JULY/AUGUST 2016

TAKING DOWN TRUMP FUKUSHIMA’S GHOSTS THE REAL BORDER WALL THE SPLIT

SCHOLARS, ARTISTS & 23 ACTIVISTS ON WHAT’S DRIVING THE DEMOCRATS APART

NAOMI KLEIN JOHN JUDIS RICK PERLSTEIN RIVKA GALCHEN MARK GREEN ZEYNEP TUFEKCI JOHNETTA ELZIE DAVID SIMON

contents JULY/ AUG 2016

18 Reboot the World The internet was supposed to be democratic and open to all. Then and the 30 NSA got their hands on it. Here’s how we can reclaim our digital future. The Split BY PAUL FORD 19 reasons the Democrats are so divided—and what it means 22 for the party’s future. The Ghosts of Fukushima It’s been five years since the meltdown forced them to abandon their village. Now they’re going home. Can a town devastated by nuclear disaster be brought back to life? BY STEVEN FEATHERSTONE 42 Borderline Madness What lies between the and Mexico. PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD MISRACH

UP FRONT COLUMNS REVIEW

6 Food producers caught 14 The Republican Party’s 48 After going undercover in misusing federal funds are addiction to whiteness. , a journalist faces quietly pressuring Congress BY JEET HEER her critics. BY SUKI KIM to shield them from public 16 The moral obligation 52 In Emma Cline’s debut novel, scrutiny. BY TED GENOWAYS to protest the Republican attraction can be deadly. 8 Our analysis of every primary- convention. BY THESSALY LA FORCE season attack ad reveals BY MICHAEL ERIC DYSON 55 Did an illicit love affair how defied the give birth to Moby-Dick? conventional wisdom. BY WILLIAM GIRALDI BY LAURA RESTON 58 How factory revolts inspired 11 If Barnes & Noble goes out of a new form of the novel. business, it’ll be a disaster for BY RACHEL KUSHNER book lovers. BY ALEX SHEPHARD 62 What men got wrong about 12 How hard-core gymnastics the economy. BY MALCOLM HARRIS fans are revolutionizing the way the sport is covered. 64 Backstory BY ELSPETH REEVE PHOTOGRAPH BY STÉPHANIE BURET

COVER REFERENCE PHOTOS: JAMIE MCCARTHY/GETTY (SANDERS). MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP (CLINTON) CENETA/AP BALCE MANUEL (SANDERS). MCCARTHY/GETTY JAMIE PHOTOS: REFERENCE COVER POETRY 61 Himalayan BY CAROL FROST COVER ILLUSTRATION BY PIOTR LEŚNIAK

JULY/AUG 2016 | 1 contributors

Michael Eric Dyson, a contributing editor at , is university professor of sociology at Georgetown and the Editor author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race Eric Bates in America. He’s calling on “all good citizens of conscience and decency” Executive Editor Culture Editor to join him in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention this Ryan Kearney Michelle Legro summer to “protest the specter of a Trump presidency by putting our Politics Editor Features Directors bodies on the line.” WE MUST MARCH ON CLEVELAND, P. 16 Bob Moser Sasha Belenky Deputy Editor Theodore Ross Steven Featherstone, a journalist based in Syracuse, has Ryu Spaeth Senior Editors Brian Beutler visited both Chernobyl and Fukushima twice. “I learned to stop Story Editor Laura Marsh Jeet Heer asking about radiation altogether,” he says. “Only then did I begin to Elspeth Reeve Managing Editor see the tremendous human impact the Fukushima disaster has had.” Elaine Teng News Editor THE GHOSTS OF FUKUSHIMA, P. 22 Alex Shephard Art Director Poetry Editor Rivka Galchen, a novelist and essayist, is the author of Parker Hubbard Cathy Park Hong Photo Director Atmospheric Disturbances. Her most recent book, Little Labors, is Associate Editors Stephanie Heimann an essay collection published this year. She has been emotionally Mikaela Lefrak Production Director managing the election season by reading the novels of Anthony Adam Peck Pamela Brandt Bijan Stephen Trollope and not combing her hair. THE SPLIT, P. 30 Contributing Editors Assistant Editor Esther Breger Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, activist, James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, and author of the international best-sellers This Changes Everything: Reporter-Researchers Siddhartha Deb, Michael Eric Dyson, Steven Cohen Capitalism vs. The Climate and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Paul Ford, Ted Genoways, Emma Foehringer Merchant Capitalism. She is never more grateful to live in Canada than during William Giraldi, Dana Goldstein, Gwyneth Kelly Kathryn Joyce, Suki Kim, U.S. elections. THE SPLIT, P. 30 Laura Reston Maria Konnikova, Corby Kummer, Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, Intern is the author of The Strange Case of Rachel Rachel Kushner Graeme Wood, Robert Wright Maggie Foucault K and The Flamethrowers, a novel indebted, in various ways, to Nanni Editorial Assistant Intern, Social Media Balestrini. Her essay in this issue appears in different form as the Meaghan Murphy Lillianna Byington introduction to Balestrini’s We Want Everything, forthcoming from Verso Books. POPULAR MECHANICS, P. 58 Editor in Chief Win McCormack Richard Misrach, an award-winning photographer based in California, was roaming the desert near the U.S.–Mexico border in 2004 when he spotted a blue barrel with the word agua printed on VP of Marketing and Director of Sales Communications Suzanne Wilson the side. The moment inspired his latest book, Border Cantos, a Erika Velazquez Advertising Account Manager cross-disciplinary project with composer Guillermo Galindo, which Senior Integrated Nano Fabuss was released by Aperture in April. BORDERLINE MADNESS, P. 42 Marketing Manager Associate Account Executive Evelyn Frison Shawn Awan Rick Perlstein is a historian, journalist, and best-selling author Director, People and Finance Director of Software of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Paul Biboud-Lubeck Gregg Meluski Consensus; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing Controller Director of Digital Design of America; and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of David Myer Silas Burton Reagan. THE SPLIT, P. 30 Office Manager, NY Product Manager Tori Campbell Max Zimbert Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor of Publisher African American studies at Princeton University and the author Hamilton Fish of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Her research examines the intersection of race and public policy, specifically as it relates to American housing policies. THE SPLIT, P. 30 Published by Lake Avenue Publishing 1 Union Square West, is an assistant professor at the University of Zeynep Tufecki New York, NY 10003 North Carolina. She started out as a programmer, but after her boss President asked her if the computer system she managed could tell when he was Win McCormack lying, she switched fields to study the social impacts of technology. THE SPLIT, P. 30 For subscription Inquiries or problems call (800) 827-1289 For reprints and licensing visit www.tnrreprints.com

Clarification: The Adrienne Rich illustration by Janna Klävers on page 59 of the May 2016 issue was based on a photograph by Joan E. Biren.

2 | NEW REPUBLIC from the stacks

DEMOCRATS HAVE ALWAYS fought among themselves. The tensions between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders that we explore in this month’s cover section—between pragmatists and populists, incrementalists and insurgents—have echoes throughout the modern era, from Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson in 1988. In that year, shortly after Dukakis led Democrats to their third straight presidential defeat, the new republic blamed the loss squarely on Jackson. In this essay by Ben Wattenberg, a left-wing intellectual who migrated to the right during his career as a writer and TV pundit, the magazine argued that Democrats needed to shun liberal activism and focus on appealing to middle-class whites who had abandoned the party over civil rights. Using racially coded language, Wattenberg painted Jackson as “an extravagant caricature” who “embodies” every white conser- vative stereotype of “squishy” liberals. In the short term, Wattenberg’s side won: Bill Clinton recaptured the White House in 1992 and made centrism the party’s default platform. Jackson’s brand of populist insurgency went into hibernation. But as Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders have shown, it was only sleeping.

Ben J. Wattenberg The Curse of Jesse DECEMBER 5, 1988

If Democrats manage to regain potency on business-is-bad, defense-is-a-waste, law- too far in the ’60s and ’70s? You got it. We the presidential level, they will have two and-order-is-an-unclean-issue, etc. did. We were wrong. But we’ve learned from people to thank: George Bush and Jesse Bush has billboarded the excesses of lib- our mistakes. We’ve returned to our roots. Jackson. eralism. Jackson will almost surely run again We’re ready to govern. And by the way, what By running a shrewd, brilliant, relevant, in 1992 and embody the issue even if he about ‘The C-Word’? What about those symbolic, sometimes demagogic, and wholly tries to duck it. And so it is possible that the bozos on your side? Didn’t they also go too successful referendum on “The L-word,” Bush Democrats will finally be able to do easily far? Now let’s get serious and cut the cards. focused the mind on the central question and clearly what they should have done long Let’s talk about the future.” … of modern American politics: Has liberalism ago: Choose up sides, have an up-front The serious problem is not that the gone too far? By winning with a solid clash of ideas, and decide whether the Democrats keep losing, but what might majority, he has told doubting Democrats Democratic Party is moderate, tough, and happen if they end up running the world’s the answer: “Yes.” progressive—or very liberal, squishy, tend- superpower before they have reformed! If Bush has prominently reidentified ing toward radical. … Was Dukakis a good Every four years there are signs that the the problem, Jesse Jackson has come to candidate? Not particularly. Was the cam- Democrats collectively understand their personify it. The man has the courage of paign a good one? Not particularly. Why? … problem and will act to solve it. We’ve now his convictions. Of those men (13 of them) It’s said that Dukakis’s problem was that lost five out of six for roughly the same rea- who ran in the Democratic primaries in he didn’t counter Bush’s charges quickly son; sooner or later the message will get 1984 and 1988, Jackson came closest to enough. Wrong. Even when he ultimately through (I hope). … speaking his mind. The others fudged; dealt with the issue, he still didn’t get it None of this can happen without a pub- they did not have the intestinal fortitude right. He gave the “dead liberals” answer: lic fight about ideas. The right wing of the or tactical sagacity to disagree directly “I’m in the tradition of Roosevelt-­Truman- left-wing party (that’s the American center) and/or regularly with Jackson, although John Kennedy-Johnson.” But that’s not the must join in the intellectual combat and the in fact they all did disagree with him. In charge. It’s the “live liberals” that are at issue: political combat. There are young, promi- extravagant caricature, and with monu- McGovern-Carter-Ted Kennedy-­Jesse Jack- nent politicians and young, less-prominent mental celebrity, Jackson embodies what son (and now, Dukakis). activists who have come to see that the only the public holds against the brand of lib- There were three magic words that might way out is to look again to the values of the eralism that has been publicized since the have saved Dukakis: “We were wrong.” As in, earlier generation of tough liberals and apply

’60s: America-is-guilty, America-is-racist, “George, you want me to say liberalism went those values to the current circumstance. a TARO YAMASAKI/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY

4 | NEW REPUBLIC

up front

FOOD FIGHT

Schmear Campaign

Food producers caught misusing federal funds are quietly pressuring Congress to shield them from public scrutiny.

BY TED GENOWAYS

A CLEAR PATTERN IT STARTED WITH a court battle over mayonnaise. mayonnaise: Had they, too, been enlisted to fight How do states respond In October 2014, Unilever, the multinational food Hampton Creek? Shapiro filed a series offoia when whistle-blowers titan, sued Hampton Creek, a small food-­technology requests to obtain the records of the American Egg catch the food industry company, for false advertising. Unilever, which Board, a government-funded trade group overseen engaging in unsafe owns Hellmann’s and Best Foods mayonnaise, was by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After months practices? They contesting the name of Hampton Creek’s competing of haggling, the usda released a batch of internal introduce “ag-gag” product, Just Mayo, a vegan substitute that uses yel- emails that Shapiro describes as “stunning.” laws to crack down on low peas in place of eggs. Since the Food and Drug Industry groups like the egg board, which togeth- the whistle-blowers. Administration defines mayonnaise as “egg yolk– er received roughly $1 billion in federal funding last containing,” Unilever argued that Just Mayo isn’t year, are supposed to use tax dollars to promote really mayo at all. The name, it claimed, was causing their own products—usually through advertising “serious, irreparable harm to Unilever.” campaigns like the ones for beef (“It’s What’s for IOWA: Law passed Much of the mainstream media covered the fight Dinner”) and pork (“The Other White Meat”). But in 2012 after PETA as a “weird war” between corporate competitors. the egg board, it turned out, was a chief architect of investigators recorded (“Yep, It’s Mayo,” declared Inc. “No Eggs, No Mayo,” the smear campaign against Hampton Creek. Joanne cruelty against replied Entrepreneur.) But Ryan Noah Shapiro Ivy, the board’s president, had emailed fellow board animals at a hog farm. took the lawsuit seriously. A graduate student and members, instructing them to consider Just Mayo’s animal-­rights activist, Shapiro is a master at using success “a crisis and major threat to the future of the the Freedom of Information Act—known as foia— egg product business.” She solicited ideas to thwart to uncover public records that reveal how industry Hampton Creek, and suggested pushing the FDA to wields undue, and even illegal, influence over gov- declare Just Mayo’s label misleading. She also used ernment agencies. a go-between PR firm to pressure Whole Foods to Shapiro suspected that Unilever was getting drop the product. (The grocery chain refused.) In help in its war against Just Mayo. Egg manufac- turers, for example, were also imperiled by vegan ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVID PLUNKERT

6 | NEW REPUBLIC one email, a member of the egg board joked that the be treated as government agencies are now claim- CALIFORNIA: Legislation trade group should arrange a Mafia hit on Joshua ing that they are not government agencies. “They’re introduced in 2013 after Tetrick, the CEO of Hampton Creek. talking out of both sides of their mouth,” says Tony undercover videos at When the emails became public, Ivy resigned. Corbo, the senior lobbyist for Food & Water Watch. slaughter plants led to Utah Senator Mike Lee called for a full usda inves- “You just can’t have it both ways.” largest beef recall in tigation. The records, he wrote, offer “compelling What’s more, Corbo says, industry groups may U.S. history. evidence” that leaders of the egg board “may have have once again misused public funds in their violated the federal laws and administrative regula- effort to be exempted fromfoia disclosures. The tions” that govern such tax-supported groups. presidents of the 14 food boards signed a letter to Shapiro and other activists believed that the Congress requesting the exemption—but getting VERMONT: Bill stalled scandal would force the government to ensure that such language inserted into a major agriculture in 2013 after Humane industry food groups don’t misuse public funds to bill, Corbo points out, would likely have required a Society documented attack their competitors. But the industry had a more extensive campaign. “I’m sure it was followed veal plant workers different idea. To food manufacturers, the problem up with direct lobbying”—an activity the boards kicking, shocking, and wasn’t the egg board’s emails—it was the fact that are barred from engaging in under federal law. dragging weak animals. Shapiro had been able to get his hands on them. (Tom O’Brien, clerk of the Republican-led House In April, 14 food boards—including the leading Agricultural Appropriations Subcommittee, did not producers of beef, milk, pork, potatoes, and eggs— respond to requests for information about who had quietly convinced Congress to insert language into drafted or inserted the language.) IDAHO: Law drafted in this year’s Agricultural Appropriations Bill that The foia exemption is just the latest front in the 2014 by a registered would exempt them from all foia requests. If the food industry’s ongoing war against public over- lobbyist for the Idaho measure passes, America’s biggest food manufac- sight. Over the past decade, in an effort to silence Dairymen’s Association turers will be allowed to spend millions in federal animal-rights activists and other whistle-blowers, after activists filmed funds every year, while operating in total secrecy. eight states have passed “ag-gag” laws making it cows at one plant being The move involves far more than the public’s a crime to film or photograph activities on farms. beaten by workers. right to know how its tax dollars are being spent. Last year, four activists were charged under Utah’s With less transparency about how food is produced, ag-gag law after photographing an industrial hog it will be harder for consumers to make informed farm from a public road. Some states have gone choices about what to put on their tables. And if even further in shielding the food industry from the food industry is allowed to operate in the dark, experts warn, there will be no way to identify and prevent the kinds of practices that lead to outbreaks of food-borne illness. “In long, industrialized supply chains, the thing In one email, a board member joked that makes the system work is transparency,” says Bill that egg producers should arrange a Marler, a leading food-safety advocate. “Positive and Mafia hit on a rival CEO. negative microbial testing, recall information, out- break information—all of that should be in the public domain. foia is the public information system.” In asking for the sweeping foia exemption, the industry groups argue that they should not be required to make their records public because unwanted scrutiny. In North Carolina, businesses they are “not agencies of the federal government.” can sue anyone, including an employee, who But a decade ago, the food boards took exactly the documents corporate lawbreaking on company opposite position—and won. In a case before the property. In Wyoming, it is now a crime to col- Supreme Court in 2005, they argued that they lect water-quality data on public lands—or even to should be allowed to use tax dollars to promote share such data with the federal government. their products because those efforts constitute Ryan Shapiro first started focusing his attention “government speech.” The court agreed. “The mes- on the food industry in 2005, as the recent wave of sage set out” in the industry’s ad campaigns, Justice expansive ag-gag laws were coming up for legislative Antonin Scalia declared in his majority ruling, “is debate. To expose how the government was collabo- from beginning to end the message established by rating with industry to monitor and discredit animal-­ the federal government.” rights activists, he began bombarding the FBI with Food-safety advocates are outraged that the foia requests. Finally, in 2012, the government asked same organizations that went to court specifically to a federal court to block Shapiro from obtaining more

JULY/AUG 2016 | 7 up front

documents from the FBI, arguing that the informa- the government and private industry are doing, all tion he was uncovering could be pieced together in of a sudden there’s this rhetoric of terrorism and ways that posed a threat to national security. attempts to shut off the flow of information.” “Whenever government or industry wants to As the food industry comes under increas- collect information about private individuals and ing scrutiny for its dangerous and often illegal advocacy groups, there’s unobstructed access,” says practices, Potter predicts, its efforts to evade pub- Will Potter, the Marsh Visiting Professor of Journal- lic scrutiny will only intensify. “Big agriculture is ism at the University of Michigan. “But when you really facing a crisis of public awareness,” he says. try to turn the tables even a little bit, and have jour- “foia is a critical tool, and the industry is trying to nalists or concerned citizens try to find out what cut it off at its knees.” a

BEYOND TEFLON

The ‘I’m Rubber, You’re Glue’ Candidate

Our analysis of every primary-season attack ad reveals how Donald Trump defied the conventional wisdom.

BY LAURA RESTON

IT WAS JUST before the New Hampshire primary the tried-and-true script of smearing an opponent in February. Jeb Bush, once the heir apparent in a with his own words. sprawling Republican field, was mired in fifth place. Except for one thing: It didn’t work. In debate after debate, he had been outmaneuvered The ad aired for seven straight days before vot- and humiliated by Donald Trump, whose reality-­ ers went to the polls in New Hampshire. Before it show instincts and merciless insults had turned the started, Trump was sitting at 33 percent. The day it GOP primaries into a demolition derby. But unlike his ended, he won the state with 35 percent of the vote. rivals, Bush had a campaign war chest big enough to And among voters who made up their minds during pick off anyone who stood in his path. So he did what the week the ad aired, more broke for Trump than candidates have always done when they’re plunging for Bush. in the polls: He flooded the airwaves with attack ads. For the past year, the new republic has tracked In the fiercest ad of the primary season, the Bush every political ad released by presidential candi- campaign set out to expose Trump as an unhinged dates and their super PACs. Of the 325 Republican bully. For two full minutes, the commercial cycles commercials in our online archive, 141 were attack ads—and Trump was the target of nearly half of them. His GOP rivals spent $75 million to assail him on everything from his Mafia connections to shady business deals to flagrant misogyny and racism. Brutal ad blitzes not only failed to dent But according to our analysis, the brutal ad blitz- Trump, they often made him stronger. es not only failed to dent Trump, they often made him stronger, shoring up his base and sending him surging in the polls. “People who support Trump could care less how many people attack him,” says Shanto Iyengar, a political science professor at Stan- through clips of Trump spewing outlandish insults ford University and the co-author of Going Negative, at John McCain, Carly Fiorina, and a disabled New a seminal book about political advertising. “To be York Times reporter. “I could stand in the middle of attacked by the elites, it is a red badge of courage. It Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” Trump brags, makes people more enthusiastic about him.” “and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” The ad was a classic example of campaign mudslinging, following CARTOON BY RAUL ARIAS

8 | NEW REPUBLIC JULY/AUG 2016 | 9 up front

THE FAILED AIR WAR The same scenario played out again and again It’s impossible, of course, to view any single cam- Trump’s rivals spent throughout the primary season. South Carolina, paign ad in complete isolation; a host of factors con- $75 million on attack deep in the Bible Belt, ought to have been Ted Cruz tribute to a candidate’s electoral results. But attack ads. They didn’t work: territory. Ten days before the Republican prima- ads have long been one of the most effective weap- ry, the Cruz campaign rolled out a series of ads ons in American political campaigns. According to $4,980,000 that aimed to expose Trump as a grasping devel- political scientists, campaign ads matter most in two Amount spent to attack oper and crooked power broker. One spot chron- situations: when voters know very little about a can- him in New Hampshire icled how Trump used eminent domain to force didate, or when one candidate is able to dramatically an elderly widow from her modest Atlantic City outspend another. “The general agreement was that 5% home to make way for a parking lot to accommo- the candidate who had a real firepower advantage, Trump’s poll increase date the sleek limousines visiting the Trump Plaza who could outspend their opponents, would stand during the ad blitz Hotel and Casino. “Trump bankrolled politicians to benefit,” Iyengar says. The math was simple: More to steamroll the little guy,” the narrator says. “A pat- money meant more ads, and more ads meant more tern of sleaze stretching back decades.” votes. In 2012, for example, Mitt Romney accrued Rather than rise in the polls, however, Cruz a massive financial advantage going into the pri- $15,700,000 dropped from 21 percent to 17 percent immediately maries and was able to use attack ads to pick off his Amount spent to after he began airing the attack ads. He eventually rivals one after another. attack him in Florida finished third, eclipsed by Marco Rubio. Trump held Now, as the focus shifts from the primaries to relatively steady, even as the attacks intensified, the general election, Hillary Clinton appears to 10% winning the state handily with 33 percent. be playing by the same playbook used by Trump’s Trump’s poll increase After South Carolina, Rubio stepped into the rivals. Less than a day after Cruz bowed out of the once the dust settled fray. In the week after he walloped Trump at the Republican race in May, clearing the way for Trump Republican debate in Houston, Rubio’s super PAC, to clinch the GOP nomination, Clinton’s campaign Conservative Solutions, raised $20 million for an released a short video on . assault on the front-runner. A dark-money group “He is a con artist,” Rubio begins. called the American Future Fund rolled out three “A phony,” Romney says. ads featuring middle-class Americans who had “Donald is a bully,” Cruz adds. spent $35,000 to enroll in Trump University cours- “This is an individual who mocked a disabled es that turned out, they said, to be a scam. “Ameri- reporter,” Romney says. ca, do not make the same mistake I did with Donald “The most vulgar person ever to aspire to the Trump,” a single mom named Sherri pleads in one presidency,” Rubio says. ad, her voice wavering. “I got hurt badly.” “He needs therapy,” Bush sighs in disgust. It’s possible that such broadsides by Trump’s vanquished rivals may hurt him more in the gener- al election than they did in the GOP primary. That’s certainly what strategists at Priorities USA Action Those who went after Trump and failed believe. Priorities USA, a super PAC founded by two warn that Clinton should think twice before White House veterans to combat the flood of cash relying on attack ads. pouring into Republican coffers after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, plans to serve as Clinton’s main attack dog this fall. For months, the group has been reserving prime airtime in battle- ground states and assembling dossiers of damning research on Trump. According to Justin Barasky, the As the attacks escalated through early March, communications director at Priorities USA, Trump’s however, Trump climbed ten points and finished GOP opponents effectively served as Clinton’s guin- with 46 percent. All told, outside groups and super ea pigs. “They saved us millions of dollars, because PACs ran 4,300 commercial spots hammering we could focus group their ads,” he says. “Some of Trump in Florida—more than twice the number these lines of attack are very effective against him in Trump funded to defend himself—only to see him the broader electorate.” rise in the polls. But those who went after Trump and failed warn “We’ve never seen anything like him,” says Jim that Clinton should think twice before relying on Duffy, a media strategist at the Democratic consulting​ attack ads. “For the last year, I have heard people firm Putnam Partners. “He defies every rule of saying that about Donald Trump,” says Fred Davis, a thumb in politics.” veteran Republican consultant who created multiple

10 | NEW REPUBLIC TV ads attacking Trump for New Day for America, strategies. Like Jeb Bush, she entered the race as her the super PAC that backed John Kasich. “But he party’s heir apparent—and Trump does best when swamped Jeb Bush and Chris Christie and Marco he’s being attacked by a political insider like Clinton. Rubio and Scott Walker—all these people who were “They better change their tactics,” Davis says. supposed to make mincemeat out of him.” “How many charges are left that people haven’t To take down a candidate who has defied every heard? They have already heard about the school rule of thumb in politics, Clinton may need to throw and the businesses that failed. His popularity is out the old playbook and start coming up with new increasing—not decreasing—with these attacks.” a

END MATTER

Pulp Friction

If Barnes & Noble goes out of business, it’ll be a disaster for book lovers.

