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BoJack Horseman’s Brilliant Crack-Up

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It’s hard to think of a show currently on air that could make me want to watch a single character speak in one long, despairing stream for nearly a whole episode. Prolonged expressions of angst can sink live-action drama, which thrives on eventfulness and conflict. But BoJack Horseman—a cartoon sitcom whose title character is a melancholic, middle-aged stallion—inhabits a genre of its own, somewhere between slapstick and theater of the absurd. Midway through the show’s new season, BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) wears a charcoal suit and stands at a pulpit next to a coffin. His mother has died. For over 20 full minutes, with no interruption, he delivers a brilliant, pained, rambling eulogy.

Written by the show’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with brilliant art direction by Lisa Hanawalt, the monologue careens between pathos and black humor, delusion and acceptance—and is totally transfixing. BoJack doesn’t miss his mother so much as he despises her; he is angry that she’s left him without a sense of closure. He begins his story by saying that when he went to a fast-food place and said that his mother had died, the person behind the counter gave him a free churro. Later, he ties this anecdote up in a joke: “My mother died, and all I got was this free churro.” Then he adds, “That small act of kindness showed more compassion than my mother gave me her entire goddamn life.” His voice starts to break, as he finally confronts a lifetime of abuse from his mother. It is an aria of abjection and resentment. I’m still thinking about it, days later.

If this seems like heavy stuff for a cartoon, BoJack has earned it. Over five seasons, Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt crafted a truly goofy world (there’s a spider who works as a playwright, multitasking with eight limbs, and an ingenue deer who has literal doe-eyes) that allows them to slip in and out of surreal, sometimes dark subject matter. In one episode, a pop star named Sextina Aquafina (a leotard-wearing dolphin) has a cynical hit song about abortion; in another, BoJack is present when one of his young mentees overdoses on heroin in a planetarium. In true Darwinian fashion, BoJack Horseman has evolved from an easy joke about a horse to one of the most complex and empathetic shows on television.


The first three seasons of BoJack established the world of Hollywoo—a fantastical Hollywood equivalent in which humans and animals not only interact, but also marry, divorce, collaborate with, disappoint, and mistreat one another—and focused on the career misadventures of BoJack, an aging, egotistical actor who once starred in a hyper-successful network hit as the surrogate father to three ragamuffin orphans. When the show opens, he has money and a mansion in the hills, but he hasn’t worked in years. He attempts to revive his career by writing a memoir, which he only completes by hiring a sardonic co-writer, a human woman named Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie), married to a galumphing, ever-optimistic Labrador named Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tomkins). An ambitious pink tabby named Princess Caroline (Amy Sedaris) is BoJack’s agent, and Todd (Aaron Paul), a hapless, beanie-wearing human, is his best friend.

Together, these characters form a menagerie of desperate show-business hopefuls, who clatter around Los Angeles trying to wring opportunities and relevance out of an industry that is designed to break people down. These first three seasons present an inspired riff on disillusionment—the way people (and animals) fail each other, the way capitalism creates a system of bogus incentives, the way star-power is mostly cardboard and paste.

In the fourth season, the show plunges deeper. BoJack may be an insecure asshole, but his flaws have an origin story. BoJack learns that he has a teenage daughter, Hollyhock (Aparna Nancherla). This discovery sends him into a reverie about his own parents and their many shortcomings. BoJack’s father, a stallion named Butterscotch Horseman (also voiced by Arnett), was a failed writer, who swilled whiskey and tinkered away for years on his Great American Novel while working a dead-end job at a fish cannery. His mother, Beatrice Sugarman (Wendie Malick), was a sparkling heiress to the Sugarman Sugar Cube fortune. She had a fling with Butterscotch after falling for his bohemian ambitions, and this tryst resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. Although she considered an abortion, she decided to keep the baby and married Butterscotch.

Over the years, she turns bitter and cold. Butterscotch refuses a job with the Sugarman firm in order to write fiction in San Francisco. The move never bears fruit. Between the grind of family life and the wasting of Beatrice’s inheritance through profligate spending, the couple grows destitute and resentful. Both turn into volatile, chain-smoking alcoholics. And into this environment—straight out of an Arthur Miller play or a Richard Yates novel—BoJack is born.

The weight of Beatrice’s death in the fifth season doesn’t come as a surprise. The entire fourth season showed how the effects of depression and anxiety have rippled through BoJack’s family. Earlier seasons also paved the way for the big formal risk of season five’s eulogy; Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt have always leaned into the elastic potential of animation, using the medium to paint with a wide range of moods, from playfulness and pretentiousness to desolation and profundity. When BoJack attends an underwater film festival, the entire episode transforms into a silent movie, accompanied by twinkling music and air bubbles. In another episode, as Beatrice Horseman descends into dementia, an episode charts the inside of her muddled mind. She sees people as crude drawings, or as blobs with their faces crossed out in magic marker.

This inventiveness is perhaps why BoJack’s eulogy doesn’t feel self-indulgent or labored in the new season. It works because BoJack is a talking horse, and because that is ridiculous, and because it’s hard to guess where this already-bonkers premise will lead.


BoJack has become, more than anything, a show about how hurt people hurt people. It is about generational trauma, and how abuse trickles down until someone works out how to stop the train. In his eulogy, BoJack muses on the nature of sitcoms as a metaphor for life. He says that in television writing, you can never have a happy ending, because then the show would be over: “There is always more show, I guess, until there isn’t.” His mother’s story may be over, but he is still living with the trauma of her life, still acting out its major scenes. He is caught in a loop—a fact underscored by the eerie sense that BoJack may not be delivering this speech to anyone at all, but may be standing in an empty room, or perhaps inventing the macabre setting in his mind. He often cues an off-screen drummer to play a snare riff after his jokes, which makes the episode feel like a dream sequence, a kind of nonsensical vaudeville act.

He recounts his entire family story: his dad’s failed ambitions, his mother’s seething. He remembers how, at parties, she sometimes temporarily dropped her mantle of martyrdom and began to dance. It was one of the few moments, he says, that he could see love between his parents. “This cynical, despicable woman he married took flight,” he says.

This moment of grace, it meant something. We understood each other in a way, me and my mom and my dad. . . . My mother, she knew what it was like to feel your entire life like you are drowning, with the exception of these moments, these very rare instances in which you suddenly remember you can swim.

BoJack and his circle are drowners, and always have been. But they also attempt to keep swimming, despite everything. And it makes sense that many of these characters are zoological. We are less likely to blame animals for their own pain; if they are hurt, we tend to ask what the world did to them, rather than what they did to themselves.

There is a sticky cohesion to this episode, which is the apex of the season—it both stands alone and works as a mortar for the other characters’ stories (Diane travels to Vietnam in the numb wake of her divorce, Princess Caroline is desperately trying to adopt a baby, the feckless Todd rockets to the top of the corporate ladder in a position he can neither handle nor control). This is what BoJack Horseman has been building up to for several seasons—it is a cathartic release and a cruel joke. The last words BoJack’s mother ever said to him were “I see you” from her hospital bed. It was “not a statement of judgment or disappointment,” he says, “just acceptance and the simple recognition of another person in a room. Hello there, you are a person, and I see you. Let me tell you, it is a weird thing to feel at 54 years old that for the first time in your life, your mother sees you.”

By the end of his speech, BoJack realizes that Beatrice was in the intensive care unit, and she was probably just reading the words “ICU” from a wall. He steels himself against this knowledge and says that he is relieved to finally know that, like all other creatures slithering and trotting and flapping their way through Hollywoo, he is truly on his own. Then, he looks up, and we finally see his audience: a confused-looking room full of reptiles, flicking their tongues. He is in the wrong funeral parlor. The ordeal sends him on a long bender, a dizzying descent toward tragedy. But for a moment, the show conveys all the ache of another person’s loss, whether he is man or beast.


Should Cops Be Immune From Lawsuits?

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In October 2013, two investigators from the Texas Medical Board arrived at Dr. Joseph Zadeh’s medical practice in suburban Dallas with an administrative subpoena for the medical records of more than a dozen patients, joined by two DEA agents. When a medical assistant told them that she would need to contact a lawyer first, they said Zadeh’s license was at risk if she didn’t comply immediatelyShe backed down, and they rooted through Zadeh’s patient files for evidence of wrongdoing—all without a proper search warrant.

Zadeh and an unnamed patient thus sued the board in federal court. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the board had violated Zadeh’s rights with the warrantless search. But it ruled against him nonetheless. The court found that under the Supreme Court’s precedents on qualified immunity, a legal privilege for certain types of government officials, the violation of Zadeh’s rights wasn’t “clearly established” under existing legal precedents.

The ruling drew an unusual concurring opinion from Judge Don Willett, a widely respected conservative jurist who is on President Donald Trump’s original shortlist for Supreme Court nominees. Willett labeled his concurrence as “dubitante,” a Latin legal phrase used by judges to signal misgivings about their own rulings. He argued not that his court had incorrectly applied Supreme Court precedents, but that those precedents are the real problem. “The court is right about Dr. Zadeh’s rights: They were violated,” he wrote. “But owing to a legal deus ex machina—the ‘clearly established law’ prong of qualified-immunity analysis—the violation eludes vindication.”

Willett’s opinion adds to the growing criticism of how the Supreme Court has shaped qualified immunity over the years. This burgeoning pushback includes two of the high court’s justices, and an unlikely pair at that: conservative Clarence Thomas, who has signaled his displeasure on originalist grounds, and liberal Sonia Sotomayor, who has objected to the doctrine’s tendency to protect public officials in cases of clear wrongdoing.

Qualified immunity isn’t in mortal danger yet, but the ranks of powerful opponents to it are growing. If the doctrine is eventually weakened or even eliminated, it would expand citizens’ right to seek remedies against public officials, including police officers, who have wronged them—and could prevent future constitutional wrongs.


To understand qualified immunity, think of a Russian nesting doll, but with layers of legal doctrines and exceptions. Start with the general principle: If one person is wronged by another, they may be able to seek a remedy from the courts. There’s an exception, however, that shields the government and its agents from liability for their official acts. Section 1983 carves out an exception to that exception by waiving the shield. It allows lawsuits in federal court against state and local officials who violate federal constitutional rights while acting “under the color of” law. It was under this section that Dr. Zadeh and his unnamed patient tried to sue the Texas Medical Board.

Over time, the high court has added its own layer of exceptions to Section 1983. Some groups of public officials, such as legislators, judges, and prosecutors, enjoy absolute immunity from lawsuits related to their official acts. (The first two categories are generally accepted on constitutional grounds, while the third is more controversial.) Other public officials enjoy a more qualified form of immunity that can be overcome in certain circumstances. Qualified immunity, the court says, helps shield public officials from financial burdens and the stresses of litigation related to their official duties—unless the claim is merited, of course.

How can courts tell when a violation of constitutional rights is justified enough to overcome qualified immunity? The Supreme Court tells lower courts to determine whether the violation ran counter to “clearly established law,” a term that the justices interpret in the narrowest possible ways. Willett signaled that he found the premise absurd because it effectively requires that there be precedent for every imaginable constitutional violation, otherwise the offender can’t be held responsible. “To some observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly,” he wrote. “Merely proving a constitutional deprivation doesn’t cut it; plaintiffs must cite functionally identical precedent that places the legal question ‘beyond debate’ to ‘every’ reasonable officer.”

Qualified immunity’s impact radiates beyond each individual case that it thwarts. The doctrine’s flaws might be mitigated if the Supreme Court provided better guidance on what amounts to “clearly established law,” for example. But another problem, Willett explained, is that courts are no longer required to determine whether the act in question actually violated the Constitution in qualified-immunity cases. Instead, judges can simply cite the lack of existing precedent and end the inquiry there. The result is “constitutional stagnation” for American law as well as a Catch-22 for would-be litigants, he concluded.

“Plaintiffs must produce precedent even as fewer courts are producing precedent,” Willett wrote. “Important constitutional questions go unanswered precisely because those questions are yet unanswered. Courts then rely on that judicial silence to conclude there’s no equivalent case on the books. No precedent = no clearly established law = no liability. An Escherian Stairwell. Heads defendants win, tails plaintiffs lose.”


Section 1983 is a bulwark of American liberty. Named for its place in the U.S. Code, the provision traces back to Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. Federal efforts to build a multiracial democracy in the South after the Civil War faced violent resistance from armed groups of ex-Confederate veterans, notably the Klan, which frequently acted with tacit support from local officials. They waged a domestic-terrorism campaign by killing black Americans and white Republicans, burning down their homes and churches, and intimidating local communities into accepting white-supremacist rule.

The Klan posed an unprecedented threat to American democracy, and the government armed itself with unprecedented powers in response. The Ku Klux Klan Act gave federal prosecutors new powers to charge and convict Klansmen who tried to intimidate black voters and candidates. It also included the provision now known as Section 1983, which gives private citizens a mechanism to sue state and local officials for violating federal constitutional rights in their official capacities. It was bold legislation by any era’s standards, and not without its critics. Democrats denounced Grant as a would-be dictator who governed the South by military rule. “The Ku Klux Klan Act pushed Republicans to the outer limits of constitutional change,” historian Eric Foner wrote.

The new tools allowed Grant and the newly created Justice Department to smash the Klan for a generation. Many of those tools were later taken away by the Supreme Court, which narrowly interpreted the Reconstruction Amendments and weakened the federal government’s power to enforce them. “The nation’s founding document is no match for a dedicated majority of justices committed to circumventing its guarantees,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer recently observed. But Section 1983 itself survived, dormant but intact.

Its reawakening came during the Second Reconstruction in the 1960s. In the 1961 case Monroe v. Pape, a black family and their six children in Chicago sued the city’s police department for carrying out a warrantless nighttime raid on their home. “The police officers broke into petitioners’ home in the early morning, routed them from bed, made them stand naked in the living room, and ransacked every room, emptying drawers and ripping mattress covers,” Justice William O. Douglas later recounted in the court’s majority opinion. Officers hauled the father in for interrogation about a recent murder, held him without access to a lawyer, and eventually released him without charges.

The court reaffirmed that the lawsuit fell within Section 1983’s original purpose and design. “It is abundantly clear that one reason the legislation was passed was to afford a federal right in federal courts because, by reason of prejudice, passion, neglect, intolerance or otherwise, state laws might not be enforced and the claims of citizens to the enjoyment of rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment might be denied by the state agencies,” Douglas noted. The court’s ruling in Monroe sparked new interest in using the 1871 statute.

At first, the Supreme Court said, public officials could cite traditional common-law defenses of good faith and reasonableness to overcome Section 1983 lawsuits. But the court abandoned those subjective defenses in 1982 for an objective formulation that survives today, and which the doctrine’s critics are challenging on multiple fronts. The Supreme Court has justified qualified immunity as a protection for government officials from the costs of litigation as well as the stresses of discovery and trial. But there doesn’t appear to be empirical evidence that it actually fulfills this purpose. Joanna Schwartz, a UCLA law professor, studied how courts applied the doctrine in five federal court districts. In the cases she examined, qualified immunity only led to dismissal before the discovery phase in 3.2 percent of the cases where it was raised.

Schwartz noted that the low dismissal rate doesn’t reflect qualified immunity’s overall impact. First, she argued, the Supreme Court’s habit of upholding it at almost every opportunity may send a message to law-enforcement officers that they can act with impunity. Second, she noted that qualified immunity may act as a deterrent in challenging other violations of constitutional rights. Finally, she warned that the court’s current approach could undermine police departments’ ability to properly train officers. “When the Supreme Court suggests that only its decisions can clearly establish the law, and then repeatedly grants qualified immunity without ruling on the underlying constitutional questions, law enforcement agencies have little in the way of guidance about how to craft their policies,” Schwartz wrote earlier this year.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor in particular has raised concerns about the impact of the court’s qualified-immunity rulings when it comes to police shootings. “As I have previously noted, this Court routinely displays an unflinching willingness to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity but rarely intervenes where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity in these same cases,” she wrote in a dissent in the 2018 case Kisela v. Hughes. “Such a one-sided approach to qualified immunity transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment.”

The doctrine is also under siege from originalists, who argue that the court’s purported historical basis for qualified immunity appears to be groundless. In a 2017 article, University of Chicago law professor William Baude noted that the court typically advances three justifications for the doctrine. “One is that it derives from a common law ‘good faith’ defense; another is that it compensates for an earlier putative mistake in broadening the statute; the third is that it provides ‘fair warning’ to government officials, akin to the rule of lenity,” he wrote. But Baude found those arguments wanting: “There was no such defense, there was no such mistake, and lenity ought not to apply.”

