JAN/FEB 2017

INSIDE TRUMP COUNTRY MOMS ON LSD THE GOP’S REAL VICTORY Anyone who wants to make America great has to grow the economy. Here’s how.

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“ The next U.S. President should thank David Smick for The Great Equalizer.” —BILL BRADLEY, former U.S. Senator

“Whoever advises the next president on economics will want to read this book.” —LAWRENCE SUMMERS,

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GreatEqualizer_ad4 Final.indd 1 11/11/16 1:03 PM contents JAN/FEB 2017

UP FRONT 6 Trump’s Vanishing Base 20 Blue-collar whites put him over the top. It won’t happen again. BY BOB MOSER 8 The Democrats’ Biggest Disaster The GOP dominates state legislatures. BY NICOLE NAREA AND ALEX SHEPHARD 10 The Disease Detectives Why is the government spying on mosquitoes? BY CYNTHIA GRABER 11 Q&A: Bad Education For-profit colleges don’t work. So how can we stop them? BY RACHEL M. COHEN 13 #IHeartMyDictator Authoritarian regimes are winning the social media wars. BY SEAN WILLIAMS

COLUMNS 16 Great White Hopes Why did the rural working class elect Trump? BY ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD 18 He’s Making a List Trump is more paranoid and dangerous than Nixon. BY RICK PERLSTEIN

REVIEW 50 A Trip of One’s Own LSD is back. Can women finally enjoy drugs? BY CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS 56 Tied in Knots Beyond Hope The modern marriage is an elaborate How much of Obama’s legacy will survive the age of feat of performance. BY VIVIAN GORNICK 58 Ordinary Monsters Trump? Five historians and political observers weigh in. The twisted fairy tales of Ottessa BY ERIC BATES Moshfegh. BY JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE 61 Dead Center The failure of “grown up” liberalism. BY TIMOTHY SHENK

34 42 64 The Rise of the Telenovela The Making of an The Great How soap operas are remaking TV in American Terrorist Abandonment their own image. BY SARAH MARSHALL Robert Dear shot up a Planned How decades of economic hardship 68 Literary Agents Parenthood clinic and killed three and neglect have turned Nebraska’s Rethinking the legacy of writers who people. Did the right-wing media help once-proud farming towns into Donald worked with the CIA. BY PATRICK IBER turn a disturbed loner into a mass Trump country. TEXT BY TED GENOWAYS 72 Backstory murderer? BY AMANDA ROBB PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER PHOTOGRAPH BY FURKAN TEMIR

COVER PHOTOILLUSTRATION BY JUSTIN METZ COVER: OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO/CHUCK KENNEDY. ABOVE: BEN BAKER/REDUX.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 1 contributors

Danny Wilcox Frazier is an award-winning photographer whose Editor in Chief Win McCormack work has appeared in Time, The New Yorker, and National Geographic. He spent the last two years traversing the Nebraska plains, documenting Editor people struggling to survive the economic shift that has devastated rural Eric Bates communities throughout America. THE GREAT ABANDONMENT, P. 42 Executive Editor Culture Editor Ted Genoways is a contributing editor at the new republic and Ryan Kearney Michelle Legro author of This Blessed Earth, his forthcoming book about a farm family in Politics Editor Features Directors Bob Moser Sasha Belenky Nebraska. His ancestors arrived in the state in 1851. “The decay has been Deputy Editor Theodore Ross visible in my lifetime,” he says. “City-dwellers abandon these communities Ryu Spaeth Senior Editors at our own peril—morally and politically.” THE GREAT ABANDONMENT, P. 42 Story Editor Brian Beutler Laura Marsh Jeet Heer Vivian Gornick is an essayist, critic, and memoirist. Her newest book Managing Editor News Editor is The Odd Woman and the City. She has written about intimacy, marriage, Laura Reston Alex Shephard and feminism for more than four decades. TIED IN KNOTS, P. 56 Staff Writer Design Director Graham Vyse Siung Tjia Arlie Russell Hochschild is professor emerita of sociology at Poetry Editor Photo Director Cathy Park Hong the University of California, Berkeley. For Strangers in Their Own Land: Stephanie Heimann Anger and Mourning on the American Right—a finalist for the 2016 National Production Director Social Media Editor Book Award—she spent five years immersed with Tea Party members in Peter Niceberg Sarah Jones rural Louisiana. GREAT WHITE HOPES, P. 16 Contributing Editors Reporter-Researchers James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Clio Chang Patrick Iber is an assistant professor of history at the University of Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, Lovia Gyarkye Texas at El Paso. He is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Siddhartha Deb, Michael Eric Dyson, Sukjong Hong Nicole Narea Cold War in Latin America, which offers new interpretations of front groups Paul Ford, Ted Genoways, William Giraldi, Dana Goldstein, like the Congress for Cultural Freedom. LITERARY AGENTS, P. 68 Kathryn Joyce, Suki Kim, Interns Maria Konnikova, Corby Kummer, Demetria Lee Sarah Marshall hosts the podcast The Feelings Club. She is at work Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, Sagari Shetty on a forthcoming book about indigent defense in the South. Her writing Graeme Wood, Robert Wright Social Media Intern has appeared in the new republic, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Elle. Eric Armstrong THE RISE OF THE TELENOVELA, P. 64

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President VP of Marketing and Associate Publisher and the Fracturing of America and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and Communications Art Stupar the Rise of Reagan. His work has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, Erika Velazquez Director of Sales and Rolling Stone. He lives in Chicago, where he is working on his next Senior Integrated Suzanne Wilson book about Ronald Reagan. HE’S MAKING A LIST, P. 18 Marketing Manager Evelyn Frison Associate Account Executive Amanda Robb began reporting on abortion violence after her Audience and Shawn Awan uncle Barnett Slepian, a doctor who provided abortions, was shot and Partnership Manager killed in 1998. Robert Dear is the third abortion-motivated murderer Eliza Fish Controller she has interviewed. This article was reported in partnership with Media Relations Manager David Myer Steph Leke Office Manager, NY the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. THE MAKING OF AN Tori Campbell AMERICAN TERRORIST, P. 34 Publisher Timothy Shenk is a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University Hamilton Fish in St. Louis, a Carnegie Fellow at New America, and an editor at Dissent. He is the author of Maurice Dobb: Political Economist. DEAD CENTER, P. 61

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Gold Fame Citrus, an Published by Lake Avenue Publishing 1 Union Square West, eco-fabulist novel she conceived while smoking marijuana and watching New York, NY 10003 Planet Earth. A Guggenheim fellow, she is a card-carrying member of President Bloom City Cannabis Club, the “first and only female-owned and operated Win McCormack dispensary in Michigan.” A TRIP OF ONE’S OWN, P. 50

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2 | NEW REPUBLIC Cultural experiences curated by the New Republic DESTINATION:

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FOLLOWING BARACK OBAMA’S election in 2008, a diverse cadre of intellectuals flocked to Washington to serve in the new administration. Eight years later, those same liberal elites are reeling from the election of Donald Trump. He campaigned in direct opposition to the smarty-pants Ivy Leaguers who trod the halls of the White House during the Obama years. ✯ This kind of populist backlash against intellectual elites is a common theme in American politics. Sixteen years ago, George W. Bush kicked out Bill Clinton’s team of Rhodes scholars and excluded Ivy League grads from his Cabinet. “Frustrated conservatives,” new republic editor Franklin Foer wrote, “have created an acronym for the administration: nina, for ‘No Intellectuals Need Apply.’” ✯ Trump could well adopt the same motto. Our new president has surrounded himself with a crew of misfits, opportunists, and extremists—the furthest thing imaginable from the over ­achievers and Team of Rivals that Clinton and Obama enlisted. But as Foer noted, governing the most powerful country in the world is a task ill suited to sycophants. Bashing eggheads may be fun, but it takes more to make an omelet. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton in Arkansas.

Franklin Foer

After Meritocracy FEBRUARY 5, 2001

Eight years ago, the Clinton administra- What the Clintonites called meritocracy W’s father is dead—there is not a single tion ushered in what seemed like a social conservatives had long called “the New powerful American institution that remains revolution. The Clintonites didn’t just bring Class”: a cadre of elites educated in the exclusively in WASP hands. an ideology to Washington; they brought a 1960s who had inherited the Protestant Almost all the wonks who traveled to caste. Gone were Poppy’s crusty boarding-­ establishment’s institutions while waging Austin to instruct Bush in policy have either school WASPs. In their place was a new war on its values. Viewed from the right, the been ignored in the transition or handed kind of elite: multicultural, aggressively Clintonites exhibited the evils of intellectu- second-tier positions. As Newsweek report- brainy, confident they owed their suc- als: a love of abstraction, a hostility to tra- ed, frustrated conservatives have created cess not to birth or blood but to talent dition, a predilection for social engineering. an acronym for the administration: NINA, for alone. “Perhaps more than any in our his- Within two years of Clinton’s election, “No Intellectuals Need Apply.” tory,” wrote The Washington Post’s David his cadre of meritocrats had produced one The advantage of a highly cautious, high- Ignatius, “Clinton’s is a government of of the most ferocious right-wing populist ly disciplined administration is that it keeps smart people.” Or at least credentialed backlashes in modern American history. its eye on the ball: no endless meetings, no people. The White House staff alone Newt Gingrich railed against Washington’s intellectual tangents. But if he is to succeed boasted six Rhodes scholars. One-third “corrupt elite.” Bob Dole called the new as president, Bush is going to have to learn of Clinton’s 518 earliest appointments had ­administration “a corps of the elite who ... how to do in Washington what he never had attended Harvard or Yale—or both. The never did anything real.” Bush denounced to in Austin: throw out the script and impro- president called his staff “the top ranks of a people who think “they’re all of a sudden vise. And when he does, he’s going to realize new generation.” smarter than the average person because that he’s surrounded himself with people The Clintonites set out to solve America’s they happen to have an Ivy League degree.” largely unable to do so. And then, much as problems by thinking smarter thoughts than Not surprisingly, then, Bush has crafted he may loathe them, he will be forced to turn anyone before them. Almost immediately, an administration largely devoid of intellec- to the experts and intellectuals he has kept the project went awry. They produced a tuals. His staff contains no Rhodes scholars. out of his inner circle. Bush has instigated a health care plan that was thoroughly ratio- Of his 14 Cabinet members, only two went highly successful backlash against the mer- nal; it was also mind-numbingly complex, to Ivy League colleges, and only one holds itocrats who many assumed would forever hopelessly bureaucratic, and the product a Ph.D., Secretary of Education Rod Paige— define the new American elite. But the back- of an undemocratic process. And it almost and his doctorate is in physical education. lash against the backlash may be just around

ruined Clinton’s first term. The Protestant establishment that shaped the corner. a VISIONS OF AMERICA/UIG/GETTY

4 | NEW REPUBLIC WelfareofNations_NewRepublic_4C.qxp_Layout 1 11/4/16 5:12 PM Page 1 New from the Cato Institute “This stands as a book which tells the hard truth about

how welfare states are changing the “ world we live in. —RON HASKINS Brookings Institution

hat damage is being done by W failing welfare states? What lessons can be learned from the best welfare states? And— is it too late to stop welfare states from permanently diminishing the lives and liberties of people around the world? Traveling around the globe, James Bartholomew examines wel- fare models, searching for the best education, health care, and support services in 11 vastly different coun- tries; illuminating the advantages and disadvantages of other nations’ welfare states; and delving into cru- cial issues such as literacy, poverty, and inequality. This is a hard-hitting and provocative contribution to understanding how welfare states, as the defining form of government today, are changing the very nature of modern civilization.

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ABSENTEE BALLOTS

Trump’s Vanishing Base

Blue-collar whites put him over the top. Here’s why it won’t happen again.

BY BOB MOSER

ON THE SUNDAY EVENING before Election Day, as ­manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010—an part of his eleventh-hour barnstorming tour, Donald easy target for Trump. Trump touched down on some of the most famously Trump was running late for his rally, but after contentious political turf in the country. Macomb Ted Nugent played for the 8,000 white voters in the County—the big, overwhelmingly white, working- Sterling Heights Amphitheater, they entertained class suburb of Detroit—is currently embroiled in a themselves with chants of “CNN sucks!” and “Lock lawsuit for blocking the construction of a mosque. her up!” When the man himself arrived, he issued It’s also home to the original “Reagan Democrat,” what would soon become a famous prophecy, the that once-prosperous union voter who abandoned political equivalent of Babe Ruth’s home-run point the Democratic Party in the 1980s and upended the or Joe Namath’s “guarantee” of a Super Bowl vic- political map. The perfect place, in other words, tory. The polls were either wrong or rigged, Trump for Trump to make a last-ditch appeal for support. thundered. “We’re going to go on Tuesday, and we’re Unlike white voters down South, working-class going to win like they’ve never seen,” he vowed. voters across the Rust Belt ranged all over the elec- “This is going to be Brexit-plus.” toral landscape after Reagan. Macomb backed Bill When that expert-defying prediction came true, Clinton in the 1990s and voted twice for Barack it looked like the Reagan Democrats had once again Obama. But Hillary Clinton took Macomb’s support transformed the political map. Nationwide, Trump largely for granted, leaving working-class whites in the county—which lost more than half of its ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM

6 | NEW REPUBLIC won working-class whites by a margin of more than favors Democrats—single and professional women, THE NEW two to one, outpacing Reagan’s historic highs in people of color, and millennials—will continue to ELECTION 1984. Across the Rust Belt, longtime Democratic grow. Overall, the minority share of the electorate, MATH strongholds flipped red. In Ohio, Trump won the which stood at just 23 percent in 2000, will soar to Decline of blue-collar bastion of Trumbull County by six points, 40 percent by 2032. Over the past four years alone, White Voters converting voters who had supported Obama by the clout of Asian American and Latino voters has 1980: 85% 22 points in 2012. In Pennsylvania, Trump narrowly jumped by more than 16 percent. 1996: 79% lost working-class Lackawanna County, where Hillary Even with Clinton’s shortcomings, Democrats 2008: 73% Clinton’s father was born—but still pocketed 13,000 fared well in states with the fastest-changing de- 2016: 69% more votes than Mitt Romney did. And in Macomb mographics. Clinton won Virginia and Colorado 2024: 64% itself, Trump won by double digits, capturing 33,000 handily, and Nevada more narrowly. She also cut 2032: 60% more voters than Romney—nearly three times his into the GOP’s victory margins from 2012 in Ar- razor-thin margin of victory statewide. Riding the izona, Texas, and Georgia. But in North Carolina Rise of Minority Voters blue-collar wave, Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida—two battleground states expected to and Pennsylvania—and his Electoral College margin trend blue in the future—Democrats fell short of 1980: 16% 1996: 21% of victory—by a total of just 110,000 votes. expectations. “Unfortunately for Democrats, not 2008: 27% The implication seemed clear: The election had every state looks like Virginia or Colorado,” says 2016: 31% been decided by working-class whites. It was “the Kyle Kondik, who analyzes elections for the Center 2024: 35% revenge of the deplorables,” Bloomberg View pro- for Politics at the University of Virginia. 2032: 40% claimed. Shocked Democrats immediately descend- The trend is so strong that no level of turnout ed into finger pointing. Some blamed Clinton, a among working-class whites will stem the demo-­ ­­­ States Where Washington insider running in an election fueled graphic tide. “The racial composition of the elector­- Minorities Hold by populist anger. “The Democratic establishment ate will continue to shift dramatically over the next a Majority is finished,” wrote Slate’s Jim Newell. “What a joke.” four elections,” says Teixeira, co-author of The 2016: 4 Others called on the party to rethink its entire strat- Emerging Democratic Majority. “Even with the as- 2020s: 10 egy. Within days, The Washington Post reported, tronomically high support for Trump among the 2030s: 13 2040s: 19 Sanders and other liberal activists were pushing white working class and the relatively weak ­minority 2050s: 22 to transform the Democratic Party into “an advo- support for Clinton, projected demographic shifts will cate for working-class voters.” Sanders supporters still produce a very different outcome in 2020.” Even pointed to his victories over Clinton in Michigan if blue-collar strongholds like Macomb County swing and Wisconsin—Trump-style upsets fueled by heavy redder next time, the GOP will still come up short. white majorities—as evidence that the party needed The turnout in November suggests even worse a whole new focus on blue-collar voters screwed by news for Republicans. Despite the image of a “Trump free trade and Wall Street. surge,” the white share of the electorate was the There’s no question that without the record sup- lowest in history, at just 69 percent. Trump won port of working-class whites, Trump would not evangelical voters by a record-smashing 65 points, have eked out his narrow wins in the Rust Belt— and he even won college-educated whites—but by or in the Electoral College. But the truth is, 2016 did not mark a fundamental shift in the American electorate—and revamping the Democratic Party’s entire political strategy would be an enormous mis- The election may well represent what take. “This was an extreme election,” says William demographer Ruy Teixeira calls “the last Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. stand of America’s white working class.” “All the stars and moon were aligned the same way for the Republicans.” In fact, a closer look at what happened in Macomb County and elsewhere in the Rust Belt reveals that 2016 may well represent what 10 points less than Romney. The real problem for demographer Ruy Teixeira calls “the last stand of Democrats wasn’t that whites showed up on Election America’s white working class”—the final time that Day—it’s that they broke so strongly for Trump, while blue-collar whites will determine a national election. many minority voters stayed home. In Michigan’s It’s all in the numbers. Since 1980, working-­ Genesee County, which includes majority-black class whites have seen their share of the electorate Flint, Clinton narrowly won—but garnered 26,000 plunge by about 30 percent—and it will contin- fewer votes than Obama did in 2012. ue to decline another two to three points every Such numbers suggest that working-class whites four years. Meanwhile, the “rising majority” that don’t hold the key to future victories for Republicans,

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 7 up front

let alone Democrats. To forge a winning coalition That thinking will likely be short-lived. The GOP, going forward, the GOP will need to do everything it says Teixeira, is “clearly riding on demographic can to buttress its support among white profession- borrowed time.” In the long run, Trump’s coalition als and evangelicals—by overturning Roe v. Wade, of the aggrieved may have as little staying power for instance, and passing tax cuts for the wealthy. as the agrarian populists of the 1880s, whose rural Republicans will also intensify efforts to suppress base was ultimately overwhelmed by urbaniza- minority turnout by passing voting restrictions at the tion. Ironically, if Republicans continue to ignore state level. “Sooner or later, Republicans are going America’s new majority—women, young voters, to reach out to minority groups,” says Frey. “But and people of color—their only sure path to the Trump’s victory may hold them back, and make them White House will be the one Trump denounced: think they can keep riding the white vote for longer.” rigging the election. a

LOCAL POLITICS

The Democrats’ Biggest Disaster Forget Washington—the party is weaker at the state level than it’s been in nearly a century.

BY NICOLE NAREA AND ALEX SHEPHARD

DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY over Hillary Clinton unprecedented decline for the party at the state level. has left Democrats with little power to shape the Since Obama took office eight years ago, Democrats national agenda in Washington. With Republicans have lost over 800 seats in state legislatures. For now in control of the White House and both houses the first time in history, they do not control a single of Congress, much of the progress under Barack legislative chamber in the South. Overall, the party is Obama—on health care, immigration, financial re­­ now at its weakest point at the state level since 1920. form, and more—stands to be systematically un­ “I don’t know how it gets any worse for the Demo- done. Republicans “just earned a mandate,” House crats,” says Lucy Flores, a party activist who was one Speaker Paul Ryan declared. “We are going to hit the of the first Hispanic women elected to the Nevada ground running.” state legislature. “There is no national strategy—we Look past the GOP takeover of Washington, how- don’t invest in sustained engagement with voters ever, and the outlook for Democrats is even more outside of the presidential election. I don’t have a alarming. In November, the party lost control of lot of faith in the current leadership.” State legislatures and governors play a pivotal role in shaping national politics. First, they pass laws on a variety of crucial issues, from the minimum wage “I don’t know how it gets any worse for the and carbon emissions to Medicaid expansion and Democrats,” one party activist says. “There police accountability. Second, they serve as a train- is no national strategy.” ing ground for the party’s future leaders, grooming candidates for Congress and the White House. And third, they hold the power to draw electoral maps that all but dictate the political makeup of Congress. state legislatures in Iowa, Minnesota, and Kentucky. The GOP takeover of state governments was no The state senate in Connecticut, which had been accident. In 2010, Republicans poured $30 million firmly blue, is now evenly split. Republicans ousted into state races—three times more than Demo­crats— Democratic governors in Missouri, New Hampshire, as part of a deliberate strategy to control the once- and Vermont. All told, Democrats surrendered about in-a-decade process of congressional redistricting. 30 seats in state legislatures. They now hold major- As a result, Republicans picked up 675 legislative ities in just 31 of the country’s 98 legislative bodies, seats and gained control of twelve state legislatures. and only 15 of the nation’s governors are Democrats. In 2014, the GOP spent another $38 million on state The losses in November are part of a sharp and races and picked up ten more legislatures.

8 | NEW REPUBLIC “The scale of Republican success in recent years like the corporate-backed American Legislative ELEPHANT outside the presidency has altered the balance be- Exchange Council and the State Policy Network YEARS tween the two parties,” Democratic strategist Simon began using state legislatures as laboratories for The worst elections for Rosenberg warned after the 2014 debacle. “It may conservative ideas, funneling policy proposals from state Democrats, by legislative seats lost even leave the GOP a stronger national party than Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” to state the Democrats over the next decade.” lawmakers. With their first majority in Congress 1900 Rosenberg was right: The GOP’s state-level vic- in 40 years, Republicans in Washington could also 767 seats tories played a key role in defeating Hillary Clinton. dictate public policy in a host of states: For the Because Trump outsourced much of his campaign first time in history, as conservative Democrats 1920 607 seats to the Republican Party, his get-out-the-vote effort defected to the GOP, more than half of Southern was largely managed by state officials who mobilized legislatures tilted red. 1966 their political networks to help swing crucial battle- “As recently as the early 1990s, the South was 762 seats ground states to Trump. In North Carolina—where very competitive between parties, if not favoring Republicans hold a veto-proof supermajority in the Democrats,” says Boris Shor, a professor of political 1994 514 seats state legislature—Trump won by a four-point margin, science at the University of Houston. “But since the even capturing some of the counties that Obama landslide of ’94, Republican voting in state legisla- 2010 won in 2012. tures has become a function of what is happening 708 seats “Trump tapped into those preexisting networks,” in Congress and the presidency.” says Garrett Ventry, a Republican strategist in North Democrats are slowly starting to tackle their Carolina. “Democrats traditionally do better with problems at the state level. Obama himself has digital ad campaigns—I’m not afraid to admit that. announced that he will focus his post-presidency But people here are very engaged in state politics. on a new effort, led by former Attorney General What we have is a more organic kind of volunteer- Eric Holder, to battle the GOP’s advantage in state ship, because voters believe that state government legislatures, with an eye on the 2020 elections and affects their lives more than the U.S. Congress.” the next round of redistricting. The initiative will Republicans have been deliberately building focus on raising money for candidates, launching their advantage at the state level since 1994, when ballot initiatives to create independent redistrict- they took control of 15 state legislatures. Groups ing commissions, and challenging gerrymandered

ANDREA BRUCE/NOOR ANDREA GOP headquarters in Pamlico County, North Carolina. Local get-out-the-vote operations helped Trump win the state.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 9 up front

electoral districts, which have made it harder for Solving this problem is the enduring challenge Democrats to win state elections. for Democrats, and it will determine who controls But it will take years of concentrated effort to politics for at least another generation. “We have reverse the GOP’s decades-long mission to dominate to turn the Obama coalition into the Democratic the states. And even without rigged electoral maps, coalition,” says Rosenberg, who sounded the alarm demographic changes continue to give Republicans over the shift in 2014. “Reaching millennials and an edge: Because so many Democrats congregate Hispanics requires a completely different way of in urban areas, their growing numbers translate running a campaign than reaching old, white people into fewer electoral districts. As Trump’s victory who still watch the local news at night. We’ve been demonstrated, Democrats can continue to win the very fast to innovate at the top of the ticket, but not popular vote in presidential elections but still lose to adjust to these changes underneath. There are the Electoral College. parts of the party that have been slow to catch on.” a

GOING VIRAL

The Disease Detectives Can Silicon Valley help government find a better way to fight viruses like Zika?

