology is not something new, journalism—are still essential. but the repackaging of older forms of American xenophobia The best part of On Tyranny is the epilogue, a thoughtful and authoritarianism. meditation on the fate of history in our moment. Snyder con- This American authoritarianism, as befits a geographically nects Trump’s rise to the deeply ingrained belief among elites dispersed society with a meager social security net, is less that history had ended. Triumphant after the close of the Cold concerned with building up an all-encompassing state than its War, Americans luxuriated in a fantasy that they lived in a European counterparts. American authoritarians have rarely perfected polity, an illusion that withstood even the ruptures gone in for paramilitary movements, perhaps feeling that the of September 11 and the global economic meltdown in 2008. local police and national guards can be relied on to enforce their Believing “that there was nothing in the future but more of agenda. And Trump’s promises of bringing back factory and the same,” Americans came to feel, in Snyder’s words, that mining jobs are much less extravagant than the Nazi agenda “history was no longer relevant.” to build a strenuous and athletic master race. If Trump is a Now history has resumed with a vengeance. With each fascist, he’s a fascist befitting a nation of couch potatoes who passing day, the course of events threatens national institutions want to be left alone, not to embody the Triumph of the Will. and stability as it has not for many decades. “Our government For most of the last century, American authoritarian impuls- continues to be in unbelievable turmoil,” General Tony Thomas, es have been powerful but never really dominant. Lindbergh, who serves as head of U.S. Special Operations Command, told after all, was discredited by Roosevelt; Patton was sidelined by a military conference in Maryland in early February. “I hope General George Marshall; and McCarthyism was eventually they sort it out soon, because we’re a nation at war.” Although checked by the Eisenhower administration. Nixon did become Trump himself has only a shallow historical consciousness, president, but he felt compelled by the office to hide his dicta- his legacy may be to teach an entire nation the full import of torial tendencies, using them covertly in ratfucking operations Faulkner’s words from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never

BETTMANN/GETTY against his opponents, which ultimately led to his disgrace and dead. It’s not even the past.” a

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PODCASTS highlight so far has been episode four, in which our host goes to dig up a small mound of dirt, prompted by a random tip. He doesn’t find much. Two days later, the cops dig around the same small mound of dirt and find some bones and a pair of panties. “How in the world did we miss that?” the hapless Lindsey puzzles. Moments of futility like that comprise at least half of this strange little show. We are living through a great flowering of the podcast industry, whose province of iTunes is something like a frontier boomtown right now, teeming with hastily erected new store- fronts. The podcast form has been around since about 2004—it is kissing cousins with the iPod, in that way—but it was only in 2014 that the idea struck gold. That would be the Serial moment, when Sarah Koenig’s twelve-episode exploration of a long-forgotten murder in Baltimore morphed into an amateur crime-solving hobby for millions of bored listeners. Before that, podcasts were a thing audio nerds did and talked about. Now, in the comfortable, educated, middle-class households of America, podcasts slot pleasantly into the routine of daily life. They help pass the time commuting on a crowded train or cleaning the bathroom. The experience lies somewhere between binge-listening and background noise. Even though podcasts share no particular style and very few conventions, a sense of high purpose lingers around them. Pod- cast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it’s a history lecture Voices of America broadcast from a university, or an amateur talk show recorded Can podcasts tell us more than in someone’s garage. Both types of show are somewhat educational, in the sense that they expose listeners to unfamiliar stories of individual obsession? subjects and subcultures. But the essence of a podcast is to be esoteric, specialized. And sometimes it’s hard to draw a line BY MICHELLE DEAN between the specific and the trivial.

