It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, February 29, 2020
On the Cover of New York Magazine: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez By Aude White ON THE COVER JAN. 6, 2020 Photo: David Williams for New York Magazine
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reshaped her party’s legislative agenda, resuscitated Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, and hardly has a friend in Washington. For the January 6–19, 2020, cover story, New York offered Ocasio-Cortez the opportunity to assess her first year. As she tells writer David Freedlander, she’s one of the most hated people in the country; she’s also one of its most influential. Freedlander talked to the freshman member of Congress from Queens and the Bronx about Democratic party leadership, the 2020 election, and what she’ll do next.
Freedlander, who is writing a book about Ocasio-Cortez due later this year and lives in her district, says he first interviewed her when she was just an unknown upstart engaged in a quixotic political campaign against one of the most powerful people in New York City. Her win against Congressman Joe Crowley (“an old-school Irish pol who slapped backs and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his peers”) was one of the biggest congressional upsets in at least a generation. “She impressed immediately,” Freedlander says of Ocasio-Cortez. “It was clear that she had a unique connection to people, a fierce sense of justice, and a preternatural self-possession.”
What happened in the year and a half since that election has been staggering, Freedlander says, and unlike anything he has seen in New York, or American politics — she’s the first thing people overseas ask him about, he’s spotted counterfeit pins and bumper stickers featuring her face in a surf shop in a Podunk town on the North Carolina coast, and she’s, of course, become a favorite of Fox News. “It is clear that in the past year she has become the most significant political figure in the country not named Donald Trump, which is all the more staggering when you consider that she just turned 30 years old and serves on the backest bench in Congress,” says Freedlander. “She has come to symbolize everything that people on the left and the right either hope or fear will be coming true in American politics —that it is turning sharply to the left as a rising, hyperliberal, wired-into-social-media generation takes over. It’s only been a year, and I can’t imagine what the future holds for her.”
In 2002, Our Singles-Issue Cover Model Was the Future First Lady of the United States By Christopher Bonanos Melania is the one on the right. Photo: New York Magazine
New York Magazine has, over the years, published quite a few issues devoted to single life and dating, often around Valentine’s Day. In February 2002 — a few months after the 9/11 attacks, when first responders, especially those of the FDNY, were on everyone’s mind — our editors had the last-minute idea of recreating Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 photograph of the sailor and nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. The photographer Firooz Zahedi, on barely any notice, made the picture you see here. The guy was not a model in costume but a real New York City firefighter (and part-time model) named Daniel T. Keane; the young woman was, similarly, hired from a modeling agency. These days, the image perhaps seems a little corny — even if you set aside the contemporary controversy about Eisenstaedt’s original — although we will note that it accurately reflects the sentiment of the time. That, however, is not what is most interesting about it.
Recently, the journalist Matt Haber learned (via this Flickr post) something that we at New York had forgotten: The female model we’d hired was a pretty young Slovenian named Melania Knauss, who had been dating a New York real-estate developer on and off for several years, and married him a couple of years after that. We did not, at the time, expect to be working with the future First Lady of the United States. But we were. Photo: New York Magazine
This past week, Haber called up Keane, who is now an FDNY battalion chief and remembers the shoot well. “The person who was doing my hair and makeup, they said, ‘Do you know who that is?’” he recalls. “I don’t know any models, I really wasn’t into the scene. And they said, ‘That’s Melania Knauss… That’s Donald Trump’s girlfriend.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay.’” As he recalls it, they struck the pose “a couple hundred times” for the camera. Caroline Miller, who was New York’s editor back then, also offered Haber some context: “After 9/11 firefighters were the heroes of New York—they were the rock stars,” she says. “We wanted to show that.” And, she adds, “there was also the twist that she was grabbing him.”
It was not her last time on our cover, by the way: Melania appeared a second time, for a story about the Met Gala, in 2005. She’s under her own name there, and we knew about that one.
From a self-styled fiscal conservative’s point of view, however, that $1 trillion figure is a real eyesore. And for at least some of the self-professed conservatives who work in the Trump White House, it is a source of psychological discomfort bordering on guilt.
House Democrats tell us they are outraged by one aspect of the White House response in particular: The White House appears to have informed Democrats that they want to fund the emergency response in part by taking money from a program that funds low-income home heating assistance.
A document that the Trump administration sent to Congress, which we have seen, indicates that the administration is transferring $37 million to emergency funding for the coronavirus response from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, which funds heating for poor families.
Democrats see this as provoking budgetary bickering and unnecessary political friction at a time when a clean emergency appropriation could easily avoid both.
Low-income Americans in frigid regions of the country aren’t the only victims of the administration’s arbitrary penny-pinching. The White House is also calling for $535 million cut to funding for Ebola virus treatment and containment — despite the fact that the Republic of Congo is still battling an Ebola epidemic. The administration’s insistence on financing the fight against one epidemic disease with cuts to funding for the containment of a different epidemic disease — so as to avoid increasing the federal budget by .01 percent — is emblematic of this White House’s goldfish-esque lack of foresight: Since taking office, President Trump has tried to slash national health spending by $15 billion; cut the disease-fighting budgets of DHS, NSC, HHS, and CDC; allowed the ranks of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps to steadily erode (after trying and failing to shrink its budget by 40 percent); eliminated the federal government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund; and shut down the National Security Council’s entire global health security unit.
There is no rational explanation for the administration’s current position. The coronavirus represents a massive political liability for Trump, not least because of how indefensible his previous bouts of penny-pinching on public health now appear. There is no mass constituency for prioritizing opposition to infinitesimal increases in the national debt over pandemic prevention. In fact, many congressional Republicans were alarmed by the austerity of Trump’s proposal. As Politico reports:
Administration officials sought to swat away concerns their emergency request for $2.5 billion to address the outbreak was inadequate, even as some Republicans joined Democrats in criticizing the amount — and slamming a lack of transparency around efforts to contain the disease on U.S. soil.
… The Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee at Azar’s hearing accused the administration of making a “low ball” request.
