Conservatives can't win the history wars

Conservatives can't win the history wars

Slow Boring / by Matthew Yglesias / 1h

(TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)

Part of the extremely confusing and confused debate about “critical race theory” (scare quotes very intentional) in American education is actually about something entirely different — the content of history curricula.

On the history front, the conservative backlash really started well before the “critical race theory” kick got going. It dates back to The New York Times’ publication of the 1619 Project and the announcement that the Pulitzer Center was developing school curriculum units based on the project. Conservatives immediately lost their shit over this, and progressives countermobilized. History is now, I would say, one front in a multi-front battle composed of things that are only loosely related.

And on the history front, I think that at times liberals protest too much, acting as if nobody had ever taught about slavery in a social studies class pre-1619 or as if all of public education was still stuck in Dunning School propaganda as of five years ago. The whole point of the 1619 Project was to be provocative and not just to repeat the most common, basically known facts about slavery in American history. There is nothing wrong with adopting a provocative framing conceit for a special issue of a magazine. Good journalism should aim, at times, to provoke. But a provocateur can’t then turn around and act outraged that an act of deliberate provocation was not met with immediate acclaim across the political system.

I thought that was really all I had to say about this until I read Ross Douthat’s column on the history wars which made me think that conservatives don’t even really understand what they’re mad about here. He thinks conservatives are trying to rescue the good name of The United States of America from leftists who want to drag it through the gutter. But I think the core issue here is a new line of historiography that says not that America is bad but that the American conservative movement is bad. And what’s threatening about that line isn’t its worst excesses, but the fact that large swathes of it are perfectly plausible.

Douthat’s view of the debate

Douthat conceptualized the new historiography as advancing three lines of argument:

One: It seeks to expurgate elements of the old, racist historiography. When my wife was a kid in Texas she was taught “the war of northern aggression.” That kind of stuff has been marginalized since then, but it’s not completely gone.

Two: It seeks to publicize things like the sheer brutality of slavery, the violence of redemption, and the scope of ongoing theft that was part and parcel of the Jim Crow system.

Three: Douthat refers to “a more radical narrative of U.S. history as a whole — one that casts a colder eye on the founders and Lincoln’s halting path to abolition, depicts slavery as the foundation of white American prosperity and portrays the Republic’s ideals as just prettying up systems of racist and settler-colonialist oppression.”

Douthat’s view is that the problematic thing here is argument three — the anti-patriotic element — and that “the biggest zone of controversy lies where the second project, the recovery of memory, blurs into the third one, the radical critique — where the impulse to memorialize Tulsa gives way to the impulse to take Lincoln’s name off a San Francisco school, where the indictment of slave owning gives way to an indictment of the American Revolution.”

I really do not think that this is correct.

The Lincoln-cancellers are being dumb, and conservatives like to talk about them because highlighting dumb left-wing people is instrumentally useful politics. By the same token, it is true that Nikole Hannah-Jones’ lead essay for the project contained a factually dubious assertion about slavery as a motivator for the American Revolution. That was an error on the part of the editors who should have been more careful about that line because when you say something sloppy in a controversial essay, your critics will seize on your weak point. But her critics didn’t criticize her because of that line — that line is not the point of the essay. The point of the essay is to center Black Americans as the hero of the fight for American freedom, and thus cast their political adversaries as the villains.

And the project as a whole ties together in popularized form a lot of strands of newer history that, broadly speaking, cast racial conflict as the central through-line of American history and does so in a way that’s devastating to conservatism.

The old progressive historiography

I think a useful way to think about this is in the context of a much more longstanding debate about how to understand American history. If you go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the biggest names in history were the folks who Richard Hofstadter labeled “the progressive historians” — namely Charles and Mary Beard, Frederick Turner, and V.L. Parrington.

I cannot claim to be an expert on these guys, but I have read some of the Beards’ work, and I read Hofstadter’s critique of them.

These guys thought of themselves as being on the left. But it was a very old-fashioned kind of left, and the conclusion it led them to was very different from the conclusions of the contemporary left. Beard’s view, in particular, was that class conflict is the overriding theme in American history. The creation of the Constitution, on this view, is a kind of counterrevolution undertaken on behalf of rich bondholders. Then Thomas Jefferson puts forward an economic agenda on behalf of farmers to counter the finance/trade/manufacturing interests of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists.

Beard remarks upon Jefferson’s slave-owning, but not in a particularly condemnatory way, and mostly with a view to casting him as an anti-capitalist.

This sets Beard up to put forward a kind of Marx-inspired view of the American Civil War. Much as the French bourgeoisie overthrew the feudal system in 1789 to usher in capitalist modernity, Lincoln and the Republicans overthrow the planter aristocracy, not in order to liberate enslaved people but to advance a capitalist development program centered on railroad construction and protective tariffs.

The whole view just doesn’t really take racial conflict seriously. It doesn’t endorse the pro-slavery politics of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson but doesn’t condemn them either. And because it doesn’t take racial issues seriously, it doesn’t even really see them as “pro-slavery politics” — these are the politics of agrarian interests counterposed to financial and industrial interests. Reconstruction is an effort to impose a kind of northern colonial rule on the South, and Redemption is the inevitable pushback against that. Abolitionists, Radical Republicans, and Black people themselves are just not seen as major actors.

And the point of all this — and the reason they got the label Progressive Historians — was to provide ammunition to the Progressive political faction in the then-present. The Progressives wanted to overthrow Gilded Age Classical Liberalism and impose a kind of technocratic reform program on politics and economics. The Progressives were often very racist (like Woodrow Wilson) but most of all were not interested in waging a big fight about racial justice, so the Progressive historiography insisted that past fights about racial justice were basically fake.

Consensus and collapse

After World War II, I think people were feeling less cynical about things and the Cold War context made this Marx-esque view of history that centered class conflict pretty dicey stuff.

Enter Hofstadter himself was feeling this way, along with guys like Louis Hartz and Daniel J. Boorstin, whose adversaries eventually labeled them the “consensus school” of American history. The big idea here is that American politics is mostly not that ideological. You have a lot of picayune fights about stuff like tariff schedules that are driven by idiosyncratic interests, and you have various reform efforts, but mostly you have a national ideology and a national project. Americans are individualistic, they believe in liberalism, they are skeptical of the state, and they are into conquering western lands and expanding the scope of opportunities.

The Consensus School would note that America stands out in not having a mass socialist political party, so while obviously class conflict has occurred, it’s an odd theme to emphasize in American history when it seems like we have less of it than other countries.

This is a worldview well-suited to the disorganized and non-ideological partisan politics of the 1950s, and it also kind of fits with the very American tradition of generically celebrating “founding fathers” rather than paying attention to the fact that the founders argued viciously with each other.

Consensus history ends up getting challenged by the New Left across many dimensions, but the one that’s had the most influence in mass culture is the critiques stemming pretty directly from the Civil Rights Movement. Eric Foner argues that we should take abolitionists, Reconstruction, and free soil ideology seriously. Du Bois’ old book “Black Reconstruction in America” enjoys a revival of interest. You start getting books like “What Hath God Wrought” that cast the Whig Party as heroes and Jackson as the villain. Jonathan Chait makes the subtext text here with a 2014 article casting Barack Obama as a kind of modern-day Henry Clay fighting Jacksonian tea partiers. And then Trump becomes president and starts explicitly affiliating with Jackson!

This contemporary progressive view in which we make musicals celebrating Alexander Hamilton, read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ meditations on Ulysses Grant, and take Woodrow Wilson’s name off the policy school at Princeton is in some ways the complete opposite of the old Progressive School. But I do think it’s important to understand that the Old Progressive History was supposed to be left-wing! It’s just that we pirouetted between a left view that centered class conflict arguing with a more conservative view that centered consensus, to an argument between consensus and a left view that centers race. But from an actual conservative viewpoint, neither conflict-oriented interpretation of American history is viable because they are both saying that conservatives are bad.

What matters in the 1619 Project

The most important 1619 essays, really, are the ones conservatives don’t even want to talk about.

Jamelle Bouie argued, for example, that we should see America’s idiosyncratic political institutions as a legacy of slavery and especially of slaveholders’ interests. Matthew Desmond’s article arguing that we should see America’s relatively libertarian approach to capitalism as a legacy of slavery is less persuasive in my view, largely because Bouie’s argument is so correct. Once you understand that American political institutions are designed to protect the interests of property owners, you don’t really need to reach for further explanations. Jeneen Interlandi argues that racial conflict is important to understanding why America doesn’t have universal healthcare. Kevin Kruse writes about how segregation influenced American urban planning for the worse.

The point of all these pieces is more forceful than Douthat’s “recovery of memory” but less stupid than canceling Lincoln — it’s to argue that the conservative movement in America is heir to the political legacy of America’s bad guys.

And this is not a matter of hazy reconstructions either. Bouie traces contemporary conservative enthusiasm for undemocratic political institutions to John C. Calhoun’s pro-slavery advocacy. But conservatives themselves hail William F. Buckley Jr. as a key intellectual architect of their movement and Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign as a major breakthrough for their movement in electoral politics. But Buckley straightforwardly opposed enfranchising Black people, and Goldwater ran in ‘64 as an opponent of the Civil Rights Act.