AMERICANS, OF COURSE, have been listening to the radio for more than a hundred years. But radio is different: Beamed out TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Payne Lindsey is a filmmaker from to a broad audience whose choices in programming are limited the middle of nowhere, Georgia. Like millions of Americans, by their physical location and the time of day they tune in, he became obsessed with the podcast Serial two years ago. radio aimed from the start to reach anyone and everyone who Then he lost himself in the Netflix documentary Making a happened to be listening. It couldn’t be too weird or off-kilter; Murderer. “I thought to myself,” he said recently on his own it couldn’t be about individual obsession. It had to be about podcast, Up and Vanished, “What if I made one of those?” He the shared stuff of public life. fished around on the internet until he found a suitable cold No longer. If you care about a subject, there’s a podcast for case—the 2005 disappearance of a high-school history teacher it. There’s a podcast called Silage Talk, which is produced by named Tara Grinstead—and off he went, on his merry way to Dairy Herd Management magazine. (“We’re kicking off a great becoming a podcast king. new conversation about silage,” the first episode promises its Though you probably haven’t heard of Up and Vanished, it listeners.) There’s a podcast where writers and actors from has repeatedly graced the iTunes podcast Top 100, the closest the 1990s hit series The West Wing discuss each episode in thing the industry has to a hit parade. The show has solid, if detail, even though those episodes aired some 20 years ago and weird, production values: There’s a lot of ominous music, now seem rather devastatingly naïve about American political doors creaking, and long phone conversations with people culture. There’s a podcast about mobile home park investing tenuously connected to the case. Like many shows in this called, appropriately, The Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast. genre, its appeal lies in inviting its listeners along on its slightly And inevitably, the industry reflects its own internal brand crazed amateur detective journey, and it knows that to keep them going it has to muster some dramatic tension. Yet the ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ DA LOBA

56 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW of professional celebrity: There’s a podcast called Tape about and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form people who make podcasts. There are podcasts for Buddhists of virtue. While the subjects covered may sometimes be as and podcasts for Satanists. There is also a podcast called Hobo esoteric as any that you might find on a more rough-and-ready, for Christ, about a young woman who is traveling around the lower-end podcast—the murder long forgotten, the case long country being frugal and worshipful—the title really says it all. unsolved—their pedigree makes them appear more high-minded. Many of those podcasts are destined to sail out into the Sometimes they are: American Public Media’s In the Dark excels ocean and never be heard from again. They are often too de- at taking apart complicated cases and social issues, and laying tailed, too niche, too chatty. A lot of people produce podcasts them out in profound and carefully reported ways. The NPR in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves Politics Podcast is a voice of relative calm in an era when the and their lives. There is something very poignant about the dominant mode of political engagement is screaming. volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild But the curious thing about such successes is how heavily West of podcasts. One gets the impression that for many they depend on the NPR reputation for public-mindedness. podcasters, audience size is almost irrelevant. The point The obsessives are all well and good, but an appetite for au- is to put your voice on record (which is now easy and cheap thoritativeness still exists. At this point, few among us are to do), and leave it there for someone to find, ponder, and surprised or disappointed when someone gets it wrong on perhaps even enjoy. the internet; but when NPR screws up, we feel like it matters. A podcast, after all, only truly flourishes when it has one That’s why public radio has managed to keep its foothold in of two things. The first is a genuinely engaging obsessive who American life in an era of growing media fragmentation. But its can’t let go of a subject, and the second is prestige. The former continued presence in public life is far from assured: Trump’s is the basis of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, whose dizzyingly detailed episodes about everything from the Black Death to the rise of Genghis Khan are clearly the work of the very best Podcast listening carries with it kind of madman. Carlin reads piles of books to prepare for his a faint aura of cultural snobbery, episodes, and presents his extensive research in the engaging persona of an erudite and rambling man who will, eventually, a notion that to listen is to do make a point, but likes to take a leisurely trip in order to get something highbrow. there. In the