HOW HE UNLEASHED the WORST POLITICAL TEAM in HISTORY New from COLUMBIA University Press

Home , Brian Kilmeade, Dana Goldstein, Jamil Smith (journalist), Jeffrey Lord, Joe Soap, Jonathan Rauch

OCTOBER 2016

THE POPULIST REVOLT UTOPIAN KINK REFUGEES IN BOISE TRUMP’S LAP DOGS HOW HE UNLEASHED THE WORST POLITICAL TEAM IN HISTORY New from COLUMBIA UnIvERsIty PREss

A History of Virility Reductionism in Art ALAIN CORBIN, JEAN- and Brain Science JACQUES COURTINE, Bridging the Two Cultures GEORGES VIGARELLO, ERIC R. KANDEL EDS. “[A] fascinating survey of mind Translated by Keith Cohen science and modern art. . . . “A sweeping history of Kandel presents concepts to masculinity in the tradition of ponder that may open new Ariès and Duby’s A History of avenues of art making and Private Life.” neuroscientiﬁc endeavor.” —Lewis Seifert, Brown —Publishers Weekly University

Exhaustion A Brief History of A History Entrepreneurship ANNA KATHARINA The Pioneers, Profiteers, and SCHAFFNER Racketeers Who Shaped Our “When Exhaustion does World bring theory and experience JOE CARLEN together, it becomes “This enjoyable book is full engrossing—which makes it all of great stories and practical the more regrettable that for so ideas.” many centuries, our exhausted ancestors remained silent.” —Brian Tracy, author of The Way to Wealth —New Republic

Deciding Data Love What’s True The Seduction and Betrayal of The Rise of Political Digital Technologies Fact-Checking ROBERTO SIMANOWSKI

in American Journalism Translated by Brigitte Pichon, Dorian LUCAS GRAVES Rudnytsky, and John Cayley “Brilliant . . . an ironic and “A lively page-turner . . . critical take on contemporary that also digs deep into the society’s ambivalent very foundations of public relationship with data.” knowledge. What do we really know, and how do we know —Saskia Sassen, author of it? Graves provides thought- Expulsions provoking answers.” —Rodney Benson, New York University

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU • CUPBLOG.ORG contents OCTOBER 2016

UP FRONT Beyond the Killing Fields Can tourism help Cambodia face its brutal past? BY BRENT CRANE

Shop Till You Drop Corporate America cashes in on Armageddon. BY RACHEL MONROE

The New Hillarycare How Clinton can make amends for welfare reform. BY CLIO CHANG

Q&A: The Occupier What did the 99 percent actually achieve? BY ALEX SHEPHARD

The Ladies’ Man How Trump is ﬁring up female candidates. BY LAURA RESTON

COLUMN

Divide and Conquer What Trump learned from sports and stand-up comedy. BY JEET HEER Red-State Blues Why do people support Trump and the Tea Party? REVIEW A native son and a sociologist search for answers. Me Oh My! Jonathan Safran Foer writes BY JEDEDIAH PURDY about himself. BY MICHELLE DEAN

The Beat Don’t Stop Breaking down hip-hop’s past and future. BY SASHA FRERE-JONES The Philosopher Destination Boise Enigma Variations and Her Camera Every year, a thousand refugees Notes toward a theory of Nell Zink. BY JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE A conversation with ﬁlmmaker Ava from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East journey to Idaho to make a new life DuVernay about race, Hollywood, and Prophet and Loss the urgent need for prison reform. in America. Marx in a world that’s made peace PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANGIE SMITH BY RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH with capitalism. BY MICHAEL KAZIN

Utopian Kink Reports from the frontiers of free love. BY TONY TULATHIMUTTE Trump’s Court Jesters All the Rage Backstory Meet the rogues’ gallery of outcasts, Sanders and Trump represent two PHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE BELLEME opportunists, and extremists sides of American populism— who make up his inner circle. and a far larger upheaval to come. BY JOHN B. JUDIS COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉ CARRILHO

POETRY On a Dirt Road Outside Oaxaca BY JAVIER ZAMORA PHOTOGRAPH BY STACY KRANITZ

OCTOBER contributors

Editor in Chief Sasha Frere-Jones is a writer from Brooklyn who lives in Los Win McCormack Angeles. From the age of twelve, he bought every rap record he could Editor find in New York. The earliest were on local labels like Enjoy and Sugar Eric Bates Hill—including the seven-inch version of “Rapper’s Delight,” for $1.29. Executive Editor Culture Editor Then the entire country started making rap. He tried to keep up. Ryan Kearney Michelle Legro THE BEAT DON’T STOP, P. Politics Editor Features Directors Bob Moser Sasha Belenky Deputy Editor Theodore Ross Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist living in Brooklyn. Ryu Spaeth Senior Editors Her forthcoming book, The Explainers & The Explorers, includes Story Editor Brian Beutler profiles of Toni Morrison, Ona Judge, and Serena Williams. In her Laura Marsh Jeet Heer News Editor work, she aims to identify how black America will define itself in the Managing Editor Laura Reston Alex Shephard twenty-first century. THE PHILOSOPHER AND HER CAMERA, P. Poetry Editor Art Director Cathy Park Hong Andy Omel John B. Judis is the author of The Populist Explosion: How the Photo Director Social Media Editor Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, which Stephanie Heimann Sarah Jones explores the anity between populist movements in the United States Production Director Reporter-Researchers Pamela Brandt and Western Europe. He is an editor at large at Talking Points Memo Clio Chang Steven Cohen and a former senior editor at the NEW REPUBLIC. ALL THE RAGE, P. Contributing Editors Anakwa Dwamena James Burnett, Alexander Chee, Sukjong Hong Ben Crair, Michelle Dean, Michael Kazin is a history professor at Georgetown University Siddhartha Deb, Michael Eric Dyson, Interns Paul Ford, Ted Genoways, and editor of Dissent. During the New Left’s heyday, he called himself Saif Alnuweiri William Giraldi, Dana Goldstein, a Marxist, but he gradually grew wary of ideologies that turn into Harrison Stetler Kathryn Joyce, Suki Kim, faiths. “I started studying history and things got complicated, what can Maria Konnikova, Corby Kummer, I say?” His next book, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, Jen Percy, Jamil Smith, Graeme Wood, Robert Wright 1914–1918, will be published in January. PROPHET AND LOSS, P.

Andy Kroll is a Pun Foundation reporting fellow whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, National Journal, and Mother Jones. He reported the cover story on Donald Trump’s inner circle with VP of Marketing and Associate Publisher Communications Art Stupar assistance from Saif Alnuweiri, Clio Chang, Steven Cohen, Sukjong Erika Velazquez Hong, and Harrison Stetler. TRUMP’S COURT JESTERS, P. Senior Integrated Director of Sales Marketing Manager Suzanne Wilson Evelyn Frison Advertising Account Director Josephine Livingstone is a writer and academic in New Nano Fabuss Audience and York. She first read Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper on her phone while Partnership Manager Associate Account Executive Shawn Awan commuting to NYU. As she reached the final page, a mouse ran over Eliza Fish her foot on the subway platform at West 4th Street. Like Zink, Controller Livingstone admires this garbage planet. ENIGMA VARIATIONS, P. David Myer Office Manager, NY Tori Campbell Jedediah Purdy, like J.D. Vance, grew up in Appalachia and attended Yale Law School. Reading Vance’s and Arlie Russell Publisher Hochschild’s books, he reflected, “We’ve entered a part of the political Hamilton Fish season when people really want to understand where ‘the other side’ is coming from.” He has explored questions of American political identity in three of his books: For Common Things, Being America, and Published by Lake Avenue Publishing 1 Union Square West, A Tolerable Anarchy. RED-STATE BLUES, P. New York, NY 10003

President Angie Smith is a Los Angeles–based photographer. She ﬁrst Win McCormack encountered the refugee community in Idaho ﬁve years ago, while

visiting her father in Boise. Some were reluctant to talk at ﬁrst, For subscription Inquiries or problems call (800) 827-1289 but she slowly gained their trust. “Most people want to be seen, For reprints and licensing visit www.TNRreprints.com

heard, and acknowledged,” she says. DESTINATION BOISE, P.

NEW REPUBLIC from the stacks

IN THE SPRING OF , Montana pacifist and suragette Jeannette Rankin became the first woman sworn in to Congress. That year, women in 18 states could vote for president. Yet, as the founding editors of the pointed out, most newspapers seemed to think their female readers were only interested in recipes for jam tarts, cures for wrinkles, and instructions for “the pickling of young cucum- bers.” Rankin had run on a platform of social welfare and women’s surage, but the press focused on her household duties and fashion sense: “The exact nuance of her hair was controversial newspaper matter for weeks after her election,” the editors lamented. A century later, as the nation weighs whether to elect its first female president, it is remarkable how much the media still judge women in politics by their appearance rather than their achievements. Over her long career, Hillary Clinton has been criticized for everything from her pantsuits to her makeup. As she noted only four years ago, her hairstyle—like Rankin’s before her—“is one of the great fascinations of our time.” But Clinton made her peace with such non- sense years ago. “If I want to knock a story o the front page,” she quipped back in 1995, “I just change my hairstyle.” Jeannette Rankin at a rally in New York, 1924.

The Editors According to Gender SEPTEMBER ,

The press could really accomplish something paragraphs that she made her own hats almost pathetic relief. Domestic anarchy by giving a definite page to the record of and dresses and a certain “wonderful may darken the future, but one of its har- women’s hopes and achievements as citi- lemon meringue pie.” bingers can make lemon meringue pie and zens of the world. The suffrage problem, the One New York advocate of woman suf- the cataclysm is at least postponed. trade union problem, the equal pay for equal frage writes enthusiastically of a speech That this was the natural position to take work problem, all these and others are being made by Miss Rankin at a gathering in her against the first feminine interlopers, one precipitated by the war, and they furnish honor: “Her white chiffon dress fluttered can easily understand. It is less easy to see material for the conducting of several pages, in the breeze of her own eloquence. Her why it should still be so all-pervasive. Per- being further supplemented by the women’s white satin cloak lay over the back of the haps it is the crystallization of an attitude activities growing directly out of the war. chair, and her white satin pumps were small into a habit, a far more tenacious evil. But Even metropolitan reporters worry and dainty. She was a debutante at the even for this ill the war may prove an unex- whether a woman elected to public office coming-out party of women into the class pected panacea. Not the most reactionary has brown or red hair and whether she of real people.” There is a kindly intention paper can afford space to the appearance wears crepe or gingham dresses. The here, but there is also a little of the joy of and domestic accomplishments of each records of suffrage show that women are the dog-owner whose Pomeranian has impersonal unit in a regiment of girl soldiers, gradually becoming recognized as people successfully toured the room on its hind- or to each and every member of an army in the eyes of the law, but the record of legs, “the marvel being not that it walks so of women workers. By sheer force of num- events in any newspaper shows that the well, but that it walks at all.” The benevolent bers if by nothing else women will attain to eyes of the press are yet as those of a very newspaper tries to crown the success of the status of people, of ordinary human recent kitten when it comes to separating its suffrage protégée by insisting on her beings, allowed to pursue their unphoto- a woman’s achievements from the fact entire femininity, the authentic femininity graphed way in whatever vocation they may that she is a woman. of height of heel and depth of powder. choose; and when they deserve comment The most shining instance of recent It is for a different reason that a hos- getting it not according to gender but on record is Miss Jeannette Rankin, Con- tile paper writes of Miss Rankin: “Even the actual merits of the case. And in that gresswoman from Montana. The exact after entering politics, she refused to day there shall be no more Woman’s Pages, nuance of her hair was controversial news- forsake the old household arts, cooking nor shall reporters worry whether a woman paper matter for weeks after her election. and needlework.” Here it seems to be the treads the halls of Congress in high-heeled

Conservative organs proclaimed in long motive of fear reassured. It is a throb of shoes or in Groundgrippers. a FPGGETTY

NEW REPUBLIC up front

DARK TOURISM

Beyond the Killing Fields

Can a remote region in Cambodia help the country come to terms with its brutal past?

BY BRENT CRANE

DEEP WITHIN THE Dangrek Mountains of northern part of Cambodia’s tourism industry. Besides the Cambodia, on a cli at the end of a rugged jungle Angkor Wat temple complex, the biggest tourist draws path barely wide enough for a motorbike, stands Pol in the country are the infamous “killing fields,” where Pot’s house. Blanketed in moss and moldering in the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were murdered tropical swelter, the two-story ruin is a monument from 1975 to 1979 under the Khmer Rouge regime, to two decades of neglect. The air, heavy and humid, and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, housed in the buzzes with cicadas. former S-21 Prison, where thousands were detained, A man emerges from the overgrowth and begins tortured, and killed. Together, the sites sell hundreds picking leaves from a handful of green shrubs. “For of thousands of tickets a year, introducing visitors— my rabbits,” he explains. A former government soldier many of them foreigners—to the Khmer Rouge’s who fought for 22 years against Pol Pot’s guerrillas, brutal excesses. Kuch Khemara owns the area’s only restaurant, Destinations like these are part of a worldwide located four miles back up the path. Like others in market known as “dark tourism,” which promotes the remote mountain region of Anlong Veng, he hopes travel to places associated with death and suering. that sightseers will one day flock to this old building There has always been a ghoulish fascination with in the jungle, bringing a much-needed economic death and destruction; visitors have flocked to the boost to one of Cambodia’s poorest districts, the final ruins of Pompeii for more than two centuries, and stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. after Pan Am Flight 103 crashed near Lockerbie, The idea of tourists making a pilgrimage to a Scotland, in 1988, curious onlookers flooded the genocidal dictator’s jungle hideout might seem dis- tasteful. But such destinations are already a major ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNA BARCZYK

NEW REPUBLIC roadways to the wreckage site, tying up trac and Party, which has ruled the country in various guises POPULAR hampering emergency services. Some tourist sites since the early 1980s, has exploited the Khmer DARK TOURISM use biased narratives to rewrite history: For years, a Rouge’s atrocities to maintain its grip on power. The DESTINATIONS display at the Cottonlandia Museum in Greenwood, party oers a stark message: With us, peace; without Auschwitz Mississippi, explained how plantations “employed” us, chaos. The sentiment gains a national audience A record 1.72 million people visited slaves to harvest crops. But from Hiroshima and every May 20—a holiday originally called the Day of last year, up from Ground Zero to Chernobyl and Auschwitz, memori- Anger, but now rechristened as the Day of Remem- 500,000 in 2000. als to atrocities can play an important role in the brance—when communal visits to the killing fields Ground Zero process of healing and national reconciliation. Sites are broadcast on government-aligned media channels, Memorial site has like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe complete with dramatic reenactments. By politiciz- received more than in Berlin and Remembrance Park in Buenos Aires ing the past, the holiday winds up inflaming old 23 million visitors attempt to harness “the power of social memory to animosities and further alienating former Khmer since it opened five come to grips with past abuse,” says Louis Bickford, Rouge fighters. “People in my town, when they hear years ago. a human rights scholar and the former director of that a man is former Khmer Rouge, they are afraid Chernobyl the International Center for Transitional Justice, who of him,” says my translator, Vanna Chea. Private tours guide has studied memorials in Cambodia and elsewhere. DC-Cam hopes to change that. The group is train- up to 15,000 visitors a year through the Now, an independent research group in Cambodia ing dozens of tour guides to escort visitors to Anlong radioactive ruins. hopes to jump-start the country’s process of recon- Veng’s historical sites, and it hosts “peace tours” for ciliation by attracting tourists to the mountains of Cambodian students that feature group discussions Hiroshima Attendance jumped Anlong Veng, where Pol Pot made his last stand. There and written reflections. But its most ambitious—and 40 percent—to are already more than a dozen historical landmarks controversial—eort is one that goes to the heart of more than 150,000 in in the area, including the villa of Ta Mok, an infamous reconciliation: It has recruited former Khmer Rouge June—after President commander known as The Butcher, and the spot soldiers to speak with visitors about their experiences. Obama’s visit. where Pol Pot was cremated on a pile of old tires Youk Chhang, the director of DC-Cam, believes following his death in 1998. Supported by $100,000 that such face-to-face interactions with Cambodia’s in grants, much of it from the U.S. government, the longtime boogeymen will help foster forgiveness and Documentation Center of Cambodia is working to understanding. While he does not advocate excusing restore the sites and provide visitors with historical Khmer Rouge crimes, he hopes to show that the context. In July, DC-Cam opened the Anlong Veng regime’s former soldiers are human beings, many of Peace Center in a former meeting house for the Khmer whom acted out of fear or ignorance. As with the Rouge’s top brass. Out front, a display features a most eective eorts at reconciliation, the goal is comprehensive timeline of the Khmer Rouge’s reign, in English and Khmer. Inside are collections of academic literature about the regime and its victims. Those involved with the project hope it will help Cambodia confront its violent history. To date, the Cambodia’s reconciliation process has been country’s reconciliation process has been fragmented fragmented at best. For the most part, it has at best. For the most part, the government has fol- followed a simple principle: Don’t look back. lowed a simple principle: Don’t look back. “We must dig a hole and bury the past, and look ahead into the twenty-first century,” Prime Minister Hun Sen once proclaimed. Nearly two-thirds of Cambodians are younger than 30, and parents rarely talk to their children about what they endured during the “Pol not to provide simple answers, but to ask dicult Pot time.” Khmer Rouge history was not taught in questions. “Can Khmer Rouge be peaceful?” Chhang schools until 2007, and some youth doubt that the asks. “Can Khmer Rouge be integrated? Can Khmer slaughter took place at all. “They simply don’t believe Rouge be part of us?” that Cambodians could kill other Cambodians,” says Those who meet the former killers often come Matthew Trew, a Canadian anthropologist who has away with a more complex understanding of their studied tourism and post-conflict recovery in Cam- country’s past. Sen Vicheth, a sociology student who bodia. “I’ve talked to people who you show the bones has volunteered to run the Peace Center for three to, and they say, ‘Oh, these are chicken bones.’” months, used to feel nothing but dread toward the When the past is acknowledged, the government ex-militants. Now his view has softened. “They are often uses it to sow fear and resentment, rather than just normal people,” Vicheth says. “They just got trust and understanding. The Cambodian People’s orders. They had no choice.”

OCTOBER up front

Yet it’s clear that Cambodia still has a long way to remains happy to have taken part in what he views go before it truly comes to terms with its brutal past. as the defense of his country. Yet the atrocities com- As a sinking sun breaks through the clouds over mitted by the Khmer Rouge—the mass starvation, Anlong Veng, I speak with Nim Nam, an ex-militant torture, and executions—are something he seems who took up arms with the Khmer Rouge in 1986, unable to acknowledge. As we speak, Nam looks at the age of 20. His motivation, he says, was to join down at the dirt, averting his eyes. On the most Pol Pot’s call “to ﬁght Vietnam.” Most of his time was important subject of all—the legacy of Pol Pot—he spent in the jungle, exchanging ﬁre with government oers no opinion. Whether the Khmer Rouge leader troops. He received little food and no pay, but he was good or bad, Nam says, “I cannot judge.” a

DOOMSDAY DEALS

Shop Till You Drop

How corporate America is cashing in on the end of the world.

BY RACHEL MONROE

FOR A SMALL BUT fervid subset of Americans, week- and the growing fear of nuclear war. Since then, ends are devoted to preparing for the end of weekends. survivalism has been fueled by everything from avian Whether it’s canning vegetables, stocking the bunker, flu and the Y2K computer bug to September 11 and or drilling the kids in target practice, survivalists climate change. The shared belief is that civilization maintain a constant state of readiness for whatever faces imminent collapse; the shared goal is to survive doomsday scenario—zombie attack, electromagnetic the chaos and be in the best position to recover. It’s pulse, coordinated FEMA takeover—they believe will a story of doom, but also of hope: Survivalists, in the bring about the end of the world as we know it. It’s end, are the heroes who emerge to rebuild our shat- a pastime that rewards obsessives: Every detail, no tered world. “Survivalism confronts modernity and matter how small, could wind up being a matter of finds trouble,” Mitchell writes in his study Dancing life and death. “You can readjust the cans on your at Armageddon, “but trouble with possibilities.” Now, however, survivalism itself is being exploited by the very forces it seeks to escape. In recent years, a growing number of companies have rushed to capitalize on the deep-seated fears that drive surviv- A growing number of companies are alists, hoping to cash in on the end of the world. rushing to capitalize on the deep-seated Anxiety, after all, is one of the most fundamental fears that drive survivalists. drivers of commerce—and who’s more anxious than someone who is convinced that doomsday is near? Survivalism’s push into the mainstream picked up steam in 2012, when the National Geographic Channel premiered Doomsday Preppers, a reality show centered on Americans preparing for what’s shelf, count the cans on your shelf,” says Richard known as a SHTF (shit-hits-the-fan) scenario. Prep- Mitchell, a sociologist who has been studying sur- pers quickly became the most-watched show in the vivalist subcultures since the 1980s. “Counting is channel’s history, and spawned popular spin-os very popular. Everybody loves to count.” like Doomsday Bunkers (think home-renovation From the start, survivalism has been infused, show, but with armored blast doors instead of open- either implicitly or explicitly, with a criticism of plan kitchens). The shows were part of a wave of modern society. The movement’s first wave was entertainment that took a decidedly apocalyptic sparked in the early 1970s by the Arab oil embargo turn, from movies like The Road and World War Z

NEW REPUBLIC MM’s Bug-Out Bag, from a photo series by Allison Stewart. Preppers stock bags with everything from food to gas masks. to television shows like The Walking Dead and The you keep stocked with everything you’d need to RECENT ADVICE Last Man on Earth, which depicts the lighter side of survive for 72 hours. A cheap one that retails for FROM OFFGRID what survivalists call TEOTWAWKI (The End of the $25 might come with an emergency blanket, ear SURVIVAL World As We Know It). plugs, and a fishing line. High-end ones, which can “EMP Preparedness: “Preppers,” as National Geographic dubbed them, set you back as much as $700, include a Bear Grylls– Preparing for an are more of a market than a movement. If being a brand fire starter, a crank radio, and a pocket chain- Electromagnetic Pulse Attack” survivalist is about acquiring skills, whether it’s start- saw. If you want to stock your own bug-out bag, ing a fire without matches or defending yourself you can opt for gas masks from China that cost less “Invasion Force: They’re against marauding enemies, then being a prepper is than $20, or pay at least 20 times that much for one Already Here—The ISIS Threat to America” about accumulating stu. Ambient, insatiable anxi- that ostensibly protects against nuclear agents. There ety makes preppers ideal consumers; they’re always are heated debates within the prepper community “Dangers of Buying & scrambling to achieve a better state of preparedness. about what actually counts as a necessity. A lengthy Selling on Craigslist: Protecting Yourself Mass marketers have taken notice. Prepper-centric article on GunsAmerica.com recommends stocking from Killers, Criminals shows don’t just feature survival gear—they directly a bug-out bag with a computer tablet and micro-SD & Wackos” profit from it. Doomsday Preppers, for example, is cards loaded with books and movies, because “sur- “Violent Leftist Mobs sponsored by Wise Food Storage, a purveyor of freeze- vival is boring.” Planning Summer dried meats and other “emergency foods.” On the The intrusion of corporate interests into the sur- of Attacks on Trump show’s web site, there’s a quiz that purports to tell vivalist scene hasn’t pleased those who take their Supporters: Supported you how long you can expect to survive in a SHTF doomsday scenarios seriously. Rob Richardson, a by Media” world based on how many MREs you’ve stockpiled self-styled survival expert based outside of Las Vegas, and whether or not you have body armor. Even the founded the web site Ogrid Survival in 2007. Over advanced-level preppers featured on the show are the next six years, he built Ogrid into one of the never ready enough: At the end of each segment, most popular survivalist sites, oering practical, they’re graded on their preparedness level, and few real-world tips like “HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM score more than 80 out of 100. VIOLENT MOBS OF CRIMINALS.” While many prepper products oer buyers the Then, in 2013, a Los Angeles–based media con- feeling of being prepared, their actual utility in a glomerate called The Enthusiast Network—the pub- post-disaster world is questionable. The prepper’s lisher of Motor Trend and Surfer—launched a glossy essential accessory is the “bug-out bag”—a backpack quarterly called Ogrid Magazine. On Richardson’s

OCTOBER up front

Ogrid site, TEOTWAWKI involves FEMA and Obama who have no experience in my profession who are and Muslim terrorists. In Ogrid Magazine, all polit- making a show on survival skills.” ical content has been neatly excised. Its imagined But stoking people’s fears is what capitalists do Armageddons involve bipartisan disasters like alien best—even if they wind up scaring themselves in the attacks and plane crashes—the better to sell expensive process. The CEO of Overstock.com told BuzzFeed water ﬁlters to consumers of all political persuasions. last year that he has a 30-day food supply and Richardson took his corporate rival to court, claim- $10 million in precious metals hidden away near the ing copyright infringement. As he sees it, the brand company’s Utah headquarters, just in case the U.S. he built over the years with calls to prepare for mar- economic system suers a total meltdown. tial law is being capitalized on—and watered down— Whatever the prepper industry is selling— by a bunch of urban wannabes who don’t even give mini-crossbows, sailboats to withstand an electro- good survival advice. “If you look at the magazine,” magnetic pulse, a simpliﬁed fantasy of control in an he fumes, “you can tell it’s written by people who increasingly complex world—people are buying. At have no clue about preparedness for survival.” a recent prepper trade show in Irving, Texas, hosted Richardson isn’t the only survivalist using the by the National Self-Reliance Organization, sta legal system to wage war against corporate intruders. coordinators had to turn away would-be vendors due Cody Lundin, a survival instructor, is suing the Dis- to overwhelming demand for space. “People are covery Channel for defamation after he was kicked loving this stu,” says Taylor McClendon, the group’s o the show Dual Survival as a co-host. As Lundin event management coordinator. “We emptied all the explained to TV Guide, “You’re dealing with people ATMs in the building.” a

BABY BENJAMINS

The New Hillarycare

Clinton helped cast millions of children into poverty. Here’s how she can make amends.