BY CYNTHIA GRABER

OVER THE PAST year, the Zika virus has threatened Even in the United States, which has one of the millions of people throughout South and Central world’s best early-monitoring systems at the Centers America, posing a risk of serious birth defects for Disease Control, identifying a disease outbreak among a generation of newborn children. Officials can take as long as a month. Making matters even in warm, mosquito-rich regions of the United worse, some people infected with Zika show no States—such as Texas, Louisiana, and Florida—are symptoms of the disease, passing the virus to others scrambling to track the disease and keep it from without even knowing it. spreading; the appearance of Zika in Miami last But what if scientists could catch diseases before August prompt­ed a two-month federal travel advi­ they sweep through populations, causing untold suf- sory for pregnant women. fering and death? What if we could identify potential Controlling the spread of viruses like Zika is the outbreaks before people are even infected? That’s the kind of centralized, coordinated responsibility that thinking behind a new scientific partnership being governments were created to address. Yet the process funded by government intelligence agencies: combin- ing James Bond spy-craft and Silicon Valley wizardry to disrupt the fields of entomology and epidemiology. At Microsoft headquarters outside Seattle, a team In addition to monitoring internet chatter, of researchers has pulled together top ­scientists from the government is funding private industry around the country to develop an early-warning sys- to spy on mosquitoes. tem for plagues—a project that stands to save millions of lives. Known as Project Premonition, the system aims to scrap the current process of disease report- ing, which is slow and unreliable. Instead, research- for preventing deadly epidemics remains antiquated ers are trying to deploy digital firepower and drone at best. First, people must feel sick enough to go to a technology to identify pathogens in real time—not doctor. Next, the physician must make an accurate only mosquito-borne viruses like Zika, malaria, and diagnosis. And finally, the results must make their dengue, but infections like Ebola that are transmitted way to the country’s central health authority, where by human blood and bodily fluids. the risk of a general outbreak can be assessed. That’s The effort is being funded by the Intelligence a huge challenge in parts of the world where doctors ­Advanced Research Projects Activity, a government are scarce and diagnostic tests can be unreliable. spy program modeled after the military’s darpa

10 | NEW REPUBLIC Q & A

Bad Education Lawmakers are cracking down on for-profit colleges for their shady business practices. But sociology professor Tressie McMillan Cottom says there are bigger forces at play.

BY RACHEL M. COHEN

For-profit colleges have existed for centuries, but now they’re this new kind of beast. What’s changed? There’s this great narrative about how many more people are going to college now, but that’s not actually true unless you account for the rise of for-profits. Historically, it’s mostly been women and blue-collar white men who enroll in for-profit colleges to obtain certificates for skilled labor. We can’t say that anymore. Starting in the mid-1990s, for-profit colleges really expanded due to financialization and shareholder investment. These schools now offer bachelor’s degrees and even graduate degrees. The pool of students is only going to grow as the economy continues to grow more precarious. Did you find that these schools are preying on vulnerable popu- These schools market themselves as holding the keys to the future. lations? These students aren’t thoughtless victims. But the Yes, if you look at their advertising, much of it is about being choices available to them are predatory. That’s actually not “future oriented”—that they’re this new, cutting-edge way to the fault of for-profit colleges as much as it’s a failure of go to school. The colleges themselves, especially the larger government and politics and social policy. We can get rid ones, trade on that idea. And students believe the marketing. of consumer demand for for-profit colleges within a year, simply by providing better social insurance for working-class You call for-profit colleges a “negative social insurance program.” What do you mean? We as a society send this message: Go to school to have a good, middle-class life—it’s the only way. “ We can get rid of consumer demand for What we don’t say is how. For-profits sell the idea that they for-profit colleges within a year, simply can help students smooth over economic shocks. That’s by providing better social insurance for what the social safety net is failing to do—we see that with working-class people.” the decline of welfare programs, our reticence to provide child care, the decimation of labor unions. So these schools are actually a form of social insurance—just not a good one. people. Neither Democrats nor Republicans question what’s fueling the demand for these types of credentials, because to Is the government “crackdown” on for-profit colleges the wrong do that would require a much harder political conversation. ­response? We need to go beyond focusing on whether for-profit colleges help graduates land a job. Why go after For-profit colleges disproportionately hurt poor people and those job-placement statistics, for example, when these ­minorities, but you argue that, ultimately, we’re all at risk. How so? schools are legally allowed to generate up to 90 percent of The fact is, many of us are struggling to fit job training into their profits from federal student aid programs? If 90 percent our lives and figure out how to subsidize it—taking an online of your profit comes from student aid, then you don’t have master’s course here, or teaching ourselves how to code to invest in things like campuses or research that could help there. Politicians say American workers have to retrain for your students. The fact that we won’t even let the public the jobs of the twenty-first century. But they never say how know that that’s actually the issue—not gainful employment we’re supposed to do that, or who will pay for it. And that’s a data—is again part of the problem. problem for all of us. In this economy, we’re all vulnerable. a PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT EICH FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 11 up front

BEYOND initiative. iarpa is designed to support “high-risk, SNOWDEN high-reward” projects to advance the goals of the Some of IARPA’s intelligence community—a skunkworks to help scariest projects the government find new ways to identify hackers and terrorists. But now, in addition to developing Data Eye in the Sky Analyzes social media surveillance technology to monitor internet chatter, & financial markets to the government is funding private industry to spy predict political crises on mosquitoes. “Insects kind of rule the world,” says Eamonn Next-Gen Drone Keogh, a computer science and engineering pro- Building a deadlier aerial vehicle that’s fessor at the University of California in Riverside as silent as an owl who is responsible for one of the project’s biggest breakthroughs. “But nobody had applied computer Advanced Geotagging science to entomology.” Scans photos and At Project Premonition, Keogh and his fellow videos to identify where they were taken scientists have developed a next-gen bug trap: a large black cylinder that emits signals designed to A Digital Brain attract mosquitoes. When an insect flies inside one Reverse-engineering of the trap’s 60 tiny compartments, a sensor runs a A researcher sets up a Project Premonition mosquito trap. the human mind to complex series of calculations to determine in real make spy tech smarter time whether the bug is a mosquito, whether it’s the the high-pitched whine of a mosquito, say, or the right species and gender (only female mosquitoes low-pitched hum of a bumblebee. But that’s just bite), and whether it has recently feasted on some- the first step. Because there are thousands of species one’s blood. If the sensor indicates it has found the of mosquitoes and bees alone, the sound must then right kind of mosquito, a tiny trapdoor snaps shut. be instantly evaluated against millions of data points Once all 60 compartments are full, a drone fetches assembled by Keogh and his team: everything from the trap and flies it back to a mother ship, where the the location of the trap and the time of day to cur- blood each insect has ingested is rapidly analyzed rent weather conditions and field research on insect for markers of disease. acoustics. “It takes the insects about one-twentieth Last spring, when Project Premonition conduct- of a second to fly past the LED beam,” Keogh says. ed preliminary trials of the system near Houston, “And at the end of the one-twentieth of a second, things didn’t go quite as planned. The trapdoors we already know what it is.” In the field tests, the sensors accurately distin­ guished mosquitoes from leaves and bees, and even identified mosquitoes of two different species. “It’s Keogh and his fellow scientists have fantastic,” says Douglas Norris, a professor of mi- developed a next-gen bug trap that can crobiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Uni- identify mosquitoes in real time. versity. “This is the first really big step in trapping technology. Using it to identify mosquitoes on the way in is just such a game changer.” The government is working on other fronts to malfunctioned, and the lure used to attract the mos- speed its response to diseases, relying on advanced quitoes—a combination of smelly socks and dry ice, detection platforms that can recognize as many as which mimic our body odor and the carbon dioxide 20 pathogens simultaneously and report the results we exhale—is too expensive and labor intensive to within hours. And as Project Premonition works to replicate on a wide scale. Based on the initial tests, get the new disease sentinels up and running, Keogh though, the traps could be up and running within is looking into other applications for his insect the next five years—a reasonable time line for such spy system. In agriculture, for example, sensors a complex system. could let farmers know when and where pests are One element of the traps that has already proved emerging—allowing them to target small patches effective is the sensors used to identify insects. with pesticides, rather than blanketing an entire When a bug flies past the device—essentially an farm with toxic chemicals. The National Science inexpensive LED beam—its beating wings cause a Foundation recently awarded Keogh $3 million to shadow to appear on the sensor. That shadow is then train graduate students in computational ento-

translated into an acoustic signal that correlates to mology, the new field he has created. And Keogh RESEARCH MICROSOFT COURTESY

12 | NEW REPUBLIC is sending his LED-based insect spy devices to The shift, Keogh notes, will disrupt entomology and scientific colleagues around the world, so they can epidemiology in much the same way that computers collect more data on caged insects to add species transformed the music industry. Music on vinyl was to the model. “cumbersome and expensive,” he says. “But once In the end, such work indicates how Big Data it became a digital object, you could do cool things can be used effectively for all kinds of government with it. We’re basically taking insects and making functions beyond surveillance and law enforcement. them digital objects.” a

MESSAGE MACHINE

#IHeartMyDictator Social media gave power to the people—but authoritarian regimes are taking it back.

BY SEAN WILLIAMS

SINCE RODRIGO DUTERTE was elected president social media is designed to make each user appear of the Philippines last June, he has waged a brutal to be a unique individual whose views are her own, crackdown on drug dealers and addicts. Nearly Madelyn and her cohort stick exclusively to the 4,000 people have been killed by government forces, Duterte talking points, without any of the cat GIFs, and Duterte has invoked the Holocaust to describe funny asides, jokes with friends, or other elements the scope of his ambition. “Hitler massacred three that populate most people’s feeds. million Jews,” he declared in September. “Now there When Facebook and Twitter were founded a is three million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy ­de ­cade ago, they heralded a new era in which the to slaughter them.” voices of ordinary citizens could be heard alongside—­ Duterte’s authoritarian rhetoric has elicited sharp condemnations from human rights advocates and foreign leaders. But there’s another front in his war on drugs that has escaped international attention. Last The government pays online trolls up to $2,000 fall, as I reported on the violence in the Philippines, I a month to create fake social media accounts picked up an ardent critic on social media. Her name and flood the digital airwaves with propaganda. was Madelyn, and she was young and attractive, with long hair and deep, brown eyes. When I posted about Duterte’s war on drugs, Madelyn responded with derision. “Maybe u are anti-­Duterte TROLL,” or even above—those of establishment insiders. she tweeted. “A foreigner who knows NOTHING From the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to bout my country.” She seemed to devote her waking Black Lives Matter and recent demonstrations hours to spreading her love of Duterte and assailing against Vladimir Putin, activists have used social anyone who questioned him, posting dozens of times media to attract followers and broadcast their mes- a day. “My President and I am proud of him,” one sages free from official oversight. But increasingly, tweet read. “Get lost critics!” authoritarian regimes like Duterte’s are deploying Madelyn, it appears, is part of a vast and effective social media to disseminate official propaganda, “keyboard army” that Duterte and his backers have crack down on dissent, and maintain their grip on mobilized to silence dissenters and create the illusion power. What began as a tool of freedom and democ- that he enjoys widespread public support. Each day, racy is being turned into a weapon of repression. hundreds of thousands of supporters—both paid and “For authoritarian states, social media censorship unpaid—take to social media to proselytize Duterte’s will increasingly be seen as an essential aspect of the deadly gospel. They rotate through topics like cor- security apparatus,” says Eric Jensen, a sociologist ruption, drug abuse, and U.S. interference, and post at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England,­ links to hastily cobbled-together, hyper-partisan who specializes in online public engagement. web sites at all hours of the day and night. Though “There has been a pattern of civil society embracing

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Use the enclosed gift card, or go to www.newrepublic.com/holidaygift up front opportunities for more open communication, such has mobilized a network of government bureaucrats as social media—followed inexorably by a gradual known as the “50 cent” army to post 450 million colonization of those communication channels by fake comments a year on social media. In Russia, corporations and government.” the Kremlin finances a huge army of trolls who post Duterte’s social media campaign began while he disinformation all over the web. In Egypt, where PLUGGED IN was the mayor of Davao, where he allegedly ran death Twitter and Facebook helped topple Hosni Mubarak’s Why digital propaganda squads to curb rampant drug dealing and other street regime, the military-led government has tracked, is so effective in the Philippines crime. In November 2015, when he decided to run silenced, and in some cases killed its opponents. for president, he enlisted a marketing consultant In many countries, governments routinely spy on Average time spent on named Nic Gabunada to assemble a social media social media accounts, assisted by a raft of private social media each day army with a budget of just over $200,000. Gabun- firms. Procera Networks, a Silicon Valley startup, 3 hours, 42 minutes ada used the money to pay hundreds of prominent has signed a contract with the Turkish government † #1 worldwide online voices to flood social media with pro-Duterte of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to extract usernames and Average time spent on comments, popularize hashtags, and attack critics. passwords from unencrypted web sites. The Turkish internet each day Despite being vastly outspent by his rivals, Duterte government could use that information to spy on 5 hours, 12 minutes swept to power with almost 40 percent of the vote. political opponents. “People could well die from this † Tied for #1 worldwide After the upset victory, the new president’s spokes- work,” one former Procera employee told Forbes. Facebook users man issued a warm thanks to Duterte’s 14 million It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back in 2012, 39.8 million social media “volunteers.” as Facebook prepared for its IPO, Mark Zuckerberg † 39% of population The Philippines seem tailor-made for this kind of wrote a letter to investors touting the company’s propaganda machine. The median age in the country role in helping ordinary citizens hold their leaders Filipinos who get their is only 23 years old, and almost half of its 103 million accountable. “By giving people the power to share, news via social media citizens are active social media users. Access to Face- we are starting to see people make their voices heard 80 million † 79% of population book is provided free with all smartphones, but on a different scale from what has historically been Filipinos incur data charges when visiting other web possible,” he wrote. “These voices will increase in sites, including those of newspapers. As a result, number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over millions of citizens rely on social media for virtually time, we expect governments will become more all of their news and information, consuming a daily responsive to issues and concerns raised directly diet of partisan opinion that masquerades as fact. by all their people.” Duterte has taken advantage of this media land- Unfortunately, Zuckerberg was only half right. scape. Online trolls can earn up to $2,000 a month Social media has undeniably helped activist move- creating fake accounts on social media, and then ments draw attention to their causes. But regimes using those “bots” to flood the digital airwaves with around the world have figured out how to use social pro-Duterte propaganda. According to Affinio, a social media analytics firm, a staggering 20 percent of all Twitter accounts that mention Duterte are actually bots. Thanks in part to this constant thrum From China to Russia, governments are of pro-Duterte messaging, the president has main- using social media to crack down on dissent tained an approval rating of more than 80 percent. and maintain their grip on power. As my encounters with Madelyn illustrate, Duterte’s supporters are also quick to attack the president’s critics. Leila de Lima, the country’s for- mer justice secretary, has endured death threats media to build even bigger megaphones, effectively and online abuse since she launched an inquiry into drowning out dissent. In the Philippines, the mas- Duterte’s current policy of extrajudicial killings and sive online army has chilled public opposition to alleged use of death squads in Davao. Ellecer Carlos, the crackdown on drug users. In one Manila slum a human rights advocate, was forced to change his I visited, where English terms like “human rights” Facebook profile after he received repeated threats of and “extrajudicial killings” are sprinkled into Tagalog violence. In a country where antigovernment activists like grim shibboleths, almost everyone opposes the have been killed during Duterte’s drug war, Carlos bloodletting. Some criticize the drug lords; others takes such threats seriously. “Sometimes you go save their ire for overzealous cops. But no one blames home, you’re alone, and you need to buy something the president. When I mention Duterte’s orders to from the store,” he says. “Then the fear kicks in.” shoot drug addicts, one mother simply shrugs her Such tactics are being employed by authoritarian shoulders. “I don’t read the newspaper,” she says. regimes around the world. China’s Communist Party She gets her news exclusively from Facebook. a

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 15 battle lines

BY ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD fishing trips, at church gumbo cook-offs and political meetings, and on visits to schools, graveyards, and birthplaces. What I found was a deep sense of loss: Many of my informants felt cast adrift in a country that was changing and increasingly, they felt, held little place for them. “Ronald Reagan told us ‘I didn’t leave my party, my party left me,’” one explained to me before the election. “Now we aren’t leaving our country, but our country is leaving us.” My friends in Louisiana defined themselves as “strangers in their own land,” a phrase I chose for the title of my book. But now their chosen candi- date would soon be in power. “The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again,” the ­president-elect­ tweeted on November 9. “We will all come together as never before.” I picked up the phone. I wanted to know what my friends thought the result meant to them—and what, if anything, they believed they might have won. Not least because the future of the Democratic Party, now in opposition, will depend in part on reaching out from our liberal enclaves to all those in conservative ones. First we have to get to know and appreciate each other as people. Then we have to build a new politics—one that truly addresses the toll taken by widening income inequality, and that rewards companies for creating and keeping Great White Hopes jobs here. I called was Sharon Galicia. Why did the rural working class elect Trump? THE FIRST PERSON A petite single mother of two, she works for Gulf South Benefits, selling insurance mostly to workers in petrochemical plants on the dreary outskirts of IN BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, a few days after election Lake Charles. Galicia is a libertarian conservative night, my two granddaughters played on the living- and former president of the Republican Women of room floor, wearing safety pins on their blouses. The Southwest Louisiana; she had feared that Hillary pins were a gesture of protection and solidarity with Clinton would open the floodgates to illegal Mexican America’s most vulnerable—those who felt unsafe as a immigrants in return for Democratic votes and more result of the attacks Donald Trump made on Muslims, government handouts. That, she felt, would have led Mexicans, and other minorities during his campaign. to the long-term loss of American jobs, culture, and A Comcast repairman arrived at the front door to identity. Today, however, she feels confident that look at our broken phone. “I’m from Morocco,” he Trump will return her country back to her. “I feel told me. “I’m Muslim, and I can’t believe Trump is surprised and relieved Trump won,” she confided. my president.” Before he left, he picked up a safety With him, she expects better jobs for blue-collar pin, too. The mood was glum. whites, lower taxes, fewer handouts, and a brave Over the next week, however, I called up some new culture of national pride. friends whose mood was very different. Well before Borders were the central issue for another Trump the election, I knew how they were going to vote: I supporter I called. Shirley Slack is a former flight at- had spent five years with them in southwest Louisi- tendant in her seventies who had predicted Trump’s ana, researching a book about the American right. In win. Her dread focused less on immigrants swarming the interviews I conducted with dozens of supporters into the United States than on global “higher ups” of Trump and the Tea Party, I sought to understand coming to direct America from “afar.” Like many why their right-wing political beliefs felt right to commentators, she sees a link between the ­American them. I tried to shut off my own political alarm system and to listen to what people were saying on ILLUSTRATION BY HANNA BARCZYK

16 | NEW REPUBLIC vote for Trump and the British vote for Brexit. “I’ve had a troublemakers as “Hillary’s stormtroopers.” In another post, lot of layovers in London hotels,” she explained, “and I tell he offered an image of five freakishly dressed young men with you, the English live for their tea and toast. But the European strange beards (Hillary supporters) next to an image of robust Union wanted to ban high-powered tea kettles and toasters. If men in military uniform (Trump supporters). Perhaps he had it weren’t for Brexit, the British would have had to live with a read that many liberals fear Trump’s potential for German-type ban on eight of the best tea kettles and nine of the best toasters authoritarian rule, felt insulted by it, and was trying to reverse in England to meet emissions targets. Globalization isn’t good it. Hillary is the scary one, he seemed to say. We’re not unmanly, for a lot of us.” At stake in both of these elections, she seemed pampered men: We’re the return of “real” men—those with honor. to say, was not just a set of policies but the defining symbols For these voters, Hillary Clinton came to personify an at- of each nation. tack on their honor: someone who promoted the interests of Many Trump supporters I came to know in Louisiana newcomers over theirs, who justified their loss of status in were the elite among those left behind by globalization—elite the language of identity politics, who was friendly with Wall in the sense that some half of them had college degrees and Street. My Louisiana friends got most of their news from Fox, had prospered. But their story was one of loss, both of class Breitbart, and right-wing Twitter feeds. Who killed Vince position and of social identity. Of the 40 Tea Partiers I studied Foster, the deputy White House counsel whom Hillary worked intensively, most had grown up in blue-collar homes. In their with as First Lady? Who killed the young Democratic Party own families and those of neighbors and friends, they had witnessed divorce, single parenthood, drug use, and unemploy- ment. Some spoke with anguish about the humiliating search to It is now those of us on the liberal left, replace jobs they had lost. Some had faced age discrimination trying to guard the safety of those shamed and financial decline. and blamed by Trump, who are strangers Their fears about future employment are not unfounded. In in our own land. Louisiana, I found the state government desperate to attract new industry to the state, but the single biggest industrial new­comer—­ the South African petrochemical giant, Sasol—planned to employ Filipino pipe fitters and Mexican construction workers to build operative who was about to leak damaging documents about a new multibillion-dollar complex. The plants, once expanded, her? The many rumors that circulated about Clinton during will be—like the ones there now—highly automated. the campaign only bolstered these voters’ feeling that she did And their perceptions of a system rigged against them not have their best interests at heart. were borne out by some grim statistics. Over the last three So what now? Trump has made some big promises that may decades, the real median hourly wage for white, blue-collar be very hard to keep. He’s vowed to stop the outward flow of men has fallen by over 10 percent. These days, the term “blue blue-collar jobs to Mexico and reverse the trade deficit with collar” usually refers to the 68 percent of Americans who lack a China. But what if jobs continue to disappear not through off- bachelor’s degree, that supposed passport to good jobs. Insofar shoring, but through massive automation? What if the deficit as Trump spearheaded a movement on behalf of blue-collar with China grows? Disappointment is bound to follow, and workers, it’s a movement that reached out to that 68 percent. soon after that, the search for someone or some group to blame. Blue-collar workers pay a heavy price for their lack of op- Understandably, in the euphoria of their victory, this line of portunities. According to a study by Princeton economists questioning didn’t come up among my Louisiana friends. But Angus Deaton and Anne Case, the mortality rate for whites it’s not too soon for us to start thinking about it. with no college education between the ages of 45 and 54 years The United States is not alone in its sharp turn to the right. old has increased by 22 percent since 1999. The rate for the A mix of globalization and automation has exac­erbated college-educated, meanwhile, actually fell during the same ­inequality—and made the footholds of those on its lower slopes period. In another study, the journalist Jeff Guo discovered a more uncertain—all over the world. The Philippines, India, correlation between counties with higher rates of premature Great Britain, France, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, death among middle-aged whites—often by alcohol, drug Poland, Russia, China: In each of these countries, the right is abuse, and suicide—and support for Donald Trump. gaining political traction and in some cases elected office. It is now those of us on the liberal left, trying to guard the safety FOR MANY OF THE TEA PARTY and Trump supporters I inter­ of those shamed and blamed by Trump, who are strangers in viewed before and after the election, something more than our own land. Out of the cultural spotlight, our beliefs will be economic standing was at issue: personal honor. In Trump, more aggressively questioned, our media critiqued, and we they saw the promise of strong, masculine leadership and will be thrown on the defensive. It won’t be easy to recover the possibility of redemption. One of my Louisiana contacts, and move forward. But just like those forgotten men and a retired oil professional, posted about the aftermath of the women who voted for Trump and embraced Brexit, we can election on his Facebook page. He pointed out that violent remind ourselves that here at home and around the world, ILLUSTRATION BY HANNA BARCZYK crimes take place mainly in blue-state cities, referring to the we are not alone. a

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 17 body politic

BY RICK PERLSTEIN bets that his more experienced rivals were unwilling or unable to match. But then you win, and your problems begin. “It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top,” Nixon con- fessed. “You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it, because it is a part of you and you need it as much as an arm and a leg. You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice, because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.” What Nixon was describing sounds like nothing so much as a seasoned heroin addict chasing the next high: It takes bigger and bigger doses to get there, until too much is not nearly enough. And a little thing like being elected the leader of the free world isn’t nearly enough to jolt a man like Nixon or Trump into rehab.