Today’s conservatives often like to quote Martin Luther King Jr. as an apostle of “colorblind” policy as an aspirational goal. But King was a socialist who argued for a radical redistribution of material resources. Goldwater not only opposed that, but he also opposed the simple non-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act as philosophically incompatible with the overall conservative view of how regulation of the economy should work (or more precisely, not work). Because of course the same people who don’t like minimum wage rules or mandatory parental leave also don’t like mandatory non-discrimination rules.

Conservatives don’t agree with anti-patriotic radicalism, but they have no reason to fear it — it’s just a political millstone. But Hannah-Jones wasn’t making a case against patriotism, she was lighting a path for herself to find her way back to her father’s patriotism. What’s left out of the 1619 narrative isn’t ra-ra-ra-Americana, it’s conservatives and their view that their movement is good rather than bad.

Public schools are public

My basic view is that all tellings of history reflect contemporary concerns, and it’s a little bit reductive and naive to think we can really debate which of these perspectives is “true.”

The old progressive historiography captures something real about America, but at the cost of completely leaving out Black people and proferring a nonsensical account of the origins of the Civil War. The race-centric historiography is much more inclusive and handles key episodes of our history much more reasonably. But the Progressive Era itself was actually a really important time in American political history, and the newer historiography struggles to make sense of it. All the bad things people say about Woodrow Wilson are true, but there’s also a reason that all the New Dealers and postwar liberals saw him as their progenitor.

And the thing about the Consensus School is that it’s well-suited to the task of being assigned in public schools in a large and diverse electoral democracy.

If you’re writing a book, you can absolutely just say that the lesson of American history is that conservatives are bad. You can say that on your Substack, you can Tweet it, and you can write it in a special issue of a magazine. But you can’t teach it in public schools in Indiana because Indiana is full of conservatives.

If your passion in life is to deploy bracing truths that are rejected by a majority of the population, then teaching eighth grade is probably not the right career for you.

Some people, of course, think we shouldn’t have public schools at all. They think all families should get a voucher and go do whatever, maybe backstopped by some kind of state assessments. Progressives could send their kids to progressive schools and conservatives to conservative schools. But since most teachers are progressive and most parents probably just aren’t super-political, the balance of market forces would favor schools with a progressive slant.

But if you do have a public school system then, by definition, you need a curriculum that’s acceptable to the state legislature. Truth is important. But public schools are public. And public institutions are subject to politics. And even though the new race-centric historiography says many important truths, it’s hardly the only set of true things you could teach to kids. Ron DeSantis is striking back with a requirement that Florida schools teach more about communism, a subject that makes the conservative movement’s track-record look better and the progressive movement’s look worse. But you could probably comply with the letter of the mandate and work in stuff about how as real as the sins of communism were, anti-communism was also routinely used as a pretext to attack the Civil Rights Movement and to bolster apartheid in South Africa. History!

1776 is good enough

I think the 1619 Project was a tremendous magazine issue. The Desmond article I have some serious problems with (a story for another day), but one bad article in a whole issue of a magazine is a good hit rate. The sheer volume of criticism that’s heaped just on a couple of lines from Hannah-Jones’ essay shows the extent to which conservatives are mad about the project (because they rightly perceive it as bad for the right) but don’t really have the goods to debunk it.

But I think teach the 1619 Project in public schools is just an overreach. I don’t expect they’ll teach Slow Boring posts in many schools either. That’s life.

What I do think is noteworthy is the extent to which being mad at the 1619 Project has induced conservatives to pound the table in favor of 1776 as America’s true founding, because historically that has always been the argument specifically of the anti-racist faction in American politics.

Lincoln, dating the founding of the country to 1776 rather than 1790, famously describes it as “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That idea doesn’t appear in the U.S. Constitution, which not only endorses slavery but entrenched a profoundly undemocratic political system that we still have today. This is precisely the struggle that Buckley was on the wrong side of and that is being pressed today when progressives argue for creating new states and instituting tough curbs on gerrymandering.

This is why it’s Joe Biden who likes to say “America is an idea” because the good idea behind America is a progressive egalitarian one. Rich Lowry, Buckley’s successor at National Review, knows that the spirit of 1776 isn’t actually workable for the conservative project — that they need to insist that America is somehow a blood-and-soil nation out of German Romanticism.

Rich Lowry @RichLowry

America is a nation, not an idea.

April 29th 2021

72 Retweets499 Likes

But that’s dumb. Words are just words, but again, it’s Lincoln who says we’re not just “a nation” but rather a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal — i.e., an idea. Portugal isn’t dedicated to anything. It’s the Iberian kingdom that didn’t get amalgamated with Castille and Leon, and so its local dialect entered the era of mass education and mass media with the legal status of an official language, and so now they’re a “nation.” America’s not like that.

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How years of mandate-claiming paved the way for the crisis of democracy

How years of mandate-claiming paved the way for the crisis of democracy

By Julia Azari, June 28, 2021.

Mischiefs of Faction.

Elections are at the center of Trumpism. A recent report finds that “Republicans widely support Donald Trump and believe his claims about a stolen election." Stating that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and discussing Trump's connection to the January 6 insurrection have become politically costly for Republican leaders – just ask Liz Cheney. States are passing laws to change how votes are cast and counted, including consolidating partisan power over election administration. The Department of Justice is suing Georgia over a new law that it claims targets Black and Latino voters. And there’s the struggle in Congress over the For the People Act.

We are no longer just polarized in elections; we are now polarized about elections. This polarization isn’t just about genuine disagreement, but is also driven by misinformation and false narratives. To state the obvious: this isn’t sustainable for a democracy, which requires a shared acceptance of election results and procedures in order to be stable and legitimate.

Scholars and commentators have delved into both the recent context for this – Trumpism and trends in the modern GOP – and the deeper historical precedents of disenfranchising Black voters and dismantling democracy at the state level. But there’s also something to be learned from more mid-level context – the last 50 years or so. During that time, American politics became increasingly concerned with interpreting elections, findings mandates and meaning in virtually any contest, however contested or close. What I call the “age of mandate politics” created the conditions for this development in two ways that I discuss in my 2014 book: it promoted the crafting of election narratives that were zero-sum, and that were at least partly rooted in fiction. There’s also a factor I wish I had discussed more in my published work: race and the creation of a fictitious “real” electorate.

In my research, I document an increased emphasis on rhetoric about fulfilling campaign promises, “doing what I was elected to do,” and“the reason I was elected,” from presidents and their surrogates. News media also increasingly sought and advanced these mandate narratives. Why did this turn toward mandate politics happen? I connected the shift to the declining institutional legitimacy for the presidency after Vietnam and Watergate – greater reliance on election rhetoric came as a way to justify a powerful office of which the public was suddenly more suspicious. I also linked the rise of mandate rhetoric to the rise of polarization and clearer ideological sorting between the parties – it’s easier to credibly claim that the election was a referendum on a particular set of ideas when the parties are distinct. These two factors have only become more relevant to presidential politics, and as the book went to press I predicted that mandate narratives would also become more common frames for increasingly nationalized Congressional, state, and local elections.

This didn’t have to be a negative development. As historian Sam Rosenfeld has documented, political leaders (with help from political scientists) have pushed for parties and elections to be structured as to give voters a more meaningful choice. In theory, the idea that elections mean something and bind politicians to their promises is a nice blueprint for democracy. In practice, this kind of mandate claiming lent itself to a zero-sum way of presenting election results - which are often complex and paint a less than straightforward picture of what the electorate may be thinking. There are lots of great works to explain how this has played out: Frances Lee’s work on how close competition for control of Congress has given politicians very little incentive to cooperate and hand the other side a win; Lilliana Mason’s work on the psychological aspect of consolidating our political and social identities and then combining that with perceptions of winning or losing in politics. Many have written on the poor fit between distinct, ideologically cohesive parties sand Madisonian institutions. In other words, the age of mandate politics has been one in which elections are increasingly spun as clear victories for one side or another because it makes a neater and more compelling narrative, and this contributes to the zero-sum environment.

Over time, I also observed election narratives that became increasingly based in fiction. Reagan’s conservative mandate in 1980, a “mandate for change” in 1992 for Bill Clinton, or a compelling narrative of the 2000 election, are all mostly constructions. The evidence for the 1980 election as a decisive ideological shift among voters is mixed. Clinton – who won 43% of the vote – likely benefited from an economic recession rather than a positive endorsement of his ideas. The 2000 election was a tie, with Bush’s opponent winning more votes. But this, again, didn’t prevent the administration from occasionally using mandate rhetoric. As a result, the whole political system – politicians, media, and the electorate – have all grown somewhat comfortable with interpretations that stretch the truth into a useful political story. Once we entered an area in which the facts were merely a starting point to build a story, it’s been more plausible to build up increasingly wide interpretations, and slide into outright lies.

This isn’t a point I’ve seen raised much, and I think it is worth dwelling on for a moment. There’s a worthwhile debate about how much Trumpism represents a stark departure or is simply an extension of existing political forces. While acknowledging that the post-2020 stuff has been different, and the general refusal to accept an election loss belongs to a different category than some narrative stretching, it’s worth contemplating how our tolerance for more benign electoral fictions has loosened the standards for truth when it comes to stories about elections.

