Why white evangelicals should panic by Michael Gerson,


Why white evangelicals should panic
by Michael Gerson, washingtonpost.com
August 29, 2019
Much white evangelical support for President Trump is based on a bargain or transaction: political loyalty (and political cover for the president’s moral flaws) in return for protection from a hostile culture. Many evangelicals are fearful that courts and government regulators will increasingly treat their moral and religious convictions as varieties of bigotry. And that this will undermine the ability of religious institutions to maintain their identities and do their work. Such alarm is embedded within a larger anxiety about lost social standing that makes Trump’s promise of a return to greatness appealing.

Evangelical concerns may be exaggerated, but they are not imaginary. There is a certain type of political progressive who would grant institutional religious liberty only to churches, synagogues and mosques, not to religious schools, religious hospitals and religious charities. Such a cramped view of pluralism amounts to the establishment of secularism, which would undermine the long-standing cooperation of government and religious institutions in tasks such as treating addiction, placing children in adoptive homes, caring for the sick and educating the young.

But this is not, by any reasonable measure, the largest problem evangelicals face. It is, instead, the massive sell-off of evangelicalism among the young. About 26 percent of Americans 65 and older identify as white evangelical Protestants. Among those ages 18 to 29, the figure is 8 percent. Why this demographic abyss does not cause greater panic — panic concerning the existence of evangelicalism as a major force in the United States — is a mystery and a scandal. With their focus on repeal of the Johnson Amendment and the right to say “Merry Christmas,” some evangelical leaders are tidying up the kitchen while the house burns down around them.

There is a generational cycle of religious identification that favors religion. Adolescents and young adults have always challenged the affiliations of their parents and been less likely to attend a house of worship. This tends to change when people have children and rediscover the importance of faith in the cultivation of values and character. So there is likely to be some recovery upward from 8 percent as this cohort ages.

But this recovery will come from a very low baseline of belief. Evangelical identification could triple without reaching the level found among senior citizens today. In an interview in November, David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame said: “It’s unlikely that [young people are] going to be able to climb back to the same level of religious involvement as their parents’ or grandparents’ generation did. Just because they’re starting at a much, much lower point.”

Why is that point so low? There are a number of reasons, but one of them, Campbell argued, is “an allergic reaction to the religious right.” This sets up an irony. “One of the main rationales for the very existence of this movement was to assert the role of religion in the public square in America. And, instead, what’s happening in that very movement has actually driven an increasing share of Americans out of religion.” This alienation preceded the current president, but it has intensified during the Trump era.

Since 2000, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has more than doubled, from 8 percent to 19 percent. The percentage of millennials with no religion has averaged 33 percent in recent surveys.

As Campbell described it, some of those alienated from religion merely drop out of the faith marketplace. They are what he calls “passive secularists.” But there is also an increasing number who are “active secularists” — people who have chosen secularism as an identity. And this is creating a secular left within the Democratic Party to counter the religious right in the Republican Party. In their hands, the culture war will be fought to the last man or woman.

If evangelicals were to consult their past, they would find that their times of greatest positive influence — in late-18th-century and early-19th-century Britain, or mid-19th-century America — came when they were truest to their religious calling. It was not when they acted like another political interest group. The advocates of abolition, prison reform, humane treatment of the mentally disabled and women’s rights were known as malcontents in the cause of human dignity.

Today, far too many evangelicals are seen as angry and culturally defensive, and have tied their cause to a leader who is morally corrupt and dehumanizes others. Older evangelicals — the very people who should be maintaining and modeling moral standards — have ignored and compromised those standards for political reasons in plain view of their own children. And disillusionment is the natural result.

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How Trump’s Justice Department Screwed James Comey The New Republic / by Marcy Wheeler

How Trump’s Justice Department Screwed James Comey

The New Republic / by Marcy Wheeler / 7h

There’s a lot of delicious irony in the Justice Department inspector general’s report finding that former FBI Director James Comey violated FBI rules by retaining four memos documenting President Donald Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation. In the report, the guy who made a career prosecuting people who leaked information for the public good was scolded for doing the very same things past whistleblowers have been punished for, including holding on to official documents and sharing classified information with their lawyers (and, through them, the media). It turns out Comey didn’t fare too well when his own standards were applied to him.

It is doubly ironic that the man who roiled the 2016 election by accusing Hillary Clinton of being “extremely careless” with her emails, some of which were retroactively classified, has been accused of leaking classified information because one to four words in a document he took home were deemed confidential after the fact.

But there’s an aspect of the report that, when compared with the inspector general’s past practice in a similar case, suggests the office piled on the accusations against Comey to provide basis for a headline-grabbing censure, even where there was no basis for prosecution. Indeed, Trump made the most of the inspector general’s rebuke, asserting that Comey had been “thoroughly disgraced and excoriated” by the report’s conclusions.

According to the report, Comey documented the damning things the president said to him in a series of one-on-one meetings because he believed a contemporaneous record might be necessary “at some point to protect myself and to protect the FBI.” That’s also why he kept a copy of four of the memos—all unclassified at the time—at home in his personal safe.

That’s roughly the same reason that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales kept notes he drafted in 2004, back when he was the White House counsel, at President George W. Bush’s request. He wrote the notes shortly after briefing top members of Congress about a warrantless wiretapping program he had a role in authorizing. Gonzales would later say that he drafted the notes merely to record lawmakers’ reactions, though the notes included operational details of the program and its code name, Stellar Wind.

In 2005, when he became attorney general, Gonzales took the notes with him from the White House because, as he later said, he wanted to “protect” them. According to the testimony of multiple witnesses, for some period he kept the notes at his home, even at a time when he couldn’t have stored them in a safe there. In 2007, after, yes, James Comey made damning claims in testimony to Congress about the dispute memorialized in the notes, Gonzales reviewed them with the White House to try to rebut Comey’s claims. Far less credibly than Comey, Gonzales claimed he did not think the notes he brought home to protect were classified; he stored them in an envelope marked, “AG -- EYES ONLY -- TOP SECRET.”

Like Comey, after Gonzales alerted others to the existence of the notes, the Justice Department inspector general conducted an investigationinto his improper handling of the documents. Like Comey, the inspector general referred the conduct for prosecution. Like Comey, the Justice Department declined to prosecute. With both, the inspector general laid out the purported facts in the investigation in the first section of its report, then followed up with a description in the second section of why those facts show the subject violated departmental rules.

A comparison of how the inspector general used its factual findings in the two reports makes it clear that the Comey report strains mightily to support its conclusion of misconduct. In yesterday’s report, the inspector general did not lay out the facts necessary to support its analysis—and in some instances, it had to twist those facts.

The evidence against Gonzales was compelling. At a time when he couldn’t operate any of the safes available to him, he had some of the most sensitive information in government wrapped inside two envelopes marked Top Secret at either his home or a briefcase he didn’t always lock. Every review of the document upheld a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) classification for it. The conclusion that Gonzales violated Justice Department rules about handling classified information all flows from that.

With Comey, however, the inspector general report doesn’t establish two key facts: whether Comey’s notes documenting Trump’s efforts to interfere in investigations recorded official business, and whether he disclosed any non-public information about a pending investigation. The factual findings about a third issue, the classification review that found Comey had taken home a document that included “confidential” information, said that those conducting the review would “not be shocked” if others found the information to be unclassified. A judge ultimately found that just one word in the memo was confidential.

Because the factual findings section does not present compelling evidence on these three points, the analysis section at times strains to support its conclusions—and in some places introduces new information.

For example, there’s the conclusion that Comey improperly disclosed Trump’s request that he drop the investigation into Michael Flynn (i.e. “I hope you can let this go”) to his friend Daniel Richman, who then told the New York Times. For the first time, the report in the second section cites Comey’s colleagues’ response to his action. “Members of Comey’s senior leadership team used the adjectives ‘surprised,’ ‘stunned,’ ‘shocked,’ and ‘disappointment’ to describe their reactions to learning that Comey acted on his own to provide the contents of Memo 4, through Richman, to a reporter.”

The report later also claims there is “no doubt” that his colleagues used those words because he violated the FBI duty to safeguard investigative matters. But if there were truly no doubt, then the report could have shown that by citing those witnesses stating that themselves. Since the report relies on this language in its analysis of two different findings, those reactions should be included, with full context, in the factual findings section.

Then there’s the report’s claim that, in releasing that same memo, Comey had revealed non-public investigative information. To back this up, the report includes two lengthy footnotes on former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’s extensive testimony to Congress about her discussion with White House Counsel Don McGahn about Flynn—testimony that revealed a great deal about the status of the FBI’s Flynn investigation as it existed on the day she got fired. These footnotes attempt to argue that Yates’s disclosures were less substantive than Comey’s repeated references to Trump describing the calls Flynn had made to Russia’s ambassador (calls that were publicly disclosed) and insisting that Flynn had done nothing wrong. The second footnote describes that information by asserting, “Comey’s disclosure of Memo 4 provided the public with details relevant to the Flynn investigation.”

But what Yates’s testimony demonstrates is that Yates had, without objection from the Justice Department, introduced a great deal of information about the investigation into Flynn into the public record before Comey’s disclosure. Furthermore, the report cannot claim that he revealed details about the investigation itself. The actual new information that the memo disclosed was a description of how the president had, in highly unusual fashion, tried to end the investigation into Michael Flynn. The memo could only have disclosed investigative information if the president himself was being investigated—and he wasn’t yet.

The inspector general might have argued that fielding a request from the president to end an ongoing investigation is part of that investigation itself. But it tellingly does not lay out that case, instead merely claiming that such a request is “relevant” to the investigation.

More generally, the report does not discuss whether presidential efforts to intervene in investigations, in violation of department rules about proper communication channels and chain of command, constitute the official business of the FBI director. The report does, however, lay out abundant evidence that such efforts are not normal. It quotes former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker stating that any one-on-one meetings are “quite outside the norm of interactions between the FBI Director and a President of the United States.” It describes Baker and Comey’s repeated efforts to address Trump’s direct communications: After Trump asked Comey to let the Flynn investigation go, the report quotes Comey as saying he “took the opportunity to implore the Attorney General to prevent any future direct communication between the President and me. I told the AG that what had just happened—him being asked to leave while the FBI Director, who reports to the AG, remained behind—was inappropriate and should never happen.”