BY ALEX SHEPHARD

EVEN BY THE standards of the ailing book publish- ing industry, the past year has been a bad one for THE RISE & FALL Barnes & Noble. After the company spun off its prof- OF BARNES & NOBLE itable college textbook division, its stock plunged nearly 40 percent. Its long-term debt tripled, 1971 to $192 million, and its cash reserves dwindled. Leonard Riggio buys Leonard Riggio, who turned the company into a company, then a single behemoth, has announced he will step down this Manhattan bookstore, summer after more than 40 years as chairman. At for $1.2 million. the rate it’s going, Barnes & Noble won’t be known as a bookseller at all—either because most of its space will be given over to games and gadgets, 1995 or, more ominously, because it won’t even exist. Jeff Bezos founds There’s more than a little irony to the impend- Amazon, holds early ing collapse of Barnes & Noble. The mega-retailer meetings at Barnes & that drove many small, independent booksellers Noble coffee shops. out of business is now being done in by the rise of Amazon. But while many book lovers may be tempted to gloat, the death of Barnes & Noble 2008 would be catastrophic—not just for publishing But the focus on sales masks the deeper degree Company hits its houses and the writers they publish, but for Amer- to which the publishing industry relies on Barnes peak, with 726 stores ican culture as a whole. & Noble. The retailer provides much of the in operation. If Barnes & Noble were to shut its doors, Ama- up-front cash publishers need to survive, in the zon, independent bookstores, and big-box retail- form of initial orders. Most independent book- ers like Target and Walmart would pick up some of stores can’t afford to buy many books in advance; 2009 the slack. But not all of it. Part of the reason is that a single carton of 24 books would represent a large Nook reader launches. book sales are driven by “showrooming,” the idea order. Amazon also buys few books in advance, It flops. “No one’s that most people don’t buy a book, either in print preferring to let supplies run down so as to prompt happy about it,” an or electronically, unless they’ve seen it somewhere online shoppers to “add to cart” because there are insider admits. else—on a friend’s shelf, say, or in a bookstore. “only five left in stock.” Even on the brink of closing, Barnes & Noble still Barnes & Noble, by contrast, often takes very accounts for as much as 30 percent of all sales for large initial orders. For books it believes will fly some publishing houses. off the shelves, initials can reach the mid-five

JULY/AUG 2016 | 11 up front

2013 figures—­hundreds of thousands of dollars that go National Book Awards. Without the initial orders After dismal holiday to the publisher before a single book is even sold. Barnes & Noble places, and the visibility its shelves season, company That money, in turn, allows publishers to run ads provide, breakout hits by relative unknowns—books announces it will close in magazines and on Facebook, send authors on like Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See or one-third of its stores. book tours, and pay for publicists. Without Barnes Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—will suffer. & Noble, it would become much harder for publish- In a world without Barnes & Noble, risk-averse ers to turn books into best-sellers. publishers will double down on celebrity authors 2015 Even if Barnes & Noble doesn’t close, publish- and surefire hits. Literary writers without proven Stock plunges by ers are already starting to suffer from the chain’s sales records will have difficulty getting published, 40 percent; long- decline. “What can happen is that their number of as will young, debut novelists. The most literary of term debt triples stores can shrink, their store footprint can shrink, so novels will be shunted to smaller publishers. Some to $192 million. that the number of titles on which they put meaning- will probably never be published at all. And rigor- ful advance orders can shrink,” says Mike Shatzkin, ous nonfiction books, which often require extensive an industry veteran. “Publishers are going to have to research and travel, will have a tough time finding a adjust to a model where they print what they know publisher with the capital to fund such efforts. will sell rather than what they hope will sell.” The irony of the age of cultural abundance is that Big-name authors, like Malcolm Gladwell or it still relies on old filters and distribution channels James Patterson, will probably be fine. So too will to highlight significant works. Barnes & Noble and writers who specialize in romance, science fiction, corporate publishers still have enormous strides to manga, and commercial fiction—genres with devot- make in fully reflecting America’s rich diversity. But ed audiences, who have already gravitated to Ama- without them, the kinds of books that challenge us, zon’s low prices. But Barnes & Noble is essential to that spark intellectual debates, that push society to publishers of literary fiction—the so-called “seri- be better, will start to disappear. Without Barnes & ous” works that get nominated for Pulitzers and Noble, we’ll be adrift in a sea of pulp. a

GOLD STANDARD

The Tumbler Tumblr

How hard-core gymnastics fans are revolutionizing the way the sport is covered.

BY ELSPETH REEVE

LOW BAR WHEN OLYMPIC GOLD medalist McKayla Maroney Launched just after the London Games, O’Beirne’s A sampling of how decided to announce her retirement from gymnas- podcast is part of the “gymternet,” a growing net- NBC has described tics in February, she didn’t talk to the Today show, or work of blogs and social media streams led by hard- female gymnasts: espn, or . She picked GymCastic, core fans that has upended the way women’s a weekly podcast run by a 41-year-old law librarian gymnastics is covered. “We wanted gymnastics to • Ever-perky in Orange County named Jessica O’Beirne. be treated like a normal sport,” O’Beirne explained • Diva Maroney, best known for her “unimpressed” face on her show. “To get the same press coverage all year • Petulance while accepting a silver medal for at the 2012 long, every year, that the NFL, the basketball, the • Slender in London, was just as open about hockey, all those sports get.” • Temperamental her true feelings on the podcast. She revealed she’d This summer, with the nearly unbeatable U.S. • This little gift been afraid to eat in front of her coaches, and was women’s team expected to bring home the gold • Little girl pressured to ignore serious injuries. When she broke in , the gymternet will serve as an • A kid off the cereal box her toe on the after arriving in Lon- antidote to the inane and sometimes sexist cov- • Playground don, she told O’Beirne, her coaches ordered her to erage provided by mainstream broadcasters. For • Pigtails and smiles hide it from the press. “Don’t limp; smile, make sure serious fans, the worst offender is NBC. When a • Eighteen and ancient you just look like you’re fine,” they told her. “Because gymnast was injured right before the 2008 Olym- • Sobbing that’s the only way you’re going to stay on this team.” pics, for example, NBC commentator Al Trautwig

12 | NEW REPUBLIC said, “It’s like having a tear in your wedding dress right before you walk down the aisle.” At the 2012 Games, he described Russian gymnasts as “divas” who are “temperamental” and exhibit “petulance to criticism.” The gymternet, by contrast, focuses more on ath- leticism than on the tears of teenage girls. One of the most popular sites, The Gymternet, is run by Lauren Hopkins, a 30-year-old fan who works in marketing at a New York law firm. Barely two years old, the site breaks news and provides injury reports, live blogs and analysis of competitions, interviews with elite gymnasts, and critiques of leotard fashion. Hopkins does both serious and silly, writing on everything from international politics (a 2012 decision by the sport’s governing body to devalue the Amanar vault corporation, and it’s a business, and they’re trying to was considered to be “specifically targeting the make money.” The way to do that, he said, is to pick Americans”) to why pigtails became popular at the “the most dramatic stories out there” and tell them 1972 Olympics (“This was the exact moment that over and over again, “because it’s what the casual the age of gymnasts in the sport shifted from women viewer wants.” to young girls, so it was out with the old debutante O’Beirne sees a paternalistic double standard updos and in with the charming youths!”). in the way female athletes like Maroney are told Initially, some of The Gymternet’s best sources to hide their injuries and smile for the cameras. were the parents of gymnasts. “Almost immediately, “A man that’s competing, or a teenage boy who’s I’d get parents emailing me little tidbits” of news, competing with an injury is a hero,” she says. “He’s Hopkins says. Now her followers include the biggest being a man, and he’s stepping up.” But a female names in the sport, as well as the professional jour- nalists who cover it for a living. At the American Cup in March, half the screens in the media pen were open to The Gymternet’s live blog. “The gymternet has an outsized influence, because there’s not a million places covering every- The gymternet focuses more on athleticism thing,” explains Reeves Wiedeman, who recently than on the tears of teenage girls. profiled three-time world champion for . “It’s only a handful of outlets, but they cover it so in-depth.” If The Gymternet is the New York Times of the gymnastics world, GymCastic functions a bit like Meet the Press: Top athletes and coaches sit for gymnast, she says, doesn’t feel she can tell report- interviews, and a panel of informed fans provides ers, “Fuck you! My foot hurts. I’m going to do what- analysis. Guests have included Biles and her coach ever gets me through the competition. If I have to Aimee Boorman, Olympic gold medalist Shannon limp or crawl my way back to the hotel room, that’s Miller, world champion , and Sovi- what I’m going to do.” et legend Boginskaya. On the night Biles In Rio this summer, Simone Biles will dazzle won her third national championship last year, one the world, doing the hardest flips with ease, with of Boorman’s first stops wasGymCastic —together, a shot at five gold medals. She even has her own they podcasted until 3 a.m. and ate an entire bag signature move: The “Biles” is a double backflip, her of Twizzlers. body stretched out straight like a pencil, with a half When O’Beirne launched GymCastic in 2012, she twist on the second flip. Serious fans already know took the fight directly to the enemy. Her very first that she’s as electrifying as LeBron James, and as guest was NBC commentator Tim Daggett, who was far ahead of her competition as Usain Bolt. Now, well aware that his network is unpopular among thanks to the gymternet, Biles and other female gymnastics junkies. “When you see a broadcast on gymnasts are finally getting the recognition and television,” Daggett confessed, “it’s not being put respect they deserve. It’s time for the rest of the together for a group like you guys. … NBC is a huge media to catch up. a

JULY/AUG 2016 | 13 body politic

BY JEET HEER If Goldwater was the GOP’s original dealer, Nixon was its first full-blown junkie. Like any decent recreational drug, whiteness ini- tially made the Republican Party feel good. It fueled a swing to the right that picked up many disaffected whites unhappy with the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. Following Nixon, it powered the national victories of Ronald Reagan and the George Bushes. But over time, the very drug that made the Republi- can Party so powerful slowly started to kill it. The way Barack Obama won in 2008 left Repub- licans feeling jittery about the future. Obama’s victorious coalition was built not only on a record turnout of African American voters, but also on overwhelming support from Latinos, Asian Amer- icans, and other nonwhites. He won three big Southern states—Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida—without pandering to conservative whites. And the groups that fueled his victory were increas- ing rapidly as a share of the electorate. Yet even as Republican leaders recognized the damage whiteness was doing to the party, they couldn’t give it up. They’d grown so accustomed to relying on the stuff that it was impossible to imagine life without it. Sure, they made a few half-hearted Breaking Mad attempts to kick the habit. They tried reaching out to minorities—think Jack Kemp’s “enterprise zones” The Republican Party is addicted to whiteness. for distressed urban neighborhoods, or George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives, which channeled federal funds to black churches. And they held up IMAGINE AN AUTOPSY that concludes the cause of a succession of figures—from Alan Keyes and J.C. death was a drug overdose. After the funeral, dis- Watts to Herman Cain and Ben Carson—as model traught family members assemble to talk about how black Republicans. But such efforts always carried they could have prevented such a senseless tragedy. a whiff of desperation. The party wasn’t changing Then, after brief reflection, they all decide to start its core policies and messages. It was just slapping a mainlining heroin. “postracial” patina over its fundamental whiteness. That, in a nutshell, is the history of the Republi- Not long after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, can Party over the past half-century. Republican National Committee chairman Reince The GOP is addicted to whiteness, a psychologi- Priebus convened party notables to conduct what cal drug it started ingesting in the early 1960s with was informally described as an “autopsy.” The result- the encouragement of Goldwater conservatives, ing set of recommendations had a bland and euphe- who argued that the party could win over the tra- mistic title: “Growth and Opportunity Project.” But ditionally Democratic white South by resisting the the autopsy itself was unusually blunt: The GOP lost civil rights movement. Richard Nixon was one of the 2012 presidential election because it had alien- the Republicans who initially had trepidations. “If ated young people and nonwhites. And in the future, Goldwater wins his fight,” he told Ebony magazine in the party’s whiteness would “tilt the playing field 1962, “our party would eventually become the first even more in the Democratic direction.” Between major all-white political party. And that isn’t good. 1980 and 2012, the autopsy noted, the white share That would be a violation of GOP principles.” of the electorate had plunged from 88 percent to Nixon was right. But like most party leaders, he 72 percent—a trend that would only accelerate. soon came around to the Southern Strategy, craft- The autopsy paid special attention to Hispanic ing a set of coded appeals to white resentment that voters, whom Romney had turned off in droves by helped him win the White House in 1968 and 1972. championing “self-deportation.” The RNC urged a dramatic remedy: Get behind comprehensive ILLUSTRATION BY PETER OWEN immigration reform.

14 | NEW REPUBLIC Instead, Republicans responded by doing the exact oppo- the true “missing” voters are Asian Americans and Latinos, who site. After a brief interlude in 2013, when Senate Republicans go to the polls at a lower rate than whites or blacks (though in the so-called Gang of Eight joined Democratic colleagues to Trump’s presence on the ballot could change that in November). try and forge an immigration deal, the party faced a grassroots But as dubious as Trende’s notion of missing white voters revolt and backed away from reform, stifling the measure in the may be, it speaks to a powerful longing in the Republican Party House of Representatives. to avoid changing its core policies to appeal to a broader swath The most notable about-face came from the senator who of American voters. When the GOP autopsy was released in seemed to embody the party’s best hope for recovery. Young, March 2013, it immediately received a harsh rebuke from talk Latino, and wired into popular culture, Marco Rubio helped radio’s kingpin of whiteness. “They think they’ve gotta rebrand, negotiate the original immigration deal, then distanced him- self from the measure after being stung by blistering nativist attacks from right-wing sites like Breitbart, which ran scare items claiming that undocumented migrants would be given free cell phones (dubbed “MarcoPhones”). Yet Rubio’s will- Trump’s meth-head politics ingness to betray immigration reform didn’t help him with white voters: When he ran for president, many conservatives offer an intense high. shunned him. Rubio’s dilemma over immigration was a microcosm of And the aftermath will be the Republican Party’s larger problem with race. Any move to make the party more inclusive precipitates an uproar from tooth-rottingly ugly. its overwhelmingly white base, which remains committed to stopping the very demographic changes the party needs to embrace. So rather than conquer its addiction to whiteness, the GOP has responded to the dwindling supply of white voters and it’s all predictable,” Rush Limbaugh told his millions of lis- by shooting up even faster, desperate to enjoy the high while teners. “They gotta reach out to minorities, they gotta moderate it still lasts. The party’s first response to Obama was the rise their tone here and moderate their tone there. Nonsense. The of the Tea Party, a nakedly nativist appeal to white unity. Now Republican Party lost because it’s not conservative. It didn’t get Republicans have doubled down by turning to Donald Trump, its base out in the 2012 election.” a presidential nominee far more openly racist than any national Versions of the “missing white voters” theory were put for- politician since the heyday of George Wallace. ward by both of the leading Republican candidates this year. Consider how much worse the GOP’s whiteness addiction Ted Cruz claimed that he would get millions of votes from evan- has grown in just the past four years. Mitt Romney was a powder- gelical conservatives who felt betrayed by mainstream Repub- cocaine Republican, a socially acceptable xenophobe offering licans. Trump, meanwhile, has boasted that he will attract the a high that made whites feel like masters of the universe: Still support of vast numbers of disaffected voters, most of them in charge here! Trump, by contrast, is dealing meth—a trailer-­ working-class whites. Cruz’s claim was soundly debunked park drug you take when you’ve given up hope and just want to during the primaries; Trump’s has yet to be tested beyond the get rip-roaring stoned. Compared to the country-club slickness narrow bounds of the GOP base. of Romney’s cocaine conservatism, Trump’s meth-head poli- More recently, Limbaugh has been spinning a whole new take tics are at least more honest. Instead of Nixonian euphemisms on the mythology of Republican denial: the idea that minori- about law and order, or Reaganite winks about welfare queens, ties actually adore Trump. This theory ignores every national Trump offers the intoxicating thrill of telling protesters and poll, focusing instead on the backing Trump received from the immigrants—them—to get the hell out. It’s an intense high. And vanishingly few nonwhite voters during the GOP primaries. the aftermath will be tooth-rottingly ugly. But that’s enough for Limbaugh. So the RNC wants to build a broad coalition? “Guess who’s doing it?” Limbaugh proclaimed ONE REASON REPUBLICANS so fiercely resist change is that in March. “Donald Trump is doing it! Donald Trump has put they’ve developed a complicated mythology of denial that together a coalition—whether he knows it or not, whether he winds around to a skewed conclusion: The party doesn’t need intended to or not—he’s put together a coalition that’s exactly to focus on nonwhite voters, because the real problem is that what the Republican Party says that it needs to win!” white conservatives are sitting out elections. After Romney’s It’s well known that Limbaugh once wrestled with OxyCon- loss, this thinking was given its most sophisticated form by tin abuse. But his suggestion that Trump will help the Repub- Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics, who argued that the defeat lican Party gain nonwhite voters sounds like the product of was the result of five to seven million “missing white voters.” far more powerful hallucinogens. That’s the way of addiction, As political scientist Ruy Teixeira has shown, Trende’s the- though. Come November, Republicans may discover that it’s ory rests on shaky ground, since voting by nonwhites declined too late to give up on whiteness. Because this time, it won’t just in 2012 at roughly the same rate as voting by whites. Besides, cost them an election. It may finally kill the party. a

JULY/AUG 2016 | 15 promised land

BY MICHAEL ERIC DYSON is indeed the most eventful of my lifetime, and per- haps the most important. Now that Trump has vanquished his primary foes, his final combat with the Democrats is fast approaching. But first comes the spectacle of his official coronation at the Republican National Con- vention in Cleveland. The question is no longer whether Republicans will come to their senses. The question is what those of us who care about America must do, given that they will not. I laughed when Trump paid me a compliment while imagining his own rise. I didn’t take him seri- ously, even a year ago. Who did? Very few of us. But now, when his offhand joke reads like prophecy, the circumstances demand more than good-natured forbearance or a witty riposte. Cleveland, the con- vention, is where we must begin to make our stand against Trump and the malignancy he represents. I know that these words can be read as a call to violence unseen at a national political convention since Chicago in 1968. So be it. As Martin Luther King Jr. taught us, it is a risk we must take. We have a positive moral obligation to protest the nomination of this racist demagogue for president. It is not simply a matter of voicing disappro- bation for Trump; his supporters, too, must be answered. They are driven by rage that a black man today still represents a nation that once held black We Must March on Cleveland folk in chains, and which still depends on the law to check their social and political aspirations. Barack The moral obligation to protest the Republican convention. Obama so spooked the bigoted whites of this coun- try that we are now faced with a racist explicitness that hasn’t emerged since the height of the civil “YOU’VE BEEN tough on me,” he said, “but I love you.” rights movement. It was last summer, and there I was, in the lobby Trump, more than anything else, signifies the of the NBC building in New York, confronted with undying force of the fear unleashed by Obama’s pres- the flaming orange visage that is Donald Trump. idency. He exploits the emotions dredged up by his He was being gracious. I had just finished criticiz- rhetoric, manipulating a confused and self-­pitying ing him on a daytime talk show, and our paths had white public. And so we must go to Cleveland, not crossed in front of the elevator bank. He comman- to derail Trump’s nomination. Instead, we protest deered my phone to ask my wife if I was treating to proclaim the man’s moral repugnance and politi- her well. Before we parted, he added, “If I had your cal illegitimacy. It is an opportunity, with the whole brains, I’d be president.” world watching, to declare Donald Trump the worst There’s no question that Donald Trump has of the American political mind and soul. “uuuuge” charisma, a brutally appealing magne- tism that amplifies the most virulent rumblings of THE TIME TO sit idly by has passed. To paraphrase racism, misogyny, and xenophobia this country has Marx, pundits and critics—and even sympathizers reckoned with in quite some time. Each election, with moral principles—interpret the world, but the we hear that this run for the presidency says more point is to change it. You can’t do that from the com- about who we are than any other—Obama defines fort of an office cubicle, through a tweet, or even in us, Reagan embodies us, Shrub will be the ruin of a church sanctuary. The deeds of hate being cooked us all. We’ve become inured to the get-out-the-vote up by Donald Trump, directly or implicitly, must be sales pitch; the nation endures. And yet this election met with the willingness of good folk to speak up, and most important, to show out. And with that ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS KINDRED knowledge, some Americans—and I expect many of