In the 2017 case Ziglar v. Abbasi, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion that cited Baude’s work and echoed his concerns. “Because our analysis is no longer grounded in the common-law backdrop against which Congress enacted the 1871 Act, we are no longer engaged in ‘interpret[ing] the intent of Congress in enacting’ the Act,” he wrote, paraphrasing other cases. “Our qualified immunity precedents instead represent precisely the sort of ‘freewheeling policy choice[s]’ that we have previously disclaimed the power to make.” He suggested that the court should revisit the issue “in an appropriate case.”


The problems with qualified immunity mirror a deeper and more disturbing trend in the law. Courts, which are supposed to be the great vindicators of Americans’ rights and liberties, are increasingly closed off to them. For instance, the U.S. legal system grants prisoners the right—known as habeas corpus—to challenge the constitutionality of their imprisonment, including the trial and sentencing phrases that placed them there. But in 1996, Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which imposed new limits on habeas petitions and sharply raised the legal thresholds for them to succeed. The changes led to a sharp and deleterious drop in successful legal challenges by defendants in federal courts.

Defendants who go on trial are already rare. Contrary to portrayals of the criminal-justice system in Law & Order and other legal procedurals, the overwhelming majority of people charged with a crime never make their case before a jury. More than 90 percent of felony convictions are now obtained through plea bargains instead. The coercive power of harsh sentencing laws—and the promise of a lighter punishment to avoid them—gives prosecutors so much power that some critics fear many innocent people are pleading guilty rather than risk a trial, especially if they lack the resources to defend themselves. Federal judge Jed Rakoff noted in 2015 that roughly 20,000 federal prisoners may be actually innocent if the limited available data on exonerations is extrapolated nationwide.

Would-be litigants also face tougher hurdles in civil cases. Two recent decisions that largely escaped public notice—2007’s Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and 2009’s Ashcroft v. Iqbal—lowered the legal threshold for judges to summarily dismiss civil lawsuits when the initial complaint isn’t detailed enough. The change had a palpable effect on civil litigation throughout the country, especially in cases that typically rely on the discovery process to find sufficient evidence. (Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren recently introduced legislation that would restore the old pleading standard through federal law.)

In the private sector, companies increasingly use contractual clauses that require would-be litigants to submit to arbitration instead, an alternative to the judicial process that was meant to alleviate strain on the courts. The practical reality is an parallel legal system of sorts that often deprives workers of their ability to challenge discrimination, harassment, and wage theft.  Earlier this year, for example, the Supreme Court signed off on clauses in employment contracts that thwart class-action lawsuits by forcing employees into closed-door arbitration instead. “The inevitable result of today’s decision will be the underenforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the well-being of vulnerable workers,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned in her dissent.

The broad, cross-ideological push against qualified immunity is a rare step in the right direction, but any reform of the doctrine relies on the Supreme Court. The justices have multiple options if they take up a case where they can reconsider qualified immunity itself. The first, of course, would be to leave it intact. Baude noted in his 2017 article that the court is usually reluctant to overturn its own precedents when they interpret federal statutes instead of the Constitution. “Because qualified immunity has been on the books for years and Congress has declined to revisit it, it may have obtained a belated congressional imprimatur,” he wrote.

The doctrine’s questionable justifications could help the court overcome that reluctance, however. That would allow the justices to either eliminate qualified immunity altogether, substantially narrow its scope, or justify it on other grounds. “Plaintiffs should be able to defeat a qualified immunity motion by pointing to evidence of an officer’s bad faith,” Schwartz wrote earlier this year. “And the Court should broaden its definition of clearly established law—by making clear that courts of appeals can clearly establish the law, by defining clearly established law at a higher level of factual generality, and by recognizing obvious constitutional violations [...] without reference to an analogous case.”

Those suggestions may provide the court with a good starting point. “Doctrinal reform is arduous, often-Sisyphean work,” Willett observed in last month’s concurrence. “And the entrenched, judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity seems Kevlar-coated, making even tweak-level tinkering doubtful. But immunity ought not be immune from thoughtful reappraisal.”

Can an Organic Farmer Win in Appalachia Virginia?

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Virginia’s 9th congressional district, in the largely mountainous southwestern corner of the state, is one of the most conservative districts in the state—even the country. Cook Political Report says the district leans Republican by 19 points. Donald Trump won 68 percent of the vote there. It went for Mitt Romney and John McCain, and indeed every other Republican presidential candidate since 1964. When President Barack Obama travelled there in 2009 to build support for the Affordable Care Act, locals greeted him with protests. It is not a place any Democrat seems likely to win a race for Congress.

So Republican Congressman Morgan Griffith should, theoretically, have little trouble defeating Anthony Flaccavento this November. But the 9th district’s political history is more complicated than it seems, as reflected by Griffith’s own rise to power. He defeated Democratic incumbent Rick Boucher eight years ago with the backing of a newly powerful Tea Party movement. At the time, Boucher had represented the 9th for 28 years. The district’s Democrats now face the same quandary that confronts Democrats throughout these mountains: How can the party rebuild power in the Appalachians?

West Virginia’s Joe Manchin is one of the most conservative Democrats in the U.S. Senate, and thus embodies the old party doctrine that only conservative or moderate Democrats can reliably win in districts like Virginia’s 9th. But Flaccavento, a 61-year-old organic farmer and author, is running on Medicare for All, green alternatives to the coal industry, and abortion rights. Like Richard Ojeda in West Virginia’s 3rd congressional district, Flaccavento believes that progressive populism, not political moderation, can revive a flagging Democratic Party in rural America.

Ojeda recently campaigned for Flaccavento, crossing the state line in an expression of Appalachian solidarity. Ojeda’s race is a toss-up, or at worst leans Republican. But neither RealClearPolitics nor Cook Political Report rates the 9th as competitive. This also isn’t Flaccavento’s first run against Griffith. He lost to Griffith by 20 points in 2012.

But Flaccavento and his supporters say that this year is different, that the 9th is different. As evidence, his campaign cites internal polling that puts him within 7 points of Griffith. Flaccavento, who also supports stricter anti-trust regulation, a path to citizenship for DACA recipients, and an emphasis on rehabilitation over incarceration for opioid users, believes that Trump isn’t as popular as he used to be, even in western Virginia, and that Griffith’s political credit is running out.

“When I ran six years ago, Mr. Griffith was a first-term incumbent. So people were still kind of checking him out and giving him the benefit of the doubt,” he told me. “Now he’s been here for eight years, and people are no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt. They’re wondering what he’s doing.”


The Fighting 9th, as it’s called, is large. At more than 9,100 square miles, it’s larger than the state of New Jersey, but just 700,000 people live within its borders. It takes up the state’s entire Appalachian west, beginning just west of Roanoke and touching the borders of West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. The southern region of the district is historically agricultural; coal lies to the north. A successful insurgent will have to cover that distance, closing gaps both physical and political. To that end, Flaccavento has pledged to hold 100 town halls before polls open in November; his campaign says that as of today, he’s completed 80.

“It takes eight hours to traverse the entire district and in addition, it’s not very well populated. So in order for somebody to try and unseat an incumbent, you have to be able to put in a lot of miles on your car and wear out a lot of pairs of shoes,” said Delegate Chris Hurst, a Democrat in the General Assembly who represents the city of Radford and surrounding areas, which are in the 9th.

As the geography of the district defies easy generalities, so does its political identity. Trump has widespread support, but since he took office in 2016, regional loyalty to the president hasn’t always guaranteed victories for Republican candidates. Hurst defeated a Republican incumbent for his seat in 2017. And while Virginia’s western counties backed Republican Ed Gillespie for governor, data published by The New York Times after the conclusion of 2017’s gubernatorial race showed a shift toward blue: Ralph Northam, who defeated Gillespie, outperformed Hillary Clinton’s share of the 2016 vote in the 9th district.

The district’s historical voting patterns are idiosyncratic. In the coalfields, the United Mineworkers of America has long been an important vehicle for turning out Democratic votes. Bob Hutton, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the author of Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South, said the region’s Democratic support didn’t end with the coal counties. “We talk a lot about the mining districts up there on the West Virginia and Kentucky line,” he said. “You don’t often hear as much about the smattering of family farms that were still in existence... And those were farmers who had voted Democratic for the most part since the Great Depression, if not before.”

But they were also split-ticket voters. During Rick Boucher’s 28 years as the Democratic representative for the 9th, his constituents voted for Republican presidents. “Rick Boucher is from Washington County, Virginia,” Hutton said. “During that time, his hometown was never once carried by a Democratic president. In fact, Washington County hasn’t been carried by a Democratic president since 1964.” Griffith’s 2010 victory didn’t represent a Republican realignment, at least at the federal level, so much as it represented a solidification of Republican support.

Over the past decade, the state has shifted left in presidential and statewide elections—thanks largely to population growth in the northern half of the state, from Richmond to Washington, D.C. The question is whether western Virginia also will turn blue, or at least less red.

“I think the reason that Trump does well here is largely for the same reasons that he was able to carry five districts in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that had traditionally voted Democratic. You know, working people have historically looked to the Democratic Party as the party that offered solutions to their problems. And rightly so,” Boucher said in a phone call. He added that there’s “a fine line” between “working person sentiment” and the sort of populism Trump claimed to espouse, and that while Trump’s version was popular in the 9th, his success there doesn’t indicate that the district fundamentally changed in 2016.

“I think a Democrat who can talk about real problems in the community and ways to solve those problems, who really understands what the needs of working people are and who announces programs that will address those needs, has a very good chance of winning,” he said. “That is exactly who Anthony is.”


Like Hutton, I grew up in Washington County, where Flaccavento also farms. (None of us have met.) The Appalachian Regional Commission says Washington County’s economy is in “transition,” which means that its economy has improved while some surrounding counties still struggle. Even so, its rate of adults out of work is still significantly higher than the national average, according to the Economic Innovation Group, and life spans are shorter. Go north, up through the coalfield counties, and the poverty levels increase as employment levels decrease. There are bright spots in the district; the counties on the district’s eastern edge are better off economically than many counties to their west. The district might not be monolithic, but its inequalities are prevalent. Opioid addiction, black lung, depopulation—the 9th experiences it all.

The 9th district has, at times, turned to the political left to address its troubles. The region’s political history, like that of its neighbor, West Virginia, includes a tradition of militant labor organizing against the coal industry’s exploitative practices. And since 2016, progressives established a more visible presence, which could count in Flaccavento’s favor.

“I do think there has been an uptick in people willing to call themselves progressive,” said Robert Kell of Young Appalachian Patriots, a political group that formed as a response to Trump (and whose name intentionally echoes the Young Patriots Organization, a left-wing collective of Appalachian migrants in Chicago a half-century ago.) “I grew up in Marion, and I felt like there weren’t a lot of young progressive people in high school. But now that I’ve moved away and then come back, I feel like the vast majority of young people I know are progressive-leaning. When they talk about issues, they talk about issues in a way that that draws from their personal story. It demonstrates that they are very aware of the ways in which certain policies shape their lives.”

Kell cited Medicaid expansion, which the state General Assembly passed this year, as an example. “People have that real-life experience of waiting in line in Wise County to get their eyes checked and their teeth checked or get their diabetes under control. Sometimes they learn they have cancer for the first time in a barn,” he said, referring to the area’s free Remote Area Medical Clinics, which convene semi-regularly at the Wise County fairgrounds. Clinicians conduct some exams and treatments in a nearby horse barn due to space constraints. “When a candidate like Anthony comes and says, ‘Hey, you deserve to have healthcare, you deserve to be able to go to the doctor and have your health needs covered,’ I think people begin to understand that and really resonate with that message,” he added.

Meanwhile, Griffith’s critics say that his presence in the region has been sparing. He’s held a handful of town halls in the district since taking office; he held one in August in conjunction with the local chapter of the NAACP, according to Karen Jones, the chapter’s political action chair. “But those were pre-prepared written questions that he was provided. He took written questions from the audience, but that was just our members,” said Jones, who has been canvassing and phone-banking for the Flaccavento campaign. “So if you’re kind of outside of a member group or organization that he’s speaking in front of, I haven’t seen any open events for constituents to come to.”

Griffith, whose campaign did not return requests for comment, has lost at least one supporter as a result. Chris Church works at Bristol Compressors, or will until the end of the month; the plant is set to close on September 30, putting 470 people out of work. Church, who says he voted for Griffith (and Trump), credited Flaccavento for promptly reaching out to the plant’s workers, meeting with a group of them on August 16, six days before Griffith arrived to do the same; the Democrat also set up a helpline “to inform workers of their legal rights,” the Washington County News reported at the time. “He came and talked to us for a good hour and a half. He took a lot of notes,” Church said of Flaccavento. “And I have nothing against Morgan Griffith, but he has showed us no concern, other than [saying] ‘We’re looking into it. We’re looking into it.’” Church now says that he supports Flaccavento, as do a number of his coworkers.

Griffith’s absenteeism may not be enough to tip the race in Flaccavento’s favor. The Republican congressman can cite some achievements: In May, he harshly criticized opioid distributors for failing to report suspiciously large orders for painkillers. And in a September interview with The Virginian Review, he said that the “balanced regulations” he supports have saved local businesses like the WestRock paper mill in Covington, Virginia. He has $411,539 on hand to Flaccavento’s $100,762. Griffith also votes mostly in line with Trump, who is still popular with district voters.

But Flaccavento, who founded a consulting firm that advises communities on building farmers’ markets and supporting organic agriculture, believes his “rural progressive platform” can win them over. “I am very much a progressive. I am not a Joe Manchin Democrat one bit,” he said. “It really starts with the land, and it starts with people’s connection to the land, whether they’re farming or logging or fishing or hunting or mining. It starts with the thinking that whatever we do, and how many resources we put into protecting the land, we have to give the same attention and resources to ensuring that people can have a decent life.”

The French Plan to Fix Inequality—by Ignoring It

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In Paris, a highway called “the periphery” separates the privileged in the city from the marginalized “banlieues” or suburbs. Some residents of the banlieues even joke that they may as well need a passport to cross. But as students around the country head back to school this month, thousands of teachers are set to traverse this line, heading into some of the most underprivileged school districts in the country.   

The national education reforms being implemented this fall in France—including cutting class sizes, adding more evaluations, and banning mobile phone use—are the latest attempt by the government of Emmanuel Macron to close the staggering school performance gap between low-achieving students, who often live in the banlieues, and wealthier, predominantly white students. Macron’s government has heralded the reduction of certain primary school class sizes from 24 students per teacher to 12 students as a flagship reform—one that he started rolling out in 2017 and that he promises will transform public education, pouring teachers into the nation’s underperforming schools. Yet at the heart of the plan lies a questionable assumption: that the achievement gap in the banlieues can be solved through education reform alone.

In fact, the banlieues’ lagging academic performance is entangled with issues affecting low-income areas almost everywhere: low wages, high unemployment, and perhaps above all, systemic segregation. Institutional racism and a French system of social cachet created this problem decades ago. Some experts fear that the new measures are not so much a Band-Aid on a gaping wound (insufficient and ineffective) as bad medicine—liable to cause further damage.

“I think the proposed reforms even risk increasing inequalities,” said Philippe Meirieu, a French researcher in pedagogical science at the University of Lyon and a former left-wing political candidate. Adding more student evaluations, for instance, might only fill the most prestigious establishments with students who are labeled “good” from a young age, widening the lag with schools that are already struggling, according to Meirieu. He went so far as to call certain measures—including the option to switch from five days of primary school class per week to four—“catastrophic.” The measure was introduced primarily as a cost-saving technique, and its effect will be strongest in families where parents cannot afford to spend the day engaged in cultural or educational opportunities with their kids, giving wealthy children yet another advantage.

A survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2015 found that of the 72 countries surveyed, France was the country where a student’s social, economic, and cultural background had the greatest effect on school performance. Just two percent of students from low-income backgrounds were among the top performers while 40 percent were characterized as struggling in school.

Many of those low performers come from the banlieues, which first emerged outside of urban centers like Paris in the post-war years, their towering housing projects welcoming an influx of immigrants from North Africa. In the following decades the banlieues increasingly became associated with crime, drugs, low employment, and most recently radical Islam. The link between the banlieue and radical Islam is often more correlative than causal, but certain strains of extremism resonate in the banlieue because they speak to a reality of exclusion.

The borders of the banlieue fall along racial and ethnic lines, perpetuating a cycle of institutional racism common to cities in many countries: immigrants and people of color are segregated in their housing options, end up in schools with fewer resources, and in turn have trouble finding good jobs. Without a good job, they are likely to end up in segregated housing projects, where their children are cycled through the same poor schools. The schools in low-income neighborhoods also tend to have the least experienced teachers, who are often ill-equipped to deal with learning or behavioral issues.

