newrepublic.com
Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem?
By Miguel Salazar
19-24 minutes
On an afternoon in July, nearly 200 people packed into the ballroom of a local community center in northern Oakland for a general meeting of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). As they settled into folded chairs on the room’s faded wooden floors, the group ran through the week’s agenda, which included votes on the establishment of a code of conduct, a resolution to meet monthly instead of once every two months, and a proposal to support Cat Brooks, a black activist running for Oakland mayor.
Three miles away at the Marriott City Center, Brooks was working events at the California Democratic Caucus. Brooks, a co-founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project, which provides support to communities of color in response to police violence, had been invited to speak on a panel defending Prop 10, a ballot measure that sought to repeal a 1995 law restricting rent control in Oakland and other cities in California. At the end of the event, Brooks checked her phone and found a stream of texts from people at the DSA meeting. The messages read: “You need to get here right now.”
Minutes later, Brooks stormed into the ballroom. A proposal to “prioritize” two other endorsements—for Prop 10 and a candidate for California’s state assembly—had snowballed into a referendum on Brooks herself, with critics saying she was too compromised to receive the DSA’s backing. The group’s support shouldn’t be given to people who are “a dime a dozen,” Brooks remembered one man saying. Like many of her rivals, she had pledged to expand affordable housing and reduce Oakland’s growing homeless population. Notably, she had insisted on cutting the city’s police budget in half.
At one point, Tur-ha Ak, a black organizer with Brooks’s Anti-Police Terror Project, asked to speak. As his turn approached, the young man who was chairing the meeting asked if Ak was a member. A number of white people had spoken before him, including Forrest Schmidt, 42, who was attending his first DSA meeting. “None of us had our credentials called,” he said. “Nobody said, ‘Are you a DSA member?’” When Ak responded that he was not a member, the chair asked him to take a seat.
The room erupted. The procedural rules were racist, Ak proclaimed, raising his voice over a cacophony of protests and chants. “The energy,” Brooks recalled, “turned into that of a white mob.” She decided to take the floor. “My name is Cat Brooks,” she said. “I’ve been organizing in this city longer than most of you have lived here.” In a brief, piercing speech, she accused the largely white crowd of being gentrifiers and then walked out, leaving members confused and outraged.
The debate quickly moved to Twitter, Reddit, and other corners of the internet. In an online essay, Jeremy Gong, an East Bay member who sits on DSA’s National Political Committee, the organization’s highest decision-making body, argued that Cat Brooks “weaponized” her race to coerce DSA into supporting her candidacy. He would not endorse her. The July DSA meeting, he wrote, was a textbook example of “race reductionism and liberal guilt politics.” By insinuating that white members were “the problem” when it came to Oakland’s gentrification, he claimed, Brooks had mistakenly reduced what was fundamentally a class conflict into a racial one.
Though a dustup among a small group of lefties in Oakland may seem to be a parochial affair, the controversy surrounding Brooks is part of a fierce debate about race within the newly invigorated socialist movement. Since 2016, when it had only 6,500 members, DSA has added nearly 50,000 members and over 125 chapters across the country. In 2018, two of its members—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, both women of color—were elected to serve in Congress, and 21 more won seats in state legislatures. Though DSA is separate from the Democratic Party, some of its members represent both institutions, while DSA itself is at the cutting edge of the broader progressive movement, a loud, insistent voice on issues ranging from universal health care to debt forgiveness.
But unlike other progressive groups, DSA has to contend with internal factions that are very seriously wedded to a certain strain of socialist ideology—one that emphasizes, as Karl Marx did, a churning class war that governs the history of humankind. For these socialists, an anti-capitalist movement must be anti-racist, since capitalism has been instrumental in the subjugation of minorities. But they are also weary of liberal politicians who, they say, exploit race to pander to minority groups, all while skirting the deeper class conflict at work. In the past year, these hard-liners have clashed on numerous occasions with other socialists, often minorities themselves, who contend that righting America’s unique wrongs requires an approach distinct from the universal precepts of historical materialism—one that emphasizes racism’s special impact on inequality, supra-class.
In the Brooks controversy and other incidents, these tensions have come to a head, badly dividing the movement and raising difficult questions about socialism’s potential as a political force in the United States. In important respects, these are the same questions that dogged socialism as an ideology throughout the 20th century—questions that America’s fledgling socialists are openly struggling to answer, on Twitter and in left-wing periodicals like Jacobin. Is socialism, as an ideology, capable of welcoming dissenting opinions? And how central should issues of race be in a socialist movement?
Around the time Cat Brooks stepped into the East Bay DSA meeting in July, a similar controversy broke out in the organization’s Philadelphia chapter. In an email to the chapter’s political education committee, a small group of DSA organizers had proposed a new book by Asad Haider, a University of California graduate student and editor of Viewpoint magazine, for a reading group. The book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, envisions a socialism that both addresses racism head-on and advances a class-based movement.
Haider adopts an understanding of identity politics first introduced by the Combahee River Collective, a black lesbian militant group, which held that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” The idea is that an authentic socialist movement needed to go beyond a vision of “sexless, raceless workers”; it required centering the identities and lived experiences of marginalized groups, in order to address issues that wouldn’t necessarily be mended through economic reforms alone.
The political education committee responded that it was no longer creating new reading groups. So the organizers, who belonged to a subcommittee created in 2017 to develop local socialist campaigns, held the reading group anyway. On the day before the first meeting, however, they received a letter from the chapter’s leadership. The event, they wrote, was “unrelated” to the subcommittee’s stated purpose; the group was acting “autonomously, apparently as a protest.” Leadership provided an ultimatum: Stay focused on local political campaigns, or resign.
The two sides exchanged correspondence for weeks. Then, in late August, Jacobin published a scathing review of Mistaken Identity, penned by Melissa Naschek, the Philadelphia chapter’s co-chair. Attempting to engage in both class politics and identity politics, she wrote, was the left’s own Third Way: a “lopsided advocacy for particularist demands” that would lead the movement to a dead end. The only path to forging a mass socialist movement, she wrote, was by fighting for “universalist” reforms, like single payer health care and free college tuition.
The essay sparked a heated, sometimes nasty intellectual debate, often conducted in the kind of dogmatic jargon that was once a hallmark of Marxist academia. The DSA members who originally proposed the book for the reading group interpreted the review as a blatant partisan attack. They released a statement arguing that Naschek’s “framing inherently privileges white identity.” On Twitter, Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin’s The Dig podcast, called the review “class reductionism of sort that I hoped only existed in liberal identitarians’ caricatures of the left.” Adolph Reed Jr., a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped Naschek craft her review, blasted Haider’s arguments on a Marxist podcast, saying they “smell like a truckload of rotten fish.” East Bay DSA’s Jeremy Gong also came to Naschek’s defense in an article claiming the workplace to be the “primary strategic site of class struggle.”
R.L. Stephens, a former member of DSA’s National Political Committee, argued that framing issues of racial justice in moral terms made these issues “either subordinate to or outside of class struggle itself.”* Haider himself penned a long, philosophical response to Naschek’s review. His book, he wrote, was “not a political platform, but a work of theory.” (He did, however, get in a jab: “Naschek dismissively proclaims that the [Combahee River Collective] was not a mass movement. Neither is the DSA.”) When I spoke to Haider, he lamented the idea that “there are two isolable, discrete phenomenon that can be parceled out into race and class.”
What seemed to be a drawn-out exercise in academic hair-splitting, however, revealed profoundly different approaches to organizing a mass movement, particularly around issues of race. “A lot of it is postulating more than it is significant differences on the left within DSA,” said Jack Suria Linares, also a National Political Committee member. “But I also think that in the long run those differences might grow.”
These ideological clashes, usually pitting DSA leadership against rank-and-file membership, have been largely limited to East Bay and Philadelphia, the only two major chapters in the country run by the Momentum caucus, a subgroup described in a 2017 Nation profile as the “most explicitly Marxist” within the organization, with a heavy focus on the campaign for Medicare-for-All. Momentum leaders pride themselves on a precise and strategic, if narrow, political vision. While DSA members in other chapters can form working groups to take on autonomous initiatives, that behavior is heavily regulated in the two Momentum-run chapters.
In public and private, DSA members in the East Bay and Philadelphia have expressed frustration at leadership. In October 2017, ahead of a meeting to vote on the endorsement of candidates for local office in Oakland, two East Bay DSA members prepared a statement demanding more agency. “To date, when members have proposed to do work outside of single payer, we have been told that the organization does not have the bandwidth or capacity,” they wrote.
In one notable dispute, a brake light repair initiative in the East Bay DSA was flatly rejected by the chapter’s co-chairs, who refused to put it up for a vote. The repair clinics first sprouted in New Orleans as a strategy to combat police brutality, as people of color are often pulled over for problems as innocuous as broken taillights. These traffic stops can even lead to—as in the case of Philando Castile—killings by the police. While DSA chapters across the country soon began replicating the program, and embraced it as an effective way to build a stronger working-class base, East Bay leadership remained strongly resistant to the campaign. In a private conversation, one East Bay co-chair insinuated to a member of color organizing the clinic that it would look like “white saviorism.” A former member of the chapter’s leadership referred to it as “charity” in a blog post.
In response, over 300 DSA members—a third of whom identified as people of color—from across the country signed a petition urging East Bay leadership to reconsider. “We are alarmed by what increasingly feels like the erasure of our voices and presence within the DSA,” they wrote. Weeks later, East Bay members collected nearly 100 signatures from their chapter, enough to bring the initiative to a vote at a general meeting. Despite protests from some DSA leaders, the resolution passed.
Momentum’s centralized approach stands in stark contrast to the emphasis on mutual aid and direct action in most chapters across the country. Bianca Cunningham, who co-chairs the New York City chapter and helped found DSA’s Afrosocialist caucus, agrees with Momentum leaders like Naschek and Gong that universal policies like Medicare-for-All and free higher education would disproportionately benefit people of color, but argues that they are not sold that way by the mostly white membership rallying behind them. “You have to take that extra step,” she said, “and do more to engage with that community specifically around their own needs and experiences.”
However, the idea that racial justice is a subsidiary issue to class, one exploited by liberal politicians for cynical gain, is common on the left. “It’s crucial that we not let our best impulses be weaponized against our interests,” Briahna Joy Gray wrote in The Intercept, criticizing politicians like Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina who opposed free college tuition on the grounds that it would hurt historically black colleges and universities. Gray also cited the example of Hillary Clinton, who, in a dig at Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primaries, asked, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow ... would that end racism?”
DSA members are understandably wary of such entreaties, which end up pitting working-class people against each other. But the interests of race and class often cross in unexpected ways. Weeks after the East Bay DSA’s July meeting ended in chaos, Cat Brooks submitted a formal endorsement request to the chapter. An electoral subcommittee discovered that, from 2011 to 2014, Brooks had served on the board of GO Public Schools, a pro-charter school nonprofit that has led efforts to destabilize teachers’ unions and promote education privatization in and around the city. Brooks’s critics had found their smoking gun.
Members flooded the DSA’s website with statements and articles urging people to vote against her endorsement. Charter schools, which are publicly owned but privately operated, have had a uniquely destructive effect on Oakland. The city has the highest concentration of charters in the state, which, according to a recent report, has cost the Oakland Unified School District $57 million in funding every year. “I believe in public education. I believe in democratic socialism,” wrote one member in her statement. “I don’t believe that Cat Brooks is right for EBDSA.”
But Brooks had changed her position, and had even told DSA that she supported “a moratorium on charter schools” in Oakland.** Still, DSA members remained unconvinced. Meagan Day, a staff writer for Jacobin and an influential East Bay DSA member, wrote that Brooks’s new position was “fantastic. ... But how can we be certain?” The reversal, she argued, was “too last-minute to constitute a meaningful political transformation.” On September 9, East Bay DSA voted against endorsing her.
The actual story of Brooks’s “political transformation” is more nuanced. Mike Hutchinson, Oakland’s loudest anti-charter activist, who described his relationship with Brooks as “complicated,” recalled that as recently as two years ago, people were calling him “crazy” for his position against charter schools. When charters first began popping up in Oakland in the 1990s, they were sold to residents as a way to give them agency over their own schools. “It was tied into the self empowerment theme that goes back to the Black Panthers,” he said. It was only recently that public opinion shifted, and Brooks’s evolution was representative of that. When she reached out to Hutchinson to consult on her education platform, he was “happily surprised on how she moved away from the charter connections she had in the past.” He ultimately signed on.
The growth of DSA, especially in urban areas, has brought with it a similar set of complications. As of last year, the organization was roughly 90 percent white and composed of people mostly under 35, a palette often associated with gentrification in areas like Oakland, Philadelphia, and New York City. (When I asked DSA for updated numbers, I was told they are not currently collecting demographic data.) It’s a demographic makeup that can be off-putting and even intimidating to leftists of color, many of whom have left DSA or declined to join in the first place. When Cunningham would bring her socialist friends of color to DSA meetings, they would feel uncomfortable. “I would beg them to stay,” she said. She remembered telling them, “‘If you don’t stay, then the next people are going to come in and they’re going to say the same thing.’”
