Black Lives Matter Still Matters

TRUMP VS. TEXAS AFRICA’S LAST COLONY THE CONSTITUTION IN CRISIS

MAY 2017

WHY BLACK LIVES MATTER STILL MATTERS

PLUS DETROIT’S KILLER COPS THE RISE OF ‘WARRIOR’ POLICE Anti Piketty_Reason_4C.qxp_Layout 1 2/28/17 9:37 AM Page 1 New Book from the Cato Institute

Cogently evaluates “Thomas Piketty’s work ....“ should be widely read.

—PASCAL SALIN, Paris-Dauphine University Eminently readable and“ “precise. It is superb! —DOUGLAS B. RASMUSSEN, St. John’s University

Brings together many of “the best criticisms of“ Thomas Piketty. —PETER BOETTKE, George Mason University

homas Piketty’s well-received book Capital in the Twenty-First Century Tprovided a new theory about wealth and inequality. However, there have been major criticisms of his work. Anti-Piketty: Capital for the 21st Centurybrings together key criticisms from 20 specialists who provide rig- orous arguments against Piketty’s work while examining the issues of inequality, growth, wealth, and capital.

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4O YEARS OF ADVANCING LIBERTY RETAILERS NATIONWIDE. contents

MAY 2017

UP FRONT 6 The Spy Who Loved Me 42 What I learned from my own contacts with Russian agents. BY TONY HORWITZ 8 How Not to Fight Terrorism Obama made mistakes. Trump’s making them worse. BY HEATHER HURLBURT 9 The Trump Tweetometer A highly precise quantitative analysis of last month’s presidential tweets. 10 Don’t Mess With Texas The biggest obstacle to Trump’s border wall isn’t money. BY RACHEL MONROE 12 The Voice of Trump Forget Twitter. The president now has a bigger megaphone. BY CHRIS IOVENKO

COLUMN 14 Just Say No to Just Say No Why all-out obstruction is the wrong way to stop Trump. BY JOHN B. JUDIS Divided We Fall REVIEW The Founders knew economic inequality would destroy 52 The United States of Work our democracy. So why can’t the Constitution save us? How bosses control our lives, even when we’re not on the job. BY MIYA TOKUMITSU BY GANESH SITARAMAN 58 Real Housewives A new Handmaid’s Tale sounds a warning to conservative women. BY SARAH JONES 60 Eyes on the Guys

16 20 I Love Dick turns feminist theory into Why Black Lives Matter Professor Carnage urgent, messy drama. BY RACHEL SYME Still Matters Police officers are taught to think like 63 Lonely Planet Three years into the uprising against “warriors.” Is the rise of a militarized How to read the global novel in an age of police violence, what’s next for the mindset turning black citizens into militarized borders. BY SIDDHARTHA DEB targets? BY STEVE FEATHERSTONE movement? BY PENIEL E. JOSEPH 66 High and Mighty Can drone photography truly capture life on the ground? BY KYLE CHAYKA 69 Freestyle Marxism 28 46 Marshall Berman taught the left to seize the cultural moment. BY MAX HOLLERAN The Fire Last Time Africa’s Last Colony 72 Backstory How an elite police squad terrorized In Western Sahara, 165,000 refugees PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW CULLEN African Americans in 1970s Detroit, are still fighting for their freedom. and turned the city into a battleground. TEXT BY CARNE ROSS POETRY BY MARK BINELLI PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANTHONY JEAN 56 [but how long into the apocalypse could you go before having to kill some white dude?] BY DANEZ SMITH 65 War Poem BY NOMI STONE ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY

MAY 2017 | 1 contributors

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer at Rolling Stone and The New York Editor in Chief Win McCormack Times Magazine, and the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be and the novel Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits. Editor THE FIRE LAST TIME, P. 28 Eric Bates

Tony Horwitz spent a decade overseas covering conflicts in Africa, the Executive Editor Literary Editor Middle East, and the Balkans for The Wall Street Journal. He won the Ryan Kearney Laura Marsh Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and wrote for The New Yorker before Politics Editor Features Directors becoming a full-time author. His latest book, Midnight Rising, was named a Bob Moser Sasha Belenky Theodore Ross New York Times Notable Book. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, P. 6 Deputy Editor Ryu Spaeth Senior Editors Brian Beutler Managing Editor Heather Hurlburt directs the New Models of Policy Change initiative at Jeet Heer Laura Reston New America, a Washington-based think tank. She has held positions in the News Editor Social Media Editor White House, the State Department, and Congress, and has published Alex Shephard Sarah Jones widely on the intersection of national security and politics. Staff Writers HOW NOT TO FIGHT TERRORISM, P. 8 Design Director Emily Atkin Graham Vyse Siung Tjia Josephine Livingstone Anthony Jean is a French photojournalist who has been covering Africa Photo Director Poetry Editor Stephanie Heimann and the Middle East for over six years. In 2010, he and his colleague Lise Cathy Park Hong Tregloze covertly infiltrated the Gdeim Izik encampment, the largest Production Manager peaceful demonstration in the history of the Sahrawi people since Steph Tan Reporter-Researchers Clio Chang Moroccan occupation. They were among the only foreigners to witness the Contributing Editors Lovia Gyarkye protest, now considered by human rights observers to be the true starting James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Sukjong Hong Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, Juliet Kleber point of the Arab Spring. AFRICA’S LAST COLONY, P. 46 Siddhartha Deb, Michael Nicole Narea Eric Dyson, Paul Ford, Ted Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Genoways, William Giraldi, Interns Dana Goldstein, Kathryn Joyce, Eric Armstrong Values at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and professor of history and Suki Kim, Maria Konnikova, Jasmine Bager Corby Kummer, Michelle Legro, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the Naomi LaChance Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, Sagari Shetty University of Texas, Austin. He is author of Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: Graeme Wood, Robert Wright A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Stokely: A Life. He has written widely about Black Lives Matter, race, criminal justice, and U.S. politics. WHY BLACK LIVES MATTER STILL MATTERS, P. 16 Director of Marketing Director of Sales and Revenue Suzanne Wilson Rachel Monroe is a writer, radio host, and volunteer firefighter based in Evelyn Frison Associate Account Marfa, Texas. She covers border politics and has been published in The New Audience and Executive Partnership Manager York Times Magazine, The Guardian, New York, and Pacific Standard. Shawn Awan Eliza Fish DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS, P. 10 Controller Media Relations Manager David Myer Carne Ross is the founder of Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit Steph Leke Office Manager, NY Associate Publisher diplomatic group that advises the Sahrawi liberation group the Polisario Tori Campbell Art Stupar Front in Western Sahara. He is the author of The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century and Publisher Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite. Hamilton Fish AFRICA’S LAST COLONY, P. 46

Ganesh Sitaraman is an associate professor at Vanderbilt Law School Published by Lake Avenue Publishing and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. A longtime adviser 1 Union Square West, to Senator Elizabeth Warren, he served as her policy director and senior New York, NY 10003 counsel. His most recent book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: President Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic, was published in March. Win McCormack DIVIDED WE FALL, P. 42

Miya Tokumitsu is a lecturer in art history at the University of For subscription inquiries or problems call (800) 827-1289 Melbourne. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin and the author of Do For reprints and licensing visit www.TNRreprints.com What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness. THE UNITED STATES OF WORK, P. 52

2 | NEW REPUBLIC Expl e Y r W ld

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iupress.indiana.edu from the stacks

DONALD TRUMP AND his team may have coined the term “alternative facts,” but conservatives have been ignoring cold, hard evidence for decades. Ever since the 1970s, when Republicans embraced fire-breathing ideologues like Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, the GOP has blindly moved to slash taxes, gut regulations, and shred the social safety net, in good economic times and bad. As new republic editor Jonathan Chait explained in 2005, it doesn’t matter to conservatives whether their policies help families put food on the table. What matters is the dogma that undergirds their beliefs. ✯ Trump has taken the conservative disdain for empiricism and ratcheted it up to eleven. He’s promised massive tax cuts for the rich, despite evidence that George W. Bush’s tax handouts ballooned the deficit and cra- tered the economy. He’s vowed to roll back federal regulations—including those designed to protect working-class Americans. And he wants to amp up carbon emissions, even as global warming melts the polar ice caps. If God himself were to appear, as Chait envisions, and proclaim that today’s conservatives are wrong, Trump would not see the light. Like his fellow Republicans, he has embraced the gospel of smaller government at any cost.

Jonathan Chait Fact Finders FEBRUARY 28, 2005

Imagine that God were to appear on Earth precepts. Would economic conservatives hand, produces better measurable health for the unlikely purpose of settling, once likewise abandon their views? A great many outcomes at a vastly lower cost. and for all, our disputes over economic pol- would not. Economic conservatism, unlike lib- George W. Bush’s signature proposals— icy. And suppose that, to my enormous eralism, would survive having all its empirical massive tax cuts and Social Security surprise, he announced that every empirical underpinnings knocked out from beneath it. privatization—reflect a belief that reducing claim advanced by conservatives was cor- For a true conservative, whatever ends government is an end in itself. Outside events rect. Cutting taxes produces such great eco- they think smaller government may bring exert not even the slightest influence on his nomic growth that even the poor benefit. about—greater prosperity, economic mobil- goals. In the book The Price of Loyalty, former Privatizing or eliminating Medicare and Social ity for the non-rich—are almost beside the Bush Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill mourns Security will cause the elderly to save mon- point. As Milton Friedman wrote, “Freedom the administration’s hostility to expertise ey and enjoy higher living standards. Slashing in economic arrangements is itself a com- and fact-driven debate. “You don’t have to regulations actually does a better job helping ponent of freedom broadly understood, so know anything or search for anything,” he those whom the regulations were intended economic freedom is an end in itself.” Prov- says of the ideologues in the administration. to help. Suppose that God presented these ing that their policies can produce material “You already know the answer to everything. conclusions so convincingly that everybody improvement in people’s lives is a luxury, It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.” immediately accepted them as truth. not a necessity. Meanwhile, Democrats have contin- How would liberals respond? No doubt Empirical reasoning simply does not drive uously reexamined their policies in light of by rethinking and abandoning nearly all their thinking. What appears to be conserva- changing conditions. Part of this difference their long-held positions. Liberalism, after tive economic reasoning is actually a kind of reflects the cultural predilections of the last all, claims to produce certain outcomes: backward reasoning. It begins with the conclu- two presidents—Bush is the instinctive anti more prosperity and security, especially sion and marches back through the premises. intellectual who likes to go with his gut, and for the poor and middle classes; a cleaner Consider the conservative view of health Bill Clinton is the former Rhodes scholar who environment; safer foods and drugs; and care. Conservatives repeat the mantra that relished academic debates. But it also reflects so on. If it were proved that liberal policies the United States has “the best health care the natural tendencies of conservatism and lib- fail to produce those outcomes, then their system in the world.” That isn’t true by al- eralism. Bush’s administration gives primacy to rationale would disappear. most any objective measure. Our health care political advisers over policy wonks in large part Now imagine the opposite were to hap- system is indeed the best at minimizing the because they have no need to debate their

pen. God appears in order to affirm liberal role of government. France, on the other ends, only the means of achieving them. a DETAIL FROM THE CREATION OF ADAM, FROM THE SISTINE CEILING, MICHELANGELO. VATICAN MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES/ BRIDGEMAN

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SOFT POWER

The Spy Who Loved Me What I learned from my own contacts with Russian intelligence agents.

BY TONY HORWITZ

I NEVER THOUGHT I’d identify with Attorney General to coax information and alcohol from diplomats. Our Jeff Sessions and the other Trump associates who are American envoys were no help: The U.S. embassy in under scrutiny for their contacts with the Kremlin. Cairo was a citadel, drawbridges up, and the ambas- Yes, their meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak sador’s rare press briefings were so icy and anodyne sound fishy. Yes, they failed to disclose direct that we stopped going. Egyptian officials were far more ex changes with Russian intelligence agents at a gracious, serving us endless cups of sweet tea while moment when Russia was apparently meddling in helpfully informing us—the night before a presidential the U.S. election. But what about my own dealings election—that Hosni Mubarak had won another term, with Russian envoys? with 97 percent of the vote. Soviet, actually. In the late 1980s, when the ussr Our Egyptian hosts also sent us frequent invita- was still intact, my wife, Geraldine, and I went to tions to Foreign Ministry receptions, affording us work as Middle East reporters, based in Cairo. We a chance to practice our kindergarten Arabic and knew nothing, and no one, and in the great tradition of foreign correspondents, we spent a lot of time trying ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARTIN ELFMAN

6 | NEW REPUBLIC execrable French with low-level envoys from minor Vladimir volunteered to be my translator, arranged TRUMP’S nations while sipping fruit juice in a genteelly shab- for a car and driver, and spent several days guiding RUSSIA TIES by salon. It was at one such leaden gathering that me to my forbears’ remote homes. Michael Flynn we met a handsome, charming Russian who spoke Like Alexei, Vladimir was warm, well-informed, Discussed U.S. sanctions excellent, if heavily accented, English and seemed and implausibly cast, in his case as an Intourist agent with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. eager to become better acquainted. in drab, untouristed Minsk. The peasants we met Alexei, as I’ll call him, said he was second sec- treated him with cautious deference, and during Jared Kushner retary for sport at the Soviet embassy. My wife had our long drives, he would take out a notebook and Met with Kislyak at Trump Tower. visited Moscow as a student and was something of a ask, “What is your opinion of cooperation between Russophile. I’m of Russian Jewish descent and grew Common Market and socialist bloc?” When I noted, Jeff Sessions up on tales of czars and Cossacks. We chatted about as other journalists had in print, that some Arabs had Spoke with Kislyak the Olympics and Russian literature, and exchanged joined the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, during campaign. phone numbers. he asked if this was “official information.” Carter Page Before long, Alexei began turning up at our apart- Not long afterward, Geraldine and I left Cairo for Met with Kislyak at ment, always with a gift: flowers for Geraldine, a a new posting in London and lost touch with Alexei, GOP convention. bottle of cherry brandy. For expats in Cairo, buying though I corresponded with Vladimir as the ussr Paul Manafort spirits required a trip to a distant state outlet and crumbled. “Time is running and you can’t stop it In contact with Russians pharaonic sheaves of paperwork. So we welcomed or slow it down,” he wrote. “I hope for the better.” under NSA surveillance. the brandy, and Alexei’s company, while recognizing My encounters with Alexei and Vladimir didn’t that his visits weren’t just social. Veteran hacks in amount to much. I had no secrets to share, and they Roger Stone In touch with DNC hacker Cairo often played a parlor game, guessing who were weren’t providing me with sensitive information. Guccifer 2.0, who is sus- the “spooks” working under diplomatic cover. Being But in retrospect, I view them both as minor but pected of Russian ties. an inquisitive second secretary in a minor sector effective practitioners of “soft” power, even if they was judged a sure giveaway. were also spies. They gained a little insight into how Donald Trump Encouraged Russia to And sure enough, over brandy one night, Alexei Americans think, and I got a rare glimpse of life hack Clinton’s emails. asked, “So. What do you think of Shultz visit?” At behind the Iron Curtain that left me feeling warmer the time, then–Secretary of State George Shultz toward the Russian people. was touring the region. Geraldine laughed and told In a different time, at a very different stratum, Alexei he could find out all she knew by reading that Sergey Kislyak appears to be a virtuoso of this es- day’s Wall Street Journal. As the paper’s Middle East sential art of statecraft. By all accounts, he’s a pol- bureau chief, she covered the peace process and other ished and persistent diplomat, adept at ingratiating hefty matters. As a stringer, I mainly wrote color himself with influential Americans and putting the features, from which Alexei could learn all about Egypt’s camel-riding border patrol or chewing khat in Yemen. Undeterred, Alexei invited us to dinner at his apartment, where his wife cooked cabbage Alexei began turning up at our apartment, always dumplings and he plied us with enough vodka to with a gift. We welcomed the brandy, while animate the Sphinx. recognizing that his visits weren’t just social. Over the next few years, we would see Alexei from time to time, with much the same routine. Drinks and chat, then a leading question we’d laugh off before returning to pleasant conversation. I liked to best face possible on his nation. He reminds me of think we were doing our bit for perestroika, while Nizar Hamdoon, Saddam Hussein’s ambassador to enabling Alexei to advance his career by telling his the United States and United Nations in the 1980s bosses he was developing American assets. and ’90s, who spoke at schools and Rotary Clubs all Near the end of our Cairo posting, my father across the country and helped persuade Americans sent me letters about his father’s shtetl childhood. that Saddam was someone we could “work with.” My mother’s grandparents had also fled from rural Hamdoon acted as the eyes, ears, and mouthpiece Belorussia, and no one on either side of the family of a monstrous regime. Some would say the same of had ever returned. When I decided to visit my an- Kislyak and Russia. But however sinister the motives cestral homeland, the U.S. embassy in Cairo warned of such figures, they are doing their job, and doing me that Americans were almost always barred from it well, and perhaps we can learn from them. that region. But Alexei just smiled and advised me to Most of the American diplomats I met during my fly to Minsk and visit the Intourist office—where, a decade overseas were all but imprisoned in their day after my arrival, an Intourist “inspektor” named compounds, even before September 11 accelerated

MAY 2017 | 7 up front

such bunkerization. Now the Trump administration we were masters of soft power: think the Marshall wants to slash the already minute share of the federal Plan, the Voice of America, our magnetic cinema, budget devoted to foreign assistance and outreach, the thousands of Peace Corps volunteers who sowed while spending billions more on defense. goodwill in developing countries. This strikes me as an opportunity lost. Even in the Make America great again? Absolutely—by “hostile” nations I’ve visited, including Iran, Sudan, be coming true diplomats, in ways both little and and Yemen, foreigners who resent U.S. policy almost large, and projecting our open, big-hearted person- always like Americans as people. Not so long ago, ality around the world. a

HOMELAND INSECURITY

How Not to Fight Terrorism Instead of correcting Obama’s missteps, Trump is exploiting the public’s worst fears.

BY HEATHER HURLBURT

A STUDY IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION thinks it knows all it obstacle. “Everything is going to be quicker from CONTRASTS needs to about what motivates extremist violence. flash to bang,” explains a former Pentagon official. Michael Flynn, the president’s former national It’s natural, of course, for a new administration Obama: security adviser, considers it “nonsense” even to to review and revise its predecessor’s security pol- “A sustainable counterterrorism try to figure out the root causes of terrorism. John icies. And there are, in fact, plenty of reasons to strategy depends Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, describes critique Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and on keeping the America’s opponents as “driven irrationally to our make some changes. They’re just not the ones that threat in destruction”—even though scholars have docu- Trump is pursuing. perspective.” mented that the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and other Consider, for example, the welter of counter Trump: extremist movements work quite rationally toward terrorism programs that Obama consolidated “I would bomb the their goals: controlling territory, establishing under the banner of Countering Violent Extremism— shit out of ’em. I ideological dominance, and defeating their political everything from online Twitter campaigns and coun- would just bomb those suckers.” enemies. The administration’s plan to combat seling vulnerable young people to preventing genocide terrorism, in fact, flows directly from Steve Bannon and women’s empowerment. Critics have argued that and other key advisers, who believe that the United many CVE programs were overseen by unqualified States is locked in an ideological conflict not only officials who were unable to demonstrate wheth- with “radical Islamic terrorists,” but possibly with er the work was even making a difference. Early Islam itself. English-language videos called “Think Again Turn Rather than countering extremist organizations Away”—produced by the State Department to guide and building support among Muslim allies, the ad- young people away from terrorism—were derided as ministration has called for increased surveillance of “the equivalent of a Just Say No marketing effort.” mosques in the United States, banned travel from Last year, the Obama administration shuttered the six predominantly Muslim countries, and under- video campaign and sought to streamline CVE oper- cut Islam’s protected status as a religion under ations scattered across a dozen federal agencies. But the First Amendment. Overseas, it has dispatched problems persisted. An investigation into a Pentagon additional U.S. forces to Syria and conducted more effort to combat isis’s social media propaganda, drone strikes in Yemen in a single week than the for example, found it “beset with incompetence, Obama administration did in an entire year. It has cronyism, and flawed data.” And as researchers Can- also floated the idea of rolling back Obama-era rules dace Rondeaux and Bethany McGann point out, the designed to protect civilians from drone strikes and social science on what actually works to counter other counterterrorism missions, and reducing over- extremism remains thin—even as anti-poverty and sight when military force is used outside declared humanitarian programs have jumped on the CVE war zones. Trump sees military victory as the goal— bandwagon, because that’s where the money is. and Obama’s limits on the use of force as a central U.S. officials still have significant blind spots when

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

BASED ON HIS tweets, Donald Trump’s second first time since the inauguration. In short, month in office was a rough one. It started @realDonaldTrump seemed lost and lonely. when he ignited an international incident by “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Twitter,” accusing Barack Obama of having his “wires he acknowledged during an interview. Then, tapped” in Trump Tower during the election. with true Trumpian self-inflation, he claimed Denounced by everyone from the British to have 100 million followers. (In reality, he has government to GOP congressmen, Trump 27 million on Twitter, an estimated one-fourth largely retreated from Twitter. He toned down of which are automated bots.) Here are six key his insults, started patting himself on the back indicators from our Tweetometer that Trump more, and began using the word “sad” for the had a really, really bad month.

1. He tweeted less. 4. He projected his misery. 5. He spent more time Words he used for the first time praising himself. since his inauguration: In his first month he focused on 187 113 criticizing others—but now self- praise is his top tweet priority.

First month Second month disaster (3)

2. He used fewer exclamation points. sad (3) 33% 47% 9% From first (2) month to pathetic second 15%

5% rude (1) 3. He put far fewer Praised himself Praised others words in all caps. Criticized others Praised his team (1) 132 lying MOST ATTACKED Obama (8), fake news (6), danger (1) the Democrats (6), Obamacare (4) 51 MOST PRAISED First Second ExxonMobil (3), women (2), month month CEOs (1) joke (1) MOST CAPPED JOBS (8) FAKE NEWS (6) MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN (4) sick (1)

6. He logged his very first day as president without a single tweet. On March 12, Trump was at home in the White House. It was a Sunday. He had no publicly scheduled events. Yet he didn’t fire off a single tweet all day—even though his “friend” Rand Paul and Paul Ryan took to the Sunday talk shows to reject his health care plan and his wiretapping accusations. SHUTTERSTOCK; COURTESY OF CBS

MAY 2017 | 9 up front it comes to und erstanding what interventions deter assault—something many military and intelligence young people from joining radical groups, which pro- officials warn is simply not possible. grams transfer between countries and cultures and So how has Trump been able to push through which do not, and where to focus scarce resources. such an enormous divergence from his predecessor’s While human rights groups have been the most policy? First, Americans view terrorism through a vocal in criticizing Obama’s escalation of drone strong partisan lens: Trump voters were twice as strikes and Special Forces operations, senior mili- likely as Hillary Clinton supporters to cite terrorism tary and intelligence officials have also quietly raised as a key concern. Second—and for this Obama must concerns. They point out that years of so-called direct bear some of the blame—many Americans perceive action have been good for tactical wins but have not Trump’s policies as simply a more effective version defeated a single extremist group, while strikes and of what Obama tried to do. Since the rise of isis, perceived violations of sovereignty have spurred Americans have been swimming in a media ocean of resentment against the United States. “It is possible overheated rhetoric about terror threats. Conserva- that the political cost of these attacks exceeds the tive commentators used terrorism as a proof point tactical gains,” argues retired Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, for arguments about racial and religious insecurity a highly regarded collaborator of Gen. David Petraeus. during the Obama years. Obama himself—who fre- In fact, as Trump considers rolling back the Obama- quently reminded his staff that more Americans die era standards that govern such operations, even each year from handguns, from car accidents, or from four-star generals are calling for significantly more falls in the bathtub than from terrorism—attempted oversight and transparency—including negotiating to emphasize the limited nature of the threat by global rules for targeted killings. limiting its place in his rhetoric. As the election The Trump administration, however, is moving underscored, however, not talking about terrorism in exactly the opposite direction. Its single-minded is not an effective way to deal with terrorism. focus on “radical Islam” ignores evidence about The Trump administration, by contrast, actively the diversity of those who turn to violence, as well seeks to fuel public fears rather than allay them. The as the role of religious communities in identifying textbook definition of terrorism, after all, is that it and thwarting potential terrorist threats. What’s heightens fear among civilians at home. Among all more, Trump’s recent escalation of drone strikes in of Obama’s missteps, his failure to acknowledge that Yemen is widely viewed as a trial run for defeating fear, however irrational, and to counter it effectively, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with an all-out air may be the one that haunts us the longest. a

OBSTACLE COURSE

Don’t Mess With Texas The biggest hurdle to Trump’s border wall isn’t money or geography. It’s private landowners.

BY RACHEL MONROE

TERRY BISHOP, A West Texas native with a mono previous attempt to build a border wall, during the grammed belt buckle and a leather holster for his flip presidency of George W. Bush, those most intimately phone, looks out over the 2,000 acres of farmland impacted by the plan are among its sharpest critics. he owns near the small town of Presidio. His There’s a lot to criticize about Trump’s plan for a prop erty is a five-minute walk from the Mexican border wall. It will be enormously expensive, bitterly border, and Bishop knows what’s coming. “I’ve divisive, and most likely ineffective; it will also slice got no doubt he’s going to build it,” he says. “He through Big Bend National Park and other wildlife promised he would.” sanctuaries, disrupting the migration of more than By “he,” Bishop means Trump. And by “it,” he 100 threatened and endangered species. But the means the wall. If it gets built, it will almost certainly reason why many Texans oppose the wall boils down pass through Bishop’s land—as well as property to one simple fact: It will require them to give up owned by thousands of other Texans. But as with the their land.

10 | NEW REPUBLIC Texas property owners, often fighting over less than an acre of land, have tied up the border fence in court for years.