Unemployment levels in low-income neighborhoods in France are three times the national average, according to government statistics published in 2016. And residents’ qualifications don’t always help them: The same study found that residents from low-income areas who had a master’s degree were still 22 percent less likely to find a job than their metropolitan counterparts.

Social cachet plays a strong role in determining who succeeds in France. The Republic insists that its institutions are blind to race, ethnicity, and social class. Yet children who attend schools of a certain name, who are taken on cultural excursions from a young age, who are taught the specific codes of behavior endemic to French culture tend to do better—as do children with certain family names. A 2010 Stanford study found that a résumé submitted under a typically Muslim name like “Khadija” was two-and-a-half times less likely to receive a response than one submitted with identical qualifications under a non-Muslim name.

“We live in a country where equal human rights are declared in our constitution as a founding principle, and at the same time where school inequalities are structural. They have existed for a long time,” said Michel Kokoreff, a sociologist who has been studying the banlieues for more than three decades.

The government has made class size its signature reform effort. On the surface the idea seems unassailable, creating good media buzz. But it doesn’t address all of the other social and environmental factors that contribute to ongoing inequality.

Macron’s government has a history of denying the role played by race and ethnicity. In 2017, a teacher’s union attempted to host a two-day conference about “discrimination in the national education system,” open only to teachers of color. The education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer threatened to file a lawsuit against the union, claiming that even using the term “state racism” constituted national defamation.

For a former cabinet member under socialist President Francois Hollande, who himself campaigned relatively progressively in his presidential bid, Emmanuel Macron has proved a disappointment to leftists. The president has spent the past year attempting to situate himself as a new kind of politician, grandstanding on progressive causes like the environment, all while constructing a typically conservative agenda, including slashing labor protections and increasing executive power. Blanquer, a former high-ranking official in the Republican government of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, has similarly tried to rebrand himself.

“The important idea is that if we take the political agenda of Jean-Michel Blanquer and Emmanuel Macron as a whole, this measure is very isolated,” said Pierre Clement, a lecturer at the University of Rouen with a doctorate degree in sociology. “My fear is that that the government will stop its efforts here.”

Clement expressed some of the same fears as Meirieu, noting that these reforms could, paradoxically, make matters worse. He pointed to the move to allow families’ greater choice in where their children go to school (a promise first made by Sarkozy). Historically, greater choice in school is also accompanied by greater inequality, as this freedom often only serves to drain wealthier students from low-income districts who can afford to go somewhere else.

With the central structures kept intact, educational inequality will continue to flourish. And reforms that address the symptom and not the disease—namely, systemic inequality—seem likely to help politicians more than students.

Penguin Random House Is Building the Perfect Publishing House

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When Penguin and Random House announced in the fall of 2012 that they intended to merge, Hurricane Sandy was barreling toward New York City, America’s publishing capital. It was an instant metaphor for headline writers: “As Sandy Loomed, the Publishing Industry Panicked.” People inside both companies worried about their jobs; people outside the companies worried about the market power of a new conglomerate comprised of the country’s two largest trade publishers. Agents and authors, meanwhile, worried that the consolidation would further drive down advances.

Random House’s top brass insisted that there was no need to panic. “The continuity will far outweigh the change,” Markus Dohle, the CEO of what would become Penguin Random House, told The New York Times when the merger was completed the following summer. “We have the luxury to take the time before we make any strategic decisions. There is no need to rush.”

This has been the story of Penguin Random House these past five years. Privately owned, the company has moved deliberately, while publicly traded competitors like HarperCollins (which is owned by News Corp) and Simon & Schuster (CBS) have had to fend off pressures from shareholders. It has not used its gargantuan size—it controls more than half of the traditional literary marketplace according to many estimates—to take back territory from Amazon. Instead, it has focused on building equity and ensuring that it publishes the next generation of bestsellers. In so doing, Penguin Random House has built what may be the perfect corporate publishing house. There’s just one problem: Thanks to Amazon, the age of the imperious corporate publishing house is coming to an end.

In July of this year, on the fifth anniversary of the merger, Dohle took a victory lap. Publishers Weekly touted Penguin Random House’s size ($3.4 billion in sales, 275 imprints, 700 million books sold a year, 14,000 new releases, 10,000 employees), prestige (60 Nobel laureates), and the seamlessness of the merger itself. Given the size of the two companies involved, it had the potential to be a logistical and cultural nightmare. But according to Dohle, it was an organic effort. “We literally designed and implemented the merger together as a team without all of the consultants and external advisers of usual mergers,” Dohle told Publishers Weekly. “Doing it our way meant that the new Penguin Random House became ‘our’ company. Designed and implemented by us.”

The point of a Penguin Random House is to create scale. It is larger than its four biggest rivals combined, and its sheer size gives it leverage to promote and sell books. “We are able to leverage scale in direct marketing to consumers and in our supply chain to support our retailers and to get our books into the hands of readers quickly,” Penguin Random House spokesperson Claire Von Schilling told me in an email. “We have the largest book sales force in the world, with unparalleled reach into every different kind of bookseller globally.”

Penguin Random House’s digital marketing and data efforts are the envy of the industry, which in many ways still publishes books way the same way that it did 50 years ago. Penguin Random House uses consumer data and information from Goodreads to help acquire prospective bestsellers, which then get the promotional benefits of Penguin Random House’s size and influence. Corporate publishing in the 21st century is driven by bestsellers—both the backlist (older books) and the midlist (non-bestsellers) have never had less impact, making it all the more important to score big hits.

When it comes to digital marketing, customer acquisition, and data analysis, little is being left to chance. That fastidiousness was also evident in the nearly imperceptible way that the merger was undertaken. There have been more layoffs than the media coverage would suggest, and redundant imprints have been shuttered. There is some concern, particularly after the company announced an early retirement buyout earlier this summer, that further layoffs are on the horizon. But Von Schilling told me there were “no layoffs and no plans for any.” And there have been no Black Fridays, no major disruptions to business.

This is where being privately owned has been a major boon for Penguin Random House, allowing for a slow, smooth transition. But calling what happened a merger has never quite been accurate—Random House all but acquired Penguin. While many of Penguin’s imprints have been preserved, multiple former Penguin employees and agents told me that the company’s unique corporate culture—a confederacy of personality-driven fiefdoms—no longer exists.

The editorial independence of various imprints was of great concern for agents, who worried that a single publisher controlling more than half of the market in some genres, including literary fiction, would drive advances down. It’s difficult to determine the precise impact of the merger on advances, but it’s clear that the worst-case scenarios haven’t occurred. Despite some changes, Penguin Random House’s imprints still compete against one another for books in a system that angers some executives, but ultimately serves to further the company’s ultimate goal of increasing its likelihood of acquiring bestsellers.

Amazon is the most important subject in the publishing industry in 2018, as it has been for the last fifteen years, but Penguin Random House has consistently downplayed the Amazon threat. Asked if additional size has benefited the publisher in its dealings with retailers, Von Schilling responded, “That was not a purpose of the merger.”

Even before the merger, Random House treated Amazon more conservatively than its rivals. While the other five, for instance, were sued for antitrust violations for joining forces with Apple to fight Amazon’s e-book dominance, Random House kept its hands clean (Penguin settled with the Department of Justice less than two months after the merger was announced). To many, this was a savvy play. Penguin Random House’s remit, after all, is to sell books, not to go to war with its retail partners.

But others have expressed frustration with Penguin Random House’s timidity. The point of market share, they argue, is to exert influence over retailers and there is little evidence that Penguin Random House has done this in a meaningful way (though it’s possible that it does receive slightly better terms than its rivals). Still, Amazon has spent the past several years accruing significant power in the industry. It has further cemented its hold over bookselling. It has feuded with other conglomerate publishers, notably Hachette, while building up its own disruptive publishing arms. These include the Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service, which has taken over genre publishing, and Audible, which has a stranglehold on audiobooks, the industry’s most important growth sector. When it comes to publishing, Amazon has arguably never been more powerful.

It’s possible that some master plan is afoot in the inner sanctum of Penguin Random House to bend Amazon to its will. In the meantime, Penguin Random House has spent the last five years perfecting the corporate publishing house, shoring up its ability to publish bestsellers. The problem is that in the age of Amazon that may not be enough. In the long term, perhaps the wisest move isn’t to build an organism that blends seamlessly with an aggressive retailer, but one that fights against it.

How to Win in Trump Country

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At an August rally in West Virginia for Patrick Morrisey, the crowd at the Charleston Civic Center was largely there to see Donald Trump. The president had flown in to give Morrisey, the state’s attorney general, a boost in his attempt to unseat Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in the midterms this fall. Morrisey gave Trump a grateful look as he strode on stage, declaring, “We love you, Mr. President!” In the midst of his stump speech, he even coined a Trump-esque epithet for his opponent: “dishonest liberal Joe Manchin.”

Trump played some of his greatest hits (“the people of West Virginia can’t stand winning so much”) to a rapturous audience. Whether he succeeded in generating enthusiasm for Morrisey, a round-shouldered man with glasses who stood a half-head shorter than the president, was another question. One attendee, John Shannon, who wore a Trump 2020 hat and was angling to shake hands with a Fox News personality, told me he needed to “do some more research” before he could say who he’d back in the Senate race.

That Trump is needed in West Virginia to boost his party’s Senate candidate is indicative of the problems Republicans face in 2018, even in so-called Trump Country. Two years ago, Republicans absolutely dominated West Virginia. The Mountain State gave Trump his second-biggest percentage of the vote (67.9 percent) in the country after Wyoming, and his second-biggest margin of victory (41.7 percentage points), also after Wyoming. Republicans that year retained majorities in both chambers of the state legislature and successfully defended all three congressional seats.

Now, however, Manchin has a narrow but tangible lead over Morrisey. In southern West Virginia, Richard Ojeda, an Army veteran who voted for Trump but is running for Congress as a pro-pot, pro-labor Democrat, has made a competitive race out of one of the Trumpiest districts in the country. Teachers in West Virginia won national attention in late winter for a strike that cascaded into similar actions in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and beyond, and their actions have been injecting energy into state legislative races.

It’s tempting to see in these events a blue wave that’s poised to break over the country, including in states that went hard for Trump two years ago. But that’s not what’s happening in West Virginia. If Manchin successfully wins re-election in November, it will be precisely because he prevented his campaign from turning into a referendum on the president.

Consider Manchin’s response to Trump’s rally. Hours before, Manchin’s campaign sent out a message that began this way: “It’s always special when the president of the United States comes to West Virginia.” Manchin then sent another publicity blast expressing his support for the Trump administration’s rewrite of the Clean Power Plan, which rolls back planned restrictions on carbon emissions that would have accelerated the national shift away from coal-fired electricity. Subject line: “Manchin Applauds New Trump Energy Policy, and Help for Coal Miners.”

This is not a Democrat running against the president; this is a Democrat racing to embrace him.


Joe Manchin’s kind is virtually extinct. More than any other U.S. senator, he has successfully carved out a spot in Capitol Hill’s political center, occupying a no man’s land between a Democratic Party tilting left and a Republican Party becoming more Trump-like by the day.

“He’s the party of Joe Manchin,” said Hoppy Kercheval, a radio journalist who’s been covering West Virginia for four decades. “He now runs more as a populist than as a Democrat.”

His brand predates his own career. His uncle, A. James Manchin, served in President John F. Kennedy’s administration before winning three statewide elections as a Democrat. He then worked closely with Republican Arch Moore, a congressman, three-time governor, and the father of Joe Manchin’s fellow U.S. senator from West Virginia, Shelley Moore Capito.

When Manchin ran for governor in 1996, and suffered his only career election loss in a Democratic primary to progressive Charlotte Pritt, he joined a group of Democrats backing her Republican opponent Cecil Underwood, who went on to win the general election. The 1996 election was also the last time West Virginia voted for a Democrat for president. Some blame conservative Democrats like Manchin, who ultimately prevailed in his bid to become governor in 2004, for the party’s woes in the state. “The Democratic Party doesn’t stand for anything that the Democratic Party used to stand for,” Pritt told me. “It’s completely been eviscerated since Joe Manchin took control of the party.”

After Senator Robert Byrd died in 2010, Manchin won a special election to replace him in a year in which Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. A viral television ad showing Manchin shooting the House’s cap-and-trade carbon emission bill introduced him to the country even as his fellow Appalachian Democrats became an endangered species.

In the Senate, Manchin blazed a center-right path that placed him to the right of all other Senate Democrats and even a couple of Republicans, according to GovTrack’s ideology score. Planned Parenthood gives him a 57 percent rating. In 2012, he received an “A” from the National Rifle Association. Later that year, after the Sandy Hook mass shooting that left 20 children dead, Manchin reconsidered his policy position on guns, co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill to expand background checks that failed. Now the NRA has given Manchin a “D” and is running ads against him in state.

Although Manchin endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, he has been a rare Democratic ally of Trump since his election victory, voting for all but a few of the president’s cabinet nominations and loudly applauding his rollback of environmental protections. However, he stuck with Democrats as they defended Obamacare and tried to scuttle the $1.5 trillion Republican tax package—making him a possibly valuable vote on key issues if Democrats manage to take back control of the government in 2020.


Manchin’s relative independence, frequent support for conservative policies, and outspoken devotion to West Virginia’s fossil fuel industries enabled him to survive the Obama years, when Republicans used “War on Coal” messaging to wipe out Democrats in rural areas.

“Joe Manchin’s six-year term coincides with catastrophe down the ballot for the Democrats,” said Chris Regan, a prominent voice among West Virginia progressives. He cited Governor Jim Justice’s party flip in 2017, which gave the GOP control of the governor’s mansion and codified West Virginia’s transition from a blue state to a deep-red one. Regan ticked off the other losses: “They lost the board of public works, four of the five seats. They lost the state House of Delegates. They lost the state Senate. They lost two out of three congressional seats. It’s extraordinary how the state has changed during his six years.”

These dynamics have resulted in an atypical Senate race, with Morrisey, the Republican, hoping to turn it into a referendum on the nationally unpopular Trump and Manchin, the Democrat, trying to keep Trump out of it.

Manchin may have lucked out in his opponent. In the Republican primary, Morrisey faced off against former Democrat Evan Jenkins and former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who had just come off a one-year prison sentence for conspiring to skirt mine safety rules at Upper Big Branch, where a 2010 explosion killed 29 miners. Blankenship drained enough ballots from Jenkins in southern West Virginia to hand Morrisey the win.

Morrisey is the perfect foil for Manchin, who can attack his challenger in ways that highlight his own strengths and diminish his own weaknesses by comparison. Manchin’s a West Virginia native who has spent his whole life in-state. Morrisey grew up in New Jersey and unsuccessfully ran for Congress there before moving to West Virginia.

Manchin’s daughter is the CEO for Mylan, the second-largest generic pharmaceutical manufacturer, which has been sued for overpricing its EpiPen line for emergency treatment of anaphylaxis. But Morrisey himself worked as a pharmaceutical lobbyist whose clients included McKesson, a drug wholesaler that contributed to the opioid epidemic by flooding West Virginia with 100 million pain pills over five years. Morrisey’s wife Denise is also a lobbyist, who has argued against opioid restrictions for the pharmaceutical giant Cardinal Health.

Health care has become one of the few nationalized focal points in the race. But it’s not one that favors Morrisey. Barack Obama is still unpopular in West Virginia, but key elements of his signature Affordable Care Act—especially coverage for pre-existing conditions and the Medicaid expansion—are popular among a majority of state residents. So while West Virginians have cheered Morrisey’s efforts to fight Obama’s Clean Power Plan in court, they’re skeptical of his legal attempt to overturn Obamacare. In September, Manchin reprised his cap-and-trade stunt with a viral ad that featured him firing a bullet into Morrisey’s lawsuit.  

“The Manchin campaign is going to run a straightforward, health care-and-corruption kind of campaign,” said Scott Crichlow, associate professor of political science at West Virginia University.


The hard-fought primary drained Morrisey’s campaign funds, leaving him with less than $900,000, compared to Manchin’s $6.3 million. Over the summer, Democrats and their allies hit Morrisey with ads about his lobbyist past and his carpetbagging, while Republican spots dared Manchin to vote against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and tried to tie him to national Democrats.

Meanwhile, Manchin himself ran low to the ground, restricting himself to spot appearances at tailgates, festivals, and meetings of civic groups, and all but ghosting the national media, which has become one of Trump’s primary enemies. As campaign spokesman Grant Herring told me, “We are keeping a laser-like focus on local media at this point.”