16 | NEW REPUBLIC them to be black—will venture to Cleveland with pure hearts not fully understand, or account for, is the deep-seated, intrac- and revolutionary intentions. table anger of white Americans who never viewed Obama as Yes, yes, some will say—but not all Republicans are like the answer to any question or desire they’d ever had. Donald Trump, or even like Trump. We must take care not to harm Trump has taken advantage of these people, harangued them potential allies at the convention. It is true that the Republi- and praised them, promised them a different transformation, can establishment has finally, though unconvincingly, rebelled one that returns the country to what they would like to believe against Trump. But it was these same “reasonable” Republicans it once was: theirs. who ignored his early impact—declined to give him oxygen, as We have moved backwards in so many ways since the high they say—and refused to listen to those who insisted that his point of Obama’s first election. Our only hope to preserve the vitriol was destructive to the country. As long as it didn’t impact first, fragile tendrils of the new era that it promised is to say Republican interests, the lives Trump imperiled didn’t matter. Now those same Republicans are angry, and ashamed, and fear- ful of what Trump has become. But let us not forget that Fran- kenstein is the name of the doctor who invented the monster, not the monster itself. The party for which he is now standard-­ bearer must be held accountable for his creation. The party for which Trump My views would most likely contradict the counseled civil- ity of Barack Obama. He has taken recently to chastising Black is now standard-bearer Lives Matter—chiding them for shouting down politicians when they should instead be listening. It seems unlikely that must be held accountable for he’d countenance a physical resistance against those who have enabled the American instinct for antipathy. Black lives, he his creation. would say, ought not be lost to the police—who are too rarely able to distinguish whether black folk commit crimes or are themselves the crime. He is right in this regard. But it sad- dens me that the central figure arousing the white fury that has no to Donald Trump. Those of us who rallied around Obama, engulfed America would discourage the vigorous response of no matter our disappointment in what he failed to deliver, or black people who don’t cotton to his centrist reform values. what we failed to demand of him, should remember that much For me, this is the great risk inherent in unforgiving protest good came of his presidency, not least in that it kept at bay the in Cleveland. On Trump’s long roster of “others”—black folks, political goons who would feed poison to our nation’s fevered women, Latinos, Muslims, all those he has maligned or threat- racial imagination. ened or undermined—blacks will likely suffer the most. Black I would argue that to resist the sweep of malevolence signi- bodies in America are carriers of the most virulent strain of oth- fied by Trump’s prominence is a tragic counterpoint to a vote erness. Our existence is a viral bad act that must be contained, for Obama in 2008. It is the only way to find the right side under any circumstance, even legal political protest. The police of history again. There is no option but to go to Cleveland, to might take for themselves the role of white hero, bravely acting raise our voices, put our bodies to work, and maybe even at to arrest “black thuggery” before it can spread, or in the case of risk. What injury may come seems meager in comparison to the dissent, before it can even begin. In calling for confrontation, I social violence that Trump’s election portends. No more com- am probably bringing down the worst violence against my own pelling is the belief that street protest at the convention could people, asking them—us—to stand in the vanguard of challeng- cause even greater divides throughout the country. The rac- ing bias and hatred. The penalties will be higher for my people ism, misogyny, and nativism that would be unleashed during a than for others. But then, there is nothing new in that. Trump administration would be far worse than any conflict that It wasn’t so long ago, just eight years, that Obama led mil- could arise from legitimate protest. lions of white Americans to believe that they were voting for a How bad could it be in Cleveland? It’s hard to say. If the transformational figure. He would change the country perma- force used against Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson nently for good. A vote for him was a vote for decency and intel- and Oakland and is any gauge, it may be very bad ligence to prevail over hate and chaos. It meant, simply, being on indeed. But if King proved anything, it’s that the threat of vio- the right side of history. Yet his impact has been so quickly and lence mustn’t dissuade from acting those who would do good. thoroughly eclipsed by a pervading sense of racial and national In fact, King used violence, integrating it into his strategy of doom. What many of us didn’t see coming is that Obama’s suc- civil disobedience. Displays of white madness let the nation cess would contain the roots of his failure. The election of the in on its dirty secret: It was willing to blast black bodies with nation’s first black president tapped into a deep vein of escapist water hoses, and unleash police dogs on innocent black flesh. hope, a painless way to heal our historic wounds. And too many King sacrificed black bodies to make white America look plainly people—more than I could bear to imagine—resented Obama’s at its barbarism. Trump’s convention may be the next proving rise and began to plan for his, and our, demise. What we did ground for this costly technique. a

JULY/AUG 2016 | 17 REBOOT THE WORLD The internet was supposed to be democratic and open to all. Then Facebook and the NSA got their hands on it. Is it too late to reclaim our digital future?

BY PAUL FORD

The ICL 7500, released in the 1970s, was one of the earliest office computers.

18 | NEW REPUBLIC “SOME BUDDIES OF mine need your help with a database,” my seen that before: a man in a cold, air-conditioned room friend said. sweating, slightly wild-eyed. “I’m good at databases,” I replied. “And I like to help.” “I just need to know,” he said. “How bad is it?” So I found myself in a large conference room with two I started with last names. nervous men who wanted to know exactly how exposed they “That’s not me,” said the other man. “That’s my brother. were by the Ashley Madison leak. They wanted me to look inside I’ll have to talk with him.” the leaked data to see if I could find any traces of their exploits. We found some profiles, and I read them. Walks on the “I can do this,” I said. beach. Long nights, fine wines. Nothing cruel or strange. This was several leaks ago, so a refresher: Ashley Madison We also found records of credit card transactions. They’d is a web site that helps you have affairs. You enter your signed up, left a trail, and it was still there. One of them personal information and the site lets you look at other people had a credit card connected to his home address. His friend who have also entered their information. Then you can shook his head. Poor bastard. make arrangements to have sex with these other people. And “OK,” the man said. “It’s better to know.” because it is digital, it felt anonymous, which meant you Once there was a time when if you wanted to have an affair, could structure the social interactions so that no one in your you had to take charge of keeping it a secret. Wink slyly at a immediate vicinity (spouse, children) would ever know. prospective lover and receive a subtle nod in return. Leave Ashley Madison is a heavily advertised digital product, a scented note in a mailbox. Meet at a motel off the main and until the leak it was doing pretty well. Roughly 35 million route. Pay the bill in cash; never call your lover’s house. Ashley people had signed up, and presumably more than one of Madison’s innovation was that it took care of all that for them had sexual intercourse without the knowledge of their you. The entire come-on of the site was that it would make spouses. By which I mean wives—the users were seamless—frictionless—something that had previously been overwhelmingly men. difficult and time-consuming. All while reducing the risk. Then it all went pear-shaped. One day last summer, an It seemed safe and secure, but it wasn’t. Ashley Madison individual or individuals known as “The Impact Team” knew what you told it: name, email address, sometimes a determined that all of the information in the Ashley Madison home address. It knew your credit card information, provided database should be made public. This was a lot of data: so that you could pursue conversations and thus sex. It tens of millions of names, addresses, profiles, and credit card promised anonymity, but the service it delivered was sitting transactions. The database, in essence, was Ashley Madison. right in the middle of a world of transactional processing. It felt as if a nuclear bomb had gone off in the datasphere. Thirty-five million individuals had placed responsibility for The files were spread through the BitTorrent network, which the continuance of their marriages and relationships in the meant that lots of people could easily download them; it also hands of a single company. Ashley Madison was a massive, meant that the files were difficult to suppress, because they centralized agglomeration of indiscretion. were so widely distributed. I downloaded the database in anticipation of my new The internet was once a highly decentralized system. In friends’ arrival. And while I was unimpressed by the database the earliest days, there were no large corporations or service itself—the typical mess of MySQL fields, with functional but providers like Ashley Madison or Facebook or Twitter, or hardly exemplary data modeling—I was staggered by its scope, behemoth databases to house your information. If you wanted the fact that one big database could serve all these people to join up, you plugged in a computer and found a connection looking for affairs. It was the encapsulation of so much human through a service provider, and that was basically it. You were desire. I poked around. Then, seeing a name I recognized, online. Your computer was a “peer” of the other computers. I stopped poking around. It wasn’t worth knowing. It was a computocracy. One of the visitors was sweating as he handed me a list of When the web came along, it was the same. You wanted to names written in pencil on the back of an envelope. I’d never say something, so you ran a web server on a computer. You put some web pages in a folder. Your web server waited, night PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES BALL and day, for other computers to ask it for pages and files, and

JULY/AUG 2016 | 19 across the web, it turned out, are a chore to manage. You need to update the copyright statement at the bottom of every page you’ve published, because you’re in a new year. Or you need to wipe the CEO’s name from all the pages after he resigned in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal. Doing that one page at a time would be a real pain. At the same time, it became possible to rent access to a database on a server somewhere. To solve this too-many-pages problem, people began to put their “content” into databases, and then publish everything through consistent, replicable “templates.” As a result, every page on your web site—and everyone else’s—eventually came to look roughly the same. Data went into the database via forms and came out via templates. Content was thusly managed. To change the copyright notice across all 100,000 pages of your retro sneaker site, you only needed to change a single line of one template. The CEO’s photo could be briskly removed and replaced by the photo of the new, interim CEO. This was obviously a better state of affairs. Soon the home page, which had enabled individual A TR 48 desktop computer from the 1960s. expressions of interest in mycology or Star Trek or bondage, was subsumed by the blog, which brought form and chronological order to the universe of web content. Tools like Movable Type, Blogger, and Typepad emerged, which “hosted” then sent those files back over the network. The servers were your content in their databases. No longer did people tend still off on their own, but now they could talk to each other. their own digital gardens. The gardens were tended for them. That’s really all there is to it. It is, at its core, a wonderfully Freed from the need to build and manage their own web autonomous, independent, and decentralized arrangement. sites, people could do more social things with their computers. Anyone can set up a web site and point to all the other web They could talk to each other, start conversations, argue pages. Everyone is a publisher. Everyone is a peer. That’s endlessly. They could leave private messages. Many found a why it’s called a web. Individuals knit themselves together by community. And the companies that hosted the databases linking to one another. Everyone tends his or her own little found a business model. Make the messages short, and adapt epistemological garden, growing ideas from seed and sharing the database to manage millions of “friends” and “followers” them with anyone who comes by. (Friendster, then Twitter). Make a blogging engine that allows Yet as the web grew, the problem of finding information you to post short updates and keep track of your friends arose. Search engines were needed that could crawl across the (MySpace, then Facebook). The computocracy was now web, indexing the words in web pages; this way someone something else—a Googlopoly. could type a word in a box and the machine could consult its The technology that let people make web sites never went index and list the pages that matched. But once you do that away. You can still set up a site as if it were 1995. But culture successfully, you have created something that appeals to larger changes, as do expectations. It takes a certain set of skills to forces. The search engine has power over other pages—you’re create your own web site, populate it with cool stuff, set no longer a peer. up a web server, and publish your own cool-stuff web pages. Imagine you had a huge bread machine and an enormous I would argue that those skills should be a basic part of living bag of flour. You made so much bread that you gave some in a transparent and open culture where individuals are able to away. And people came to eat the free bread, and they liked it communicate on an equal field of play. Some fellow nerds and wanted more. They told their friends. Free bread! People would argue the same. But most everyone else, statistically, just just kept coming—ten people; 100; 100,000; 100,000 million. uses Facebook and plays along. A googol. To keep up with demand, you find yourself in need There’s an obvious connection between a decentralized of not just more flour, but more bread machines. Fortunately, internet, in which individuals create and oversee their own there are companies that are willing to pay you—not for your digital identities, and a functioning democracy, in which we bread, but for the right to say, “This bread was brought to you make informed choices about who rules us and how we are by…” All because you’ve done the work of getting a lot of ruled. Yet too few people make that link. We live in a world in people in one place to eat free bread. Eventually you turn out which sensitive information of every conceivable sort—financial, enough loaves that you’re designing wearable technology and sexual, medical, legal, familial, governmental—is now self-driving cars. kept, and presumably guarded, online. It’s guarded in gigantic There were other technical demands that chipped away at treasure chests labeled “important data here.” So many plums the decentralized nature of the internet. All those files spread for hackers to pluck.

20 | NEW REPUBLIC If you don’t take care of yourself online, someone else will. software corporations in utility, user-base, and network That someone is likely not a peer but a megacorporation valuation,” writes David Johnston, managing director of the that is tracking and selling your preferences in a silent auction, Dapps Fund, which helps bankroll decentralized consumer a government surveilling your movements and religious apps. There will always be money to be made in big and few. affiliations, or a hacker collective that feels entitled to publish But there is also money—lots of it—in small and many. your sexual indelicacies. That someone probably already is. Think of Bitcoin, which pioneered a block chain model of financial transactions that has been used by millions. Or So what is the alternative? For starters: In a utopian vision of Ethereum, which raised $18 million in a single crowd-funding a better, devolved-but-more-human internet, I would never post to your database. There’d be zillions of personal data sets, and every individual would have the technical capacity and social resolve to share only what they wanted, plus the power to revoke information from the commons. It’s much easier to load my thoughts into someone else’s little box and hit “Submit” If you don’t take care of (perhaps the most well-chosen interface word of all time). But submission comes at a price. My personal information, my yourself online, someone else finances, my family connections, my ideas—all are now in the hands of those to whom I have submitted. will. That someone is The temptations of centralization are powerful. With a few employees you can make something worth a billion dollars, likely a megacorporation. as Instagram did. You don’t need to worry about advertising. You just create a situation where a larger company sees an opportunity to insert lots of ads. People are desperate to buy places to insert lots of ads so they can resell those places, which is what Facebook did when it bought Instagram. It bought campaign for its secure, peer-to-peer platform for consumer future ad inventory. No one is paying attention to individuals transactions. Or all those little apps on our phones—those online, at least not any more. There’s no money in it. What they incredible pocket supercomputers—talking to billions of other are looking for is tens of millions of people all in one place, little apps. This is how file-sharing networks already work. moving in one direction. If you’re Facebook, you need to get BitTorrent uses “trackers” to keep, well, track of the files that in front of that mass of humanity; you need to define their people are sharing; the software functions as a tiny server. destiny. You need centralization. “I am here,” it says. “I have these files, some in completeness Standing against this tide of centralization is the indie web and others in parts. I seek parts of some files as well.” And movement. (And hackers, the black hat kind and otherwise.) that signal goes out to one or more trackers, and then to other Perhaps “movement” is too strong—it’s more an aesthetic of clients, and in this way files are distributed. This was independence and decentralization. The IndieWebCamp how the centralized Ashley Madison database was ultimately web page states: “When you post something on the web, it decentralized, by force. Someone took the pirated data, should belong to you, not a corporation.” You should own zipped it up, and made it available as one big torrent. An older, your information and profit from it. You should have your own smaller internet protocol brought down a newer, larger, servers. Your destiny, which you signed over to Facebook corporatized database. in order to avoid learning a few lines of code, would once again Making a shift to a more democratized internet won’t be be your own. easy. Once you start to rally your energies toward a more But an affair? That’s trickier. A decentralized dating system open future, you will be shocked by the forces arrayed against would end up being a lot like Bitcoin—confusing, briefly you; the intransigence of the people who want to buy and exciting, and overpopulated by desperate, libertarian men. And sell your information; the amorality of the hackers who play the sites would be vulnerable, hackable. But big decentralized with millions of people for sport; the cold, endemic corruption systems have many points of failure, rather than just one. The of intellectual property and patent law; the infinite protections government could still spy on you, but the damage would be for copyright. It can get a person down. limited. The data wouldn’t be in one place. We could still live in that decentralized world, if we I’m not proposing some sort of digital back-to-the-land, wanted to. Despite the rise of the all-seeing database, the communal-living, anti-regulation paradise that does away core of the internet remains profoundly open. I can host it with food-delivery apps and secure online banking. I am an from my apartment, on a machine that costs $35. You can avid self-publisher and web site geek, but I also make a living link to me from your site. Just the two of us. This is an age as a paid client of centralizers. of great enterprise, no time to think small. Yet whatever Oddly, the people most excited about peer-to-peer enormous explosion tears through our digital world next technologies are not hackers but bankers. “Decentralized will come from exactly that: an individual recognizing the applications will someday surpass the world’s largest potential of the small, where others see only scale. a

JULY/AUG 2016 | 21 THE GHOSTS OF FUKUSHIMA

It’s been five years since the meltdown forced them to abandon their village. Now they’re going home. Can a town devastated by nuclear disaster be brought back to life?

BY STEVEN FEATHERSTONE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER BLAKELY

Radioactive waste from the evacuation zone is stored at massive dump sites. In Naraha, thousands of decontamination workers dug up and disposed of a two-inch layer of soil around every building in town.

22 | NEW REPUBLIC JULY/AUG 2016 | 23 Hisao Yanai, a one-armed, chain-smoking, retired risk for cancer by .005 percent. For a smoker like Yanai, yakuza boss, stands alone behind the bar at Ippei, the restaurant cigarettes pose a far greater threat than radioactive fallout. he owns in the Japanese town of Naraha. There are no Like many residents, however, Yanai distrusts the customers today. The streets outside the restaurant are deserted. government. Surveys indicate that half of all evacuees don’t Five years ago, on March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake and plan to return home. The cleanup effort is widely viewed tsunami triggered a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi as political theater, designed to whitewash Fukushima in time nuclear power plant, located ten miles north of Naraha, forcing for the 2020 Olympics. Encouraging evacuees to return the evacuation of roughly 160,000 people. Half of them home now would also put an early stop to some compensation still cannot go home. Last fall, Naraha became the first town payments, which aren’t set to expire until 2018. The in Fukushima’s mandatory evacuation zone to reopen fully, government, in short, has a financial incentive to strong-arm allowing all 7,400 residents to return. Nothing like it had ever mayors into reopening towns before they’re ready, or even been attempted before. Could a town despoiled by radiation properly decontaminated. be summoned back to life? “The central government pressured us to lift the evacuation When I visit Naraha in the fall of 2015, not long after order,” Yanai says. “Nobody in town wanted it, because it reopens, only 150 residents have returned. (The number nothing is prepared.” His restaurant remains the only place in has since risen to 500.) Most are elderly. The town seems Naraha where you can get a beer. In the two weeks I spent abandoned, like a seaside resort in the off-season. With no in town, I saw only two people dining at Ippei. Behind the bar, functioning banks, schools, or even a post office, Naraha has the hands on the clock are frozen at 2:47, the moment when reverted to the rural backwater that Yanai escaped 50 years the earthquake hit. Yanai has vowed not to reset it until life in ago as a high school dropout. At 15, he ran off to Tokyo and Naraha returns to normal. learned to drive a dump truck during the construction boom One day, Yanai invites me to his home, to see the results of leading up to the 1964 Olympics. At 16, he lost his left arm the government’s decontamination program. His house sits on to a conveyor belt at a quarry. Eventually, he returned to a hilltop, ringed by a concrete wall. When I arrive, Yanai is Naraha and went to work at Fukushima Daiichi, which was sitting at a picnic table, smoking. Thick weeds mark the border flooding the area with high-paying jobs and government of the decontaminated buffer zone around his house. Before it subsidies. Naraha, once known in as “the Tibet of was decontaminated, radiation levels in Yanai’s yard measured Fukushima,” had suddenly been thrust into the nuclear age. 10 microsieverts per hour—nearly 50 times higher than the “The nuclear plant changed the history of this town,” government’s allowable limit. Yanai says. “They told us it was 100 percent safe.” “There are still places in town that measure 10 micro­sieverts,” Naraha still has the outward appearance of a sleepy farming Yanai says. He walks over to the corner of his garage, which community, with tidy neighborhoods separated by rice houses a dusty Mercedes resting on flat tires, and points to paddies, fruit orchards, and two rivers tumbling to the sea from a patch of gravel beneath a downspout. This particular spot, the nearby Abukuma Mountains. Since decontamination he says, was decontaminated three times, because rain kept began about 18 months after the disaster, thousands of workers washing radioactive particles off the garage roof. Government equipped with little more than garden tools have cut down contractors excavated the hot spot each time, but only after trees, power-washed streets, and peeled off a two-inch layer of Yanai filed a request through the town office. radioactive soil in a 65-foot perimeter around every structure “If you don’t ask,” Yanai shrugs, “they won’t do it.” in town. Vast fields and mountainsides have been left largely The government has strict decontamination guidelines, but untouched, save for large burial mounds of black plastic bags in the field practices are often improvised. At Yanai’s house, filled with low-level radioactive waste that metastasized across contractors dumped wheelbarrow-loads of contaminated dirt the landscape as the work progressed. in a corner of his garden. There’s no blueprint for remediating a radioactive town “Look, I’m a nice guy,” says Yanai, grinning. He crushes and then moving people back into it. After the 1986 nuclear a cigarette butt into the gravel with his heel. “I said, ‘Fine, disaster in Chernobyl, the simply abandoned if you want to dump it there, I’m not going to say anything. scores of towns. But in a country as densely populated But if you do the same thing in the neighbor’s yard, they as Japan, abandoning an area the size of Connecticut wasn’t might shoot you.’ ” an option. In a concerted push to resettle all but the most Yanai is keen to show me his menagerie. His prized severely contaminated areas, the government has spent specimen is Boo, a boar named for the sound, in Japanese, that $31 billion on the cleanup effort, and a staggering $58 billion a pig makes. After the Fukushima disaster, wild boars came in compensation payments to evacuees. down from the mountains and roamed the evacuation zone, The government maintains that it is safe for residents to tearing up gardens and ransacking houses. They can still be return to Naraha. Radiation levels in the central part of town seen in Naraha, trotting along the road at night. Boo is the size average less than 1 millisievert per year—the maximum of a small, snaggle-toothed dog. He snorts and gnaws at allowable exposure for ordinary citizens under guidelines set Yanai’s shin. “They’re not very friendly to people,” says Yanai, by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. shooing the pig away with his foot. “But I’m determined to An annual dose of 1 millisievert would increase a resident’s make him my pet.”

24 | NEW REPUBLIC Of the 500 villagers who have returned to Naraha, most are elderly. It is a town without children.

Although Yanai professes to be retired from the Japanese confidence while posing next to a brightly colored illustration Mafia, his years as a yakuza boss have left him with wealth, of Naraha’s future. “The clock that was stopped,” he declared, influence, and a fearsome reputation. It was rumored that he’d “has now begun to tick.” served time in prison for assault. After the nuclear disaster, A few weeks later, I meet Matsumoto at the town hall. he used his mojo to force the big construction companies Scattered among the office’s sober furnishings are stuffed in charge of the cleanup to hire local firms as subcontractors. toys portraying Naraha’s mascot, an anthropomorphic yellow “In a way,” he says, “the disaster was a good thing.” citrus fruit named Yuzutaro. Between sips of green tea, Stepping onto the patio in back of his house, Yanai reaches Matsumoto speaks in a soft monotone. To hear him tell it, into a galvanized steel tub full of water and pulls out a goldfish running a radioactive ghost town for more than three years as big as a grapefruit. There is a technique to feeding them, he was marginally more eventful than a meeting of the zoning observes. “Do it too quick and they die.” commission. He attended countless meetings with government It’s obvious that Yanai misses being a yakuza boss. He is officials and oversaw infrastructure repairs. When he speaks still bending creatures to his will, only now it’s a quirky of the town, the word “radiation” rarely crosses his lips. Instead, hobby. He has a wife and daughter, but they live in Tokyo. he prefers vague euphemisms like “environment.” “It must get lonely here,” I venture. I ask him to describe what evacuees are most concerned “That’s true,” says Yanai, releasing the goldfish back into about. At first, he says, they were “quite angry” about “the the tub. He watches the fish rejoin its companions. “When environmental conditions of the town.” I get home they’re waiting for me. They don’t complain if “And now?” I ask. they’re hungry, but they’ll die if I don’t take care of them.” “Now there are no problems,” he says, “and people have become tranquil.” Later, as I talk to more residents, it becomes clear that this At the ceremony to mark Naraha’s reopening, characterization is a vast overstatement. It’s obvious to even Mayor Yukiei Matsumoto performed the banal civic rituals the most casual observer that only old people are returning to required of mayors everywhere. He planted a tree using a gold Naraha. If young people are afraid to raise children here, shovel, celebrated with a group of children, and projected I ask Matsumoto, what kind of future is there for Naraha?