Private property is central to Texas mythology, and small farms. More than 300 property owners and there’s a lot of it: Some 95 percent of the land filed lawsuits to block the wall from being built in the Lone Star State is privately owned, far more on their land. Among them was Eloisa Tamez, a than in any other state along the border. (In Ari- nursing professor and indigenous activist, who zona and California, the federal and state govern- went to court to protect her property, which was ments own more land than private citizens do.) deeded to her family in 1767 by the King of Spain. Land ownership often stands in for other things Even though the government has won every court that Texans feel proprietary about: independence, battle so far—most of which involved less than an self-sufficiency, not being told what to do. Texas acre of land—the process has been long and costly. is the only state in the nation with a Landowner’s Tamez’s lawsuit, United States of America v. .26 Bill of Rights, which makes seizing property via Acres of Land, took seven years and hundreds of eminent domain a costly and time-consuming pros- court filings to sort out. pect. “As a state, we probably lead the nation when In the end, only about 100 miles worth of fencing it comes to private property,” says Richard Thorpe, wound up being built in Texas along its 1,254-mile president of the Texas Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. Those rights may not mean that landowners can stop a wall being built. But they can definitely slow Due to local resistance, only about 100 down the process, jack up the cost, and force the miles of fencing have been built in Texas Republican Party to take Texas ranchers and farm- along its 1,254-mile border with Mexico. ers to court to seize their land by eminent domain. That, in fact, is exactly what happened the last time the government tried to build a wall. In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, authorizing border with Mexico. And the piecemeal and polit- the construction of more than 700 miles of barriers icized nature of the process wound up marooning between the United States and Mexico. But when several swaths of property—including a Brownsville plans for the border fence were drawn up, land- golf course—on the Mexico side of the fence. The bar- owners in Texas were incensed that the proposed rier is “more holes than it is fence,” Denise Gilman, path veered as much as a mile inland from the Rio director of the Immigration Clinic at the University

SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS SHANNON Grande, cutting through backyards, commercial lots, of Texas in Austin, told reporters last year.

MAY 2017 | 11 up front

This time around, building the border wall may Presidio to supply Mexico with natural gas, but the be even more difficult and expensive. For starters, backlash has been surprisingly vigorous for such a not a single member of Congress from Texas has lightly populated area. no pipeline bumper stickers offered a rousing endorsement of Trump’s plan. are plastered on pickups throughout the county; “Building a wall is the most expensive and least in February, an 80-year-old veteran was arrested effective way to secure the border,” says Rep. Will for chaining himself to a fence surrounding the Hurd, a Republican whose district includes 800 pipeline company. The protesters don’t break down miles along the border. “Many areas in my district into neat ideological categories: Terry Bishop, the are perfect examples of where a wall is unnecessary local farmer, says that “even some very wealthy and would negatively impact the environment, pri- landowners,” including longtime Republicans, have vate property rights, and economy.” joined in the battle. What’s more, state lawmakers are considering For his part, Bishop doesn’t think that Trump’s BORDER several bills that would give landowners in Texas a wall makes sense. He’s nostalgic for the days when SKIRMISH stronger hand in negotiations if the government tries the border with Mexico was more porous, when he Texas landowners to seize their land through eminent domain—which and his high school classmates would sneak under have already forced would likely result in them winning higher payouts the flimsy, unguarded fence and go drink cervezas the feds to pay for their property. Thorpe, the head of the cattle at the Rojana Hotel in Ojinaga. To him, Presidio feels $15 million to resolve 300 fence-related ranchers association, is personally a Republican, much closer—both geographically and spiritually— lawsuits. a fan of the president, and a supporter of “secure to its sister city across the river than to the air- borders.” But in a legal war between the Trump conditioned conference rooms in Washington where Eloisa Tamez administration and Texas ranchers, his allegiance is border walls are planned. But he doesn’t relish the Disputed: 0.26 acres Received: $56,000 with the landowners. “If down the road President coming fight. Case lasted: 7 years Trump starts using the power of eminent domain “If I wanted to be in the middle of things, I’d in Texas,” he says, “we really feel that these bills will live somewhere else,” he says. “I kind of just want Josefa Guerra help our landowners in the state, including those to be left alone. I don’t bother other people, and Disputed: 0.19 acres Received: $1,300 along the border.” I don’t want people to bother me. But sometimes Case lasted: 8 years The proposed laws would also strengthen the you don’t have a choice. Maybe since I saw what hand of landowners who are embroiled in a lawsuit happened after 2006, I’m resigned to the fact that Nature Conservancy with Energy Transfer Partners, the same company the government has all the time, money, and lawyers. Disputed: 8 acres Received: $1.2 million that’s responsible for the Dakota Access Pipeline. In reality, none of us has any real power. If they Case lasted: 5 years Energy Transfer wants to build a pipeline through decide they’re gonna build this, I can’t stop them.” a

SIGNAL ANALYSIS

The Voice of Trump The president is poised to turn a government broadcaster into his personal megaphone.

BY CHRIS IOVENKO

SINCE BECOMING PRESIDENT, Donald Trump has to appear on cable news shows. But if he has his way, waged a persistent disinformation campaign on the the president will soon be able to rely on an even American people. In his telling, he’s the most popular larger and more powerful information machine to leader in U.S. history, criminals and terrorists are trumpet his views: the Voice of America. flooding across our borders, and he “inherited a A month after Trump was elected, Republi- mess” of an economy that he has already masterfully cans in Congress changed the VOA’s governing rescued. The White House, meanwhile, has barred structure, replacing its independent and bipar- government scientists from sharing their findings tisan board of governors with a CEO appointed with the public and dismissed critical media coverage directly by the president. And in January, the Trump as “fake news.” Trump has promoted his distorted administration dispatched two young staffers to views on his Twitter feed, and dispatched his advisers monitor the VOA’s operations and assist with

12 | NEW REPUBLIC School for Communication and Journalism at the THE VOA’S University of Southern California who served as GLOBAL the VOA’s director under Bill Clinton. “The under- MEGAPHONE lying belief is that, in the end, the values that are most important to the United States will be best Weekly audience served by a service which is accurate and balanced.” 236 million In recent years, however, Republicans have Languages broadcast worked to strip the VOA of any semblance of being objective and fair. In 2014, Rep. Ed Royce, the 45 chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Annual budget introduced legislation that would turn the agency into an explicit instrument of American “public $211 million diplomacy,” with a mandate to promote U.S. for- Employees eign policy. Then, during last year’s presidential campaign, conservative critics accused the VOA of 1,115 being anti-Trump. BBG Watch, a watchdog web site Radio and TV affiliates started by a former VOA staffer, highlighted news reports in which the agency compared Trump to 3,000 Lenin and Mao, criticized his immigration policies, Mobile app downloads the transition: Matthew Ciepielowski, who hails and poked fun at his speeches. Last summer, in from the Koch-founded group Americans for the wake of GOP criticism, VOA director Amanda 1 million Prosperity, and Matthew Schuck, who worked as Bennett held anti-bias training sessions for the Audience that finds VOA a staff writer for theDaily Surge, a right-wing news agency’s news staff. coverage “trustworthy” site that traffics in “alternative facts.” Taken -to The staff appears to have gotten the message. In 86 percent gether, the moves indicate that Trump is poised to January, the VOA issued a pair of tweets echoing the turn the government news s ervice—which reaches a White House’s blatantly false claim that Trump’s global audience of 236 million every week through inauguration crowd was the largest in history. One its radio and TV broadcasts—into a mouthpiece for of the tweets, which chastised the media for “false, his personal brand. misleading reporting,” was taken down following “The single most important thing for the Voice backlash online. Now, BBG Watch cheerfully reports of America is its credibility,” says Frank Sesno, the that Trump may replace the agency’s current CEO director of the School of Media and Public Affairs with Kenneth Timmerman, a Breitbart contributor at George Washington University. “If the Trump who accused the VOA of “wild fantasy-land libel” administration’s attitude toward the Voice of Amer- against Trump during the 2016 campaign. ica reflects its attitude toward the media here at For her part, Bennett doesn’t sound optimistic home, and if inconvenient stories are ‘fake news,’ about the agency’s future. “The best we can say right then we’ve got a real problem.” now is that the Voice of America is and has been an The VOA was founded 75 years ago as a propa- independent news organization,” she says. “That ganda tool under the auspices of the Office of War is in the law, that is the way we operate, and that’s Information. During World War II and then the Cold War, when it operated under the purview of the U.S. Information Agency, it helped spread information to parts of the world that did not benefit The Voice of America’s charter mandates that it from a free press. The stated goal, however, was report the truth. But the arrival of Trump staffers always to promote American values by presenting has sparked fears about “alternative facts.” accurate and unbiased news—in contrast to the government-fashioned messages emanating from the Nazi and Soviet regimes. “The news may be good or bad,” a VOA presenter vowed in an early the way we hope to continue to operate.” But now, broadcast. “We shall tell you the truth.” critics fear, the VOA may become little more than The VOA’s charter mandates that the news agency the Voice of Trump. Just as Vladimir Putin has his be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive,” present- own TV network in Russia Today and isis has turned ing a nonpartisan view of America. “It doesn’t avoid social media into a viral propaganda machine, Trump stories that are embarrassing to the United States,” may have finally found a news outlet whose coverage says Geoffrey Cowan, a professor at the Annenberg of him he can personally control. a

MAY 2017 | 13 body politic

imperative: It’s also the smartest way for Democrats to stage a comeback. After all, it replicates the cutthroat-but-genius strategy that McConnell used to stifle Barack Obama. As New York columnist Jonathan Chait explained, “McConnell’s strategy of withholding bipartisan support and forcing the majority party to have complete responsibility for all outcomes is an effective one for the opposition. That’s the best model.” Actually, the model that Chait refers to is a myth. Yes, the way McConnell obstructed Obama helped position Re- publicans to come roaring back in 2010 and beyond. But he didn’t do it with “full- on resistance to everything.” McConnell is too crafty for that. And Schumer and the Democrats should be, too.

ET’S LOOK AT WHAT McCONNELL and the Republicans actually did Lin 2009. This was the year, keep in mind, after Obama’s election had shocked and terrified so many of their constituents. But McConnell extended the traditional deference to Obama’s cabinet nominees, approving some of them—including Hil- Just Say No to Just Say No lary Clinton for secretary of state—with Why all-out obstruction is the wrong way to stop Trump. nearly unanimous backing. (Only two Re- publican senators opposed the she-devil of BY JOHN B. JUDIS the right.) Nor did McConnell try to block all of Obama’s early initiatives. During Obama’s first four months in office, signif- N THE LAST DAY IN JANUARY, AN that Warren just decided not to run for icant numbers of Republicans got behind angry horde, reportedly number- president in 2020,” quipped Ian Millhiser bills to expand the AmeriCorps program, Oing in the thousands, amassed out- of the Center for American Progress. The crack down on mortgage lenders, enforce side the Brooklyn home of Chuck Schumer, only acceptable stance for Senate Dem- truth in lending, and prevent rural fore- the Senate minority leader. Liberal and ocrats to take, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte closures. When Obama submitted his sup- left-wing activists had come to scold their added, is “Just say no.” plemental budget to keep the government senator—the de facto leader of congressio- Ever since Trump’s election, that’s been running that spring, 38 of 40 Republican nal resistance to Donald Trump—for voting the consensus view on the left. Senators senators voted yes. to confirm three of the president’s cabinet got the message loud and clear. In March, The Republican opposition to Obama nominees, and for offering to work with when Carson’s nomination came before was actually quite selective. McCon- him on an infrastructure package. Schumer the full Senate, Warren voted against him. nell highlighted GOP opposition to two was being put on notice, declared Jonathan Later that month, Schumer and four other bills: the huge stimulus package and Westin, executive director of New York top Democrats sent a letter to M ajority the Affordable Care Act. The minority also Communities for Change: “The Democratic Leader Mitch McConnell threatening stood firm against smaller proposals that base wants full-on resistance to everything the ultimate form of obstructionism: a involved greater spending or regulation. this president does.” government shutdown if Trump includes But they didn’t squawk about every- In the early days of Trump, even liberal funding for a border wall in the supple- thing Obama tried to do. That was the favorites Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod mental budget needed to keep federal Tea Party’s job. Instead, GOP senators Brown were coming under fire, after operations running past April. drew red lines on core symbolic issues they voted in committee to approve Ben Those who advocate a “just say no” ap- Carson as housing secretary. “It’s a shame proach will tell you it’s not merely a moral ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ CARRILHO

14 | NEW REPUBLIC for their base, while tapping into Middle it to a vote. And their united front against dismissing every Trump proposal, Demo- America’s skepticism about big govern- Bolton, who symbolized the arrogance crats would be dismissing that part of the ment. And when unemployment contin- and folly of Iraq, prevented his confir- electorate that likes his stands on trade, ued to rise, from 6.8 percent in November mation. As unpopular as Bush was at the manufacturing, runaway shops, and in- 2008 to 9.8 percent in November 2010, time, Democrats understood that it was frastructure. Democrats need to connect McConnell’s party was poised to make its wiser to fight his most destructive poli- with those working-class voters, and they case that Obama was steering the econo- cies, not every one of them. Even though won’t do it by refusing even to try to team my in exactly the wrong direction. grassroots liberals cried “sellout” with with him to stimulate the economy with McConnell knew that total obstruction some regularity, Senate Democrats cast the right kind of infrastructure plan, or was a dead end. The Republicans had tried the party as the one that cared about to protect Social Security and Medicare it in 1995–96, when Newt Gingrich lost peace, and would go to battle for the aged from the Ryan Republicans. his shutdown showdown with President and vulnerable. As a result, they swept the Unfortunately, the Democrats can’t just Clinton, who sailed to re-election. When congressional races in 2006, rendering pick a single issue on which to make their Tea Party Republicans tried it again in Bush virtually powerless. Two years later, stand, like they did with Bush’s privatiza- 2013, shutting down the government they elected a president. tion plan. Trump’s first-termambitions in a doomed effort to defund the Afford- are far too broad for that. Schumer’s able Care Act, the strategy was a bust. A UT ISN’T TRUMP A WHOLE DIFFER- minority will likely go to the mat on cli- majority of Americans blamed the GOP ent story? Doesn’t he present a mate change, financial deregulation, and for obstructionism, and the party would Bthreat to democracy that’s entirely the border wall. Their guiding principle have paid a steep price in the 2014 mid- unique in our history—and thus demands should be that Democrats will fight any terms, if not for the glitch-filled rollout a level of stubborn, unflinching resistance Trump initiative that betrays public ex- of Obamacare. McConnell’s steady and that even Dubya did not? pectations of what government owes its focused opposition had primed voters Not yet, he doesn’t. Based on his cam- citizens. Accordingly, they should mount to turn against Democrats. Republicans paign rhetoric, and on what he’s already a national crusade, and use every block- had lost the ACA battle, but they’d won tried to do as president, it’s clear that ing tactic at their disposal, to oppose the the political war. Trump is quite capable of leaving ca- GOP plan to “replace” Obamacare with a Democrats who can’t stomach the tastrophe in his wake. But he faces plenty program that won’t guarantee affordable slight est overture to Donald Trump should of friction from his own Republican ma- health insurance to all Americans. also look back at their own party’s track jorities in Congress, which will make it To revive their fortunes and lay the record of successful opposition. In 2005, hard for him to do his worst. And Dem- groundwork for dispatching Trump in Republicans had just re-elected George ocrats should bear in mind that Trump’s 2020, Democrats will, first and foremost, W. Bush, and they controlled both houses election was a sign of discontent with have to re-establish their reputation as of Congress by majorities similar to the both Clinton Democrats and Paul Ryan the party that cares about ordinary Amer- ones they currently enjoy. Hard as it is to Republicans. He appealed to the dark side icans. This is where elections are won and believe, many Democrats loathed Bush of the American soul, and his campaign lost. It’s where Obama bested Romney, as much as they now detest Trump. But the 44 Democrats in the Senate didn’t try to block all of Bush’s nominees and Rather than going to the mat on every one of bills. Instead they used a strategy of se- Trump’s proposals, Democrats in Congress need lective opposition. Bush’s cabinet and to follow the path of smartest resistance. agency appointees were routinely waved through on voice votes. Thirty-five Dem- ocrats voted for the Bush-Cheney energy was heavy on standard GOP fare about with his talk of the “47 percent,” and it’s plan, 18 for the bankruptcy bill, and 17 climate change, abortion, and illegal where Trump defeated Clinton, with for the so-called Tax Increase Prevention immigration. But he also championed her condemnation of the “deplorables.” and Reconciliation Act. But they held the remnants of New Deal liberalism, spoke to Democrats who counsel universal intran- line on a single proposal: Bush’s plan to people’s genuine economic despair much sigence to all things Trump must bear partially privatize Social Security. And like Bernie Sanders did, and pledged to this in mind. The party needs to forge they closed ranks to obstruct a single create his own universal health program. a new politics that, without rancor or nominee: John Bolton as ambassador to Trump’s victory was not merely a scapegoating, resonates with the eco- the United Nations. sign of an electorate gone mad; it was nomic anxieties that both Sanders and They chose well. Democratic opposi- also a cry of dissatisfaction with the way Trump tapped into in 2016. The best way tion to privatizing Social Security stirred that Democrats, as well as Republicans, to do that isn’t to follow the path of all- up so much public opposition that Re- responded to the Great Recession and out resistance. It’s to follow the path of publicans in Congress didn’t even bring its brutal aftermath. By peremptorily smartest resistance. a

MAY 2017 | 15 BLACK LIVES

WHY BLACK LIVES MATTER STILL MATTERS

BY PENIEL E. JOSEPH

BLM emerged from the Ferguson uprising in 2014, combining street protest with modern-day social media activism.

16 | NEW REPUBLIC Three years after BLM launched a nationwide uprising against police violence, what’s next for the movement? In this special section, a leading African American historian explores how the group is forging a powerful new form of civil rights activism. Plus: How police in 1970s Detroit unleashed an undercover execution squad, and the modern-day rise of “warrior policing.”

MAY 2017 | 17 BLACK LIVES

VEN IN THE SPLINTERED AND OFTEN FRACTIOUS movements to end mass incarceration or apartheid, no free world of social justice movements, Black Lives breakfasts in public schools (an outgrowth of hot-meal programs Matter doesn’t fit easily into existing categories. launched by the Black Panthers), no black studies programs at E Few grassroots uprisings have done as much, in Harvard and other major universities, no Do the Right Thing or such a short period of time, to focus attention on long-neglected Lemonade, no Barack Obama. issues of racial justice, gender, and economic inequality. Yet so Like BLM, which was born in the wake of widespread inci- far, BLM has not followed up on its initial victories by building dents of police brutality, Black Power came of age in the violent the kind of lasting, hierarchical organizations that grew out racial landscape confronted by civil rights activists. If Martin of the civil rights movement; nor has it dedicated itself to a Luther King presented himself as a shield capable of defend- single, easily identifiable goal, like enacting the Voting Rights ing the black community from the evils of racial segregation, Act. How are we to make sense of organizers who themselves Malcolm X entered the world stage as a sword capable of de- remain so loosely organized? And if Black Lives Matter isn’t feating a Jim Crow system that excluded and brutalized black devoting itself primarily to bringing about substantive legal Americans. “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm’s historic and legislative change, then how can it hope to transform its speech in Detroit in November 1963, offered a blueprint for a resistance into lasting and meaningful gains in human rights? black revolution, one sophisticated enough to recognize white Such questions are understandable, given the course that supremacy as a national issue, rather than a regional concern, BLM activists are charting for their organization. But compar- and bold enough to deploy radical strategies—including armed ing the group to the civil rights movement betrays a fundamen- self-defense and political self-determination—to defeat it. tal misunderstanding of both its importance and its broader The movement gained its name three years later when Stokely agenda. BLM was certainly inspired, in no small measure, by the Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), a Trinidad-born student activist nonviolent civil disobedience that was so effective during who became a leader among the Freedom Riders and the Student the civil rights era. But its unique contribution comes from the Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gave a speech in Green- way it has married those grassroots tactics to the radical struc- wood, Mississippi, calling for “Black Power.” To Carmichael, tural critique of institutional racism and economic injustice Black Power was a call for radical self-determination: social, developed by the Black Power movement. In so doing, it has political, economic, and cultural. Black people, he insisted, had issued a clarion call to an entire generation of social justice the right to define the framework of racial oppression—and the activists, placing the fledgling movement on the cutting edge tools to combat it—for themselves. of civil rights activism for the twenty-first century. “A new society must be born,” Carmichael insisted in one Comparing BLM to the Black Power movement, of course, of his most important and powerful speeches, before 10,000 is not without pitfalls. Many critics have been quick to dis- people at the University of California in Berkeley. “Racism miss BLM for trafficking in the angry polemics exemplified by must die,” he said, and “economic exploitation of nonwhites groups like the Black Panthers. Indeed, Black Power is often viewed as the evil twin of the civil rights movement, one that undermined the heroism of more mainstream leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. In the popular imagination, Black BLM has forged a movement that is Power exists as a kind of fever dream, populated by gun-toting far more inclusive and democratic Black Panthers, student militants who took over university campuses, Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam than either the Black Panthers or War, and Malcolm X’s insistence that black Americans would civil rights activists ever envisioned. be justified in resorting to violence to defend themselves from the violence of entrenched racism. The reality is richer—and far more resonant to our current moment. The Black Power movement’s greatest achievement was turning racial consciousness into a weapon that could be must end.” He then posed a fundamental question that BLM used to promote institutional change. Transforming “Negroes” activists implicitly continue to ask: “How can white society into proud black people wasn’t a rhetorical flourish—it was move to see black people as human beings?” an essential and strategic move that helped bring about a The Black Panther Party answered this question with a corresponding transformation across a broad spectrum of vengeance. Inspired by Malcolm X, anti-colonial movements in racial identity. Africa and Latin America, and an eclectic reading of Marxist- Black Power inspired sweeping changes in American lit- Leninism and the literature of Third World revolution, the erature, art, and poetry; created a new wave of black schol- Panthers (whose leadership at times veered toward authori- arship in higher education; and helped elect two generations tarianism and violence) deliberately cut a combative posture of black officials at every level of government. Without the to strike fear in white Americans. But like BLM, the group consciousness-raising of the Black Power movement, there quickly expanded its initial focus on police brutality to embrace

would likely be no King holiday or Black History Month, no a ten-point program that called for the radical transformation MONTGOMERY PHILIP SPREAD: PREVIOUS

18 | NEW REPUBLIC oppression of women, those in lgbtq communities, and other people of color. It has made full use of the power and potential of social media, but it has also organized local chapters and articulated a broader political agenda. Last summer, following critiques that they had failed to put forth specific demands, BLM activists and affiliated organizations published “A Movement for Black Lives,” a detailed and ambitious agenda. Divided into six parts, it includes a host of interconnected demands: a shift of public resources away from policing and prisons and into jobs and health care, a progressive overhaul of the tax code to “ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth,” expanded rights to clean air and fair housing and union organizing, and greater community control over police and schools. More detailed than the ten-point program issued by the Black Panthers, the BLM policy agenda offers a remarkably pragmatic yet potentially revolutionary blueprint—one that it aims to implement through the concerted use of both protest and politics. Unlike the activists of the civil rights era, those in BLM do not feel forced to make an either/or choice about which model of black liberation struggle they follow. Instead, BLM has merged the nonviolent civil disobedience of the civil rights Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 “Black Power” speech in Greenwood, movement with the radical structural critique of white suprem- Mississippi, called for black self-determination and self-defense. acy and capitalist inequality articulated by Black Power activists. Indeed, the decentralized organizational philosophy of BLM most closely mirrors that of the Student Nonviolent Co- of American democracy. Within a year of their founding, the ordinating Committee. Founded in the aftermath of the sit-in Panthers ended their armed surveillance of white police offi- movement that swept the South in 1960, sncc became the cers, and created local chapters in poor black neighborhoods most important grassroots social justice organization of the that provided free breakfasts, health care, legal and housing era. It served as a convergence point for several overlapping, aid, drug rehab, and transportation to visit relatives in prison. at times contradictory, political tendencies. Christian pacifists, Equally important, the group’s revolutionary politics evolved black nationalists, liberal integrationists, black and white fem- into a full-blown anti-imperialist framework that connected inists, and peace activists were all, at various points, a part of racism and economic injustice at home with America’s wars the group, which successfully straddled the competing mod- in Vietnam and beyond. els of black identity advocated by the civil rights and Black Like the Panthers and others in the Black Power movement, Power movements. BLM rose to prominence in a landscape of police violence Like sncc, BLM embraces what we now call the intersectional and entrenched racism. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was nature of black identity. By placing the lives of trans and queer created in 2013 by Opal Tometi, Patrice Cullors, and Alecia black women, young people, and the poor at the center of its Garza, three queer, black activists who were outraged at the policy agenda, the group has enlarged our collective vision acquittal of the “neighborhood watch” volunteer who shot and of what constitutes membership in the black community. In killed 17-year-old black Trayvon Martin. BLM evolved into a doing so, it has expanded the terrain of what it means to be full-fledged movement during the urban rebellions in Ferguson human in a society that has, since its inception as a democratic in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015. Those political uprisings, like the republic founded in racial slavery, insisted that black lives were larger conflagrations that spread throughout America during disposable. Whatever future success it achieves on the policy the long, hot summers from 1963 to 1969, represent a direct front, BLM recognizes that what Malcolm X called a struggle confrontation of institutional racism and economic injustice. for “black dignity” has always traveled a path toward universal But BLM has moved beyond many of the blind spots and human rights. Freedom for black Americans, the group reminds shortcomings of its predecessors, embracing the full complexity us, ultimately means a better nation for all. Until the most of black identity and forging a movement that is far more in- marginalized among us—the trans teenagers traumatized by clusive and democratic than either the Panthers or civil rights dehumanizing legislation, the Latina and queer youth with no activists ever envisioned. Many of its most active leaders are access to HIV treatment, the single black women struggling queer women and feminists. Its decentralized structure fosters to raise their children while holding down three jobs—are participation and power sharing. It makes direct links between recognized as part of our collective American family, we all

FLIP SCHULKE/CORBIS/GETTY the struggles of black Americans and the marginalization and remain imprisoned. a

MAY 2017 | 19 BLACK LIVES

PROFESSOR CARNAGE

Dave Grossman teaches police officers to think like “warriors.” But is the rise of a militarized mindset turning black citizens into targets?

BY STEVE FEATHERSTONE

ARLY ONE FRIDAY MORNING, MORE THAN 250 POLICE OFFICERS FILE into a high school auditorium in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Dressed in the uniform of the off-duty cop—polo shirts and khakis accessorized E with pistols and handcuffs—the officers are here to attend a seminar called “The Bulletproof Mind: Prevailing in Violent Encounters … and After.” As the cops settle into their seats, a burly National Guard sergeant in camouflage fatigues takes the floor to introduce the man who will lead the seminar: Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a retired Army ranger and former West Point instructor. A lean and energetic man, Grossman paces back and forth between two oversize pads of paper propped on easels. Equal parts motivational speaker, drill sergeant, and prophet of doom, he jabs the air with a fat permanent marker of the sort favored by graffiti artists. “We. Are. At. War,” he tells the officers, many of them from small towns in Pennsylvania. “And you are the frontline troops in this war. There is no elite unit showing up to save your bacon when the terrorists attack. You are the Delta Force. You are the Green Beret. You are British SAS. Can you accept that? Every single one of you is in the frontline of a live ammo combat patrol every day of your life.” Sitting next to me, my father listens intently as he sips coffee. A retired cop who experienced his share of violent encounters during his 35 years on the Syracuse police force, he knows firsthand about being on the frontlines. He’s been thrown on the ground, pelted with rocks, threatened with power tools and knives, and shot

20 | NEW REPUBLIC A chalk outline drawn at a protest in Minnesota over the police shooting of Philando Castile. The officer had attended a “Bulletproof Warrior” seminar co-taught by Grossman.