The strategy, so far, seems to have worked, allowing Morrisey’s drawbacks to dominate the story of the race. When I had visited Ojeda, the Democrat running in the 3rd District, last year, he was wasn’t happy with the senator. “What’s he done for West Virginia that’s made him so awesome?” Ojeda asked as we drove around Logan that fall day.

But then Ojeda won the Democratic nomination and went on to become one of the heroes of the West Virginia teacher’s strike. When I spoke to him in August of this year, Ojeda offered his ticket-mate praise for fighting for coal miner pensions, but grew more animated when Morrisey the “carpet-bagger” came up. “Patrick Morrisey means nothing to me,” Ojeda spat. “He is a bootlicker. If shoe polish was poison, he’d be dead. Make sure you write that!”

The carpet-bagger accusation came up frequently in interviews with people across the state. “He doesn’t know people,” said a West Virginia Republican who did not want to be named. “It’s not that he’s from New Jersey, it’s that he’s not from here.”


In February, the marble halls of the state capitol in Charleston rang with the sound of thousands of teachers singing “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” In mid-August, it was quiet. The teachers who had packed the halls a few months ago had gone back home, with many getting involved in state legislative races.

Those state races are also a part of the Manchin’s Senate race. As West Virginia attorney general, Morrisey threatened an injunction against the striking teachers and school personnel. He didn’t follow through, but his words have not been forgotten. The American Federation of Teachers in West Virginia has endorsed Manchin, as has the WV Education Association and WV School Service Personnel Association.

“While I do not always agree with Joe, I have met him on a few occasions and it seems as though he puts thought into the decisions he makes in representing us,” said Joshua Gary, president of the AFT’s Marshall County chapter. “Attorney General Morrisey was reportedly looking to file injunctions against us during the strike, so right there he lost my vote.”

Carrena Rouse, president of the AFT’s Boone County chapter, grew up as the daughter of parents who were involved in the Democratic Party machine of the 1960s. She remembers coal company representatives threatening her mother’s job, which led Rouse to leave the Democrats and register as a Republican. Several years ago she switched back again. Manchin’s positions appeal to Rouse, who believes in economic and social justice but also wants the right to own a gun and is against late-term abortion.

“I’m not a fan of the good ole boy ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,’” Rouse said, “but that’s what’s taking place. I’d rather have Joe than someone who’s going to sell me out because they have a political lobbyist background. I understand where Joe Manchin comes from. I really believe he’s trying to find a way to put West Virginia first.”

More than coal or cultural issues, what unites West Virginia voters is the desire for someone who will fight for them. The Mountain State frequently finds itself near the bottom of state-by-state rankings, whether in median household income (48th), teacher pay (47th), or health care rankings (44th). West Virginia has a long history of exploitation by outside interests, with revenue from timber, coal, and most recently natural gas flowing out to companies and individuals in other states. Its voters want someone who will look out for them.

That’s what Trump did in 2016, promising to bring back coal, while Hillary Clinton’s out-of-context remark about putting coal miners out of work sealed her doom. Voters in West Virginia do not appear unduly concerned by the hollowness of Trump’s promises. His continued attention has mattered more, it seems, than his follow-through (or lack thereof). His repeated appearances in the state have won him support that’s persisted throughout his troubled presidency.

Manchin’s campaign leans heavily on his loyalty to West Virginia. In August, he dropped an ad in which he appears in a town with dozens of state residents. So the GOP’s best shot is to nationalize the race and paint Manchin as a liberal Democrat who hates Trump. “Manchin is a Democrat running who over time has become more and more part of the liberal Washington Democratic establishment,” said former West Virginia GOP chairman Conrad Lucas. “The state has moved away from him as he’s moved away from the state.”

Or as Hoppy Kercheval put it, “When you hear Morrisey, he’s going to talk about Joe Manchin, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and maybe Barack Obama. He’s going to try to put them all in the same sentence.”

But Obama is not in the White House. And Morrisey is still facing attacks from Blankenship, his primary opponent, who has blasted Morrisey for being “a guy who could not find many of the counties you fellas live in without a GPS.”

The lessons that Democrats might draw from Manchin are this: Represent your constituents, even if it means sometimes breaking with party leadership. Keep the focus local. Talk about health care. And maybe most importantly, draw the right opponent.

Greek Economic Recovery Has Nothing to Do With Odysseus

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In 2010, at a picturesque port on the island of Kastelorizo, then Prime Minister George Papandreou announced the start of “a new Odyssey for Greeks”: entry into an austerity-focused International Monetary Fund-European Union bailout agreement to help finance the country’s debt. “We know the route to Ithaca,” Papandreou said, “and we’ve got a map.” Eight years and $360 billion later, last month Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced the end of the third such bailout program. Speaking from a peaceful cove on the island of Ithaca itself—Odysseus’s home and final destination—Tsipras took full advantage of the symbolism to declare the long voyage over.

The analogy was designed to appeal to the country’s love of associating with the grandeur of Ancient Greece, and to flatter its citizens, comparing their troubles with the story of one of literature’s archetypal heroes, whom they study in school. In Homer’s epic poem, it took Odysseus ten years to return to his home island after the end of the Trojan war, making eight years of contemporary austerity a slight improvement. Greek citizens had to face pension cuts and tax hikes, and infrastructure privatization. Odysseus had to fight a Cyclops, survive storms at sea conjured up by the god Poseidon himself, navigate his ship between Scylla and Charybdis, resist the enchanting song of the Sirens, and even pay a visit to the underworld .

But beneath the superficial lure of a mythic analogy, the comparison suggests a worrying degree of confusion in Greek political discourse about what the past eight years have meant, and the lessons the country should draw from them.

Arnold Böcklin’s depiction of Odysseus and the CyclopsWikimedia Commons

The Odyssey is a story about the triumph of human agency. Even though Odysseus’s return to Ithaca is aided by the goddess Athena, his struggle is that of a mere mortal against divine powers—a celebration of resourcefulness and tenacity in the face of life-threatening challenges thrown at him by gods much more powerful than he is. The Greek crisis, meanwhile—according to the narrative that the current Greek government itself created—was the story not of a country employing the powers of quick thinking and creativity to come up with clever ways of overcoming the tricky predicament it found itself in, but of a country which had a solution imposed on it from above. The bailout agreements contained detailed rules about the running of the state and its economy, which many Greek citizens perceived as undermining Greece’s autonomy and democracy.

Nor have these last eight years been a story of Greece’s tenacity and determination to overcome its crisis, despite what its citizens have suffered — a 25 percent loss of the country’s GDP, numerous pension cuts, and unemployment rates of 30 percent. Elected officials of this period, despite voting through parliament the terms of one bailout agreement after another, went on to drag their feet throughout their application, often merely pretending to comply with the terms. The behavior resembled Virgil’s less flattering portrayal of Odysseus in the Aeneid—as the crafty con-man behind the Trojan horse—more than Homer’s honorable protagonist.

But, above all, comparing the present moment to Odysseus’s Ithaca homecoming suggests a return to how things were before: something neither possible nor desirable for Greece in the wake of the financial crisis. A return to ‘how things were before’ for Greece would mean a return to a state of ignorant bliss, before the abrupt awakening of 2010, when the severity of the debt crisis became explicit. It would also mean a return to an economy and political class with all the bad habits and mismanagement practices that helped set the country on this woeful journey in the first place. What’s more, despite the official end of the bailout agreements, Greece is still bound by numerous commitments to its creditors for the coming years, including  what many claim are unrealistic growth and surplus targets. It will remain under surveillance for years to come by its creditors to ensure it actually meets those targets. Greece is a long way from returning to a sense of normality, and has yet to regain autonomy when it comes to decision-making about its economy. Even Tsipras contradicted his own analogy with his closing statement: “Ithaca is only the beginning”—a stark departure from the final destination Ithaca represented in Homer’s poem.

“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition,” according to philosopher Daniel Dennett, is “telling stories and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others—and ourselves—about who we are.” It’s a statement as true of politics as of individuals. 

But not all of the stories we tell about ourselves are equally convincing, and some of them might even be damaging. The Odysseus analogy is just the latest in series of Greek narratives since the start of the crisis, none of which helped the country understand how it had arrived near the point of debt default, nor how to fix the situation. On the one hand, there were the ‘grand scale’ narratives, seeing Greece as the victim of global finance or of a rigged Euro structure that benefitted richer, northern countries and punished the poorer, southern ones. That story downplayed any way Greek actions might have contributed to the crisis, therefore also downplaying any Greek ability to improve the situation. Other narratives focused on the mistakes of Greece’s own political class: Some saw Greece as paying the price of hubris for all those years of living beyond its means and for citizens’ tax-evasion, meaning maybe Greece deserved what it was going through. Then there were those who saw the crisis as simply the result of badly negotiated bailout agreements—negotiations a game-theory specialist finance minister, like the one installed later in 2015, could do better at.

These narratives were all one-sided and reductive. The truth is that the Greek crisis was caused by a combination of factors: domestic mismanagement of the economy and budget, the overreaction of financial markets to any new potential threat after failing to predict the 2007 subprime mortgages crash, and the EU’s lack of structures to help manage a country’s bankruptcy. In failing to recognise the numerous causes contributing to Greece’s crisis, the dominant narratives oversimplified the country’s complex predicament. 

The fundamental issue with the reductive narratives has been that they made the crisis seem either impossible to overcome, or something that could be simply solved by the right election or referendum result, neither of which were true. Concrete policies, not merely the signalling of political will, were and are necessary at the domestic level, and better structures possible at the European Union level.

Perhaps looking for narratives about its past was the wrong exercise for Greece during these years. In trying to make sense of the present by looking backwards, these stories served as a distraction or exculpatory narrative. Abandoning these self-serving origin stories, along with the implausible appeals to Ancient Greek myths, would allow Greece to focus on developing a different kind of narrative—one about where it wants to be in the future.  A return to Ithaca is not an option.   

Hurricane Florence Is a Public Health Emergency, Too

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Florence, the hurricane charging toward the Carolina coast, has been called a “monster,” a “Mike Tyson punch,” and the “storm of a lifetime.On Wednesday, it was generating waves up to 83-feet high. Though Florence was downgraded to Category 2 on Wednesday night, the National Hurricane Center says it’s still an “extremely dangerous major hurricane” that’s expected to bring “life-threatening storm surge”—as high as 13 feet in some places—and as much as 40 inches of rain, which “would produce catastrophic flash flooding and prolonged significant river flooding.”

Residents are bracing for the impact, as more than 750,000 homes are at risk from storm surge damage, according to one estimate. But coastal properties aren’t the only ones that could be pummeled. Heavy, prolonged rainfall—perhaps up to 40 inchesis expected over a large portion of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Much of the ground there is already saturated from past wet weather, increasing the likelihood of catastrophic flooding in inland homes and businesses.

But experts are also warning that Florence will bring something less visible: an unprecedented threat of sickness, particularly to low-income communities and other vulnerable populations. The storm is predicted to move inland after making landfall, and its likely path runs through the heart of North Carolina’s hog farming and coal country, where dozens of unlined lagoons of animal feces and chemical waste sit adjacent to the drinking water sources of thousands of rural poor.

“The path it’s currently on is about as bad as it could be,” said Geoff Gisler, who heads up the Southern Environmental Law Center’s clean water program. According to the National Hurricane Center, Florence is expected to travel directly through North Carolina’s coastal lowlands, where much of the state’s 9 million hogs are raised. (North Carolina has 10 million people.) These hog operations produce almost 10 billion gallons of feces a year—“enough to fill more than 15,000 Olympic-size swimming pools,” according to the Environmental Working Group. That feces is then stored in large open-air lagoons, which Gisler said risk overflow with Florence’s massive expected rainfall totals.

Overflows bring a number of health risks. “You don’t want hog waste flowing freely for the same reasons you wouldn’t want sewage flowing freely into the river and the house,” Gisler said. Feces is a breeding ground for bacterial pathogens like salmonella and giardia, and exposure via drinking water could cause experience a number of gastrointestinal problems. Exposure via open wounds or other mucous membranes could cause E. coli.

North Carolina has seen this before. During Hurricane Floyd in 1999, the manure lagoons from dozens of hog farms spilled “over thousands of acres of private and public lands and into the watersheds of four rivers that feed the second-largest estuary system in the nation,” according to the environmental news site Coastal Review. The storm’s extreme rainfall also killed more than 20,000 hogs, whose drowned bodies’ were scattered across the coastal landscape. The state legislature passed a moratorium on new manure lagoons after Floyd, but critics say little has been done to reduce the number of them across the state.

This also happened, to a lesser degree, in 2016, when Hurricane Matthew submerged 14 hog manure lagoons. That time, farmers managed to pump out some waste before the storm hit, and used it as fertilizer on nearby fields. Pork farmers have been doing the same thing this week, in preparation for Florence. But Gisler says this solution is inadequate because once heavy rainfall starts, fecal matter spread on farmland will still run off into waterways and seep into groundwater.

There’s also concern about overflows from North Carolina’s huge pits of coal ash—the waste left over from coal burning. This byproduct—which often includes metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, chromium, and selenium—is often stored in unlined pits next to lakes and rivers, because coal plants need to be near water sources to generate steam. North Carolina has at least two dozen of these pits, many of which are located alongside major river systems like the Neuse, Cape Fear, and Lumber—all in Florence’s projected path.

Eastern North Carolina is the worst place a hurricane could come in terms of coal ash risk to communities,” said Frank Holleman, an SELC senior attorney who works on the issue. “These sites are dangerous when the sun is shining,” he said, referring to past spills that sullied local drinking water sources with toxic gook. “But when you have high winds, floodwaters, storm surges, and then flooding from heavy rains, each these sites is a cause of serious concern for communities and rivers throughout coastal North Carolina.”

In preparation for Florence, the Environmental Protection Agency is monitoring nine of the nation’s most toxic sites—known as Superfund sites—where various chemicals and pesticides risk spreading due to excessive rainfall. But that’s only a fraction of the Superfund sites in Florence’s path, according to the Kansas City Star, which counted more than 60.

Massive hurricanes like Florence threaten public health no matter where they hit. Warm, still floodwaters always serve as breeding grounds for infectious diseases and mosquitoes. Flooding always causes sewage and wastewater treatment systems to fail, overflowing into homes and businesses. High winds and heavy rains always cause infrastructure damage and power outages, which make it harder for people to access medical care. And poor, minority, and elderly populations are always disproportionately affected.

But there’s also always a twist, said Irwin Redlener, the director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness. “Every single storm has its own identity, its own fingerprint,” he said. “No two are ever alike.” For Hurricane Harvey in Texas last year, it was the storm’s close proximity to the nation’s petrochemical infrastructure—a proximity which led to gas spills, air pollution, and chemical explosions. For Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, it was the island’s already-crumbling electricity infrastructure and the Trump administration’s weak preparation and response.

For Hurricane Florence, Redlender fears it will be defined by its impact on the rural poor. “There’s a lot of poverty in those communities,” he said. The health impacts from the state’s hog farming industry, for instance, disproportionately affect poor and African American communities. And when public health impacts hit poor communities, the effects are generally worse. “You’re more vulnerable to everything,” he said. “Your health problems are more prevalent and severe. You won’t have the access or ability to purchase medications. You’re more likely to be uninsured.”


New York Elects Its Next Anti-Trump Warrior

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By winning the Democratic primary to be New York’s next attorney general, Tish James is now virtually guaranteed to become the state’s top legal officer this November. That position will almost immediately make her into a national figure—and perhaps the most influential state official in the country who isn’t a governor.

James, who currently serves as the public advocate of New York City, trounced three rivals to capture the Democratic nomination. The race saw strong challenges from her left flank by Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor known for her anti-corruption work, and Sean Patrick Mahoney, a sitting congressman. New York’s status as a Democratic stronghold means that the party’s primary is the de facto election to office, and her victory in November is all but certain.

It’s no slight against other states to note that James will wield slightly more power than the typical attorney general. Other big blue states are home to strong attorneys general, too: California’s Xavier Becerra, for example, is a leading figure in litigation against the Trump administration. (The state budget even set aside more money for him to fight the White House last year.) But it’s hard to compete with New York. After all, it’s easy to become a national figure when your jurisdiction includes the nation’s preeminent urban metropolis and the nerve centers of American media.

That’s become more true in the past decade, as attorneys general have become key players in national politics. Republican-led offices frequently banded together to challenge the Obama administration, from the Affordable Care Act to his executive order enacting the DACA program for children of undocumented immigrants. After Trump took office, it was the blue states’ turn. Democratic attorneys general have waged their own legal wars on the Trump administration’s travel ban, regulatory rollbacks, and family separations. Those fights have made the position into a politically lucrative one in an era where Democrats are powerless in Washington. Keith Ellison, who was a rising Democratic star in Congress, opted to run for the Minnesota attorney general’s office this year instead.