JULY/AUG 2016 | 25 “Naturally we want everybody to come back,” he says. than 1 millisievert per year, which is what the government “Elderly people are coming back first.” He places his teacup on set for exposure to the public. That’s the reality I want people the table. “But if the children do not come back here, the to understand.” town cannot exist.” I ask him if he is happy with the government’s For a moment, Matsumoto seems surprised by his own decontamination efforts. Matsumoto chuckles. “Let me candor. Then he hastens to obfuscate it. Leaning forward in say I’m not 100 percent satisfied,” he says. For further his chair, he redefines Naraha’s existential dilemma as a simple details, he refers me to Hiroyuki Igari, the town’s director misunderstanding. Naraha is completely safe, he asserts. of radiation measurement. Parents with young children just need a little more convincing A week later I speak to Igari, a churlish man with a to return. One thing his office could do, he suggests, is dosimeter badge—a device that measures a person’s cumulative to “make the environment around the schools better. Also we radiation exposure—hanging on a lanyard around his neck. need to do something to make the parents understand.” If anything, he insists, the government is actually overstating “Understand … what?” the amount of radiation that residents are being exposed to. “Regarding the issue of—radiation,” says Matsumoto, “I live in Naraha,” he says. “I commute to work. Sometimes searching for a more diplomatic word. “People have their own I stop by the store. Then I go home. That’s my routine.” He yanks ideas about what’s safe. But actually, in Naraha, it’s lower on the dosimeter. “After two weeks, it’s obvious from this dosimeter that my exposure won’t exceed 1 millisievert per year.” While Igari doesn’t put any stock in the notion that the government is pressuring towns like Naraha to reopen prematurely, he acknowledges that the cleanup is imperfect. In his view, the government has done a poor job of educating people about radiation, and its standards for mopping up recurring hot spots like the one in Yanai’s yard are nonexistent. But he believes that radiation isn’t a determining factor in whether people choose to return. “People who were stressed in the temporary houses, they just want to come home. They don’t care about dose rates,” Igari says. “People who don’t return are used to their new lives. They’re used to living under one roof. But now they’re split up, and they don’t want to leave their families again.” But dosimeter readings and official reassurances have done nothing to alter a more fundamental reality: In post-Fukushima Japan, nuclear safety is a bankrupt concept. Officials like Mayor Matsumoto who use the word “safe” in an absolute sense echo the corporate propaganda of companies like Tokyo Electric Power Company, the disgraced utility that owns Fukushima Daiichi. As the son of a tepco salaryman, Matsumoto has spent his career working the levers of a political machine that is oiled with money from the nuclear industry. Yet in the aftermath of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters, he still believes himself to be a credible authority on the relative safety of low-dose radiation. The truth is that there’s no such thing as a “safe” dose of radiation, only gradations of risk. Epidemiological studies show that cancer risk increases in tandem with radiation dose, but we know very little about the risks associated with doses below 100 millisieverts per year. Denying that risk contradicts most people’s inherent understanding of safety as a cost-benefit equation. A patient who agrees to a CAT scan of their head, for example, knows that the diagnostic benefit outweighs any increased risk for brain cancer. Matsumoto prefers to focus on the benefit side of the equation, which doesn’t require him to invent new euphemisms Tokuo Hayakawa (top), chief monk at Naraha’s 600-year-old temple, believes the town can’t be revived: “Naraha isn’t a for “radiation.” He points to the brand new secondary school place to live anymore.” Hisao Yanai (bottom), a retired yakuza that will open next year, as well as a $50 million retrofit of boss, returned without his wife and daughter. J-Village, a national soccer training facility presently serving

26 | NEW REPUBLIC as a staging ground for 7,000 nuclear workers, which will open regulators promoted the absolute safety of nuclear power, and in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. tepco executives operated with little or no oversight. This “It’s going to be big news,” says Matsumoto. conspiracy of complacency led to dangerous practices, such There are also plans for a new hotel, office building, and a as locating diesel generators at Fukushima Daiichi in areas that “compact town” that will house a supermarket, pharmacy, home were vulnerable to flooding—a factor that contributed directly center, and medical clinic. A robotics research facility is due to to the disaster. Last February, three former tepco executives open this summer. And thanks to government subsidies, ten were charged with criminal negligence for their role in the companies, including a battery-maker, a pharmaceutical firm, nuclear meltdown. and a steel manufacturer, are thinking of moving to Naraha. For its investment in Naraha, Tokyo got a showpiece to justify the trillions of yen it’s pouring into Fukushima. Since the disaster, only two of Japan’s 42 operable nuclear reactors have reopened over public protests, and the nuclear industry is desperate for a public relations coup. As we part, Matsumoto There’s no blueprint for repeats the promise he made personally to Prime Minister remediating a radioactive Shinzo Abe. “I told the prime minister that we’re not going to town and then moving simply reconstruct the town—we’re going to be a model town of the reconstruction,” Matsumoto says, beaming with people back into it. conviction. “We’re going to do that, and you’re going to see it.”

Convoys of construction vehicles rumble continuously down Route 6, the coastal highway that runs Hayakawa didn’t want to return to Naraha, but he had through Naraha and connects the boomtown of Iwaki to the no choice. “I cannot abandon the temple,” he says. “There ghost towns of the restricted zone clustered around the nuclear are family tombs here.” Besides, he feels too old to start a plant. Built for the 1964 Olympics, Route 6 was instrumental new life. He had his hopes set on his grandson taking in nudging the region out of rural isolation and onto the over for him. But the disaster eliminated that possibility. planning maps of authorities in charge of Japan’s nascent “I am definitely the last one,” he says. “It’s clear that nuclear energy program. Within a decade, Naraha and its Naraha isn’t a place to live anymore.” neighbors became charter members of Japan’s “nuclear village,” a network of company towns that received government subsidies in return for hosting nuclear power plants. “The monk was opposed to the nuclear Tokuo Hayakawa was a young man in 1967 when tepco plant from the beginning,” says Toshimitsu Wakizawa, a began building Fukushima Daiichi. He is the chief monk at gregarious 67-year-old newspaper deliveryman who seems to Naraha’s 600-year-old Hyokoji temple, and an ardent know everybody in Naraha. “And everything he said came true.” antinuclear activist. I visit Hayakawa on two occasions, and When I approach him, Wakizawa is gathering sticks each time he wears a white no nuclear plant button in his front yard. Japanese people don’t generally engage in pinned to his lapel. conversations with strangers, to say nothing of American “Since tepco started operating here, nobody believed what journalists who walk up to them unannounced. But Wakizawa they were saying about safety,” Hayakawa says. And yet the chats with me as if we’ve been neighbors for years. He points utility was able to build not just one, but two nuclear plants in to houses that are going to be demolished because their owners Fukushima prefecture: Daiichi and Daini. (Daini was also aren’t coming back. damaged by the tsunami, narrowly averting a meltdown.) How “I thought 30 percent might return,” he says, “But now could tepco accomplish this, I ask, if nobody thought the I think it’ll be 20 percent, or even less.” plants were safe? Wakizawa doesn’t blame his neighbors for preferring the “As a foreigner, it’s really difficult for you to understand,” conveniences of city life in Iwaki, where 80 percent of Naraha’s Hayakawa says after a long pause. “There’s an atmosphere evacuees went during the disaster, to the preternatural that keeps people from raising their voices. If something is quiet of their hometown. “It’s even worse here than before the dangerous, they can’t say it’s dangerous. If something isn’t nuclear plants were built 40 years ago,” he says. “When I right, they can’t say it’s not right.” drive up Route 6, I don’t see any life, not even insects. Around Social unity is a bedrock feature of Japanese culture, 8 o’clock it’s scary, because nobody’s here.” especially in rural areas. The inbred politics of the nuclear village Wakizawa is preparing to move back to Naraha in a few exploited this tendency, fusing the emphasis on communal days to restart his newspaper delivery business. “People want harmony with corporate interests. Questioning the safety of the to read the obituaries,” he says. “That’s why they want nuclear plant was akin to disavowing one’s family, friends, and the local newspapers—to see who died and what the radiation neighbors. For decades, skeptics bit their tongues, government levels are.”

JULY/AUG 2016 | 27 In May, residents planted one of the town’s first rice crops since the disaster. Many believe Naraha’s water is still too contaminated to drink.

Today there are only 50 houses on Wakizawa’s delivery Naraha’s “business district” consists of route, down from 250 before the disaster. “The town is a single prefab metal shed tucked in a corner of the town hall disappearing,” he says. He’s troubled by the sense of alienation parking lot. It contains a diner named Takechan, owned and he feels in Naraha’s desolate neighborhoods. People live operated by Miyuki Sato and her husband, who commute an alone, outside the traditional support networks of neighbors hour to and from Iwaki each day. The original Takechan, now and extended families. Somebody could die at home and nobody overrun with vermin and mold, was a neighborhood fixture would even know. When I tell him that such deaths aren’t an in Naraha for 40 years. The reincarnated version has all the unusual occurrence in the United States, he looks aghast. “That charm of a hospital cafeteria, with white laminate walls and never happens here! We always talk to our neighbors!” He glaring fluorescent lights. It is packed with decontamination shakes his head, as if attempting to dislodge the thought of workers in gray uniforms bent over steaming bowls of ramen. a world where neighbors are strangers and people die alone. After the lunch rush one day, I sit down with Miyuki. A “It’s all mixed up,” he says. “Everything is so confused.” television reporter from had interviewed her earlier I leave Wakizawa and drive to the ocean, hoping to find in the week. “What do you think about the radiation?” Miyuki some trace of the houses swept away by the tsunami. Instead I intones in mock seriousness. Then she claps her hand over find a vast radioactive waste dump, half-hidden behind flimsy her mouth to stifle a giggle. “So we finished the interview white panels decorated with pictures of birds and trees. I stand very quickly.” with my back to the sea, looking west over the dump toward The Satos haven’t yet found a place in Naraha to relocate. the dark-shouldered mountains. The river plain is a ragged They are eager to leave Iwaki, though, partly because of the long checkerboard of fallow rice paddies dotted with mounds of commute, and partly because the evacuee community there isn’t black decontamination bags. It is a sobering sight in a country as tranquil as the mayor has suggested. Residents are bitterly where every inch of arable land is intensively cultivated. The divided over his decision to reopen Naraha, Miyuki explains. She Japanese expression for it is mottainai, a feeling of sorrow for is reluctant to say more, except that she has been criticized something wasted. for cooking with the town’s contaminated tap water. She shows

28 | NEW REPUBLIC me a certificate from the water authority taped to the wall, Glimmers of Naraha’s future can be seen in the recent sale guaranteeing that Takechan’s water meets health standards. of seven residential lots near the Kido River. A few of the lots, “We just wanted to open Takechan, that’s it,” she sighs. which sold out immediately, went to buyers from Tomioka, “But some people don’t take it that way.” a town bordering Naraha that is next to be reopened. The director of the local water authority, Haruo Otsuka, “Naraha won’t take the same form in the future,” shows me a machine that tests the county’s drinking water Watanabe says. “New people will be moving in, and we have every hour for cesium-137, the primary isotope in Fukushima’s to think about making a new community for them.” fallout. The results are always undetectable. I tell Otsuka about evacuees who have criticized the Satos. “Those people are just looking for a reason not to come back,” he scoffs. “At The half-life of cesium-137 is 30.17 years. What’s first they said radiation levels in the rice paddies were too high. the half-life of a broken social bond? Then it was the roads. Now they’re blaming the water.” “After five years, it’ll be hard to repair,” says Fumiko Yokota. Tensions among evacuees, however, continue to run high. “People just get used to things, good or bad.” Hiroko Yuki’s family runs the Shell gas station around the A stout septuagenarian with a mischievous cackle, Yokota corner from Takechan. Although the Yukis were the first to lives alone in the hills above Route 6. On my last full day in reopen after the disaster, they have recently bought a house in Naraha, we talk in her kitchen as a warm breeze lifts the sheer Iwaki. They aren’t moving back to Naraha. curtains over a window offering a distant view of the ocean. “We say it’s a house provided by the government,” Yuki says. Yokota is glad to be back in Naraha. Life in Iwaki “was quite “Why is that?” “People are jealous,” she shrugs. “We work all day, morning to night, and profit margins are slim in this business. We’re not making big money, but people don’t believe it.” Such petty resentments seem unrelated to the serious disagreements among evacuees about resettling Naraha that Frivolous squabbles are Miyuki Sato had alluded to. I didn’t understand why anyone really expressions of the would begrudge their neighbors the choice to return—or not. anxiety people feel about The whole dynamic felt very—Japanese. “Yes, that’s right, it is very Japanese,” replies Yuki, unfazed. post-Fukushima Japan. She stands with her hands clasped behind her back, chin tilted in the air, looking a bit like a soldier with her buzzed hair and black Shell uniform. “Japanese people—we always care about how we’re perceived by others. That’s even more true here in the countryside.” depressing,” she says. But she recognizes that the younger In Japanese society, self-interest is inextricably tied to generation has grown accustomed to “living the evacuee life,” family, work, and community. But the Fukushima disaster and for them there is no looking back. has sliced through those ties like an axe coming down on I ask her what’s so great about life in Iwaki. a bundle of rope. Virtually overnight, tens of thousands of “There’s more beautiful people in Iwaki, that’s the biggest people were set adrift. What looks on the surface like frivolous difference,” says Yokota, laughing herself into a fit of coughing. squabbles are expressions of the profound anxiety many “Now maybe this is the twisted idea of an old lady, but I think people feel about their place in post-Fukushima Japan. The for some young people the disaster was a stroke of luck.” question of returning home has become a kind of loyalty Naraha was the kind of place young people forsook for the test that nobody can pass, because home no longer exists. big city if given the chance, just as Hisao Yanai did 50 years Nobody understands this better than Kiyoshi Watanabe, ago. The Fukushima disaster was that chance. Yokota pushes president of Naraha’s commerce and industry association and herself up from her chair and goes to the window. Just across a stolid member of the generation that had a duty, as he Route 6, an elderly couple from Tomioka has built a new house. puts it, “to keep the house and the family tombs.” Watanabe has Yokota met the woman in passing and got a good feeling from returned to Naraha to help “create more opportunities over her. “I’m thinking we could be friends,” she muses. “It’s not the next three to five years for younger people to come back going to happen fast, but gradually this is how we’re going and find work.” It won’t be easy. Paradoxically, the disaster has to rebuild Naraha. I can only do what I can do, and that’s not liberated young people from traditional obligations that kept always easy at my age.” families bound to the same area, even the same house, for “Bring her a pie,” I joke. generations. Naraha has to reinvent itself to attract new blood. Yokota chuckles. “We’re not like Americans. We’re really “In the past, even if the first son lives in some other place, shy. I’m not sure they’re looking for friends. But everybody he has to come back to take care of his parents if they ask,” needs to talk to their neighbors.” Watanabe explains. “But now he has a good excuse not to: Squinting against the sunlight, she clears her throat, her radiation. The parents can’t say anything.” voice a hoarse whisper, and says, “I hope we can be friends.” a

JULY/AUG 2016 | 29 30 | NEW REPUBLIC THE SPLIT 19 reasons the Democrats are so divided–and what it means for the party’s future.

THROUGHOUT THIS YEAR’S presidential campaign, the media has focused on the noisy and reactionary rift among Republicans. But far less attention has been paid to the equally momentous divisions within the Democratic Party. The battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders underscores a series of deep and growing fissures among Democrats, along a wide range of complex fault lines—from age and race to gender and ideology. And these disagreements won’t fade after a concession speech by Sanders, a convention coronation of Clinton, or a victory over Donald Trump. More than ten million Democrats turned out in force this year to reject the party establishment’s cautious centrism and cozy relationship with Wall Street. Unless Democrats heed that message, they will miss a historic opportunity to forge a broad-based and lasting liberal majority. To help make sense of what’s causing the split, and where it’s headed, we turned to 23 leading historians, political scientists, pollsters, artists, and activists. Taken together, their insights reinforce the need for a truly inclusive and vigorous debate over the party’s future. “There can be no settlement of a great cause without discussion,” observed William Jennings Bryan, the original Democratic populist insurgent. “And people will not discuss a cause until their attention is drawn to it.”

JULY/AUG 2016 | 31 1. It goes way, way back 1992 on a regressive flat tax. That same year, Bill and Hillary Clinton won the White House with the BY RICK PERLSTEIN business-funded support of the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to downplay the “big The schism between Hillary Clinton and Bernie government” solutions championed by FDR. Sanders is knit into the DNA of the modern Democratic Which brings us to the second strand in the party’s Party, in two interrelated ways. The first is ideological: divided DNA: It’s sociological. the battle of left versus right. Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has pointed out the pattern’s Start in 1924, when the party cleaved nearly in two. clocklike consistency: Since the beginning of the That year, at Madison Square Garden, the Democratic modern primary process in 1972, the Democratic convention took a record 103 ballots and 16 days to divide has settled into a battle between an “insurgent” resolve a fight between the party’s urban wing and its and the “establishment.” But Bouie errs, I think, conservative opponents. How conservative? Well, the in labeling every insurgent as “liberal.” Just look at convention was nicknamed the “Klanbake,” because one Brown in 1992—an insurgent who was conservative of the great issues at stake was—no kidding—whether on economic issues. Or Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and the KKK was a good or a bad thing. The divide was so 1972—an establishment favorite whose signature heated that tens of thousands of hooded Klansmen held legislative initiatives, including centralized planning a rally and burned crosses to try to bully the party into boards to dictate industrial production, were more meeting their demands. socialist than those of Sanders. This year, however, the traditional order of battle aligns with crystalline precision. Clinton, endorsed by 205 out of 232 Democratic members of Congress, is clearly the establishment’s pick—and Clinton’s eagerness to please also, increasingly, that of Wall Street masters of the universe terrified by the prospect of Donald Trump. Wall Street can be traced to the Sanders represents the guerrilla faction, arrayed this time behind the economically populist banner of FDR. party’s split during the New Deal. Does history tell us anything about how Democrats can bridge their long-running divide and forge a stronger, more unified party? Sanders would do well to remember that sore loserdom never helps. (“George McGovern is going to lose,” a leading Democrat Eight years later, under Franklin Roosevelt, the supposedly vowed after Humphrey lost the nomination party’s urban, modernist wing established what in 1972, “because we’re going to make him lose.”) would become a long hegemony over its reactionary, And Clinton needs to recognize that campaigning on Southern one. But that hegemony remained sharply economic liberalism is almost always a good political contested from the very beginning. In 1937, bipartisan bet. (Even at the height of Reagan’s morning-in- opponents of FDR banded together to forge the America blather in 1984, barely a third of American “Conservative Manifesto.” Co-authored by a Southern voters favored his plans to reduce the deficit by Democrat, the manifesto called for lowering taxes slashing social programs.) on the wealthy, slashing government spending, and If Hillary has any doubts about embracing the championing private enterprise. Hillary Clinton’s economic agenda laid out by Sanders, she should ask eagerness to please Wall Street can be traced, in part, the insurgent of 1992: William Jefferson Clinton. to that ideological split during the New Deal. The man who ended a dozen years of presidential exile Indeed, over the years, many of the most “liberal” for the Democrats didn’t do it simply by promising to Democrats have remained sharply conservative on get tough on crime and to “end welfare as we know it.” economic questions. Eugene McCarthy, the “peacenik” He also pledged $80 billion in federal investments candidate of 1968, ended up backing Ronald Reagan. to improve America’s cities and to create four million Dan Rostenkowski, the lunch-pail chairman of the new jobs—not to mention, of course, a plan to deliver House Ways and Means Committee, proposed a tax health care to all Americans. package in 1981 that was more corporate-friendly than Reagan’s. Jerry Brown of California, long derided as RICK PERLSTEIN IS A HISTORIAN AND THE AUTHOR OF “Governor Moonbeam,” campaigned for president in NIXONLAND AND THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE.