MAY 2017 | 21 BLACK LIVES

at with a rifle. I’ve brought him to the seminar this morning very desperately needs what you have to give.” to get his take on Grossman, the godfather of a controversial My father smiles wryly. Cops didn’t think of themselves as philosophy known as “warrior policing.” warriors in his day. But by the time he retired, in 1998, he had The author of On Killing, a treatise on the psychological witnessed firsthand the seismic shift in policing that gave rise nature of military and police violence that has sold nearly to the warrior cop. “The younger cops are a little different, you 500,000 copies, Grossman is the world’s sole authority on know,” he told me. “Christ, they pump fucking iron, got shaved “killology,” a scholarly field of his own invention that examines heads, got fucking tattoos.” He likened them to Special Forces the factors that “enable and restrain killing” by soldiers and soldiers. “I think they’re being trained that way,” he added. cops. For nearly two decades, he has taught tens of thousands “You guys didn’t get trained like that?” I asked. of police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and federal agents in every “No,” he said. “You were just an ordinary person that hap- state to cultivate what he calls a “warrior mindset”—being pened to be a cop. You weren’t out to conquer the fucking mentally prepared to kill at any moment. Grossman’s goal, in world. Just the assholes, that’s all.” essence, is to get cops to think more like soldiers, training them to regard the communities they serve as territory occupied by potential insurgents. HIS IS GROSSMAN’S FIFTH PRESENTATION IN Warrior training, and the martial mindset it advocates, has as many days. He is on the road 300 days a year contributed to a string of high-profile police shootings of black spreading the warrior gospel, because he believes citizens, intensifying national protests over police violence T that nothing less than the survival of our civili- and the widespread use of military tactics and equipment zation depends upon it. “I get home one, maybe two nights a by America’s police departments. Jeronimo Yanez, the police week,” he tells his audience, hitching his belt. “Conjugal visit, officer who shot and killed Philando Castile in front of his clean underwear, back on the road.” The assembled cops laugh. girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter during a routine Then Grossman clasps the microphone close to his chest. “I traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb last July, had attended a have an intense sense of urgency,” he intones. “And I implore seminar on warrior policing co-taught by Grossman. Yanez you to share this sense of urgency.” shot Castile seven times, at point-blank range, because he The morning sessions contain a lot of Sturm und Drang de- mistakenly believed that Castile was reaching for the gun in livered in a well-rehearsed, rapid-fire patter. “The murder rate his pocket instead of his wallet. exploded across America,” Grossman shouts, scribbling city names Calibre Press, an Illinois-based publisher of tactical train- and percentages from 2015 on an easel. “An explosion of homi- ing manuals for cops, organized the “Bulletproof Warrior” cides like nothing we have seen since the American Civil War!” seminar that Yanez attended. In an online description that Assertions like these, the kind that Trump deployed during has since been taken down, Calibre promised students they his march to the White House, are misleading. Most of the would learn “how to utilize the ‘Warrior Spirit’ in a practical increase in violent crime in 2015 was concentrated in just seven cities. Criminologists can’t explain precisely what fueled the spike in murders, but the uncertainty provides fertile ground for Grossman’s grim prescience. The future, he says, Grossman is the world’s sole is mass murder. There will be massacres on school buses and authority on “killology,” a scholarly in day-care centers, ultraviolence by Mexican drug cartels spilling over the border, the “systematic ambush, murder, and field that examines the factors that execution of cops,” isis-inspired butchery, September 11–scale “enable and restrain killing.” terror attacks—and perhaps worst of all, in his estimation, the emergence of a “vicious generation of kids” raised on “the sickest movies and the sickest video games,” who will soon “give us crimes as adults we never dreamed of.” During a break, we get up to stretch our legs. “He’s a lit- way so they can WIN hostile confrontations on the street.” tle intense,” says my father, “but he’s 100 percent right.” He When I emailed Grossman to ask him what this meant, he especially likes Grossman’s appraisal of Grand Theft Auto V, invited me to attend one of his own seminars to see what the a video game my dad couldn’t distinguish from Super Mario warrior concept is all about. Kart, as a “cop-killing murder simulator.” Addressing the cops, Grossman makes the case for warrior Grossman stands at a table signing books and bantering policing. His voice rises as he paints a portrait of the United with attendees. A woman with wavy blond hair tells him that States as a crime-ridden dystopia. It’s a sturdy right-wing she loves being a cop. trope, not unlike the “American carnage” that President Trump “Ain’t that a neat thing to say?” says Grossman, nodding evoked in his inaugural address. “Crazy bad times are upon in affirmation. “How many people go to work every day, take us and it’s going to get a helluva lot worse,” Grossman warns. a bite of a dirt sandwich to make a living, and how many say

“Good news.” He chuckles. “You have job security. The world they love what they do?” MATUREN/GETTY PREVIOUS SPREAD: STEPHEN

22 | NEW REPUBLIC Grossman has taught his warrior-cop philosophy, which mentally prepares police to kill, to tens of thousands of officers and federal agents.

“Yeah, couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” the woman retired from the military, he founded the Killology Research says. “It’s a tough … a tough atmosphere.” Group to focus full-time on writing and speaking. “Hoo-ah! It is a hard time!” Grossman finishes writing an His timing was perfect. The war on drugs—and later the war inscription in her book, then reads it back to her. “Ecclesiastes on terror—transformed police departments into paramilitary 3:3: a time to kill, a time to heal.” forces, spreading the warrior ethos to every corner of American Grossman’s father was a police officer in Cheyenne, -Wy law enforcement. Between 2002 and 2011, the Department of oming for a short time in the 1960s before taking a job with Homeland Security handed out $35 billion in grants to state Boeing as part of the government’s nuclear security program. and local police. At the same time, the Pentagon supplied sur- The family moved every 18 months, following the trail of plus military gear—everything from assault rifles to armored Minuteman missiles that were being installed throughout the personnel carriers with rotating turrets—to practically every Midwest in the 1960s. Grossman graduated high school at 17 police department in the country. Even small-town departments and went to work in the Nebraska oil fields. It was grueling, could now afford their ownswat teams, whether or not they dangerous work, and he quit after six months. Soon after he needed them. According to Peter Kraska, an expert in police turned 18, he enlisted in the 82nd Airborne. militarization at Eastern Kentucky University, more than Grossman’s career as a “killologist” began with a simple yet 80 percent of towns with fewer than 50,000 residents now profound question: What’s it like to kill another human being? have a swat team—and nationwide, such units are called out After basic training, he expected to be shipped off to Vietnam. some 50,000 times a year, most often for raids on the homes The Army had trained him how to kill, but he didn’t know what of low-level drug offenders. it would feel like. It was a taboo topic among combat veterans, The military gear has been accompanied by a military mind- and the war ended before he got a chance to find out for himself. set. Warrior training, like the kind offered by Grossman, seeks The Army sent Grossman to the University of Texas, where to instill cops with the same instincts as soldiers. “You gotta he earned his masters in education psychology. His thesis, On be on high alert, and you gotta look for any indices of threat, Killing, was published in 1995. In the book, Grossman makes and you need to eliminate that threat, just like the military the bold assertion that humans aren’t natural-born killers, but does, in a second,” says Kraska. must be psychologically conditioned to overcome their innate Advocates insist that warrior training helps prepare cops inhibition against taking life. “If we understand how we can for a job where even a routine traffic stop can turn deadly in a empower people to kill,” he says, “then we can understand matter of seconds. Nick Selby, a Dallas-area police detective

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTONIO BOLFO BOLFO ANTONIO BY PHOTOGRAPH how to turn it off, what signals to look for.” In 1998, after he and co-author of In Context: Understanding Police Killings of

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Unarmed Civilians, says warrior training likely prevents killings sheepdog. The doomed passengers on Flight 93, for instance, by giving officers the ability to control their fear and respond to were ordinary sheep until they summoned the courage to rush deadly threats with lethal precision. “Warriors survive,” Selby the cockpit. In the clubby atmosphere of the seminar, though, says, “because they have the tactics, and the understanding of where everyone identifies as a sheepdog, sheep are viewed as the dynamics, and they’ve trained enough that they can keep contemptible “grass eaters” that the sheepdogs grudgingly their wits about them when they have to think.” tolerate in between their Olympian battles with the wolves. The problem is, training police officers to think like warriors “You see, the sheep are always trying to pull you down,” says effectively alienates them from the communities they are sworn Grossman, exhorting the audience to train as hard as Batman. “The to protect. It can also lead them to perceive threats where none average citizen of Gotham City watches the news—crime, death, exist, escalating what should be minor conflicts into deadly violence! What do they do? Hunker down, cry, lock the door.” force encounters. Along with a host of other policies that the In this worldview, it is the wolf—not the sheep—that gives criminal justice system has inflicted disproportionately on the sheepdog meaning and purpose. Grossman emphasizes this communities of color—stop and frisk, broken windows, three point when he tells the cops what they must do if confronted by strikes—police shootings have fostered an atmosphere of deep a school siege like the 2004 massacre in Beslan, Russia, which distrust. Once cops started thinking like occupying troops, a left 186 children dead. “It is your job to put a chunk of steel in clash like the one that followed the killing of Michael Brown your fist and go in that door,” he growls, “and kill the sons of in Ferguson, Missouri, became all but inevitable. “The angst bitches who come to kill our kids and destroy our way of life!” against this sort of militaristic, overhyped policing has been The sheepdog metaphor valorizes the warrior ethos: The growing for a long time,” Kraska says. sheepdog does not serve the flock, he protects it. But without the legitimacy conferred by the trust and consent of those being protected, protection is not policing—it’s occupation. ROSSMAN PEPPERS HIS TALK WITH EXAMPLES OF “Frequently, the modern conception of policing is that cops warriors worthy of emulation—laconic Spartans, are outside, or above, or separate from the community,” says noble knights, Batman. But his ideal warrior is the Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South G sheepdog, a symbol made famous by the block- Carolina and a former police officer. “That’s the whole idea of buster American Sniper. The dinner scene in the film where the ‘thin blue line.’ It’s the thing that separates society from the father lectures his sons about the three types of people chaos, but also separates cops from society.” in the world—sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs—was based on Stoughton argues that law enforcement’s “warrior problem” a metaphor Grossman describes in his second treatise, On begins in the police academy. From day one, cadets have it drilled Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in into them that everyone they encounter on the street could kill War and in Peace. Most people in society are harmless sheep, them at any second, and their training reinforces this fearful the theory goes; a small number are wolves that prey on the sheep; and an equally small number are sheepdogs that confront the wolves. The three types coexist in a circle of violence. “Violence without empathy is a pretty good thumbnail defini- Police who think like warriors may tion of what? A psychopath, a sociopath—a wolf,” Grossman tells perceive threats where none exist, the cops in the auditorium. “But what if you have a propensity for violence, and a love for the lambs? What if you spent a lifetime and can escalate minor conflicts nurturing the capacity for violence and the desire to use it in a into deadly-force encounters. righteous battle? Now what do you have? A sheepdog—a cop.” The sheepdog also functions as Grossman’s brand. He co-teaches a series of sheepdog classes tailored for civilians, and sells a line of sheepdog custom weaponry through a side business run by his son, a master gunsmith. (The company’s outlook. According to the Police Executive Research Forum, a mission: “to provide quality tools for our Sheepdogs to survive law enforcement think tank, police recruits receive an average and thrive in these violent times.”) of 107 hours of training in firearms and defensive techniques, The concept works on an almost subliminal level. When but only 16 hours in crisis intervention and de-escalating con- Grossman asks the cops in Elizabethtown what the sheepdog flicts. Police departments also pay for officers to attend classes said when he first heard about the September 11 hijackings, a like Grossman’s as part of their “in-service” training. Given the murmur ripples through the audience: I wish I was on that plane. emphasis on firearms over conflict resolution, which skill is an “I wish I was on that plane,” says Grossman, repeating the officer likely to fall back on when things get dicey? phrase. “Be ready in the mall, be ready in the theater, be ready What’s more, cops are now expected to handle potential in your house of worship.” threats that go far beyond walking a beat. Ever since the Col- In On Combat, the sheepdog ideal of heroic sacrifice is dem- umbine school massacre in 1999, police officers have had to ocratic. Anyone can make the conscious decision to become a prepare for the possibility of storming their local high school,

24 | NEW REPUBLIC guardian-like, and warrior-like only when necessary. But right now the polarities are reversed, and changing that will require an overhaul of police culture no less profound than the one that gave rise to the warrior cop. “It’s not going to happen soon,” Stoughton says. “We’re talking about changing a profession’s self-identity.”

T LUNCHTIME, I FOLLOW A LINE OF COPS TO THE cafeteria. Someone nudges my shoulder, and I turn around to see a young cop with a shaved head and A a pistol on his hip scowling at me. “Hey buddy, who you work for?” he asks. I explain that I’m a journalist. “I hate the media,” he says. “CNN, no go. Fox, yes.” I introduce him to another citizen of Fox Nation, my father, and quicken my pace. Moments later, the cop sidles up to me again, a bottle of Mountain Dew sloshing in each hand. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer in Minnesota who had taken Grossman’s “I can say this much,” he says. “When I grew up, I was that seminar, caught in the act of killing Philando Castile. liberal kid. And when I got into this job—forget it.” His name is John. He serves on the police force in Harris- burg, Pennsylvania, “a little capital with big-city problems,” and the attacks of September 11 put them on the frontline of he tells me. He likes pulling night shifts because “evil seeks combating terrorism. But while cops may sometimes need darkness,” and vanquishing evil is a lot more fun than writ- to rely on warrior skills, Stoughton says, orienting law en- ing traffic tickets. Then he launches into a disjointed diatribe forcement around such low-probability, high-risk events is about the liberalizing agenda within law enforcement, media “counterproductive to good policing.” bias against cops, and the public’s ignorance of case law that The current debate over police reform is often present- “protects the police officer” from unfair scrutiny in use-of- ed as a false choice between two straw men: the aggressive, force situations. trigger-happy warrior versus the gentle guardian who thinks “Things are changing,” he says tersely. “Even police officers he can magically de-escalate every situation. It’s not useful to make mistakes, you know? Because we’re human.” frame the debate exclusively in terms of use of force, because John’s defensiveness is common among police officers I’ve all police officers use force. A guardian’s response to an armed spoken to. Besieged by criticism over police shootings, they robbery will be no different from a warrior’s. What truly matters lash out at their perceived enemies, especially Black Lives is the set of principles that guides an officer’s actions, whether Matter activists and the liberal media. It seems to them as if it’s a traffic stop or a school shooting. everyone is an armchair quarterback, questioning an officer’s The guardian model is premised on cooperation and split-second decisions based on snippets of viral video. Their “protecting civilians from unnecessary indignity and harm,” frustration is understandable, but their defensiveness masks says Stoughton. The warrior model is based on principles of a darker assumption: that the public has no say in how they compliance and control, which puts police in an adversarial are policed. Grossman’s advice to his audience is to suck it up. relationship with the public. It’s the cop who threatens to “There’s umpires and cameras everywhere,” he tells them. use force on anyone who doesn’t follow his orders. Not only “We gotta win this game, gotta win by the rules, no other way. is such behavior alienating and provocative, it’s just bad po- People say, ‘But the bad guys don’t play by the rules.’ That’s licing. My father says he was always prepared to administer a why he’s the bad guy! That’s why we all get together, we hunt “hickory shampoo” with his nightstick if the situation called him down like a dog, we fill him full of holes, we shove him in for it, but he preferred to reason with people, even when they a cage like an animal—because he won’t play by the rules. If we were noncompliant or aggressive. To many police officers of don’t want to play by the rules, they’ve got a cage for us, too.” his generation, treating criminals like human beings instead But cops are playing by the rules—rules that favor them. of enemy combatants just seemed like common sense. Between 2004 and 2011, according to an analysis by The Wall “It’s all in how you fucking talk to people,” he explains. Street Journal, officers were cleared of wrongdoing in more “You’ve got to show them respect. You can’t be a fucking wise than 99 percent of fatal shootings. The problem isn’t that the guy: ‘Well, I’m the police!’ It ain’t gonna work, because you’re shootings might have been legally justified—the problem is making them hostile.” that they were often unnecessary. In a report released last Most situations officers face on a daily basis don’t call year that caused an uproar in the law enforcement community,

YOUTUBE YOUTUBE for warrior skills. Their default mode should therefore be the Police Executive Research Forum refers to such shootings

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as “lawful but awful.” perf recommends making de-escalation The man lowered the knife and slid it into his pocket. In formal policy in the nation’s 18,000 police agencies and giving that instant my father and his partner grabbed the man and cops more training in how to defuse conflict without resorting pinned his arms to his sides. No one was injured. No one died. to deadly force. These days, cops rarely grapple with knife-wielding suspects. Grossman, for one, dismisses the report, arguing that cops It’s too dangerous, and it’s contrary to the warrior mindset. In are already being “force fed” this kind of guardian-oriented recent years, videos have emerged showing police officers in San training. Many police officers denounce it as politically cor- Francisco, Albuquerque, and Chicago killing suspects holding rect hokum that will get cops killed. They point to Graham v. knives. In 2010, a police officer in Seattle killed John Williams, Connor, the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled an a 50-year-old Native American wood-carver. Police dash-cam officer’s use of force must be considered from the perspective video of the incident shows Williams crossing the street in front of an objectively reasonable officer in the same circumstances, of the officer’s car, carrying a piece of wood and a small knife. without the clarity of hindsight. That’s why cops hate being The officer gets out and pursues Williams around a corner, gun second-guessed by community activists and journalists, who drawn. He shouts at Williams, who was deaf in one ear, to drop in their eyes are ignoring this established legal standard. the knife. Then five shots ring out. The whole encounter lasts perf wants to hold police officers to a higher standard than less than ten seconds. Graham. In situations that don’t involve suspects armed with Despite opposition from many police officials, perf’s guidelines to curtail the use of excessive force have been endorsed by police departments in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and else- where. And there are other signs that police culture is starting to Grossman’s metaphor about shift away from the warrior model. Calibre Press, the company sheepdogs and wolves valorizes the that pioneered warrior-policing tactics back in the 1980s, has eradicated the word warrior from its course listings and added warrior ethos: The sheepdog does new classes to align its curriculum more closely with reform not serve the flock, he protects it. trends. New offerings such as “The Guardians of Democracy” and “Balancing our Bias” read like chapter titles from a perf report. Grossman acknowledges the debate between guardians and warriors only when it allows him an opportunity to remind his audience of the warrior’s rightful claim on the soul of the guns—roughly half of the 963 people killed by police last year— American cop in these “dark and desperate times.” The symbol perf says officers should be better trained to defuse conflicts, for his brand may be a sheepdog, but it’s a dog that favors the and to use force proportional to the threat they face, not simply wolf’s instincts to fight over the sheep’s aversion to violence. force that’s justifiable. “The definition of a warrior is one who is a master of what? When I ask my father how he resolved such issues during War,” he tells the auditorium full of cops. “Is our nation at war? his years on the force, he gives me a perfect example of the Are you the frontline troops in this war? The people screaming kind of situation that perf’s guidelines are designed to address. the loudest about never using that evil word warrior are going to One day, responding to a call about a disturbance at a housing look very, very foolish in the near future, do you understand?” project, he and his partner confronted a man in a hallway brandishing a knife and a hammer. The man appeared to be mentally ill and ignored commands to drop the weapons. “He N GROSSMAN’S VIEW, WARRIORS AND GUARDIANS was crazier than shit,” my father recalls. “We gotta take him agree on one crucial point: Unlike soldiers, their out of there, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with mission is to avoid killing. “Our strength comes us. So now we know we gotta take him forcibly.” I from that, our purity comes from that,” he says. This happened about 40 years ago, before street cops were is- “We must never fail to communicate that message. That’s sued body armor, Tasers, pepper spray, metal batons, or beanbag what the guardian model is about. And they’re right—they’re guns. So he and his partner decided to bum-rush the guy. They very right. Treating people with dignity, without a doubt, is each chose a hand. My father volunteered to go for the knife. at the foundation of what we have to do. That’s what they lost But the standoff between my father and the crazy guy didn’t track of in Ferguson.” end with a dramatic struggle. Just as he and his partner were Three stories came out of Ferguson. The official story was about to converge on the man, my dad tried reasoning with that officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in self- him one last time. He took what perf calls a “tactical pause.” defense after Brown assaulted him. A counter-narrative quickly “Look, sir,” he said to the man. “A lot of people are look- emerged from witnesses who claimed that Brown was sur- ing out of their doors here, and they think there’s something rendering with his hands in the air when he was executed by wrong. Can’t you just put your hand in your pocket with that Wilson. Less well-known is the third story, which was laid out knife? Put it in your pocket so they don’t see it. Then people seven months later in the Justice Department’s investigation won’t think there’s something wrong.” of the shooting. The investigation confirmed the official story,

26 | NEW REPUBLIC Police departments have increasingly turned to militarized units, equipped with heavy armor and advanced weaponry, provided by the Pentagon.

but it also provided important context that explains why the seminar, I followed up with Grossman multiple times to clarify counter-narrative took hold. this point, but he stuck to his guns. As he sees it, the rising Witnesses didn’t come forward to refute the bogus execution homicide rate, a recent spike in murders of police officers, story, for a simple reason: The community’s relationship with and the election of Donald Trump have combined to discredit local police was totally broken. The Ferguson Police Depart- Black Lives Matter and others seeking to curb police violence. ment, the investigation found, had engaged in a “pattern of “There’s going to be a backlash of enormous magnitude excessive force” against the city’s black residents, and “with in the other direction,” Grossman predicts. “Back to broken extremely limited exceptions” all of the arrest warrants issued windows, back to stop and frisk, back to cops in the street by the city’s municipal court were for unpaid parking tickets, aggressively pursuing crime.” housing code violations, missed court dates, fines, and other To Grossman, serving as a police officer is ultimately about minor infractions. Police, judges, and city officials weren’t being willing to sacrifice oneself for others. It is a distinctly protecting or serving the citizens of Ferguson—they were Christian ethos that he backs up with frequent Bible quotes systematically preying on them. and references to medieval times. His ideal cop is a modern Grossman views Ferguson as a cautionary tale about what can Crusader in the eternal battle between good and evil, a paladin happen when police officers violate the warrior’s code. “The social whose violence is sanctified by his higher purpose. Even if he contract says you have the right to use deadly force,” he says. kills the wrong person, a true warrior cop kills only for the “But the moment that person is not a deadly force threat, their purest of motives. life is as precious as any other life on the planet.” After Wilson At the end of the seminar, Grossman uncaps two markers, shot Brown, he tells his audience, the police made no effort to bends toward the easel, and writes the word love in large save Brown’s life. “Not one single person jumped on that body block letters on a fresh sheet of paper, underscoring it with a and gave chest compressions,” he says. “If somebody had even squiggly flourish. Then he turns to face his audience. Projected tried to take action—slap on a tourniquet, a couple of Band-Aids, on the screen behind him is an image of Christopher Amoroso, doing chest compressions—it would’ve been a different story.” a Port Authority police officer who died rescuing people on Ferguson provoked national outrage over racism and po- September 11. lice violence, launched a mass protest movement, and forced “Only the sheepdog loves enough to die for other people’s police departments to rethink the warrior model. But in Gross- loved ones,” Grossman says, his face lit by the ghostly glow of man’s view, all of that might have been avoided if one cop the projector. “You believe in who you are, you believe in what

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY SCOTT had performed CPR on Michael Brown’s dead body. After the you do. For greater love hath no one than this.” a

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THE FIRE LAST TIME

An elite police squad was supposed to clean up the streets of 1970s Detroit. Instead, it terrorized African Americans, and turned the city into a battleground.

BY MARK BINELLI

28 | NEW REPUBLIC After the 1967 riot, many African Americans in Detroit viewed cops as a hostile occupying force.

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In the early morning of March 9, 1973, Robert Hoyt, a 24-year-old black motorist, rear-ended a white man named Raymond Peterson on Detroit’s westbound Fisher Freeway. Hoyt, who worked the late shift at an auto factory, had apparently dozed off at the wheel. * Peterson, however, interpreted the collision as a deliberate act of aggression. He was an undercover police officer, driving home in an unmarked sedan. His partner, Gary Prochorow, witnessed the accident. He happened to be driving in the same direction in his own car, also unmarked. The two officers had just stopped at a diner for coffee after an uneventful night’s patrol.