THE WAYS RICHARD NIXON chased that high are now a matter of voluminous historical record. None is more harrowing than his exploitation of the vast powers of his office to spy on those he perceived as threats to his power, and then seek to use the results of that surveillance to neutralize or destroy them. The first phone tap on one of his own officials came in the fourth month of his presidency. That same year, federal agents snared a gay, closeted antiwar organizer He’s Making a List named David Mixner in a “honey trap,” and threatened to release photographs of his assignation unless he Donald Trump is as paranoid as Nixon—and even more dangerous. ratted out his comrades. By the second year, an entire unit of the Internal Revenue Service was chartered in a locked, soundproof room to harass a blacklist DONALD TRUMP and Richard Nixon have at least one of antiwar activists. Nixon personally approved a thing in common: They are the two most paranoid plan to break into the offices of his opponents, even and vindictive men ever to win the presidency. Both though the young White House staffer who devised came to power armed with enemies lists, vowing to the scheme described it as “clearly illegal.” The fol- seek revenge against those who stood in their way. lowing year, Nixon ordered aides to come up with a Both roamed the mansions of power late at night, plan to break into a safe in the Brookings Institution, raving against every perceived slight. Both were which he imagined as a Kennedy government in exile. caught on tape describing the ways they enjoyed His enforcer, Chuck Colson, drew up “enemies lists” bending others to their will. that included such fearsome figures as actress Carol But Nixon, unlike Trump, was an introspective Channing and Vikings quarterback Fran Tarkenton. man. In one particularly fascinating moment of self-­ The IRS was deployed to audit their taxes or take away reflection following his resignation, he described the nonprofit status of their organizations. “What we to a former aide the habits that had enabled him to cannot do in a courtroom via criminal prosecutions rise to the top of Washington’s greasy pole. When to curtail the activities of some of these groups,” a you’re on your way, he explained, it pays to be crazy. White House memo explained, “IRS could do by “In your own mind you have nothing to lose, administrative action.” so you take plenty of chances,” Nixon said. “It is All that, mind you, came before the simultaneous then you understand, for the first time, that you operations to bug George McGovern’s campaign have the advantage—because your competitors can’t headquarters and the Democratic National Com- risk what they have already.” That’s an insight that mittee’s suite at the Watergate hotel. Trump put to good use during the Republican pri- maries, when he was willing to place high-stakes ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ CARRILHO

18 | NEW REPUBLIC Donald Trump assembles enemies lists, too; his organs of official William Binney has described it, is nothing short of cognition appear to be structured around the idea of revenge. “turnkey totalitarianism.” There are Republicans who voted against him, like Senator Lindsey Graham. (“It’s so great our enemies are making them- IT’S NOT HARD to imagine the kind of damage Trump could selves clear,” Trump surrogate Omarosa Manigault exulted, do with the powers of the NSA at his disposal. “Let’s say you “so that when we get to the White House, we know where we become part of the Trump opposition,” says Jon Stokes. “It stand.”) There are media organizations he claims have covered probably won’t be long before Trump knows what kind of porn him unfairly, like The Washington Post. (Just as Nixon threat- you like. Sure, that’s against the law—but the government has ened to take away the broadcast licenses of television stations been breaking those laws for 20 years. We’ve just been doing it owned by the Post, Trump has vowed to prosecute Post owner for noble, Jack Bauer reasons, not petty Donald Trump reasons.” Jeff Bezos for antitrust violations.) And it’s not hard to imagine Consider, too, all the federal officials beyond the director that Trump’s list of targets will only grow longer as his power of national intelligence who will serve at the pleasure of expands. Like Nixon, he has spent his entire life chasing the Trump. There’s the commissioner of the Internal Revenue narcotic rush afforded by dominating others, the better to fill Service, whom the president could illegally order to tar- the void where a functioning soul ought to be. get enemies with tax audits, like Nixon did. The head of the But there are two key differences that set Trump apart from Small Business Administration, which could cut off loans to his predecessor in paranoia. First, his soul is sicker by miles Trump’s rivals. The entire Cabinet, which oversees billions of than Nixon’s. And second, the surveillance apparatus he is dollars in federal research grants and defense contracts and about to inherit is far scarier than the one available to Nixon. construction jobs. The administrator of the General Services “Over the past two decades, we’ve witnessed the building of Administration, from which Trump leases the building he’s the greatest, most pervasive surveillance apparatus and security just turned into a luxury Washington hotel. And the head of state that humanity has ever seen,” says Jon Stokes, co-founder military intelligence, who could use the Pentagon’s powers of the news site Ars Technica and author of Inside the Machine. to spy on left-wing groups, as it did under Lyndon Johnson “Now we are about to hand over that entire apparatus to a and to a vastly expanded degree under the paranoid auspices paranoid, score-settling sociopath whose primary obsession of Richard Nixon. seems to be with crushing his personal enemies.” Another Nixon story, perhaps apocryphal. It was told to me Today the government can monitor virtually every form of by David Harris, an Illinois state assemblyman who served as communication, including the contents of emails, phone calls, a John Kasich delegate to last summer’s Republican National online searches, and a host of personal data. Barack Obama, of Convention. Nixon, just elected president, was flying over course, has the same tools at his disposal; indeed, he presided the National Mall on Marine 1 and spotted a particularly ugly over their construction and expansion. Perhaps it’s no wonder grouping of Quonset huts. He ordered them removed. Upon that there’s been no public uprising against this new surveil- leaving office, he discovered they were still there. lance state; it’s been in the hands of a president who is about Harris told me the story by way of explaining why he wasn’t as far removed from obsessive score-settling as anyone could too worried about the abuse of power under a President Trump. conceivably be. Besides, our system of constitutional checks and balances is supposed to prevent individual officials from going rogue. “If men were angels,” James Madison observed, “no government would be necessary.” Like Nixon, Trump has spent his entire That’s not to say that Obama hasn’t abused his powers: life chasing the narcotic rush afforded by Just ask the journalists at the Associated Press whose phone dominating others. records were subpoenaed by the Justice Department. But had he wanted to go further in spying on his enemies, there are few checks in place to stop him. In the very first ruling on the National Security Administration’s sweeping collec- “You can’t just issue an edict,” he laughed, “and expect it to tion of “bulk metadata,” federal judge Richard Leon blasted happen overnight.” the surveillance as downright Orwellian. “I cannot imagine I’m not so sure. To me, that Nixon legend is the opposite a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this of reassuring. What will happen when President Trump or- collection and retention of personal data,” he ruled. “Surely, ders some eyesore removed from his sight, only to discover such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the the limits of presidential power? Revenge is a narcotic, and founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.” Trump of all people will be in need of a regular, ongoing fix. But the judge’s outrage did nothing to stop the surveillance: Ordering his people to abuse the surveillance state to harass and In 2015, an appeals court remanded the case back to district destroy his enemies will offer the quickest and most satisfying court, and the NSA’s massive surveillance apparatus—soon kick he can get. The tragedy, as James Madison could have told to be under the command of President Trump—remains ful- us, is that the good stuff is now lying around everywhere, just ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ CARRILHO ly operational. The potential of the system, as former NSA waiting for the next aspiring dictator to cop. a

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 19 BEYOND HOPE What did Barack Obama accomplish? And how much of it will survive in the age of Trump? Five leading historians and political observers discuss the legacy of hope and change.

BY ERIC BATES

FROM THE MOMENT Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he own making. From Brooklyn to Berkeley, American liberals began to disappoint those who had believed in his message of have cocooned themselves in a soothing feedback loop woven change. He appointed entrenched Washington insiders to his from Huffington Post headlines, New York Times polls, and repeat Cabinet. He put Wall Street bankers in charge of regulating viewings of Madam Secretary. If nothing else, Trump’s election Wall Street banks. He compromised with Republicans on demands that we return to the real world in all its complexities the economic stimulus, slowing the recovery for millions of and contradictions, and confront our own obliviousness. Americans. He refused to push for universal health care, and We can begin by reassessing the president we still have, deported two million immigrants. He failed to shut down while we still have him. Barack Obama came to office with an Guantanamo, dispatched another 60,000 troops to Afghanistan, ambitious liberal agenda. He sought to make America great and launched hundreds of drone strikes that killed countless by emphasizing unity over division, civic responsibility over civilians. Today, income inequality continues to rise, and big corporate greed, international engagement over foreign in- banks are bigger than ever, and student debt has hit a record tervention. Eight years later, what lessons can we learn from $1 trillion. Democrats have not only lost control of every branch his successes and failures? And how much of his legacy will of the federal government, they are weaker at the state level survive the coming onslaught? than at any point since 1920. Those who thought they had Two days after the election, we sat down with five leading elected a bold and inspiring populist were surprised to find historians and political observers in the new republic’s offices him replaced by a cautious and deliberate pragmatist. in New York City, overlooking Union Square. At the table were Now, eight years later, many of Obama’s critics suddenly Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard and Nell Painter of Princeton, find themselves yearning for the euphoria that accompanied two of America’s preeminent scholars on American history. his election, and fearing for the small but significant progress They were joined by Sarah Jaffe, John B. Judis, and Andrew he made on a host of fronts: equal pay, expanded health care, Sullivan, journalists and authors who have explored the wider nuclear nonproliferation, global warming. It’s not just that hope forces that have shaped Obama’s presidency. The streets below and change have given way to fear and loathing—it’s that so were packed with thousands of anti-Trump protesters, and their few of us saw it coming. Right-wing extremists, it turns out, rising chants served as a grim counterpoint to our conversation aren’t the only ones who live in a faith-based reality of their about Obama, and where he leaves us.

20 | NEW REPUBLIC President Obama at a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Orlando, Florida, two weeks before the election.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 21 I. Is Trump Obama’s Legacy? Let’s start with the seismic political reversal that just took place. It’s hard to imagine a bigger shift for America than going from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. The two of them are polar opposites in almost every regard. But now, instead of seeing his legacy cemented, Obama faces the prospect of having his major accomplishments undone. How much responsibility do you think that he himself bears for creating the conditions that allowed Trump to get elected? In ret- rospect, are there things he could or should have done to protect and institutionalize his agenda more? NELL PAINTER: I don’t think it has anything to do with him personally, ex- cept that he’s a black man. The election of Trump was a gut-level response to what many Americans interpreted as an insult eight years ago, and have been seething against ever since. The only way you can President Obama meets in the Oval Office with President-elect Trump on November 10, 2016. see Trump as somehow Obama’s fault is Obama’s very being. It’s ontological. ANNETTE GORDON-REED: I agree with PAINTER: Before day one. nothing he could have done accounts for Nell. There’s nothing he could’ve done GORDON-REED: Before he had done what’s happened. in this climate other than be somebody anything: “We’re going to make him a SARAH JAFFE: I can’t separate Obama else. We know the record of obstruction one-term president.” People suggested from the financial crisis he inherited. by Republicans, the lack of cooperation. that he didn’t try to work with Congress What could he have done if the economy Some Democrats suggested that Obama enough. They’d ask me about Jefferson didn’t explode? Maybe he could’ve had was giving things away before they and his dinner parties: “Obama didn’t a magically perfect health care program, were even asked for, to try and be accom­ invite people over for dinner like or maybe he could’ve used the crisis to modating. But there was no chance for Jefferson did!” But today is a different nationalize all the banks. But in reality, bipartisanship—it was obstruction from time, and Obama is a different person. probably not. So it’s really difficult to say day one. You can always do things better. But what he could have done versus what we’d like him to have done. JOHN B. JUDIS: There were a number of things he didn’t do that could have TAKING SARAH JAFFE, a fellow JOHN B. JUDIS, a prevented Democrats from losing their at the Nation Institute, former senior editor at majority in 2010. In his first two years,

THE LONG is a journalist who the new republic, is the Obama didn’t really understand the con- NAMEE/GETTY c VIEW reports on labor and author of The Populist nection between policy and politics. He social movements. She Explosion: How the Great would say that himself now. THE PARTICIPANTS IN OUR FORUM ON is the author of the new Recession Transformed PAINTER: That’s right. OBAMA’S LEGACY book Necessary Trouble: American and JUDIS: He didn’t go after the banks and Americans in Revolt. European Politics. Wall Street the way Roosevelt did in 1933. That left a political vacuum that made it NELL IRVIN PAINTER ANNETTE GORDON- ANDREW SULLIVAN, possible for the Tea Party to become the is professor emerita REED is a professor a former editor of the major mass political force in the country at Princeton and of law and professor of new republic, is a by August of his first year. And he was the former president history at Harvard. She contributing editor at naïve about the possibility for bipartisan- of the Organization of won the National Book New York magazine. ship, especially in the way that he dealt American Historians. Her Award and the Pulitzer His most recent book is with the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare most recent book is The Prize for her book The The Conservative Soul, ended up being designed in a way that al-

History of White People. Hemingses of Monticello. on the future of the right. lowed the middle class and senior citizens OPENING SPREAD: SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY. THIS PAGE: WIN M

22 | NEW REPUBLIC to think that they weren’t getting much not a hapless stiff—he was a very effec- political skills, complete mediocrity. So out of it, and that their tax dollars were tive candidate. that’s the mistake—allowing the Clintons going to subsidize the uninsured. So there Andrew, did Obama help create the to keep control of the party and then al- was a failure in those first two years that conditions for Trump’s victory? lowing this mediocrity to be his successor. led to the gridlock and other problems ANDREW SULLIVAN: If Obama had run PAINTER: [Gesturing to the other women that made it easier for Trump to come in for a third term, he would have won. It’s around the table] Can we just say: We en- as the champion, as the man on the white Hillary Clinton’s fault. The worst candidate tirely disagree with that. horse who’s going to change all that. for president in recent history. Worse than JAFFE: Well, I don’t know. I think Hil- That said, we also have to recognize Dukakis. She threw this away. Insofar­ as lary Clinton was a lousy candidate. something else: There’s a third-term curse. The party that controls the White House for two terms always has a hard time keeping it for a third term. Think of Ken- nedy beating Nixon in 1960. That wasn’t “ Obama’s mistake was being cowed by the because Eisenhower was unpopular— ­ Clintons and not finding a successor who ­it’s because Kennedy was going to get the could win the coalition he had assembled.” country moving again. Whoever is trying to succeed the in- cumbent can’t really position him or her- self as the agent of change, because then you’re repudiating your own president: that’s Obama’s responsibility, it was in GORDON-REED: I don’t think she was Nixon would be repudiating Eisenhow- not making sure that Biden entered the a lousy candidate. But for a candidate to er, Gore would be repudiating Clinton, race, and being cowed by the Clintons, lose to someone who’s never been in the Hillary would be repudiating Obama. and not finding a successor who could military, who’s never held public office— So they have this incredible dilemma win the coalition he had assembled. The he’s not like any candidate who’s ever run that doesn’t allow them to represent Clintons destroyed Obama. No one else. before. So there were other forces at play themselves as having a vision for how Even so, she won the popular vote. But here, most notably her gender. to change the country. The only time I because she’s just a dreadful candidate, PAINTER: She’s an older woman. can remember that it didn’t happen was and someone almost no one can imagine GORDON-REED. That’s right. It’s clear with George H. W. Bush, but that’s be- being president of the United States, she— that many people have a hard time paying cause the Democrats nominated Michael GORDON-REED: Oh, I could! attention to older women as anything Dukakis, who was hapless as a candidate SULLIVAN: She’s a terribly unpopu- other than mothers or grandmothers. and had no vision of change. Trump was lar person. Horrible: no inspiration, no SULLIVAN: She’s just a bad candidate and a terrible politician whom large num- bers of people despised. You can see it in the polls: She represented everything that people hate about Washington. PAINTER: Yeah, because she’s an older BILL McKIBBEN woman. CLIMATE ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR SULLIVAN: The idea that she should OBAMA’S GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT Blocking the Keystone have been the candidate to replace this pipeline. It marked the first such loss Big Oil ever suffered, and inspiring new person who really did it helped trigger a wave of opposition to virtually every other transform America was itself a joke. So fossil fuel project on the planet. BIGGEST FAILURE Falling for the was the Democratic Party’s delusion in idea that gas would be a good substitute for coal. The result thinking that being the spouse of a for- is that we’re emitting about the same volume of greenhouse gases as when mer president would be an advantage in he took office. He should have stood up to the fossil fuel industry and gone this election, when obviously it wasn’t. straight from coal to renewables. WHAT SURPRISED YOU MOST? That he shut down the movement that got him the presidency in 2008. His “I’ve got this” vibe She couldn’t even win white women set him up for repeated Lucy-with-the-football moments with the GOP. WHAT against someone who has a history of HE DESERVES MORE CREDIT FOR That we came through his eight years with net sexual assault. neutrality preserved is a pretty big deal. HOW HISTORY WILL JUDGE HIM I fear that GORDON-REED: Well, that says some- the only issue history will care about before too long is climate chaos, and that thing about white women. We’re talking in that respect he’ll be judged as temporizing and half-hearted. He definitely about this like it was a landslide against did more than his predecessors, but that’s not saying much. her. I mean, Dukakis—what did he win? JAFFE: Exactly. That’s why I think Eliz- abeth Warren could have won.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 23 GORDON-REED: You think Elizabeth Warren could’ve won? JAFFE: Yes. She could have run on a more populist message, and she would RAFIA ZAKARIA ATTORNEY AND AUTHOR have been better at it. Plus, her name does not say “nafta” in Indiana and Wisconsin OBAMA’S GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT Barring the use of pre- and Ohio. existing conditions as a basis for denying health coverage. PAINTER: But it would say “socialist.” BIGGEST FAILURE As a Pakistani-American, it pains me to see GORDON-REED: And it would say how often the Obama administration boasts of its capture “Pocahontas.” I mean, she was my col- of Osama bin Laden. Using a public vaccination program as a front to collect DNA via a CIA operative has seriously impacted the credibility league at Harvard, and I love and would of public health programs in Pakistan. This has led to fewer vaccinations support Elizabeth. But Trump under- and more disease outbreaks all over the country. WHAT SURPRISED YOU MOST? stands media, he understands narrative, Perhaps it was my naïveté, but I really did think Obama’s intellectual pedigree he understands story. This has been a as a constitutional scholar would mean he would be more passionately story. And he played it very, very well. opposed to covert wars, extrajudicial killings via drone attacks, and the He would have done it against anybody. continued use of indefinite detention. WHAT HE DESERVES MORE CREDIT FOR He is probably one of the best-looking and most charismatic presidents in several decades. (Who says we can’t judge men by their looks?) HOW HISTORY WILL JUDGE HIM “Historic firsts” come with their own baggage. His presidency will II. Obama’s Machine likely be remembered for the fact that it was the first time an African American Obama entered office with one of the most was elected to the highest office, rather than for what he did in office. effective political machines in history. But instead of using it to create grassroots sup- port for his agenda, he basically shut down the entire operation and told his supporters, “I got this.” In basketball terms, he bet his useful, because he wasn’t willing to de- Republicans. He only figured that out af- entire presidency on an inside game. Do ploy it against his own party. ter August 2011, when they really screwed you think that was a mistake? He certainly didn’t mobilize it in the him with the whole national debt crisis JAFFE: Well, he didn’t shut it down. way that the right mobilized the Tea and the sequester. If he would have done This narrative kind of annoys me. He Party—as­ a grassroots machine. Did he that from the outset, there would have mobilized it in the wrong direction. I was miss an opportunity by not capitalizing been more of a possibility of mobilizing. reporting on the people in Organizing for on the operation he built and running it But it was that kind of ambiguity that left America, who came out of Obama’s cam- in a more active way? the door open. paign. And when it came time to pass the JUDIS: It’s hard for presidents to do PAINTER: We’re also forgetting the Affordable Care Act, the people who were that. Reagan didn’t really try to do it. You cultural context of all this: that Obama organizing through the OFA were told to have to have an outside force that does it. was operating as a black man among a pressure Republicans, who were never At the time, I was as critical as anyone of whole bunch of white guys. They were middle Americans whose gut sense was distrust—not being comfortable with him, not wanting to go along with him. There was a lot of static going on. He “ He didn’t mobilize his grassroots machine had to prove that he wasn’t a communist. in a way that was useful—because he wasn’t That’s part of the reason, I’m guessing, willing to deploy it against his own party.” that he didn’t move further left against the banks and kept on the side, really, of the Republican financial establishment. JAFFE: I agree with John that you need an outside force. But in this case, the out- going to vote for anything. They should their turning it into a kind of subsidiary side force voluntarily demobilized: After have pressured wavering Democrats, like of the Democratic National Committee. the stimulus was approved, the labor Rep. Bart Stupak from Michigan, who But it’s hard to pull off. One of the things movement refused to push on the things were going to flip the whole thing if they you have to have is a very clear adversary. they wanted. Everybody went along with couldn’t have it be anti-abortion. So I And one of the things that Obama was Obama’s idea that “now we pivot to health cringe when people say he demobilized unwilling to do in his first year was to de- care,” even though unemployment was his operation. He just didn’t mobilize it clare himself the president of Main Street still at 10 percent. Nobody was willing in a way that would have actually been against Wall Street—to really go ­after the to push him, largely because the left was

24 | NEW REPUBLIC just coming out of eight years of ptsd over Because you, John, are thinking of this It sounds to me like you’re all reaching a George W. Bush. context without the racial dynamics that similar conclusion from different directions. SULLIVAN: He won reelection easily. played a big part in narrowing his room You all agree that Obama didn’t move left. All these arguments about his first term: to maneuver. Andrew’s just saying that he didn’t need How did he win reelection so convinc- SULLIVAN: He won more white voters to, because he already had the support he ingly, if he got things so wrong? in 2012 than Hillary Clinton just did, OK? needed among white voters. You’re saying that it didn’t matter that He was always popular with white people SULLIVAN: They keep saying that be- he didn’t mobilize grassroots support? in the Midwest. This whole racial thing cause he’s black he couldn’t move left. SULLIVAN: If he’d moved left in is just so myopic. PAINTER: Andrew, that is so gross, in that first term, he wouldn’t have won GORDON-REED: No, it’s not myopic. the sense of using such a big club. You’re reelection. We’re talking about his responses to not hearing what we’re saying in terms of JAFFE: I think it depends what we’re things. We’re talking about why an in- context, psychology, and culture. It’s not defining as “left.” dividual maneuvers in a particular way. a toggle switch of racism, or “because he’s GORDON-REED: He didn’t have to go If you are an African American person black.” It’s because of the fine-grained very far to be too left for some people. and you are in this setting, you can’t ma- nature of our society. What he could ac- For the first black president, there were neuver like a white person. Sure, there complish changed month by month, week all kinds of psychic things going on that are white people who like him—that’s not by week, congressman by congressman, just don’t apply for a “regular” person. He the question. The question is, why did he senator by senator. What I’m trying to say couldn’t have gone too far left and won. act in a particular way? is that there’s more going into this than PAINTER: This is the only place I’m SULLIVAN: What should he have done just the policy and the politics. sort of separating myself from John. otherwise and didn’t because he’s black? JUDIS: I agree. At the time, there was always the Jesse Jackson comparison—­ that if Obama wanted to succeed, he couldn’t sound like Jesse Jackson, he couldn’t raise hell. But I think there were two other factors that played into that. First was the financial crisis: Tim Geithner and Larry Summers argued that they couldn’t do something that would create a crisis of confidence among the banking industry and Wall Street. And second was that based on Obama’s ex- perience as a state legislator in Illinois, he had this idea that he could pull off a bipartisan compromise. Those are really the two big reasons, leaving aside race, why he took a very cautious course of action that first year. JAFFE: And there was almost no one within his party who was willing to break ranks with him. Nobody was pulling left.

III. His Biggest Success Let’s broaden out beyond politics and talk about what he achieved as president. I’d like to hear from each of you what you consider to be his single biggest accomplish- ment that will outlast the Trump era. What will history look back on as his greatest achievement? JUDIS: What will outlast Trump? We just threw everything out! [Laughter] Well, that’s really the question now:

DOUG MILLS /THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX Obama mobbed by supporters at a campaign rally in Nevada on September 30, 2008. What did he do that’s going to survive?

