20 YEARS AFTER 9/11, HAVE WE LEARNED A SINGLE THING?

September 2021

THE
MORTAL
STORM MARY L. TRUMP
ON JANUARY 6,
THE BIG LIE—
AND WHY
HER UNCLE
IS MORE
DANGEROUS
THAN EVER

WALTER SHAPIRO
CAN BIDEN
DEFY HISTORY?

OSITA NWANEVU
A REPUBLIC BORN
IN TURBULENCE
Our workforce can’t afford to lose mothers.
Yet many mothers can’t afford to stay.
With the burden of balancing careers and caregiving, it is no surprise that
mothers are leaving the workforce at an alarming rate. As mothers fall
out of the workforce, the economy experiences critical losses in job skills,
experience, and tenure.

Support mothers, support our economy.

Download the report and learn more
at Kauffman.org/mothers
 Table of Contents September 2021
Features

12 Donald’s Plot Against America Mary L. Trump

Now, he and his GOP enablers are peddling the Second Big Lie:
that January 6 was just legitimate protest. It’s the crucial ingredient
in convincing America to return them—and him—to power.

20 Twenty Years On, Jordan Michael Smith

Are We Any Smarter?
Our foreign policy wise people responded to 9/11 by
embracing belligerence. What, if anything, have they learned?

30 Behind the GOP Strategy Melissa Gira Grant

To Outlaw Trans Youth
Activists are beating back Republicans’ virulent attacks on trans
rights. But the battle is costing the trans community.

38 Can Biden Defy History? Walter Shapiro

Conventional wisdom says the Democrats are finished after
the midterms. But the conventional wisdom might be wrong.

“So there would be

no respite from
Donald’s particular
COVER IMAGES: DAVID BECKER/GETTY (TRUMP); LEV RADIN/ZUMA; LEV RADIN/SIPA (JANUARY 6)

blend of mendacity,
cruelty, and
destructiveness.”
—Mary L. Trump
LEFT TO RIGHT: DINA LITOVSKY/REDUX; ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN

12 Donald’s Plot Against America 30 Behind the GOP Strategy to Outlaw Trans Youth

Cover photo illustration by Sean McCabe

1
Signs & Wonders

4 The Radicalization of Clarence Thomas The New Republic

His time working for Monsanto and other polluting industries

helped make him the fierce conservative he is today.
Scott W. Stern Editor in Chief Win McCormack
Editor Michael Tomasky

6 The New WikiLeaks Magazine

How a transparency collective eclipsed Julian Assange Editorial Director Emily Cooke
Jacob Silverman Literary Editor Laura Marsh
Managing Editor Lorraine Cademartori

8 “Reopening” Loose Talk

Deputy Editor Laura Reston
Design Director Andy Omel
Photo Director Stephanie Heimann
A tenuous note of shared victory Production Manager Joan Yang
John Patrick Leary Poetry Editor Cathy Park Hong
Contributing Copy Editor Howery Pack

10 Critical Thinking Right Before Your Eyes newrepublic.com

Conservative parents win school board seats by promising Digital Director Mindy Kay Bricker
to fight “critical race theory.” Executive Editor Ryan Kearney
Deputy Editors Heather Souvaine Horn
Jake Bittle Jason Linkins
Katie McDonough
Books & The Arts Art Director Robert A. Di Ieso Jr.

46 Decades of Fear Staff Writers Kate Aronoff

Matt Ford
Melissa Gira Grant
How the War on Terror undermined American democracy Josephine Livingstone
Nick Martin
Patrick Iber Grace Segers
Walter Shapiro

51 Lengthening Shadows Alex Shephard

Jacob Silverman
Why W.G. Sebald kept returning to the horrors of the past Copy Editor Kirsten Denker
Ryu Spaeth Social Media Editor Hafiz Rashid
Front-End Developer Clark Chen

56 Empathy Exams Product Manager

Reporter-Researchers
Laura Weiss
Shreya Chattopadhyay
Is there a place for human connection in Richard Powers’s Julian Epp
Daniel Fernandez
intricate novels of ideas? Annie Geng
Gish Jen Interns Divya Karthikeyan
Jordan Levy

59 Unfinished Business Editor at Large Chris Lehmann

What the revolutionary groups of the 1960s left undone Contributing Editors Rumaan Alam
Emily Atkin
Michael Kazin Alexander Chee
Michelle Dean

62 State of the Union Siddhartha Deb

Ted Genoways
Jeet Heer
The early history of the American republic has come to Patrick Iber
carry too much meaning.

Kathryn Joyce
Suki Kim
Osita Nwanevu Bob Moser
Osita Nwanevu
Alex Pareene
Poetry
Publisher Kerrie Gillis
50 Chronicle of Drifting Chief Financial Officer David Myer
Yuki Tanaka Associate Publisher, Art Stupar
Circulation and

55 And Ode
New Business Development
Sales Director Anthony Bolinsky
Alyse Knorr Marketing Director Kym Blanchard
Engagement Manager Dan Pritchett
Res Publica Engagement Associate Matthew Liner
Executive Assistant/ Michelle Tennant-Timmons

68 The First Amendment Under Fire

Office Manager

Can the ideals of free speech and social justice be reconciled?

Lake Avenue Publishing
Win McCormack 1 Union Square West
New York, NY 10003

For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289.

For reprints & licensing, visit www.TNRreprints.com.

2 September 2021
 Want your phone bill to support
Climate Justice
Justice,
Economic Justice
& Civil Rights
for free?
Switch to CREDO Mobile.