After Trump called Comey directly about an intelligence investigation on March 9, 2017, Comey called then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions immediately, “to keep the Attorney General in the chain of command between [Comey] and the President.” The last memo records Comey reviewing again the proper channels for the president to intervene in investigations; the report’s discussion of it notes that Comey’s chief of staff shared the details in real time with the proper chain of command.

Is this what constitutes official business? This is what the inspect general’s report would have you believe: that the president asking Comey to do things that break the FBI’s rules is part of the FBI director’s job—and hence, Comey is at fault for airing that official business to his associates and ultimately the press. The report treats a memo recording the president demanding that he “‘lift the cloud’ created by the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election” as official business, implying that Comey should have done what the president asked of him.

This report could have been a review of why the Justice Department’s chain of command never found a way to stop Trump’s repeated efforts to influence investigations in ways that violated Justice Department rules and guidelines. The report’s revelation that someone handed over a full copy of those memos under whistleblower protection suggests it probably should have. Of course, that report could only have reviewed the failures of the attorney general and his deputies in the Russia investigation, when in fact the violations were caused by the president—someone the inspector general has no jurisdiction over. Instead, after significant public pressure from the president and reportedly private pressure from his lackey Attorney General William Barr, the report instead faults Comey for trying to do something about it.

Comey may well be guilty of retaining memos that constitute official records. But to make that case, the inspector general would first have to establish that it is part of the FBI director’s official duties to let the president interfere in ongoing investigations. Needless to say, it has not done that.

Instead, the report provides compelling proof that Comey is a hypocrite and a grand-stander, while dodging the critical question of what the Justice Department can do in the face of the president’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the protections on its investigative integrity.

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The Family’s Big Secret Is Hiding in Plain Sight The New Republic / by Josephine Livingstone

The Family’s Big Secret Is Hiding in Plain Sight

The New Republic / by Josephine Livingstone / 15d

We are in a high season of political showboating. On the debate stage, candidates for the Democratic nomination tussle for our attention, straining to exploit their allotted seconds of screentime. But televised debates are electoral theatrics, not governance: Most of the people who run the world have little to no face recognition. I don’t think I could pick Robert Mercer out of a line-up, for example, and he bankrolled Brexit and Trump’s candidacy.

But that public-private boundary is fraying. President Trump’s atrocious behavior in office has begun to sully the public image of many of his major donors, with billionaires like Equinox-owner Stephen Ross suffering boycotts waged by his high-income, left-leaning customers. Things have gotten so perilous for plutocrats that Joaquin Castro, a congressman whose brother, Julián, is one of those Democratic candidates for president, was accused of harassment when he publicly named a few of Trump’s campaign contributors—which of course was already a matter of public record.

The scrutiny has extended to evangelical Christians, who have confusingly been a pillar of support for the president, despite the fact that he behaves in decidedly un-Christian ways and frequently takes the Lord’s name in vain. A new documentary faces both issues—the private money behind the government, and Trump’s alliance with the religious right—head on. The Family is a Netflix miniseries based on two books by the investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet. Across five episodes, director Jesse Moss lays out a series of shocking claims regarding a secretive Christian organization variously called The Family, The Fellowship, or nothing at all. It has no hierarchy, no staff, and its members prefer not to acknowledge the group’s existence. But if Sharlet and Moss are to be believed, The Family is one of the preeminent powers behind the throne. It doesn’t merely run a system of private prayer meetings to funnel tax-exempt cash to favored individuals, or promote a warped interpretation of Christian scripture. Its goal is to undermine the project of American democracy itself.

It’s the kind of story we’re hungry for now, because The Family, like any good conspiracy theory, makes sense of what would otherwise be absurd, nonsensical. We begin with Jeff Sharlet himself. As a young writer in New York City in the early 2000s, Sharlet recalls, he was asked by family friends to check on their son, who they worried had joined a cult. The two men met, and the son invited Sharlet to take a look at the community he had joined near Washington, D.C. There, Sharlet found a group of young men all living together, fraternity-style, spending their days playing sports or reading from a slim volume simply titled Jesus. Also: The young men were told they were being trained to rule to world.

The organization running the community claimed to have no name and no real mission, aside from spiritual matters. So why was Sharlet noticing so many politicians—from U.S. senators to the leaders of foreign nations—visiting their compound? From its narrow initial focus, the show’s narrative opens up to incorporate a huge story that has its origins in the Great Depression.

Abraham Vereide with John F. Kennedy.Courtesy of Netflix.

In the 1930s, a Norwegian named Abraham Vereide visited America, where he organized a “breakfast prayer meeting” between 19 unnamed business leaders who wanted to keep Western money in private pockets as the world’s markets heaved. When Vereide died in 1969, leadership of the secretive club passed to the legendary evangelical figurehead Douglas Coe (who died in 2017—the group now has no official leader, but many cells).

Vereide’s little meeting grew into the National Prayer Breakfast, the annual D.C. event attended by hundreds of politicians—including, since 1953, each sitting president of the United States. Many congresspeople believe the event is thrown by Congress itself, Sharlet discovered, but in truth it has always been a Family affair. “The more invisible you can make your organization,” Coe once said, “the more influence it will have.” The Family is modeled on Coe’s own profile: he was deeply pious, extremely secretive, and influential beyond belief.

For example, President Jimmy Carter himself appears in The Family to recall how helpful Coe was in during the 1978 Camp David Accords, helping negotiate the peace deal between Egypt and Israel behind closed doors. President George H.W. Bush spoke directly to Coe during the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast speech to praise him for his “quiet diplomacy—I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy.” The show’s fourth episode, “Dictators, Murderers, and Thieves,” explains how Coe and his congressmen emissaries travelled around the world to pray privately with leaders, including men like Muammar Gaddafi, to build diplomatic backchannels.

How did Coe gain the trust of so many politicians, Democrat and Republican and Libyan dictator alike? He met with people one on one, looked into their eyes, and told them to believe in Jesus and nothing else. He called the doctrine “Jesus Plus Nothing,” and the strategy seems to have relied on Coe’s enormous charisma. Coe was never elected to any public office in his lifetime, instead building a network of religious allegiance that he always intended to function as a closed-room alternative to the democratic process.

In The Family’s eccentric theology, the world is run by “key men” who have been chosen by God to rule over the rest of us, in imitation of Jesus, who they believe to have been a muscular leader interested only in power. This equation of divine and political power runs counter to the American principle of the separation of church and state, and propounds an elitist, even totalitarian view of politics.

The Family shows several clips from a lecture given by Coe in 1989, in which he invites his audience to think about “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler.” The three men were so powerful because “they bound themselves together in an agreement.” Coe means this, however, as a compliment. “Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself,” Coe says. The same was the case, he adds, with Hitler: “that was the demand to be in the Nazi party.” He goes on to marvel at China’s Red Guard, and its members’ willingness to execute their own mothers in the name of their cause. “That was a covenant. A pledge. That was what Jesus said.”

This, Coe figured, was exactly what America needed to retain its place at the top of the global food chain. To create a comparable “covenant” in America, Coe decided to strip away all aspects of Christian theology not having to do with Jesus himself, so that the ideas were basic enough for anybody to subscribe to. A simple idea can be more powerful than a man’s love for his mother, Coe observed, so why not make such an idea our own?

Coe has been dead for a couple of years, but his works live on. Sharlet and Moss demonstrate that The Family has lately cultivated an intimate relationship between the evangelical movement and Donald Trump, helping Christians accept him as the “imperfect vessel” for Jesus’ will.

Forgiveness, in a sense, is the heart of The Family’s “religion.” All sins can be forgotten, they argue, because Jesus loves any fallen man who loves Jesus back. And if a man has been chosen by God, then who are the people to contradict him? It’s a some-are-more-equal-than-others theory that suits the evangelical agenda: In Trump, they found a “key man,” in Vereide’s phrase, who could channel the muscular vision of Christ’s will favored by those who value Christianity’s ubiquity more than any other policy. Jesus isn’t the point—power is.

The problem with The Family is the sheer sprawl of the subject: There is so much information here, with such far-reaching and horrifying ramifications, that it is difficult for the viewer to leave clearheaded. The extent to which The Family influences Democrats as well as Republicans, for example, is uncertain—Hillary Clinton was a friend of Coe’s, but we don’t know much beyond that. (Like Jeffrey Epstein, Coe’s deleterious influence seems to have transcended party lines.) And while the documentary clearly seeks to accumulate sufficient evidence against Trump to seed doubt in his supporters’ minds, it never really comes together into a single, snappy argument.

Moss and Sharlet also struggle to define the ideological roots of the Vereide/Coe/Family mission. The easy answer, of course, is that it doesn’t exist: They cared about increasing their own power, and not much else. But that kind of nihilistic realpolitik is no match for the emotions such agents traffic in. Once you’ve won a person’s heart, it’s hard to appeal to the head.

The Family’s most valuable payoff is, in the end, the story of fascist rhetoric’s entry in fundamentalist conservative politics. Trump doesn’t sound like a dictator by accident, and The Family finally explains why, in detail: The president speaks that way because men like Douglas Coe idolized fascist rulers of the mid-twentieth century and spread their appeal. The “covenant” offered by Christian fundamentalism is popular because of, not in spite of, its similarity to Nazi brotherhood, and it was engineered on purpose to be its equivalent.

Though it’s doubtful that The Family will sway many conservative religious viewers—how can you prove that the show about a conspiracy isn’t a counter-conspiracy?—Coe’s admiration for Hitler cannot be forgotten once learned. Though the documentary’s larger argument is muddier and harder to verify, that speech from 1989 will haunt Coe’s spiritual descendants with a viciousness that will only grow as more of the public learns about his views. Meetings can be secret, and diplomacy can be covert, but videotape is forever.

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The Misogyny of Climate Deniers The New Republic / by Martin Gelin

The Misogyny of Climate Deniers

The New Republic / by Martin Gelin / 1d

Climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have difficulty sticking to the blasé tone when it comes to a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden.

Throughout the summer, Lomborg has sent out half a dozen tweets mocking or criticizing Greta Thunberg, the prominent young activist who has been sailing across the Atlantic to attend the UN’s Youth Climate Summit and other meetings in the U.S. “Just when you thought climate alarmism at least couldn’t go higher than 11, you see someone who’s found 111,” Lomborg wrote in a recent tweet. “Of course, she should be treated respectfully,” he later added. Most of Greta Thunberg’s critics did not seem to care much for the caveat.