BY CLIO CHANG

POOR CHILDREN DURING HER HISTORIC run for the presidency, Hillary and children based on the false claim that lazy and IN CRISIS Clinton has made much of her record of fighting for sexually promiscuous “welfare queens” were somehow Lead-poisoned women and children. As First Lady, she played a bilking the system. Thanks in part to the policies she 535,000 pivotal role in passing the Children’s Health Insurance backed, one in five children in the United States— Homeless Program, which provides medical care to eight million some 16 million kids—now live in poverty. That’s a 2.5 million kids. And on the campaign trail, she’s fond of trum- higher rate than in every industrialized nation except Parent in prison peting her support for paid family leave and child Greece, Spain, Latvia, Israel, and Mexico. 2.7 million care for working families. “I’ve spent my life fighting If Clinton is genuine about wanting to help Amer- for children, families, and our country,” Clinton said ica’s neediest kids, there’s a commonsense solution Uninsured 4.9 million at a rally in 2015. “I believe that success isn’t mea- she can champion that would instantly reverse much sured by how much the wealthiest Americans have, of the damage she’s done over the years: providing Hungry 15.3 million but by how many children climb out of poverty.” every American family with a child allowance, regard- But over the course of her career, Clinton may less of their income level. According to a recent report have thrown more children into poverty than she’s by the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, rescued from its clutches. During her husband’s time oering families an annual benefit of $4,000 for in the White House, she supported the mass incar- every kid would reduce child poverty in the United ceration of African American men, which left millions States by more than half. of black women raising families on their own. And A universal child allowance would fix what’s she played a crucial role in the passage of welfare broken in our current system. Right now, families reform, which gutted cash benefits to poor women qualify for a federal child tax credit only if they make

NEW REPUBLIC ANDREW GOMBERTEPAREDUX of trying: embarrassment. You are going to embarrass yourself. that they tried. And they suered the natural first consequence more spaces if our demands ourweren’t if spacesmore that, If done wemet. had park.I up the do us wantedto OCTOBER from suering underclass the of people brown and black to talk cannot we But points. talking right the all havewe ple, had our politics. As upper-middle-class, educated white peo- Occupy?of What’s your take on Bernie Sanders? Was his candidacy a result stantly fighting oppression. con are theywere;weway awish we in activists are oners privilege.of Pris apoint activist?”itself activistis an Being Occupy Wall Street was. I was constantly asked, “What is an organizing?moreless and tobe activism needed there So arrests, and we’d have ourselves a movement. more responses, police violent more been have would there Occupyshould Whathave differently?done art ofother people’s daily nightmare. are right on the brink to join you? They were making performance face than choosing homelessness, and then inviting people who represented in Zuccotti Park. I mean, what’s a bigger slap in the was percent five top the percent.”only But99 the are “We diversity?of lack short—a fell it where that Is to hate—it was stillruledby a privileged minority. In the end, Occupy was an extension of the very system it claimed If most of us found our house broken into, we’d call the police. back to that 1960s attitude of “Fuck the police!” But let’s be real: mean?you do What with a problem you cannotpossibly conceive of. Because as privileged white people, you don’t know how to help What did Occupy get right? BY why Occupy achieved—and it didn’t go far enough. in jail. Five years after it began, she what considers Street’s protest in Park Zuccotti and spent 58 days was Cecily McMillan arrested during Occupy Wall The Occupier the peopledying beside them. hear even can’tthey talking, busy so know.are They I people even call myself an “activist” anymore. They’re the least active Q &A ALEX SHEPHARD I don’t think I met anybody in Rikers who knew what knew who Rikers in anybody met I think don’t I Bernie was the champion of the five percent. Hepercent. five the of champion the was Bernie After we got beaten up by police, we wentwe police, by up beaten got weAfter What I respect most about Occupy is moreoccupy: to down shut and I didn’tI givewantto Theysaying, were I won’t - - have madea choicenot to go there. these—experiences, because we have not gone there. And we 20 or 30 years from now, we’ll say that was the beginning. of a cultural movement, a social revolution. When we look back What’s the legacy of Occupy? ing isgoing to change. person, but you are going to have to shoot me first,” then noth an ocer and a person behind us, and say, “You can shoot this ways to put ourselves between the barrel of the gun wielded by find literally weUnless it. use and privilege Knowwhite your anyone to be worse o; we want everyone to have more privilege. want don’tWe to? want you wouldwhy And privilege. white wear secondhand clothes. You cannot wipe away the stenchof because we don’t. It doesn’t matter if you don’t shower, or you everything, know we like act not is do can we thing best The change?formovement genuine a create to take it would what So beside them. they evencan’t hear the people dying anymore. They’re so busy talking, I won’t even call myself an “activist” It drew a line. It was the beginning

a - up front more than $3,000 per year. That leaves out the poor- allowance, its focus on younger children would help est of the poor—disproportionately hurting black kids who require additional child care, and whose kids and the children of single mothers. (The number parents are more likely to be younger and poorer. of children who live on $2 a day or less has more than “As parents, it’s very clear that the needs of a two- doubled, to three million, since Bill Clinton signed year-old are dierent from those of a teenager,” says welfare reform into law.) What’s more, the child tax Greg Duncan, a professor at the University of Cali- credit arrives just once a year, at tax time. A univer- fornia in Irvine who studies child poverty. sal child allowance, by contrast, would provide cash The young-child tax credit would cost an esti- on a regular basis—allowing parents to use it for daily mated $15 billion per year and help lift one in seven expenditures such as groceries and child care. poor children under the age of three out of poverty. Most industrialized nations, including the United A universal child allowance of $4,000 would cost Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and much of the Euro- much more—around $200 billion per year—but it pean Union, already provide a child allowance to would do far more to help poor kids of all ages. It support families. “Every other developed nation would also be a smart investment: Child poverty makes a social statement that, universally, we’re costs the U.S. economy an estimated $672 billion a going to ensure that there is money there on a monthly year in lost wages, higher crime, and sicker kids. or weekly basis for families with kids,” says Rachel For Clinton, backing a big idea like a universal West, associate director of the poverty research pro- child allowance would be a way to create a new leg- gram at the Center for American Progress. acy for herself. She was no bystander when it came So far, Clinton has resisted the idea of a universal to welfare reform—as late as 2002, she was still child allowance. “I’m not ready to adopt a plan that calling mothers on welfare “deadbeats.” But she has comes from some other country,” she told Vox in June. proven that she can change with the political times. But the proposal is gaining ground: A bill co-sponsored “Poverty is not inevitable,” West says. “We can solve by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi would create it with policy. Here’s a chance for Clinton to keep a tax credit that would pay parents $125 each month what was good during the last Clinton administration for every child under the age of three. While the and mitigate what was not. It’s a huge opportunity, legislation wouldn’t go as far as a universal child and one she should take.” a

OFFICE POLITICS

The Ladies’ Man

Forget Hillary—Trump is the one who’s inspiring women to run for office.

BY LAURA RESTON

TWO DAYS AFTER Donald Trump swept the Super most,” she recalls. “It became a calling to step forward Tuesday primaries, Terri Bono was perched on the and say that this isn’t right.” Soon after, Bono couch in her living room in Minnetonka, an a±uent decided she was going to run for Congress. Minneapolis suburb, suering through the eleventh She’s not the only woman Trump has inspired to Republican debate. Bono, a longtime Democratic jump into the fray. For the ﬁrst time in recent mem- state senator, knew what to expect by now. She had ory, half of the challengers in GOP strongholds being watched Trump feud with Megyn Kelly, bully Jeb targeted by Democrats—the 38 toughest, most com- Bush, and excoriate Hillary Clinton. But this time, petitive House races out there—are women. At the Trump kicked o the proceedings by stretching out state and local level, hundreds of women are running his hands for the cameras and boasting about his for oce, many in what political insiders say is a virility—“Are they small hands? I guarantee you. direct backlash against Trump. The man with the There is no problem.” tiny hands, it turns out, may prove to be the best For Bono, something snapped. “I watched them thing to happen to women since the ratiﬁcation of have a contest about who could insult each other the the Nineteenth Amendment.

NEW REPUBLIC Seeing Clinton’s haircuts and velvet headbands get WOMEN IN more media coverage than her policy positions made POLITICS, BY entering politics seem even more daunting. “People THE NUMBERS were saying she should be o baking cookies instead 20: Number of women of governing,” Hartman recalls. “You see what folks currently in Senate go through. You know it’s going to be a hard road.” 84: Number currently Bono, the Minnesota legislator, knows how tough in House it is for women to run for oce. In 2008, when a 307: Total number congressional seat in her district opened up, she had of women who have three years in the state legislature under her belt. A served in Congress hard-charging former business executive, she sewed 11,871: Total number up the key endorsements from national groups and of men who have local politicians, including Minnesota icon Walter 42: Highest percentage Mondale. But at the nominating convention, state of women in a state delegates rejected her bid—and threw their support legislature (Colorado) behind a younger man who had never run for oce. 13: Lowest percentage When women do run, studies show, they win at of women in a state the same clip—or even more often—than men. But legislature (Wyoming) “Women have been empowered to jump in because because they are less likely to run, they remain woe- they wanted to run a campaign that rejected the angry fully underrepresented: Women currently hold fewer nature of the race that Donald Trump was running,” than one-fifth of all seats in Congress, and fewer than says Lauren Beecham, executive director of the Min- one-fourth in state legislatures. nesota organization Women Winning. “There cer- Thanks to Trump, though, that could soon change. tainly has been a trickle-down eect from his Back in 1992—the one true “Year of the Woman” in candidacy, pushing women over the top. It’s turned American politics—four new women were elected to the tables for women in politics.” the Senate and 24 to the House, a jump of 70 percent. Representative Cheri Bustos, who oversees the Like today, women who ran that year were motivated Democratic eort to flip House seats held by Repub- by the cavalier behavior of men: Many had seethed licans, says Trump has been “our best recruiting tool.” During the GOP primaries, Bustos began hearing back from women she had been unsuccessfully court- ing as candidates for years. Suddenly, they were lining up to run. Trump’s unfettered sexism was a factor in their decision, women say, but not the only Studies show that women are far less likely one. “I believe that words have power,” says Steph- to consider running for office—even though anie Murphy, a Vietnamese immigrant who decided they win more frequently. to run in Florida’s seventh congressional district after Trump vowed to bar Muslims from entering the United States. “You cannot have somebody running for oce at the highest level who speaks in such divisive terms.” In most election cycles, convincing women to run as they watched the Senate Judiciary Committee grill for oce is a notoriously hard sell. According to a Anita Hill about her accusations of sexual harassment study by American University, even the most highly against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. qualified women—business executives, lawyers, edu- For Bono and other women, the 2016 campaign cators, and activists—are 16 points less likely to con- oers a daily reminder of why they belong in politics. sider standing for oce than their male peers. Women “Donald Trump inspired me to run,” she says. “There’s worry about upending their families, about their no room for such a mean-spirited person as the leader appearance being picked apart, about their qualifi- of our country.” In her home state, Women Winning cations being questioned. Most of all, they worry is on track to endorse more than 100 women running they’ll get the Hillary Clinton treatment. for oce, the most in the group’s 35-year history. Christina Hartman, a first-time candidate vying “I don’t think there’s a single one of our candi- for an open congressional seat in the Philadelphia dates,” says Beecham, “that’s not motivated to get out suburbs, remembers the charges leveled at Clinton and continue the hard work of campaigning every while she worked on health care reform in the 1990s. time Trump opens his mouth.” a

OCTOBER body politic

BY JEET HEER

strong, beautiful,” he later explained to Howard Stern. The white team would be all-blond, but the black team would be an “assort- ment” of light- and dark-skinned African Americans. Even Stern was taken aback. “Wouldn’t that set o a racial war?” he asked. The question was apt, because Trump’s idea harkened back to a form of entertainment that incited violent confrontations between black and white Americans. By the late nineteenth century, race-based entertainment, from blackface minstrelsy to ethnic joke books, had long been a profitable mainstay of American popular culture. Boxing promoters, looking to get in on the action, orchestrated matches that pitted dierent ethnic groups against each other: Irish pugilists against Italians, Ger- mans against Greeks. But the most incendiary and money-making matches were between blacks and whites. In 1908, when Jack Johnson became the first black world heavyweight champion, it triggered mass culture shock in white America—and ushered in a golden opportunity for publicists, newspaper publishers, and proto-Trumpian hype-men. The cry went out for a “great white hope” to re-establish white supremacy in what was then America’s most popular sport. Novelist Jack London, writing in the New York Herald, famously appealed to former champion Jim “Je” Jeries to rise to the challenge: Divide and Conquer “Je, it’s up to you.” When Jeries answered the call, the buildup to the bout was everything Trump wanted for The Apprentice: How professional sports and stand-up comedy taught Race War, and what he has finally achieved in his campaign for Trump to profit from racial stereotypes. president: a racially charged drama that caught the national imagination, even at the risk of inciting violence. When the match came o in 1910, Je let the white man down. Because the fight had been publicized as a life-or-death DONALD TRUMP IS an entertainer. He is also a racist. These two matter for the white race, Johnson’s victory led to a national facts are usually viewed as reflecting distinct and isolated facets outburst of violence, almost all of it white-on-black. “In Hous- of Trump’s personality. But we need to see them as intertwined. ton,” writes historian Allen Guttmann, “Charles Williams openly It’s the only way to make sense of the traveling racial-incitement celebrated Johnson’s triumph and a white man ‘slashed his throat show that is Trump’s campaign—and of how it’s taken him so far. from ear to ear’; in Little Rock, two blacks were killed by a group The whole “Make America Great Again” extravaganza is of whites after an argument about the fight in a streetcar; in rooted in Trump’s persona as an entertainer, and his long immer- Roanoke, Virginia, a gang of white sailors injured scores of sion in spectacle—from beauty pageants to boxing, from reality blacks.” While at least 20 people were killed and many more television to professional wrestling. Trump is the latest in a long injured, the newspapers that wrote up the match and the film line of carnival barkers, sports impresarios, and insult comics company that recorded it made tremendous profits. who have exploited America’s racial anxieties to build large Like Trump’s campaign, the Johnson-Jeries bout both played audiences in the service of a quick buck. He’s brought the mores o existing racial tensions and greatly exacerbated them. The of the taboo-pushing performer and the boxing hype-man into gladiatorial nature of boxing lends itself to allegories about the political arena in ways that Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, group pride and dominance, and Trump clearly picked up some and Arnold Schwarzenegger never dreamed of. In the process, tips from his longtime friend Don King, the sport’s most shame- he’s cannily exploited the license given to entertainers to talk less promoter and stirrer of the racial pot. This summer, before about race in oensive ways, benefiting from the forgiveness saner heads prevailed, Trump even asked King, who served time that’s extended more readily to clowns than to politicians. for manslaughter after kicking a man to death, and Mike Tyson, In 2005, while serving as host of The Apprentice, Trump the former heavyweight champ and convicted racist, to speak oered NBC a novel idea for re-energizing a program he felt on his behalf at the Republican convention—Trump’s twisted was losing its zip: a season in which the competing teams would idea of reaching out to black voters. be divided along racial lines, black against white. “It would be nine blacks against nine whites, all highly educated, very smart, WHAT HE DIDN’T learn from Don King about racism as entertainment, Trump gleaned from his favorite art form: the quasi- ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID PLUNKERT sport of professional wrestling, which took the tradition of

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Use the enclosed gift card, or go to www.newrepublic.com/holidaygift exploiting America’s racial anxieties, blew it up, and turned it The appeal of Trump’s act also draws on a related tradition into a highly profitable, long-running drama. Boxing always in American entertainment: that of the insult comic. At the had a show-biz aspect to it; Jack Johnson made o-ring dollars National Review, John Podhoretz called Trump the heir to How- on the vaudeville circuit. But professional wrestling is an even ard Stern and Andrew Dice Clay, those ace purveyors of the purer example of strife sold as entertainment—and it became (white) American id. “Guys like the Dice Man and Stern,” the perfect place for Trump to hone his act as a bigger-than-life, Podhoretz observed, “had been told and taught and trained by self-inflating, insult-flinging antihero, while taking notes from respectable middlebrow culture to believe that their tastes and impresarios like Vince McMahon, the CEO of Worldwide Wres- desires were piggish and thuggish and gross, and they said, tling Entertainment. ‘So be it!’” For insult comics, nothing is o-limits. Just the way Trump hasn’t merely been an avid fan. He’s hosted two Trump and his fans like it. editions of WrestleMania, and participated in numerous story Trump’s pose as a fearless taboo-breaker may be the best lines through the decades. In 2007’s “Battle of the Billionaires,” explanation of how he’s sold a plutocratic agenda (which includes he shaved McMahon’s head after his own wrestler bested getting rid of the estate tax) to a base that consists largely of McMahon’s champion. Atlantic writer Vann R. Newkirk II described the proceedings as a virtual precursor to the Trump campaign: “phallic boasts, celebrity endorsements, crowd- pleasing grandstanding, lots of bloody violence, and constant references to polls by Trump.” Trump cannily exploits While it has become déclassé in American marketing to tra¨c too openly or obviously in racial stereotypes, pro wrestling the license we give to never stopped. As recently as 2008, you could still see Kamala, a tribal boogeyman from “deepest, darkest Africa,” performing entertainers to talk about in face and chest paint and wielding a spear. African American wrestlers still pose as pimps and ghetto “thugs.” Latinos fare no race in offensive ways. better, often done up in stereotypical garb—bandannas and “wife-beater” ©-shirts—with equally oensive backstories. One of the best-known Latino wrestling teams, Los Guerreros, per- formed under the motto: “Lying, cheating, and stealing.” older white men. Contrary to most media accounts, this is not The pleasure of professional wrestling is that it blurs distinc- really a crowd of “working-class whites.” Most of the men at tions not only between sports and entertainment, but between Trump rallies are Tea Party types, solidly middle class. But reality and fiction. Wrestling fans bristle at the accusation that culturally, they are drawn to the plebeian forms that Trump so the sport is “fake,” since the athletic prowess needed to perform expertly deploys: the insult humor of stand-up comedy, the in the ring is indeed genuine. And if you ask them about the over-the-top stereotypes and cartoonish conflicts of pro wres- racially stereotyped characters, many will say that they’re not tling, and the Darwinian ethos of boxing. More deeply, they are meant to be taken seriously, that they’re just jokes. taken by the white man’s nostalgia of Trump’s message, his call Trump’s campaign has translated those blurred distinctions for a return to an older style of bluntness—and oensiveness— into the political arena. His outrageous comments are shielded about race and ethnicity that once pervaded the culture, rein- by the plausible deniability aorded a WWE hype-master. When forcing white supremacy under the guise of amusement. he suggested this summer that only “Second Amendment peo- Trump is routinely described in the media as a “real-estate ple” would be able to deal with Hillary Clinton, House Speaker mogul.” But for more than a decade, he has been a professional Paul Ryan shrugged it o as a “joke gone bad.” Earlier in the entertainer who licenses his name for profit. His real-estate campaign, when Trump fell into a fake Chinese accent while deals routinely fall apart. As a politician, he doesn’t display even speaking about trade deals—“We want deal”—it barely stirred a minimal interest in enacting policy or advancing an agenda. a ripple of protest. It was just Trump being Trump. His specialty is performing his insult-flinging, “king of the Over-the-top vulgarity and tacky spectacle—the stocks-in- world” character while flogging his eponymous brand. Like trade of professional wrestling—have defined Trump’s presi- others before him in the worlds of boxing, stand-up comedy, dential campaign from the get-go. His campaign launch could and professional wrestling, he’s found a lucrative niche market have been scripted and produced by WWE: the grand escalator in exploiting racial tensions for their entertainment value. entrance, the whooping audience stocked with hired actors, the It appears that Trump’s market really is a niche—that what racial taunting of Mexican immigrants. “They’re bringing drugs,” drives some voters to him drives more of them away. It’s tempt- Trump thundered, Los Guerreros–style. “They’re bringing crime. ing to take comfort in such political math. But when it comes They’re rapists.” His rallies are WWE-style events, too, complete to Trump’s brand of racial showmanship, what happens in Vegas with his own hype-master—anti-immigration crusader and doesn’t stay in Vegas. As the riots that followed Jack Johnson’s campaign adviser Stephen Miller, who whips the crowds into a win back in 1910 remind us, what starts out as a racist spectacle frenzy before the candidate triumphantly takes the stage. in the ring too often ends up spilling blood in reality. a

OCTOBER The PHILOSOPHER and HER CAMERA Ava DuVernay made history with Selma. Now, in two new ﬁlms, she’s taking on America’s prison system—and tesseracting through the universe.