For a limited time

Get a $350 Visa prepaid card or Have 5 lines? That’s $1,750 on us!
$350 off any smartphone per line. Use offer code TNR21 at checkout or call us at 844-327-3221.
Signs & Wonders
Of Clarence Thomas
The Radicalization
His time working for Monsanto and
other polluting industries helped make
him the fierce conservative he is today.
By Scott W. Stern
IN 1992, an electrician named Robert Joiner
sued Monsanto, the immense and power-
ful agrochemical corporation that had, for
many years, manufactured the toxic chem-
ical compounds polychlorinated biphenyls,
or PCBs. For more than a decade, Join-
er had worked in a Georgia utilities plant,
which used dielectric fluid containing PCBs
as a coolant. As he tinkered with the ma-
chinery, the fluid splashed into his eyes and
mouth; sometimes, he was forced to plunge
his arms and hands directly into the fluid
to make repairs. When Joiner fell ill with
lung cancer, he took Monsanto (as well as
General Electric) to court, arguing that his
exposure to the chemicals had “promot-
ed” his condition, and that Monsanto was
therefore liable.
Five years later, the Supreme Court ruled
against Joiner, siding with Monsanto’s
formidable legal team in a decision that
4 September 2021
ILLUSTRATION BY COLIN VERDI
has been largely forgotten outside legal
circles. These days, law schools teach it
mostly to explain the legal standard for ex-
pert scientific testimony; journalists rarely
mention the case at all. But it is notable
for one unexplored reason—one of the jus-
tices who ruled for Monsanto not only had
worked for the company as a young lawyer
but had personally negotiated contracts to
indemnify it from liability for harm result-
REFERENCE PHOTO: MARK REINSTEIN/CORBIS/GETTY
ing from PCB exposure: Clarence Thomas.
Ever since his controversial 1991 con-
firmation hearings, Thomas has been the
subject of ravenous popular and scholarly
interest. Today, there is a veritable shelf of
books and studies analyzing his biography,
his ideology, and his jurisprudence. Yet none
of them linger on the almost three years he
worked for Monsanto (it was his only private-
sector experience) or the two subsequent
years he spent advising Senator John
Danforth—a Republican from Missouri—on
environmental and energy issues.
To better understand Thomas’s envi-
ronmental work, I viewed several folders
of Monsanto’s highly restricted archival
material in St. Louis. I then traveled to
the State Historical Society of Missouri
to view Danforth’s surviving office files.
These 40-year-old pieces of papers—
which I read shortly before the coronavirus
pandemic shut down archives across the
world—plainly documented the influence
of Monsanto and other polluting industries
in shaping the young Thomas’s thinking.
When viewed alongside other archival ma-
terial (including some records Monsanto
was forced to disclose in litigation), the doc-
uments demonstrate how Thomas adopted
the chemical industry’s fierce opposition
to government scrutiny in his subsequent
legislative work and judging. As a justice,
Thomas has displayed a profound rever-
ence for untrammeled private enterprise
and a deep skepticism of the adminis-
trative state. In short, he judges like the
chemical industry attorney he once was.
THOMAS SPENT THE first several
decades of his life as a reflexive liberal, not
even registering as a Republican until 1980.
His biographers have offered up a number
of theories to explain his move to the po-
litical right: his resentment of privileged
classmates at Yale Law School; his intro-
duction to the writings of the conservative
economist Thomas Sowell; his experience
in the Missouri attorney general’s office,
opposing appeals from incarcerated in-
dividuals; his own growing wealth. Absent
among these theories is the influence of
Monsanto. Yet Thomas’s time working
within the chemical industry coincided
with a period when it was one of the most
anti-environmental and politically active
corporate sectors in the United States.
When the 28-year-old Thomas arrived
at the company’s spacious, suburban of-
fices in early 1977, he was entering a new
world. Founded in 1901, Monsanto had be-
come by mid-century a massive producer
of chemicals, fertilizers, plastics, and, prof-
itably, aspirin. Just as Thomas joined, it was
also a company in flux—rapidly growing and
reorganizing but also straining to find new
sources of business. Under assault from
environmental activists and government
regulators, it funneled money into lobby-
ing and litigation, battling virtually every
law that might hinder its operations, from
the Toxic Substances Control Act—which
Signs & Wonders
would eliminate one of its most profitable
(and toxic) products, PCBs—to regulations
that might compel Monsanto to disclose
what it called “trade secrets.”
Thomas’s responsibilities at Monsanto
included drafting contracts, advising man-
agers on legal matters, dealing with liability
issues, and registering pesticides and herbi-
cides with federal agencies. One of his first
tasks was to negotiate the aforementioned
contracts for PCB disposal—a duty of enor-
mous importance, given the danger PCBs
posed to human health and the multiple bil-
lion-dollar class-action suits Monsanto was
facing over PCB contamination at the time.
In the summer of 1979, Thomas left for
a job as a legislative assistant with Sena-
tor Danforth. In this new position, Thomas
relentlessly lobbied his boss on behalf
of industry interests, especially the chemical
industry. For instance, after representatives
from DuPont asked him to have Danforth
convince the “EPA to slow down their head-
long rush to regulate CFC’s”—chemicals
that were manufactured by DuPont and that
were destroying the ozone layer—Thomas
dashed off a memorandum to Danforth,
echoing DuPont’s rhetoric. The reason the
EPA wished to regulate CFCs, he wrote,
“is that theoretically they are responsible
for depletion of the ozone.” But Thomas
was skeptical, and he sought to convince
Danforth to co-sponsor a much weaker bill,
citing industry talking points, such as the
“severity of the economic impact on those
industries relying on CFCs.”
Thomas was likewise amenable when
the steel and coal industries sought to skirt
environmental regulations. At the request of
steel company representatives, he lobbied
Danforth to co-sponsor a bill to “stretch
out” the period over which the Clean Air Act
required “the steel industry [to] install pol-
lution control equipment.” He did the same
for coal mining reps fighting amendments
to the Surface Mining Control and Recla-
mation Act. And, remarkably, Thomas often
advocated on behalf of Monsanto itself. To
take just one example, he served as a liaison
between the company and Danforth when
the chemical giant objected to the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service’s proposal to designate
land around one of Monsanto’s plants as a
“critical habitat” for a certain turtle species.
Danforth lambasted the agency for its “ap-
parently shabby treatment of Monsanto,”
and the agency soon dropped its proposal.
Monsanto’s director of environmental oper-
ations wrote to Danforth, thanking him and
his staff—“especially Clarence Thomas.”
At the time, Thomas was already display-
ing a hardening conservative sensibility.
A week after Ronald Reagan was elected
in 1980, Thomas wrote a memorandum
for Danforth titled “We have power—now
what?,” in which he outlined an aggressive
new direction for the senator and his staff
now that Republicans had secured a Senate
majority. Thomas suggested that Danforth
seek a seat on the Environment and Pub-
lic Works Committee, primarily in order to
“limit the impact of the Clean Air and Clean
Water Acts,” which were both up for reau-
thorization in 1981. Such a seat would also
allow Danforth to shape “the scope and
coverage” of the Superfund bill (a subject
in which “[i]ndustry” had “demonstrated its
keen interest”), and to fight for the interests
of Missouri industries, including Monsanto.
Thomas saw the ascendant conservative
movement as a chance to realize his envi-
ronmental policy goals.
THOMAS’S YEARS OF work for, and on
behalf of, polluting industries is plainly ap-
parent in his judging. He is a consistent
friend to corporations and a determined
foe of administrative agencies, especially
those that seek to protect the environment
through regulation (most notably the EPA).
He has written decisions in cases decided
in favor of Shell, Texaco, and Entergy; sided
repeatedly with coal companies; and at-
tempted to rein in the authority of the very
agencies he once sought to help corporate
executives sidestep. Perhaps most nota-
bly, he and his colleagues have limited the
liability provisions of the Superfund law—
provisions Thomas fought against while
working for Danforth.
To be clear, I am not alleging that Thomas
has done anything illegal. But many observ-
ers have called on Thomas to recuse himself
in cases involving Monsanto. He has always
declined. Today, the company is frequently
the subject of harsh criticism, stemming
from its historic production of DDT, diox-
in, Agent Orange, aspartame, Roundup,
and genetically engineered seeds; it was
voted the “Most Evil Corporation of 2013.”
This modern reputation may be why few of
Thomas’s supporters dwell on his corporate
experience. But the effect the chemical in-
dustry had on him was profound. The effect
he, in turn, has had on environmental rights
in the United States is undeniable.
Scott W. Stern is an environmental attorney.
His research on Clarence Thomas’s environ-
mental ideology will appear in the Harvard
Environmental Law Review later this year.
5