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 25 JAFFE: That’s such a hard question. a clean-living family, a rather liberal ad- a “living, walking example of American After Trump, I think we’re going to look ministration, as well as ethical and honest. ­exceptionalism”—just the fact of his elec- back at Obama and be like, “Oh, this It will look like the good old days. tion, and the way he’s conducted himself. was such a decent human being in the GORDON-REED: Also the fact that he Do you see that as the thing that will most White House.” got elected. It was a particular moment. endure? Or do you see other things he’s GORDON-REED: And no scandals. PAINTER: And reelected! We can feel accomplished that will be a significant part JAFFE: Right! Even the people who are good about ourselves. of his legacy? the angriest at Obama post pictures of him and his family on Facebook and go: “Look at how great they are.” GORDON-REED: Well, maybe not the angriest. “ What we will remember is an upstanding JAFFE: OK, true. But if Hillary Clinton family, a liberal, ethical administration. It was going to be president in January, I will look like the good old days.” would have come in here and been really critical of the Affordable Care Act. In a few months, though, I’m going to have no health insurance instead of crappy health insurance. It all looks very different now. GORDON-REED: We can feel very SULLIVAN: Look, we just elected I don’t know what’s going to last. good about it. America crossed a par- someone, and we have no idea what PAINTER: I agree with you that it’s ticular marker there. I think that will be this person is going to do in office. He going to be mostly nostalgia, because the ­important. Along with his intelligence, has supreme total personal power for Republicans want to dismantle every- his spirit. the indefinite future. He’s destroyed the thing that Obama did. As you say, what Andrew, this is something that you’ve Republican Party and created what looks we will remember is an upstanding family, written about. You have called Obama like a neofascist party in its place. But I would put a bet that a lot may last that people are currently dismissing. Let’s just take three examples: First, of all the things Obama achieved, saving the global economy from a second Great Depression is a huge achievement that will outlast Trump. Second, redirecting American foreign policy away from neoconservative, global interventionism will actually be entrenched by Trump. That is one of the key reasons he was elected in the first place, and that huge shift in global power is something that will last. And third, Obamacare. Republicans are say- ing they’re going to repeal it. Well there are 13 million people, including me, on Obamacare. I’m extremely happy with my Obamacare. JAFFE: [Laughs] I’m not. SULLIVAN: The question is: Can they throw 13 million people off health care and face no massive political problem? The thing that’s happened is that the dog has caught the car. They now have to do what they said they were going to do, and the consequences of doing that would be quite extraordinary. So those are three rather huge things that could well outlast Trump. Sure,

Obama works on remarks in the Oval Office before giving a speech on May 15, 2013. there are things Trump can throw out. OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA

26 | NEW REPUBLIC He can eliminate every single action on climate change that Obama was able to do through the executive branch. But that doesn’t mean that Trump can abolish the NIKHIL PAL SINGH ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, NYU fact that climate change is happening. At some point, reality will intrude. OBAMA’S GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT The Iran nuclear JAFFE: When Washington, D.C. is nonproliferation deal—a difficult and painstaking agreement under water. that dampens the ardor of those advocating for another SULLIVAN: And there are other things large-scale, costly, mass-casualty war. BIGGEST FAILURE He that could survive Trump. Let’s look at disillusioned millions of new entrants into the political process, particularly younger voters, by failing to advance the ambitious and the Iran deal on nuclear ­nonproliferation. transformational political agenda that he seemed to promise, and that the Will Trump really rip it up and launch times demanded. He had a steady hand in a time of significant turmoil, but a new war in the Middle East? Will his his eight years in office settled nothing of consequence. WHAT SURPRISED YOU buddy Putin, who signed the deal, be MOST? How disappointing he’s been on questions of racial justice, equity, happy with that? I don’t think that the and education, given his clear understanding of the issues. WHAT HE DESERVES revolution in civil rights for gay people MORE CREDIT FOR Maintaining his composure and avoiding many of the traps can be easily reversed. I think the social laid for him by right-wing brinkmanship. HOW HISTORY WILL JUDGE HIM Favorably. shift we saw toward legal marijuana and His ability to preside over a mostly scandal-free administration, to restore the unwinding of the drug war is some- dignity to the highest elected office, to exist as a public person who treats thing that may well endure. And I think his intimates with respect and care, and to conduct an often intellectually Obama as an emblem of the future of elevated, wise, and sometimes humorous discourse on public affairs, far outstrips the low bar set by his predecessors. America may well reemerge. He once said to me, personally, in an offhand moment, “You know, I wonder if I be- came president 20 years too soon.” And in 20 years’ time, we may see the Obama administration as the architecture for bailout, was important. In his second wanted him to be tougher and not take the entire twenty-first century. So let’s term, the Iran deal. so many steps toward the Republicans just pause on the notion that it’s all com- JAFFE: Sitting here and listening to and really to fight it out much more. pletely over. It’s been wrecked by the the chants of the Trump protesters in GORDON-REED: I was not overly money-grubbing, power-hungry Clinton Union Square, I’m reminded that thou- thrilled with Guantanamo. I understand machine, and the one great silver lining sands and thousands of young people got I don’t have all the information, but many of this tragedy is that those awful people trained as organizers in Obama’s cam- of those people were not the worst of the may leave the stage. paign. Then they went out and raised worst. As a lawyer, I’m concerned about GORDON-REED: And it’s been wrecked hell and didn’t wait for Obama to do it what it does to the rule of law to have by the white nationalism that’s always for them. The young people in Ferguson, people held without trial for this length of been there, and now feels that it has the young people in New York, the young time. That’s problematic to me, the way he power. The kind of people I knew grow- people in Chicago and everywhere else handled that. He continued Bush’s foreign ing up are not going anywhere. Maybe are saying, “OK, real change is not going policy in ways that I think— in 20 years, Obama might be regarded to come from the president. It’s going to PAINTER: The military aspect? like you suggest, Andrew. But between come from us.” That, in the long run, may GORDON-REED: Mainly with Guan- now and then, we might be in for a pret- be one of the most enduring aspects of tanamo and the drone war. ty rough time. It’s not going to be all Obama’s legacy. JAFFE: And the surveillance state, pretty after this. which is now going to be in the hands John, same question: What do you of Donald Trump. I used to get very think Obama has achieved that will out- frustrated with people saying, “It’s OK last Trump? IV. His Biggest Failure to have all this surveillance—we trust JUDIS: It’s possible that there might be Let’s take the same question in reverse: Obama.” We might—but look at who’s a way to preserve Obamacare so that it’s What do each of you see as Obama’s big- coming next. actually improved. That’s what happened gest failure? John—biggest failure? in Australia after Conservatives repealed PAINTER: Overestimating the ability JUDIS: I already said some of it. Squan- national health care—Labor came back to work across the aisle. Coming in and dering the majority in Congress in the and made it better, and now no one thinking that he could work with Repub- first two years. In foreign policy, Libya will touch it. That would be an amazing licans. Paul Krugman and Hillary Clinton just jumps out. They misjudged the Arab achievement for Obama. Getting through told him in 2009 that this sunny idea of Spring, and left that situation even worse the Great Recession, e­ specially the auto bipartisanship was unrealistic. I myself than it was before.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 27 SULLIVAN: I can’t think of a single up firmly and solidly enough when the left friends—including Cornel West—who ­major huge mistake, except the Libyan was taken over by this madness. were against his lecturing to black people. intervention. It’s staggering how few Many people would argue the opposite: I can hear that, I can see that. But, jeez, mistakes this man made. I don’t buy the that it was Obama’s failure to address sys- he’s the president of 320 million people. idea that if he’d done some big major temic racism that gave birth to grassroots, GORDON-REED: I’m not a Marxist at left-wing push in the first two years and street-level movements like Black Lives all. But I think he was in an impossible ranted against the bankers that somehow Matter. There were a lot of people on the position. The problem with the lectur- the country would have risen up in left left, especially a lot of black Americans, ing was that it was at occasions where populism. The only thing I would say in who felt that Obama was lecturing them he was talking to people who had already my own view is that I think the war to about their behavior and chiding them for done the things he was advocating. At contain and destroy isis was a mistake. not playing politics by the rules he plays the Morehouse commencement? I mean, That he did it at all? Or the way that by. Many younger supporters wound up that’s not the place he needs to make that he did it? feeling that they had to go outside of the argument. So I think it was the context SULLIVAN: That he did it at all. That conventional political apparatus, because that bothered some people. there was any attempt to intervene against Obama wasn’t willing to articulate and Take the famous speech he gave on isis in Iraq and Syria was, I think, a great confront some of the systemic issues of race after Jeremiah Wright. He did the mistake. Because it destroyed the coher- racism that go back to the Clintons. false equivalency thing—that whites are ence of his foreign policy position, which PAINTER: That go back to time angry because of this, and blacks are an- is that we cannot control these events. immemorial. gry because of that, as if those two things He did his best. But I honestly think JAFFE: Right—white identity politics in are the same. The difference between that after you look at the choices that this country is certainly not new. It goes being angry because someone has op- were in front of him and you go back over back to the founding of this country. It pressed you and being angry because you the eight years and you ask yourself which way outdates Hillary Clinton. don’t think another person is a human was the biggest blunder, I don’t think you being and belongs on the earth—those can come up with one. I know that makes two things are not the same at all. me sound like a total Obamaphile, and I John? You have thoughts on this? am. But again, the one major failure of V. Obama and Race JUDIS: No. [Laughter] his, the Libyan intervention, was primar- Let’s talk about race directly for a moment. SULLIVAN: I want to bring up some- ily a function of the Clintons. How did Obama do at handling race, given thing about quote-unquote “identity [Laughter] his position as the first black president? pol i­tics.” Because there was an area of SULLIVAN: Well, it’s true! You can PAINTER: It put him in an utterly extraordinary ­success Obama had in the laugh, but it’s true. So the biggest fail- impossible situation. Damned if he did, advancement of civil rights. Namely, the ure was allowing Hillary Clinton to be damned if he didn’t. Damned if he went achievement of marriage equality and secretary of state, and not finding some- left, damned if he went right. I have many openly gay people in the military, which no one who could actually succeed him. He failed to nurture the next generation of Democratic talent sufficiently enough, to make sure that his legacy could be secured. That’s his biggest failure. JAFFE: That’s a good point. KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY, NYU SULLIVAN: His other failure is not doing enough to confront the identi- OBAMA’S GREATEST SINGLE ACCOMPLISHMENT Expanding ty politics of the left. Because the left’s government health insurance for millions of people. More ­obsession with race and gender and all Americans now are able to access medical care than before his presidency. BIGGEST FAILURE Not addressing more forcefully the other Marxist notions helped create the country’s economic inequality, and not pushing for laws the white identity politics that is now that would make it easier for unions to organize. WHAT SURPRISED YOU MOST? going to run this country. His intense hostility toward whistle-blowers. HOW HISTORY WILL JUDGE HIM [Laughter and shouting] People will always recognize his significance as the first African American GORDON-REED: Marxist? Marxist president, and the symbolic importance of that victory for black freedom identity politics? and equality. But these last eight years will also represent a time of loss: SULLIVAN: That’s what has allowed a moment when it might have been possible to do far more to grapple with white identity politics to emerge and to the political and moral crises that our society faces, especially around win. And insofar as the left is going to re- economic hierarchy, environmental devastation, the power of elites, and spond to Trump’s election by intensifying the conditions of working people. that, it’s going to empower the forces of Trump even further. Obama didn’t stand

28 | NEW REPUBLIC The First Family joins the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where civil rights activists were attacked 50 years earlier.

one believed could happen. And the lesson Andrew. But in a way, you captured the Matter. The Tea Party was ready to be of that to me was exactly what Sarah said core of Obama’s own take on race. He has angry at Obama on day one, explicitly earlier: that yes, we didn’t wait for him, we been very clear and very conscious that because he was a black president. It’s did it ourselves. But we did it by eschewing his larger goal was essentially a civic one: just chronologically backwards to say identity politics, by saying we have got to try and get people to see themselves in that thousands and thousands of Amer- to stress what we have in common with each other. Was that the right approach? icans who finally got fed up with racial heterosexual people, by embracing our Or did it limit what he could achieve, by injustice and took part in protest move- responsibilities rather than finding con- appealing to our commonality rather than ments were somehow responsible for stant excuses for failure, by persuading a more forcefully confronting the policies and polarizing the conversation or rejecting large number of people in the middle and prejudices that divide us? common ground. taking their concerns seriously, instead GORDON-REED: That’s always been the PAINTER: We’ve been talking about of screaming “racist” and all this other philosophy of people who have been ar- what Obama might have done or what claptrap we hear from the left. guing for black rights. That’s what we’ve Obama didn’t do or what Obama should There is a great lesson in that—which been doing: We’re people. All men are have done. But when we’re talking about is that if the left thinks that it didn’t created equal. We’ve used the Declaration a lot of American politics, it goes on at stress identity politics enough, they are of Independence, we’ve used all those the state and local level. That’s where we gravely mistaken. The only progress that kinds of things. I don’t know who this need to focus as progressives. Maybe the will come on these issues is by getting “left” is that Andrew’s talking about. Black Democratic Party didn’t do enough on rid of that poison and concentrating on people have always been trying to assert that front. But American citizens have what we have in common as citizens, our equal humanity. That’s what we’ve led certainly shirked their responsibility to irrespective of our race and our gender with. Obama’s approach is not that dif- be involved in our public life. and our sexual orientation. ferent than what other people are doing. I want to come back to what Obama I know other people in the room will JAFFE: Keep in mind that the Tea said to Andrew—the idea that he became

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY LAWRENCE JACKSON disagree with a lot of what you just said, Party came first. It wasn’t Black Lives president 20 years too soon. With his

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 29 election, Obama accelerated a demograph- past this. But that is what Obama really ic trend that we all expected would take represented: both black and white. The VI. The Big Picture much, much longer to manifest itself. Will challenge of navigating that through a Let’s talk about a larger perspective on his he be judged differently as the world catch- sense of national identity, which is not legacy. It’s worth pausing for a moment to es up to what he managed to accomplish? racial—which is the only way we can sur- remember what a huge goal Obama had GORDON-REED: As a historian, we’re vive as a single country—is something when he ran for the White House. He didn’t never supposed to predict the future. But he tried to do, tried so hard. But he was just want to be president—he wanted to I think I would disagree with him. He caught in a pincer movement between change the way politics work. He wanted came exactly at the time he was supposed the racial left and the racial right. to change the way we see ourselves. He to come. JUDIS: Two things. First, it’s not sur- wanted to usher in a new and lasting era PAINTER: Otherwise, he couldn’t have prising that Obama got the nomination of liberalism or centrism, depending on come at all. in 2008. At that point, the two biggest how you define it. When we look back at GORDON-REED: He belongs where interest groups in the Democratic Party him from a historical perspective, will we he was, and it’s for us to deal with that. that hadn’t yet got to serve at the top were think he succeeded? The conditions were right for it, and the blacks and women. And those were the JAFFE: No. It won’t be entirely his fault, country was ready for it. But it’s going to two most important post-Sixties groups. though. I don’t think that was possible, given that capitalism was basically im- ploding around his ears when he entered office. There was certainly no new era of civility or bipartisanship. As everybody “ Just because there’s a backlash doesn’t has pointed out, nobody was gonna let mean he didn’t come at exactly the right him do that, no matter how hard he tried. time. I think he’s here to teach us lessons.” The political change we’re experienc- ing right now has more to do with the resurgence of a populist right around the world: in Europe, in Latin America. We’re seeing Trumpism in many forms, be a struggle. It’s always been a struggle. Second, when I was writing about the in many places. To go back to Yeats, the From Reconstruction, and even before election in early 2008, I decided to do a center cannot hold. I don’t know how then. This is just a step in the process. study of whether a black guy could win you can credit or blame Obama for any Just because there’s a backlash doesn’t the presidency that year. I looked at all of it. I think it’s global. mean that he didn’t come at exactly the these psychological studies designed to JUDIS: Obama ran a brilliant campaign right time. I don’t think he accelerated measure implicit racism, and I concluded in 2008, based on “hope and change.” But things. This is just the course of Amer- that it was very unlikely that Americans a lot of it was premised on the record of ican history. would elect a black person. The lesson I Bush and the Iraq War. In terms of a new PAINTER: This is how it happened. drew from that ten months later, when politics, he pretty much inherited this GORDON-REED: I think he’s here to Obama won the presidency, was that race unwieldy coalition of Wall Street, Silicon teach lessons. We have lessons from this is overrated in terms of understanding Valley, Hollywood, and minorities, but that came at precisely the right moment. why people do things. I don’t think it is with a lot of the white middle that used JAFFE: Right. His comment assumes all about race. That’s a factor in Trump’s to be the center of the Democratic Party that there are historical inevitabilities, popularity, for instance, but it’s only missing. It’s proven to be a coalition that and that people and social forces don’t a factor. And a lot of the people who on the key issues of globalization and make things happen. voted for Trump this year were people worker rights is simply not able to do the GORDON-REED: It’s all contingent. who voted in Ohio for Obama in 2008 job. The rise of Trump, and of his kind of That’s what history is—contingencies. and 2012. politics, partly reflects the failure of the SULLIVAN: But this is all a slow disin- Obama became president in spite of kind of Democratic politics that Obama tegration of an American identity, which racism in America. He became president inherited from Bill Clinton. I don’t think is not racial. because that is only one factor in people’s it was anything new. What was new was JAFFE: Has there ever been an Ameri- minds and motivations, and they can put the brilliance of Obama’s campaign. can identity that was not racial? it aside if there are other reasons. PAINTER: I see something going on in SULLIVAN: Yes. There can be under- GORDON-REED: I agree with you. It’s my home state of New Jersey that may tell stood to be something that transcends just one factor. But it was also a fac- us something about where we’re going race, as a citizen with no race. tor for people who wanted to vote for a and how we look back. The man who cur- PAINTER: Maybe if you’re really rich. person who is black, not just those who rently is looking like our next governor, SULLIVAN: The racially obsessed peo- opposed him. Phil Murphy, comes out of Wall Street. He

ple on the right and the left can’t quite get JUDIS: Yes, exactly. is funding his own campaign, and he is OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA

30 | NEW REPUBLIC running very much to the left. He’s even talking about reviving labor unions. And if state and local politics are being revived like that in other parts of the country, ELIZABETH BRUENIG WRITER AND EDITOR AT THE WASHINGTON POST we may see a different political galaxy in 2018, which could change the way we OBAMA’S GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT Allowing schools to provide look back at Obama. free lunches for everybody if at least 40 percent of students Andrew, any thoughts on Obama’s big are eligible for subsidized meals. It’s the best kind of politics: ambition, and whether he succeeded? a small but substantial improvement that opens up the imagination to greater possibilities. BIGGEST FAILURE Obamacare SULLIVAN: We’ll see. To some extent, has fallen far short of what was promised. WHAT SURPRISED YOU MOST? That his what happens to Trump’s vision and administration was scandal-free. Eight years in, his critics are still complaining whether it works or not may help us look about the same things they were the day he took office. The fact that there’s back on him in a different way. The one nothing new for them to advance against him—even something fictitious!—is huge thing that’s been a background to very surprising. WHAT HE DESERVES MORE CREDIT FOR The stimulus package, which all of this has been the enormous shift in likely saved the country from a far more devastating recession. And how the global economy over the last 30 years conciliatory his statements on race and unity have been. HOW HISTORY WILL since the end of the Cold War. The way JUDGE HIM Very kindly. Obama restored a sense of dignity to the presidency, and the global economy has expanded so dra- he maintained his composure through some extremely difficult years, often matically, the competition for the kind providing a sense of security and trust when no other institutions did so. of good, white-working-class jobs that I didn’t always agree with him, but I will dearly miss hearing his voice. used to be the backbone of the American middle class is just gone, never to return. And automation and technology is going to make it even worse. There’s really no solution to this. is no solution, my concern is that people American history. The South kept itself Obamacare was about providing a safety will increasingly seek out authoritarian behind rather than accept help from the net for exactly the white working class leaders, as well as scapegoats to blame federal government: “I would rather not that ended up voting for Trump. That’s for all sorts of things that cannot really have a road if the Negro gets to ride on all the government can do, really, because be stopped. the road.” We’ve seen the same message it can’t stop the deep structural shifts in GORDON-REED: I agree. On your point played out over and over, from Bacon’s the global economy. And because there about finding scapegoats—I mean, that’s Rebellion in 1676: Don’t align yourself with those particular people. That’s something we have to conquer. But it’s a really tough nut to crack. Just reading about how tech- nology is changing, things like self-driving cars and what that’s going to do to the workforce? It’s not going to be pretty. SULLIVAN: That’s why we’ve got legal weed. [Laughter] JAFFE: If you can afford it. SULLIVAN: The whole country is go- ing to be high. That’s the only option at this point. All the working-class men in particular who are under such siege right now will have to be high and playing vid- eo games to keep their lives together, because there’s much less work for them. JAFFE: It’s not inevitable. None of it is inevitable. It’s all a question of who has power and who decides where it’s going to be distributed. If we decide that we are going to put millions of people out of work and not come up with something for them to do, then that’s ultimately a political question that is bigger than any The White House Situation Room on May 1, 2011, the day Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden. one president.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 31 PAINTER: And it’s bigger than the PAINTER: The great presidents faced don’t think Obama will be remembered country as well. extraordinary challenges. Are we going in that tier of presidents. GORDON-REED: And to go back to your to put him up with Franklin Roosevelt? GORDON-REED: That might be true. original question, this is not something Well, he didn’t go to war and he didn’t That’s why I hesitated to, say, put him that Obama could have solved on his own. get a depression. He’s certainly going to in the category of Reagan. But Barack, SULLIVAN: Equally, Trump can’t solve be above Reagan, if you ask me. Michelle, and their children—the idea it, either. JAFFE: I would hope so. of a black family in the White House— JAFFE: But that doesn’t mean there’s GORDON-REED: I don’t know. In terms will be transformative to young people not a solution. There’s either going to be of influence? I can’t say that now. It’s who grew up with them and who have a lot of people starving in the streets or too soon. followed them. It may have changed the we’re going to find a way to take care of JUDIS: I completely endorse the prior attitude about race for younger people. people. We may not like the solution, but responses. I don’t know. SULLIVAN: I second everybody—it is there’s going to be one. PAINTER: I would put him right under way too soon. It all depends on what hap- SULLIVAN: They won’t be starving. Franklin Roosevelt, but I’m a partisan. pens in the next few years. One has the JAFFE: There is starving already. GORDON-REED: I’m a partisan, too, feeling, though, that future generations but I can’t. will potentially look back and see a pres- JUDIS: There’s a political scientist from ident as influential as Reagan. He ran a Yale who wrote a book about transforma- principled, ethical, largely scandal-free VII. The Verdict of History tive presidents. I don’t think Obama was administration. He may have permanently All of you have studied Obama closely over a transformative president, but Reagan reoriented the United States away from the years, and several of you are histori- was. So were Wilson and Roosevelt. I’m its post–Second World War, post–Cold ans. Which presidents will history compare not saying that’s good or bad. Wilson War interventionist position. He moved him to? changed the way people saw America’s us decisively toward universal health care. GORDON-REED: I get this question role in the world, and Roosevelt changed He established civil rights for gay people, every year. It’s too soon. He’s not even the way Americans saw the relationship and he grappled with climate change, finished yet. between government and economy. I the issue which will hang over all of us.

Obama runs through the East Colonnade of the White House with Bo, the family’s new dog, on March 15, 2009. OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA

32 | NEW REPUBLIC of the Carnegie Foundation or something like that? Or a new nonprofit in his name? GORDON-REED: It would probably be THOMAS FRANK easier if he could do it on his own. AUTHOR AND CO-FOUNDER OF THE BAFFLER PAINTER: Well, he has a lot of really OBAMA’S GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT The terrific blow he rich friends. delivered to American racism, and his resounding GORDON-REED: He should come demonstration that a clean, scandal-free administration is back to Harvard Law School for the two-­ completely possible. BIGGEST FAILURE Obama entered office hundredth ­anniversary and talk. with an enormous mandate and majorities in both houses SULLIVAN: He should also be com- of Congress; he leaves it with Republicans in power all over the country and pletely silent. He should take a Bush a public so anxious they chose an obvious demagogue as his successor. position for a couple of years. It would WHAT SURPRISED YOU MOST? Three things: His many wars. His capitulation to the Clinton faction of the Democratic Party after he beat Hillary in 2008. be much smarter for him to withdraw And the continued turning of the revolving door. WHAT HE DESERVES MORE and say, “Let this fool do what he does,” CREDIT FOR The biggest misperception of Obama is that he is some kind of wild without intervening in any way. Because leftist, when in fact he has proven to be an unremarkable exponent of the at some point, they’ll be saying, “Where Washington consensus. HOW HISTORY WILL JUDGE HIM Very positively, at first. have you gone, Barack Obama? A nation He is a powerfully inspiring man, and in certain ways he has been objectively turns its lonely eyes to you.” superior to the Bushes, Bill Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, and Johnson, We’re going to need him. Let him stay all of whose administrations were enormously flawed. Over time, however, above the fray, outside the world for a people will start to ask, What did Obama actually do? while, to recoup and to sleep and to write probably the best presidential memoir ever. To do what Churchill did after the Second World War and to write the literary account of this period. He deserves that. People will see the sheer caliber of this GORDON-REED: That’s exactly right. I have no idea how he got through this. man. The grace and poise with which he We have the advantage of having him PAINTER: Absolutely. conducted himself in unbelievably diffi- around as a young man—and his wife and SULLIVAN: My heart has gone out cult circumstances; the way he withstood family, too, who have been incredibly im- to him so many times. I get emotional abuse and disrespect with extraordi- portant to the spirits of so many people. just thinking about what they did to this nary calm and goodwill. He will in his JAFFE: I’m very interested to see what man. What a beautiful American. [Begins post-presidency become a symbol, maybe Obama does under President Trump. to choke up] You know, I’m going to be somebody we need more than when he That was actually my final question for sworn in as an American soon.… was president, to remind us of what it is to you all. If Obama came to you and said, PAINTER: Oh, cool. Welcome! be dignified in public life. Especially if this hideous monster who’s succeeding him continues to despoil the public culture. We have to remember, Obama is leav- ing office having been elected twice by a “ Obama wasn’t a transformative president majority and with approval ratings that are like Reagan, Wilson, and Roosevelt. I don’t matching Reagan’s. If he had a successor think he’ll be remembered in that tier.” who could continue that, then he would be in the epic position to be the architect of the entire twenty-first century. It may be, in my view, that the coun- terreaction is so perverse and so destruc- “What should I do in my post-presidency?” JAFFE: Congratulations. tive that we will return to this figure as what would you tell him? SULLIVAN: Because Obama helped get the cornerstone of our future. And he SULLIVAN: No speeches at Goldman rid of the HIV ban on people becoming is young. At some point in the future, Sachs, please. [Laughter] Americans, which was signed by the Clin- with the possible bloodshed and civil GORDON-REED: He says he wants to tons. He means what America means, unrest in this country that we’re about do something about gerrymandering. what it can mean—the dignity, the fusion to engage in, he may be a key person as JAFFE: That would be really, really, of the races. He has a great temperament a post-president—a bit like a monarch ­really important. Push to restore the Vot- and great pragmatism, and he has great who might be able to hold us all together. ing Rights Act. Fight voter suppression. Midwestern decency. I’m in awe of this PAINTER: [Applauding] Well said, Go get some Democrats elected governor. man. God bless him. I mean it. Thank Andrew, well said! PAINTER: Should he become the head you, Mr. President. a

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 33 34 | NEW REPUBLIC The ILLUSTRATION BY CUN SHI Making of an American Terrorist Robert Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic and killed three people. Did the right-wing media help turn a disturbed loner into a mass murderer?