BY RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH

AVA DUVERNAY, DIRECTOR of the Oscar-nominated Selma, asked indentured servitude of sharecropping that defined the era after me to meet her at a vegetarian restaurant near her editing Reconstruction, only to have these prejudices catch up with them facility in Studio City. DuVernay has long been an impressive in the form of housing segregation and tough-on-crime policies. filmmaker, but her prodigiousness is now undeniable. If Compton is right there in the middle of all that history. you are a black artist who dares to deal with the past, it is not Compton, Long Beach, South Central—that whole corridor uncommon for others to question your dexterity and your of blackness. Black neighborhoods just kind of strung together. authority. Her new documentary The 13th—which opens the Rebellious black neighborhoods. Over-policed neighborhoods. New York Film Festival on September 30—traces black But also black neighborhoods that don’t necessarily take what’s America’s dealings with the justice system after emancipation, given to them. and the vast political malfeasance that has allowed mass Well, what black neighborhood does? I grew up there in incarceration to thrive in the twenty-first century. the ’90s. It was a time of Rodney King and O.J., a time of Selma entered DuVernay into the pantheon of important tremendous gang presence, of an encroaching police presence. black directors and earned her wide acclaim. Since then, her I had a beautiful childhood. I lived on a beautiful street with acuity and influence as a director have only grown deeper with a beautiful mom and dad. But within a black community there each project. What is increasingly apparent is that DuVernay always was a bit of chaos—that’s just a part of the daily fabric of uses her camera to issue a serious demand to viewers, as living there. My mom grew up in Compton, my father’s from consumers and citizens, to look deeply at black life and black Montgomery, Alabama. They’re from areas that are hotbeds of representation in American cinema. She is unique because black consciousness, but they lived there as people, not as of the rarity of her race and her gender in Hollywood—which a political statement. My first consciousness came in college, reveals her enormous capability not to let the bastards stop when I went to . her stride—but even more because she refuses to look merely What happened there for you? to the past and mine it for easy, stagnant material. Instead, It sharpened my view of what I experienced growing up, much like Meg Murry, the protagonist of A Wrinkle in Time— and added a political context to it. You start reading the the next film she is set to direct—DuVernay works to thread great thinkers. You’re reading Frantz Fanon for the first time. together the past continuous. You’re going through your red, black, and green phase. DuVernay and I spoke for two hours about prison reform, I remember going through that phase. And I think one cinema segregation, and the neighborhood where she grew up. reason your documentary is going to be important is because a lot of people don’t like to read, or don’t have the time to do it, Let’s talk a little bit about Compton, where you are from. People so they aren’t familiar with the work that people like Michelle are actually leaving the South to go there for a better life. As you Alexander and Bryan Stevenson are doing around justice and

show in the documentary, they’re ﬂeeing anti-black laws and the criminal reform. DANIELLE LEVITT AUGUST IMAGE

NEW REPUBLIC

You can read about these things, but not enough people do. So the hope is that this documentary is a primer about black liberation theory for people who might not have ever heard of some of these ideas before. There is value to having it all in one place, in the documentary. You start to see connections. This was two years of work, right? And you wanted to keep it a secret? Secrecy is overstating it a little bit. Everything doesn’t have to have a Twitter account. I really didn’t know what the film was, what form it was going to take. When it started, it was about incarceration in the present day. Then it became important to provide a historical context for it, a cultural context for it, a political context for it. I wanted to include folks from dierent parts of the spectrum—the Right on Crime people versus the Black Lives Matter people. In The 13th, DuVernay included voices from across the political When you watch The 13th, you see how insidious movies have spectrum, seeking a “perspective that will speak to everyone.” been in terms of fueling the image of “black equals bad.” How do you as a black director enter that conversation? Do you think Do you really think Bill Clinton didn’t know what his prison about how we can correct those representations? Or do you just policies would lead to? This is something that a lot of my go about your work? generation feels—that the Clintons were in on it, and that their That’s all I think about. I work in an industry that was commitment to black people is flimsy at best. founded upon the psychology of The Birth of a Nation. If you What I try to do is show how in each administration, what are a woman in Hollywood, if you are of color, particularly the president wanted to achieve was for his own political gain, if you’re black, the founding images of cinema are adverse to and the weapon by which they do that against their political your very humanity. And if the images of the medium you opponent was the black body. It’s been ongoing knowledge work in are adverse to your very humanity, then every action that the black body triggers fear, it triggers opposition, it is a reaction. So everything I do tries to provide contrast. triggers the standard tropes of protection and defense and all I try and pivot from the characterization of what women those things that allow a politician to do whatever they’re should be, what black people should be, what black women going to do. The through line is simply, “Oh, the blacks—we’ll should be. I try to counter the presentation of black life— get what we need from them, whether it’s in the cotton field within Hollywood, within the studio system, within what or in creating fear.” makes it to theaters. Were you surprised by the forms that this maneuvering and With Selma, people came at you about historical correctness. fearmongering took? I’ve been doing historical research for my book, and when As someone who thinks deeply about these issues, and who I went to Mount Vernon, the tour guides didn’t even know what for a long time thought it was all made by Republicans, it was Washington’s quarters for his enslaved people looked like, striking to really break it down and to look at the Democrats’ or how their beds were arranged. Everything they’re doing is part in this. In general, the master plan has been: “This is interpretation—that’s what they call it. It made me realize that how you get what you want.” It has been applied and used by it’s all about who has agency to be a storyteller or a historian. every dierent kind of non-black person throughout the For Selma, I sat down with people in the movement who generations. That’s why it’s important to have a timeline—so told me what happened. I read diaries, I read journals. Yet the we see how we’ve been used over the centuries for political whole white experience was about people who weren’t there gain, for financial gain, for cultural gain. telling me I got it wrong. It’s jaw-dropping to me that people I was gutted by the clips you show of Eric Garner. One of the believe their truth is the only truth. It’s become the bedrock questions you bring up in the documentary is: Should we be of the way that we live: “I am right and you are wrong.” But watching these videos of police violence that have gone viral? history is in the eye of the beholder. What I said during the What do you think about the use of cameras to log how we whole promotional campaign for Selma was: “You decide.” are treated? I never came in and said, “This is the only way.” The challenge It’s important for us to talk about the ways in which black is to try to create a filter of perspective that will speak to people have asked the wider world to bear witness to their pain everyone, regardless of their point in the spectrum. over time. So much of the civil rights movement was What’s the significance of putting out this documentary on orchestrated for newspapers, for cameras. The reason Selma prisons right before the election? popped the way it did was because it invaded American I want people to hold our candidates accountable. We need televisions for the first time. That image was powerful, and to be asking them what they’re going to do about prison we’re in this current moment because of images. There is reform. How have you voted on it? Where do you stand? We no tape of Trayvon Martin, there is no tape of Michael Brown,

haven’t asked these questions enough. of the actual acts against them. All you have are images of NETFLIX COURTESY

NEW REPUBLIC the bodies, prone and gone. But it’s not just the body—it’s the turned studio head. They pushed me to read it. I was like, “I’m life taken from the body. So those images need to be balanced busy. I already know I’m not gonna want to do it.” So they send with images of black humanity not in distress and chaos. me the graphic novel—not the book. One night it’s late, and Did you get scared with this documentary at any point? I pick it up and end up reading into the middle of the night. At Scared? No, not scared. I cried a lot. 3 a.m. I buy the book online and spend the rest of the night You did? reading. I fell in love with it instantly. I felt like it was mine. There are a couple sections in there that break me every That book grew me. Meg Murry is every smart girl. She time I look at them. Many people behind bars never had a trial. embodies the smart-girl struggle of being perceived as both stupid That’s one of the things most viewers are stunned about— and weird. stunned about how much money is being made from prisons, One of the things that really interested me about the story stunned at laws that are written by folks who are not is that it centers on a girl, and it deals with technology and lawmakers, stunned about where the whole idea of criminality science and love and darkness and light and time travel and and black men and white women and all that stu comes from. breaking time and space, all these concepts. But what was Do you think we should be optimistic about prison reform? really interesting to me was: What if these were brown kids At one point I thought, “Should we be more hopeful?” So traveling through the universe? I included a sequence of everyone who’s in the documentary Wait—so Meg is gonna be a black girl? And her brother Charles saying who they are and what they do. But I took it out, because Wallace is a black boy? That brings tears to my eyes. I can’t I felt like I was saying, “Here’s the problem, but don’t worry, even imagine it. It really is an abolitionist story, a black story. these people are working on it.” It was too hopeful. Viewers I won’t give too much away, but yes—they’re biracial. should be uncomfortable and walk out of there thinking, Their father is white and their mother is black. “Fuck, I gotta do something.” I brought my copy of A Wrinkle in Time with me today. I used How did you become a director? You were at , but you to write my name all over it. We dorky black girls were never weren’t a film student. I wrote for the black student newspaper called ¡¡, and was involved in black student politics, and rapped at the Good Life Café on Crenshaw. You rapped? It’s jaw-dropping to me Oh yeah. that people believe their Were you good? What MC doesn’t say they’re good? If you don’t say you’re truth is the only truth. good, then you’re not a dope MC. One of my first films, This Is the Life, was about the artists who were rhyming at the Good Life. It was very famous—an underground thing, known around the world—and it stood in opposition to the gangsta rap that presented with visions of ourselves in the media. We had Denise was coming out at the time. So that’s what I was doing while I Huxtable, I guess, but it helps to be a dork if you’re absolutely was in college. I was learning about the world and my place in it. conventionally stunning. This—like, wow, this is progress. What films were you watching at the time? It’s funny that you thought Meg Murry was going to be a In Westwood, they have these great, single-house movie white girl. theaters that play only one movie, and they would show I did. I thought, “How is this gonna work?” But it seems like independent films. I remember seeing Ruby in Paradise. It had things are slowly starting to change in Hollywood. Now there’s a pace I felt an aection for, a pace that was luxurious, that the “DuVernay Test”—the idea proposed by Manohla Dargis that really allowed me to live in someone else’s shoes. The films African Americans should live fully realized lives in films, rather I might have been interested in as a young person didn’t than serving as props in white stories. Did you think that was cool? play near me, because there’s no movie theater in Compton. I did. That kind of thing is important. I liked what it was You can’t see Straight Outta Compton in Compton. You saying, and it was flattering. can’t see Selma in Selma. It’s cinema segregation. Even if I was You’ve achieved an enormous amount in a short time. It is interested in independent films at that time, I would’ve had incredible. to get on a bus to take me across town, which is not possible. I feel like I have a short window, to be honest with you. I I’m not getting from Lynwood to Westwood. It only happened feel like I have to make the most of this time, because there’s when I went to . And how many of us went to ? not anyone I can look to who’s had a long window who’s a What made you want to make A Wrinkle in Time? Did you woman, period. A black person, period. I don’t know what’s like the book? there beyond four films, because none of us have done it. I never read the book. I knew it was a kind of classic. There is no black woman who’s made seven films. So for me Like, a really dorky classic. it feels like a window that could close at any time. It doesn’t It was a black executive at Disney, Tendo Nagenda, and feel fast like, “Wow, this happened fast.” It feels fast like, another executive, Sean Bailey, an independent producer “Better get it in.” Before it closes. a

OCTOBER

TRUMP’S COURT JESTERS Meet the worst political team ever assembled—an inner circle of outcasts, opportunists, and extremists with nowhere else to go.

FROM THE START of Donald Trump’s erratic, improbable Trump tried to scare up endorsements in Congress, he ended campaign, political observers of all stripes have been waiting up with a handful of backbench extremists. When he for him to “pivot.” Surely, the thinking went, Trump would cobbled together a foreign policy team, he couldn’t even find eventually set aside the bombast and insults and strive to a respectable ex-general from CNN, much less a credible reassure voters that he could be presidential. “Very shortly,” think-tank wonk. When he put together an economic advisory opponent-turned-supporter Ben Carson said back in March, team, he found exactly one willing economist. “I think you’re probably going to see him pivoting more in the So Trump has been forced, for reasons of his own making, direction of everybody, rather than just those who are angry.” to assemble what could well be the worst political team But such thinking always misconstrued Trump’s nature. in presidential history: a rogues’ gallery of outcasts and It’s not just that he approaches politics as a reality-TV series opportunists, has-beens and never-weres, conspiracy- in need of a ratings boost, or that his entire brand is based mongers and crackpots. Few of the advisers in his inner on an attention-grabbing blend of provocation and hyperbole. circle possess any real qualifications for the positions It’s that Trump has never been oriented to the idea of a Trump they hold. Some have been ousted from their previous jobs administration. The word, with its implications of organization for incompetence, corruption, or outright craziness. and stability and control, is the antithesis of what has made Many, exiled to the political fringes, see the campaign as Trump a success. As a boss, Trump does not look for established a way to get back into the game. Most of them, sad to thinkers or veteran insiders to provide him with wise counsel say, have sunk so low that Trump looks like a big step up. or even a diverse range of opinions. He surrounds himself The survey of Trump’s closest advisers presented here with people—mostly white, mostly men, often wealthy—who does much to explain why his campaign went o the rails in look and sound and think just like him. He is, for all practical such a spectacular fashion over the summer. Rather than purposes, a party of one. compensate for his own shortcomings, both political and With his showman’s flair, Trump has assured anyone who temperamental, Trump has surrounded himself with people will listen that he will compensate for his political inexperience who reflect and exaggerate them. It is the mark of a man and policy indierence by surrounding himself with the who feels deeply insecure about his own worth. “Always be “best people.” They’ll be the “smartest.” Not to mention the around unsuccessful people,” Trump advised his supporters “greatest.” Unfortunately for Trump, no one with those at a rally in Wisconsin, “because everybody will respect qualifications wants to work for him. When his campaign you.” But one thing is certain: Whether or not Trump wins approached hundreds of aides to the 16 losing GOP in November, there will not be—can never be—a Trump candidates—including more than 150 who worked for Ted administration in any meaningful sense of the word. There Cruz—the vast majority passed on the opportunity. When is, in the end, only Trump. As the candidate himself boasts, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because ILLUSTRATIONS BY MICHAEL WITTE I have a very good brain. My primary consultant is myself.”

OCTOBER THE HONEY BADGER Stephen Bannon Claim to Fame: Runs Trump’s favorite web site Ties to Trump: Campaign CEO

When Trump shook up his campaign leadership just 90 days the former head of Fox News, has reportedly helped Trump before the election—for the second time in two months—he prepare for the presidential debates. By some accounts, turned to a man who’s been touted as “the most dangerous Ailes also pushed for the ouster of Paul Manafort, the campaign political operative in America.” Bannon certainly represents the chairman who oversaw Trump’s summer-long implosion. essential qualities that Trump looks for in his closest advisers: But while Manafort is out, his longtime business partner, personal wealth, electoral inexperience, and a penchant for the former Nixon operative Roger Stone, continues to serve as dirty tricks. A former Navy ocer who had never worked Trump’s conspiracy-monger in chief. A “loyal” friend of a day in politics, Bannon was a banker at Goldman Sachs before 40 years who made his fortune providing political services to taking over Breitbart News, the facts-be-damned web site an all-star team of international tyrants, Stone has fueled some that has become a shameless cheerleader for Trump. Under of Trump’s wildest accusations (linking Ted Cruz’s dad to JFK’s Bannon’s personal direction, Breitbart has launched hyperbolic killer, spreading fears of a “rigged” election), and is hawking attacks on Paul Ryan and other Trump enemies, and even a book of debunked attacks on the Clintons (Bill isn’t Chelsea’s refused to side with one of its own reporters who was publicly real father, Hillary is a secret lesbian). “Trump without manhandled by Trump’s former campaign manager. “In my Stone,” observes the National Review, “is akin to George W. Bush opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully,” said a leading editor at the without Karl Rove or Barack Obama without David Axelrod.” site who resigned over the incident. “He has sold out Breitbart’s Bannon certainly shares Stone’s love of political theater. mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump.” In July, he called the left’s focus on police shootings But Bannon is more than Trump’s most ardent media a “plot to take down America,” adding, “here’s a thought: promoter. Under the radar, he runs a Florida-based operation What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to called the Government Accountability Institute, which deserve it?” At Breitbart’s oces in Washington, he hung specializes in churning out damning research on Trump’s a portrait of his daughter seated on a throne once used political opponents. Where Breitbart takes a shotgun-blast by Saddam Hussein, cradling a machine gun on her lap. “If approach to Trump’s foes, the institute quietly employs experts there’s an explosion or a ﬁre somewhere,” says Breitbart in data science to scour the so-called Deep Web for details editor Matthew Boyle, “Steve’s probably nearby with some it can use to smear the likes of Jeb Bush. Its biggest success is matches.” Bannon was appointed the campaign’s CEO, Clinton Cash, an investigation of Hillary and Bill’s ﬁnancial as aides have put it, to achieve a single goal: “Let Trump be dealings that spurred a major story in The New York Times. Trump.” Indeed, Bannon’s personal credo—a nod to a Bannon isn’t the only right-wing media crusader viral internet video—could double as Trump’s campaign who’s playing a major role in the Trump campaign. Roger Ailes, slogan: “Honey badger don’t give a shit.”

NEW REPUBLIC THE PIT BULL MR. DARK MONEY THE RABBLE-ROUSER Michael Cohen Donald McGahn II Stephen Miller Claim to Fame: Bullying reporters Claim to Fame: Campaign finance foe Claim to Fame: Immigration extremist Ties to Trump: Attorney, consigliere Ties to Trump: Chief campaign lawyer Ties to Trump: Policy adviser, hype-man Want access to Trump? You’ll have to In the early days of his campaign, When Trump needed someone to write get past Cohen. Write something critical Trump railed against the influence his apocalyptic acceptance speech at of the real estate mogul? Expect a of big donors and lambasted his rivals the Republican National Convention, he threatening phone call from his longtime as “puppets” of the Koch brothers turned to one of the youngest advisers attorney. Although Cohen’s ocial title and Sheldon Adelson, pledging in his inner circle. Only 30, Miller is is executive vice president and special to “campaign with integrity, wholly a formerly obscure congressional staer counsel at the Trump Organization, independent of the dark-money who’s become famous as the sharply in practice he is Trump’s Tom Hagen—a donor class perpetuating a broken dressed, chain-smoking hype-man fiercely loyal lieutenant, enforcer, Washington.” Which made it all the at Trump rallies, where he riles up and all-purpose adviser in the mold of more surprising when Trump selected the crowds with grim forebodings about Vito Corleone’s consigliere in The McGahn as the lead attorney for the twin threats Godfather. Cohen, who serves on the his presidential campaign. For years, posed by “radical fund-raising committee at the elite McGahn has been at the forefront Islamic terrorism” Manhattan prep school attended by of the GOP’s push to remove federal and rampaging, Barron Trump, has been described limits on campaign finance, demanding murderous illegal as Trump’s “pit bull.” He doesn’t quibble that wealthy donors and special immigrants. with the characterization. “It means interests be permitted to contribute Miller is Trump’s that if somebody does something that unlimited sums to candidates with nativist whisperer. Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything little or no disclosure. A former counsel Miller has been in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s to former House Majority Leader pounding his radical benefit,” he once explained. “If you do Tom DeLay, who was indicted for conservative message since his student something wrong, I’m going to come at money laundering, McGahn spent days: At Duke University, he became you, grab you by the neck, and I’m five years on the Federal Election a cause célèbre on the right for declaring not going to let go until I’m finished.” Commission, where he cheered the that eorts to fight racism are Like his boss, Cohen has a slippery Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens actually a form of “racial paranoia,” and grasp of the facts and a penchant for United and routinely used his vote that Hollywood is one big pro-¨©ª« cartoonish overreaction. Last year, when to enable America’s billionaires and conspiracy, a dangerous force that “feels The Daily Beast was investigating rape corporations to corrupt U.S. politics sympathy for the terrorists, detests allegations leveled at Trump by his with an unregulated flow of cash. Republicans, and sees America as an first wife, Ivana, Cohen threatened the His goal, he explained to a group of obstacle to a better world.” As a teenager, reporter with a $500 million lawsuit. students, was actually to prevent Miller was such a prodigy of “You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s the nation’s campaign finance laws conspiratorial extremism that he served name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and from being enforced. “I plead guilty as a guest on conservative talk-radio I’m going to mess your life up for as long as charged,” he boasted. shows more than 30 times. On Capitol as you’re on this frickin’ planet,” he Hill, he made more fans on the fringe: told the journalist. Cohen went on As a lieutenant to Senator Je Sessions, to defend Trump against the accusations the anti-immigration crusader who by wrongly insisting that, from a was Trump’s first Senate endorser, legal standpoint, “you cannot rape your Miller was credited with plotting behind spouse.” In June, Cohen tweeted a the scenes to kill comprehensive picture of Hillary Clinton and accused immigration reform in 2014. Sessions her of murder while she was serving compares him favorably to Karl Rove. as secretary of state. But Ann Coulter, who knows a good rabble-rouser when she sees one, may be Miller’s most ardent groupie. When Trump appointed him to the campaign, Coulter tweeted, “®’¯ ®° ±²³´²°!”

OCTOBER THE ROGUE WARRIOR THE KNIGHT OF MALTA SENATOR SYCOPHANT Lt. Gen. Michael Joseph Schmitz Jeff Sessions Flynn (Retired) Claim to Fame: Too corrupt for Rumsfeld Claim to Fame: Immigration hard-liner Ties to Trump: Foreign policy adviser Ties to Trump: Chief ally in Senate Claim to Fame: Ousted by Pentagon Ties to Trump: Top military adviser Schmitz, who was named to Trump’s In February, Sessions became the first five-man foreign policy advisory team, U.S. senator to endorse Trump, America’s national security served under George W. Bush as the praising his anti-immigration platform establishment, hidebound by nature Pentagon’s inspector general, but was and opposition to the Trans-Pacific and wary of change, couldn’t be more forced out by Donald Rumsfeld over Partnership. Their relationship extends terrified by the prospect of a President corruption charges. John McCain back to 2005, when the Alabama Trump. An August letter signed by savaged his tenure at the Defense Republican invited Trump 50 GOP national security experts warned Department as “a textbook case of bad to testify before a Senate that Trump “would be the most procurement policy and favoritism.” subcommittee about reckless president in American history.” Schmitz wasted no time cashing in on the United Nations’ Flynn, one of the few military ocers his disgrace: He went to work for the renovation plans. to support Trump, has a 33-year career very military contractors he had been (Trump dismissed of seeking out recklessness. As an aide to charged with regulating, serving as the $1.2 billion disgraced General Stanley McChrystal, general counsel for the Prince Group, makeover as Flynn served as director of intelligence the company that owned the notorious excessive, claiming for the Joint Special Operations private military firm Blackwater. he could do the job Command, a shadowy team of highly Schmitz is closely tied to the Center better, and for half the trained soldier-assassins. His final for Security Policy, a group whose price.) Sessions called the testimony assignment was heading the Defense anti-Muslim paranoia is so extreme that the best he’d ever heard. Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s it’s been banned from attending the One of the most nativist members of internal spy agency, until he was forced annual gathering of the Conservative Congress, Sessions was an early into early retirement in 2014 after Political Action Committee. In 2014, cheerleader for a border wall with Mexico. butting heads with his superiors, who he attempted to coordinate a shipment His appointment as a federal judge deemed him “disruptive.” of 70,000 assault rifles and 21 million under Ronald Reagan was opposed by A year into his retirement, Flynn was rounds of ammunition to the Free Syrian both Democrats and Republicans due asked to join Trump’s campaign team, Army, financed by a Saudi prince. (The to his record of prosecuting civil rights where he has pushed the candidate to CIA shut the operation down.) Schmitz activists while U.S. attorney for oppose the Iran nuclear treaty and take also belongs to the Sovereign Military Alabama. He dismissed the °³³¹º as a more aggressive position on fighting Order of Malta, the Christian “knights” “Communist-inspired,” and denounced the Islamic State. (Flynn calls Islam tasked with defending “territories that a white civil rights lawyer as a “disgrace a “cancer” that “hides behind being a the Crusaders had conquered from the to his race.” religion.”) Vetted as a potential candidate Muslims.” One prominent member In May, after Trump said he would for vice president, Flynn also shares of a conservative think tank, quoted speak with North Korean leader Kim Trump’s fondness for Vladimir anonymously Jong Un, Sessions defended Trump’s Putin. A frequent contributor in the National prowess as a deal-maker: “There’s on Russia Today, the Review, oered nobody who has run for president in Kremlin-backed network, a simple summary years who understands how to negotiate Flynn sat at the head of Schmitz’s more eectively than Donald Trump.” table with the Russian reputation: “He’s The sales pitch hasn’t worked: Just days president during just a nut.” after Sessions endorsed Trump, the media outlet’s tenth prominent members of the GOP foreign anniversary gala in policy establishment published an Moscow last December. open letter criticizing everything from Trump’s ill-conceived border wall to his “hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric.”