same vein is Karina Longworth’s You Must Re- member This, a Hollywood history podcast that made its name with a sprawling, epic season on the Charles Manson murders and the various Hollywood lives they touched. These podcasts live and die by the extent of detail their team reportedly wants to privatize the Corporation for Public hosts can assemble. Narrative structure is often immaterial Broadcasting, a move that would effectively silence many of to the appreciation of the form. There doesn’t need to be a the most talented makers of public radio. Without them, we story, per se, that one can follow. What there needs to be is would lose one of the country’s few remaining trusted sources an accretion of minutiae that satisfies the listener in his or her of information. own obsession. The host and listener are like children counting Even the best prestige podcasts can’t exist on their own; marbles, things that have little or no value to others but that they rely on the reputation and resources of established cultural seem priceless to those engaged in the counting. institutions to find an audience. The people who make podcasts seem well aware that they need the veneer of journalism to THE OTHER TYPE of podcast—the kind founded on prestige— be deemed respectable. Serial’s Sarah Koenig, interviewed by thrives on being a mini-institution, building itself atop a sturdy, David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour, resisted the already-existing brand. One of the most popular podcasts in label “true crime” being applied to what was clearly that rose the current crop is Malcolm Gladwell’s somewhat ominously by any other name. “I don’t think I did that,” she said—“that” titled Revisionist History—“my podcast about things forgot- being some distasteful, popular thing that didn’t align with ten, or misunderstood,” he says at the top of an episode. It’s her own view of herself as a serious journalist. a slickly produced item, not unlike most of Gladwell’s books. Podcasts have devised new and entertaining ways to keep (A rare disastrous moment erupts in episode seven, when us informed. But they can’t quite fill the role of public broad- Gladwell bursts into song.) For many podcasts in this mold, casting, on their own. Podcasting is idiosyncratic by nature, the mother brand is NPR. Some are little more than chat and if we have learned anything in the last year, it is that the shows, like the NPR Politics Podcast. Others are meticulously idiosyncrasies of America do not add up to a coherent Amer- produced audio spectaculars striving to imitate This American ican life. The Payne Lindseys of the world chase mysteries Life. Still others, like Serial, marry the obsessive model with in their own haphazard fashion, while the Sarah Koenigs public radio prestige. know how to apply a polished, professional gloss to the most Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to chaotic investigations. But the big picture has, so far at least, have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, eluded them. a

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BOOKS women stranded, overworked, and underpaid. Moreover, as she laments, the term “feminist” has come to be used so broadly that it can apply merely to any prominent, successful woman, rather than one who consciously questions the patriarchy. We now measure feminism’s success by the triumphs of female CEOs and self-declared feminist pop stars. Over the course of the book, it becomes clear that Crispin is denouncing a particular strain of contemporary feminism: what she alternately calls “surface-level feminism” and “universal feminism.” We might also call it “neoliberal feminism.” This is a feminism preoccupied with workplace success and equal Yes All Women earnings, a feminism that abets global capitalism rather than Feminists do not have to be challenging it. To many feminists, neoliberal feminism is a kind of “faux feminism”: It represents the interests of the top ideologically pure to be radical. 1 percent of women while ignoring, or even exacerbating, the challenges most women face. As the political theorist Nancy BY MAGGIE DOHERTY Fraser has argued, a woman working in the corporate world can “lean in” only if she can also “lean on” low-wage workers— usually women of color—who will care for her children, clean her home, and cook her food. A FRIEND OF mine has a favorite question. A local union or- Crispin warns, too, of the ways that feminism and capital- ganizer, he poses this question when he encounters people ism can be mutually reinforcing. Early in her book, she makes who won’t participate in the labor movement for reasons of clear that she will not be part of any feminist movement that is ideological purity. They can’t go to the march, or sign the peti- not about “the full destruction of corporate culture.” She calls tion, or talk to their fellow workers, they will explain, because her feminism a “cleansing fire.” She doesn’t want to infiltrate the movement doesn’t perfectly reflect all of their political the halls of power; she wants to burn the very buildings to the beliefs, all of the time. In these instances, my friend asks: “Do ground. The more people pour into the movement, the more you want to feel good