BY AMANDA ROBB

ON THE MORNING that Robert Dear Jr. opened fire on had been following him for more than two decades. They had a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, he began assassinated Robin Williams and a White House chef, and now the day by stopping by the hospital to pick up his girlfriend. they wanted to attack him as he was changing Bragg’s bandage. Dear, a 57-year-old marijuana grower, lived with Stephanie “It was a trick,” he told me later. “They wanted to come up Bragg in an RV, with no electricity or running water, on a behind me while I had my hands up her ass.” barren alpine plain roughly 40 miles from Woodland Park, Dear grew confrontational. “Look, I’m not playing your Colorado. Bragg had been hospitalized for a boil on her rear games,” he told the doctors. “I’m not going to do it.” end that had turned gangrenous. When Dear arrived at Pikes Bragg began to sob. “Whatever happens, I love you!” she said. Peak Regional Hospital at 9 o’clock on the morning of No- Dear stormed out of the hospital and drove away in his vember 27, 2015, he learned that Bragg’s doctors did not want pickup truck. He decided to find a pay phone and call Bragg. to release her. They were concerned she would be unable to He didn’t own a cell phone, because he believed federal agents care for her open wound. could use it to track his movements. He wanted to tell Bragg to “I can change her gauze,” Dear told them. leave the hospital and wait outside so he could pick her up. But The doctors asked to watch him do it. Dear refused. A burly when he found a working pay phone at a pharmacy, he couldn’t man who stands six-foot-two and weighs 240 pounds, he looks get through to the switchboard at the hospital. like a caricature of a biblical prophet, with a thick, white beard In that instant, Dear recalled, he “went white.” The feds, and wild, angry eyes. He believed that the doctors were actually he believed, were holding his girlfriend hostage as a way to federal agents in disguise. The government, he was convinced, get at him. At any moment they might attempt to kill him or

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 35 throw him in a “federal gulag.” In his paranoid imagination, to an appointment, had barricaded himself inside a bathroom the failed phone call was no coincidence. It was an act of war. when a bullet pierced the wall and struck him in the chest. Dear thought about retaliating with a direct assault on the The clinic’s windows were treated so that people could see FBI. But targeting the feds would be difficult. “They don’t out, but not in. So when police arrived, at 11:40 a.m., Dear began list FBI addresses so guys like me can’t find them,” he told picking off the officers one by one. He injured five, and killed me. So Dear decided instead to make his last stand at what he one. Police used an armored vehicle to smash through the clinic’s considered to be “the most evil place on earth.” He stopped at doors, but they couldn’t get at Dear. “We’re exchanging gunfire,” a couple of stores to buy phone cards, then found a pay phone an officer radioed during the fight. “We’re trying to keep him at a Howard Johnson. Standing in the lobby, he called Planned pinned down.” Police attempted to communicate with Dear by Parenthood’s toll-free number, 1-800-230-plan. calling the clinic’s phones, but he refused to answer. Then they A receptionist gave him the address for the clinic in Colorado lobbed in tear gas, setting off the facility’s sprinkler system. Springs, and Dear got back in his truck and drove away. But Dear, who considers himself an ardent Christian, began he quickly got lost. He stopped and asked a mail carrier for coughing and praying. “Just take me home, God,” he pleaded. directions, but still couldn’t find the clinic. He stopped again “Just take me home.” A bullet grazed his hand. Sitting on the and looked at a map. Finally, at around 11:30 a.m., he reached wet floor, he drew a cross on the wall with his blood. He put his Planned Parenthood. fingers in the accumulating water and licked them to soothe Dear parked in front of the clinic and went around to the back his parched throat. At one point during the standoff, he found of his pickup. The truck held four SKS semiautomatic rifles, two a credit card and wrote the words “Shoot out” on one side and other rifles, a shotgun, two pistols, a hatchet, several knives, “Give up” on the other. He flipped the card. It landed “Give up.” a supply of ammunition, arrow tips, a bulletproof vest he had At 4:52 p.m., Dear surrendered. As he was arrested, he fashioned himself from coins and duct tape, and a Bible. For yelled, “No more baby parts!” the past year, he had kept the arsenal close by him at all times,

The right-wing media A FTER THE SHOOTINGS, much of the media’s early reporting on Dear emphasized that he had no formal connec- that radicalized Dear tion to anti­ -abortion groups or other right-wing activists. The New York Times called him a “gentle loner who occasionally were his shelter and unleashed violent acts towards neighbors and women he his inspiration, his knew.” Buzzfeed described him as a “loner” who “never smiled.” Because he was white and American and acted alone, Dear did only real community. not fit the accepted definition of a terrorist: He was depicted simply as a crazy person, someone whose actions could not be anticipated or prevented. His violence, in short, was spurred “just in case.” Now he donned the vest and placed several of by mental illness, not political ideology. the weapons in garbage bags so they would be easier to carry. The right was especially eager to distance itself from Dear. Then he began what he would later refer to as his “rampage.” In the aftermath of the shooting, I spoke with Troy Newman, Two women had just arrived at the clinic and were getting president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, who out of their car. Samantha Wagner had an appointment that helped produce the notorious and discredited videotape that morning. Her friend Jennifer Markovsky, a mother of two accused Planned Parenthood of selling “baby body parts” from young children, had accompanied her to provide moral support. abortions. Newman disavowed any responsibility for Dear’s “You shouldn’t have come,” Dear told them. Then he shot killings, even though his group had played a key role in helping them both, shattering Wagner’s arm and killing Markovsky. direct Dear’s ire at Planned Parenthood. Dear was not part of Ke’Arre Stewart, an Iraq War veteran and father of two, was the anti-abortion movement, Newman insisted. He was just standing outside waiting for his girlfriend, who had an appoint- “a loon who clicks on Google all day.” ment at the clinic. Hearing the shots, he yelled a warning to the When Muslim Americans commit acts of terrorism, we hold people inside. Dear shot and killed him, then entered the clinic. isis and Hezbollah and “radical Islam” accountable for their Inside, someone screamed, “There’s an active shooter!” A actions, even if they are mentally unstable, and even if there nurse ran out the back door to an adjacent medical building and is no direct connection between them and the groups that told the office workers there to call 911. The remaining staff in inspired them. We call these terrorists “self-radicalized.” It is the clinic followed safety protocols that Planned Parenthood has how we see Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed developed for attacks: They barricaded themselves in exam rooms the Boston Marathon in 2013; and Omar Mateen, who went on and offices, along with nine patients, turned off the lights, and a murderous rampage at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando last silenced their phones. Dear opened fire, shooting wildly in all June; and Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who killed 86 people directions. Ammar Laskarwala, who had accompanied a friend and injured 434 at a celebration in Nice on Bastille Day. They

36 | NEW REPUBLIC did not go to a terrorist training camp, or join an organized Kopp had murdered my uncle, Barnett Slepian, a doctor who cell, or attend an anti-Western madrassa. They learned to hate performed abortions. I told Dear that I wanted to understand from a network of web sites and magazines and videotapes. why he chose Planned Parenthood as his target. Dear called Their madrassa was the media. me collect shortly after Christmas. He sounded suspicious and “That’s the way many terrorists today are radicalized now,” guarded, but he was willing to talk. says Paul Gill, a professor of security and crime science at Univer- “The easy answer,” he told me when I pressed him about sity College London. “They are not formally recruited or trained. Planned Parenthood, “is it’s all about saving babies.” Today’s terrorists go online and find the ideology that fits their Dear started calling me every week or so. In March, I vis- personal grievance and passively consume the propaganda.” ited him in jail. Visitors at El Paso are allowed to speak with Dear became radicalized in precisely the same way. But prisoners only via closed-cir­ cuit television, so I watched him because the media he listened to advocated war in the name on an old black-and-white monitor. He looked much as he did in his arrest photos: wild-eyed and disheveled, jumpy and jittery, sometimes lurching, as if his body mirrored the furious pitching of his mind. The things he said to me veered between raving paranoia—government agents had broken into his home and left behind a feather—and more lucid diatribes about abortion. “Some day, somebody is going to send me a letter with a picture of a baby,” he said, his pride evident. “They’re going to say, ‘Thank you. I didn’t have an abortion. Here’s a picture of the baby. Thanks to you.’ That’s going to happen some day.” Dear said that his hatred of abortions, and the groups that provide them, was long-standing. But the news that Planned Parenthood had been “selling baby parts” focused and amplified his antipathy. Be- fore the attack, Dear learned about the videotapes on The Mandy Connell Show, a right-wing radio program he listened to in Colorado. Connell is well- known for her racist and xenophobic statements. She once referred on-air to President Obama as a “half-breed,” and calls Planned Parenthood “evil,” accusing it of “protecting rapists.” The summer Dear, who was diagnosed after the shooting with a delusion disorder, believed that before Dear’s attack, Connell had devoted several the Planned Parenthood clinic he attacked was the “most evil place on earth.” segments of her show to the Planned Parenthood videos. She posted links to them on Twitter and of a Christian god, and argued for an ideology considered her Facebook page. Major news organizations reported that “conservative,” he is portrayed as no one’s responsibility. In the videos were fraudulent, but Connell published an article fact, as I learned from hours of speaking with Dear, the narra- on the web site of her radio station with the headline, “another tives he learned from Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones and Bill planned parenthood video starring pp of the rockies.” (“PP O’Reilly and countless far-right web sites meshed perfectly of the Rockies” is Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, with his paranoid delusions, misogynist beliefs, and violent which operates the Colorado Springs clinic.) “I am almost at fantasies. The right-wing media didn’t just tell him what he my tipping point,” she wrote. wanted to hear. They brought authority and detail to a world As Dear grew more comfortable with me, his diatribes turned he was convinced was tormenting him. They were his shelter from abortion to government surveillance. When I asked him how and his inspiration, his only real community. the “feds”—his favorite term—could monitor him so closely, he “I’m a loner,” Dear told me. “I don’t talk to anyone. I just pointed to Alex Jones, another right-wing radio host he followed found this stuff searching web sites. What the real truth is.” closely. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, has called Jones “the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America.” On Infowars, a web site run by Jones, Dear learned about an FBI program called InfraGard. Started in A FEW DAYS after Dear attacked Planned Parenthood, 1996, InfraGard connects local law enforcement agencies, U.S. I wrote to him at the El Paso County Jail, where he was being businesses, and universities with information about possible

ANDY CROSS-POOL/GETTY ANDY held. In 1998, an anti-abortion extremist named James Charles terrorist threats. To Jones, InfraGard is a government conspiracy

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 37 that pays Americans to spy on their neighbors. “InfraGard has “Rob put on a tie, went to work, and watched the evening citizen spies everywhere,” Jones warned in a YouTube broadcast news,” Micheau said. But whenever Dear felt slighted, he would in 2012. “It has over 100,000 preachers trained to spy on their lash out. “He was obsessed with revenge,” she said. To retaliate flocks.” Fueled by such fevered claims, Dear concluded that the against a supervisor he felt pushed him too hard, Dear went feds were using InfraGard to track his every move. running in his office clothes so that he stank at work. When Dear also relied on right-wing radio shows to formulate a neighbor pestered him about following their subdivision’s his beliefs about gun violence and mass shootings. He took as parking rules, Dear poured gasoline on the man’s lawn to make the gospel truth the claims of Carl Gallups, a Baptist minister it die. At first, the conflicts remained interpersonal, small, and in Florida who hosts a show called Freedom Friday, that gun contained. Nothing in the wider world seemed to interest Dear. safety advocates had hired Hollywood actors to fake the mass Then he discovered shortwave radio. shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut in 2012 that killed 20 first In those days, thanks to the Fairness Doctrine, major broad- graders. According to Gallups, one actor played “the part of cast outlets were forbidden from running partisan content a grieving father with a woman standing beside him, crying, with ­out providing equal time to opposing views. But on short- slinging snot.” wave channels, right-wing broadcasts were proliferating. Gallups also introduced Dear to the idea that Barack Obama Dear tuned in as often as possible. “That’s what turned me is the Antichrist. In a YouTube video he posted in 2009, Gallups on to the conspiracies and the Bible prophecies,” he recalled. pointed to Luke 10:18: “He said unto them, I beheld Satan fall His favorites included Brother Stair, a Pentecostal minister as lightning from heaven.” The transliteration of the Hebrew who has predicted the end of the world; William Cooper, who word for lightning, Gallups explained, is baraq. The video has preached that aids was a man-made disease; Pete Peters, whom been viewed more than two million times. the- ­Anti ­Defamation League has called a “leading anti-Jewish, “Immediately, I saw this video, and I said, ‘That’s it!’ ’’ Dear anti-minority, and anti-gay propagandist”; and Texe Marrs, told me. “I looked it up in the Bible. And he was right!” It made leader of the Power of Prophecy Ministries, who claimed that no difference to Dear that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and that the New Testament is written in Greek. “You better start thinking,” Dear warned me. “You heard Dear relied on right-wing about Judge Scalia, how they didn’t even do an autopsy. So they took the Supreme Court out of the equation. Now Obama can radio shows to formulate declare martial law. He’s got isis fighting to get troops over here. He’s got a Cuban army. All of our troops are overseas, his beliefs about gun over in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we don’t have enough troops violence and mass here. We’ve got to bring troops from these other countries to help. It’s all a plan. It’s just like Judas betraying Jesus, the spirit shootings. of Satan is from Judas. He says the spirit of Satan will be the Antichrist. Everything is going to be on lockdown!” “The world you describe is an incredibly frightening place,” the federal government committed the Oklahoma City bombing I told Dear. and framed Timothy McVeigh. “You have no concept,” he replied. Dear also became fixated on small magazines devoted to right-wing conspiracies. He spent hours at Barnes & Noble poring over magazines like The Prophecy Club, The Spotlight, and Paranoia, obsessing over their brand of crackpot theorizing: how DEAR WAS BORN into an upper-middle-class family in the Robert Bork confirmation battle was connected to the JFK Charleston, South Carolina, in 1958. His father, Robert Sr., assassination, how the World Trade Organization ran a secret attended the Citadel and worked for a tobacco company. His “Codex Alimentarius,” how the government operated a series mother, Mary, was a health care worker. On the surface, they of Deep Underground Military Bases, how it was planning an seemed to be a conventional family. Yet Dear was always un- “American Hiroshima.” usual. He recalls having a powerful religious experience at age But for Dear, conspiracy magazines and shortwave radio nine, when he claims he was struck by lightning. “The miracle were just gateway drugs. Once the Fairness Doctrine was abol- of the lightning strike,” he calls it. “I saw the vision.” ished by the FCC under Ronald Reagan, radio stations were As Dear grew older, he began to have serious issues with free to air far-right views as often as they liked. On August 1, women. In 1984, when he was 26, he and his girlfriend, Barbara 1988, a talk-show host named Rush Limbaugh began broad­ Micheau, began discussing marriage. Dear brought her home casting nationwide. to meet his family. Over dinner, no one told her that Dear was Limbaugh, with his anti-PC humor and anti-female perspec- already married and had a four-year-old son. When she learned tive, appealed to Dear. He liked to listen in the car, tuning in for the truth, she married him anyway, and her father got him a hours on long trips he took alone, disappearing to the beach job as a management trainee at the local utility. or Atlantic City. At the time, Operation Rescue was staging

38 | NEW REPUBLIC ABOVE Police in Colorado Springs fought an hours-long gun battle with Dear, who had barricaded himself inside the Planned Parenthood clinic. UPPER RIGHT Dear lived in a trailer on a remote mountain plain; his main connection to the outside world was right-wing radio and web sites. LOWER RIGHT The family of police officer Garrett Swasey, one of Dear’s victims, mourn at his funeral.

aggressive protests against abortion clinics, and Limbaugh angrily denounced abortion as a “modern-day holocaust.” Among his first on-air jokes was the “caller abortion”: When someone annoyed him on air, Limbaugh hung up and played the sound of a vacuum cleaner mixed with a choking scream. unlawfully carrying a long-blade knife and a loaded gun. The It was around this time that Dear committed his first act of following year, a woman he met at a mall accused him of raping political vigilantism. One night, he met a local activist who had her at knifepoint. Dear denied the charge, and boasted that spent the day picketing an abortion clinic in Charleston. While his parents paid $25,000 to hire “the biggest lawyer in South they were talking, the woman pointed to a mother with her Carolina” to defend him. Dear failed a polygraph test, but the young daughter, and told Dear that the little girl had recently charges were dropped when a key witness refused to testify. thanked her for talking her mom out of aborting her. In a rage, As he was fighting the rape charge, Dear became obsessed Dear later told his wife, he had gone to the abortion clinic and with an event that had transfixed the right-wing media: the put Super Glue in the door locks. Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas. When federal agents were accused of setting fire to the sect’s compound, killing more than 70 people, Dear called in to a far-right talk show and unleashed an angry rant about the “Federal Bureau of DEAR’S LIFE, meanwhile, began to fall apart. He lost his Incineration.” This, he believes, was the moment when the FBI job in 1989, after repeated confrontations with his co-workers. decided to go after him. He turned violent at home, yanking and shoving his wife if “So I call in to the radio station, and two months later I get she arrived home late from work, slamming her head into a a fake rape charge,” Dear told me. “They studied me and they floor because she had moved his motorcycle helmet. “We had said, ‘OK, here’s his weakness. We’re going to send him one dogs—yellow labs,” Micheau says. “He Tasered them just to see of our fed women, to come on to him, and then we can charge what would happen.” him with rape and put his ass away.’” In 1990, Micheau became pregnant. Not long after that, she Dear, in fact, was accused of the rape before Waco. But in learned that Pam Ross, the woman who would become Dear’s his mind, it was his interaction with the right-wing media that third wife, was also expecting a child by him. “Rob loved preg- transformed him into someone important enough to be targeted nant women,” Micheau says. “He wanted us all to live together.” by the government. Far-right talk shows not only reinforced They separated in 1992, and finally divorced two years later. his views, they gave him a platform to express them. They Dear started getting into legal trouble around this time didn’t care that he was paranoid, or delusional, or violent.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ANDY CROSS/THE DENVER POST/GETTY; COURTESY A.ROBB; STACIE SCOTT/THE GAZETTE. as well. A year before Micheau left him, he was convicted of They thrived on the calls—the more extreme, the better. The

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 39 calls made Dear feel like he was part of something bigger than the internet was a round-the-clock source of affirmation. “He himself. As with Islamic terrorists, the line between religious was hooked—addicted,” his son recalled. “He was all, ‘The fundamentalism and extremist ideology grew blurry. “That’s Illuminati control the world! Contrails control your mind! when Rob started compulsively reading the Bible,” Micheau The CIA started aids! Jenny McCarthy is right about vaccines! recalls. “That’s when he started obsessing about Judgment Day.” George W. and Laura Bush are both lizards!’” Walker stressed to me that the Dears enjoyed a relatively normal family life in Walterboro. Dear sometimes played video games with him and Taylor, and he liked to ride his motorcycle B Y 1995, DEAR was living with Pam Ross in a three- with them while they rode dirt bikes or ATVs. On Sundays, ­bedroom trailer home in Walterboro, South Carolina, with Dear read the Bible with them. “He was my dad,” Walker told their five-year-old son, Taylor, and her son from a previous me. “He was really normal, except for his beliefs.” marriage. Dear says he supported the family by purchasing art Embedded in Dear’s anger against Planned Parenthood was from local artists and selling it to galleries across the region. a deep-seated anger against women. Dear and Ross divorced in But Walker Dear, his son with Micheau, doesn’t recall him as 2001, after an incident of domestic violence. In 2005, he began overly focused on his business. “I don’t exactly remember my posting his profile on dating sites like SexyAds.com. He was dad ever working much,” he told me. What he remembers, interested, according to his posts, in a “discreet relationship, when he visited his father on weekends, was seeing him “glued” casual sex, bdsm, a long-term relationship, spanking.” He was to the television, obsessively watching the latest right-wing in and out of online relationships with women until 2008, broadcaster he was following: Bill O’Reilly. when he met Stephanie Bragg. Fox News had launched in October 1996, a little more than Bragg, whom acquaintances describe as fragile and needy, a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, and O’Reilly was one was a devout Christian with two school-age daughters. After of its biggest on-air talents. “Fox gives voice to people who dating Dear for a year, she left her children and joined Dear in North Carolina, where he lived in an isolated shack in the woods to evade what he believed was persecution by the feds Dear was “glued” to Bill back in South Carolina. Dear did, in fact, have trouble with the law in South Caro- O’Reilly and “addicted” lina, but not at the federal level. One neighbor had called the police to complain that Dear had threatened his life and shot to right-wing sites, his his dog; another filed for a restraining order after he peeped son recalls. “He was all, in her window. Dear’s problems persisted in North Carolina, with complaints that he was abusing and neglecting his dogs. ‘The CIA started aids!’” In 2012, Colorado joined Washington to become the first states to legalize recreational marijuana use. Dear had been a regular user for years. Bragg had a prescription for medical can’t get on other networks,” O’Reilly later told a reporter. marijuana, but her supply was apparently limited, so Dear “When was the last time you saw pro-life people unless they had to buy from weed dealers, which made him nervous. He shot somebody?” Like Limbaugh, O’Reilly devoted lots of air decided to move with Bragg to a remote locale in Colorado, time to denouncing abortions, and those who provided them. where he could avoid federal surveillance and freely grow and At one point, Dear told me it was on O’Reilly’s show that he’d smoke “herb,” his favored term for marijuana. first learned that Planned Parenthood sold baby body parts. Frustrated by his father’s conspiracy theories and strident “One little story,” he said, “and I kept it in my mind.” religiosity, Walker had fallen out of touch with his dad. Then Dear often gets confused over time lines; Fox was not his one day, he turned on the television and saw his father on the introduction to the Planned Parenthood story. But O’Reilly did news for the Planned Parenthood shooting. It was hard to devote show after show—29 in all—to attacking Dr. George Tiller, reconcile his memories of his dad with the wild-eyed murderer the Kansas abortion provider targeted by Operation Rescue. “If being paraded before the cameras. He was especially struck by you want to kill a baby, you hire Tiller,” O’Reilly said. “Pay him shots of Dear’s dilapidated camper. The squalor seemed like a $5,000 up front, and he’ll kill the baby.” O’Reilly also claimed symbol of just how much his father had changed. “Our place that Tiller’s clinic performed abortions on girls as young as ten, in Walterboro wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t a mess,” Walker and did not report the pregnancies to authorities. In 2009, Tiller said. “We lived there.” was murdered during a service at his church by an anti-abortion militant named Scott Roeder. At about the same time he began listening to O’Reilly, Dear also bought his first computer and went on the internet for the THOSE IN THE RIGHT-WING media who traffic in hate first time. For a mind already conditioned to the endless stream and conspiracy theories are quick to deny that they should be of conspiracies and hate-mongering of talk radio and Fox News, held responsible for the consequences of their words. After

40 | NEW REPUBLIC AMERICA’S MADRASSA he said that Dear “realized there is truth here, that babies are being murdered. So he went and acted—but in a lunatic way, rather than within the system.” But when it comes to his terrorism, Dear’s insanity is beside the point. “Forty percent of lone actors who commit terrorist acts are diagnosed as mentally ill,” says J. Reid Meloy, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Carl Gallups Mandy Connell California in San Diego who develops terrorist assessment It was from Gallups, a Sandy A few months before his tools for the FBI. “Paranoid individuals take what they Hook “truther” who believes rampage, Dear called in to hear in a very literal, concrete, absolutist way. They often the school shooting was a Connell’s radio show, where don’t understand sarcasm. It can excite them to violence.” hoax, that Dear learned that he’d first heard about the President Obama is Satan. “baby body parts” videos. Dear talked often about a group called Army of God, a Christian terrorist organization that has engaged in murder and kidnapping against abortion providers. He loved its web site and felt a kinship with its leaders. After the Planned Parenthood massacre, when Dear was in prison, he received a letter he said was full of praise from Donald Spitz, a spokesman for the group. I told Dear that last spring, Army of God posted a chill- ing homage to him on its web site. It showed a photograph Alex Jones Texe Marrs of Dear at the time of his arrest, with a caption that read, The conspiracy theories on A shortwave radio host and “I am a warrior for the babies!” Dear was pleased about Jones’s web site, Infowars, favorite of Dear, Marrs claims fueled Dear’s delusional fears the federal government this, but not satisfied. about surveillance by the framed Timothy McVeigh for “Does it say anything else?” he asked. federal government. the Oklahoma City bombing. Dear had written to Spitz, and he was eager to know if Spitz had complied with his request to post the passage from Luke 10:18 that proved Barack Obama was Satan. When I told him it wasn’t there, he seemed annoyed, but also validated. “Spitz is a fed,” he said. “I knew he was a fed because he said he couldn’t afford to call me. Yeah, right.” It would be easy to dismiss Dear as an unstable man Rush Limbaugh Bill O’Reilly who was driven by his mental illness rather than an org­ Limbaugh made anti-abortion O’Reilly’s unrelenting on-air anized ideology. After his arrest, psychiatrists ­diagnosed rhetoric mainstream; Dear attacks on George Tiller, an him with a “delusional disorder, persecutory type.” But liked to tune in to his anti- abortion doctor murdered by government rants for hours on an extremist in 2009, had a Dear’s tendency toward violence was shaped and steered long drives, alone in his car. powerful impact on Dear. by outside forces every bit as much as the foreign terror- ists we have come to fear. In its calls for an anti-abortion jihad, Army of God sounds eerily similar to isis. “We des- Waco, Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves to predict that “the perately need single lone rangers out there, who will commit to second violent American revolution” was imminent. Yet two destroy one abortuary before they die,” the group has declared. weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing, he published an op-ed Terrorism respects no borders and hews to no one ideology in Newsweek entitled “Why I’m Not to Blame.” After running or religion. The raw materials it needs are always at hand. All 29 shows attacking George Tiller as “Tiller the Baby Killer” and it requires is the proper vehicle to drive itself into the world. saying there was “a special place in hell” for him, Bill O’Reilly For Dear, the right-wing media and the extremism they cham- dismissed any accountability for inciting the doctor’s murder: pion gave his delusions and rage a sense of higher purpose—­one “I reported extensively on Tiller and after he was assassinated couched in a religiosity every bit as dangerous as that of Islamic by a man named Scott Roeder, some far-left loons blamed me.” fundamentalists. “I’m what you call the guys who fought the I contacted many of Dear’s media role models to ask if they crusade,” Dear told me. “I prayed to God to let me be David from saw any connection between the beliefs they advocated on-air the Bible, a mighty man of valor. I prayed and he granted my and online and what Dear had done after he listened to them. wish.” The voices Dear heard came not from above, but from his Only Troy Newman, from Operation Rescue, agreed to speak radio and his television and his computer. They told him whom with me. He denied that his group’s rhetoric had spurred Dear to think of as evil. They told him whom to hate. “That’s the only in any way, but he acknowledged the power of its anti-abortion reason I had the strength to do what I had to do,” he says. “I’m

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY PHOTO S. SAVENOK/GETTY; X 3; ILYA JUSTIN LUBIN/NBCU PHOTO BANK/GETTY; LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS. message. When we talked about the Planned Parenthood videos, nothing special.” a

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 41 THE GREAT ABANDONMENT How decades of economic hardship and neglect have turned Nebraska’s once-proud farming towns into Donald Trump country.

