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Whose Side Are Asian-Americans On?

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Katherine Sanchez, a 16-year-old with curly hair and glasses, is unique among her peers at Stuyvesant, one of eight specialized high schools considered the “crown jewels” of New York City’s public education system. In seventh grade, when she found out about the entrance exam—a single three-hour test known as the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT—she enrolled in a local prep school on the weekends. During the summer before eighth grade, Sanchez upped that commitment to five days a week, spending four hours each day being taught to the test. “You’re not learning material that’s relevant,” Sanchez told me. “You’re like, ‘How can I do these questions as fast as possible? How can I get used to these questions?’”

Of course, other students at Stuy also spend years cramming for the SHSAT. But unlike the vast majority of them, Sanchez is Latina. In 2016, Stuyvesant’s school newspaper found that, in comparison to Asian students, black and Latinx students were more likely to start studying later and on their own. Even in prep school, Sanchez recalled being the only Latina in a majority-Bengali class. Aside from kids in the honors class, most of the students in her middle school in the Bronx hadn’t heard of the SHSAT or specialized high schools.

In fact, Sanchez was told that she was the first person from her middle school to get into Stuyvesant in over a decade. “I don’t know anyone from my school who takes the 2 uptown after 42nd Street,” Sanchez told me in August, as she gave me a tour of Castle Hill, the predominantly working-class Latinx and black neighborhood where she grew up. When pressed, she conceded that she had heard rumors of a freshman at Stuy who also lives in the Bronx.

Stuyvesant has been criticized in recent years because of one stark fact: almost no black or Latinx students attend. In the 2015-2016 school year, the student body was 74 percent Asian-American and 20 percent white. Only 3 percent of students were Latinx and even less—1 percent—were black. This school year, black and Latinx students made up only 10 percent of offered seats across all eight specialized high schools, despite making up nearly 70 percent of the city’s public school population overall.

Sanchez, whose parents immigrated from the Dominican Republic, is acutely aware of the disparity. She had rarely even gone into Manhattan before high school, let alone the posh neighborhood of Tribeca where Stuyvesant is located. Entering the school itself was a culture shock, especially when it was clear many of the students already knew each other. “Waiting on the bridge for the doors to open on the first day was so scary, just standing there,” Sanchez said. “Everyone was in clusters, but I knew nobody.”

In June, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed changing the admissions policies of the city’s specialized high schools in an effort to integrate them. Under de Blasio’s proposal, the SHSAT would be phased out over three years and eventually replaced with a system that automatically admits the top 7 percent of students from every middle school in the city, based on a combination of grades and state exam scores. He also wants to expand the Discovery Program, which sets aside a certain number of seats for low-income students. According to city officials, the impact of eliminating the test would be sweeping: When the new plan is fully implemented, 45 percent of offers would go to black and Latinx students.

In response, many in the city’s Asian-American community, which is represented in lopsided numbers in the city’s specialized high schools, rose in protest. Spurred mainly by New York’s vocal Chinese-American community and alumni groups, protesters amassed outside de Blasio’s office, chanting, “Keep the test!” They claimed that the move was racist, targeting a disadvantaged minority that historically has had little clout in New York politics compared to other minorities. Their protests were quickly plastered all over the news, adding yet another layer of racial tension to the effort to fix the most segregated school system in the country.

Though the plan did not pass muster with the state legislature, it created the opening for a summer of outrage from members of the Asian community, some of it fueled by legitimate grievances (a “profound sense of powerlessness” as Jiayang Fang put it in The New Yorker), some by resentment toward other minority groups. As Kenneth Chiu, president of the New York Asian American Democratic Club and one of the most outspoken leaders against de Blasio’s plan, told NY1: “He never had this problem when Stuyvesant was all white. He never had this problem when Stuyvesant was all Jewish. All of a sudden, they see one too many Chinese and they say, ‘Hey, it isn’t right.’”

The outrage surrounding De Blasio’s plan also prompted some difficult questions: If racial integration is essential to educational equality, as many education experts believe, then are Asian-Americans an obstacle to that equality? Is the scramble for opportunity the zero-sum game that Asian activists make it out to be? And, more broadly, where do Asian-Americans fit in this city’s minority politics?


From a young age, Amy Lam knew that specialized high schools were the path she was expected to take. “I didn’t have much of a choice,” said Lam, a 17-year-old senior at Brooklyn Tech. She started preparing for the SHSAT, which tests students on English and math, in sixth grade, two full years before the test is usually taken. She attended a free program that she was accepted into in the Upper West Side, but her mother felt that wasn’t enough, so she enrolled Lam into a second, paid program in Chinatown. At that point, Lam was going to test prep every weekday after school for two hours. On Saturdays, she went to both prep classes, studying from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Lam grew up in a public housing complex in Chelsea. When her parents moved to New York City from China in the 1990s, they first worked as fruit vendors in Chinatown. Her mother, who speaks mostly Cantonese, is now a home attendant.

As we sat in the one-room office of New York’s Chinese Progressive Association, where Lam interned this summer to help register voters, she belied the stereotype of the personality-less Asian student who is interested in nothing but her studies. She was quietly confident, well-spoken, and fully aware of the politics surrounding the school she attends. She had already thought about what she might do with her life, saying that her dream college was Georgetown and that she was interested in pursuing a law career.

In Lam’s mother’s eyes, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science were the gold standard, while Brooklyn Tech was a safety school. What about other public high schools? “When I was researching high schools I would be like, ‘Hey mom there’s this good high school that’s not specialized,’” Lam said. “And she’d be like ‘Oh do you want that to be your other safety?’”

This intense focus on specialized high schools is common for New York’s Asian immigrant community. “My mom mostly talked to Asian-American moms,” Lam said. “She met them either at my test prep place, even on WeChat, and pretty much all they talked about on there was ‘Oh my son went to Bronx Science.’”

This do-or-die mentality is partly a product of New York’s labyrinthine public school system. The SHSAT offers a bright, simple path for the city’s poor Asian immigrant population, many of whom face language barriers and a dearth of accessible information. And in many of these immigrants’ ancestral countries in East Asia and South Asia, rigorous test prep is a cultural norm.

“A lot of newly arrived Asian immigrants have this erroneous idea that there are three public schools that are good and then there’s the abyss,” explained Amy Hsin, a professor of sociology at CUNY and a member of the city’s school diversity advisory group. “And we have these test prep companies who are feeding off of that fear. You see these immigrant families who don’t have a lot of money spending enormous amounts of money prepping these children to test to get into these schools.”

Katherine Sanchez, a 16-year-old at Stuyvesant, says, “I don’t know anyone from my school who takes the 2 uptown after 42nd Street.”

This deep investment is evident in the numbers: In addition to dominating Stuyvesant, Asians comprise 62 percent of the student body at Bronx Science, and 61 percent at Brooklyn Tech. New York City’s public school population itself is 16 percent Asian. (White students are also overrepresented, garnering 27 percent of offers to specialized high schools this year, despite the fact that they make up 15 percent of the city’s students.) Their outsized presence makes them wary of change, particularly since de Blasio didn’t offer Asian-American communities any kind of recompense for a proposal that would disproportionately affect them. They would just have to take the hit.

Asian-American community groups were blindsided by the mayor, whose office failed to consult them before the proposal went public. Shino Tanikawa, a school integration advocate, told me that de Blasio’s proposal was part of a depressingly familiar pattern of Asian-Americans either being lumped in with white people or brushed aside. Tanikawa agreed that the admissions system needs to be reformed, but pointed out that for de Blasio “to not even talk to any Asian community leaders before he made the announcement, it’s disrespectful. It’s another example of, what about us, do we not exist?”

Richard Carranza, New York City’s new school chancellor, made matters worse when he bluntly told a local news organization, “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.” And by failing to get buy-in from New York’s Asian-American community, de Blasio undermined his own project. “Those people are needed,” Mae Lee, executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, told me, referring to the mainly Chinese-American contingent that is rallying against de Blasio’s plan. “We need to draw those people in more and it’s not being done.”

It didn’t help that it was easy to read de Blasio’s announcement as a cynical political move. He campaigned on integrating specialized high schools in 2013, but he let the issue languish until this summer. De Blasio has often said that his hands are tied because reforming the admissions system needs approval by the state legislature, but he also announced it less than a month before the end of the legislative session, meaning that it was almost surely going to be shunted to next year—which is exactly what ended up happening. And if he wanted to, de Blasio could re-designate five of the specialized high schools and change their admissions policies on his own.

Furthermore, the focus on specialized high schools, which make up only 6 percent of the city’s entire public high school system, fails to address the greater, systemic problem of school segregation throughout the city. “It really is a challenging issue because it ends up being a debate about a small number of schools that you can’t really have without opening up a much bigger questions about screening,” said Halley Potter, a fellow at The Century Foundation who focuses on integration policy in New York. “I’m hopeful that a year from now we can look back and say this is just one of multiple fronts that the administration has been looking at to tackle segregation.” Addressing just a few high schools out of an entire K-12 system is, in many ways, a distraction from the bigger issues.

Still, the fact remains that specialized high schools are in dire need of integration. Unless New York gets rid of elite schools altogether, which some advocates have in fact proposed, it will have to diversify them in some way. This inevitably means that Asian-Americans will have to figure out where they fit into this new reality—and, perhaps, reassess their political priorities when it comes to their kids and New York City’s school system.


Sanchez took me to a small park in Castle Hill not far from where she grew up, before she moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Morris Park with her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her three siblings. Sanchez now finally has her own bedroom, an exciting development that she told me she is definitely “still not over.” When we first started speaking, Sanchez was a little nervous, but quickly opened up about her experiences. Despite her criticisms of New York’s school system, Sanchez cheerfully pointed out all the things she loves about Stuyvesant—her peers and teachers, the fact that Tribeca is “really nice.” She told me that she wants to go to Wesleyan, but is worried about burdening her mother with the cost of tuition—a whole other educational system they’ll have to navigate.

The test’s proponents claim that the SHSAT is the only truly meritocratic method of admitting students into specialized schools, and that getting rid of it will compromise these schools’ academic integrity. This is despite the fact that the test itself has been subject to very little evaluation. In August, the education news site Chalkbeat obtained through a public records request a 2013 study from the mayor’s office that de Blasio declined to release, showing that the SHSAT is a strong predictor of academic achievement. Yet outside experts told Chalkbeat that the study didn’t answer the question of whether alternative admissions methods would admit just as strong or even better students.

Hsin, the sociology professor, told me, “If you were to put aside any concerns about goals of diversity at all and you just wanted to come up with mechanism for identifying the most talented individuals to be admitted to specialized high schools, you would never come up with the admissions policy you have now.” Grades, which are repeated measures over time, are considered better indicators of academic acumen. It’s also been shown that they are better than standardized test scores when it comes to predicting success for black and Latinx students.

And if you put aside the evidence—or lack thereof—regarding the effectiveness of the test, defending the status quo means defending the idea that admitting black and Latinx students would bring down the quality of the student body, as New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones has pointed out.

This racist principle is baked into the history of the admissions policy itself. The original bill that mandated the use of a single standardized test was passed in 1971 by state legislators in order to preempt moves by the city to try to make the specialized schools more diverse. According to Politico, state legislators at the time argued that the bill would “protect the current status and quality of specialized academic high schools in New York City.”

Sanchez told me that many of her peers at Stuyvesant have been talking about the mayor’s proposal since it came out. Common remarks that she’s heard include things like, “People aren’t being accepted because they aren’t smart” and “Stuy is ruined.” I asked her how she feels when she hears those responses. Sanchez paused for a beat, then said, “I think it’s just insensitive to think that way.”


Asians in America have long sat at the messy crux where minority politics and education meet. They are often the poster-children of conservative attempts to roll back affirmative action and integration, despite being some of these policies’ biggest beneficiaries. The model minority myth—the idea that Asians are successful because they have better values and work harder than other minorities—is pervasive, and often used as a cudgel by whites against black and Latinx Americans for their supposedly wayward values and lax worth ethic.

The sight of Asian-Americans marching against integration efforts in New York City plays into these storylines. It is why Donald Trump’s Justice Department is siding with Asian-American students challenging affirmative action programs at Harvard, which they say discriminate against them by privileging less qualified students.

How did they reach this point? For one, because most of the Asian adult population are immigrants, they lack a lived understanding of America’s racial history. Asians have been excluded by this country’s racist immigration policies (see: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), but they have also benefited from the loosening of immigration laws in 1965 that brought in more highly educated Asian immigrants. Those trends are set to accelerate: The foreign-born population in the U.S. is at a record high thanks to Asians, according to new Census data, and more Asians with college degrees are expected to emigrate to the country in coming years.

There is also the glaring fact that Asian-Americans—who hail from a vast continent composed of different cultures and ethnicities—are far from a unified group. In fact, a survey by AAPI Data, a policy research site, shows that the Asian-American opposition to affirmative action is almost entirely driven by Chinese-Americans.

Historically, Chinese-Americans have been on both sides of the civil rights divide. OiYan Poon, a professor at Colorado State University, noted two examples that should have resonance for Asian-Americans involved in the ongoing controversies surrounding minority rights and education. First was the case of Gong Lum, a Chinese immigrant who lived in the Jim Crow South in the 1920s. When Lum’s daughter was placed in a colored school, he sued, trying to get his daughter into the local white school. Lum lost the case in Supreme Court, but the battle he chose to fight—securing the privileges of whiteness for his daughter, rather than against a racist system—is instructive. “You can imagine how that case could have been a different possibility,” Poon pointed out. “It could have been Brown vs. Board of Education. Instead Gong Lum argued, ‘We want to be white.’”

Poon juxtaposed this approach with the 1974 Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols, in which Chinese students who weren’t fluent in English had been recently integrated into the San Francisco Unified School District, which wasn’t providing them with English language instruction. The parents of Kinney Kinmon Lau, along with other non-English-speaking Chinese parents, argued that their Fourteenth Amendment rights were being violated since their children did not have equal educational opportunities. They won the case and secured the right to supplemental language education for non-English speaking minorities across the board. In collaboration with the Latinx community, Poon explained, the Chinese community was able to “push for systemic transformation and totally new possibilities.”

In New York today, members of the Asian community have lined up behind a system that results in blatant racial disparities. And they are doing so without examining the costs this system extracts, alongside the clear benefits it provides to a select few. The SHSAT effectively functions as a tax on poor Asian immigrants, both in terms of the actual dollars spent on prep courses as well as the years of childhood spent studying for a test that has little real-world relevance. “Thirteen- and 14-year olds don’t want to spend a lot of their sixth and seventh grade locked up in classroom on weekend preparing for this dumb test,” Jade Wong, a daughter of Chinese immigrants and a senior at Brooklyn Tech, told me.

Lam said that when her mother found out about de Blasio’s plan, even she acknowledged that “maybe now certain students can focus more on their grades in middle school, focus into getting into a high school they would actually like to go, that they won’t have to study hours and hours to get into.” Potter, the education policy researcher, pointed out that in Brooklyn’s 15th District, which is going through a similar debate about integration and screening, she found that even advocates of screening recognized that the system felt broken. “If we started with this premise around specialized high schools,” Potter said, “we would find many folks in the Asian American community for whom that would resonate.”

In a broader sense, these specialized schools not only fail the black and Latinx community, but cannot even serve the vast bulk of the disadvantaged Asian-American community. Forgotten in the debate are the Asian children who are turned away; the ones who get in, but then struggle with mental health issues; the ones who would have flourished in different or more diverse schools.

Despite media headlines that might indicate otherwise, the city’s Asian-American community—which, again, includes an impossible multitude of ethnicities and immigrant experiences—is far from unified in opposition to the mayor’s plan. In July, a group of Asian-American alumni from specialized high schools published an op-ed that called for reform of the admissions process, writing, “Asian Americans ought to stand in solidarity with all marginalized communities by advocating for equity in the educational opportunities and outcomes of all New York City students.” That same week, Asian-Pacific American community groups released a statement arguing that “diverse and inclusive school environments are beneficial to all students” and that the city needs to “address inequities in education across Pre-K through 12th grade and examine current processes and admission policies.”

Barring action from politicians, Asian parents will also have to be convinced that there are alternative paths to success in this country, and that the binary of “test or no test” is failing all minorities in one way or another. As Lam put it to me, “It would benefit parents to know that it doesn’t have to be this way.”


All the Rage

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You would think there would be more literature about why men are so angry—the president, the mob in Charlottesville a year ago, the alt-right generally, the bar brawlers, the wife-beaters, the gay-bashers, the man who got more famous than he anticipated for screaming at a couple of women who were speaking Spanish in a Manhattan restaurant earlier this year. Add to this all the high-powered, high-profile men—the #MeToo perpetrators—who have been cruel and degrading to women, and the men who went berserk in early August when The New York Times appointed Sarah Jeong to its editorial board, slinging sexualized and racist insults at her because she had dared to criticize them. Anger is often entangled with entitlement—the assumption, which underlies a lot of the violence in the United States, that one’s will should prevail and one’s rights outweigh those of others.

Male anger is a public safety issue, as well as a force in the ugliest politics and social movements of our time, from the epidemic of domestic violence to mass shootings, and from neo-Nazis to incels. Because we normalize the behavior of men—and of white men in particular—the fact that a lot of far-right movements, such as the American neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division, are mostly male, is seldom noted. (Michael Kimmel’s recent book, Healing From Hate, which examines male fury in global politics, is among the valuable exceptions.) We have until very recently treated it as inevitable that women should adapt to these outbursts with Mace in our purses, self-defense lessons, and limits on our freedom of movement, tiptoeing around men who use their volatility to intimidate and control others.