about yourself, or do you want to win?” Crispin wants to retreat. “If feminism is universal,” she writes, I found myself wanting to put this question to Jessa Crispin “if it is something that all women and men can ‘get on board’ many times while reading her perceptive and impassioned with, then it is not for me.” new book, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. A critique of contemporary feminism, the book began, as so CRISPIN HAS LONG positioned herself as an outsider. In 2002, many books do, one drunken night in New York City. Crispin she founded one of the first online literary reviews,Bookslut, spent an evening ranting to the publishers of Melville House in an effort to cover idiosyncratic and innovative writers who about how feminism had lost its way. It was now either entirely rarely garnered mainstream critical attention. The result was toothless, or fixated on the wrong problems: “safe spaces,” a wider range of reviews and, often, more honest reviewing. “outrage culture,” and “lean-in culture,” as she would later Her first book,The Dead Ladies Project, was a travel memoir in tell Vulture. Self-proclaimed feminists were so worried about which she visited European cities—Berlin, Galway, Sarajevo— learning how to negotiate raises and proj- and mused on the work of writers such as William James and ect confidence that they weren’t willing to Rebecca West. Many of these figures served as foils to the author challenge oppression in any meaningful herself: Jean Rhys was needy, but Crispin is independent; West way. Instead, they took to Twitter to po- was unselfconscious, but Crispin is self-aware. She wouldn’t lice speech and to commiserate over their make the same mistakes. so-called “wounds.” They cared more Crispin’s stance in Why I Am Not a Feminist fits with this about a joke made in poor taste than they outsider mentality. Her main objection to contemporary fem- did about sweatshops or deforestation. inism seems to be that it is popular. To her mind, if a social At its best, the resulting manifesto movement is popular, then it must necessarily be “banal … serves as a useful skewering of feminism’s nonthreatening, and ineffective.” She hates the idea that femi- worst tendencies. In her introduction, nism has “become universal,” as if a movement’s growth were a Crispin rejects the “feminist label” be- hindrance to its success. By her account, feminism has always WHY I AM NOT A FEMINIST: A FEMINIST cause it has become almost meaningless. been a “fringe movement,” one that appealed to some but that MANIFESTO In a chapter titled “Women Do Not Have alienated and threatened many others. She is thus suspicious BY JESSA CRISPIN to Be Feminists,” Crispin pokes holes in of feminists who want to “convert” others to their cause. (In MELVILLE HOUSE, 240pp., $24.95 the ideal of female independence, cor- rectly pointing out how often it leaves ILLUSTRATION BY SHREYA GUPTA

APRIL 2017 | 59 REVIEW some circles, this is called organizing.) She wants feminism By missing this history of conflict and coalition-building, to stay true to its radical origins, to create its “own religious Crispin implies that one should only participate in a movement systems, governments, and economies” rather than to “knock when it mirrors your own beliefs—beliefs you’ve already formed. on the doors” of established institutions. Some of her objections to “universal feminism” reminded me of There’s something decidedly appealing, even romantic, about the important critiques of the recent Women’s March—it was this vision of a radical movement that will, in Crispin’s words, too white and too polite—but she doesn’t recognize possible set about “fully dismantling” the system. The feminists of the allies. Reading Crispin, one might think that the right thing to 1960s and 1970s, Crispin believes, brooked no compromise in do on January 21 wasn’t to show up and speak out, or use the challenging the patriarchy and, though the rest of us benefit march as an opportunity to engage and organize the potentially from the bravery of these few, their legacy has been unjustly ne- like-minded but politically naïve, but rather to do nothing at all. glected. Younger women have lampooned the anti-pornography feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, painting WITHIN TODAY’S FEMINIST movement, moreover, Crispin them as “bra-burning, hairy-armpitted” bogeywomen. But would find many women who share her criticisms of “universal Crispin celebrates their anger, their willingness to displease feminism.” Feminism must be anti-capitalist, Crispin argues. It and even disgust. She seems to yearn to return to this historical must be intersectional. It must work for the betterment of all moment, when sisterhood was powerful and feminism was humans, not just women. These are the same arguments that fierce. She likes that these women “went too far.” Angela Davis made at the Women’s March when she called on The problem with Crispin’s vision is twofold: It misconstrues protesters to join “the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, feminism’s past, and thus offers the wrong prescription for the to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.” present. For starters, the last decade has seen renewed