NEW REPUBLIC THE ISLAMOPHOBE Walid Phares Claim to Fame: Spokesman for murderous militiamen Ties to Trump: Foreign policy adviser Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States and propagandist for a Christian sectarian militia that has taken a variety of shapes and forms. First, it was a “total and massacred thousands of Muslims in Lebanon’s Sabra and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Shatila refugee camps. When he moved to the United States Then, following the inevitable backlash, it became a temporary in 1990, Phares reinvented himself as a counterterrorism ban on Muslims—including those with U.S. citizenship. In expert. After the September 11 attacks, he began appearing July, Trump demanded a halt to immigration “from any nation regularly on Fox, oering grave warnings to Bill O’Reilly’s that has been compromised by terrorism”—a tweak, Trump viewers. “Linguistically, the Arabic language is a very powerful crowed, that would actually expand his Muslim ban. But what one,” he explained. “It has a lot of codes. It could be used all the versions have in common, besides their roots in Red in a lethal way.” During the Bush years, Phares testified before Scare paranoia, is their debt to Phares, one of Trump’s most Congress on “Islamist terrorism,” served on a Homeland influential—and conspiracy-minded—advisers. Security task force on “Future Terrorism,” and had two of his A professor and former analyst at neoconservative think books placed on a summer reading list compiled by GOP tanks, Phares is a fixture on Fox News and Arab-language members of Congress. By 2011, he had gained such currency TV networks, his commentary shot through with conspiracy in Republican circles that Mitt Romney named him a national theories about Islamic “fundamentalists” and “jihadists,” security adviser. along with a healthy dose of fearmongering about a looming Phares personally briefs Trump on foreign policy, oers war between the West and Islam. In books with titles analysis of breaking news, and writes policy papers for him. In like Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America, Phares his frequent television appearances on Trump’s behalf, he fills decries the depth of “Islamic jihad’s” infiltration of the in the blanks in the candidate’s pledge to rewrite U.S. foreign U.S. government. Before September 11, he writes, “the Wahabi policy in the Middle East. A Trump administration, he influence was so profound and subtle that it made its arms explained on Al Arabiya TV in August, will pursue three Middle within the State Department, CIA, and information agencies East policies: rejecting the Iran deal, forming new coalitions think that they, not the Wahabis, were in control of policy.” in the region, and dismantling ®¼®¼ and defeating its ideology. Another tactic of “jihadists within the West,” argues Phares, is Trump has taken his adviser’s “terrorist under every to “pose as civil-rights advocates,” infiltrate “almost all bed” paranoia to heart. In a high-profile address in August, mosques, educational centers, and socioeconomic institutions,” he reiterated his pledge to ban immigration from certain and then wait for a “holy moment” to strike. Trump’s rhetoric countries and vowed to create a McCarthyesque “screening on terrorism and “radical Islam” echoes such paranoia: In June, test” to keep out “any who have hostile attitudes towards our he asserted—with zero evidence—that many Syrian refugees country or its principles.” One of his first acts as president, he seeking entry into the United States are members of ®¼®¼. said, would be the creation of a commission to “identify and At first, Trump appeared to believe that Phares was a explain to the American public the core convictions and beliefs Muslim who hates Islam—the perfect man to advise him on of radical Islam.” Sounds like a job tailor-made for Phares. Middle East policy. In March, soon after he named Phares to his foreign policy team, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade twice referred to Phares as Muslim—and Trump failed to correct him. “Yes, that’s true,” Trump agreed at one point. In fact, Phares is Maronite, the largest Christian sect in Lebanon. During the 1980s, he worked as a top political ocial FRACKER IN CHIEF THE APOLOGIST CONGRESSMAN NUKE ’EM Harold Hamm Jeffrey Lord Duncan Hunter Claim to Fame: Fracking true believer Claim to Fame: TV pundit Claim to Fame: Wants to nuke Iran Ties to Trump: Energy policy adviser Ties to Trump: Believes that Trump Ties to Trump: Congressional cheerleader Unlike Trump, Hamm is indisputably University is a great school One of the first congressmen to endorse a billionaire, and a self-made one at Lord, a CNN commentator and former Trump, Hunter has worked to that. The 13th child in a family of political director in the Reagan drum up support among his fellow GOP sharecroppers in rural Oklahoma, administration, earned his place in the lawmakers. So why did only eleven he grew up to make his fortune—some Trump orbit in 2013, when he House members declare themselves for $13.7 billion, according to Forbes—with denounced a New York State lawsuit Trump before he secured the Republican Continental Resources, which he against Trump University as “bizarre, nomination? “I think you have more founded when he was only 21. An energy wacky, and legally weak.” Not satisfied Trump supporters in Congress,” Hunter company best known for its extensive with simply defending Trump’s told reporters. “They just have to fracking in North Dakota, Continental scam school, he hailed the tycoon as an come out of the closet, so to speak.” has been responsible for more “American icon—the walking definition When it comes to the military, “environmental incidents”—industry- of how to make your own American however, the member of the House speak for spills, fires, pipeline breaks, dream your reality.” Armed Services Committee wants and oil-train derailments—than any Trump helped Lord get his job at CNN, to keep the closet firmly closed. Hunter other company drilling in the state. and Lord has rewarded that act of opposed repealing “Don’t Ask, Hamm, whom Trump calls the “king of patronage by serving as his most devoted Don’t Tell,” arguing that the “homosexual energy,” is being touted as a potential media apologist. Where other lobby” would “take over.” He also secretary of energy. That would make conservative pundits have taken pains to opposed the defense secretary’s decision Hamm the first energy secretary in U.S. distance themselves from Trump’s to include women in combat roles, and history to move directly from the oil and flare-ups, Lord has run headlong into the wants the Obama administration to drop gas industry into the cabinet, a reverse flames. When Trump played coy with nuclear bombs on Iran. “If you have to revolving door that would put the Big Oil the endorsement of David Duke, Lord hit Iran,” he declared in 2013, “you do it cronyism of George W. Bush to shame. claimed that the former grand wizard with tactical nuclear devices and you Hamm met Trump in 2012, when he of the KKK was actually a “hard-core set them back a decade or two or three.” was an adviser to Mitt Romney. During leftist” out to discredit Trump. And when Like Trump, Hunter has a flair for the a private chat at Trump Tower in New Trump insinuated that the election theatrical. At a recent hearing, he York, they discussed Hamm’s vision for itself could be “rigged,” Lord rushed to defiantly pued on a vaporizer in a losing U.S. energy policy—get more oil out agree: “I am worried that the election battle to allow e-cigarettes on airplanes. of the ground—and Trump’s sense of could be stolen.” But convincing his fellow Republicans to fashion: Hamm soon appeared on Even his fellow conservatives are back Trump is proving such a tough the cover of Forbes in a Trump-brand disgusted by such blatant sycophancy. sell that he’s taken to suggesting they necktie, a gift from the Donald. “I don’t envy Jerey having to carry overlook the candidate’s erratic Hamm, who shares Trump’s reckless Donald Trump’s decidedly fetid water temperament. “It’s like having the best temperament, is fond of drawing every day,” said S.E. Cupp, a fellow home decorator in the world, but wild links between energy policy and CNN commentator. In another when he works on your house, he leaves national security. “Every time we appearance, GOP strategist Ana Navarro beer cans around, he plays loud music, can’t drill an oil well in America, turned to Lord on air and said it was his pants aren’t all the way up when he terrorism is being funded,” he declared “just too much on an empty stomach, in bends over, but he still is the best home at the Republican National Convention. the morning.” Lord had just compared remodeler in the world,” Hunter told Fox “Climate change isn’t our biggest Trump to Abraham Lincoln. News in June. “That’s what I want problem—it’s Islamic terrorism.” as president. I don’t really care about Trump’s personality.”

NEW REPUBLIC THE PAPER PUSHER BUCKAROO BOZO SCALIA REBORN Steven Mnuchin Sid Miller William Pryor Jr. Claim to Fame: Subprime profiteer Claim to Fame: Champion cattle roper Claim to Fame: States’ rights zealot Ties to Trump: National finance chair Ties to Trump: Agriculture adviser Ties to Trump: Supreme Court contender After pretending for months that he was Miller is Texas agriculture commissioner, Pryor, an appeals court judge and self-funding his campaign, Trump a position he has undertaken with a former Alabama attorney general, is owned up to the realities of running a Trumpian mix of self-regard and America’s most prominent judicial billion-dollar presidential bid and jaw-dropping peculiarity. Among other champion of states’ rights—and the brought on a full-time money man to acts, he changed the design on the closest conservatives are going to get handle his fund-raising. Mnuchin earned state’s fuel-pump inspection stickers to to a cryogenically revivified Antonin his fortune as a partner at Goldman more prominently feature his name, Scalia. One of a handful of judges Trump Sachs—a firm Trump attacked during and he advocated for “local control” of named to his short list for the Supreme the GOP primary for its ties to Ted deep fryers and soda machines in Court, Pryor was appointed to Cruz—and later formed his own hedge public schools. Miller, who is currently the federal bench by George W. Bush fund, making him the type of investor under investigation by the state’s while the Senate was in recess. that Trump has savaged as “paper ethics commission for campaign finance His record reads like a conservative pushers” who are “getting away with irregularities, has been accused of fantasy: He has denounced Roe v. murder” for how little they pay in rewarding one campaign consultant, Wade as “the worst abomination in the taxes. In 2008, Mnuchin and a group and the wife of another, with seats history of constitutional law.” He of investors bought the subprime- on the agriculture commission that pay detests that citizens arrested by the mortgage portfolio of the failed bank $180,000 a year. (Miller’s campaign police are entitled to be read their IndyMac at a steep discount. With treasurer was none other than Ted Miranda rights. He has argued that the federal guarantees to cover major Nugent.) The Texas Rangers have also government should appoint attorneys losses, Mnuchin churned out $2 billion launched a criminal probe into Miller’s to represent the interests of fetuses, in dividends to his investor pals by misuse of public funds. A champion and that legalizing gay sex gives a green engaging in dodgy foreclosure practices, cattle roper, Miller used $2,000 from light to “prostitution, adultery, then made another $2 billion by selling state coers to cover expenses for a trip necrophilia, bestiality, possession of the bank. to the Dixie National Rodeo last year. child pornography, and even incest Mnuchin has made a name for himself (No word on whether he reimbursed the and pedophilia.” as a movie producer—The Legend of state with his $880 in prize money.) Like Trump, Pryor also wants to Tarzan, Mad Max, Suicide Squad—but he He also spent at least $1,120 in taxpayer strike down laws designed to raised eyebrows in Hollywood when it money on a medical excursion to protect minorities against bias and was revealed that he’d quietly ditched his Oklahoma to receive a snake-oil cocktail, mistreatment. Before he landed on post as the co-chairman of Relativity known as the “Jesus Shot,” to help with the federal bench, he filed an endless Media, a once-booming studio, just before chronic pain caused by his career as stream of amicus briefs in Supreme it declared bankruptcy. Mnuchin a rodeo cowboy. “Worked out good,” he Court cases, arguing that federal says he and Trump have been friends for said of the treatment. Could Miller laws against discrimination—based on 15 years, despite Trump once suing be appointed agriculture secretary under everything from age and race to gender Mnuchin over a real estate deal. President Trump? “I’d have to pray and disability—are unconstitutional. In July, Trump raised $82 million about it,” he said. “Right now I’ve got the States, Pryor argues, must be free for his campaign and the national GOP. best job in the state of Texas.” to discriminate as they see fit. Anything For Mnuchin, Trump’s campaign is a else would be “anti-democratic.” distressed asset—and a win in November would be the ultimate turnaround job.

OCTOBER A VOICE FROM ABOVE Paula White Claim to Fame: Converted Trump to Christianity Ties to Trump: Evangelical outreach leader Trump enjoys a commanding lead among America’s evangelical voters, yet his credentials as a Christian are notoriously shaky. He says no one reads the Bible more than he does, but when asked to name his favorite verse, he cited a Proverb (“Never bend to envy”) that doesn’t exist. He says he’s never asked for forgiveness because he’s never done anything that requires forgiveness. He says he’s a Presbyterian who attended Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan—except that Marble Collegiate isn’t Presbyterian, and it has no record of Trump being a member. “If anything, this man is a baby Christian who doesn’t have a clue about how believers think, talk, and act,” says James Dobson, the evangelical heavyweight who founded Focus on the Family. So how to explain Trump’s standing among evangelicals? A big part of the answer is White, a popular, Florida-based televangelist who has led Bible study with the New York Yankees and leveraged her friendship with Oprah to meet the Obama family. White, who serves as Trump’s spiritual adviser, preaches the prosperity gospel—the belief that God rewards the faithful with material wealth. (Imagine Gordon Gekko’s adage, “Greed is good,” with a semi-scriptural twist.) While Many prominent evangelical leaders either don’t know most evangelical leaders view peddlers of the prosperity gospel White, or say they despise her. “Paula White is a charlatan and as frauds, White has turned the promised land into a source of recognized as a heretic by every orthodox Christian, of profit, creating Paula White Ministries to hawk her books (Move whatever tribe,” Russell Moore, an influential Southern Baptist On, Move Up) and DVDs (Why We Want You to Be Rich). leader, tweeted in June. Nevertheless, White has attracted an The way White tells it, she and Trump met through divine ideologically extreme group of leaders to Trump’s evangelical intervention. Several years ago, she says, Trump was flipping advisory team, including Michele Bachmann, former Christian through TV channels when he stopped on one showing White Coalition mastermind Ralph Reed, and mega-church pastor delivering a sermon titled “The Value of Vision.” Trump called Robert Jeress. Their large followings and celebrity status White to compliment her, and the two struck up a friendship among evangelicals have lent a sheen of spiritual respectability that supposedly led to White overseeing Trump’s conversion to Trump’s decidedly un-Christian positions. Like Trump, to Christianity. Trump and White have never confirmed they’re all given to incendiary remarks. Jeress, who leads the this account, but when he launched his presidential campaign 12,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, is best known last June, he turned to White to serve as his spiritual adviser for warning that legalizing gay marriage will “pave the way” for and lead his outreach to the religious right. White introduces the Antichrist “to persecute and martyr Christians without any Trump at rallies, delivered the benediction at the RNC, repercussions whatsoever.” He also preaches that Catholicism and procured a Bible for him that was signed by no less than is satanic: “Much of what you see in the Catholic Church the Reverend Billy Graham, the iconic evangelist. today doesn’t come from God’s Word, it comes from that cultlike, In many ways, Trump and White make a perfect match. White pagan religion,” he says. “Isn’t that the genius of Satan?” is a political neophyte—GOP ocials in Florida say they’d Trump’s most prominent evangelical backer is Jerry never heard of her before Trump’s campaign. Her advice to the Falwell Jr., the popular televangelist and president of Liberty faithful sounds like an excerpt from one of Trump’s books: University. Falwell has urged Christians to arm themselves, “Find your passion in life and figure out a way to make money.” and argued that if more people had concealed-carry permits Like Trump, White enjoys the high life—she once bragged for handguns, “We could end those Muslims.” During of having “millions in the bank”—and has a past littered with the campaign, Falwell has compared the real estate mogul controversy. In the late 2000s, a church run by White and to Martin Luther King Jr. and even Jesus Christ himself. her second husband was targeted by congressional investigators White knows that Trump doesn’t sound like Christ—but for allegedly abusing its tax-exempt status by providing its she dismisses his hate-filled pronouncements as a matter of leaders with private planes and multimillion-dollar homes. (The semantics. “He doesn’t know our Christianese,” she told Whites declined to cooperate with investigators and were the Christian Broadcasting Network recently. “Someone might never charged.) White, twice divorced, is now married to former take a sound bite and say, ‘Oh, see? He’s not saved,’ or ‘He Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain. doesn’t love God.’ That’s the furthest thing from the truth.”

NEW REPUBLIC THE WALL BUILDER THE TAX MAN Kris Kobach Stephen Moore Claim to Fame: Brains behind the far right’s nativist crusade Claim to Fame: Reaganomics peddler Ties to Trump: Leading immigration adviser Ties to Trump: Top economic adviser No public ocial in American politics has done more to Throughout his campaign, Trump has plant the seeds of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda mocked his opponents for kissing than Kobach. Even before he was elected Kansas secretary the ring of the billionaire Koch brothers. of state during the Tea Party wave of 2010, Kobach led “I don’t want their money or anything the right-wing crusade against the mythical scourge of else from them,” he tweeted last summer. “voter fraud” perpetuated by “illegal aliens.” His fingerprints “Cannot influence Trump!” Yet when can be found all over restrictive voting laws and anti- it came time to craft his tax plan, Trump immigrant policies far beyond Kansas. Kobach helped write turned to Moore, who enjoys close the so-called Show Me Your Papers measure in Arizona ties to Americans for Prosperity and the that allowed police to demand proof of citizenship from American Legislative Exchange Council— anyone suspected of being undocumented. He authored a two Koch-backed organizations. (Moore draconian law in Alabama that bars illegal immigrants previously worked from attending school, renting apartments, and obtaining at the Cato Institute, work. He inspired Mitt Romney’s infamous call for another Koch group.) a “self-deportation” policy in 2012. “He is one of the most A former research dangerous public ocials I am aware of in the United director for Ronald States,” says Rick Hasen, a leading expert on voting rights. Reagan and a longtime Kobach’s self-proclaimed goal is to make America believer in supply-side “inhospitable” to undocumented immigrants, and he has economics, Moore’s tax played a lead role in shaping Trump’s deport-them-all- plan for Trump calls and-ban-the-rest approach. Kobach suggested that Trump for $38 billion in tax force immigrants to pay for a wall along the border breaks for the wealthy. with Mexico by seizing payments they send home to their “Capitalism,” he has families. He also led the push to embed Trump’s border- argued, “is a lot more important than wall fantasy in the GOP’s platform. In July, when Trump was democracy.” In August, he was named criticized by Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim-American to Trump’s economic advisory council soldier killed in Iraq, Kobach complained on talk radio that along with 13 other white men (and he was tired of being “lectured about our Constitution” four other Steves). A visiting fellow at by “aliens in the United States.” (Khan and his wife, Ghazala, the Heritage Foundation, Moore has are both U.S. citizens.) called climate change “one of the greatest Trump has also parroted Kobach’s talking points about propaganda campaigns in world history.” voter fraud—a nonexistent threat that Republicans have used While his support for Trump has been to block voters of color in many states from casting ballots. criticized by his friends at the National “I want to see voting laws so that people that are citizens can Review, Moore seems thrilled to be in the vote,” Trump said in May. “Not so people can walk o the candidate’s inner circle. The last time street and can vote, or so that illegal immigrants can vote.” he had the chance, he blew it—forgetting Like Trump, Kobach is also one of the few politicians who about a meeting he had requested with still flirts with birtherism. In 2012, as Kansas secretary of George W. Bush in 1999. He’s been filled state, he floated the idea of removing President Obama from with regret ever since. “If I had been at the ballot as a noncitizen. And in April, responding to a that meeting,” he recently lamented, “it talk-radio caller, Kobach insinuated that Obama supports would have changed my life.” immigration reform because he’s really an illegal immigrant himself. “You know,” Kobach said, “he would rather not bring up the citizenship issue.” BURGER BOY MAYOR OF MEAN Chris Christie Rudolph Giuliani Claim to Fame: Something about a bridge Claim to Fame: “America’s Mayor” Ties to Trump: Transition team chairman Ties to Trump: Surrogate in chief The announcement shook the Trump’s improbable rise has handed a second—or third, or Republican Party to its crumbling fourth—chance to a crew of washed-up demagogues and foundations: Christie, stalwart of Republican retreads. Consigned for years to the fringes of the GOP, the GOP establishment and contender these political exiles have latched on to Trump as a way to regain for the party’s nomination, had endorsed the limelight. They have hit the campaign trail, resurfaced on Trump for president. After Sarah Palin, Sunday talk shows, and angled for spots it was the New York tycoon’s first in a Trump administration with the high-profile Republican endorsement, sweaty desperation of gamblers looking and it gave Trump an injection of for one last lucky streak. They were much-needed credibility. Longtime losers—until Trump dealt them back into Christie supporters were “shocked” by the game. his decision to “betray” the party. But Rudy Giuliani oers a textbook another Christie loyalist recognized it example. A self-promoting prosecutor for what it was: “an astonishing display who rode his crime-fighting reputation of political opportunism.” The wildly to the New York mayoralty in 1994, unpopular, term-limited governor of Giuliani essentially served as Trump 1.0. New Jersey needed a job—and a future. He lashed out at everyone from His fall from grace had begun with an squeegee kids to Times Square strippers, email: “Time for some trac problems instituted draconian “stop and frisk” laws that unleashed a wave in Fort Lee.” With those eight words, of racial profiling, and made headlines with his messy divorce. written by a close Christie aide, a nasty By September 2001, Giuliani was a largely disliked, term-limited backup on the George Washington mayor who seemed destined for political oblivion. Then Bridge exploded into Bridgegate, a the September 11 attacks turned him into one of America’s most full-blown scandal that tanked Christie’s revered politicians, the unbowed leader of a shaken but resilient bid for the White House. city. Time named him Person of the Year. The Queen of England Once on the Trump bandwagon, bestowed an honorary knighthood. He was “America’s Mayor.” Christie began to look like a After leaving oce and cashing in with lucrative gigs in security man questioning his life choices. His consulting, investment banking, and legal services, Giuliani woebegone expression during sought to parlay his fame into a White House bid in 2008. But his Trump’s Super Tuesday victory lap campaign set a new standard for boneheaded strategy and sent Twitter into a frenzy: One tone-deaf messaging. Giuliani evoked his experience of guiding GOP member of Congress likened it to New York City through the aftermath of the terror attacks so “a hostage situation,” and the hashtag relentlessly that one pundit described him as suering from “9/11 #FreeChrisChristie went viral. Angling Tourette’s syndrome.” He largely sat out the first seven primaries for the VP slot, Christie reportedly went of the race, hinging his campaign on winning Florida. Instead, he so far as to fetch Trump cheeseburgers finished a distant third, and dropped out the next day. from McDonald’s. Mike Pence’s Afterward, Giuliani receded from view. If he made news at all, ascension to the ticket left Christie with it was usually for saying something oensive about Obama. (“I do little incentive to stay on message. But Trump dangled a consolation prize: Christie, he has told reporters, “would make a great attorney general.” not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani declared at a GOP fund-raiser last year.) Then along came Trump, who needed allies. When Trump clinched the nomination in May, Giuliani emerged as one of his go-to surrogates, charged with defending him and airbrushing his screwups—a skill Giuliani honed during his eight years battling the New York press and cleaning up after his own blunders. (He once quipped that the “dysfunctional” New York City school system “should be blown up.”) Trump’s claim that President Obama was “the founder of ®¼®¼”? Giuliani called it “legitimate political commentary.” When Trump said that only “Second THE REVOLUTIONARY Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton if she won the White House? Giuliani rejected the notion that the nominee was Newt Gingrich calling for violence. “If Donald Trump was going to say something Claim to Fame: Contract With America like that, he’d say something like that,” he explained on Good Ties to Trump: On Trump’s VP short list Morning America. Giuliani echoes the candidate’s disdain for facts, It’s been years since Gingrich was even about September 11. “Under those eight years before Obama chased from public oce over his ethical came along,” Giuliani wrongly asserted in August, “we didn’t have violations and disastrous political any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the U.S.” leadership, and he made no secret of his At the RNC, the former mayor set the tone with his opening- desire to return to Washington on night, prime-time speech, in which he hectored America about Trump’s coattails, eagerly lobbying for the need to crack down on its enemies. “You know who you the position of vice president. “In one are,” he barked, “and we are coming to get you.” The speech was form or another, Newt Gingrich is going described by a range of political observers as “bombastic,” to be involved with our government,” “truly unhinged,” and “a disaster.” Trump announced in July. “He says I’m Fortunately for America, Giuliani is one of the worst people to the biggest thing he’s ever seen in the whom Trump could have turned for campaign advice. When history of politics.” Trump’s campaign was on the verge of imploding in July, Giuliani Trump and Gingrich have much in was one of a handful of GOP ocials who reportedly joined common: Both dumped two wives for RNC chairman Reince Preibus in staging an “intervention.” younger women, and both dream of Afterward, Giuliani boasted that his sage counsel had done the trick. grand projects to defend America against “You’re going to see Donald Trump campaigning in a somewhat illegal aliens. (“By the end of my second dierent way going forward,” he predicted, “an evolution that will term,” Gingrich said during his own focus much more on the positive than the negative.” presidential bid in 2012, “we will have Two days later, Trump was blasting away at Hillary Clinton over the first permanent base on the moon.”) her use of a private email server. “Anybody whose mind ‘¼±ÂÃ« “Newt is a revolutionary,” Trump ¹®Ã¹Ä®«¼’ is not fit to be our president!” he tweeted. “Look up the ally Roger Stone told the National Review, word ‘ªÃ³®°Å³¼±²Æ.’ ” “and Trump is leading a revolution.” But when Trump picked Mike Pence as his VP, Gingrich looked like a man who had sold his soul, only to discover it was worthless. He had not only lost his gig as a Fox News contributor, he’d shamelessly flip-flopped on many of his longtime views, even going so far as to endorse Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims. Still hoping for a post in a Trump administration, he continues to tout the candidate, boasting that Trump will win in a landslide. “Frankly,” Gingrich has predicted, “he’s going to end up beating Hillary by surprising margins.” a