The New
WikiLeaks
How a transparency collective
eclipsed Julian Assange
By Jacob Silverman
AS FREDDY MARTINEZ tracked the
latest impeachment proceedings against
Donald Trump on Twitter, he saw a screen-
cap of a CNN broadcast that struck him as
odd. Right there in his feed was a clip from
some shaky phone footage shot by one of
the Capitol rioters. CNN credited the video
to someone Martinez had just met, if only
through the internet: donk_enby, a rela-
tively unknown hacktivist who had scraped
the data from the right-wing social network
Parler. They then gave the data to Distrib-
uted Denial of Secrets, a transparency
collective Martinez advises, which pub-
lished a 32-terabyte archive of posts and
videos from the riot as a shareable archive,
making it available to practically anyone—
including news networks and congressional
investigators, who played some of the vid-
eos during the impeachment hearings.
For Martinez, watching the investigators
play the videos for millions of Americans was
“surreal”—“a cyberpunk moment,” Martinez
6 September 2021
heard someone call it. Distributed Denial of
Secrets, or DDoSecrets, had been a thorn in
the side of secretive governments, corrupt
corporations, and powerful law firms since
its founding in late 2018. In June 2020, in a
release known as BlueLeaks, the group pub-
lished 269 gigabytes of law enforcement
data, which exposed police malfeasance
and surveillance overreach across the
United States. DDoSecrets also published
incriminating records from overseas tax
shelters, from the social media site Gab, and
from a Christian crowdfunding site often
used by the far right. The group has affected
autocrats as well, exposing the Russian gov-
ernment’s plans in Ukraine and mapping
out the Myanmar junta’s business dealings.
These revelations have spawned numerous
news stories in the public interest, making
DDoSecrets a valuable source for journal-
ists, but also rendering it a target: In July
2020, German authorities seized one of the
organization’s servers. August of last year
brought ominous news of a Department
ILLUSTRATION BY HANNA BARCZYK
of Homeland Security bulletin labeling
DDoSecrets a “criminal hacker group.” And
yet by February, Congress was discussing
the Parler videos on the Senate floor.
Such are the contradictions that come
of being in the vanguard of the jour-
nalistic transparency movement in the
post-WikiLeaks era. One part of the U.S.
government uses group members’ work;
another describes them as criminals.
Of all the transparency organizations,
hackers, whistleblowers, and leakers that
have emerged since WikiLeaks stopped
publishing data in December 2018,
­­DDoSecrets stands apart, not just for its
collaborative discipline, technical sophis-
tication, and a wide network of sources,
but also for its lack of ego and aggressive
commitment to transparency. That al-
chemical combination doesn’t mean the
group is without internal disagreements
or public criticism—indeed, its growing
prominence and willingness to push the
envelope of what it publishes seem to earn
the organization enemies wherever it goes:
In February, Gab CEO Andrew Torba said
that “mentally ill tranny demon hackers”
were attacking his company—an absurd
description that DDoSecrets members,
many of whom are trans or queer, have
reappropriated. (Emma Best, perhaps the
collective’s most prominent representative,
briefly added the phrase “Demon Hacker”
to their display name on Twitter.)
In the murky world of hacked and leaked
materials, which often contain personal
or sensitive information, DDoSecrets has
had to grapple with thorny questions: What
should be published? Who can the group
trust? And how can transparency work sur-
vive when tech companies are ready to
cooperate with government investigators
in preserving official secrecy and criminal-
izing investigative journalism? Distributed
Denial of Secrets is still figuring that out.
AVOWEDLY NONPARTISAN, DDoSecrets
nonetheless exhibits an ethos that seems to
fuse anarchist politics, a hacker’s curiosity
about forbidden knowledge, and a gener-
al sympathy for the oppressed. Its barbed
Latin slogan, Veritatem cognoscere ruat
caelum et pereat mundus, roughly trans-
lates to, “To know the truth, even if the
heavens fall and the world perishes.” Call
it a bolder, more transformative version of
“information wants to be free.”
Best, a prolific filer of Freedom of Infor-
mation Act requests who covered national
security as a freelance journalist, launched
DDoSecrets in December 2018 with some-
one known only by the pseudonym “The
New from Columbia University Press
Architect.” Together, they set out to distin-
guish their group from WikiLeaks, which
they felt had morphed into a vehicle for
Julian Assange’s ego.
In July 2018, Best published more than
11,000 internal messages from WikiLeaks.
The messages showed how the group oper-
ated, along with a great deal of homophobia,
transphobia, and other crude behavior. Best
has since critiqued WikiLeaks for its lack of
transparency, for supporting conspiracy
theories, and for a tendency to editorialize
“An inspiring story of character and “Coleman’s multidisciplinary approach
around major releases. Best described it
to me over the encrypted messaging app integrity on the world stage.” yields fresh insights and reasons for
Signal as “deception about their sources — Kirkus Reviews hope. Policymakers and community
and even their data.”
Whereas WikiLeaks cultivated an anti- activists will want to take note.”
imperialist mystique centered on the cultish — Publishers Weekly
figure of Assange, DDoSecrets professes
something more modest: an unvarnished
commitment to providing information use-
ful to journalists and concerned citizens.
As the DDoSecrets website puts it, data
must fulfill two criteria: “Is it in the public
interest?” and “Can a prima facie case be
made for the veracity of its contents?” If
it passes that test—and the group, which
now has approximately 10 members along
with an advisory board and volunteer con-
tributors, decides collectively that they can
protect their sources—then they publish “A roadmap for citizen activists and “Bravo, Professor Rubenstein,
the archive, sometimes as an easily down- public servants who aspire to rebuild for speaking truth, however inconve-
loadable torrent, other times through its
slightly more difficult to reach onion site, faith in democratic government as an nient it may be for world leaders.”
which requires using the Tor browser. While agent of the common good.” —Laurie Garrett,
many archives are published for a wide au-
dience, others are withheld and only offered
—Theda Skocpol, coeditor of Pulitzer Prize–winning writer
to journalists upon request; and in some Upending American Politics
cases, the organization will write about data
it receives without publishing its contents.
At its best, the work of DDoSecrets re-
veals the limits of official transparency, of
authorized government leaks and incre-
mentalist beat reporting and foia requests
that yield pages of useless redactions.
Nowhere is this more visible than with Blue-
Leaks. “Reading the unredacted, hacked
documents gives a very different picture
than the selections you get from an open
records officer,” said Brendan McQuade,
author of Pacifying the Homeland, a book “Fantastic, funny, informative, “[This] startling book provides fascinat-
about the modern surveillance state. Based and very, very timely.” ing insights into the global fabrication
on BlueLeaks information, he wrote arti-
cles that exposed police malfeasance and —Kate Devlin, author of of a new conception of the self.”
brought attention to a federal whistleblower Turned On: Science, Sex, and Robots —Hartmut Rosa, author of
suit against the Maine Information and Anal-
Social Acceleration
ysis Center, or miac. Maine’s state house
cup.columbia.edu
Signs & Wonders
later voted to close the site (although the bill
never cleared the Senate). To McQuade,
and to the members of DDoSecrets, hacked
data provides what official channels cannot:
truth and the potential for accountability.
DDoSecrets attracted criticism a few
years ago for publishing—and then with-
drawing—an archive hacked from the
infidelity dating site Ashley Madison, an
experience the group said it learned from.
The BlueLeaks archive also included per-
sonal information, such as emails and
home addresses, for roughly 700,000 law
enforcement officers (though nothing has
apparently come of that data dump).
DDoSecrets is adamant that it doesn’t
break the law or solicit hacked material. But
its members are mingling with the hack-
tivist underground, which includes people
engaging in potentially criminal behavior.
Like many journalistic outfits, it does pub-
lish hacked and stolen material, but that
remains a long-standing, legally protected
practice of a free press. And these days,
journalists often have to act much like spies
to escape prosecution of whistleblowers
and leakers. If the work of DDoSecrets
has the whiff of the illicit, it’s because of-
ficial secrecy, mass surveillance, threats
of prosecution, and big tech’s cooperation
with censorious authorities have impeded
the ability of journalists and publishers of
leaked data alike to operate.
Freddy Martinez wondered if somehow
the broken systems of democratic account-
ability that gave rise to DDoSecrets could
be repaired. “Maybe we’ll become irrele-
vant, which might be nice,” he said. For now,
the group has become a 501(c)(3) and col-
lects small donations. It has also formed a
partnership with Harvard’s Institute for
Quantitative Social Science and established
a legal defense fund for Best, a journalist
who is believed to be the main target in the
federal investigation. (For three months this
year, the FBI prevented them from filing foia
requests, before lifting its ban in June.)
“Truth has an impact, regardless of the
respectability politics some people choose
to engage in when it comes to the alleged
sources,” Best wrote after Swiss law
enforcement, at the request of U.S. author-
ities, arrested Tillie Kottmann, a hacker
who alerted journalists to security vulner-
abilities in a vast commercial network of
surveillance cameras. “The world can no
longer be rid of hacktivists or leaktivists.
Not as long as people are willing.”
Jacob Silverman is a staff writer at
The New Republic.
8 September 2021
LOOSE TALK
RE·O·PEN·ING
BY JOHN PATRICK LEARY
G
overnor Gretchen Whitmer announced that
50 to 90
Percent of classified
Michigan would “open to full capacity” on
June 22, when the state rescinded mask mandates
and restrictions on indoor and outdoor gather-
documents that either ings. At a celebratory press conference at Detroit’s Belle Isle
were overclassified or Park, she proclaimed, “our Pure Michigan summer is back”
should not have been (a reference to a ubiquitous state tourism slogan). One might
classified at all, have expected the “reopening” celebration to take place in-
according to 2010 doors, to mark a return to pre-pandemic normalcy. But rather
congressional than convening in a previously shuttered theater or office,
testimony Whitmer stood in the summer sun, speaking of comebacks
and resilience to a sparse crowd of reporters and officials.
42
Dozens of other states are celebrating, as they, too, lift
the restrictions put in place during the pandemic’s worst
months. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo organized
fireworks displays, calling the reopening a “return to life as
we know it.” California’s Gavin Newsom, flanked by various
Percent of former minions from the Despicable Me movie franchise, announced
government officials lottery prizes worth more than $1 million apiece for those
surveyed who admitted who had been vaccinated, saying that his state had “turned
leaking information the page on the pandemic.” But the triumph these governors
to the press at least once aimed to project was shadowed by the creeping anxiety that
still surrounds pernicious Covid variants.
7
Besides this uncertainty, the word “reopening” also raises
a few questions: What was ever “closed,” when, and for
whom? Americans continued to order pizza, buy groceries,
and take their trash to the curb, confident that someone
would grow their food, make it, package it, deliver it, and take
Number of leakers the waste away regularly. Certain places were closed—like
charged under the movie theaters and ballparks—and plenty of businesses
Espionage Act between went under during the pandemic. Other workplaces mi-
1917 and 2008 grated online. Much else, though, like nursing and home
health care, carried on. So while “reopening” makes sense
13
in some cases, the note of shared victory that accompanies
it is, alas, a bit misplaced. Essential work has carried on
throughout the pandemic, and it was rarely compensated
fairly, given the dangers.
The American business system is sustained by many
Number of leakers imaginative turns of phrase that tell us that our working
charged since 2008 lives, which are generally boring, hot, tiring, frustrating,
and painful, are actually a theater of weightless magic and
3
artistic whimsy. We are told, for instance, that risk-taking
entrepreneurs (rather than self-dealing executives) and
creative innovators (instead of overburdened workers) drive
capitalism. But that fantasy relies on another, central myth:
that of “the marketplace.” We all know the marketplace is
Factor by which leak an abstraction, but we talk about it like a medieval market
investigations town, a bounded place where we arrive with our ideas, skills,
increased during Jeff products, and labor and compete for the fair rewards of a free
Sessions’s tenure as economy. That’s why we can talk, against logic and our own
attorney general experience, of “reopening” the American economy as though
it were a public square that could simply be opened and
shut. But Covid, not unlike the market itself, is persistent,
and pervasive. If only entering and exiting the pandemic
were as easy as our governors suggest.
DON ARNOLD/GETTY

OLIGARCH OF THE MONTH

RICHARD BRANSON BY ALEX SHEPHARD

M
usic-and-travel tycoon Richard Branson didn’t
quite make it to space in July, though he came
pretty close: From his VSS Unity space capsule,
he live-streamed 53.5 miles above the earth and
only 8.5 miles short of the Kármán line, where space begins.
“To all you kids down there, I was once a child with a dream
looking up to the stars,” an ecstatic Branson intoned, while
members of the Unity crew bounced, giddy and weightless,
behind him.
Branson had other reasons for joy: With hundreds of
reservations already booked, Virgin Galactic’s nascent
space tourism business seems poised for takeoff. There
are billionaire bragging rights at stake, too, with Elon Musk
(SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) also sinking a por-
tion of their unthinkably large fortunes into private space
travel in the hopes of earning it all back, and then some,
from tourism and government contracts. Indeed, Bezos’s
own rocket, New Shepard, soared higher than Unity nine
days later, sending Virgin Galactic’s share price tumbling.
Branson is genuinely adventuresome—he’s also crossed
the Pacific in a hot-air balloon—and has courted publicity
for decades, once donning a bridal gown and shaving his
beard to promote an ill-fated retail venture, Virgin Brides.
“I want Virgin to be the coolest brand on the planet and for
that, I’m prepared to dangle in the buff over Times Square,
fly over Everest in a balloon, or find myself on a bunjee [sic]
100 feet below a helicopter in a skydiver position, to be
landed among 100 buxom and beautiful female lifeguards,”
he wrote in his 2006 book, Screw It, Let’s Do It.
Branson now aims to extend Virgin’s coolness beyond
terra firma, so it might be understandable that he got a little
treacly at the thought of coming so close to his goal. It may
have been the altitude, sure. But Branson certainly also
realized that he had briefly won an ego contest against two
men even richer than him—and that he had many, many
more millions on the way.

New from the

Cato Institute
I n the age of the drone, how should we best regulate airspace
and protect privacy? In Eyes to the Sky, experts from the legal,
regulatory, policy, and civil liberty communities tackle these
pressing problems, not only highlighting how we can learn from
the history of drone regulation but also proposing policies that
will allow for an innovative and dynamic drone sector while
protecting our privacy.