The final element concerns something I didn’t write much about in my book, but I should have: talk of the “real” American people that emerged from populist rhetoric on the right connected mandate construction with racial exclusion. In the version of my book that I wish I could write today, I would do a deeper investigation of how constructions of the electorate, populist language, and stories of electoral legitimacy are connected to whiteness. It’s probably trite to say so now, but this became a powerful story after the 2016 election: despite Trump losing the popular vote, mainstream and left-leaning outlets nevertheless searched for meaning in his surprise victory, and clung to the idea that it must have carried a profound and urgent message about the state of the country. The key turning point here is Nixon’s “silent majority” in 1969, but claims of conservative mandates – especially after shaky victories – relied on this populist messaging. On the other points – zero-sum and exaggerated narratives – the parties are equal opportunity offenders. With this one, the main purveyors and beneficiaries have been the GOP, though the Democrats’ willingness, despite their dependence on a multi-racial coalition, to accept the idea of white voters as the “real” American electorate is also deserving of more scrutiny. If I wrote my book now, I’d pay closer attention to race in post-1960s election narratives, and how it structures understanding of both victories and losses.

Increased attention to interpreting election results in media and political rhetoric has, paradoxically, had the effect of trivializing the role of elections and creating opportunities to invent fictions about them. This includes the “big lie” about 2020. It also includes bills passed with the stated purpose of protecting election integrity, but that really impede voter participation and, most concerningly, even possibly create opportunities for election officials to overturn the results. In other words, the age of mandate politics has brought us to a place in which elections are taken neither literally nor seriously, subject to strained interpretations and held up as civically sacred but only in the most superficial ways. What makes elections important is not just talking about them and creating narratives from them, but forging real connections among voter preferences, accountability, and governance. These broken connections are also part of the crisis of democracy. Talking more about the meaning of elections has not made them more meaningful.

What’s striking about Biden’s crime plan? It actually focuses on reducing crime.

What’s striking about Biden’s crime plan? It actually focuses on reducing crime.

Opinion by 

Michael Gerson

Columnist

June 29, 2021 at 5:09 a.m. GMT+9

President Biden at the White House on June 23. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

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The issue of crime is frequently employed by politicians as an instrument of ideology. On the right, talk of law and order has often been a method to stoke racial and ethnic fears while remaining a step removed from racism. On the left, criminal justice reform has sometimes been narrowed to the issue of gun control or subsumed into a broader agenda of social justice activism.

So President Biden’s recently announced crime package was remarkable in one way: It was actually focused on reducing crime.

If the president’s primary goal had been to reinforce liberal messaging, he could easily have proposed the “Ban All Guns and Crush Right-Wing Subversion Act of 2021.” But he did nothing of the sort. And his commitment to tangible policy outcomes led him beyond some traditional ideological categories.

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In criminal justice policy, prescription is largely a function of diagnosis. Looking at three decades of declining violence, and at the past year’s major spike in killings, a few conclusions are unavoidable:

First, aggressive policing and mass incarceration actually work in reducing violent crime. In his book “Uneasy Peace,” the sociologist Patrick Sharkey sets out the evidence that having more “guardians” — police officers, private security forces, closed-circuit cameras — in public spaces makes those places safer. Keeping violent criminals off the streets for longer periods makes the streets less violent. And the benefits of greater safety to poor and minority communities are considerable. Sharkey points out that reductions in violent crime since the 1990s have increased the average life expectancy of Black men by an amount equivalent to the elimination of obesity.

Second, heavy-handed police tactics can also produce community resentment, even rage. This is the reason Sharkey thinks that brute force methods are ultimately unsustainable. When portions of cities are effectively under police occupation, and imprisonment is massively over-applied, the resulting peace is inherently fragile. A moment of filmed police brutality can set spark to tinder. The murder of George Floyd led to unrest last year in some 140 U.S. cities.

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Third, in the wake of police scandals, violence can rise. Police pull back from communities and suffer from morale problems when the legitimacy of their calling is questioned. Communities pull back from the police, turning to them less frequently and providing less cooperation and information. When the peace of a community is maintained mainly by external force, the removal of that force is likely to result in additional violence.

Many police officials and analysts also point to a fourth factor in rising violence: the weakening of social ties that resulted from the coronavirus pandemic. “People lost connections to institutions of community life,” Sharkey said during an interview with the Atlantic, “which include school, summer jobs programs, pools and libraries. Those are the institutions that create connections between members of communities, especially for young people. When individuals are not connected to those institutions, then they’re out in public spaces, often without adults present. And while that dynamic doesn’t always lead to a rise in violence, it can.”

In the light of these four claims, the details of Biden’s crime proposal make good sense. It begins with hiring more police officers, with funding from the American Rescue Plan’s $350 billion in state and local spending. The plan also subsidizes overtime for trust-building community policing. The goal is clearly to encourage law enforcement that is active without being oppressive. But Biden is proposing to expand the number of police, not defenestrate them.

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Biden’s main focus on gun control — going after gun traffickers and rogue gun dealers — is realistic, incremental and strategic.

The administration’s plan expands employment and housing programs that help released prisoners to find a foothold in a new life.

And Biden’s plan would invest billions of dollars in — and encourage private foundation support for — community violence intervention programs. These programs use trusted local messengers to intervene directly with young people to resolve conflicts and find constructive alternatives to violence. For those who need reminding, supporting community institutions to reach at-risk children is straight out of the compassionate conservatism playbook.

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This approach to crime may not be revolutionary, but it is rational, practical and well-devised. And it has already revealed a great deal about politics in the Biden era.

It has revealed that the president’s White House policy shop is skilled and serious.

It has revealed that the weed of ridiculous and ignorant partisanship has taken over the entire Republican garden. When asked about Biden’s proposal, the chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), could only sputter incoherent rubbish about “the Squad” and “the radicals” who want to disrespect and dismantle the police.

And it reveals a president who, against constant opposition, is trying to govern.

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Opinion | A war on truth is raging. Not everyone recognizes we’re in it.

Opinion: A war on truth is raging. Not everyone recognizes we’re in it.

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(Rob Dobi for The Washington Post)

Opinion by Lee McIntyre

and 

Jonathan Rauch

 

June 25, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

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Lee McIntyre is a research fellow at Boston University and the author of “Post-Truth.” Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.”

In 2015, word spread online that a routine military exercise in the southwest, called Jade Helm 15, was a plot by President Barack Obama to impose martial law and seize everyone’s guns. The paranoia was “fueled by conservative bloggers and Internet postings,” the New York Times reported. So far did the claim spread that Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor the exercise.

At the time, Americans responded to such bizarre online happenings with exasperation and bemusement. But the paranoia was fueled by more than conservative bloggers and Internet postings. Former CIA director Michael Hayden later said that Russian propagandists were behind the campaign. They were probing for vulnerabilities to disinformation — and found them. “At that point I think they made the decision, ‘We’re going to play in the electoral process,’” Hayden said.

Americans are no longer so naive about foreign attacks on our information space. The news media, the government and the public did a better job of recognizing and resisting information warfare from outside adversaries in 2020 than four years earlier.

But what if a far larger, more sophisticated and more ruthless disinformation campaign against American democracy originated within the United States? Would we recognize and respond to the threat? The answer so far is no — or, at best, only partially.

Most people regard Republicans’ #StopTheSteal campaign, also known as the “big lie,” as an attempt to re-litigate the 2020 election and pander to a radicalized, Trumpy base. It is that, but it is also a massive and devastatingly effective deployment of Russian-style information warfare against American democracy — by Americans themselves — with an eye toward the future. We should think of it not as a momentary partisan outburst but a kind of epistemic 9/11: a moment when a menace that has been developing for years reaches maturity and displays its full prowess.

Attacks on the concept of objective truth are not new. Left-wing attacks on objectivity date at least to the 1970s, with the rise of academic trends such as deconstructionism and postmodernism. Not long after, conservative media began attacking truth systematically, for example, through the rise of demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, who railed against the “four corners of deceit” (government, academia, science and the media).

The digital era raised the stakes by making misinformation easy to spread. GamerGate and online trolls refined viral outrage. Anti-vaccine groups pioneered digitally amplified misinformation. Russia spread divisive hoaxes and conspiracy theories. Misinformation became weaponized as disinformation — not a mistake but an intentional obfuscation created by those with interests at stake.

Specialists in the U.S. intelligence and military communities understand the power of information warfare to divide, disorient and demoralize the public. The Army Cyber Institute at the U.S. Military Academy has published a graphic novel warning against it. But few others have paid much attention, and many who do still blame cognitive bias and social media.

The rise of Donald Trump brought a turning point. He and his allies in conservative media and Republican politics seized upon Russian-style disinformation techniques and applied them to domestic politics. In his 2016 campaign, Trump lied so frequently and flagrantly that the media couldn’t keep up and the public lost track, a favorite Russian tactic known as the fire hose of falsehood.