OCTOBER Destination Boise Every year, 1,000 refugees from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East journey to Idaho to make a new life in America.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANGIE SMITH

SOMALIA Members of the Gosha Education Foundation pray in a backyard in Boise during a break in their meeting. The Gosha are a Bantu minority who converted to Islam in the nineteenth century as captives of the Arab slave trade. The group meets three times a year to discuss how to help those still in refugee camps back home.

NEW REPUBLIC OCTOBER TANZANIA Rocky, 18, moved to Boise to escape a war back home. “There was a lot of gunshots, but I was in my mom’s hands, so I was protected,” he says. His father died last September. “So my life has changed a little bit. I knew that whatever happened, my dad was going to take care of it, not me.”

NEW REPUBLIC IDAHO, A LANDLOCKED state with dreary winters and an overwhelmingly white population, might seem an unlikely destination for refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Yet every year, nearly 1,000 asylum seekers settle in Idaho, which accepts one of the largest shares of refugees, relative to its population, of any state. The inﬂux began in 1975 after the fall of Saigon, when 130,000 refugees ﬂed Vietnam and arrived in America within a matter of months. When Governor Jerry Brown of California attempted to prevent a plane full of refugees from landing at a military base in Sacramento, Idaho redoubled its eort to welcome those in need. Today, the Idaho Oce for Refugees provides newcomers with English lessons, driving instruction, social workers, and access to health care, education, housing, and jobs. A majority of the refugees come from war-torn regions in Iraq, Congo, Burma, Bhutan, and Somalia. Many are persecuted religious minorities, including Christians and Muslims. Over the past year, leading Republicans—including Governor Butch Otter—have demanded a halt to the program, suggesting it could be a pipeline for terrorists. Nearly 700 refugees settle in Boise each year, and photographer Angie Smith has followed a handful of families as they navigate their new world. For asylum seekers, life in America’s 99th-largest city is calm, but confusing. Many aren’t used to handling money or paying bills. Some have been stopped by the police for minor infractions. Others have developed high blood pressure from spending so much time indoors, watching TV and eating unhealthy foods. “Some people, when they start to eat, they cry,” says Dadiri Nuro, the former president of the Bantu Zigua community in Boise, who moved to the city after nearly a decade in a refugee camp. “Their memories go back to their relatives: I’m eating this food, and my people, they’re hungry.” Nuro has started a farm where refugees can grow African corn and other familiar crops. “They can plant things they know back home,” he says. “So they can be a little bit relieved.” a

OCTOBER CONGO Alfonse, 48, has worked as a housekeeper to support her five kids, two of whom remain in a refugee camp. She makes her own clothes: “I love it so much, because it’s my identity.”

BURMA Sar Bah Bi, 25, is a member of a Muslim minority in Burma. She met her husband at the YMCA. They raise vegetables to sell at a local market and work until 3 a.m., cleaning at a bank.

NEW REPUBLIC BURUNDI Maria, 28, prepares food at a party for a fellow refugee who graduated from Boise State University. Fewer than one percent of refugees attend college after resettlement.

SUDAN Khamisa, 30, worked two jobs in Boise, sleeping less than two hours a night. “My kids keep me going,” she says. “If I can see them laughing every day, I don’t think of anything else.”

OCTOBER

KENYA Hajia, 14, has been in school in Boise for a year, where she studies science, social science, and English. As a girl, she feels she has more freedom in America, but her goal remains the same: to become a doctor. “I had the same dream in Africa and here,” she says.

OCTOBER 2016 | 41 All the Rage Sanders and Trump represent two dierent sides of American populism—and the uprisings they sparked could topple the established political order.

BY JOHN B. JUDIS

ON NOVEMBER , the day after this year’s election, Donald realignments. To understand why the forces unleashed by Trump may well join Bernie Sanders as a footnote to Trump and Sanders will outlast their campaigns, you have to U.S. history. But that doesn’t mean that their candidacies will understand American populism. vanish without a trace. In a decade or two, American politics may look as strange to us as the conservative politics of the 1980s looked from the liberal vantage point of the 1960s. And There are as many meanings of populism as part of the reason will be Trump and Sanders, and what they there are of liberalism and conservatism. Sometimes the revealed about the soft underbelly of our political system. term is simply used as a synonym for popularity. Sometimes Trump and his followers are regularly denounced as business lobbies like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity fascist, nativist, misogynist, and racist. “We want him o the borrow populism’s language of anti-elitism to camouflage stage,” political scientist Peter Dreier declared in August, their self-interest. But there is a political tradition in America “and we want his racist followers to know that they represent that begins with the Farmers’ Alliances of the 1880s and the a tiny sliver of America.” Sanders was dismissed by Clinton People’s Party of 1892 (whose adherents coined the term backers and Republicans as a “utopian socialist” whose populist) and extends down through Huey Long and George supporters were “naïve idealists.” But such simplistic dismissals Wallace, to Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, to the Tea Party overlook something essential about both men’s campaigns— and Occupy Wall Street, and finally to Trump and Sanders. and about the impact they are likely to have. The central feature of all these populist campaigns has Leaving aside his bilious nature, his preening self- been the attempt to champion “the people” against an elite or absorption, and his casual bigotry, Trump represents a establishment. But how the people and the elite are defined has tradition of American populism that dates back to the 1880s. changed with the campaigns. The People’s Party represented So does Sanders. And in America, populist campaigns, “the plain people” against the “plutocracy,” Huey Long the movements, and parties have played a vital role: Their “poor man” against the “money power,” Wallace “the man in ascendancy serves as an early warning signal that the political the street” against “big government,” Trump the “silent consensus uniting the country—and the leadership of both majority” against the “special interests,” and Sanders “we the major parties—is breaking up. Populist campaigns have people” against the “billionaire class.” prefigured, provoked, and sometimes precipitated political But there is another element of populism that is less understood, one that divides the tradition into two distinct ILLUSTRATION BY CARLO GIAMBARRESI political strains. In the left-wing strain, epitomized by Long,

NEW REPUBLIC

Perot, Occupy Wall Street, and Sanders, populists champion and civil rights to blacks, precipitating the end of the consensus the people against the elites. In the right-wing strain, it’s also in Washington about civil rights, welfare, and taxes, and the people versus the elites—but the elites are attacked for bringing about the realignment of both the Democratic and coddling and subsidizing a third “out group,” such as African Republican parties. Americans (Wallace) or immigrants who have entered the country illegally (Buchanan, the Tea Party, and Trump). What distinguishes populists from conservatives and So what world view is under assault by liberals? It’s all in the kind of demands they make. populism today? Trump and Sanders both reflect the growing Conservatives and liberals advocate for incremental changes public dissatisfaction with the political consensus that that are subject to negotiation and compromise—raising supplanted New Deal liberalism after Ronald Reagan’s landslide the minimum wage by $2 an hour, say, or eliminating the victory in 1980. In Europe, it’s called “neo-liberalism.” In Aordable Care Act’s tax on medical devices. Populists, by the United States, it might more accurately be called “market contrast, make demands that would be turned down flat liberalism.” Forged in reaction to the protracted economic by the country’s current political leadership. Long wanted to slowdown that began in the 1970s, it has prioritized growth create a guaranteed annual income. The Tea Party wants to repeal over equity—with the promise, as Reagan put it, that a “rising the Aordable Care Act. Trump wants a 45 percent tari on tide would lift all boats.” It has promoted free trade and capital goods from runaway shops. Sanders wants “Medicare for all.” mobility (including outsourcing), labor mobility (including By their very nature, such immediate, unrealizable demands immigration), tax reductions on business and the wealthy, create a divide between the people and the powers that be. deregulation of finance, and fiscal restraint (to keep taxes down).

In the leftward strain of American populism, from Ross Perot to Occupy Wall Street to Bernie Sanders, it’s people versus elites, pure and simple.

Most of the time, the American electoral system works to It has retained, but punched large holes in, the “safety net” ensure that political demands remain both incremental and created under the prior New Deal consensus. negotiable. Our winner-takes-all approach discourages third The consensus of market liberalism was put in place by parties, and the two-party system rewards candidates who Reagan and a new generation of Republican conservatives, move to the center in national races. The center itself is usually backed by traditional GOP business interests and members defined by a broad consensus that delineates the relationship of the white working class. Although many Democrats between the government and the economy, as well as initially resisted market liberalism, the “new Democrats” led America’s place in the world. After the Civil War, for instance, a by Bill Clinton soon embraced the emerging consensus on consensus that government should chiefly promote industrial business tax cuts, free trade, increased immigration, and expansion persisted, with some deviations, from 1872 to 1932; financial deregulation. American politics entered a new after the New Deal, a consensus on welfare capitalism endured stage of normalcy. until 1980. A consensus lasts as long as it fulfills a promise The first populist rebellion against market liberalism of peace and prosperity. Once it does not, the United States came in the wake of the 1990–91 recession and the weak enters a political crisis. recovery that followed. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire, The rise of populist movements indicates that a prevailing promised “to make America work again.” He attacked the world view is breaking down. Ignited by the farm crisis that North American Free Trade Agreement for inducing U.S. swept the South and West in the 1880s, the original People’s corporations to move south of the border. “We must stop Party defied the laissez-faire consensus of the day, demanding shipping manufacturing jobs overseas,” Perot declared, that the railroads be nationalized and farm debt reduced. At “and once again make the words ‘Made in the USA’ the the onset of the Great Depression, Long’s demands for economic world’s standard of excellence.” In June 1992, Perot led both equality pressured Franklin Roosevelt into undertaking the George H.W. Bush and Clinton in presidential polls, but second New Deal, which established the modern welfare state. he undermined his own campaign by withdrawing and then

In the ’60s, Wallace attacked the extension of public beneﬁts re-entering the race with only a month to go. BROOKS KRAFT SYGMAGETTY; MAX WHITTAKERGETTY; ANDREW RENNEISENGETTY.

NEW REPUBLIC While Perot arose from the center-left of the political He is the first populist since William Jennings Bryan to gain the spectrum, another rebellion was brewing on the right. nomination of a major political party. In the 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, former Reagan Trump’s political style is entirely within the populist aide Pat Buchanan railed against illegal immigration and tradition. Huey Long, George Wallace, and Ross Perot were condemned “the hired men of the Money Power” for NAFTA, also compared to fascists and accused of being would-be runaway shops, and globalization. “What has global dictators. Like them, Trump is a charismatic leader who competition done for the quality of life of Middle America?” appears to put himself above party, representing himself as Buchanan asked. “What, after all, is an economy for, if the voice of the people against the elite. In a January campaign not for its people?” ad—titled simply “The Establishment”—Trump sits behind a The current incarnations of populism represented by desk. “The establishment, the media, the special interests, Trump and Sanders bubbled up with the onset of the the lobbyists, the donors—they’re all against me,” he declares. Great Recession. In the wake of the financial crash, the first “I’m self-funding my campaign. I don’t owe anybody populist rebellion took place among Tea Party activists. Most were small-business owners or members of the white working-class who had escaped the worst eects of the recession, but who bitterly resented policies that forced them Trump’s populism isn’t to subsidize what they saw as the undeserving poor, unprecedented—just the including illegal immigrants, as well as reckless speculators on Wall Street and poorly run auto companies in Detroit. At degree of his success. first, the Tea Party targeted the Obama administration. But after it helped elect a Republican Congress—which failed to repeal the Aordable Care Act—the Tea Party’s activists turned their fury on their own party. anything. I only owe it to the American people to do a great On the left, the first populist stirrings were expressed by job.” In his acceptance speech at the GOP convention, Occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011. The movement was Trump assured “the forgotten men and women of our country” composed primarily of college-educated young people, that “I am your voice.” burdened by student debt, uncertain of their future, and angry Trump has struck at some of market liberalism’s key tenets. that Obama had let Wall Street and the wealthy o the hook He has attacked ®¯°±¯ and other trade deals for sacrificing for the Great Recession. The Occupy movement lasted only a American jobs, and revived the economic nationalism of few months, but its attack on economic inequality as an Ross Perot—and sometimes the very language he used—by outgrowth of market liberalism had a profound political denouncing U.S. corporations for moving overseas. “Our impact. After the Occupy demonstrations, Obama turned jobs are being sucked out of our state,” he complained during against the precepts of market liberalism. That December, the the New York primary. “They’re being sucked out of our president began his re-election campaign with a speech at country, and we’re not going to let that happen any more.” Osawatomie, Kansas, where he took aim at a new “kind of Even after Trump had wrapped up the Republican inequality that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.” nomination in May, and would have been expected to make The two uprisings—Occupy and the Tea Party—typified his peace with the Republican business class, he persisted the left-wing and right-wing strains of populism. An in attacking market liberalism. In a June speech on “The Stakes extensive poll in October 2011 found that followers of both of the Election,” Trump appealed to Sanders supporters movements overwhelmingly agreed that “government is too to back him: controlled by special interests.” But the poll underscored their dierences. Eighty-two percent of Occupy supporters Because it’s not just the political system that’s rigged. agreed that there is “too much inequality in America,” It’s the whole economy. It’s rigged by big donors compared to only 26 percent of Tea Party activists. Occupy who want to keep down wages. It’s rigged by big businesses viewed equality as a way to redistribute the wealth of the top who want to leave our country, fire our workers, and one percent to everyone else. The Tea Party saw that concern sell their products back into the U.S. with absolutely no about economic equality as justifying an attempt to equalize consequences for them.... It’s rigged against you, the income between the rich and poor by taxing the middle. American people. Those two expressions of populism soon found new homes, in the campaigns of Trump and Sanders. Trump’s harsh, nativist views on illegal immigration, Mexicans, and Muslims are also far from unprecedented. In 1894, the People’s Party Paper denounced Chinese immigrants Ever since Trump declared his candidacy, his as “moral and social lepers,” and a year later, Kansas populist campaign has regularly been described as “unprecedented.” Mary Elizabeth Lease warned of a “tide of Mongols.” In But it fits squarely within the American populist tradition. blaming illegal immigration for crime, rising social costs, and The only thing unprecedented is Trump’s degree of success: declining wages, Trump is following Pat Buchanan and the

OCTOBER Tea Party. But he has also drawn attention to market Sociologist Donald Warren describes them as “middle- liberalism’s support for low-wage legal immigration, which American radicals” who believe that the establishment has he promises to reduce, and for high-tech guest workers. sold them out for those on the bottom rungs of the economic Trump has pledged to “put American workers first.” ladder. Sanders drew his main support from young voters Trump’s foreign policy views have been attributed in large who in the early 2000s had begun voting en masse for part to his a³nity for Russian president Vladimir Putin. But as Democrats—first over social issues, then over opposition to far back as 1987, Trump was urging burden-sharing among the war in Iraq, and finally over economics and the Great America’s ®¯±µ allies. His insistence that “the United States Recession. They saw in Sanders someone who shared cannot aord to be the policeman of the world anymore,” their anger—and who, unlike Hillary Clinton, oered a and that “we have to rebuild our own country,” echoes both compelling vision of the future. Perot and Buchanan. (“Our highest foreign policy priority Clinton supporters dismissed Sanders’s proposals as is to get our house in order and make America work again,” politically unrealistic and economically flawed. “Sanders Perot declared in 1992.) Trump—with considerably less really does have a singularly naïve and simpleminded knowledge of its isolationist background—adopted Buchanan’s understanding of American politics,” scoed Michael Cohen, “America First” slogan to describe his foreign policy. a former Clinton-administration speechwriter. (Similar charges have long been made against populists; in 1935, the ®¶· ¸¶¹º»¼½¾ rhetorically asked Huey Long, “Upon Like Trump, Bernie Sanders does not call himself what statistics of economic studies do you base your a populist. While he’s admitted to being a “democratic conclusions?”) While it was true that the details (and costs) socialist,” he prefers to be called a “progressive.” His proposals of Sanders’s proposals often didn’t add up, it was certainly were modeled in part on European social democracy and conceivable that the United States could enact them— American progressivism, but his approach was fundamentally after all, Canada and several European countries have “Medicare that of a populist. Unlike traditional socialists, Sanders for all.” What made them seem unrealistic was their challenge to the market liberal consensus on fiscal restraint and redistribution. Unlike Trump, Sanders never contended, as his liberal critics suggested, that if he were elected president, he could Trump and Sanders remind enact the changes he advocated. “If we are going to transform us that parties inevitably America,” he said last November in Las Vegas, “we need a reject their old identities. political revolution. Millions of people have to stand up and get involved in the political process in a way we have not in many, many years.” Perhaps “revolution” was too strong a word. But Sanders’s point was that breaking with market liberalism would require did not claim to represent “the working class,” but a broader a radical departure from politics as usual. It would require, in group; unlike progressives, he did not seek to reconcile short, a populist revolt. class interests within a democratic pluralism. Instead, he advanced demands for Medicare for all, free tuition at public colleges, the reinstatement of Wall Street regulations repealed In 1968, George Wallace ran as an during the Clinton administration, and public financing for independent, siphoning o votes primarily from Democrats in political campaigns—demands that established a sharp divide both North and South, and carrying five Southern states. At between “the people” and political leaders in Washington. the time, it was unimaginable that the blue-collar workers Sanders rejected ®¯°±¯ and subsequent trade deals, as did who had formed the bulwark of the New Deal majority would Trump, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership that the bolt from the Democratic Party and help Republicans create Obama administration negotiated and that Hillary Clinton a conservative majority for market liberalism. But Wallace’s initially backed. “I do not believe in unfettered free trade,” populist appeal was a sign of what was to come: The parties Sanders explained in a February debate. “I believe in fair trade realigned, and a new world view replaced the old. that works for the middle class and working families, not just Nearly half a century later, are Trump and Sanders for multinational corporations.” Again like Trump, Sanders playing a similar role? And if so, what will America’s new also criticized “corporations that take their jobs to China.” But political parties—and its new political consensus—look like? he diverged sharply from Trump on illegal immigration, The answer, in part, depends on the economy. The first supporting a “path to citizenship” for migrants who entered populist assault on market liberalism, championed by the country without proper authorization. the Perot and Buchanan crusades of the ’90s, was beaten Sanders and Trump also diered in their political bases. back by the internet boom. If today’s mild recovery gives Most of Trump’s followers are white workers—the same way to another boom, Trump and Sanders’s populism could voting bloc that backed George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. conceivably retreat into political background noise—

NEW REPUBLIC waiting to be reawakened, with new political champions, and Sherrod Brown share his populist rejection of market after the next economic plunge. liberalism. That sets up an ongoing struggle with the party’s But a new boom is unlikely. The recovery is fragile. backers on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Because market liberalism has left us with huge trade deficits, How will this all shake out? One thing’s certain: There the United States relies on countries like China, Japan, and will be no “populist agenda” that achieves landmark Germany to prop up our economy and sustain our financial legislation. That’s not what populists do. Instead, they set the sector by using their trade surpluses to buy U.S. government broader direction of political reform and realignment. bonds or properties. That arrangement, which helped fuel And the movements unleashed by Trump and Sanders suggest the housing bubble that burst in 2007, broke down after the that we’re headed toward a rejection of unfettered globalization. financial crash. As China’s growth slows, and as Europe fails to That will usher in, among other things, limits on free trade, bounce back from the Great Recession, the chances of a stricter financial regulations, and more spending on large-scale buoyant American recovery are slim. What’s more likely is infrastructure. It could also bring new restrictions on another downturn, which will keep the fires of discontent unskilled immigration. burning brightly well past November. What would this new economic nationalism mean for the That discontent will continue to roil both parties. political parties? If another downturn causes an even stronger Trump’s candidacy has driven a wedge in the long-standing upsurge in populism, it’s not inconceivable that Republican Republican coalition between business leaders and the voters could end up driving out the Koch brothers and turning white working class. Even if Trump is soundly defeated by the GOP into a right-wing “workers party,” as Trump has Hillary Clinton, the rift he’s opened in the party won’t be predicted. Or that the Democrats, even at the risk of alienating

Right-wing American populists, from George Wallace to the Tea Party to Trump, take aim at elites for favoring undeserving “others.”

magically healed. Business Republicans will try to use his Wall Street and Silicon Valley, could embrace Sanders’s loss to discredit the Trumpian critique of market liberalism, vision and once again become a home for the working-class the same way moderate Republicans made the case that whites who left them in the last great realignment. Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964 meant his hard-line It’s easy to throw cold water on such scenarios. Would conservatism was a nonstarter. The establishment lost the Republicans, the party of business for a century and a half, that argument, and it could lose again. Trump’s working really slough o the bulk of their ﬁnancial support? Would class supporters furiously reject the GOP’s support for free the Democrats, after years of embracing identity politics, trade, overseas investment, and large-scale immigration, actually be capable of reviving FDR’s universal approach to and they oppose Republican calls to privatize New Deal social and economic legislation? programs like Social Security and Medicare. And Trump, But it’s always unfathomable, at any given moment, that like Goldwater, will almost surely inspire less foolish, less the current political consensus could suddenly unravel, or that unhinged imitators who can rally his troops in future elections a major political party would dramatically reject its long- and further divide the party. standing identity. Trump and Sanders remind us that such Sanders’s campaign has already had a decisive impact on radical transformation is not only possible, but inevitable. the Democratic Party, driving Hillary Clinton to distance Back in the 1960s, almost no one imagined, let alone predicted, herself from market liberalism. In her acceptance speech at that FDR’s New Deal legacy would be seized by a Goldwater the Democratic convention, she denounced “unfair trade acolyte like Ronald Reagan and transformed into something deals,” promised to “stand up to China,” and vowed to punish entirely new. It shouldn’t be hard to envision that another corporations that “ship their jobs overseas.” But despite charismatic TV personality with a frighteningly simpleminded such talk, Clinton is hardly a born-again populist, and her view of global aairs, or even an elderly Vermont socialist, presidency won’t reconcile the party’s factions. Sanders could be harbingers and catalysts of another great crisis in himself may exert little personal inﬂuence after the election, American politics. That’s what populists do. They signal the

BETTMANNGETTY; NICHOLAS KAMMAFPGETTY; ALEX WONGGETTY ALEX KAMMAFPGETTY; NICHOLAS BETTMANNGETTY; but prominent Democrats like Senators Elizabeth Warren arrival of the unimaginable. a

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A skateboard party in Rutland, Ohio. Trump supporters believe Washington cares more for shirkers and cheaters than for hard-working people.

