How to Oppose Fascism, by Jeet Heer, Jan. 3

How to Oppose Fascism

Jason Lutes's graphic novel "Berlin," about the break-up of the Weimar Republic, is both unsettling and uplifting in its timeliness.

By Jeet Heer

January 3, 2019

 

BERLIN by Jason LutesDrawn & Quarterly, 580 pp., $49.95

Jason Lutes first started drawing Berlin, his epic graphic novel about the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, in 1996, when the topic seemed an esoteric choice for an American storyteller. The winding down of the Cold War brought with it an ostensible closure of the ideological battles of the early 20th century, leading some of the more triumphalist partisans of capitalism to proclaim nothing less than the end of human history. The future seemed more or less certain: America’s free-market, liberal democratic model would continue to prevail as the best of all possible worlds.
Yet in going back to the apparently irrelevant past, Lutes became an inadvertent prophet. The cartoonist patiently drew his story in short, irregularly released pamphlets, gathered together every few years in paperback collections. When he finally finished the project and codified it in a hefty hardcover in 2018, what had once been antiquarian was now urgent. In the fraying and polarized America of Donald Trump, the Weimar Republic looks more like a mirror than a fading photograph.
When I first started reading Berlin more than two decades ago, I primarily admired it as a bravura feat of historical reconstruction. Everything—the trains, the buildings, the fashion, the faces—looked right, a testament not just to archival research but also, more importantly, to a style that channeled the imagery of the era. Lutes’s clean, brisk cartooning owes much to Hergé (the creator of Tintin), but there is more than a dash of noir taken from German Expressionism and the woodcut novels that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s (notably those by artist Frans Masereel). The style has an uncanny aptness, as if the book were a product of the very period it surveys.

Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly

The book’s physical presence is also a marriage of form and content. In size and weight, Berlin is a building block of a book, reminiscent of the cobblestones, bricks, and concrete slabs that make up the titular city. Cartoonists refer to the white spaces between the panels in a graphic novel as “gutters,” and the street metaphor is particularly appropriate for Berlin. Reading a graphic novel, especially one as dense with geographical information as Berlin, is akin to deciphering a map. The inside cover of Berlin is, in fact, a map of the city, which reinforces the experience of the book as a kind of urban guide in narrative form.

Still, in reading the whole of Berlin, the immersion in a historical urban environment is secondary to the political dilemma that confronts the characters. Berlin features a large and diverse cast: workers and plutocrats, communists and fascists, bewildered liberals and political activists, Jews and anti-Semites, pacifists and street fighters. What unites them is the shared experience of living in a crumbling democracy, where economic chaos, distrust of the established order, and rising violence all work to destroy social cohesion. On a personal level, this means the characters are all tested, again and again, to show empathy, and even the best of them sometimes fail these tests. But the redemptive thrust of the book comes from the resilience of solidarity and hope even in the darkest times.
Indeed, Lutes sees in the Weimar Republics’s failure an opening for genuine creative excitement. The two sides are embodied by the main characters of Berlin: Kurt Severing, a jaded journalist, and his sometime lover Marthe Muller, a young woman who comes to the city to study art. Even as Severing is baffled and shattered by the rise of political extremism, Muller finds pleasure in the city’s flowering of sexual diversity (briefly taking a lover who we would now call a trans man) and aesthetic pleasures (especially a visiting band of African American jazz musicians), which are the direct result of the collapse of suddenly outmoded traditions.

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Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly

It’s not an accident that Severing and Muller have different experiences of the city. Berlin belongs to the great tradition of the urban novel, which runs from Dickens’s Bleak House to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. But as the critic Roger Sale noted in 2000 in the journal Left History, this tradition is highly gendered. Sale wrote that “the high modern conviction that cities are breeding grounds for alienation and despair” tends to come from male writers and filmmakers.
Sale pointed out that we should “[s]et against all that: Lucy Snowe coming to London in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, or Toni Morrison’s account of southern blacks coming to Harlem in Jazz, or Mrs. Dalloway setting out across London to order her flowers, or Martha Quest coming to London at the opening of The Four-Gated City. All these women characters and writers acknowledge the reasons for alienation and despair, the overwhelming confusion of large cities, but they know also a sense of richness, of possibility, in the very qualities the men deplore.”
The achievement of Lutes’s Berlin is that it combines both sides of the gender divide in urban fiction. In so doing, it offers a more comprehensive way of looking at our own troubled times, which can easily invite despair and resignation. If fascism is a death cult, then opposing it has to include not just political organizing, but also a positive alternative of a good life. Lutes offers just that: His Berlin is a city of hope as well as pain. He doesn’t shirk from depicting the rage and violence that brought down Weimar democracy, but he also shows the heroism and joy that came from standing against the rise of fascism, from people trying to live decently, freely and creatively.

Jeet Heer is a contributing editor at the The New Republic.

@HeerJeet

Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem? by Miguel Salazar

 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.

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

6-7 minutes

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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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.