32 | NEW REPUBLIC 2. It’s Obama’s fault for raising our hopes took a while to set in. The Obama campaign had the form and rhetoric of transformative politics, but not the substance. JACOB HACKER, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT YALE Many of us believed or hoped the substance might follow the AND CO-AUTHOR OF WINNER-TAKE-ALL POLITICS: We’ve now form; but it didn’t. It turns out you need a program that had almost eight years of a Democratic presidency. And with challenges existing power and aims to reshape it. So Sanders the exception of the policy breakthroughs in 2009 and 2010, represents the continuation of these insurgent energies. they’ve been viewed as relatively lean years by many in the Clinton is also the continuation of Obama, but the Obama of Democratic Party. There’s a sense of, “We went with someone governance, not of the campaign. within the system, and look what happened—Republicans still tried to crush that person. So let’s go for the whole thing.” There’s a sense that supporting the Democratic establishment and going the conventional route hasn’t been that productive.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH, AUTHOR OF INVISIBLE MAN, GOT THE WHOLE WORLD WATCHING: A lot of young people who showed up to vote for Obama were voting for the very first time. But now they’re looking at the ways economic inequality persists, and they’re saying, “Oh, the Democratic Party doesn’t actually stand against that.” They’re looking at the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the two big linchpins in the Black Lives Matter movement, and they’re like, “Oh, Democrats are actually the architects of the policies that have affected and continue to define young black life in terms of systemic, institutionalized racism.” So you have young folks getting into the Democratic Party and realizing they don’t have a place. 3. It’s Hillary’s fault for lowering our hopes ASTRA TAYLOR, AUTHOR OF THE PEOPLE’S PLATFORM: TAKING BACK POWER AND CULTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE: This is in part JOHN JUDIS, FORMER SENIOR EDITOR AT THE NEW REPUBLIC a symptom of the expectations that people had for the AND CO-AUTHOR OF THE EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY: Obama administration that weren’t met. It got its first major In 1984, you had Walter Mondale, a candidate of the Democratic expression through Occupy Wall Street, and it’s still playing establishment, pitted against a young upstart, Gary Hart. out. Because nothing has changed, and people know that. The split wasn’t left-right—it was young-old, energetic-tired, vision-pragmatism. Bernie, for all his 74 years, represents RUY TEIXEIRA, CO-AUTHOR OF THE EMERGING DEMOCRATIC something still of the rebellious Sixties that appeals to young MAJORITY: You can make the case that Obama has been a very voters, while Hillary represents a tired incrementalism—utterly successful and progressive president, but people are uninspiring and rooted largely in identity politics and impatient. What used to keep people in line, so to speak, when special interest groups, rather than in any vision for the future. they had these kinds of dissatisfactions was, “Oh, I’m really frustrated, but what can we do? The country is so right-wing. We’ve got to worry about the national debt—there’s no room 4. The party hasn’t kept up with its base in the system for change.” Now there’s much more of a sense of possibility. The Democratic Party has contributed to this JILL FILIPOVIC, LAWYER AND POLITICAL COLUMNIST: The party transformation by becoming more liberal, and by ceasing to be itself has been stuck in some old ideas for a while. You’ve obsessed with the national debt and the deficit. been seeing movement around the edges, whether from Elizabeth Warren or these grassroots movements for ELAINE KAMARCK, SENIOR FELLOW AT THE BROOKINGS income inequality. The pro-choice movement, for example, INSTITUTION AND AUTHOR OF PRIMARY POLITICS: Here’s the is a key part of the Democratic base that has liberalized irony—the Bernie people are the Obama people. They’re all the and modernized and completely changed its messaging in a young people; that’s the Obama coalition. They’re frustrated way that the party is now just catching up to. So you get because under Obama, nothing much happened that they liked. these internal discords that dredge up a lot of bad feelings. They’re taking it out on Hillary, which is unfortunate, since she’s much more capable of making something happen. DANIELLE ALLEN, DIRECTOR OF THE EDMOND J. SAFRA CENTER FOR ETHICS AT HARVARD: In the last 20 years, we’ve collectively JEDEDIAH PURDY, PROFESSOR OF LAW AT DUKE AND experienced various forms of social acceleration. Rates of

OPENING SPREAD: MARK PETERSON/REDUX; HILLARY CLINTON: RON HAVIV/VII FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC NEW THE FOR HAVIV/VII RON CLINTON: HILLARY PETERSON/REDUX; MARK SPREAD: OPENING AUTHOR OF AFTER NATURE: The disappointment in Obama change in social dynamics have increased across the spectrum,

JULY/AUG 2016 | 33 from income inequality to mass incarceration to immigration just saying they’re overplaying their hand by celebrating to the effects of globalization and the restructuring his focus on reining in the super-rich as the only way that of the economy. When you have an acceleration of social we can talk about improving economic equality. transformation, there’s a lag problem. The reigning policy paradigms will be out of sync with the actual needs ELAINE KAMARCK: This is part of a bigger problem with on the ground. That’s what we’re experiencing now. American presidential politics selling snake oil to the voters. Everybody from Trump with his stupid fucking wall, to JEDEDIAH PURDY: The people who have been drawn to the Sanders with, “Oh, free college for everybody.” Of all the Sanders campaign have no love for or confidence in elites, dumb things—let’s go ahead and give all the rich kids in Hillary’s habitus. And why should they? They’ve seen growing America a nice break. That’s not progressive, I’m sorry. But inequality and insecurity, the naked corruption of politics people want to believe in Peter Pan. And he’s just not there. by oligarchic money, total cynicism in the political class of consultants and pundits, and wars so stupid and destructive MARK GREEN, FORMER PUBLIC ADVOCATE OF NEW YORK AND that Trump can say as much and win the GOP primaries. AUTHOR OF BRIGHT, INFINITE FUTURE: A GENERATIONAL There’s a whole world that people are surging to reject. MEMOIR ON THE PROGRESSIVE RISE: There’s a lot of adrenaline in primaries between purity and plausibility. Sanders is the most popular insurgent in American history to get this close to a nomination, and to help define the Democratic agenda. I admire his guts to run in the first place, and I get why his combination of Bulworth and Eugene Debs makes him such an appealing candidate. But the programmatic differences between a walking wish list like Sanders and a pragmatic progressive like Clinton are dwarfed by the differences between either of them and the first proto-fascist president.

6: There’s a double standard against Hillary

JILL FILIPOVIC: The dovetailing of gender and wealth in this election is really striking. I don’t remember a lot of Democrats ripping John Kerry to shreds for being wealthy when he ran for president. But it’s been interesting to see Clinton demonized for her Goldman Sachs speeches. For some Democrats, that seems to be inherently disqualifying. Obviously, money would 5. Bernie’s supporters aren’t living in reality be an issue even if she were a male candidate, because this is an election that’s about income inequality. But the sense that DAVID SIMON, CREATOR OF THE WIRE: I got no regard for she’s somehow undeserving, that does strike me as gendered. purism. What makes Bernie so admirable is he genuinely believes everything that comes out of his mouth. It’s incredibly THEDA SKOCPOL: Older women support Clinton because refreshing. If he didn’t have to govern with people who they’ve witnessed her career, and she’s always been into don’t believe what he’s saying, what a fine world it would be. economic redistribution. Some Sanders followers have been I look at the hyperbole from Bernie supporters that lands quite sexist in things they’ve said; that’s very apparent to older on my doorstep. Either it’s stuff they believe—in which case women. A friend who studies abortion politics tells me that the they’re drinking the Kool-Aid, so they’re not even speaking nasty tweets she’s gotten from Bernie supporters for backing in the vernacular of reality. Or what they’re doing is venal and Hillary are worse than anything she gets from the right wing. destructive. That level of hyperbole, which Bernie himself is not responsible for, is disappointing. The truth is, it’s not just AMANDA MARCOTTE, POLITICS WRITER FOR SALON: What your friends who have utility in politics—sometimes it’s the you’re seeing is a huge drift in the party, away from having people who are against you on every other issue. If you can’t our leadership be just a bunch of white men who claim to play that game, then what did you go into politics for? speak for everybody else. We’re moving to a party that puts women’s interests at the center, that considers the votes of THEDA SKOCPOL, PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT AND people of color just as valuable as the votes of white people. SOCIOLOGY AT HARVARD: A lot of Bernie supporters are Unfortunately, some of the support for Sanders comes upper-middle-class people. I’m surrounded by them from people who are uncomfortable with that change and are

in Cambridge. I’m not saying they’re hypocritical. I’m looking to a benevolent, white patriarch to save them. PETERSON/REDUX MARK

34 | NEW REPUBLIC 7. Poverty is fueling the divide right to appeal to disgruntled Republican voters. As long as the party has no challengers to its left, BY KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR the thinking goes, its base has nowhere else to go. This strategy may lead Clinton to victory in The Democratic Party today engages in delusional November. But there is a danger here: In winning happy talk about economic recovery, while a staggering the battle, she very well may lose the war being waged 47 million Americans are struggling in poverty. within the Democratic ranks. The inattention to As the rich remain as wealthy as ever, working-class growing inequality, racial injustice, and deteriorating people continue to see their wages stagnate. In the quality of life will likely result in ordinary people 1970s, 61 percent of Americans fell into that vague voting with their feet and simply opting out of the but stable category of “middle class.” Today that coming election, and future ones as well. Millions of number has fallen to 50 percent. African Americans, Americans already do not vote, because most elected the core of the Democratic Party base, continue to officials are out of touch with their daily struggles, and be plagued by dead-end jobs and diminished prospects. because there is little correlation between voting and Fifty-four percent of black workers make less than an improvement in their lives. By continuing to ignore $15 an hour. Thirty-eight percent of black children live the issues Sanders has raised, Clinton and the rest of in poverty. More than a quarter of black households the party establishment risk losing a huge swath of the battle with hunger. Democratic electorate for years to come. This is the heart of the crisis within the Democratic There is a way out. More and more voters are Party. Eight years ago, the party ran on hope: identifying as independents. This demonstrates that “Yes, we can” and “Change we can believe in.” Pundits people want real choices—as opposed to politics openly wondered whether the United States was on driven by sound bites, political action committees, and the cusp of becoming a “postracial” nation; on the eve billionaire candidates. The wide support for both of Obama’s first inauguration, 69 percent of black Sanders and Trump points to the incredible vacuum Americans believed that Martin Luther King’s “dream” that exists in organized politics. If the movements had been fulfilled. Today, the tune is quite different: against police racism and violence were to combine Millions of Americans are more disillusioned and with the growing activism among the disaffected, cynical than ever about the ability of the state to provide from low-wage workers to housing advocates, we a decent life for them and their families. could build a political party that actually represents Bernie Sanders tapped into the palpable disgust at the interests of the poor and working class, and leave America’s new Gilded Age, and it’s a revulsion that the Democrats and the Republicans to the plutocrats will not be quieted with a few platitudes from Hillary who already own both parties’ hearts and minds. Clinton to “give the middle class a raise.” Yet the Democratic leadership continues to treat Sanders as KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR, AN ASSISTANT an unfortunate nuisance. The party keeps charging PROFESSOR AT PRINCETON, IS THE AUTHOR OF ahead the way it always has, as Clinton pivots to her FROM #BLACKLIVESMATTER TO BLACK LIBERATION.

ELAINE KAMARCK: Clinton is being penalized because she has dynamic a candidate as Bill and Barack? Who is? That’s an a realistic view of what can be done, and that leads people to unfair comparison. But if I had to bet, I’d guess she’ll mistake her for some kind of bad conservative. She’s not. She’s be as consequential and good a president as either of them. extraordinarily liberal, particularly on children and families. But because she’s been around a while, when Sanders comes out with this new radical stuff, they think, “Oh, he’s the one 8. It’s the economy, stupid whose heart is in the right place.” But listen, she took on Wall Street before he did, in a way that hit their bottom line. If JOHN JUDIS: There have been insurgencies before—George people really want to get something done, they’d vote for her. Wallace in ’64 and ’72—that were radical. What made Wallace radical was the split in the party over civil rights. What makes MARK GREEN: Look, there’s a debate I have with my friend Sanders radical is the lingering rage over the Great Recession. Ralph Nader. He sees Hillary as more Wall Street, and I see If you want to move the question up a level theoretically, her as more Wellesley. She’s as smart as anyone, grounded, you can talk about the failure of “new Democrat” politics practical, engaging, and unlike most testosterone-fueled male to deliver prosperity or economy security. Clinton and the politicians, actually listens more than lectures. So she’s not as Democrats in Washington don’t understand the level of

JULY/AUG 2016 | 35 anxiety that Americans, and particularly the young, feel 9. Democrats are too fixated on white workers about their economic prospects. It can’t be addressed by charts showing the drop in the unemployment rate. JILL FILIPOVIC: The class-based concerns that a lot of the loudest voices in the Sanders contingent of the Democratic BRETT FLEHINGER, HISTORIAN AT HARVARD AND AUTHOR OF Party focus on are the concerns of the white working class, THE 1912 ELECTION AND THE POWER OF PROGRESSIVISM: and they aren’t bringing a lot of race analysis into it. The The Democratic Party has done a poor job of delivering on the income-inequality argument makes a case, particularly to the economic promises of equality. That’s what’s opened up the white working class, in a way that seems to have alienated possibility for Sanders. It’s what he’s believed in for 20-plus African Americans and, to a lesser extent, the Hispanic vote. years. But the question is: What’s making it resonate now? It’s the failure of the party to liberalize, since Bill Clinton. MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Look at every demographic breakdown of who votes. The strongest Democratic Party voters are black women. So why is it that you’re so zeroed in and focused on regaining the white working-class vote? What value does that have to you, as opposed to appeasing the voters that are actually there for you? Democrats want it both ways. They want to attract the white working-class voter Democrats want to be the again, but what they don’t accept is that the reason they lost that voter is because of Republican appeals to racism. So party of anti-racism but also the Democrats want to be the party of anti-racism but also win back the racists. You can’t do that! Why would you want a win back the racists. coalition of those people? It doesn’t make sense.

10. Democrats have neglected white workers

DAVID SIMON: There’s certainly something unique about this JACOB HACKER: There’s a feeling of, “Really? This is it? moment, and the populist rebellion that has affected both the This is the recovery we’ve been promised?” It’s been a long, Republican and Democratic parties. And I think it’s earned. difficult path since 2008 and the financial crisis. Even Both parties can be rightly accused, not to the same degree, Democratic voters who are doing pretty well are feeling that of having ignored and abandoned the working class and the something has gone seriously awry. middle-middle class for the past 30 years. This may be the first time in my life that there’s been a full-throated critique of the Democratic Party as being excessively beholden to money and too willing to work within 11. Millennials of color are tired of waiting the system. You saw echoes of this in the Howard Dean campaign, and you saw it much more forcefully in 2000 ALAN ABRAMOWITZ, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE with Ralph Nader. But Nader was not running within the AT EMORY AND AUTHOR OF THE POLARIZED PUBLIC? Democratic Party; he was clearly playing a spoiler role. WHY AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IS SO DYSFUNCTIONAL: Why Whereas Sanders is essentially trying to take the Democratic are African Americans so loyal to the Clintons? Part of it is just Party in a different direction. familiarity. They feel a comfort level with the Clintons, and they really like Bill Clinton, especially older African American JEDEDIAH PURDY: Bernie’s campaign is the first to put class voters. But there’s a generational divide even among African politics at its center. Not poverty, which liberal elites have American voters. Younger African Americans and Latinos are always been comfortable addressing, and not “We are the not as supportive of Clinton. 99 percent,” which is populist in a more fantastical sense, but class more concretely: the jobs and communities of blue-collar MARK HUGO LOPEZ: I was in Chicago recently, and I was people, the decline of the middle class, the cost of education. surprised when a young Latina college student stood up and described how much she did not like Clinton. She actually MARK HUGO LOPEZ, DIRECTOR OF HISPANIC RESEARCH AT THE said, “I hate Hillary Clinton.” That’s the phrase she used, which PEW RESEARCH CENTER: When you ask Clinton supporters, drew a round of applause from everybody in the room. or people who see Clinton favorably, you’ll find that more than half will say that, compared to 50 years ago, life is better in JOHNETTA ELZIE, A LEADER OF BLACK LIVES MATTER: I don’t America today. Whereas among Sanders supporters, one-third think anyone was ready to deal with black millennials. will say that things are actually worse. I just don’t believe that anyone in politics who is running on

36 | NEW REPUBLIC available to male politicians in a way they are not to women (and to whites in a way they are not to blacks or Hispanics or Asians). Black women in politics don’t have the option to wear their hair “natural”; nearly all white women appear to have blowouts, even Elizabeth Warren. It’s nonsense, and yet the only politically viable option, and therefore not nonsense. It’s not just that research has shown that women are perceived to talk too much even when they talk less, or that men who display anger are influential while women who do so are not. It’s that there is no such thing as “masculine wiles.” The phrase just doesn’t exist. This doesn’t mean that calling into question Clinton’s authenticity and trustworthiness— the fault line along which the Democratic Party 12. Authenticity is gender biased has riven—is pure misogyny. It just means that it’s not purely not misogyny. BY RIVKA GALCHEN Clinton is often described as the institutional candidate, the establishment. There’s a lot of truth In an early scene in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, a to that. But she’s also the woman who initially carpenter’s son hired as a tutor for a wealthy family kept her name (and her job) as the wife of the governor dons a tailored black suit provided by his new employer. of Arkansas, who used the role of First Lady as The black suit was a new and radical thing in this era, cover to push for socialized health care, and who was one in which bakers dressed like bakers, nobility like instrumental in getting health insurance for eight nobility. In a black suit, one’s social class was cloaked—a million children past the Republican gorgons when form of what back then was often termed hypocrisy. a full reform failed. Someone who has survived Lately, as I’ve followed the contest between Hillary being attacked for nearly 40 years must possess a Clinton and Bernie Sanders, I’ve found myself thinking highly developed sense of what the critic Walter of The Red and the Black, and its play with antiquated Benjamin calls “cunning and high spirits”—the means notions of authenticity. The passionate support for by which figures in fairy tales evade the oppressive Sanders has, one hopes, much to do with excitement forces of myth, and mortals evade gods. Somehow she about his insistent expression of a platform of economic achieved one of the more liberal voting records in populism. But it would be naïve to think it doesn’t also the Senate, despite rarely being described as a liberal have to do with his appearance, his way of speaking. by either the left or the right. There is authenticity, and there is appearing authentic. Perhaps one reason that Clinton’s “firewall” of black These two things may mostly align—as they largely but support has remained standing is that “authenticity” not entirely do with Sanders. (Most anti-establishment has less rhetorical force with a historically oppressed figures avoid 35 years in government.) Or they may people, for whom that strategy—being recognizably almost perfectly not align—as in the case of Donald who people in power think you ought to be—was never Trump. (A liar celebrated for speaking the truth.) Either viable. There are, of course, important and substantial way, it’s worth investigating authenticity in our criticisms of Clinton. But perhaps when we say that political thinking, both to understand its power and to Hillary is inauthentic, we’re simply saying that she consider how it helps or hurts the kind of effective, is a woman working in the public eye. forward-looking agenda that we hope will emerge from Democrats on both sides of the party should a fractured Democratic Party. consider which tactic best suits the underdogs One problem with authenticity as a campaign tactic they feel they are defending, and want to defend. is its unsettling, subconscious alliance with those who Whoever receives the nomination, perhaps the benefit from the status quo. If you’re not who you say worry should shift from whether the candidate is you are—if you’re moving on the social ladder, or are cunning to whether the candidate—and the not in “your place”—you’re inauthentic. Keeping it real Democratic Party—can be cunning enough. subtly advocates for keeping it just like it is. The semiotics of Sanders’s political authenticity— RIVKA GALCHEN IS A NOVELIST AND ESSAYIST WHOSE dishevelment, raised voice, being unyielding—are MOST RECENT BOOK IS LITTLE LABORS. MARK PETERSON/REDUX MARK

JULY/AUG 2016 | 37 a national scale knows how to address young black or brown before you were a politician! You know what it is, you know people in a way that’s different from how they addressed our the sense of urgency, you know what it means to be told to elders. Because we’re not the same. wait and to know that we don’t have time to wait.” I remember when Hillary got shut down by some young black students in . They wanted to know, “What does MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Throughout our history, progressive she even know about young black people in this neighborhood movements have often left out the idea of ending racism. Then and what we go through?” John Lewis basically told them, “You they go to communities of color and say, “What choice do you need to wait to speak to Hillary. Just be polite, ask questions, have but to join with us­—to put aside your concerns about the yada yada.” And people were like, “But you were a protester differences that we experience in terms of racism?” In this

13. The disruption is digital party. Instead of rejecting traditional politics, they decided to disrupt the Democratic primaries, the way BY ZEYNEP TUFEKCI Tea Party activists did to the GOP in 2010 and 2012. In some ways, it didn’t matter that Sanders was Insurgents like Bernie Sanders have been the rule, not the candidate they rallied behind. His ideological the exception, in the modern era of Democratic politics. consistency earned him the trust of the left, and they From Eugene McCarthy to Jesse Jackson, the party’s in turn stoked his online fund-raising—producing left wing regularly broke ranks to run on quasi-social the flood of $27 average donations that kept him democratic platforms. But with the exception of George competitive with Hillary Clinton. In the spirit of McGovern in 1972, these challengers all fell short of Occupy, Sanders’s digital operation was more the nomination, partly because they lacked the money volunteer-driven and dispersed than Obama’s; instead to effectively organize and advertise. The party of “Big Data,” the watchword for Sanders was “Big establishment had a virtual monopoly on every political Organizing,” as hundreds of thousands of volunteers tool needed to win. effectively ran major parts of the show. A pro-Sanders Slowly at first—and then with a big, loud bang— Reddit group attracted almost a quarter-million digital technologies changed all that. First came subscribers, who helped organize everything from Howard Dean, who used the internet to “disrupt” voter-registration drives to phone banks. A legion of the Democratic Party in 2004. Powered by small young, pro-Sanders coders on Slack produced apps online donations and digitally organized neighborhood to mobilize volunteers and direct voters to the polls. “meetups,” Dean outraised his big-money rivals and There was even a BernieBNB app, where people could revolutionized the way political campaigns are funded. offer their spare couches to #FeelTheBern organizers. Four years later, Barack Obama added a digitally Ultimately, the Sanders campaign became a lesson fueled ground game to Dean’s fund-raising innovations, in both the potential and the limitations of a digitally creating a campaign machine that could identify fueled uprising. It seems miraculous that a 74-year-old and turn out voters with a new level of accuracy. But democratic socialist could come so close to beating a when Obama’s policies fell short of the left’s candidate with Clinton’s institutional advantages. But expectations, many turned their energies to building Sanders’s superior digital reach couldn’t help him a different kind of digital rebellion—this time, outside win over African Americans and older women, most of of electoral politics. whom favor Clinton. And all his fans on social media Sparked by a single email in June 2011, Occupy Wall could not alter the mainstream media’s narrative that Street exploded in a matter of months into a worldwide this was yet another noble but doomed insurgency. movement that mobilized massive street protests— Whether or not Clinton wins in November, it’s safe to including many who’d sworn off partisan politics as expect another Democratic insurgency in 2020—and hopelessly corrupted. Occupy demonstrated how beyond. Digital fund-raising, organizing, and messaging the masses could organize without a campaign or a have given the left the weapons not just to tilt at the candidate to rally around, opening a space that would establishment’s windmills, but to come close to toppling soon be joined by Black Lives Matter and other activist them. Next time, they might just succeed. groups. It also unleashed a populist fervor on the left. As the 2016 campaign approached, Occupy veterans ZEYNEP TUFEKCI STUDIES TECHNOLOGY’S SOCIAL joined forces with left-leaning activists inside the IMPACTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA.

38 | NEW REPUBLIC election, the movement on the ground has at least pushed feminists, unionists. It lasted a long time, until it broke down Democrats to adopt the language of anti-racism. They’ve had over race and the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Finally, you had to say things like “institutionalized racism”—they’re learning the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council and the Clinton- the language on the fly. The problem is, they understand that ite and Obama-ite version of more conservative progressivism. they don’t actually have to move on these issues, because they But what that coalition left unanswered, for a lot of people have Trump to run against. All they have to do is say, “Look at in the party and in the country, was just how they were going how crazy the other option is. Where else are you going to go?” to make a living in this new world. What we’re seeing now is a very civil contest, relatively speaking, over who is going to lead that coalition. 14. Split? What split?

RUY TEIXEIRA: I don’t see differences massive enough to provoke any kind of split that has serious consequences. It’s just part of an ongoing shift in the Democratic Party. The party is going to continue to consolidate behind a more aggressive and liberal program, and the Sanders people are a reflection of that. We shouldn’t lose track of the fact that Clinton will be the most liberal presidential candidate the Democrats have run since George McGovern.

BRETT FLEHINGER: In historic terms I don’t think this party is split. I don’t even think the divide is as big as it was in 2000, when a significant portion of Democratic voters either considered Ralph Nader or voted for Nader.