Most leftists agree that, despite the DSA’s overwhelming whiteness, it is committed to recruiting candidates of color like Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez. But such efforts can also border on tokenism. When I spoke with the mostly white members of East Bay DSA’s leadership, some pointed out that, during their July meeting, an older member said this after Brooks stormed out: “If we don’t endorse her, what will black people think of us?”
Online, the debate about race can be particularly alienating to minorities. It is a space where small, intellectualized differences are made insurmountable, and where naked ideology sometimes supersedes the lived experience of organizers who have dedicated their lives to lifting up working-class people. “An organization like DSA might benefit from the kinds of racial sensitivity trainings that we hear about because those are real tendencies that have to get checked,” said Shaun Scott, a DSA member in Seattle. This is particularly true for Momentum, which has an outsized presence within DSA. The group’s modus operandi is predicated on a top-down structure; general meetings are infrequent and subcommittees are limited in their scope. Though small, the group is highly ambitious while also being dismissive of its critics, an attitude seemingly incompatible with DSA’s identity as a “multi-tendency” organization.
On the ground, these battles tend to be fought by proxy, through debates over organizing strategy. Disputes over brake light initiatives and canvassing for Medicare-for-All often have a racial subtext, and tensions between members and the communities they live in can be heightened by DSA’s prescriptive, dismissive attitudes. “As DSA, as relatively new kids on the block, as this predominantly white organization, it’s really paramount that we do that solidarity work,” said Shanti Singh, a co-chair of DSA’s San Francisco chapter, who was one of the signatories on the brake light petition.
Despite DSA’s anti-racist positions, many socialists of color believe there still hasn’t been a full reckoning when it comes to issues of race, nor a resolution between the beliefs of certain socialists and the world we live in. The urgency felt by activists of color doesn’t always exist in white spaces, noted Kristian Hernandez, a 29-year-old Latina DSA member in Texas. In November, two weeks after a gunman killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Proud Boys, a far-right chauvinist group, had planned a demonstration in Philadelphia, which was scheduled during the same time as the local DSA chapter’s general meeting. The organization’s South Jersey chapter had canceled its general meeting to join counter-protesters, but in an email, the Philadelphia chapter’s co-chairs, Melissa Naschek and Scott Jenkins, urged members to attend the meeting instead, to make quorum, calling the protesters “far-right LARPers,” a reference to people who dress up as fictional characters. “We shouldn’t be distracted by their theatrics,” they wrote. “Instead, we should push ahead with our collective goals.”
The decision drew scorn from other socialist leaders. “Countering right-wing anti-Semitism should not be a contentious issue,” Singh tweeted. Ultimately, it’s that attitude of downplaying discrimination, a perspective rooted in privilege, that worries leftists of color. They still need assurances that “at the end of the day, if push comes to shove, people are going to have my back,” Hernandez said. “Particularly white people.”
*A previous version of this article misstated R.L. Stephens’s relationship to DSA. He’s a former member of the National Political Committee, not a current one.
**A previous version of this article misstated when Cat Brooks updated her website platform on charter schools. Brooks notified DSA members of her change in position before the September 9 meeting, but updated her website afterwards.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Trump Is Being Exposed for the Grifter That He Is by Matt Ford
Trump Is Being Exposed for the Grifter That He Is
By Matt Ford
The New Replublic
The
Donald J. Trump Foundation was an audacious grift, even by the
standards of its namesake. Charitable foundations are supposed to
operate under a simple premise: They receive certain tax exemptions when
it comes to receiving and disbursing their funds, and in turn, those
funds will be funneled into good works for society’s benefit. For
Trump’s charity, however, those good works largely amounted to crass
self-enrichment—a guiding principle throughout the president’s life and
political career.
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported two years ago that the Trump Foundation’s most generous expenditure, totaling $264,361, went to renovations for a fountain outside the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel in New York City. Its smallest contribution—just $7—appears to have been used to pay for Donald Trump Jr.’s registration fee for the Boy Scouts of America. In one instance, Trump auctioned off a six-foot-tall painting of himself to charity, then spent $20,000 from the foundation’s funds to purchase it.
New York thinks it can find a better use for the money. Barbara Underwood, the state’s attorney general, announced on Tuesday that the president agreed to shut down the foundation and let state officials disperse its remaining funds to genuine charitable organizations. “This is an important victory for the rule of law, making clear that there is one set of rules for everyone,” Underwood said in a statement announcing the agreement. Her office is still pursuing more than $2 million in restitution from Trump and restrictions on his family’s involvement in non-profit organizations in the state.
An investigation by Underwood’s office uncovered a clear pattern of instances where the Trump family misused charity funds. The foundation cut checks for well-publicized donations during Trump’s presidential campaign, transmogrifying charitable funds into politically beneficial expenditures. It shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle legal disputes involving Trump himself or his companies. Normal safeguards like an active board of directors, standard accounting practices, and grant-making policies did not exist. The charity itself, investigators said, “is little more than an empty shell.”
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported two years ago that the Trump Foundation’s most generous expenditure, totaling $264,361, went to renovations for a fountain outside the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel in New York City. Its smallest contribution—just $7—appears to have been used to pay for Donald Trump Jr.’s registration fee for the Boy Scouts of America. In one instance, Trump auctioned off a six-foot-tall painting of himself to charity, then spent $20,000 from the foundation’s funds to purchase it.
New York thinks it can find a better use for the money. Barbara Underwood, the state’s attorney general, announced on Tuesday that the president agreed to shut down the foundation and let state officials disperse its remaining funds to genuine charitable organizations. “This is an important victory for the rule of law, making clear that there is one set of rules for everyone,” Underwood said in a statement announcing the agreement. Her office is still pursuing more than $2 million in restitution from Trump and restrictions on his family’s involvement in non-profit organizations in the state.
An investigation by Underwood’s office uncovered a clear pattern of instances where the Trump family misused charity funds. The foundation cut checks for well-publicized donations during Trump’s presidential campaign, transmogrifying charitable funds into politically beneficial expenditures. It shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle legal disputes involving Trump himself or his companies. Normal safeguards like an active board of directors, standard accounting practices, and grant-making policies did not exist. The charity itself, investigators said, “is little more than an empty shell.”
“In sum, the Investigation revealed
that the Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments to
not-for-profits from Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization,” the attorney
general’s office said in a lawsuit
this summer. “This resulted in multiple violations of state and federal
law because payments were made using Foundation money regardless of the
purpose of the payment. Mr. Trump used charitable assets to pay off the
legal obligations of entities he controlled, to promote Trump hotels,
to purchase personal items, and to support his presidential election
campaign.”
Though the Trump Foundation was an impressively brazen scheme, it’s far from the only one bearing the president’s name. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle a multi-state class-action lawsuit against Trump University, his now-defunct real-estate seminar program. Court filings showed how the seminars preyed on customers’ financial anxieties so they would fork over thousands of dollars for mundane lessons about buying and selling property. This undercut Trump University’s main selling point: that “students” would be able to draw upon its eponymous founder’s reputation for savvy real-estate deals.
Even this reputation isn’t grounded in anything, though. The underlying basis of Trump’s political career is his public image as a self-made real-estate magnate. Careful scrutiny by journalists and investigators, however, has shown this to be largely mythical. It wasn’t business acumen that helped Trump establish a foothold in New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s, but a steady infusion of at least $413 million from his father through dubious tax practices. Trump’s inflated reputation is a source of income in and of itself. Many of the overseas hotels bearing his name don’t even belong to him: He simply licenses his image to real-estate developers overseas, giving a branding edge to them and a reliable stream of profit to him.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an aspect of the president’s life that isn’t marked by grifting. The Trump campaign and its allies heard multiple offers of assistance from Kremlin-linked figures while Trump’s personal lawyer tried to secure a hotel deal in Moscow. His inaugural committee later raked in more than $100 million—more than twice the sum of his predecessors—from wealthy donors that largely went unaccounted for. A ProPublica investigation found that the Trump Organization may have overcharged the committee for use of Trump’s Washington hotel, raising questions about whether any illegal self-enrichment took place. (Federal prosecutors are reportedly investigating the matter.) Foreign governments have also poured money into the Trump Organization’s properties, which may violate a constitutional ban on federal officials receiving foreign profits.
Ironically, some of these schemes likely would have gone unnoticed if Trump had never run for president. Fahrenthold, of the Post, began his Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into Trump’s charitable donations after then-candidate Trump handed out oversized checks to veterans’ groups in campaign stunts. And the illegal hush-money payments that eventually led former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to start cooperating with the federal prosecutors likely wouldn’t have been made if Trump wasn’t trying to win the presidency. Becoming president has subjected Trump’s hollow empire to a level of scrutiny that he never imagined. The question is whether any of it will remain by the time he leaves, or is forced from, the White House.
Though the Trump Foundation was an impressively brazen scheme, it’s far from the only one bearing the president’s name. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle a multi-state class-action lawsuit against Trump University, his now-defunct real-estate seminar program. Court filings showed how the seminars preyed on customers’ financial anxieties so they would fork over thousands of dollars for mundane lessons about buying and selling property. This undercut Trump University’s main selling point: that “students” would be able to draw upon its eponymous founder’s reputation for savvy real-estate deals.
Even this reputation isn’t grounded in anything, though. The underlying basis of Trump’s political career is his public image as a self-made real-estate magnate. Careful scrutiny by journalists and investigators, however, has shown this to be largely mythical. It wasn’t business acumen that helped Trump establish a foothold in New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s, but a steady infusion of at least $413 million from his father through dubious tax practices. Trump’s inflated reputation is a source of income in and of itself. Many of the overseas hotels bearing his name don’t even belong to him: He simply licenses his image to real-estate developers overseas, giving a branding edge to them and a reliable stream of profit to him.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an aspect of the president’s life that isn’t marked by grifting. The Trump campaign and its allies heard multiple offers of assistance from Kremlin-linked figures while Trump’s personal lawyer tried to secure a hotel deal in Moscow. His inaugural committee later raked in more than $100 million—more than twice the sum of his predecessors—from wealthy donors that largely went unaccounted for. A ProPublica investigation found that the Trump Organization may have overcharged the committee for use of Trump’s Washington hotel, raising questions about whether any illegal self-enrichment took place. (Federal prosecutors are reportedly investigating the matter.) Foreign governments have also poured money into the Trump Organization’s properties, which may violate a constitutional ban on federal officials receiving foreign profits.
Ironically, some of these schemes likely would have gone unnoticed if Trump had never run for president. Fahrenthold, of the Post, began his Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into Trump’s charitable donations after then-candidate Trump handed out oversized checks to veterans’ groups in campaign stunts. And the illegal hush-money payments that eventually led former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to start cooperating with the federal prosecutors likely wouldn’t have been made if Trump wasn’t trying to win the presidency. Becoming president has subjected Trump’s hollow empire to a level of scrutiny that he never imagined. The question is whether any of it will remain by the time he leaves, or is forced from, the White House.
Lobbyists Are Feasting in Trump’s Swamp by Emily Atkin
Lobbyists Are Feasting in Trump’s Swamp
By Emily Atkin
5-7 minutes
Let’s say Washington is a swamp, as Trump calls it. Then lobbyists are the gators, and strong ethics rules are the fence that keeps Americans from getting bit. In President Donald Trump’s swamp, the gators keep getting bigger and the fence is in tatters.
On Saturday, Ryan Zinke submitted his resignation as secretary of the Interior Department, the seventh-largest agency responsible for most of the nation’s natural resources and public lands. Zinke will be replaced—at least temporarily—by David Bernhardt, a former high-profile lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry and the Interior’s current second-in-command. As a lobbyist, Bernhardt worked on behalf of several oil companies that he’ll soon be in charge of regulating. He’s been called “a walking conflict of interest” by his critics.
Bernhardt’s ascent follows Trump’s announcement last month that a former lobbyist for the coal industry would soon be nominated to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Andrew Wheeler has been serving as acting administrator since July, after former EPA chief Scott Pruitt resigned amid numerous ethical scandals. As a lobbyist, Wheeler represented Murray Energy—a coal company whose CEO literally sent Trump a wish list of all the environmental regulations he wanted dismantled. Trump’s EPA, now led by Wheeler, is on track toward fulfilling almost all those requests.
David Bernhardt, the Interior Department’s new acting chief, has been switching between lobbying jobs and government jobs since the early 1990s.Center for Responsive Politics
It’s alarming to know that two men who became rich by helping polluters dismantle environmental protections are about to lead the two most important federal agencies protecting public lands, wildlife, and human health. Many environmentalists believe that fossil fuel lobbying should disqualify Wheeler and Bernhardt from these positions.
But the mere presence of lobbyists in Trump’s cabinet doesn’t raise the alarm of government ethics experts. “The revolving door is a basic part of the Washington Establishment,” said Laura Peterson, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight. “People go back and forth between the public and private sectors all the time.” It makes sense why they would; government agencies regularly deal with lobbyists when they’re crafting regulations, so they hire people who are familiar with the process.