As Thunberg approached America, she was followed by a tsunami of male rage. On her first day of sailing, a billionaire Brexit activist tweeted that he wished a freak accident would destroy her boat. A conservative Australian columnist called her a “deeply disturbed messiah of the global warming movement,” while the British far-right activist David Vance attacked the “sheer petulance of this arrogant child.”

In the U.S., former Trump staffer Steve Milloy recently called Thunberg a “teenage puppet,” and claimed that “the world laughs at this Greta charade,” while a widely shared far-right meme showed Trump tipping The Statue of Liberty to crush her boat. We can expect a surge of similar attacks in the U.S. as she arrives in New York this week.

While these examples might feel like mere coincidence to some, the idea that white men would lead the attacks on Greta Thunberg is consistent with a growing body of research linking gender reactionaries to climate-denialism—some of the research coming from Thunberg’s own country. Researchers at Sweden’s Chalmers University, which recently launched the world’s first academic research center to study climate denialism, have for years been examining a link between climate deniers and the antifeminist far-right.

In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics […] it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”

The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they perceive it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, antifeminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.

“There is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity that I call ‘industrial breadwinner masculinity.’ They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It’s a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment” Hultman told Deutsche Welle last year.

The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé wrote in another paper.

These findings align with similar ones in the United States, where there is a massive gender gap in views on climate change, and many men perceive climate activism as inherently feminine, according to research published in 2017. “In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female,” marketing professors Aaron R. Brough and James E.B. Wilkie explained at Scientific American. “In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment,” they write.

In the past year, young women such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S. and Thunberg in Europe have become the global faces of climate activism, often with tremendous political impact. In the United States, Ocasio-Cortez has helped transform what was once considered a bit of fringe rhetoric—the Green New Deal—into a topic of regular conversation. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a recent poll, one out of three Germans said that Thunberg has changed their views on climate change.

The rise of Thunberg and Ocasio-Cortez has generated a predictable backlash among conservative men. In the U.S., Ocasio-Cortez has become an obsession on right-wing media. During her first month in Congress, Fox News mentioned her an average of 76 times a day. Now, Greta Thunberg is becoming a similar target for European nationalists. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party seems to have coordinated their attacks on Thunberg with the right-wing European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) think tank.

Climate change used to be a bipartisan concern, the first Bush senior presidency famously promising to tackle global warming. But as conservative male mockery of Thunberg and others shows, climate politics has quickly become the next big battle in the culture war—on a global scale.

As conservative parties become increasingly tied to nationalism, and misogynist rhetoric dominates the far-right, Hultman and his fellow researchers at Chalmers University worry that the ties between climate skeptics and misogyny will strengthen. What was once a practical problem, with general agreement on the facts, has become a matter of identity. And fear of change is powerful motivation.

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Gerson

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/evangelical-leaders-are-tidying-the-kitchen-while-the-house-burns-down/2019/08/29/49d09a14-ca95-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html

The Beltway Book of the Damned The New Republic / by Jason Linkins

The Beltway Book of the Damned

The New Republic / by Jason Linkins / 5d

Who among us has been secretly longing for a book-length Axios newsletter that comprises the sanguine opinions of cable news green room habitués and is compiled by a serial sexual predator? Disgraced pundit Mark Halperin reportedly is set to deliver precisely that in November. Tentatively titled How to Beat Trump: America’s Top Political Strategists on What It Will Take, the book features several dozen political strategists who may not have predicted the 2016 election accurately, but who understand that such failures have never stopped anyone from dispensing stray advice so that Beltway scribblers can pad out their daily dispatches. 

That the wider public might take umbrage with this project apparently did not become clear to many of Halperin’s enablers—who include Donna Brazile, James Carville, David Axelrod, and Jennifer Granholm—until the nature of the project was publicly disclosed, at which point everyone was reminded that Halperin had not exactly earned a shot at rehabilitation. As Eleanor McManus, whose “informational interview” with Halperin at ABC News ended with his failed attempt to kiss her, told The Daily Beast, “He leveraged his position as a prominent journalist to prey on women. He has yet to take responsibility for his actions by apologizing to his victims or demonstrating genuine contrition.”

Asking for anything “genuine” from Halperin may be an impossible-to-fulfill request, as he’s spent his career rising to greater perches of prominence despite the fact that he’s proven to be nigh on incapable of much beyond the banal observation. While Halperin deserves credit for pioneering the political tip sheet—at ABC News, he created “The Note,” which essentially reimagined the Associated Press Daily Planner as a stylish and buzzword-filled Beltway character study—he’s never managed to hit the same heights as a writer without someone else’s assistance (first John Harris and later John Heilemann). Left to his own devices, Halperin’s career has always resembled a parody of The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the titular hero forgets to hide his cursed portrait.

For instance, after leaving ABC News for Timemagazine, he created “The Page,” a web 2.0 experiment that tested this proposition: How many web pages can a single wan thought be stretched across in order to trick the reader into serving multiple ad impressions? This project is best remembered for the time when he crudely photoshopped Louisiana Governor Mary Landrieu’s hair to resemble the scene in the movie There’s Something About Mary in which Cameron Diaz’s character accidentally mistook semen for hair gel. (The entire sordid post was constructed to deliver the news that Landrieu, per a spokesperson, was reviewing a CBO score.)

What once seemed to be a misguided jock-joke now appears, in hindsight, as a warning to us all. Halperin wasn’t brought low until 2017, a full decade after leaving ABC News, when seven women who worked with him there accused him of offenses ranging from “propositioning employees for sex to kissing and grabbing [one woman’s] breasts against her will” to “pressing an erection against [other women’s] bodies while he was clothed.” Less than two years later, he is now seeking redemption from the very same culture that overlooked his predations. That so many people were willing to assist him in reclaiming his lost relevance demonstrates not only that he remains a master of the Acela corridor’s marketplace of elite favor-trading, but that This Town remains as morally bankrupt as ever.

How fitting that Halperin’s publisher is Judith Regan, who has a yen for exploitative trash. She is perhaps best known for permitting O.J. Simpson to hypothesize how he might have carried out the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The folderol that ensued was among the proximate causes of News Corp’s decision to fire her from HarperCollins, a decision that touched off a twisted “did she fall or was she pushed” legal battle that eventually ended with Regan securing a $10 million settlement.

After news of Halperin’s book broke, Regan attempted to bridge the ethical crevasse. “I do not in any way, shape, or form condone any harm done by one human being to another,” she said in a statement. “I have also lived long enough to believe in the power of forgiveness, second chances, and offering a human being a path to redemption. How To Beat Trump is an important, thoughtful book, and I hope everyone has a chance to read it.” But Halperin has yet to undertake any sort of atonement for his misdeeds. The idea being put forth here, then, is that by writing an “important, thoughtful” book about how to rid our body politic of Trumpism’s infestation, Halperin is atoning, and those who would see this book waylaid are doing harm not just to Halperin’s own redemption story, but the nation’s.

It’s a good grift, exploiting the emotional insecurities of the Trump-imperiled liberal professional class, and Halperin should not be thought a fool for trying his hand at this game. After all, it has proven lucrative for any number of latter-day exploiters of The Resistance’s emotions. Both the labyrinthine tweet-threader Seth Abramson and the primrose pathfinders known as the Brothers Krassensteinsuccessfully turned their perpetual promises of Trump’s imminent undoing into a make-work side-hustle that have included book deals of their own. If anything, it’s about time that the chattering Beltway elites tried their hand at this genre, and Halperin has handed them the opportunity to align their needs with his own.

Halperin’s co-conspirators have, over the past day, attempted to distance themselves from the project or otherwise justify their participation in it. Many of their responses take Regan’s official line about the project: Working to defeat Donald Trump is too important to not collaborate with a man who exploited his power to degrade his female colleagues. 

Anita Dunn, a former Obama White House adviser now at SKDKnickerbocker, a lobbying firm that works with the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, responded through a spokesperson: “Anita cares about beating Donald Trump, that is the only reason she participated.” Carville sounded a similar refrain, saying, “I know he’s been accused by a lot of people & lost his job. The guy called me & asked me to speak to him on a topic that I obviously care about. And I spoke to him.”

Other responses were more mysterious. Brazile’s response suggested that those who agreed to be interviewed were somehow captive to some great existential event, telling CNN’s Oliver Darcy, “I’m not the author. Ask Mark why he chose us.” Axelrod suggested that some degree of flimflammery was involved, tweeting, “To those who have asked, I have known Mark Halperin as a reporter for 25 years. He emailed me three questions about the 2020 race for a book he was writing and I replied in a few sentences, without giving enough thought to how my participation would be used or interpreted.”

A perhaps more accurate description of their participation is that they willingly agreed to do a solid for someone with whom they’d spent many happy days socializing. Halperin’s entire enterprise hinges on all of the exclusivity of these transactions, and the relationships that further those transactions, which apparently continue to flourish despite the fact that Halperin obstructed or imperiled the careers of many women in journalism. It’s impossible for any Beltway careerist to enter into a conversation with Halperin without being aware of this bare fact. It’s similarly impossible to contemplate a “Mark Halperin comeback” that does not involve him being paid a king’s ransom that might otherwise facilitate the careers of several more worthy individuals.

Since no one involved in this exploit would ever suggest that they are not savvy Washington political insiders, none of them can be innocent. So what is do be done with them? Former Roll Call reporter Meredith Shiner, who possesses her own searing knowledge of what it’s like to lose a career to someone like Halperin, suggeststhat journalists of good conscience could simply “decide unilaterally” to never “speak to the operatives who spoke to Halperin” again. “There are plenty of other fish in that swamp,” she wrote.    

It is, perhaps, naive to expect Halperin’s enablers to be shunned in Washington. But it’s not as naive as believing that the few dozen people who thought participating in this book would come with no public consequence possess the political knowledge to defeat President Trump.   

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Trump’s Tax on the National Psyche The New Republic / by Matt Ford

Trump’s Tax on the National Psyche

The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 3d

The most incredible thing about last week’s decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on detained migrant children is that the case existed at all. The court ruled that the Trump administration had to provide basic health and hygiene supplies, including soap and toothbrushes, to the children in its custody. Justice Department lawyers had argued that such items weren’t necessary to meet the required “safe and sanitary conditions” to hold kids at immigration facilities. The three-judge panel disagreed.