interest Though Crispin doesn’t come out as a socialist feminist, in the art and thought of many radical feminists, including many of her ideas for change mark her as such. She believes those Crispin name-checks. Shulamith Firestone, who called we need better social welfare programs and redistribution of pregnancy “barbaric,” was memorialized at length in The New wealth. Since everyone living under global capitalism, she Yorker and n+1 after her death in August 2012. Kate Millett’s reasons, lives precariously, increased job security and social Sexual Politics, a groundbreaking work of feminist literary benefits will help more women more profoundly than any criticism, is back in print. Even Yale University, not usually initiative designed to benefit female executives. Crispin points out that second-wave women were right to liberate themselves from unpaid care work, but we now face a situation where care Crispin believes that if a social is in desperately short supply. This echoes arguments Fraser has movement is popular, then it must been making for decades: A capitalist society can produce all the wealth it wants, but it will fall apart if it doesn’t find ways be “banal” and “ineffective.” to look after the young, the sick, and the old. Such concerns make Crispin part of a growing community of feminists, rather than the outsider she perceives herself to be. Indeed, I was puzzled by Crispin’s insistence that none of today’s feminists share her aims. I thought of the women behind Black Lives Matter, and the women risking injury by a bastion of radical politics, recently named one of its new protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. I thought of the female colleges in honor of Pauli Murray, the civil rights activist and service workers leading today’s labor movement in the Fight founding member of the National Organization for Women. for $15 and in organizing the hotel industry in Nevada. They What’s more, there was as much ideological variation represent the kind of intersectional feminism that helps women within second-wave feminism, and even within radical femi- by helping the economically oppressed, the environmentally nism, as there is in the feminist movement today. The radical at-risk, the silenced and the marginalized. They are proof that feminist groups Redstockings, Cell 16, The Feminists, and New today’s feminist movement includes many more women than York Radical Feminists disagreed sharply about sexuality, psy- Sheryl Sandberg and Taylor Swift. chology, and hierarchy. Were married women “brainwashed,” It may be easier to adopt the feminist “label” today than it or were they making strategic economic decisions? Should was in the early 1960s. Still, we need more women to claim feminist organizations have formal leadership structures, or feminism, and then fight to make the movement what they should they be horizontal and leaderless? Must all women want it to be. As a movement grows, internal disagreement become lesbians? Margaret Sloan, June Jordan, and Alice grows, too. This isn’t always a bad thing: It is often in moments Walker criticized the whiteness of second-wave feminism of disagreement that participants find common goals, fashion and the exclusionary editorial practices of Ms. magazine; livable compromise, or persuade moderates that more radical Firestone, Ellen Willis, and Kathie Sarachild fought as bitterly strategy is needed. Living with conflict, building coalition—this about movement tactics and strategy as Crispin might fight is the stuff of politics. As the threats to feminism grow ever with her contemporaries today. more apparent, I hope Crispin will stay in the fight.a

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BOOKS are trapped in a “sleep crisis”—one that can conveniently be ameliorated by following the steps outlined in her book The Sleep Revolution or buying products (eye masks, pajamas, microbiome-analysis kits, light bulbs that imitate a sunrise) from Thrive Global, her wellness startup. Such companies find a primed market. Up to 70 million Americans suffer from some form of sleep disorder, and millions more self-medicate with booze, drugs, meditation, diets, or elaborate hygiene regimens. Offices are strewn with Red Bulls, coffee machines, and (when budgets allow) the occasional napping pod. We complain about sleeplessness in the same way we complain about how busy we are: as a signal of our success and engagement with society. The less sleep we get, the more it has come to mean. As the new sleep industry has flourished, so has a whole field of study, dedicated to the culture surrounding sleep. Countless new books, relying on the language of efficiency and hacking, analyze the “sleep paradox” and “smarter sleep.” In 2015, the mattress startup Casper launched a magazine about sleep, titled Van Winkle’s, and there is hardly a lifestyle publication in America for which sleep isn’t a staple subject. What all this thinking tends to ignore is that our current sleep dysfunction is not a glitch, a minor bump in the smooth running of a success-oriented society, but an inextricable part of our working lives. If millions are experiencing a crisis of sleep, it reflects a full-scale unraveling, a crisis centuries in the making.