The Trump administration does, however, seem “particularly comfortable stacking high-level posts with former lobbyists whose policy proposals are like a corporate Christmas list,” said Peterson. As ProPublica revealed in March, “At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to ‘drain the swamp,’ many are now overseeing the industries they once lobbied on behalf of.”
These former lobbyists are not only flooding the government. They’re entering “a wild west environment where anything goes,” said Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, when he resigned out of “disappointment” with Trump.
Shaub emphasized that previous administrations had “a lot” of industry members. “But past Republican presidents were similar to Democratic presidents in at least supporting the government ethics programs,” he said. President Barack Obama, for example, signed an executive order in 2009 prohibiting the government from hiring people who had been a lobbyist in the previous year. Special waivers could be granted, but had to be made public. A hired former lobbyist would also be prohibited from working on any issue on which they had previously lobbied.
Trump repealed Obama’s policy when he took office, replacing it with an executive order that he claimed would more effectively “drain the swamp.” But the ethics order has proven much weaker than Obama’s in practice, Shaub said. Now, lobbyists can be hired for any government position. Lobbyists can also work on issues where they have a direct conflict of interest, provided they get a waiver. And Trump has been giving these waivers out like candy to the most powerful people in his administration—at least 37 “to key administration officials at the White House and executive branch agencies,” according to a March report from the Associated Press.
But the total number of government officials with conflict-of-interest waivers is likely much more than 37, for two reasons: Trump’s ethics policy, unlike Obama’s, does not require waivers to be made public. His waivers are also often extremely vague, said Shaub, who now works for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s impossible to count the number of people listed on a waiver, because they describe the type of person they’re waiving rather than directly naming them,” he said. The waivers granted to ex-lobbyists also “don’t offer any explanation” for why they’re needed.
This secrecy is perhaps the most troubling part of Trump’s lobbying policy. Of course, we want nothing more than to assume that government officials will act in good faith. But American history is littered with examples of those who were able to abuse their power thanks to a lack of transparency and oversight. The current administration is contributing more than its fair share to that ignominious list. Though he ran on a promise to “drain the swamp,” Trump is feeding with gators and letting them roam free—then asking us to trust him that the gators won’t bite.
By Emily Atkin
5-7 minutes
Let’s say Washington is a swamp, as Trump calls it. Then lobbyists are the gators, and strong ethics rules are the fence that keeps Americans from getting bit. In President Donald Trump’s swamp, the gators keep getting bigger and the fence is in tatters.
On Saturday, Ryan Zinke submitted his resignation as secretary of the Interior Department, the seventh-largest agency responsible for most of the nation’s natural resources and public lands. Zinke will be replaced—at least temporarily—by David Bernhardt, a former high-profile lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry and the Interior’s current second-in-command. As a lobbyist, Bernhardt worked on behalf of several oil companies that he’ll soon be in charge of regulating. He’s been called “a walking conflict of interest” by his critics.
Bernhardt’s ascent follows Trump’s announcement last month that a former lobbyist for the coal industry would soon be nominated to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Andrew Wheeler has been serving as acting administrator since July, after former EPA chief Scott Pruitt resigned amid numerous ethical scandals. As a lobbyist, Wheeler represented Murray Energy—a coal company whose CEO literally sent Trump a wish list of all the environmental regulations he wanted dismantled. Trump’s EPA, now led by Wheeler, is on track toward fulfilling almost all those requests.
David Bernhardt, the Interior Department’s new acting chief, has been switching between lobbying jobs and government jobs since the early 1990s.Center for Responsive Politics
It’s alarming to know that two men who became rich by helping polluters dismantle environmental protections are about to lead the two most important federal agencies protecting public lands, wildlife, and human health. Many environmentalists believe that fossil fuel lobbying should disqualify Wheeler and Bernhardt from these positions.
But the mere presence of lobbyists in Trump’s cabinet doesn’t raise the alarm of government ethics experts. “The revolving door is a basic part of the Washington Establishment,” said Laura Peterson, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight. “People go back and forth between the public and private sectors all the time.” It makes sense why they would; government agencies regularly deal with lobbyists when they’re crafting regulations, so they hire people who are familiar with the process.
The Trump administration does, however, seem “particularly comfortable stacking high-level posts with former lobbyists whose policy proposals are like a corporate Christmas list,” said Peterson. As ProPublica revealed in March, “At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to ‘drain the swamp,’ many are now overseeing the industries they once lobbied on behalf of.”
These former lobbyists are not only flooding the government. They’re entering “a wild west environment where anything goes,” said Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, when he resigned out of “disappointment” with Trump.
Shaub emphasized that previous administrations had “a lot” of industry members. “But past Republican presidents were similar to Democratic presidents in at least supporting the government ethics programs,” he said. President Barack Obama, for example, signed an executive order in 2009 prohibiting the government from hiring people who had been a lobbyist in the previous year. Special waivers could be granted, but had to be made public. A hired former lobbyist would also be prohibited from working on any issue on which they had previously lobbied.
Trump repealed Obama’s policy when he took office, replacing it with an executive order that he claimed would more effectively “drain the swamp.” But the ethics order has proven much weaker than Obama’s in practice, Shaub said. Now, lobbyists can be hired for any government position. Lobbyists can also work on issues where they have a direct conflict of interest, provided they get a waiver. And Trump has been giving these waivers out like candy to the most powerful people in his administration—at least 37 “to key administration officials at the White House and executive branch agencies,” according to a March report from the Associated Press.
But the total number of government officials with conflict-of-interest waivers is likely much more than 37, for two reasons: Trump’s ethics policy, unlike Obama’s, does not require waivers to be made public. His waivers are also often extremely vague, said Shaub, who now works for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s impossible to count the number of people listed on a waiver, because they describe the type of person they’re waiving rather than directly naming them,” he said. The waivers granted to ex-lobbyists also “don’t offer any explanation” for why they’re needed.
This secrecy is perhaps the most troubling part of Trump’s lobbying policy. Of course, we want nothing more than to assume that government officials will act in good faith. But American history is littered with examples of those who were able to abuse their power thanks to a lack of transparency and oversight. The current administration is contributing more than its fair share to that ignominious list. Though he ran on a promise to “drain the swamp,” Trump is feeding with gators and letting them roam free—then asking us to trust him that the gators won’t bite.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
The fixer's toolbox, weaponized. By Josh Marshall
We know that a key, maybe the key to Michael Cohen’s job for Donald Trump was making prob-lems go away, most especially making women who had stories to tell – whether consensual sex-ual encounters or abuse – stay silent. Yesterday I suggested the possibility that this defensive capacity could very easily be weaponized against others. When you consider it, it’s frankly hard to imagine it wouldn’t be. Cohen had close relationships with lawyers for clients with damaging revelations. He had an equally close relationship with The National Enquirer, which is in the busi-ness of damaging revelations but seemed willing to subordinate that business to its transactional relationship with Donald Trump.
We have a couple other odd examples. Trump insider and fundraiser Elliott Broidy had a mistress who became pregnant and then threatened to go to the press. And well, Michael Cohen called up Elliott and told him he had a big problem but Michael could help. For a price. I mentioned this odd set of connections between Jerry Falwell, Jr., Michael Cohen and Jerry’s odd decision to go into business with a 21 year old pool attendant in starting a booze and sex flophouse in South Beach. Is this really happening? Something seems odd and maybe compromising about Falwell’s relationship with Giancarlo Granda. Michael struck up a relationship with Falwell while he was trying to put together a Trump campaign for President in 2012. He got Falwell to endorse Trump in 2016.
It’s all very fuzzy and amorphous, a lot of smoke and a fair amount of fire and who knows? But there is maybe another example of it.
Remember Eric Schneiderman? He was the well-respected and hard-charging New York Attor-ney General who everyone loved until news emerged of abusive behavior towards a number of women and then within a day he had resigned and disappeared. But then a short time later a lawyer who said he’d represented two of Schneiderman’s victims (not the four who came for-ward in the article that led to Schneiderman’s resignation) came forward and said he’d shared the information with Michael Cohen back in 2013.
The lawyer is named Peter J. Gleason. He’s apparently a bit of a self-promoter who often posi-tions himself in proximity to big news stories. In this case he went before Judge Kimba Wood, who was overseeing the exploding Michael Cohen investigation and asked that any documents related to his clients be kept confidential.
At the time, I think it was hard to know what to make of Gleason’s claim because it immediately and inevitably got caught up in suspicions that Schneiderman may have been set up (not really guilty of the accusations) or that Trump or Cohen were behind the stories that brought him down. Those points don’t really need to concern us though. Schneiderman did what he did. He resigned and left public life. How the story made its way into the press doesn’t matter for our purposes. But the fact he went to Cohen and shared the information with him seems highly rel-evant to understand this part of Cohen’s work for Donald Trump. Just for perfect clarity, we treat as a given that Schneiderman did what he did and saw his career collapse because of it. There is also no evidence I can see that Cohen or Trump leaked the information that led to his downfall. (I think the author’s The New Yorker piece specifically said they weren’t the sources.) What we’re concerned with is purely Michael Cohen’s MO and whether he used the tool box and relation-ships he used to protect Trump to attack and control Trump’s enemies or simply those who could help him.
Here’s the portion of a New York Times article that discusses Gleason’s interactions with Cohen, circa 2013 …
In his letter, Mr. Gleason said that after his attempts to assist the women fell on deaf ears, he decided to take their accusations against Mr. Schneiderman to Steve Dunleavy, a former column-ist for The New York Post. According to the letter, Mr. Dunleavy “offered to discuss the matter with Donald Trump.”
Within a day of speaking with Mr. Dunleavy, Mr. Gleason said, he received a phone call from Mr. Cohen.
“In the conversation,” Mr. Gleason recalled, “I said, ‘Listen, I’m looking for somebody to help.’ At the time, Trump was considering running for governor. And Cohen said, ‘If Trump runs and wins, you’ll have an ally for bringing these women forward.’”
Mr. Gleason added, “I’m no fan of Michael Cohen, but he was sympathetic.”
It’s just one example. But the examples or apparent examples are piling up.
We have a couple other odd examples. Trump insider and fundraiser Elliott Broidy had a mistress who became pregnant and then threatened to go to the press. And well, Michael Cohen called up Elliott and told him he had a big problem but Michael could help. For a price. I mentioned this odd set of connections between Jerry Falwell, Jr., Michael Cohen and Jerry’s odd decision to go into business with a 21 year old pool attendant in starting a booze and sex flophouse in South Beach. Is this really happening? Something seems odd and maybe compromising about Falwell’s relationship with Giancarlo Granda. Michael struck up a relationship with Falwell while he was trying to put together a Trump campaign for President in 2012. He got Falwell to endorse Trump in 2016.
It’s all very fuzzy and amorphous, a lot of smoke and a fair amount of fire and who knows? But there is maybe another example of it.
Remember Eric Schneiderman? He was the well-respected and hard-charging New York Attor-ney General who everyone loved until news emerged of abusive behavior towards a number of women and then within a day he had resigned and disappeared. But then a short time later a lawyer who said he’d represented two of Schneiderman’s victims (not the four who came for-ward in the article that led to Schneiderman’s resignation) came forward and said he’d shared the information with Michael Cohen back in 2013.
The lawyer is named Peter J. Gleason. He’s apparently a bit of a self-promoter who often posi-tions himself in proximity to big news stories. In this case he went before Judge Kimba Wood, who was overseeing the exploding Michael Cohen investigation and asked that any documents related to his clients be kept confidential.
At the time, I think it was hard to know what to make of Gleason’s claim because it immediately and inevitably got caught up in suspicions that Schneiderman may have been set up (not really guilty of the accusations) or that Trump or Cohen were behind the stories that brought him down. Those points don’t really need to concern us though. Schneiderman did what he did. He resigned and left public life. How the story made its way into the press doesn’t matter for our purposes. But the fact he went to Cohen and shared the information with him seems highly rel-evant to understand this part of Cohen’s work for Donald Trump. Just for perfect clarity, we treat as a given that Schneiderman did what he did and saw his career collapse because of it. There is also no evidence I can see that Cohen or Trump leaked the information that led to his downfall. (I think the author’s The New Yorker piece specifically said they weren’t the sources.) What we’re concerned with is purely Michael Cohen’s MO and whether he used the tool box and relation-ships he used to protect Trump to attack and control Trump’s enemies or simply those who could help him.
Here’s the portion of a New York Times article that discusses Gleason’s interactions with Cohen, circa 2013 …
In his letter, Mr. Gleason said that after his attempts to assist the women fell on deaf ears, he decided to take their accusations against Mr. Schneiderman to Steve Dunleavy, a former column-ist for The New York Post. According to the letter, Mr. Dunleavy “offered to discuss the matter with Donald Trump.”
Within a day of speaking with Mr. Dunleavy, Mr. Gleason said, he received a phone call from Mr. Cohen.
“In the conversation,” Mr. Gleason recalled, “I said, ‘Listen, I’m looking for somebody to help.’ At the time, Trump was considering running for governor. And Cohen said, ‘If Trump runs and wins, you’ll have an ally for bringing these women forward.’”
Mr. Gleason added, “I’m no fan of Michael Cohen, but he was sympathetic.”