“Assuring that children eat enough edible food, drink clean water, are housed in hygienic facilities with sanitary bathrooms, have soap and toothpaste, and are not sleep-deprived are without doubt essential to the children’s safety,” Judge Martha Berzon wrote for the court. One of the panel’s members, Judge A. Wallace Tashima, was himself held at an Japanese-American internment camp as a boy during World War II.

The episode amounted to an act of astonishing cruelty towards the children themselves. It was also an enormous waste of everyone’s time and energy.

Litigation, unlike Greek gods, does not spring from the earth fully formed. Lawyers for both sides wrote briefs and memoranda on the legal issues involved, pored through mountains of past cases, and probably even worked long into nights and weekends to meet deadlines. Judges, too, read all of these filings and likely wrote multiple draft opinions on their conclusions. The American legal system spent countless man-hours to decide whether children in federal custody should get soap and toothbrushes.

Wasting time is a defining feature of Trump’s presidency. He is fairly adept at frittering away his own days, spending an indeterminate number of hours languishing in front of the television, simply to watch cable news coverage of himself so he can then offer comments about it on Twitter. But when it comes to wasting the time of everyone around him, the president is without peer. Trump’s haphazard style of governance forces journalists, lawyers, and government officials to expend innumerable hours on doomed initiatives and errant tweets. His corrosive effect on American politics forces Americans to devote far more hours of their life to thinking about him than they should. All of this amounts to a tax of sorts on the national psyche—one that can never be repaid.

Human lives are bounded by time and attention. Every moment that’s spent focused on one thing can’t be spent another way. At a certain level, it’s not healthy to tabulate all of these expenses. In other circumstances, however, it’s unhealthy not to do so. I first started thinking about how Trump wastes Americans’ time two months after he took office. In the early morning of March 4, 2017, he sent a series of tweets alleging that former president Barack Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” before the election. “Nothing found,” Trump added. “This is McCarthyism!”

The claim was ridiculous on its face. Trump’s habitual lying also gave no reason to believe the assertion. And yet journalists and lawmakers spent weeks trying to discern whether he was telling the truth. Multiple congressional committees investigated it. Newspapers assigned reporters to cover the allegations; cable news channels spent hours debating them. After U.S. spy agencies resolutely denied any such wiretaps existed, a Fox News analyst sparked a minor diplomatic row by suggesting that Obama may have asked the British to do it instead. (He did not, Britain’s version of the NSA said in an extraordinarily rare statement.)

Two months later, Trump offered some insight into the tweets’ origins. “I don’t know if you remember, a long time ago, very early on I used the word wiretap, and I put in quotes, meaning surveillance, spying you can sort of say whatever you want,” he told Sean Hannity. He said he based the tweets “just on a little bit of a hunch and a little bit of wisdom maybe,” rather than hard evidence. “It was pretty insignificant, I thought when I said it, and it’s pretty amazing.” This process still repeats itself on a regular basis, though Americans have grown more accomplished at distinguishing which of Trump’s tweets matter and which ones don’t.

Should someone be so lucky as to supplant Trump, they will likely spend the bulk of their first term cleaning up after Trump’s last.

It would be almost comical if Trump’s tweets created the largest of his presidency’s opportunity costs. Unfortunately, they pale in comparison to his reckless approach to policy-making. His hastily written executive order to enact a ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries in 2017 led to hours of chaos at U.S. airports before federal courts finally intervened. After multiple rewrites and more than a year of litigation, the Supreme Court upheld a narrower version of the measure last summer. It would become a recurring theme: Trump regularly announces bombastic moves on immigration, then leaves it to federal agencies, lawyers, and the courts to try to fashion some sort of order from the wreckage.

The constant exposure to Trump’s rhetoric and governance carries its own measurable toll. Surveys by the American Psychiatric Society, Politico reported last fall, have found a marked increase in stress and anxiety among respondents with regard to the future in recent years. One poll taken shortly after Trump became president found that nearly six in ten Americans thought 2017 was the lowest point in living American memory, surpassing the Vietnam War and 9/11. Nearly three-quarters of Democrats said they were stressed about the nation’s future, a view shared by clear majorities of Republicans and Democrats as well.

This effect does not fall evenly on all Americans. A Gallup poll from April found that younger and less affluent Americans felt more daily stress in general. Women reported higher rates than men in the APS survey; black and Hispanic Americans also registered higher levels of anxiety about the future than their white counterparts. In some communities, that stress may have serious consequences for health. A study published last month in Obstetrics and Gynecology found a correlation in CDC data between the 2016 presidential election and premature births among Latina women in the seven months that followed. Other studies reported similar results after large-scale immigration raids.

Trump’s gnawing hunger to be at the center of the daily news cycle is a poor fit for our system of government. Higher levels of political awareness and news literacy are always welcome, of course, but they have their limits. “If you elect me president, I promise you won’t have to think about me for 2 weeks at a time,” Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, one of the two dozen Democrats running for the party’s nomination, recently quipped. “I’ll do my job watching out for North Korea and ending this trade war. So you can go raise your kids and live your lives.”

Bennet’s overall campaign hasn’t caught on among prospective Democratic voters. But the underlying theme of a return to normalcy is propelling former vice president Joe Biden to the front of the crowded field. Biden’s message, a gauzy nostalgia for a pre-Trump world that didn’t really exist, could carry him all the way to the White House next November. But a return to this hallowed Before-Time will not be quickly achieved. Should someone be so lucky as to supplant Trump, they will likely spend the bulk of their first term cleaning up after Trump’s last: restaffing a depleted State Department, reversing the Sessions-Barr policies at the Justice Department, reorienting the EPA back towards fight climate change, and much more.

Trump knows what he’s doing. Last month, Representative John Ratcliffe, his nominee to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, withdrew from consideration only a few days after Trump announced his nomination. Ratcliffe received intense scrutinyfor apparently inflating his record of prosecuting terrorism offenses as a federal prosecutor. Trump probably knew none of this when he chose him; he later admitted to reporters that he let the news outlets do the vetting for him.

“A lot of times, you do a very good job, not always,” he told reporters after Ratcliffe’s withdrawal. “If you take a look at it, the vetting process for the White House is very good. But you’re part of the vetting process, you know? I give out a name to the press and they vet for me. We save a lot of money that way. But in the case of John, I really believe that he was being treated very harshly and very unfairly.” Thanks for providing your free labor, journalists. You’re still fake news.

Trump, of course, pays his own tax freely. He largely spends his days as president in unstructured “executive time” where he fields calls from outside advisers and ingests massive quantities of raw Fox News coverage. The work of solving the nation’s problems, except insofar as it rallies his supporters and keeps him in office, is a largely secondary concern. Soon after Trump took office, White House aides tried to persuade him that the national debt would become unsustainable in the future. “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” he reportedly replied. Trump’s time may be limited, but so is ours.

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There’s No Such Thing as a “Populist” The New Republic / by John Patrick Leary

There’s No Such Thing as a “Populist”

The New Republic / by John Patrick Leary / 1d

When I read mainstream political commentary, I often think of the awkward gyrating Elaine used to do on Seinfeld, flapping her limbs in all directions in an incompetent, and yet totally confident, imitation of what dancing is supposed to look like. Political pundits are engaged in a similar dance. Convinced of their abilities, they mimic certain words and phrases they associate with skillful political commentary, all without realizing how clumsy they must appear.

One word journalists frequently stumble over is “populist.” It was coined in the 1890s, when Kansas Democrat David Overmyer needed a convenient noun to identify members of the new People’s Party. Then, as now, populists claimed to act in the name of ordinary Americans against an exploitative elite. When Bernie Sanders denounces the “billionaire class,” for example, he speaks for “the people.” Likewise, when Donald Trump addresses the “forgotten man and woman,” he invokes a community of ordinary, excluded people—and, implicitly, those who do the excluding. The more the word is used, however, the more meaningless it feels. 

Today, a populist might be socialist or conservative, tolerant or nativist, egalitarian or racist (Elizabeth Warren, Ross Perot, and Hugo Chávez have all earned the moniker). It can describe a coherent political program, or a mere affectation, such as dropping one’s g’s and conspicuously owning a pickup truck. Reporters, eager to appear neutral, have taken to deploying the word as a euphemism for the resurgent racist right; when USA Today calls the alt-right a vehicle for “racism, populism, and white nationalism,” for example, it’s not clear what these terms mean or how they differ. Some foreign-policy pundits explain the success of Trumpian populism with a xenophobic metaphor of contagion—as if “our democracy” has caught an authoritarian bug from some unvaccinated place like Russia or Venezuela. And just as the rural populists of the nineteenth century were mocked as irrational “cranks” and “calamity howlers,” modern populists of all stripes always seem to be “angry” or “unhinged.” For the Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, Sanders is “prickly,” seducing voters with the “rhetoric of an angry populist not actually grounded in reality.” 


Focusing on populism as a mood or as a virusimplies that it is all rhetoric—as if the anger of “the people” is something suspicious, a phantasm summoned by crude and dishonest demagogues. Left out is an important question. If American elites really do act like vampiric idlers, shouldn’t the rest of us be a bit “prickly”? Besides, what democratic politics worthy of the name doesn’t mobilize “the people”? If an appeal to a broadly defined common people struggling against an out-of-touch elite is populist, then the Declaration of Independence is a populist document par excellence. 

The trouble starts when people assume populism is, as Robert S. Jansen of the University of Michigan puts it, “a thing”—a particular ideology or style of governance—rather than a set of practices that partisans use to mobilize the people against an elite. Populism is something you do, not something you are, and even levelheaded centrists do it. The real question, then, isn’t whether a candidate or thinker is populist, but what the consequences of his or her populism are. Whose version of “the people” do you want to empower? And whose version of “the elite” do you seek to suppress? 

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Is the Biden Bubble About to Burst? The New Republic / by Alex Shephard

Is the Biden Bubble About to Burst?