ALAN ABRAMOWITZ: It’s easy to overstate how substantial the divide is. Some of it is more a matter of style, the sense that 15. Don’t worry: Trump will unite us Clinton and some of these longtime party leaders are tainted by their ties to Wall Street and big money. But it’s not based JOHN JUDIS: Whatever shortcomings Clinton’s campaign has so much on their issue positions, because Clinton’s issue in creating unity are likely to be overcome by the specter of a positions are pretty liberal. Not as far left as Bernie—but then, Trump America. nobody’s as far left as Bernie. Part of it is a distortion, because you can’t get to Bernie’s left, except maybe on the guns issue. RUY TEIXEIRA: I don’t see the people who support Sanders, So Bernie can always be the one taking the purist position. particularly the young people, as being radically different from the Clinton folks in terms of what they support. They’ll THEDA SKOCPOL: This isn’t a revolution. The phenomenon of wind up voting for Hillary when she runs against Trump. having a left challenger to somebody called an establishment Democrat goes way back. It’s been happening my whole life, DAVID SIMON: If you’re asking me if I think the Democratic and I’m not a child. It’s never successful, except in the case of Party will heal in the general election, I think it will. Trump Obama. And Obama had something that the other challengers helps that a lot. The risks of folding your arms and walking didn’t: He was able to appeal to blacks. Most of these left away are fundamental, in a way they might not be with a more candidates appeal to white liberals, and Sanders is certainly in viable and coherent candidate. But let’s face it, the idea that category. His entire base is white liberals. of this man at the helm of the republic is some scary shit.

KEVIN BAKER, AUTHOR OF THE NOVEL STRIVERS ROW: Democrats have almost always been the party that co-opts 16. Bernie isn’t the future, but his politics are and brings in literal outsiders and outside movements. In the late nineteenth century, it was a bizarre coalition between ALAN ABRAMOWITZ: Younger voters are the future of the Southern bourbon planters and big-city machines, which Democratic Party. But Bernie Sanders is not the future each had their own grievances. Then it was an uneasy coalition of the Democratic Party. The question is: Who’s going to come between those same machines and the agrarian populists along who can tap into that combination of idealism and brought in by William Jennings Bryan. Then you had the Grand discontent that he represents? Coalition, the biggest, most diverse coalition in American history, which was the New Deal one: farmers and workers, JOHN JUDIS: Sanders is an old guy, like I am, and not one,

MARK PETERSON/REDUX MARK urbanites and Main Street progressives, blacks, whites, I suspect, to build a movement. And I think “movement” is

JULY/AUG 2016 | 39 probably the wrong word. What inspires movements is Republicans have done a much better job, in all honesty, at particular causes (Vietnam, civil rights, high taxes) or a party in growing up a generation of younger politicians. Democratic power that is seen as taking the wrong stance on those issues politicians skew older, so that sums up the real question (George W. Bush for liberals, Barack Obama for Republicans). If about the Sanders moment: Is this enough of a wake-up call Clinton is the next president, I don’t expect a movement to to the Democratic Party to start bringing talent in? spring up. Instead, I’d expect to see caucuses within the party that take a Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren point of view. But if Trump wins, you will see a movement, whatever Sanders does. 17. It’s a trap!

ASTRA TAYLOR: The young thing, this millennial left turn, is great. But there’s a part of me that’s afraid. In the 1960s, the story was the counterculture and the new left. It was Students for a Democratic Society, the civil rights movement, the war in I’m worried Democrats Vietnam. But there’s been a lot of smart revisionist scholarship that says the story of the ’60s was not the new left, it was actually are going to paper over a the new right, which spent the decade laying the groundwork for its resurgence. At this moment, when left-wing millennials flaw in their coalition. are getting a lot of attention, my fear is that there’s a conservative counterpoint that I’m just not seeing, because we’re all in our little social and political bubbles. We should study the split between the new left and the new right in the ’60s, and make JACOB HACKER: There’s a growing chunk of the Democratic sure that history doesn’t repeat itself. electorate that believes the existing policy ideas that define the mainstream of the party don’t go far enough. The question becomes: What do those folks do after the election? What kind 18. The worst thing would be to ignore the split of force will they be within the party going forward? Can they form a strong movement that will press national politicians DAVID SIMON: The Democrats are going to win, because to move to the left, the way the Tea Party did on the right? they’re up against Trump. But I’m worried they’re going to If a Democrat wins in November, you probably can’t get paper over a fundamental flaw in their coalition, which is: a movement like the Tea Party under Obama, or Move On You’ve got to help working people and the middle-middle under Bush. But what you could get—what you would hope to class. They’re not your guaranteed votes, and you lost them get—is a true grassroots, longer-term movement that tries once to Reagan. Maybe you can do without them long-term. to move the center of gravity of American politics to the left. But I would get them back because (a) it secures your coalition going forward and (b) it’s the right thing to fucking do. JEDEDIAH PURDY: But what would a movement built out of Sanders supporters be for, exactly? The campaign itself gives JILL FILIPOVIC: The brawls that people are having on Twitter some answers. The Sanders campaign is much more distinct every day—I don’t know if that’s healthy for the party. But from the Clinton campaign, in substance, than Obama’s first the bigger debates are really important conversations to be campaign was. The Fight for $15, single-payer health care, having. Who is our coalition? Who are we representing, stronger antitrust law, free college: These are huge, concrete and how do we best do that? Do we want to be the center-left goals. If people can organize around one guy who expresses party of the ’90s, or should we be serving a more diverse them but, if elected, could do very little unless we also changed and liberal voter base? I don’t think those conversations are Congress, then we should be able to organize around them going to destroy the party. I think they’re going to set us to try to change the makeup of political structures from top to in a better direction. bottom. Maybe we need to move into our local Democratic parties. The Moral Majority took over school boards with a JACOB HACKER: It’s nice to be able to talk about what’s specific agenda they could implement. Are there electoral happening on the Democratic side, because all of the focus has institutions, as well as party institutions, that we should be been on the Republican side. It’s a bit like living in a house aiming to reshape in our image? that’s got some peeling paint and holes in the roof. Right next to it is a derelict building that’s practically falling over. And DANIELLE ALLEN: It’s a huge opportunity for Democrats, if you’re like, “Man, I’ve got a nice house.” But if you just put your they can take all the incoming young participants seriously and hand up and cover up your neighbor’s house so you can’t see give them a real role in digging into hard policy questions. it, you’d be like, “Um, I think my house needs some work.” The This is a chance to cultivate leaders who can run for office across Democratic Party is kind of like that right now. I want to live the landscape—not just national office, but local office. The there, but I really would love to upgrade it.

40 | NEW REPUBLIC nomination, Clinton has been forced to pivot sharply to the left and disavow her own history as a market- friendly centrist. Even Donald Trump threw out the economic playbook entrenched since Reagan—coming out against corporate-friendly trade deals, vowing to protect what’s left of the social safety net, and railing against the influence of money in politics. Taken together, the evidence is clear: The left just won. Forget the nomination—I mean the argument. Clinton, and the 40-year ideological campaign she represents, has lost the battle of ideas. The spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of data. What for decades was unsayable is now being said out loud—free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy. And the crowds are cheering. With so much encouragement, who knows what’s next? Reparations for slavery and 19. The best is yet to come colonialism? A guaranteed annual income? Democratic worker co-ops as the centerpiece of a green jobs BY NAOMI KLEIN program? Why not? The intellectual fencing that has constrained the left’s imagination for so long is lying On the surface, the battle between Hillary Clinton and twisted on the ground. Bernie Sanders looks like a deep rift, one that This broad appetite for systemic change did not threatens to splinter the Democratic Party. But viewed begin with Sanders. During the Obama years, a wave in the sweep of history, it is evidence of something of radical new social movements emerged, from far more positive for the party’s base and beyond: not Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 to #NoKXL a rift but a shift—the first tremors of a profound and Black Lives Matter. Sanders harnessed much of ideological realignment from which a transformative this energy—but by no means all of it. His weaknesses new politics could emerge. reaching certain segments of black and Latino voters Many of Bernie’s closest advisers—and perhaps in the Democratic base are well known. And for some even Bernie himself—never imagined the campaign activists, Sanders has always felt too much like the would do so well. And yet it did. The U.S. left—and past to get overly excited about. not some pale imitation of it—actually tasted Looking beyond this election cycle, this is actually electoral victory, in state after state after state. good news. If Sanders could come this far, imagine what The campaign came so close to winning that many a left candidate who was unburdened by his weaknesses of us allowed ourselves to imagine, if only for a few, could do. A political coalition that started from the furtive moments, what the world would look like premise that economic inequality and climate with a President Sanders. destabilization are inextricable from systems of racial Even writing those words seems crazy. After all, and gender hierarchy could well build a significantly the working assumption for decades has been that larger tent than the Sanders campaign managed to erect. genuinely redistributive policies are so unpopular in And if that movement has a bold plan for the U.S. that they could only be smuggled past the humanizing and democratizing new technology American public if they were wrapped in some sort of networks and global systems of trade, then it will feel centrist disguise. “Fee and dividend” instead of a less like a blast from the past, and more like a path to carbon tax. “Health care reform” instead of universal an exciting, never-before-attempted future. Whether public health care. coming after one term of Hillary Clinton in 2020, or Only now it turns out that left ideas are popular one term of Donald Trump, that combination—deeply just as they are, utterly unadorned. Really popular—and diverse and insistently forward-looking—could well in the most pro-capitalist country in the world. prove unbeatable. a It’s not just that Sanders has won 20-plus contests, all while never disavowing his democratic socialism. NAOMI KLEIN IS THE AUTHOR OF THIS CHANGES It’s also that, to keep Sanders from hijacking the EVERYTHING AND THE SHOCK DOCTRINE. MARK PETERSON/REDUX MARK

JULY/AUG 2016 | 41 42 | NEW REPUBLIC BORDERLINE MADNESS What lies between the United States and Mexico.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD MISRACH

THE NEIGHBORS ARE bound by a history of economic imbalance, fueling a contentious daily exchange of bodies and goods across the 2,000 miles of their shared border. The sheer length of the divide, and the difficulty of the terrain, have made building a wall between the United States and Mexico a logistical nightmare, but that hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from trying. The wall itself is a collage of materials: train rails, oil-drilling pipes, concrete, corrugated steel, barbed wire, wood, iron mesh, chain link, and the crisscrossed beams of “Normandy” barriers, which resemble the fortifications used on D-Day. Parts of the wall, made of metal picket fencing, are almost neighborly. Other sections slice through suburban lawns and golf courses, steering wide of the Rio Grande. Richard Misrach began photographing the border in 2004, and his images capture both the wall’s aggressive solidness and the futility of its task. “The wall is a political spectacle,” he says. One of the first large-scale barriers, built during the Clinton administration and nicknamed the “Tortilla Wall,” was a corrugated, rust-brown fence that runs 14 miles along the northern edge of Tijuana before spilling into the Pacific. Of the 670 discontiguous miles of fencing that exist today—walling off parts of California, Arizona, and New Mexico—most were built under the Secure Fence Act, signed by George W. Bush in 2006, at a cost of $2.4 billion. To complete the border wall as Donald Trump is proposing would likely cost an additional $25 billion. a

To avoid construction along the Rio Grande, portions of the wall have been built miles inland. Here, the wall cuts through an American farmer’s land near Brownsville, , leaving half his cabbage crop stranded on the other side.

JULY/AUG 2016 | 43 44 | NEW REPUBLIC OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: The border fence runs past a private residence in Brownsville, Texas. Unlike most Bush-era construction, which took place on federal lands, Trump’s proposal would forcibly displace thousands of homeowners.

OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM: On the San Diego-Tijuana border, loved ones visit through a mesh fence at Friendship Park. Misrach spoke with one Mexican woman for half an hour through the grating. “If I ran into her on the street,” he says, “I wouldn’t be able to recognize her.”

ABOVE: A stretch of wall east of Nogales, Arizona. Designed to funnel migrants into areas patrolled by border agents, the wall is no match for humans fleeing poverty and violence; a teenager can scale this section in under half a minute.

JULY/AUG 2016 | 45 46 | NEW REPUBLIC Misrach first photographed this isolated segment of the wall near Los Indios, Texas, in 2012. Returning three years later, the only change he found was the patch of green grass. Because the land was purchased under eminent domain, Misrach estimates that this single piece of fencing cost more than half a million dollars to build.

JULY/AUG 2016 | 47 ESSAY

The Reluctant Memoirist What happens when the professional becomes personal?

BY SUKI KIM

IT WAS IN Miami, last December, while sitting on a panel at an In reexamining a terrible tangle of a situation, one can international book fair, that I tried to piece together the chain sometimes pinpoint that single moment when everything went of events that had brought me to a place I knew I did not belong. wrong. During my decade-long research, I had always feared I considered the writers sitting next to me, three women who that this would happen in North Korea, where I would have no had written memoirs from places close to their hearts—stories control over my fate. As it turned out, the moment took place in of loss, family, selfhood. The questions from the audience, also New York City, after I had finally finished my draft. Six months mostly women, focused on each author’s emotional awakening before publication, my editor sent over the design for the book and growth. How did we feel about the spiritual journeys we cover. Something caught my eye: Below the title—Without You, had undertaken? What lessons had we learned along the way? There Is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea’s Elite— I had no idea how I was supposed to answer, for a simple were the words, “A Memoir.” reason: My book wasn’t a memoir. As an investigative journal- I immediately emailed my editor. “I really do not feel com- ist, I had been researching and visiting North Korea for over a fortable with my book being called a memoir,” I told her. “I think decade. In 2011, armed with a book contract, I went undercover calling it a memoir trivializes my reporting.” Memoir, after all, to work as an ESL teacher at an evangelical university in Pyong- suggests memories—the unresolved issues of the past, exam- yang. My 270 students—the elite of North Korea, the sons of ined through the author’s own experiences. My work, though high-level officials—were being groomed as the face of regime literary and at times personal, was a narrative account of inves- change to come under Kim Jong-un. tigative reporting. I wasn’t simply trying to convey how I saw As a virtual prison state, North Korea is a place where the the world; I was reporting how it was seen and lived by others. act of journalism is nearly impossible. Talking to citizens will My editor would not budge. She noted that my book was get you nothing more than the party line, and most informa- written in the first person—a device I had employed, like many tion about North Korea is related by Western journalists, who journalists, to provide a narrative framework for my report- either visit the country on brief press junkets or record and ing. To call it journalism, she argued, would limit its potential repackage the unverifiable accounts of defectors. Having been readership. I did not quite understand then that this was a sales born and raised in , I am fluent in the country’s decision. I later learned that memoirs in general sell better than language and culture, which enabled me to glean the subtle- investigative journalism. ties beneath the surface, without the censoring presence of an I tried to push back. “This is no Eat, Pray, Love,” I argued official translator. during a phone call with my editor and agent. As I taught, I lived in a locked compound under complete “You only wish,” my agent laughed. surveillance: Every room was bugged, every class recorded. I But that was the whole point. I did not wish that my book scribbled down conversations as they happened and buried my were Eat, Pray, Love. As the only journalist to live undercover notes in a lesson plan. I wrote at night, erasing the copy from in North Korea, I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of my laptop each time I signed off, saving it to USB sticks that international importance by the only means possible. By cast- I carried on my body at all times. I backed up my research on ing my book as personal rather than professional—by market- an SD card, which I hid in the room in different spots, always ing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than with the light off, in case there were cameras. After six months, I returned home with 400 pages of notes and began writing. ILLUSTRATIONS BY DADU SHIN

48 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

JULY/AUG 2016 | 49 REVIEW

contemporary world.” My greatest concern had been for my students, and I had followed well-established journalistic prac- tices to ensure that they would not be harmed. But when my book was finally published in the fall of 2014, the backlash came not from North Korea, but from a source I had not expected: other reporters. As my publisher began to promote my book, several journalists took to the internet to denounce me. They called me “deeply dishonest” for going undercover. They slammed me as a “selfish person” for using my access at the university to write a “kiss-and-tell memoir.” They accused me, without any evidence, of “putting sources at risk.” In their eyes, it seemed, I was a memoirist treading on journalistic turf, a Korean schoolteacher who sold out her stu- dents for a quick buck. For the most part, the attacks ignored the substance of what I had written—my investigative findings—and focused instead on my methods. “What she wrote is nothing too shocking or new,” went a typical tweet. “She lied and risked people’s lives for financial gain.” When I was interviewed by the BBC, the radio hosts read aloud a damning letter they received from the university in North Korea, and accosted me for betraying my employer. In discussion threads on Facebook, people accused me of going to North Korea for “the sole purpose of using the experience to make money by producing a book,” which might or might not have to do with the fact that my book made the New York Times best-seller list. My inbox began to be bombarded a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively with messages from strangers: “Shame on you for putting good being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best. It was people in harm’s way for your gain.” One morning, I woke up to a subtle shift, but one familiar to professional women from all a Twitter message that read, simply: “Go fuck yourself.” walks of life. I was being moved from a position of authority— When the first review was published by Kirkus, I was shocked What do you know?—to the realm of emotion: How did you feel? to see the words “deceive” and “deception” three times in the It soon became clear that this was a battle I could not win, first paragraph. The Chicago Tribune questioned my ethics: and I relented. The content of my work was what really mat- “Her book raises difficult questions about whether this insight tered, I told myself. However it was labeled and marketed, my is worth the considerable risk to these innocents, none of whom reporting would speak for itself. knew her real reasons for being there.” The Los Angeles Review of Books went even further: “Her dishonesty has left her open to LEADING UP TO publication, I was nervous. The evangelical criticism, and rightfully so. The ethics of her choice cast doubt university in North Korea had sent me threatening emails, on her reliability (another de facto peril of memoir), and her demanding that I send them my draft and cease publication. fear of discovery appears to have colored her impressions and This was not unexpected: Investigative journalists who go descriptions with paranoia and distrust.” undercover to gain access to institutions considered off-limits My book was being dismissed for the very element that to the public—from private prisons to mental hospitals—don’t typically wins acclaim for narrative accounts of investigative expect a warm reception from the institutions they infiltrate. journalism. When Ted Conover, author of the award-­winning The evangelical organization wanted to protect its close ties to Newjack, posed as a corrections officer to investigate the the North Korean regime and the country’s future leaders. But prison system, he was lauded by The New York Times for going I had entered the country under my own name, and gained the “deeper than surface” and reporting “for real.” Barbara Ehren- unpaid teaching job based on my qualifications. reich, author of the best-selling Nickel and Dimed, was widely The code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists celebrated for working undercover as a waitress, hotel maid, states that reporters should “avoid undercover or other surrep- and sales clerk to expose the conditions of the working poor. titious methods of gathering information unless traditional, Among journalists, undercover work is generally viewed as a open methods will not yield information vital to the public.” It badge of honor, not a mark of shame. (Miscategorizing my book is hard to imagine any subject more vital to the public, or more as a memoir, as it happens, also had the effect of disqualifying it impervious to open methods, than the secretive, nuclear North from any journalism awards.) Korea; its violations against humanity, the United Nations has The backlash extended well beyond the media. At my book declared, “reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the events, I began to notice that there was always someone in the

50 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW audience—often white, often male, inevitably hostile—who sincerely fascinated by every detail they reveal about them- raised his hand to challenge my work. The gist was always the selves. They are, after all, my work. same: He had been to North Korea himself, or knew someone I recently spoke with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Ran- who had, and it wasn’t as bad or dangerous as I claimed, so why dom Family, who chronicled the lives of a single family in the was I lying, and putting people in danger, to sell a book? South Bronx for a decade. When her book came out, she told The invariable pattern of such attacks gave me pause. Why me, it was her emotional bond with her subjects that received did people with no real experience of North Korea feel such a much of the praise, more than her meticulous reporting. “If I passionate need to dismiss my firsthand reporting and defend had written a highly detailed book about being embedded with one of the world’s most murderous dictatorships? My book had a troop,” she said, “the magnitude of the actual legwork would clearly wounded these men in some way. Perhaps it had undercut have been recognized.” Yet she also believes that great literary their male pride, their sense of being an expert on world affairs, journalism combines the heart and the brain. “I cannot imagine even when they weren’t. Perhaps they felt accused of being com- doing the reporting I did if I weren’t a woman,” she said. “You plicit in North Korea’s horrors, and converted that guilt into are who you are, and that includes when you go to report.” denial, a basic survival instinct. Whatever their motives, they felt a need to assert themselves over me. Some even denounced me, I WOULD LIKE to report that I took the reaction to my book in a South Korean woman, as someone who had merely returned stride, that I weathered all the accusations and dismissals with “home” to North Korea; to them, I hadn’t gone undercover at patience, that I understood their causes and effects. But I did not. all. Which is another way of saying that what I had written was The rage I felt was deeper than any other emotion I had ever personal, and therefore by definition not authoritative. known, as if I had been holding it in for a very long time—not just since the end of my yearlong book tour, much of which I THERE ARE ONLY two kinds of books on North Korea: those by spent in bleak hotel rooms sipping bad wine from the mini- white journalists who visited the country under the regime’s bar, but since I first arrived in America as a foreigner at age 13, supervision, and “as told to” memoirs by defectors. The intel- mute and powerless. In immigrant ghettos, I learned that in lectual hierarchy is clear—authority belongs to the white gaze. my adoptive home, my skin was considered yellow, the color Orientalism reigns. of the forsythia that had bloomed around my childhood home For me, the systematic undermining of my expertise was back in South Korea. All these years later, despite everything I further escalated by the review in The New York Times. What had achieved, it was as though none of it mattered: I was still struck me was not whether the review was positive, but the that girl. And this time the girl was not mute, but muted. selection of the reviewer, a former TV columnist of Korean As I grappled with these feelings, I saw that my anger, the origin, whose only past book-length nonfiction was on South inner bits of it, reaches back to the reason why I write: to soothe Korean popular culture. Other than her ethnicity, it was hard to that stirring within me, each moment I face the blank page, that see why the editors felt that a pop culture expert was qualified beckons a heart so fearful of the wider world. When I sleep, to review a serious investigative book on a dictatorship. I wasn’t I rarely dream; I am alone inside a darkness, and at the edge surprised, however, since any time in my career that I am asked of my consciousness lurk the howling, stifled cries of what lies to review a book by a leading newspaper, which is not often, outside. In my own way, I write to make sense of these jarring the book is almost always by an Asian, regardless of its content. worlds, from internal to external, and to save lives, both mine As an Asian female, I find that people rarely assume I’m an and others’. This is why I risked going into North Korea under- investigative journalist; even after I tell them, they often for- cover: because I could not be consoled while the injustice of get. Having spent my formative years in America not speaking 25 million voiceless people trapped in a modern-day gulag English, I know how to be mute; my accent sometimes makes remains part of our society. To have my reporting on this bru- people assume I am naïve. I am good at disappearing. I am tal truth so systematically undermined is symptomatic of what aware that such apparent weaknesses can in fact be advan- scares me about America. tages. The less threatening your subjects perceive you to be, the I recognize the irony here: Sifting through my memories, more careless they are in revealing information, which makes recalling again and again what happened has turned me, in it easier for the writer to infiltrate a world without being con- this essay, into a memoirist. My book is about North Korea, but spicuous. Joan Didion, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, notes this essay is about me, and for me, there is something deeply a similar quandary: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I humiliating about being so self-obsessed. Here I am telling my am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and story to you, the reader, essentially to beg for acknowledg- so neurotically inarticulate, that people tend to forget that my ment: I am an investigative journalist, please take me seriously. presence runs counter to their best interests.” I had been excluded from the insular world of journalism; per- Such gender discrimination can manifest either posi- haps, in the end, my anger is a reaction to that exclusion. As a tively or negatively. Most people I interact with as a reporter woman of color entrenched in a profession still dominated by tend to be men, and generally, men like to explain things to white men, I have been forced to use my writing not to explore women. So I let them. I listen attentively; I never talk about topics of my own choosing, or to investigate the world’s com- myself because I am discreet by nature, but also because I am plexities, but as a means to legitimize myself. a

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A young woman dances in a park in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1970. Photograph by Thomas Hoepker.