New York’s singular status gives James even more opportunities to make a national impact. The state is home to the bulk of America’s financial infrastructure, thereby giving its attorney general a unique set of responsibilities. Eliot Spitzer spent the bulk of his tenure using New York’s broad anti-fraud laws to investigate major Manhattan banks and corporations, a crusade that transformed the office into “the sheriff of Wall Street” and catapulted him to the state governorship. (He resigned two years later after a prostitution scandal.) Andrew Cuomo, the state’s current governor, succeeded Spitzer and followed a similar path, minus the prostitution scandal.

James will be expected to carry on the office’s modern role as a financial watchdog and an anti-corruption enforcer, though she disclaimed the “sheriff of Wall Street” moniker on the campaign trail. But the job’s most pressing responsibility today is keeping an eye on an even bigger fish. By sheer happenstance, President Donald Trump and his business empire fall under the jurisdiction of the New York attorney general’s office. This wouldn’t matter much under normal circumstances, but Trump is not a normal president.

In fact, two of James’s predecessors have already tangled with the president. In 2013, Eric Schneiderman began investigating Trump University, a now-defunct real-estate seminar program, for defrauding thousands of its customers. Lawsuits in other states depicted the seminars as a scheme preying on financially insecure people and offering them mundane real-estate advice for thousands of dollars. Trump settled the lawsuits, including Schneiderman’s, for $25 million after the election. Earlier this year, current New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood sued to shut down the Donald J. Trump Foundation for habitually violating state charity laws. James pledged to serve as an anti-corruption check on the president during her candidacy.

Policing Trump’s business empire may only be the beginning. The New York attorney general’s office has reportedly worked with special counsel Robert Mueller on his sprawling investigation into Russian electoral meddling, although the full extent of the offices’ cooperation is unknown. There’s widespread speculation that the New York attorney general could theoretically function as a dead man’s switch for the Russia investigation, continuing the case in some form even if the federal inquiry is shut down. Trump could theoretically fire Mueller, purge the rest of the Justice Department, and pardon his political allies at a moment’s notice. But he has no power over state-level investigations, and presidential pardons only apply to federal crimes.

As a result, James could find herself playing a pivotal role in American history should the worst come to pass. She made clear on the campaign trail that she’s eager for the fight. “The president of the United States has to worry about three things: Mueller, [Michael] Cohen, and Tish James,” she said in a recent interview. “We’re all closing in on him.”

Britain’s Boarding School Problem

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When socially privileged children are separated from their families at a tender age, some develop what psychotherapists have called “Boarding School Syndrome”: “a defensive and protective encapsulation of the self,” in which they learn to hide emotion, fake maturity, and assert dominance over anyone weaker. They develop loyalty to their institutional tribe and suspicion of outsiders; they become bullies devoted to winning above all. If these traits sound familiar, it may be because the men who sent Britain careening into the catastrophe of Brexit—David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage—are all products of elite boarding schools, notorious symbols of social and economic inequality. These institutions—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster and their ilk—may be quintessentially English, but, as they have become the ultimate educational status symbol for the global super-rich, their influence today extends across the world.

POSH BOYS: HOW THE ENGLISH PUBLIC SCHOOLS RUIN BRITAIN by Robert VerkaikOneworld Publications, 304 pp., $25.99

Robert Verkaik’s new book Posh Boys is a detailed and damning history of the institutions that at once run and ruin Britain. The most venerable of the confusingly-named “public” schools were established in late medieval England to educate poor but talented boys in religion and classics. They continued to teach that curriculum long after their charitable purpose had faded, and by their golden age in the nineteenth century, the public schools’ main purpose was to groom upper-class boys to become the administrators of the British Empire. They instilled an “unshakeable confidence” and sense of superiority in their pupils, as members of the best class of the best nation in the world. In return, they demanded unswerving loyalty and a willing submission to a rigid hierarchy.

Bullying was not just endemic, it was structural, with younger boys acting as servants for older ones, carrying out menial tasks and enduring whatever punishments their teen overlords could dream up, in the knowledge that eventually they would get to mete it out themselves. They went on to demand similar submissiveness and loyalty from the native populations they were sent out to rule, having been taught to regard them as unruly children in need of discipline.

A taste for violence and an obsession with hierarchy also work quite well to prepare boys for the military, and to this day the vast majority of teenagers enrolled as cadets in Britain attend private schools. Verkaik points out, however, that the military ideology bred in the public schools is mostly vainglorious myth. The British won battles across the Empire in the 19th century because they had vastly superior weapons, not better tactics or leaders—and the legend that the Battle of Waterloo was won “on the playing fields of Eton” is “fatally undermined” by the detail that school had no playing fields at the time.

Critics of the public schools have argued instead that their obsession with militarism—absorbed bone-deep by generations of prime ministers and generals—has in fact more often than not goaded the country into war and prolonged the bloodshed, most ruinously during World War I. The British army, led by a Harrow graduate, simply reproduced civilian class hierarchies, installing public schoolboys as officers with command over hundreds of working-class men whose life experiences were as foreign to them as those of the African villagers their forefathers subjugated. A disproportionate number of these aristocratic boys, including the prime minister’s son, died in the fighting for the nihilistic, vaguely classical ethos that death in battle would be the most noble end to their lives.

Public schools continue to place a strong emphasis on violent sports—at many schools rugby, which was invented and much mythologized at the northern English school of the same name, is preferred, while Eton lays claim to the notorious “wall” game, a violent mass scramble that killed a boy in 1825. Historically, masters encouraged games and military drills, as a way of exhausting the body and beating out any dangerous tendencies like gentleness, kindness, and affection. But given their cultures of loyalty and secrecy, it’s hardly surprising that sexual abuse has been rampant in the public schools for centuries. In a pattern that mirrors similar cover-ups in religious communities, Verkaik writes, “children were either disbelieved or silenced” and “the teacher quietly moved on.” The stories of victims are currently engulfing many of the country’s most elite schools in scandal, with a pair of comprehensive independent inquiries underway that will make their findings known in 2020.


Would even the most damning revelations puncture the lingering mythology of the public schools? For generations, these schools have guaranteed exclusivity and loyalty through elaborate codes and rituals (which saturate English literature from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Enid Blyton novels and Harry Potter,). Old Etonians are famed for identifying each other with the question, “Did you go to school?” as though there is only one school worthy of the name. Those strictly-controlled networks can sustain a graduate throughout his or her life, but in the short term, a parent’s investment pays off in improved chances of entrance to Oxford and Cambridge, or another top-tier university. Eton was established in 1440 as a feeder school to my own alma mater, King’s College, Cambridge—which prided itself, when I was there, on taking more state-school pupils than any other college, but still held places for choral scholars, often from Eton and other public schools (since not many comprehensives train their students in world-class choirs.)

Fee-paying schools educate 7 percent of British schoolchildren, but in 2016, 34 percent of Cambridge acceptances and 25 percent of Oxford places went to privately educated applicants—actually much lower numbers than in previous years, as both universities have tried to tackle their elitist image. Yet in Britain the professions—from politics to the military, law, journalism, and banking—all remain dominated by private school graduates. Access, a hand up the ladder, is what the schools sell. And it can have immeasurable value—ask Kate Middleton’s wealthy middle-class parents, who sent their daughter to the exclusive co-ed boarding school Marlborough College as a stepping stone to St. Andrew’s University, where she met and started to date a member of the royal family.

One weakness of Verkaik’s analysis is that it doesn’t really consider how the most traditional all-male schools like Eton differ from all-girls schools and co-ed schools. There is no doubt that girls in private schools, whether single sex or co-ed, benefit in similar ways from the improved chances of university access and the post-school network, but it still harder for professional women to accumulate wealth and power on a scale to match the entrenched advantages of their male counterparts (girls’ schools struggle a great deal more to attract alumnae donations, for example.)

Exclusivity and access have justified enormous hikes in private school fees in recent years, leading some to fear that fees are rising in a “bubble.” In 1990, annual boarding-school fees were less than £7,000 per year, they now hover around £40,000. At Eton, extras like uniforms, trips, supplies, and miscellaneous “donations” can run another £10,000 on top. It’s in the interest of all schools to keep pace. In 2001, two boys at Winchester College hacked their school’s private email system and exposed a price-fixing scheme aimed at ensuring that fees rose well above inflation across the sector. One email even began with the phrase, “Confidential, please, so we aren’t accused of being a cartel.”

Such behavior is all the more galling because public schools in the United Kingdom enjoy tax-exempt charitable status. Several governments, Tory and Labour, have attempted to reform the relationship between the schools and the state—either by taxing school fees, cutting off some state funding, or forcing the schools to behave more like charities, perhaps by educating some poor children for free. But in general, any discounts on fees tend to benefit middle-class, professional parents, who are the bottom-feeders of the ecosystem at a school like Eton. Genuinely poor children remain, for the most part, a purely theoretical species. In order to become need-blind in their admissions, the schools would need endowments similar to those held by the leading private American universities, and a fundraising infrastructure to match—something that might be in the reach of Eton and Harrow, with their oligarchs in the rolodex, but certainly does not look feasible for less prestigious schools.


The cozy relationship of public schools to the global super-rich has become increasingly apparent in recent years. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of wealthy Russian pupils at elite UK boarding schools more than tripled, and a group of Eton students made headlines when they were granted a private audience with Vladimir Putin. During the Cold War, the KGB notoriously recruited several public-school-educated British boys as spies and double agents, but Russia’s relationship with the status-symbol boarding schools today is far more open, visible, and lucrative, both to the schools themselves and the highly paid consultants who ease the admissions process.

UK private schools and colleges are attracting more and more of their fee income from wealthy overseas parents, but they are not compelled to report or investigate suspicious transactions, raising concerns that they could be targets of corruption or organized crime—in 2014 a prestigious Somerset boarding school was caught up in a global money-laundering investigation when it was discovered that a pupil’s fees had been paid via an illicit shell company. But Transparency International, the anti-corruption organization, has warned that it is not just money—the schools also have the power to whitewash the shadiest family reputation.

Despite the risks, the value of the school brand in a global marketplace is too high to pass up, and several English schools have established campuses in China, Russia, South Korea, Singapore, Qatar, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere, educating some 30,000 children of the rich and influential, in “an important expression of Britain’s own soft power.” At the same time, some foreign buyers have been disappointed by the quality of the product so expensively purchased. One German banker, who sent his children to Westminster school, cautioned his countrymen against sending their children to these bastions of excess and entitlement, where the education was no better than what children gained for free in Germany. Like France and many Scandinavian countries, Germany has barely any culture of private schooling beyond religious institutions. Why would you pay for something that ought to be your right as a citizen?

That question leads to murkier, deeper waters: What is an education for? How can we know it’s good? There is plenty of historical evidence that public schools did not offer the best education: Their commitment to the classics and deliberate, disdainful neglect of the sciences during the nineteenth century meant that most of the figures whose innovations drove the Industrial Revolution were educated outside the system. More recently, the moral code that elevated “muscular Christianity” and its ethos of leadership seems to have dissolved, leaving pure muscle behind. Verkaik observes of the 46 boys in former Prime Minister David Cameron’s 1984 Eton house, only one could claim to have gone onto a career in public service: He became a schoolteacher, although eventually “returned to the private fold.” The others became politicians, bankers, journalists, entrepreneurs—professions where success rests on something that public schoolboys learn to excel at: public speaking, debate, the subtle art of blagging. These boys dominate British politics across parties: Labour leaders Tony Blair and current leftist hero Jeremy Corbyn both have public-school pedigrees.

For Britain’s privately educated leaders, politics is a ladder to be climbed, and policy-making a game. Never has this been clearer than in David Cameron’s colossal gamble on Brexit in the summer of 2016, when a referendum dominated by bad-faith messaging, data breaches, and campaign-finance violations triggered the UK’s limping exit from the European Union. It was not a cause for which the majority of citizens was seriously advocating. The only real victors so far have been those (often privately educated) financiers who made millions by betting on a massive drop in the value of the pound.


The ethos of the modern British private school is not the same now as it was in the days that molded the country’s current leaders. The turn against bullying and the emphasis on a well-rounded, pupil-centered education have penetrated even their forbidding ivy-covered walls. Still, Verkaik’s book is not a call for the reform of the schools, but for their abolition. Tweaking their tax status, or limiting the numbers of top-tier university places their pupils can earn, will not absolve the schools of the real damage they do to communities by encouraging their most privileged members to opt out.

Verkaik argues that “pushy” middle-class parents are needed to pull up the standards of struggling state schools, and that the presence of their “articulate, confident, able” children will help their less privileged peers. But this is a painfully one-sided view. As the American journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has frequently pointed out in her work on school segregation—racial and socioeconomic—in the United States, the white, middle-class kids have just as much to gain from learning alongside children who are different from them. Difference challenges us, and so does community: It requires that we put ego aside and commit to values that transcend our individual tastes, wants, and needs. It may be uncomfortable, but difference is not harmful. The alternative is segregation, isolation, and a cripplingly narrow vision of success.

Why the Gubernatorial Glass Ceiling Is So Hard to Shatter

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For the first time in American history, white men comprise a minority of Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives: The party has nominated 180 women and 133 people of color for the House’s 435 seats, according to Politico. “The numbers are even starker in the districts without Democratic incumbents,” Elena Schneider reported. “In the 125 districts where a Democratic incumbent is leaving office or a Republican seat is at risk of flipping...more than half the nominees (65) are women.” White male dominance in the House—and Senate—won’t end in November, but it appears to be on the wane.

This “year of the woman” isn’t limited to Congress. A record 14 women are competing in the 36 gubernatorial races being decided in November. Eleven of them are Democrats, and three of those would make history if they won their races, as Vox noted earlier this week: Georgia’s Stacey Abrams would become America’s first black woman governor; Vermont’s Christine Hallquist would become the first transgender governor; and Idaho’s Paulette Jordan would become the first Native American governor. In South Dakota, Republican Kristi Noem is likely to win her bid to become the state’s first female governor.

The latest evidence suggests that these candidates are up against greater odds than their counterparts running for Congress. As of Thursday, according to Politico’s women candidate tracker, half of all women running for the House and 42 percent of women running for Senate have won their primaries. But only 27 percent of women candidates for governor have accomplished the same. Some of that may have to do with greater competition for fewer seats: 61 women had declared campaigns for just 36 gubernatorial seats. But historical evidence bears out this truth: It’s extremely difficult for women to become governor.

There are only six female governors in office today, down from a peak of nine in 1994. There have been only 39 women governors in U.S. history, and 22 states have never had one at all, according to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP). Voters didn’t elect a female governor in her own right until 1974, when Connecticut voters put Democrat Ella T. Grasso in office. Previously, three female governors had succeeded their husbands in office.

Jane Swift, a Republican and former acting governor of Massachusetts, explained what women are up against in running for the office. “If they think you’re nice, they think you can’t run their state, and if they think you can run their state, they worry you’re not nice,” she told The New York Times. The role of governor includes a ceremonial aspect, not unlike the role of president; the governor moves their family into a mansion, where they remain in the public eye for at least the next four years. If the governor is male, traditional notions about breadwinning husbands persist without challenge. A female governor, however, subverts those old ideas.

“The biggest challenge that women face when running for executive office is they really have to work twice as hard to prove that they’re qualified, because we know that voters are more accustomed to seeing women as part of a deliberative body like a legislature,” said Amanda Hunter, the communications director for the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which has tracked every gubernatorial race with a female candidate since 1998.

“I think women, when they run to be the chief executive, still have a challenge, which is the stereotype about women not being tough enough, or strong enough, to be that final authority and to be the place where the buck stops,” said Debbie Walsh, CAWP’s director. (CAWP and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation run Genderwatch 2018, which monitors the campaigns of female candidates and analyzes gender’s influence on electoral outcomes.)

If a woman can break the gubernatorial glass ceiling, however, she might help smooth the way for future candidates. “For example, Molly Kelly won her primary in New Hampshire. And New Hampshire’s had two female governors, Governor Shaheen and Governor Hassan,” Hunter said. “And we’ve seen that trend with Arizona. They’ve had four women governors. Kansas has had two. Then of course Gretchen Whitmer won the primary in Michigan, and they had a female governor not terribly long time ago.”