The New Republic / by Alex Shephard / 1d

Joe Biden never thought he’d have to do this. Positioned, as he was, as the affable veep to an immensely popular president, the veteran of three previous bids for the Democratic nomination assumed a presidential primary was just a way to garner free media until main event, the general election. But, since declaring his candidacy at what was, in American political terms, the eleventh hour, Biden’s campaign has been marked more by the sheer number of gaffes delivered than by any soaring rhetoric or roaring crowd of supporters. So far, his defining moment was not the unveiling of a visionary policy or a particularly poignant exchange with a supporter, but rather, by a debate face-off with Kamala Harris, in which the California senator attacked Biden’s documented record of opposing court-ordered busing as a means to integrate public schools.

And yet, through it all, Biden has held on to a commanding lead in most opinion polls. 

But that lead may be illusory. There’s a growing sense that Biden is something of a starter nominee, a candidate that voters can glom onto while they search for someone who better suits their values. “I did not meet one Biden voter who was in any way, shape or form excited about voting for Biden,” Patrick Murray, who heads the Monmouth Polling Institute (which recently released a poll giving Biden a significant lead in Iowa) told The New York Times. “They feel that they have to vote for Joe Biden as the centrist candidate, to keep somebody from the left who they feel is unelectable from getting the nomination.” JoAnn Hardy, who heads the Cerro Gordo County Democrats, concurred, telling the Times, “He’s doing O.K., but I think a lot of his initial strength was name recognition. As the voters get to meet the other candidates, he may be surpassed soon. I would not be surprised.”

It’s an important, if still-emerging shift. At the start of primary season, “electability” was seen as the key attribute voters wanted in a presidential candidate. But as the election has heated up—and as voters begin to know more about the candidates—its importance appears to be dimming. And candidates who voters are actually excited about are rising. That’s good news for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but it may be a bad omen for Biden. 

Biden has made the “electability” case explicitly, arguing that defeating Donald Trump should come first and everything else—like, you know, the stuff he would do as president—second. While other candidates have issued white paper after white paper, the former vice president has harped on the necessity of voting for the candidate who has the best chance at defeating the incumbent next November—a candidate who, at least as the early polls tell it, just happens to have the name Joe Biden. 

It’s an explicit “play it safe” approach and one aimed at Democrats who are concerned big policy ideas will alienate general election voters. “This is do-or-die, and Joe Biden is the best candidate to go against Trump in November,” Dick Harpootlian, a state senator in South Carolina told Vanity Fair in May. “Would Joe Biden be running if he thought any of these other folks could beat Donald Trump? No way. We can’t risk this thing with someone who has not done this before, who is unchallenged, who is untested. There is something to be said for two old white guys going at it,” Harpootlian, who is himself white, said. “The African-Americans in the State Senate with me are going to be with him overwhelmingly. Because this is a pragmatic year. This isn’t a battle of ideologies or identity or Medicare for All or a Green New Whatever. It’s all about who can stop this juvenile narcissist from getting a second term.”

The frontrunner’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden, made a revealing pass at this argument earlier this week, telling New Hampshire voters “You know you may like another candidate better but you have to look at who’s going to win…. So yes, you know, your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, healthcare than Joe is, but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Okay, I personally like so and so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.” 

This is not exactly the stuff of which inspiring campaigns are made. It’s condescending at best—existential policy imperatives like climate change and health care are hardly trivial, regardless of who occupies the White House—but it also contains an air of menace. Biden and his supporters are trying to create a binary choice: Vote for Joe and beat Trump, or don’t vote for Joe and lose. But most early polling has suggested that any candidate with near-universal name recognition—something that would automatically follow a major party presidential nomination—would lead Trump in a head-to-head competition. 

If voters are transitioning away from electability, that would be good news for Sanders and Warren, in particular. Both candidates have used policy as the backbone of their campaigns, and both have large and deeply loyal bases. Recent polling puts Warren and Sanders in the top tier of Democratic candidates; though they still trail Biden in most opinion polls, each have significant advantages should his campaign falter. Sanders, in particular, has gained momentum in recent weeks, releasing a flurry of policy proposals, including a $16 trillion plan to fight climate change and remake the country’s energy infrastructure. 

Most polling shows Sanders and Warren each defeating Trump in a general election matchup. Biden and his surrogates have gone to great lengths to make the argument that he is the only candidate who is guaranteed to beat the president in such a contest, but like most election-year promises, there are caveats. The fact is, nothing succeeds like success. Despite what Jill Biden said, whomever Democratic voters like the best, whomever gets the most voters to the polls on election day, that will be the candidate with a very good chance of defeating Trump. Deep down, most voters know this; now, it seems, the people who purport to know what most voters know may finally be waking up to this, too. That’s probably better for just about everyone’s future, except maybe Joe Biden’s. 

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Bolsonaro, Trump and the nationalists ignoring climate disaster

  VIEW ON WEB >     Edited by Ruby Mellen Share Share Tips/Feedback   BY ISHAAN THAROOR Bolsonaro, Trump and the nationalists ignoring climate disaster (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters; Eraldo Peres/AP; Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post; iStock) President Trump and leaders of the other Group of Seven nations will meet at the seaside French town of Biarritz this weekend for a ritzy get-together that hopes to be defined by its eco-friendliness. Summit attendees will be made aware of local reforestation plans that help offset the event’s carbon footprint; they can drink water from “environmentally responsible” bottles, pedal around on hydrogen-powered bikes, hop on trams that run on renewable energy, and dine on food sourced from local and sustainable supply chains. If it all feels a bit cosmetic, it should. In the form of Trump, the G-7 is playing host to the world’s climate denier in chief, a president who has called global warming a hoax and, since taking office, worked assiduously to roll back U.S. environmental protections. Then there’s the backdrop to the proceedings: By the end of the summer, some 440 billion tons of ice will have calved off Greenland’s ice sheet — the consequence of record heat waves. And when the planet isn’t melting, it’s ablaze. This week, global attention fell on the Amazon rainforest, where widespread fires led to the city of Sao Paulo — the largest metropolis in the Western hemisphere — being cloaked in dark smoke. Videos uploaded on social media showed vast stretches of devastation, with animals scurrying for shelter within the charred husk of the forest. Online hashtags urging action and prayers for the Amazon went viral, proliferated by Hollywood celebrities, French President Emmanuel Macron and others. “According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the fires have led to a clear spike in carbon monoxide emissions as well as planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, posing a threat to human health and aggravating global warming,” noted Andrew Freedman of the Capital Weather Gang. “The Amazon rainforest serves as the lungs of the planet, taking in carbon dioxide, storing it in soils and producing oxygen. Scientists agree that it is one of the world’s great defenses against climate change,” wrote my colleague Terrence McCoy. “In Brazil, it has suffered 74,155 fires since January, the space research institute reported. That’s up 85 percent from last year and significantly higher than the 67,790 blazes at this point in 2016, when there were severe drought conditions in the region associated with a strong El Niño event.” In this instance, climactic conditions don’t explain the surge in fires. Instead, many point to the government of far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who came to power vowing to end or loosen up protections for forested areas inhabited by indigenous people in favor of the country’s powerful agribusiness industry. Some of the blazes were probably started by emboldened cattle ranchers or farmers seeking to clear new land for cultivation or pasture. In the space of little more than a year, critics argue, Bolsonaro has reignited the “arc of fire” that ravaged the Amazon rainforest in the 1970s and ’80s. “I cannot remember any other big fire episode like this one,” Vitor Gomes, an environmental scientist at the Federal University of Para, told my colleagues. “It is also sharply overlapped with the increased deforestation. Attributing the whole episode to natural causes only is practically impossible.” Bolsonaro, though, is contemptuous of his domestic opponents and international critics. He has dismissed the findings of his own government’s scientific agencies as “lies” and advised those concerned about global warming to eat and defecate less, because that would collectively bring down emissions. This week, he accused left-wing nongovernmental organizations of deliberately starting the fires, but later admitted that he had no evidence to back up the claim. “Everything indicates that people went there to film and then to set fires,” he said. “That is my feeling.” Bolsonaro’s stance here is part of his broader nationalist politics. He and his allies have no time for lectures from foreign elites and nothing but scorn for the indigenous Amazonian communities and leftist environmental policies that they see as obstacles to economic growth. The surge in deforestation has provoked a diplomatic spat between Brazil and European countries and now may halt a free-trade deal between the European Union and South American trading bloc Mercosur. The putative pact requires a commitment to the Paris climate accord, which among other things calls for an end to illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030. But Bolsonaro may be tempted to take Trump’s path instead and pull Brazil out of the Paris agreement, which would mark a significant blow for global efforts around climate action. “Brazil has a responsibility not only to its own citizens but also to the entire earth,” wrote American climate campaigner Bill McKibben. “Bolsonaro’s tantrums, like Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accords, damages not just his own nation for a few years; it also imperils the entire earth for millennia to come.” But such an appeal won’t move Bolsonaro. “This seems to be at the heart of a lot of what the president believes. It’s not just about climate change ― it’s also about globalism, sovereignty and economic development,” Oliver Stuenkel, an international relations professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, told HuffPost. “For the president, it’s, if you believe in [climate change], it’s a conspiracy meant to keep Brazil from developing. … And he knows this causes agony and outrage among his international opposition.” Nationalists like Trump and Bolsonaro probably see the cause of climate action as a political dead end for their base. On the other side of the Atlantic, their right-wing counterparts in Europe are a bit more attuned to the scientific reality of the threat but still exhibit deep contempt for some activists seeking to drive greater awareness. In the United States, climate change is a fully partisan issue, largely thanks to the Republican Party’s wholesale embrace of the fossil fuel industry — the American analog to Brazil’s agribusiness lobby. But concern is widespread on the left and a key subject of debate ahead of the 2020 election. On Thursday, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders unveiled a $16.3 trillion Green New Deal platform, possibly the most radical proposal put forward so far by a candidate that would create some 20 million new jobs while dramatically restructuring American society and economy around a supposedly more sustainable future. “We need a president who has the courage, the vision, and the record to face down the greed of fossil fuel executives and the billionaire class who stand in the way of climate action,” the plan’s call to action declares, taking aim at Trump and his allies. “We need a president who welcomes their hatred.” • McCoy, The Post’s Brazil bureau chief, also wrote the text for a stunning photo essay that explains why the Amazon is burning. What’s most worrying “isn’t what’s happening now,” he notes. “It’s what will happen next. Researchers already say that they’ve seen more fires this year than ever before – and the driest party of the year is still ahead.” • Europe will see a third major heat wave of the summer starting this weekend. The sweltering conditions are set to arrive in Germany on Sunday, when Frankfurt could hit the upper 80s. Then they will be within a degree or two of 90 on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday — “pretty impressive considering their average high this time of year is just 71 degrees,” my colleagues note. • The Post’s White House bureau chief, Phil Rucker, examines how Trump has thrust Israel into an American culture war, fueled, in part, by the president’s frustration with his unpopularity with Jewish voters. Trump’s rhetoric about Jews magnifies his transactional approach to politics and his miscalculation that his support for Israel should automatically translate into electoral support from Jewish Americans. • At the same time, as my colleague Julie Zauzmer explores, the Trumpian discourse on Israel is exposing another reality: The prevalence of many Trump-supporting, evangelical Christian voters whose support for Israel and its right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not dented their deeply anti-Semitic views. • French President Emmanuel Macron hosted British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ahead of the G7 meetings. The two had less than fruitful discussions around Brexit: Macron made clear that Johnson’s opposition to the “Irish backstop,” which prevents a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, was unacceptable. French officials indicated they now believe Britain is likely to crash out of the E.U. without a withdrawal deal in place by the end of October. • The Syrian military recaptured a strategic town held by rebels for the past five years. The seizure of Khan Sheikhoun is the latest victory in President Bashar al-Assad’s bid to stamp out the long rebellion. Some 76,000 civilians have been forced to flee their homes just this week in the face of the regime’s offensive. South Korean protesters react as they hear the news that Seoul has scrapped its intelligence-sharing agreement with Tokyo. The signs they are holding called for the deal to be abolished. (Lee Jin-Man/Associated Press) Not so smart Last year, the South Korean Supreme Court ordered Japanese companies to pay compensation to victims of forced labor during Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. The judgements infuriated Japan’s government, which had given South Korea an economic aid package to settle the historical grievances when the countries restored diplomatic relations in 1965. The lingering dispute has escalated into recent tit-for-tat trade measures fueled by nationalist sentiment in both countries with moves that have affected South Korea’s electronics industry, Japan’s consumer goods and more. Things continued to heat up Thursday when South Korea scrapped an agreement to share military intelligence with Japan, significantly escalating the stakes in the U.S. allies’ dispute over trade and historical grievances. The decision is sure to be met with concern in the United States, which views intelligence sharing between the allies regarding North Korea as critical. The pact, known as the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), was signed in 2016 in the face of a growing threat from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. South Korea’s decision comes just a day after the foreign ministers of both countries met at a trilateral event in China, where they agreed to keep talking but did not announce any progress in the dispute. The United States also urged the two allies to settle their differences, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stressing their “incredibly important” cooperation on North Korea. But some critics say the Trump administration should have acted sooner and more forcefully to defuse the row. The forces at work may not be so concerned with what the United States thinks. The GSOMIA was signed by a conservative South Korean government, which traditionally puts more value on the alliance with the United States and takes a more tolerant attitude toward Japan than liberal or left-wing governments, such as that of South Korean President Moon Jae-in.  Either way the biggest losers may be the South Koreans if the decision damages the U.S.-Korea alliance. And the biggest winner is likely North Korea. “With Pyongyang bolstering its military capability through repeated weapons tests, intelligence sharing is more important than ever to counter nuclear threats from North Korea,” said Lee Ho-ryung, a researcher at the state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul. — Simon Denyer and Min Joo Kim As President Trump's hopes of buying Greenland continue to dominate the news cycle, a piece in The Post notes the United States should capitalize on the arctic territory it already owns. Speaking of Trump, a column in Americas Quarterly argues his strategy in Venezuela is more damaging than helpful, and one in The Post examines Trump's history of anti-Semitic comments. Meanwhile, an op-ed in Politico urges Italy's politicians to unite against the League's far-right leader Matteo Salvini.  We already have a Greenland. It’s called Alaska. Wouldn’t it be better to wisely and sustainably invest in the American Arctic? Heather A. Conley | The Washington Post Read more » Four signs Trump’s Venezuela strategy is backfiring The humanitarian toll of U.S. sanctions is mounting, and Guaidó's association with Trump has become his greatest liability. Oliver Stuenkel | Americas Quarterly Read more » A no-Salvini alliance is Italy’s best hope Tie-up between the 5Stars and Democratic Party would help avoid a damaging budget fight with Brussels. Silvia Merler | Politico Read more » Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he’s praising Jews. Philo-Semitism seems benevolent, but it can easily spur hatred of Jews. Yair Rosenberg | The Washington Post Read more » Following a week of reflection on the country's history of slavery and racism, the New Yorker has a somewhat light-hearted piece on the 1929 debate where African-American leader W.E.B. Du Bois caused the group to roar with laughter at a once prominent and now hardly known white supremacist. Elsewhere, The Post reports on how animal welfare protection under Trump has declined, and a Massachusetts city will hear from a Jewish woman who spied on the Nazis during World War II.  When W. E. B. Du Bois made a laughingstock of a white supremacist Why the Jim Crow-era debate between the African-American leader and a ridiculous, Nazi-loving racist isn’t as famous as Lincoln-Douglas. Ian Frazier | The New Yorker Read more » Caged raccoons drooled in 100-degree heat. But federal enforcement has faded. Amid Trump’s push to deregulate, changes at the USDA now emphasize treating animal businesses and labs as partners. Karin Brulliard and William Wan | The Washington Post Read more » Jewish woman to tell stories of spying on Nazis Had Marthe Cohn been captured, she surely would have been executed, and probably in a torturous way.