“It could be an existential threat to a lot of people in this country,” warned Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “So money should not be an object. We should try to contain and eradicate this as much as we can, both in the U.S. and helping our friends all over the world.”
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer unveiled an $8.5 billion emergency funding proposal, composed entirely of new spending. The Democrats’ counteroffer is not merely superior on the merits, but also a sound election-year messaging device: If the coronavirus creates major disruptions to American life, the Democratic Party will be able to say it demanded more ambitious preparations than the Republican president would allow; if the epidemic somehow peters out, no voters are going to reward Trump for holding the line against a $7 billion increase to the $1 trillion deficit.
Thus, the most plausible explanation for the White House’s stance is the neurosis of budget director Mick Mulvaney and his ideological kin. In the House, Mulvaney was that rare breed of a “small-government” crusader whose zeal for slashing spending didn’t spare the Pentagon. By most accounts, the man is a supply-side, deficit-hawk true believer. Now, like a guilt-prone cannibal who seeks to mitigate his sense of moral injury by religiously observing “meatless Mondays,” Mulvaney is ostensibly trying to compensate for his complicity in an exploding deficit by holding pandemic prevention hostage to trivial spending cuts.
Across the World, Voters Are Losing Faith in Government
But fostering the social trust necessary pursuing ambitious collective action — and weathering all the disruptions that attend it — can be hard to sustain at the national level, let alone the planetary level (and recent European history underscores the difficulty of scaling up governance merely to the continental one). And over the past two decades, political elites the world over have done more to undermine their constituents’ faith in state power than to consolidate it.
In 2002, Pew Research asked citizens across 20 nations whether they believed that “the state is run for the benefit of all of the people.” In nearly all jurisdictions, majorities said yes. Eighteen years, one historic financial crisis and innumerable globalization and climate-induced disruptions later, faith in government has declined significantly in 11 of those countries, while increasing in only three (Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Japan). In Germany, the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, and Lebanon, faith in the beneficence of the state has fallen from being a majority position.
Trust in political elites is similarly low. Asked whether elected officials care what people like them think, overwhelming majorities in 34 countries surveyed said no.
Pew’s report does not offer much insight into the roots of the declining trust it documents. And the proximate sources of disaffection vary considerably from one nation to another. In the United States, our government’s xenophobic abuses of immigrants are a source of outrage for a wide swath of the public; in Hungary, the state’s virulent xenophobia has earned Viktor Orbán’s government aberrantly high marks from the public, with some 74 percent of Hungarians saying their state is run for the benefit of all the people (refugees ostensibly do not fall under majority’s definition of “people”). Relatedly, in places where right-wing populist parties are out of power, their supporters are among the most distrustful of government; in places where such parties rule, reactionary nationalists are among the most fervent statists.
As one would expect, assessments of whom the state serves are also deeply correlated with perceptions of the economy. Those who regard their nation’s economic situation as bad are much more likely to take a dour view of how their democracy is functioning.
How precisely progressive forces can foster a faith in state power broad enough to facilitate a historic energy transition — and greater global cooperation on matters of climate, tax evasion, labor rights, and public health — is unclear. In many nations, the conflicts beneath (ethno-)nationalist traditionalists and cosmopolitan liberals appear inescapably zero-sum. And in many contexts, reactionary plutocrats have found that arming the immoderate rebels in such culture wars is a handy way of suppressing latent conflicts between labor and capital.
But it’s hard to see how our species meets the challenges of the coming decades (and/or, weeks) unless more of us accept “big,” democratically-accountable government as our collective instrument and potential savior.
Pompeo declines to apologize for Trump's downplaying of service members' brain injuries
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday declined to apologize on President Donald Trump's behalf for his comments downplaying the seriousness of traumatic brain injuries suffered by US service members in a January Iranian missile attack on a military base in Iraq.
The heated exchange occurred during Pompeo's two-hour hearing Friday on Iran before the House Armed Services Committee.
"Mr. Secretary, do you want to take the opportunity -- it's a yes or no question -- do you want to take the opportunity here today to apologize to those service members for trivializing their injuries?" Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, asked.
Pompeo replied that he had never trivialized any injuries, so Sherman asked if he would like to apologize on behalf of the administration in which he serves.
In late January, Trump downplayed the severity of the injuries to US service members who were being treated for concussion symptoms from the Iranian attack as "headaches."
"We take seriously every American service member's life. It's why we've taken the very policies in Iran that we have," Pompeo said Friday.
The Pentagon and the President had initially said no service members were injured or killed in the Iranian missile attack, which was retaliation for the January 2 US drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
About two weeks later, US Central Command said that 11 service members were treated for concussion symptoms from the attack.
That number of diagnosed cases continued to climb week after week. Concussions are not always apparent immediately after they've been suffered.
In early February, the Pentagon confirmed that more than 100 service members had been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries and that nearly 70% had returned to duty.
Approximately 200 people who were in the blast zone at the time of the attack were screened for symptoms.
BACK IN THE USSA Trump Accuses Media and Democrats of Exaggerating Coronavirus Threat
WASHINGTON — President Trump and members of his administration mobilized on Friday to confront the threat of the coronavirus — not just the outbreak, but the news media and the Democrats they accused of exaggerating its danger.
While stock markets tumbled, companies searched for new supply chains and health officials scrambled to prevent a spread of the virus, Mr. Trump and his aides, congressional allies and backers in the conservative media sought to blame the messenger and the political opposition in the latest polarizing moment in the nation’s capital.
Mr. Trump said that news outlets like CNN were “doing everything they can to instill fear in people,” while some Democrats were “trying to gain political favor by saying a lot of untruths.” His acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went even further, telling conservative activists that journalists were hyping the coronavirus because “they think this will bring down the president; that’s what this is all about.”
At a campaign rally on Friday evening in South Carolina, the president denounced Democrats, describing the concerns they have expressed about the virus as “their new hoax” after the Russia investigation and then impeachment. “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” he said. “We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They cannot even count the votes in Iowa.”