Where men can rely on their credentials, women are more likely to win over voters by emphasizing personal experience and real-world achievements, either in state or local politics or in the business world, according to Hunter. The Barbara Lee Family Foundation’s research found that successful women candidates find ways to balance authenticity with likeability, but even if they do discover that balance, they can still face other institutional obstacles. “Although women now often regularly raise and spend money in their campaigns on par with their male opponents, women candidates still report being excluded from financial circles that include the wealthiest and best-connected donors,” the foundation concluded.

With so few female governors in office, and so many obstacles to increasing their numbers, any uptick seems welcome. But a victory for a woman candidate isn’t always a victory for the women she represents. Four of the nation’s six female governors are Republican, and are hostile to legal abortion and to LGBT rights. In 2017, Alabama’s Kay Ivey, who is up for reelection, signed a law allowing adoption agencies to refuse to place children with same sex couples. Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, who is also up for reelection, signed a May law banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. In New Mexico, Governor Susana Martinez opposed same-sex marriage prior to the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized the practice, and has stated opposition to abortion rights (though some anti-abortion activists believe she hasn’t expressed enough public support for restrictive abortion regulations).

South Dakota’s Kristi Noem and Hawaii’s Andria Tupola, the two Republican nominees seeking a first term, also oppose abortion rights. Tupola has even re-posted articles by Operation Rescue, an extremist anti-abortion group, on her official Facebook page, and Noem has repeatedly attacked abortion rights as a member of Congress. As The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported in 2014, Tupola also helped lead protests against the governor’s call for a 2013 special legislative session to legalize same-sex marriage.

Walsh called 2018 “a bit of a breakthrough moment” for women running for governor, and that’s clearly true in general. There’s a record number of candidates, and Abrams, Jordan, and Hallquist could all make history—not just for the Democratic Party, but for the country. But it’s not as clear, in a case like Noem’s, that a breakthrough moment for female candidates would mean a breakthrough moment for all women. Would her victory help accustom South Dakota voters to the idea of a woman as the state’s chief executive? Or will she end up pushing policies that make it more difficult for other women to achieve what she has done? In some cases, an achievement for one woman creates quandaries for others.

Robert Mueller Is Winning

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Robert Mueller first dropped Paul Manafort into the criminal-justice system last October, and he’s been tightening the vise ever since. The special counsel has flipped Manafort’s close associates and used their testimony against him. He persuaded a judge to revoke Manafort’s house arrest and send him to jail for trying to tamper with other witnesses. And he made a convincing enough case for a jury to find Manafort guilty on eight fraud-related counts in last month’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia, all but guaranteeing the 69-year-old political operative a hefty prison sentence.

On Friday, Manafort finally cracked from the pressure. President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct justice in a D.C. courthouse. He also admitted his guilt to ten charges on which the Alexandria jurors failed to reach a verdict. And in exchange for a lighter sentence to be determined later, Manafort gave Mueller his prize after eleven months of labor: a binding agreement to “cooperate fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly ... in any and all matters as to which the government deems the cooperation to be relevant.”

This is the moment that Trump feared and tried to prevent. Manafort is one of the few people who can provide details about the extent of the campaign’s interactions with the Russian government during the last election. His extensive connections to Moscow-aligned figures in Eastern Europe make him the likeliest vector for whatever conspiracy may have existed between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016. Manafort’s cooperation will likely shed new light on key moments during that fateful year: He’s the only American, for example, who participated in the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 that isn’t related to Trump by blood or by marriage. Friday’s plea agreement could therefore increase the legal peril not only for the president, but also for his inner circle and members of his family who have already testified about the encounters.

Manafort’s guilty plea spares him from the financial and legal ordeal of facing a second trial in D.C. that was scheduled to begin later this month. The first charge relates to his work as a political consultant for pro-Kremlin political parties in Ukraine, where he amassed a small fortune and illegally funneled it back into the United States. “Manafort laundered more than $30 million to buy property, goods, and services in the United States, income that he concealed from the United States Treasury, the Department of Justice, and others,” the indictment said. “Manafort cheated the United States out of over $15 million in taxes.”

The second charge against Manafort is connected to his communications with other former conspirators earlier this year. According to the indictment, Manafort reached out to his associates, including Konstantin Kilimnik, a former business associate reportedly connected to the Russian intelligence services, to coordinate their testimony on matters related to his overseas work. Mueller first charged Manafort over this action—attempting to undermine the investigation—in June, which led a federal judge to revoke the 69-year-old lobbyist’s house arrest and let him await trial in jail.

The result is perhaps Mueller’s most important victory yet, and a vindication of his quiet, patient strategy in the investigation. Federal prosecutors in white-collar and organized-crime cases often begin by bringing charges against low-level members, often on unrelated charges. Investigators then work their way up the chain of command by offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and testimony against higher-level conspirators. Mueller has maintained the radio silence of a Soviet submarine captain since taking over the investigation last spring, but his prosecutions so far suggest that he’s employing a similar strategy against Trump and his associates.

What distinguishes Trumpworld from an organized-crime syndicate or a money-laundering bank, of course, is the presidency itself. Trump could use its powers to shut down the Russia investigation, fire Mueller and other top Justice Department personnel, and pardon his cronies with relative ease. That threat is now somewhat mitigated. Mueller’s team told the court during Friday’s allocution that Manafort had already begun providing them with information, which limits the practical impact of pardoning him now.

Moreover, in recent months, the president’s legal team occasionally suggested they might demand Mueller hew to a September 1 deadline, implying any major action after that would be interfering the November midterms. If Trump now attempts to halt Manafort’s cooperation with a pardon or other major move, he may face a similar quandary. Democrats are currently forecast to make major gains in the House of Representatives and have a slim chance at retaking the Senate. Given Mueller’s current popularity, any substantive steps against him would probably make a Democratic takeover of Congress—and with it, potential impeachment proceedings—even more likely. Manafort’s flip means Trump is damned if he tries to stop the Russia investigation before November and damned if he doesn’t.

It’s theoretically possible, of course, that Trump played no part in any possible collusion, and that Manafort doesn’t know anything that could implicate him. The president, like all potential defendants, is legally innocent until he’s proven guilty.

Trump and his allies, however, aren’t acting like innocents. Earlier this year, I wrote that the best available explanation for Mueller’s quiet moves and Trump’s noisy countermoves is that the president knows or believes that the special counsel can prove collusion. Many of the president’s most vociferous defenders operate under the assumption that Trump is guilty but Mueller won’t or shouldn’t find any proof.

Trump’s posture towards the investigation supports this view as well. After the twin blows last month of Manafort’s conviction in Virginia and Michael Cohen’s guilty plea in New York, the president praised his former campaign chief for not bending the knee to prosecutors. “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “[The Justice Department] took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’—make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!”

Shortly thereafter, Trump reportedly told a Fox News reporter off camera that he was considering a pardon for Manafort. He then suggested in the interview that “flipping,” a common prosecutorial tactic, “should be illegal.” Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, quickly briefed reporters that Trump and his legal team agreed that there would be no pardons until after Mueller’s investigation had ended. The implicit message seemed to be clear: As long as Manafort stays quiet, the president will spare him from prison when this all blows over.

That option now seems moot. It’s not clear what the president’s countermove will be. The White House’s only public response so far is to stress that Manafort’s legal troubles don’t directly affect them. “This had absolutely nothing to do with the President or his victorious 2016 Presidential campaign,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Friday. “It is totally unrelated.” Left unspoken were the two most important words: for now.

Behind Hurricane Florence’s Poop Lagoon Crisis, a Nation of Pork Lovers

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Even before Hurricane Florence made landfall in North Carolina on Friday morning, it had an impact: introducing the phrase “poop lagoon” to the nation.

As forecasters cemented the storm’s track, reporters began to warn that it was headed straight toward the heart of North Carolina’s hog farming country, where millions of gallons of pig feces was stored in uncovered pits. These man-made lakes of hog waste risked overflowing into adjacent drinking water sources if they became inundated with rain. And considering Florence’s predicted rainfall totals, they very likely would.

Overflows had also happened before, reporters noted. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd caused manure to spill “over thousands of acres of private and public lands and into the watersheds of four rivers that feed the second-largest estuary system in the nation,” according to the environmental news site Coastal Review. And during Hurricane Matthew two years ago, 14 hog manure lagoons became submerged. Drowned hog bodies were also found floating and decomposing in floodwaters in both instances, which created yet another source of potential disease pathogens.

As Florence approached, CNN, Vice News, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal all warned of a potential pig waste crisis. Less discussed, however, has been why this threat exists and persists, despite years of knowing catastrophic fecal overflows could happen during hurricanes. Surely, there are many reasons. But the most obvious is our appetites.

The Washington Post

“Americans are eating more pork now than they have in decades,” the Washington Post reported last year, citing Department of Agriculture statistics showing a spike in pork production. That spike was partially because of U.S. farmers exporting pork products to other countries, the Post noted; but also because “Americans have developed a new taste for pork, particularly bacon, as well.” The growing popularity of Asian cuisines have made dishes like bulgogi and banh mi, which often include pork, “among the year’s hottest foods.” The growing popularity of low-carbohydrate diets, too, has contributed to pork’s rise. Pork production may soon outpace beef.

The growing demand for pork, both here and abroad, has been an economic boon for North Carolina. Home to nine million hogs and more than 2,000 hog farms, the state is the nation’s second-largest pork producer. And to keep that pork cheap for U.S. consumers, most of the state’s pigs are kept in concentrated animal feeding operations, commonly called CAFOs. These are industrial farming operations where more than 1,000 animals are confined for at least 45 days or more per year in an area without vegetation.

A flooded hog farm and poop lagoon in North Carolina after Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The waste overflow from this lagoon ultimately infiltrated Wilmington, North Carolina’s water supply.John Althouse/AFP/Getty Images

CAFOs are where the poop problem really comes from. On any type of farm, a grown hog would produce as much waste in a day as two to three grown adults. But on many of North Carolina’s hog CAFOs, as Pacific Standard recently described it, “feces, urine, and anything else that seeps beneath pens’ slatted floors—stillborn pigs, afterbirths, pesticides, blood—form a liquid slurry, which is then pumped into open-earth pits.”

In these deep pits, oxygen becomes deprived, and the waste can’t decompose as quickly. Thus, contaminants from the fecal matter “often leak into the ground,” Pacific Standard reported, citing “everything from noxious gases and heavy metals to over 100 microbial pathogens.” The manure also contains lots of nitrogen and phosphorus, which can spawn toxic algae if too much gets into nearby waterways. Nearby residents—mostly poor, and mostly African American—complain about the stench and runoff from these pits when the sun is shining. Those complaints seem like mere quibbles compared to what Florence could bring.

If American and foreign demand for pork keeps growing as it is now, the result won’t actually be more poop lagoons in North Carolina. In 2007, the state government banned waste lagoons from being built on new pig farms, in part due to the public health crisis Hurricane Floyd wrought in 1999. It does mean, however, that the old poop lagoons will remain in operation for as long as hog farmers feel they can make a profit. Considering America’s love for pork, that could be a very long time—and many more hurricane seasons.

The Origins of America’s Enduring Divisions

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“To write history is to make an argument by telling a story,” Jill Lepore once explained. And the argument a historian makes about America’s long, turbulent, and demographically complex past—from the arrival of the first European settlers in the sixteenth century to the triumph of Donald Trump—depends upon the story she chooses to tell. It’s the story of a white man’s empire, many scholars on the left contend, against which dissenters of all races and genders have struggled to create a truly democratic society. No, insist most conservatives, it’s a narrative of individuals striving for liberty, who got stymied, at times, by meddlesome progressives and riotous radicals. One group hopes to see America become great again; the other claims that such golden age thinking is a fantasy of the privileged.

The parallel lives of Harry and George Washington illustrate the contradictions embedded in the nation’s story from birth. George, of course, commanded the Continental Army that defeated Great Britain and then became the first president of the United States; his immense popularity helped legitimize the government of the early republic. On the day the last British ships sailed out of New York harbor, the general-politician grandly toasted “the memory of those heroes who have fallen for our freedom” and vowed, “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the earth!” Harry, a black man born in Gambia, was George’s personal property—or had been until he escaped from the Mount Vernon plantation in 1776, signing up with a British regiment that promised him and every other slave their liberty if they fought against the Patriots. It would be only his first stop on a frustrating odyssey of liberation.

THESE TRUTHS: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Jill LeporeNorton, 960 pp., $39.95

After the war ended, Harry moved to Nova Scotia, where he joined “the largest free black community in North America,” led by two evangelical ministers. But poverty and hostility from whites doomed the settlement, and Harry sailed back to West Africa, where the new British colony of Sierra Leone offered land for the asking. When that promise also proved hollow, and the colony’s rulers became tyrants, the settlers took up arms again. The rebellion was crushed, and the victors banished Harry and his fellow insurgents to a malaria-infested area along the Atlantic Coast, where he died around 1800. Still, if Harry had remained at Mount Vernon, he would probably have been buried there. George’s will stipulated that his slaves would be freed only on the death of his wife.

The tale of the two Washingtons can serve as a kind of historical Rorschach test. On the left, most would undoubtedly see it as clear evidence that the United States was founded on a despicable lie: The wigged icon who prattled on about “freedom” owed his wealth and status to the coerced labor of black men and women. Those on the right might counter that the majority of white Americans never owned a single slave, and that the founders’ belief in individual freedom eventually led the country to abolish the “peculiar institution.”

Lepore, who tells this dual story splendidly in her new book, These Truths, declines the temptation either to condemn the national project or to celebrate it. For her, the United States has always been a nation wrestling with a paradox, caught between its sunny ideals and its darker realities. “Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other,” she writes, “lies an uneasy path.” The American Revolution was far more than a mere change of power from one group of well-to-do white men to another. “The United States,” writes Lepore, “rests on a dedication to equality.” Yet throughout her deftly crafted survey, she also makes clear how often citizens and their leaders failed to implement this ideal or actively betrayed it. She borrows her title from the Declaration of Independence, to signal both the standard of reason and equality that Americans profess and how their deeds have fallen short of it.


Few writers in this country produce narratives about the past as insightful, concise, or witty as those that Lepore seems to turn out every few months or so in The New Yorker and in her many books. She divides this book, her tenth, into four parts. It moves chronologically from the making of the new nation (“The Idea” where the tale of the two Washingtons appears), to the antebellum era and Civil War (“The People”), to the growth of federal authority (“The State”), to the 70 years and counting since World War II, which Lepore labels “The Machine,” in a nod to the dominance of computers. While she confines herself mostly to political history, it’s a politics imbued with a rich understanding of culture, biography, and technology.

In her section on the early to mid-nineteenth century, Lepore draws out the contradictions of a nation that was rapidly becoming more democratic and consumer-friendly—and then split in two when the South refused to accept the popular election of a president who swore to halt the expansion of slavery. Some of these tensions are intimate: One of the unsung benefits of the first industrial revolution, which heightened inequality in the republic, was, she notes, that the price of mattresses dropped from $50 to $5—which allowed most families to afford one for the first time. But she also tracks larger shifts, observing that the same Democratic Party that encouraged ordinary white men to run for office and welcomed plebeian immigrants from all over Europe also reviled the abolitionists and grabbed a huge chunk of land from Mexico.

One vocal opponent of that “wicked war,” as Ulysses Grant called it, was “a gangly young House member” from central Illinois who became known as “Spotty Lincoln,” because he “introduced resolutions” in Congress “demanding to know about the exact spot where American blood was first shed on American soil.” At the end of the Civil War almost two decades later, Abraham Lincoln’s assassination inspired a torrent of monuments, oratory, poetry, and images that continue to define his legacy. But nearly all that memorializing left out a distinct group of Americans whose lives the sixteenth president had helped to transform utterly. In mourning Lincoln, Lepore writes,

Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment, the injuries wrought on the bodies of millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, and buried in unmarked graves. No president consecrated their cemeteries or delivered their Gettysburg address; no committee of arrangements built monuments to their memory. With Lincoln’s death, it was as if millions of people had been crammed into his tomb, trapped in a vault that could not hold them.

For more than 150 years, black Americans and their allies have been struggling to create a society that both reckons with the evils of the past and lives up to its promise.


Throughout the book, Lepore takes particular delight in tracing how both Americans with power and those without made effective use of new forms of media either to advance the ideal of equality or to betray it. From his early days as a free man in the 1840s until his death in the 1890s, Frederick Douglass sat so often before the camera that he became “the most photographed man in nineteenth-century America.” He understood that filmed portraits of black people challenged pervasive racist caricatures by showing them as they really looked and hoped to be seen. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt mastered the art of speaking on the radio, which had become a common household appliance by the time he moved into the White House. Although we know that his Fireside Chats helped build and sustain his popularity, Lepore highlights the preparation that made them so effective. FDR memorized everything he said on the broadcasts and spurned the hyped-up style of most radio announcers in that era.