NEW REPUBLIC ESSAY

Red-State Blues Why do people support Trump and the Tea Party? A native son and a sociologist search for answers.

BY JEDEDIAH PURDY

IN BLUE AMERICA, from Berkeley and Brooklyn to Durham and Arlie Russell Hochschild, an eminent left-liberal sociologist, Austin, talking about Trump supporters has become an addiction and J.D. Vance, a Republican ex-marine and recent Yale Law that, like checking your phone, asserts itself in moments of School graduate with Appalachian roots, have thrown two rather weakness or inattention. Meals begin with promises that this dierent bridges over this divide. Hochschild, who lives in time we will talk about something else. Then, faithful as a bad Berkeley, must have heard dozens of these tail-chasing conver- habit, conversation turns back to troubling questions: Who are sations. Maybe it was their hermetic quality that inspired her these people? What are they thinking? new book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on There’s plenty of cause for worry. Trump claimed the Repub- the American Right, a combination of travelogue and sociolog- lican presidential nomination on an identity politics of white, ical analysis that distills several years of visits to rural and nominally Christian nativism that has not been so explicit in small-town Louisiana. There, Hochschild gets to know Tea Party American politics for many decades. Even if his blustering, scat- supporters, most of whom become Trump supporters by the tershot campaign ﬂames out in November, as many have expected end of her research, and works to understand the world view or hoped, it will be survived by the millions who supported him, that organizes their politics. many enthusiastically. If they continue to embrace some version Vance grew up in Rust Belt Ohio, in a family from eastern of Trump’s nationalism, what will that mean for the shape of the Kentucky coal country. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, must have political landscape? For the rest of us, accepting the right’s white begun in stories he had to work out during earnest, not entirely identity politics as part of normal life, year in and year out, is a comprehending conversations with his New Haven classmates: bleak prospect. So is treating perhaps a third of your fellow Where do you come from, J.D.? (Middletown, Ohio, but really citizens as beyond the pale of normal politics. Anyone who is not we’re from Jackson, Kentucky.) What do your parents do there? a Trump enthusiast should hope that there is some other way to (My dad is a sort of o-the-grid Pentecostal who gave me up address his supporters, and for them to understand themselves. for adoption when I was a kid. My mom has boyfriends and Yet when liberals talk about Trump voters, they are often serial husbands, and works as a nurse when she’s not too strung driven to conjecture and make-believe. The question, “Do you out on prescription drugs or heroin. My grandmother raised me know anybody who is for Trump?” is answered by some varia- with a Bible and a gun. What does your dad do in Greenwich?) tion on: “A few people I know on Facebook, some from high Hochschild is a cultural interpreter by vocation. Vance has school; maybe my husband’s uncle, but we don’t really talk become one out of necessity. about it.” And then it’s back to, “Who are these people?” The conversations themselves are symptoms of a country whose HOCHSCHILD IS FASCINATED by how people make sense of their political segregation runs through our neighborhoods, work- lives, what she calls the “deep story” that locates them in the places, and social media. world. A person’s deep story underlies their sense of what it means to lead a good life; what makes them proud or angry; PHOTOGRAPHS BY STACY KRANITZ where they feel at home. Hochschild conveys that she genuinely

OCTOBER REVIEW likes the people she meets, communicating their dignity and not the wealthy (who have simply reached the front), but values. She doesn’t hide her baement at their politics, and she public-sector workers, whom they see as lazy and overpaid, clearly felt comfortable enough with her subjects to argue back and welfare recipients. As Hochschild’s informants see it, gently but persistently, probing for the bedrock of their views. Obama’s Washington cares more for shirkers and cheaters than Her Tea Party friends (as she sometimes describes them) for hard-working people. They don’t have much love for Wall live in a region deeply polluted by petrochemical industries, Street or multinational corporations, but the free market is the and some of their most obvious losses and grievances are envi- enemy of their enemies. The Democratic Party is their enemies’ ronmental. One devout Pentecostal Cajun family lives on a best friend. poisoned bayou, surrounded by dead forests. They carry mem- Hochschild’s people also feel the loss of other, noneconomic ories of their grandparents’ time, when the family lived on the sources of honor and dignity. They are proud to think of them- bountiful water and woods, and of their parents’ time, when selves as rooted people, oriented to family and community, cows and horses drank from or waded into polluted waterways even if they have divorced or moved away. But fidelity and and died within days. steadfastness, values crystallized in an ideal of traditional One elderly informant lost his engineering job after he was marriage, seem to be scorned by a new elite, a cosmopolitan doused at work with harmful chemicals that disabled and could type that can choose its places and its attachments. Members have killed him. Born into a Democratic family in the Pacific of that elite make a fetish of their admiration and concern for Northwest, he became an environmentalist after going public gay people, black people, immigrants—and flaunt their disdain with stories of being instructed to dump his factory’s most for backward, presumptively racist traditionalists. Again and dangerous by-products into local wetlands, week after week, again, people find ways to tell Hochschild that they aren’t big- always in secret. Now in his eighties, he puts up signs for Tea ots: They just don’t want to be told whom to admire and care Party candidates. Another Tea Partier lost his home and neigh- for, especially by elites who make no pretense of admiring or borhood to a sinkhole the size of a subdivision after a risky even halfway understanding them. fracking operation shattered a subterranean mineral formation In these attentive, detailed portraits, Hochschild finds the (which other companies were already nerve that President Obama touched in two of his most widely using to store toxic waste). reviled remarks—about economically abandoned rural people Hochschild asks a question familiar “clinging” to guns and religion, and that business owners “didn’t to anyone who has ever wondered what’s build that” by themselves. As usual with comments that cut the matter with Kansas: How does a deep, they were not wild claims or vicious attacks, but more or Republican Party of big business, whose less straightforward facts, spoken by someone who felt distant candidates split over whether to shrink and condescending. The president’s remarks expressed an idea the Environmental Protection Agency shared by FDR and Dwight Eisenhower, that infrastructure or abolish it outright, appeal to these and policy form a necessary backdrop to personal freedom and victims of what one can only call envi- eective action in the modern world. But today they reveal a ronmental injustice? gulf between Hochschild’s “strangers in their own land” and STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND Here is what she hears: The line for a new elite, strange to their eyes, that seems unforgivably safe BY ARLIE RUSSELL advancement toward the American dream and at home in a land it is making over in its image. HOCHSCHILD of secure prosperity has grown very long. The New Press, Sometimes it seems to have stopped mov- VANCE VOICES SOME of the same feelings of alienation, speaking 368 pp., $27.95 ing. And, in front of these hard-working not for the subjects of sociological interviews, but for cousins people, newcomers are cutting in line, and neighbors. He describes his grandmother, raised an FDR playing by their own rules to get ahead. Democrat like most coal country people of her generation, Armative action, jobs for illegal immi- railing against idle, dishonest welfare recipients. In one of his grants, and (in some men’s view) women most telling passages, he writes that Obama “feels like an alien” in the workforce are all moving the goal- to many people “for reasons that have nothing to do with his posts, undercutting what these tradition- skin color.” The president “is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like alist Louisianans feel are lives of working a constitutional law professor … he conducts himself with a hard, waiting patiently, and playing by confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American the rules. Many of these people don’t trust meritocracy was built for him.” If people claim that Obama is a the companies that have poisoned their liar, a crypto-Muslim, an inarticulate, teleprompter-dependent home place; but they feel that the federal armative action baby, that is partly because they know that, HILLBILLY ELEGY BY J.D. VANCE government, especially under Barack in this new world, he is better than they are: Harper, Obama, is on the side of the line-skippers 272 pp., $27.99 who are changing the rules. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears They are equally aronted by people suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky they see as having escaped from the line: enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we

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Tin Can Hollow, West Virginia. Hillbilly Elegy sees people whose “ready violence and mistrust of outsiders ill prepared them for the modern world.”

shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and went sour, telling no one where she was. But he loves when they we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong, make sense, even a rather primitive and violent sense, like his but because we know she’s right. sailor-mouthed, pistol-packing Appalachian grandmother, whose fierce love, he believes, kept him alive and on track for his He laments that “we”—the working-class Appalachian whites unheralded successes. that he calls hillbillies—eat Pillsbury for breakfast, Taco Bell for Shortly after he graduates from Yale, Vance is driving back lunch, and McDonald’s for dinner; use high-interest credit cards to Middletown, Ohio, to rent a motel room for his mother, who to buy luxuries they can’t aord; fall fecklessly into and out of is homeless and has been using heroin. He is finally free enough sexual relationships; and seem unable to resist alcohol and drugs. to feel some sympathy and generosity toward her, and at last But for all the denunciation, Vance’s preferred pronoun is he has enough money to help; at the same time, he feels he’s “we.” He speaks from within the culture he has more than half- being pulled back to where he least wants to be, but still fears way left for the upper echelons of meritocracy. (He now works he might belong. Besides its political interest, Vance’s book is a in venture capital in San Francisco.) Hochschild likes her subjects, reminder that writing about yourself and the people you love is is interested in the stories they tell, and sees them as basically always an exercise in both loyalty and betrayal; he may have capable, admirable people thrown into bewildering circum- learned that while writing it. stances. Vance loves and hates them with the helplessness of so Vance agrees with Hochschild—and, it seems, nearly every- many emotions about home and family. He hates when they one these days—that traditional American success is getting hurt themselves and their children; his mother’s drugged-out harder to achieve “in an economy that failed to deliver the most selfishness and failure to take care of him and his sister, he basic promise of the American dream—a steady wage.” But his writes, left him angry enough “to kill.” He hates when unac- diagnosis of working-class experience is basically cultural: He countable waves of rage and terror send him running into the sees people whose clannishness, ready violence, and mistrust streets of Washington, D.C., during a romantic quarrel. He of outsiders ill prepared them for the modern world, and whose realizes he is acting like his mother, who would flee with her encounters with post-1960s licentiousness and 1980s consum- children to hide in a motel for a few days when a relationship erism have been catastrophic. He places some hope in an updated

OCTOBER REVIEW

Three generations in Bluefield, West Virginia. Since their grandparents’ time, residents have watched the region beset by job loss and pollution.

version of his grandparents’ virtues—faith, hard work, and The establishment conservative view, sounded by figures like constancy—with a dash of contemporary emotional self-aware- Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Rauch, and Leon Wieseltier, is that ness. But he believes that many of the working-class whites he Trump is the sick consummation of an individualistic, knows have more or less given up on the system, and on them- “hyper-democratic” culture that values emotional satisfaction selves, in a moral failure that is a symptom of cultural failure. and “authenticity” over facts and reason. One liberal view— Hillbilly Elegy details bleak experience and describes the fault expressed at its bluntest on social media, but also in columns lines of a divided country, but its tone is resolutely measured, by Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie—is that his supporters are its bottom-line attitude conventionally patriotic. Vance’s treat- basically racist and otherwise-bigoted hicks, whom the Repub- ment of the same themes in occasional writing, however, has lican Party has been feeding on the sly for decades, and who are been more provocative and contrarian. He wrote in the Times now out of their cages. A more polite version of this take sees in April that Trump’s rise resulted from Republicans’ failure to Trump’s success as a response to the declining status of admit that the Iraq war “was a terrible mistake imposed on the working-class, rural, and small-town whites in a demographi- country by an incompetent president,” and that white working- cally and culturally changing world, a last grab at a nostalgic class voters hate the Republican elite because “the last time America where, even if they are not bigots, they feel they once Republican voters put a member of that elite in the White House, belonged. A final view, more congenial to the Sanders and he sent their children on a bloody misadventure.” He is clearly Jacobin left, is that while Trump himself is a repugnant charla- proud to come from people who can see these facts while his tan, his supporters seek in him a salve for the real economic party’s chattering class ignores them. But he is mainly despair- problems of blue-collar displacement and the bait-and-switch ing about the Appalachian and Rust Belt world he loves: For promises of the American dream. people like him, he wrote in the National Review in 2014, “home Hochschild tends toward views three and four (status conflict might be the worst enemy.” and economic displacement) while Vance gives a gritty, hillbilly-specific version of view one (cultural self-immolation). WHERE DO THESE books leave us? There are, crudely drawn, But the virtue of these strongly felt, experience-rich interpre- four or so current theories of Trump and the new New Right. tations of a divided America turns out to be their vice as well:

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One cannot really adjudicate among competing theories based about them. Talk radio and the partisan internet have created on intimate portraits of personal life, in which many things a series of spaces where people spill out political and cultural are true at once. The theories become just dierent ways of impatience and disdain, and signal their own versions of virtue, talking about the same thing. Working-class wages are stag- often to cathartic applause. But these spaces only feel private: nating, jobs are harder to come by—and people make bad They are public, or at least leaky, and the worst, most ill- decisions, sometimes unremittingly, like many members of considered posts soon get shared in other rooms. In a world of Vance’s family. Traditional virtues get derided as heteronor- physical segregation by class and subculture, there has never mative small-mindedness—and many people are not dealing been so much opportunity to feel insulted by people one does well with a black president. not know, but who come to feel like intimate enemies. Hoch- Still, some general lessons come through here, not all of them schild argues convincingly that Trump’s rallies are basically intended. One is grounded in a modern version of tribalism: festivals of self-assertion for people who spend much of their People will stand for a great deal from an institution they believe time feeling like embattled strangers, but, together, feel at home is basically well-intentioned and on the side of people like them. in their common outrage. These rallies mimic in real space By the same token, you can get almost nothing out of people much of our less visible activity, where, it can seem, we are who believe the opposite. Hochschild’s Tea Partiers grudgingly always preparing for battle. admit that they appreciate federal highways and Coast Guard All of this is happening in a time when realities people protection, but even the ones who have been environmental cannot see directly—global capital ﬂows, changing manufac- activists will credit the EPA with hardly anything, and forgive turing technologies, geopolitical earthquakes, and the tecton- private industry nearly everything. J.D. Vance loves the Marine ics of inequality in wealth and income—are violently shifting Corps, which subjected him to a great deal of one-size-ﬁts-all the landscapes where their “deep stories” and everyday eorts sadism and sent him to Iraq (as a public relations ocer), with play out. The factory job that gave Vance’s beloved grandfather the same loyalty he has for his grandmother, who usually shows a middle-class income while he drank and fought in the eve- up in his stories armed and threatening to shoot someone. nings no longer exists in Middletown. Vance’s desultory atten- Another lesson is that the meaning of identity politics has tion to high school, which would have been an economic death changed. When it emerged, mainly in arguments on the left sentence for him without some extraordinary lucky breaks, between those who focused on redistributing material goods and those who emphasized cultural standing and “recognition,” it automatically referred to the identities of historically marginal Trump’s rallies are basically groups, who were symbolically as well as materially disadvan- festivals of self-assertion for people taged. Now there is a white, Christian, nativist identity politics, espoused by people who, as both Vance and Hochschild note, who feel like embattled strangers. regard themselves as members of an aggrieved minority, hence “strangers in their own land.”

DESPITE THEIR BEST intentions, both Hochschild’s and Vance’s books suggest that identity, feeling, and personal narrative—the currency of so much public discourse these days—oer incom- plete and often counterproductive keys to politics. Hochschild pays respectful attention to the moral and emotional “deep stories” of Tea Partiers whom she comes to regard as friends. Then she ends her book, after a plea for mutual understanding, was the norm for factory-bound kids not so long ago. This with an appendix noting all the ways her new friends are wrong— economy oers no clear path toward making a secure and about the size of government, the cost of welfare, the repro- digniﬁed life out of the ways many people are raised to live, to ductive behavior of black people, and the relationship between seek pleasure and respect. At the same time, it holds up the jobs and pollution, among others. She proposes, in eect, a cultural habits of second- and third-generation liberal meri- détente by which liberals would admit that Tea Party activists tocrats as the keys to economic success and high moral status. are human beings with feelings and personal virtues, and con- Wouldn’t you feel you had been set up, too, if you realized too servatives would admit that liberals are right about the substance late that you were on the wrong side of this story? It may be of the issues. She is bracingly honest to end this way: Under- imprecise or even irresponsible to say that such a system is standing where the other side is coming from may be invaluable, “rigged,” but to say so is also natural. but it is only a ﬁrst step. Politics is ultimately about disagreement Where I grew up in Appalachia, local people would sometimes over substance, which is distinct from either dissonant identi- say, about nearly anything ongoing, “It’ll get worse before it ties or harmonious ones. gets better.” Sometimes they sounded mournfully pleased by Our identity-oriented, feeling-driven politics is especially their own realism. Nothing in these admirable books suggests vexed because everyone today knows what others are saying that they would be wrong today. a

OCTOBER BOOKS idiosyncratic imaginings of female sexuality are made worse when accompanied by statements like, “Every architect has fantasies of building her own home, and so does every woman.” This is the only masturbation scene Julia gets. We are treated to Jacob’s fantasies at greater length, though his sexuality boils down to a penis fixation so strong that a minor subplot of the novel sees him wondering if Steven Spielberg is uncircumcised. It’s hard to say whether Here I Am is serious about any of this. Foer splices these sex scenes into a bourgeois family fantasy, set in a bourgeois neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Jacob works in television, and Julia is an architect. Their children are precocious in a J.D. Salinger sort of way. The middle child, nine, is prone to observations like, “You realize that’s not even honey. That’s agave.” The twelve-year-old turns his talents to the man- ufacture of an “artificial vagina” from a toilet-paper roll, rubber bands, Saran Wrap, and maple syrup. Eventually their family romance is disrupted: first by Jacob and Julia’s impending divorce, set o by her discovery that he has been sexting “one of the directors” at his prestige cable television show. Then a major earthquake hits Israel, because no Foer novel is complete without the functional use of a grave historical moment. In Everything Is Illuminated, it was the Holo- caust; in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the September 11 attacks. Jacob spends several chapters mulling whether he will go to Israel to help with the relief eort. Ultimately, he doesn’t, Me Oh My! and the disaster proves irrelevant to his personal drama. Slice Can Jonathan Safran Foer write out the newsworthy catastrophe and you’d have almost exactly the same book. fiction about anything but himself? TYPICALLY, WE DON’T think of the kind of success that Foer has BY MICHELLE DEAN achieved as a punishment. But as one burrows deeper into Here I Am, the solipsism of a gilded life becomes stifling. Anointed fiction’s Next Big Thing in his early twenties, Foer sold his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, for half a million dollars. When YOU CAN’T MAKE a woman come just by looking at her. Or so it it was published in 2002, the critical praise was rhapsodic: “Not seemed we all agreed, until the arrival of Here I Am, Jonathan since Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange has the Safran Foer’s new novel. This is a book about a marriage falling English language been simultaneously mauled and energized apart, but we are granted a single window into the lives of Julia with such brilliance and such brio,” etc. and Jacob Bloch before they tie the knot. Once upon a time, they Later, Foer married another serious novelist and purchased stayed in a nice Pennsylvania hotel, and Julia asked Jacob to an enormous Brooklyn brownstone. His second novel, deemed stare into her vagina until, well, you know. “I have this desire,” less thrilling, still sold well. Both novels were made into movies; she says, improbably, at the start of the routine. It is very import- the actress and fellow wunderkind Natalie Portman found his ant to her author that this all be framed as her choice. third book, Eating Animals, so powerful that she became a vegan. Not too much later, Julia decides to masturbate with a stolen Foer is now divorced. All of this is Googleable history. bespoke doorknob. She is reported to like “how the warm metal One likes to keep details of the author’s personal life out of began to stick to her skin, to pull at it a little each time.” This is criticism, but Foer has always been set on inviting readers to a novel that makes you puzzle over small questions, not least of evaluate him personally. In Everything Is Illuminated, one of the them the science of this particular claim. How warm, exactly, main characters is named after himself, and he is happy to admit would the metal have to be for skin to be “pulled” by it? How the biographical parallels in interview after interview. More long, exactly, does warm water actually last as a lubricant, since recently, Foer published some of literary history’s most fatuous we are told that this is all Julia uses? correspondence between himself and, yes, Natalie Portman in Novelists get a pass on an odd erotic claim or two, if only T Magazine. “How do you think about freedom?” he asks. “When because imagination ought to have some place in sex. But Foer’s do you most strongly wish you had more of it? When do you most strongly wish you had less?” If he is unhappy to be the ILLUSTRATION BY WESLEY MERRITT subject of celebrity gossip, he has an odd way of showing it.