RAGE BECOMES HER: THE POWER OF WOMEN’S ANGER by Soraya ChemalySimon & Schuster, 416 pp., $27.00
ELOQUENT RAGE: A BLACK FEMINIST DISOVERS HER SUPERPOWER by Brittney Cooper St. Martin’s Press, 288 pp., $25.99
GOOD AND MAD: THE REVOLUTIONARY POER OF WOMEN’S ANGER by Rebecca Traister Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $27.00

Instead of a theory of male anger, we have a growing literature in essays and now books about female anger, a phenomenon in transition. Rebecca Traister’s new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, scrutinizes its causes, its repression, and its release in the last half-dozen years of feminist action, particularly in response to the treatment of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and in the remarkable power shift that women demanded in #MeToo. Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger focuses on the ways in which women’s (and by contrast, men’s) emotions are managed, judged, and valued in contemporary North American life, while Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower is a first-person narrative about power, solidarity, race, gender, and their intersections.

These books arrive at a moment when a lot of women have changed and too many men have not—and some are, in fact, retreating into revved-up misogyny and rage against the erosion of their supremacy. Women no longer obliged to please men may finally be able to express rage, because we’re less economically dependent on men than ever before, and because feminism has been redefining what’s appropriate and acceptable. “Gender-role expectations . . . dictate the degree to which we can use anger effectively in personal contexts and to participate in civic and political life,” Chemaly notes. “A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women—not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.”

The same feminist transformations that have allowed this outpouring may eventually wear down some of the causes of our anger. Much of the anger discussed in all these books comes from being thwarted—from the inability to command respect, equality, control over one’s body and destiny, or from witnessing the oppression of other women. One of the pitfalls in trying to establish equality is to confuse gaining power with unleashing rage. For all of us this is the conundrum: How, without idealizing and entrenching anger, can we grant nonwhite people and nonmale people an equal right to feeling and expressing it?


There’s a zen story I heard long ago, about a samurai who demands that a sage explain heaven and hell to him. The sage replies by asking why he should explain anything to an idiot like the samurai. The latter becomes so enraged in response that he draws his sword and prepares to kill. The sage says as the blade approaches, “That’s hell.” The samurai pauses, and realization begins to flood in. The sage says, “That’s heaven.” It’s a story about anger as misery and ignorance, and awareness as the antithesis.

Verbal rage and physical violence are weaknesses. (Here I think of Jonathan Schell’s book on the power of nonviolence, The Unconquerable World, which makes the case that even state violence is ultimately weakness, since, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. … to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant.”) Equanimity is one of the key Buddhist virtues, and anger is considered a poison in many Buddhist philosophies. It too often hardens into hate or boils up into violence. The sage makes clear that the samurai feels lousy when he’s about to commit a murder. Angry people are miserable. The sage also shows that the samurai is easily yanked around by what someone else does or says. Easily angered people are manipulable.

Yet here in the West, we talk about anger constantly, and we’re a lot more like the samurai than the sage. We assume, at least about male anger, that it’s an inevitable and normal reaction to unpleasant and insulting things, and that it’s powerful. This summer, NBC broadcast a video of a man from Nashville flying into a rage after he repeatedly propositioned a woman at a gas station and she turned him down. (Did he think women came to gas stations to get dates, not gas and maybe a soda? Or did he just think that women in general owed him, and he had the right to punish any stranger of that gender for disobedience?) In the footage, the man jumps onto the woman’s car, kicks in her windshield, and then assaults her directly. This inability to take no for an answer is far from rare. Since 2014, a Tumblr titled “When Women Refuse” has kept track of “violence inflicted on women who refuse sexual advances.” There is no shortage of examples, some of them fatal.

For those whose anger is sanctioned, its display can net rewards—if you want to be part of a system of intimidation and extortion, if you imagine the people you interact with as primarily competitors to be bullied rather than collaborators to be embraced. Some of the most privileged people on earth are raging and roaring their way through life—notably the president and his older white followers whose faces, scrunched in fury, can be seen at his rallies. These crowds are angry, perhaps because the alternative is to be thoughtful about the unfairness and complexity of this time and place and what they demand of us.

Activists, dressed as Handmaids, protesting restrictionson abortion at the Texas Capitol in Austin in 2017. Eric Gay/AP Photo

Much of what Traister and Chemaly address in their books is a double bind: We live in a world in which there is a good deal for women to object to, including the fact that a lot of men wish to harm and humiliate and subjugate us, but responding to that comes with its own penalties. When a woman shows anger, Chemaly observes, “she automatically violates gender norms. She is met with aversion, perceived as more hostile, irritable, less competent, and unlikable.” But even if, for example, she says quite calmly that gender violence is epidemic, she can still be attacked and characterized as angry, and that anger can be used as a way to discount the evidence, in a society that often still expects that women be pleasing and compliant.

A disturbing anecdote that Chemaly tells shows how early in life women are denied the right to be angry. At her daughter’s preschool, a boy keeps knocking down the towers that her daughter builds while his parents justify his aggression and refuse to prevent it. “They sympathized with my daughter’s frustration but only to the extent that they sincerely hoped she found a way to feel better,” Chemaly writes:

They didn’t seem to “see” that she was angry, nor did they understand that her anger was a demand on their son in direct relation to their own inaction. They were perfectly content to rely on her cooperation in his working through what he wanted to work through, yet they felt no obligation to ask him to do the same.

All three authors point out that race, as well as gender, sorts out whose anger is tolerated and whose is condemned. Among the black women Traister interviewed are Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and Representative Barbara Lee, who tells gripping stories about her own birth—in a hospital that nearly let her mother die because of her color—and about her mentor, congresswoman and 1972 presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm. Chemaly talks about the ways conservatives imagined and impugned Michelle Obama’s anger, and also reflects on her own family’s avoidance of women’s pain and anger. She wonders if it was rage that made her mother break all the best dishes by silently hurling them, if it was rage that her grandmother—kidnapped as a teenager by her grandfather—felt about a life in which she had little say.

Traister’s book documents moments when women have overturned expectations of silence and compliance in order to bring about change. As well as recent events, she presents vignettes from earlier eras of American history, covering Mother Jones, and the Industrial Workers of the World; Fannie Peck, who organized “Housewife Leagues” in Detroit; Rosa Parks and her only recently rediscovered, pre-bus-boycott feminism; the drag queens and transwomen who led the Stonewall Riot but were lost in the legend; and Anita Hill, who faced viciously condescending white men when she testified in Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing. Traister portrays these women’s motives for standing up in each case as anger, an anger that gave them the energy to do what they did.

Rosa Parks on the day in 1956 when buses in Montgomery, Alabama, were desegregated; Anita Hill traveling to Washington, D.C., to give testimony in 1991.Bettmann/Getty; Doug Mills/AP Photo

Yet sometimes it seems that energy might come from something else. Traister quotes Representative Lee saying that in public Chisholm would be “so cool, her voice and demeanor tough and strong and boom, boom, boom,” even when she was upset. “But get her behind closed doors? She’d let her guard down and acknowledge her pain.” Was her pain the same as anger? Or was it something else? Traister also quotes Garza saying that “what is underneath my anger is a deep sadness” and that it breaks her heart “to hear that a woman as visionary as Shirley Chisholm used to cry.” Later, Garza tells Traister that

the question for us is: Are we prepared to try and be the first movement in history that learns how to work through that anger? To not get rid of it, not suppress it, but learn how to get through it together for the sake of what is on the other side?”

What is on the other side is not quite clear, but Garza definitely takes the view of the sage, though she has compassion for the samurai in all of us. Perhaps Cooper is already there. Her book is as much a book about love as it is about anger: self-love and the struggle to find and hold it; love for the many women in her life, as well as public figures from Ida B. Wells to Audre Lorde to Terry McMillan to Hillary Clinton (they all talk about Clinton, of course); and at least implicitly a love of justice, of equality, of righting wrongs and telling truths. It is a warm and generous work, and a fierce one. All three books are compendiums of enormous numbers of anecdotes from and figures on recent American life, but Cooper’s is distinct both for its telling as the author’s own journey and for its—yes—eloquent personal voice, which, between her erudition (she is a professor at Rutgers) and her command of vernacular, is funny, wrenching, pithy, and pointed.


Returning to the fable, it seems the interaction between the two figures is about many less obvious things than fury and restraint. One of those things is power: If the sage had held the sword and the power of life and death with it, it’s easy to imagine his interlocutor would have been less eager to turn to violence, and their interaction would have stopped with the insult. Imagine a woman asked the sage the same question and he told her she was stupid and ineligible for enlightenment. Like the samurai, she might resent it, but, unlike him, she might not express that resentment, because expressing it will just open her up to other kinds of condemnation.

Or perhaps she accepts his definition of her worthlessness and his right to disparage her, so she’s not even angry, just miserable because she believes in her own inferiority. This is another kind of hell in which a lot of people reside. Don’t think of the warrioress Uma Thurman in the film Kill Bill, where she uses a samurai sword to slice off the top of an adversary’s head; think of the actual Uma Thurman, who seemed, before #MeToo, to have long normalized her abuse by director Quentin Tarantino.

Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino at the Cannes Film Festival closing ceremony in 2014. Pascal Le Segretain/WireImage/Getty

Both Chemaly and Traister see Thurman as a counterexample to the more unrestrainedly angry women they describe. When Thurman was asked in October 2017 what she thought about Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo insurrection, she was reluctant to vent: “I don’t have a tidy sound bite for you,” she responded, “because I’ve learned—I am not a child—and I have learned that when I’ve spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry. And when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.” For Chemaly, this response shows that Thurman was fenced in by inhibitions; she should have spoken out in the moment. “The actress’s sense of her own position,” Chemaly argues, “reflected the precariousness of women, even powerful women, when they have this anger.”

Traister also analyzes that extraordinary footage of a clench-jawed Thurman (who is the daughter of a renowned Buddhist practitioner and scholar, and who perhaps has absorbed some non-Western ideas about the uses and abuses of anger). But she proposes that “sometimes, there is a strategy behind the suppression of rage; in Thurman’s case, she was waiting to tell her story in full.” Months later, in an interview with The New York Times, Thurman did just that, revealing that she considered that Tarantino had subjected her to “dehumanization to the point of death” when he forced her to perform a stunt in an unsafe car and she crashed, leaving her with permanent, painful injuries.

Thurman confided that up until that moment most of the abuse she had suffered from Tarantino—including spitting in her face—“was kind of like a horrible mud wrestle with a very angry brother.” The stunt setup was different, because it wasn’t just degrading but potentially fatal. “Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you ‘in love’ with you,” she reflected. “It took a long time because I think that as little girls we are conditioned to believe that cruelty and love somehow have a connection and that is like the sort of era that we need to evolve out of.” That is, women are conditioned to accept abuse and to accept it as its opposite (and to keep letting boys knock down their towers). The power to define your own experience is one of the powers that matters most.

Thurman impugned the reputation of two powerful men she’d worked with to speak of her own struggle and the plight of women exactly as she wanted to. She waited until she could be considered and effective. Her goal was not just what we call letting off steam—an Industrial Revolution-era metaphor that casts human beings as machines in which pressure builds up and must be released. Thurman’s goal was apparently to tell the truth in a way that had consequences, for the men who mistreated her and for the public at large—and perhaps for participants in the feminist insurrection underway, because stories like hers can fortify other women and the movement for women’s rights.


Anger itself is a catch-all term for a lot of overlapping but distinct phenomena. Among them are outrage, indignation, and distress, which are commonly born of empathy for the victims rather than animosity toward the victimizers. These feelings, which may last a lifetime, may not include the temporary physiological reaction that is bodily anger, with rising blood pressure and quickened pulse, tension, and often a surge of energy. That reaction is, in the moment, a preparation to respond to danger. It may be useful if you’re actually being attacked; when it becomes a chronic state, it turns the body against itself with impacts that can be devastating or even fatal.

I have often been struck by how some of the people who have the most grounds for anger seem to have abandoned it, perhaps because it could devour them. These are the falsely accused prisoners, farmworker organizers, indigenous rebels, black leaders, who are closer to the sage than to the samurai in our story, and powerful when it comes to getting things done and moving toward their goals.

I had a formative experience in the mid-1990s, when I was working with activists trying to expose the effects of depleted uranium on people who had been exposed to it in the 1991 Gulf War and at American weapons testing sites. I took two dedicated experts to a radio station, where they and the radio host talked at cross purposes throughout the interview. My colleagues were driven by love and compassion for the soldiers and the civilians in the United States and Iraq exposed to the stuff, and they wanted to talk about the suffering and the solutions. Their interlocutor—who if he were female might’ve been called histrionic, self-involved, and volatile—wasn’t really interested; he seemed to be motivated by hatred of the government and kept trying to turn the conversation to indictments of the institutions of power. He missed what his subjects were trying to say as he tried to beat their story into his mold.

Most great activists—from Ida B. Wells to Dolores Huerta to Harvey Milk to Bill McKibben—are motivated by love, first of all. If they are angry, they are angry at what harms the people and phenomena they love, but their urges are primarily protective, not vengeful. Love is essential; anger is perhaps optional.

How Not to Do Comic Noir

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Genre-crossover movies can be delightful. Red Sun is a brilliant Samurai Western. Black martial arts films like The Last Dragon or Game of Death are blessings in video form. Noir might be the most successful crossover genre of the bunch. Mixed with sci-fi, we get Blade Runner. With teen drama, Brick. With ‘90s alt-psychological cool, Memento. But what do you get if you mix noir with Paul Feig, director of Bridesmaids, Freaks and Geeks, and the new Ghostbusters? The result is A Simple Favor, a deeply confused movie that feels like a mash-up of Mean Girls and an episode of Law and Order.

Starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, the movie’s site calls it a “stylish thriller,” which is the kind of thing that nobody ever says in real life but that appears on the back cover of bad books all the time (the film is adapted from a novel by Darcey Bell). The trailer’s ambience is chilly, tense. I expected something Gone Girl-esque, a mystery to really get one’s teeth into.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the movie opened with the jolly soundtrack of the French version of Andy Williams’s “Music to Watch Girls By.” Was this to be some kind of swinging, Truffaut-esque quasi-noir? A charmingly funny mystery? The sudden cut to a school drop-off scene is a formal jolt, propelling us into an apparently completely different film and immediately auguring the film’s confusion.

Kendrick plays Stephanie Smothers, an awkward mommy-vlogger who speaks large quantities of plot exposition into her recipe videos. Lively is Emily, her extremely fashionable, martini-swilling new friend. The other moms at school loathe Stephanie for her goodie-two-shoes ways, and envy Emily for her fancy job in public relations. The very funny Andrew Rannells, a bitchy parent at the school, figures that Emily is just using Stephanie as a free babysitter. He delivers zingy asides throughout the movie, a bit of script decoration that leavens its grind significantly.

Against the odds, the two become close, swapping confessions over afternoon drinking sessions. Then, after asking Stephanie for the “simple favor” of picking up her kid from school, Emily disappears. This is where both the genre styling and the story truly dissolve into insanity. Stephanie becomes a detective figure, looping in her ever-increasing vlog audience as she follows the clues to where Emily might be. She also takes up with Emily’s left-behind husband Sean, played with incredible limpness by Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians). Our sympathies are therefore compromised, to put it mildly.

Stephanie starts delving into Emily’s past, interviewing people she’s known and putting together a picture of her family. As she does so, Kendrick’s character becomes less and less coherent. In one scene, she raps along to MOP’s “Ante Up” while driving, flushed with a bit of sleuthing success. It’s unclear whether this scene is supposed to be funny. Kendrick, who looks so anxious throughout the whole thing, seems to share the audience’s bewilderment.

A Simple Favor is littered with similar flashes of humor that don’t reconcile with the rest of the movie’s tone. An artist who once painted Emily calls her a “knockoff dyke Mapplethorpe.” That’s funny! But she’s also delivering ominous information about her old subject, which takes all the fun out of the scene. Likewise, Kendrick’s role is clearly supposed to be a comic turn—she hangs a hideously Pinterest-ish painting of a lemon tree in Emily’s home once she starts dating her husband—but her backstory is truly, ickily dark.

As each bizarre revelation layers over the last, it becomes clear that the problem with A Simple Favor is not really the inconsistent styling (sixties cool, but make it ... YouTube?) or the TV-paced humor, but the poor plot underpinning it all. This story makes no sense, and Feig has packaged it inside a patchwork of styles that amplifies rather than conceals the movie’s problems.


The classic examples of comic noir are the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple and Fargo. Other such disparate films as Fight Club, Arsenic and Old Lace, Hot Fuzz, and The Grifters all slot into the same genre. The key to each of these fine movies is a sense of romance at the heart. They use noir as a formal container for innovative story-telling, introducing new ingredients to a familiar visual style. But for comic noir to work, we have to buy into the characters’ desire to find the pot of gold at the end of the mystery. We have to be in the hunt with them.

This is where A Simple Favor falls down. Lively’s performance as Emily is authentically funny, a refreshing turn for an actress whose last memorable role was as a glistening butt in The Shallows. But she and Kendrick read like characters from two completely different films, with Golding as an extra from some other, much worse flick. A Simple Favor simply fails to leave the audience rooting for anybody in particular, unless you can be on the side of Blake Lively’s magnificent wardrobe. When a pair of trousers steals your movie, you’re in the kind of pickle that no plot twist can redeem.