42 | NEW REPUBLIC ↓ An abandoned home off Highway 23 near Hayes Center, Nebraska. Settlers flocked to the state in the 1860s, lured by the promise of free farmland. Today, one in five homes in the area stands vacant, and the population has plunged 21 percent since 1990.

THE GREAT ABANDONMENT

BY TED GENOWAYS PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER/VII

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 43 FIRST, REMEMBER: Nebraska is a place. It sits square as an anvil in the center of our maps, and yet, somehow, people on the coasts seem to forget it exists. Maybe that’s because Nebraska is also a land of ghosts, of small towns dwindling to the point where, in another generation, they might disappear altogether. It wasn’t always so. The Homestead Act of 1862 brought more than a million people to the state— among them my ancestors, who farmed along the Platte River and opened general stores in Aurora, Murphy, and Giltner. But the act, which deeded 160 acres to anyone who would build a home and raise a crop, was no match for the drought of the 1890s and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. People fled in droves. Technology, which promised to save small towns, only contributed to their demise. Combines, tractors, and trucks meant fewer men were needed to plant and harvest; hybrid crops, herbicides, and pesticides meant fewer hands were needed to tend rows in the summers. With each catastrophe—drought in the 1950s, the Farm Crisis of the 1980s—farms consolidated. “People used to have an 80-acre farm and raise a family,” a cousin of mine lamented. Now farms encompass thousands of acres and are often run by a single family. My father jokes that people in his hometown came to believe in a flat Earth: All their children left and never returned. Those who do stay, those documented by photographer Danny Wilcox Frazier, become landlocked castaways, marooned in crumbling farmhouses amid oceans of corn and soybeans. As tax revenues dwindle, rural communities struggle to provide adequate hospitals and schools. The worse things get, the more people go. And the more people go, the redder the state has become: Nebraska has not voted for a Democrat for president since LBJ. Today, my father’s hometown is half the size it was when he was a kid. The restaurant where we’d go with my grandparents is boarded up. The shops are closed. The old movie theater is long gone. People feel abandoned and forgotten. There was a lot of talk during the past election about this demographic and the motives behind their voting. If you really want to understand, remember: Nebraska is a place, with people, not just precincts. Then ask yourself: If this were your home, how would you feel? a

→ A teenage couple dance at the wedding reception of two ranch hands in Sioux County. The number of immigrants in Nebraska has grown by 50 percent since 2000, but Sioux remains 96 percent white. Donald Trump won the county by 74 points.

44 | NEW REPUBLIC THE GREAT ABANDONMENT

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 45 ← Drinkers at the Longhorn Saloon, a hunter and biker bar in Harrison, population 247. The Longhorn is the only bar in town, and almost everyone ends up gathering there. But few young people stop by: More than a third of the county’s residents are older than 55.

← Gottsch Feedyard, near the town of Red Cloud, best known as the home of frontier novelist Willa Cather. The Gottsch yard alone feeds 60,000 head of beef cattle. Today, only 1,000 Nebraskans work as cattle hands—fewer than librarians or janitorial workers.

→ Wayne Gerlach, 92, a retired postal worker from Cowles. Gerlach added a second steering wheel to his car for mail deliveries. Only 30 people remain in Cowles, and the county has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1910. “Sooner or later, I’ll have to move,” Gerlach says. “Might be tomorrow, might be a year, but I know I’ll have to.”

46 | NEW REPUBLIC THE GREAT ABANDONMENT

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 47 48 | NEW REPUBLIC THE GREAT ABANDONMENT

← Ted Morrow, who retired from a company that makes irrigation machinery, outside his home in Cowles. Morrow helped end the way of life that once defined this part of the country: Industrialized irrigation opened more land to farming, but eliminated thousands of jobs. Since 1950, the number of farms in Nebraska has been cut in half, while their size has more than doubled.

↑ McKenize and Stephen McIntyre shop with their daughter, Tye, at the sole grocery store in Hayes Center. The nearest supermarket—a Walmart—is nearly an hour away. Social isolation breeds political uniformity. “If under 100 percent of the county voted for Trump,” Stephen says, “I would be very surprised.” He wasn’t far off: It was 93 percent.

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A Trip of One’s Own Microdosing has brought back LSD. So why can’t mothers join the fun?

BY CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS

ONE DAY, WHILE driving home to Berkeley after a poorly at- under the tongue. Microdosing advocates argue that LSD is tended reading in Marin County, Ayelet Waldman found herself a safer and more reliable alternative to many prescription weighing the option of pulling the steering wheel hard to the drugs, particularly those intended to treat mood disorders, right and plunging off the Richmond Bridge. “The thought was depression, anxiety, and adhd. Respite is what Waldman is more than idle, less than concrete,” she recalls, “and though I chasing, a gradual tempering, drop by drop, of our fractured, managed to make it across safely, I was so shaken by the ex- frazzled selves. If the 1960s were about touching the void, perience that I called a psychiatrist.” The doctor diagnosed her microdosing is about pulling back from it. with a form of bipolar disorder, and Waldman began a fraught, I’d been on prescription antidepressants for about a year seven-year journey to alter her mood through prescription when I opened Waldman’s book. To say that mental illness runs drugs, a list so long that she was “able to recite symptoms in my own family would be an understatement. After listen- and side effects for anything … shrinks might prescribe, like ing to a very abridged version of my family medical history, the soothing voice-over at the end of a drug commercial.” She my psychiatrist called me the “poster child for mental health was on a search for something, anything, that would quiet the screenings before marriage.” My sister, gripped with undiag- voices, the maniac creativity, the irritable moods that caused nosed postpartum psychosis, once fantasized, as Waldman her to melt down over the smallest mistakes. That’s when she did, about driving off a bridge with her infant daughter in the began taking LSD. car, and my mother killed herself by overdosing on OxyCon- Lysergic acid diethylamide is in the midst of a renaissance tin and other legal drugs a month before I graduated from of sorts, a nonprescription throwback for an overmedicated college. Battle is the stock verb of illness—we battle cancer, generation. As pot goes mainstream—the natural solution to a depression, and addiction. But I cannot in good conscience variety of ills—LSD is close behind, in popularity if not legality. say I battle my depression and anxiety. Rather, my madness By 1970, two years after possession of LSD became illegal, an and I are conjoined twins, fused at the head and hip: Together estimated two million Americans had used the drug; by 2015, always, we lurch along in an adequate, improvised shuffle. more than 25 million had. In A Really Good Day: How Micro- Like Waldman, I worry about the negative effects of taking dosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and an ssri long-term. The daughter of hippies, a flower grand- My Life, Waldman explores her own experience of taking teeny, child, I don’t trust the pharmaceutical industry to prioritize “subtherapeutic” doses of the drug. This “microdose,” about my wellness over their profits. I’ve long agreed with Waldman a tenth of your typical trip-inducing tab, is “low enough to that “practitioners, even the best ones, still lack a complete elicit no adverse side effects, yet high enough for a measurable understanding of the complexity and nuance both of the many cellular response.” Her book is both a diatribe and diary. She psychological mood disorders and of the many pharmaceuticals offers a polemic on a racist War on Drugs that allows her, a available to treat them.” So when I finished the prologue to middle-class white woman, to use illegal substances with ease, A Really Good Day, I set the book down and left my therapist as well as a daily record of the improved mood and increased focus she experiences each time she takes two drops of acid ILLUSTRATION BY TRAN NGUYEN

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 51 REVIEW a voicemail announcing my plan to wean myself off Celexa. the legal supply of LSD. The result was a black market rife with Then I went on reading. I did not mention the new-old mystic’s unregulated doses, experimentation, and contamination. During medicine beckoning me—the third eye, the open door. the “Pink Wedge Incident” of 1967, a shipment of LSD laced with another psychotropic drug caused a rash of panic attacks IT’S SURPRISINGLY SIMPLE to get LSD. I asked a few friends, in Haight-Ashbury. who asked a few of their friends, and the envelope arrived If cocaine kept Wall Street humming at all hours in the just a few days later with a friendly, letter-pressed postcard. 1980s, LSD today keeps the ideas flowing in Silicon Valley’s Spliced into the card, via some impressive amateur surgery, creative economy, solving problems that require both con- was a tiny blue plastic envelope. Inside that was a piece of plain centration and connectedness. Microdosing is offered as an white paper divided with black lines into ten perfect squares: improvement over Adderall and Ritalin, the analog ancestors ten tabs of acid, 100 microdoses at a dollar each. of modern-day smart drugs. Old-school adhd methamphet- LSD has been illegal in the state of California since 1966, amines, it would seem, clang unpleasantly against Silicon six months after LIFE magazine published a scare piece about Valley’s namaste vibe. Today’s microdosers “are not looking “the exploding threat of the mind drug that got out of control.” to have a trip with their friends out in nature,” an anonymous At its invention, LSD was highly controlled—first synthesized doser recently explained to Wired. “They are looking at it in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, an employee of as a tool.” One software developer speaks of microdosing as what is now Novartis, one of the world’s largest multinational though it were a widget one might download for “optimizing pharmaceutical companies. Hofmann was attempting to isolate mental activities.” The cynic’s working definition might read, and replicate a profitable analeptic based on compounds that “microdose (noun): the practice of ingesting a small dose of a naturally occur in ergot, a fungus. He did not discover LSD’s once-countercultural drug that made everyone from Nixon to psychoactive properties until five years later, when he ran a Joan Didion flinch in order to make worker bees more produc- self-experiment in which he took 250 micrograms of acid— ­ tive; Timothy Leary’s worst nightmare; a late-capitalist miracle.” 25 times the amount Waldman takes every few days—went for Productivity is not Waldman’s purpose—pre-LSD, she a bike ride, and thought he was dying. could write a book in a matter of weeks—but neither is non-­ “My surroundings had now transformed themselves in more productivity, the glazed-over stoner effect. Waldman is instead terrifying ways,” Hofmann recounted. “The lady next door, whom insistent on the therapeutic value of microdosing. There is I scarcely recognized, brought me milk—in the course of the nothing, it seems, that LSD isn’t good for, no worry it can’t evening I drank more than two liters. She was no longer Mrs. R, soothe, no problem it can’t solve. Once an afternoon delight but rather a malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask.” By midcentury, LSD had made its way to American hospi- tals, where researchers intended to use it to induce and study If cocaine kept Wall Street psychosis. Inconveniently, doctors and staff observed that the humming at all hours in the 1980s, drug meant to make people insane was more likely to induce in patients a sense of well-being, or even euphoria. The transition LSD today keeps the ideas flowing of LSD from lab to therapist’s couch was spurred by Dr. Sidney in Silicon Valley. Cohen, who administered LSD to himself and other “normal people” at the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles. In 1956, Cohen filmed a housewife before she took LSD: She sits in her good dress with good posture and a perfect manicure, visi- bly pleased when Cohen informs her that she is a “very stable and well-balanced person” according to of recreational trippers and high-school seniors, LSD has be- a “series of psychological tests.” Then she come a drug of power users: engineers, salesmen, computer drinks a glass of water laced with LSD. scientists, entrepreneurs, writers, the anxious, the depressed. Soon the drug kicks in, and her move- The trip isn’t the thing; instead, microdosing helps maintain ments grow playful and sensual. “It’s like a fragmented, frenzied order, little by little, one day at a time. you’re released, or you’re free,” she says, her face turned heavenward. “Everything IN HER BOOK, Waldman is good company; she is candid, goofy, is one. You have nothing to do with it. I am and beyond knowledgeable about the drugs she takes to stabilize one with what I am.” When was the last her mood, and the risks she takes in procuring them. Her ex- time you felt at one with what you are? pertise on the subject is twofold: She is a former federal public Researchers suspected that LSD could defender and a law school professor who taught a seminar on A REALLY GOOD DAY facilitate creativity, cure alcoholism, and the War on Drugs at the University of California at Berkeley. BY AYELET WALDMAN cheer sullen grad students. But in 1962, Waldman goes to great length to establish her averageness. Knopf, 256 pp., $25.95 The FDA tightened regulations on the She has “never been what you would call a regular drug user,” approval of new drugs, which restricted never bought illegal drugs from a dealer, barely even drinks.

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loss of spinal fluid allegedly caused by mdma, which Waldman and her husband use to supplement their conventional couples therapy. Eventually, Waldman’s honest and intelligent ethos takes the form of a humane, well-reasoned, and absolutely necessary argument for a major overhaul of America’s drug policy. The book triumphantly coheres in a lucid manifesto of how and why the racist, immoral undertaking called the War on Drugs has failed. Drug criminalization has long been an effective tool of marginalization in America. John Hudak’s Marijuana: A Short History explains how the use of the word “marijuana” was itself a propaganda tool advanced by fearmongers to “vilify” Mexicans and Mexican-Americans after the Spanish-American War, so much so that some cannabis reformers still refuse to use the word. But of all the lies Mr. and Mrs. Reagan told me, the one I was most gratified and embarrassed to have Waldman demolish is the long-held assertion that most recreational drug users in America are black. White people, in fact, do more drugs than black people, and this is true using a variety of metrics. That I needed, at least on some level, this fact-based corrective has everything to do with my own whiteness, which still falls prey to myths about black people that are left unchecked by A dancer on LSD in 1966. Today, microdosing the hallucinogenic drug my everyday, white experiences. offers an alternative to mood-altering medications like Prozac. Waldman adds her voice to those of doctors, therapists, and researchers in opposition to scientific censorship and in Sure, she’s done some drugs—“more than some people my age, support of “a world free of a drug market controlled by vicious less than Presidents Obama and Bush”—but Waldman is at pains criminal syndicates, where hundreds of thousands are mur- to present herself as “the mom surreptitiously checking her dered and hundreds of thousands more die of drug reactions phone at Back to School Night, the woman standing behind and overdose, where millions are incarcerated, and where you in Starbucks ordering the skinny vanilla latte.” She rhe- none can gain legal access to drugs that have the potential for torically aligns herself with women who are, as her kids would markedly improving their lives.” She has a convert in me. Yet say “totally basic,” while exposing a slightly condescending and I found her book at times too careful. Her lawyerly argument very white notion of who those women are. By the book’s end, refines rather than resists the binary between medicinal and however, these apparently unintended missteps turn out to recreational drugs, a rigid distinction long held by squares be a conscious strategy deployed for a higher purpose. Come and used in some states to craft legislation decriminalizing for mom’s mental health memoir, stay for the careful and medical marijuana, thereby preempting all-out legalization. convincing polemic against the War on Drugs. Waldman includes powerful anecdotes of the injustices visited I graduated from high school in 2002, when LSD use among by federal drug policy upon her former clients, typically people 18-year-olds was on the decline after hitting an all-time high of color. But what really stings is her decision to aim her book in 1996. I remember learning the origins of the drug in middle at affluent moms.A Really Good Day is a passionate, persuasive school, where I was named “Outstanding D.A.R.E Student of argument for drug decriminalization disguised as an accessible the Year,” an honor that came with a brand-new satin jacket memoir about one mother’s zany LSD experiment. emblazoned with the D.A.R.E logo. The story we were told went something like this: LSD is a dangerous chemical developed I CONSIDER MY OWN zany experiment. I’ve flipped over the by the U.S. military as a weapon of psychological warfare. postcard every few days, checking to see that the LSD blotter The army had indeed conducted experiments with LSD on its paper is still there. The truth is, I haven’t yet found the time to soldiers in the 1950s through the 1970s, as had the CIA. But switch to another alteration in mood. Instead, as I transition psychosis, it turned out, was not the best instrument of war. from my antidepressant, I reach for a more available form Patients dosed with LSD would laugh and cry, and reported of microdosing: marijuana. Like LSD, marijuana has what seeing and hearing things. Old stigmas die hard: Today, D.A.R.E Waldman calls “a very low toxicity level and a large safety still lists LSD as a “potent hallucinogen that has a high poten- range.” It also enables me to read and write again after a long, tial for abuse and currently has no accepted medical use in melancholy drought. treatment in the United States.” If being a woman is crazy-making, Waldman argues, being Waldman vanquishes many of D.A.R.E’s “just say no” a woman who makes art is a kind of schizophrenia. “Though

LAWRENCE SCHILLER/POLARIS COMMUNICATIONS/GETTY COMMUNICATIONS/GETTY SCHILLER/POLARIS LAWRENCE boogeymen, among them meth mouth, acid flashbacks, and the I am proud of my books, there is a vicious voice in my head

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 53 REVIEW that tells me I’m worthless,” she writes. “Every single time I husbands and drug-friendly families. My mother often spoke sit down to work, I hear that ugly whisper in my ear.” I suspect of smoking pot and taking LSD while pregnant with me—they most female artists have at least two voices in their head: one helped her quit smoking and drinking—and K had recently voice saying we’re either property or prey, and another voice, discovered a poem written by her mother when K and her two perhaps our own, which says only one word, one syllable, but sisters were very young, an ode to “grass in the box / bread in says it again and again and again, a relentless chugging: make, the oven.” Wake and bake was practically our birthright. make, make, make. Art-making, drug-enjoying mothers are our matrilineage, As a diary, A Really Good Day is unabashedly indebted yet K and I hardly ever see this part of ourselves reflected in to Virginia Woolf. Waldman searches for a room of her own the broader culture. If there’s anyone we identify with, it would throughout, tired of squatting in her husband’s studio, longing be Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana, despite their ecstatic childless- for an office of her own where she can paint the dark walls ness. It’s more likely for a pregnant woman or a mother to be white, where she can calm her voices of creative doubt. Wald- invited to pass the dutch at a party than on TV. Everyone in man’s fears of a bad trip—“The prospect of being locked in pop culture gets to blaze with impunity, it would seem, except my own ugly mind terrifies me”—echo those of the unnamed mothers. Call it the grass ceiling. narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gil- man’s late-nineteenth-century short story of a woman whose “IT’S A TRICKY THING, acid,” a guy called Max tells a young postpartum bed rest becomes a prison of paternalism and Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her chronicle insanity. (Her plight, “hysterical neurosis,” was in the Diag- of a summer in the Haight. “When a chick takes acid, it’s all nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980.) right if she’s alone, but when she’s living with somebody this Together, these mixed messages give female artists an ironic edginess comes out.” Max doesn’t wonder what it does to a advantage: We are constantly asked to see the world through woman to flee her parents’ home as a teenager in 1967 and another’s gaze. But what if our art-making makes us mad? hitch to San Francisco and arrive at the so-called revolution, Waldman looks back on a time when she wrote three novels only to find herself responsible for the cooking, the cleaning, in six months with concern rather than pride: “This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.” There are many Everyone in pop culture gets to words she doesn’t use to describe her tremendous creativity, blaze with impunity, it would among them inspiration and genius. Waldman emphasizes—and overemphasizes—that every drug she takes has a therapeutic seem, except mothers. Call it the purpose. If a person uses drugs to relieve physical or psycho- grass ceiling. logical pain, to alleviate a frozen shoulder, nausea from chemo, or anxiety, isn’t she doing so in order to be happy? A Really Good Day’s focus on the cessation of pain reads like hard-learned rhetorical savvy from a writer who knows all too well how society trains women, especially mothers, to turn on each other. Waldman lived through a public shaming the child-rearing. He’s not what you would call enlightened, before outrage theater was the admitted business model of the that Max. Yet I think he’s onto something. I remember Dr. internet: In 2005, she published an essay in The New York Times Cohen’s experiments on that “normal” woman, filmed almost declaring her supreme love for her husband over their four like a freak show: This drug is so powerful it can ignite even the children, earning her the ire of haters everywhere. Waldman imagination of a dunderheaded housewife. has plenty of pain—pain that microdosing LSD undeniably Didion offered “society’s atomization” as an explanation soothes—but what about pleasure? Can’t mothers also enjoy for Haight-Ashbury, and the timely image stuck. Ours too drugs? And what if those of us who already do could admit to is a fractured time, perhaps even a shattered time, a time of it without apology? forever war with a rising generation of young people poised A friend I’ll call K, a writer and a publicist at an indepen- to inherit a ruined planet and forced to divest from the values dent press, came for a visit recently. Our husbands were away, that have left them worse off than their parents: consumption, working, and they had left us to parent solo for the weekend. inequality, selfishness, and greed. Perhaps this is the occasion Instead, K came over so we could pool our mothering re- for the reemergence of mind-altering drugs in an unexpected sources. On Saturday, the children woke us at 6 a.m., and societal strata. Illegal and semilegal drugs promise all sorts we struggled to feed them breakfast. By 7 a.m., K and I each of salve: spiritual, artistic, a surrendered peace between our popped a marijuana edible from my stash. It was going to be bifurcated, hysterical selves, maybe even the psychic melding a very good day, damn it. of our fractious existence into something whole, something K and I were not microdosing for a sub-perceptual experience. healed, something beautifully beyond words. We wanted to have fun and be good moms while having that The dying have already begun to microdose. Doctors are fun. We are both regular recreational drug users with enlightened starting to use LSD and psilocybin mushrooms in palliative

54 | NEW REPUBLIC care—a category of caretaking that should include most women, most artists, and all parents of small children. How about rec- reational weed and ’shrooms for all adults, and a prescription for LSD for every new mother? Put it in the cucumber water at yoga, the cold-pressed watermelon juice at the farmers mar- Democracy ket. Drop a tab into our epidurals. We could—and Waldman A Case Study would say should—work toward making this world a little less David A. Moss escape-worthy. “[These] well-documented, I am writing this a little high, my daughter napping across accessible essays present the the hall of our house with all its original woodwork. My sister prickly challenges facing the did not drive off a bridge. She suffered two years of severe rapidly changing American postpartum depression and a divorce rather than take prescrip- democracy, for lawmakers tion antidepressants, which were very risky for someone with and citizens alike . . . A her history, yet her only legal option for help. She is thriving fresh presentation of how now, but she was in such pain for so long. ‘democracy in America has She’d seen our mother yanked by widowhood, poverty, always been a contact sport.’“ and the mysteries of her chemical brain into a depression —Kirkus Reviews that ssris couldn’t touch. She’d seen our mother prescribed (starred review) legal heroin for pain associated with Lyme disease—saw, as I Belknap Press | $35.00 did, the pills not yet dissolved on her tongue when she would overdose, which was often. What if my sister had been offered microdosing? What if our mother had? Courting Death It’s been two weeks since I called my therapist. I’m entire- The Supreme Court and ly off my antidepressants, smoking lots of weed, and more Capital Punishment curious than ever about the promises of LSD. I imagine Joan Carol S. Steiker • Didion reporting from the Haight in 2017, using her iPhone Jordan M. Steiker to record interviews, checking Reddit to see what molly is, texting her friends back in Berkeley to let them know “[The Steikers] have brilliantly she’s safe, seeing which of these hang-up-free fellows are deˆined—in language on Tinder. In 1967, Didion’s shattered society had distinct accessible to the general edges, often sharp ones. Today, those previously discrete reader—the massive pieces of experience—­the local, the global, the personal, the dysfunction of the current political—­are often indistinguishable. News and entertain- system and the course that a ment merge into infotainment. On college campuses, free future Supreme Court could speech and trigger warnings intertwine beyond recognition. take to do away with it.” Corporations are people; the current political scene is a long, —Michael Meltsner, painful flashback. In the anemic blue light of the internet, Hufington Post these heated spheres glob together like the contents of a Belknap Press | $29.95 lava lamp, swirling and surging with humor and fear, inter- connectedness as both philosophy and aesthetic. Our feed, Virtual Competition we call it—a sustaining, scrolling blur of information and misinformation, personalized, of indecipherable autonomy, The Promise and Perils at once alienating and the source of our collective identity, of the Algorithm-Driven such as it is. I watch myself transmogrified by media, itself Economy made by and for people and bots, and I watch it warp others. Ariel Ezrachi • How many times a day do I find myself thinking:Is this real? Maurice E. Stucke Or, colloquially: Am I tripping? “When the masses get mad enough, perhaps they’ll elect Being alive and paying attention in this moment is often a new trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt for the digital era. In hallucinatory. I’ve heard people say that nothing makes sense the meantime, we can hope the ideas discussed in Virtual of the senseless like LSD. I, for one, sure could use a sense of Competition get on the political agenda.” oneness, of unity and contentment, some way to accept and —Barry Nalebuff, Science forgive and love this entire fucked, fracked, and fractured universe. I keep my postcard of LSD in a recipe box on a high $29.95 shelf in my kitchen. The promise of oneness beckons, and I’ll soon abide. a HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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BOOKS he loves me not—still riveted by the high drama and pitched emotion of courtship and passion.” Years later, she and her husband laugh together over the incident, “But the laughter is its own edgy commentary on how things have changed … how the two people who smile at this joke are indelibly stained with each other’s expectations and disappointments, how who we are is a composite of who we might have been refracted through the lens of whom we married.” As for the notoriously unsentimental Natalia Ginzburg, she begins with an astonishing laundry list of the differ­ences—some vital, some trivial—between her and her husband: “He always feels hot, I always feel cold.... He loves the theater, painting, music, especially music. I do not understand music at all, painting doesn’t mean much to me, and I get bored at the theater.” Soon the list becomes so stark the reader cannot help wondering how on earth they ever managed to live together. Then, at the very last, Ginzburg pulls the whole piece togeth- er with an evocation of how once upon a time, very long ago, these two, almost strangers to one another, took an evening walk together and, while each found the other attractive, they were equally “ready to say goodbye to one another forever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.” Only they didn’t, and here, more than two decades later, they were. Over the years, Ginzburg has often marveled at the fact that “he and I” fell randomly together when it was just as possible to have fallen randomly apart. It is the very randomness of their des- Tied in Knots tiny that has held her attention over time; the randomness of The modern marriage is an life itself that got cemented into a relationship that somehow became a marriage. elaborate feat of performance. In each essay, the writer seems, as she writes, to be dis- covering the mysterious in the familiar. The more she con- BY VIVIAN GORNICK templates the everydayness of her life, the more amazed she becomes. Stunned, in fact. Stunned by what it actually means: being married. When people live together without the benefit FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO, the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg of the legal tie, there is often talk of the anxiety of not being wrote an essay about marriage called “He and I.” Thirty years fully committed; but when they are legally bound, and have after that, the American journalist Lynn Darling wrote one now become “husband” and “wife,” the psychological power called “For Better and Worse.” The titles alone make these attached to no longer beginning and ending with oneself in pieces sound as though they might belong in a “Can This the eyes of civil society is felt 24-7. Marriage Be Saved?” column—but they don’t. Both grew out In both the Ginzburg and the Darling essay, the shock of of raw, unmediated experience, and both are saturated in a the quotidian is central to the internal action of the piece. visceral reality that reaches beyond marital complaint into the It’s extraordinary, the writing seems to say, this compelling territory of existential testimony. need to rationalize the trade-offs, endure the intermingling of The American announces straight off, “When I was single, contradictory emotions—admiration, dislike, desire, distrust, I equated marriage with drowning: Your identity disappeared, stimulation and boredom, exile and ease—none of which will your privacy was invaded, your self submerged. After I married, ever separate out; and all because of the blind hunger to mate I found out that I was right; what I hadn’t known was how much that, without exception, characterizes animal life. of an amphibian I could be.” She adds to this a long recital of the surprises (pleasant and otherwise) that the coming years MARRIAGE AS A FINE ART is a book of conversations between were to hold, including the one that delivered an angry shock the celebrated French power couple Julia Kristeva and Philippe during their first year together. Sollers, in which they open themselves to a barrage of questions When Darling’s husband bought her red bathroom towels about their own marriage. This subject matched with these for Valentine’s Day, she cried because she thought the honey- participants must seem highly suspect to many: Kristeva is a moon was over. “We were not really married then,” she observes ruefully, “we were still in teen-romance mode—he loves me, ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ DA LOBA