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Just look at the title of this latest novel. The publisher’s self-conscious performance of exuberance and Hollywood-style materials are at pains to point out that “Here I am” is a Biblical big emotions, uninterested in the larger territory he lives in. quotation, evidently hoping to brush o some of the autobiographical implications. It is, indeed, what Abraham says to FOER’S NOVEL HAS the same shortcomings as a lot of contem- God after God has tested him, to demonstrate his continued porary American writing. Elif Batuman once proposed that faith. But it’s hard to resist the reading that this is Foer serving writers didn’t read enough great literature in MFA programs, himself up in yet another thinly fictionalized form. His charac- but the echo-chamber problem goes further than that. Many ters live in a large house they love in a well-to-do area of Wash- literary writers cloister themselves from an early age, when they ington, D.C. But no one in their world seems aware of the either study writing under already-established authors, or existence of government and power nearby. Their problems are immerse themselves in the hierarchies of New York’s magazine and book publishing industries. The Brooklyn literary journal n+1 called this split in American literary culture “MFA vs. NYC,” Focusing on grand, poetic truths and celebrated it with an anthology of essays on the subject. The about “freedom,” Foer misses out dominant question is always which route is the more favorable. on the real complications of life. But we discuss much less frequently the possibility that two such narrowly defined career paths might produce airless fiction. Foer could be a poster child for the “NYC” half of that equa- tion. He attempts to lend more weight to his work by drawing on Jewish history, though not in any searching or committed way. A rabbi at a funeral laments “our choice to have Anne Frank’s diary replace the Bible as our bible,” professes not to find Larry David very funny, and ponders the “persistence of the problems of the moneyed creative class—i.e., how to derive the Jewish American Princess,” among other things. But Jacob meaning and love from a world that seems to be structured never follows up on any of those points. One wonders why it’s against the development of either thing. In other words, they so satisfying for him, and for his author, to stop there. There is are gentrified Brooklyn problems. a question in all this about why we draw the lines of our lives Foer writes in the certainty that all of humanity shares uni- where we do, but the answers Foer settles on could be sections versal experiences, so for him the particulars are often irrelevant, of a greeting-card store: Family. Love. Dog. which feels like the most Brooklyn thing about him. He doesn’t Absent the texture of wide experience, the only thing to tell us what Jacob’s show is about, nor anything about the woman evaluate in the book is the prose. And there are fragments of he has been illicitly texting. We learn that Jacob’s sole satisfac- prose in Here I Am that stick in the brain. Early on, Foer stops tion lies in secretly writing an autobiographical television show— with the sex scenes long enough to depict Jacob and Julia’s not that we discover much about it. In focusing on grand, poetic daily life: truths about “freedom,” “passion,” and “loneliness,” Foer misses out on the real complications of life. Jacob and Julia had managed to collaborate in avoidance: Maybe that’s a blessing. When Foer does try to address large you walk Argus, while I help Max with his math, while you questions, he is able to deliver only clichés in response, and not fold laundry, while I search for the Lego piece on which particularly resonant clichés at that. He is unduly fond of the everything depends, while you pretend to know how to fix infelicitous word “aloneness.” “Aloneness isn’t loneliness,” a a running toilet, and somehow, the day that began as Julia’s secondary character informs Julia, and to have to herself ended with Jacob out at drinks with indeed it isn’t, but somehow the word someone-or-other from HBO (or so he, and the calendar, keeps cropping up anyway. “Between any said) and Julia cleaning up the day’s mess. two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary,” he An unremarkable sentence in many ways, the kind that appears writes. “Sometimes it takes the shape of in any number of current domestic novels. But for days after aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape reading it, I found myself thinking about the Lego on which of love.” everything depends. Though it’s a small thing, the best novels That last remark is inspired by a dog, are built on small, unforgettable things that mount to one seri- rather than a person, and the observation ously unforgettable thing. is not made in jest: Fellow pet owners Foer’s still figuring that last bit out. Instead of the small things HERE I AM BY JONATHAN will certainly understand. But following everything depends on, he goes for big jokes. An apple, cored SAFRAN FOER the earthquake and Jacob’s decision not out so that it can be used as a bong, sits on a table. Jacob thinks, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to help out in Israel, this dollar-store “He understood what Tamir meant, about wanting to fuck it. It 592 pp., $28.00 insight is confusing. It is the work of a wasn’t a sexual longing, but an existential one—to enter one’s writer too practiced in the painfully truth.” With all due respect: What the hell? a

OCTOBER TV Luhrmann and his large cast of advisers from this early age of hip-hop—many of whom also appear as characters in the show—have managed to make the world of the break seem as much fun as it did to this skinny kid from Brooklyn. It’s a minor thrill that the characters talk about stick-up kids and bullies as “hard rocks,” a term I did hear in Brooklyn, but have never heard in a TV drama. While The Get Down rockets through the Bronx in the summer of 1977, Donald Glover’s Atlanta slouches through the South of today. These two new shows bookend a 40-year period The Beat that has been defined by hip-hop, though they don’t see eye to eye on the power of music, socially or culturally. The executive summary is that both are careful, concentrated TV shows Don’t Stop that work in very dierent ways: The Get Down is a whirling, Two new shows break down saturated, fantasy-friendly “yes,” while Atlanta is a granular, stubbornly realistic “nah.” The former is a vivid history lesson hip-hop’s past and future. about music—blend Scooby-Doo with Saturday Night Fever and you’re close to the tone—and the latter is a sharp, dark BY SASHA FRERE-JONES report about being young, black, and Southern in 2016. For The Get Down, hip-hop is a substance being mined and used to light up a city that, literally, goes pitch black. In Atlanta, DURING THE S, Grandmaster Flash found a way to jury-rig the lights are just o. Even Paper Boi, an aspiring rapper and a turntable so he could listen to one beat while another record one of a trio of friends who anchor the show, doesn’t think played over the speakers—now the standard cue function on the music he’s making is going to help him launch a career: mixers. Back then, many DJs made some kind of visible mark “There’s no money anywhere near rap.” In 1977, hip-hop was on a piece of vinyl to note where the beginning of a break was a way to play with the fabric of time. In 2016, it’s just another located. With a great deal of concentration, a DJ could return way to kill time. a record to the beginning of a break by looking at that mark, manually spinning the record backwards the right number of BAZ LUHRMANN WOULD not have been my first, third, or tenth rotations, and then switching that turntable back on to play choice to direct a show about how hip-hop, disco, and Ed Koch for the crowd, essentially flying blind and trusting that his eyes all handled New York in 1977. As a director, his production and muscles could keep two turntables alternating in time. design is unmatched; as for making the parts of the film that When it was done correctly, dancers and wallflowers alike transmit narrative, I have found most of his decisions almost found themselves in a world where exclusive versions of songs unwatchable. His recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby may or were being created in real time. may not have addressed Jay Gatsby’s hubris, but I couldn’t tell As a 12-year-old kid living in Brooklyn in 1979, I fell instantly you for sure, as the movie continually had me one more god- for “Rapper’s Delight,” but that didn’t mean it was clear what damned zoom-shot away from a seizure. kind of music I was falling for. Since the entire backing track for In The Get Down, characters sometimes talk in rhymed “Rapper’s Delight” is the rhythm bed of Chic’s “Good Times,” dialogue, like refugees from Luhrmann’s adaptation of Romeo I assumed it was a one-o, a “special” version of the Chic sin- and Juliet, and expository phrases float by like burners on the gle. But then another rap song appeared, and another. It was sides of subway cars. But somehow, television has turned unclear to my teenage brain how people were making new Lurhmann’s frantic visual hunger into exuberance. Perhaps songs from bits of old songs. You were allowed to do that? But credit should go to a cast of advisers and producers that includes how? I began to hear people whisper about these “breaks” that Nas, Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, Rahiem of the Furious stitched together one beat to another, but older Bronx natives Five, and journalist Nelson George, one of the few people to called those sections “the get down.” know hip-hop and film equally well. This cabinet of consiglieres It’s a small dierence, a quirk of geography. But before may explain how someone who didn’t grow up in the city, or the internet, it was a genuinely long way from my home in the era, could get so many things right. With its frenzy filtered Fort Greene to the South Bronx. Local vernaculars could be over six hours, The Get Down feels wired. really local. This kind of attention to detail is what drives Baz Earlier this year, the HBO miniseries Vinyl took on the same Luhrmann’s exuberant, lopsided, and lavish Netflix series, The assignment as The Get Down: Pick an era (the East Village punk Get Down, which can’t possibly fall down every musical rabbit scene in the ’70s), gather a parade of famous musicians (Janis hole that New York in the ’70s had to oer, but certainly tries. Joplin, Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls), and plant a fictional protagonist in the middle (Bobby Cannavale’s venial record ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN RITTER producer). Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and their collaborators

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CTOBER REVIEW knew their onions, or grew them—but Vinyl would not likely told,” Sugar Hill house drummer Keith Le Blanc once said, make any teenager dig out a Ramones album, or search YouTube “because there’s so much skullduggery attached to it.” It’s a for live Sex Pistols footage. Scorsese’s taste for slow, magisterial sentiment that Q-Tip summed up in a lyric: “Industry rule sweep didn’t suit the story of bands that valued speed and impact number four-thousand and eighty / Record company people over precision, and that didn’t mind some dirt in the gears. The are shady.” Get Down matches its imagery to the pulse of the music—it’s plausible that a teenager would end up mauling her parents’ THE CHARACTERS IN Atlanta don’t need to be told any of this. turntable trying to learn how to beat-juggle like Grandmaster Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) is launching his own low-budget Flash. Unlike the drug-addled population of Vinyl, the kids in rap career, managed by his drifting cousin Earn (Donald Glover), The Get Down make the challenge of creating a new music from while already not believing such a thing exists. Glover—who pieces of the old look like fun. created, wrote, and directed several episodes of the show— The show’s scrawny hero, Ezekiel, a.k.a. “Books,” is played knows the industry firsthand. After a first career as a writer for by Justice Smith with a charming blend of teenage jitters and 30 Rock and a second career on Community, for his third career bravado. Books is something like the Grandmaster Caz of his he released two albums as Childish Gambino. As a performer, day, writing rhymes for everyone around him, as well as himself. Glover staked out the territory that Chance the Rapper now occupies: streetwise but legal, sweet but not dumb. Paper Boi The show is careful to avoid the is nothing like Gambino and Chance—he’s more in the vein of Atlanta rappers like Migos, who appear in the show briefly. clichés of urban decay that plague Rhymes can be simple and repeat ad infinitum: The appeal is almost every story of hip-hop. all in delivery and tone. Glover’s own rhymes exhibit a faith in wordplay and literary turns, a taste that is becoming something of a generational divide. Though not Chance’s equal as a rapper, Glover’s Gambino deserved a better shake than he got from hip-hop fanatics, an unforgiving community. Atlanta may be Glover’s revenge—it’s his best work yet. It’s low-key enough that it may not get the panopticon treatment The Get Down enjoys, but it is more suited to a long series run. If The Get Down is the spiritual heir to Wild Style, Atlanta is a Sometimes his cadence sounds more 2016 than 1977—more Nas spin on the post-Girls sitcom. (Glover appeared briefly on that than Rahiem. At the time, getting everything to work together show as a well-meaning Republican boyfriend.) It’s a comedy in strict time was the first goal; virtuosic rhythms were a decade that’s as likely to stress the di§culty of paying for a restaurant away, as was sampling. But such missteps are few: Books and meal as to go for a laugh, and things generally don’t work out his Get Down Crew sound like they would have ended up on for the show’s small group of friends, none of whom show their Enjoy or Sugar Hill. They compete against a variety of crews cards quickly: Earn is a Princeton dropout trying to win back that spring up quickly across the Bronx. Books’ love interest, the mother of his child; Paper Boi is navigating his rap career; Mylene, lives under a religious house arrest with her parents, and Darius deals drugs in a utilitarian, unflashy, day-job style. but her dream is to become a disco diva like her fictional hero The tone of the show is solidly deadpan—Glover has described Misty Holloway. it as “Twin Peaks with rappers”—which becomes increasingly Lurhmann’s ’70s South Bronx does a good impression of useful as the season unfolds. the actual ’70s Bronx. Manfred Kirchheimer’s Stations of the The characters are more like witnesses to their world than Elevated, which followed gra§ti artists as they tagged sub- participants, which would be dull if Glover wasn’t so good at way cars in 1977, captured kids jumping out of abandoned capturing the fine detail of people’s blockheaded moments. In buildings onto mattresses. Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant’s one episode, Earn and Paper Boi encounter Zan, an internet Style Wars, which covered both taggers and break-dancers, addict who does everything for the Vines. To him, all footage is contains footage of the legendary gra§ti writers’ bench at the simply good, an opportunity for likes. When he mocks Paper 149th Street–Grand Concourse stop that Luhrmann recreates Boi on his YouTube channel, he sees no cognitive dissonance (sort of) in The Get Down. The show is careful to avoid the in later running into Paper Boi on the street and inviting him clichés of urban decay that have plagued almost every story to ride along as he delivers pizzas. Zan then films a young boy of hip-hop. The protagonists of The Get Down spend as much delivering a pizza and getting stied, which he visibly enjoys, time hanging out in St. Mary’s Park as they do in the crew’s ignoring the kid’s distress. It’s a masterful skewering of online monastic squat. personalities. If Glover wants to take his band of human shrug- It’s hard to imagine such crews surviving for long in the real gies around town as they bear witness to the glorious rainbow world, because historically, they didn’t. Disco was over in a few of modern stupidity, I will happily ride along. The Get Down years and early hip-hop labels were notoriously unscrupulous. scratches an admittedly nostalgic itch, like a parade for my “I don’t think the true Sugar Hill Records story has ever been youth. But who ever watches a parade twice? a

NEW REPUBLIC BOOKS us much about Zink herself or the deeper origins of her books. Reading Franzen doesn’t particularly help us read Zink: Even though some of their concerns are similar—they are both vicious on the subject of middle-class hypocrisy—there are few obvious similarities between Franzen’s universalizing social novels and Zink’s short, frantic fictions. The critics have been a little too ready to hitch a female writer’s star to a completely dierent male wagon, no doubt because a lot of them are mildly sexist. On the other hand, the discovered-by-Franzen narrative has at least the virtue of coherence. We use Franzen as a way to Enigma understand a career that otherwise makes no sense at all: Zink’s novels, while undeniably excellent, are so strange that it is hard Variations to understand why anybody actually likes them. Zink satirizes average-to-privileged people in the manner of Jane Austen, but Notes toward a theory of Nell Zink. her books are too short to run to social commentary. She’s also wildly erudite, but straightforward, even plainspoken, in her BY JOSEPHINE LIVINGSTONE vocabulary. American publishing today milks a reliably profitable herd of authors for bland, high-fat novels. Zink’s work is dis- tinctly unpasteurized, and yet—here she is. Zink’s two new books emphasize her contradictions, and “I FELT LIKE THE Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices?” oer some clues to her appeal. Nicotine, a novel, and Private Thus wonders the narrator of The Wallcreeper, Nell Zink’s 2014 Novelist, which is harder to categorize, represent the two sides debut. “Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana—not that of Zink’s bizarro stylistic coin. The first is propulsive and plot- three isn’t enough, but that the three on oer aren’t enough to driven, adventurous and populist; the second digressive and sustain a marriage?” This is how all of Zink’s jokes go. She starts experimental, written for a highly educated audience of one. o nasty and allusive, confusing you with bits of history you Nicotine is most like Zink’s more traditional second novel, don’t know, then curdles the thought into something between Mislaid, while Private Novelist takes after her dicult debut, an aphorism and a punchline. Laugh, cry, put the book down— The Wallcreeper. In one, she wants us to think with the heart, see if she cares. in the other with the head. Love and care for one another, she We haven’t had very long to get to seems to say, but know that you do it against the backdrop of grips with Nell Zink. Born in 1964 in decayed and overloaded and nonsensical cultural wreckage, in California and raised in rural Virginia (she a world that mostly is meaningless. always includes the “rural” in professional bios), Zink became famous with her acidic NICOTINE IS THE story of a beautiful young woman named Penny, debut only two years ago. Magazine pro- who falls in with an anarchist collective and must reassess her files invariably emphasize that she’d pub- politics and her sense of self simultaneously. Penny watches lished practically nothing before striking her father die in the first third of the book. The dead father is up an epistolary friendship with the nov- named Norm, which is surely symbolic. Penny is the child of elist Jonathan Franzen in middle age. Norm and a woman named Amalia, whom Norm rescued as NICOTINE BY NELL ZINK After Zink contacted Franzen about a child from a garbage dump in Cartagena. Norm is a kind of Ecco, 304 pp., $26.99 endangered birds in 2011, she published hippie icon who runs a healing center. Before he married this two novels in rapid succession. First came rescued child, Norm had two kids, named Matt and Patrick, The Wallcreeper, then Mislaid in 2015, with an American woman, who mysteriously disappeared. Matt then a whole slew of reviews explaining is now a sociopath who designs innovative garbage trucks for a Zink’s charming rags-to-riches tale, while living, while Patrick lives on a pristine island and rarely appears. praising her freakish novels in vague Norm finds Amalia besieged by pigs, covered in filth. You could terms. The Guardian said that Zink “suc- call trash—physical trash, trashy aesthetics, the disposed-of in ceeds in putting into words the most culture and humanity—a theme of the novel. inexpressible experiences,” which is not After Norm’s horrible death, Penny goes to visit a long- very specific. neglected family property and finds it full of attractive and This version of Zink’s story is troubling charismatic squatters. The squatters have named the house but convenient. It posits Franzen as a “Nicotine,” after their cause within the activist community: They PRIVATE NOVELIST BY NELL ZINK heroic excavator of talent, fishing Zink are all smokers, which is tough nowadays. (There are other Ecco, 336 pp., $15.99 out of obscurity like a bog person out of houses within their collective called “Tranquility” and the like.) the peat. At the same time, it doesn’t tell Penny falls in with its informal tenants, but she does not disclose

OCTOBER REVIEW

jail. Later she’s blamed unfairly by other political types for what happened at the protest, but we remember her private pain, and her friend comforts her in the cell. The pretty heroine generally does the right thing. It’s a little bit boring, in that respect. In its tenderness toward Penny, Nic- otine recalls Mislaid. The earlier book pits its characters against a very odd plot about race and mistaken identity, but in the end we simply want to see its central characters, like Peggy, ﬁnd some peace. After Odyssean trials and tribu- lations, Peggy looks back on her life and sees “years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself.” The stakes are fundamentally human. This is Zink at her most heartfelt.

BOTH NICOTINE AND Mislaid display Zink’s flair for crafting absorbing narrative out of unpredictable subject matter. Private Novelist, by contrast, consists of two bonkers stories of diering length and quality hammered together into one book for no good reason at all. The first is a novel, titled “Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats,” and the second is something like a novella, named “European Story for Avner Shats.” The Avner Shats in both titles is a real person, an Israeli author and poet. The conceit behind the book is that Zink wrote for her friend’s entertainment and edification before she ever wrote for the public at large. Hence the idea that she was a “private novelist,” otherwise a contradiction in terms. The repeated reminders that these works were never Zink’s novels are so strange that it is hard to understand why anybody actually likes them. really intended for publication excuse their flaws while making them feel her claim to the land. Matt and Amalia fight her for rights to the uniquely intimate. A writer who meant a story for one person property; they wish to develop it into something profitable. The and one alone must surely care for her reader in a way that no house becomes a good and complex (if slightly on the nose) commercial novelist can care for her audience. What a privilege, symbol of personal and political identity. Of course, it gets to bask vicariously in that love! destroyed. But can Penny be rebuilt? “Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats” has an excellent Nicotine’s satire of bourgeois morality bites at hypocrisy with premise. Zink sets out to translate Shats’s novel Sailing Toward Zinkian snappishness, but retains a conventional level of sym- the Sunset into English, but her Hebrew is not good enough. pathy for its attractive female protagonist when she gets into So, in a series of emails to Shats, written daily, she starts over— hot water. Penny goes to a protest in Manhattan, where she’s each time taking the material in a dierent, brilliantly misguided arrested, and she doesn’t have any Tylenol when she needs it in direction. The resulting novel is readable, but only just. It includes real-life human beings, like Zink and her ex-husband, PHOTOGRAPH BY GENE GLOVER Zohar Eitan, but also a silkie (the mythic Scottish seal-woman,

NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW usually spelled “selkie”) and a huge, gelatinous submarine. than to expand upon it. (The Wallcreeper makes fun of environ- Perhaps most telling is Zink’s announcement of her own liter- mentalist men, but through mean one-liners about stereotypes ary preferences. She both obsesses over The Pickwick Papers—a rather than through a sensitive treatment of character.) These picaresque novel like her own—and ris on her dislike of A.S. books mock, laugh, then look for the next joke. Zink holds Byatt’s best-seller Possession: ﬁction at arm’s length—aectionately, but with suspicion.