The accusations came as other elements of the federal government moved to head off a broader wave of infections like those in China. The State Department urged Americans to reconsider traveling to Italy , where the virus has spread, and health officials reported three more cases of unknown origin, in California , Oregon and Washington State, raising fears of local transmission. The World Health Organization reported cases in 56 countries and warned of a “very high” global risk, while stock markets closed their worst week since the 2008 financial crisis.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general said that it would begin a “comprehensive review” of the federal government’s coronavirus response, speeding up a process that had already been underway to monitor how the health agency was organizing its resources for a potential domestic outbreak.
While other presidents in moments like this have sought to transcend politics and assert national leadership, Mr. Trump has framed the issue in partisan terms while playing down the risk to the United States. Privately he has been consumed by concern that his enemies will use the coronavirus and the economic impact it has against him as he seeks re-election.
China has been battling an outbreak of a new SARS-like coronavirus (COVID-19), which originated in Wuhan. The virus has claimed over 2,700 lives and infected nearly 80,000 people around the world.
Democrats said that Mr. Trump was making the crisis all about himself rather than the American public. “For Mick Mulvaney to suggest that Americans turn off their TVs and bury their heads in the sand when they’re worried about a global health pandemic is Orwellian, counterproductive, dangerous and would be repeating China’s mistake,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
Tensions over the issue flared on Friday even at a congressional hearing on Iran when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was quickly hit with questions about the coronavirus rather than the Jan. 3 drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani , the head of Iran’s elite security forces.
Democrats argued that the virus posed a greater threat to Americans than General Suleimani, and Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island asserted that the Trump administration had not been forthcoming about the real risks each presented.
“Because of the dishonesty from this administration on this and many other issues, Americans have lost trust in their government,” Mr. Cicilline told the secretary. “Now we’re facing a serious global health crisis in the form of the coronavirus and trust is more important than ever.”
Mr. Pompeo bristled at what he considered a political ambush. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran,” he complained.
Republicans defended Mr. Pompeo by going on offense against the Democrats. “This hearing is a joke,” declared Representative Lee Zeldin of New York.
With Vice President Mike Pence leading the response to the virus , the administration has moved to coordinate its communication with the public. But officials sought on Friday to dispel the impression that they were clamping down on scientific information or limiting the availability of experts whose tone has suggested more alarm than the president’s.
In a briefing with congressional officials on Friday morning, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that he “was not muzzled” by Mr. Pence’s office, but he did say that he had to get permission for roughly a half-dozen television appearances that had already been planned.
Administration officials held a briefing at the White House featuring Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, along with Russell T. Vought, the budget director, and Eric Ueland, the White House legislative director. After each official read off a series of prepared talking points, they took only a handful of questions from journalists.
Of the three officials, Mr. Azar went the furthest in suggesting that the United States might face a difficult next phase of the coronavirus, if it spreads. Mr. Trump has repeatedly told advisers he is concerned that Mr. Azar and others in the administration are presenting an “alarmist” view.
“The administration has ignored or sidelined expert staff at agencies like the C.D.C. and the N.I.H., offered the public inconsistent and confusing information, and failed to provide clear leadership,” said Dr. Kathleen Rest, the executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a health policy expert, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
Mr. Pence went to Florida on Friday for a previously scheduled fund-raiser for the state’s Republican delegation, although he planned to give a briefing to Gov. Ron DeSantis while there. He also stopped by the radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh’s studio to insist that the administration was not focused on politics.
“Washington is always going to have a political reflexive response to things,” Mr. Pence said. “But we’re going to tune that out.”
Mr. Limbaugh has been among the conservative commentators who have blamed the news media and political opponents for overemphasizing the coronavirus, which he compared to the common cold. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Mr. Limbaugh, who was recently given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Mr. Trump, said on his show on Monday.
That theme has been amplified by some of the president’s favorite Fox News hosts, like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, in recent days and animated Mr. Mulvaney’s appearance on Friday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md.
“The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “That’s what this is all about it.”
Mr. Mulvaney noted that the administration took action weeks ago to prevent a public health emergency by limiting travel from China, where the worst outbreak has centered. “Why didn’t you hear about it?” Mr. Mulvaney asked. “What was still going on four or five weeks ago? Impeachment, that’s all the press wanted to talk about.”
The news media, in fact, has been covering the global spread of coronavirus intensively for months , including the Trump administration’s travel restrictions.
Following the president’s lead , Mr. Mulvaney also minimized concerns over the virus. “The flu kills people,” he said. “This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS. It’s not a death sentence; it’s not the same as the Ebola crisis.”
Mr. Trump sounded off to reporters as he left the White House for the rally in South Carolina. “They’re doing everything they can to instill fear in people, and I think it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Trump said of CNN and other news outlets. “And some of the Democrats are doing it the way it should be done, but some of them are trying to gain political favor by saying a lot of untruths.”
His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., even accused the president’s opponents of wishing for widespread deaths from the virus, citing a New York Times columnist who wrote that the illness should be called Trumpvirus . “For them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they can end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness,” he told Fox News from the conservative conference.
That message was quickly picked up and repeated at the conference. “It’s overblown in the media,” said Lee Murphy, a congressional candidate in Delaware and an actor who played a defense secretary once on “House of Cards.” “They want to get at President Trump every chance they can, but this should not be political. I’m tired of it being overblown and being political.”
Jeff Jordan, running for Congress in Virginia, said too much has been made of the coronavirus, which he compared with the common flu. “The media at large is not a fan of the president,” he said. “The media will take any opportunity they can to cause damage.”
On Capitol Hill, the attacks on coverage drew scorn from Democrats. “The problem is the American people need to be able to trust that their government will tell them the truth, no matter what the truth is,” said Representative Andy Levin of Michigan. “And I’m very concerned that the American people cannot trust this government.”
Tony Fratto, who served as a deputy press secretary to President George W. Bush during multiple crises, including the last time the stock markets fell so far so fast, said blaming others in such a situation is counterproductive and urged the White House to keep its attention on the underlying issue.