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BOOKS sewing needle. The constant project of our girl selves seeming to require odd and precise attentions.

Beauty is a project. Evie tests her makeup in different lights (morning, dusk, and night); she mixes face masks out of avoca- dos and honey; she dresses “to provoke love.” Doing anything Cult Following else—reading, say, or writing—is unimaginable. “As an adult, I wonder at the pure volume of time I wasted,” as she puts it. In Emma Cline’s debut novel, “The feast and famine we were taught to expect from the world, attraction can be deadly. the countdowns in magazines that urged us to prepare 30 days in advance for the first day of school.” But this, Cline implies, is the tax for being female. What Evie wants is to be wanted. “I BY THESSALY LA FORCE waited to be told what was good about me,” Evie says. Then one day in this long, languid summer, Evie is seduced. She glimpses three young women she’s never seen before, dumpster diving outside of a restaurant. Their beauty is uncon- ventional, maybe even a little feral. Suzanne, their ringleader, GIRLS, WOMEN—WHAT do they desire? “To have fun,” Cyndi stands apart: Lauper advised. Freud was baffled; he called it “the great ques- tion that has never been answered and which I have not yet Her black hair marking her, even at a distance, as different, been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the her smile at me direct and assessing. I couldn’t explain it to feminine soul.” Hollywood answered the question by making myself, the wrench I got from looking at her. Mel Gibson read women’s minds. Mary McCarthy sent them to Vassar. Lena Dunham took them to party in Bushwick. Mostly, The attraction is propulsive. Suzanne belongs to a cult on though, female desire is a mystery no one rushes to solve. One the fringes of Petaluma’s farmland. (Cline liberally borrows vastly ignored area of desire is the kind depicted between two details from the grisly events surrounding the Manson Family.) women—not so much sexual desire, but more a sense of iden- Russell, their leader, is a charismatic but delusional man who tity and projection. Women speak of crushes on other women. has surrounded himself with young women, all tragically inse- Admiration is a form of coveting. cure and impressionable—too eager to please, and too easy to In The Girls, Emma Cline’s highly anticipated debut novel, groom. Suzanne is more intelligent and self-possessed, but she Evie Boyd, a 14-year-old living in the sleepy city of Petaluma, too falls under Russell’s spell. Evie is desperate for Suzanne’s California, desires a new life. It’s summer in 1969, and swim- attention: Does she want to be with Suzanne, or to be like her? ming pools are the shape of kidney beans, and vegetables are The plot is predictable but not tedious. There’s a Dennis cooked to the color of ash. Not too far away, San Francisco’s Wilson–Terry Melcher hybrid named Mitch, who has an in with Haight-Ashbury is filled with hippies and runaways. The the music industry and a cushy mansion in the city, complete scent of patchouli drifts through the air, while acid tabs melt with hot tub. He’s intrigued enough by Russell to supply the on tongues. Petaluma, with its ranch houses and suburban ranch with drugs and funds, and vaguely promises a record deal complacency, is a less excitable place, and fame. It falls through. Russell doesn’t respond well to the but the center of Evie’s life no longer rejection; the tension builds as summer drifts by. Soon—­ holds. Her father has left for a younger knowing what actually happened to Sharon Tate at Cielo woman, and in the aftermath of the Drive—one begins to worry more about Mitch’s fate than Evie’s. divorce, her mother is too self-absorbed to notice her daughter’s unhappiness. CLINE PROVIDES SOME comfort by weaving together two In the fall, Evie will be sent off to an all- chronologies. In the present day, a middle-aged and much girls boarding school. In the meantime, more defeated Evie is able to tell us—through a chance encoun- her days are aimless, spent on how to ter with some teenagers—how she became involved with Rus- make herself desirable: sell’s cult in the first place. She’s crashing at a beach house on the foggy California coast when its owner’s son, Julian, a college THE GIRLS Every day after school, we’d click dropout, shows up unannounced. He recognizes Evie as “that BY EMMA CLINE seamlessly into the familiar track of lady” from the cult, and while she’s reluctant to sensationalize Random House, the afternoons. Waste hours at her past, she’s grateful for the company. She’s also focused on 368 pp., $27 some industrious task: following Vidal Julian’s teenage girlfriend, the impressionable Sasha: Sassoon’s suggestions for raw egg smoothies to strengthen hair or picking I could see she was nervous with my eyes on her.

MAGNUM at blackheads with the tip of a sterilized I understood the worry. When I was that age, I was

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uncertain of how to move, whether I was walking too Story. Their popularity reveals our obsession with the horror fast, whether others could see the discomfort and stiffness of unimaginable violation, and our naïve belief in recovery. in me. As if everyone were constantly gauging my These memoirs start and end the same way. One day, long performance and finding it lacking. It occurred to me that ago, a young woman’s life changed irreversibly. Dugard, for Sasha was very young. Too young to be here with Julian. example, was eleven and walking to a school bus stop when She seemed to know what I was thinking, staring at me she was grabbed and tossed into a gray car. The last thing she with surprising defiance. remembers touching was a pinecone. She was imprisoned, raped, and treated like a caged animal for 18 years. Today, Evie is protective of Sasha. It’s maternal, yes, but it’s also a she is a survivor. But this kind of storytelling is deceptive. It projection—an understandable impulse, given what happened makes us believe that through forgiveness, fortitude, and the to her. Soon we’re back in the past with younger Evie, who passing of time, you will heal—even though there is little evi- knows that Russell is sleeping with all the others girls on the dence to support this. What of the woman who wants to call herself a survivor, but—either from depression or addiction This is the novel’s loose brilliance— or some other trouble—can’t?

the helter-skelter dramatization THERE’S AN ADMIRABLE, sensuous alertness to Cline’s prose. of innocence being lost. Sasha is “drained” when her boyfriend removes his arm from her shoulder. Suzanne’s appearance in town has mothers “glancing around for their children,” and women “reaching for their boyfriends’ hands.” When Evie returns from the trailer with Russell after their first sexual encounter, she’s certain that Suzanne can recognize “the inward shift you sometimes see in young girls, newly sexed.” Evie’s father’s girlfriend, a young, uncomplicated woman named Tamar, picks up Evie one eve- ning: “I could tell she wanted to ask questions, but she must ranch. She also knows that he’ll eventually make a move on her. have known that I wouldn’t explain.” He is predatory and manipulative. “I’m not trying to hurt you, Women are constantly tracking each other; they’re never Evie,” he says to her, coercing her into a blow job. “I just want to not observing, communicating without words. That Evie’s own be close to you. And don’t you want me to feel good?” Evie never mother is incapable of noticing the subtle changes occurring says no, but she is too young to know any better. “Was I sup- with her daughter doubles as neglect. It’s perceptive, and The posed to cry?” she wonders. And yet: “I liked it, too,” she admits. Girls pulses with this awareness. Cline has an ear for the barbed This is Cline’s loose brilliance—the helter-skelter dramati- and baiting way girls speak to each other. Her dialogue is casual zation of innocence being lost. The dark intimacy of an older but convincing. Elsewhere, though, Cline’s metaphors land man manipulating a younger woman isn’t shocking. Russell’s heavily, and don’t help to show the world the way Evie might desire for Evie, for all her ambivalence, is intoxicating. He has actually see it. Spaghetti is “mossed” with cheese in an oth- power, and Evie is happy to have a conduit to feeling power- erwise suburban kitchen. Sun “spiked” through the trees on a ful herself. “You could be pretty,” she realizes, “you could be summer day. Food is “ferried” to the couch on a quiet night. wanted, and that could make you valuable.” Russell is almost beside the point in the end. Evie comes Still, men are never to be trusted. Present-day Evie is perilously close to being embroiled in murder, but by the grace unemployed, unattached, and incapable of intimacy. Has she of deus ex machina, she avoids it. About girls who sound a lot repressed some form of Sapphic desire as a result of losing like Evie, Joan Didion in her 1967 essay “Slouching Towards Suzanne? Or does she still fear Russell’s return and the threat Bethlehem” wrote: of violence? Cline provides no answers. Evie’s experience with Russell and Suzanne is so rare that the novel can’t stand as an There are always little girls around rock groups—the same exemplary examination of female adolescence. Cline is writ- girls who used to hang around saxophone players, girls ing more about the lingering effects of trauma than the sexual who live on the celebrity and power and sex a band projects chaos of the counterculture movement. Although this makes when it plays—and there are three of them out here this the novel’s historical details and fixation on the Manson cult afternoon in Sausalito where the Grateful Dead rehearse. feel more artificial than inspired—like cheap props in a play—it They are all pretty and two of them still have baby fat does create room for something new. and one of them dances by herself with her eyes closed. Whether Cline intends it or not, The Girls is a fictional response to the slew of sensational memoirs flooding today’s What happens to these girls? They grow up, fade away, move best-seller lists. This is the literature of valorized victimhood— on. It’s the dance of the almost famous. Evie continues to live in from Jaycee Dugard’s A Stolen Life to Amanda Berry and the shadows. A man’s desire is thrilling, dangerous, even—but, Gina DeJesus’s joint memoir, Hope, to Elizabeth Smart’s My as Cline shows, it may not be what you really want. a

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BOOKS up front what new detail Shelden believes he’s disinterred: Melville’s mistress. Biographers have long known about Sarah Morewood, the Melvilles’ bewitching neighbor in Pittsfield, Massachusetts—an indefatigable thrower of parties and the Berkshires’ top literary hanger-on—but Shelden wants you to know her in the Biblical sense. “Sexy beyond measure,” More- wood is “one of the great unsung figures in literary history,” a woman who “didn’t like to take no for an answer.” Shelden Fifty Shades of describes her as Melville’s “goddess in his Berkshire paradise,” the “powerful key to unlocking his secrets,” an “untamed spirit” Moby-Dick whose “seductive powers worked their wonders on more than a few men.” Her supposed years-long affair with Melville was “so Did an illicit love affair give birth intimate and revealing that it colored every aspect of his life.” to the Great American Novel? Shelden’s panting, cliché-choked style soon has you reaching for the light switch and candle, then the cigarette and bonbons. Four years younger than Melville, Morewood was an aspir- BY WILLIAM GIRALDI ing poet who was allergic to boredom and married to a wealthy, English-born stiff. She became the nucleus of Melville’s set in Pittsfield. Previous biographers haven’t considered her import- ant in comprehending Melville, but Shelden believes that she “will prove the most enduring influence on Melville’s life, a THINK OF HERMAN MELVILLE and you don’t think lothario. But muse as well as a lover.” in 1847, after the publication of his first two novels,Typee Proof, however, is precisely what he does not have. When and Omoo, Melville was considered something of a venereal you navigate by the premise that the married Melville was made adventurer by the antsy prudes who controlled literary com- dizzy by a married lover, and that such dizziness had central ment. The erotic episodes he’d had with girls on the Marquesas effects on an American masterwork, you’ll spot support for that Islands as a young sailor helped inform the narrative contours premise wherever you glance. Shelden proceeds, page upon of Typee, and puritanical readers eagerly squinted between the page, with the dauntless pluck of a conspiracy theorist out lines to spot evidence of their own obsessions. The greatest to show that Elvis killed Kennedy. The tenet that bold claims living authority on Melville, Hershel Parker, in his matchless require bold evidence? Shelden is having none of it. He arrives two-volume monument to the author’s life and work, writes with chatty letters between Melville and Morewood, first- and that Typee and Omoo saddled Melville with the erroneous rep- secondhand accounts of soirees and countryside frolics, and utation for “being sexually dangerous, and even depraved.” inscribed books they gave to one another as gifts. He arrives, You didn’t have to sin very earnestly in antebellum America too, with a schoonerful of extrapolation and conjecture. to be branded a libertine: Writing temperate books of the flesh Where other biographers see friends, he sees fornicators; did the trick. So Melville had to listen to the drivel of censo- instead of affection, he sees infatuation. And since he can’t rious critics such as Horace Greeley, who charged his novels shake his romance-novel mood, you’ll have to endure sentences with being “positively diseased in moral such as, “She would always be restless and dreamy, a bright tone.” Melville was many things—a woman with endless curiosity searching for an elusive hap- husband for 44 years, the father of piness,” and the faux-suspenseful query: “She may have been four children, an artist of impetuous eager to cross the line into adultery, but was he?” You’ll have virtuosity—­but a diseased promoter of to hear of Melville’s lust for a “dreamy realm of lovesick heroes eroticism wasn’t exactly one of them. and heroines,” but it should be tormentingly clear by this point You close Parker’s 2,000-page excava- that Shelden himself is the one salivating for such sickness. He tion of Melville’s world not much wiser believes that Moby-Dick was written for Morewood, “to amaze about his love life but certain of his life’s her, amuse her, and to conquer the world for her,” and it’s hard loves: books, ideas, art. to overstate how hokey that is. Worse, he’s consistently inept It’s always a touch suspicious when at handling Melville’s language; the best he can do with Moby- MELVILLE IN LOVE: the biographer of a hyper-scrutinized Dick is to say that it has “passages of prose like the best poetry,” THE SECRET LIFE OF figure such as Melville comes along with a nonstatement. The writer who won’t be bothered with the HERMAN MELVILLE AND THE MUSE OF a new, catchall detail that everyone else integrity of his sentences won’t be bothered with much of any- MOBY-DICK miraculously missed. Michael Shelden’s thing else either, proof included. BY MICHAEL SHELDEN made-for-daytime biography, Melville in Melville might have been charmed by the attractive More- Ecco, 288 pp., $25.99 Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville wood, and he might have referred to her as “Thou Lady of All and the Muse of Moby-Dick, lets you know Delight” and other pet sobriquets, but flirting is not fucking,

JULY/AUG 2016 | 55 REVIEW and is very often an indication of its absence. Imagine the Melville- ­Hawthorne dyad has since been hyper-romanticized Ahabian effort it would have taken to keep such an affair from in the mold of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but Haw- their families and the prying citizens of Pittsfield. As Shel- thorne, though he esteemed Melville, wanted very little to do den himself admits, Hershel Parker “dismisses any chance of with him. The uxorious Hawthorne wanted very little to do a romance” between Melville and Morewood. Andrew Del- with anybody who wasn’t his wife: Parker writes that he went banco allots Morewood only four unmemorable sentences in to “grotesque lengths … in his efforts to avoid company,” and his 400-page biography of Melville. Newton Arvin, in his 1950 you wince at Melville’s scribbled pleas for the great man’s Herman Melville, a bio-critical beauty of uncommon acuteness, brotherhood, unrequited admissions of his “infinite fraternity mentions her only three times in passing. The 16 scholars in of feeling.” The Hawthornes lived in Lenox, Massachusetts, six The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville mention miles from the Melvilles in Pittsfield, but the novelist who Mel- ville says “dropped germinous seeds into [his] soul,” and to whom Melville dedicated Moby-Dick, “In Token of My Admira- A love affair would not have tion for His Genius,” could not be coerced to visit. When the supplied the grim soul-struggle men did manage to convene, it was always an overdue tonic for with the cosmic order Melville, who passed his days without much literary compan- ionship in a semi-isolated arcadia, living with his wife, chil- that permeates Moby-Dick. dren, mother, and what Delbanco horrifyingly calls “a rotating delegation of sisters.” Melville’s young-man hankering for male camaraderie on whalers was necessary for his survival; his philia for Haw- thorne was something else. Hawthorne was the grave embod- iment of literary sensibility; he’d harnessed the ethos of the her not at all. It didn’t seem to occur to Shelden that those visionary artist, the sublime quester after darkness and light— scholars and writers don’t mention her because there’s noth- what Melville dubbed Hawthorne’s “mystical blackness”—and ing of substance to mention, no there there. Whatever might so Melville’s passion for the man was really a passion for lit- have happened between Melville and Morewood is the prov- erature, for linguistic communion, for a tapping of the requi- ince of gossip, and that’s what Shelden has whipped up here: site reserves within himself. About Melville’s correspondence an extended gossip column for those voyeurs who believe that with Hawthorne, Robertson-Lorant writes: “More narcissistic every Melville needs an inamorata. than erotic, these passionate letters express Melville’s infatua- tion with the new self-image and artistic self-confidence Haw- BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Melville was a beautiful man: tall, built, thorne aroused in him.” That’s no doubt true of most writers blue-eyed, with a seductive voice and that virile beard—he who alter how we apprehend our existence: Their most abiding had an unignorable presence. It’s impossible to deny his mel- love is for the Word. ancholic and hermetic bent, his pessimism in the scowling face of life’s pointlessness—and just as impossible to deny his TO SOMERSET MAUGHAM’S question, “What turned the com- charisma. His wife, Elizabeth Shaw, was neither literary nor monplace, undistinguished writer of Typee into the darkly alluring compared to someone such as Morewood, though, as imaginative, powerful, inspired, and eloquent author of Moby- the daughter of a rich and influential Boston judge, she was Dick?” Shelden writes: “The short answer is falling in love.” elegant in her way, what used to be called “well-bred.” It’s true Short and wrong. Even if Melville and Morewood had the ener- that Melville and Elizabeth were perhaps ill-matched—she getic affair that Shelden everywhere suspects but nowhere sub- had scant appreciation for his one-off genius and, later in life, stantiates, that affair would have in no major way made her “the didn’t mind his giving up literature to take a spirit-stabbing job muse of Moby-Dick.” Melville’s novel, he thinks, resulted from as a clerk—but that doesn’t even come close to meaning that “the author’s own extended dive into the depths of his life. It Melville wasn’t dedicated to her, that he would barrel into such allowed him to explore the mysteries of his identity, his dreams, a volcanic affair. Shelden’s Melville is a giddy, lust-smacked and his experiences in new and complex ways.” To believe such swain, a reckless wooer in thrall to his pushy heart, though cant is to misunderstand, by an enormous margin, how a liter- the proof on hand in Parker, and in Laurie Robertson-Lorant’s ary masterwork gets made—the fallacious notion of writing as excellent Melville: A Biography, shows that he was an essen- therapy, writing as mere self-expression, as the heartfelt shar- tially conscientious family man, if always broke. As a father, ing of “identity” and “dreams” and “experiences.” Dilettantes he seems to have been in the vicinity of nineteenth-century write that way; Melvilles do not. Here’s critic Northrop Frye: average; he’d win no awards for over-doting. “Many people think that the original writer is always directly For Melville, passionate love meant mostly literary love, inspired by life. … That’s nonsense: The only inspiration worth and nowhere is that more pronounced than in his relationship having is an inspiration that clarifies the form of what’s being with Nathaniel Hawthorne, though “relationship” won’t quite written, and that’s more likely to come from something that do when you consider the woeful one-sidedness of it. The already has a literary form.”

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man” and “damned in the midst of Paradise!” The fallen angel Abdiel describes Satan as “Thyself not free, but to thyself enthrall’d”—that is Ahab, daemonic seeker, Ego incarnate, yet in vassalage to his own heroic fury, his unswerving lust for self-slaughter. “Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines,” says Ahab with Satanic tenacity. Both are orators who deliver oper- atic sermons to their crews. (In Redburn, written just two years before Moby-Dick, Melville’s narrator calls Milton’s Satan “our high-priest of poetry.”) Reluctant solipsists, both feel that the wrath of the cosmos falls directly upon their own heads, feel personally assaulted by cosmic autocracy, by a malefic deity unworthy of his reign, and both then rebel in ways that exact steep costs, not only on themselves but on their loyal crews. Satan’s pledge of “revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield” is exactly the pledge Ahab makes in his quest against the faceless leviathan: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.” His war with the whale resembles nothing so much as Lucifer’s war with Heaven in Book VI of Paradise Lost (they both last three days). In a June 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Mel- ville speaks of “the hell-fire in which [Moby-Dick] is broiled.” Milton’s touch thrives not only in the epical sweep of the tale and in Ahab’s transgressive grandeur, but in the very lineaments of Melville’s prose, in its syntactical tremors and intensity of perception, a language so present on the page it’s practically brocaded. No lone factor builds a masterwork, but rereading Paradise Lost was decisive in the novel’s final asser- tive potency. Melville’s traipsing through Berkshire glades with someone who might have been his paramour is paltry in In the summer of 1850, while in the jaws of composing comparison: A love affair would not have supplied the grim Moby-Dick, Melville reread Milton’s Paradise Lost. No imagi- soul-struggle with the cosmic order—a cosmos “formed in native writer of English in the nineteenth century would have fright,” as Ishmael says—that permeates Moby-Dick, its single- succeeded in blocking the muscled presence of Milton, and no minded mythos and mystical undertow. No other American major American writer co-opted Milton more than Melville novel matches its nourishing peril and world-smashing icon- did. His two-volume edition of Milton, with his tantalizing oclasm. Simultaneously Genesis and Job and Revelation, the marginalia, now sits in Princeton University’s rare books col- offspring of American ardor and Calvinist terror, the book not lection, a testament not only to how many times he read it, but only gathers all of life into its hold—it is itself life, a cease- to how intimately he engaged it. Prior to Melville’s rereading of less living creation of tremendous magnitude, an energy that Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick showed every sign of being not much invents itself as it advances, refusing to sit still for our attempts different from his first five novels, another at-sea bildungs- at taming it. To reduce its empyrean quarrel to an adolescent roman. Henry Pommer’s crucial 1950 study, Milton and Mel- expression of forbidden love is to blaspheme it and its maker. ville, in no way exhausts the parallels between Moby-Dick and Moby-Dick remains the Great American Novel not only Paradise Lost. Melville might have been overall more indebted because it couldn’t have been written by anyone other than to the King James Version and to Shakespeare—“I have swam an American, but because it alone wields the capaciousness to through libraries,” says Ishmael—but Milton’s work, according include the whole of American individualism, the Richter-scale to Pommer, was “trenched in Melville’s mind.” Captain Ahab collision of American mind and soul, the sacred grasp of the could not have been birthed without Milton’s Satan, and if you profane, that barbarous striving toward both a rumored heaven take away Ahab you have no Moby-Dick. and a welcoming hell. We are interested in Melville’s life chiefly Both are would-be Promethean insurgents, brassy aveng- because we are interested in the violence of his art, because ers engined by an outsized hubris, battling the unkillable, art is not enough. Our curiosity craves backstory, craves the self-determined yet shackled to fate: Satan’s “obdurate pride” life that created the book. The problem is that a writer’s life becomes Ahab’s “fatal pride.” With “heaven-insulting pur- never adequately explains a writer’s art, though the art does pose” and “proud as Lucifer,” Ahab is “more a demon than a help explain pertinent aspects of the life. For Melville the artist, whom he loved must be ancillary to what he loved, to the liter- ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS EHRETSMANN ature and the art that fired the roaring furnace of his vision. a

JULY/AUG 2016 | 57 BOOKS the assembly lines of Alfa Romeo. And yet the saga is not over. It is far from over. The end of the film opens outward to the portents of the future. To what was to come, and eventually did come. Almost a decade later, in 1969, the workers from the south on the assembly lines of the north revolted in waves of wild­ cat strikes and violence. This was a new movement, of workers that rejected the values of classic worker organizations, and Popular most especially the Communist Party, which was regarded as a blockade to real change, an organ of compromise with com­ Mechanics pany bosses. These workers were ready to reject the entire structure of northern life and of work itself. Their revolt was an How factory revolts inspired all-out assault on their own exploitation. They wanted every­ a new form of the novel. thing, as their placard slogan and shop floor chant famously expressed, Vogliamo Tutto!