With the #StopTheSteal campaign, the turning point became a point of no return. In April 2020, Trump launched a propaganda onslaught against mail-in balloting. Much as the Russians had used Jade Helm 15 to test their disinformation methods, Trump used the attack on mail-in balloting to organize the propaganda campaign he would launch if he lost the election. The already-high rate of Trump’s falsehoods ticked up sharply. After he lost, he and his allies unleashed a flood of exaggerations, lies and conspiracy theories through the White House, conservative media, social media and even the courts.

#StopTheSteal is not merely Trump’s way of being a sore loser or clinging to relevance (though it is those things). It is the most audacious disinformation campaign ever attempted against Americans by any actor, foreign or domestic. And it has been devastatingly effective. According to a recent Ipsos-Reuters poll, the majority of Republicans think the 2020 election was stolen, and almost half of independents either think the election was rigged or are unsure. Vladimir Putin could only dream of creating so much cynicism, doubt and distrust.

The “big lie” is a wake-up call, and not just about Trump. Even today, most scholars and commentators talk about America’s rising levels of polarization, extremism, and distrust of institutions and expertise as if they were natural disasters or products of generalized forces such as social media quirks, institutions’ failings and individuals’ gullibility. While those explanations have validity, they miss the more immediate threat: For years, Americans have been targeted with epistemic warfare — that is, with attacks on the credibility of the mainstream media, academia, government agencies, and other institutions and professionals we rely on to keep us collectively moored to facts. Those doing the targeting are nameable individuals and organizations, including Trump, conservative media outlets, Republican politicians, anti-vaccine groups and Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Since epistemic warfare has proved its mettle so spectacularly in U.S. politics, it is likely here for good. Measures may allow us to fight back, such as revamping social media and teaching media literacy. But our primary means of defense is to be awake to the scope and origin of the threat. The first step toward winning the war on truth is to accept that we are in one.

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What if…

What if…

(Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)

I love alternate history, so here’s a story for you. After flirting for a bit with the idea of running for president, Donald Trump decides to prove everyone in journalism right and not actually pull the trigger.

Ivanka persuades him it would be bad for the family brand, and Roger Ailes agrees to work with him on some kind of politics-themed media venture that will make a lot of money. The race appears to be shaping up as a coronation for Jeb Bush, though Marco Rubio is out there making the case for a more youth-oriented approach and Ted Cruz stands as an apostle of the true conservative faith. But then New Jersey governor Chris Christie starts making some interesting moves — he’s landing body blows from the right on the Florida Amnesty Boys while also making the case that it’s time for the party to stop losing elections over Social Security and Medicare.

“If Hillary Clinton takes office, it’s going to be the end of this country as we know it,” he says on the stump, “and these bozos I’m running against want to risk that by jeopardizing programs our seniors know and love.”

Christie’s combative style and lib-owning personality help him sell to the base that this is a commonsense approach and not a sign of weakness. Christie wants to run on tax cuts, backing the blue in the face of the rising Black Lives Matter movement, and no amnesty no-how while telling donors that they need to face facts about marriage equality and Social Security if they don’t want to see a third Democratic term in a row. He says he won twice in New Jersey, won the endorsements of lots of moderate Democratic mayors and building trade unions, and he knows how to deliver the blue-collar majority that will keep the country safe from thugs, illegals, and anarchists.

Conservative elites are mildly alarmed by this course of events, especially when Christie’s love of courting hard hat unions leads him into flirtations with protectionism and a denunciation of Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. Paul Ryan wants to win in 2020 and privatize Medicare, not create viral videos of yelling at anti-police activists. But the Fox audience eats it up, and when Christie lights into Jeb and Rubio for promoting the failed policies that have us stuck in endless Middle Eastern wars, even some leftists start to say nice things about him.

President Christie

From there the story is straightforward. It’s actually pretty normal for a relatively moderate choice to win a GOP primary because the views of blue-state Republican voters have a lot of swaps in their delegate allocation.

The difference between Christie 2020 and Romney 2012 or McCain 2008 is that Christie did a much better job than those two of holding onto his moderate branding. He did meetings with key evangelical leaders and the NRA to clarify that he is 100% with them on judicial nominees and their other core priorities. But rather than running as “the establishment” choice, Christie runs as an anti-establishment moderate who wants to pull back from Koch-style politics. He tells business people that interest rates are low so he’ll cut taxes and there’s no need to yolk tax cuts to politically unpopular spending cuts. He’ll appoint business-friendly regulators. But there’s not going to be a Ryan-style Götterdämmerung where you eliminate the welfare state. That’s for losers.

In the end, he beats Clinton by a 51-45 margin with an unusually high number of third-party votes. Republicans gain in the House, and in contrast to our world, they also win the Senate races in New Hampshire and Nevada.

The first order of legislative business is to “repeal Obamacare,” but of course this turns out to be harder to accomplish as real legislation than as a slogan. Speaker Ryan initially wants a very dramatic bill that would upend the ACA root and branch while drastically cutting long-term Medicaid spending. But the White House, working with GOP senators from Medicaid expansion states, ultimately forces through a more modest plan. Republicans actually keep most of the ACA apparatus in place but eliminate the dreaded “mandate,” characterizing that as a repeal of the law along with eliminating many of the ACA revenue-raisers. A second bill cuts corporate taxes.

The midterms feature a noticeable backlash to Christie; as is happening elsewhere in the world, upscale, highly-educated districts are shifting left and many of Christie’s regulatory policies are unpopular, allowing Democrats to poach back some blue-collar districts as well. But the skew of the Senate map ensures it stays in Republican hands, and thanks to gerrymandering, a 3-point Democratic advantage in the House popular vote still generates a narrow Republican majority.

Alternate punditry

One big strand of commentary in this world is people dumping on Hillary Clinton for being a terrible candidate who lost despite Barack Obama still being popular.

Others say criticizing her is apologizing for misogyny, and others point out that Christie really only did a bit better than the fundamentals would suggest. The most noteworthy thing is that Clinton suffered a lot of defections to Jill Stein on her left — a symptom of Democratic Party agenda exhaustion after eight years in office.

But a lot of this is just transparent factional infighting.

Strategists and analysts who are really just interested in winning elections say there’s fundamentally nothing surprising about what happened here. Christie moved to the center on two very important economic policy issues, Social Security and Medicare, while keeping the donor base locked down with the promise of tax cuts. Similarly, on the religion-loaded issues, Christie negotiated a surrender on the once-hot marriage equality issue but sold evangelical leaders on the idea that he was their best chance to control the Supreme Court and reverse Roe v. Wade.

To the extent that anything about Christie’s politics defied expectations, it’s just that people were surprised you could win the nomination while running as a moderate. But Republican elites were in a pragmatic mood, and the base turned out to be very fired up by a rightward shift on immigration. That was a risky gambit on Christie’s part in the general election, but it worked for him because Democrats simultaneously shifted left on issues related to immigration enforcement and crime in general.

But how different is any of this?

Obviously, the punchline is that the “Chris Christie” in my story is not that different from Donald Trump in reality.

What we are talking about in either case is taking a recognizable form of Republican Party politics that is sporadically successful in the northeastern United States and taking it national. This is the politics of Rudy Giuliani and Paul LePage and Larry Hogan. It’s conservative on economics in the sense that people don’t like paying taxes, and dislike of taxes tends to make them skeptical of new programmatic spending. It’s “tough on crime” in a way that left-wing people deem racist. But fundamentally, it’s more about owning the libs and checking the excesses of progressive politics than it is about advancing its own constructive ideological program.

Now obviously Donald Trump is a wild, bizarre phenomenon. He’d say and do crazy things. He’s wildly corrupt. He lies in an unusual way, not using slippery or misleading rhetoric but just blatant up-is-down stuff out of a totalitarian nightmare.

But my basic hypothesis is that all of that was bad for him — it’s why Christie’s electoral performance is considerably better. Christie keeps his shit together. He doesn’t openly feud with co-partisans. He doesn’t embarrass people who agree with him.

Because he’s a bit less of a domineering figure, I think the Christie administration would have more intra-party ideological tensions. The Freedom Caucus would stick closer to its origins and complain that spending isn’t really being curtailed. Those kind of disagreements would create headaches for the White House, but also increase the salience of its relative policy moderation. I think the smart take would be that Christie was headed for reelection, but these tensions would be a big issue in the second term. Then of course Covid happens, and realistically everything hinges on how the administration handles that.

The point, though, is that I think the main macro-trends of Trump-era politics are explicable in fairly banal terms. Relative to aughts politics, what Trump did was abandon unpopular GOP positions on the key issues of entitlement spending and gay rights and retrenching to some less sweeping conservative views on work requirements and transgender issues. In an abstract game-theoretical sense, Democrats could have countered that by moving to the center. But instead, they themselves moved to the left. And given those macro strategic choices, Democrats have actually done amazingly well — they’ve recruited good candidates, and Trump is an unpopular nutjob.

O’Malley would’ve won

Of course Republicans didn’t nominate my Alt-Christie; they nominated Donald Trump, a man with some good political instincts but also some very serious weaknesses — weaknesses so severe that Clinton beat him in the popular vote and nearly beat him in the Electoral College.