The Night Shift IT WASN’T ALWAYS this way. Sleep as we know it—along with Data-driven cures ignore the true many of its disorders—is a relatively recent development. For most of human history, sleep was social, Benjamin Reiss cause of our sleeplessness epidemic. argues in Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World, a new cultural and anthropological examination of BY JACOB SILVERMAN sleep through the ages. It was “generally distributed in several chunks throughout the day and night” and it varied to fit into the changing of the seasons and of daily life. People slept longer in winter to conserve energy, and between short bouts of sleep FOR $149, A COMPANY called Hello will sell you Sense, a two- there was time to have sex, pray, or socialize. Don Quixote and-a-half-inch, machine-tooled orb that watches you while could satisfy himself with one short spell, but his companion you sleep. Tracking room temperature and other data through Sancho Panza slumbered much longer, spending “from night the night, the device awards you a “sleep score” between 0 to morning” in uninterrupted repose. and 100, based on how well you rested. You can then boost Just as different cultures developed distinct notions of family your rating by following certain tips and best practices, like and hospitality, they fostered different sleep rituals. Among shelling out for a humidifier or fiddling with the thermostat. the Asabano people of Papua New Guinea, it is polite, even It’s not clear how much this element of gamification helps you an honor, to offer to sleep in the same bed or room as a guest. drift off, but Hello’s numbers are certainly on the rise: Founder Co-sleeping offers protection, warmth, and comfort. In other James Proud, a protégé of Peter Thiel, has raised more than contexts, though, co-sleeping can feel threatening: Homeless $40 million in funding, and garnered admiring profiles from shelters, Reiss notes, are often loud and dangerous, with people the likes of Forbes and Business Insider. coming and going at all hours, many of them suffering from Sense, and a host of apps and biobehavioral doodads like untreated mental illness. And since co-sleeping can also con- it, are the vanguard of a vast new industry that promises a tribute to the spread of disease, the practice eventually came better-rested future. From meditation apps to glasses that to be associated, at least in the United States, with the very prevent screen-induced eye strain to green tea lotions, this poor and destitute. “Massive group sleep was really only for brave new world of sleep products ranges from new age to the neglected or unwanted members of society,” Reiss writes. high-tech and back again. Arianna Huffington, in her latest -it eration, has emerged as a sleep guru, preaching that Americans ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL BEJAR

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During the Industrial Revolution, a new kind of “sleep dogma” took hold, one immediately recognizable to many Westerners today. The new “sleep norms” included “sleeping in private” and “consolidating one’s sleep at night”—the eight hours we now think of as a gold standard for proper rest. Children were trained to “reproduce these norms,” and those who couldn’t learn to sleep this way were diagnosed as medical exceptions. Society began to hum to the carefully managed timetables of factories, offices, schools, and militaries. Civilized people now rose early in the morning, labored during the day, and slept at night—customs that served to create “hearty, au- tonomous, self-willed adults who could march off confidently into the workforce” and toil more productively. No development was more consequential than the advent of electric lighting, which finally severed sleep from its place in the cycle of day and night, and created new opportunities for socializing and working after dark. Cafés could stay open late; factories could operate 24 hours. Streetlights opened roads and other public spaces to recreation, especially for the lower classes. A radical restructuring was underway, as the rhythms of nature gave way to those of commerce, transport, and other Pullman porters were often granted less than four hours sleep a night. capitalist imperatives. If electric lighting allowed cities to hum at all hours of the day, it also made them louder, amenable to been standardized, used, and abused as a disciplinary mech- activity but not to rest. Sleep became routinized, light turned anism. In excellent chapters on slavery and mental illness, he into a pollutant, and the modern age of sleeplessness began. demonstrates how asylums “tamed” people’s sleep by medicat- Sleep deprivation began to spawn a rich literature. Henry ing and institutionalizing them, while slave owners kept slaves David Thoreau’s famous rant against the railroad (“We do fatigued and thus more easily surveilled. Frederick Douglass not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”) was also an outcry wrote that “more slaves are whipped for oversleeping than against sleeplessness and exploitation. The railroad, he argued, for any other fault.” Writings by former slaves like Solomon came