AVAILABLE FROM ONLINE RETAILERS

NATIONWIDE � #CATOBOOKS

Eyes to the Sky_New Republic_4C.indd 1 7/19/21 12:10 PM


RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES
Critical
Thinking
Conservative parents win school
board seats by promising to fight
“critical race theory.”
By Jake Bittle
IN THE FALL of 2018, a Snapchat video
began circulating in the wealthy Dallas
suburb of Southlake, Texas. It showed a
group of white high school students at
a party, laughing as they chanted a racial
slur in unison. After the video went viral,
the school district held a series of listening
sessions and committee meetings around
diversity and racism that resulted in a list of
recommendations, which were then com-
piled into a “Cultural Competence Action
Plan.” The plan, released last summer in
the wake of the George Floyd protests,
proposed a series of trainings and policies
that would help “achieve student equity
and inclusion.”
10
That report made a woman named Han-
nah Smith very upset. Smith had clerked for
Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas
and Samuel Alito, but now she was a parent
with children in Southlake’s largest school
district. She viewed the cultural compe-
tence plan as evidence of a new and radical
anti-racist dogma, and earlier this year she
decided to run for school board to stop the
district from implementing it.
The spring school board election in the
district soon became not only a referendum
on “critical race theory,” the term con-
servatives have appropriated to describe
all manner of race and equity initiatives,
but also a contest for political control in a
diversifying suburb. The local Democratic
PHOTOGRAPH BY ORLANDO PINDER
Party called the conservative candidates
racist on social media, while the conserva-
tive bloc raised more than $200,000 from
a bespoke right-wing PAC. National report-
ers from Fox News and NBC covered the
election and the turmoil in the district.
When the polls closed in the first week
of May, Smith won in a landslide, beating
her opponent by more than 30 percent, as
did another conservative candidate who
ran alongside her on similar issues. Smith
told a reporter that the results proved par-
ents “don’t want racially divisive critical race
theory taught to their children or forced on
their teachers.”
The uproar in Southlake has attracted
more attention in the press than almost any
other scuffle over critical race theory, but the
idea has become a flash point issue in doz-
ens of school districts around the country,
from the suburbs of Philadelphia and Port-
land to rural swaths of Utah and Florida. The
furor originated in the backlash to the di-
versity and equity commitments that many
school districts announced after the Floyd
protests, but it has profound implications
for the midterms and beyond. Republican
donors and the right-wing media have
seized on the phenomenon as a potential
wedge issue for the suburban electorate,
and they are now doing everything they can
to invent a crisis where none exists.
MOST OF THESE tussles have followed a
predictable pattern. White parents press
incumbent school board members to take
an uncompromising stance on a hard-to-
define dogma, then react with fury when
the board members struggle to respond. In
some cases, like Southlake, these parents
are fielding their own conservative candi-
dates, putting control of the school board
in the balance. These candidates run the
gamut from engaged operatives like Smith
to political newcomers: A homemaker in
Rapid City, South Dakota, and a real estate
agent on Long Island have both won recent
elections in part by opposing the doctrine.
The issue has mobilized conservative
parents even in places that do not have a
school board election this year. A vitriolic
battle has been raging in the wealthy D.C.
suburb of Loudoun County, Virginia, since
the Washington Free Beacon reported last
September that the district had spent more
than $420,000 on diversity training and eq-
uity assessments. The next school board
elections in the county are not until 2023,
but a former Trump Justice Department
September 2021
official named Ian Prior has led an effort
to recall six members of the board before
then. Prior has reportedly accrued more
than 75 percent of the signatures needed
for at least one of the recalls. At one recent
school board meeting to discuss transgen-
der issues, chaos erupted as parents tried
to derail the meeting, resulting in at least
one arrest.
It is important to note that the phrase
“critical race theory” means something dif-
ferent in all these districts, and rarely does it
have anything to do with the school of legal
thought outlined by the scholar Kimberlé
Williams Crenshaw in the 1980s. The phrase
has become conservative shorthand for
any kind of diversity or equity training what-
soever, whether a lesson intended to help
students dissect their privilege or a teach-
er seminar on implicit bias. The perceived
threat in all these cases is that teachers
will somehow indoctrinate students with
the lessons of writers such as Ibram X.
Kendi, author of the 2019 book How to Be
an Antiracist, and Robin DiAngelo, who
wrote White Fragility in 2018.
Although recent polls show that a large
majority of Americans have no opinion
about “critical race theory,” there is no
doubt that some of the parent outrage
over the issue is sincere. Thanks to the
work of documentarian Christopher Rufo
and the willing megaphones at Fox News,
millions of conservatives now believe that
schools across the country are teaching
radical racial dogma. The freak-out over
CRT comes on the heels of a yearlong con-
flict over school reopenings, one that pitted
many white and well-to-do parents against
the interests of school boards and teach-
ers’ unions. The coincidence of these two
issues has made local education a fertile
ground for right-wing outrage, especially
as Republicans attempt to claw back Dem-
ocratic gains in the suburbs.
The upheaval in school board elec-
tions like Southlake, though, is not entirely
grassroots in nature. Smith and her fellow
conservative candidates benefited from
tens of thousands of dollars in donations,
an unusual amount for a race in which only
a few thousand people voted. The same has
been true in Loudoun County and in Rapid
City, where a retired financier recently bank-
rolled a victorious slate of four conservative
candidates. This influx of money has also
seeded multiple advocacy organizations,
which have sprung up in recent months
to combat critical race theory. These in-
clude No Left Turn in Education, founded
Signs & Wonders
by a former social worker from outside
Philadelphia, and Parents Defending Ed-
ucation, which maintains a shady map of
ever-multiplying places where students are
supposedly suffering beneath the yoke of
racial dogma. (In one district, for instance,
a teacher used a nonbinary “snowperson”
to teach students about gender identity.)
However, the most prominent public
face of this political mobilization is not a
parent at all, but a childless, 34-year-old
political operative named Ryan Girdusky. A
native of Queens, New York, and a veteran
of several Republican campaigns, Girdusky
in May launched what he called the “1776
Project PAC,” intending to raise money he
could funnel into school board elections
this November. When I reached him over
the phone in mid-June, he told me that he
had founded the group after he heard that
his nine-year-old cousin had learned police
officers “only follow Black cars, they don’t
follow white cars.” He said he had raised
more than $100,000 in the three weeks
since he launched the PAC and plans to
raise more—enough to move the needle in
multiple elections. Donations were com-
ing at a steady trickle until Tucker Carlson
highlighted the project, at which point the
money started flowing from all corners.
These weren’t deep-pocketed donors
either, but small-dollar contributors com-
pelled to action by the outrage machine.
It is no coincidence that this surge of
political activity has arrived right after a
Democrat took over the Oval Office. The
moral panic over CRT is a kind of right-wing
mirror image of the #Resistance movement
that exploded in the first years of the Trump
era, when the interests of pissed-off liber-
als and deep-pocketed donors aligned at
a fortuitous political moment. The explicit
goal of organizations like 1776 Project PAC
and Parents Defending Education is to spin
the fervor around critical race theory into
discernible electoral gains. Once installed
on local school boards, these CRT skeptics
could have the power to ban diversity train-
ing for teachers, buy new textbooks, and
fire superintendents they don’t like.
But the more profound possibility is that
the uproar over CRT will lay the ground-
work for Republican mobilization in next
year’s midterm elections. Republicans be-
lieve they have identified a social issue they
can use to cleave suburban voters away
from the Democratic Party’s social liber-
alism, and they intend to exploit that issue
for everything it is worth. The electoral
future of their party may depend on it.
DONALD’S
PLOT
AGAINST
AMERICA
Now, he and his GOP
enablers are peddling
the Second Big Lie: that
January 6 was just
legitimate protest. It’s the
crucial ingredient in
convincing America to
return them—and him—
to power. By Mary L. Trump
 I felt as though I had stumbled

DINA LITOVSKY/REDUX FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC

across a crime scene so violent that
I couldn’t process it, let alone syn-
thesize the images in front of me.
The parts remained stubbornly
separate, and there was no way to grasp the mean-
ing of the whole. ¶ In the early afternoon of Janu-
ary 6, while the mob was still swarming the stairs
of the Capitol, I was asked in an interview what I
thought of the unfolding situation. I watched the
crowd that had been stoked that morning by my
uncle, and by Republicans like Ted Cruz, Josh
Hawley, and Mo Brooks, with their Confederate
flags, their maga hats, and their Camp Auschwitz
shirts; I watched the smoke (the origin of which
I couldn’t yet discern) drift through the air, and I
heard their shouts of grievance and anger. It
looked like a scene from a failed country whose
government had just been toppled, a banana re-
public; but it was the United States of America,
my country, our country, and, knowing who was
responsible for the chaos here, the first word that
came to my mind was “tawdry.”