Double Trouble Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by David Kurtz

Double Trouble

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by David Kurtz / 9h

In Arizona, an key 2020 state, the Republican attorney general is launching a new “election integrity” unit. Among the first hires? A Tea Party voter fraud alarmist.

The AG’s office is taking pains to say that it will not just prosecute voter fraud (reminder: super rare!) but also help to restore public confidence in elections by debunking bogus claims.

You can see again the vicious cycle where those making bogus voter fraud claims (including the president himself) create an environment where “confidence” becomes an issue, and elected officials respond to the supposed climate of concern. It basically rewards those making the most outlandish bad faith voter fraud claims.

But beyond that, it’s important to note the difference between good election administration practices (usually performed by secretaries of state) and the introduction of law enforcement into the mix, as is happening in Arizona. The threat of criminal prosecution for an exceedingly rare crime like voter fraud is a disproportionate response to the small underlying threat, with serious knock-on effects from creating the public perception that there is some risk associated with voting.

All of those concerns would persist even if you stood up the most stalwart, careful, sober election integrity unit. But when you staff it with people who have championed the myth of rampant voter fraud? Come on.

This isn’t hard. You either favor widespread participation in the electoral process and taking reasonable steps to encourage and enable it or you have partisan political reasons for opposing it. The choice is pretty simple.

SHAREVISIT WEBSITE

The Summer of Warren / GQ magazine / by Julia Ioffe

gq.com
The Summer of Warren

By Julia Ioffe


August 21, 2019


28-35 minutes

Elizabeth Warren was ready for the question. She gets a variation of it almost everywhere she goes. Often, it’ll come after she’s outlined any number of the big, sweeping things she intends to do once she’s assumed the presidency—wipe out student debt, say, or bring the private equity industry to heel, or revamp the State Department. Her immodest plans tend to inspire at least a few people in every crowd to wonder the exact same thing: Really? And how do you expect you’ll do all that?

On a chilly summer evening in a high school gym in Milwaukee, I noticed she’d begun preempting the question by highlighting her own audacity.

She recounted a little story of a colleague who had once approached her on the Senate floor to suggest that an idea of hers was maybe a bit improbable. “That’s just too hard,” Warren said he told her, and added she should “smile more.” (The good, liberal crowd booed on cue.) “And here’s what I remember thinking,” she said, her voice resonating with the righteous disbelief she must have felt then. “What do you think they said to the abolitionists? ‘You’re not going to change this country, that’s too hard!’…What do you think they told the suffragettes? ‘Quit now. It’s just too hard.’ What did they say to the early union organizers? ‘Quit now. It’s just too hard.’ But here’s the thing. They didn’t quit. They persisted and they changed the course of American history!”

The stakes of Warren’s run are historically significant. She is vying to become not simply the country's first female president, but the architect of an ambitious rethinking of American government. (Her campaign’s central question is: Who does our government work for?) Yet for all the grandness of her vision, some of her shrewdest innovations on the trail can seem almost imperceptible. Consider her selfie strategy. “We’re going to take pictures,” Warren announced from the stage, shortly after invoking those trailblazers of yore. Here was a stealth weapon available to neither abolitionists nor suffragettes. “Someone will explain whether to go to that side or that side.”

For many of the hundreds of people who had turned out to hear Warren speak, this was the main event: a photo with the candidate. Quickly, a buzzing but orderly line began to snake across the gym, into the school’s hallway, and out the double doors into the street.

The selfie line has, by now, become a notorious feature of a Warren event—one that reflects the campaign’s savvy as well as the candidate's unique commitment and stamina: She stays as long as it takes to pose with every person who wants a picture. Sometimes the line is so long that this obligation requires hours of Warren’s time—as it did in Chicago in June, when over three thousand people took two and a half hours to shuffle through. “I don’t know how she does it after doing the speech and taking those questions, which is very hard,” said former Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid. “I’ve never known anyone to do that before. I know that when I finished my town halls, I just wanted to go home.”

Warren, however, told me that she finds the selfie line “energizing.” Earlier that day, as we chatted in her hotel, I asked her about these post-rally meet-and-greets. “The selfie line is the chance to have the direct touch,” she told me. “I get to hear from one person after another what they want me to hear. Anything! This is their chance, and they can tell me anything they want as they come through that selfie line. And it keeps me connected to people in a powerfully important way.”

What Warren has created is a contemporary twist on the age-old rope line, one that feels hipper than her age (Warren turned 70 in June) and is both more personal and more efficient than randomly reaching into a sea of anemone-like arms—or getting carpal tunnel from shaking too many hands, as George W. Bush did in 2000. Other 2020 hopefuls oblige random requests for selfies with voters, but no one has the casual spontaneity of picture-taking down to a perfectly engineered production the way the Warren campaign does.

As soon as Warren is done delivering her stump speech, she’ll answer three randomly selected audience questions, and then four of her staffers will swoop in to get the selfie assembly line moving. If Warren sees that the emerging line is a particularly long one, she’ll kick off her black mules and lace up her sneakers, preparing for the slog of retail politics with an eye toward orthopedic comfort.