Prochorow also assumed the collision had been intentional. As word of his body count spread, Peterson was vilified by After shouting from his window for Hoyt to pull over, he fired black citizens and cheered by his fellow cops. Both sides ad- a shot from his moving vehicle, striking Hoyt in the wrist. opted the same nickname for him. They called him Mr. stress. Panicked, Hoyt exited the freeway, both officers in pursuit. Just past the exit ramp, he finally had no choice but to stop. When Peterson emerged from his vehicle, he thought he saw T THE PRECISE MOMENT THE MOST NOTORIOUS Hoyt reaching under his seat for a gun. “My reaction was in- killer cop in Detroit was planting a knife on a man stinctive, sharp like a scalpel,” Peterson later recalled. “Boom. he’d just murdered, the city’s most notorious cop He went down.” A killer sat in a jail cell just a few miles away. Hay- In fact, Hoyt was unarmed. So, after an unfruitful tossing ward Brown was 18, black, a lifelong Detroiter, arrested nu- of Hoyt’s car, Peterson covered his tracks: He pulled out a merous times as a juvenile. His father worked on the line at six-inch knife, slashed his own coat, wiped the knife’s handle Ford’s River Rouge plant and his mother was a homemaker. clean of prints, and dropped it on the ground beside the crime Two months earlier, police claimed, Brown and an ac- scene. Hoyt, shot in the abdomen, was later pronounced dead complice had attempted to rob a bank on Woodward Avenue, on arrival at Detroit Receiving Hospital. Detroit’s main thoroughfare. To create a distraction, they had Peterson had already achieved a certain notoriety in Detroit. tossed a pair of Molotov cocktails into the lobby of a Planned A 1971 profile in the Detroit Free Press described him as looking Parenthood clinic above the bank. In the pandemonium that “more like a radical college professor or folk singer than what followed, they were forced to flee. Brown’s accomplice tried he actually is—a Detroit police man who has probably been part to hail a taxi on Woodward, but wound up escaping on foot. of more violence in recent months than any other cop in the Brown, dressed in a long coat and floppy hat, crossed into country.” Hoyt marked the tenth shooting death at which Peter- the Cass Corridor, a rough neighborhood surrounding Wayne son was present over a two-year period. He’d personally killed State University. six men, all black, many unarmed, and wounded five others. Newspaper accounts described the wild, extended pursuit Peterson joined the Detroit Police Department in 1961, at age that ensued as a “movie chase,” like something out of the recent 25. During his first decade on the force, according to official Best Picture–winner, The French Connection. When a pair of records, he was responsible for only six injuries, and received Wayne State security guards approached Brown as he fled, he 41 citations and commendations for meritorious service. Then, calmly pulled out a revolver and fired three shots through their in January 1971, Peterson was recruited to join an elite, highly windshield. One of the guards gave chase on foot and was fired secretive unit within the police department. The new unit was on twice more. Another security guard caught up with Brown created to combat street crime, but it soon became infamous in several blocks away; Brown shot at him as well, then dashed Detroit’s black community as something closer to an execution into a burned-out storefront. While he was cutting through a squad. Though the initiative’s official designation was predictably residential yard, a German shepherd bit him on the seat of his anodyne and bureaucratic—“Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe pants. Finally, on Trumbull Avenue, several Detroit police offi- Streets”—the unit quickly became known by its more descriptive cers tackled Brown to the sidewalk and placed him in custody. acronym, stress. It would prove to be one of the most excessive In the squad car on the way to the police station, Brown

and lawless policing experiments in modern history. confessed to the firebombing. But in arrest photos released PREVIOUS SPREAD: AFP/GETTY

30 | NEW REPUBLIC the following day, Brown’s face appeared bruised, and a doctor who examined him suggested that he had been “badly beaten,” noting multiple abrasions and con- tusions on his face, chest, and hands. The police claimed Brown had injured himself while unsuccessfully attempting to hop a fence. There were plenty of reasons to doubt the official narrative. Before his arrest, Brown had been on the lam for nearly two months, the lead suspect in a pair of dramatic shoot-outs—one outside of the known residence of a major heroin dealer—that had left one police officer dead and five others wounded. In a press conference, Detroit’s chief of police had dubbed Brown and his two alleged accom- plices “mad dog killers.” What followed was the largest manhunt in Detroit history, Detroit police commissioner John Nichols with the police effectively putting black (right) created stress as a “zero visibility patrol” that would counter the city’s neighborhoods under martial law. One of street crime. Raymond Peterson (above), the officers who arrested Brown had been known as “Mr. stress,” would embody the carrying his photograph on a clipboard in unit’s brutal style, gunning down six black his squad car. men and wounding five others. The case had another significant, and complicating, detail: All of the police officers who had been shot were members At a press conference held at the Wayne County jail, Brown of stress. Brown’s brilliant, flamboyant attorney, Kenneth “appeared calm and confident as he spoke,” according to the Cockrel, seized on that fact to fashion a defense for his client. Free Press. He informed reporters that “the community was Perhaps the most famous black radical in Detroit at the time— being drowned by drugs, and the authorized parties ... weren’t picture Johnnie Cochran as a committed Marxist—Cockrel was doing anything. We took it upon ourselves to do something.” eager to put the police department in general, and stress in Entering the courtroom for the first time, he looked at the particular, on trial. Shortly after accepting Brown as a client, cameras and raised his fist in a black power salute. he offered a surprising, galvanic twist: Brown, he argued, was no drug dealer. He was actually a revolutionary-minded vigilante inspired by the Black Panthers who was dedicated to HIS YEAR MARKS THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF driving the dope dealers from his neighborhood by ripping off the 1967 Detroit riot, the second-largest civil their stashes and threatening them with violence. disturbance in modern U.S. history. The inciting Like Raymond Peterson, Hayward Brown became a polar- T incident, a police raid on a black speakeasy, and izing figure in Detroit, only their constituencies were flipped: the government response, a mobilization of both the Na- A “mad dog killer” to police, Brown would be venerated as a tional Guard and the U.S. Army, set the tone for the ensuing folk hero by the police’s victims. “Our position is that Hay- decades. To many Americans, Detroit became synonymous ward Brown is not a client,” Cockrel said. “He is a comrade.” with violent crime and economic decline. To many black De- troiters, meanwhile, local law enforcement became a hostile occupying force. In the late 1960s, Detroit was still majority white. Two stress, as the unit became known, years after the riot, a conservative prosecutor and former would prove to be one of the most sheriff named Roman Gribbs was elected mayor, in part by running on a Nixonian “law and order” platform. To serve as excessive and lawless policing police commissioner, Gribbs appointed John Nichols, a native experiments in modern history. Detroiter who started out as a beat cop. A taciturn workaholic, Nichols had seen combat during World War II, kept his hair in a tight crew cut, and answered to the nickname “Uncle John.”

NEWSPAPERS.COM (X2) (X2) NEWSPAPERS.COM He’d also built up a degree of comity with the black community.

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Civil rights leaders “regard him as progressive,” the Free Press noted after his appointment. Nichols faced a daunting task. Robberies in the city had risen 67 percent in the previous two years. A staggering number of them—some 18,000 in 1970—took place on the street, and 85 resulted in murder. In one of his first orders of business, Nichols instructed his staff to conduct a thorough study of the available data and build a detailed profile of the “typical robbery.” They found that victims were most often “male, not young, nonwhite, and living in or near the neighborhood in which the robbery took place,” while criminals tended to be “young, nonwhite, and armed.” One of the most salient factors, for Nichols, involved the sheer brazenness of the crimes. As he later testified at a congressional hearing on street crime and policing:

In contrast to what one would believe, most robberies were not being carried out covertly. They occurred openly and in full view of other citizens and potential witnesses on the street. It was apparent that the criminal felt safe in carrying out his act in front of others. He obviously believed that large segments of the community were either so apathetic or intimidated that they would not interfere. His only concern then was to assure himself that there were no police in the area.... In retrospect, the answer seems too obvious: a zero visibility patrol.

And so stress was born. With the help of com- After a stress officer was killed, police stormed Detroit’s black neighborhoods hunting puter data, Nichols planned to flood the streets for Hayward Brown, John Boyd, and Mark Bethune (top, from left). with undercover cops disguised as drunks and priests, hippies and elderly women. When robbers tried to hold up these “decoys,” backup city, usually in teams of four. An undercover “point man,” officers would swoop in and make an arrest. As Nichols -ex disguised as an easy victim, took the lead, tailed by an un- plained to the congressional committee, his department hoped dercover back-up and two more “cover” officers surveilling to “perfectly blend men into the environment” on a scale never from a distance. The neighborhoods targeted for decoy patrols before attempted. “With stress,” he testified, “the criminal were generally “heavily populated with pensioners, alcoholics, must fear the potential victim.” homosexuals, prostitutes and their clients,” but also racially Plans for stress coalesced in the winter of 1970. Out of a de- diverse enough to allow the members of the nearly all-white partment of 5,000, only some 80 officers were recruited to join stress unit to walk the streets without standing out. the clandestine unit. When Raymond Peterson was approached The existence of the unit was revealed in a flippant 1971 by his superiors, he found the invitation flattering. “What the Detroit News article. “Muggers beware!!” the story began. hell?” he recalled thinking. “Variety is the spice of life.” “That helpless looking little old lady you are about to rob may stress instructed plainclothes officers to blend in every- be a wiry, young cop, whose shawl conceals a loaded .38.” where: at the downtown “ethnic” festivals (Polish, Irish, Arab, Describing a “hush-hush project designed to make Detroit Italian) that took place on summer weekends; outside of auto streets safer,” the article revealed that undercover cops would factories as workers streamed into the streets and parking lots “pose as average people on the street”—grocery clerks, gas during shift changes; in the rail yards where thieves boosted station attendants, cab drivers. “They will be prime bait for tires from freight cars. But the most controversial aspect of the robbers who prey on such people,” the paper reported. “And unit was the decoy squads. Each night, after their commanding they will be armed and ready.” officers consulted a large map pinpointing the previous day’s But in truth, for all the careful planning, stress at first street crimes, the new stress recruits fanned out across the seemed like a bust. “We weren’t getting any results at all,”

32 | NEW REPUBLIC Peterson later recalled. Would-be robbers saw right through he later said, and he saw them as a scourge to be eradicated. the disguises. “We walked our asses off. But I guess we were He also admitted to supporting himself by robbing johns who too obvious. Too uptight.” came into the neighborhood looking for prostitutes. Eventually, Peterson said, the officers got their “act polished” Brown found kindred spirits in two students at Wayne State and “started to get hit on.” On the first night he was robbed, University: his cousin John Boyd, and Boyd’s friend and class- May 3, 1971, Peterson had costumed himself as “a white guy mate Mark Bethune. Boyd had recently returned from Vietnam, down a little on his luck.” Sometime around midnight, at and was struck by how much his hometown resembled a war the corner of Woodward and Peterboro, a black man named zone. “He looked around and felt like the community was under Dallas Collins stole up behind Peterson. With his hand in his siege, not just by the police but by the heroin plague,” recalls left pocket, Collins jabbed a finger into Peterson’s back. “Give his sister, Melba. “We thought of it as a form of germ warfare. me your wallet, motherfucker,” he commanded. Reaching into And the police weren’t really doing anything about it.” People Peterson’s hip pocket, he discovered a billfold, grabbed it, and in the community used to refer to the Tenth Precinct as “the began running. Peterson drew his own (real) gun and ordered drug house,” because so many of the cops there were rumored Collins to halt. Then he fired as many as four times, striking to be accepting kickbacks from the dealers. him once in the arm. Bethune, the youngest of eleven children, had moved into Collins, lurching and holding his shoulder, disappeared a ymca when he was 14, later joining the Black Panthers. His into an alley. Moments later, Peterson and one of his partners, nickname was Igbo, “after the African tribe,” recalled the Rev. Marvin Johnson, found him hiding in a building. According to Dan Aldridge, a local black nationalist who served as a men- Peterson, Collins made a move for Johnson’s gun. “Without tor to Bethune. “But he spelled it wrong, E-I-B-O. You know thinking, I automatically squeezed off another round and hit young people, man.” Bethune had become fed up with “all the him in the chest,” Peterson said. “He went down.” talk and no action” when it came to Detroit’s heroin epidemic. Afterwards, Peterson recalled what he was thinking: “I ex- “Mark told me that the only way to stop dope traffic was to rip pect to see my family again at all costs, and it’s better him than off the big dealers,” Aldridge said. “I disagreed with him and me.” He added, “They found my wallet in an alley somewhere. argued vigorously against his vigilante plan. But Mark was Fortunately, the guy didn’t die.” his own man.” Aldridge had brought the Student Nonviolent One week later, the Free Press noted, Peterson would kill a Coordinating Committee leader H. Rap Brown to town for a man 100 feet from the same alley. rally after the 1967 riot. Bethune became fixated on a poster of Brown hoisting a rifle in one hand and a black newborn baby in the other. the price of dope, the poster read, is death. EARS AFTER HIS ARREST, HAYWARD BROWN TOLD At about one o’clock on the morning of November 29, 1972, a reporter that he “used to be a St. George. You William Moore, a 50-year-old gas station operator, was driving know, fighting those dragons. I was a chaser of to a corner store to pick up some milk when he spotted James Y causes. I was for the underdog. I was aware some- Ford, a 50-year-old “local hustler” who sold clothes and other thing was wrong, but I didn’t know what.” One of his attorneys, items out of the trunk of his Cadillac. Moore decided to stop and Chokwe Lumumba, a black nationalist who was later elected buy a pair of shoes. As the two men chatted, Boyd and Bethune mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, recalled Brown was “pretty politically aware, as any young black man coming up in the late ’60s and early ’70s had to be. But he was clearly a street brother rather than a member of the active intelligentsia.” Brown became a polarizing figure in Brown “probably had a genius IQ,” recalls his first cousin, Detroit: a “mad dog killer” to police, the poet and historian Melba Boyd, a distinguished professor of Africana studies at Wayne State University. Brown didn’t like but venerated as a folk hero by the school, Boyd says, and “got in a lot of mischief, doing petty stuff, police’s victims. driving his mama crazy.” But he also read constantly—James Baldwin, Malcolm X, American history, poetry—and had the mild-mannered, upbeat personality of someone “blessed with good looks and charm.” Police would later cite Brown’s 14 juvenile arrests, along approached, flashing a pair of guns and forcing them into the with two busts for armed robbery and carrying a concealed Cadillac. Back at Bethune’s apartment, Moore and Ford were weapon just after his eighteenth birthday, as evidence that he lashed to chairs, blindfolded, beaten, and asked “Who is the was a “dope addict,” as “high-placed sources” described him chief of the Black Mafia?” and “Where is the dope?” in the newspapers. Boyd calls the charge “ridiculous.” At trial, Somehow, the older men managed to free themselves and leap Brown insisted he’d only snorted heroin “for about a month” from a second-floor window. During the escape attempt, Ford in 1970. He found Malcolm’s militant anti-drug message in- was shot and killed. When police arrived at Bethune’s apartment,

TOP: NEWSPAPERS.COM (X3); WALTHER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, ARCHIVES OF LABOR AND URBAN AFFAIRS, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY STATE WAYNE AFFAIRS, URBAN AND LABOR OF ARCHIVES LIBRARY, REUTHER P. WALTHER (X3); NEWSPAPERS.COM TOP: spirational; he had seen friends murdered by drug pushers, they discovered guns, marijuana, “narcotics paraphernalia,” and

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“militant and anti-narcotics literature.” The cops concluded that In all, 13 Detroiters, all but one of them black, died at the hands Boyd and Bethune must have been addicts. “When youth hang of stress officers between April and December 1971. “During the around people in narcotics and act like people in narcotics,” a first year of stress’s operation, the Detroit Police Department high-ranking official told the Free Press, “we can only assume chalked up the highest number of civilian killings per capita of you are in narcotics.” any American police department,” Dan Georgakas and Marvin Five days later, Boyd and Bethune—this time with Brown Surkin observed in their 1975 book Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. in tow—decided to kidnap the wife and the girlfriend of a Peterson, for his part, sounded unapologetic when he spoke major heroin wholesaler. They had come up with the idea after to the Free Press in 1976 about the early days of stress. “No- watching the movie Shaft. body could get away from us,” he said. “No matter which way the son of a bitch turned, somebody could get him—he ran into somebody’s arms.” stress training included trips to the Y THAT POINT, STRESS HAD FINALLY “FOUND A firing range, with officers making split-second decisions to pull groove,” as Raymond Peterson put it. A week af- the trigger based on flash cards depicting perps, both armed ter he shot Dallas Collins, Peterson encountered and unarmed. “My reaction time got quicker and quicker,” B a transgender prostitute while walking point on Peterson said. He snapped his fingers. “You’re supposed to Charlotte Street. Suspecting the solicitation might be a set-up determine that quick whether you’re going to shoot or not.” for a robbery, Peterson followed the “female impersonator” In the end, he groped for a familiar metaphor. “They kind of into a nearby apartment and found “two homosexuals in bed.” tune you like an engine, you know?” he said. “What the hell After Peterson told the men, “Hey, none of this,” they dressed can they expect of you?” and departed, leaving the prostitute to negotiate a price for sex. Since Peterson had no desire to make a vice bust, he started to beg off. Suddenly, the two gay men returned, one waving Five thousand people, including off-duty black cops, gathered in

a knife. Peterson shot the man, Herbert Childress, twice, downtown Detroit for an anti-stress protest on September 23, 1971. UNIVERSITY STATE WAYNE AFFAIRS, URBAN AND LABOR OF ARCHIVES LIBRARY, REUTHER P. WALTHER fatally—the first killing by astress officer. Two weeks later, Nathaniel Johnson, a 21-year-old janitor for the Detroit Public Library, and his friend Clarence Manning, 25, encountered stress officer Michael Worley disguised as a hippie in old clothes and a beard. Worley claimed Johnson, who had no criminal record, threatened him with a gun; Johnson said that Manning had stepped out of his Buick to urinate and had exchanged words with the “hippie” lingering nearby. What happened next wasn’t disputed: Worley and his back-up crew, including Raymond Peterson, shot Manning, who was holding nothing more than an empty beer bottle, seven times. It was Peterson’s bullet to the heart that most likely killed him. Johnson escaped in Manning’s Buick. When he returned to check on his friend, the police arrested him for armed robbery, though they never found a gun, and a jury ultimately acquitted him. Over the summer and fall, the body count continued to rise. On July 5, 1971, a team of stress officers, including Peterson, fatally shot Horace Fennick and Howard Moore as the two men fled after an attempted robbery; one of them allegedly had a knife. On July 14, a team of stress officers, including Peterson, fatally shot James Smith as he and an accomplice fled after an attempted robbery; one of them allegedly had a knife. On September 9, Peterson fatally shot James Henderson, who allegedly pressed a knife to the throat of another stress officer during an attempted robbery. (Henderson, it turned out, had been the “female impersonator” who solicited Peterson before the Childress shooting.) On November 14, a team of stress officers, including Peterson, fatally shot Neil Bray after he allegedly used a broomstick to attack an officer disguised as a hippie. “I thought at the time he was armed, because he had an object in his hand,” Peterson later said.

34 | NEW REPUBLIC N SEPTEMBER 1971, A POLICE-REFORM GROUP M1 carbine rifle and killed three supervisors. Without denying called the State of Emergency Committee led a that Johnson had snapped, Cockrel shifted the focus onto the demonstration of more than 5,000 Detroiters endemic racism and inhumane working conditions at what I calling for the abolition of stress. The group’s was one of the most dangerous plants in the country. Jurors spokesman was Kenneth Cockrel, who had already earned a visited the crime scene, where black employees regularly drew reputation as the city’s leading radical activist. Cockrel, who the worst job assignments (Johnson had toiled in front of a grew up in a mostly black Detroit suburb, lost both of his par- 120 degree oven); they also heard testimony that Johnson had ents when he was twelve. A few years later, he dropped out of witnessed a lynching in Alabama at age five. high school and enlisted in the Air Force before enrolling at Cockrel grew out his Afro and sported a black beret at ral- Wayne State. In 1968, he passed the state bar and co-founded lies. “Even if you are not a revolutionary—even if you are a the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a radical alterna- running honky dog of the capitalist establishment—you have tive to the United Auto Workers and other white-dominated to agree he handles himself with immense style and aplomb,” unions that reigned in Detroit. “More than any other single journalist William Serrin wrote in the Free Press. “He is brilliant individual,” Georgakas and Surkin wrote in Detroit: I Do Mind and audacious as hell.” When a white judge cited Cockrel for Dying, “he was identified in the popular mind and in the mass contempt of court—he had been overheard describing the judge media as the personification of a serious black revolutionary.” as a “racist honky” and a “honky dog fool”—it only added to his Cockrel’s reputation grew with a pair of high-profile court legend. “Half of the courtroom was filled with police and their victories. In 1969, he won an acquittal for Alfred Hibbitt, a black supporters, and half with community folks,” recalls Ken Mogill, a separatist accused of shooting a white police officer during a young clerk at Cockrel’s law firm at the time. “You could cut the gun battle that erupted at the New Bethel Baptist Church. The tension with a knife.” Cockrel went on to win that case as well. following year, Cockrel successfully defended James Johnson, With the rise of stress, Cockrel had found the ultimate a black Chrysler worker who showed up at his plant with an foil—a state-controlled terrorist group, to his mind, and a near-perfect manifestation of white-supremacist repression. In a petition that eventually drew 30,000 signatures, Cockrel called stress “a murder squad with an unlimited license to kill and maim.” Word of the unit made national headlines in March 1972 with the so-called Rochester Street Massacre, when undercover stress officers burst into an apartment in search of illegal weapons and engaged in a firefight with a group of men playing poker, killing one and wounding three others. The men turned out to be off-duty deputies from the Wayne County sheriff’s department.

N THE EVENING OF DECEMBER 4, 1972, A TEAM OF stress officers staking out a dope house on Stoepel Street noticed a Volkswagen circling the block in a O manner they deemed suspicious. Though the driver had committed no traffic violations, the officers decided to pull the car over based on what they later called “police instinct.” Approaching in their unmarked car, the members of the stress team claimed they flashed their badges and identified themselves as police, only to be greeted with gunfire. Hayward Brown, who was riding in the backseat of the Volk- swagen, later offered a conflicting account. He said he’d come to the house on Stoepel with his cousin John Boyd and their friend Mark Bethune to carry out their bizarre, Shaft-inspired kidnapping scheme. But Jack Crawford, the heroin dealer whose wife and girlfriend they planned on snatching, ended up being home. So the self-styled vigilantes decided to kidnap Crawford instead. Just then, a group of white guys tapped on their car window. Then a bullet whistled past Brown’s left ear. The white guys had started shooting, without identifying themselves. However it started, the shoot-out ended with all four stress officers wounded, and the Volkswagen tearing off into the night.

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Kenneth Cockrel, speaking at an anti-stress rally, was Detroit’s most famous black radical—Johnnie Cochran as a committed Marxist.

One officer, Richard Grapp, lost most of a lung after being struck rational human being should object to answering questions in the upper chest. The police traced the identities of Brown, about the whereabouts of these men,” he said. Boyd, and Bethune through their getaway car, declaring them Two days after Christmas, stress officers Robert Bradford “armed and extremely dangerous.” The suspects, police warned, and Robert Dooley ran across Bethune and Brown on Carlin were “professional triggermen” who had bragged to friends Street during an unrelated robbery stakeout. Bethune shot that they would “shoot any police officer on sight.” Thestress and killed Bradford, a 25-year-old who had drawn lots earlier team had potentially interrupted “either a major heroin transfer that evening so he could work overtime for extra pay. Dooley or an execution attempt on a known dope dealer.” A $6,000 attempted to use Brown as a human shield, but Bethune shot reward was offered for information leading to their arrest. him as well, leaving the second officer paralyzed and blind in Police unleashed an intensive manhunt in black neigh- one eye. Once again, Brown and Bethune escaped. borhoods where they believed the suspects might be hiding. Cops in flak jackets broke down doors without warrants and interrogated hundreds of black residents. Plainclothes stress HE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, AN ENRAGED officers killed Durwood Foshee, a 57-year-old former security Commissioner Nichols held his infamous press guard with no criminal record, after they burst into his home conference in which he branded the fugitives as in the middle of the night and he allegedly greeted them with T “mad dog killers.” Homicide Sergeant Gil Hill, a shotgun. Twenty police officers smashed down the door of who would later play Eddie Murphy’s foul-mouthed boss in Boyd’s parents’ home with a battering ram, rifles drawn, and the Beverly Hills Cop movies, called the murder of Bradford detained the family for hours without charge. “They started an “execution slaying.” yelling and screaming at me,” Melba Boyd recalls. “They told But black Detroiters had had enough of stress and the on- me what they were going to do to my brother—that if I didn’t going manhunt. On January 6, 1973, the city council launched a help them, they’d make me identify his dead body.” James Ban- probe of police misconduct, decrying “harassment of the black non, the commander of stress, allowed that some police may community in the search for these very dangerous killers.” A have engaged in rogue “bounty hunting” during the manhunt. public hearing held on January 11 at Ford Auditorium drew

But the suspects, he insisted, were extremely dangerous. “No more than 1,200 Detroiters, “mostly black, all angry,” according UNIVERSITY STATE WAYNE AFFAIRS, URBAN AND LABOR OF ARCHIVES LIBRARY, REUTHER P. WALTHER

36 | NEW REPUBLIC to the Free Press. When Commissioner Nichols attempted to gun. Bethune, on the other hand, “was laughing at me,” Dooley read a statement, he was shouted down by the crowd. said. “I was crawling on the ground, begging him not to kill The council heard testimony from citizens like the Rev. me.” Cockrel denounced the heightened security measures Leroy Cannon, who’d been awoken by a noise at his door at surrounding the trip, calling them “Keystone Cops theatrics” four o’clock in the morning on December 4. Assuming his designed to lend “credence to the commissioner’s statement teenage son had stayed out late, Cannon rose and prepared to that we are dealing with ‘mad dog killers.’ ” scold him. Instead, he was greeted by a team of plainclothes John Boyd remained at large until February 23, when Bobby police officers, who kicked in the door and shoved him against Davis, a black police officer in Atlanta, spotted him nod- the wall. “Nigger, if you breathe too loud, I’ll blow your brains ding off beneath a tree on the northwest side of town. After out,” one told him. The officers mistakenly believed that Can- Davis approached to investigate, Boyd drew an M1 carbine non owned a white Volkswagen similar to the gunmen’s car. from beneath his jacket. As the two men grappled over the “I have a brown 1972 Cadillac,” he testified. rifle, Davis drew his own pistol and shot Boyd four times in A man named Carl Ingram told the council that police of- the chest, killing him. Owen Winfield, Boyd’s half-brother, ficers had forced his fiancée to strip during an illegal search emerged from behind a parked car and began firing a .357 on December 7. “There ain’t no man hiding in her clothes!” Magnum at Davis. The officer returned fire, killing Winfield he said. “If I had had a gun, I sure enough would have used with a shot to the head. it.” John Reynolds, the chair of a city task force dedicated to Two days later, a plainclothes Atlanta police officer received improving police-community relations, testified that his son a tip that Mark Bethune had been sighted on the campus of had been stopped and beaten by police on New Year’s Eve. Morris Brown College. When he found Bethune in a crowded Kenneth Cockrel called on Mayor Gribbs to remove Nichols dormitory lobby, the Detroiter dashed up a set of stairs and from his post and shut down stress. But as with more recent debates over initiatives like stop and frisk, police brass countered with reams of crime statistics. The purpose of stress was to reduce robberies, they insisted, and Cockrel viewed stress as a state- the unit had been a resounding success. During their first year controlled terrorist group, and on the job, stress officers made 2,496 arrests and seized 600 guns. Robberies were down for the first time in a decade—by a near-perfect manifestation of nearly 30 percent in two years. white-supremacist repression. Officers, meanwhile, discovered that killing unarmed civilians was a badge of honor within the department. “I was still lauded for what I was doing, even after the community started to get heavy on stress,” Peterson recalled. “They were happy with me. Whenever I shot someone, I would have to go to managed to reach the roof, where, according to the police, he headquarters to fill out a report and the guys would cheer me drew his gun. The officer fired first, striking Bethune in the when I walked in. The brass ... went out of its way to encourage chest. Bethune then shot himself in the head. Newspapers me. I was a proud boy, you know? I was the fair-haired boy—as printed a gruesome photograph of Bethune’s bloodied corpse long as everything worked their way. Who doesn’t like to be lashed to a stretcher, ropes lowering it to the street. The Fulton the fair-haired boy? Who doesn’t like applause?” County Medical Examiner later concluded that the barrel of Bethune’s gun did not appear to have been pressed against his head, which would suggest a highly unconventional suicide. N JANUARY 12, AFTER THE FIREBOMBING OF Hayward Brown’s first trial, for the attempted murder of the Planned Parenthood clinic, police captured the four stress officers during the botched,Shaft -inspired Brown. When Melba Boyd met with her cousin kidnapping attempt, began in May 1973. Hundreds of spec- O at the police station, she recalls, his face “was tators crowded the courtroom—not simply “young militants so swollen it was a wonder he could even see.” Brown had a with Afros,” Cockrel later pointed out, but also “mothers with single request. “I want Ken Cockrel to represent me,” he told babies, middle-class people, and old folks.” As one reporter her, “because this has got to be a political trial.” recounted, Brown “emerged as a folk hero,” a symbol of public Eleven days later, Brown was transported from jail to Henry “frustration with the Detroit Police Department’s continuing Ford Hospital. It was treated as a moment of high drama. Police stress unit and police inability to rid the city of drugs.” The were stationed on highway bridges along the route and secured previous month, 22 police officers had been accused of deal- the hospital parking lot as if it were a military base under ing drugs and accepting cash payments from heroin dealers. siege. At Henry Ford, Brown was handcuffed to the foot of a “I have seen and I have heard of police who have not only bed holding Officer Robert Dooley, who had been paralyzed protected pushers but sold drugs,” Brown told reporters. He during the gunfight after Christmas. Dooley identified Brown, claimed he’d spent the past two years “persuading” dealers to but admitted that he hadn’t witnessed him holding or firing a quit by threat of force, that he’d stolen the dealers’ cash but