It’s just one example. But the examples or apparent examples are piling up.
Friday, November 2, 2018
The President of Blank Sucking Nullity
Put a cone on it.
David Roth, August 22, 2017
The President of Blank Sucking Nullity
From a-hole to b-hole, Trump explained
MY FATHER IS CONVINCED that his dog is embarrassed. He doesn’t mean the rudimentary way that dogs ever show embarrassment, which from my observation amounts to taking several willful strides away from a mess they’ve made and then looking back disdainfully, as if wondering what sort of ingrate would do that right there by the parking meter where everyone could see it. My dad understands his dog’s shame as a more fraught and sorrowful thing, which is why he has taken to removing his dog’s protective cone before taking her outside. He thinks that she (the dog) thinks the other dogs are laughing at her.
At the risk of belaboring things, dogs are animals that introduce themselves to their peers by assertively investigating those peers’ b-holes; their brains are the size of nectarines and in many cases not significantly more brain-like. They are just about the best creatures on this earth, but if you or my father believe that dogs are embarrassed by the protective cones that veterinarians place on them, then you or my father are overthinking it.
Dogs are animals that introduce themselves by assertively investigating their peers’ b-holes. You have gathered that this is about Donald Trump.
The dogs are inarguably inconvenienced by these cones, which is their purpose: the cones are prescribed by veterinarians because saying things like “I’ll need you to try avoid licking these stitches for a week” or “I’m going to ask you to stop gnawing on that bacterial infection on your ass” is not going to work. The dogs do not like this, and they also may not like engaging with their peer-dogs while wearing a goofy blunderbuss that keeps them from their habitual introductory b-hole assessments and self-administered kamikaze junk ablutions. But at some point there’s no real sense in guessing. You have probably gathered that this is about Donald Trump.
On August 12, Trump and the world witnessed armed white supremacists in the streets and an attempted mass murder by an ISIS-preferred method. Over the course of three working days, he figured out a way to get firmly and even defiantly on the wrong side of it all. In a pair of transparently strained attempts at being Presidential, Trump struggled to muster a condemnation of literal fascism on the literal march; he identified the presence of “very fine people” on both the fascist and anti-fascist sides of what is honestly not a working binary, and he reserved the phrase “truly bad people” for the news media, which had been so unfair, so unfair, in their response. By Tuesday, the issue was once again the media’s selective and slanted and dishonest treatment of him. By Thursday morning, Trump was tweeting mournfully about the tragedy of Confederate monuments being removed from public parks. He finally sounded like himself again.
Among the segment of the population that’s put off by things like a president refusing to forcefully condemn Nazi rioters, this has raised some uncomfortable questions about Trump’s beliefs. Does he really share any or many of the beliefs with the racists and nationalists and racist-nationalists who made his campaign their cause, or is this a political calculation against criticizing a small but important part of his base? Was his decision to defend statues of famous slave masters a reflection of his perspective on history, or maybe a darkly strategic reading of the national political mood? Did he not know that what he said was historically incoherent and obviously wrong? It’s right to wonder, but we should be past asking these questions about this man at this point. The most significant thing to know about Donald Trump’s politics or process, his beliefs or his calculations, is that he is an asshole; the only salient factor in any decision he makes is that he absolutely does not care about the interests of the parties involved except as they reflect upon him. Start with this, and you already know a lot. Start with this, and you already know that there are no real answers to any of these questions.
It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved.
There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life. He has no friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided between ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless ones, all of whom hold him in low regard and see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. There is no help on the way; his outer orbit is a rotation of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy operators.
Trump now “executes” by way of the The Junior Soprano Method. When he senses that his staff is trying to get him to do one thing, Trump defiantly does the opposite; otherwise he bathes in the commodified reactionary grievance of partisan media, looking for stories about himself. It takes days for his oafish and overmatched handlers to coax him into even a coded and qualified criticism of neo-Nazis, and an instant for him to willfully undo it. Of course he brings more vigor to the latter than the former; he doesn’t really understand why he had to do the first thing, but he innately and deeply understands why he did the second. The first is invariably about someone else—some woman, there was a car accident, like during or maybe after that thing—and therefore, as an asshole, he does not and cannot really care about it. The second is about him and therefore, as an asshole, he really, really does.
To understand Trump is also to understand his appeal as an aspirational brand to the worst people in the United States. What his intransigent admirers like most about him—the thing they aspire to, in their online cosplay sessions and their desperately thirsty performances for a media they loathe and to which they are so helplessly addicted—is his freedom to be unconcerned with anything but himself. This is not because he is rich or brave or astute; it’s because he is an asshole, and so authentically unconcerned. The howling and unreflective void at his core will keep him lonely and stupid until the moment a sufficient number of his vital organs finally resign in disgrace, but it liberates him to devote every bit of his being to his pursuit of himself. Actual hate and actual love, as other people feel them, are too complicated to fit into this world. In their place, for Trump and for the people who see in him a way of being that they are too busy or burdened or humane to pursue, are the versions that exist in a lower orbit, around the self. Instead of hate, there is simple resentment—abject and valueless and recursively self-pitying; instead of love, there is the blank sucking nullity of vanity and appetite.
This is what an asshole is, and lord knows Trump is not the only one in his business, or our culture, who insistently bends every incident or issue back towards his sour and jealous self. Some of the people who do this even care at some level about the broader world, but because they are assholes believe that the solution to that world’s problems lies in paying more attention to one particular asshole and his or her ideas. Trump is not one of those people. The rest of the world is an abstraction to him, a market to exploit; there is no other person in it who is real to him. They’re all supplicants or subjects, fans or haters, but their humanity is transparently not part of the equation. What other people might want, or indeed the fact that they could want at all, is crowded out of the picture by the corroded and corrosive bulk of his horrible self.
There is no room for other people in the world that Trump has made for himself, and this is fundamental to the anxiety of watching him impose his claustrophobic and airless interior world on our own. Is Trump a racist? Yes, because that’s a default setting for stupid people; also, he transparently has no regard for other people at all. Does Trump care about the cheap-looking statue of Stonewall Jackson that some forgotten Dixiecrat placed in a shithole park somewhere he will never visit? Not really, but he so resents the fact that other people expect him to care that he develops a passionate contrary opinion out of spite. Does he even know about . . . Let me stop you there. The answer is no.
Every lie, every evasion, every massive and blithely issued shock to the conscience Trump authors will only ever be about him.
The answer is always no, and it will always be no because he does not care. Every lie, every evasion, every massive and blithely issued shock to the conscience Trump authors will only ever be about him. He will never be embarrassed by any of these things, because he cannot understand anyone’s response to them except as it relates to him. Slavery? That’s another thing that his very dishonest enemies want to blame him for. Racism? He’s been accused of it, and honestly it’s so ridiculous, so ridiculous. History? He’s in the business of making it, baby. Violence? Not his fault. People protesting? He doesn’t know them.
This is the horror at the hole of every asshole, and it is why Trump will never get better as a president or a person: it will always and only be about him. History matters only insofar as it brought him to this moment; the roaring and endless present in which he lives matters because it is where he is now; the future is the place in which he will do it all again. Trump’s world ends with him, and a discourse or a politics that is locked into scrutinizing or obsessively #resisting or otherwise chasing him will invariably end up as arid and abstracted and curdled as he is. More to the point, it’s a dead end. The shame an animal feels is secret to us.
David Roth is a writer from New Jersey who lives in New York. He is on Twitter at @david_j_roth.
© The Baffler 2018
The Promise of Polarization: Ideological division was once seen as the solution to America’s political gridlock. What went wrong? By SAM TANENHAUS
The Promise of Polarization
Ideological division was once seen as the solution to America’s political gridlock. What went wrong?
By SAM TANENHAUS
October 29, 2018
How divided have Americans become? When it comes to the two-party war, the differences could not be starker. Pew Research Center has reported that 55 percent of Democrats are “afraid” of the Republican Party and nearly half of Republicans are similarly fearful of Democrats. These survey results were published in June 2016—before Donald Trump was elected. Since then, of course, the enmity has increased. Trump’s genius for stirring up discord is one reason, but only one: The ingredients of all-out political warfare have been simmering for many years, as each of the two parties has discarded the old-fashioned ideal of the “big tent” and enacted its own purifying rituals.
What has changed is how personal these political divisions have become. Partisanship has taken on an unsettling aspect and turned into something new: “affective polarization,” which dictates not only how we vote, but also, as social scientists have reported in the Harvard Business Review, how we “work and shop.” Politically minded consumers are “almost twice as likely to engage in a transaction when their partisanship matched the seller’s,” and they are “willing to work for less money for fellow partisans.” Is this honorable self-sacrifice or self-inflicted injury? It is hard to say, especially since, when it comes to political dispute, “particular policy beliefs” are often beside the point, the researchers write. What matters is who wants the new bill passed and who wants it stopped. It’s a zero-sum game in which victories are less important than the other side’s defeats.
Yet, as Sam Rosenfeld shows in The Polarizers, the irrational-seeming “extreme partisanship” and “tribalism” that contaminate our politics today originated in the principled efforts of writers, activists, and politicians who thought the two parties needed more polarization, ideological fixity, and internal discipline. This idea went back to the New Deal era, when the two major parties were each riven by internal disagreements on race, the economy, and much else, so that President Roosevelt met opposition in Congress not only from Republicans but also from Southern Democrats. He tried to fix the problem, first mounting a campaign to purge conservatives from the Democratic Party in the 1938 midterms (it backfired) and then inviting the moderate Republican nominee he defeated in 1940, Wendell Willkie, to join him in a plan to break apart the two parties and reset them like straightened limbs, “one liberal, and the other conservative.”
Today that course seems fatefully misguided, but Rosenfeld is right to point out that what came before wasn’t always better. What some enshrine as an age of “statesmanlike civility and bipartisan compromise” often involved dark bargains and “dirty hands” collusions, and was not especially democratic. This is what led political scientists such as E. E. Schattschneider and James MacGregor Burns to argue in the 1940s and 1950s against bipartisanship, because it depended on toxic alliances that hemmed in political players, from presidents on down. Thus, even the immensely popular war-hero Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican president elected in 24 years, was stymied time and again by in-built flaws in a defective system. Eisenhower wanted to do the sensible thing—to advance civil rights and economic justice at home while negotiating abroad with the Soviet Union. He repeatedly came up against a stubborn alliance of conservative Southern Democrats and heartland Republicans.
Out of all this came the drive to reform the two parties, to make them more distinct through what Rosenfeld calls “ideological sorting.” The hope was that clear agendas, keyed to voting majorities, would marginalize the reactionaries and extremists in both parties, and that mainstream, “responsible” forces would govern from the center, giving the public the expanded, activist government it obviously wanted. This was the initial promise of polarization. What went wrong?
For one thing, Schattschneider and Burns were viewing the system from the heights of presidential politics, where centrism did indeed dominate. The ideological distance from FDR in 1932 to Eisenhower’s successor Richard Nixon, elected in 1968, was not great. World War II and cold war “wise men” could be either Republicans or Democrats. They belonged to the same establishment, attended the same Ivy League colleges, were members of the same clubs, read the editorial pages of the same few newspapers. Two parties organized around such leaders could each have presented a coherent agenda, one to the left of center, one to the right, meeting in the middle.
It was the consensus ideal, and it ignored deeper tensions in parts of the country where politics was harder-edged and culturally driven. An ideology nourished in the small-town Midwest and rural South and in the growing population centers of Western states resented and opposed the approach, style, and transactional presumptions of East Coast elites. And this resistance found support from right-wing intellectuals, heirs to pre-World War II “Old Guard” conservatism. Its best minds coalesced around National Review, founded as an anti-Eisenhower weekly in late 1955. Rosenfeld has much to say about the magazine, but he leaves out its most original and penetrating thinker, the Yale political scientist and NR columnist, Willmoore Kendall. An incisive critic of the Schattschneider-Burns thesis, he helped coin the term “liberal Establishment” and theorized that proponents of the “presidential majority” seemed to be wishing away the second, “congressional majority” elected every two years and therefore more directly accountable to voters.
Burns could argue that the “true” Republican Party naturally reflected Eisenhower’s internationalism, because influential people—including the publishers of The New York Herald Tribune and Time magazine—approved of him. But much of the GOP base gave its loyalty to local figures, whose views more closely resembled their own on the whole range of issues: civil rights and civil liberties, military spending and foreign aid, free trade and the national debt, even “the scientific outlook.” When it came to these matters, the people’s tribune wasn’t Eisenhower, the five-star general, who had been the “supreme commander” of NATO and the president of Columbia University. It was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who became the hero to the emerging postwar right. His most eloquent defender, National Review’s editor, William F. Buckley Jr., applauded McCarthy’s Red-hunting investigations and ridiculed the tu quoque hypocrisies of McCarthy’s “enemies”—liberals and moderates in both parties.