Brett Kavanaugh Has Already Disqualified Himself

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Since the sexual assault allegations against him were made public earlier this month, can you think of a single thing Brett Kavanaugh has done or said that makes you more confident that he’ll be a judge of high integrity on the Supreme Court? I cannot. At every step of the way he has acted less like a potential justice and more like a partisan functionary, desperately clinging to the chance at the job of his lifetime. He has, in this way if not others, already disqualified himself for the job regardless of how the (now two) sexual assault allegations against him pan out.

There are Christine Blasey Ford’s credible allegations of “attempted rape” that Kavanaugh must answer for during a hearing scheduled for Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And now there are new allegations that Kavanaugh engaged in sexual misconduct not just in high school, when Ford says the episode took place, but also at Yale University, where Kavanaugh attended. A woman named Deborah Ramirez has stepped forward to tell Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer at The New Yorker that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face at a drunken party in the 1983-84 school year and made her touch it.

Kavanaugh denies the new allegation with the same vigor with which he has denied Ford’s allegations. But the emergence of Ramirez makes it even more imperative that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee stop the voting track and investigate all of this in a serious way. That means they must abandon the he-said/she-said plan for Thursday’s hearing and open it up to other witnesses who will either incriminate or exculpate Kavanaugh and the women who say he’s a sex offender. And it means Kavanaugh and the White House must abandon the approach they’ve taken to his defense so far.

Kavanaugh is not on trial for his life. He’s not a defendant in a court of law. His accusers and their supporters need not make a case of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They don’t even need to make a case using the civil standard of a “preponderance of the evidence.” This notion that Kavanaugh can convince America that he is innocent by producing his calendar from 1982 is patently absurd in a process in which live witnesses are barred from providing their insight about what Kavanaugh’s life was like in those days. It wasn’t going to fly when Ford was the only accuser. It’s certainly not going to fly now that Ramirez has stepped forward.

But put aside these other people and focus only on the man who wants to help shape the course of American law for the next two generations. The man who preached “judicial independence” during his listless testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month, the man who is a life-tenured judge on a federal appeals court, spent parts of at least four days last week at the White House being “prepped” for his looming confrontation with Ford. Prepped, that is, by the very executive branch officials whose presidential privilege claims he may be asked to adjudicate, in a matter of months perhaps, if he ascends to the High Court. That’s not judicial independence. That’s a conflict of interest.

The nominee became “incredibly frustrated,” we are told, about all the questions he now has to answer about his drinking habits and sex life as a teenager. The pious preacher of integrity and honor during his confirmation hearing would rather get the job without having to tell the American people what sort of teenager he was. That attitude—the antithesis of selfless public service, an anti-judge perspective, a good-old-boys thing—was summed up on a Sunday talk show. “What am I supposed to do?” wailed Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the committee. “Go ahead and ruin this guy’s life based on an accusation?”

No. What Graham and his Senate colleagues are supposed to do is take the Ford and Ramirez allegations seriously and do everything possible to ensure a full and fair investigation takes place before there is a vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination. What they are supposed to do is realize that going public with the allegations already has “ruined” Ford’s life, a reality about sexual abuse she understood for all those long years in which she remained silent. Indeed, what’s persistently missing from the Republican defenses of Kavanaugh is the extent to which Ford and Ramirez already have laid it all on the line.

And Kavanaugh? What he’s supposed to do is everything he has not done so far. He’s supposed to say that it is more important to him to get to the heart of the matter, wherever it leads, than it is for him to get promoted to the Supreme Court. He’s supposed to say that he will withdraw his name from consideration for the job if the Senate is unable or unwilling to adequately investigate the Ford and Ramirez claims. He is supposed to put his country above his own personal and professional goals. If he is as innocent as he and his defenders claim he is, this is the only “honorable” approach out of this mess.

I keep going back to all that prep work and Kavanaugh’s reaction to it. Kavanaugh is no ordinary witness, this is no ordinary testimony, and so what is there to prep for, exactly, if Kavanaugh is as innocent as he claims? What kind of “lawyering up” does lawyer Kavanaugh need if he were not at that long-ago party where Ford alleges she was almost raped? Or the other party where Ramirez says Kavanaugh imposed himself on her? The nominee is no novice when it comes to courts and courtrooms. He doesn’t need a lesson, or a reminder, in how a witness should or should not act. He has to be both persuasive and honorable, writes Benjamin Wittes, but if that is true then it’s either genuine, in which case Kavanaugh needs no coaching, or it is not, in which case Kavanaugh is worse than dishonorable.

The truth is that Kavanaugh is being coached in great detail to clap together precisely the right phrases during his next round of public testimony that will allow Vichy Republicans like Susan Collins or Jeff Flake to declare themselves satisfied that he’s not an attempted rapist. He’s also being coached on what to say more broadly about sexual assault and victimization so as not to further erode Republican support among women this election season. There is nothing about any of this that enhances anyone’s argument that Kavanaugh has a judicial temperament that warrants his inclusion on the Supreme Court.

As if Kavanaugh’s collusion with the White House in advance of his Senate testimony isn’t worrisome enough, there also now is the question of the connection, if any, between Kavanaugh and Ed Whelan, the conservative ideologue who pitched a dubious “mistaken identity” theory last week in which he named another man as Ford’s possible abuser. Did Kavanaugh and White House operatives know that Whelan was going to pitch this conspiracy theory dreck? Would it surprise anyone that Bill Shine, the former Fox News executive now at the White House, would pull a stunt like that? And what happens now that Ramirez has emerged? More strategy sessions between the executive and judicial branches?

I can understand how upset Kavanaugh is, as I wrote last week, being so close to his life’s goal only to have this happen. But that does not excuse the very un-judge like behavior Kavanaugh has exhibited in the past two weeks. He has acted like a guilty man trying to hide something instead of a righteous man knowing the truth will help him past this hurdle. He as acted like a nominee who believes it’s more important to get the job than it is for him to have any respect when he has the job. Even if you didn’t think he was disqualified for the ferocity of his conservative ideology, his reaction to these allegations tell us he’s unworthy of the job for which he is nominated.

What the Public Lands Are Truly Worth

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If ever there was a time for a defense of the federal public lands system, it is now. Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, has expressed his contempt for the preferences of the American people by presiding over the largest rescissions of federal land protections in history. In 2017, a huge majority of Americans–99.2 percent by one measure—were in favor of the preservation of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. Yet President Donald Trump, thirteen months after taking office, and acting on Zinke’s recommendations, reduced them in size by close to two million acres. 

Right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Institute, Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, Reason Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council applauded the decision. These groups, many of them funded by energy industry magnates Charles and David Koch, have been at the forefront of claims that public lands, burdened with environmental regulations, are a drain on the American economy. 

In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and TransferTemple University Press 264, pp., $28.45

The ultimate goal of these groups, however, is not merely deregulation but a radical transformation of the more-than-century-old system of public ownership of hundreds of millions of acres of land, mostly in the Western states. Public lands, they say, should be privatized, sold off to the highest bidder for the best use, be it logging, cattle grazing, or exploitation for oil, gas, or hard-rock minerals. Subjected to market forces, the land, in this view, will yield a higher return to society than the current system that “locks it up” under the auspices of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service. 

These three land management entities, along with other federal agencies, oversee approximately one-third of all land in the country. No matter that overwhelming numbers of Americans have decided that they like the Park Service, the BLM, and Forest Service and want to keep the land as a vast commons

A compelling rejoinder to the noxiously anti-democratic program of land privatizers is Steven Davis’s new book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and TransferThe chief argument for privatization, writes Davis, is based on a reductionist calculation of the operating budget of public lands agencies compared with the revenue those lands produce. Government statistics show that it costs ten times more to run the Forest Service than the service receives from users of the national forests. Therefore, goes the logic, junk it. In fact, the public lands system as a whole operates at a significant loss. In 2014, total appropriations for all federal land agencies came to $11 billion while revenue was only $1 billion. From the national parks to the national forests and monuments to the wildlife refuges operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it’s all money down the drain. They are economically inefficient. Therefore, the nation ought to abolish them. “To the advocates of privatization,” writes Davis, “the government’s management of public land is the main culprit in the thwarting of rational, efficient, and productive resource policy.”

I called Davis at his home in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is a professor of political science at Edgewood College, to ask about the genesis of his book. “My project was to examine and dismantle the arguments that endlessly spew forth from rightwing think tanks and Koch-endowed professorships. There is quite an academic literature out there that begs refutation,” he told me. “The privatizers fancy themselves as rational and analytical, and I wanted to show that even on their own turf, they are dead wrong, empirically.” 

The world as envisioned by libertarian economists, Davis argues, is determined by a stunted creature that he calls “Homo economicus.” Bleakly isolated from his fellow man, an atomized free individual in the marketplace, Homo economicus decides what is good for society via decisions based exclusively on profit and loss. But society isn’t made up of free-floating atoms. We continually engage in collective decisions for the greater good, regardless of cost. That’s why we fund public schools and libraries, the Postal Service, the Veterans Administration, highways, and the like.

There are preferences, values, and outcomes we seek as a society that transcend the strictures of the market. These are called the public good. Markets, Davis argues, can’t be relied on to provide that, nor should it be expected to. Standing against Homo economicus is “Homo politicus,” asserting that the nation make choices together through messy, conflicted, difficult democratic processes. And one of those choices is to maintain public lands regardless of what the market tells us of its value. Davis quotes philosopher Mark Sagoff: “When citizens and their representatives deliberate in moral and aesthetic terms about the fate of the environment, they often reach conclusions utterly at odds with those they would reach if they considered only the economic aspects.”  

On the other hand, says Davis, it is useful—simply for the purpose of trapping libertarians in the narrow confines of their ideology—to establish a market value of the ecosystem services that publicly owned lands provide.

Biologists are extremely uncomfortable with the commodifying of ecosystems and wildlife, and so is Davis, given that it reduces the functions of nature merely to what it does for human beings. But in a market environment, it’s possible to look at public lands as an inestimable treasure, worth trillions of dollars, “a kind of fountain,” he writes, “that pours out a continuous flow of precious things.” Essential assets such as photosynthesis and biomass production, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, clean air, fresh water, water retention and filtration, soil retention, nutrient cycling, pollination—these are all products of America’s public lands. Economists may not value these “free” products, but if they did, the valuation would shatter the notion that public land is a money-loser.

Given the total cost of maintaining public lands is just $11 billion a year, it’s a bargain in exchange for those trillions of dollars of ecosystem services. “It’s the greatest bargain the American people have ever made,” writes Davis. Hell, the United States spent $20 billion alone on air-conditioning in military bases in Iraq during the height of the war. And what did that investment produce for the American people? 

What Davis has accomplished with his book is a much-needed public service to light the fires of populist indignation. That he so ably debunks the privatizers’ claims provides ammunition to those interested in exposing what the corporate intellectuals at Cato, Heritage, and others really are: enemies of a beloved American institution, our great commons of land.   

The World Beyond Knausgaard

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On a sweltering day in July, Karl Ove Knausgaard was standing on a London sidewalk, wearing a dark coat, gray jeans, and boots. From a shaded spot across the street, the photographer commissioned for this article directed the author to look this way, then that. Knausgaard was at his ease, staring coolly into the distance, as if he could feel neither the heat nor the camera’s glossy black eye on him. Had he gotten used to all these photo shoots? “I don’t even think about it anymore,” he said, his expression still composed for the camera. Every so often, the photographer asked me to hold a large silver reflector in front of him, angling it to light his face with a soft glow.

Knausgaard has built his reputation on a talent for self-obsession. His own image is a starting point for his six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle. In its opening pages, he looks at his reflection in the window, at the lines that time has left across his forehead and cheeks, and asks: “What has engraved itself in my face?” Over the next 3,600 pages, he flees the conventions of the novel—plot, character development, a smooth and accomplished style—to focus purely on the author and his experiences. No moment is too mundane to escape his notice, no memory so distant that it can’t be recalled with the force of naked experience. But his is a radically narrow world, one in which little really exists outside himself.

The novel’s reception focused still more attention on Knausgaard’s personal life. The publication of Book One in Norwegian in 2009 turned into a scandal in the Scandinavian press, as family members and old flames accused him of slander and betrayal. The controversy made him a sensation, a kind of literary Kardashian whose story was fodder for gossip and intrigue in the newspapers. When the books began to be published in the United States in 2012, American critics highlighted the author’s reputation for shamelessly exposing the most intimate details of his life, particularly his frustrations with his then-partner Linda Bostrom. “What kind of person,” Evan Hughes asked in a 2014 profile of Knausgaard, “would publish such a thing about his wife?” At the same time, he was hailed as one of the foremost practitioners of the newly invigorated genre of autofiction and glowing profiles dwelled intently on the details of his daily life: his clothes, his smoking habit, his writing shed in the Swedish countryside.

In Book Six, the newly released, final volume in My Struggle, Knausgaard looks back on these controversies and attempts to understand them. He begins by reflecting on the publication of Book One and its impact on him, Linda, and their children. But this book also stands apart from its predecessors, as it zooms out from Knausgaard’s little domain, situating My Struggle against the backdrops of family, society, and history. At its heart is a 400-page essay on Adolf Hitler titled “The Name and the Number,” which Knausgaard told me was “the only thing that I really thought was fun to write, because it wasn’t about me.”

There’s very little in the previous volumes to prepare the reader for this effort—an intellectual history of Western Europe in a search for the conditions that led to Nazism—other than the book’s ominous title, which it shares with Hitler’s autobiography-cum-manifesto. When an artist as introverted as Knausgaard looks at the wider world, what does he see?


For a writer who has been interrogated by dozens of journalists, it’s striking how little Knausgaard has said about the world. Meeting him in person is an uncanny experience, because he comes off as both an intimate acquaintance and a total stranger. His features are utterly familiar from magazine profiles and book covers (the pale eyes, the wave of silvery-metallic hair) and yet also unexpected (the nicotine stain between his two front teeth). When we met for breakfast this summer, he ordered a bowl of muesli, a beige mound he shoveled into his mouth with several quick scrapes of his spoon. He was drinking so much coffee that morning, he said, partly to compensate for having quit smoking six weeks earlier.

Book Six contains much of the familiar Knausgaard. During the fallout from Book One, he writes, members of his extended family in Norway threatened to take him to court, bitterly rejecting the book’s version of events. In an email with the subject line “Verbal Rape,” his uncle accused him of writing “this despicable, immoral, and self-centered shambles of a book” to “get back at the family” and get rich. The uncle takes his complaints to Knausgaard’s publisher and to the press, resulting in an all-engulfing public ordeal, with journalists waiting to ambush the author in the streets. Later, when Linda reads a draft of Book Two, she learns that Knausgaard attempted to cheat on her and the couple have a flaming row.

Now, he agonizes over the consequences. “This novel has hurt everyone around me,” he writes in Book Six. “It has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children.” But when I asked him whether it was worth such a high cost, he gave an unequivocal yes. He defends the writer’s right to be immoral, to be a “terrible person” as he put it, since otherwise he is only abetting the silence that society imposes on our darkest thoughts and feelings, about death, sex, love. “There must be a place where you can be, where you can write, where you can think, without a façade at all,” he said. If anything, he added, his book fell short because he was not callous enough, because he could actually feel the pain he was inflicting on the people he was writing about. “I tried to fight it, I tried to be more immoral.”

He is perhaps at his most terrible in the concluding section of Book Six, which recounts in harrowing detail Linda’s descent into a suicidal depression, possibly triggered by the controversy surrounding My Struggle. This window into his family’s bleakest hour was apparently part of a conscientious push to hold nothing back, to atone for what he sees as the dishonest timidity that pervades Books Three, Four, and Five, which itself was a product of the public backlash that met Books One and Two. That his ex-wife has borne the brunt of his revived appetite for truth-telling—that, besides Knausgaard himself, she is the most brutally exposed of all the characters in My Struggle—is a painful topic for Knausgaard, but also the topic he seems able to talk about most proficiently and fluently. “You try to get as close as you can, like a one-to-one relation to life,” he told me, “and then it doesn’t feel like stealing or taking.”

When the conversation turned to politics, by contrast, he was often at a loss for words, sinking into prolonged silences and squinting into space as if he were seeking an answer written hazily in the distance. The tension that hovers over Book Six isn’t so much the ethical conundrum that comes from revealing his loved ones so nakedly, a conundrum with which he has apparently made his peace. Rather, it is whether the lights that have guided him as a writer—an aversion to morality, a hyper-focus on the self, and an unwavering belief that feelings come closer to the truth than the intellect—can illuminate a less personal theme.


Knausgaard’s politics have long been a subject of speculation, thanks to a handful of cryptic references to current events that are strewn across My Struggle’s thousands of pages: passing observations about immigration or Swedish politics or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict squeezed between loading the dishwasher and taking the kids to daycare. There is also his very public interest in the writers Peter Handke and Knut Hamsun, whose allegiances to Slobodan Milosevic and Hitler, respectively, have earned them notoriety.

In Book Six, which appeared in Norwegian in 2011, a more distinct political viewpoint emerges, complementing the historical analysis in “The Name and the Number,” which offers some prescient insights on the appeal of nativist movements. In its recounting of the events that led to Hitler’s rise, there are unavoidable parallels with the present moment, from a devastating recession that undermined public faith in state institutions and demanded scapegoats, to the widespread hunger for a demagogic leader “who said things the way they were,” as Knausgaard puts it.

Yet many of the defining political events of the late 2000s had little to no effect on his writing, he said. Was the financial crisis and its political repercussions at the back of his mind when he was writing the book? Did he have the sense that ethnonationalism as a force was growing in response to the failures of liberal democracy? “No,” he insisted. “There’s nothing from above or from outside in the book. It just doesn’t exist. It’s all internal, intuitive.”