at too great a cost to those who built it and those who Northup describe how overseers would check on sleeping lived nearby. “Did you ever think what those sleepers are that slaves multiple times per night and demand that they rise underlie the railroad?” Thoreau asked. “Each one is a man, an immediately in the morning. Irishman, or a Yankee man.” Racist assumptions about sleep plagued the descendants of Noise from trains, Thoreau complained, also disrupted the slaves long after the Civil War. In the late 1800s, the Pullman rhythms of rural life. For the solitary writer, this was an acute Company, which managed sleeper cars on trains, actively concern. In his journal, he described himself as “a diseased recruited former slaves to work as porters, and often granted bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a them little more than four hours sleep per night. For decades, a withered leaf.” Thoreau suffered from tuberculosis most of vastly overworked, under-slept, mostly black workforce toiled his adult life, a condition that worsened on railroad cars, ensuring that white travelers slept peaceably. when he went to work at his family’s pen- When the Pullman porters formed a vibrant union, better cil factory. Plagued by debilitating insom- sleeping conditions were among their central demands—but nia, he moved to the country partly in an they weren’t granted a 40-hour workweek until 1965. attempt to regain some of the salubrious Today, sleeping conditions remain sharply divided along quiet unavailable in the industrial towns racial and socioeconomic lines. “Poverty is most acutely felt of Massachusetts. The dorms and board- at night,” Reiss notes, and “to be poor is to be acutely sleeping houses springing up to serve factory deprived.” Overwork, physical insecurity, noise, pollution, workers particularly repelled Thoreau. lack of child care, and inadequate health services affect the “I think I had rather keep a bachelor’s poor more harshly and make sleep more difficult. In New York hall in hell than go to board in heaven,” City housing projects, the nypd’s Omnipresence program uses he wrote. “The boarder has no home.” enormous floodlights to illuminate courtyards through the WILD NIGHTS: HOW No sooner did sleep become a tool for night, disturbing all residents in the name of crime preven- TAMING SLEEP CREATED OUR industrial capitalism than sleep depri- tion. The scholar Simone Browne has likened Omnipresence RESTLESS WORLD vation became one of its most effective to the city’s eighteenth-century lantern laws, which required BY BENJAMIN REISS BASIC BOOKS, weapons. Reiss’s book is best read as an blacks and Indians to carry lanterns at night. Both policies 320pp., $28.00 exploration of the ways that sleep has use illumination as a form of social control, making black NEWBERRY LIBRARY / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

62 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW bodies visible to allay the fears of a white ruling class. They on sleep shouldn’t be undersold, which makes it all the stranger also reflect how little control the poor often have over the to see sleep apps and smart beds peddled as the latest solution. conditions in which they sleep. You can see this on any day Our high-tech solutions echo old folk beliefs. “Victorians de- on any municipal train or bus service, where working-class ployed all manner of electrified sleep gadgetry,” Reiss notes, Americans nod off on the long ride to or from home. “including belts, rods, brushes, and even a vibrating helmet to induce the sleep that seemed so difficult to attain in their SILICON VALLEY’S INTEREST in sleep hacking and optimization frantic, hyperconnected world.” Now the vibrating helmets serves the same corporate goal as many of the changes wrought come with Bluetooth. during the Industrial Revolution: maximum productivity. The Starry-eyed entrepreneurs herald these upheavals as mere standardization of sleep in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- “disruptions,” an opportunity to commoditize yet another core turies fit the needs of large industrial concerns, who wanted aspect of life. Sleep becomes something to hack, to game, a their workers to be efficient, on time, and rested just enough. site of competition where hidden inefficiencies can be leveraged Today’s startups likewise treat sleep not as a matter of neces- by a canny operator who knows how to sell to the under-slept sity, pleasure, and biology, but as a problem to be eliminated. masses. As sleep is submitted to the logic of the market, pro- This view tracks with the Silicon Valley commonplace that prietary sleep scores promise us greater insight into how we courageous acts of technological innovation will suffice to fix all sleep. But the tech startups don’t share the data they collect manner of bugs and inefficiencies. Few products demonstrate with the public, and users don’t have any way to know what that principle better than one of Arianna Huffington’s most the scores really mean, or even how they’re calculated. Sleep expensive offerings. The EnergyPod, priced at $10,000 in the scores are data as a form of mysticism. The computer spits Thrive