Rosenfeld is curiously silent about all this. He praises Buckley’s 1959 manifesto Up From Liberalism, calling it a “thorough formulation of the connection between building a conservative ideological movement and recasting the party system.” In fact, Buckley said little about this, apart from restating the case for McCarthy. It was puzzling to readers, including some on the right, that Buckley never got around to saying what conservatism meant or even what conservatives should do. When he talked about policy, it was mainly to denounce liberal proposals—on voting rights, health care, battles between labor and management—without offering any serious alternative in their place. What would a truly conservative administration do if elected? Buckley had no idea, “Call it a No-program, if you will,” he cheerfully wrote or shrugged, in words that sound like marching orders for today’s GOP. Undoing or rolling back the New Deal and post-New Deal programs already in place would suffice. “It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy.”
Buckley wasn’t being flippant. He was being honest. Conservatives really did have no interest in social policy. National Review writers excelled at philosophical theory and high rhetoric, but when the subject turned to “a crucial policy issue such as Medicare, you publish a few skimpy and haughty paragraphs,” Buckley’s friend Irving Kristol complained in 1964, when it was clear some kind of national health care for the elderly was going to be enacted, expanding the popular protections in Social Security. “Why not five or six pages, in which several authorities spell out the possible provisions of such a bill?” Kristol urged. “It could really affect the way we live now.” Buckley wasn’t interested, and Kristol plugged the hole himself with The Public Interest, the quarterly he founded with Daniel Bell in 1965. It was one of the era’s best journals, filled with well-written analysis and incisive commentary on the entire range of midcentury policy. But in the end, Buckley was right. As Rosenfeld says, it was National Review that gave direction to the conservative revolution and made the GOP better organized and more ideologically unified than the “polarizers” of the ’40s and ’50s could imagine.
Buckley’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, was a key figure in translating these ideas into political strategy. He brilliantly repackaged Buckley’s “No-program” in a tract he ghostwrote for Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, meant to launch a shot-across-the-bow challenge to Nixon in 1960. In a famous passage, Bozell and Goldwater project a vision of the ideal “man in office,” the savior of the Republic, who tells the people,
I have little to no interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.
When the book became a best-seller and the guessing game of authorship began, Goldwater insisted he had written it—or that it grew out of his speeches and published writings (never mind that they’d been ghosted too). Under normal conditions, few would have cared—John F. Kennedy didn’t write his books either. But Goldwater was being marketed as a bold political thinker. Rosenfeld perpetuates this myth, the better to present Goldwater as a serious-minded intellectual who “framed his positions on disparate issues within an overarching ideological vision.” That vision consisted of libertarian economics at home and militant anti-Communism abroad. Goldwater didn’t come close to getting the nomination. Nixon did, as expected, and then lost, barely, to John F. Kennedy—another victory for the liberal Establishment.
Goldwater was too good a politician to chain himself to a single script, especially a losing script. It was dawning on some that Kristol had got one big thing right. The public really did want government programs, as long as the benefits accrued to them and not someone else. In early 1961, getting a jump on the next election, a second Goldwater ghostwriter, Michael Bernstein, drafted a prescient document, the “Goldwater Manifesto” or “Forgotten American” speech. It sketched out the beginnings of what later came to be called big-government conservatism—a reordering of spending away from the poor and minorities (singled out for help by Kennedy’s New Frontier) and toward a newly aggrieved group, “the silent Americans,” who truly “constitute the substantial majority of our people” and yet “cannot find voice against the mammoth organizations which mercilessly pressure their own membership, the Congress, and society as a whole for objectives which these silent ones do not want.”
What might the silent ones want instead? For one thing, Bernstein proposed, “tax relief for families with children attending college.” NR purists were appalled. This was still Big Brother—manna flowing from the Beltway—even if, in this case, the money was going back to overburdened taxpayers. In embarrassment, Goldwater backed away and made a new calculation. The most numerous “silent” votes were to be had in the South. White majorities there felt disrespected or worse by the presidencies of Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Civil rights was the pivotal issue, but not the only one. In fact, it overlapped with other tensions: in labor unions, public education, housing, anti-colonial uprisings abroad. Below the calm surface of consensus, a deeper struggle was going on. “There is a vague and bitter counter-revolution in this country—anti-big government, anti-union, anti-high taxation, anti-Negro, anti-foreign aid, and anti-the whole complex spirit of modern American life,” James Reston, The New York Times’ Washington bureau chief and most respected columnist, wrote in 1963, when Goldwater was the uncrowned king of an increasingly conservative GOP. The center that Schattschneider and Burns had counted on was coming apart.
What Reston missed was the sophistication of Goldwater’s rhetoric, helped along by the writings of Buckley, Bozell, and Bernstein. He overlooked as well the Southern strategy devised by NR’s publisher, William Rusher. It wasn’t a new idea. Goldwater’s first stab at the presidency, in 1960, had begun in South Carolina, when he won the delegates at the state Republican convention, catching Nixon off-guard. It was his first successful “duck hunting” expedition—that is, courting the votes of middle-class whites in the “New South,” with its rising business class. Uncomfortable with the overt race-baiting of Dixiecrats, these voters responded to a broader argument cast in the language of states’ rights and free enterprise, the true pillars of the constitutional republic as opposed to the Democrats’ promise of egalitarian democracy. You could make this case, and Goldwater did, without mentioning race at all. Buckley made the same adjustment. Instead of saying black people were inferior—National Review’s line in the 1950s—he now argued that Goldwater “does not intend to diminish the rights of any minority groups—but neither does he desire to diminish the rights of majority groups.”
While Democrats had become the party of civil rights, the Republican Party, without explicitly saying so, “was now a White Man’s Party,” as Robert Novak put it in his account of the 1964 election, The Agony of the G.O.P. The transformation began in earnest when Senator Strom Thurmond quit the Democratic Party, taking South Carolina’s electoral votes with him, and was welcomed into the GOP by his good friend Goldwater. Thurmond the defecting Democrat was joined by younger Southern politicians nourished within the GOP. These were figures like James Martin, who challenged and nearly unseated Lister Hill, the four-term incumbent Democratic senator in Alabama, in 1962. Martin was elected to the House in 1964, together with five others from the South, four of them from states—Tennessee, Texas, Florida, and Kentucky—that today contribute to the GOP’s base. Canny operatives like the Alabama prodigy John Grenier (oddly absent from Rosenfeld’s book) rose to top positions in Goldwater’s campaign. Its victories came almost entirely from the Deep South.
Outside the South (and his home state, Arizona), Goldwater got a thrashing in 1964. But he had opened up the route to what the political strategist Kevin Phillips soon called the “emerging Republican majority,” which nationalized the Southern strategy by courting alienated white voters in the North as the civil rights movement moved there; by focusing on racially charged issues like “forced busing” and the integration of labor unions, the GOP drove a wedge in what had once been Democratic strongholds. In 1968, Richard Nixon dusted off Bernstein’s “forgotten man” speech and made it the template for his appeal to the “silent majority,” as Garry Wills reported in his classic Nixon Agonistes. Like Goldwater, Nixon cast tribal politics in lofty ideological terms. He talked of “positive polarization” and promised to overturn “the false unity of consensus, of the glossing over of fundamental differences, of the enforced sameness of government regimentation.” Ronald Reagan, preparing to run in 1976, went even further, warning that if Republicans continued “to fuzz up and blur” the differences between the two parties when they should be “raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors,” he might quit the GOP and form a third party. Instead he contested and badly weakened the incumbent Gerald Ford. Four years later, Reagan repeated the Goldwater and Nixon formula, rechristening the “forgotten American” and “silent majority” as the “moral majority,” and won in a landslide.
For all this talk of the fundamental differences between the parties, however, partisanship did not yet reach today’s poisonous extreme. Nixon and Reagan, experienced leaders, ran “against” government while also realizing there were very few programs the voting public would be willing do without. Once in office, Republicans too were expected to make the system work. Democrats, with their long history of taking public policy seriously, were, however, better at it—as some conservatives acknowledged. In his influential book Suicide of the West, Buckley’s colleague James Burnham quoted Michael Oakeshott, who said fixing social problems was the liberal’s ambition, or delusion. While the liberal “can imagine a problem which would remain impervious to the onslaught of his own reason,” Oakeshott wrote, “what he cannot imagine is politics which do not consist in solving problems.” The conservatives’ job was to apply the brakes when necessary, to keep alive the opposition argument in a world in which all knew liberalism remained the basis of modern governance but weren’t always prepared to admit it.
This broad but tacit acceptance of activist government is what inspired the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan to take a job in Nixon’s administration in 1969. He gambled that a moderate Republican, who said he disliked government but realized voters wanted it, might succeed in passing legislation where Democrats had failed. Despite encountering resistance from the “congressional majority,” Moynihan was vindicated. The Nixon years gave us a good deal of effective government. They saw the creation of the EPA, wage-and-price controls, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Supplemental Social Security income (for the blind, disabled, and elderly), Pell Grants (college loans for lower-income students), the Endangered Species Act, and more. It was a “rich legislative record,” as the political scientist David Mayhew has written. The reason is conveyed in the title of Mayhew’s book, Divided We Govern, which showed how well government worked when voters split tickets and gave each party control of a different branch.
Rosenfeld’s thesis—that the postwar enthusiasm for ideologically unified parties yielded some positive good—works better when he turns to the Democratic Party, which really did clean house, cutting loose Southern reactionaries to make itself the party of civil rights. Stalwarts of the Senate “citadel” like Harry F. Byrd and Richard Russell lingered, but with diminished authority as civil rights became the party’s great cause, and Northern liberals—the Minnesotans Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, to name two, and the Prairie populist George McGovern—gained national followings. There were also the brave organizing efforts of college students, white and black, who mobilized citizens in the South. Rosenfeld has very good pages on the 1964 Democratic convention, when members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, led by the activists Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer, challenged the Dixiecrats. Their victory was symbolic, but politics is often written in symbols.
One wishes Rosenfeld had more to say about other political figures, particularly black leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, and Shirley Chisholm, who guided the Democrats’ response to the most important polarization in America. Kendall’s “two majorities”—one “presidential,” the other “congressional”—only grazed the surface of a nation profoundly split into “two societies, one black, one white— separate and unequal,” to quote one of the period’s great public documents, The Kerner Report. Published in 1968 after a year of investigation by a presidential advisory commission, the report explored the causes of the urban disorder in almost 150 cities—especially Detroit and Newark—in the summer of 1967.
In April 1968, while the Kerner commission findings were still being digested, King was assassinated, and the two societies hardened along lines that prefigure today’s jagged divisions. Trump’s truest forerunner, many have pointed out, was the one true radical in the 1968 presidential campaign, the Alabama segregationist George Wallace, a lifelong Democrat who ran on a third-party ticket and preached a Trump-like gospel of revenge. “The desire for ‘law and order’ is nothing so simple as a code for racism,” Garry Wills wrote of Wallace’s message at the time. “It is a cry, as things begin to break up, for stability, for stopping history in mid-dissolution.” Fifty years ago, “middle America” already yearned to make their country “great” again.
In truth it was becoming great—or better, anyway. Rosenfeld’s book, though the last pages rush through the years between 2000 and 2016, says very little about President Barack Obama, whose two terms were a model of “responsible party” politics, ideologically moored but also pragmatic and aimed at the broad middle of the electorate. It led to much good policy, and to the strong economy that is now buoying Trump’s presidency. Why does Rosenfeld have nothing to say about Obama? One answer might be that Obama was detached from the Democratic base: It steadily eroded during his two terms, especially at the all-important state level, as Nicole Narea and Alex Shephard wrote soon after Trump was elected. The Republicans, meanwhile, had diligently rebuilt from the bottom up, bringing about today’s “relentless dynamics of party polarization” and a climate of “factional chaos.”
Rosenfeld blames our current partisan gridlock on the system’s “logic of line-drawing.” But he also warns that “any plausible alternatives to the rigidities and rancor of party polarization might well prove to be something more chaotic and dangerous.” What can he mean? He points to the dangers of “pragmatic bargaining” and to the unprincipled compromises that might take the place of “effective policymaking.” This, he worries, would leave us with the same problems Schattschneider and Burns identified decades ago. Yet the last half-century of legislative history suggests something very different: The only coherent policies we’ve seen in decades—from the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s through Medicare and then Reagan’s tax reform in the 1980s—owe their passage to exactly the bipartisanship Rosenfeld finds corrupting. The lone recent instance of one-party rule creating a powerful piece of legislation is the Affordable Care Act, and the bill was vulnerable to attack precisely because no Republicans in either the House or the Senate voted for it and so had no stake in protecting it.
In one important way, however, Rosenfeld could be right about the ultimate benefits of polarization. In the Desolation Row of the Trump era, “Which side are you on?” has become the paramount question. Trump’s coarseness has invigorated the forces of resistance: A politer figure would not have given us the Access Hollywood tape, and the brazen denials afterward, and would not have fed the outrage that burst into public consciousness with the “Me Too” movement. So too Trump and Paul Ryan’s failure to come up with a workable replacement for Obamacare—a failure rooted in half a century of a “No-program program”—has given Democrats one of their most potent issues in the midterms. And the excesses of House Republicans, especially the foot soldiers in the Freedom Caucus, may well create opportunities for another disciplined group whose presence has been growing on the other side, the Congressional Black Caucus. If these changes come, polarization will be a major reason. The most enduring accomplishment of Trump and Trumpism— the latest, most decadent stage of the American right—could be the rebirth of an authentic American left.