If politics is present in the book, he suggested, that is only because it has flowed through the channel of his being the way everything else has, the headlines tumbling out of him along with the soiled diapers and the musings about Proust and the majestic fjords. Yet he was aware that some of his opinions might prove controversial, going so far as to discuss with his English-speaking editors whether to “change anything” prior to the publication of Book Six. “But I didn’t in the end,” he said. “I thought that it would give in to something I really didn’t like.”

There are quite a lot of things Knausgaard doesn’t like. He makes his disdain for the political-media establishment in Sweden abundantly clear in the pages of Book Six. He rails against it for being ossified in its political correctness, hypocritical in its brand of cosmopolitan bourgeois liberalism, blind in its inability to recognize how personal identity is deeply rooted in gender, tradition, nationality. He is wary of the flattening effect that globalization—or more precisely Americanization—can have on discrete national traditions. He singles out Japan (like Norway and Sweden, a tightly-knit, homogenous society) as precisely the kind of peculiar place that should remain peculiar—that should remain distinctly Japanese, unadulterated by foreign influences. “In this wide perspective, I was against immigration, against multiculturalism, against notions of sameness of nearly every kind,” he writes.

In the book, he characterizes the Swedish elite’s political correctness as an insane abstraction divorced from reality:

It was this same ideology, hostile to all difference that could not accept categories of male and female, he and she. Since han and hun are denotative of gender, it was suggested a new pronoun, hen, be used to cover both. The ideal human being was a gender-neutral hen whose foremost task in life was to avoid oppressing any religion or culture by preferring their own.

This can (and probably will) be read as reactionary, a holdout against attempts to accommodate the rights of non-binary people. But it can also be understood as part of a suspicion of all political ideologies. “What you want as a writer is complexity,” he told me. “And politics is the opposite.” Ideologies color our perception of the world, determining what is ugly and beautiful, what is moral and immoral. For Knausgaard the problem is this: How can anyone express the truth and not just unwittingly reiterate through every act and word the predominant worldview?


The idea of the artist standing both inside and outside the community is a central theme of “The Name and the Number.” The reason he dropped this enormous essay into the middle of Book Six was, he said, quite simple. “It was because of the title,” he explained, referring to the fact My Struggle (Min Kamp in Norwegian) is the same as Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Knausgaard explains the origins of his series’ title in Book Six: It came from his best friend Geir, who acts throughout the books as a foil to Knausgaard’s suffering artist; the title is typical of Geir, being both a provocation and a brash joke. (One of Knausgaard’s previous working titles was the decidedly less dramatic Argentina.) “Because I chose the title in the beginning, that led to my reading Hitler’s book,” he said. “And then realizing that that, too, was a book about the self, somehow.” But critics will inevitably suspect that there’s something more at work here than happenstance and blind writerly instinct—that Knausgaard is aiming for transgression, flirting with the ultimate taboo as he lays out his intellectual history of Nazism.

He begins with the Industrial Revolution. As befits a novelist, Knausgaard’s depiction of the alienation produced by this event—a large-scale atrocity that not only led to mass death and mass squalor in Europe’s ever-growing cities, but also helped destroy traditional ties of faith and family—is based on close readings of Kafka, Joyce, Stefan Zweig, and others. While he tries to capture the sweep of history, he’s most interested in its significance for the individual: how the industrialized world produced a conflicted person, who was simultaneously convinced of his supreme individuality and haunted by the intimate knowledge that he was just one of millions, an ant in a mechanized ant farm, all but indistinguishable from everyone else.

It’s this conflict that Knausgaard sees in the young Adolf Hitler. “The Name and the Number” shows us a single-minded, humorless young man who rebelled against his strict, civil-servant father, by vowing never to become a civil servant himself and never to pursue any career common to the petit bourgeoisie; who saw a higher destiny for himself as an artist, as a great painter or a great architect or even a great musician, but who had no patience for the effort and discipline such fields require; and who ultimately could not bear the vast gulf between his grandiose self-image and a world that continually rejected and humiliated him, to the point that he was living homeless on the streets of Vienna, selling shoddy paintings to bars and inns, too proud to return to his hometown in failure.

There is nothing evil, yet, about any of this; it could describe any number of aspiring artists. For Knausgaard, Hitler simply exemplifies an artist’s tendencies turned bad. Despite Hitler’s youthful aspirations and his clear love for certain kinds of art, he was, Knausgaard concludes, the opposite of an artist. The artist attests that the individual—“you”—is everything, that every perspective has some value, that every soul has worth. The fascist offers transcendence through the group, which in his racist ideology entails the eradication of other groups. “You are nothing, your people is everything,” as a Nazi slogan went.

“The Name and the Number” is a showcase for Knausgaard’s erudition, spanning numerous disciplines and containing in-depth analyses of Heidegger, Marx, the Bible, and so much more (it comes with its own bibliography). It feels like Knausgaard’s attempt to break free of his own stifling reputation as a writer of autofiction, to show that he knows a thing or two beyond shopping for groceries and putting the kids to bed. Yet for all its sprawl and ambition, it comes back to the dichotomy of the artist and the anti-artist, the tyrant. These are the two principal actors in history—humanity’s angel and devil, in constant struggle.


At one point toward the end of our conversation Knausgaard leaned over and sheepishly said, “You asked what my politics were and for some reason I couldn’t reply to that.” He went on to insist that he is a bog-standard democratic socialist, that there is nothing to the “rumor” that he is “on the right,” that he is, above all, a committed environmentalist. But he maintained that rigid political ideologies, in Sweden and elsewhere, have made us blind to the humanity of other people.

We talked about a recent visit to the United States, where he was picked up in a car driven by a Donald Trump supporter. When he told the car’s owners, he was shocked by their response: “‘Do you want us to fire him?’ It was like they were so appalled by the fact that he was saying these things. And that was crazy, too, to think that firing him would be legitimate.” For Knausgaard, the spread of nativist populism was less alarming than the idea that the others might reject and distance themselves from these views—an unexpected stance for a writer who has completed a vast study of Nazism. The case of the Trump-supporting driver was, for him, a free speech issue. “I’m very pro-openness when it comes to these things,” he said.


When we discussed Sweden’s forthcoming elections, in which nearly a quarter of voters were expected to vote for the anti-immigration party, Knausgaard said that, despite what the media might suggest, it doesn’t mean that one in four Swedes were racist. (The far-right Sweden Democrats ended up winning 18 percent of the vote, a blow to the establishment parties but not enough to unseat them.) He noted that he himself had been accused by a prominent Swedish academic of being a fascist for daring to challenge Sweden’s culture of political correctness. And he said he knew writers who were ostracized and had lost friends because of their unpopular opinions, which goes against one of his core beliefs: that “people must be able to say whatever they want to say, especially writers.”

It is notable that Knausgaard is drawn to these disparate figures: the would-be artist, the voter who is persecuted for troublesome beliefs, the writer who is silenced. It perhaps exposes the limit of a political outlook that is otherwise so admirably grounded in the world of lived experience, since it is easier to empathize with those who are closest at hand. Ideologies may be limiting, but then again so are our personal perspectives. And in Knausgaard’s case, it is tempting to draw a more specific conclusion: that he can’t look at anyone, even the most terrible figures in history, without seeing himself.

When Democrats Retaliate

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Supreme Court justices don’t need an electoral mandate to do their jobs. But their latest would-be colleague may carry an anti-mandate of sorts. Brett Kavanaugh already had lower-than-average levels of support after he was nominated to replace Anthony Kennedy in July. Those numbers dropped even further after California professor Christine Blasey Ford said he sexually assaulted her in the early 1980s when they were in high school. (Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.) Now 38 percent of Americans oppose his confirmation, while only 34 percent support it.

Despite this discontent, Kavanaugh is still more likely than not to be confirmed to a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court within the next few weeks. He would reach the high court on the thinnest of margins, nominated by a president who received almost three million fewer votes than his opponent, confirmed by a Senate that gives disproportionate political power to less populous states, and sworn in amid historic levels of public opposition. Once there, he’ll likely fulfill the three-decade conservative quest to build a five-justice majority of staunch conservatives who could roll back precedents on abortion rights, affirmative action, and more.

So where does that leave Democrats? Between the scorched-earth process to put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell’s refusal to hold hearings for a moderate nominee like Merrick Garland in 2016, the seismic legal changes in which Kavanaugh will take part, and the shredding of all but a few remaining norms surrounding the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation process, liberals are gravitating toward extraordinary measures to restore a semblance of balance to the Supreme Court—no matter the damage to the court itself.

Some of these fissures were inevitable. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty presciently noted in January, months before Kennedy announced his retirement, that the court’s swing justice may have been the glue that’s holding the American political system together. Though no fan of Kennedy’s jurisprudence, Dougherty recognized that the justice’s tendency to form coalitions with a variety of justices helped preserve the court’s ideological balance of power and with it, public confidence in the court.

“Kennedy deals out victories and defeats to each side—giving slightly more defeats to social conservatives,” he wrote. “In effect, he constrains what each side can do to the other. His mercurial jurisprudence replicates and even gives the savor of legitimacy to a closely divided country. So I’ve started to worry that if the Court soon consolidates to the left or the right, partisans on the losing end of that bargain will swiftly lose faith in democracy itself.”

I don’t fully agree with Dougherty’s characterization. (As I’ve noted before, Kennedy’s votes on labor unions, voting rights, political gerrymandering, and campaign-finance reform have structurally tilted the American democratic process toward the Republican Party.) But his overall conclusion about Kennedy’s role in the nation’s political life is indisputable. Sandra Day O’Connor played a similar role as the court’s moderate stabilizer in the 1990s and early 2000s, as did Lewis Powell before her in the 1980s. But that function now appears to be at an end, and with it, the illusion of equanimity in American politics.

Kennedy’s departure and Kavanaugh’s ascension would leave Chief Justice John Roberts as the court’s median justice—a term I use in lieu of “swing justice,” because there is scant evidence that he will fulfill that role. The New York Times’ David Leonhardt suggested on Sunday that Roberts may yet follow Kennedy’s example, noting that the chief justice “clearly cares about the court’s credibility” and once voted with the liberal justices to save the Affordable Care Act. I am less certain. Unlike Powell, O’Connor, or Kennedy, Roberts is a product of the conservative judicial-nomination machine, which exists entirely to prevent Republican presidents from placing any more swinging jurists on the federal bench.

This is what conservatives wanted. Unless special counsel Robert Mueller finds evidence that Russian agents changed vote totals in the Rust Belt, the key event that placed Donald Trump in the White House wasn’t election meddling or James Comey’s letter to Congress. It was Antonin Scalia’s death. His passing in February 2016 left the Supreme Court evenly split between four conservative justices and four liberal justices. The vacant ninth seat had a tremendous psychic impact on the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole, and gave voters who otherwise may have been repelled by Trump an indisputable reason to vote for him: the prospect that Hillary Clinton would name a fifth liberal justice to the Supreme Court.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Ted Cruz. The Texas senator waged a bitter contest against Trump and publicly spurned him at the Republican National Convention that summer, citing the caustic insults to his wife and family. Two months later, after Trump released a second version of his Supreme Court shortlist, Cruz reversed course and endorsed the Republican nominee. He listed multiple reasons for the endorsement, but first among them was Scalia’s vacancy. “For anyone concerned about the Bill of Rights—free speech, religious liberty, the Second Amendment—the Court hangs in the balance,” he wrote in a statement.

Much of the American left is now waking up, albeit a little too late, to what five reliably conservative justices could accomplish—and will demand that Democrats, should they return to power one day, respond in kind. Post-Kavanaugh, Senate Democrats can now feel liberated to push through anyone to the ideological right of William Kunstler. They need not disclose all of the nominee’s records or even most of them—a fraction of documents will suffice, especially if they are vetted by a partisan lawyer instead of the National Archives. Any allegations of misconduct or impropriety won’t warrant a FBI investigation and can be safely brushed aside so that the nominee can entrench partisan political power.

Even then, that may not be enough for liberals scorched by Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. Some have already floated the idea of so-called court-packing: expanding the court’s membership from nine justices to eleven or more, giving a future Democratic president the opportunity to appoint two or more justices even if no vacancies arise. Legal scholars and political commentators alike have expressed some support for the proposition, including in this publication.

Such a move would be perfectly lawful since the court’s size isn’t defined by the Constitution. But it would permanently damage public confidence in its integrity, weaken its independence from the political branches, and turn it into something closer to a House of Lords than a constitutional tribunal. In 1937, fearing those results, lawmakers from both parties halted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s push to pack the court. No other president has attempted a similar maneuver since then.

Perhaps the most dramatic move for Democrats would be impeachment. In a New York magazine cover story, Jill Abramson laid out the case last year for impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas for allegedly lying to Congress during his confirmation hearing about sexually harassing Anita Hill and other women in the 1980s. “The idea of someone so flagrantly telling untruths to ascend to the highest legal position in the U.S. remains shocking, in addition to its being illegal,” she wrote. Some Democrats have begun floating a similar proposal to impeach Kavanaugh and remove him from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals if his nomination fails, or from the Supreme Court if it doesn’t.

Congress has used its power to try and remove federal judges for criminal misconduct multiple times throughout American history, but it has only sought to oust a Supreme Court justice once before. In 1804, the Jeffersonian-led House of Representatives impeached Justice Samuel Chase, an unabashed Federalist who made no secret of his political leanings. One of the articles of impeachment accused him of “tending to prostitute the high judicial character with which he was invested to the low purpose of an electioneering partisan.” The Senate declined to remove him, however, and thereby set the two-century-old precedent that federal judges should not be ousted for ideological reasons. The trial became a symbol of judicial independence, one of the United States’ least appreciated and most impressive accomplishments.

Will those precedents survive the next few years? The last generation of Supreme Court confirmation fights aren’t reassuring. Conservatives are still bitter about the treatment of Robert Bork in 1987, such that “borking” remains in common usage, and the allegations Clarence Thomas faced from Anita Hill in 1991. If Democrats have similarly long memories, the damage from the last three years could haunt the country and the court for at least thirty more.

What Trump Gets Right on Trade

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In April 2016, Presidential candidate Donald Trump promised to “surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism” no longer. “I am skeptical,” he said in a speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, “of international unions that tie us up and bring America down.” Two months later, campaigning against Hillary Clinton, Trump reiterated: “Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.”

As president, Trump has made good on his promises, with a variety of actions: He has pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership; announced that he would do the same with the Paris climate agreement; held up nominations to the World Trade Organization; begun renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement; instituted tariffs on steel and aluminum imports; targeted Chinese trade and investment; and threatened to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t fund a great wall with Mexico.

Democrats and some of Trump’s fellow Republicans have roundly condemned many of these moves as either useless or of questionable utility. And they were often right to do so: His decision to dump the Paris accord or separate immigrant children from their parents at the border, or even to withdraw from the TPP, would do little to end the poverty and heartache that he believes globalization has caused. Still, whether wittingly or not, Trump’s attack on globalization has struck at profound failings of American economic policy, and liberals who might otherwise dismiss Trump would do well to acknowledge them. If their goal is to create a kinder, more generous, more livable country without gaping differences in income and power, they must consider globalization’s downsides.


One of the first economists to warn against globalization was Harvard’s Dani Rodrik. In his 1997 book, Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, Rodrik argued that globalization would empower mobile businesses at the expense of their workers and threaten the welfare state.

At the time, his claims were highly controversial. Throughout the 1990s, Bill Clinton had made the case for globalization. As he won approval for NAFTA and for America’s entry into the WTO, he urged Americans to “make change our friend” and to “embrace the inexorable logic of globalization.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, another champion of globalization, argued that it was making the world “flat.” Many believed that by enriching Mexicans, NAFTA would stem the flow of unauthorized immigrants to the United States, and that China’s entrance into the WTO would propel the country toward free-market democracy. Meanwhile, the free movement of capital and currencies would guard against instability and boost prosperity.

None of these contentions proved correct. Rather than creating a global free market that was stable and consistent, financial globalization instead contributed to a succession of major crises. Between 1945 and 1973, while the Bretton Woods agreement still regulated currency values, no crises occurred, but since the 1980s, there have been at least 13, climaxing in the Great Recession of 2008.

After the Recession, establishment economists began to echo Rodrik’s early warnings. Was globalization creating inequality? Because of the rapid growth of China and India, globalization did contribute purely on average to a decline in global inequality. But the gap between rich and poor nations widened, and as former World Bank chief economist François Bourguignon has noted, within the United States, as well as much of Europe, and even in China and India, inequality rose between 1990 and 2010.

Under the new order, corporations were competing to find countries where they could pay workers lower wages and governments fewer taxes. As Trump pointed out during the 2016 campaign, Nabisco had cut its labor costs by moving a food processing plant from Chicago to Salinas, Mexico, laying off 600 workers. In 2011, Samsonite had moved its headquarters from Massachusetts to Luxembourg to reduce its tax bill. Hoping to keep their businesses globally competitive and their rich at home, advanced capitalist countries slashed taxes. In the 1980s, most had corporate tax rates higher than 46 percent. By 2011, the 34 countries of the OECD had cut them to an average of 25 percent. With less money coming into government coffers, elected officials were forced to cut public expenditures on health care, education, infrastructure, and the environment. Globalization, in other words, has begun to undermine the fundamental promise of social democracy in Europe and of post–New Deal liberalism in the United States: to provide economic and social security and upward mobility.