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always flushed the product. Cockrel added that Brown had shot at them; police testified to finding two revolvers and 30 “never taken anyone off”—meaning, he never killed anyone. rounds of ammunition in Brown’s coat pocket when he was The trial lasted two weeks. One stress officer testified that arrested. But once again, Cockrel argued self-defense, insisting he had seen Brown fire his gun; two others said they weren’t that Brown, having been publicly excoriated as a mad dog killer sure. Kemau Kenyatta, who had loaned the men his Volkswagen, by the city’s top police official, “had every reason to believe also testified, telling the jurors how police officers, after tracing that the police would kill him on sight.” On the stand, Brown the car to his address, had beaten him and his wife and told admitted to firing at the officers, but said he had deliberately him he was “a dead nigger.” Cockrel, in his opening statement, avoided shooting to kill. He denied participating in the fire- argued self-defense. The stress officers, he suggested, might bombing of the clinic, insisting that his “confession” had been have been caught up in the heroin-corruption scandal. Brown extracted only after the arresting officers had beaten him with “had an understanding of stress,” he told the jury, which was flashlights and their guns. “all the more reason to believe he might have encountered his The jury, comprised of ten blacks, one Puerto Rican, and end on December 4.” one Asian, acquitted Brown on July 6. Cheers broke out from Prosecutors dismissed the idea that Brown was an anti-drug the spectators. Jury foreman Stanley Leon, an autoworker at vigilante, portraying him as a “cold-blooded cop killer.” But Ford, said the prosecution had failed to make its case. “When their arguments withered in the face of what the Free Press we went in to deliberate, I told the jury to forget about all feelings of race, color, or creed,” he explained. “I screened them in my own way to make sure that none of the people on the jury were anti-police. If I think a man is guilty and to my “Those mothers in stress got what satisfaction the evidence is there, then he’s gonna be a dead they deserved,” a young black man duck—even if he’s my own son.” In an extraordinary public rebuke, Cahalan denounced the told the Detroit Free Press after verdict as a “miscarriage of justice” brought on by Cockrel’s Brown was acquitted on all charges. rank appeals to “racial emotions.” Cockrel immediately fired back. “Cahalan is a classic example of those who applaud the system when it produces what they want, but go crazy when their own ox gets gored,” he said. “Persons who never had a word of criticism when all-white juries were sending called Cockrel’s “quick wit and stiletto questioning.” After ten black people, Puerto Ricans, and white working-class people hours of deliberation, the jury—ten blacks and two whites— to Jackson [a Michigan prison] are suddenly now becom- voted to acquit Brown on all charges. ing concerned and are threatening the abolition of the jury Outside the jail, passers-by honked car horns and thrust system.” Sixty-one local lawyers, all of them white, agreed fists into the air as Brown exited in triumph. “For once those with Cockrel, signing a petition that urged Cahalan “to stop mothers in stress got what they deserved,” a young black attacking judges, defense attorneys, juries, and witnesses.” To man told the Free Press. “They got caught at their own tricks. drive home Cahalan’s double standard, Cockrel pointed out Maybe they’ll start thinking twice when they pull over a car- that there had never been a homicide conviction in Detroit load of spades who ain’t done anything illegal.” Brown’s case, of a white police officer for the killing of a black man. “The Cockrel added, was “representative of questions that have police,” he said mischievously, “must not countenance mad seared themselves into the consciousness of the community.” dog killers among their ranks.” Brown, now a local celebrity, began making speeches at anti-stress rallies and on college campuses. His own face stared back at him from t-shirts in the crowds. But his trials UT DETROIT WASN’T DONE PUTTING STRESS ON were far from over. In early June, he returned to court to face trial. Not long after Raymond Peterson shot and attempted murder charges related to the shooting of Officer killed Robert Hoyt, he shrugged off the murder. Dooley, who had changed his testimony after the hospital-bed B “I don’t like taking another man’s life,” he told the interview and accused Brown of shooting him. Once again, Detroit Free Press, “but it seems that I am a magnet for trouble.” though, Brown was acquitted, even though Cockrel called not Peterson claimed self-defense, a difficult proposition to disprove a single witness on his behalf. “It was a weak case,” Cockrel before the era of dashboard cameras and smartphone videos. said, “and the jury agreed.” But by planting a knife on Hoyt, Mr. stress had slipped up: On June 27, Brown faced attempted murder charges relat- Forensic investigators, examining the knife, discovered hairs ed to his shoot-out with the Wayne State University security matching Peterson’s pet cat. He was arrested and charged with guards on the day of his arrest. Eager to avoid further humil- second-degree murder. iation, District Attorney William Cahalan became personally His trial began in February 1974. Selection of the jury, involved in the case, offering direct advice to his lead prose- which included just two blacks, took 17 days. Peterson wore

cutor. Multiple officers identified Brown as the man who had a bulletproof vest to court, and fellow stress officers packed UNIVERSITY STATE WAYNE AFFAIRS, URBAN AND LABOR OF ARCHIVES LIBRARY, REUTHER P. WALTHER

38 | NEW REPUBLIC the room in support. His partner, Gary Prochorow, testified Before killing Hoyt, Peterson once asked a reporter, “What’s that Hoyt had been driving at 100 miles per hour and that he’d racism? You don’t like black people? You don’t like Polacks? been convinced the autoworker “was going to kill us both.” I’m a Polack. I don’t take offense. My wife’s a Mick. What the Over two days of testimony, Peterson never denied shooting hell’s a racist? A racist is something someone just wants to Hoyt or planting the knife. Instead, he insisted that his notori- start an argument about. I don’t see why we all can’t just get ety as Mr. stress had left him in “constant fear for his life,” and together, black, white, yellow, striped, or purple. Our common that he had received numerous death threats. His lawyer, Nor- problem is the world. If we don’t get together and do something man Lippitt, argued that the warping influence of stress had about it, it’s going to go down the drain.” driven his client, almost inexorably, to murder. Peterson, he While he was on trial for killing Hoyt, Peterson lost 50 said, had been merely “acting as he was trained.” The system pounds and acquired a heavy drinking habit. Two years later, itself, not the officer, was to blame: he sat for a final interview with theDetroit Free Press. Reporter Tom Ricke described Peterson as a “haunted man” who spoke He was educated to respect law and order and to take orders. He in a nearly inaudible whisper and detailed symptoms that, was conditioned by the cruelty in the streets of this city, by today, might result in a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress the hate that permeates the very air we breathe. He was giv- disorder. Working for stress had left him confused, psycho- en a gun by an ignorant bureaucracy, and when he used it logically scarred, perpetually afraid. “I pay for it every day,” with fatal results, was lauded and praised by his narrow- Peterson said. “I’ll be paying for it the rest of my life, for what minded, nonthinking superiors. The very men he was taught the hell happened.” to respect and obey are the men who encouraged him and led him to this day.... A dead hold-up man is considered an ac- complishment. Officers who kill them are congratulated, N SEPTEMBER 1973, TWO MONTHS AFTER HIS lauded, and given medals. own acquittal, Hayward Brown was arrested and beaten by three plainclothes stress officers during On February 27, Peterson was acquitted. Outside the court, he I a traffic stop. The cops insisted they hadn’t been told reporters that he planned to celebrate with a vacation in following Brown, although one of them, Donald Lewis, had Mexico. He was awarded $45,728 in back disability payments been working backup with officers Bradford and Dooley on the and allowed to retire with his full pension. night Bradford was killed. They had only stopped the car, they said, after they spotted Brown toss an envelope of what they believed to be narcotics out of the passenger-side window. The powder in the envelope they claimed to recover turned out to be quinine, which can be used to cut heroin. The stress team also claimed to have found heroin in Brown’s sock and marijuana in his jacket pocket, as well as a handgun. On the ride to the police station, the stress team said Brown, while handcuffed in the backseat, reared up and kicked one of them in the back of the head, forcing them to pull over the squad car and use force to restrain him. Lewis and one of the other officers admitted to hitting Brown with their flashlights; the third officer said he used his hands. No mention of Brown re- sisting arrest, or of the officers striking him back, made it into the initial police report, though Brown was eventually taken to a hospital emergency room. The driver of Brown’s car, a woman named Bonita Burton, was not arrested. In Brown’s version of events, the officers drove him to Detroit’s heavily Brown (center) and Cockrel (left) celebrated their victory in the Shaft-inspired kidnapping case. forested, nearly 300-acre Palmer Park

MAY 2017 | 39 BLACK LIVES

and beat him savagely. News reports described him as “barely ambulatory” when the officers dropped him at the hospital. He had to be helped up the steps, and his mother said he was unable to turn himself over in his hospital bed; bruises covered his head and stomach, and his entire right arm was soaked in blood. Cockrel said the officers had meant to kill Brown but somehow “messed it up.” stress commander Bannon defended his men, astonishingly, by pointing out that they “hadn’t been that inefficient in the past.” They could have easily killed Brown, he argued, had they intended to do so. Despite the beating, Brown was charged with illegal possession of narcotics and a firearm. A jury freed him after de- liberating for five minutes. Not long after his fourth acquittal, Brown went to live with relatives in the Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles. But he was forced to return to Detroit in April 1974, when he was indicted by a federal grand jury for the firebombing of the Planned Parenthood clinic. (In an ironic twist, the federal charges against Brown, which would have appealed to the In 1974, Detroit elected Coleman Young (right) as the city’s first African average law-and-order conservative of the time, were only American mayor. Young promised to shut down stress, which was possible thanks to Planned Parenthood’s federal funding.) created by outgoing mayor Roman Gribbs (left), a former sheriff. Because the trial was taking place in a U.S. district court, the jury would be drawn from the suburbs as well as the city, and wound up including only four black jurors. Judge Cornelia a 52-year-old Detroit man named John Harris, claimed that Kennedy, a Nixon appointee, further stacked the deck against two men had attempted to steal his jewelry at a dilapidated Brown by ruling that his “confession” to the firebombing in four-story apartment building known as a neighborhood drug the backseat of the squad car was admissible. den. When one of the would-be robbers flashed a blue-steel On January 27, 1975, the jury found Brown guilty of the revolver, Harris said, he managed to grab Brown and use him firebombing and he was sentenced to eight years in prison. as a human shield. The gunman shot them both and fled the Freed on bond, he would be vindicated three years later, when scene in a brown Chevy Monte Carlo. an appeals court overturned the verdict, ruling the confession Harris was struck multiple times in the chest. Brown, pro- inadmissible. Once again, Brown was freed. nounced dead on arrival at Henry Ford Hospital, had been shot His life, however, remained dogged by brushes with the law, point blank in the face and neck. Police found eight packets of a and a series of arrests ensued: in 1978, for carrying a concealed white powder and $800 in cash on Harris. Brown had a watch, weapon; in 1979, for possession of heroin and stolen property; in lighter, set of keys, black notebook, and $4 in cash. Police 1980, for possession of narcotics, carrying a concealed weapon, speculated that it was a drug robbery gone wrong. “It seems and armed robbery. After one arrest, Brown attempted to hang clear that they were trying to rob Harris, but he surprised the himself in his jail cell, fashioning a noose from the belt of his robbers,” a police spokesman told reporters. “He looks like an sweater. The police officers on duty cut Brown down, claiming old man, but he must have had a little more spunk than they they had no idea of his identity—when he’d been arrested, he thought. The old man was a little too bad for them.” had given his name as Robert Johnson—and that, after being John Nichols, the police commissioner who conceived and resuscitated, he had complained of being “tired of all the hassles, launched stress, laughed out loud when he was informed of tired of being arrested.” Brown denied he’d attempted suicide, Brown’s death. “I think probably the violence of his career claiming the police had been the ones who tried to hang him. terminated in the kind of justice he richly deserved,” Nichols Then, in March 1981, he was arrested again, for possession said. “Not too many Detroit police officers will be sorry to hear of heroin. This time, as the Free Press put it, his “nine-year about it. At least, I’m not. Ultimately, justice does prevail.” winning streak” came to an end. An all-black jury found him A news report noted that “police headquarters was flooded guilty, and he was sentenced to up to four years in prison. with telephone calls from police officers, including some from In jail, his political views shifted. “I thought it was white officers vacationing in northern Michigan, asking if it were people’s fault, totally,” he told a reporter. “Now I don’t think true that Brown was dead.” it’s a black and white thing. It’s economic and classes—you When Melba Boyd heard the news of her cousin’s death, she know, people trying to get over, and others fighting to hang immediately flew back to Detroit from Germany, where she had on to what they have.” been studying on a Fulbright scholarship. “Hayward was always Three years later, after completing his sentence, Brown less angry than I was, because he was wise about things,” Boyd

was dead—shot during an apparent robbery. The only witness, says. “He understood it was not going to go away after he was UNIVERSITY STATE WAYNE AFFAIRS, URBAN AND LABOR OF ARCHIVES LIBRARY, REUTHER P. WALTHER

40 | NEW REPUBLIC acquitted.” From the beginning, she says, Kenneth Cockrel had how to document police abuse with a Kodak 126 camera. “We warned Brown that black people who won cases against the knew the streets where people were being stopped,” she recalls, police often ended up dead. Boyd once asked her cousin how “and we’d get out and start taking pictures of the incidents.” he had survived so many beatings. In such situations, he told Decades before the arrival of smartphones, cameras served as her, the key was to protect your vital organs. the first line of defense against billy clubs and police revolvers. Chokwe Lumumba, who had represented Brown, spoke at Cockrel views the resistance to stress and Black Lives his former client’s funeral. “We’re not talking about a monster Matter as part of the same arc of history. The video evidence here,” he reminded mourners. “We’re talking about a man.” To of police misconduct that has emerged in recent years finally a reporter, he noted that Brown’s fight against stress made “provides the opportunity to unmask the lie that was told him a target. “The police were scrapping for revenge,” he said, over and over again: ‘I thought he had a gun. I thought he had “and Hayward walks the streets of Detroit, which are alive with a knife. They came at me.’ I’ve been hearing these lies since crime. So if they see him near some crime, they will charge I was 18 years old. And often, they’re lies told to cover up him…. His options there, like other options of young blacks, un-American behavior by police officers that’s racially based. were destroyed. That left the streets.” What now happens for well-meaning people, particularly white Cockrel, who had become one of the most outspoken mem- people, watching this behavior unfold in front of their eyes, bers of the Detroit city council, expressed a similar sentiment is that it puts them in the position of having to address what about his former client. “The brother never had a chance,” white privilege really means in this country. And that’s not a he said. “His father was an autoworker and his mother was a comfortable thing to do.” hardworking, decent woman. But the brother was out there Kenneth Cockrel, a persistent critic of Mayor Young from on the street, and the street is a stern mistress.” the left, remained skeptical of trying to “reform” the police. “Reformism is what is counterrevolutionary,” he said. “You do not write letters to attorney generals, meet with black police HORTLY AFTER BROWN’S INITIAL SERIES OF assistants, etc. You take over the police department and you acquittals, a state senator named Coleman Young take over the city.” Cockrel died of a heart attack in 1989. was elected the first black mayor of Detroit. He He was 50. S had run for office on the promise that he would Raymond Peterson died in April of last year, at the age abolish stress and fire Commissioner Nichols—who also of 81. He still lived in River Rouge, a downriver suburb of happened to be his Republican opponent in the mayor’s race. Detroit. No media outlets seemed to take note of his passing, “Nowhere, perhaps, has the issue of police conduct in an age of high crime come to be so clearly focused as in Detroit,” The New York Times noted shortly before Young’s election. True to his word, Young disbanded stress in 1974. The Cockrel warned Brown that black unit wound up costing the city more than $1 million in legal people who won cases against the settlements. During its first year, stress was responsible for 90 percent of all killings by Detroit police officers. The final police often ended up dead. “The death toll, over the course of two and a half years, was 22. All brother never had a chance,” he said. but one of the victims were black. Over the same period, the unit conducted some 500 warrantless searches. By the 1980s, crime in Detroit began soaring to new heights. But during the brief window between the end of stress and the onset of the crack cocaine epidemic, major crimes and murders let alone his previous life as Mr. stress. In the final interview both declined. A 1979 New York Times profile of Young called he granted, he admitted that he worried about the price he him “one of the most influential blacks in the United States,” would pay for the people he killed. “What’s going to happen and pointed out that not a single Detroit police officer had to me,” he wondered, “if there is a hereafter and I die and get been killed in the line of duty in four years. By contrast, six up in front of the big boss and he says, ‘Hey, man, you were officers had been killed in 1971, the first year of stress. (The a little heavy on those people, weren’t you?’ ” He admitted to article also admonished Young for being “occasionally uppity thinking at times, “You’re no better than a rotten murderer,” to whites both in public and in private.”) though his psychiatrists, he quickly added, always assured Four decades after the trials of Raymond Peterson and him, “No, man, it’s not the way you are—it’s the way you’ve Hayward Brown, those who fought to stop stress see little been made.” He couldn’t seem to understand how a man like change in the tactics and mindset of many police departments, him, who had been raised “with a lot of love for everybody,” post-Ferguson. Kenneth Cockrel’s wife, Sheila, an activist could end up “out on the street killing people, and it not really who served on the Detroit city council, still has copies of a bothering me.” hand-drawn, mimeographed “cop-watching” manual that she “I’ll tell you,” he said. “If that ain’t sick, boy, I don’t know. distributed during the stress years to teach outraged citizens I don’t know.” a

MAY 2017 | 41 Divided We Fall THE FOUNDERS KNEW THAT ECONOMIC INEQUALITY WOULD DESTROY AMERICA’S DEMOCRACY. SO WHY CAN’T THE CONSTITUTION SAVE US?

BY GANESH SITARAMAN

T ONLY TOOK A WEEK AFTER The alarm over the travel ban r eflected And the only way we’ll avert the disinte- Donald Trump’s inauguration the wider fear that many Americans have gration of our political system—as Lincoln before Democrats and the media felt ever since Trump was elected. In- and the abolitionists did in their day, and began to warn that our democracy deed, the mere fact of his victory struck the Roosevelts and the progressives did in faces a grave and potentially fatal many on the left as nothing short of a theirs—is first to understand its origins. threat. On the second weekend national emergency—a threat to the very Iof Trump’s presidency, when customs nature of American democracy. But in F YOU ASK MANY AMERICANS officials began enforcing his hastily their vigilance, many politicians and today, they’ll tell you exactly who the imposed ban on travel from Muslim na- pundits are missing a deeper and more IFounding Fathers were: a pack of rich tions, Senator Cory Booker dashed out to profound peril. We aren’t “careening” white men who rigged the Constitution Dulles Airport and told a crowd of pro- toward a constitutional crisis, as Senator to serve their own financial and political testers that the American rule of law was Blumenthal feared. We’ve been sinking interests. Sure, they talked like radical under assault. “I believe it’s a constitu- into one for years—and the Constitution egalitarians. But they also denied women tional crisis,” Booker declared. Two days isn’t designed to get us out of it. the vote, slapped a specific numericv alue later, when Trump fired acting Attorney Long before Trump came along, Amer- on the political worth of slaves, and en- General Sally Yates for refusing to enforce ica was already mired in a constitutional shrined human bondage as wholly com- the ban, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer practically crisis—one that crept up on us gradually, patible with a democracy founded on had the question, “Are we on the verge of as historical transformations always “unalienable rights.” a constitutional crisis?” on auto-repeat. do. The reason is simple: Our Consti- That’s true enough. But it’s easy to And when Trump blasted the “so-called tution wasn’t built for a country with forget, at the historical distance that sep- judge” who overturned the travel ban, massive economic inequality and deep- arates us from the eighteenth century, Senator Richard Blumenthal wasted no ly entrenched political divisions. The that America in its founding era was, in time in predicting the worst: “We’re three times in our history when the the relative terms of the time, the most careening, literally, toward a constitu- republic has faced a threat to its very economically equal place on Earth. Un- tional crisis.” existence—the Civil War, the Gilded Age like their revolutionary counterparts in We weren’t. The ban may have been through the Great Depression, and the France, the Founders didn’t have to ac- illegal, and deeply un-American, but its present moment —the crisis arose because count for—or break from—centuries of issuance alone didn’t present an exis- America had evolved in ways the Found- entrenched wealth and property. There tential threat to the republic. Lawyers ers could only dimly imagine. In each was no hereditary nobility in America. No sprang into action, and federal judges instance, the social conditions of the coun- property rules that concentrated wealth. halted the ban’s enforcement. Even the try no longer matched the Constitution. No history of feudalism. Instead, there president’s tweeted response indicated Trump is a symptom, not the cause, that the Constitution was still in working of the crisis we now face. It is written, in order: “see you in court.” fact, into the very fabric of our society. ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM

42 | NEW REPUBLIC

Divided We Fall were vast lands to the West, which meant their democratic experiment would the turn of the twentieth century. With that any white man could work his way collapse. The rich would gradually take industrialization, urbanization, the clos- into the middle class. Even William Man- over the government, passing laws to ben- ing of the frontier, and the shift from ning, one of America’s first great cham- efit themselves at the expense of everyone artisanal and agricultural work to wage pions of “the many” versus “the few,” else. When America’s wealthy began to labor in factories, the Constitution once acknowledged in 1799, “We are on an “plunder the poor,” a Virginia politician again strained at its seams. equality as to property [compared] to what warned in 1814, it would be “slow and James Madison, for one, had foreseen they are in the old countries.” legal.” Sooner or later, the masses would that the republic would confront such The Founders shaped their new republic respond—but not through a violent upris- challenges. In 1788, he estimated that around its economic parity. Nothing short ing. Instead, they would turn to a figure America had 25 years before the popu- of “equality of property,” declared Noah who would know how to manipulate their lation density across the entire country Webster, could ensure the social stability resentments. Of “those men who have would match that of the Eastern states. By and national solidarity that any constitu- overturned the liberty of republics,” Alex- 1829, thanks to westward expansion, he’d tional system needs to function properly. ander Hamilton observed in The Federalist revised his estimate: Within a century, This, Webster added, was “the very soul of Papers, “the greatest number have begun Madison thought, the mass of Americans a republic.” Our Constitution, in short, was their career by paying an obsequious court would be “reduced by a competition for literally founded on an egalitarian distri- to the people; commencing demagogues, employment to wages which would af- bution of wealth. Without property being and ending tyrants.” ford them the bare necessities of life.” As “pretty equally divided,” the anti-federalist But in preindustrial America, the onset the “proportion being without property” Samuel Bryan warned during ratifica- of mass inequality—and the social and increased, the system would have to be tion, “the nature of the government is political divisions that grow from it—was overhauled for representative democracy changed, and an aristocracy, monarchy, or only a distant possibility. In a society with to survive. “The institutions and laws of despotism will rise on its ruin.” relative equality, the only “checks and the country must be adapted,” Madison For most of the world’s constitutional balances” needed were between three wrote, “and it will require for the task all history, property had been anything but separate—and equal—branches of govern- the wisdom of the wisest patriots.” “pretty equally divided.” Political sys- ment. “The Founding Fathers devised a tems were often created to accommo- scheme to deal with conflict,” the political HEN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE date economic inequality, and to ward scientist Louis Hartz once observed, “that plunged America into its sec- off catastrophic clashes between the rich could only survive in a land of solidarity.” Wond constitutional crisis, wise and poor; social stability was achieved, at “Solidarity,” of course, is also a relative patriots answered Madison’s call. From least theoretically, by giving each class a term, and a fragile foundation on which to the 1890s to the 1930s, populists, pro- share in governance. Think, for instance, build a national government. Throughout gressives, and New Dealers alleviated of Britain’s House of Lords (for the rich) the nineteenth century, as the regional the strain on our system by passing a and House of Commons (for the masses) divide over slavery grew, some Americans combination of new laws and constitu- or Rome’s tribune of the plebs, which al- came to believe that the only solution tional amendments. Anti-trust measures lowed poor citizens to veto the decisions was to alter the Constitution to account broke up the concentration of economic of the patrician senators. for the increasingly deep fractures— power. Working hours were regulated, Our Constitution, by contrast, made to find an American equivalent of the and labor unions offset the power of em- no such accommodations to economic Lords and Commons. In the buildup to ployers. The Constitution was amended inequality. There are no wealth require- the Civil War, Senator John C. Calhoun to establish a progressive income tax, ments for U.S. senators, and no cap on of South Carolina proposed splitting the helping redistribute superconcentrated wealth for admission to the House. In presidency in two: one president from wealth. The people’s voting power was fact, there are no provisions in our consti- the North, one from the South. The co- expanded by requiring the direct election tutional structure—not one—that account presidents would have to agree before any of U.S. senators, permitting citizens to for differences in economic class. This law could take effect. “Nothing short of float ballot initiatives to change laws by represented an extraordinary transforma- this,” he warned, “could restore harmony popular vote, and extending the fran- tion in the way countries govern them- and tranquility to the union.” chise to women. These reforms were selves. Instead of drafting a constitution The Civil War, our greatest consti- all designed to realign economic and to resolve divisions created by wealth and tutional crisis, stemmed directly from political power—to give a fair measure poverty, the Founders asserted that all the Founders’ failure to create a frame- of it back to the people. Only then could men were created equal, and established work for forging solidarity out of divi- the Constitution work again as intended. a government that depended on all men sion. And in the decades after the war’s By the 1960s, the progressive patri- remaining economic equals. brutal resolution, sweeping economic ots had largely succeeded. This was the The Founders understood full well that changes would lead to a second crisis— age of the Great Compression: The gross if severe economic inequality emerged, rooted in another stark social divide—at domestic product soared, wages rose,