Sam Tanenhaus is former editor of The New York Times Book Review. He is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.
Ideological division was once seen as the solution to America’s political gridlock. What went wrong?
By SAM TANENHAUS
October 29, 2018
How divided have Americans become? When it comes to the two-party war, the differences could not be starker. Pew Research Center has reported that 55 percent of Democrats are “afraid” of the Republican Party and nearly half of Republicans are similarly fearful of Democrats. These survey results were published in June 2016—before Donald Trump was elected. Since then, of course, the enmity has increased. Trump’s genius for stirring up discord is one reason, but only one: The ingredients of all-out political warfare have been simmering for many years, as each of the two parties has discarded the old-fashioned ideal of the “big tent” and enacted its own purifying rituals.
What has changed is how personal these political divisions have become. Partisanship has taken on an unsettling aspect and turned into something new: “affective polarization,” which dictates not only how we vote, but also, as social scientists have reported in the Harvard Business Review, how we “work and shop.” Politically minded consumers are “almost twice as likely to engage in a transaction when their partisanship matched the seller’s,” and they are “willing to work for less money for fellow partisans.” Is this honorable self-sacrifice or self-inflicted injury? It is hard to say, especially since, when it comes to political dispute, “particular policy beliefs” are often beside the point, the researchers write. What matters is who wants the new bill passed and who wants it stopped. It’s a zero-sum game in which victories are less important than the other side’s defeats.
Yet, as Sam Rosenfeld shows in The Polarizers, the irrational-seeming “extreme partisanship” and “tribalism” that contaminate our politics today originated in the principled efforts of writers, activists, and politicians who thought the two parties needed more polarization, ideological fixity, and internal discipline. This idea went back to the New Deal era, when the two major parties were each riven by internal disagreements on race, the economy, and much else, so that President Roosevelt met opposition in Congress not only from Republicans but also from Southern Democrats. He tried to fix the problem, first mounting a campaign to purge conservatives from the Democratic Party in the 1938 midterms (it backfired) and then inviting the moderate Republican nominee he defeated in 1940, Wendell Willkie, to join him in a plan to break apart the two parties and reset them like straightened limbs, “one liberal, and the other conservative.”
Today that course seems fatefully misguided, but Rosenfeld is right to point out that what came before wasn’t always better. What some enshrine as an age of “statesmanlike civility and bipartisan compromise” often involved dark bargains and “dirty hands” collusions, and was not especially democratic. This is what led political scientists such as E. E. Schattschneider and James MacGregor Burns to argue in the 1940s and 1950s against bipartisanship, because it depended on toxic alliances that hemmed in political players, from presidents on down. Thus, even the immensely popular war-hero Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican president elected in 24 years, was stymied time and again by in-built flaws in a defective system. Eisenhower wanted to do the sensible thing—to advance civil rights and economic justice at home while negotiating abroad with the Soviet Union. He repeatedly came up against a stubborn alliance of conservative Southern Democrats and heartland Republicans.
Out of all this came the drive to reform the two parties, to make them more distinct through what Rosenfeld calls “ideological sorting.” The hope was that clear agendas, keyed to voting majorities, would marginalize the reactionaries and extremists in both parties, and that mainstream, “responsible” forces would govern from the center, giving the public the expanded, activist government it obviously wanted. This was the initial promise of polarization. What went wrong?
For one thing, Schattschneider and Burns were viewing the system from the heights of presidential politics, where centrism did indeed dominate. The ideological distance from FDR in 1932 to Eisenhower’s successor Richard Nixon, elected in 1968, was not great. World War II and cold war “wise men” could be either Republicans or Democrats. They belonged to the same establishment, attended the same Ivy League colleges, were members of the same clubs, read the editorial pages of the same few newspapers. Two parties organized around such leaders could each have presented a coherent agenda, one to the left of center, one to the right, meeting in the middle.
It was the consensus ideal, and it ignored deeper tensions in parts of the country where politics was harder-edged and culturally driven. An ideology nourished in the small-town Midwest and rural South and in the growing population centers of Western states resented and opposed the approach, style, and transactional presumptions of East Coast elites. And this resistance found support from right-wing intellectuals, heirs to pre-World War II “Old Guard” conservatism. Its best minds coalesced around National Review, founded as an anti-Eisenhower weekly in late 1955. Rosenfeld has much to say about the magazine, but he leaves out its most original and penetrating thinker, the Yale political scientist and NR columnist, Willmoore Kendall. An incisive critic of the Schattschneider-Burns thesis, he helped coin the term “liberal Establishment” and theorized that proponents of the “presidential majority” seemed to be wishing away the second, “congressional majority” elected every two years and therefore more directly accountable to voters.
Burns could argue that the “true” Republican Party naturally reflected Eisenhower’s internationalism, because influential people—including the publishers of The New York Herald Tribune and Time magazine—approved of him. But much of the GOP base gave its loyalty to local figures, whose views more closely resembled their own on the whole range of issues: civil rights and civil liberties, military spending and foreign aid, free trade and the national debt, even “the scientific outlook.” When it came to these matters, the people’s tribune wasn’t Eisenhower, the five-star general, who had been the “supreme commander” of NATO and the president of Columbia University. It was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who became the hero to the emerging postwar right. His most eloquent defender, National Review’s editor, William F. Buckley Jr., applauded McCarthy’s Red-hunting investigations and ridiculed the tu quoque hypocrisies of McCarthy’s “enemies”—liberals and moderates in both parties.
Rosenfeld is curiously silent about all this. He praises Buckley’s 1959 manifesto Up From Liberalism, calling it a “thorough formulation of the connection between building a conservative ideological movement and recasting the party system.” In fact, Buckley said little about this, apart from restating the case for McCarthy. It was puzzling to readers, including some on the right, that Buckley never got around to saying what conservatism meant or even what conservatives should do. When he talked about policy, it was mainly to denounce liberal proposals—on voting rights, health care, battles between labor and management—without offering any serious alternative in their place. What would a truly conservative administration do if elected? Buckley had no idea, “Call it a No-program, if you will,” he cheerfully wrote or shrugged, in words that sound like marching orders for today’s GOP. Undoing or rolling back the New Deal and post-New Deal programs already in place would suffice. “It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy.”
Buckley wasn’t being flippant. He was being honest. Conservatives really did have no interest in social policy. National Review writers excelled at philosophical theory and high rhetoric, but when the subject turned to “a crucial policy issue such as Medicare, you publish a few skimpy and haughty paragraphs,” Buckley’s friend Irving Kristol complained in 1964, when it was clear some kind of national health care for the elderly was going to be enacted, expanding the popular protections in Social Security. “Why not five or six pages, in which several authorities spell out the possible provisions of such a bill?” Kristol urged. “It could really affect the way we live now.” Buckley wasn’t interested, and Kristol plugged the hole himself with The Public Interest, the quarterly he founded with Daniel Bell in 1965. It was one of the era’s best journals, filled with well-written analysis and incisive commentary on the entire range of midcentury policy. But in the end, Buckley was right. As Rosenfeld says, it was National Review that gave direction to the conservative revolution and made the GOP better organized and more ideologically unified than the “polarizers” of the ’40s and ’50s could imagine.
Buckley’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, was a key figure in translating these ideas into political strategy. He brilliantly repackaged Buckley’s “No-program” in a tract he ghostwrote for Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, meant to launch a shot-across-the-bow challenge to Nixon in 1960. In a famous passage, Bozell and Goldwater project a vision of the ideal “man in office,” the savior of the Republic, who tells the people,
I have little to no interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.
When the book became a best-seller and the guessing game of authorship began, Goldwater insisted he had written it—or that it grew out of his speeches and published writings (never mind that they’d been ghosted too). Under normal conditions, few would have cared—John F. Kennedy didn’t write his books either. But Goldwater was being marketed as a bold political thinker. Rosenfeld perpetuates this myth, the better to present Goldwater as a serious-minded intellectual who “framed his positions on disparate issues within an overarching ideological vision.” That vision consisted of libertarian economics at home and militant anti-Communism abroad. Goldwater didn’t come close to getting the nomination. Nixon did, as expected, and then lost, barely, to John F. Kennedy—another victory for the liberal Establishment.
Goldwater was too good a politician to chain himself to a single script, especially a losing script. It was dawning on some that Kristol had got one big thing right. The public really did want government programs, as long as the benefits accrued to them and not someone else. In early 1961, getting a jump on the next election, a second Goldwater ghostwriter, Michael Bernstein, drafted a prescient document, the “Goldwater Manifesto” or “Forgotten American” speech. It sketched out the beginnings of what later came to be called big-government conservatism—a reordering of spending away from the poor and minorities (singled out for help by Kennedy’s New Frontier) and toward a newly aggrieved group, “the silent Americans,” who truly “constitute the substantial majority of our people” and yet “cannot find voice against the mammoth organizations which mercilessly pressure their own membership, the Congress, and society as a whole for objectives which these silent ones do not want.”
What might the silent ones want instead? For one thing, Bernstein proposed, “tax relief for families with children attending college.” NR purists were appalled. This was still Big Brother—manna flowing from the Beltway—even if, in this case, the money was going back to overburdened taxpayers. In embarrassment, Goldwater backed away and made a new calculation. The most numerous “silent” votes were to be had in the South. White majorities there felt disrespected or worse by the presidencies of Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Civil rights was the pivotal issue, but not the only one. In fact, it overlapped with other tensions: in labor unions, public education, housing, anti-colonial uprisings abroad. Below the calm surface of consensus, a deeper struggle was going on. “There is a vague and bitter counter-revolution in this country—anti-big government, anti-union, anti-high taxation, anti-Negro, anti-foreign aid, and anti-the whole complex spirit of modern American life,” James Reston, The New York Times’ Washington bureau chief and most respected columnist, wrote in 1963, when Goldwater was the uncrowned king of an increasingly conservative GOP. The center that Schattschneider and Burns had counted on was coming apart.
What Reston missed was the sophistication of Goldwater’s rhetoric, helped along by the writings of Buckley, Bozell, and Bernstein. He overlooked as well the Southern strategy devised by NR’s publisher, William Rusher. It wasn’t a new idea. Goldwater’s first stab at the presidency, in 1960, had begun in South Carolina, when he won the delegates at the state Republican convention, catching Nixon off-guard. It was his first successful “duck hunting” expedition—that is, courting the votes of middle-class whites in the “New South,” with its rising business class. Uncomfortable with the overt race-baiting of Dixiecrats, these voters responded to a broader argument cast in the language of states’ rights and free enterprise, the true pillars of the constitutional republic as opposed to the Democrats’ promise of egalitarian democracy. You could make this case, and Goldwater did, without mentioning race at all. Buckley made the same adjustment. Instead of saying black people were inferior—National Review’s line in the 1950s—he now argued that Goldwater “does not intend to diminish the rights of any minority groups—but neither does he desire to diminish the rights of majority groups.”
While Democrats had become the party of civil rights, the Republican Party, without explicitly saying so, “was now a White Man’s Party,” as Robert Novak put it in his account of the 1964 election, The Agony of the G.O.P. The transformation began in earnest when Senator Strom Thurmond quit the Democratic Party, taking South Carolina’s electoral votes with him, and was welcomed into the GOP by his good friend Goldwater. Thurmond the defecting Democrat was joined by younger Southern politicians nourished within the GOP. These were figures like James Martin, who challenged and nearly unseated Lister Hill, the four-term incumbent Democratic senator in Alabama, in 1962. Martin was elected to the House in 1964, together with five others from the South, four of them from states—Tennessee, Texas, Florida, and Kentucky—that today contribute to the GOP’s base. Canny operatives like the Alabama prodigy John Grenier (oddly absent from Rosenfeld’s book) rose to top positions in Goldwater’s campaign. Its victories came almost entirely from the Deep South.
Outside the South (and his home state, Arizona), Goldwater got a thrashing in 1964. But he had opened up the route to what the political strategist Kevin Phillips soon called the “emerging Republican majority,” which nationalized the Southern strategy by courting alienated white voters in the North as the civil rights movement moved there; by focusing on racially charged issues like “forced busing” and the integration of labor unions, the GOP drove a wedge in what had once been Democratic strongholds. In 1968, Richard Nixon dusted off Bernstein’s “forgotten man” speech and made it the template for his appeal to the “silent majority,” as Garry Wills reported in his classic Nixon Agonistes. Like Goldwater, Nixon cast tribal politics in lofty ideological terms. He talked of “positive polarization” and promised to overturn “the false unity of consensus, of the glossing over of fundamental differences, of the enforced sameness of government regimentation.” Ronald Reagan, preparing to run in 1976, went even further, warning that if Republicans continued “to fuzz up and blur” the differences between the two parties when they should be “raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors,” he might quit the GOP and form a third party. Instead he contested and badly weakened the incumbent Gerald Ford. Four years later, Reagan repeated the Goldwater and Nixon formula, rechristening the “forgotten American” and “silent majority” as the “moral majority,” and won in a landslide.