Globalization’s effect on the United States was particularly pronounced. NAFTA not only encouraged American auto companies to move out of the Midwest; it also, as labor economist Kate Bronfenbrenner has argued, allowed employers to use the threat of moving to Mexico to undercut private-sector unions. (When the United Auto Workers tried to organize one Michigan auto parts plant in 1995, managers parked 13 flatbed trucks with signs reading “MEXICO TRANSFER JOB” for workers to see.) The decision to sponsor China for the WTO had an even more dramatic effect. Under the WTO’s umbrella, China was able to use currency manipulation and hidden export subsidies to drive American firms out of business or abroad. According to a study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, its entry into the WTO cost Americans as many as 2.4 million jobs between 1999 and 2011.

The jury is still out on whether Donald Trump is helping the voters who have lost jobs to globalization. Will his tariffs on Chinese imports lead the Chinese to abandon the strategy of dumping their products at below cost? Or will the tariffs simply damage American companies dependent on foreign steel? Mexico recently agreed to impose tariffs on cars made with less than 75 percent North American parts. But will this bolster U.S. car manufacturers? Or, as trade expert Alan Tonelson has charged, is the 2.5 percent tariff too low to be effective? Trump may not have the answers, but for all his casual bigotry and corruption, at least he has fairly accurately identified the damage wrought by globalization.

Even so, many Democratic policy intellectuals have peremptorily rejected his initiatives. Last July, when Trump criticized American business leaders for being “more for their business than they are for the United States,” he was accused by Aaron Rupar of ThinkProgress—an offshoot of the liberal Center for American Progress—of striking “a fascistic note while criticizing American business leaders [for] not doing more about unfair trade deals.” Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution compared Trump’s trade policies to Herbert Hoover’s, and in The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey accused Trump of initiating a “pointless, destructive round of mercantilism.” Destructive? Maybe. Pointless? Absolutely not. On China, in particular, eight years of international appeals under the Obama administration had done little to stop the Chinese from undercutting American industries.

Some Democrats, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have encouraged, without fully endorsing, Trump’s trade initiatives and his attempt to strengthen the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which can block foreign takeovers of critical American firms. And instead of dismissing Trump’s efforts, policy experts at the Economic Policy Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation have devised their own responses to Chinese mercantilism. (Rob Scott at EPI stresses pressuring China to accede to a currency realignment.) But these solutions rarely make it to the top of Democrats’ political agenda, subsumed instead by the emphasis on Trump’s personal malfeasance and most egregious social policies.

Democrats can and should promise to help the people hurt by globalization, rather than leaving it to the president. After all, on certain key matters, Trump has made the impacts of globalization worse. By pulling out of the Paris agreement and propping up coal, he is posing an immediate health risk to the silent majority he claims to speak for. By stacking the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees, he is depriving workers of their best means of resisting globalization. And by almost halving corporate taxes, Trump has fueled the global race to the bottom among corporate managers and money movers, thereby depriving the federal government of revenue it needs for social spending.

Some American workers may be the incidental beneficiaries of Trump’s attack on globalization. But many will be casualties. Democrats need to fashion remedies that speak to those workers. They don’t need to reject multilateral trade deals and international organizations. They do have to insist that those organizations operate in the national interest—not, as they have in the past, in the interest of footloose corporations and countries willing to bend the rules to their own advantage.


Why Would Anyone Climb This Insane Cliff Face?

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Vertigo is a sensation experienced in the stomach and the mind—though some sufferers feel it as sharp pains in the soles of the feet. At the edges of precipices I feel it as a sudden absence, a classic “bottoming out.” Not only is the floor gone but my entire body with it: Nothing stands between the void and my core being. Vertigo is not so much a feeling about life and death as some sudden and horrific mixture of the two.

Free Solo, a new documentary by filmmaker E. Chai Vasarhelyi (Meru) and photographer/climber Jimmy Chin, gets very close to capturing this sensation on film. It follows Alex Honnold—described by a rock climber friend of mine as “a nut”—on his quest to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan cliff face. He wants to do it without a rope.

Several people try to explain just how unhinged this idea is. Tommy Caldwell, a role model to Honnold, asks us to “imagine an Olympic gold medal level achievement, but if you don’t get the gold medal—you die.” It’s a sheer face of granite, 3,200 feet high. Honnold picks a route, then tests it out with the safety gear on, for practice. His confidence is beyond belief; so far, he has simply never fallen. But now he falls, falls again, then again. There seems to be no way that he could survive a “free solo” climb.

Why would a person want to do such a thing? As the documentary gets closer to Honnold the man, it only gets harder to understand what drives him. He has enormous brown eyes and a fidgety affect. He has a reasonable income, presumably from sponsorships (it’s not explained), but he lives in a van and calls himself a “dirtbag-climber.” He’s committed to environmental issues, but finds it hard to relate to people.

Over the course of the film, we see Honnold fall in love with a woman named Sanni. He worries that she is melting away the mental armor he needs to pull off the inhuman task he’s set himself. Sometime’s he’s downright crass about her. “I will always choose climbing over a lady,” he says.

His attitude stems from his single-mindedness as a climber. In a Q&A sent to journalists by the movie’s distributor, he locates his confidence in “rationalism, in a basic evaluation of objective reality.” Why shouldn’t he ditch the safety equipment? “If I’ve done something on a rope over and over and over, then obviously I can physically do it, so there’s no real reason why I shouldn’t be able to do it without the rope.”

Fear does not seem to enter the equation. And when Honnold receives an MRI of his brain, it turns out that his amygdala seems not to activate in the same way that other people’s do. He’s on “the fairly dull end of the spectrum in terms of a fear response,” as he puts it.

So Free Solo is an intimate screen portrait of a man whose brain just does not work like the rest of us. It makes him hard to relate to: I’m terrified of heights, Honnold can barely conceive of fear. But when his humanity flashes out, it’s all the more touching. When Honnold stares up at the cliff face in front of him, it’s beautiful to look at. He might not experience fear but he’s more than capable of wonder.

When it finally comes to the climb itself, we are essentially prepared to watch Honnold fall. The filmmaker Jimmy Chin appears on screen several times himself, describing the problems innate to his project. He might disturb Honnold—an old friend of his—with his camera drone, or with a wrong movement. What if Chin kills his subject with his art? Everybody close to Honnold tries to do the difficult moral math around enabling his ambition. It’s impossible to know if they are ushering him towards the void, or to the top of his own personal mountain.

It’s almost impossible to watch the actual ascent. Honnold is a speck of T-shirt floating against a completely flat rock face. The rock itself is gorgeous, streaked with ochre and red. At one moment he is hanging on by a thumb. At another, he must lurch one leg far over to his left, essentially standing in the splits in mid-air. Incredibly, while hanging to the rock by fingertips and leaning way backwards over the abyss, he looks down.


In probably the most famous nonfiction movie about mountaineering, Touching the Void (2003), the climber Simon Yates describes the appeal of his sport. The world has become so safe, he explains. Tough mountain climbing is risky. It makes you feel “more alive.” Filming a person battle a mountain, or some other serious peril caused by rocks and snow, automatically generates a meditation on life, death, and the sublime. 127 Hours, Alive!, Seven Years in Tibet, the Herzog movie Scream of Stone: They are dramas about pure joy, pure white snow, pure pain, and pure oblivion. The surreal enormity of the mountains reduces the human drama down to its essential components.

But there is something about the climbing movie that feels particularly interesting now. Free Solo, in fact, is not even the only documentary about climbing El Capitan coming out this season. Coming soon is a film called The Dawn Wall, showing the struggles of two climbers—including Honnold’s friend Tommy Caldwell—as they scale the part of El Capitan the sun hits first in the morning.

One possible explanation is new, widespread interest in the sport. As a 2017 piece in The New York Times explained, rock climbing as an indoor sport was once niche. But between 2015 and 2016, the number of indoor rock climbing gyms in America went up by over a quarter. This may have had the effect of making rock climbing more safe. There’s an odd kind of masculinity to intense rock climbing, even though its devotees tend to be wiry, nerdy, and dressed in brightly colored technical gear. A movie like Free Solo, or even Tom Cruise’s rock-climbing scenes in the Mission Impossible movies, reclaim the sport for its outdoorsy, lone wolf–style men.

Honnold’s fierce independence is the narrative engine of Free Solo. (He doesn’t even like Halloween, since he doesn’t like “being told” when to have fun.) The classic movie model of man versus mountain makes the heroic climber into a masculinized symbol of humanity, brave in the face of nature’s cruelty.

Honnold is such an intense version of the character that he pushes the archetype past its ordinary boundaries. He isn’t just fearless; he doesn’t know fear. He doesn’t just risk his life; he cares almost nothing for it. The classic tension between the sublime and the human spirit breaks down. Man, rock, camera: they’re old suspects, but here they seem made anew.

The Hurricane Damage That Didn’t Have to Happen

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Several areas of southeastern North Carolina are still facing dangerous conditions from Hurricane Florence, the catastrophically wet storm that crawled over the state more than a week ago. But the Outer Banks are open for business. Miraculously, the state’s 18 highly developed, low-lying barrier islands were spared Florence’s worst effects; preliminary reports showed only a few million dollars in damage. “We were really blessed on this one,” resident Matt Paulson told the local Fox affiliate.

The state’s Republican politicians were blessed, too. Because if Florence had hit the barrier islands directly, they would have been blamed for making the damage far worse than it had to be. In 2012, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law allowing developers to ignore the latest climate science showing that sea-level rise would essentially drown the islands by the century’s end. As a result, according to The Washington Post, “Billions continue to be invested in homes and condos on low-lying land,” as well as bridges and roads.

When a powerful hurricane like Florence does target the Outer Banks in the future, as one inevitably will, lawmakers will have to account for the preventable devastation their climate law engendered. For now, though, they only have to grapple with the not-insignificant damage from Florence—some of which can also be tied to state lawmakers’ decisions in recent years.

One of the biggest concerns as Florence approached the mainland was that floodwaters would inundate coal ash pits, which contain the metallic waste left over from burning coal. At least three spills have been reported in North Carolina thus far. There’s an ongoing dispute over how much has spilled, because floodwater has still not receded in many areas. But residents living near these ash pits must now worry about exposure to toxins, along with whatever other Florence-related damage they’re already dealing with.

Florence brought record-breaking rainfall and catastrophic flooding to South Carolina, too, but residents there aren’t facing the same problems with the state’s ash pits. Back in 2013, power utilities started removing the waste from the pits alongside coal-fired power plants. The removals were a response to legal challenges from environmental groups over the risks the substance posed to the surrounding community, particularly during flooding events. “Today, every unlined coal ash lagoon in South Carolina has either been excavated, is being excavated or is scheduled to be excavated for transportation to dry, lined landfills or for use in recycling,” according to The Post and Courier.

North Carolina’s power utility, Duke Energy, responded to these lawsuits differently. “They spent years lobbying to try to avoid this litigation,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center who fought Duke in court. Duke also sought help from North Carolina’s Republican political leaders, donating hundreds of thousands to their campaigns and political committees—particularly during “key moments in state coal ash regulation,” one report noted. In turn, the state’s legislature has often assisted the company in delaying excavation of coal ash storage sites.

Republican lawmakers in North Carolina became more reluctant to allow Duke to delay excavation after one of the company’s pits spilled a massive amount of waste into the Dan River in 2014. The legislature passed requirements for coal ash cleanup and created an independent commission to oversee the work. But then-Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican who had worked at Duke Energy for 28 years, lent a hand to his former employer by shutting down the commission in 2016.

North Carolina still has at least 13 unlined pits filled with millions of tons of coal ash, which risk overflowing or breaching during big rainfall or flooding events. But South Carolina’s present-day reality shows that “this is a totally unnecessary risk,” Holleman said. “The ash does not have to be placed in a pit near a river.”

Hog farming is also a major industry in North Carolina, and Hurricane Florence caused dozens of man-made ponds filled with pig feces to overflow. Last week, The New York Times reported that “at least 110 lagoons in the state have either released pig waste into the environment or are at imminent risk of doing so.” This was expected: It had happened as recently as 2016, due to Hurricane Matthew, and more devastatingly with Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

North Carolina does not allow newly built industrial hog farms to store urine and feces from their animals in these literal cesspools. But existing farms are still allowed to, despite what happened during Matthew and Floyd. “Environmentally superior technologies exist to handle animal waste, such as the Terra Blue technology, which separates liquid and solid waste, composting the solids,” wrote Rick Dove, a founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, in a recent Washington Post op-ed. “But the industry has dragged its feet on upgrading its waste management; thanks to friends of industrial agriculture in North Carolina’s legislature, such changes aren’t required by law.”

North Carolina Republicans’ climate myopia, and the consequences of it, are especially instructive given the Republican control of Washington. The Trump administration is ignoring the threat of sea-level-rise on development; last year, he rescinded an Obama-era executive order urging federal agencies to consider climate science when rebuilding damaged infrastructure. His Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of loosening several regulations related to coal ash storage. And his chosen leader of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, said it was “despicable” that a pork company had been made to pay $50 million to neighbors whose health was affected by manure lagoons.

In theory, these policies are supposed to benefit the economy. It’s true: Ignoring climate science is a boon for real estate developers, while lenient waste rules are a gift to agriculture and coal industries. But when disasters like Florence strike, these policies are economically catastrophic, as communities are left with an even bigger mess to clean up. Politically, the consequences are less clear. Do North Carolinians regret electing so many politicians who knowingly exposed the state to such predictable disasters? And will we be asking this question about all American voters in the years to come?

Why Populists Reject Evidence

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The participation of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon at The Economist’s Open Future festival this month caused a great deal of controversy. But the actual interview he gave was fairly predictable. Free trade and immigration have been bad for the United States and Europe, argued Bannon, a view he shares with other right-wing populists. Interviewer Zanny Minton Beddoes, meanwhile, defended the liberal viewpoint which sees free trade and immigration having broadly increased prosperity. “We will have you back in a few years,” Beddoes said to close the interview, “when we will see which of these world-views proved to be the right one.” 

Beddoes’s closing statement might have been casual, but it revealed an interesting assumption: that these sorts of disagreements, between liberal and right-wing populist politics, can be settled by empirical evidence. Once the right-wing populist agenda has been implemented for a few years in countries such as Hungary, Italy, the USA, so this assumption goes, experience will show that following populist policies did not bring about the promised results, leading to disillusionment with populism. This is also the logic behind articles addressed at Trump supporters, highlighting the discrepancies between what he promised to deliver, and what he is in fact delivering. The implicit claim is that voting for politicians and policies is like adopting a theory about how the world works, one that experience can later either confirm or falsify.

This line of thought echoes the way the twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Karl Popper thought science works: Scientists put forward a theory which they then test against experience. If experience contradicts the theory’s predictions, the theory is “falsified” and should promptly be discarded. Popper saw science as the model of critical and rational thinking, always open to being shown that it was wrong, always accountable to empirical evidence. He also saw science as a model for democratic politics. In a democracy, the government should always be open to criticism, and it should of course be accountable to voters, who test the degree to which government policies work or not. If not, they get rid of them in the next election and vote in a new government.

The problem is that science doesn’t actually work that way—and neither do democratic politics.

In 1965, the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science in London, featured a debate including Popper and a young American historian and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. Popper was by then 63 years old and an eminent professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics, whereas Kuhn was a 43-year-old academic who had failed to get tenure at Harvard, and whose first book on the philosophy of science had only been published three years prior. Unlikely as it might have seemed then, Kuhn turned out to be the more influential philosopher of the two, with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions selling over one million copies.

Whereas Popper saw scientists as always engaged in attempts to test the truth of the dominant theories of their time, Kuhn understood science as for the most part a conservative affair, with scientists conforming to the scientific status quo of their day. Kuhn argued that most of the time scientists work towards developing the available theories, rather than putting them on trial. More importantly, according to Kuhn, scientists stick to a theory even in light of observations that seem to contradict it. Having faith in the overall validity of the theory, they make allowances to explain away any apparent contradictions, putting them down to external factors that have nothing to do with the theory itself. A famous example of this is the now-discarded vision of an earth-centric solar system. Having accepted Aristotle’s theory that the sun and planets moved around the Earth in perfect circles, Ptolemy was faced with observations that showed the planets were moving differently. Instead of taking that empirical evidence to signify that Aristotle’s cosmology was wrong (which of course it was), Ptolemy postulated the existence of some extra circular motions the planets made, called epicycles, that resulted in his observations being made compatible with Aristotle’s cosmological thesis.            

In other words, scientists act towards scientific theories less like dispassionate referees, out to catch any mismatch between theory and experience, and more like partisan supporters who blame anything but their adopted theory. This resembles the behavior of the electorate, too. Instead of holding governments accountable to the results they promised, research shows that voters tend to exculpate the party they support, continuing to support them even in the face of apparent shortcomings. Given the levels of devotion that populist politicians inspire today, their voters are unlikely to recognize any future failures of their policies as evidence: Even if immigration cuts and tariffs fail to bring back jobs to the U.S. and raise workers’ wages, voters are unlikely to blame Bannon’s world-view. After all, there is already evidence that the policies he supports don’t work.  

But Kuhn did see a means through which true change could come—both in science and politics, whose revolutions Kuhn saw as fundamentally similar. Even though revolutions—profound shifts in thought—are a response to inherent problems, mere arguments and empirical evidence pointing out the problem aren’t enough to start them, Kuhn argued. A compelling alternative theory also needs to be available. Moreover, since two competing theories lack enough common ground to agree on an evaluation of the arguments and evidence, a level of faith in the new theory is needed, as well as persuasion by rhetoric and other non-evidence based means.