She’ll find her place in front of a giant American flag, beaming, ready to hug or to listen or, if the person is a little girl, to bend down, reach out her right pinkie and loop into the pinkie of the little girl and tell her that “running for president is what little girls do!” It’s not clear why this is the subject of a pinkie swear, or why the selfie line is called a selfie line, because what actually happens is that, the moment one staffer ushers you toward Warren, another takes your bag, a third staffer grabs your phone, snaps your picture (not a selfie) with the senator, and a fourth staffer pushes you off the stage as the first staffer ushers in a new selfie—photo—subject.

Each photo and brief moment of chit-chat takes, according to the campaign’s estimate, an average of six seconds. By the summer’s end, the surging Warren campaign had taken more than 42,000 of these photos. Not everyone who comes to her town halls is a die-hard supporter. Most are undecided but Warren-curious. Others supported Bernie Sanders last time around and still share his ideals but are intrigued by the specificity of Warren’s vision. These people are crucial to her campaign, and Warren wants to send them all away with more than just a headful of policy details. Everyone who comes through the selfie line walks away dazzled and giddy and armed with a photo of Elizabeth Warren that they can blast to their social-media feeds. They may only be getting six seconds with the candidate, but those are six more seconds than they’re likely getting with anybody else running for the White House. And those pictures live forever.

Warren is able to devote herself to this kind of laborious, voter-by-voter outreach, her allies say, because she has freed up vast chunks of campaigning time by eschewing the typical fund-raising protocols of White House candidates. In February, just as her campaign was beginning, she forswore big-dollar fundraisers and said she wouldn’t be spending her time courting deep-pocketed donors, a move so controversial that her first finance director resigned in protest. It turned out that the pledge didn’t cost her, at least not much. In the second quarter of the year, Warren raised over $19 million, almost as much as the other front-runners. The average contribution to her campaign was $28. Warren highlights her grassroots donor base by randomly calling the people who have given her money—sometimes getting hung up on by people who believe that they are being pranked. (There is, of course, always a camera rolling when the calls go out.) “It’s revolutionary—I think voters don’t understand that,” says Jess McIntosh, a political commentator and Warren fan. “She’s working on policy proposals and taking 40,000 selfies because she’s not spending eight hours a day with rich people. And that’s huge.”

Elizabeth Warren has made the "selfie line" a strategic feature of each campaign stop—and has snapped roughly 42,000 photos with those who've turned out to hear her speak.

Elizabeth Warren was ebullient when I first met her. She had every reason to be. It was July, halfway through what was shaping up to be the Summer of Warren, and she bounded into the hotel conference room with obvious energy.

Tall and wiry, Warren visibly thrums with good cheer. She’s got that kind of pert friendliness stretched taut around a core of steel that some foreigners find confusing in certain willful Americans. But in Warren, both the chipper facade and the steel guts feel genuine: She is a very nice lady who will put up with exactly zero bullcrap. She carried a tiny banana smoothie and was dressed in her standard uniform: black slacks and a black shirt. On top of this neutral canvas, she usually wears either a simple jacket or a cardigan in a solid, bright color—professional but approachable and, as any TV producer will tell you, perfect for a screen. The cardigan on this day was a periwinkle number, which caught the lightly faded blue eyes behind her rimless glasses.

The Massachusetts senator was rising inexorably in the polls, gleefully capturing electoral territory from Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, two white men who many despairing Democrats believed in hindsight might’ve saved the country from Trump, had either been the nominee in 2016. Though the first primaries were still months off, Warren’s high-octane campaign had been scoring wins and gathering energy. By the end of August, she’d visited 27 states and Puerto Rico, held 128 town halls, dominated her opponents in two primary debates, and was holding steady at third place in most national polls. She had vaulted into first place in Iowa, and most head-to-head matchups with Trump had her winning.

Warren had also been—quite notoriously—cranking out progressive policy proposals in a steady volley. She outlined her intention to end the opioid crisis. She showed how she’d tackle housing costs and make amends for redlining and other policies that have held back black Americans. She announced plans to cancel student debt, prevent gun violence, and bring manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt. Most recently, she detailed how she intends to help Native American communities. On nearly any subject of national concern, she's offered a prescription that's gone far beyond cursory talking-points. And she's been deeply and personally involved in crafting each plan, often seeking out input from scholars in the relevant fields. It is a time-consuming process and one that would seem to be at odds with another lesson one could draw from Clinton’s campaign: You can’t win against Trump by running on policy. And yet the approach has become a key part of her appeal.

As I followed Warren this summer, through Midwestern states that Trump had won—places like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana—I watched her confront a myriad of issues and then shrug in playful self-deprecation, admitting that yes, she has a plan for that, too. The crowd would go wild. “I have a plan for that” has become the recognizable catchphrase of the campaign season—a wonky motto about old-fashioned preparedness and acumen that serves as a kind of anthem in the chaotic age of Trump. And her campaign has leaned into the marketing opportunity, spangling the phrase on all manner of merchandise, including the item handed out to black women at the New Orleans Essence Festival: Warren-branded day planners.

Preparedness aside, these months of pre-primary jockeying can be a grind for a candidate as well-traveled as Warren. It’s a routine that features crowded economy flights (Warren prefers the aisle), a blur of nondescript hotel rooms, and a diet of meals that would shear years off anyone’s life. Warren told me that she keeps up her energy, as well as her physical and psychological health, by walking. She tracks her miles on her iPhone and was pleased to show me that she’d already logged 4.1 that day. We flipped for a moment through her phone, studying the data. “My average for this month so far is 7.4,” she said, pointing to an orange bar. “And my yearly average to this point is 6.2. I really had a tough January, because it was soooo cooold!”

Some mornings, she gets up early to walk before the day’s whirlwind. Other days, she walks late at night, strolling through towns she’s stumping in but hasn’t gotten a chance to see. “Sometimes it just really means circling the parking lot, but each time thinking, ‘Okay, but I’m moving,’ ” she said. Often, she’ll listen to a book—she just finished Ballistic, part of a pulpy series by Mark Greaney about a shadowy ex-CIA officer. Now, she was on to Douglas Brinkley’s American Moonshot, a history of the space race. Sometimes she’ll just turn off the audio book and do silent laps around the parking lot, earbuds in her ears, hat on her head. “It’s very—relaxing is almost not the right word; it’s grounding. It’s okay, I’m walking, I’m reading a book, I’m unwinding from all of the things that come flying in during a presidential campaign.”

I asked her if she ever has moments where she’s just staring out into space, not moving, her mind suspended in silence. She looked at me, puzzled, then exclaimed, “Not really! That’s just kind of not me!”

When she speaks on stage, Warren insists that the house lights are turned up to illuminate the audience. "This is not a performance, this is a chance to engage," she says, "and I need to see faces when I’m talking through that.”
There is a story Warren has been telling lately, one that explains how she learned the words that have come to define her career—first as a law professor, and more recently as a politician: mortgage, foreclosure, bankruptcy. Long before she encountered them as cold legal terms, those words had a more powerful meaning as the ones whispered late at night by her parents in Oklahoma. This was after her father’s heart attack, when he’d spend long stretches out of work. The family had sold off the station wagon, but it wasn’t enough to keep the creditors at bay.

One spring day, 12-year-old Betsy found herself standing in her mother’s bedroom. “Laid out on the bed was the dress,” Warren nearly whispered to a crowd one scorching afternoon in Elkhart, Indiana. “Some of you in here know the dress,” she went on, scanning the predominantly silver-haired room. “It’s the one that only comes out for weddings, funerals, and graduations.” A faint and knowing “yeah” echoed where I sat. “And there’s my mom, and she’s in her slip and her stockinged feet, and she’s pacing and she’s crying. And she’s saying, ‘We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house.’ ” The audience was silent as she delivered the line, her voice crackling with tears.

Warren tells this story at each of her town halls, sometimes more than once a day, and every time she tells it, she is on the verge of crying. She doesn’t in the end, but people in the audience do. At every single event I attended, I saw people wiping away tears when she told the story. It was a masterful summoning of sentiment that calls to mind a method actor dredging up the same emotion in the same play, night after night, for a months-long run.

American voters demand authenticity of their candidates, despite the obvious and calculated performance of a political race. I wanted to know what happens in that moment—how does Warren manage to move a crowd to tears despite the repetition? I wanted to ask her if what I heard in her voice was real.

“Because I’m back in that room,” she told me, her eyes suddenly brimming. “I can describe the shade of the carpet to you and the bedspread, and I’m there with my mother. And I’m not only there as the little girl standing in the doorway, I’m there in my mother’s heart.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, her eyes blinked away the extra moisture. “She was so frightened,” Warren went on, reprising the story of how her mother—who, at 50, had never worked outside the home—walked to the local Sears, got a minimum-wage job, and saved the family from foreclosure.

“I knew how scary it was by the time I was standing in that doorway,” Warren said, her voice gravelly. “I’d heard her cry night after night after night, and I think that for kids sometimes, it’s harder to hear a parent cry, knowing they won’t do it in front of you. That’s really scary.”

That she elicited such empathy in that room in Elkhart was a special feat. It was a relatively conservative corner of a conservative state, and the audience was palpably cool to her when Warren took the stage. Several voters I spoke to before the event weren’t sure what to expect, and one man told me that, though he was curious about the Massachusetts senator, he was sure the country would not elect a woman.

Warren said she could sense that the audience wasn’t with her when she started. “Well, it’s not like I walked in and said, okay, diagnosis: Here’s the problem,” she explained. “It’s in the room. And even as I’m being introduced, I can see faces—I’m kind of standing off to the side—and as soon as I got on stage, I thought, the people standing here want to know me better, they want to know who I am and why I’m here. So let’s slow down a little bit, let’s talk a little more, but we got there.” By the end of her speech, most of the able-bodied people in the room were up on their feet, their fists and cheers churning the air.

Her trick isn’t to just read the energy in the room, it’s to feel the people there. And like all of her plans and strategies, she leaves nothing to chance, ensuring that the faces in her audiences are lit, that the crowds are never obscured to her by the curtain of darkness one sees from a bright stage. “It’s very important to me to be able to see faces when I’m doing a town hall,” Warren said. “I don’t want to be in a theater where I’m on stage and the audience is in the dark. This is not a performance, this is a chance to engage, for all of us in the room to think about what’s happening to our country, to our lives, and I need to see faces when I’m talking through that.”