“Focus only on health and safety, and I know they don’t believe this, but if they keep Americans safe, they will definitely get credit for it,” he said. “Because of the White House’s attacks, if things do go poorly, they’re going to be blamed for taking their eye off the ball even if they’ve done all the right things.”
Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Lara Jakes, Catie Edmondson and Noah Weiland.
Appeals court denies tribe’s quest for casino landBy PHILIP MARCELO, Associated Press
BOSTON — A federal appeals court has ruled against a Native American tribe that had been granted sovereign land to build a casino in Massachusetts.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston on Thursday upheld a lower court decision declaring the federal government had not been authorized to take land into trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in 2015.
The lower court ruled the tribe didn't qualify because it wasn't officially recognized in 1934, when the federal Indian Reorganization Act became law.
The Cape Cod-based tribe, which traces its ancestry to the Native Americans that shared a fall harvest meal with the Pilgrims in 1621, gained federal recognition in 2007.
Despite the ruling, the tribe said its years-long battle is far from over.
Its 321 acres remain in federal trust because a separate case is pending in federal court in Washington, D.C., Cedric Cromwell, the tribe's chairman, said in a statement.
“There’s no question that this is a grave injustice,” he said. “We will continue to fight, as our ancestors did, to preserve our land base, our culture and our spiritual connection to our homelands.”
Casino opponents, who had filed the original lawsuit challenging the land decision, said the latest ruling is further vindication for them.
Their lawyer said in a statement that the justices correctly interpreted federal law “as written” and "without favor or bias.”
The case was a largely semantic debate centered on whether the tribe could be considered “Indian” under the 1934 federal law, which created the process for taking lands into trust for tribes, among other things.
The casino opponents argued the law clearly defined Indians as “all persons who are descendants of such members who were, on June 1, 1934, residing within the present boundaries of any Indian reservation.”
But the tribe argued the phrase “such members” made the definition ambiguous and open to other interpretations.
The appeals judges, like the lower court, rejected that argument.
Cromwell said the tribe will continue to press Congress to approve legislation pending in the Republican-controlled Senate that would protect its reservation, regardless of what the courts decide.
The Democrat-led House has passed the measure, but President Donald Trump has asked Republicans to reject it. Trump called it a “special-interest casino bill” backed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of his potential Democratic presidential rivals.
Roughly half the trust lands awarded to the tribe are located on Cape Cod where it already operates a government center that includes a school, among other things.
The other half of the land is located in Taunton, a city some 50 miles away, where it still hopes to build a $1 billion casino, hotel and entertainment resort.
The tribe and its supporters have said the land battle sets a dangerous precedent as it represents the first time in the modern era that the federal government has moved to strip a tribe of its trust lands.
Corruption with No Consequences, from Bridgegate to Impeachment Andrea Bernstein
John Moore/Getty Images New Jersey Governor Chris Christie accompanying then Republican frontrunner Donald Trump at a Mar-a-Lago press conference on Super Tuesday, a few days after Christie had abandoned his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, Palm Beach, Florida, March 1, 2016
Two days before he was sworn in to preside over the US Senate impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump, the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts conducted a hearing on a different case entirely: concerning whether two former aides to former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie were properly convicted for running afoul of US anti-corruption statutes.
The Bridgegate trial, as it came to be known, was a result of an extraordinary abuse of power. Christie, a Republican, had set up a series of both rewards to entice and punishments to deter local elected officials in New Jersey.
His particular aim, back in 2013, was to run up the totals of Democratic mayors who had endorsed him during his gubernatorial campaign for re-election that year—to build a record of bipartisan support in anticipation of his own 2016 presidential bid. He went about this by offering inducements such as breakfasts at the governor’s mansion, or tickets to his box at the Giants–Jets stadium, or fragments of scorched steel from the destroyed World Trade Center towers. Thanks to the governor’s largesse with such 9/11 mementos, the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, Mark Sokolich, ended up with more pieces of WTC steel than any office-holder or official body besides the New York Fire Department.
But Sokolich, a Democrat, did not endorse Christie. That was when three former aides of the governor, steeped in this culture of raw displays of dominance, put the Bridgegate scheme into effect. Calling on the resources of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, they realigned lanes on the George Washington Bridge in a way that specifically punished Mayor Sokolich by creating “traffic problems in Fort Lee.” They refused to take the mayor’s calls when four days of gridlock on the approaches to the world’s busiest bridge blocked ambulances and made children late on the first day of school. (One of Christie’s aides subsequently pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, resulting in the convictions now being argued before the Supreme Court.)
The traffic scheme also had a more general purpose: to telegraph to every other Democratic official in New Jersey that it was better simply to fall in line with Christie’s political wishes than to cross him in any way.
This type of behavior is precisely equivalent to the conduct for which President Trump was put on trial. He called a democratically elected president of Ukraine, and asked him to “do us a favor though.” That “favor” was to open an investigation that would both discredit the prosecution of Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and so reinforce Trump’s narrative about the “Russia hoax,” and at the same time smear the man Trump considered was his chief political opponent in the 2020 presidential election: Joe Biden.
Like Sokolich, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was made to understand that the price for non-cooperation could be ruinously steep: losing vital military aid and an audience with the president at the White House. Trump’s aides, instilled with their own culture of raw displays of dominance, worked overtime to use the levers of government to enhance the power of their boss.
It now appears that both abuses of power will be sanctioned, with potentially crippling consequences for fighting corruption in America.
Already, in 2015, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that is widely seen as having discouraged the prosecution of corruption. The court ruled that year in McDonnell vs. United States that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s conviction for bribery should be overturned, even though he had accepted $175,000 in gifts, including a Rolex watch, from a donor who wanted McDonnell’s assistance in using state resources to promote a tobacco-based dietary supplement start-up.
Even though McDonnell did things for this businessman, including setting up meetings on his behalf, the Supreme Court ruled that these actions did not qualify as “official acts,” the legal standard that would make them quid pro quo corruption.