But she lost, and I think the peculiar toxic dynamics of the 2016 Democratic primary created a rip in the space-time continuum that we are still living with to this day. Sanders ran against Clinton from the left, and Clinton beat him thanks in no small part to the loyalty of Black voters. Something we have seen in many subsequent primaries is that African American Democrats are generally more moderate than white Democrats, so it’s hardly shocking that they would back Clinton. But Clinton’s campaign actually seemed a little confused as to why they were winning Black votes and thought it made sense to incorporate formerly obscure left-wing academic ideas into her public campaign

Before Clinton, nobody in Democratic Party politics would have ever thought it made sense to tweet about intersectionality or deliver speeches on “systemic racism.”

But at the same time, before Sanders, nobody in Democratic Party politics would have ever thought that the alternative to that style of politics was socialism and running around saying that you don’t want to make the country like Venezuela, you actually mean Sweden.

The alternative was just normie politics full of banal patriotism, homages to the progress made in the past, and discussion of policy specifics. I used to do joke tweets about how “Martin O’Malley would’ve won” and I even have an “O’Malley Would’ve Won” t-shirt. But I think that alternative history is true. If somehow Clinton and Sanders hadn’t entered the field and we’d had O’Malley against Elizabeth Warren, then he’d have beaten her (because most Democrats aren’t that left-wing), and then he’d have beaten Trump (because Trump is crazy). There would still be protests against police brutality and people making fun of left-wing academics, but nobody in workaday practical politics would think that incorporating exotic academic ideas into routine political rhetoric is the right way to address concerns about police misconduct.

Back to reality

Of course, we are in the real world.

But while I’m reliably told that academic historians think counterfactual history is nonsense, what they teach you in philosophy classes is that counterfactual reasoning is critical to doing any kind of causal analysis.

And I think that basically, Trump is such a weirdo and his rise to power was so unexpected that it’s tended to obscure some pretty banal points about politics and gotten a lot of people lost in the fog of speculations about “Trumpism without Trump.”

The counterfactual is helpful because it lets us see that the “lol nothing matters” interpretations of recent politics are probably wrong. Positioning and salience on policy matter a lot. Trump successfully defanged Democrats’ best issue for winning over cross-pressured moderate voters by moving to the center on Social Security and Medicare. And while I think that analysis has a pretty clear upshot (Democrats should moderate on cultural issues), it’s also just an objectively hard problem.

Labour would have an easier time winning in the U.K. if the Tories would give speeches about how the NHS should be completely dismantled and replaced with a free-market health care system. But they don’t do that, even though the right-of-center U.K. policy elites are surely familiar with the same works that undergird American conservatives’ thinking. They exert discipline, and that’s that.

Far and away the most effective thing for Democrats to do would be to hypnotize Kevin McCarthy and get him to wage the 2022 midterms on a detailed plan to balance the budget through spending cuts. Barack Obama was a very skillful politician, but he was also lucky to face off against Paul Ryan. Unless and until Republicans revert to pushing the right’s most unpopular ideas, Democrats are just going to be in a tough situation.

Braveheart’s Warped History Keeps Suckering Evangelicals

Braveheart’s Warped History Keeps Suckering Evangelicals

KILT CULT

Updated Jun. 21, 2021 5:40AM ET 

Published Jun. 20, 2021 12:12AM ET 

20th Century-Fox/Getty

When Chloé Zhao took home the awards for Best Picture and Best Director for her movie Nomadland at this year’s Academy Awards, she made history. The film was only the second best-picture winner directed by a woman, and the first by a woman of color. In her acceptance speech, she thanked those she had “met on the road” who had taught “us the power of resilience and hope and for reminding us what true kindness looks like.”

Twenty-five years ago, the Best Director and Best Picture awards went to a strikingly different feature film. That year, Mel Gibson captured both for his epic film Braveheart. Gibson also starred in the film as the freedom-loving, kilt-wearing William Wallace. Based on the legendary 13th-century Scottish warrior, the film was less about kindness and hope and more about unquenchable violence avenging evil and injustice. In a very different way, Gibson’s film, too, would make history.

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Gibson was a conservative Catholic, but it was white evangelicals who would become the film’s most fervent fans. With William Wallace their hero and “Freedom!” their battle cry, American evangelicals assigned the film a prominent place in their culture-wars liturgies.

When the film was released, in 1995, evangelicals were in a time of transition. Their political and cultural values had been forged during the Cold War era, but by the 1990s the Cold War had come to an end, “traditional” gender roles were in retreat, and with the Clintons in the White House, the Religious Right seemed in disarray. All of this made for confusing times, and an evangelical men’s movement emerged in force to address this confusion.

Justin Baragona

Seeking a path between an outmoded machismo and the emasculating impulses of modern life, organizations like Promise Keepers promoted a “soft patriarchy,” a kinder, gentler model of masculine authority. Across the nation, millions of men sang and prayed together at rallies where they promised to lead their families and their nation.

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To some evangelicals, this softer patriarchy felt a bit too soft. Appearing at the height of the evangelical men’s movement, Braveheart offered a more vigorous model of Christian manhood, one that would better equip men to fight the ascendant culture wars.

Braveheart wasn’t the most obvious choice for an inspirational Christian film. In an era predating computer-generated imagery, the film depicted violence on an unprecedented scale; many of the more than 1,800 extras ending up dismembered, impaled, or otherwise succumbing to a bloody onscreen end. Despite such graphic violence, and also despite the inclusion of “six obscenities… and two obscene acts,” the film met with the approval of Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission. Baehr saw the movie as “a rallying cry for the supremacy of God’s law” over the authority of officials who had flouted that law, a timely reminder with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.

The film was also riddled with historical inaccuracies, yet it was precisely these inaccuracies that endeared Braveheart to evangelicals. In order to frame the conflict as a religious one, the film depicts Wallace’s nemesis King Edward as a pagan ruler (he was Christian) and the Scottish rebels as earnest Christians. In another fictitious plot point, Wallace marries his childhood friend in secret to spare her from the horrors of primae noctis, or the historically dubious “right of first night,” and then rescues her from attempted rape only to have her killed by English soldiers in her attempt to escape, setting him off on a path of unquenchable violence. In another contrived plot twist, Wallace has an affair with Princess Isabella, who is drawn to Wallace’s inexorable masculinity that contrasts starkly with her own husband’s effeminacy.

When confronted with the film’s many inaccuracies, Gibson was unapologetic: “I’m in the business of cinema. I’m not an (expletive) historian.” But evangelicals loved the film for its righteous warrior motif, for its portrayal of rugged masculinity, feminine purity, and for its call to heroic action. Offering evangelicals a fantasy that resonated with their own values and desires, Braveheart became a touchstone for a generation of American evangelicals.

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At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Pat Buchanan acknowledged that the Cold War had ended but insisted that a new war had begun, “a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself”—a war “for the soul of America.” This war, too, required warriors. When he ran for president in 1996, religious supporters heralded him with shouts of “Braveheart!”

In 2000, Mark Driscoll, the notoriously militant (and misogynistic) pastor of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, adopted the pseudonym “William Wallace II” to goad members on his church’s online discussion board: “I love to fight… Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified,” before America became a “pussified nation.”

The next year, John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul secured Braveheart’s place within evangelical popular culture. Inspired by Gibson’s William Wallace, Eldredge’s God was a warrior god and men were made in his image. His Jesus, too, was more akin to the Scottish warrior than to Mister Rogers, and men were to follow his example. “In your life you are William Wallace,” he asserted; every man had a battle to fight and a beauty to rescue.

“The legacy of 'Braveheart' can be glimpsed in a generation of evangelicals who have chosen fear over hope and militancy over kindness.”

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Only months after Wild at Heart debuted, terrorists struck the United States. A very real “battle to fight” had suddenly materialized for American men, and Eldredge’s call for heroic warrior masculinity took hold within and beyond American evangelicalism. Wild at Heart would sell more than four million copies, becoming ubiquitous in evangelical churches, colleges, small-group Bible studies, and Christian bookstores. Christian men retreated to the wilderness to participate in Wild at Heart Boot Camps. Churches fashioned their own events featuring homegrown “Braveheart Games,” with activities ranging from changing tires on a car to throwing axes and chasing greased pigs. Evangelical pastors showed clips of the film in Sunday sermons while men’s ministries held Braveheart viewing nights. One Christian college boasted a Braveheart dorm (the film was the only R-rated film allowed to be shown). Meanwhile, copycat books with titles like No More Christian Nice Guy abounded.

The election of Barack Obama only heightened evangelical militancy and the need for a Christian warrior masculinity. In 2013, Ted Cruz pointed to Braveheart as “the key to understanding Washington,” and he liked to envision himself a modern-day William Wallace. In 2016, however, Ted Cruz would not be leading the charge.

Many observers were baffled by evangelical support for Donald Trump, a man who seemed the very antithesis of family-values evangelicalism. In fact, Trump embodied the rugged warrior masculinity that many evangelicals had come to expect in their political leaders, in terms of ruthlessness if not actual physical form.

According to his evangelical biographers, Trump was evangelicals’ “ultimate fighting champion,” and although they conceded that evidence was sketchy, his biographers noted that according to “family history” Trump’s ancestors included “an incredible soldier who fought the English at the Battle of Bannockburn”—the battle depicted in Braveheart’s closing scene.