56 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW world-famous psychoanalyst and feminist theorist and Philippe Kristeva, especially, sins on this score. When asked how Sollers a novelist, critic, and magazine editor well known in she herself would respond to a clear instance of infidelity, France. The couple has been married for 50 years, and has for Kristeva observes, “In male-female relations, you can engage just as long been part of an elite circle of intellectual theorists— in ‘outside’ friendships that are sexual and sensual while still including such figures as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and respecting the body and sensitivities of your main partner”— Jacques Lacan—where defending marriage as such is the last and adds that she herself has never known jealousy and thus thing on anyone’s agenda. So what were these two now up to? could never feel betrayed. “To feel betrayed,” she clarifies, In her preface to the book, Kristeva promises “to tell all “implies zero self-confidence, a narcissism so battered that about a given passion, with precision, without shame or shirk- the slightest affirmation of the other person’s individuality is ing, without altering the past or embellishing the present, and felt as a crippling blow.” Huh? steering very clear of the flaunting of sentimental fixations and erotic fantasies so prevalent in the current ‘selfie’ memoir.” THINKING BACK to the Darling and Ginzburg essays, I could not Sollers adds that when “people get married out of calculation or help admiring anew the fearlessness with which those writers delusion, time wears down this fragile normality contract, they evoked the pleasures and pains of that extraordinary contractual get unmarried, they remarry, or else they stagnate in mutual relationship into which two human beings, no matter how many disappointment. Nothing of the sort with us: Both partners times they’ve performed the ceremony, enter as innocents and equally preserve their creative personality, each stimulating emerge initiates. In contrast, Kristeva and Sollers’s presentation the other all the time.” It’s a “new art of love,” he proposes, of their marriage seemed the work of two people who think one that he believes society may not, however, be ready to openness equates with exposure, and thus were more involved accept. Thus, from the very start, both respondents took pains with self-protection than with truth-speaking. to establish their attachment as an example of the intelligence Towards the end of one conversation, however, they each and courage that it takes to rescue the words “husband” and answer a question that breaks their uniform imperturbability “wife” from their ever-increasing lack of prestige. and, inadvertently, delivers a flash of emotional rupture. When Kristeva and Sollers met in Paris in 1966 when she was the hapless interviewer insists that whether to confess or to 25 years old and had just arrived on a fellowship from Bulgaria, and he was 30, already a published writer, and a disaffected son of the French middle class. No sooner had they begun talking It’s a “new art of love,” one than each recognized in the other an exciting kindred spirit. that he believes society may Two years later they were married and, from that day on, the conversation between them has not ceased to flow. This intel- not be ready to accept. lectual companionateness, both aver, has established the kind of equality that is vital to a successful marriage. It also doesn’t hurt that Kristeva and Sollers are equals insofar as material independence goes. Sollers, sounding for all the world like an American feminist as well as a French bourgeois, confides that without equal earning power, “there’s not much use in talking about the sophistication of love or the ins and outs of fidelity.” deny an infidelity is still the great question in marriage, Kriste- Kristeva laughs and assures the reader that Philippe is only va instantly announces, “I don’t believe there can be secrecy.” speaking the simple truth. The problem But Sollers declares, “I don’t believe in transparency ... I’m is both Kristeva and Sollers are incorri- all for secrets.” Secrets, he persists, are the real foundation gible intellectuals, constitutionally inca- of liberty. I could not help recalling that the couple does not pable of a simple anything, much less a live together, and began mischievously to wonder exactly how straightforward answer to a straightfor- open this marriage is; and at what emotional cost; and if the ward question. For each, theory is moth- cost is being paid equally. er’s milk, abstraction the staff of life. To It is my fervent belief that no reader could come away be sure, bits of concrete information—­ from this book with anything like a usable insight into the including the fact, mentioned on the actualities of the Kristeva-Sollers marriage—or, for that book jacket, that Kristeva and Sollers matter, into the institution of marriage itself. At the same do not actually live together—­appear time, I’d also bet that nearly everyone will come away exhil- MARRIAGE AS A FINE ART alongside abstract disquisitions on liter- arated. The performance, so smart, so practiced, is genuinely BY JULIA KRISTEVA ature, social history, analysis, you name entertaining, enacted, as it is, by two people who are openly AND PHILIPPE SOLLERS it. But while their book is characterized energized by showing off to and for one another. Their mu- Columbia University Press, 128 pp., $26.00 by intellectual elegance, not much of tual enjoyment, as they go through their paces, is palpable. what they say has the feel of flesh-and- Clearly, intellectual busking is the glue that binds Kristeva blood reality. and Sollers to one another. a

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58 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

BOOKS through the chain-link fence—that was her. She’s also the author of Eileen, a fast-paced novel she wrote for a popular audience as a means of disseminating her special strain of dissatisfaction with the world as it is. If she made a name for herself and a little cash, she figured, people might pay attention when she published the kind of stories she cares about. “I looked at the dominating paradigm and I abused it,” she wrote last year in The Masters Review. The resulting Ordinary potboiler about a miserable twentysomething caught up in a thrilling mystery with a tall redhead was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, so I suppose her scheme worked. Monsters In Homesick, as with Eileen, Moshfegh has produced a book Ottessa Moshfegh plots twisted that abuses its paradigm. By this I mean that her stories ex- ploit the fun, singsong qualities of storytelling while peddling fairy tales for an age of alienation. a manic savagery that doesn’t fit the medium. Homesick is filled with spidery-faced women and deadly fruits, against BY JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE the backdrop of games arcades and meals at Friendly’s. Like her peers—Tao Lin, Nell Zink, Alexandra Kleeman—Moshfegh writes characters who shrink big feelings into flat utterances, the kind of disaffected tone that feels born of the internet and ALIENATION IS AS OLD as storytelling itself. In earlier days, its mechanisms for emotional distance. The overall effect is we used to explore our feelings of isolation and disconnection of an ancient fairytale performed by bad television actors, the through salivating monsters, because we used to think about kind who seem to be makeup all the way through. the monster as a figure that hovered at the edges of human society, looking in. In Beowulf, Grendel hears the humans EACH STORY in Homesick features a clear protagonist, who may celebrate indoors while he mopes around the moors, alone. be young or old or male or female—the specifics don’t seem to Frankenstein’s monster lurks outside a peasant family’s house, matter. These heroes are never sympathetic, or really even close only to be driven away when they catch sight of him. In the to humane. One character says nothing as a pregnant woman stories we told ourselves, we were careful to keep our darkest begins to bleed in front of her. Another forges her students’ fears on the periphery. standardized test results in between drinking sessions. But But the monsters of today’s art are part of our world. They’re all these protagonists have desires: for sex, for an acting gig, fathers or sisters or neighbors who got turned into zombies by for escape. The stories are all animated by a plot motion that an alien virus or a government experiment run amok. They’re muffles or perverts those desires, delivering a nice injection normal teenagers who happen to be vampires or werewolves of twist. The protagonists may fuck or booze or laze their way or mutants. Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes to our high school. through tightly choreographed plots, but they never quite These new monsters—the ones within us—represent a distinct dance into fulfillment. departure from older genres of literature that were created to As we tour this odd world, we meet substance-abusing explore our existential terror. You couldn’t write Steppenwolf women and gross men (one memorable character speaks to his now—the word “wolf” in the title would girlfriend while “squatting in the bathtub and slathering the make it seem more like a supernatural towel between his legs”). We meet children and the memory thriller than a book about loneliness. of childhood. But we are never taken quite to the beginning In her new collection of short stories, or end of any character’s journey. Motifs drift through these Ottessa Moshfegh reverses our modern stories like bad smells on the air: They don’t organize the expectations of genre by connecting the tales, but they characterize them in an inescapable way. Chief estranged ethos of the existentialists among these motifs are physical deformity, drugs (crack, meth, with the horror of ordinary life in our weed), would-be Hollywood actors and their agents, vague time. Homesick for Another World is a dissatisfaction, teachers and teaching, intellectual disability, compendium of 14 compulsive little sexual depravity, and poisonous berries. tales, each powered by the sense of dis- These last I like the most. In one story, a stuck-up man named HOMESICK FOR tance implied in the book’s title. Sev- Charles recalls in childhood smushing poisonous berries into ANOTHER WORLD: STORIES eral of them have run already in The a pie “up under the crust” for some unlucky eater. In another, BY OTTESSA New Yorker, so the distinctive Moshfegh two siblings play poisonous-berry rituals. (They are the char- MOSHFEGH flavor—­minimal, repulsive, fleshly—may acters who are homesick for another, unspecified world, and Penguin Press, 304 pp., $26.00 already be known to you. That one about the creepy neighbor and the firm thighs ILLUSTRATION BY EDWARD KINSELLA

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 59 REVIEW they close out the book.) The brother puts the berries up his people are at once normal and so viscerally gross (unwashed nose. The sister gathers them up in her skirt, so that later she colostomy bag, cystic acne) that they’re like actual monsters. can make them into a poisonous jam to kill a dangerous man Moshfegh also abuses the fairytale through her hard-­hearted whose name has sprung into her mind unbidden. In a different register. The stories are written in the alienated, toneless style story, a husband puts his lips to his dead wife’s “berry-colored” that has dominated certain types of fiction writing in recent lipstick mark in a final gesture of closeness. The seam of poison decades. The wax-mannequin vibe will feel familiar to you. running through the book makes his lipstick communion seem “Then the girl kissed me on the lips. It was terrible … I wiped my dangerous, icky. Beware berries, love, and lipstick marks. mouth with my napkin.” Moshfegh writes a little like the stone- Makeup in general is repulsive to Moshfegh: She writes cold novelist Tao Lin—there’s the same refusal to comment, the about it with words like “greasy” and “spidery” and “chalky” same lack of exegesis. For a while, critics paid attention to this and “caked.” Her characters often wear their grotesquery on style and the Camusian alienation that fueled it, referring to the outside, which is a quick way to deliver drama into a story. books like Lin’s Taipei and Everything’s Fine by Socrates Adams One beautiful young lady, for example, likes to get “dressed as “alt lit.” But mostly it got chalked up to a fashion, and we up special on the weekends”: stopped thinking about the meaning of emotional minimalism because the alt-lit sensibility simply became the mainstream I liked to wear a trench coat, an old hat like a (see: the wild popularity of Melissa Broder’s @sosadtoday). detective’s, and large, tinted eyeglasses. Underneath Flatness started to feel natural, even obvious. my coat I wore a lacy red teddy. I’d snipped at the Nell Zink writes like this, and so do Helen DeWitt and Al- fabric around the crotch to accommodate my genitals, exandra Kleeman and Tony Tulathimutte. Such books refract which were abnormally swollen due to a pituitary ordinary life into the grotesque surreal through their insistent situation. Underneath the teddy, there were lack of engagement. Although they would find it unpleasant to pennies taped over my nipples and a cutout photo be grouped by name, I’d call them surreal minimalists. These of Charlie Chaplin’s face taped across my pubis. novelists are the grandchildren of Camus, writers who estrange and estrange until some new world comes glowing through the Our heroine with the pituitary situation won’t tell us why old, empty one. The emotions are minimal, but the worlds of she does what she does, but she will tell a one-night stand these novels are colorful and weird. These writers represent that she doesn’t want to “make love,” merely inviting him to the first wave of novelists who truly respond to and incorporate peel Chaplin’s face from her engorged genitals. Why Chap- lin, I don’t know. It’s probably an arcane joke I’m not smart enough to understand. “You have more than meets the eye,” This is what life is like—everything her suitor remarks. means too much, and we don’t Moshfegh repeatedly subjects the human body to extreme experiences: miscarried pregnancies, intellectual disability, know what anybody is thinking, eating disorders. This is not a very modern thing to do, because which makes them creepy. it is cheap and sadistic. But it is a very postmodern thing to do, because no body is blank and healthy and symbolically normal in real life. An older generation of writers may have deployed this imagery out of disgust for the human body, but not Moshfegh. William Burroughs, say, reads like a man severely disappointed by an imperfect world, while Moshfegh the syntactic and emotional influence of the internet, and our aggressively accepts imperfection, even endorses it. In that embrace of them, as readers, represents the same. sense her book is of its time, an age that lovingly insists we Homesick for Another World abuses its chosen genre, just as embrace the imperfect body as flawless. Moshfegh intended, but in the way that Dr. Frankenstein abused his raw materials. Raw and red and sutured, his monster was MOSHFEGH’S STORIES end with heavy clangs (“I got what I tortured into consciousness, to live. As the genre theorist Jeffrey wanted. I walked back home”), which makes them feel like fa- Jerome Cohen writes in his study “Monster Culture (Seven bles. But they’re knitted so airily throughout that they also feel Theses),” monsters are only born at “metaphoric crossroads, like advertisements. They’re infomercial versions of Grimm’s as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, tales, acted out by mannequins. This is what life is like, often— a feeling, and a place.” The monstrous body, Cohen writes, everything means too much, and we don’t know what anybody is pure culture. It is a “construct and a projection,” it “exists else is thinking, which makes them creepy. Objects in the stories only to be read.” Moshfegh has made berries and condos and are at once so prosaic and hyper-symbolic that they feel like bodies into monsters for our time, to teach us something. In artifacts of myth. The wrap of crack cocaine, the stray dildo the end, as Cohen points out, it’s the monsters who end up in the upstate cabin, the genitals thrust “into the cold steam of doing the asking of the culture into which they’re born: “They the refrigerator.” Life is like a horrible story, and Moshfegh’s ask us why we have created them.” a

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BOOKS revolutionary change, Schlesinger had simple advice: “We must grow up now.” Yet Schlesinger had more in common with the dreamers than he wanted to admit. The Vital Center culminates with a call to turn liberalism into “a fighting faith” with a moral grandeur of its own, a creed that could meet the challenges of totalitarianism by calming the psychological anxieties of the age. Schlesinger’s bluster was a thinly concealed disguise for his own idealistic yearnings. He was as hungry for meaning as any dewy-eyed radical; he just found it in an unlikely spot. Pragmatists have their own kind of romanticism, cynics their own kind of naïveté. The twentieth century had no better spokesman for sentimental realism than Schlesinger, who could portray a vote for Adlai Stevenson as an appropriate reaction to existential dread. More than 60 years after The Vital Center’s publication, Schlesinger’s celebration of the rational Democrat caught between ideologues on both sides continues to resonate with a certain type of liberal. Jonathan Chait is most definitely one of those. A commentator for New York and, before that, a longtime editor at the new republic, he is one of the most influential political journalists of our time, and he has used this standing to crusade for a belligerently responsible liberalism. In his latest book, Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Transformed America, Chait has taken on a challenge that provides his distinctive method of argument with its greatest test. Audacity, his early history of the Obama administration, Dead Center turns his lens inward. The subject under the microscope is The failure of “grown up” liberalism. now liberalism itself. CHAIT DOES NOT owe his success to his politics, which are BY TIMOTHY SHENK conventional enough. What distinguishes him from other com- mentators is his knack for distilling the complicated arguments of his opponents into a few essential premises, and then, with AT THE DAWNING of the Cold War, a worried Arthur Schlesinger inexorable logic, taking these streamlined arguments to absurd Jr. looked out on a bleak horizon. The Soviet Union was a threat, conclusions. He does not aim for sympathetic reconstructions but Schlesinger concluded that the roots of the crisis ran much that capture the intricacies of rival positions. Instead, he wants deeper. “Our lives are empty of belief,” he wrote in his 1949 to expose the rickety foundations that high-flown rhetoric book, The Vital Center. “They are lives of quiet desperation.” can obscure. When done poorly, this is straw manning; when Figures he looked to for guidance—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, done well, it has the elegance of a geometric proof. In either Camus—would become staples in the rhetoric of student pro- case, the verve with which he pursues his quarries has made testers a generation later. So too would the concerns he dwelled him one of our great polemicists. upon: loss of community, feelings of powerlessness, a sense The 2016 campaigns supplied a depressing example of his that politics had been drained of meaning. Even the poem he approach at its most effective. Back in 2012, Chait repeatedly selected for his book’s epigraph became a touchstone in the maintained that conservatism had devolved into little more turbulent years to come: “Things fall apart; the center cannot than identity politics for white people. “The glue holding hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” together the contemporary Republican agenda,” he wrote, “is The Vital Center was Schlesinger’s bid to hold on to this ethnocentrism.” Conservative intellectuals shrugged off the tenuous middle ground. Unlike the youthful radicals of the charge. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat complained 1960s, Schlesinger thought the alienation he saw around him that Chait’s “reductionist” and “unfair” thesis used accusa- could only be alleviated by accepting the broad outlines of tions of racism to dismiss legitimate debates over policy. Chait the status quo. Power was more than a necessary evil. When could not, Douthat noted, account for the popularity of Tea properly restrained, it was “the source of wisdom,” a check Party candidates who campaigned on reducing the growth of on the juvenile tendency to seek refuge from a harsh reality in fantasy. For the childish dreamers clinging to hopes for ILLUSTRATIONS BY LORENZO GRITTI

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 61 REVIEW entitlement programs that benefited their elderly, white base. Douthat is a subtler thinker than Chait, but four years later, Donald Trump’s election made it clear who came out ahead in the exchange. Chait has been less successful at interpreting the left, which in his analysis becomes an undifferentiated mass of rabid Marxists, politically correct ideologues, and postmodern academics. Rather than attacking these distinct factions at their strongest points, he lumps them together as products of the illiberal left, and then takes fire at the caricature he has drawn. “Marxist theory does not care about individual rights,” his readers learn, while, “Political correctness borrows its illiberal model of political discourse from Marxism”—as if Marxist theory and political correctness are buddies who meet up for drinks to plot the demise of free speech. Chait has also used this method to explain his own politics. In Chait’s telling, “The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious.” Again, a complex philosophy brimming guys won.” Chait’s foreign policy preferences are more hawk- with internal tensions and burdened with a complex history ish than Obama’s, but he still views Obama’s record as a vast becomes a notion simple enough to serve as a weapon. In this improvement over George W. Bush’s tenure. case, the process of simplification works in liberalism’s favor, It makes for an impressive catalogue—but what Chait has turning it into a parent that hands out gifts (“social freedoms”) to leave out to mount his defense of Obama is just as striking to its obedient children (“blacks, Jews, gays, and women”). as what he includes. On economic policy, Chait passes by the Time and again, Chait sends out stick figures—liberalism, administration’s fumbling efforts to relieve households weighed Marxism, political correctness, conservatism—to do battle down by crippling debts. On health care, Chait downplays while he provides snarky commentary from the sidelines. the fact that large stretches of the country, mostly rural and An early supporter of Obama, Chait sees the outgoing pres- poor, have struggled to attract insurers; enrollment is more ident as a figurehead for the type of liberalism he has spent his than eight million below what the Congressional Budget Of- own career vigorously defending. His assessment of Obama’s fice projected. On national security, readers will search in tenure is straightforward: Barack Obama “has accomplished vain for the name Edward Snowden, or any consideration nearly everything he set out to do, and he set out to do an of the surveillance state that thrived under Obama’s watch. enormous amount.” But Obama isn’t Chait’s real focus. His Chait glides past the escalation in deportations—well over two goal is not to understand the president but to prosecute a case million—that Obama presided over. And a chapter on racial on behalf of the liberal political tradition he believes Obama politics compiles outrageous statements from Rush Limbaugh represents. In the first days of the age of Trump, the vital but doesn’t mention Black Lives Matter. center is again on trial. Though excluded from Chait’s account, such points have be- come standard elements in left-wing evaluations of the Obama CHAIT IS MORE firmly grounded in years, which might be why Chait ignores them. “Liberals found Washington than Schlesinger. Instead the experience of Obama’s presidency mostly dissatisfying,” of dwelling on the philosophical stakes of he claims, “because they find power itself discomfiting”—part Obama’s liberalism, Audacity focuses on of a larger “infantile rejection of the compromises inherent the policy debates that occupied the White in governing” that perennially dogs the left. The tone recalls House, swapping Camus and Dostoevsky Schlesinger’s, and Chait makes the connection explicit when for Chuck Todd and Maureen Dowd. he quotes The Vital Center on how idealistic liberals supposedly Obama did not always get his way, but, dislike “making concrete decisions and being held to account in chapters that make for painful reading for concrete consequences.” Chait recruits the president to after the election of Donald Trump, Chait the team of pragmatic liberals, too. “Obama,” he writes, “has insists that Obama won decisive victories always located himself between the despair of the left and the AUDACITY: HOW in the most important battles. The stimu- obliviousness of the right.” BARACK OBAMA DEFIED HIS CRITICS lus was “a gigantic success”; Obamacare Chait’s posture is the same as Schlesinger’s, but the content AND TRANSFORMED will be remembered as “one of the most of the centrism he champions has shifted. Gone is the radical AMERICA BY JONATHAN CHAIT ambitious and successful social reforms democratic tradition that supplied the moral core of Schlesing- Custom House, in the history of the United States”; and er’s politics. In Schlesinger’s interpretation, radical demo- 272 pp., $27.00 in the war to tame Wall Street, “The good crats led the charge from below; enlightened representatives

62 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW from the upper classes legitimized their outrage; and “the by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough deci- politician-­manager-intellectual type” converted these protests sions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead into policy. For Chait, as for so many liberals today, only “the of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to politician-manager-intellectual type” remains. tackle big problems.” This change expresses itself most vividly in his analysis of Inviting the country to free itself from decades of grind- Obama. At times, he casts Obama as the latest proponent of a ing political warfare, Obama promised to break with politics Democratic agenda that reaches back to Franklin Roosevelt. But as usual. He was speaking to the same hunger for a moral he more often depicts the president as the last of the Rocke- depth in public life that Schlesinger believed democracy needed feller Republicans, a once-flourishing species that Obama’s in the fight against totalitarianism. And he did it by holding own administration nevertheless helped push to extinction. out the possibility of a new connection between the people and “Obama,” Chait argues, “turned the ethos of the banished their government. Obama did not make technocracy lyrical; moderate and liberal Republican wing—with its support for he made reform seem radical. civil rights and openness to well-designed, market-friendly public solutions to social problems—into a highly effective ANY BOOK PUBLISHED in the last month of a president’s tenure blueprint for Democratic governance.” is forced to reckon with the political scene that will form in Chait has also discarded Schlesinger’s faith in political ac- his wake. While Chait was prescient on Trumpism in 2012, tivism, replacing it with a vision of Americans too busy with he underestimated its force in 2016, and was similarly blind- their own lives to bother with politics. Ignorant of the stakes sided by the success of Bernie Sanders’s campaign. According in policy disputes, they become averse to partisan conflict, as- to Chait, “The case for democratic, pluralistic, incremen- suming that the truth must fall between the two sides. Having tal, market-friendly governance rooted in empiricism—i.e., removed voters from the picture, policy-making becomes a liberalism—has never been stronger than now.” It is an odd battle between conservative activists and liberal technocrats, with the business community often serving as tiebreaker. Chait sees the interplay between radicals and policymakers Sentimental realists are never as a burden foisted on Republicans, while Democrats merely more utopian than when they try have to fend off demands from an ineffectual left. Schlesinger had different aspirations. Despite the gloom that to banish idealism from politics. hung over The Vital Center’s view of its time, his account was fundamentally optimistic. He was confident that the United States had set out on a road that would lead it to social democ- racy. Future economic downturns would lead to more New Deals and “capitalist suicide.” His only fear was that liberals would fail to meet the craving for a deeper purpose than trans- actional wheeling and dealing. Chait doesn’t share this anxiety. claim to make in a season of populist upheavals. As the most Schlesinger’s radical democracy has become Chait’s chastened bloodless technocrat should have long ago recognized, no technocracy, with all Schlesinger’s self-righteousness intact. policy achievement is complete without political legitimacy. With that in mind, his claim that Obama’s distinctive genius Deference to the status quo has always been a consequence lay in his ability to “make technocracy lyrical” becomes high of vital centrism. So is a propensity for self-important mono- praise. Today, it could hardly be more damning. logues on pragmatism. Schlesinger described his politics as “less gratifying perhaps than the emotional orgasm of passing FOR A WORK ARGUING that Obama fulfilled the promises he resolutions against Franco, monopoly, or sin, but probably more made to the American people, Audacity displays little concern likely to bring about actual results.” But sentimental realists are with the content of those promises. Chait would rather focus never more utopian than when they try to banish idealism from on the president’s concrete achievements than on his political politics. Democratic leadership does not consist of lecturing thinking, but if the details of Obama’s proposals had been his voters on what they should want. The intersection of politics chief attractions in 2008, he would never have made it past and policy, briefing books and ideology, is where transformative the Democratic primary. During the 2008 contest, Obama and candidates stake their claims. Hillary Clinton both sought to magnify their differences because Obama understood that in 2008, and it made him president. their real conflict was over their sense of what politics could be. The passions inspired by his first run for the White House In his speech announcing his run for the White House, long ago slipped out of his control. A right-wing version of Obama insisted that his campaign was about more than white that democratic spirit gave Trump the presidency, but it could papers. “What’s stopped us from meeting these challenges not have happened without Clinton’s antiseptic liberalism— is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans,” he Obamaism minus Obama. Now Republicans are poised to maintained. “What’s stopped us is the failure of leadership, the eviscerate the achievements Chait celebrates. Reality has smallness of our politics—the ease with which we’re distracted broken the realists. a

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TV the struggle between the lure of pleasure and the pressure to be pure. And more adaptations are in the pipeline: the CW recently remade Como Aproveitar o Fim do Mundo as No Tomorrow, a quirky drama about a couple planning for the end of the world. All of which raises the question: What do telenovelas give us that other shows can’t?