Global store, bills itself as the “world’s first chair designed for napping in the workplace.” The large, scallop-shaped pod, which resembles a cross between a dentist’s chair and a No sooner did sleep become a gigantic motorcycle helmet, promises gentle vibrations and tool for capitalism than sleep soothing music to guide you in and out of your power nap. “With just a 20-minute nap, employees emerge refreshed and deprivation became its weapon. focused,” the ad copy chirps, a keen reminder of just what purpose all this restfulness ultimately serves. In the Silicon Valley worldview, someone who doesn’t sleep well simply needs to be introduced to a more sophisticated and personalized mattress, new sleep-tracking software, a strict regime of food intake, or other forms of biobehavioral them out, so they must be right. And so the bleary-eyed con- monitoring. When awake, the worker can continue to optimize sumer adjusts her habits to please the algorithm, trying to his performance and well-being by wearing a Fitbit; taking increase her score. Provigil, Adderall, or nootropic stimulants; consuming the Sleep remains a universal experience, but it’s lived seven latest boutique energy drink; or following a host of soothing billion different ways. One finishesWild Nights with the feeling mantras developed for the tech-forward high achiever. that our modern-day anxieties about sleep are the symptom Sleep hacking is an individualized, consumerist approach of another, more complicated disease. If societies were better to sleep dysfunction, one that ultimately obscures the political able to provide their citizens with life’s basic necessities—food, and social causes of today’s disorders. It’s difficult to look at shelter, safety, employment, health care, a clean and quiet our society of ever more precarious workers, and not recognize environment, transportation, civic participation—then the that the sleep crisis has deeper causes than outdated mattress sleep crisis might fade away on its own. As long as we lack this technology. In an economy that has seen more and more full- larger vision, Reiss warns, we are stuck “attempting to repair time jobs replaced by contract positions, the unemployed and broken sleep with some of the tools that broke it.” What must underemployed scrape by on unreliable gig work or the tattered change so that we can put it back together? The answer might remains of a social safety net. Even those in salaried employ- as well be: almost everything. a ment find their wages stagnating and their bosses beckoning from their smartphones at all hours. THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 4, Issue 5,002, April 2017. As the stable binaries of work and home life begin to unravel, 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 core functions like sleep, which once firmly belonged on the (202) 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage home side of the equation, also come undone. Phones and and handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: tablets enter the bedroom, where they encourage us to push off www.TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. 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APRIL 2017 | 63 backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTIA VACCA

LOCATION RUKLA, LITHUANIA DATE SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

DONALD TRUMP MAY admire Vladimir Putin, but Russia’s neigh- remained under Soviet control for nearly half a century. Today, bors are readying for war. Over the past few years, the govern- Putin is stoking fears of another invasion: In 2014, he dispatched ment of Lithuania has ramped up defense spending, begged 9,000 soldiers and 55 ships for war games in Kaliningrad, a nato for troops, proposed building a fence along its border, small Russian territory on the Lithuanian border. and distributed detailed manuals briefing its three million As Lithuania gears up for war, Italian photographer Mattia citizens on what to do if Russia invades. The country has also Vacca traveled to the Rukla forest to document basic training reinstated military conscription, which was abolished in 2008. exercises for the country’s new recruits. In the image above, a Men between the ages of 19 and 26 must now complete nine reservist from Kaunas throws a smoke bomb shortly after sunrise, months of compulsory military service. So far, though, the move to signal the start of the day’s military simulations. Lithuania’s has proven premature: So many citizens have volunteered for swelling military ranks, Vacca says, reflect the upsurge in patriotic duty that the government hasn’t needed to implement the draft. fervor stoked by Russian hostility. “We are ready to fight for our Lithuania has a long history with Russian aggression. After freedom,” Defense Minister Juozas Olekas declared recently, “for Soviet tanks rolled into Vilnius in 1944, resistance fighters bat- every centimeter of our land.” a tled the Red Army for nearly a decade from rickety hideaways in the country’s vast forests. Twenty thousand died, and Lithuania See more of Mattia Vacca’s work on newrepublic.com.

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