44 | NEW REPUBLIC and the middle class boomed. Not since of the political process—from meeting Thanks to the Constitution’s checks the founding era had America seen such candidates, to donating to their cam- and balances, a president alone can’t fix economic equality. At the same time, pro- paigns, to voting and running for office. the republic any more than he can destroy gressives took aim at social divisions, Some scholars argue that the majority’s it. Only a new surge of progressive patrio- ending Jim Crow segregation and begin- views now have zero impact on public tism, modeled on the one that took hold a ning to ensure equal rights for women, policy; all is dictated by the interests of century ago, can save our democracy. Like gays, and lesbians, and the disabled. As wealthy elites. It’s no wonder that trust the wise patriots of the Gilded Age, the the 1970s dawned, the great American in government has sunk to all-time lows. progressive patriots of the twenty-first experiment faced a new challenge: Could Just as the Founders feared, our sense century will have to rebuild the bedrock the republic sustain an equal economy of national solidarity could not survive of economic opportunity, stone by stone: and an inclusive social community? the rise of economic inequality. We have a fair tax system, tougher financial regu- This time, however, our leaders failed divided ourselves geographically, with lations, more investments in education us. Instead of promoting policies to con- liberals amassing in urban areas and blue and infrastructure. The foundations of tinue broad-based economic growth, states, and conservatives in rural and red. participatory democracy must also be rebuilt, by liberalizing election laws and enabling more Americans to vote. Only then can we hope to rediscover a sense If trump were driven from office of common purpose that the Founding and forced into exile at Mar-a‑Lago, Fathers knew was a prerequisite for their experiment to succeed. America would still be facing a It sounds impossible, of course. Don- ald Trump’s in the White House. Anti- constitutional crisis. government, trickle-down conservatives dominate Congress, the courts, and most state legislatures. How can we even they passed tax breaks for the wealthy We get our news from sources that reflect dream about reversing such entrenched and gutted regulations that protected our partisan assumptions, and we make inequality, or of healing our seemingly workers and consumers. Rather than our political decisions based on funda- bottomless social rifts? work toward social harmony, they took mentally incompatible ways of looking at Our hope rests partly in our history. advantage of growing economic anxiet- democracy. We may be governed by a sin- Hard as it is to believe, we have been here ies and used dog-whistle politics to stir gle Constitution, but we are becoming, for before. We’ve stared into a dark future in racial resentments. And if you couldn’t all intents and purposes, two countries. which the Constitution no longer func- blame “those people” for your problems, The terrifying thing is that all these tions, in which democracy is replaced by you could always blame the government, transformations—economic, political, and oligarchy or tyranny. But wise patriots which Ronald Reagan so memorably cast social—make reform even more difficult to found a way to adapt. It took more than in his first inaugural address as “not the achieve. As the wealthy rig the system in one election, one candidate, one party. solution,” but “the problem.” their favor, it gets harder to tax the rich, A crisis decades in the making will take As much as liberals would like to bust up monopolies, help working families, decades to resolve. chalk up this disastrous state of affairs and reduce the influence of money in our Our greatest hope, ironically, rests in to white racism, or pin it to the rise of politics. As social divisions become more the very ferocity of our political climate. reactionary conservatism, Democrats entrenched, it becomes easier to keep ev- Trump wasn’t elected because conserva- have done their part to contribute to the eryone divided through fearmongering tive voters are unaware that America is crisis. For decades, many Democrats have and scapegoating. To function properly, in a mortal crisis. A socialist like Bernie gone along with economic reforms that the Constitution requires equality and Sanders didn’t almost upend the Demo- aided the rich, and they have increasingly solidarity—and once those are gone, it cratic establishment because liberals felt demonized working-class whites as igno- contains no mechanism to restore them. that everything was fine under President ramuses, contributing to a destructive tit Obama. The American people might not for tat that only keeps escalating. T WOULD BE NICE TO THINK THAT think of what we’re experiencing as a By neglecting the economic conditions our current crisis could be solved by “constitutional crisis,” but they under- necessary to sustain our republic, we’ve Igetting rid of President Trump. But stand what their leaders have failed to fueled a slow-burning constitutional if he were driven from office and forced recognize: The system does not work any- crisis. As a battery of studies over the into exile at Mar-a-Lago, the conditions more. Something radical has to happen. past decade have shown, the rich now that created the crisis would still be with This knowledge, above all, is one thing dominate our system of governance. us. There’s no quick fix to a problem that that the citizens of our deeply divided They participate more at every stage has been half a century in the making. country still have in common. a

MAY 2017 | 45 → Five hundred Sahrawi women march in a military parade to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Western Sahara’s struggle for independence from neighboring Morocco. Some 165,000 Sahrawis still live in remote refugee camps in Algeria, where many begin their military training at the age of 18.

46 | NEW REPUBLIC Africa’s Last Colony In Western Sahara, 165,000 refugees are still fighting for their freedom.

TEXT BY CARNE ROSS PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANTHONY JEAN

MAY 2017 | 47 ↑ In October 2010, Sahrawi activists erected tents at Gdeim Izik, not far from the capital of Western Sahara. Within weeks, 20,000 protesters had descended on the makeshift camp—the largest display of civil disobedience since Morocco annexed Western Sahara in 1976.

48 | NEW REPUBLIC Africa’s Last Colony

OR OVER 40 YEARS, THE PEOPLE OF through in these remarkable images by Anthony Western Sahara have endured war and Jean, who has documented life in the camps over the occupation—yet few outside of north- past six years. But there is also a mounting sense of ern Africa have ever heard of them or despair among the refugees and, for some, a desire their suffering. In 1975, their vast to return to armed struggle. territory—some 100,000 square miles Morocco has sealed off the occupied territory with Fof desert bordering the Atlantic—was invaded by a towering sand wall that stretches for 1,700 miles Morocco. Almost half of the traditionally nomadic across the desert, fortified by the world’s longest Sahrawi population was driven into remote refugee minefield. Journalists are rarely permitted inside; camps in neighboring Algeria, where 165,000 re- small wonder, given Morocco’s systematic abuse main to this day. An entire generation has been born of human rights. Included here are rare photos of and raised in these camps. the Gdeim Izik protests in Western Sahara. In 2010, Following Morocco’s occupation, the Sahrawis when thousands of Sahrawis demonstrated for their waged a long war of resistance. It ended in 1991, political freedom, Morocco responded by attacking when Morocco agreed to allow the Sahrawis to vote them with helicopters and ground troops, using on independence. But thanks to Moroccan obstruc- rubber bullets and water cannons to disperse the tion, that referendum has never taken place. The uprising. Seven years later, many of the protesters United Nations has done almost nothing, and the remain in Moroccan custody, subjected to unjust United States and European Union—both of which military trials and torture. railed against Russia’s intrusion into Ukraine—have The true beginning of the Arab Spring, as Noam refused to defend the Sahrawis. Chomsky has observed, took place in the camps I have visited the refugee camps as a diplomatic of Gdeim Izik. And it is there, in Western Sahara, adviser to the Sahrawis, and have come away in- that the nations of the world must put an end to spired by the vibrant and democratic society they Morocco’s unlawful occupation, granting freedom have built. Their vitality and determination shine and independence to Africa’s last colony. a

← Nguia and Hayat, two young Sahrawis, joined the protests at Gdeim Izik a few weeks before the Moroccan army leveled the camp, attacking protesters with tear gas and water cannons. For the next six months, both women were imprisoned in cramped cells. Morocco routinely detains and tortures dissidents to maintain control over Western Sahara’s phosphate mines and oil reserves.

MAY 2017 | 49 Africa’s Last Colony

↓ Schoolgirls between the ages of ten and twelve in El Ayoun, a refugee camp in Algeria. According to the United Nations, one in four young children in the camps suffer from stunting caused by malnutrition. The girls wear t-shirts bearing the flag of the Sahrawi Republic.

← Women in the Dakhla camp perform a traditional dance to celebrate the republic’s founding. The Sahrawis are a matriarchal society, descended from nomadic Berber tribes in which women handled household finances and ran local communities. Today women sit in the Sahrawi parliament, administer the refugee camps, and train in the Sahrawi military.

50 | NEW REPUBLIC ↑ Sahrawi troops march in the Dakhla camp in February 2016, as the United Nations distributes water. The following month, Morocco expelled U.N. officials from Western Sahara after Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Morocco’s presence there an “occupation.” He has expressed concern about the “potential danger” that Sahrawi youth could be radicalized by Islamic extremists, given the protracted nature of the refugee crisis.

MAY 2017 | 51 REVIEW

ESSAY

The United States of Work Employers exercise vast control over our lives, even when we’re not on the job. How did our bosses gain power that the government itself doesn’t hold?

BY MIYA TOKUMITSU

WORK NO LONGER works. “You need to acquire more skills,” of philosophy at the University of Michigan, explores how the we tell young job seekers whose résumés at 22 are already discipline of work has itself become a form of tyranny, docu- longer than their parents’ were at 32. “Work will give you menting the expansive power that firms now wield over their meaning,” we encourage people to tell themselves, so that employees in everything from how they dress to what they they put in 60 hours or more per week on the job, removing tweet. James Livingston, a historian at Rutgers, goes one step them from other sources of meaning, such as daydreaming further in No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea. or social life. “Work will give you satisfaction,” we insist, Instead of insisting on jobs for all or proposing that we hold even though it requires abiding by employers’ rules, and the employers to higher standards, Livingston argues, we should unwritten rules of the market, for most of our waking hours. just scrap work altogether. At the very least, work is supposed to be a means to earning Livingston’s vision is the more radical of the two; his book an income. But if it’s possible to work full time and still live is a wide-ranging polemic that frequently delivers the refrain in poverty, what’s the point? “Fuck work.” But in original ways, both books make a powerful Even before the global financial crisis of 2008, it had become claim: that our lives today are ruled, above all, by work. We clear that if waged work is supposed to provide a measure of can try to convince ourselves that we are free, but as long as well-being and social structure, it has failed on its own terms. we must submit to the increasing authority of our employers Real household wages in the United States have remained stag- and the labor market, we are not. We therefore fancy that we nant since the 1970s, even as the costs of university degrees want to work, that work grounds our character, that markets and other credentials rise. Young people find an employment encompass the possible. We are unable to imagine what a landscape defined by unpaid internships, temporary work, and full life could be, much less to live one. Even more radically, low pay. The glut of degree-holding young workers has pushed both books highlight the dramatic and alarming changes that many of them into the semi- or unskilled labor force, making work has undergone over the past century—insisting that, in prospects even narrower for non–degree holders. Entry-level often unseen ways, the changing nature of work threatens wages for high school graduates have in fact fallen. According the fundamental ideals of democracy: equality and freedom. to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, these lost earnings will depress this generation’s wages for their entire ANDERSON’S MOST PROVOCATIVE argument is that large com- working lives. Meanwhile, those at the very top—many of panies, the institutions that employ most workers, amount to whom derive their wealth not from work, but from returns a de facto form of government, exerting massive and intrusive on capital—vacuum up an ever-greater share of prosperity. power in our daily lives. Unlike the state, these private govern- Against this bleak landscape, a growing body of scholarship ments are able to wield power with little oversight, because the aims to overturn our culture’s deepest assumptions about how executives and boards of directors that rule them are accountable work confers wealth, meaning, and care throughout society. to no one but themselves. Although they exercise their power In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson, a professor ILLUSTRATION BY MARCEL CEUPPENS

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MAY 2017 | 53 REVIEW to varying degrees and through both direct and “soft” means, as the bulwark against state oppression. Paine and Smith, employers can dictate how we dress and style our hair, when however, would hardly qualify as hard-line contemporary we eat, when (and if) we may use the toilet, with whom we libertarians. Smith believed that public education was essential may partner and under what arrangements. Employers may to a fair market society, and Paine proposed a system of social subject our bodies to drug tests; monitor our speech both on insurance that included old-age pensions as well as survivor and off the job; require us to answer questionnaires about our and disability benefits. Their hope was not for a world of win- exercise habits, off-hours alcohol consumption, and childbearing or-die competition, but one in which open markets would intentions; and rifle through our belongings. If the state held allow individuals to make the fullest use of their talents, free such sweeping powers, Anderson argues, we would probably from state monopolies and meddlesome bosses. not consider ourselves free men and women. For Anderson, the latter point is essential; the notion of Employees, meanwhile, have few ways to fight back. Yes, they lifelong employment under a boss was anathema to these ear- may leave the company, but doing so usually necessitates being lier visions of personal freedom. Writing in the 1770s, Smith unemployed or migrating to another company and working assumes that independent actors in his market society will be under similar rules. Workers may organize, but unions have self- employed, and uses butchers and bakers as his exemplars; been so decimated in recent years that their clout is greatly his “pin factory,” meant to illustrate division of labor, employs diminished. What’s more, employers are swift to fire anyone only ten people. These thinkers could not envision a world they suspect of speaking to their colleagues about organizing, in which most workers spend most of their lives performing and most workers lack the time and resources to mount a legal wage labor under a single employer. In an address before the challenge to wrongful termination. Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Lincoln stated, It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As corporations have “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages worked methodically to amass sweeping powers over their awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for employees, they have held aloft the be- himself, then labors on his own account another while, and guiling principle of individual freedom, at length hires another new beginner to help him.” In other claiming that only unregulated markets words, even well into the nineteenth century, defenders of an can guarantee personal liberty. Instead, unregulated market society viewed wage labor as a temporary operating under relatively few regula- stage on the way to becoming a proprietor. tions themselves, these companies have Lincoln’s scenario does not reflect the way most people succeeded at imposing all manner of reg- work today. Yet the “small business owner” endures as an ulation on their employees. That is to American stock character, conjured by politicians to push say, they use the language of individual through deregulatory measures that benefit large corporations. liberty to claim that corporations require In reality, thanks to a lack of guaranteed, nationalized health freedom to treat workers as they like. care and threadbare welfare benefits, setting up a small business

NO MORE WORK: WHY Anderson sets out to discredit such is simply too risky a venture for many Americans, who must FULL EMPLOYMENT IS A arguments by tracing them back to their BAD IDEA BY JAMES LIVINGSTON historical origins. The notion that per- THE UNIVERSITY OF sonal freedom is rooted in free markets, If the state held the sweeping NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 128pp., $24.00 for instance, originated with the Levellers powers that employers do, we in seventeenth-century England, when working conditions differed substantially would probably not consider from today’s. The Levellers believed that ourselves free men and women. a market society was essential to liberate individuals from the remnants of feudal hierarchies; their vision of utopia was a world in which men could meet and interact on terms of equality and dignity. rely on their employers for health insurance and income. These Their ideas echoed through the writing conditions render long-term employment more palatable than and politics of later figures like John a precarious existence of freelance gigs, which further gives Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and companies license to oppress their employees. Abraham Lincoln, all of whom believed PRIVATE GOVERNMENT: HOW EMPLOYERS RULE that open markets could provide the es- THE MODERN RELATIONSHIP between employer and employee OUR LIVES (AND WHY WE DON’T TALK ABOUT sential infrastructure for individuals to began with the rise of large-scale companies in the nineteenth IT) shape their own destiny. century. Although employment contracts date back to the Middle BY ELIZABETH ANDERSON PRINCETON UNIVERSITY An anti-statist streak runs through Ages, preindustrial arrangements bore little resemblance to the PRESS, several of these thinkers, particularly the documents we know today. Like modern employees, journey- 224pp., $27.95 Levellers and Paine, who viewed markets men and apprentices often served their employers for years,

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Yet because employment contracts create the illusion that workers and companies have arrived at a mutually satisfying agreement, the increasingly onerous restrictions placed on modern employees are often presented as “best prac- tices” and “industry standards,” framing all sorts of behaviors and outcomes as things that ought to be intrinsically desired by workers themselves. Who, after all, would not want to work on something in the “best” way? Beyond employment contracts, companies also rely on social pressure to fos- ter obedience: If everyone in the office regularly stays until seven o’clock every night, who would risk departing at five, even if it’s Miners in Ohio were required by their boss to attend a rally for Mitt Romney—and give up a day’s pay. technically allowed? Such social prods exist alongside more rigid but master s performed the same or similar work in proximity behavioral codes that dictate everything from how visible an to their subordinates. As a result, Anderson points out, working employee’s tattoo can be to when and how long workers can conditions—the speed required of workers and the hazards to break for lunch. which they might be exposed—were kept in check by what the Many workers, in fact, have little sense of the legal scope of masters were willing to tolerate for themselves. their employer’s power. Most would be shocked to discover that The Industrial Revolution brought radical changes, as com- they could be fired for being too attractive, declining to attend panies grew ever larger and management structures more a political rally favored by their employer, or finding out that complex. “Employers no longer did the same kind of work as their daughter was raped by a friend of the boss—all real-life employees, if they worked at all,” Anderson observes. “Mental examples cited by Anderson. Indeed, it is only after dismissal labor was separated from manual labor, which was radically for such reasons that many workers learn of the sweeping deskilled.” Companies multiplied rapidly in size. Labor con- breadth of at-will employment, the contractual norm that tracts now bonded workers to massive organizations in which allows American employers to fire workers without warning discipline, briefs, and decrees flowed downward, but whose and without cause, except for reasons explicitly deemed illegal. leaders were unreachable by ordinary workers. Today, fast food workers or bank tellers would be hard-pressed to petition their IN REALITY, THE employment landscape is even more dire than CEOs at McDonald’s or Wells Fargo in person. Anderson outlines. The rise of staffing or “temp” agencies, Despite this, we often speak of employment contracts as for example, undercuts the very idea of a direct relationship agreements between equals, as if we are living in Adam Smith’s between worker and employer. In The Temp Economy: From eighteenth-century dream world. In a still-influential paper Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America, sociologist Erin from 1937 titled “The Nature of the Firm,” the economist and Hatton notes that millions of workers now labor under sub- Nobel laureate Ronald Coase established himself as an early contracting arrangements, which give employers even greater observer and theorist of corporate concerns. He described latitude to abuse employees. For years, Walmart—America’s the employment contract not as a document that handed the largest retailer—used a subcontracting firm to hire hundreds of employer unaccountable powers, but as one that circumscribed cleaners, many from Eastern Europe, who worked for months those powers. In signing a contract, the employee “agrees to on end without overtime pay or a single day off. After federal obey the directions of an entrepreneur within certain limits,” agents raided dozens of Walmarts and arrested the cleaners as he emphasized. But such characterizations, as Anderson notes, illegal immigrants, company executives used the subcontracting do not reflect reality; most workers agree to employment agreement to shirk responsibility for their exploitation of the without any negotiation or even communication about their cleaners, claiming they had no knowledge of their immigration employer’s power or its limits. The exceptions to this rule are status or conditions. few and notable: top professional athletes, celebrity entertain- By any reasonable standard, much “temp” work is not ers, superstar academics, and the (increasingly small) groups even temporary. Employees sometimes work for years in a

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY of workers who are able to bargain collectively. single workplace, even through promotions, without ever

MAY 2017 | 55 REVIEW being granted official status as an employee. Similarly, “gig A weak job market, paired with the increasing precarity economy” platforms like Uber designate their workers as of work, means that more and more workers are forced to contractors rather than employees, a distinction that exempts make their living by stringing together freelance assignments the company from paying them minimum wage and overtime. or winning fixed-term contracts, subjecting those workers Many “permatemps” and contractors perform the same work to even more rules and restrictions. On top of their actual as employees, yet lack even the paltry protections and benefits jobs, contractors and temp workers must do the additional awarded to full-time workers. work of appearing affable and employable not just on the job, but during their ongoing efforts to secure their next gig. Constantly pitching, writing up applications, and personal branding on social media requires a level of self-censorship, lest a controversial tweet or compromising Facebook photo [but how long into the sink their job prospects. Forced to anticipate the wishes not of a specific employer, but of all potential future employers, many apocalypse could you go opt out of participating in social media or practicing politics before having to kill in any visible capacity. Their public personas are shaped not some white dude?] by their own beliefs and desires, but by the demands of the BY DANEZ SMITH labor market.

FOR LIVINGSTON, IT’S not just employers but work itself that i want to believe is the problem. We toil because we must, but also because our i would take culture has trained us to see work as the greatest enactment of debris & craft an arch our dignity and personal character. Livingston challenges us to turn away from such outmoded ideas, rooted in Protestant not rush my hands ideals. Like Anderson, he sweeps through centuries of labor to draw a long red line theory with impressive efficiency, from Marx and Hegel to down his face Freud and Lincoln, whose 1859 speech he also quotes. Liv- spit from a red mouth ingston centers on these thinkers because they all found the above the brow connection between work and virtue troubling. Hegel believed that work causes individuals to defer their desires, nurturing or dig a tunnel a “slave morality.” Marx proposed that “real freedom came through the lung after work.” And Freud understood the Protestant work ethic just wide enough as “the symptom of repression, perhaps even regression.” for a spirit to flee Nor is it practical, Livingston argues, to exalt work: There how long after are simply not enough jobs to keep most adults employed water becomes rare at a living wage, given the rise of automation and increas- do we become es in productivity. Besides, the relation between income what we won’t name? and work is arbitrary. Cooking dinner for your family is unpaid work, while cooking dinner for strangers usually comes how long could you with a paycheck. There’s nothing inherently different in the starve before labor involved—only in the compensation. Anderson argues you rob a man or that work impedes individual freedom; Livingston points hunt him? out that it rarely pays enough. As technological advances continue to weaken the demand for human labor, wages will i fear my making how quick i might inevitably be driven down even further. Instead of idealiz- evolve ing work and making it the linchpin of social organization, into a new kind Livingston suggests, why not just get rid of it? of creature Livingston belongs to a cadre of thinkers, including Kathi Weeks, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams, who believe that we i can’t should strive for a “postwork” society in one form or another. say i wouldn’t Strands of this idea go back at least as far as Keynes’s 1930 smile essay on “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Not only would work be eliminated or vastly reduced by technology, Keynes predicted, but we would also be unbur- Danez Smith is the author of DON’T CALL US DEAD dened spiritually. Devotion to work was, he deemed, one of (Graywolf Press, 2017). many “pseudo-moral principles” that “exalted some of the

56 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the dirty, hazardous, and shouldered largely by women and im- highest virtues.” migrants. Regardless of whether employment is virtuous or Since people in this new world would no longer have to earn not, our immediate goal should perhaps be to distribute the a salary, they would, Livingston envisions, receive some kind burdens of caregiving, since such work is essential to the func- of universal basic income. UBI is a slippery concept, adaptable tioning of society and benefits us all. to both the socialist left and libertarian right, but it essentially entails distributing a living wage to every member of society. A TRULY WORK-FREE world is one that would entail a rev- In most conceptualizations, the income is indeed basic—no olution from our present social organizations. We could no cases of Dom Pérignon—and would cover the essentials like longer conceive of welfare as a last resort—as the “safety net” rent and groceries. Individuals would then be free to choose metaphor implies—but would be forced to treat it as an unre- whether and how much they want to work to supplement the markable and universal fact of life. This alone would require us UBI. Leftist proponents tend to advocate pairing UBI with to support a massive redistribution of wealth, and to reclaim a strong welfare state to provide nationalized health care, our political institutions from the big-money interests that are tuition-free education, and other services. Some libertarians allergic to such changes. Tall orders indeed—but as Srnicek view UBI as a way to pare down the welfare state, arguing and Williams remind us in their book, Inventing the Future: that it’s better simply to give people money to buy food and Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, neoliberals pulled health care directly, rather than forcing them to engage with off just such a revolution in the postwar years. Thanks to their food stamp and Medicaid bureaucracies. efforts, free-market liberalism replaced Keynesianism asthe According to Livingston, we are finally on the verge of this political and economic common sense all around the world. postwork society because of automation. Robots are now ad- Another possible solution to the current miseries of un- vanced enough to take over complex jobs in areas like agricul- employment and worker exploitation is the one Livingston ture and mining, eliminating the need for humans to perform rejects in his title: full employment. For anti-work partisans, dangerous or tedious tasks. In practice, however, automation is full employment takes us in the wrong direction, and UBI a double-edged sword, with the capacity to oppress as well as corrects the course. But the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, rather than creating new jobs, full employment could require us to reduce our work hours drastically and spread Instead of idealizing work and them throughout the workforce—a scheme that could radically making it the linchpin of society, de-center waged work in our lives. A dual strategy of pursuing full employment while also demanding universal benefits— Livingston suggests, why not just including health care, childcare, and affordable housing—would get rid of it? maximize workers’ bargaining power to ensure that they, and not just owners of capital, actually get to enjoy the bounty of labor-saving technology. Nevertheless, Livingston’s critiques of full employment are worth heeding. As with automation, it can all go wrong if we use unburden. Machines often accelerate the rate at which humans the banner of full employment to create pointless roles—what can work, taxing rather than liberating them. Conveyor belts David Graeber has termed “bullshit jobs,” in which workers sit eliminated the need for workers to pass unfinished products in some soul-sucking basement office for eight hours a day—or along to their colleagues—but as Charlie Chaplin and Lucille harmful jobs, like building nuclear weapons. If we do not have Ball so hilariously demonstrated, the belts also increased the a deliberate politics rooted in universal social justice, then full pace at which those same workers needed to turn wrenches employment, a basic income, and automation will not liberate and wrap chocolates. In retail and customer service, a main us from the degradations of work. function of automation has been not to eliminate work, but Both Livingston and Anderson reveal how much of our to eliminate waged work, transferring much of the labor onto own power we’ve already ceded in making waged work the consumers, who must now weigh and code their own vege- conduit for our ideals of liberty and morality. The scale and tables at the supermarket, check out their own library books, coordination of the institutions we’re up against in the fight for and tag their own luggage at the airport. our emancipation is, as Anderson demonstrates, staggering. At the same time, it may be harder to automate some jobs Employers hold the means to our well-being, and they have that require a human touch, such as floristry or hairstyling. the law on their side. Individual efforts to achieve a better The same goes for the delicate work of caring for the young, “work-life balance” for ourselves and our families miss the sick, elderly, or otherwise vulnerable. In today’s economy, the wider issue we face as waged employees. Livingston demon- demand for such labor is rising rapidly: “Nine of the twelve strates the scale at which we should be thinking: Our demands fastest-growing fields,”The New York Times reported earlier should be revolutionary, our imaginations wide. Standing this year, “are different ways of saying ‘nurse.’ ” These jobs also amid the wreckage of last year’s presidential election, what happen to be low-paying, emotionally and physically grueling, other choice do we have? a