14 September 2021
 Of course, it was so much more than
that—so much more dangerous and se-
rious than that, as we would eventually
find out. At around 2:15, while Republicans
Cruz and Paul Gosar were objecting to the
legitimate results of the election, the insur-
rectionists breached the Capitol, Congress
was adjourned, and frantic attempts were
made to get the vice president and all of
the senators and representatives to safety.
Two hours later, the Georgia Senate race
was called for Jon Ossoff. It mattered, cer-
tainly; it meant that the Democrats would
control the Senate. But there was no room
for celebration. After four years of Donald’s
incessant attacks and ineptitude, we were
already exhausted. Joe Biden’s victory was
supposed to have offered us some reprieve,
but having given Donald room to promote
his Big Lie, elected Republicans had now
granted him the opportunity to incite an
insurrection. So there would be no respite
from the madness, from Donald’s particular
blend of mendacity, cruelty, and destruc-
tiveness. There would be no celebrating.
That horrific day—which we now know
General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, referred to as a “Reichstag
moment”—was bracketed by Donald’s
incendiary speech given just before noon
and a video released two hours after the
Capitol had been breached that added more
fuel to the fire. The speech itself was full
of grievances—lies about the “landslide
election” that had been stolen from him,
threats to Mike Pence, whom he led the
crowd to believe had the power to overturn
the results of the election, fabulations about
people voting as Santa Claus and Dem-
ocrats’ taking down statues of Jefferson
and Lincoln, and calls to action demand-
PREVIOUS SPREAD, WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY; THIS PAGE, ASHLEY GILBERTSON/VII/REDU​X
ing that the crowd force Congress to “do
the right thing.” In the 62-second video,
Donald says the word peace three times,
presumably because somebody convinced
him he had to distance himself from the
role he played in stoking the mob’s violence;
but, because he can never help himself in
these instances, he kept hammering away
at what was supposedly stolen from them.
The video sickened me just as the “apology”
video he recorded after the Access Holly-
wood tape was released had sickened me.
I feared the same result—that there would
be no consequences.
That night, after I was finally able to turn
off the news, the only two things I knew
with absolute certainty were: one, that for
the first time in our nation’s history there
had not been a peaceful transfer of power,
Features
American terrorists, January 6, 2021
because my uncle, who could not accept
his resounding defeat and the humiliation
that came with it, had attempted to in-
spire a coup; and two, the next two weeks
before Joe Biden’s inauguration would be
the most dangerous this country had ever
lived through.
On November 7, after Joe Biden was
declared the winner, Donald began ped-
dling the Big Lie—massive voter fraud and
cheating by Democrats had turned Donald’s
landslide victory into a loss. The phrase “the
Big Lie,” coined by Adolf Hitler, describes
the technique of saying something so out-
rageously false that people will believe it
simply because they think nobody would
have the audacity to lie so brazenly. This
has been a specialty of Donald’s since, as
a teenager, he had to convince his father
everything he did was always the biggest,
the greatest, and the best. Back then, his lies
protected him from his father’s wrath. The
Big Lie about the election protected him
from having to face the deep narcissistic
wound he’d suffered after losing to Biden. In
addition, it kept his base riled up—keeping
them afraid of what a Biden administra-
tion planned to take away from them (or
force upon them) and enraged by what he
claimed had been stolen from them.
In Donald’s January 6 video, the Sec-
ond Big Lie was born. By telling them that
they are loved and special, he transformed
the violent anti-American mob into pa-
triots who had merely been trying to save
their country from the Democratic Party’s
treasonous attempt to steal the election
from him—and therefore from them. We’ve
seen how this has become a strategy for
almost every single Republican politician
as well. Despite the testimony given by D.C.
police officers Daniel Hodges and Michael
Fanone, Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn,
and Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell in
front of the House select committee on July
27, which was impossible for any empathet-
ic human being to watch without feeling
a visceral rage and profound sadness, this
will continue to be the Republican strategy.
They know that if midterm voters still re-
member the truth about January 6, they’re
in trouble. The insurrection of January 6
should have been a wake-up call. It looks,
instead, to have been a dress rehearsal.
I
N THE MIND-BOGGLINGLY LONG
and destabilizing year since the
publication of my first book, Too
Much and Never Enough, Amer-
ica’s weaknesses and structural
deficiencies have been laid bare
because one man, Donald John
Trump, did something none of his prede-
cessors would have dreamed of doing—
through his destruction of norms, he actively
set out to undermine and dismantle the very
institutions that were designed, in part, to
protect us from leaders like him. Keeping
him in check required a functioning legis-
lative branch and Cabinet secretaries, like
15
the attorney general or the head of health
and human services—who were willing to
act with some independence—to put coun-
try over party. But having shown himself
incapable of building anything, Donald
has always been expert at tearing things
down. In this endeavor, he has had plenty
of sycophants, enablers, and users, just as
he has throughout his life. And Republicans
saw a way to make the most of it.
As a politician, Donald has benefited
greatly from his rabid base of supporters.
He embodies their fear and gives expres-
sion to their grievance. He doesn’t just
give them permission to indulge in their
white supremacy; he champions it. He
makes them feel good about their preju-
dices. Following him by denying the virus
or claiming immunity from it is another
way for them to feel superior. It’s bizarre,
because in the process they are putting
themselves and those they love at risk,
but it is similar to the function lynching
has historically served for white people.
Lynchings are not only about showing
the power of the aggressor but also about
demonstrating the other person’s weakness
and total subservience. That makes sense
in the context of what white supremacists
and white supremacy were trying to ac-
complish, because, in an incurably racist
society, the power so clearly belonged to
the one race, and the vulnerabilities so
clearly belonged to the other. The response
to Covid—the denialism and disdain for
science—functions the same way, but in
this case, whether they acknowledge the
reality and the risk or not, the denialists
are victims, too. These are devout (for
lack of a better word) Republicans. If the
people they’ve voted for, at every level of
government, equate mask-wearing with
being liberal or claim that worrying about
catching a deadly virus somehow makes
you weak, you will follow their lead. Donald
took it a step further. In order to demon-
strate their allegiance and support, it was
no longer enough for them to attend a rally.
They had to do so in the middle of a deadly
pandemic without social distancing or
wearing a mask.
That’s the part that is confounding. But
it demonstrates how deeply it matters to
them that they, at least in their own minds,
maintain a position of superiority over
those they consider less-than—particularly
Black Americans and immigrants—and
stay connected to a man who, through a
mesmerizing dance of his followers’ micro-
concessions and his own micro-aggressions
16
against them, keeps them in thrall. That
their children are dying or their parents and
friends are dying isn’t beside the point—it
is the point.
It’s impossible to understand the appeal
Donald has for his followers if we try to do
so from the perspective of people who value
honor, decency, empathy, and kindness in
their leaders. It isn’t that they see things
in Donald that aren’t there. They identify
with what is—the brazenness of his lies,
his ability to commit crimes with impuni-
ty, his bottomless sense of grievance, his
monumental insecurity, his bullying, and,
perhaps most intriguing, the fact that he
is an inveterate failure who keeps being
allowed to succeed. Donald is their proxy
and their representative. And their ardor
has only seemed to grow since his loss. We
need only look at data from North Carolina
Senate candidate Ted Budd’s campaign
to see how complete this identification is.
When Republican primary voters were told
that Budd had been endorsed by Donald,
there was a 45-point net swing in his favor,
skyrocketing him to a 19-point lead over
his primary opponent. The idea that any
other one-term president (George H.W.
Bush or Jimmy Carter) would have had
the same kind of influence is laughable.
On the other hand, though, neither one
of them would have tried.
By the same token, elected Republicans,
Donald’s chief enablers, see Donald as a
means of perpetuating their own power.
But they aren’t just putting up with the
worst of him simply because they see him
as a means to an end. He is them. They
value his mendacity and his name-calling
and his autocracy because these work for
them as well.
Republicans counter truth with absur-
dity, rendering the truth inoperable. Now
a party of fascists, they call Democrats
socialist communist Marxists, which is
effective in part because it is so nonsensical
and in part because they are never asked
to define the terms. They cover up their
massive (and successful) efforts at voter
suppression with wild claims of widespread
voter fraud, which essentially doesn’t
exist—31 incidents in over a billion votes
cast, a number so vanishingly small as to
have no meaning.
The main mechanism by which they
can successfully carry out these sleights of
hand is fear. Whether it’s drug dealers from
Mexico or caravans from Central America
or Democratic presidents coming for your
guns, abolishing religion, or letting gay
people get married, they need to keep their
voters afraid.
Mr. Lockwood, the frame-narrator of
Wuthering Heights, describes a feverish
nightmare in which, during a blizzard, he
sees a child outside his window begging to
be let in. He is so undone by the appear-
ance of this wraith that he drags its wrist
across the broken pane of glass, until its
blood soaks his bedsheets. “Terror made me
cruel,” he says. Fear is a deeply unpleasant
emotion, and Republicans have become
expert at stoking it, on the one hand, and
transforming it into anger on the other.
This state of affairs makes it much easier
for their followers to become comfortable
with the cruelty of their leaders—whether
of policy or of action—as long as it is direct-
ed at groups they’ve been told they should
fear. It also makes it easier for the Repub-
lican rank and file to be comfortable with
their own cruelty—it feels better than fear,
and it allows them to delude themselves
into thinking they have some measure of
control, because they have been granted
permission by the powers that be to express
their cruelty with impunity.
E
LECTED REPUBLICANS
have become Donald’s
greatest enablers since
his father, Fred. For all
of their professed reluc-
tance and half-hearted
attempts to keep Donald
at arm’s length, almost every single elected
Republican at every level of government, ei-
ther tacitly or enthusiastically, very quickly
came to support his breaches—against de-
cency, the rule of law, and the Constitution.
Kevin McCarthy went from being one of
Donald’s critics in the immediate aftermath
of January 6 to pretending that creating a
commission to find out what happened
on that day was somehow a partisan witch
hunt. Elise Stefanik intuited that going all
in with Donald would be her best chance
for advancement. The number three Re-
publican in Congress, Liz Cheney, had the
audacity to stand up against the Big Lie, for
which she was removed from her leadership
position and replaced by Stefanik.
The most dangerous Republican enabler
by far is, of course, Mitch McConnell, who
saw an opportunity that even he probably
never dared hope for: The guy in the Oval
Office wouldn’t just sign off on every aspect
of the Republicans’ agenda, he would push
the envelope—of decorum, of autocracy—
so far that the system itself could be used
September 2021
 It was possible for
Donald, the weakest man
I have ever known,
to exploit the weaknesses
in the system not
because he introduced
them, but because they
were there for him to
exploit in the first place.  premacy. How else do we grapple with the
to create permanent minority rule. Donald
showed his party (and yes, it is his party)
the limits of pretending to care about good
governance or play by the rules. He also
showed them the utility of not just stoking
racism and hatred of the Other—in the
form of immigrants, Democrats, and even
epidemiologists—but championing those
who espoused them.
McConnell is the greatest traitor to this
country since Robert E. Lee (with the dif-
ference that McConnell has been trying to
take our country down from within). He
has always been expert at using existing
rules and procedures in ways they weren’t
intended to be used, and yet—whether it
was denying Merrick Garland a hearing,
pushing through Amy Coney Barrett’s
confirmation, or ending the filibuster as
it applied to Supreme Court nominees
but employing it to block legislation that
would expand voting rights—his anti-dem-
ocratic maneuvers have been performed
within the bounds of the system. The fact
that he’s misusing the system outlined in
the Constitution isn’t an exoneration of
Features
him, however; it’s a condemnation of the
Constitution’s limitations. The definition
of treason in the Constitution is so narrow
(levying war against the country or giving
aid and comfort to the enemy) that a case
could never be made against him. It would
be difficult, however, to find anybody in
modern times who has so undermined
our democracy.
This destruction of norms by Donald
and other Republicans in the executive and
legislative branches has happened so quick-
ly, and has been so thorough, that it’s clear
the seeds of it must have been planted a long
time ago. It was possible for Donald, the
weakest man I have ever known, to exploit
the weaknesses in the system not because
he introduced them, but because they were
there for him to exploit in the first place.
These situations are not the result of
four years or even four decades of poor
governance—although the worsening of
the problem has certainly accelerated since
Ronald Reagan’s disastrous presidency. The
combination of “trickle-down” econom-
ics, his devastating handling of the aids
crisis, and the intensification of the “War
on Drugs,” with all of its racist implications,
accelerated the divide between Americans
along economic, cultural, and racial di-
mensions. But we really need to go back
to this country’s inception to understand
how we got here and to assess how we can
possibly repair the extensive damage. With
Joe Biden’s election, we did indeed snatch
democracy from the jaws of autocracy—a
rarity in human history. But as the insur-
rection of January 6 made clear, we are not
out of the woods yet—far from it.
I
CON TEND THAT WE HAVE
arrived at this fraught political
moment in which it feels that
everything is at stake because of
our long history of, on the one
hand, failing to hold powerful
white men accountable and, on
the other, the normalization of white su-
fact that we Americans appear so spectacu-
larly vulnerable to corrupt and incompetent
leaders? How else do we understand the
breathtaking extent to which the feder-
al government, because of the cynicism,
selfishness, and opportunism of one man,
proved incapable of managing the crises of
Covid and the ensuing economic fallout?
How else do we explain the effectiveness
of Donald’s strategy of race-based divi-
sion? And how do we avoid acknowledging
that supporting him or even accepting
him meant that institutionalized racism
was not only not a deal breaker, it was an
effective political strategy?
The initial response of Donald’s admin-
istration to the pandemic was driven by his
inability to take it seriously. Once the virus
had undeniably taken hold here, Donald
hung on to the fact that it had originated
in China, which allowed him to make it
about the Other from the outset. In spring
of 2020, when Covid was spreading almost
exclusively in blue states, and later, when
it became clear that Black Americans were
being disproportionately affected, it was
easier for him to dismiss the danger. Even
when it became clear that no one was safe,
he made the case that Americans had to
choose between combating the virus
and saving the economy, squandering
what could have been an extraordinari-
ly unifying moment for this country.
But Donald has no interest in unity. He
thrives on division and chaos—much of
it racially driven. We saw this in the way
he exploited the backlash against Barack
17
 The Republicans haven’t
Obama’s presidency, thereby giving his
base permission to express their racism
even more openly and proudly.
The Republicans haven’t lost their way.
They have, instead, found it. And it has led
them straight toward unabashed white
lost their way. They
supremacy and fascism. This is nothing
new. We saw what happened after the Civil have, instead, found it.
And it has led them
War. The traitors of the Confederacy were
given a pass by the North, and the prom-
ise to grant freedmen and women their
40 acres was largely reneged in the in-
terest of reestablishing “national unity.”
Because of the enormity of the North’s
straight toward
postbellum failures and the terrorist tactics
employed by the re-empowered Southern
unabashed white
supremacy and fascism.
Redeemers—those believers in the Lost
Cause, who are the direct ancestors of those
who sullied the Capitol Rotunda with their
Confederate flags—the Black vote in the
South was all but eliminated. The large
majority of the electorate of the Southern
slave states remained racist and reaction-
ary, allowing the South to continue as a
closed, fascist state for another century.