Although we are not yet facing a revolution, Kuhn’s remarks have a familiar echo in our current political moment. Despite addressing real grievances, the rising tide of populism seems to be less the result of rigorous argument and evidence, and more the result of effective rhetoric and the cult-like devotion populist politicians inspire in their followers. What is more, we are witnessing the absence of any common standards that opponents and supporters of populist politics can use to engage one another in an exchange of arguments, rather than talk past each other. Bannon’s interview was a case in point.

For those who wish to defeat the agenda of populism in Europe, the U.S. and beyond, Kuhn’s insights suggest a specific approach: The battle has to be won just as much at the level of rhetoric and persuasion as anywhere else. For better or for worse, people are easily persuaded when what you’re offering is a quick solution to a problem they’re facing. According to Kuhn, the Copernican revolution didn’t take place when new observations were made. It was the result of society’s need for a more accurate calendar, and astronomers’ faith that this new Copernican astronomy could quickly provide it. (In fact, it didn’t.) Rhetoric as a means of persuasion is also very effective. It is often looked at with suspicion, as the appeal to brute passion and emotion over reason, as a technique of manipulation. But even good arguments are more powerful when delivered with rhetorical verve, something effective change-makers have always understood. Despite Dr. Martin Luther King’s brilliance as a political thinker, it was the emotional impact of his speeches and his practice of non-violence that made him so influential in the struggle for civil rights.

Populists have been aiming very effectively at this emotional impact. Defenders of the liberal order need to as well. Simply waiting for experience to prove populist politics wrong won’t work—that strategy doesn’t even work in science.   

The Rise of West Coast Democrats

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In July, Jeff Merkley, the junior senator from Oregon, traveled to Iowa. The trip was his third in twelve months—a sign, political commentators said, that he was preparing to launch a presidential bid.

Nobody from the West Coast has ever won the Democratic presidential nomination. But two years from now, at least six will likely be competing for it: a mayor, a governor, at least two senators, even a few business executives. Tom Steyer, a venture capitalist from San Francisco, has already spent $40 million on a national ad campaign calling for President Trump’s impeachment and has held town halls in Iowa and New Hampshire. Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, headed to Iowa in June, where he gave the keynote speech at a Democratic Party function outside Des Moines. Eric Garcetti, the photogenic mayor of Los Angeles, was there just two months before. On a swing through the Northeast in May, Garcetti also stopped by New Hampshire. (Senator Kamala Harris of California and Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, are widely seen as presidential contenders as well, though so far they have refrained from visiting the early primary states.) The flurry of trips is instructive. With Donald Trump in the White House, a group of gifted politicians and public figures from the Pacific Coast believe that they are the best positioned to challenge him.

They may be right. A special brand of American liberalism, at once independent-minded and dedicated to the common good, has flourished in the West. And it could well be this tradition—with its commitment to immigrants, to equality, to free trade, and to environmentalism—that provides the best path forward for Democrats looking to unite their fractured base.


Americans tend to think of the West Coast as a liberal fortress. But not so long ago, Washington, Oregon, and California supported Republicans. (Much of the rural parts of all three states still does.) Westerners were attracted to the GOP’s valorization of individual independence, an attraction that sometimes manifested as libertarianism. They wanted to be allowed to do their own thing, without interference from the state. This emphasis on autonomy is still apparent. “We’re the people who believe in personal freedom,” Oregon Senator Ron Wyden told me.

Yet what personal freedom means to Westerners is now different from what it means to the GOP. As Republicans started to take more regressive stances on social issues, the desire for independence led voters in Washington, Oregon, and California in another direction, toward advocating for abortion rights, gay rights, and the legalization of marijuana.

With help from the technology industry, all three states also came to support loosening immigration restrictions. Tech startups lobbied for more H-1B visas, and not only because they needed skilled workers from overseas; immigrants or their children have founded 60 percent of tech startups.

Washington, Oregon, and California became strong proponents of free trade, as well. Tech companies, which rely on global supply chains, had strong incentives to block tariffs. So did Hollywood, which in the 1980s started to depend heavily on the international market. Nike, and the sports shoe and apparel companies that grew up around it in the Portland area, make many of their goods in Asia. Boeing, historically the linchpin of the Seattle economy, depends on international sales.

Starting in 1949, with California’s landmark Dickey Water Pollution Act, the West Coast also made itself the role model for environmentalism. More than half a million Californians work in renewable energy, ten times the number of coal miners in the entire nation.

In spite of the West Coast’s early conservatism, or perhaps precisely because of it, Democrats from the region are now uniquely suited to challenge Trump. All told, they have created a platform that is almost the polar opposite of his xenophobia, bigotry, protectionism, and environmental carelessness.


This isn’t to say that these Democrats won’t have obstacles to overcome in 2020; there are plenty. Even though all three states boast some of the highest state minimum wages in the country, housing costs and income inequality are major regional challenges. (California has a higher rate of inequality than Mexico.) Any presidential candidate from these states will have to answer for the problems back home. But of all the critiques leveled at these politicians, their alliance with the tech industry may be the most difficult to overcome.

Several prominent liberals in the Pacific Northwest, like Washington’s Suzan DelBene and Maria Cantwell, worked in tech before they entered politics, and even the politicians who didn’t work in tech rely on its donations: Kamala Harris’s donors are a “who’s who of major Silicon Valley players,” according to The Hill. At a time when some Democrats want the party to take a far tougher stance on monopolistic business practices, these connections could be a liability.

Then again, voters may not be concerned. Even after the Cambridge Analytica scandal of this past spring, the social media giants remain wildly popular. In June, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 74 percent of Americans think major technology companies have had a positive impact on their lives. Middle American cities such as Nashville, Dallas, and Indianapolis are eagerly seeking Amazon’s planned second headquarters, as smaller cities vie for Facebook and Google data centers. “Silicon Valley should be a huge ally to the progressive movement,” said Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California’s 17th district, home of the technology industry.

Perhaps the most powerful reason Democrats from the West Coast have a real shot at the White House is that on many fronts they have been leading the resistance to Trump. Kate Brown, the governor of Oregon, refused Trump’s request to send National Guard troops to the Mexican border. Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, has buried the administration in lawsuits, at least 40, on topics as diverse as clean air and 3-D printed firearms. As Trump prepared to gut the Paris climate agreement, the three states made a deal with British Columbia to reduce their own emissions.

The region is likely to be significant for Democrats well before 2020. Of the 23 seats they need in order to take control of the House in November, Democrats hope to pick up eight in California, and as many as three in Washington. And now that its primary falls earlier in the presidential cycle, soon, not only will Californians need to visit Des Moines; Democrats from the Midwest and the East will have to make pilgrimages to California. As a result, state Senator Ricardo Lara has said, they will no longer be able to treat as “afterthoughts” issues that are for the West—and ought to be for the nation—of utmost importance.

How Red States Stifle Blue Cities

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In 2014, years before he became the Democratic nominee for governor of Florida, Andrew Gillum was targeted by two gun-rights organizations, Florida Carry and the Second Amendment Foundation, which threatened to remove him from his post as Tallahassee city commissioner over a pair of local regulations prohibiting residents from shooting firearms in public parks. Despite the fact that these regulations, which were passed in 1957 and 1988, were no longer being enforced, the lobbyists argued that they violated a 2011 state law barring local governments from passing their own gun regulation ordinances. With the full weight of the National Rifle Association behind them, the gun groups sued the city of Tallahassee.

Facing personal fines of $5,000 and damages of up to $100,000 in addition to the threats to remove him from office—all for not officially removing the defunct laws from the books—Gillum defended his city in court. He did so without even the support of Tallahassee’s legal team, which was prevented by the same 2011 state law from supporting local legislators in such cases. In the midst of the lawsuit, he defined the stakes of the legal battle as a bid by red state governments to overturn the democratic will of blue cities: “It’s … about how these special interests and corporations, after getting their way with state government, are trying to intimidate and bully local communities by filing damaging lawsuits against officials like me.”

Gun control is just one of many areas where Gillum confronted intimidation tactics, first as city commissioner and then as mayor of Tallahassee. In Florida, cities are preempted by the state from raising their minimum wage, enacting paid sick days, restricting smoking in public areas, regulating the nutritional value of restaurant food, establishing public broadband networks, or regulating Uber and Airbnb. Ultimately, the court ruled in Tallahassee’s favor, but it left the firearms preemption law intact.

Tallahassee is hardly alone. Across the country, the past few years have witnessed a spike in state preemption of local authority—every state except one has at least one such law on the books and nearly three-quarters of states have three or more. In the past year alone, 19 new preemption laws were passed in different states. The effort has been quiet, but nonetheless coordinated and precise: In many states, particularly conservative ones, preemption law has rendered left-leaning local policy-making largely impotent. It has revealed yet another way Republicans have paralyzed government, while underscoring the need for progressives to win back not just Congress, but statehouses across the country.


For most of American history, preemption law was used differently. “Preemption was about aligning state and local law—making sure there were no inconsistencies,” says Kim Haddow, director of the Local Solutions Support Center, a national hub working to counter preemption. “It wasn’t used very often, and it was used by both Democrats and Republicans without much disparity.”

One of preemption law’s most significant functions was to establish statewide standards on civil rights. It’s only in the past decade or so that it has been widely used to establish a ceiling—rather than a floor—on benefits, quality of life, and equality. “The laws are punitive, they’re broad, and they’re a denial and distortion of democracy,” Haddow says. “It isn’t the voice of the people being truly represented by their elected representatives—it’s that voice being deliberately warped.”

Preemption laws are not inherently anti-democratic but become so when used to amplify existing racial and economic inequality. “What we’re seeing is conservative, mostly white legislatures really tying the hands of cities that are majority people of color,” says Jackie Cornejo, an organizer with the Partnership for Working Families. Cornejo’s colleague Miya Chen Saika explains, “The pro-preemption industry groups use the argument that we need to protect the uniformity of wages across the state. But the reality is that the only uniformity these corporate interests want to protect is the uniformity of African Americans earning the lowest wage in all sectors in all geographies.”

This aggressive manipulation of preemption law by corporate lobbyists has played a big role in transforming preemption from a largely neglected policy tool to a conservative blockade against progressive interests. The American Legislative Exchange Council—known as ALEC—has taken the lead, drafting model legislation to preempt everything from minimum wage regulations to sanctuary city policies. Representing over 200 corporate and nonprofit members and a quarter of all state lawmakers, the organization has immense influence over state law nationwide.

ALEC has been advancing corporate interests in statehouses since the tobacco bills of the 1990s, but entrenched itself further after the Republican wave of the 2010s that decimated Democrats at the local level. There are currently 25 states where Republicans wield absolute power—controlling the legislature and governor’s mansion—compared with only eight for Democrats. For progressive city officials attempting to compensate for gridlock in Congress or to counteract the White House’s deregulatory efforts, this alliance of state and corporate interests presents a formidable opponent.


Preemption laws have tended to sneak through state legislatures mostly unnoticed, with bills often passed in a matter of days. This quick turnaround has been a major obstacle in generating the public awareness necessary to build resistance. But there have been some successful efforts to thwart such laws. In Birmingham, Alabama, a federal appeals court ruled in July, after over a year and a half of pressure from local labor groups, that the state’s minimum wage preemption law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection rights. In California, organizers collected enough signatures to put a bill to repeal the state’s rent control preemption law on the November ballot.

The crucial next step, advocates believe, is to show these disparate movements that they are connected, and that the issue is larger than any one preemption bill. And they’re looking to a blue wave to make it happen—not in the House, but in state legislatures.

“Democrats for too long have been ignoring legislatures while Republicans have been, frankly, eating our lunches,” says Steve Farley, an Arizona state senator. “That’s why we’ve seen so much gerrymandering—Republicans have understood the power the legislatures have to be able to change a lot of things.”

Democrats are aiming to flip 14 legislative chambers in ten states in November, and advocacy groups are promoting a new generation of state leaders more favorable to local progressive power. Local Solutions Support Center, for example, aims to support progressive state legislators in challenging preemption law right away. “There is a reason Kris Kobach showed up on Trump’s doorstep on day one with a 365-day plan from the Heritage Foundation,” says Haddow, referring to the hard-line Republican secretary of state from Kansas. “Republicans are very good at thinking through ‘what do we want to move when we win?’ So, we’re taking a page out of their book.”

For his part, Gillum has a history of rallying leaders around the cause of local democracy, organizing a group of mayors into the first anti-preemption group in the country: the Campaign to Defend Local Solutions. Other candidates in this election cycle also have a history of anti-preemption work: Stacey Abrams, running for governor in Georgia, fought in 2017 against a bill that preempts local governments from requiring employers to compensate workers for last-minute scheduling changes.

Pushing back against preemption is becoming a theme for an emerging slate of local candidates. “There are a lot of young Democrats and progressives coming up and running for state legislatures who can have a big impact here,” says Mark Pertschuk, the director of Grassroots Change, an organization fighting preemption from a public health perspective. Pertschuk says preemption isn’t a cut-and-dry partisan issue. Democratic legislatures have also been guilty of overreach, such as this past summer when California’s overwhelmingly blue statehouse passed a bill preempting soda taxes in an effort to appease the American Beverage Association. The power of up-and-coming candidates to challenge preemption lies not just in their party ticket but in their good-government politics. “These candidates are much less likely to care what multinational corporations or trade associations want them to do than the old time political hacks,” says Pertschuk. “And they’re much less likely to listen to ALEC and others because of a campaign donation.”

Globalism Helped Make America Great

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President Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday rejected more than 70 years of American historical experience. Although the speech repeated the phrase “national interest,” it extolled a swaggering, primal ethno-racial assertiveness that echoed the hyper-nationalist militarism of two world wars: “We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy. America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.” Still more chilling for those recalling twentieth-century conflicts, the president also boasted that “our military will soon be more powerful than it has ever been before. In other words, the United States is stronger, safer, and a richer country than it was when I assumed office less than two years ago. We are standing up for America and the American people.”

The implication here is that globalism—and the United Nations itself—run counter to U.S. interests. In fact, most of the history of the past century suggests otherwise. Far from hemming in U.S. capabilities, globalism and international institutions have worked incredibly well in furthering American international objectives. And that’s probably why previous American presidents worked so hard to establish them.

President Franklin Roosevelt promoted the idea of a United Nations before the United States entered the Second World War. Meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland on August 14, 1941, Roosevelt conditioned American military support for London on an international commitment to “common principles” for the allied countries. Those principles included disarmament, territorial security, open trade, improved conditions for working and retired citizens, and a “wider and permanent system of general security.”

Less than five months later, the leaders of twenty-four other nations joined Roosevelt and Churchill in signing the “Joint Declaration of the United Nations on Cooperation for Victory.” They pledged their shared efforts to defeat fascism and design a new international system that protects “human rights and justice.” They promised to work together for a common vision and mutual gains, insured by agreed principles of peaceful behavior. Under American leadership, the allies signed a charter on June 26, 1945, creating a bricks-and-mortar United Nations Organization in the last days of the Second World War. The charter was ratified in the United States and fifty other founding member states as a binding treaty, becoming a cornerstone of international law.

The U.N. charter opened with an aspirational mission to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Signatories pledged “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security” and “to employ international machinery for the economic and social advancement of all peoples.” The twenty-page document then went on to design the institutions that would carry out this cooperative global mission, including the General Assembly (where Trump spoke on Tuesday), the Security Council, and the International Court of Justice.

The existence of a United Nations, with strong American support, transformed international relations after 1945. First, the General Assembly, the Security Council, and the Office of the General Secretary became primary venues for mediating international disputes. This began with the earliest debates about the regulation of atomic materials in 1946 and included intensive negotiations over the future of Palestine, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam, and many other sites of the Cold War conflict. Many like to think of the UN as feckless, but the reality is that without the U.N.-assisted negotiations between adversaries during these crises, larger wars would surely have erupted, as they did before the U.N.’s creation.

Once adversaries reached settlements, the U.N. frequently recruited and managed peacekeepers who provided neutral enforcement. From the Sinai Desert to the Congo, and to Haiti and beyond, the U.N. has conducted more than seventy peacekeeping operations since its founding, fifteen of which are still active. It’s easy to forget what a radical idea international peacekeeping forces—one of the great peacemaking innovations of the twentieth century—represent, historically.

The United Nations also quickly emerged as a coordinating and information-sharing body between states. From transportation and trade to health and the environment, U.N. agencies pooled crucial knowledge across nations, set norms for mutually beneficial behavior, and created basic regulations, including standards for safety and coordination across such varied fields as air travel, shipping, and immigration. The International Civil Aviation Organization, the World Health Organization, and the International Atomic Energy Agency are three examples of the many U.N. offices that have facilitated safe and prosperous interactions across nations.

Finally, the United Nations has been one of the most powerful advocates for human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948, established basic principles for the treatment of all humans across the globe, with associated obligations for governments. Although the enforcement of these principles has been inconsistent, they have created a set of common expectations that discipline national actors and empower dissident voices. They also create a common language for cooperation among culturally diverse peoples. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, inspired additional efforts to protect vulnerable citizens, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Activist organizations working across societies, especially Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have used these U.N. documents to mobilize diverse citizens and build vibrant networks for influencing government policies.

American-led efforts at international cooperation through the United Nations have not always succeeded, and have often been self-serving. They have, however, contributed to the peace and prosperity that Trump emphasized repeatedly in his Tuesday speech. Without the United Nations—and America’s leading commitment to it—the period since 1945 would have been marked by vastly more war, economic dislocation, and personal suffering than it in fact saw. Without the United Nations, the United States would also have paid a higher price for its security, as well as the spread of its ideas and interests. Put simply: Cooperation saves money—along with many other resources, including lives.