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TV pussy-grabbing presidency has given cover to the sort of blatant misogyny many thought consigned to the past. “In Trump’s America, The Handmaid’s Tale matters more than ever,” The Verge declared the day after Trump’s election. In February, the book overtook George Orwell’s 1984 on the Amazon best-seller list. Texas is Gilead and Indiana is Gilead and now that Mike Pence is our vice president, the entire country will look more like Gilead, too. Set in the very near future, Hulu’s new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale subtly updates Atwood’s dystopia. The execu tion of a gay woman in episode three seems inspired by a real Iranian execution. Played by Elisabeth Moss, Offred is more relatable than she’s ever been, with a motto (“I intend to sur vive”) destined for a thousand Etsy products. In the show, as in our moment, it is not just men, but crucially some women, too, who fervently wish for a society where women are no longer free or equal. Women known as Aunts initiate the Handmaids into their new roles; Wives terrorize Handmaids with little restraint. These women midwife Gilead into the world, though it’s not clear what they stand to gain from any of it. Most contradictory and recognizable of all these female collaborators is Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), the wife of Offred’s commander. Before Gilead, she graced American tele vision screens as a preternaturally blond evangelist. (Serena Joy was her stage name, a nom de guerre for the culture wars.) Even though she occupies the highest rank for a woman in this new world, she is now legally inferior to her sad-sack husband and, Real Housewives finding herself childless, has to employ Offred as a surrogate. A new The Handmaid’s Tale sounds a Rage roils the edges of her ice-princess restraint. “She doesn’t make speeches anymore,” Offred notes in the book. “She stays warning to conservative women. in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.” BY SARAH JONES AMERICA IS RICH in Serena Joys. One need look no further for her contemporary counterparts than Michelle Duggar and her daughters; or Paula White, the televangelist who allegedly LIKE THE KINGDOM of God, the Republic of Gilead is both now led Donald Trump to Christ; or his aide Kellyanne Conway, and not yet. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale who defends him as a “great boss” to women. The character conjures a theocratic dystopia—a version of the United States Atwood invented is an amalgam of Phyllis Schlafly and Tammy taken over by fundamentalist Christians after a terrorist attack Faye Bakker with a dash of Aimee Semple McPherson. The on Washington. Women are now divided into rigid classes spectacle of the female fundamentalist celebrity is not recent, determined by an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. and she is not an anomaly. Her existence is proof of American Atwood’s protagonist, Offred, is a Handmaid—a fallen woman fundamentalism’s durability, and a reminder that it could not who is forced to bear children for righteous couples—and the thrive without the enthusiastic backing of women. book follows her sufferings under the Gilead regime. Atwood When Atwood wrote her novel, Schlafly had already es paints in garish strokes intended to shock: This new society tablished herself as one of America’s most visible and influ calls homosexuality “gender treachery” and forbids women to ential conservative women by leading a successful campaign read, own property, or choose their own clothing. against the Equal Rights Amendment. A committed Catholic, Since the novel’s publication three decades ago, Gilead has Schlafly hurled herself against feminism’s second wave with existed as a paper nightmare that gains or loses dimension all the conviction of the activists she loathed. “The women’s based on the state of our national politics. Of course, we don’t libbers don’t understand that most women want to be wife, divide women into classes of Marthas, Handmaids, Econo mother, and homemaker—and are happy in that role,” she wives, and Wives; we call them “the help,” “surrogates,” the asserted in 1972. working class, and the one percent. America has never forced fertile women to bear children for infertile ones, but Trump’s ILLUSTRATION BY TRAN NGUYEN

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But like her fictional doppelgänger, Schlafly was no home- is the hand that wields the cattle prod. She’s charged with maker. She traveled the country; she appeared on television; the re-education of future Handmaids, and she accomplishes she influenced policy. The world she wanted to build could this by emphasizing both the high value of women and the not coexist with the world that allowed her career. These necessity of their oppression. “A thing is valued,” she teaches, contradictions did not, however, trouble Schlafly’s supporters. “only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, She defeated the ERA by mobilizing them; her mostly female girls.... Think of yourselves as pearls.” Serena Joy chose her life. volunteer brigades harried legislators into rejecting the bill. Lydia is empowered to attack other women with a cattle prod. Women also propped up the career of a man to Schlafly’s Both are proof that women are represented in Gilead’s power right: the theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony. Whereas Schlafly structure. If feminism is only about representation, choice, or was content to work within the Republican Party, Rushdoony some vaguely sketched notion of empowerment, it is difficult preferred a purist approach: As historian Michael McVicar has to say our Serena Joys and our Aunt Lydias are not feminists. recounted, Rushdoony lost a job at the Center for American But The Handmaid’s Tale does more than present a possible Studies after attempting to purge its Catholics. This was further future: It asks us to consider how we’d end up there. A form than most in the American right of the 1960s wanted to go, of feminism that celebrates power for power’s sake, instead of and so he labored in the fringes, formulating his vision of a interrogating how it is concentrated and distributed, will literal Protestant theocracy. It was conservative women who usher us into fascism. Feminism means something. Some came to his rescue: In 1965, Women for America granted him a stipend to continue his work—envisioning a society in which women would stay at home with their children, and apostasy Women midwife Gilead into the and homosexuality would be punishable by death. world, though it’s not clear what The dilemma of Serena Joy feels deceptively easy to resolve. She’s in this for power, and understands that it’s hers if she they stand to gain from it. says the right things to the right audiences. Schlafly achieved international fame, and Conway has the ear of the president. With Gilead, however, Atwood reminds such women that they might not like the results of their labor; that by the time they come to regret it, the culture they helped create will have developed far beyond their control. Serena Joy is a warning, choices oppress the women who make them, and some beliefs, not only to her feminist antagonists, but to conservatives, too. if enforced, would oppress everyone else, too. Allow an anti choice woman to call herself a feminist, and you have ceded FOR NEARLY 20 YEARS, I believed that real feminists—women politi cal territory that you cannot afford to lose. Stripped of po- who truly cared about other women—hated abortion and litical meaning, “feminist” becomes an entirely subjective term careers and dresses that showed too much collarbone. The that anyone with any agenda can use. Christian churches and schools I attended assured me that Two events convinced me to leave the church. The first: I empowerment awaited at home, in the arms of the husband I read The Handmaid’s Tale. The second: The university’s all- would marry young and then provide with endless children. female, pro-abstinence organization held a “modesty panel” I commended myself to Gilead, or something like it: I at- for campus women. The speakers were all men—professors, tended a religious university that controlled almost every classmates, the campus pastor—who held forth about appropri- aspect of my daily life and behavior. Students could not stay ate swimsuits and wedding dresses and the pernicious specter out past midnight on weeknights; women could not run for of girls in pajama pants. Most people listened and thought class chaplain or wear tight clothing. Not long after I gradu- that was fine: It was pro-woman. After all, women organized ated, the school’s new president gave a sermon promoting the it! They just wanted to help us protect our value. This is why “headship” of men over women—not because he’s a bigot but women couldn’t preach, or get abortions if they didn’t want because, he said, he was only preaching “what the text says.” to be pregnant, or fall in love with other women. My alma mater capitalized on the “pro-woman” claims “This may not seem ordinary to you now,” Aunt Lydia tells the established by Schlafly and her ilk. Their greatest achieve- Handmaids, “but after a time it will.” And that is exactly what ment was to take a language of female empowerment from they want you to believe. Fundamentalism asks you to endure the women’s movement and turn it to their own purposes. a thousand separate indignities, and tells you this is freedom. No one has noted this inversion more ruefully than Atwood. They sell it to you by telling you it’s feminism—or “empower- Offred’s mother, we are told, was a second-wave feminist. She ment” or “choice,” if the f-word feels a bit too threatening. They envisioned a porn-free society that would largely exclude men. promise you it’ll fix your problems and the world’s, too. Like “You wanted a women’s culture,” Offred imagines telling her. any authoritarian ideology, it expects you to tire of fighting. “Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists.” Margaret Atwood makes a perfect cameo in Hulu’s series. In the Tale, this paradox is exemplified not just by Serena She plays an Aunt, and she slaps the side of Offred’s head during Joy but by Aunt Lydia. Cruder and lower-ranked, Aunt Lydia her re-education. Pay attention, she seems to say. Wake up. a

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TV shabby rental adobe house as she and Sylvere make vigorous love, which they had not done for months before arriving in Marfa. Sylvere doesn’t seem to mind, at least at first, if she calls out to Dick in the heat of passion: They have mutually agreed that Dick is an abstraction, a distant perfection. A straight line. Of course, straight lines can, equally, be oppressive and antiseptic. They don’t leave much space for human messiness. And this is where the show’s erotic tension lies: Chris is all messy twists, a woman in the midst of coming undone, professionally and personally. She was beginning to unravel before she arrived in Texas. Her latest film is a bleak, muddy Eyes on the Guys failure. Her career is moving backwards. Encountering Dick I Love Dick manages to turn feminist and his formalist sculptures—one is just a brick sitting on a table—is the last straw. Dick won’t let her into his seminar; theory into urgent, messy drama. he refuses to allow her pent-up, discontented energy into his world. This blockade only makes Chris more determined. “If BY RACHEL SYME you’ve achieved perfection,” she yells at him, “what else is there to work on?” Her voice is thin, full of desperate oxygen. “Sorry, I don’t think a straight line equals art! They don’t call it the Philadelphia Museum of Lines!” THERE IS A SCENE in the second episode of I Love Dick, the It is rare to see a woman embrace her own abjection this new Amazon original series from Jill Soloway, in which two way on screen, rare in fact outside the pages of experimental characters debate the aesthetic appeal of straight lines. Dick literature. Here is a 43-year-old actress waxing fluidly about (Kevin Bacon), an abstract sculptor who swaggers around in art and desire and the devaluing of women’s labor under pa- weathered cowboy boots, loves them. “A straight line is per- triarchy, working herself into a frenzy, letting her hair fall into fection,” he tells Chris (Kathryn Hahn), a frustrated filmmak- her face as she stands up for herself to a man she also wants to er who is new in town and newly besotted with Dick’s preten- grab hold of. It feels deeply layered, like a cake made of theory tious buckaroo machismo. The scene takes place in a gallery and corporeal need and artistic resentment. Perhaps we could in Marfa, Texas, that odd patch of artisan bohemia in the only get I Love Dick, the show, right now, when tensions be- desert: a place where one can hitch a horse outside the Judd tween men and women (and discussions surrounding gender Foundation, and where two sculptors constructed a nonfunc- in general) have reached a kind of politicized apex, and even tional Prada store that sits right off U.S. Highway 90. (It’s a those whose lives exist completely outside the academy are commentary on capitalism and the mythos of the Western regularly debating feminist theory and capitalist ideologies on souvenir shop, you see.) Twitter during coffee breaks. Dick is one of the sauntering artistic giants on the scene. There is a hyper-intellectualism to the show—which grows He runs a competitive artists’ residency when he is not making directly out of the novel—but also a dirtiness, a raw emotional earthworks on his multi-acre ranch. Chris is a fish out of water nerve. Hahn’s frenetic energy in this scene stands in for that from Brooklyn; she is in Marfa to support her pedantic historian of all women who have decided they are tired of living in a husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), who is one of Dick’s new man’s world and demand to be heard, but who also are trying fellows. She was not supposed to stay long, but one of her art to square this deep frustration with a libidinous thirst. After films got cut from the Venice Biennale, and now she is stuck Dick leaves their verbal tête-à-tête, Chris has to press herself in outlaw territory. Her crush on Dick begins as a way to pass against a cold steel wall to slow her pulse. Simply asserting the time and soothe her blistered ego, but soon it swells into herself to a man who won’t bend to her aesthetic will has turned an all-encompassing obsession. her on. It is one of the most authentic sexually charged scenes Adapted from Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel of the same name, television has seen in a long time. We may finally be in a cul- I Love Dick is, above all, the story of a three-way romance: Chris tural moment in which we can root for the ravenous woman. wants Dick, Chris confesses to Sylvere, and then the two of them slowly pull Dick into various sexual and psychological THE FIRST THREE episodes of I Love Dick premiered earlier games. Over dinner on Chris’s first night in town, Dick intro- this year at Sundance, where Soloway made clear that the show duces himself to her by berating female filmmakers, snorting is primarily about the “female gaze”—one of her pet subjects that he is too “post-idea” to read books. From that moment, (she gave a master class on it at the Toronto Film Festival). she is fully hooked: Dick becomes her white whale, the fire of The male gaze, as film critic Laura Mulvey defined it in a now- her loins, her virile cowboy idée fixe. She begins writing him canonical 1975 essay, is all about the ways men turn women letters, which she reads out loud to Sylvere as a kind of con- ceptual art foreplay. Chris pins these notes over the bed in their ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB THOMAS

MAY 2017 | 61 REVIEW into objects of pure visual delight. In Toronto, Soloway joked And adapting I Love Dick has its own pitfalls: While the show that in 40 years, no one had thought to adapt the theory to a boldly deploys feminist theory, it still privileges and centers the woman’s perspective: “No one has claimed being the namer of voice of a bourgeois, white, bohemian woman. That Chris has the female gaze yet! So I’m taking it now. It’s mine. I want it been able to make films at all puts her in a fortunate position. to be like: Mulvey, male gaze; Soloway, female gaze!” The goal Her own frustrations as an artist don’t necessarily represent of the female gaze, as she explains it, is to explore how it feels women’s experiences more broadly. to be an object, and then to turn that scrutiny around, so that Soloway wanted to make a show that could embrace a more we “gaze on the gazers.” The female gaze is “about how it feels expansive view of feminism, representing a range of female to stand here in the world having been seen our entire lives.” identities and how they converge and challenge one another. I Love Dick is particularly suited to this kind of explora- Accordingly, the narrative switches between several women tion. It’s the story of a woman who is not only steeped in film in the Marfa universe, revealing each of their ambitions and theory, but is also grappling daily with the way the art world heartsick cravings in turn. There’s Devon (Roberta Colindrez), views her body and her intellectual weight (or lack thereof). a lesbian playwright and property manager, who becomes It is about the way women are allowed to move through the so captivated by Chris’s dysfunction that she starts to write world, what aesthetic spaces they are allowed to claim. In one her tenant into her next one-act play. There’s Suki (Phoebe exasperated moment, after Dick’s rejection, Hahn breaks down. Robinson), who finds herself caught up in Devon’s theatrical “I’m beginning to think there is no such thing as a good woman experiments. There’s Toby (India Menduez), who has come to filmmaker,” she laments. “Because how can you be, if you are Marfa to complete her research on hard-core pornography. If just raised to be invisible ... I mean visible, I mean looked at. the show were completely faithful to Kraus’s novel, it would It’s a wonder any woman can think of herself as an artist.” be told entirely from Chris’s discontented perspective. But Soloway’s co-creator, Sarah Gubbins, claims to have picked Soloway and Gubbins “took the book,” Soloway has explained, up a copy of Kraus’s novel after reading a paean by Leslie Jami- “and tried to explode it into these viewpoints of these women.” son in The New Yorker. She then pressed a copy into Soloway’s All these supporting characters have tangled lives in the hands, insisting that now was the ideal time, 20 years after its desert: Devon is obsessed with Chris and also Toby, Toby is publication, to adapt it for the screen. That’s how Kraus’s work obsessed with Devon and also Dick, though in a different way tends to spread through culture—from one devotee to the next. from that in which Chris is obsessed with Dick. The charac- A cult document since its publication, the novel is an intimate, ters’ needs overlap and interweave. Once Chris abandons her genre-bending work of fiction that includes diversions into inhibitions, everyone in her orbit starts to do the same. literary criticism, biography, and ’90s academic theory. The material for the book, in which the protagonist’s name is also WE SO RARELY get to see women like these on television: Chris Kraus, came straight from life—Kraus really did have a women who want to be respected and hallowed and serious and fixation on a man named Dick, and her husband (at the time) also naughty and profane. Women are not often encouraged to was named Sylvere. Chris hunts Dick down, pursues an affair, perform exalted abjection, to swerve into a glorious failure as and debases herself in order to get what she wants. a way out of a dull, depressive one. If there is one thing that I In the introduction to the 2006 reprinting, the poet Eileen Love Dick does well, it is showing that these compulsions can Myles (Soloway’s ex-partner and an inspiration for a charac- be artistically fertile. It is about the art of simply hitting a nerve ter in Transparent) wrote that “in Chris’s case, abjection ... is raw enough to allow swooning infatuation to become praxis. the road out from failure. Into something bright and exalted, After absorbing her rejection, Chris allows herself a mis- like presence.” Soloway and Gubbins lean into this abjection, chievous act: She packages her risqué letters to Dick in a box refusing to shy away from Chris’s base motivations. There’s an adorned by a dead moth and places them on his desk. It recalls obvious risk in presenting a female character in all her complex- a moment in Steven Shainberg’s indie S&M drama Secretary, ity: If you overshoot, you can end up reinforcing the age-old when Maggie Gyllenhaal puts a desiccated cockroach on James women-are-crazy stereotype, rather than subtly undercutting Spader’s bed. It is as an act of provocation and of love. Both it. But they have also made a careful choice in casting Kathryn women are pushing in order to be pulled. Hahn, an underappreciated actress whose face contorts so For Chris—and everyone else caught up in the swirl of her fully into each individual emotion that it is impossible not to experiment—Dick is a rugged Mephistopheles, her incessant empathize with her, even at her least dignified. need for him leading her out of her gray funk and into a place In interviews, Soloway has said that she hopes the show will where the rules and the sharp angles melt away. She is pushing do for feminine desire what Transparent has done for transgen- up against his hard edges not because she desires his rigid code, der issues; to explore the humor, heaviness, and messy, complex but because she knows that subverting what Dick wants is a humanity of marginalized points of view. Soloway met with her vital way to tap into her own ambition, wobbly and rapacious share of criticism for Transparent; her casting of a cisgender as it may be. What makes I Love Dick exciting—as television man to play a transgender woman in the main role was not well and as a literary work—is that it offers a promise of liberation, received by some, and she was forced to course-correct along for both men and their abstract cold lines, and for the women the way, bringing in trans actors, writers, and a trans director. who dare to crash through them. a

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BOOKS banned in Saudi Arabia has a charming strangeness, like the thought of hookahs being banned in Minneapolis.” It is hard to recall a foreign novel being greeted with such hostility in an American mainstream publication in the decades that followed the end of the Cold War. Foreign writers might still be considered strange or different, and they might not be covered at all. But even the notoriously elitist, insular establishment of book reviewers in New York did not see their novels as completely out of place in a world rapidly being shaped by globalization. In an era of cheap air travel, digital communications, consumerism, worldwide urbanization, and the dominance of English—all overseen by the United States as the world’s single remaining imperial power—readers, editors, and critics found it easy to welcome works by Haruki Murakami or Orhan Pamuk and the snapshots of foreign life they reveal. In fact, the literary critic Adam Kirsch argues in his new book, The Global Novel, these circumstances have given rise to an entirely new literary category. No longer located tightly within national boundaries, and often written by authors who move between cultures, the global novel takes fiction’s usual remit—the examination of human nature—and places it in new cosmopolitan settings. The scope and structures of these books may vary: “A global novel can be one that sees humanity on the level of the species,” Kirsch proposes, “so that its problems and prospects can only be dealt with on the scale of the whole planet; or it can start from the scale of a single neighborhood, showing how even the most constrained Lonely Planet of lives are affected by worldwide movements.” Yet such nar- How to read the global novel in an ratives are unified in their concern for “contemporary global problems, including immigration, terrorism, environmental age of militarized borders. degradation, and sexual exploitation.” The differences that aggravated Updike, the suspicion of BY SIDDHARTHA DEB things not sufficiently Western, serve as approaches from which Kirsch draws inspiration. In the midst of xenophobic populism—the age of Brexit and Donald Trump—Kirsch counters that the global novel bears out Goethe’s belief that WHEN CITIES OF SALT, an Arabic novel by Abdelrahman Munif, “poetry is the universal possession of mankind.” And the fact was published in translation in 1988, John Updike reviewed that readers have come to appreciate it shows, for him, the it for The New Yorker. “It is unfortunate,” Updike remarked, currency of liberal values “like tolerance of difference, mutual “given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif, a S audi understanding, and free exchange of ideas.” born in Jordan, appears to be—though he lives in France and received a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of THE CHALLENGE OF the global novelist is, as Kirsch sees it, in Belgrade—insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative many ways a matter of style and technique: “How can a writer that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of situated in one culture communicate its truth to readers in a campfire explainer.” very different places?” he asks. For the answer, he turns to Updike was writing near the end of the Cold War, confi- works by eight writers: Pamuk, Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, dent in his pronouncements about the novel, the West, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Margaret At- about border-challenging writers like Munif, whose father wood, Michel Houellebecq, and Elena Ferrante. “They span was Saudi, mother Iraqi, and who at different points of his six languages”—Turkish, Japanese, Spanish, English, French, life held Algerian, Yemeni, and Iraqi passports. Stripped of and Italian—and are, he writes, “generally agreed to be leading his Saudi nationality and having fallen afoul of Saddam Hus- figures in the pantheon of world literature.” sein’s regime in Iraq, Munif wrote Cities of Salt in France. Of More precisely, the quality that seems to draw Kirsch to the fact that the novel, with its critique of American oil cor- several of these books is their resonance in the West. The porations and Arab oligarchies, was banned in Saudi Arabia, Updike had only this to say: “The thought of novels being ILLUSTRATION BY DAN BEJAR

MAY 2017 | 63 REVIEW first novel he considers at length is Pamuk’sSnow, the story of a poet named Ka, who has returned to Turkey after twelve years away and who travels to the provincial town of Kars to investigate, and write about, the phenomenon of “suicide girls.” These are young women who may or may not be religious martyrs. One of them had been involved in a school protest in which she refused to take off her head scarf, as demanded by the secular director of the school—who is later assassinated by an Islamic radical for suppressing religious belief. For Kirsch, this shows us how Snow dramatizes the conflict “between Turkey and Europe, Islam and the West,” thus placing Pamuk in the context of the West and its rhetoric about Islam after September 11. It also turns Pamuk, in Kirsch’s view, into the very em- bodiment of a global writer. Modern Turkey is, in Kirsch’s account, a “traditionally Islamic” country that underwent Adichie’s exploration of borders goes beyond many Western novels. “forced secularization” in the 1920s and began to see the resurgence of “political Islam” by the 1990s. Against this readings. The Chilean author Bolaño’s 2666 is, for instance, a background, Pamuk is the maverick author in an authoritarian massive novel about a mysterious German writer and a group state, whose themes just happen to overlap “with Western of literary critics devoted to his work, and about the world as concerns” about the conflict between Islam and secularism, “a place of evil.” The haunting middle section of the novel de- between personal freedom and collective belief. On occasion, scribes an epidemic of murders of women in the fictional city Kirsch acknowledges that there is a danger in reading Pamuk of Santa Teresa on the Mexican border with the United States. as an “ambassador” from Turkey to the rest of the world, es- This episode, Kirsch notes, is based on the actual murders of pecially since Pamuk himself disavows this role through his at least 370 women in Ciudad Juárez between 1993 and 2005. use of wordplay and metafictional elements in his novel. For That readers care more about these deaths in fiction than when instance, the protagonist’s name, Ka, the name of the town, they appear in the news, Kirsch comments, “adds a terrible Kars, and the word for snow, kar (which is the novel’s original irony to Bolaño’s project.” Yet Kirsch himself is ultimately more Turkish title), deliberately echo one another—a point Kirsch concerned with Bolaño’s prose style than with human realities. makes much of: For him, the section’s impact comes from “the way it eschews the style … that dominates 2666,” and is instead written in a In Turkish, then, kar forms a linguistic bridge between the straightforward manner, as if “reported or recited.” protagonist, Ka, and the city, Kars: ka, kar, kars, a pun that The larger problem with this analysis comes from the fact suggests deep unity. But as Pamuk of course intended, this that Bolaño’s novel is concerned with much more than just pun is untranslatable. In English, you can hear the similarity literary effects. Kirsch notes in passing that the factories of between Ka and Kars, but not the word for “snow” that unites Santa Teresa are “a creation of the globalized economy, with them. This gesture could be characterized as defiant, for the all its moral contradictions.” By this he seems to mean that way it builds untranslatability into a novel obsessed with cul- workers come there to make money, but that the crime-ridden tural translation. But it could equally well appear resigned factory towns actually threaten their safety. Yet there is no to the fact that … it is impossible to fully know a place, or a contradiction in Bolaño’s depiction of the factories: He portrays book, from outside. them as cesspits of global capitalism that prey upon women, who are driven to the ghastly city more by desperation and In other words, there are cultural specifics that a reader in the the devastation of rural economies in Latin America—also West might well miss. Kirsch’s exploration of cultural specifics, an effect of globalization—than by some Western notion of however, does not extend much further than a consideration upward mobility. of stylistic issues. There is no examination of the way Pamuk This aspect of 2666 undercuts Kirsch’s conviction that has, in a number of his novels, been working through the mobility is a key feature of the global novel: In these books, conflicts of modernity in Turkey—a country that as an author- Kirsch maintains, we see a happy movement of ideas, peo- itarian state that quashes dissent while being a political ally ple, books, and capital that speaks of a more diverse world, of the United States, and whose long history includes Islam “the portrait of an age when more and more people have the as a strand of modernity, does not fall neatly onto one side of ability to cross borders in both directions.” There is a kind of a divide between “Islam and the West.” willful blindness to such an assertion in an age of increasingly A tendency to downplay the messy interaction between militarized borders and forced deportations, especially when politics, capital, and culture, and to focus instead on literary other novels that Kirsch considers, such as Chimamanda Ngozi

qualities like irony and ambiguity, runs through many of Kirsch’s Adichie’s Americanah, seriously undermine any such notion. PHOTO ELIAS/UN MANUEL