In the Supreme Court arguments on Bridgegate, there were zero mentions of the name Chris Christie, or of his campaign, or of the culture of clientilism, favorites, and enemies that the former governor had established in Trenton. For Christie, a line from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton seemed especially true: “Everything is legal in New Jersey.”
In oral argument, lawyers and the justices stayed on a narrow legal plain: whether government officials should be criminally prosecuted for politically motivated official acts. The term “snow plow” came up a lot— whether it would be criminal for an official to have his favored constituents’ streets plowed before others’.
What was lost in all of this, though, was whether a bi-state agency—with a budget larger than many states—can devote its resources to causing a huge traffic jam with grave costs and potentially life-threatening consequences purely with the goal of furthering the political ambitions of the governor of New Jersey. The less powerful officials in the affair were convicted and sentenced to prison time. The person who conveyed to them that they were on his team and should do what it took to enhance his political career was never charged or prosecuted. Chris Christie escaped consequences.
That the highest executive in the land should never face consequences for his actions is the explicit position of the President Trump and his attorneys, public and private. Last fall, before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, his attorneys argued in the case Trump vs. Vance that even if the president shot a person on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, he can’t even be investigated so long as he’s president.
“Nothing could be done. That’s your position?” Judge Denny Chin asked Trump lawyer William Consovoy. “That is correct,” Consovoy replied. He repeated. “That is correct.”
Trump lost his case in the Second Circuit. He appealed. The US Supreme Court will consider that case in March, along with a batch of others about whether his bankers and accountants must turn over his records to Congress, a year after several congressional committees subpoenaed the documents. Here, too, as with the second article of impeachment before the Senate, there have as yet been no consequences for Trump’s obstruction of multiple investigations of his conduct.
This has long been a pattern of the Trump family business, stretching back decades. Whether through lawsuits, or donations to district attorneys and judges and power-brokers, or simply by beguiling law enforcement agents with meals and golf outings, Trump has escaped again and again. Each time, he has learned to push the boundaries further. It was one day after Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s lackluster congressional testimony that President Trump called President Zelensky of Ukraine for help with what one former aide called “a domestic political errand” and what Trump’s national security adviser called a “drug deal.” The president’s allies in Congress argued vociferously that that, too, was fine.
It’s hard to chart what will follow, with a Congress that won’t impeach, and a Supreme Court, presided over by the same John Roberts who gaveled the impeachment trial, that seems poised to further narrow the scope of corruption prosecutions and even to agree that a president has absolute immunity from investigation so long as he remains in office. But it would certainly be reasonable to conclude that for Trump the Hamilton lyric should be rewritten:
Everything is legal. If you’re president. January 31, 2020, 5:45 pm
Attorney General William Barr delivering remarks to a conference at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington, D.C., October 03, 2019Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
US Attorney General William Barr’s defense of unchecked executive authority in his recent speech to the Federalist Society had an unpleasant familiarity for me. It took me back to a time in my life—during the late 1990s, as a graduate student in England, and the early 2000s, teaching political theory in the politics department at Princeton University—when I seemed to spend altogether too much time arguing over the ideas of a Nazi legal theorist notorious as the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich.
Carl Schmitt’s work had then become popular in universities, and particularly in law schools, on both sides of the Atlantic. The frequent references to his “brilliance” made it evident that in the eyes of his admirers he was a bracing change from the dull liberal consensus that had taken hold in the wake of the cold war. Schmitt’s ideas thrived in an air of electrifyingly willed dangerousness. Their revival wasn’t intended to turn people into Nazis but to rattle the shutters of the liberal establishment.
Schmitt was supposed to be a realist. For him, laws and constitutions didn’t arise from moral principles. At their basis, there was always a sovereign authority, a decision-maker. Schmitt stipulated that the essential decision was not a moral choice between good and evil but the primally political distinction between friend and enemy. And that distinction, in order to be political in the most important sense, had to generate such intense commitment that people would be prepared to die for it. He set out this view in a brief work, The Concept of the Political, in 1932. Only a few years later, he and many of his fellow Germans showed that they were prepared to kill for it. And kill and kill and kill.
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, 1930
In spite of his ideas’ serving this dismal role in recent history, I found that there were always one or two students for whom the simplicity of Schmitt’s dualistic choice was appealing. All the complex reflections and reasoning that enter into responsible political judgment could be dismissed in favor of one very simple binary opposition. We all want our justifications to end somewhere, to bring an end to the process of providing reasons for our beliefs, values, and actions, and those prepared to listen to an authority telling them exactly where that should be are unburdened. I liked to think that most of the students who embraced Schmitt’s work were attracted to the view merely as a theoretical position and were as lacking in real enmity as the anemic liberals whom Schmitt despised.
But in the same period that I encountered these tousle-haired Schmittians in flip-flops, there was in the United States a tremendous craving for action to avenge the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and prevent further loss of American lives. Impatience at endless diplomatic wrangling, including the United Nations’ failure to take seriously the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq, made simple decisionism and the idea of the unchecked executive ferociously appealing in US political life. The concept of the “enemy combatant” became sufficiently vague for the executive branch to apply it more or less at will to whatever person it pleased. And for many of those advocating pre-emptive war, or rendition and torture, on the grounds that terrorists might attack us with weapons of mass destruction, the sense of “it’s them or us” developed a new and ugly intensity.
The problem of containing the terrorist threat was not construed as one of detection and policing. It was a war. And for prominent thinkers and politicians on the right, it was a civilizational battle for “Judeo-Christian values” against “Islamo-fascism,” a friend-enemy distinction that remains deeply rooted in parts of American society today. This ill-defined enemy is the specter constantly evoked by the people Trump has chosen as his advisers and officials. Their mythic world-historical struggle has become detached from the actuality of counter-terrorism operations. General Michael Flynn, a veteran of the “global war on terror,” wrote in his 2016 book The Field of Fight:
We’re in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam. But we are not permitted to speak or write those two words, which is potentially fatal to our culture.