O
NLY THE DEMOCRATS
and the media can
save democracy from
fascism. But the Demo-
crats are split between
the activists who un-
derstand the stakes,
and the institutionalists who keep fol-
lowing a rule book the Republicans lit on
fire a long time ago. On the one side, the
progressives and pragmatists, senators like
Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, and Amy
Klobuchar, seem to understand the urgency
of the problem—American democracy can’t
survive if we fail to realize that the United
States Senate is currently operating under
the tyranny of the minority. On the other
side, institutionalists like Joe Manchin
and Dianne Feinstein cling to the idea that
maintaining long-standing mechanisms
like the filibuster, which is not in the Con-
stitution and impedes the Senate’s ability
to act democratically, is more important
than enacting legislation that would, on
the one hand, help the American people in
substantive ways while bolstering Biden’s
presidency and, on the other, prevent the
Republican Party from turning this country
into an apartheid state. It remains to be
seen whether President Biden himself, who
understands the workings of the body in
which he served for almost 40 years, will be
able to transcend his own institutionalist
leanings. His July 13 speech on voting rights
was a powerful repudiation of Republican
voter suppression—but he didn’t mention
the filibuster once.
What happens next also depends on
how the media portray what’s currently
going on. In 2016, the media lent Donald’s
run a gravitas and seriousness it hadn’t
earned. The Senate’s failure to convict him
of impeachment the first time around was
a crucial moment, as it allowed Donald to
campaign for the 2020 election as if he were
a legitimate candidate—but this time with
all of the attendant powers of incumbency,
including the massive bullhorn. By asking
him questions they would ask any other
candidate, the media didn’t just confer
upon him legitimacy, they erased the fact
that he was a traitor to his country who
had been impeached for abuse of power
and obstruction of Congress after seeking
the help of a foreign power (for the second
time) in undermining his political oppo-
nent. Anybody who was paying attention
knew the trial Republicans put on was a
sham, a shabby bit of political theater, the
outcome of which was a foregone conclu-
sion. “I am trying to give a pretty clear
signal I have made up my mind,” said Sen-
ator Lindsey Graham before the trial even
began. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a
fair juror here.”
Since the election was called for Joe
Biden, the media have done reasonably
well calling the Big Lie what it is, and yet
Republicans who lie about the Big Lie con-
tinue to be given a platform. There are
propaganda outlets, led by Fox News, that
amplify the lies of the Republican Party
while distorting (or ignoring) facts. Many
in the mainstream media, however, act as
if journalistic neutrality means giving both
sides equal time no matter the content of
their message.
The Republicans continue to think that
Donald is somebody whom they need.
While it’s true that Trumpism, so-called,
doesn’t scale, and that only Donald can
carry the mantle of Trumpism, the fact
that it’s not a winning formula (after all,
Republicans, largely thanks to Donald,
lost the House, the Senate, and the White
House) is completely irrelevant. They
continue to embrace Donald because
they need him to keep the Big Lie alive
in order to maintain the support of the
base, so they can advance their voter-
suppression legislation while continuing to
cast doubt on the last election by pushing
for audits in states, like Arizona, where the
popular voter margin was narrow.
Every undemocratic facet of our system—
from the filibuster to the Electoral College