Warren often talks about how she knew in second grade that she wanted to be a teacher. Though she eventually went from being a speech therapist to a tenured professor at Harvard Law School and a formidable presidential candidate, the guiding impulse is still obvious. Her stump speeches operate like a satisfying college lecture, the kind where you feel so engaged and entertained that you almost don’t realize you’re learning something.

“Better than anyone I’ve seen in public life, she can make that transition in a discussion that feels totally relatable and easy to follow,” says Andrew Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law School who was once Warren’s student. “She’s a natural teacher. On some level, teaching isn’t just about conveying information, it’s about capturing the attention and interest of your audience in a way that they come away with something new. She does that.”

With the primaries still months away, Warren has visited 27 states and Puerto Rico and has held 128 town halls.
One day last fall, a young woman in suburban Michigan named Mallory McMorrow watched a number she didn’t recognize flash on her phone’s screen. She was content to let the call go to voicemail, but at the last moment, she picked up. It was Warren.

Just two years earlier, McMorrow, who was then 30, was stunned to notice that a family down the street had taken down their American flag and put up a Trump sign. It was just after the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape. The family, McMorrow knew, had two daughters in middle school. What was happening?

Like so many women horrified by Trump’s election, McMorrow, a graphic designer, decided to quit her day job and run for office. On November 6, 2018, she flipped her district, snatching a seat in the Michigan state Senate away from a deep-pocketed Republican incumbent from a well-known political family.

Suddenly McMorrow was the youngest woman ever elected to the state Senate. She was still absorbing the wildness of it all when her phone rang with the senator from Massachusetts on the other end. She was calling to congratulate her—and to gather intelligence. “She said, ‘Mallory, I saw the results of your election. Wow!’ ” McMorrow recalled. “And she asked me, ‘Tell me about Michigan. Tell me about your district. Tell me about the people there. What were the conversations like? What were the people like? What do they care about?’ ”

McMorrow recounted this as she introduced Warren at a town hall in Lansing, Michigan, the capital of a state Warren was making a point to visit a full nine months before its primary. In 2016, Democrats had been sure that Michigan was a reliable brick in their “blue wall” across the Upper Midwest. Yet Clinton, who notoriously didn’t pay much attention to the area during the general election campaign, ended up losing the state by some 11,000 votes—and, with it, the presidency. By the 2018 midterms, most of the candidates atop the Democratic ticket in Michigan were women. “There was some skepticism about running so many women on the ticket, given how Secretary Clinton performed in Michigan,” says Lavora Barnes, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. But the mostly female ticket triumphed, sending a woman to the U.S. Senate and three more to the House of Representatives, part of a record-setting year for women getting elected across the country. “Some attribute it to her gender, but I don’t,” Barnes says of Clinton’s loss now. “Michiganders are comfortable voting for women. I think there were plenty of other factors that did it. It had nothing to do with her gender but more with her ability to connect to voters.”

When Warren announced on New Year’s Eve that she was forming an exploratory committee, becoming effectively the first Democrat in the 2020 race, a rash of articles appeared reprising the theme of likability. Politico asked if she was “too unlikable” to win. Vanity Fair wondered the same. But instead of feeding into a larger discussion, the publications were widely condemned for asking a question they would never ask about a male candidate. “When I see people talk about ‘likability’ now, at least it’s in a discussion about whether that’s an appropriate question to ask,” says Jennifer Palmieri, who worked for both President Obama and Hillary Clinton, “as opposed to 2016, when people asked, ‘Why does no one like her?’ ”

Things have changed since the last election. In part, this is because Clinton did smash a glass ceiling: She was the first woman nominee for president and won the popular vote by nearly three million votes. In part, it is because she still didn’t get the job. It went instead to a man who was not only comically less qualified than she was, but was also accused by two dozen women of sexual misconduct and, in some cases, sexual assault. The result was the Women’s March, which dwarfed Trump’s inauguration crowds the day before, the #MeToo movement, and a holy rage in women that most men can’t fathom.

Though she refuses “to relitigate 2016,” as she puts it, Warren accedes that what happened three years ago—Hillary Clinton’s run and Donald Trump’s win—makes her current quest for the White House a bit easier. “Of course, it helps that Hillary ran in 2016,” she told me. She is aware that the energy and momentum generated by a record number of women candidates in 2018—spurred on in part by the presence of a committed misogynist in the Oval Office—also help her. The path now, Warren thinks, is much better trodden. “I believe that having six women in the race right now makes it easier,” she said. “It’s good to not be the only one standing on stage who’s female. Having started teaching in law schools decades ago when there were very few women, I taught in commercial law, which was largely male. Commercial and corporate and all the money and finance courses stayed heavily male-dominated much longer than some of the other fields, and I’ve just lived through years of ‘Gentlemen! Oh. And lady.’ ” She rolled her eyes. “Years of, I’d look around the room and there’d be 50, 75, 100 people, and I’d be the only woman in the room. And the idea that right now, there are six women who held up their hands and said, ‘Yup! I’m in this race!’ It’s just fabulous!”

These days, it’s hard to find Democratic primary voters who will openly admit to a fear that a woman is unelectable in America. (I did find one in Elkhart.) Surveying a primary field unprecedented in its diversity, many voters I spoke to saw Warren’s gender as an advantage. Two Teamsters in Milwaukee, members of the elusive and coveted white working class, were avid Warren supporters. “I truly don’t think that’s an issue,” said Paul Host, a retired truck driver. “Hillary just didn’t understand the Midwest, that many of us are still treading water.” Warren, he felt, was different. They had met her several times in Washington when they came to lobby Congress to protect their pensions and she supported them, winning their undying loyalty. Host told me he liked her better than Biden or Bernie, who he said had “amazing” ideas but was not as electable as Warren. “She does a better job at explaining things,” Host said. “I think she’s got as good a chance as anyone,” his friend Bill Constable said. Most of the people he knew who wouldn’t vote for a woman were never going to vote for a Democrat anyway.

As she cranks out a litany of specific plans, Warren is hoping to refute a supposed lesson drawn from Hillary Clinton's failed run: That you can’t win against Trump by running on policy. So far, Warren has made her fluency with details a key part of her appeal.
On the same day that Warren and I met in Milwaukee, Donald Trump himself seemed to take note of the senator’s gathering momentum. With Warren climbing in the polls, the president lambasted her on Twitter. Again. “Could you imagine having Sleepy Joe Biden…or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas (1000/24th), as your President,” he banged out, “rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!”

Trump may not have understood the use of fractions, but he trusted his followers to comprehend the Native American slur, his preferred line of attack against Warren, who had quietly touted her faint lineage for decades until it became a national scandal during her first run for the Senate in 2012. Her rival at the time, Republican senator Scott Brown, suggested that Warren, a white woman, had been posing as a Native American in order to advance her career. The conservative Boston Herald dubbed her “Fauxcahontas,” and the controversy nearly sank Warren’s candidacy. Trump first picked it up in 2014 and dubbed Warren “Pocahontas”—nearly a year before he announced his own presidential run.

When I asked Warren about that morning’s iteration, with its bonus jab at her appearance, she batted it away. “It’s just Trump trying to find his way to be insulting,” she said with a shrug. “And he’ll try to find it for everyone because it worked for him. But it’s not going to work this time around.”

Last fall, Warren attempted to disarm Trump and put the ancestry issue to rest by releasing the results of a DNA test that strongly supported that she had one Native American ancestor six to ten generations back. It was a rare misstep that threatened to doom her campaign before she had even declared it. Warren was immediately buried under a landslide of criticism from progressives and Native Americans, who accused her of reducing indigenous culture and tribal membership to the morally dubious science of tracing racial bloodlines. Warren apologized to the Cherokee Nation (she had claimed her forebears came from their stock, as well as that of the Delawares), but two months after she declared her intention to run for president, most news stories were still centered on the fallout from this disastrous decision.

She worked hard to find her footing on the issue, learning to respond to pointed questions in a consistent way. “I’m not a person of color. I'm not a citizen of a tribe…and I shouldn't have done it,” she told Charlamagne tha God, host of The Breakfast Club, who was searing in his criticism of her. Undaunted, Warren soldiered on and made plans for a bold and lengthy run. She rolled over $10 million from her Senate re-election campaign fund, raised nearly $6 million more, hired 180 staffers and operatives, and for a long time had the biggest campaign team of any primary contender. Her inauspicious operation was burning nearly every cent she was taking in. The moves have paid off. So much so that the question central to her campaign now looms larger than ever: Can she truly beat Trump?

“I have heard so many people say that they believe in you and all your plans,” one woman told Warren at a Detroit town hall. “But then they follow up with the objection of wanting a male candidate who can beat Trump.” Warren seemed pleased for the chance to address the concern, presumably about toughness. “Let’s just start with one of those basic truths that you know somewhere deep in your bones,” she told the woman, “and that is you never back down from a bully.”

Warren intends to go straight at Trump in other ways, even co-opting aspects of his populism to promote progressive values. She has rolled out a plan for boosting quality of life in a rural America down on its luck. She notes that companies evading taxes or outsourcing labor are not “patriotic” or “loyal” to America. Her program for what she calls “economic patriotism” is so eerily similar to what Trump ran on in 2016 that Tucker Carlson mentioned the plan approvingly on his Fox show.

By summer’s end, all the plans, the town halls, and strong debate performances—to say nothing of those 42,000 selfies—had catapulted Warren to within striking distance of the nomination. And after following her around the populist-minded Midwest, I could see why. She shines on the stump, leaning into her wonkiness and her mom jokes; she takes obvious and real delight in meeting voters; she makes crowds loopy with enthusiasm. After two and a half years of a proudly ignorant president sitting atop a chaotic administration, suddenly the smart older lady who’s thought of everything doesn’t seem like a schoolmarm who reminds you of your ex-wife anymore. Suddenly, she was feeling like the most exciting thing in American politics.

“Great campaigns make people feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves, than just a movement to elect a person,” says one Wisconsin political insider. “When you see a group of Democrats and two of them have a SHE PERSISTED or I HAVE A PLAN FOR THAT T-shirts, you have the feeling that there’s something growing out there.”

Julia Ioffe is a GQ correspondent.

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