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The man best suited to lead “Christian America” wasn’t a man formed by traditional Christian virtue; it was a man who would do what needed to be done to protect faith, family, and nation. For the next four years, conservative white evangelicals remained loyal to their warrior leader.

Braveheart continues to inspire. In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch shot up a Washington, D.C. pizzeria in order to break up a non-existent child-sex ring; after his arrest, he told The New York Times that his favorite book was Wild at Heart. When Jerry Falwell Jr. and Charlie Kirk founded their think-tank “for faith and liberty,” they called it the Falkirk Center, a clever play on their own names and also the name of a battle featured in Braveheart. At the Jan. 6 rally-turned-insurrection, a man could be seen carrying a Braveheart sign featuring an image of Trump as William Wallace, sword in hand. This past February, when Ted Cruz sought to position himself as Trump’s successor at CPAC, he struck a belligerent tone and closed his speech with “the immortal words of William Wallace,” shouting “Freedom!” with as much gusto as he could muster.

More significant than any individual act, however, the legacy of Braveheart can be glimpsed in a generation of evangelicals who have chosen fear over hope and militancy over kindness, and who have transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into a ruthless warrior king who leads them into the battles of their own choosing.

This Town After Trump: Nothing to See Here, Folks

This Town After Trump: Nothing to See Here, Folks

By Julia Ioffe,

June 27, 2021.

Hello and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse. I’ve spent the last two weeks traveling—my first time on a plane since March 2020!—and sending you my thoughts about the Biden-Putin meeting. Now, I’m back in the Swamp, whence I will be delivering dispatches about how this strange city works. (We all need a break from Putin, methinks.) This letter is the first in a series I’ve decided to do on how Washington has—and hasn’t—changed in the six months since January 6th.

I’ll be doing that as my colleagues and I continue building our new media company, which will be focused on telling you what’s really happening in America’s four centers of power: Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C., known somewhat ironically by its residents as #thistown, after the eponymous (and gloriously merciless) Mark Leibovich book.

Also, this is a work in progress, so we’re going to try out a more interactive feature: one of my newsletters every week will be dedicated to answering your questions. So, please submit your questions to fritz@puck.news and I will answer the best ones in the next newsletter.

Thank you for signing up, thank you for reading. If you like what you’re seeing, pass it on. And subscribe to my colleagues here, here, and here.

#ThisTown After Trump: Nothing to See Here, Folks

Washington is a strange place. People who don’t live here love to beat up on us, to accuse us of being cynical and corrupt, and full of people who say one thing and do another, and Washington is undoubtedly all those things—though it is also full of some of the biggest idealists I’ve ever met. But what I find mind-boggling about this place is how and why Washington gets outraged.

Remember the time this city absolutely lost its mind when comedian Michelle Wolf was the keynote comedian at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and went after then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders? If you don’t, let me remind you: Every year, the White House Correspondents Association throws a black tie dinner where an A-list comedian is brought in to roast the people in power. In 2018, at the height of Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that tore children away from their parents at the southern U.S. border and just a few days before then-attorney general Jeff Sessions said “we need to take away the children,” Wolf joked that Sanders created the perfect smokey eye by dusting her lids with crushed lies. All press secretaries get creative with the truth but Sarah Huckabee Sanders was infamous for her gymnastic manipulations. But when Wolf tied Sanders’s Olympic feats with her make-up, lots of people felt this was not very nice.

Remember what I told you about the importance of being nice in Washington? It’s very, very important. Because this is a town that, like most towns, runs on personal connections and you never know whom you might need down the line in #thistown. And guess whom you’re probably going to need in the future? That’s right. The president’s press secretary and her off-the-record chats and her responding to your text messages at all hours. And it’s very easy to slam an outsider—a female comedian at that—to score points with the people in power by appealing to the very decorum that the people in power made a fetish of trampling.

Which is a big reason why Washington and Washington-adjacent people all along the Acela corridor were outraged. Wolf had insulted “a wife and a mother”! Others noted Sanders' incredible fortitude in weathering Wolf’s vicious attack. The White House Correspondents Association issued a statement saying that Wolf’s monologue was “not in the spirit” of the Association’s mission, which is strange, considering the fact that the only memorable part of these dinners has always been the A-list comedians invited to roast the people in power. Because they were so scandalized by Wolf’s monologue, though, the Association decided to do away with the tradition entirely. (They stuck to their guns and held a uniquely boring dinner in 2019 before the pandemic spared them of having to repeat the idiocy in 2020 and 2021.)

Sometimes, the city clutches its pearls so hard it risks choking itself. I’ve had run-ins with this, too, like when, in 2016, I tweeted about the news that president-elect Trump was reportedly planning on giving the First Lady’s quarters of the White House, normally reserved for a president’s wife, to his daughter Ivanka. This was more than a bit awkward, given all the sexual things he’s said about her. I won’t repeat the tweet here, but let’s just say I lost two jobs over it and was lectured by very powerful people in Washington, including those who helped start the Iraq War, that this was definitely a career-ender because it was worse than getting a story wrong.

That’s the strange thing about Washington: it has its own cancel culture, one that predates whatever it is conservatives have been banging on about recently. Washington has a different cancellation metric than the rest of the country, and it can be hard to divine from the outside—or, honestly, from the inside. Making fun of a Trump press secretary who lies without blushing by invoking her eye shadow technique? Never again! Alluding to Trump’s absolutely insane comments sexualizing his own child? Off with her head! Helping spread lies and cheer the start of a completely unnecessary war that kills hundreds of thousands of people and destabilizes an entire region? Well, hindsight is 20-20 and crafting American foreign policy is a tricky business…​

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I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as we near the six-month anniversary of the insurrection of January 6. This week, the first of the insurrectionists was sentenced and there are hundreds more in line behind her. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to create her own commission to investigate that day’s events because Republicans in the Senate killed the idea of a bipartisan one. Trump has been indefinitely banned from Twitter and Facebook. But has anyone else suffered any consequences for enabling the former president and his deranged supporters?

In the days after January 6, there was a raft of stories citing anonymous Trump staffers worried that the events of that terrible day would make them unemployable. It wasn’t an irrational fear. One could easily imagine professional repercussions for a line on your resume tying you to the man who tried to violently overturn a democratic election—or that there should be. Yet every day, #thistown’s political newsletters bring news that yet another Trump alumnus has landed a cushy new job. Here’s a representative sampling:

Former Louisiana Representative John Fleming served through the entirety of the Trump administration and ended his term as an assistant to the president, working on the COVID-19 task force and basically doing everything that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows wasn’t. Unlike some other Trump appointees, Fleming didn’t flee the ship when rioters stormed the Capitol, and left the White House only when Trump’s term was officially over. In April, Fleming joined the McKeon Group, a lobbying shop, as a principal.

William Crozer, who was a special assistant to the president, condemned the violence at the Capitol but still said it was “the honor of a lifetime” to work for Trump. He too landed on his feet. In April, he joined a large lobbying firm as a vice president.

Greg Jacob, who was chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence and an advisor to President Trump, rejoined the massive international law firm O’Melveny as a partner, where he will go back to making millions. He had advised Pence on whether he could challenge the Electoral College vote—though, to be fair, he ultimately gave him the right advice—and was in the Capitol with the VP when the building was stormed by Trump supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

Morgan Ortagus, who served as Mike Pompeo’s press secretary, has joined the Atlantic Council, a prominent D.C. think tank. Pompeo himself joined another prominent think tank, the right-leaning Hudson Institute. (Think tanks, as a D.C. friend once joked, should all be renamed as “The Center for the Next Democratic Administration” or “The Institute Where Republicans Wait Out the Democratic President,” because often, that’s all think tanks are: holding pens for appointees of future administrations.)

Amy Swonger, a veteran Republican who served for most of the Trump administration in the legislative affairs office, returned to the lobbying firm of prominent D.C. lobbyist Heather Podesta, the ex-wife of D.C. lobbying titan Tony Podesta and former sister-in-law of John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and Hillary Clinton’s right hand man. (Oh, #thistown.)

Former Trump Chief of Staff Reince Preibus, fired by tweet and abandoned on the tarmac, is living the good life, making up to six figures per speech and getting cheeky write-ups in the Washington Post about his salt-water fish tank.

Another former Trump chief of staff, John Kelly, who, as head of the Department of Homeland Security, implemented Trump’s child-separation policy, has joined the board of Caliburn International, which, rather ironically, operates four shelters for unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States.

Oh, and the one Trump administration official that has apparently been struggling to find a job? Former D.H.S. secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who became the face of Trump’s child separation policy, even though she was pushed out for not being hardcore enough. She has reportedly sold her D.C. house and moved somewhere where she’s not as recognizable. Two sources told me that doors have been closed to her. (A representative for Nielsen told me "her plate is very full working with multiple companies on a consulting basis.")

Here’s how a Republican lobbyist explained it to me. He had heard of mid-level Trump people struggling to find jobs, but, he said, despite the way Trump went out, trying to take down the edifice of democracy on the way, this cycle of outgoing administration officials looking for jobs wasn’t all that different from past transfers of power. “Transitions are difficult. Any time an administration changes, there’s a scramble for jobs,” the lobbyist said. “That’s just the nature of town: when there’s a change, the party on the out struggles. Anybody leaving has a hard time, and the Trump thing didn’t help. It was going to be a challenge anyway.”