The idea that “evil people” might destroy “our culture” is alarmingly bellicose rhetoric, but one that is evidently persuasive for certain people. Steve Bannon uses it, too. He made a speech via Skype at a Vatican conference in 2014 in which he stated that “we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism.” These are just the beginning stages “of a very brutal and bloody conflict.” He called upon the “church militant” to fight this “new barbarity.” In the White House, Bannon’s main initiative was the racist and deeply harmful travel ban on people from Muslim countries. Trump’s Executive Order 13769 restricted entry to the United States for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen on the grounds—disputed by most counter-terrorism experts—that it was an essential counter-terrorism measure.
So the views expressed in Barr’s Federalist Society address were not new ones. Not only has this Schmittian approach to constitutional doctrine come to be accepted as one respectable view among others in law schools, it has become increasingly accepted as a feature of American politics as well. Barr described the travel ban as “just the first of many immigration measures based on good and sufficient security grounds that the courts have second guessed since the beginning of the Trump Administration.” The president, when acting, or claiming to act, in the interests of national security, should be allowed unlimited scope for decision-making. Barr told his audience that the Framers’ view of executive power—
entailed the power to handle essential sovereign functions—such as the conduct of foreign relations and the prosecution of war—which by their very nature cannot be directed by a pre-existing legal regime but rather demand speed, secrecy, unity of purpose, and prudent judgment to meet contingent circumstances. They agreed that—due to the very nature of the activities involved, and the kind of decision-making they require—the Constitution generally vested authority over these spheres in the Executive.
Constitutional experts have denounced this view of the unchecked executive not only as a misinterpretation of Article II of the Constitution, but as a dangerous attempt to place the president above the law.
Barr’s view is the final reductio ad Schmitt of our political era. As US attorney general, at the head of the Justice Department, he is charged with upholding the rule of law, but he admires only lawlessness in moments of crisis. He claims in his Federalist Society speech that America’s greatness has been achieved through its most savage conflicts, from the Civil War, through World War II “and the struggle against fascism,” to, most recently, “the fight against Islamist Fascism and international terrorism.” Barr even folds into this narrative the “struggle against racial discrimination,” while using his office to defend a blatantly racist president. These “critical junctures” when the country has been most challenged, he claims, are the moments that have brought the Republic “a dynamism and effectiveness that other democracies have lacked.” Such moments of decision gained that significance precisely because this was when the presidency “has best fulfilled the vision of the founders.” By this, Barr means the urgent, secret decisions that forge a strong and vital sovereign authority.
This is not just a theoretical position for Barr. He previously supported President George H.W. Bush’s pardoning of Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense who was charged with obstruction of federal investigations and lying to congress about the Iran-contra affair. That reckless criminal enterprise presumably represented the kind of “dynamism and effectiveness” that the liberal rule of law tries to suppress. Barr admires action.
He also fears that the commitments motivating sovereign decisions and actions will become etiolated if removed from the sustaining light of Christian faith. Religion is the only basis, he has claimed, for the kind of commitment that is conducive to greatness. In a recent address at Notre Dame, Barr poured contempt on the “high-tech popular culture” that distracts us from our fundamental commitments. Willfully disregarding the First Amendment’s establishment clause, he told his audience that “as Catholics, we are committed to the Judeo-Christian values that have made this country great.”
Barr claims to have extremely high-minded motivations. Unlike the frivolous and profane culture that surrounds him, he has understood how to lead a dignified human life:
Part of the human condition is that there are big questions that should stare us in the face. Are we created or are we purely material accidents? Does our life have any meaning or purpose? But, as Blaise Pascal observed, instead of grappling with these questions, humans can be easily distracted from thinking about the “final things.”
The “militant secularism” rampant in America, he insists, endangers this spiritual vocation. Will Barr be remembered, I wonder, for his determination to confront important and intractable theological and philosophical problems? Surely not.
He will be remembered, rather, for defending an impeached president who tried to bribe a foreign power to dig up dirt on his domestic political rivals. And for mischaracterizing Robert Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, then lending his support to the bizarre view, promoted by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, that Ukraine was responsible for the electoral meddling. Barr may also be remembered for eccentrically jetting around Italy, Britain, and Australia, in an effort to gin up support for a baseless conspiracy theory about the “deep state” involving George Papadopoulos, a junior adviser to the Trump campaign and convicted felon. He will be remembered, too, for accusing the FBI of “spying” on the Trump campaign and for dismissing the Inspector General’s report that vindicated the FBI on the substantive issues on the same day that the president called the agency’s officers “scum.”
Like Barr, Carl Schmitt held a moralizing view of secularism and liberalism as inadequate to the true seriousness of life. But commentators have been puzzled by what this “seriousness” consists of and whence the demand for such deep enmity arises. The political philosopher Leo Strauss criticized Schmitt for implicitly resting “the political” on moral foundations, even as Schmitt claimed the realm of politics was entirely distinct from morality. One prominent German scholar, Heinrich Meier, made a very influential argument that this moral basis was supplied by Schmitt’s Catholic faith. The “ultimate values” that demand the “ultimate sacrifice” must derive from the hidden theistic basis of this thought. Is this what Schmitt has in common with Barr?
A more obvious explanation for Schmitt’s demand for enmity, for his condemnations of a liberal culture that weakens that hostile will and of the rule of law that obstructs it, is racism. He was, after all, not just a Catholic but a Nazi. His actions and unpublished writings betray a virulent anti-Semitism. We do not need to invoke an esoteric theism to account for what can be sufficiently explained by bigotry. And many would argue that in our own time the mythic crusade against the civilizational threat of “Islamo-fascism,” and the manufactured fear of the supposed barbarian hordes who must be prevented from flooding in from the south by an impregnable border wall, are barely disguised manifestations of a similar racism. It has nothing at all to do with the meaning of human existence, or “final things,” or anybody’s God.