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A Nigerian who comes to the United States for college, Americanah’s protagonist Ifemelu struggles through the terrain of intimacy and work before deciding to return to Lagos; War Poem her old boyfriend, meanwhile, tries to make it in Britain as an BY NOMI STONE undocumented immigrant and is eventually deported. “The genre of the novel, Americanah reminds us,” Kirsch argues, Goldfish-shaped balloons tense “has always thrived by chronicling upwardly mobile people, at coming fire, the sensor and the means of that mobility is seldom pure—just look at reels and leaves stutter out the window Balzac, or Henry James.” It is odd to take a lesson of upward of the cell where the translator mobility from Americanah, when the two main characters both peels oranges for the fallen leader. end the novel back where they started, painfully aware of the The city dims. God possibilities missed. of infinite sets, god of the craters not visible to the naked RATHER THAN VIEW the global novel through a Western lens, eye: nothing prepared me for this. it is important to ask what allows certain books to be per- A man crosses the city, ceived as global in the first place. What are the mechanisms traveling with his sister to somewhere safe, of selection and rejection, of publishing and publicity? How at last the roar paling behind them. much does the emergence of an anglophone global elite, its But she falls and cannot walk, so he carries her. tastes largely in accord with those of New York and London, He carries her and carries her until he cannot carry her. have to do with this process? Then he puts her down. The novelists Kirsch surveys found a Western readership He puts her down in the shade. because they were driven by a sense of urgency that had deepened over a long period. Most of them (Pamuk, Murakami, Bolaño, Adichie, Ferrante) had to write a number of books before one broke through, in great part because they addressed Nomi Stone’s second collection of poems, KILL CLASS (Tupelo Press, 2018), is forthcoming. issues that had all but disappeared from the mainstream West- ern novel, including the complexities of race, imperialism, and migration; the liberating possibilities of feminism, anarchism, or Islamism; the overwhelming loneliness of our late-capitalist lives; as well as the damage that can be caused by upward mobil- question of why he includes no American writers. Is that be- ity. Bolaño emerged as concerns about inequality and youthful cause “global” is ultimately defined by whatever the United radicalism bloomed into the Occupy movement, Adichie against States is not? In fact, an American writer like Rachel Kushner, the backdrop of what would become Black Lives Matter, and with The Flamethrowers, has an excellent claim to having Ferrante during a moment of a rejuvenated feminism, which written a global novel. On the surface a bildungsroman about can be seen in the International Women’s Strike. Reno, a young American trying to make it in the art world of The only writers Kirsch discusses who do not really seem to New York in the 1970s, Kushner’s novel portrays far more than fit this pattern are the French Houellebecq and the Canadian individual mobility. As Reno rides around on a motorcycle Atwood. Both Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Houellebecq’s manufactured by her boyfriend Sandro’s family, The Flame- The Possibility of an Island are dystopias; throwers reveals the evasion, exploitation, and complicity that they imagine a future where humanity their lifestyle is built on. “has been not just extinguished by its own Kushner shows us the striking workers in the Italian factory environmental recklessness, but also su- that makes the motorcycles, and the slave-labor-like condi- perseded by a genetically engineered race tions in the Brazilian plantations that produce the rubber for of quasi-human creatures,” Kirsch writes. the tires, and the possibility for solidarity between Reno, of While these narratives are global in their working-class origin, and the Italian workers who loathe her scope, Houellebecq and Atwood portray boyfriend’s family. The European and American characters a trajectory of decline, a narrative of the are defined in direct relation to the Third World, the bour- fall of the West that most of Kirsch’s other geois characters in relation to the working class, the men to global novelists do not share. In Adichie, in the women—connections that seem, in their humanity and Pamuk, in Bolaño, the global novel instead insight across cultures, to offer fertile ground for a global THE GLOBAL NOVEL: focuses on those who have never been part novelist. To consider The Flamethrowers alongside Snow or WRITING THE WORLD IN THE 21ST CENTURY of the rise of the West, and who have often 2666 would challenge the notion that a novel is global only BY ADAM KIRSCH suffered from its hegemony. if it depicts people in faraway places who confirm the West’s COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS, Still, the presence of Houellebecq faith in upward mobility—a faith that now seems rather quaint, 135pp., $12.99 and Atwood in Kirsch’s book raises the even in the West itself. a

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PHOTOGRAPHY share a certain transcendent quality; precipitous height, rather than color or composition, is their strength. In many individual images, the shift in perspective acts as little more than a gimmick. But seen as a genre, the drone’s- eye view presents a troubling contradiction. On the one hand, commercial drones promise a newly democratized view of the world: Just as Polaroid cameras made spontaneous, roving photography easier in the 1970s, drones now give more people than ever the ability to make aerial images, to see themselves and their surroundings from a godlike vantage. On the other, that same view enables drone operators to surveil anyone or High and Mighty anything, without any legal process or even a clear motivation. Can drone photography capture the However trivial or striking the resulting imagery may appear, the form itself requires a reckoning, since to contemplate the complexity of life on the ground? dronestagram is to witness both the grandeur and vulnerability of life on the ground. BY KYLE CHAYKA THERE ARE, OF COURSE, precedents for documenting the world from above. The first aerial photograph was taken in 1858 by a French photographer and polymath named Gaspard-Félix PICTURE OUR WORLD seen from the air. A condo tower ap- Tournachon, who went by the pseudonym Nadar. Floating in pears as a dollhouse, each window offering a glimpse into an a hot-air balloon over Petit-Bicêtre, a village near Paris, he individual life. The street below is a flat plane, occupied by captured a bucolic scene from the sky and brought it down to toy cars. Or a single stand of evergreens points toward the sky earth in the form of a permanent print. “One can distinguish in the midst of a barren, snow-covered landscape no vehicle perfectly on the road a tapestry maker whose cart stopped has crossed. before the balloon,” he recalled in his memoir, “and on the tiles For most of human history, such views have been impossible of the roofs the two white doves that had just landed there.” for pedestrians to achieve. But in recent years, that has begun The past decade has seen a comparable revolution in aerial to change. Drone photography, developed by the military to imaging. Whereas the vast flyover shots of the past required enable pilots to stay on the ground while sending their cameras expensive air travel, drones are both readily available and into the sky, is no longer limited to surveillance and warfare. completely interactive. Drones can also fly lower and maneuver Consumer drones are now available for as little as $30, and more tightly than any airplane or balloon, enabling the aerial anyone with a few practice flights under their belt can take equivalent of street photography. The rise of the drone has photos and video from the sky. Amateur photographers have even birthed a new genre of portraiture: the “dronie,” which begun to record intimate moments from the air, the way they Ecer describes as “the aerial equivalent of the selfie.” These might have once used Polaroids or digital SLRs. By 2020, ac- snapshots tend to demonstrate their subjects’ dominance over cording to the Federal Aviation Administration, there will be the natural landscape: a couple cuddling on a rug laid in a vast as many as 7.5 million drones operating in the United States field, a silhouetted figure standing on top of a mountain, a alone; on Instagram, the hashtag #dronestagram—the format’s human tower rising off the beach. The drone’s height means nickname—has attracted more than 780,000 posts. that the images can encompass more background than those This soaring aesthetic is on display in Dronescapes, a new from a smartphone, but people are still the focus. book of drone photography sourced from Amateur drone photography has already developed a dis- the #dronestagram community and cu- tinctive set of subjects. The book is organized into sections rated by Ayperi Karabuda Ecer, formerly such as “Urban,” with photos of city landmarks and street a photo editor at Magnum and Reuters. layouts; “Fauna,” with Planet Earth–style shots of animals; The imagery she has gathered represents and “Probe,” which documents environmental threats like a kind of twenty-first-century sublime, pollution and wildfires. The themes are decidedly unsubtle: The with all of the beauty drones reveal and photographers are preoccupied with capturing a novel view none of the terror. Much of the collec- of a familiar scene, or playing tricks with the camera’s height DRONESCAPES: THE NEW AERIAL tion is coffee-table kitsch: tiny swimmers rather than using it to push the boundaries of symbolism or PHOTOGRAPHY FROM bobbing in turquoise tropical waters; an the format of the photo. Superficial content dominates form. DRONESTAGRAM EDITED BY AYPERI Umbrian walled city enveloped in fog; a Given the camera’s distance, the results also tend to be visually KARABUDA ECER parking lot packed with cars that form static, and even alienating to viewers. THAMES & HUDSON, 288pp., $40.00 a geometric zigzag; an entire chapter of The images in Dronescapes suffer from a shortage of indi- wacky stunt wedding photos. The images viduality or original style. Photographers are often identified

66 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

MARCIO OGURA/THE PHOTOGRAPHERS OF DRONESTAGRAM/COURTESY THAMES & HUDSON & THAMES DRONESTAGRAM/COURTESY OF PHOTOGRAPHERS OGURA/THE MARCIO A family portrait taken by drone in Brazil, 2016. Shot from a precipitous height, the “dronie” is “the aerial equivalent of the selfie.”

MAY 2017 | 67 REVIEW only by their online usernames (“postandfly” or “mountain a husband who caught his cheating wife with footage from a drone”), lending a curious anonymity to the enterprise. Beyond drone; a New Mexico court ruling justified police using drones the dronestagrams that look like stock imagery for motiva to surveil citizens under the strange logic that the machines tional posters, the book’s best moments—such as contributor are less obtrusive than helicopters. JackFreer’s eerie shot of a nuclear testing site—bring to mind The romantic imagery collected in Dronescapes doesn’t the work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer reflect the decidedly unpretty purposes to which most drones who has documented from the air the rusting hulls of disused are put. This is a deliberate choice: The book is presented in ships, highway overpasses, and suburban sprawl. His focus part as a document of drone photography’s early flourishing, is humanity’s industrialization of the natural landscape, his before, as its editors foresee, government regulation limits the aesthetic an ordered ugliness that reveals the unintended use of aerial imaging to armies and spy agencies. The edito consequences of such environmental intervention. rial tone seems to admonish readers for their undue anxiety Most of the images in Dronescapes, by contrast, fail to un over drones. “The Wild West of drone photography is slowly settle the viewer. Since the early twenty-first century, we’ve diminishing,” Ecer writes. “The fear of terrorist attacks, of become accustomed to the grandeur of an aerial perspective, paparazzi invading the sky and drones crashing into aeroplanes whether from film flyovers in blockbuster movies likeSkyfall, are just a few examples that have led to new jurisdictions to or from the daily experience of scrolling through Google Earth. restrict their use.” Viewing the world from above has become an unremarkable Yet other artists have tried to grapple with the political experience that entails little risk or danger. Consumer drones implications of using drones as imaging technology. From simply allow people to create this imagery for themselves, 2012 to 2015, the British artist and writer James Bridle ran an zooming in on the specific target of their surveillance. Drone Instagram account, also called “Dronestagram,” which posted kitsch—the growing vernacular of images taken with these satellite photographs of locations bombed by military drones machines, neither inspiring nor provocative—allows us to in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The juxtaposition of desert become accustomed to being surveilled from the sky without landscapes with the names of victims and the dates of their questioning the nature of or justification for the surveillance. deaths presents an aesthetic utterly unlike the grand and Since hobbyist photographers use the technology to document peaceful vistas of much drone photography. The project was their vacations, Dronescapes implies, it can’t be all that bad. chilling because it made visible the work of often-invisible machines, approximating what military drones and their pilots IF DRONE PHOTOGRAPHY often feels glib, it may be because actually see when they are deployed. pictures taken from the air don’t fit easily into clear, human-scale The most powerful drone imagery is not aspirational snap narratives. In fact, the looming presence of the machines threat shot photography, but documentary. Last November, at the ens the order of life on the ground. In 2013, the novelist and height of the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline, an photographer Teju Cole published a series of tweets composing aerial drone captured scenes of police blasting protesters with “seven short stories about drones.” Cole inserted the machines water cannons. Men and women scatter like ants across the into the beginnings of novels by Melville, Kafka, and Chinua floodlit landscape as the drone weaves nimbly in and out of the water, conveying the violence and unpredictability of the assault. Civilian drones also captured the austere geometry Drones now give photographers of the pipeline being constructed under cover of night, and the ability to see themselves from the ominous sight of armored police vehicles surrounding the a godlike vantage. clutch of tents and tepees erected by protesters. The drone footage quickly went viral, netting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and instantly becoming an iconic image of the ongoing protests. So many activists and journalists were using drones to document the protests, in fact, that the Federal Aviation Administration instituted a Achebe, giving familiar stories abrupt endings, echoing the no -fly zone in the area. The message was clear: Drones are fine innocent lives that drones cut off in the real world: “Call me for bombing terrorists or observing suspects, but they are far Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated too dangerous when placed in the hands of ordinary citizens. at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.” As the protest imagery suggests, drone photography at its Just as military drones make it “impossible to die as one best can provide us with a more expansive and revealing view kills,” as the French scholar Grégoire Chamayou observes in A of the world around us. Not only do drones empower users Theory of the Drone, the drone photographer can see without to document their own unique views, they also challenge being seen—a clear advantage in warfare and law enforcement the perspectives presented by larger and better-equipped alike. Drones first established their role on the battlefield in the institutions. This newfound visual authority can be used to 1980s, and by 2002 the CIA was successfully using Predator disrupt authority itself—but only if we spend more of our time drones in targeted killings. One recent tabloid story told of examining the nature of power than looking at ourselves. a

68 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

BOOKS works stop short of evoking the human costs of capitalism. There is one recent thinker, however, who embodied the marriage of Marxist thought with a kind of protest poetry. Born in the South Bronx in 1940, Marshall Berman spent his childhood in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood before enrolling at Columbia, and then Oxford and Harvard. At these schools, he discovered both the thinking of Marx and the transcendental power of modernist literature. Unlike many of his generation, he never chose one over the other. He wrote about philosophy, politics, and urbanism with the same intense yearning for literary elegance that he hoped to bring to progressive politics; his best-known work, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, combined the analytical rigor of dialectical materialism with the lyrical spryness of Leaves of Grass. A study of the often destructive effects of capitalism and modernization on the life of cities, All That Is Solid put Berman on the map as an urbanist, but his body of work addresses a much larger project. He often called himself a Marxist humanist, a sensibility that runs through a new collection of his essays titled Modernism in the Streets. In many of these pieces, his thoughts on freedom, alienation, and community are filtered through an exuberant appreciation of culture, from William Blake to Cyndi Lauper. To make a lasting impact, he believed, the left had to combine the wisdom of Das Kapital with an all-out attempt to recapture American culture through music, art, and poetry.

Freestyle Marxism MUCH LIKE TODAY’S activists, Berman, who died in 2013, Marshall Berman taught the left to was the product of a time and place in which left politics were being reinvented. He found midcentury Marxist thought embrace the culture of the moment. overly dogmatic and too tied to the Soviet Union; American communists had elevated Marxism high above the plane of BY MAX HOLLERAN day-to-day existence. For the ideology of a mass movement, its meaning was curiously guarded by an enlightened few, Berman noted in his essay “Radical Times”:

A POPULAR IMAGE of resistance during the Occupy Wall Street Classical communist education was Talmudic, based on a study protests of 2012 showed a ballerina poised atop the Charging of commentaries, with an underlying suspicion of sacred pri- Bull statue in New York City’s financial district. The aggressive mary texts. Among Orthodox Jews, the Bible is a sort of adult capitalist system that had failed so many in the 2008 financial movie—a yeshiva-bucher is exposed to it only after years of crisis needed, the image suggested, to bend to fundamental Talmudic training, to insure that he will respond in orthodox human values like grace, dignity, and compassion. Yet the ways. Similarly, a trainee at a party school would begin with socialist and Marxist thought that many of the protesters Stalin, until 1956; then the great indoctrinator Lenin; then, favored did not do a great job finding beauty in resistance with some hesitation, Engels. Marx came in only at the very either. The mathematics of Marxism—with its factionalism end, and then only for those with security clearance. and its arcane language, strictly policed for misuse—did not form a strong foundation for a movement. The Marxist left By the mid-1950s, younger intellectuals and radicals had was good at political economy, but lacked poetry. soured on the Trotsky-inspired, materially focused Marxism For the most part, the intellectual works that have galva- of the 1930s; they yearned for writing that dealt with gender, nized today’s growing left are studies in economic and political sexuality, race, and youth culture. Berman remembers his theory—Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, or the family watching the news of Soviet forces rolling into Buda- writings of Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance min- pest in 1956 and thinking that there had to be a new kind of ister. Although the rhetoric of equality and liberation conveys Marxism formulated quickly. The American left’s definitive in the best of these books its own beauty, and its impassioned adoption by a new generation holds its own romance, such ILLUSTRATION BY PETER O’TOOLE

MAY 2017 | 69 REVIEW break with Soviet-centric thought came in 1968, as the So- viet crackdown in Prague outraged the world and the student- worker revolt in Paris inspired a generation. The New Left ascended not just because of its distance from the ussr, but because it seized the bottled-up cultural energies that were then erupting into music and literature. Berman pioneered a form of social criticism that responded to this charged moment. His dissertation, The Politics of Au- thenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society, published in 1970, merges Rousseau and Montesquieu with Marx in a distinctly New Left style (the introduction is titled “The Personal is Political”). Throughout the 1970s, he wrote for magazines such as Dissent, The Nation, and Partisan Review, while drawing on his own autobiography. As a college student, Berman recalled, he would ride the subway back up- town to watch the obliteration of the Bronx of his childhood. In the name of modernization, Robert Moses, New York’s infamous urban czar from the 1930s through the 1960s, took a “meat ax” to the borough with glee. Berman’s parents knew that the Cross Bronx Expressway would cut their neighborhood into pieces, placing once-vibrant blocks next to a roaring freeway, but they were helpless to stop it. This early experience was central to All That Is Solid Melts Berman in London in 1991: The life of the street was central to his work. Into Air. Berman himself had lived with the fallout from capitalism’s drive for “creative destruction.” Capitalism destroyed created the mass culture called Hip-Hop,” he wrote. “Hip-Hop previous systems of production in order to open new avenues today envelops the whole world.” Berman was early to under- for profit: Manufacturers were constantly inventing new looms stand that distinctly urban art forms like graffiti and street to revolutionize (and destroy) the artisanal labor of weavers, corner free-style rap were ways for communities stripped of while real estate developers tore down old buildings every few their comfort and autonomy to retake city space, even as their decades to erect taller, more lucrative structures. He saw this poverty deepened. experience registered, too, in literature down the centuries: “To be modern,” Berman wrote, “is to experience personal Baudelaire had described it in his treks around nineteenth- and social life as a maelstrom, and to find one’s world in perpet- century Paris, which was being reassembled into grand avenues ual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity by Baron Haussmann; a century earlier, in St. Petersburg, the and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is czar demolished classic Slavic wood structures and built new solid melts into air.” Modernization was a process that tilted ones from stone in the name of “Europeanization.” Finally, the world off-axis, forcing people to hold on, but also giving Berman circled back to examine the trauma that the Cross Bronx them a new perspective. In the 1971 essay “Notes Toward a Expressway caused in his own times. The New Society,” Berman described the social dislocation that book is more acid jazz than symphony. the consumer society had produced and how Students for Although All That Is Solid laments the a Democratic Society used the upheaval of the late 1960s to excesses of modernization, it embraces publicize a more egalitarian politics. Even as modernization the cultures people formed amid their set people adrift, modernism promised “to give modern men newly modern environments. Like Marx, and women the power to change the world that is changing Berman felt that nostalgia is a trap, since them.” Freedom could arise from alienation; as David Marcus even indignation over a dispossession or writes in his introduction to Modernism in the Streets, “from loss, he recognized, can be more produc- modernity’s ruins came new life.” tive. Berman understood intimately the plight of many New York neighborhoods NOT EVERYONE ON the left was taken with Berman’s exuberant in the 1970s, when landlords burned their use of literature and culture to illustrate Marxian concepts. MODERNISM IN THE buildings to claim the insurance money. The eminent New Left historian Perry Anderson gave a speech STREETS: A LIFE AND TIMES IN ESSAYS At the same time, he cared for the life that criticizing All That Is Solid for its analytical messiness. Berman BY MARSHALL BERMAN flourished in the wake of this destruc- was too loose with the term modernism, Anderson argued; not VERSO, 400pp., $29.95 tion. “The South Bronx, at its moment of just any development between the French Revolution and the greatest misery and anguish, and in some urban renewal of the 1960s could represent what was actually

sense because of its misery and anguish, a distinct historical moment. Nor did he think it proper to COURTESY SHELLIE SCLAN

70 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW celebrate the cultures spawned by modernity. The point of But he also felt that elite institutions must throw off their revolution, he insisted, was “neither to prolong nor to fulfill high-minded demeanor and become more inclusive in tangi- modernity, but to abolish it.” ble ways. For this reason, he took pride in working within the Berman’s response, published in the New Left Review, is City University of New York, a public system, and hanging out included in Modernism in the Streets. With a characteristic mix at the school’s hip-hop open mics. His inclination to throw of potent irony and street wisdom, Berman contrasts himself out the old educational orthodoxies and overly formal rituals with Anderson and other traditionalists on the academic left, was not just part of his intellectual and political awakening who only have “eyes for world-historical Revolutions in pol- during the 1960s, but also of his commitment to embracing itics and world-class Masterpieces in culture.” Intellectuals change no matter how destabilizing. like Anderson stake their claims “on heights of metaphysical The financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated the economic perfection, and won’t deign to notice anything less. This would system’s creative destruction at its most incomprehensible, be all right, I guess, except that he’s so clearly miserable over and it refocused criticism of capitalism for a new generation. the lack of company up there.” They saw the federal government rush to save financial insti- Berman had very different ideas about what kind of culture tutions, while ignoring the ordinary people the banks had mattered. Culture was something people could use, that blos- harmed. While anti-capitalist experiments such as Occupy, the somed from their vernacular and could make them at home in Spanish indignados movement, and Greece’s Syriza government their lives. Berman was fond of extensively quoting rap lyrics during speeches and liked to mix high and low in his essays. He used Bruce Springsteen’s music, for instance, to clarify the Culture was something people themes of Isaac Babel’s bildungsroman Red Cavalry: Both men could use, that blossomed from wrote about heroic journeys of self-discovery in which the protagonist must define who he is by rejecting an “anti-self.” their vernacular and could make As Springsteen sings in “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “They left their them at home in their lives. homes and family / Their father said, ‘My sons, one thing you will learn / For everything the north gives, it exacts a price in return.’” In an essay on public space and American individualism, Berman discusses Cyndi Lauper’s song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” at length. “Girls are not only transforming their gained momentum for brief periods, a more enduring legacy lives,” he noted, “but transforming the life of the street itself.” of the crisis has been the rise of a xenophobic nationalism that Lauper’s music video opens with scenes from a cautious, sedate blends anti-globalization sentiments with racism. In both the family life: Mother is cooking, father scolding his daughter United States and Europe, the left had finally succeeded in to stay away from the phone. But their daughter is dancing reaching a mass audience on economic fairness and the perils through the streets. of finance capitalism, only to see the ugliest forms of nation- Berman was a philosophy professor in the image of Allen alism respond to the same issues with an even louder message. Ginsberg rather than Lionel Trilling. He reveled in Cyndi Is there still a way to tell the story of late-twentieth-century Lauper at a time when most people in his circle were decrying capitalism, globalization, and financialization that conveys their the depoliticization of mainstream music. For Berman, pop full human costs, and that prioritizes collective action rather animated debates over values for a large audience, even if the than a retreat into national and ethnic divisions? Modernism artists were not expressly political. He argued that “Girls Just in the Streets captures both the violent dislocation wrought Want to Have Fun” allowed people to play with the boundaries by political changes and the artistic outputs born out of suf- of the public and private: fering. Berman’s essays make the reader experience historical change as he did—as something urgent, frightening, but also The heroine returns, along with her newly constructed popular wondrous. With that feeling comes a faint but undeniable hint front to the tenement and the family that tried in vain to fence of possibility. a her in. She brings the street into the house.... Her parents find it horrifying, yet alluring: They are tempted to join their child, go public, and change their own drab lives. THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 5, Issue 5,003, May 2017. Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and Aug/Sep 2017) by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone In this essay, and many others, Berman seems to be leveling a (202) 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage charge at his own precinct of New York intellectuals who would and handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: rather die than jam along to a bubblegum hit, and who cer- www.TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. Box 6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post Agreement tainly would not view that form of music as a potential source Number 7178957. Send changes of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited of radical solidarity. manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be emailed to [email protected]. Berman fervently believed in the value of humanistic learn- For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our website at newrepublic.com/customer-service. ing, even when it came off as a bit grand and dust-covered.

MAY 2017 | 71 backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW CULLEN

LOCATION ALEXANDER, NORTH DAKOTA DATE SEPTEMBER 18, 2015

A DECADE AGO, Alexander was a sleepy town of weatherworn players Carlton Turnquist and Alejandro Constantino travel to ranch houses and dusty red roads nestled between the wheat, a game in nearby Fairview, Montana. Turnquist was born and corn, and soybean fields of northwestern North Dakota. But in raised on a farm in Alexander; Constantino’s family moved 2007, when engineers unlocked the vast oil reserves beneath there from California to cash in on the boom. the Bakken shale formation, Alexander was transformed into The Comets went 2-5 last season. The town hasn’t fared a frontier boomtown. Some 12,000 oil trucks and cars rattled much better. By the time Cullen arrived, oil prices were in free through town each day. A new trailer court was built to accom- fall. Since then, jobs have dried up and many families have modate all the oil workers and their families who were flocking left, including the Constantinos, who moved to Texas to find to the area. And for the first time since 1987, during the state’s work. And even as Donald Trump revives the Dakota Access last oil boom, Alexander High School had enough students to Pipeline, jobs in the state may continue to disappear. “During cobble together a six-man football team: the Comets. the bust, the oil industry got really good at minimizing their In September 2015, Andrew Cullen, a photographer based expenses and the manpower they need to produce oil,” Cullen in Bismarck, North Dakota, traveled to Alexander to document says. “That’s something Trump can’t do anything about.” a the team. “It was a sweet story about a small town that regained something it had lost,” he says. In this photograph, freshman See more of Andrew Cullen’s work on newrepublic.com.

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