18 September 2021
to voter suppression to failing to make
the District of Columbia a state—favors
Republicans. They have no incentive to
change anything. Tens of millions of vot-
ers may be effectively disenfranchised by
their legislation and faux-audits, but their
voters are not. The endgame is to make
it impossible for people who would vote
against them to vote at all. In a country
of changing demographics and increas-
ing openness to diversity, at a time when
elected Republicans are on the wrong side
of almost every issue—gun safety, taxes,
voting rights—they know the only way
for them to cling to power is to cheat, and
if there is one skill the de facto leader of
their party has, it’s his ability to cheat his
way out of—or into—just about anything.
Trumpism doesn’t need to scale. Repub-
licans just need to keep that 35 percent so
riled up that the base seems bigger than it
is while they quietly make sure the rest of
us don’t have a voice.
T
HE S TA K E S ARE
incredibly high in every
election going forward.
The 2020 election was
more important than
2016, and 2022 will be
more important than
2020. We can’t discount the pernicious
influence of white supremacy, which is
not just an extremist movement. It’s not
just the KKK, the Proud Boys, the Oath
Keepers. It is the mainstream of the Re-
publican Party, and we don’t need to
qualify it.
Not only can’t Republicans give up their
white supremacy, it turns out they don’t
have to. It has been and continues to be
a winning strategy. Donald got 62 million
votes in 2016 and 74 million votes in 2020.
Though Biden’s win was decisive, Republi-
cans overall beat expectations, picking up
seats in the House and becoming a minority
in the Senate that, because of the filibuster,
functionally leaves them with an enormous
amount of leverage. We desperately need-
ed a total repudiation of Donald and his
Republican enablers. We did not get one.
It’s a tragedy, but it comes from having
for decades convinced their electorate to
vote against its own economic self-interest
in the name of racial superiority. Their
attitudes in this matter are positional. The
question for them isn’t just “Am I doing
well?” but “Am I doing better than?” And
we all know who it is they need to be out-
performing. As long as that is what matters
Features
to them, they will double down on white
supremacy and hatred of the other side
while maintaining their ability to do so
through gerrymandering and voter sup-
pression. That’s all they’ve got.
On July 6, President Biden tweeted,
“Six months ago today, insurrectionists
carried out a violent and deadly assault
on our Capitol. It was a test of whether
our democracy could survive. Half a year
later we can declare unequivocally that
democracy did prevail. Now, it falls on all
of us to protect and preserve it.”
This well-intentioned statement misses
the mark. The danger hasn’t passed—in
fact, as Republicans continue their almost
universal support for the first Big Lie, while
using it to promote hundreds of sweeping
voter-suppression laws in almost every
state, they are now lining up behind the Sec-
ond Big Lie, which is that the insurrection
of January 6 was an inside job perpetrat-
ed by the FBI, or that the violent attempt
to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power
with the intention of hunting down the
speaker of the House and hanging the vice
president was a fun-filled protest carried
out by wonderful real Americans like Ashli
Babbitt, the latest martyr to their cause.
Now, those who participated (and their
supporters) are being told that it is they
who have been wronged, it is they who are
the patriots, and only they whose voices
deserve to be heard.
Republicans have made it clear that
going forward they will embrace whichever
version of the Second Big Lie is most useful
in the moment—causing the kind of cog-
nitive dissonance they have become quite
comfortable with. It’s absurd—but it’s also
effective with enough of their voters that
we can’t dismiss it, just as we can’t dismiss
Donald. It’s exhausting. And it’s infuriating.
But we look away at our peril. Democrats
need to accept that there is no longer any-
thing to hope for from their Republican
colleagues. For all intents and purposes,
we currently live in a country with only one
functioning political party that is working
to make the lives of all Americans better,
only one party that believes in democracy.
Democrats must stop squandering their
advantage as they waste time waiting for
Republicans to feel shame. They have none.
Over the four years Donald was in the Oval
Office, there were any number of opportu-
nities for Republicans to break with a man
who, at every turn, undermined everything
they claimed to have stood for—law and
order, the military, moral conservatism,
fiscal responsibility, and small government.
And yet they never did.
January 6 should have been a wake-up
call for all of us, Republicans in particular.
Initially at least, some of them had been
scared enough by a mob intent on com-
mitting violence against any member of
Congress they came across to recognize that
the monster they’d deluded themselves into
thinking they controlled could not, after
all, be tamed. Instead, they have followed
Donald’s lead. Less than six months after
the fact, Georgia Representative Andrew
Clyde claimed the insurrection was a “bold-
faced lie” and nothing more than “a normal
tourist visit,” despite the fact that there is a
photo of him rushing to help barricade the
door against the mob. Donald continues
to double down on his claim that these
were peaceful people and actually said
“there was such love at that rally.” There
has been no pushback from Republican
leadership. There can’t be. They know that
any investigation into what happened
that day is a losing proposition for them—
either because they’ve been covering it over
or because they’re guilty of sedition. They
also know that the 2022 election will turn
in part on how many Americans they can
convince of the Second Big Lie: that the
insurrection never happened.
And as far as the 2024 presidential
election is concerned, I initially thought
Donald wouldn’t run. Even if he managed
to convince himself that he had won but the
Democrats had somehow stolen the victory
from him, his defeat was so resounding,
I believed that, although he might pre-
tend to run as a way to raise money and
keep the spotlight on himself, he would
never put himself in that position again.
Now I’m not so sure. As has been the case
since my grandfather discovered that his
second son could be of use to him, ev-
erything has broken his way. In this case,
almost the entire Republican Party has
backed not one but two Big Lies that ben-
efit him. If enough people buy into the
Second Big Lie, if enough of those voter-
suppression laws pass and Republicans
make significant gains in Congress and
state legislatures in 2022, Donald might
begin to think that a win in 2024 would be
a sure thing for him, and he might make
the decision to run after all. And if he were
to win ... there would be no coming back
from that.
Mary L. Trump’s new book, The Reckoning: Our
Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, will
be released on August 17.
19
TWENTY YEARS ON,
ARE WE ANY SMARTER?
Our foreign policy wise people responded to 9/11 by embracing
belligerence. What, if anything, have they learned?
By Jordan Michael Smith Illustration by Alex Williamson
ON A WARM JUNE EVENING IN DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN, The United States has been successful

BARRY IVERSON/GETTY (BASHAR AL ASSAD); CHIP HIRES/GETTY (QADDAFI); JOHN MOORE/GETTY (HELICOPTER); DAVID BOHRER/U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES/GETTY (BUSH/CHENEY)
FALLUJAH); SHUTTERSTOCK/AP (DETAINEE AT ABU GHRAIB); GETTY (MAP); U.S. NAVY/GETTY (MARINES); ETHAN MILLER/GETTY (DRONE); UNIVERSAL HISTORY/GETTY (ISIS FLAG); REUTERS (ISIS FIGHTER);
PREVIOUS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: CHRIS HONDROS/GETTY, SPENCER PLATT/GETTY (GROUND ZERO X2); JOHN MOORE/GETTY (GUANTÁNAMO); SCOTT PETERSON/GETTY (U.S. MARINES IN
in some areas. Most notably, foreign ter-
tourists hoping to visit the National September 11 Memorial & rorists have not attacked American soil
Museum are disappointed. The spot is closed after 5 p.m., a security en masse since 9/11. “It’s simply harder
guard repeats patiently to visitors. From behind a rope, the tourists for foreign jihadists to attack the United
States at this stage,” said Steven Simon,
look at the spaces where the Twin Towers used to be. The names of
who worked on Middle East affairs at the
the 2,977 people killed by Al Qaeda in September 2001 are etched National Security Council (NSC) during
into bronze parapets surrounding two pools. Water flows down the Clinton and Obama administrations.
30 feet in clear streams over the walls into the pools. During the day, Clarke said that increased funding for
technology, the proliferation of surveil-
if you are close enough to the water, the endless noise of the city lance cameras, and the development of
is drowned out. But on nights like this one, New York’s cacophony facial recognition technology have reduced
makes itself heard here. If you close your eyes, it doesn’t sound very American vulnerabilities. Simon agreed,
saying, “Ranging from the creation of the
different than it did before the terrorists devastated the buildings.
Homeland Security Department to much
This September marks the twentieth anniversary of the attacks. tighter defenses along borders, it’s harder to
“Everybody was traumatized,” remembered Richard Clarke, the chief get into the country.” Cooperation between
counterterrorism adviser at the time. In the immediate aftermath, intelligence agencies and law enforcement
is far better than it was.
Clarke said, the Bush administration was mainly concerned with In addition, Al Qaeda leader Osama
reacting swiftly to prevent another attack. “[We were trying] to put bin Laden was killed in 2011, and 9/11
ourselves in the heads of Al Qaeda, imagine what they might do next, mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
was captured in 2003. Military strikes and
and that was difficult because there were so many vulnerabilities,
raids have eliminated many other jihad-
particularly back then, and a very long list of things they could do.” is, notably Islamic State leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi. isis is fragile today. And,
Perhaps inevitably, fear and anger through such causes as war-related disease finally, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
influenced U.S. policymaking in the weeks and water shortages. As of last year, the was captured.
and months after the attacks. But so did wars have cost about $6.4 trillion, and there Even those successes are complicated,
other tendencies with deeper sources in will be the future costs of service members’ however. Hussein’s overthrow created the
Washington foreign policy establishment long-lasting benefits. And finally, the wars opening for what became isis. Moham-
circles: delusions of grandeur, threat in- have created at least 37 million refugees. med was tortured repeatedly, and he still
flation, faith in the ability of armed force In addition, civil liberties have been awaits trial at Guantánamo Bay, along with
to solve political problems, and a refusal to curtailed, innocent Muslims have been en- 39 other detainees, underscoring America’s
accept limits and trade-offs. As President trapped and targeted, and the constant inability to counter the terrorist threat
George W. Bush’s fatefully termed “Global drumbeat about defeating Islamists abroad while adhering to the rule of law. And while
War on Terror” enters its third decade, its has fueled rampant Islamophobia and white jihadis have not attacked American soil en
enormous costs proliferate. nationalism at home. “The anti-Muslim masse in the past two decades, this could
The price tag is staggering. More than discourse that arose in the wake of 9/11 was have been achieved at significantly low-
7,000 American military personnel have a vector through which open racism and er costs, by relying mostly on defensive
died in the U.S.-led wars worldwide since open bigotry was smuggled back into the measures after ousting the Taliban and
9/11, and as of 2015, another 50,000-plus mainstream of American politics,” said Matt wounding Al Qaeda in late 2001.
had been wounded. An additional 30,000 Duss, Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy ad- There is no consensus on why the United
active-duty personnel and veterans of these viser. Broad, hateful generalizations about States has remained free of major terrorist
wars have died by suicide. More than 7,402 Muslims and Islam became permissible attacks for the past two decades. “We do not
U.S. contractors were also killed, in Afghani- because of the trauma of the attacks. “I know why there has been no mass casualty
stan and Iraq alone. The direct deaths in the think it normalized these sorts of claims attack in the United States like the 9/11
wars were upward of 800,000, but Brown about different groups of people, immi- assault,” said Simon. “We do know that Al
University’s Costs of War project, which grants, Latinos, Asians, Black people, or Qaeda got very lucky in 2001. We do not
supplied the data in this paragraph, found others,” Duss said. Donald Trump exploited know whether there was a workable Plan B.
that several times that were killed indirectly that bigotry in his 2016 election campaign. We know that there were many Al Qaeda