Trashing “globalism” and asserting national greatness, as Trump did on Tuesday, only hurts U.S. interests in the end. The United States and its closest allies have enjoyed the peace and prosperity Trump extolled in part because of the United Nations, which frequently served as a vehicle for the principles the U.S. wished to propagate. “Globalism,” in this sense, is a necessary foundation for what Trump calls “patriotism” in the contemporary world. When Samuel Johnson published a critique of false patriotism in 1774, he wrote that “the true lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears,” but “sounds no alarm when there is no enemy.” Hearing the president’s ethno-nationalist militarism on display at the U.N. this week, Johnson would likely have appreciated the irony of an ignorant demagogue attacking his country’s international assets.  

Why Conservatives Want Kavanaugh at All Costs

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Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is taking on water with every passing moment. Two women have accused him of sexually assaulting them in the early 1980s, while a third says she witnessed him groping women without their consent at house parties. (He denies any allegations of wrongdoing, calling them “last-minute smears, pure and simple.”) There are rumblings that a growing number of Republican senators are uneasy about supporting him, though others are signaling confidence. “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham recently said. On Wednesday, after the third accuser’s allegations surfaced, Utah’s Orrin Hatch said, “I don’t think we should put up with it, to be honest with you.”

Republicans more broadly appear to be standing by Kavanaugh even as the rest of the country moves away from him. An NPR/PBS/Marist poll released on Wednesday found that, whereas 59 percent of all Americans think he shouldn’t be confirmed if Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations are true, 54 percent of Republicans think he should be confirmed even if the allegations are true.

What drives the right’s insistence on elevating Kavanaugh to the nation’s highest court? Blasey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday could imperil a four-decade effort by American conservatives to bring a majority of the Supreme Court in line with their ideological views. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement earlier this year gave the influential alliance of legal organizations, think tanks, and donors a long-awaited chance to finish the task, and it’s unclear whether anything, even credible accusations of sexual assault, will stop them now.


The conservative legal movement, like American conservatism as a whole, is not monolithic. It includes big businesses that are hostile to organized labor, social conservatives who resent the secularization of public schools and loathe abortion, libertarian-minded skeptics of federal regulations and social programs, Southern whites who opposed desegregation and civil-rights laws, and law-and-order types alarmed by the expansion of criminal defendants’ rights and protections in the 1960s. What united them was an aversion to the status quo and the Supreme Court that enshrined it.

Presidents always have used Supreme Court nominations for political and electoral purposes, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was no different. He nominated Earl Warren, California’s popular Republican governor and a key supporter in the 1952 Republican primaries, to be chief justice the following year. He later tapped William Brennan to a vacant spot in 1956 to appeal to Catholics in the Northeast during that year’s election. The two men became the nucleus of what is generally referred to as the Warren Court, which spanned from the mid-1950s until Warren retired in 1969. It was the most progressive era in the court’s history, but its victories brought a backlash from more conservative elements.

Richard Nixon capitalized on that backlash in the 1968 election, pledging to appoint what he called “strict constructionists”—a term no longer used to describe conservative jurists—who would interpret the Constitution as it was written. To that end, he nominated Warren Burger as chief justice and three associate justices during his presidency: Lewis Powell, Harry Blackmun, and William Rehnquist. Rehnquist would ultimately be the only one who satisfied conservatives. Blackmun committed the ultimate heresy by authoring Roe v. Wade, for example, which Burger and Powell both joined. The Warren Court’s landmark precedents went no further, but neither were they rolled back.

The Reagan years were a crucible for the conservative legal movement. Scalia, who served as a faculty adviser to the Federalist Society when it was founded in 1982, joined the court in 1986. In 1985, Attorney General Edwin Meese called for a “jurisprudence of original intent,” where judges interpret the founding document as its drafters intended, to counter the court’s perceived liberalism. Two years later, Powell announced that he would retire from the court. To replace him, Reagan first tapped Robert Bork, a prominent federal judge and legal scholar. Bork was a rock star of sorts within the conservative legal movement and well-known beyond it for his landmark text on antitrust law. Everyone expected that his presence on the high court would greatly accelerate its drift towards the right.

Democrats and liberal interest groups immediately rose up in revolt against his nomination. Bork had been the executioner of the Saturday Night Massacre by following Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. His oft-expressed views on constitutional matters like abortion, civil rights, and privacy came under intense scrutiny and criticism as well. “Robert Bork’s America,” declared Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor, “is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids,” and more. After a poor performance in his confirmation hearings, senators quashed Bork’s nomination in a contentious 42-58 vote.

The Senate’s rejection of Bork incenses American conservatives to this day. They often single out Kennedy’s floor speech as unfair at best and slanderous at worst, but also blame the Reagan White House for not rising to his defense. “Instead the Republican master strategists let themselves be trapped in absurd debates about whether, under Emperor Bork, you would be able to buy condoms in Connecticut,” National Review’s editors fumed after the vote. “The Republican National Committee is suffocating in cash. Why didn’t the Republicans match the Left? Answer: because they are inert, and lacking in intelligent direction.”

The lesson was threefold. Potential Supreme Court nominees must be vigorously defended when attacked by liberal groups, not left to fend for themselves. They should lack a long and inflammatory paper trail like Bork’s to minimize those attacks. And the growing campaign to remake the courts can’t be limited to the presidency; the Democratic stranglehold on the Senate would have to be broken, too. “There are other good Supreme Court possibilities,” National Review’s editors mused. “But it’s not morning in America, baby. It’s hard-ball time.”


The early 1990s also exposed the conservative legal movement’s limits. When William Brennan, a liberal icon and one of the Warren Court’s last survivors, stepped down in 1990, Bush nominated the mild-mannered David Souter to replace him. Souter was not part of the movement, but the White House assured conservatives he sympathized with it. Instead, he became one of the most reliable members of the court’s liberal wing. Another lesson: Nominees must have enough of a paper trail to ensure they aren’t another Souter, but not so much of a trail that they become another Bork.

Bush then nominated Clarence Thomas, a newcomer to the federal bench who had impeccable conservative credentials, to replace Thurgood Marshall in 1991. This time, the Marshall-to-Thomas shift was one of the largest ideological swings for a Supreme Court seat in the twentieth century.

Then came Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that squarely asked whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Democrats and the American left feared that it would, after four of the court’s justices had already signaled their willingness to overturn it. Conservatives saw their long-awaited victory at hand. The decision surprised both sides: a 5-4 ruling that not only declined to overturn Roe, but reaffirmed its constitutionality. Three Republican appointees—Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter—jointly wrote the majority opinion laying out the undue-burden standard to determine when abortion restrictions went too far.

The final lesson was perhaps the most important one of all: It’s not enough to place justices on the court who were largely conservative, somewhat conservative, or simply not liberal. They must be reliably conservative. What-ifs haunt the conservative legal movement. Between Thurgood Marshall in 1968 and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993, no Democratic president had named a new justice. Republicans had an incredible run of eleven consecutive justices, and they still couldn’t build a five-justice majority to accomplish what their base demanded. Had Bork taken the seat that went to Kennedy, Roe would have been obliterated. If Bush had nominated a more reliable conservative than Souter, it would have perished no matter what O’Connor or Kennedy did.

This is how conservatives see the modern history of the Supreme Court: as a long chain of near-victories and half-defeats that only galvanized them further. The American left, meanwhile, saw a high court that was generally conservative but not that conservative. Women could still have abortions, even though states were now free to impose new restrictions on them. Laws like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 lost some of their bite, but remained on the books. And if it looked like something seismic was about to happen, there was nothing to truly fear—O’Connor or Kennedy would save the day.


The conservative legal movement played an influential role in the judicial battles of the George W. Bush years, but they didn’t truly flex their muscle until 2005. That July, Sandra Day O’Connor announced that she would retire from the court. Her departure gave Republicans their long-awaited chance to replace a swing vote with a solidly conservative one. With a Republican president and a Republican-led Senate, there would be no borking this time. “On October 23, 1987—a day that lives in conservative infamy—Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by a Democratic Senate,” The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol wrote after O’Connor’s announcement. “Now, 18 years later, George W. Bush has the chance to reverse this defeat, and to begin to fulfill what has always been one of the core themes of modern American conservatism: the relinking of constitutional law and constitutional jurisprudence to the Constitution.”

Bush responded by nominating John Roberts, whom he had elevated to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals two years earlier. Roberts had all the necessary qualifications: He was only 50 years old at the time, an excellent legal writer who hadn’t drafted any disqualifying opinions, and a familiar face at Federalist Society debates and lectures. In the liberal imagination, the Federalist Society is a gothic laboratory of sorts where Republican power-brokers grow originalist judges in cloning vats beneath their D.C. headquarters. The reality is much more mundane. Roberts wasn’t a member, but conservatives knew him well enough to not fear that he was a Souter.

When Rehnquist died that summer, Bush re-nominated Roberts to be chief justice instead. Then, to replace O’Connor for the crucial swing seat, he turned to Harriet Miers, a longtime aide and ally. This time, it was conservatives who revolted against a Supreme Court nominee. She was not part of the movement that they spent years building. She wasn’t credentialed by its institutions. She could endanger the whole enterprise.

“He has put up an unknown and undistinguished figure for an opening that conservatives worked for a generation to see filled with a jurist of high distinction,” Kristol wrote. “There is a gaping disproportion between the stakes associated with this vacancy and the stature of the person nominated to fill it.” Miers eventually bowed out amid conservative pressure, and Bush nominated Samuel Alito in her stead, to the movement’s applause. Kennedy was the last swing justice standing.

If Republicans get Kavanaugh on the high court, the American left likely will be thrust into the constitutional wilderness for at least a generation. At the moment, the machinery to claw back control of it is in its infancy. A group of Obama and Clinton veterans recently founded Demand Justice, a nonprofit organization in D.C. that aims to make the judiciary a core progressive issue. Demand Justice played a vocal role in the Kavanaugh saga and will likely be a key player in future confirmation fights, especially if Democrats retake the Senate this fall. Other essential components are further behind. American liberals lack an institution with the credentialing heft of the Federalist Society, or think tanks with judicial policy experience as deep as the Heritage Foundation. It’s also uncertain if there is a donor network willing to bankroll a judicial advocacy movement on the left.

What liberals do have is the founding mythology that can fuel that movement. In 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, an affable centrist judge on the D.C. Circuit, to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the unprecedented decision to refuse to hold hearings or a vote, insisting that it wait until after the presidential election. “The next justice could fundamentally alter the direction of the Supreme Court and have a profound impact on our country, so of course the American people should have a say in the court’s direction,” he said.

But McConnell surely wasn’t motivated by democratic concerns. He saw that conservatives’ decades-long dream was imperiled—that the court would shift decisively left for perhaps a generation. That’s why some Republicans vowed, even before the election, to block any nomination put forth by Hillary Clinton if she won. The question became moot, but if anything, Donald Trump’s victory made the Garland episode an even more galvanizing moment for Democrats—one they may use to justify almost any step necessary to retake the courts.

Thirty-one years ago, conservatives described the Bork nomination as “hard-ball time.” Now it’s liberals’ turn.


Why Won’t Democrats Move Left in the Suburbs?

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The sprawling 10th district of Virginia stretches from the conservative West Virginia border to the wealthy and more liberal D.C. suburbs. With a median household income of more than $120,000, it is the third-wealthiest congressional district in the country. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won it, 52 percent to 42 percent, but its Republican congresswoman, Barbara Comstock, a former lawyer and congressional staffer with an estimated personal net worth of nearly $1.3 million, was narrowly reelected. Two years later, though, it looks as if Comstock might lose. Early polling shows her Democratic challenger, Jennifer Wexton, with a 10-point lead, and Democrats are starting to believe they can win this seat for the first time since 1978.

The path to a Democratic House majority goes straight through upscale suburban districts like VA-10, places where Hillary Clinton outperformed the local Democratic congressional candidate two years ago, and where enough Republicans are unhappy with Donald Trump and the GOP that their partisan allegiances are up for grabs. The average median income across districts that voted for Clinton but sent a GOP member to Congress in 2016 is just over $75,000. The average median income across all other House districts is just under $60,000. Arguably then, a simple math holds for the Democrats: To take back the House, they have to win wealthier districts.

At what cost? How much will Democrats have to compromise the party’s liberal economic and social principles? My own analysis, published last year by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, suggests that it won’t be that much. Disaffected Republicans who supported Clinton aren’t just anti-Trump; they’re also worried about economic inequality, generally supportive of social welfare programs, and willing to accept higher rates of progressive taxation—perhaps not as much as core Democrats, but still, far more than typical Republicans.

The implications are clear: The party, in all likelihood, could safely move left on economic issues and still win the suburbs—and with them, the House. But the party establishment seems to have drawn different conclusions. Democratic power brokers don’t seem to be debating whether their candidates would do better if they embraced more left-leaning fiscal policies. Instead, in these pivotal suburban swing districts, the party has consistently supported corporate-friendly candidates who can raise tons of money (often because they have personal networks of wealthy friends and business associates) and who present a “moderate” face to upscale suburban voters. They’re people like Jon Ossoff, the fiscal and social moderate who ran (and lost) a special election in Georgia, and Angie Craig, a medical device executive in the Twin Cities, whose experience running her company’s corporate PAC made her the leadership’s pick to run for Minnesota’s 2nd district. Such candidates have left the party once again out of step with its voters and grassroots organizers, as Democratic strategists continue to chase after suburban Republican moms who, they believe, would vote for a Democrat, if only Democrats didn’t want to regulate the big banks quite so much.


How did the suburbs become so pivotal? Democrats and Republicans once competed equally in the cities and in the countryside, because both national parties were really just loose coalitions of state and local parties that spanned the ideological spectrum. In 1960, for example, almost every state was competitive, regardless of how urban or rural it was.

Following the civil rights era in the 1960s and the subsequent cultural backlash of the 1970s, the parties began to align along more consistent cultural lines, and the geographical alignment of the parties shifted, too. Democrats became the party of cosmopolitan values, secularism, and diversity, and therefore the cities. Republicans became the party of traditional values, and therefore the conservative countryside. As a result, the suburbs became pivotal battlegrounds. Districts like PA-4 (outside Philadelphia) and CO-6 (outside Denver), situated at the swing-y intersection between the country and big-city suburbs, earned an increasingly coveted place as the deciders of elections. A suburban vote had become worth more than an urban one.

These shifts have not been good for the Democrats. The Republicans, as the rural party, have a distinct advantage. There are very few congressional districts that are all country. But there are many districts that combine small-to-medium cities with countryside, or that combine big-city suburbs with countryside (like VA-10). Republican voters are simply spread more efficiently across congressional districts.

In 2016, there were 62 overwhelmingly Democratic congressional districts (where Clinton won 70 percent of the vote), but just 23 overwhelmingly Republican districts (where Trump won 70 percent of the vote). This is partly because of Republican gerrymandering since 2010. But the consequence, by most analysts’ estimates, is that Democrats will have to win the popular vote in the 2018 midterms by a good 6 or 7 percentage points to win a majority of seats in the House. It’s a similar story in the Senate, where there are more red states than blue states, although there are slightly more blue voters than red across the country.

This situation is more than just unfair. It influences how Democrats position themselves to win: Structural disadvantages push the Democrats toward more conservative candidates, and structural advantages allow Republicans to be even more conservative and still win. The fact that wealthy suburbs are so pivotal only makes the problem worse. American political institutions hinge on a key swing voter who is both a little more conservative and a little more affluent than the average voter. It’s up for debate just how conservative that key voter actually is, but what’s clear is that the current system dictates the kind of fights the party is having, and gives those who want to pull the party to the right more leverage than they’d otherwise have.


For the moment, Democratic voters, however much they want left-leaning candidates, might be stuck with cautious moderation. Their leaders don’t yet seem ready to gamble on candidates with more liberal economic stances. But if Democrats do take Congress, they should use their power to implement a fairer system that treats all voters equally, regardless of where they live.

Most advanced democracies have some form of proportional representation, but few started out with it. America’s current antiquated electoral system was imported from the British countryside more than 200 years ago, applied unthinkingly by colonists who didn’t have the benefit of knowing about modern, fairer voting systems. The Framers did, however, give Congress the power to determine how states elect their representatives. And there are models for reform. The Single Transferable Vote (STV), for example, a form of proportional representation that has been used successfully in Ireland for almost 100 years, doesn’t have any single-member districts. Each district has between three and five representatives. During an election, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If one candidate is the overwhelming choice in a particular district, some of her “overhang” votes are then redistributed to second-choice candidates. Candidates are eliminated from the bottom up. The top three to five are elected. The result is that all districts are competitive, and therefore all voters matter equally. No party could take an unfair geographic advantage.

Admittedly, such significant electoral reform is a long shot in the United States. But it’s not impossible. In Maine, voters this year reaffirmed their 2016 choice to implement statewide ranked-choice voting, a variant of STV. That made Maine the first state in the nation to abandon the old system.

If applied nationally, such a change would effectively create a multiparty system in which left-wing politicians could run as left-wing politicians without needing the blessing of Democratic Party. For now, however, the only way to make districts like VA-10 obsolete is to win them.

Brett Kavanaugh Disqualified Himself From the Supreme Court

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Brett Kavanaugh’s opening statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday was unlike anything in the Supreme Court’s history. In what can only be described as an angry and vengeful tirade, he lashed out at the American left, Democratic lawmakers, and “friends of the Clintons” for the attacks and allegations that he’s faced since his nomination to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. It was an astonishingly partisan performance for a sitting federal judge, let alone one who hopes to serve on the nation’s highest court.