TELENOVELAS DIFFER FROM English-language soap operas The Rise of largely in their scope: Most elapse over a few dozen episodes, and wrap up the lives of their characters in some sort of cumulatively satisfying narrative arc. If the telenovela is a the Telenovela novel—premise, complication, conclusion—then the Amer- How soap operas are remaking ican soap opera is more like a newspaper. Its only real job is to keep going. Soap opera characters go through so many American TV in their own image. convoluted misadventures, and are passed back and forth between so many writers, that the most basic details of their BY SARAH MARSHALL lives sometimes vanish without explanation: It’s not unheard of, on a soap, for relatives to forget they’re related, fall in love, and—as long as none of the writers remembers a stray fact from a thousand or so episodes ago—get married. “I’M LIVING PROOF that the American dream is alive and Like American soaps, telenovelas are dominated by well,” Teresa Mendoza says in the opening moments of Queen trauma and talk—but mostly talk. Something happens to of the South, just before she is murdered. The series, adapted a character. She calls her friend to explain. The two meet from Telemundo’s Spanish-language hit La Reina del Sur, is and repeat the facts of the incident again. And again. The as violent and unpredictable as such an opening would sug- primary rule the soap opera writer follows is Tell, don’t gest, but it has more in common with Miami Vice than Break- show, because telling is cheap and easy to write, and can be ing Bad. It’s exactly the kind of guilty pleasure that seems, stretched out forever. It also dulls the trauma of the show’s lately, to be missing from American television. The perfect events, which is a comfort, because no one in a soap is ever soapy drama doesn’t inspire disdain, as reality TV does, or allowed to be happy. If you meet the love of your life, he’ll mind-bending confusion and anxiety, the way prestige cable lose his memory tomorrow. As soon as he gets it back, his dramas do. Instead, soaps keep us entertained by whisking long-lost half­-sister will appear from nowhere and frame us through a series of outrageous tragedies and adventures, him for murder. As soon as you valiantly get him acquitted, all the while remembering that what we really want to see you’ll become the target of Bolivian jewel thieves. are people’s responses to outlandish situations, rather than In this way soaps prove oddly comforting for audiences. the outlandish situations themselves. Beneath all the drama, the characters serve as a stand-in for Queen of the South is one of a rash of new shows that us: Sometimes life itself seems like a random array of point- take their lead directly from Spanish-language telenovelas, less conflicts that just sort of drags on, shapelessly, forever. a distincti­ ve species of soap that has become unexpectedly You can never live the life you want to live but, like one of popular in the United States. The plot is a kind of matriarchal television’s beleaguered heroines, always have to watch your Scarface: After her drug-dealer boyfriend betrays his bosses plans smashed to pieces by the (unusually micromanagerial) and gets shot, Teresa goes on the run from the cartel, even- hand of fate. tually beating them at their own game. With its high-stakes La Reina del Sur and Juana la Virgen—from which Jane action, the show is a far cry from the first telenovela to make the Virgin was adapted—represent not the most basic ver- the leap to American television, back in 2006: Ugly Betty, sion of the telenovela, but new directions the genre has only which told the story of an unstylish young woman laboring recently begun to explore. Both series were created by the at a fashion magazine. More recently, the CW Network has actress-turned-producer Perla Farías, who seeks to unite enjoyed a hit with Jane the Virgin, in which the heroine is the dark, character-driven drama of American ­prestige artificially inseminated because of a mix-up at the hospital, shows like The Sopranos with the cheap, fast, and easy- and decides to carry the pregnancy to term. Now in its third to-produce conventions of the telenovela. By combining season, the show has garnered Golden Globe nominations these ­traditions, she hit a narrative sweet spot that viewers and almost single-handedly hoisted the network’s ratings. have clamored for ever since: realistically drawn characters While Ugly Betty acquainted viewers with the teleno­ vela’s struggling to survive in a world no nobler or wiser than outrageous, irresistibly sugary combination of melodrama ours, and even more endlessly chaotic. and sincerity, Jane the Virgin took the telenovela into the twenty-first century, with its complicated romp through ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN McCABE

64 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY ABC TELEVISION GROUP, USA NETWORK, TELEMUNDO, AND THE CW.

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Queen of the South, which just finished airing its first sea- watching a soap by showing its characters’ obsession with son, stars Alice Braga as Teresa Mendoza. She’s a woman in the fictional soap Invitation to Love; movies like Tootsie peril, until she’s not, shedding her girlish bearing, forcing circumvented soap opera stigma by adopting the genre’s her mouth into a thin line, and rising through the ranks of structure, but suggesting that the real drama was happen- drug trafficking and organized crime. But her rise is a slow ing backstage. and agonizing one. In the first two episodes alone, Teresa No longer as profitable or as relevant as they once were, is kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and beaten. She’s also today’s soap operas are embarrassed to own their most com- forced to watch a cartel member kill a drug mule and slice pelling traits—even as other television genres scoop up the the drugs out of the woman’s still-warm corpse. In response, kind of acclaim formerly reserved for art-house films. The Teresa treats her wounds with scorpion venom and swallows cultural standing of soaps has plunged since the 1980s, when 24 cocaine-filled balloons. Tony Montana’s vetting process they grabbed record ratings with “issue-driven” plots, most looks almost painless in comparison. infamously when fan favorite Luke Spencer raped teenager Queen of the South doesn’t look particularly striking Laura Webber on General Hospital, only for Laura to fall in compared to hyper-stylized cable shows like Hannibal and love with him. The couple married in a 1981 ratings bonanza ­American Horror Story, but it still feels infinitely more cine- that attracted 30 million viewers, and prompted Princess matic than its inspiration, La Reina del Sur. With a production Diana, herself a young newlywed at the time, to send cham- budget of $10 million, Reina is one of the most expensive tele- pagne to the General Hospital set. novelas that Telemundo has ever produced, but its 63 episodes Such daytime success spurred a rush of big-budget, maintain a cheesy cable-access aesthetic, even when the prime-time soaps, from Dallas to Dynasty. These shows events they depict are ruthlessly violent. were ostensibly about the business world, but they became most notorious for their catfights. No one cared about Blake Carrington’s business troubles, but Krystle and Alexis If the telenovela is a novel, brawling in the lily pond—that was worth skipping past a the American soap opera is football game for. Dynasty knew that no subject is quite as interesting as human relationships. By the 1990s, however, more like a newspaper. Its only prime time started to cordon off the emotional from the real job is to keep going. worldly. There were the weepy, trashy shows for kids and women (Buffy, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210), and then there were serious shows like Law & Order, whose charac- ters were so work-obsessed that their relationships were barely even acknowledged, let alone explored. Both La Reina del Sur and Juana la Virgen—and the That investment paid off: La Reina del Sur became a cul- English-language series they have inspired—reverse this tural phenomenon, and earned its star, Kate del Castillo, the decades-long decline. They give us complex pleasures but everlasting admiration of El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa don’t ask us to watch for any reason other than enjoyment. cartel. (Having escaped prison and evaded capture several Instead, they offer us the chance to understand what gives times, he already seemed more a character on a telenovela us pleasure, and why. Locked into a finite time frame, we than an actual drug lord.) For del Castillo, the admiration don’t want characters to make the same entertaining mis- appears to have been mutual. “Let’s traffic with love, you takes again and again—we want them to grow. Queen of the know how,” she tweeted to El Chapo, and set up a meeting South’s Teresa is not just complex but morally ambiguous, with him at his hideout. It was their communications, in fact, the kind of antiheroine who remains largely absent from that finally enabled Mexican authorities to track him down. American television, which still hesitates to linger overlong “You are not Teresa Mendoza,” del Castillo’s sister cautioned on women who function as anything other than nurturers, her at the time, but La Reina del Sur is exactly the kind of sex symbols, sidekicks, or ingénues. show that has a way of blurring those lines. The new wave of English-language telenovelas satisfies a deep craving among American viewers: It bestows on soaps THE TELENOVELA is triumphing on American television the kind of nuance and complexity previously portrayed only partly because American daytime soaps have been under- in prestige shows. This status boost is long overdue. At heart, going a crisis of identity. The tradition of the soap opera the greatest TV shows of the past 20 years—The Sopranos, has gradually infiltrated prime-time shows that manage to Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Transparent, Deadwood—are soaps. escape the label, while standbys like Days of Our Lives have A soap opera can have any level of production quality, and languished in their daytime slots. Directors have pillaged air at any time of day or night. What makes it a soap, in the soaps for their conventions and most intriguing ideas, end, is its conviction that there is no subject more compel- without risking the artistic Siberia of actually working in ling than the furies and desires that bind people together, soaps. Twin Peaks reassured viewers that they weren’t really and tear them apart. a

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BOOKS intellectuals. The agency had produced the popular cartoon version of George Orwell’s anticommunist classic Animal Farm in 1954. It flew the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a Euro- pean tour in 1952, to counter prejudices of the United States as uncultured and unsophisticated. It promoted the work of abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock because their artistic style would have been considered degenerate in both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The propriety of such largesse, both for the CIA and its beneficiaries, has been hotly debated ever since. Jason Ep- stein, the celebrated book editor, was quick to point out that CIA involvement undermined the very conditions for free thought, in which “doubts about established orthodoxies” were supposed to be “taken to be the beginning of all inquiry.” But Gloria Steinem, who worked with the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s, “was happy to find some liberals in government in those days,” arguing that the agency was “nonviolent and honorable.” Milosz, too, agreed that the “liberal conspiracy,” as he called it, “was necessary and justified.” It was, he allowed, “the sole counterweight to the propaganda on which the Soviets ex- pended astronomical sums.” Today’s intellectuals approach their labors in a very differ- ent set of circumstances. The struggle for academic patronage and the strained conditions of nearly all media properties have led to fewer jobs and fewer venues for substantial writing; the possibility of leading a public-facing life of the mind now Literary Agents seems vanishingly small, which only heightens nostalgia for Rethinking the legacy of celebrated the golden age of the 1950s. Yet the shadow of the CIA lurks behind the achievements of that time. The free play of ideas— writers who collaborated with the CIA. the very thing that was supposed to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union in the first place—turned out to BY PATRICK IBER be, at least in part, a carefully constructed illusion. What if the prominence of midcentury intellectuals, the sense that they were engaged in important political and artistic projects, is CZESLAW MILOSZ, the Polish poet who defected to the West in inseparable from the fact that they were useful to America’s 1951, was struck by the ostentatiousness of American cultural Cold War empire? programs: “You could smell big money from a mile away.” The era’s finest little magazines, titles likePartisan Review and The JOEL WHITNEY’S Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Paris Review, published enduring fiction, poetry, and essays. Writers insists that past glory and present disappointment The writings of Clement Greenberg and Lionel Trilling set are inextricably linked. He wants to show that the distinction the high-water mark for art and literary criticism. Richard some make between a “good,” literary CIA and a “bad” one Wright wrote the mournful poem that would provide the title that toppled leftists and subverted democracy around the for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 best-seller, Between the World globe is an artificial one. Whitney argues that the government and Me. The artists who waged the radical political battles “weaponized” culture and helped create a compromised media of the 1930s emerged in the 1950s as cultural institutions, that still serves, “in part, to encourage support for our inter- achieving a prominence—even a celebrity—that has eluded ventions.” The term he uses in the title—“finks”—implies that subsequent generations. the book’s subjects are disreputable actors, complicit in the Plenty of observers, however, suspected that the free market crimes of the agency that supported their work. of ideas had been corrupted. World tours, fancy conferences, The CIA still stonewalls efforts to understand its history, prestigious bylines and book contracts were bestowed on but journalists and scholars have been able to stitch together artists who hewed to political positions favored by the estab- interviews and papers of the people and organizations that lishment, rather than on the most talented. In 1966, The New the agency supported to generate a picture of its activities. York Times confirmed suspicions that the CIA was pumping In this sense, Whitney picks up the investigative gauntlet money into “civil society” organizations: unions, international organizations of students and women, groups of artists and ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL HADDAD

68 | NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW thrown by the British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders Mundo Nuevo in Spain and Latin America, and Encounter in with the publication of her book Who Paid the Piper? in 1999. London. Mundo Nuevo was especially influential, publishing As Saunders demonstrated, the CIA didn’t simply hand out leftist writers of the generation of the “boom” in Latin Amer- money—it actively managed the organizations it supported. ican letters (like Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez) What’s more, she showed, many people who feigned ignorance alongside international authors like Susan Sontag and Har- were aware of the connection. old Pinter. Still, the CIA felt free to nix articles and exercise Saunders’s stance reflected the cultural mood of the late prior review. “Brand America’s sales team,” writes Whitney, 1990s: With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it became easier “thought little of fostering cultural freedom through routine both to acknowledge the dark side of American power and to see acts of censorship.” the Cold War as a pretext for U.S. actions rather than the cause of those actions. Later historians, such as Hugh Wilford in The THE PARIS REVIEW, however, was not part of the CCF. Unlike Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, have examined the CCF magazines, which were generally both political and the varied reasons why groups and individuals agreed to work literary, The Paris Review remained theoretically “apolitical.” with CIA fronts. While Finks is more global than Saunders’s But Whitney shows that the CIA’s cultural Cold War helped book, devoting more attention to the CIA’s influence from to shape its content just the same. One of The Paris Review’s India to Latin America, it represents a return to her mode of editors, Nelson Aldrich Jr., discovered that a government exposing hypocritical alliances rather than explaining their agency had purchased 460 copies of one issue and taken out historical motivations. Whitney, like many of his subjects, is co-founder of a literary magazine (Guernica), and he’s the author of an intri- The government “weaponized” cate essay, published in Salon in 2012, on how the renowned culture and created a compromised Paris Review was implicated in the CIA’s program of cultural manipulation. The novelist Peter Matthiessen started the media that supported foreign magazine in 1953 with Harold “Doc” Humes, a writer who interventions. grew paranoid after overdosing on LSD that Timothy Leary gave him in 1965. In 1977, The New York Times revealed that Matthiessen had been working for the CIA when The Paris Review was founded, and that the magazine had served as part of his cover. He later explained that when he was recruited, “the CIA was brand new, and they were not yet into political ten subscriptions. “As far as possible, this information should assassinations or the other ugly stuff that came later.” But he remain secret,” he cautioned his colleagues. The CCF effectively still insisted that he’d broken his CIA ties after a few years, subsidized many little magazines simply by being a large and and that The Paris Review had no further connection to the regular purchaser. U.S. government. But its influence didn’t end there. The Paris Review is fa- Whitney’s investigations in The Paris Review’s archives, mous for its in-depth interviews with authors; the CCF paid however, tell a different story. The magazine remains the great to syndicate those interviews in its own suite of magazines. white whale of Finks: Whitney is ever chasing it, searching This it would only do, of course, if the interview subject was for its traces in the twilight depths of Cold War espionage. To prominent and didn’t conflict with Cold War imperatives. The achieve this, Whitney attempts to link CCF, Whitney shows, paid higher fees for pieces with elements The Paris Review to the central cog in of anti-Soviet propaganda, like the magazine’s interview with the CIA’s Cold War propaganda machine: the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak. The CCF also steered the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The The Paris Review toward interview subjects it wanted for its CCF was founded in 1950 as a home for own magazines. George Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review anticommunist intellectuals who want- for more than 50 years, revealed in private letters that he ed to combat the influence of Europe- knew about the CCF’s connections to the CIA before they were an communists, fellow travelers, and made public. This fits with reporting by Richard Cummings neutralists. CIA dollars and personnel in The American Conservative that Plimpton was an “agent of made it possible, even as the CCF quickly influence” for the CIA. expanded into a global organization that Through such relationships, the CIA wielded undue influ- FINKS: HOW THE CIA TRICKED operated magazines, conferences, and ence on the literary landscape. Whitney makes a compelling THE WORLD’S BEST WRITERS art galleries from Asia to South America. case, for instance, that the CIA reinforced the literary prestige BY JOEL WHITNEY At its height in the ’50s and ’60s, the of white men in American letters. If other nations believed OR Books, 336 pp., $26 CCF sponsored sophisticated, cosmo- that race relations in America were poor, the agency feared, politan magazines such as Preuves in it would damage our ability to lead the “free” world. So the France, Hiwar in Egypt, Quest in India, CIA sponsored African American voices only if their critique

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017 | 69 REVIEW of U.S. society wasn’t too sweeping. And even writers it did Though the magazines still had strategic purposes, the straight- support, like Richard Wright, found that the CIA was spying forward defense of U.S. intervention was not among them. It on them at the same time. “I lift my hand to fight communism,” is difficult, in fact, to say just who the “finks” are in all of this. Wright wrote, “and I find that the hand of the Western world If the test of finkdom is collaboration with state spies, then is sticking knives into my back.” Ex-Communist Ralph Ellison, the CIA’s Communist opponents were finks, too. author of Invisible Man, attended some CCF events; he was Whitney sounds a powerful warning about the dangerous the only black writer featured in The Paris Review’s “Art of interaction between the national security state and the work Fiction” series until the 1980s. of writers and journalists. But the precise experience of the The evidence that investigative journalists like Whitney cultural Cold War is unlikely to be repeated. A global ideological and Saunders have amassed should leave no doubt that the conflict, cast in civilizational terms, made the work of intel- so-called “free market of ideas,” which the CIA claimed to be lectuals worth subsidizing. Today’s intellectuals are no longer protecting, was distorted and undermined by the agency’s own needed as chits in a great power conflict, and our nostalgia activities. The CIA’s cultural apparatus gave intellectuals a way for the Cold War generation’s prestige seems increasingly misplaced: An era of heroic thinkers now looks instead like a grubby assortment of operatives, writers who appeared to The CIA subverted the essential challenge the establishment without actually being dangerous task of an intellectual: to cast to it. Jason Epstein was right. The CIA created conditions that subverted the essential task of an intellectual: to cast a critical a critical eye on orthodoxy and eye on orthodoxy and received wisdom. received wisdom. Today the state maintains its capacity to influence political thinking, but the frontiers have shifted. Freedom is now de- fended less in little magazines than on social media. In 2014, the U.S. Agency for International Development was caught nurturing a Cuban version of Twitter—a logical extension of the CIA’s work in the ’50s and ’60s. And as Edward Snowden’s to advance professionally, as long as they rejected radicalism revelations demonstrate, the promotion of freedom through and embraced the necessity of U.S. power in the Cold War. open communications remains uncomfortably intertwined with The CIA did not create those opinions, but it amplified them the potential for surveillance. What’s more, the vehicles we and helped give its warriors the sense of being engaged in a employ for personal speech are not only subject to electronic world-historic struggle. censorship and propagandistic manipulation by governments: They are also corporate properties. While social media can fa- STILL, WHITNEY AND OTHER critics of the CIA too often aim cilitate the circulation of ideas and the defense of free thought, to portray the agency and those who worked with it as a single they also depend on profit-chasing and maximizing saleable entity acting with a unified purpose. The reality was much engagement. In such a highly mediated and monitored system, messier. Even the term “finks” has an unexpected history. the line between participation and unwitting collaboration can Whitney picks up the word “finks” from a letter from the be difficult to discern. novelist and editor Keith Botsford to the sociologist Daniel Cold War intellectuals didn’t always realize the function Bell, both associates of the CCF. For years, Botsford had they performed as “finks,” as accessories to power in systems been trying to convince the CCF to retire Cuadernos, an anti­ they would have preferred not to validate. Today the specific communist magazine it ran in Latin America. “It was a fink configuration of state interference may have changed, but we magazine,” he wrote to Bell, meaning that it drew from re- remain subject to forces that shape our opinions and the bound- actionary thinkers and produced poor quality work. (Jorge aries of our thinking in ways we cannot see clearly. How will Ibargüengoitia, the Mexican satirist, once joked that Cuadernos we recognize it in ourselves if we, too, are finks?a was so bad that it must have been invented by communists to discredit their own opposition.) Michael Josselson, the CIA’s principal agent for the CCF, fought Botsford’s plan to THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 1 & 2, Issue 5,000, Jan/Feb spike the magazine. But Josselson’s deputy—who swore to 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 Botsford that he wasn’t CIA, when of course he was—backed (202) 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage Botsford. Botsford thought that he’d been played by the CIA’s 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: “finks,” embodied by Josselson. But the “CIA” was on both 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 sides of the debate. 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 Weaponizing culture, it turned out, was a tricky business. manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be emailed to [email protected]. Even Cuadernos criticized the U.S. invasion of the Dominican For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our website at newrepublic.com/customerservice. Republic. The magazine the CCF founded after Cuadernos’s demise in 1965, Mundo Nuevo, criticized the war in Vietnam.

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LOCATION CIZRE, TURKEY DATE MARCH 4, 2016

THE TOWN OF CIZRE, in southeastern Turkey, lies at the inter- in sight. More than 7,000 people were killed, according to section of antiquity and modernity. Legend has it that Noah, Kurdish officials. Another 350,000 fled the area. the biblical patriarch, was buried beneath the city after his ark Furkan Temir, a 21-year-old photographer born in southern washed up nearby, at the foot of Mount Judi. Alexander the Turkey, calls the fight for Cizre a “hidden conflict”—one that Great is believed to have crossed the Tigris here in 331 B.C. In has received far less attention than the civil war in neighbor- recent years, modern apartment buildings have cropped up ing Syria. “I grew up with this war,” he says. Last March, as in neat, prosperous neighborhoods, and bustling shops and residents returned for the first time to survey the damage and cafes have lined the dusty streets near the Red Madrassa, built rebuild their lives, Temir photographed the interior spaces they in the fifteenth century. had deserted—bedrooms coated in dust, boardrooms missing a All that vanished a year ago. In a matter of weeks, the entire wall, kitchens strewn with rubble and debris. In a war unseen town was reduced to rubble during fierce sectarian warfare. by most of the world, the images offer a haunting glimpse of When Kurdish separatists barricaded Cizre, fighting to carve the lives left behind in Cizre, before the tanks rolled in. a out an autonomous state, Turkish Special Forces rolled in and

blockaded the town for 79 days, bombarding every building See more of Furkan Temir’s work on newrepublic.com. TEMIR/VII FURKAN

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