As I skimmed it my face was contorted by sneers, and SO, WE HAVE TWO ZINKS: one the pleasant author of pleasant after skipping to the end to make sure the heroine really and entertaining novels, the other an obstinate obscurantist at was the direct descendant of the vigorously adulterous war with the idea of fiction. This mixture ends up placing her dead poets and heiress to their fortunes, I resolved to write in the ironically well-worn tradition of classic surreal satirists a novel myself. The result now lies before you. like Bulgakov, Hesse, Grass—even Ka¯a. Zink is an architect. She builds worlds that look a little like Hubristic statements like this one force us to reckon with ours, but are wrong enough to make one think—really think, the precious, deliberately o-putting quality of Private Novelist. not just feel. Ka¯a wrote in a notebook once that “there is no I rather liked Possession, for instance. Sure, it was very roman- such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the tic about history. Was my liking for that book fake? I hated Zink outer world.” We see our bedrooms at a level of detail totally for calling me a fake, which is what it felt like she was doing. unavailable to us when we try to look at our own souls. Zink Meanwhile, I hated her version of Sailing Toward the Sunset in places: specifically the places where Zink transcribes her own notes. “Gide’s acte gratuit <=> surrealist activity?” she wonders. Look at the world and feel “Lukács notes, I think?” Private Novelist is a brain-dislodgingly ill, Zink demands: It’s full of imaginative book that, nevertheless, seems to conjure our hatred on purpose. rubbish, not love. “European Story for Avner Shats” was written over the course of one month in 2005. This time, the high concept is that Zink must write about a cast of characters dreamed up by Shats: X type of artist from Y country does Z thing, and so on. She must also write entirely in “bad English,” so all of her characters are German, Italian, Israeli, Swiss, or people of unidentifiable ori- gin staying at an artists colony. (Actually there is a British constructs her fictional worlds with this in mind. By irritating character, too, but nobody understands him.) Her characters and confusing her reader, Zink reminds us that the fiction writer say things like, “How can you call him a thief and a pornogra- cannot know the world inside and out truthfully, cannot trust pher? Get out of my room. You are bored, but we are not your the world she makes by looking inward. interactive television.” The best part of “European Story” is a Together, Nicotine and Private Novelist explain why Zink’s very rude letter supposedly written by Goethe to Schubert, writing works so well. She tells stories with the precision of discovered in a drawer by one of our unfortunate young Euro- somebody who actually knows quite a lot about life—which the pean thinkers and later thrown in a fire by another. young and overhyped in fiction writing inevitably lack—then The themes unifying “Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner salts them massively with disruptive, surreal interludes and Shats” and “European Story for Avner Shats” are Israeli mas- skepticism over her own project. Possession is trash, garbage culinity, maritime motifs, destruction by fire, and sexy young heaps are trash, notebooks full of crappy notes about Gide are women whom other characters are not sure whether to trust. trash—but pointing all that out is necessary to Zink’s project. This book could have been awful, but arrives squarely at the The fiction market today loves a big book that feels realistic. We Günter Grass level by dint of an interlude about a wonderful laugh, we cry, but we never want to throw the book away. jewel that arrives in the mail and contains visions of pastoral “Unputdownable” is the adjective a book needs in order to sell, scenes in each of its many facets. The jewel was sent by a mys- and selling is the thing that makes a book pick-up-able by the terious agency. It contains worlds, and leads Zink to experiences publishing house. of the sublime. Who sent this jewel and why? The Swedish Instead of grossing you out, Zink’s over-seasoning acts like Academy called Grass’s fiction “frolicsome black fables,” which a refreshing purgative. Until she came along, we didn’t even is a great description of Private Novelist, too. realize what we were missing. If fiction is sick these days, it is While Nicotine, like Mislaid, is an individualistic romance, because it is too full of heart. Look at the world and feel ill, Private Novelist, like its predecessor, The Wallcreeper, is a com- Zink demands: It’s full of rubbish, not love. And yet she cares mentary on history, not on people. The latter two books display for the ruins of culture. Zink’s fiction construes the world we such painful awareness of their place in the history of Western live in as a beloved, bad child. Don’t hug this garbage planet culture—specifically European culture—that their frenzied plots close, she says, keep your distance: the better to admire it, if serve more to upend the reader’s sense of the way people are not to understand. a

OCTOBER REVIEW KARL MARX: HENRY GUTTMANNHULTON ARCHIVEGETTY GUTTMANNHULTON HENRY MARX: KARL

NEW REPUBLIC BOOKS of the democratic revolution he was actually living through. What’s more, as a political refugee in working-class London who was rarely healthy, he struggled constantly to keep his children nourished, housed, and well-educated. He was also an arrogant soul who took criticism of his work as something like an act of war. “The aim of this book,” writes Jones, “is to put Marx back in his nineteenth-century surroundings,” shedding “posthumous elaborations of his character and achievements.” Prophet and Loss Most of the biography is devoted to a careful, occasionally pedantic evaluation of what is useless in Marx’s work and what What Marx means in a world that remains of value. Jones provides lengthy examinations of his has made peace with capitalism. subject’s battles with other radical thinkers, his painstaking labors on Capital, and his ongoing quest to locate and rev up BY MICHAEL KAZIN engines of change, to put an end to the exploitation of man by man and lay the foundation of a classless society. Jones includes just enough details of Marx’s personal life to justify labeling the book a biography instead of purely a study of his ideas and their consequences. Jones dutifully quotes the man he calls “Karl” DOES KARL MARX still matter? It’s a question most readers of a complaining about his chronic liver disease and carbuncles, and new biography of Marx would ask—even if they are already continually pleading for financial support from Friedrich Engels, steeped in the contentious scholarship about (or the perpetual his sometime collaborator and ever-faithful friend. ideological skirmishes within) the radical left. What relevance Marx’s spouse and daughters also make intermittent appear- can his life and work have in a world where nearly every social- ances, revealing a formidable yet tragic family history. During ist party long ago made its peace with capitalism, and at a time the American Civil War, Karl’s daughter Eleanor, then ten years when his writings are read far more by academics than by the old, “wrote to Lincoln, appointing herself his political adviser.” workers he longed to liberate? Even Bernie Sanders, who calls Later, she would become a leading Socialist and feminist, who himself a “socialist,” just wants to force the governing and eco- translated Ibsen and Flaubert into English. But Eleanor’s renown nomic elites to treat wage earners and consumers more fairly. did not lift her from despair at the acts of an unfaithful lover. He wants a new New Deal, not a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” At 43, she committed suicide by poisoning herself. For her part, The decline of Marx’s influence does not seem to worry Gareth Marx’s wife, Jenny, wrote reviews for a major German newspaper Stedman Jones. At many points in his new book, Karl Marx: and organized a group of Londoners who read Shakespeare out Greatness and Illusion, he even seems to welcome it. That may loud to one another. Yet three of her children died very young, appear an odd stance for a distinguished left-wing historian of and like her husband, she was often plagued by protracted Britain, best known for his studies of the Victorian-era working ailments. A hidden resentment may have exacerbated her poor class; Jones was, for almost two decades, a member of the edi- health: Jenny probably knew that Karl had fathered a son with torial board of New Left Review—the most prominent and sophis- their longtime housekeeper. But if she ever spoke of it, that ticated venue for Marxian thought in the detail has never been recorded. English-speaking world. Yet he has come Recent biographies of Karl by Jonathan Sperber, of Jenny by to believe that the “dogmatic assumptions” Mary Gabriel, and of Eleanor by Rachel Holmes narrate all these of many Marxists inhibit “the writing of tales at greater length and with more insight. Jones chooses good history.” His study is thus a prolonged instead to focus on the evolution of Marx the radical intellectual— exercise in scraping o the dogma to get and immensely learned individual—who was always “determined at the unvarnished figure, the Marx who to impress himself upon the world.” died before he could turn into an “ism” both esteemed and reviled. MARX FIRST MADE a name for himself as the fierce rival of other Jones maintains that the iconic image left-wing intellectuals during the early to mid-1840s. Much of of Marx, created soon after his death in Europe was then ripe for revolution. Industrial workers crowded 1883, ignores historical context and a good into cities from Paris to Warsaw, demanding reforms that hered- KARL MARX: GREATNESS AND deal that his work got wrong. The “for- itary crowned rulers would not or could not grant. Marx, who ILLUSION bidding bearded patriarch and lawgiver, made a precarious living as a radical journalist, insisted on the BY GARETH STEDMAN a thinker of merciless consistency with a centrality of labor both to making a capitalist system possible JONES commanding vision of the future” wor- and to transcending it, someday soon. This stance embroiled Belknap Press, 768 pp., $35.00 shiped by leftists was, in Jones’s view, a him in acrimonious debates with radicals who argued that flawed theorist and failed revolutionary socialist, who overlooked the significance ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER HORVATH

OCTOBER REVIEW private property or a state that neglected the needs of its citizens was the true root of oppression. “In Karl’s view,” writes Jones, “the labour question was not simply about consumption or wages. The ambition of organized workers was not simply to attain ‘greater happiness’ through the acquisition of more material goods, but to change productive relations.” However, when uprisings did break out across the continent during the spring of 1848, Marx, in Jones’s view, proved a poor guide to their causes and how they might triumph. That Febru- ary, with help from Engels, he had written The Communist Manifesto for a tiny group of radical artisans, based in London; in it, he boldly described capitalism as a dynamic system, run by a “bourgeoisie” that “cannot exist without constantly revo- lutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” However, carried away with the heady reality of working men and women across Europe rushing to barricades to In the gray aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848, Marx topple the bad old order, Marx neglected to understand that gradually returned to work on Capital, his grand opus of polit- most of these “proletarians,” together with their middle-class ical economy. The work went slowly, in part because of his many allies, were demanding the right to vote and to be represented ailments and in part because Marx found it di¤cult to shake in parliaments, not to abolish the wage system, as Marx desired. depression about both his relative obscurity and the conserva- Marx kept calling for, and predicting, the emergence of “a tive turn in European politics. In 1862, he got so low that, separate proletarian party” to lead an economic upheaval, instead “wondering whether he should try to do something else in of fighting merely for “bourgeois” political change. A few years life … he applied for a job as a railway clerk.” Imagine Marx later, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, he wrote a memorable account snarling about “the cash nexus” as he tosses a vacationing English of how the uprising in France ended up with the election of family a fistful of tickets to Brighton. Like other biographers, Jones places Capital, the first volume of which finally appeared in 1867, within the context of the Imagine Marx snarling about economic boom Europe experienced in mid-century. As railroad “the cash nexus” as he tosses a lines and factories spread across the land, a soberer Marx vacationing English family retreated from his youthful predictions of the working class’s imminent triumph and elaborated a complex theory about the a fistful of tickets to Brighton. operations of that system and how it would eventually collapse under the weight of such insoluble “contradictions” as a falling rate of profit. With revolution no longer on the immediate agenda, he took refuge in explaining why the existing economic order could not endure. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as president. The nephew of the first Napoleon then staged a coup and named himself Emperor JONES SEEKS TO demolish the notion that, in Capital, Marx Napoleon III. But in the heat of conflict, Marx had been quite explained anything significant about the workings of unable to see the need for forging a coalition across class lines. capitalism—either then or now. His theories of “surplus value” According to a German republican who witnessed Marx in action, were vague and undeveloped, he was wrong about the increas- “Everyone who contradicted him, he treated with abject con- ing immiseration of workers, and he encouraged readers to tempt; every argument he did not like he answered either with believe the capitalist system would fall apart through what biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted Jones calls “the conjunction of impersonal and inevitable it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who processes, detached from the actions of human agents.” had advanced it.” Where Marx did excel, according to Jones, was in his vivid To be sure, a written constitution and free elections could and lavishly detailed descriptions of the miserable lives of ordi- not do away with class injustice. But as Jones correctly points nary English workers, which he had spent years researching in out, they might have stopped the army of a king or an emperor the British Museum. He thus became a pioneer in “the system- from crushing popular rebellions and established something atic study of social and economic history.” In other words, Marx like a rule of law. A keen student of society like Marx ought to achieved greatness only when he set aside his theoretical illusions have empathized with that desire. But as Marx’s erstwhile and stuck to the facts, exposing a cruelly oppressive system. mentor Arnold Ruge once told him, “My friend, you believe in This may be the kind of conclusion one would expect a social what you wish for.” and economic historian to make, although Marx’s theory of how

NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW capitalism supposedly works has surely stirred more people over time than the richness of his empirical prose. And one doesn’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate the cogency On a Dirt Road Outside Oaxaca of several of Marx’s big ideas. He was, of course, quite wrong BY JAVIER ZAMORA about the evolution of capitalism: The real income of wage earners increased over the course of the twentieth century, while a white-collar class and small businesses mushroomed in defi- ance of Marx’s prediction that “the proletariat” would become The Mexican never said how long. an ever-poorer majority. Yet he brilliantly captured the propul- ¿How long? Not long. ¿How much? sive dynamic of the system. Capitalism did conquer “the world Not much. Never told us we’d hide in vans market” and give “a cosmopolitan character to production and like matchsticks. consumption in every country,” as the Manifesto phrased it. His model of how “forces of production” come into conflict with In our town, we’d never known Mexicans “relations of production” also remains a sound explanation of besides the women and men in soap-operas, how workers revolt against their bosses in every type of society— even “socialist” ones like the ª««¬ and China. And our credulous so in our heads, we played the fence, addiction to the magical little computers in our pockets and the San Ysidro McDonald’s, a quick run, a van, purses demonstrates the wisdom of the section about “the then,¡Eureka! fetishism of commodities” in the first volume of Capital. Just like that. Marx has a larger epistemological claim on our attention as well. Just as one cannot discuss human psychology intelligently Not long, not long at all. In Oaxaca, without coming to grips with Freud’s work, despite its flaws, a small brown lizard licks horchata from my hand— Marx’s historical analysis of class relations remains a powerful we’re friends, we pick names for each other. way to understand the enduring economic inequalities of his time and ours. As a prophet of socialism, he was a bust. He drew Hola Paula. Hola Javier, she says. only vague sketches of what an egalitarian order should look We play the fence, a quick run, the van ... like. This made it possible for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk to use his words to justify the horrors they committed in peas- ¿How long? Not long. On the dirt, ant societies quite dierent from the industrial ones where Marx our knees tell truths to the cops’ front-sights had expected socialism to triumph. and barrels. Still, he captured some basic truths about the capitalism he ¿How much? Not much. believed was doomed to expire. Perhaps the most lasting of these truths is the relentless destruction of traditions—whether We’d never known Mexicans besides Chente, oppressive or comforting—that is the hallmark of modernity. Chavela Vargas. We’re on the dirt In 1848, when Marx described capitalism as a revolutionary like dogs showing nipples force, he did not realize how it would not just endure but grow. But he did understand, as the great historian-critic Marshall to offspring, it’s not spring, Berman once wrote, that its power was not just a matter of and we’re going to where there is spring, money and production, of work and authority: we say it’s gonna be alright, He knew we must start from where we are … thrown back it’s gonna be just fine— on our individual will and energy, forced to exploit my hands play with Paula. each other and ourselves in order to survive; and yet, in spite of it all, thrown together by the same forces that Javier Zamora is the author of the forthcoming collection pull us apart … to develop identities and mutual bonds that UNACCOMPANIED (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). can help us hold together as the fierce modern air blows hot and cold through us all.

THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 247, No. 10, Issue 4,996, October 2016. The same system in which “all that is solid melts into air” Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and July/August 2016) by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone (202) 508-4444. and “all that is holy is profaned”—those famous lines from The Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage and handling). © 2016 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing o¤ces. Communist Manifesto—can free us to envision a more egalitar- For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: www.TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send ian, and no less modern, way of running our economy and changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. Box 6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post Agreement Number 7178957. Send changes of address information organizing our civic life. Marx the materialist does not matter and blocks of undeliverable copies to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited manuscripts to [email protected]. Poetry submissions must be as he once did. But the Marx who imagined capitalism liberat- emailed to [email protected]. For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, ing humanity from the bonds of tradition still might. a or visit our website at newrepublic.com/customerservice.

OCTOBER BOOKS existing fringe and alternative sexual cultures, in the aftermath of free love and its backlash, STI awareness, and three waves of feminism. The subjects are spelled out in very non-misleading chapter titles, such as “Internet Dating,” “Orgasmic Meditation,” “Internet Porn,” and “Live Webcams.” San Francisco provides the ideal venue; to paraphrase William Gibson, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and the Bay Area Utopian Kink has always received the greater share. It’s “where the future was Reports from the frontiers going to be figured out,” Witt writes: of sexual experimentation. or at least it was the city America had designated for people who still believed in free love. They sought to BY TONY TULATHIMUTTE unlink the family from a sexual foundation of two people. They believed in intentional communities that could successfully disrupt the monogamous heterosexual tradition. They gave their choices names and they conceived of their actions as social movements. They THE BRAIN IS THE most powerful sex organ, the cliché goes. But saw in new technology an opportunity to refashion most popular advice around sex seems to agree on not over- society, including ideas about sexuality. thinking it—on getting out of your own head so you can screw your brains out and make him lose his mind. Or, to quote Justin From its 1960s idealism to today’s tech utopianism, the Bay Area’s Timberlake’s “Future Sex”: “Your enemy are your thoughts, chill, can-do vibe is an awkward fit for Witt, a self-described baby / So just let ’em go.” For that reason, books on sex and “maladjusted,” “skeptical,” “unhappy” New Yorker. But this dating have always been conceptual oddities, with their hundreds outlook is a useful prophylactic against the boosterism that of pages of thinking about how best not to. Must the critical surrounds her, as she goes in search of “a model of sexuality intellect always be at odds with the libido? Is sex, like comedy, better suited to the present, to its freedoms, to its honesty.” neutralized by the kinds of intense cerebration books provide? Her admirable commitment to firsthand reporting has her Emily Witt’s debut essay collection, Future Sex, unlike Tim- undertaking movie-set tours of panda-costumed gangbangs, berlake’s song, oers a resounding hmm, maybe—let’s think about experimenting with webcam hookups and online dating, and it some more. Amid the ceaseless slew of sex and dating books, doing whip-its at a Google employee’s sex party. Playing the it’s probably more ecient to describe what Future Sex is point- role of tourist or amateur, she picks up unusual details from edly not. It’s not an advice book (The Ethical Slut, Guide to the sidelines. The porn studio Kink buys fake eyelashes “several Getting It On, He’s Just Not That Into You), nor is it pop-sci (Sex hundred at a time,” she finds, and the sex-party host insures her at Dawn, Modern Romance, Bonk), though Witt makes it clear stripper pole. You could say Witt’s critical kink is voyeurism. she’s done her due diligence in reading most of these. Superfi- Her critique of intimacy remains intimate, however, owning cially, Future Sex resembles Robin Rinaldi’s The Wild Oats its own biases while rejecting the dishy humble-brag, the brave Project: A woman, uneasy about her age and romantic life, goes over-share, and over-generalized neuroscience. The honest on a mission of carnal experimentation in San Francisco. depictions of her sexual experience make few concessions to Witt includes her personal narrative not to curry read- dramatic tension, or even to sex. The “Internet Dating” chapter erly empathy (Will our intrepid, likable heroine find love and is entirely sex-free, chronicling five failed dates and encompass- fulfillment?), but to disclose her critical ing the history of online dating. Yet Witt manages to wring out perspective, which is “single, straight, plenty of insight from her doldrums: and female”; also, hyper-educated, white, serious, and curious. She finds Internet dating had evolved to present the world around herself dissatisfied with both the “total us, the people in our immediate vicinity, and to fulfill the sexual freedom” of singledom and the desires of a particular moment. At no point did it oer conventional expectations of romance, guidance in what to do with such a vast array of possibility. which, quoting from a CDC chlamydia While the lonely might harbor a secret object, from the pamphlet, she defines as “a long-term desire for a brief sexual encounter to a longing for love, mutually monogamous relationship with the technology itself promised nothing. It could bring us

FUTURE SEX a partner who has been tested and is people, but it did not tell us what to do with them. BY EMILY WITT known to be uninfected.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Despite its misleading title, Witt’s book Nor have we ﬁgured out yet how to talk about sex. Language 224 pp., $25.00 is not about the future of sex. In eight is a benchmark for political progress, and as Witt observes, “Our mostly stand-alone essays, Witt reports on relationships had changed but the language had not.” She ﬁnds

NEW REPUBLIC REVIEW

stigma,” or that “we had expanded our idea of normal.” That may be true of media representation and marriage equality, but in its dissection of progressive mores, the book largely glosses over the concomitant backlash from the right: the $1.4 billion spent on abstinence-only education in Africa, or the ongoing push to defund Planned Parenthood and repeal Roe v. Wade. And as the chapter on birth control rightly points out, the development of other contraceptive technologies has stalled. As much as the future of sex is defined by changes in attitudes, lifestyle, and language, it’s equally defined by the attempts to repress all this. But perhaps it’s wrong to fault a book for omitting what it never tried to include. Future Sex isn’t a comprehensive history or political brief, but an intensely rational, personal search for Witt’s book asks for whom free love is free. (Answer: not women.) the nuances of sexual desire, a topic often presented too bluntly (Hot or not?). To the extent that Witt is arguing anything, she’s arguing against the foreclosure of meaning and possibility in the mainstream narrative riddled with false dichotomies (casual sex. Sex is not just love or pleasure or power, and marriage isn’t sex vs. committed relationships) and vague euphemisms (“hook- equivalent to adulthood or security. ing up,” “dating”). But she doesn’t spare the alternative cultures Mostly she’s asking questions; not why or how, but now what? either, cringing at all the woo-woo slang and corny neologisms Are the novel romantic arrangements enabled by technology she comes across, in scare quotes aplenty: Orgasmic Meditation’s actually any better? For whom is free love free? (Answer: not use of “sex” as a verb and “tumesced” as an emotion, a shade women.) Is porn bad? “Watching porn left me more confident of blush called “Super Orgasm,” and all manifestations of our about my body,” she writes, not because it modeled healthy millennium’s portmanteau mania—“coregasm,” “fungeon.” Whatever the future of sex may be, let’s hope it isn’t this cute. Witt’s critique of intimacy YOU MAY HAVE surmised that the book’s subjects are, as San remains intimate, rejecting Francisco has rapidly become, mostly white and well-o, enough that a more accurate title might be Privileged Sex (or perhaps, the dishy humble-brag and following the sex-book naming convention, Sex on the Coasts). the brave over-share. This is partly because organized, institutionalized sexual adven- tures are easier to achieve with money and leisure time, which Witt is characteristically aware of, in her discussion of Bay Area utopianism:

It was not a tenable ideology, was in fact totally ungrounded in any wider reality, but for a number of relationships or gender roles, but because its variety of imper- reasons hyperbolic optimism could actually be pondered fect bodies reassured her “that someone will always want to in the highly specific time and place of San Francisco ... have sex with me.” In this she showcases her talent at debunk- among a group of young educated people with high ing conventional wisdom without Gladwellian counter-intuition standards of living. or cherry-picked science. So, where does her thinking get her? By the end, Witt The poorer fringes are mostly overlooked in her highly personal acknowledges that after five years of research and writing, account, especially illegal sex work—the sugar babies of Seeking “my life saw few structural changes,” though she comes away Arrangement, the hustling undergrads of Rentboy, Eros, and with some abstract insights. People’s resistance to changes in Backpage, and homeless survival workers, less visible but no sexuality “manifests less by institutional imposition and more less modern. Perhaps out of a desire to report only on cultures by the subtle suggestions of the people who love you” and it is she can directly experience, there’s a dearth of nonheterosexuality “the ideation and expression of intent that dierentiated sex- that’s glaring in light of her own declaration that she “wanted ualities, not the actual sex.” Still, it’s a relief to get around the to live in a world with a wider range of sexual identities.” transformative false consciousness that so many other sex books This cultural bubble—admittedly hard to avoid in the gen- peddle like free packets of lube. The pleasures of Witt’s book trified foam party of San Francisco—might be what leads Witt are like the sex it envisions, unbound from the obligations of to occasionally overstate or over-generalize social progress, solving a problem or achieving a goal. We read because we enjoy

ROBERT WHITMANTHE LICENSING PROJECT LICENSING WHITMANTHE ROBERT as when she claims that “open marriages had already lost it, sure, but more because we keep needing to be satisﬁed. a

OCTOBER backstory

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE BELLEME

LOCATION Columbia, South Carolina DATE February 28, 2016

WHEN MIKE BELLEME began traveling through the South to would be, in my opinion, the worst thing that could happen to collect photographs for his series “States of Fear,” he asked his them.” A police ocer in Kentucky, who at ﬁrst appeared strong subjects a simple question: “What is your greatest fear or con- and resolute, fears talking about his emotions: “My biggest fear cern?” He expected their responses to be “irrational, the result is expressing to the ones in my inner circle, my friends and of political fearmongering.” But in interview after interview, family, that I love them.” he discovered that their fears run deeper than politics. It’s far Damien Trott, pictured above, works as a mascot for Liberty more personal, Belleme says, “the result of things that are Tax Service in Columbia, South Carolina. Standing on the happening right around them.” roadside, he fears getting jumped by gang members. Only 21, His photos capture Southerners in everyday moments, often he was once hospitalized after being attacked. He now spends quiet and reﬂective. A coal miner fears losing the life he’s his workday in a state of constant anxiety. “You never know known: “I’m too old to change now—don’t want to.” A refugee what might happen,” he says. “Protect yourself at all times.” a fears extremists will kill his family in Iraq: “There is no way back, I would be stupid to go.” A stylist at a funeral home fears SEE MORE OF MIKE BELLEME’S WORK ON INSTAGRAM for her children’s future: “For them to stray from their faith NEWREPUBLIC.

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