BY RACHEL KUSHNER WE WANT EVERYTHING, by Nanni Balestrini, is a novel of great energy and originality that succeeds on three different levels: as a work of astounding art, a document of history, and a polit­ ical analysis that still resonates with the contradictions of the present. Published in Italy in 1971, the novel has not appeared NEAR THE VERY end of Luchino Visconti’s 1960 filmRocco and in English translation in the United States until now. Its artful­ His Brothers, the factory siren of an Alfa Romeo plant on the out­ ness lies in the tone: The person who speaks in the first person skirts of Milan sounds, indicating that it’s time for Ciro—one of in this novel is nameless, but not at all unknown to us. He is Rocco’s brothers—to return to work. Ciro is the “good” brother, intimate, insolent, blunt. He’s full of personality, full of humor, the one who found a way to live in industrial northern Italy: and rage. He speaks in a kind of vernacular poetry that gets He accepts his social position as an unskilled worker, marries into the mind and stays there. “All this new stuff in the city had a nice local petty bourgeois girl, and lives cleanly. Ciro has just a price on it,” he says, “from the newspaper to the meat to the reported his brother Simone to the police, while Rocco has gone shoes; everything had a price.” off to pursue a career in the brutal world of professional boxing. His story is likely that of a real person, named Alfonso The family is shattered and dispersed. The youngest brother, Natella, to whom the book is dedicated. Perhaps crucially, the Luca, hopes to someday return to the southern region of Luca­ protagonist speaks in a vaguely testimonial form to those who nia, where they’re from. were not there. He was there, and he knows we, his readers, Why would they have left Lucania to begin with, a world were not, and so he gives us a full account of his life. The book in where you relax in the sun, go to the beach, take a tomato its entire first half is something like a dossier, and we know the from the vine when you’re hungry? There was chronic under­ dossier matters: It’s the case file of someone who was witness to employment in the south. The soil was of poor quality. After the clashes and convulsions of his own historical era. grain markets were deregulated, prices Our hero arrives in Turin and is lucky enough to have a plummeted. For rural populations in the place to sleep at his sister’s, while many of the “great tide” of Mezzogiorno, there was simply no future. southerners washing into the city are living in the second-class At the same time, the Italian postwar waiting room at Porta Nuova train station, which would admit economic “miracle” meant there were anyone with a Fiat ID card or a letter from Fiat stating that he jobs in the factories of the rapidly indus­ had an interview at the factory. The police patrolled the train trializing north. Between 1951 and 1971, station vigilantly, but they weren’t on the lookout for loiterers nine million people migrated from rural and squatters. The police were looking for journalists, making to industrial areas in Italy. They often sure they didn’t get anywhere near the second-class waiting arrived in the big cities with nothing, room, “this dormitory that Fiat had, for free, at the Torino train and were forced to live in train station station,” as the protagonist says. WE WANT waiting rooms or on relatives’ floors. At the Fiat plant, he seeks employment along with 20,000 EVERYTHING: They worked day and evening shifts on other new hires. “The monsters were coming,” he says, “the A NOVEL NANNI BALESTRINI building sites or in factories that offered horrible workers.” And their monstrosity is magnified by the Verso, 224 pp., $24.95 treacherous conditions and long hours. high demand for labor. The work was so unbearable, many This history is all deftly evoked in Vis­ workers left after just a few days. Some withstood only half conti’s film, which ends after the south­ a day before choosing destitution over the demands of the erners return from lunch to their shift on assembly line. The protagonist is part of this tide of necessary

58 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

A meeting in 1977 at Fiat’s plant in Turin, where the nameless narrator of We Want Everything witnesses “clashes and convulsions.”

monsters, hated that much more because the factory must hire profit margin for the company. At one point our protagonist is them, must deal with them. put on a line where the work requires use of just one shoulder He goes through an interview process that is a pantomime to rivet with a heavy pneumatic gun, a repeated motion that (everyone is hired), then a factory medical assessment, which will deform him by twisting his back and bulking his muscles is even more comical and absurd. The protagonist endures asymmetrically. Meanwhile there are some on the assembly muscle- ­strength testing on newfangled machinery, a blood test line who are dedicated to work and to the Communist Party, in a room that features high piles of stinking, blood-soaked cot- northerners from peasant backgrounds, “really hard people, ton balls, a piss test that the men prepare for in a circle, “making a bit dense, lacking in imagination,” who spend their whole beer,” as they joke, and then finally, the doctor’s examination, in short lives working. People for whom “work was everything.” which the protagonist, for the hell of it, seeing that the whole To the narrator, they’re worthless. “Only a drone,” he says, thing is a charade, announces that he is missing one testicle. “could spend years in this shitty prison and do a job that He’s hired despite his lie. “Maybe they wouldn’t have taken destroys your life.” a paraplegic,” the protagonist speculates. But the medical exam The protagonist gets sick leave, but realizes that he has has not been entirely a charade. It seems instead a necessary no idea what to do with himself, how to relax or what to do stage in these workers’ exploitation: They are handing over the in Turin. The factory not only degrades work, it degrades life rights to their sole possession—their bodies—to the bosses of away from work, too. This is alienation, the lived experience Fiat, transferring ownership of their selves to the factory. So of exploitation, but it is demonstrated here without theoretical when the protagonist claims to the company doctor that he’s abstractions: It’s an oral account of a person’s life, that’s all. only got one ball, he is throwing them an insult, telling them that their new body on the line is faulty; it’s not even a full man! AT A TURNING point, the narrator decides to dedicate himself On the assembly line, the real fun begins. The work is back- totally to making trouble. It’s a commitment to risk everything. breaking, and in this era, wages were tied to productivity, “I didn’t want Fiat,” he tells the bosses. “I didn’t make it, I’m meaning workers didn’t get a decent base wage; they could inside here just to make money and that’s it. But if you piss me

ALBERTO ROVERI/MONDADORI PORTFOLIO/GETTY ROVERI/MONDADORI ALBERTO not earn enough to live on unless they produced a certain off and break my balls I’ll smash your heads in, all of you.”

JULY/AUG 2016 | 59 REVIEW

A 1963 union flier: “Only a drone,” the protagonist says, “could spend years in this shitty prison and do a job that destroys your life.”

And so the struggle begins. But the protagonist’s threat, that The second part of the novel opens with a chapter on wages, scene, is not a moment of singular heroism. As literature and and marks the narrator’s transformation into a theorist of his history both, We Want Everything is not a story of one remark- own struggle. He sees that, as a worker whose wages are tied to able man. It’s the story of the nameless and unknown who went productivity, he collaborates with the bosses against himself. north, like Rocco and his brothers and like the 20,000 who The tone makes a subtle shift. The “I” partly dissolves, and the were hired the month the protagonist was hired, in 1969. It’s book becomes something like pirate radio news bulletins of the the story of the men who worked these awful jobs and got fed war on the factory, the war in the streets. The struggle expands. up, directed their rage and their strength and violence, in the The narrator, wherever he is now, is part of a new collective interest of no longer living in misery. desire, calling not for higher base pay but for the abolition of The women would not have their say quite yet: This struggle capitalism, for the bosses’ economy to collapse. was about men and their exploitation. Women—exploited dou- bly in Italy, in the piece work they did at kitchen tables for the I ONCE ASKED a friend, an Italian from Milan who seems to factories in the north, and by their families for their domestic know a lot of people, if he’d heard of Nanni Balestrini. My friend labor—would have to mark out their own path, and did. In fact, is in the art world, and I wasn’t sure if he would have read it’s accurate to say that feminism had the most lasting and suc- Balestrini’s work. We were in this friend’s kitchen. He was mak- cessful impact among the demands made in the revolts of 1970s ing me a salad. He said “Balestrini!? Nanni? But I helped him Italy. But women’s demands were not part of the “everything” in escape into France!” this everything of factory revolts, a reminder that the word has It turned out that, in 1979, when Balestrini was going to limits, a context. “We want everything” meant we want to live be arrested for so-called insurrectionary activities against the lives with meaning, and we refuse to be forced to work in order to state, as so many were, this friend outfitted him with skis and survive. It was a working-class male “everything”; women would ski gear. He drove him to the Italian Alps, and then crossed

still be at home toiling away, even in the case of unlikely victory. into France and waited for Balestrini to ski down on the other PORTFOLIO/GETTY LOTTI/MONDADORI GIORGIO

60 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW side of Mont Blanc, into Chamonix. I pictured the one photo I’d seen of Balestrini, a man wearing a scarf wrapped in a com- plicated and elegant manner, a person who looked more bohe- mian and urbane than athletic. I asked, “But does Balestrini HIMALAYAN ski?” My friend held out his hands in emphasis, and said, “You BY CAROL FROST know … good enough!” Balestrini had been a founding member, in 1968, of the extra-parliamentary left-wing group Potere Operaio, whose Call for stars and atoms, abyss and rime. focus was on factories and factory workers, on listening to Call avalanche to cover up the climbers left behind. workers and producing a movement of their voices and direct Let no one any longer see how cold they are. experience. It’s likely that Balestrini was outside the gates of Sweep off empty canisters and Mallory’s torso, Fiat in 1969. (Alfonso Natella, the subject and “ghost author” preserve no more misgivings. Bear these heights alone. of this novel, was also involved with Potere Operaio, which is Mind sundown wrestling on the shoulders. surely how they met.) This method of workers’ inquiry—called Mind the death zone—air, air, air—and go back down, inchiesta by its practitioners in Italy—has foundations in Marx- then tomorrow like shoeless sheep ism. But it only truly took hold in postwar Europe, particularly leave earth behind with its examples of falling, in the tactics and tenets of the radical left French group Social- what’s right and what’s wrong ism or Barbarism, which then influenced workerist theory— no more than dispersing and building clouds Operaismo—in Italy. on the mountain. Make yourself no elegy Worker subjectivity, it became apparent, was shifting away but the stone snows swallow then exhume. from building a labor movement and toward a resistance against the disciplines of work. The concept of collecting the stories of workers themselves, the idea that their accounts of work and of their lives would be essential to any revolutionary process, goes all the way back to Marx’s 1880 worker’s questionnaire, Carol Frost is the author of ENTWINED: THREE LYRIC SEQUENCES which was meant to be disseminated among French factory (Tupelo Press, 2014). workers. “It is the workers in town and country,” Marx wrote, “who alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes from which they suffer.” Simply put, there is no theory without struggle. Struggle is the condition of possibility for theory. And struggle is produced by workers themselves. But in its use by Balestrini, who was not just a militant and theorist but a poet and artist, a writer to the core, inchiesta became something more, something else: a singular artistic achievement and a new literary form, the novel-inchiesta. Bal- through which Alfonso Natella speaks. As if Balestrini had rolled estrini went on to employ this same method in later novels, under the factory gates, like smoke, and was suddenly inside. Gli Invisibili (The Unseen) and Sandokan. Both feature first- Perhaps the novel-inchiesta is never a work of introspection, person protagonists who tell stories that serve also as histor- but always instead of refraction: a way to refract that which, as ical accounts: of the militancy of the autonomist movement Umberto Eco wrote of this novel, “is already literature” before its of 1977 in the former; of the Camorra and its ravages of the refraction, its transcription, before its existence in a book. south in the latter. This novel was already literature when it was in the form of These voices in Balestrini’s novels are always one person the passing thoughts a worker was having on the assembly line. speaking anonymously as a type. The voices have all the spec- I’d like to think that Balestrini skiing down into Chamonix, his ificity of an individual—a set of attitudes, moods, prejudices, scarf flapping, whether told or not, is literature, too. a back stories—but they each speak in a way that exemplifies what life was like for a person such as them, in a moment when THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 247, No. 7 & 8, Issues 4,993 & 4994, July/Aug 2016. (Printed in the United States on May 27, 2016.) is published monthly (except for two double issues there were many like them. They are works that capture and of Jan/Feb and July/August 2016) by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone (202) 508-4444. Yearly subscription, $79.97; Canada, $99.97 (U.S. illuminate voice. Voices speaking, rather than words written. funds); foreign, $119.97 (U.S. funds). Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 foreign/Canada In this way, these works depart from the classical subjectivity (includes postage & handling). © 2016 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Rights and permissions: fax (202) 204-4871. Indexed in of the nineteenth-century novel, and seem closer to an earlier Readers’ Guide, Media Review Digest. For hard-copy reprints, call (202) 508-4444. Microform, Canadian Periodical Index, and CD-ROM are available through ProQuest, 300 N. Zeeb Road, tradition, also oral and heroic and historic: epic poetry. Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Telephone (800) 521-0600. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. Box 6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post We need many epics for each epoch. Perhaps one day we will Agreement Number 7178957. Send change of address information and blocks of undeliverable finally have the testimony of Balestrini’s own life, his ownI as an copies to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolic- ited manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be emailed to [email protected]. any and a we, his militancy and flight. In the creation of We Want For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our website at Everything, he dissolved himself, became the mere medium newrepublic.com/customerservice.

JULY/AUG 2016 | 61 BOOKS joke is that GDP declines when an economist marries his house- keeper, which is not so much a joke as a good explanation of Gross Domestic Product and what it does not account for. The economic rationality that is supposed to guide human behavior isn’t designed to apply to the half of the population expected to work for free. Marçal doesn’t argue that economics is sexist so much as that it’s totally clueless.

MARÇAL, WHOSE BOOK is now available in English translation, doesn’t soft-pedal her critique. She first published the book in Sweden in 2012, partly as a response to the global financial cri- sis, and her message is no less valid today. The socioeconomic system may not be hemorrhaging the way it was in 2008, but the wounds don’t seem to be healing. In trying to express exactly what’s been going wrong, Marçal proceeds by aggressive use of common sense—poking and prodding in plain language at contradictions in economics— rather than in the terms of dense critical theory. She declines to invoke Marxist feminists like Monique Wittig or Selma James (whose work on gender roles seems to have been an inspiration, Mom’s Invisible at least indirectly) or any of their inheritors. If another thinker enters the text, it’s usually to be eviscerated. The book starts with the 2008 crash. Marçal quotes Chris- Hand tine Lagarde, then French Minister of Finance, who surmised What men got wrong about that things would have turned out differently if Lehman Broth- ers had been Lehman Sisters. That is to say, women might have the economy. a better temperament for managing global capitalism. Marçal has little tolerance for this kind of ahistorical thinking: BY MALCOLM HARRIS A world where women dominated Wall Street would have had to be so completely different from the actual world IN THE MID-EIGHTEENTH century, Scottish philosopher Adam that to describe it wouldn’t tell us anything about the actual Smith told a story about markets and goods and people, one world. Thousands of years of history would need to be that has become the dominant narrative about human nature, rewritten in order to lead up to the hypothetical moment as well as the structuring principle for our daily interactions. that an investment bank named Lehman Sisters Society is made up of self-interested individuals, he argued, and could handle its over-exposure to an overheated American through markets these individuals make collective life possible. housing market. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” Smith says in The Wealth In short, the thought experiment is meaningless. of Nations, “but from their regard to their own interest.” Marçal rejects Lagarde and the “Lean In” brand of feminism Katrine Marçal, a Swedish newspaper columnist, tells a that imagines women, economically, as heretofore repressed different story. Her tale focuses on Adam Smith and his din- men. The literal translation of the book’s Swedish title, Det ner. Smith, the originator of what we now call economics, may enda könet, is “The Only Sex,” which seems to speak to a French have imagined a table set with self-interest-filled plates, but he feminist tradition that views woman as a product of structural didn’t cook his own meals, nor did he pay anyone to do it for conflict with man. For her part, Marçal makes a radical sugges- him. He didn’t go from one devotee’s house to another like an tion that patriarchy, having operated for “thousands of years of ancient Greek, and he didn’t sit at a patron’s table like a court history,” is bound to come to an end. It’s not human nature, not painter. Instead, he had his mommy do it. biology, just a matter of time. Future societies will look back on Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? is Marçal’s book-length economics as a kind of foolish male mysticism, and Marçal’s attack on the idea of economic rationality as a whole, from book anticipates the tone of their laughter. Smith to the present day. For Marçal, the title story points to In short, self-contained chapters, Marçal moves through a fundamental error in economic ideology: “Somebody has to the contradictions and errors flowing from Smith’s mistake. prepare that steak so Adam Smith can say their labor doesn’t Although Marçal’s target is economics, her critique applies to matter.” Much of women’s domestic and reproductive labor social contract theorists and any philosophy that starts with the quite literally does not factor within economic models. The old individual, as in the thought of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.

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Only a man, she suggests, would imagine independence rather but a critical means of differentiating truth from falsehood. than dependence as the basis for the human condition. Indi- Proceeding from the truths that women are people and many vidualists make the mistake of economic thinking: They forget people are women reveals the ways in which other modes of about their mothers. “No one reads books about childbirth in thought begin with very different assumptions. By the final order to understand human existence,” Marçal writes. “We read page, it’s hard to imagine a good-faith reader maintaining full Shakespeare. Or one of the great philosophers who write about confidence in the science of economics. how people spring from the earth like mushrooms and imme- Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? is a masterpiece of rhet- diately start drafting social contracts with each other.” To the oric, clearheaded analysis, and critical imagination. But there’s idea that human society begins with men negotiating for their this move that Marçal makes at the end of the book that’s as individual security, Marçal replies, “Hardly.” Humans, after all, do not crash-land into existence. The uterus is not a spaceship, even if we’re taught to think of it that Adam Smith didn’t invent way. This is how it looks, Marçal points out, in Lennart Nils- capitalism, he just gave it son’s groundbreaking photographs of a fetus, which famously an astrology. appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1965. In the pictures, a wrinkled baby-to-be floats in a bubble membrane; the back- ground is pitch black, and a cord runs from the baby’s core to… something. This is man before he is born alone into the world, waiting to fall off the tree like a ripe plum. But nothing could be further from the truth: The fetus is entirely enveloped within another human being, and the birth process is called labor. familiar as it is frustrating. After issuing a logical argument for Once he pulls himself out of the womb by his bootstraps, the a total break with thousands of years of patriarchy, Marçal hits imagined economic individual wants one thing: more. “Our a fork: What is to be done? She writes, “We don’t need to call it most fundamental trait is that we want an unlimited number a revolution, rather it could be termed an improvement.” I read of things,” Marçal recounts. “Everything. Now. Immediately.” this to mean, “No one necessarily has to fight about it.” Political Adam Smith conceded that this was irrational behavior—if we books without a concluding commitment to steady nonviolent knew what was good for us, we wouldn’t be so willing to trade progress are usually niche products at best. our time for stuff. But Smith thought humans were fundamen- Not until the conclusion is it apparent how absent violence tally vain and miscalculating. Later, other market theorists is from Marçal’s story. Reading the book, you might think cap- would define rationality according to market behavior, allow- italist patriarchy is propped up by reason. Marçal is fully con- ing them to understand, for example, altruism as self-interest. vincing when she argues that centuries of individualist thinkers Regardless of rationality, the economic individual is understood have worked from a limited understanding of human beings. first and foremost as grabby. But isn’t that ultimately a little beside the point? Adam Smith Is that what humans are: Homo Economicus? The story of the didn’t invent capitalism, he just gave it an astrology. economic individual—Robinson Crusoe on his island—might Between Marçal’s ultimate proposal for “improvement” and make sense if you forget that women exist, but its implications her characterization of society as an ongoing war on women, are still absurd and stultifying. If the capitalist market system is the poor, and nonwhite people around the world, it’s the lat- the ultimate expression of the human species-being, then man ter that’s better argued. Except for some scandalous anatomi- is an odd bird indeed. Marçal isn’t so sure cal terms, Adam Smith’s Dinner is decidedly PG-13, but gender about the rational justification for an relations under capitalism aren’t; violence against women is indoor ski slope in Dubai, for example—­ part of the economy. The ongoing war Marçal alludes to a few and that’s just the tip of the iceberg times is literal, and she never suggests otherwise. when it comes to capitalism’s ridiculous Marçal’s work is a model of radical thought. We have been order of operations. But “if you question taught, she writes, to identify with economic man: with “the economics, you question your inner depth of his feelings,” with his “fear of vulnerability, of nature, nature. And then you’re insulting your- of emotion, of dependency, of the cyclical, and of everything we self,” Marçal writes. “So you keep quiet.” can’t understand.” Of course, the particular lies that patriarchy has put to use over the last few millennia have been dispelled and MARÇAL’S BOOK IS subtitled “a story of recomposed time and time again, but Marçal’s critique—and the WHO COOKED ADAM women and economics,” and her critical anti-capitalist feminist tradition on which it stands—is a histor- SMITH’S DINNER? register is rigorously logical rather than ical insight of unimaginable potential. “We could go from trying BY KATRINE MARÇAL moralizing. She makes an excellent to own the world,” she writes, “to trying to feel at home in it.” Pegasus Books, 240 pp., $26.95 argument for the value of feminism as an Radical thought shares an uneven but living relationship analytical lens: It is not a way to show with radical action. If Adam Smith’s Dinner inspires people, it’s respect or fill out the historical record, not clear to what exactly it will be. But I’d like to find out. a

JULY/AUG 2016 | 63 backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY STÉPHANIE BURET

LOCATION Asmara, Eritrea DATE July 20, 2015

THE ESPRESSO MACHINE at Bar Vittoria stood idle. No steaming famines, and mandatory, indefinite military service force some milk, no crunch of coffee beans. A handful of customers sat at 5,000 Eritreans to flee their homeland each month. An esti- the counter, chatting with the barista, Saba. For a few hours that mated 25 percent of the country’s population now lives abroad. day, she had nothing to do but listen to their stories. This was When Swiss photojournalist Stéphanie Buret traveled to Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and the electricity was out. Again. Asmara last year, she was struck by the quiet panic in the people Power outages are a daily occurrence in Eritrea, one of the she met. “I could always feel fear,” she says. Locals asked her to most repressive and secretive states in the world. Once an Ital- expose the brutal reality of life in Eritrea but refused to identify ian colony, it won independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after themselves for fear of arrest. Some 10,000 political prisoners 30 years of war. The capital still shows signs of its former rulers’ currently languish in prison without charges. love for la dolce vita. In the 1930s, Italian architects lined Asma- Back at Bar Vittoria, after four hours of waiting, the power ra’s streets with art deco designs, and the city is still dotted with clicked back on. Saba straightened, and got back to work. a faded cinemas and cafés, palm-lined avenues and aging Fiats. But beneath this façade of old-world gentility, life is anything SEE MORE OF STÉPHANIE BURET’S WORK ON INSTAGRAM but sweet. A ruthless 23-year dictatorship, drought-induced @NEWREPUBLIC.

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