As a prospective employer and as someone who tried to help these people find jobs in corporate America, he didn’t see working for Trump as a mark of death—or even a particularly terrible stain—on a resume. “I wouldn’t say that having Trump on your resume is a great thing for a corporate gig,” the lobbyist said, “but you’re going to get hired based on your record over a period of time, not because you worked for some asshole for two years.” In the end, though, everyone he was helping look for a job, despite the asshole they worked for trying to stage a coup, seemed like they were going to be okay. “Everybody I’ve been trying to help is in a good spot, but it took a while. In corporate America, they all landed places,” he said with evident pride, before adding, “But I’m not helping the crazy ones.”

One Republican staffer on the Hill put it more succinctly. “I think in some ways, there will always be a stigma. But people are pretty self-interested in D.C., so if you can hire someone who worked for Trump and it benefits you, you’re going to do it.” A Democratic Hill staffer agreed. “At the end of the day,” he said, “firms who think they would make money off hiring them are gonna hire them.”

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America, which historically prefers compromise and consensus over righteous conflict, has never done lustration particularly well. Lustration is the concept, implemented in some Eastern European countries after the fall of Communism, that people who participated in a country’s monstrous past should be banned from government positions where they can influence the country’s future. It’s the idea that certain acts should be disqualifying from holding positions of state power. In dealing with Confederate traitors after the Civil War, the U.S. government chose reconciliation over lustration, which is one reason we got Jim Crow laws and Confederate monuments and a huge contingent of people who think they’re a good and important part of our scenery. (If you want to read an absolutely remarkable book on the subject, look no further.) Lustration is hard to implement and, depending on who you are, can be very uncomfortable. D.C. doesn’t like uncomfortable.

D.C. insiders insist that there’s a difference between the technocrats who helped Trump implement his agenda and the political operators that helped Trump get elected—and poured gasoline on every single fire. Most of the worst actors—Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, and the other political hacks—have started their own Trump-adjacent ventures or have joined far-right “think tanks.” (NPR’s Domenico Montanaro has a good rundown here.) Some, like Trump whisperer Kellyanne Conway, MAGA digital guru Brad Parscale, and campaign manager Bill Stepien, are helping Trump acolytes run for office across the country, though one D.C. Republican told me that Parscale “made so much money [working for Trump], he may never have to work again.”

Trump son-in-law and messiah of Middle East Peace Jared Kushner and first daughter Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, are busy laundering their reputations as Trump’s biggest enablers. They’re planting stories with a credulous press going through Trump withdrawal, telegraphing to the world that they’ve distanced themselves from Trump because they’re sane people and not as bad as you think they are. (More on that in our next episode.)

Even if they’re shunned by mainstream society or corporate America—or even Fox News—there’s a growing far-right ecosystem where they can make a comfortable home for themselves. Former Trump press staffers Sean Spicer and Hogan Gidley may not have gotten contracts at Fox News, but they’ve landed gigs at Newsmax, where Spicer hosts a prime-time show every weeknight. “Outside of Fox, there’s a whole world of options for them,” says Republican strategist and former R.N.C. spokesman Doug Heye. “Sean Spicer hosts a show five nights a week on a channel that I don’t know the number of, but that’s not insignificant. It’s very easy for people to dismiss Newsmax, but there are people who watch. There’s money to be made there. If you live in New York or D.C., it’s very easy to forget that. These are very powerful outlets. And that’s also true of the political consultancy firms, issue advocacy firms—there’s an ecosphere for these people that’s not the mainstream.”

And I guess that’s the crux of the issue. Can there really be consequences—outside of the law or, say, not getting reelected—if there’s always a place you can fall back on? Can you ever really be “canceled,” even for undermining the very foundation of America’s (imperfect) democracy, if your tribe will always have your back because anything the other tribe says is bad must be good? What is to be done with these people if, instead of suffering meaningful consequences, their tribe crowns them with glory? It’s easy enough to score points with the people you need, like the White House press secretary, by ragging on an outsider like Michelle Wolf. You can make something small, like a joke, into a big deal and an even bigger opportunity to virtue signal to the right people, especially when so many people in the very strait-laced #thistown are really and genuinely offended by such things.

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Remember all those corporations who said they wouldn’t donate to any members of Congress who had in any way tried to overturn a free and fair election? Well, many of them have kept their promise in the first quarter of 2021—at least technically. Some, however, have gotten around their own pledge by donating to the umbrella committees that help Republicans get elected and reelected to Congress, like the National Republican Campaign Committee, the NRCC. Others were careful in how they defined who was worth giving to and who wasn’t. “The only thing I ever saw was that they were stopping their giving to people who voted against certifying the election,” says the Democratic staffer. “That’s a really clear line. And if you’re giving to senators, it’s a much smaller group, so you don’t have to stop giving to [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell. But is he one of the good guys?”

Meanwhile, some members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz have realized they can raise far more money without the corporate world by portraying themselves as victims of “woke corporporations” and monetizing the resultant tribal rage. And, as Bernie Sanders has shown, there’s nothing like a flood of small-dollar donations to raise your authenticity quotient. “Cruz and Hawley, they don’t care about that,” says the Republican Hill staffer about corporations shutting off the spigot of political cash. “It’s all about small donations. A corporation can give you $5,000, but you’d much rather have 500 people giving you $10 every month.” Both senators, who acted as the bellows of the insurrection, raised record sums despite the corporate punishment.

Here’s the other problem: no one thinks the corporate ban is going to be permanent. The Republican lobbyist I spoke to is counting on it. “Our counsel was to calm down, keep your head down, and do what you need to do when the time is right,” he said he told his corporate clients about political giving. “Everybody knew that at some point they’re going to resume” writing checks.

They have to, just because of how Washington is built. You give money to congresspeople and senators who, say, represent a district where you have a facility or sit on the committee that oversees your industry. Are you going to stay out of the conversation entirely while competitors are donating money to get face time with Senator X or Representative Y so that maybe they’ll remember what they told them next time they’re drafting legislation or voting on a bill? “If you’re not going to give to any Republicans that said dumb shit about the election, you wouldn’t find any Republicans to give to and you’d be opting out of the game,” says the Democratic staffer. Plus, says the Republican lobbyist, companies haven’t forgotten who’s been friendlier to their interests. “Republicans were typically the helpful ones,” he said. “The Democrats want to kick them in the ass.”

Such is the tension between civic and fiduciary duty. “If you’re a defense contractor that employs a lot of people nationally but also in Washington State and your congresspeople voted not to certify election results in Pennsylvania, I don’t know what you do,” says Heye. “That’s a very difficult question. It’s easy to say from the outside. If they’re a member who supports your agenda, that is a key member of a subcommittee, you have to look at that and balance that with what are your responsibilities to your employees, your agenda, your shareholders. By freezing them out for a few months, maybe that sends a signal that gets forgotten, but you have a responsibility to your employees and your shareholders. It might be slightly cynical, but I think that’s where things are. ”

I asked Heye what I knew was a comically naive question: Wasn’t it important for businesses to have a stable and predictable political system with strong courts and the rule of law? Wouldn’t donating to people who introduced so much instability—and potentially fatal rot—into the system not be in their business interests? “There aren’t necessarily easy answers,” he sighed. “These aren’t easy conversations. Welcome to Washington, where we’re much better at short-term decisions than long-term decisions.”

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So much of it, though, is #thistown’s palpable, desperate desire to get back to “normal.” Even among Republicans, I hear a kind of delight in the partisan battle over how to pay for infrastructure. It’s boring. It’s normal. No one is waking up with the dread of knowing that a President Trump has tweeted something batshit crazy while they were asleep. And there’s a hope, expressed through a painful grimace and crossed fingers, that this boring normal will stick. People were outraged, and now they’d really like to move on.

In November 2012, Heye was working for Eric Cantor, then the Republican House Majority Leader, and was with him the day after Mitt Romney lost the election to Barack Obama in 2012. Cantor started calling his members and gathering string for what would become the party’s famous post mortem. Honored more in the breach than the observance, it recommended the G.O.P. get serious about immigration reform and outreach to Latino voters. “We underestimate what an important factor time is,” Heye said. “If we were having drinks the Friday after the [2012] election, I would tell you Republicans are going to move immigration legislation. Every day that we moved past that, it became less and less likely, and less immediate.” By February, when G.O.P. legislators gathered at a retreat and pushed back on Cantor’s immigration proposals, the idea was dead. “Once that meeting was over, immigration was done,” Heye remembered. “The key issue there was time. If there had been a vote on the commission [to investigate the insurrection of January 6] on January 7, it would have passed overwhelmingly and even [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy would’ve voted for it. But every day that passes, it becomes less and less immediate. That’s informed by Trump, by conservative media, but it’s also time.”

It’s typical #thistown, but it's also typically human. “Everyone just settles back into their corners,” says the Democratic staffer. “Every Republican that was scandalized stopped being scandalized, except [Wyoming Republican] Liz Cheney.” Or, to quote the Republican staffer: “People are outraged and then people move on.”