The reality of the “war on terror,” though, is becoming further and further detached from the mythic crusade against “Islamo-fascism.” The greatest terrorist threat America now faces comes from domestic terrorists. And national security policy has pivoted away from the Islamic world toward more traditional geopolitical rivals such as Russia and China. We’re not engaged in a binary civilizational battle. As the myth becomes unsustainable, Barr and his allies will have to find a new enemy to justify their view of the president as the indispensable, unitary sovereign at the head of an executive branch that is perpetually on a war footing. They will be forced to ramp up the rhetoric of apocalyptic conflict—as Barr is indeed doing.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that they will need a foreign war (though, as the escalating confrontation with Iran shows, this may remain an option); all authoritarian regimes create their own internal enemies. No one should doubt Barr’s capacity and will to do this. In his original tenure as attorney general, from 1991 to 1993, Barr disbanded the counterintelligence team of the FBI that had been focused on the Soviet Union during the cold war but whose expertise and Russian language skills seemed less relevant in 1992. He instead turned the FBI’s attention to gang-related crime and violence and became a leading advocate of the mass incarceration policies that have since so disproportionately affected America’s black population.
And today, during his second tenure leading the Justice Department, in December 2019, he returned to these themes—apparently disputing the right of Americans of color to protest police violence. Law enforcement must be respected, he said, adding ominously that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.” In effect, he reserved the right to make decisions about who should and should not be afforded the protection of the rule of law, a notably Schmittian reflex.
Barr is not just another craven defender of Trump. Just as Carl Schmitt’s identification of parliamentary democracy’s weaknesses in the 1920s and his increasingly authoritarian rhetoric in that period had a basis that was quite independent of the cult of Hitler, so William Barr represents a cast of legal thinking (or perhaps, more accurately, anti-legal thinking) that has its own origins and supporters. One clear ally is John Durham, whom Barr has placed in charge of his inquiry into the FBI’s conduct in the Trump–Russia investigation.
Durham’s colleagues have constantly assured us of his integrity, but his natural tendency, too, is to speak in the crudest terms of friends and enemies. In a lecture to the Thomistic Institute at Yale University in November 2018, Durham was discussing his investigation into the destruction of tapes showing CIA torture (an investigation that resulted in no indictments) when he chose to describe the alleged malfeasance revealed by the tapes as no more than “the unauthorized treatment of terrorists by the CIA.” This is a troubling description: as Durham must know, not all of the young Muslim men subjected to torture were terrorists. At least twenty-six of them were found to have been wrongfully detained. He also chose a bizarre analogy to describe his deeper motivations: he compared himself to the 1970s movie cop “Dirty Harry,” a white officer with little respect for due process who often shoots-to-kill black criminals and displays a sociopathic lack of conscience about doing so. Durham told his audience a story about Harry Callahan encountering a “black militant” who can’t comprehend Callahan’s unselfish motivation “to serve.”
Durham now serves a master who views lawless conflict—the “critical junctures” that “demand speed, secrecy, unity of purpose, and prudent judgment”—as the most important engine of progress, the vital heart of American power, that will bring a wider reckoning with “final things.” Independently of Trump and this presidency, William Barr, his henchmen, and his Federalist Society supporters represent a powerful threat to the fundamental values of liberal democracy.
The Tyranny of the Minority, from Iowa Caucus to Electoral College Corey Robin
Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images A book stall sign at a store in Des Moines, Iowa, the day of
the Iowa caucuses, February 3, 2020
It has been more than two weeks since the Iowa caucuses, and we still don’t know who won. That should give us pause. We don’t know in part because of a combination of technological failing and human error. But we’re also in the dark for a political reason. That should give us further pause.
No one disputes that Bernie Sanders won the most votes in Iowa. Yet Pete Buttigieg has the most delegates. While experts continue to parse the flaws in the reporting process, the stark and simple fact that more voters supported Sanders than any other candidate somehow remains irrelevant, obscure.
America’s democratic reflexes have grown sluggish. Not only has the loser of the popular vote won two out of the last five presidential elections, but come November, he may win a third. Like the children of alcoholics, we’ve learned to live with the situation, adjusting ourselves to the tyranny of its effects. We don’t talk anymore about who will win the popular vote in the coming election. We calculate which candidate will win enough votes in the right states to secure a majority in the Electoral College. Perhaps that’s why the scandal coming out of Iowa is the app that failed and the funky math of the precinct counters—and not the democratic embarrassment that the winner of the most votes doesn’t automatically win the most delegates.
In the original edition of his definitive history The Right to Vote, which came out two months before the 2000 election, Harvard scholar Alexander Keyssar never mentioned the Electoral College. Trying, in an afterword he wrote later, to account for his omission, Keyssar explained that before the election, he didn’t think the Electoral College had much to do with voting rights. He thought of it simply as a “device for aggregating” the popular vote.
At the time, this was an understandable belief. (Keyssar has since devoted himself to writing what is likely to be the definitive history of the Electoral College. It is scheduled to be published in June.) Not since 1888 had a candidate won the presidential election while losing the popular vote. So insignificant had the Electoral College become by 2000 that CBS News had to remind people on the eve of the election that the Electoral College wasn’t an “institution of higher learning” but the means by which the president is chosen. A relic of the nineteenth century, the divergence between the electoral vote and the popular vote was unlikely in the twentieth and twenty-first.
Like the Electoral College, the Iowa caucuses don’t aggregate people’s votes; they weigh them, assigning different values to the votes depending on where they are cast. Much has been made of the alchemy whereby support for a candidate is converted into “state delegate equivalents,” or SDEs. Less attention has been paid to the fact that the number of SDEs each caucus is assigned and distributes among the candidates depends not on the size of the local population or turnout at the caucus but on a formula biased toward rural parts of the state. In 2016, forty-five citizens in remote, sparsely populated Fremont County could effectively select one SDE. In more populous Jefferson County, it required two hundred and thirteen citizens to select one SDE. That’s how it’s possible to win the popular vote and lose Iowa—even if the app works fine and the caucus chairs are good at math.
“The basic principle of representative government,” the US Supreme Court declared in 1964, is that “the weight of a citizen’s vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives.” In Iowa, as in other parts of the American constitutional order, that principle is not in effect.