When Lepore arrives at the internet age, however, her fascination with communications technology morphs into disdain. Such pioneers of the personal computer as Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, imagined that the universal use of the magic machines would bring about the fulfillment of a libertarian dream. “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing,” gushed Brand, “power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” Yet, like any shrewd historian, Lepore knows that technology does not by itself subvert the designs of the powerful. In the 1990s, none other than Newt Gingrich lobbied hard and successfully for a new Telecommunications Act, scrapping the New Deal regulations that had barred big media firms from squeezing out would-be competitors. And some Silicon Valley billionaires have aligned themselves with the right, like Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal hoping it would “free the citizens of the world from government-managed currency,” and went on to support Trump.

Lepore establishes the influences of technology on American ideals, but she has less time for the diverse flavors of political religiosity—egalitarian or otherwise. She dutifully notes the evangelical fervor of the abolitionists and accurately describes Phyllis Schlafly, a devout Catholic, as one of the more effective organizers of the modern Christian Right. But she glosses over the Social Gospel, which inspired many of the activists and politicians who made the early twentieth century a time of path-breaking reform. They included the mostly Protestant crusaders for Prohibition, who succeeded in getting one of the nation’s most ubiquitous consumer industries banned for more than a decade. In a land of many faiths, Americans certain of what God wanted them to do have always been central to the contest for policy and power. Even secular historians who may wish that were not true should realize that attention must be paid.


Lepore begins her book by rejecting the urge to moralize, but she cannot resist making stern judgments near the end of it about the troubling, crude politics of the present. The attacks of September 11, she argues, drove many Americans rather crazy, and a recovery is not yet in sight. Alex Jones’s accusation that the Feds brought down the Twin Towers gained him a mass audience and became a model of sorts for even more popular conspiracy theories, including the notions that Barack Obama had been born in Africa and that his health plan would create “death panels.” A decline in the readership of print newspapers and the ubiquity of smartphones have led, in her view, to a point where “truth” resides in the mind of the app-clicker and whichever online community she or he prefers. That Donald Trump both prominently advocated the “birther” lunacy and welcomed Jones’s fawning endorsement seem to prove that the country has “lost its way in a cloud of smoke.”

While her concern is obviously justified, Lepore’s jeremiad omits some key details, present and past, that might qualify the terms of the lament. Subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post have soared since Trump’s election, and Americans who oppose the president outnumber those who adore him. Which of these groups will show up at the polls this November is, of course, a different question. But this is hardly the first time in U.S. history when an election or administration “had nearly rent the nation in two” and when millions of citizens disagreed fundamentally about the accuracy of nearly every important statement uttered by a sitting president. The politics of the 1860s and 1960s were, by almost any measure, even angrier and more divisive than those we are suffering through.

Lepore is at her best when she illuminates these conflicts in both thought and action. “A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos,” she concludes. “A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.” The writers who have understood the country’s history best have always sought to capture how Americans have wrestled with these inescapable, opposing forces. Or, as Zadie Smith wrote in her obituary of Philip Roth, whose sensibility about the past matches Lepore’s, “He always wanted to know America, in its beauty and its utter brutality, and to see it in the round: the noble ideals, the bloody reality.”

The Devastating Slowness of Hurricane Florence

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If Hurricane Florence were an animal, she’d be a sloth—albeit an unusually dangerous one. The storm became a major hurricane on September 9, prompting potentially apocalyptic but uncertain forecasts. By September 11, more than one million people had been told to evacuate their homes, as Florence was most certainly inching toward the Carolina coastline. The system made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 1 hurricane on Friday, September 14, where it decided to spend the weekend. And though its been downgraded to a tropical depression, Florence continues to rage over the state as of Monday morning.

The four days Florence has spent in North Carolina has helped it break the state record for rainfall during a tropical storm or hurricane, The Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing “a preliminary report of more than 30 inches.” Put another way, meteorologist Ryan Maue told the paper, about six trillion gallons of water has fallen from the sky. That rain and wind has so far left 18 dead and 750,000 without power.

The sloth’s wrath, however, is still far from over—and in some ways it’s just begun. By the time Florence leaves the East Coast later this week, Maue said, the rain total could rise to “18 trillion gallons, enough to cover Texas in four inches of water and fill the Chesapeake Bay.” That means rivers will continue to overflow, delivering sudden, catastrophic flooding to nearby communities. It’s already happening in North Carolina, where there have been more than 900 water rescues so far. Up to six more inches of rain could fall by Tuesday evening, according to CNN.

“This storm has never been more dangerous than it is right now,” the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, said on Sunday. “Many rivers are still rising, and are not expected to crest until later today or tomorrow.”

Drowning is the main risk from these river overflows, as most people who die in hurricanes die due to flooding from storm surge or rainfall. But the extended rainfall is also threatening to make people sick. At least one pit of coal ash—the waste left over from coal burning—has overflowed near the Cape Fear River, according to NBC News, which added, There are at least two other coal-fired Duke plants in North Carolina that are likely to be affected by the storm.” Coal ash often contains metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, chromium, and selenium, exposure to which can increase the risk of various health problems.

Governor Cooper said on Sunday that the state’s 4,000 hog manure pits—which had overflowed into drinking water systems during previous storms—have not overflowed this time around. “We are closely monitoring hog lagoons, and we haven’t had any reports of issues,” he said. But not everyone was buying the assessment. “I’d like to see some evidence to show that somehow swine farms and lagoons have been magically spared as everything else fell under water,” University of North Carolina environmental sciences professor Mark Sobsey told Bloomberg. “It’s just a little bit hard to believe.”

The flooding will continue. On Monday morning, the National Weather Service said flash flood warnings were still in effect across large portions of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and that “heavy and excessive rainfall” could be expected in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and southern New England over the next few days. And more slow storms like Florence can be expected to hit the U.S. in the future. “Tropical cyclones, which include hurricanes, have grown more sluggish since the mid-20th century,” the New York Times reported last week, citing research that suggests climate change is playing a role.


What Digging Up Franco Has to Do With Democracy

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“Exclusive: Photograph of the remains of Franco,” a Twitter user posted in late August. It was a joke: The accompanying picture showed not the dusty bones of Spain’s former dictator, but a portrait of the current king, Felipe VI. 

Before dying, in 1975, Francisco Franco anointed Felipe’s father, Juan Carlos, to lead the country and keep in place his authoritarian, quasi-fascist “National Catholic” ideology. Instead, the new monarch led Spain into a process of express-speed modernization, helping create a modern parliamentary democracy. Yet four decades on, that transition still feels incomplete to many Spaniards—and nowhere is that more apparent than in the debate over what to do with the former dictator’s remains.

Last Thursday, Spain’s congress approved a motion to move Francisco Franco from his resting place, a war memorial known as the Valley of the Fallen. “Today our democracy is better,” said Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whose government had presented the initiative. His deputy prime minister, Carmen Calvo, said the exhumation should take place for “ethical reasons” and be driven by “democratic values.”

The Valley of the Fallen, a mausoleum built into the side of a mountain under Franco’s aegis to commemorate the dead in the 1936-39 Civil War he won, is one of the world’s biggest mass graves. Over 33,000 remains of war casualties were brought there on the completion of the monument in 1959, often without the consent of their families. The monument’s huge scale, history and panoramic views make it a popular tourist attraction. But its Francoist symbolism also makes it a place of pilgrimage for the far right.

Throughout the four decades of Spanish democracy, the Valley of the Fallen has been the single biggest reminder of the country’s divisive leader—a massive open sore. And that it has taken this long to address points to something Westerners outside of Spain often forget: just how new and fragile Spanish democracy has been in the past few decades. 


The speed and unified nature of Spain’s transition after Franco’s death drew admiration from around the world. Former ministers from the dictatorship joined the new political mainstream, as did the recently legalized Socialist and Communist parties. In 1978, a new constitution was instituted, following an amnesty law protecting both former members of the regime and those on the left who had been living underground. Underpinning all this was an agreement between both sides that the past would not be used as a political weapon.

“The Francoists had the power and the means of repression; the [leftist] opposition had the means to mobilize people in the streets,” said historian José Álvarez Junco. “Both sides were weak and so they were forced to reach an agreement.”

The delicate nature of the new democracy helped ensure that the political class respected that pact. That fragility became apparent one day in February 1981, when a group of civil guard officers, outraged by the country’s betrayal of Franco’s values, attempted a coup d’état by taking the members of congress hostage inside parliament. After several tense hours, the putsch failed but the message was clear: Spain’s leaders had to tread carefully.

Led by young Socialist Felipe González, who shed many of his party’s leftist policies in pursuing economic prosperity for the country, Spain developed a welfare state, joining NATO in 1982, and the European Union in 1986. Spain’s meteoric rise arguably culminated in 1992, with the Barcelona Olympics and World Expo in Seville.

In such a context, there was little appetite for digging up history. As the late novelist Rafael Chirbes put it, Spaniards were asked to “swap the past for the future … ideology for well-being, truth for money. And the country accepted.” 


But by the turn of the millennium, many Spaniards were questioning that bargain.

After Cambodia, Spain possesses the largest number of mass graves in the world, according to Amnesty International. Activists say there are over 100,000 missing people from the Francoist years. And in the early 2000s, children and grandchildren of Franco’s victims started searching for their loved ones in unmarked graves across the country.

With no official nationwide state body to oversee these excavations, unpaid activists carry them out in their spare time. The success of each search and exhumation depends in great part on the willingness of local magistrates and politicians to cooperate. “Human rights can’t be just a matter of chance, or a group of volunteers,” said  Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH). “One weekend we have human rights, then for the next two months we don’t.”

The frustration involved in these searches has prompted more of a reckoning at a national level. The last Socialist administration attempted to tackle Franco’s legacy with a historical memory law in 2007, offering a vaguely worded “moral redress” to victims of the dictatorship, and calling for the removal of statues and street names dedicated to Franco and his generals. But it turned out to be a fudge, riling the political right, who saw it as a provocative attempt to rake over the past, and dissatisfying the left, who felt it did not go far enough. Many Francoist symbols survived the initiative. A street named after the Blue Division, a unit of Spanish soldiers who fought under Hitler’s orders on the Eastern Front, remains in Madrid. Many other streets across Spain bear the name of Franco and his generals.

The new legislation allowing the exhumation of Franco is an addition to the historical memory law of a decade ago. It faces similar political opposition.

In last week’s congressional session, 172 members voted in favor of the removal of the dictator from the Valley of the Fallen, while 164 abstained and two voted against. In an echo of Spain’s longstanding political divisions, left-leaning and regional nationalist parties voted in favor, while the abstentions belonged almost exclusively to the two main right-leaning forces, the Popular Party (PP) and Ciudadanos (the two congressmen who voted against reportedly did so “by accident”).

The PP, which was originally founded as a center-right party by former ministers in the Franco regime, has always resisted efforts to tackle the legacy of Franco and the Civil War. In the past it has accused those discussing Francoist history of attempting to tar the political right with the dictator’s legacy. Ahead of the congressional vote, the PP’s leader Pablo Casado had warned that “reopening old wounds doesn’t lead anywhere.”

His argument was taken up by right-wing commentator Francisco Rosell, who accused prime minister Sánchez of using historical memory as an “ideological weapon that puts in question the Transition and the constitution.”

Yet as Spain struggles with constant political corruption scandals, the Catalonia region’s drive for independence and the eroded credibility of its antiquated judiciary, many in the country have a much less reverent attitude toward the so-called post-Franco “Transition” and the 1978 Magna Carta. 

Digging up Franco—which is expected to take place by the end of the year—only scratches the surface of Spain’s struggle to deal with its past. Not only are there mass graves and street signs to deal with, but also demands that torturers and murderers from the Franco era be brought to justice. In an era when the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust are being brought to justice, the inattention to Spain’s own mid-century perpetrators is all the more striking.

Yet if the country is to deal not just with its historical memory but with the broader weaknesses in its democratic system, the Valley of the Fallen is not a bad place to start.

The ‘Me Too’ Movement Hits McDonald’s

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On September 18, McDonald’s workers in 10 cities will make history, striking to protest what they say is a persistent failure to enforce company rules against sexual harassment at work. The Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund will provide legal support for women who have filed sexual harassment claims, and the strike is backed by the Fight for 15 movement of fast-food workers organizing for a living minimum wage. As reported by Fortune, hundreds of employees in worker-led women’s committees organized the strike, “demanding improved procedures for receiving and responding to sexual harassment complaints, plus required anti-harassment training for managers and employees.” It will be the first time McDonald’s workers have taken such action on sexual harassment.

For nearly a year, the #MeToo moment calling out sexual misconduct has revolved mostly around the already-famous: in Hollywood, in media, and in politics. On Friday, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh became the latest to be accused publicly of assault. But #MeToo originally had nothing to do with the rich and powerful. Tarana Burke, a Bronx-based activist, coined the term over a decade before it became a hashtag; at the time, Burke intended it as a response to the prevalent sexual abuse of young, working-class women of color. Sexual harassment and assault has also been a focal point for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which organizes farmworkers against the exploitation and sexual harassment of women in the fields. CIW activists recently held a hunger strike in front of the corporate headquarters of Wendy’s over the chain’s refusal to comply with CIW’s Fair Food program, which sets out a program of rules and regulations meant to protect workers from harassment and abuse. “There’s no new news here, aside from the CIW trying to exploit the positive momentum that has been generated by and for women in the #MeToo and Time’s Up movement to advance their interests,” a Wendy’s spokeswoman asserted to the Huffington Post in March.

Tuesday’s strike is a reminder that #MeToo’s roots are deep, and they were planted by working-class women. But the strike is still an unusual tactic. “There’s not a deep history of large coordinated strikes over sexual harassment,” Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, told me. “Usually when sexual harassment has been an issue, it’s one of many issues about disrespect and lack of dignity in the workplace and, like with McDonald’s, it’s in the context of a broader campaign of organizing for recognition and respect.”

“There are some key recent cases, not necessarily of strikes but of demands around sexual harassment, the major recent one being the hotel workers in Chicago, with what they called their ‘Hands Off, Pants On’ campaign to get panic button for housekeepers,” Givan said. In October 2017, the Chicago city council approved an ordinance that requires hotel owners to give panic buttons to workers and to develop anti-sexual harassment policies.

Annelise Orleck, a professor of history at Dartmouth College who has participated in a public relations campaign on behalf of striking McDonald’s workers, told me that the earliest example she could find of a strike provoked by sexual harassment dates to 1912. “Corset-makers in Kalamazoo, Michigan were the first that I could find to publicly say that they were walking out to protest physical and verbal harassment by their foreman, in addition to his demands for quid pro quo sex,” she said. According to Orleck, unions were “nervous” about the prospect of taking action on workplace sexual harassment, and preferred behind-the-scenes action as opposed to a strike.

McDonald’s already has a company-wide sexual harassment policy, but in 2016, 15 workers filed formal complaints about its non-enforcement with the National Labor Relations Board. In May, ten more women filed complaints with the NLRB, also over the company’s failure to stop sexual harassment. Many women said they experienced retaliation for reporting the behavior. “The claimants, including a 15-year-old from St. Louis, said in a conference call with journalists that they were ignored, mocked or terminated for reporting the behavior. The accusations included claims that co-workers or supervisors sexually propositioned, groped or exposed themselves to the women,” Reuters reported at the time. Filing a complaint with a Republican-dominated NLRB is a risk, and so is a strike, but women have few other options. Any complaint about sexual harassment puts workers in a vulnerable position.

“All the men feel like they have all the power, so they’ll cut your hours. Or if they can’t, they’ll just make your day a living hell. They make you feel like you are nothing, just because you tried to stand up against them,” said Adriana Alvarez, who has worked at a Chicago McDonald’s for nine years and helped organize Tuesday’s strike.

Strikes can also provoke retaliation against workers. “They may have their hours docked, they may be fired outright,” Orleck said. “But these kinds of actions get much more attention, as they’re intended to, than an individual complaint or even then a kind of legal complaint like those that have been brought before the NLRB,” she added, due to greater media attention.

“There is no place for harassment or discrimination of any kind at McDonald’s,” McDonald’s spokeswoman Andrea Abate said in a statement provided to The New Republic. “Since our founding, we’ve been committed to a culture that fosters the respectful treatment of everyone. We have policies, procedures and training in place that are specifically designed to prevent sexual harassment at our company and company-owned restaurants, and we firmly believe that our franchisees share this commitment.”