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That’s all for now. Tune in next week for the second installment of my series #ThisTown after Trump, examining how Washington has—and hasn’t—changed in the six months after the January 6 insurrection and coup attempt. In the meantime, you can support my work by sharing this email with a friend or inviting them to sign up here.

Good night. Tomorrow will be worse,

Julia

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What the pandemic Olympic Village reveals about Japan’s readiness

What the pandemic Olympic Village reveals about Japan’s readiness.

Financial Times.

By Leo Lewis, June 27, 2021.

A member of the media wearing a Paralympic T-shirt reports from the Village Plaza before the start of a media tour of the Village Plaza and Olympic Village for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games © Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty

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Pillow juxtaposition, souvenir condoms and a plumbing-based dig at previous host nations: by last Sunday evening, and with a month left before curtain-up, the Tokyo 2020 pre-Olympic stories were already writing themselves. 

The narrative-generator, on this occasion, was a first-glimpse press tour inside the Olympic Village. This sprawl of buildings in Tokyo Bay will eventually become desirable seafront flats, but feels more immediately destined to be the backdrop of a grim news bulletin later this summer that begins: “The outbreak has been traced to the wrestlers’ sauna . . . ”

A central purpose of the village tour, which dwelt upon the various measures put in place both to limit infection and test daily for its spread, was to allay precisely this type of concern. The pillows on the cardboard beds in the (fairly small) shared athletes’ rooms will now be placed at opposite ends in an effort to reduce transmission risk.

Despite this, the concerns refuse to abate: last week’s positive test for the Delta variant in an arriving member of the Ugandan team, and the decision to allow the rest of the team to travel to their host town in central Japan, is a very much sloppier look than the country wanted at this point. 

In theory, the Tokyo 2020 village bubble will not, as at previous Olympics, host an effervescent festival of cosmopolitan co-mingling, but will instead, via stern rules, Perspex screens and artificially intelligent crowd-tracking software in the canteen, serve the now paramount purpose of putting this whole spectacle behind us without a medical catastrophe. The Games motto “united by emotion” looms in giant letters behind the village plaza, but fretful obedience rather than sporty bonhomie may be the unifying emotion the organisers are secretly longing for.

And perhaps necessarily so. Experts have repeatedly warned against holding these Games, using terms that leave the administration of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, the Tokyo organisers and the International Olympic Committee with the absolute burden of proving those warnings wrong.

The decision to hold the Games this summer demanded a combination of coercion, optimism, delusion and political gamble, all of which were readily mustered. All the subsequent contortions and paradoxes — some plain silly and others potentially life-threatening — are essential to disguise just how big a stride into the risk-laden unknown has been taken. If the new “playbook” rules ban athletes from shopping and dining outside the village, for instance, why have organisers been at such pains to equip it with a fully staffed bureau de change? 

The condom conundrum arose during the tour as organisers were pressed on a knotty issue of policy. The earlier declaration that tens of thousands of condoms would be handed out to village residents jarred with the fierce exhortation against close contact between athletes. The interim solution — that they be distributed but not used — was roundly mocked but, in a triumphant show of strength, the decision was then announced to distribute them on the point of departure as latex educational emissaries from Japan to the world.

Later in the week, a similarly madcap series of policy lurches centred on the distribution of alcohol at the event venues: the sale of booze flickering conceptually between on and off as organisers groped for a balance between public opinion, a deadly virus and sponsorship commitments.

But in one important respect, the village tour was illuminating. There are many factors behind Japan’s determination to push ahead with the Olympics. The political calculus for Suga stands out, as does the natural revulsion at letting all this preparation and expenditure go to waste. 

But critical too is the script that the organisers appear to be writing in their heads: a wrenching, cinematic chaos of razor-edge decisions from which Japan successfully pulls off the “miracle” Games and is remembered as the field on which the world took its defining stand for normal life. 

“Unlike certain other hosts, everything here is fully prepared,” said one of the officials leading the village tour. “The athletes are guaranteed hot water as soon as they arrive.” 

This comment, and others like it, reflects a sentiment that comfortably predates the pandemic, echoing the instincts that surrounded the 1964 Games in Japan and suggesting a continuing desire to prove the country’s developed status to the world despite that not really being in question. The double challenge of having hot water in the village and outsmarting a dangerous virus may be a stronger motivator than many have guessed.

leo.lewis@ft.com

The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. Here’s what did.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. Here’s what did.

By Clarence Lusane

June 25, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

Two states — Delaware and Kentucky — still allowed slavery until the 13th Amendment was ratified, six months after Juneteenth.

The Juneteenth flag flies in Omaha on June 17. (Nati Harnik/AP)

The legal designation of Juneteenth as a federal holiday recognizes a pivotal moment in U.S. history. While nearly every state and many cities previously celebrated Juneteenth, President Biden’s signing this into law on June 18 provided the nation’s highest approval and recognition.

Unfortunately, most of the reporting on Juneteenth erroneously conflates the arrival of Gen. Gordon Granger and Union troops in Galveston, Tex., on June 19, 1865, with the official end of slavery in the United States. That’s a misreading of the Emancipation Proclamation.

A recent Gallup Poll reported that 37 percent of adults say they know “a lot” or “some” about Juneteenth, and that 69 percent of African Americans made those claims. But it is not clear what respondents actually know.

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The limits of the Emancipation Proclamation

As a legal matter, slavery officially ended in the United States on Dec. 6, 1865, when the 13th Amendment was ratified by two-thirds of the then-states — 27 out of 36 — and became a part of the Constitution. The text reads, in part, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” Some legal historians, scholars, activists and even filmmakers have seen the “exception” clause as a loophole, included to appease the South, allowing states to reinstitute slave-like conditions such as chain gangs and prison labor.

Nevertheless, at that moment, chattel slavery was forever outlawed — including in the last two slaveholding states, Delaware and Kentucky. Neither had done so before then; neither were bound to do so under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation, which emancipated enslaved people only in states“ in rebellion against the United States.”

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Eleven states comprised the Confederate States of America, formed after Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860. Those states were Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Four of the states (Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia) seceded formally after Lincoln’s inauguration although they sympathized with the Confederate states earlier. They joined after the attack on Fort Sumter.

Four slaveholding states — Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri — did not join the Confederacy. The number would rise to five in June 1863 when slaveholding West Virginia joined the Union and not the Confederacy. Close to half a million enslaved people lived in these states — which had Confederate sympathizers but remained in the Union.

After a year and a half of war, Lincoln came to believe that the only way to save the Union was to abolish slavery. In August 1862, he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, which was to take effect Jan. 1, 1863, with his signature. Because he saw it as a war measure, the order freed only the enslaved people in states “in rebellion against the United States.” Lincoln famously wrote in a letter to abolitionist and newspaper publisher Horace Greeley: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”

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That last clause outlines exactly what the Emancipation Proclamation did: Free some and not others. It did not apply to enslaved people in the five non-Confederate states noted above. The order did affect Texas, but not those states since they were not in rebellion.

It is also true that three of those five states abolished slavery through state legislative action before Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865. Maryland did so Oct. 13, 1864; Missouri, on Jan. 11, 1865; and West Virginia on Feb. 3, 1865. While many citizens of those states opposed abolition, practical and pro-Union sentiments prevailed.

The 13th Amendment gave emancipation a firm legal foundation

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Lincoln reportedly worried that his proclamation could be challenged at some point by a future Congress, or that it might even be declared unconstitutional by a South-friendly Supreme Court. To strengthen the proclamation’s grant of freedom and to ensure that the entire nation remained free of slavery, Lincoln and his radical Republican allies in Congress pushed through the 13th Amendment. It passed both chambers of Congress on Jan. 31, 1865, with two-thirds votes from the House and the Senate. Lincoln did not live to see it ratified 11 months later on Dec. 6, 1865.

There does not seem to be much of a record of celebration of the 13th Amendment’s ratification, either then or now, whether by African Americans or the rest of the country. Activist Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders certainly advocated for the amendment and cheered its passage. However, it was never given the attention of Juneteenth.

In 2015, President Barack Obama delivered remarks commemorating the 150th anniversary of the ratification. But even those remarks were barely noticed in Washington, D.C., let alone nationally.

So why do we celebrate Juneteenth?

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On the other hand, African Americans in Texas began to celebrate Juneteenth as early as 1866. Those celebrations began to spread as Black Texans migrated to other states and other African Americans came to value the event. Juneteenth makes sense; it specifically involved African American Union soldiers in delivering the news, and it also literally freed enslaved people. That event truly brought the military end of the Civil War.

Douglass had a hopeful but somber response to the 13th Amendment, saying, “Verily, the work does not end with the abolition of slavery, but only begins.” Perhaps that established a somber approach to the amendment’s passage. African Americans understood then as now that abolishing slavery was not the same as establishing equality and full inclusion in U.S. society. That’s why it is critical to know the history and why the struggle continues for racial justice.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify when Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia joined the Confederacy.

Clarence Lusane is a professor of political science at Howard University and the author of “The Black History of the White House” (City Lights, 2010), among other books.