For all this talk of the fundamental differences between the parties, however, partisanship did not yet reach today’s poisonous extreme. Nixon and Reagan, experienced leaders, ran “against” government while also realizing there were very few programs the voting public would be willing do without. Once in office, Republicans too were expected to make the system work. Democrats, with their long history of taking public policy seriously, were, however, better at it—as some conservatives acknowledged. In his influential book Suicide of the West, Buckley’s colleague James Burnham quoted Michael Oakeshott, who said fixing social problems was the liberal’s ambition, or delusion. While the liberal “can imagine a problem which would remain impervious to the onslaught of his own reason,” Oakeshott wrote, “what he cannot imagine is politics which do not consist in solving problems.” The conservatives’ job was to apply the brakes when necessary, to keep alive the opposition argument in a world in which all knew liberalism remained the basis of modern governance but weren’t always prepared to admit it.
This broad but tacit acceptance of activist government is what inspired the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan to take a job in Nixon’s administration in 1969. He gambled that a moderate Republican, who said he disliked government but realized voters wanted it, might succeed in passing legislation where Democrats had failed. Despite encountering resistance from the “congressional majority,” Moynihan was vindicated. The Nixon years gave us a good deal of effective government. They saw the creation of the EPA, wage-and-price controls, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Supplemental Social Security income (for the blind, disabled, and elderly), Pell Grants (college loans for lower-income students), the Endangered Species Act, and more. It was a “rich legislative record,” as the political scientist David Mayhew has written. The reason is conveyed in the title of Mayhew’s book, Divided We Govern, which showed how well government worked when voters split tickets and gave each party control of a different branch.
Rosenfeld’s thesis—that the postwar enthusiasm for ideologically unified parties yielded some positive good—works better when he turns to the Democratic Party, which really did clean house, cutting loose Southern reactionaries to make itself the party of civil rights. Stalwarts of the Senate “citadel” like Harry F. Byrd and Richard Russell lingered, but with diminished authority as civil rights became the party’s great cause, and Northern liberals—the Minnesotans Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, to name two, and the Prairie populist George McGovern—gained national followings. There were also the brave organizing efforts of college students, white and black, who mobilized citizens in the South. Rosenfeld has very good pages on the 1964 Democratic convention, when members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, led by the activists Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer, challenged the Dixiecrats. Their victory was symbolic, but politics is often written in symbols.
One wishes Rosenfeld had more to say about other political figures, particularly black leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, and Shirley Chisholm, who guided the Democrats’ response to the most important polarization in America. Kendall’s “two majorities”—one “presidential,” the other “congressional”—only grazed the surface of a nation profoundly split into “two societies, one black, one white— separate and unequal,” to quote one of the period’s great public documents, The Kerner Report. Published in 1968 after a year of investigation by a presidential advisory commission, the report explored the causes of the urban disorder in almost 150 cities—especially Detroit and Newark—in the summer of 1967.
In April 1968, while the Kerner commission findings were still being digested, King was assassinated, and the two societies hardened along lines that prefigure today’s jagged divisions. Trump’s truest forerunner, many have pointed out, was the one true radical in the 1968 presidential campaign, the Alabama segregationist George Wallace, a lifelong Democrat who ran on a third-party ticket and preached a Trump-like gospel of revenge. “The desire for ‘law and order’ is nothing so simple as a code for racism,” Garry Wills wrote of Wallace’s message at the time. “It is a cry, as things begin to break up, for stability, for stopping history in mid-dissolution.” Fifty years ago, “middle America” already yearned to make their country “great” again.
In truth it was becoming great—or better, anyway. Rosenfeld’s book, though the last pages rush through the years between 2000 and 2016, says very little about President Barack Obama, whose two terms were a model of “responsible party” politics, ideologically moored but also pragmatic and aimed at the broad middle of the electorate. It led to much good policy, and to the strong economy that is now buoying Trump’s presidency. Why does Rosenfeld have nothing to say about Obama? One answer might be that Obama was detached from the Democratic base: It steadily eroded during his two terms, especially at the all-important state level, as Nicole Narea and Alex Shephard wrote soon after Trump was elected. The Republicans, meanwhile, had diligently rebuilt from the bottom up, bringing about today’s “relentless dynamics of party polarization” and a climate of “factional chaos.”
Rosenfeld blames our current partisan gridlock on the system’s “logic of line-drawing.” But he also warns that “any plausible alternatives to the rigidities and rancor of party polarization might well prove to be something more chaotic and dangerous.” What can he mean? He points to the dangers of “pragmatic bargaining” and to the unprincipled compromises that might take the place of “effective policymaking.” This, he worries, would leave us with the same problems Schattschneider and Burns identified decades ago. Yet the last half-century of legislative history suggests something very different: The only coherent policies we’ve seen in decades—from the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s through Medicare and then Reagan’s tax reform in the 1980s—owe their passage to exactly the bipartisanship Rosenfeld finds corrupting. The lone recent instance of one-party rule creating a powerful piece of legislation is the Affordable Care Act, and the bill was vulnerable to attack precisely because no Republicans in either the House or the Senate voted for it and so had no stake in protecting it.
In one important way, however, Rosenfeld could be right about the ultimate benefits of polarization. In the Desolation Row of the Trump era, “Which side are you on?” has become the paramount question. Trump’s coarseness has invigorated the forces of resistance: A politer figure would not have given us the Access Hollywood tape, and the brazen denials afterward, and would not have fed the outrage that burst into public consciousness with the “Me Too” movement. So too Trump and Paul Ryan’s failure to come up with a workable replacement for Obamacare—a failure rooted in half a century of a “No-program program”—has given Democrats one of their most potent issues in the midterms. And the excesses of House Republicans, especially the foot soldiers in the Freedom Caucus, may well create opportunities for another disciplined group whose presence has been growing on the other side, the Congressional Black Caucus. If these changes come, polarization will be a major reason. The most enduring accomplishment of Trump and Trumpism— the latest, most decadent stage of the American right—could be the rebirth of an authentic American left.
Sam Tanenhaus is former editor of The New York Times Book Review. He is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.
Cautious Optimism by Josh Marshall
We’re now five days out from the midterm election. I wanted to share some thoughts as some of the outlines of Tuesday night start to come into view.
As I say in the headline, I find myself cautiously optimistic about the midterm results. There are a number of signs that the election is closing with momentum toward the Democrats. Yesterday The Cook Political Report nudged its estimate of Democratic House pick ups from 25-35 to 30-40 seats. The congressional generic ballot polls have been edging in the Democrats’ direction and the President Trump’s popularity seems to be edging back down. Republican campaign operatives definitely seem more pessimistic over recent days than they were as recently as mid-October.
I want to be clear: I don’t put a huge amount of stock in these small movements in the national polls. They’re all more or less consistent with bobbling around in the margin of error. The big story, I’d say, is the consistency and stability of the numbers and outlook for months. Here’s why they matter to me. Democrats have always had the inside track in this cycle. My worry has been late activation or some late shift in the GOP direction. So these small movements don’t give me a strong reason to think Democrats are surging. But it gives me some real confidence that Republicans are not. Since things look pretty good for the Democrats as is, that’s a big plus for the Democrats. There are some reasons to think that President Trump’s aggressive re-entry into the headlines in the last two weeks are reminding people of all their worries about him and building electoral momentum to create a check on his power in Washington.
There are other signs beneath the national soundings which suggest that the map of vulnerable Republicans is expanding rather than contracting, as it seemed to be in early October. It is always important to remember that there are 435 House seats up for election. A lot of those districts haven’t been polled or haven’t been polled much – through public or private polling – with any regularity. So when we hear the map is ‘expanding’ that doesn’t necessarily mean things are changing in a real sense. It may simply mean that latent vulnerabilities which were always there are coming into view. Regardless of which it is, we’ve seen a clear pattern over the last two weeks of Republicans jumping into districts that had looked safe and now look endangered. Information like that is likely what the Cook Report analysts are looking at when they upped their estimate of Democratic pick ups.
Along these lines, there’s a point Nate Silver has made several times. First, some background. The number of seats that are now genuinely toss up races, even if they lean a bit in either direction, is huge. And the overwhelmingly majority of them are currently held by Republicans. This is actually one of the reasons there’s a non-trivial chance of Democrats falling short and also dramatically outperforming expectations. It’s not like there are 25 or 30 specific seats you can point to and confidently say this is a Democratic pick up on election day. There are probably only 15 or so seats like that. But there are upwards of a 100 that could reasonably go either way on election night.
Here we have some key new data today. The Washington Post has the third and I assume final installment of a national poll which samples voters in 69 districts which The Cook Political Report categorized as “competitive” back in August. In that poll, Democrats hold a small but non-trivial four point advantage: 50%-46%. Critically these are almost all Republican districts. 63 of the 69 districts are currently held by Republicans. 48 are held by Republicans and were won by President Trump in 2016.
Democrats probably have to win only a dozen or so of those seats to win the majority. But there’s a big upside. Even a minor polling underestimation of Democratic turnout could move that number dramatically higher.
Here’s where we get back to Silver’s point. Almost inevitably you are going to have a handful of Republicans who found out late that they were in a competitive races. If Tuesday night plays out more or less as expected, you will likely have some Republicans in purple seats who hold on while some in redder seats go down because they hadn’t built a real campaign or raised enough money. A late expanding playing field leads to those kinds of outcomes.
One final point. Democrats’ winning the Senate remains a longshot. Going from 49 to 50 seats is still unlikely but far more plausible. But despite polls consistently showing Beto O’Rourke behind, he can win. I don’t think it’s likely. But I definitely think it’s possible. The key is greatly expanded turnout, as revealed in the early voting. Cam Joseph has a look at the specifics here. Early voting numbers are running high across the country. But they’re running very high in Texas.
Early voting analyses are notoriously treacherous ground to make any predictions about the results of an election. It’s almost crazy to do it. So I don’t make any predictions about what the high turnout in Texas means, who it advantages or whether it advantages anyone. What I do think is that this level of expanded turnout holds the real possibility that the models of the electorate that pollsters are using could be meaningfully off. Put differently, the shape of the electorate could be different from what pollsters are predicting. That doesn’t mean that Beto O’Rourke is more likely to win. It does mean that there’s more uncertainty about what the polls are telling us. Since O’Rourke has consistently been behind at least in the low- mid-single digits, more uncertainty about the poll numbers is a good thing. It makes outperforming that kind of deficit more plausible.
More soon.
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
A Message for Young People Who Aren’t Voting Because of Climate Change by Emily Atkin
Defeatism is understandable. But it's not based on reality.
By EMILY ATKIN
October 31, 2018
The midterm elections next week could be the most consequential in modern U.S. history. But a staggering number of young people aren’t planning to vote in them. To figure out why, New York magazine interviewed 12 conscious non-voters ranging in age from 21 to 29 years old, and published the results on Tuesday. They were not well-received.
Kevin M. Kruse
✔
@KevinMKruse
"Why should I vote for a party that doesn’t really do anything for me as a voter?"
Well, why should a party do anything for you if you don't vote?
Do you think sitting it out is going to change things? They'll suddenly care about your issues because...?http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/12-young-people-on-why-they-probably-wont-vote.html …
1:18 AM - Oct 31, 2018
12 Young People on Why They Probably Won’t Vote
Only a third of Americans ages 18 to 29 say they will cast a ballot next month. Here, we ask why.
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Most of the voters’ explanations read like lazy excuses (or excuses for laziness). “I had a hectic schedule,” said Laura, 21, on why she didn’t register to vote. “I just didn’t have the time and energy.” Some said they didn’t know enough about political issues to feel confident casting a vote. Others said they weren’t sure how to register or vote in the first place.
Tom & Lorenzo
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@tomandlorenzo
"Honestly, if someone had the forms printed for me and was willing to deal with the post office, I’d be much more inclined to vote." God help us all. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/12-young-people-on-why-they-probably-wont-vote.html#comments …
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The most disheartening response, however, was from Adam, a 25-year-old former Bernie Sanders volunteer who is registered to vote and knowledgable about politics. The issue, he said, is that mainstream Democrats aren’t “exciting.” And Adam doesn’t believe most Democratic Party politicians will make any difference in solving the problems he cares about—specifically, climate change.
“I look at it this way,” Adam said. “That report just came out the other day about global warming, talking about how we have 12 years, until 2030, for this radical change unlike the world has ever seen. And The Hill newspaper just put out that article about how the DNC does not plan on making climate change a big part of their platform, even still.
“I just do not understand why I would vote for a party that doesn’t care about me in any way,” he added. “They can say, ‘Sure, we’ll lower student interest rates.’ Well, I don’t give a shit about student interest rates if I’m not going to live past 13 more years on this planet.”
Adam’s frustration is valid. As a whole, the Democratic Party has never treated climate change with the urgency it deserves. Its leaders have also given no indication that the party will work aggressively to solve the problem if voters elect Democratic majorities to both the House and Senate next week.
But Adam’s defeatism—his idea that humanity is doomed no matter which party controls the government—is based on a misunderstanding of the climate problem.