The statement further asserts that the corporation is working with the Rape, Abuse and Incest Network and Seyfarth Shaw at Work, which describes itself as a “legal compliance and consulting services company” on its website, on prevention measures. The choice of consultant is an inadvertent reminder that sexual harassment pervades all industries, and victimizes workers in all income brackets: A Seyfarth Shaw partner, Gerald Maatman, previously represented The Weinstein Company after six actresses filed a class-action lawsuit against it. That wasn’t the first time Maatman had represented an employer in a sexual harassment case, either; according to Variety, he also represented Garban LLC., a brokerage firm, after female employees accused it of rampant gender discrimination. Male employees had reportedly circulated pornography, and hired strippers for company events.

Even if McDonald’s has good intentions—a generous assumption—Givan warns that the “pro forma training” many employers conduct in response to sexual harassment has been shown to have little impact. It does, however, help protect employers from legal liability. “It sounds like they are working with the the typical management-side firm that will help them stay in legal compliance and avoid liability while also trying to deny workers the ability to unionize or have a stronger voice. All with the goal of staying on the right side of the law,” she added.

For some workers, this show of commitment from McDonald’s only underlines how little action the massive corporation has taken until now. “They have the power to stop the sexual harassment. They have more than enough money to educate these managers and let them know what’s right and what’s wrong, which should have been done in the beginning,” said Alvarez. “They have more than enough of everything to fix this.” Taking the chain’s obvious resources into account, McDonald’s workers on Tuesday will take an unprecedented action to demand unprecedented accountability.

Why This Time Is Different

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It’s impossible to think about the sexual-assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh without thinking about Anita Hill. In October 1991, the law professor quietly gave the Senate Judiciary Committee an affidavit describing multiple instances of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, a federal judge under consideration to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. The fight over her account transformed Thomas’s nomination into the most caustic confirmation battle to date.

Hill told the committee that Thomas had made sexual advances towards her on multiple occasions during the two years she worked as his secretary in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and that he frequently described his sexual proclivities and his interest in pornography. Thomas denounced Hill’s allegations and told the committee that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” Enough senators ultimately sided with Thomas, confirming him in a 52-48 vote—including 11 Democrats.

Twenty-seven years later, another Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation has been thrown in doubt by sexual misconduct allegations. Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at the Palo Alto University, sent a confidential and anonymous letter to a high-ranking Democratic senator in late July describing an encounter with Kavanaugh when they were in high school in the early 1980s. She wrote that Kavanaugh “physically and sexually assaulted me” during a house party in suburban Maryland.

Kavanaugh physically pushed me into a bedroom as I was headed for a bathroom up a short stair well from the living room. They locked the door and played loud music precluding any successful attempt to yell for help.

Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with [name redacted by CNN], who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state. With Kavanaugh’s hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me.

Ford wrote that she managed to escape soon thereafter and hasn’t seen Kavanaugh in person since the encounter. Rumors about her letter first became public last week after Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings had already wrapped up. As its release appeared to become inevitable, Ford allowed The Washington Post to disclose her identity on Sunday. “These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,” she told the newspaper. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.” She reportedly is willing to testify before the Senate.

Kavanaugh has flatly denied Ford’s account. “This is a completely false allegation,” he said in a statement on Monday. “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes—to her or to anyone. Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself yesterday.” Kavanaugh added that he is “willing to talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee in any way the Committee deems appropriate to refute this false allegation, from 36 years ago, and defend my integrity.” The White House is also standing by its nominee. “What a ridiculous question,” Trump replied when asked on Monday if Kavanaugh had offered to withdraw.

Many observers have noted the similarities between 1991 and today. But it’s also worth examining the differences, and what they mean not only for Ford and Kavanaugh, but for the Senate, the Supreme Court, and ultimately the country.


The most significant change between Hill’s experience in 1991 and Ford’s today is the Senate itself. When Hill arrived to testify at the Capitol almost three decades ago, she was greeted by a chamber that was 98 percent male, including every member of the Judiciary Committee. The Senate operated akin to an old boys club, where personal relationships between the senators could carry more weight than partisan or practical concerns. Joe Biden, who chaired the committee at the time, came under intense criticism in the years that followed for letting the chummy, backslapping environment shape his response to Hill’s allegations.

“We went to see Biden, because we were so frustrated by [the process],” then-Colorado Representative Pat Schroeder, one of Hill’s supporters during the hearing, recounted last year. “And he literally kind of pointed his finger and said, you don’t understand how important one’s word was in the Senate, that he had given his word to [Danforth] in the men’s gym that this would be a very quick hearing, and he had to get it out before Columbus Day.”

The Senate has lost a great deal of that collegiality over the past three decades. It has also become more diverse: 21 women now serve as senators, a tenfold increase from 1991. Kavanaugh now needs the support of Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, two moderate Republicans who received the lion’s share of pressure from activists on both sides, just to be confirmed. And while Hill testified before an all-male committee three decades ago, Ford’s questioners would include four Democratic women if she makes a similar appearance. (No Republican women serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

That gender shift can be traced back to Hill herself. The Senate’s treatment of her, as well as the optics of the all-male committee’s harsh questioning, sparked a backlash among women voters nationwide. The ensuing 1992 midterm elections became known as the “Year of the Woman” after voters elected an unprecedented number of women candidates to Congress, including four new senators. Among them was San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who now serves as the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democratic member (and to whom Ford sent her letter, via her local congresswoman).

American politics is again experiencing a “Year of the Woman,” and changing cultural perceptions around sexual harassment and assault—sparked by Hill’s testimony and strengthened by the #MeToo movement—appear to be affecting how senators are processing Ford’s allegations. Hill’s account was met with disbelief and disdain from many of Thomas’s supporters. Missouri’s John Danforth, Thomas’s chief backer in the Senate, complained on the Senate floor that the confirmation process “been turned into the worst kind of sleazy political operation with no effort spared to assassinate the character of Clarence Thomas.” Utah’s Orrin Hatch floated the theory during Hill’s testimony that she invented the allegations using details from a minor federal court case and the plot of The Exorcist.

Top Republican leaders today appeared more cognizant of, if nothing else, appearing to be sympathetic. “Anyone who comes forward as Dr. Ford has deserves to be heard, so I will continue working on a way to hear her out in an appropriate, precedented and respectful manner,” Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee’s chairman, said in a statement. White House adviser Kellyanne Conway also struck a warm tone. “This woman should not be insulted and she should not be ignored,” she said during a Fox News interview. The aesthetic shift should not be mistaken for a substantive one, however: Grassley has not announced any plans to delay Thursday’s vote, and the White House isn’t backing down from Kavanaugh’s nomination.

There’s a broader social and cultural context that shapes how women’s stories of sexual misconduct are heard. In Ford’s case, her account will be filtered through one of the most political lenses possible. Supreme Court nominations are now significantly more contentious than they were a generation ago. After Thomas joined the court—with the votes of 11 Democrats, no less—the Senate went on to approve Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a 96-3 vote in 1993 and Stephen Breyer in an 87-9 vote in 1994. Nominees stopped receiving near-unanimous support after Bush v. Gore, and while John Roberts was confirmed by a 78-22 margin, no other nominee has received more than three-quarters of the chamber’s support since then. Neil Gorsuch, the most recent successful nominee, received just 54 yes votes.

This makes Kavanaugh’s nomination a moment of genuine political peril for the Trump administration. His confirmation would be a crowning triumph for Republicans and the conservative legal movement. It would mark the culmination of a four-decade campaign to build a five-justice majority on the Supreme Court that would not only advance conservative legal views, but roll back the status quo on abortion rights, affirmative action, and the scope of federal power. The solid conservative majority would also serve as a bulwark against adventurous leftward policymaking for at least a generation. Victory has never been closer for conservatives.

Trump himself shows little interest in judicial politics, but he knows that many of his supporters care about it deeply. The president’s own lawyers have often struggled to keep him from tweeting and saying potentially incriminating things related to the Russia investigation. His fondness of weighing in on the news cycle is also well established. That makes it all the more remarkable that he’s largely kept quiet about the Kavanaugh allegations since they emerged last week, saying on Monday, “We want to go through a full process ... and hear everybody out.” There could be no greater testament to the fight’s political sensitivity and importance.

But the Republicans are also well aware of what might happen if senators decide against confirming Kavanaugh to the high court at this stage. Democrats could retake the Senate in November, and lame-duck Republicans could fail to push another nominee through before the new Congress takes over in January. It would be extremely unlikely that Trump could then find a nominee who would satisfy both the conservative legal movement and the new Democratic Senate. As a result, the Supreme Court could be left with only eight justices—evenly split between four conservatives and four liberals—until at least the next presidential election.

With that risk at hand, it’s possible that Republicans could force a vote to confirm Kavanaugh as early as next week. That move would place the credibility of two American institutions at stake. The Supreme Court’s only real power is its legitimacy in the eyes of the American public, and forcing through another justice who’s been accused of sexual misconduct is a surefire way to damage it. The Senate, meanwhile, could claim that voters gave them a mandate in 2016 to confirm judges like Kavanaugh, but the message it would send to many Americans is that women’s traumatic stories still don’t matter to them.

Democrats: Don’t Get Your Hopes Up On Brett Kavanaugh

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For Republicans, getting a second Supreme Court vacancy before the end of Donald Trump’s second year in office has been like winning the lottery twice. The decision to discard democratic and legislative norms by refusing to hold hearings for Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland paid off enormously, with Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Court in 2017 and Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement in June of 2018. With five months to go until the midterm elections, confirming Kennedy’s replacement should have been a cakewalk.

Instead it’s been a mess. Trump’s nominee Brett Kavanaugh had a voluminous paper trail, but his nomination wasn’t truly imperiled until this past Friday: He was accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl at a party three decades ago, when both were in high school. Most Republican senators seem at peace with the moral aspect of this dilemma: the presence of two men on the High Court credibly accused of sexual harassment or abuse, poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the political conundrum may give them pause.

Republicans have scheduled a public hearing before the Judiciary Committee on Monday, during which both Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, and Kavanaugh are expected to testify. In the meantime, Republicans will be considering a number of bad options: pushing Kavanaugh ahead, despite the allegations; forcing him to withdraw and attempting to confirm another Federalist Society–approved judge before the next Congress is sworn in in early January; or betting on a favorable Senate map and waiting until the next Congress.

The first option is the most likely, but the problem is that it is sure to inflame an already motivated Democratic base, jeopardizing the GOP’s control of Congress. Democratic voters will see Kavanaugh’s nomination as part of a pattern of misogyny emanating from the White House, whose occupant is also credibly accused of sexual harassment. Furthermore, losing even one chamber would be an existential threat to Donald Trump’s presidency, since it would give Democrats the power to hold hearings on a wide range of the president’s unscrupulous activities.

At the same time, it’s unclear whether a successful nomination would help or hurt Republican turnout. It could lead to complacency, or Republican voters could see it as evidence that Trump had followed through on one of his most important campaign promises to them.  

Then there’s the second option. It’s possible that Kavanaugh could withdraw after publicly losing support of a handful of Republican senators who at times have been at odds with Trump, at least rhetorically. Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, and Ben Sasse have all expressed concern about the allegations and said that Kavanaugh’s accuser should be heard. These Republicans are torn between their conscience and/or political image on the one hand, and the ardent desires of their hard-core constituents on the other. There would be a dear price to pay for jeopardizing a generational majority on the Court.

Pushing another nominee through before January 3 is highly unlikely, given the amount of time the confirmation process takes. It could also hurt the GOP at the polls in another way. It would be enormously cynical to confirm a Supreme Court justice during midterm elections after blocking Garland under the pretense of “letting the people decide.” It would draw even more attention to the GOP’s hypocrisy and undemocratic maneuvers.

Republicans could also wait out the storm, and use the re-election of a GOP-controlled Senate to claim legitimacy for another nominee. Already, conservative media outlets are ginning up an outrage machine. If Kavanaugh’s nomination were actually scuttled, Republicans would have 60 days to churn out ads turning him into a perverse Merrick Garland: A rightful Republican-nominated justice whose seat was stolen by cynical Democrats. But given the importance of Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court seat, that’s a huge risk to take. Yes, Republicans have a strong chance of maintaining control of the Senate, but it’s far from a sure thing.

So the likeliest outcome is that Republicans will push Kavanaugh through anyway. Over the last three years, they have faced a similar choice, and they have often chosen to stick with the candidate credibly accused of sexual misconduct. That bet paid off with Donald Trump, who has gone on to appoint a slew of federal judges who will exert enormous influence for decades. Confirming Kavanaugh may ultimately cost Republicans Congress, but there is seemingly nothing Republicans aren’t willing to lose as it embraces its new identity as the party of Trump.

The Unequal Burden of Climate Change

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Two massive tropical cyclones made landfall on separate ends of the globe on Friday. But they were, as the Associated Press put it, “as different as water and wind.”

The wind storm was Super Typhoon Mangkhut. Deemed the strongest cyclone of 2018, it brought 165 mile-per-hour gusts and 20-foot storm surges to the Philippines, and a bit less of both to Hong Kong. The water storm was Hurricane Florence. The slow-moving storm brought only 90 mile-per-hour winds to North and South Carolina, but also torrential rainfall that set a record for both states.

These differences illustrate what one disaster preparedness expert told me last week. “Every single storm has its own identity, its own footprint,” he said. “No two are ever alike.” But cyclones’ identities are not just shaped by wind speeds and rainfall totals. They’re defined by the communities they target.

Depending on its location, a massive cyclone could be anything from a minor inconvenience to a life-shattering event. The former is more likely in wealthier, more developed places, the latter more in poor and rural areas. This isn’t a hard and fast rule; hurricanes can kill anyone of any class, anywhere near enough to a coast. But it’s been well-documented that hurricanes hit poor, minority communities the hardest. They are more vulnerable to the risks of natural disasters, and struggle most to recover.

Florence and Mangkhut show this phenomenon well. While both were life-threatening storms, the greatest destruction and loss of life was in poor, remote locations. Nearly 100 people are presumed dead across the Philippines, due not only to the strength of the storm but to the area’s weak infrastructure. The rains triggered landslides, including one that partly buried the small mountainside village of Itogon, killing at least 40 people.

These areas likely will struggle to recover. According to The Guardian, “The livelihoods of thousands has been devastated as crops were flooded just a few weeks before the harvest.”

By the time Mangkhut got to Hong Kong, which is far more developed than the affected areas in the Philippines, the storm had weakened slightly. But it was still powerful enough to tear off “parts of buildings and roofs, while storm surges flooded hotels and restaurants with waters waist-deep,” The Guardian reported. More than 100 people were injured in that phase of the storm. Still, no deaths were reported, an outcome attributed to Hong Kong’s resilient infrastructure. And unlike in the Philippines, a swift recovery is expected.

Florence hit neither a city like Hong Kong nor a ramshackle town like Itogon. As CityLab reported last week, the hurricane’s path included “fragile coastal resorts and historic cities like Charleston and Wilmington”—urban, well-off areas. But Florence was also headed straight for “more isolated inland regions, where a lack of resources, poor communications infrastructure, and challenging geography can hamper emergency efforts.” At least 32 people have died as a result of the storm.

In some cases, rural Americans are actually better equipped to deal with storm impacts. “You’re more accustomed to the occasional power outage, because you know no one is coming to help you,” disaster relief expert Randy Creamer told CityLab. “But when you get to the economically depressed areas… a single mom working three jobs, there is not a lot she can be thinking about how to get over this all by herself.”

It will take time to realize the economic effects of Florence on North Carolina’s poorer, more rural communities. But it is already clear they’re shouldering an unequal burden from the storm. On Monday, North Carolina power company Duke Energy said two of its coal ash pits had breached, spilling toxic-metal laden waste from coal burning into the surrounding environment. Several lagoons of hog feces and urine have also spilled over due to torrential rain. As CityLab noted, “Hispanic low-income communities are disproportionately located near such sites of industry and agriculture, and all of these associated wastes.”

Overall, North Carolina is able to recover from a hurricane relatively quickly. It’s relatively well-developed, home to a number of military bases, and is on the U.S. mainland, not far from FEMA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The same can’t be said for Puerto Rico. The U.S. territory, where nearly 45 percent of residents live below the poverty line, already lacked decent sewage, electricity, and road infrastructure when Hurricane Maria hit last year. But it also failed to receive adequate aid, due to isolation and political indifference. Nearly 3,000 people died.

The physical characteristics of hurricanes are expected to change over time. As humans emit more greenhouse gases, further warming the world, climate scientists predict deadly tropical cyclones will become rainier; that they may move more slowly and venture further into the northern hemisphere; and the hurricane season may become longer. The developed world’s emissions will be responsible for these changes. But it’s the developing world that may suffer the most from it.

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