Even with their acceptance of slavery and a highly restricted franchise, many of the Framers were uneasy about the notion that some people’s votes might count more than others. When one group of delegates proposed that each state, regardless of the size of its population, should have an equal vote in Congress, James Madison denounced the plan as “confessedly unjust,” comparing it to the scheme of “vicious representation in Great Britain.” State-based apportionment, claimed Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, would only reproduce the inequality of Britain’s rotten boroughs, where a nearly depopulated Old Sarum—described at the time as sixty acres without a home—had two representatives in Parliament, while London, with 750,000 to one million residents, had four.
Madison and Wilson lost that debate; the United States Senate is the result. Within a year of the ratification of the Constitution, the 50,000 free residents of Delaware, the least populous state in the nation, had the same number of senators as the 455,000 free residents of Virginia, the most populous state. That makes for a ratio of power of nine to one. Today, according to a recent report by the Roosevelt Institute, that ratio has expanded to sixty-seven to one. Wyoming’s 583,000 residents enjoy as much power in the Senate as the nearly 40 million residents of California. (In the Electoral College, the power ratio is four to one.)
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images Placards at the Women’s March, the day after the Inauguration of Donald Trump as president, Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017
Eighteen percent of the American population—on average, whiter and older than the rest of the population—can elect a majority of the Senate. If those senators are not united in their opposition to a piece of legislation, the filibuster enables an even smaller group of them, representing 10 percent of the population, to block it. Should legislation supported by a vast majority of the American people somehow make it past these hurdles, the Supreme Court, selected by a president representing a minority of the population and approved by senators representing an even smaller minority, can overturn it.
The problem of minority rule, in other words, isn’t Trumpian or temporary; it’s bipartisan and enduring. It cannot be overcome by getting rid of the filibuster or racist gerrymanders—neither of which have any basis in the Constitution—though both of these reforms would help. It’s not an isolated embarrassment of “our democracy,” restricted to newly problematic outliers like the Electoral College and the Iowa caucuses. Minority rule is a keystone of the constitutional order—and arguably, given the constitutional provision that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate,” not eliminable, at least not without a huge social upheaval.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States had two extremely close presidential elections: 1960 and 1968. Given how effectively the Soviet Union propagandized about American apartheid, prodding US officials to push for desegregation in order to avoid bad publicity in the decolonizing world, it’s not inconceivable that the cold war also may have helped prevent those elections from producing awkward splits between the electoral vote and the popular vote. If American elites feared that the tyranny of a white majority couldn’t withstand scrutiny in the Global South, what kind of legitimation crisis might the tyranny of a white minority have provoked? As the United States today approaches a multiracial majority, the tyranny of a white minority is precisely what we are hurtling toward, without the countervailing pressure of an ideologically challenging superpower to shame us into stopping it.
It was also during the cold war that the United States grew increasingly uncomfortable with the rotten boroughs of the American South. “To say that a vote is worth more in one district than in another,” the Supreme Court declared in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), would “run counter to our fundamental ideas of democratic government.” Though malapportionment in the South produced power ratios—three to one in Georgia, forty-one to one in Alabama—that seem quaint in light of today’s Senate, they were sufficiently large to provoke Chief Justice Earl Warren, in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), to spell out, in simple numerical terms, the challenge they posed to basic principles of democratic morality.
“It would appear extraordinary,” wrote the chief justice, if the votes of citizens in one part of a state were “given two times, or five times, or ten times the weight of votes of citizens” in another part of the state. That would mean that the first group of citizens “could vote two, five, or ten times for their legislative representatives” while the second group “could vote only once.” Under such a scheme of representation, the right to vote would not be “the same right” for all citizens. “To sanction minority control” of a legislative body “would appear to deny majority rights in a way that far surpasses any possible denial of minority rights.”
Warren clearly was worried about the implications of his argument for federal institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate. That is why he devoted several pages of his opinion to a preemptive rebuttal of “the so-called federal analogy.” Much of Warren’s rebuttal depended on the invocation of history. The apportionment scheme of the Senate and the Electoral College was a necessary compromise “arising from unique historical circumstances” of thirteen sovereign states contracting to form a national government. That claim from history sits uneasily with Warren’s claim, later in the opinion, that “history alone” is not a “permissible factor” in justifying departures from one-person, one-vote, that “citizens, not history or economic interests, cast votes.”
More important, however, is the history Warren invoked. Like the court’s other liberal justices, Warren cast the constitutional settlement over representation as a compromise between large and small states. As the Yale legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar has noted, this is “the stodgy version” of constitutional history that many of us grew up with. The less stodgy and increasingly accepted version holds that the battles over representation at the Convention had more to do with slavery than the size of states. As Madison pointed out, “the real difference of interests” at the Convention “lay, not between large and small but between Northern and Southern States. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination.”
It’s clear why such historical truths could not be acknowledged during the cold war. Given the centrality of the Senate to Jim Crow and the near impossibility of eliminating the Senate, as well as the improbability of reforming the Electoral College, it made sense to describe these institutions as musty and ancient compromises between large and small states. In the 1960s, ironically, anachronism was less threatening than relevance. Now that the cold war is over, however, we can admit these truths. Now that the cold war is over, that may not matter.
We are at a strange moment in American history. On the one hand, the country has never been more interested in, and desperate to know, what the majority wants. As the rise of data geeks like the two Nates—Silver of fivethirtyeight.com and Cohn of The New York Times—and outlets like Vox show, our appetite for polling is ravenous; our capacity to digest the results, prodigious. On the other hand, we have an electoral system that makes it ever more difficult to determine the will of the majority, and a political system that makes that will ever more difficult to enact. Something’s gotta give.
Or not. In her 1997 collection of critical essays The End of the Novel of Love, Vivian Gornick remarks on that “climactic moment” in a John Cheever story “when the husband realizes his wife holds him in contempt, or the wife knows the husband is committing adultery.” With mounting dread, the reader wonders how either character can go on after this moment of truth. What makes the story truly “large, awesome, terrible,” however, is when the reader realizes that the characters do “go on like this.” That moment of truth leaves the reader “staring into space, the void opening at her feet.” February 21, 2020, 8:38 am