“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups,” he told senators. “This is a circus.”

Kavanaugh then suggested that there would be dire consequences for those groups at some point in the future. “This grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country,” Kavanaugh said. “And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.” After that assertion, imagine being a Democratic official or liberal interest group who brings a case before the court and loses it in a 5-4 decision with Kavanaugh in the majority.

This statement cannot be squared with what Kavanaugh said during his opening statement to the senators just weeks ago. “The Supreme Court must never be viewed as a partisan institution,” he said. “The justices on the Supreme Court do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle. They do not caucus in separate rooms. If confirmed to the court, I would be part of a team of nine, committed to deciding cases according to the Constitution and laws of the United States.

It’s worth noting that Kavanaugh is not just a Supreme Court nominee. He’s currently a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and if the Senate decides to reject his nomination, he’ll remain there. Kavanaugh is therefore required to abide by the code of conduct for federal judges, even outside the courtroom. “A judge should be faithful to, and maintain professional competence in, the law and should not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism,” the code states.

Two women have publicly alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them in high school and in college, respectively. A third woman has said Kavanaugh was present at a beach party in Maryland in high school where she was gang-raped, though she does not allege that he took part in the attack. Kavanaugh has denied all wrongdoing, and he’s certainly entitled to defend himself. But he went far beyond that and cast the allegations, without evidence, as part of a grand conspiracy against him.

Kavanaugh undermined his credibility as a fair-minded jurist by indulging in some imaginative leaps to attack Democratic senators. “The behavior of several Democratic members of the committee in my hearing a few weeks ago was an embarrassment,” he said. “But at least it was just a good old-fashioned attempt at borking. Those efforts didn’t work. When I did at least okay enough at the hearings that it looked like I might actually get confirmed, a new tactic was needed. Some of you were lying in wait and had it ready. This first allegation was held in secret for weeks by a Democratic member of this committee and this staff. It would be needed only if you couldn’t take me out in the merits.”

He was referring to California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who learned about Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation in a letter from her during the summer. Blasey testified that she declined to take the allegations public when Kavanaugh’s confirmation appeared certain. Feinstein pledged she would keep them confidential. Nonetheless, rumors about Blasey’s letter began to surface after Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. (He did not blame Blasey, saying the letter was released “over Dr. Ford’s wishes.”) The Intercept was the first news outlet to report on the letter’s existence. After Kavanaugh’s testimony, D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim said on Twitter that the letter wasn’t leaked to them by Feinstein’s staff.

In 1991, Clarence Thomas gave a similarly defiant opening statement to the committee. He described the firestorm surrounding Anita Hill’s allegations that he sexually harassed her as “Kafkaesque” and a “grave and irreparable injustice” to him and his family. “No job is worth what I’ve been through—no job. No horror in my life has been so debilitating,” he told senators, adding thatfrom my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”

Thomas’s words, as vivid and severe as they were, did not constitute an overtly partisan attack—much as he may have wanted to do so. He came pretty close in an autobiography he released in 2007, where he broadly alleged that liberal groups had weaponized Hill’s allegations because of Thomas’s perceived views on abortion. But he managed to show at least a measure of restraint at the time. Kavanaugh, by comparison, did not. His behavior on Thursday casts serious doubt on whether he has the temperament to sit on the Supreme Court.

Republicans who support Kavanaugh’s nomination frequently touted his twelve years of service on the D.C. Circuit. But Democrats focused on his years as a political operative for the Republican Party and the conservative movement—first as one of the inquisitors on Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation into the Clinton White House, then as a Bush White House staffer for five years. They worried that he would continue that work if placed on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh seemed to validate that fear in the most visceral way possible on Thursday.

A Pivotal Election for Abortion Rights

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Before Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh faced multiple allegations of sexual assault, his views on abortion were seen as the biggest threat to his confirmation. Democrats and many legal analysts argued that his past rulings, writings, and statements on the subject made it clear: If Kavanaugh were to secure a seat on the nation’s highest court, he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide.

Abortion was always going to be an issue in the 2018 midterms, as it is in every election. But it will be especially so if the Senate votes on Kavanaugh before November 6. If that vote fails, the right will use it to mobilize anti-abortion voters to protect the Republicans’ slim majority in the Senate, which likely would ensure that an equally conservative judge was confirmed to the Supreme Court. If the vote succeeds, the left will use Kavanaugh’s confirmation to do the opposite, encouraging pro-choice voters to elect Democrats who will fight to preserve abortion access in the face of a conservative court.

There’s been a lot of talk about 2018 being the “Year of the Woman,” because the #MeToo movement and the backlash to a misogynistic president are motivating Democratic women to vote and run for office in record numbers. But this conversation largely has neglected the fact that reproductive rights are proving to be a mobilizing force this fall, too.

“The issue is getting a fraction of the attention of President Donald Trump, health care and immigration,” Politico’s James Arkin wrote on Wednesday. “But Republican and anti-abortion groups have made it a major part of their ground game.” In the last two months, the piece notes, anti-abortion canvassers have knocked on more than 1.6 million doors in six states where Republicans believe the issue could give them a boost in toss-up Senate races. “For the first time in several midterms, the GOP is worried its base won’t turn out to vote, and abortion is a powerful motivator for the conservatives who could put Republican Senate candidates over the top in key states,” Arkin wrote.

Abortion access is also a powerful motivator for liberals, a fact pro-choice groups aren’t taking for granted. Planned Parenthood recently launched “its largest voter contact campaign for a midterm election,” USA Today reported earlier this month. That campaign includes an effort to knock on more than 3 million doors, and send information by mail to another 1.5 million voters. “When we talk to voters about what’s at risk for their health care access … they listen to us,” Deirdre Schifeling, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, told the paper.

The two sides are battling over more than just Kavanaugh’s confirmation and the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade. Come election day, voters will be deciding which party controls Congress, and thus what future legislation Congress might consider and pass. Party control could determine, for example, whether Congress votes to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions except in certain cases. It could also determine the amount of federal funding given to Planned Parenthood and other women’s health providers across the country.

Reproductive rights battles will also play out on the state level, notably in the 36 gubernatorial races. These elections are of particular importance to the anti-abortion right. “The thing pro-life people have been pushing for decades now on the federal level is just for the Supreme Court to return the issue to the states,” said Daniel Burns, a Catholic political scientist at the University of Dallas, in comments to the National Catholic Register. “It doesn’t make sense if you only care about the Supreme Court nominee and then don’t also pay attention to your state elections.”

These statewide elections should be important to the left, too, since decisions at that level often affect how easy it is to obtain a legal abortion. An increasing number of states are implementing Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers, otherwise known as TRAP laws, which can make it so expensive to operate a clinic that many are forced to close. This means women have to travel farther to access the procedure. Many states also have passed or considered laws banning certain types of abortions; requiring waiting periods before women are allowed to have them; or requiring permission from the man involved.

And voters in three states will be deciding on abortion issues directly come November 6. Ballot propositions in West Virginia and Alabama will ask voters whether to amend the state constitution to declare that there is no right to abortion. If Roe v. Wade is overturned—thereby returning the issue to the states, as it was before 1973—abortion immediately would become illegal in those two states. In Oregon, voters will decide whether to ban public funding from going toward abortions that are not medically necessary. But as the Trump presidency and Kavanaugh hearings have made clear, it’s that a woman’s right to control her own body will be on the ballot in every state, whether explicitly or not.

The Enduring Scam of Corporate Tax Breaks

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In June, Donald Trump traveled to Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, for the groundbreaking ceremony of the Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn’s new manufacturing plant—a 20 million-square-foot complex that state officials say will create 13,000 jobs for southeastern Wisconsin over the next 15 years.

By the time Trump visited the site, however, those claims were already in doubt. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a Republican, had offered Foxconn CEO Terry Gou nearly $3 billion in tax credits and exemptions to move his company to the state. But Wisconsin won’t get any of that money back until 2042, only breaking even then—according to a report released by the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau last August—if Foxconn gives all 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin residents. Thus far, the company has only committed to 3,000. And it has reneged on these kinds of promises before. In 2013, the company said it would hire 500 workers and spend $30 million on a plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then never built it.

Lavish, lousy incentive deals aren’t unusual. These packages rarely influence corporate executives; CEOs tend, instead, to look for good infrastructure and skilled labor when selecting a new location. According to research by Timothy Bartik at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, tax incentives only change their minds between 2 and 25 percent of the time. When companies come to town, unemployment tends to stay where it was. Economic growth doesn’t ramp up. Big corporations nab about 90 percent of government incentive dollars, leaving small businesses almost nothing. And often, all that’s left is a big hole in the state budget.

This math is familiar—and yet, incentive packages have tripled since 1990. Thanks to blockbuster deals like Foxconn and the beauty pageant underway for Amazon’s second headquarters, which drew a whopping $7 billion bid from New Jersey and an offer from Fresno, California, to give Amazon joint control over where the city spends its tax dollars, incentive packages could double over the next five or ten years, reaching $100 billion annually, according to Bartik. Politicians, under pressure to show voters that they’re creating jobs, are increasingly reaching for the flashy choice: cutting checks to corporations that are all too happy to take them. And so far they haven’t faced a reckoning.

America’s first tax incentive package was in 1791, when New Jersey convinced Alexander Hamilton to move his manufacturing company to the state. These schemes wouldn’t become widely popular, however, until after World War II, when Southern states—hoping to transition their economies away from agriculture by luring manufacturers from the North—began offering companies tax breaks.

Despite all the evidence that these deals don’t work, they have remained popular with elected officials. It’s easy to strike them and even easier to claim political credit for them. “A company comes and they have a ribbon-cutting ceremony—that’s a way to show as an individual you are the deal maker,” said Nathan Jensen, co-author of Incentives to Pander: How Politicians Use Corporate Welfare for Political Gain. These deals often last years, even decades; the politicians who brokered them are usually safely out of office once the fiscal damage becomes apparent.

BIGGEST CORPORATE INCENTIVE PACKAGES:


Boeing:

$8.7 billion (from Washington, 2013)


Alcoa:

$5.6 billion (from New York, 2007)


Foxconn:

$4.8 billion (from Wisconsin, 2017)


Boeing:

$3.2 billion (from Washington, 2003)


GM:

$2.3 billion (from Michigan, 2009)


Source: Good Jobs First

That is why politicians can get away with offering $62 million to Marriott to convince it to move its headquarters just five miles down the road, as Maryland did in 2016, even though two years earlier, neighboring Virginia had given a Chinese industrial ceramics manufacturer called Lindenburg Industry LLC more than a $1 million to build an air pollution device factory in Appomattox County—only to discover that the company was a fraud. (It had used a fake website to get the funding and then pocketed it without hiring a single resident.)

Often, voters don’t realize that they are the ones who suffer the most from these deals. In Texas, for example, public schools have lost $4 billion to Governor Gregg Abbott’s Office of Economic Development since 2002. New Jersey and Michigan face billions in liabilities. And even when politicians try to halt tax incentives, companies seem to find a way to keep getting them. In 2015, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner, facing almost $9 billion in debt, imposed a moratorium on new economic incentives. Then ConAgra Foods, the agricultural giant with headquarters in Nebraska, told state officials that it would move its offices to Chicago, if it got the kind of incentives that were at the time prohibited. So state officials tacked $10.5 million in tax breaks onto a previous request, even as they were forced to close museums, withhold funding for nonprofits, and stop doling out lottery payments. (ConAgra’s CEO later said the incentives had nothing to do with the move.)

There are better ways to jump-start local economies. Aaron K. Chatterji of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has proposed creating a Main Street Fund to support states that invest in choices that are smarter than incentives. Those could be seed money for startups, services to help businesses scale up, or a focus on attracting particular kinds of businesses, as Amy Liu of the Brookings Institution has suggested. But first, cities and states would have to cease offering big bucks to big business.

Ultimately, these deals aren’t just about corporations looking to get a windfall where they can. It’s politicians, too, who, through their desire for a quick and easy win, end up robbing their constituents of money that could be much better spent elsewhere.

How Republicans Stole #MeToo

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There is a photo of Christine Blasey Ford from her Thursday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee that captures why her testimony about Brett Kavanaugh—the Supreme Court nominee she has accused of sexually assaulting her in the summer of 1982, when they were both teenagers—felt true. She is raising her hand as the oath is administered. Her eyes are closed and she is taking a deep breath, as if bracing herself not only for the pain of reliving a horrible personal trauma on national television, but also for the possibility that, no matter what she says and no matter how convincingly she says it, she will not be believed, that it is all for naught, that Kavanaugh will be confirmed anyway. In that moment, she has so little to gain, so much to lose.

By the end of the day, those fears appeared to be coming true. Though observers across the ideological spectrum found her testimony to be achingly credible, it was little match for the machinery of partisan politics. Republican senators lined up to say they were voting for Kavanaugh’s nomination. The conservative press went into rhapsodies over his wild, angry, tearful testimony, which they took as compelling evidence of his sincerity, even as liberals dismissed it as surreal Trumpian bombast. Few were putting much faith in a handful of Republican fence-sitters—Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake—to stem the grinding momentum in Kavanaugh’s favor. His nomination goes to a committee vote on Friday.

This spectacle was, in many ways, the ultimate test of the #MeToo movement and its exhortation to “believe women.” Though other women have accused Kavanaugh of bad behavior, they were not called as witnesses. Though another man—Mark Judge—was allegedly present when Kavanaugh allegedly attempted to rape Ford, he was also not present, turning the hearing into a he-said/she-said affair. And at stake was not just the job of a high-powered man, but a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, which provides powerful incentives for certain politicians to not believe the woman.

But it would be inaccurate to say, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, that Ford was thwarted by naked partisan interests alone. The most sinister part of yesterday’s hearing was the sight of Republicans insisting they did believe she had been assaulted, just not by Kavanaugh. (As Kavanaugh himself put it, “I’m not questioning that Dr. Ford may have been sexually assaulted by some person in some place at some time.”) One of the central premises of the #MeToo movement had been accepted and absorbed, but in such a way that its impact was neutered. Indeed, the saga of Kavanaugh saw the appropriation of several #MeToo tropes in the service of defending the accused, muddying the distinction between victim and perpetrator, the powerful and the powerless.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

There would otherwise seem to be few similarities between their respective testimonies. Ford delivered an instantly seminal account of sexual abuse and its lifelong effects, and on the biggest possible stage. As many women noted, she mustered the kinds of wiles that are typical of women in patriarchal settings (all eleven Republicans on the committee are white men). She showed her interrogators all due deference: “Does that work for you?” she said at one point. “I’m used to being collegial.” As a psychologist, she bolstered her account with expert testimony on the way trauma affects memory, illuminating a neurological cross-section of pain: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, her voice breaking. “The uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense.”

Kavanaugh, in contrast, launched a slashing, unprecedented attack on the Democratic members of the committee, accusing them of replacing “‘advice and consent’ with ‘search and destroy.’” He gave full vent to his outrage, saying his reputation had been dragged through the mud. Borrowing from Donald Trump (who heartily approved of his performance), he blamed the Clintons and their supporters for orchestrating a vast left-wing conspiracy against his nomination. He frequently dissolved into tears, on topics ranging from his daughters to his after-school weight-lifting sessions in high school. And above all, he denied, denied, denied.

For this viewer (and the perspective of the individual viewer is all-important in this polarized matter), it was a case of a person protesting too much. There were times when he stumbled, such as when Senator Dick Durbin asked whether he personally would want the FBI to investigate Ford’s accusation—for a moment, Kavanaugh seemed stunned into silence. There were little lies and deceptions strewn throughout his testimony, such as his innocent definitions of “boof” and “devil’s triangle.” And there was nothing substantial to exonerate him—certainly not his now-infamous calendar, which may in fact contain clues that point to his guilt.

His testimony was, overall, one of the most disturbing things to have happened in this presidency. It suggested, at the very least, that Republicans should find another candidate—one who is not so prone to explosive rage, for starters—to nominate to the Supreme Court. But to conservative viewers, Kavanaugh’s performance had virtually the same effect that Ford’s testimony had on liberal viewers. They praised him for showing his raw emotions. They admired his pluck in the face of hostile media coverage. They said, enough is enough. As David French wrote in National Review:

Today, there were conservatives across the nation who choked up—some openly wept—during his testimony. Not because they disrespect women. Not because they excuse sexual assault. But because they also love their sons. Because they are tired of being painted as evil when they are seeking to do what’s right. Because they want to see a man fight with honor.

This mirroring of Kavanaugh and Ford is no happenstance. It cannot simply be chalked up to the partisan prism through which all reality in this country is refracted. No, that conservatives were weeping over Kavanaugh’s testimony suggests that he pulled some of the same emotional triggers that have animated the #MeToo movement. If Ford has suffered her whole life from that one night in 1982, then so will Kavanaugh: He stated that “my family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed by vicious and false additional accusations.” (Emphasis added.) If women’s rage is finally acceptable, well then so is Kavanaugh’s; as Rich Lowry, also of National Review, wrote, Kavanaugh “showed the nation a powerfully human reaction to the attacks on him.” And if we must believe women—and all the Republicans seemed to agree that we must believe Ford suffered some kind of abuse—then we must believe men, too.

This confluence of Kavanaugh and Ford’s storylines found its clearest manifestation in an operatic performance by Senator Lindsey Graham, who told Kavanaugh, “She’s as much of a victim as you are.” By then the #MeToo-ization of Brett Kavanaugh was complete, not only giving Republicans the runway to vote for him, but also reinforcing a theme of conservative politics that gained prominence with Donald Trump’s campaign for president: that the real victims in this country are white men.

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