The report he cites does not actually say that everyone is going to die by the year 2030. It doesn’t even say humans have twelve years until the fight is over. It says humans have twelve years to implement changes that will limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Warming of 1.5 Celsius is very bad, but it’s not as bad as 2 degrees or 3 degrees. And it’s nowhere near as deadly and catastrophic as warming of 4 or 5 degrees, which are plausible scenarios if we allow fossil fuel companies to continue spewing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Many political issues are complicated. But on climate, the parties’ differences are relatively simple: The Republican Party’s political platform rests on allowing fossil fuel companies to continue emitting unchecked—even removing existing regulations—in perpetuity. The Democratic Party’s political platform does not. Their platform may not have a comprehensive plan to solve climate change, but it has emissions regulations and renewable energy investments. Most importantly, it acknowledges the reality of catastrophic global warming, and the need to reduce it and adapt to it.
Humans are no longer voting to preserve our current climate. We’re deciding whether, in 50 years, the situation will be apocalyptic or merely pretty bad. The former is guaranteed if Republicans remain in charge and continue to deny that humans cause climate change. The latter is still possible, with the right people in power. That may not be the “exciting” reason to vote that Adam is looking for. But it’s an incredibly high-stakes and meaningful one nonetheless.
Emily Atkin is a staff writer at The New Republic.
@emorwee
Friday, October 26, 2018
Justice Thomas in his Own Words By Eric Segall
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2018
Justice Thomas in his Own Words
By Eric Segall
Justice Clarence Thomas is our longest serving Supreme Court Justice. He first came into the public eye in October 1991, when Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment. He dogmatically denied the claims calling his confirmation hearing a “hi-tech lynching.” He has been embroiled in controversy ever since.
Many conservative Court scholars believe it is Justice Thomas, not the deceased Justice Scalia, who has been the most important driving force behind originalist decision-making. Thomas has written solo opinions challenging well-established Supreme Court doctrine in the areas of gun control, the appropriate balance between church and state, and Congress’ powers to regulate the economy, among many others important swaths of constitutional law. He has also recently been called by one liberal commentator the “most important legal thinker in America.”
Dozens of Thomas’ law clerks have become federal judges, and his originalist statements about constitutional interpretation have been largely adopted by the Federalist Society, a conservative non-profit that is now assisting President Trump in his selection of Supreme Court Justices and lower court judges.
No one can deny Justice Thomas’ influence on our law and politics since he became a Justice more than 25 years ago. Yet, there are numerous aspects of his career that are troubling and mystifying. Here is Justice Thomas in his own words and votes.
A. Affirmative Action and Race
Although Justice Thomas has said affirmative action helped him get into Yale Law School, he has minced no words about his hatred for such programs. In Fisher v. Texas I, the plaintiffs challenged the University of Texas’ limited used of racial preferences to fill out 25% of its class (the other 75% was decided through a facially neutral top 10% program). At the time, the University was roughly 50% white and 50% non-white. Justice Thomas compared the University’s admission process to slavery and desegregation:
Slaveholders [also] argued that slavery was a ‘positive good’ that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life …. In our desegregation cases, we rejected arguments that are virtually identical to those advanced by the University today …. The University’s professed good intentions cannot excuse its outright racial discrimination any more than such intentions justified the now denounced arguments of slaveholders and segregationists.
The reference to slavery is extraordinary and needs no comment. As to segregation, the first black student to attend the University of Texas did so in 1955. To Justice Thomas, the intentions of people who in good faith wanted more racial diversity on campuses in 2013 are no different from the intentions of people who wanted all-white campuses in 1954. This is a shamelessly wrong false equivalence.
Justice Thomas also has strong feelings about minority students attending elite universities. In Grutter v. Bollinger, he said this about black students at the University of Michigan Law School: “The Law School tantalizes unprepared students with the promise of a University of Michigan degree and all of the opportunities that it offers. These overmatched students take the bait, only to find that they cannot succeed in the cauldron of competition.” And in Fisher, he said that “Blacks and Hispanics admitted to the University as a result of racial discrimination are, on average, far less prepared than their white and Asian classmates…. As a result of the mismatching, many blacks and Hispanics who likely would have excelled at less elite schools are placed in a position where under performance is all but inevitable because they are less academically prepared than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete.”
Justice Thomas relied on controversial academic studies to make these bold claims. Moreover, who is he to decide for minority students whether it is in their best interests to attend elite schools? No one is forcing them to do so. And, it is also fair to ask what any of this fiery rhetoric has to do with whether the 14th Amendment precludes elite schools from seeking racial diversity by using racial criteria.
Off the Court, Justice Thomas has compared his experiences in the segregated South to those at Yale Law School:
At least southerners were up front about their bigotry: You knew exactly where they were coming from. Not so the paternalistic big-city whites who offered you a helping hand so long as you were careful to agree with them but slapped you down if you started acting as if you didn't know your place.
Thomas is of course completely entitled to resent the condescension that he says he faced at Yale, but again to suggest white liberal Yale law professors in the early 1970’s were similar to white bigots during segregation is another matter altogether.
B. Gay Rights
In one of the most controversial dissents of the last fifty years, Justice Antonin Scalia said the following about a Texas statute that criminalized consensual, private gay sodomy: “The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are ‘immoral and unacceptable…’ the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.” Scalia went on to say that the law was constitutional because “[m]any Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”
Justice Thomas joined this horrific dissent without qualification. He also wrote a short opinion explaining that, although he agreed with Scalia that the law was constitutional, he would vote against this law if he were in the legislature: “If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.” Apparently, Thomas’ objection to punishing gays and lesbians for private, consensual sodomy is that other crimes deserve more attention, not that gays and lesbians have a right to enjoy private, consensual intimacy.
C. Abortion
Although Thomas’ confirmation hearing is most famous for Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment, the part of the hearing about abortion is well worth remembering. Thomas graduated from Yale Law School in 1974, one year after the Court handed down Roe v. Wade. Seventeen years later, Senator Patrick Leahy asked Thomas about what was at the time and still is the most controversial constitutional law issue of the last fifty years.
Senator LEAHY. “Have you ever had discussion of Roe v. Wade, other than in this room, in the 17 or 18 years it has been there?”
Judge THOMAS. “Only, I guess, Senator, in the fact in the most general sense that other individuals express concerns one way or the other, and you listen and you try to be thoughtful. If you are asking me whether or not I have ever debated the contents of it, that answer to that is no, Senator….”
Senator LEAHY: “So you don’t ever recall stating whether you thought it was properly decided or not?
Judge THOMAS. “I can’t recall saying one way or the other, Senator.”
Here is another excerpt about abortion from Thomas’ testimony:
"Senator, your question to me was did I debate the contents of Roe v. Wade, the outcome in Roe v. Wade, do I have this day an opinion, a personal opinion on the outcome in Roe v. Wade; and my answer to you is that I do not."
Andrew Peyton Thomas’ biography of Justice Thomas alleges that William Bradford Reynolds, conservative assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan, said that “I know we [he and Justice Thomas] discussed [Roe]. I think that he thought little of Roe v. Wade. … [F]rom a scholarly standpoint, we were talking about constitutional law, constitutional issues, and Supreme Court decisions. It was clear he didn’t think much of it.”
Despite widespread reporting of Reynolds’s claims, it appears he has never denied that this conversation took place. Therefore, there are only three possibilities. Either Thomas had the conversation but didn’t remember it, or he never had it, or he lied about it. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Thomas was telling the truth. That means a Supreme Court nominee never once discussed the correctness of Roe or formed an opinion about it, from the day he graduated law school in 1974 until his confirmation hearing in 1991. Arguably, that itself should have been substantially troubling to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In 1992, Justice Thomas’ first full year on the bench, the Court reaffirmed Roe v. Wade’s conclusion that women have a constitutional right to terminate their pregnancies in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (albeit the Justices changed the legal framework protecting that right from a trimester approach to the “undue burden” standard). Justice Thomas joined the bitter and harsh dissents of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia arguing that Roe should be reversed. Many years later. Thomas summed up his views in a different abortion case:
My views on the merits of the Casey joint opinion have been fully articulated by others (referring to Scalia and Rehnquist). I will not restate those views here, except to note that the Casey joint opinion was constructed by its authors out of whole cloth. The standard set forth in the Casey joint opinion has no historical or doctrinal pedigree. The standard is a product of its authors’ own philosophical views about abortion, and it should go without saying that it has no origins in or relationship to the Constitution and is, consequently, as illegitimate as the standard (the trimester framework) it purported to replace.
These views are similar to the 1992 dissents of Scalia and Rehnquist, which Thomas joined in full. Maybe Thomas’s views on abortion were only formed after he heard arguments in the case, but it is still interesting that when asked about Roe, he didn’t say he couldn’t answer as has been the case for most nominees; he said he had not yet formed an opinion. A year later, he voted to overrule it.
D. Children and Speech
The issue in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, was the constitutionality of a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. The majority struck down the law on the grounds, among other things, that violent games were protected speech as to minors. Thomas disagreed, saying that “the practices and beliefs of the founding generation” did not “include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.” In a prior case, Thomas had said that children have no first amendment rights in public schools.
As Ian Millhiser pointed out in his article on Justice Thomas’s importance as a legal thinker, Thomas believes that children have no speech rights separate from their parents. Thomas “rooted” these views “in his belief that seventeenth and eighteenth-century adults lorded over children like petty tyrants.”
Millhiser correctly questioned why Thomas’s summary of the relationships between children and parents in 1787 mattered to constitutional law. “That is, even if Thomas is correct that the founding generation ‘believed parents to have complete authority over their minor children and expected parents to direct the development of those children,’ why does it follow that the founding generation would have let the government restrict children’s speech…?” Although we can all agree that children do not have the same speech rights as adults, the notion that they have no speech rights at all separate from their parents, teachers, and guardians, is quite simply absurd.
Two critics of Justice Thomas’s conclusion about the complete lack of students’ speech rights in public schools said the following about his analysis of that issue:
This is an extraordinary claim for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that public schools did not exist when the First Amendment was drafted. Even by the time the 14th Amendment was adopted, making the First Amendment applicable to the states, public schools were just getting started…. Justice Thomas evidently believes the question of whether students have free-speech rights should be answered by conducting an imaginary séance with 18th- and 19th-century Framers and ratifiers, who should be asked: Do you think public-school students have a constitutional right to free speech while in school? This line of inquiry is about as productive as asking an only child: Imagine you have a sister. Now, does she like cheese?
E. Originalism
Justice Thomas, first and foremost, identifies himself as an originalist. During his confirmation hearings, he clearly signaled his originalist philosophy. In numerous important constitutional law cases, Justice Thomas has said that the Justices should be guided by the Constitution’s original meaning. For example, in United States v. Lopez, Thomas argued that the Court should alter its commerce clause jurisprudence to greatly reduce the power of Congress in order be “more faithful to the original understanding of that Clause.” In McDonald v. City of Chicago, in which the Court applied the Second Amendment to the states for the first time, Thomas wrote a sole concurrence arguing that it is the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment that allows the Second Amendment to restrict state action, not the Due Process of the Fourteenth Amendment, an opinion which if accepted by the rest of the Court could have major implications for constitutional law. And, in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, he strenuously argued, in dissent, that the Constitution’s original meaning allows the states to place term limits on members of Congress, a conclusion rejected by the majority opinion.
Yet, despite Justice Thomas’s constant refrains about the importance of the Constitution’s original meaning to constitutional interpretation, he has regularly voted to strike down state and federal laws without any mention of originalist evidence. For example, he has voted to strike down every campaign finance law (state and federal) and every affirmative action program (state and federal) that has come before him without once relying on ratification era sources. He joined with the other conservative justices to invalidate the key provision of the Voting Right Act despite the opinion’s silence on historical sources. This list could go on and on. Justice Thomas’ failure to harness originalist evidence for these major constitutional law decisions, and there are many more, speaks louder than those opinions where he claims such evidence supports his decisions.
As I detailed in a prior work, Justice Thomas’ America looks like this: Americans possess a right to own guns but no right to abortion; no city, state or federal government may take racial criteria into account where trying to address our racist past and current racial problems; gays and lesbians are strangers to equal rights under the law; Congress is prohibited from addressing serious economic issues that plague our country; corporations may spend as much money on elections as they want because money is speech and corporations are people; the President of the United States may fight terrorism without any constitutional check from the other two branches of government; states may place term limits on members of Congress; and the rights of majority religions constitute constitutional trump cards authorizing discrimination against minorities and traditionally disadvantaged groups.
Perhaps Justice Thomas reached all these conclusions based on his good faith examination of 1787, 1789, and 1868 sources. But if so, it is surprising that so many of his opinions contain no such summary or evidence. Moreover, the sum of all these votes looks surprisingly similar to the Republican Party Platforms both in 1992 and today. Maybe that’s just a coincidence--or maybe not.
Justice Thomas often cloaks his right-wing extremism in originalist musings and obviously deeply-felt personal experiences. Regardless of how he came to his political views, however, his consistently partisan votes as a Justice are unlikely to change with more experiences or more historical analysis. He will almost certainly support the far right in our political and cultural wars for as long as he remains a Supreme Court Justice.
POSTED BY ERIC SEGALL AT 7:30 AM
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