22 September 2021
operatives worldwide when we started
to look for them, but we do not know if
they were prepared to sustain a campaign
against the U.S. homeland.”
Bush had alternatives. He could have
targeted Al Qaeda exclusively and ex-
plained that terrorism should be dealt
with by mostly nonmilitary means. He
could have counseled Americans to be
resilient and avoid overreacting even as
news programs endlessly repeated clips
of the planes hitting the towers. “We, the
United States, missed an off-ramp which
could have been taken a few weeks—at
most, a few months—after the initial [Af-
ghanistan] intervention in the fall of 2001,”
said Paul Pillar, then the CIA’s national
intelligence officer for the Near East and
South Asia.
There was enormous global solidarity
with the United States after the attacks,
and there was a way to build on that, Duss
said. Leaders could have emphasized the
shared vulnerability countries have to
transnational jihadis and worked with the
international community to both contain
terrorism and address its root causes. “The
Bush administration made a rhetorical
head fake in that direction, but the policy of
endless global war spoke for itself,” he said.
There are not only retrospective as-
sertions. Astute critics offered these
Our many failures these past 20 years
have not led to a widespread rethinking of
America’s foreign policy assumptions.
And what’s worse, the toll that the war
on terrorism continues to take on American
power, prestige, and domestic cohesion
makes it significantly harder to compete
with China.
Features
prescriptions contemporaneously. “Massive
military force is not a winning weapon
against these enemies. It makes the prob-
lem worse,” the political scientist John
Mearsheimer wrote in The New York Times
in November 2001, arguing against the
United States sending American troops
to Afghanistan. He advocated a patient
strategy oriented around “clever diploma-
cy, intelligence-gathering, and carefully
selected military strikes.”
Michael Howard, the eminent British
historian, argued that the Bush administra-
tion’s war framework would have disastrous
implications. “To declare that one is at war
is immediately to create a war psychosis,”
he said in London in late 2001. “It arouses
an immediate expectation, and demand, for
spectacular military action against some
easily identifiable adversary, preferably a
hostile state—action leading to decisive
results.” Instead, Howard recommend-
ed a policing project—ideally led by the
United Nations and international courts,
although he had no illusions about that
happening—that isolated terrorists rather
than elevated their importance.
Instead, the foreign policy establish-
ment almost universally saw 9/11 as a call
to arms equivalent to a world war. Intel-
lectuals needed to play a major role. The
Weekly Standard, the journalistic home
of neoconservatism that would shape the
Bush team’s thinking, said, “We have been
called out of trivial concerns,” adding, “We
live, for the first time since World War II,
with a horizon once again.” Christopher
Hitchens seemed to speak for many when
he declared that, in addition to nausea and
anger, he felt “exhilaration” at the attacks. “I
realized that if the battle went on until the
last day of my life, I would never get bored
in prosecuting it to the utmost,” he wrote.
Indeed, while the war on terrorism has
devastated countries and killed scores of
people, it hasn’t been boring. Unfortu-
nately, it isn’t completed, either. The war
on terrorism is now entering its fourth
phase. The first and most impactful phase
was the Hegemonic: an attempt to use
armed force to end challenges to Ameri-
can predominance. The second phase was
Internationalist, as first Bush rhetorically
and then Barack Obama in practice tried to
wage a campaign that balanced democracy
promotion, multilateralism, and signature
strikes as a counterterrorism strategy. Don-
ald Trump marked the Jacksonian phase,
defined by a combination of Islamophobia,
nativism, and sporadic uses of force. Pres-
ident Joe Biden looks to be beginning a
Moderate Internationalist phase, reflecting
some of the limits imposed on the United
States after two decades at war.
The good news is that the foreign policy
establishment has learned some lessons.
In particular, there seems to be a morato-
rium on trying to build a functioning state
elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East.
“Most in the foreign policy community
would oppose another conflict of choice in
the Middle East,” Biden national security
adviser Jake Sullivan wrote in 2018. If an-
other large terrorist attack occurred, “I am
not so confident that we would try a massive
state-building effort to build a new gov-
ernment,” said the Brookings Institution’s
Michael O’Hanlon, who was an important
supporter of the Iraq War in real time.
But as Sullivan’s and O’Hanlon’s remarks
imply, even skepticism of state-building
is tenuous. Our many failures these past
20 years have not led to a widespread re-
thinking of U.S. foreign policy assumptions.
23
And what’s worse, the toll that the war on
terrorism continues to take on American
power, prestige, and domestic cohesion
makes it significantly harder to compete
with China, which appears to be a more
vexing and important problem than ter-
rorism ever was.
THE PREHISTORY OF THE
POST-9/11 ERA
THE SOURCES OF AMERICA’S POST-9/11
conduct date to at least the closing years
of the Cold War, when the United States
found itself devoid of both an enemy and
a strategy. The national security state was
constructed after World War II to counter
the Soviet Union, so the demise of that em-
pire should have led lawmakers to rethink
U.S. foreign policy radically. There was
much talk in those days of the “peace div-
idend” that would help solve domestic ills.
Well ... maybe it was inertia. Or maybe
states simply cannot limit themselves.
Whatever it was, officials declined a scaled-
down global role. Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell joked in 1991,
“I’m running out of demons, I’m running
out of villains.” Instead of reducing capa-
bilities and ambitions commensurate with
an unprecedentedly secure environment,
Powell approved a strategy that envisioned
enlarging U.S. ambitions.
Two Pentagon staffers—I. Lewis “Scoot-
er” Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, who
were influential after 9/11—helped draft a
1992 strategy report for Powell, Defense
Undersecretary Paul Wolf­ owitz, and
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who all
signed off on it. “Our first objective is to
prevent the reemergence of a new rival,”
the policy statement read. Not to protect
Americans or secure the republic, but to
maintain the country’s supremacy. Ac-
cording to the strategy, the United States
needed to “dete[r] competitors from even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role”
and to use military action unilaterally and
preemptively to enforce those aims.
The report and its endorsement of pre-
emptive force were hugely controversial.
Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton’s dep-
uty campaign manager charged that the
24
Pentagon was yet again “find[ing] an excuse
for big budgets instead of downsizing.”
Delaware Senator Biden said that the De-
fense Department was pursuing “a global
security system where threats to stability
are suppressed or destroyed by U.S. military
power.” Instead, he recommended that the
United States pursue “the next big advance
in civilization”—“collective power through
the United Nations.”
Once Clinton took office, talk of dom-
ination receded. The Arkansas governor
was less interested in foreign policy than
his predecessors had been and had come of
age as a post-Vietnam Democrat, cognizant
of the limits of U.S. power. Defense bud-
gets were slashed. But as the years passed,
Clinton comfortably used military power
(in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and Iraq),
circumvented the United Nations when
needed, and expanded nato eastward with
little regard for Russian sensibilities. “The
possibilities seemed endless, in the 1990s,
for the ways in which America could re-
shape the world,” said James Goldgeier,
who served on Clinton’s National Security
Council. Charles Kupchan, a political sci-
entist who also served on both Clinton’s
and Obama’s NSCs, said that “the roots
of Trump’s ‘America First’ start sinking
into the ground in the 1990s, when the
Cold War came to an end, and a sense of
triumphalism” emerged.
Clinton was pushed by the coalition of
hawks that coalesced around groups like
the Project for a New American Century
(pnac), founded in 1997. pnac connect-
ed liberal internationalists with Cheney,
Wolf­owitz, and other neoconservatives and
assertive nationalists advocating a more
aggressive foreign policy. “If you go back
and look at all the signatories for all the
letters, there’s probably an equal number of
Democrats that were signatories to various
projects,” said Gary Schmitt, pnac’s exec-
utive director in the years it was active. In
1998, the group wrote an open letter calling
for regime change in Iraq. When Bush II
became president, 10 signatories to pnac’s
various letters joined the administration.
At first, Bush was more reticent to use
force than some pnac types wished. He
avoided confrontation with China, for
instance, and criticized state-building.
When Al Qaeda attacked on 9/11, however,
that calculus changed.
PHASE ONE: HEGEMONY
HOURS AFTER THE PLANES HIT THE TWIN
Towers, Defense Secretary Donald Rums-
feld strategized. Rumsfeld had signed
a pnac statement urging the Clinton
administration to “challenge regimes
hostile to our interests and values[,] ...
shape circumstances before crises emerge,
and to meet threats before they become
dire.” Now, an aide noted Rumsfeld’s
post-attack requests for intel in a series of
notes: “Judge whether good enough [to]
hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time.
Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” “Hard
to get good case.” “Go massive. Sweep it all
up. Things related and not.”
Rumsfeld’s thinking defined the adminis-
tration’s approach to exploit the emergency
to accomplish extravagant ambitions. Bush
needed a strategy to combat terrorism, and
his advisers provided him with some of
the ideas first outlined in the 1992 strategy
report and by pnac. “They had to be for-
ward-leaning in a lot of different ways on
the national security front than they had
thought they were going to have to do when
they first came into office,” said Schmitt.
Leading Democratic politicians quickly
assented to Bush’s binary rhetoric. “Every
nation has to be either with us, or against
us,” New York Senator Hillary Clinton
said. “Everyone has to support our presi-
dent.” In joining nearly all other senators
in voting for the illiberal usa patriot
Act, Biden, then the chair of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, repeatedly
observed that he’d anticipated the law with
his 1995 anti-terrorism legislation. “The
bill [Bush’s Attorney General] John Ash-
croft sent up was my bill,” he complained.
When in 2002 Bill Clinton urged the
Democrats to strengthen their stance on
national security, he revealed the cynical
reasoning behind his party’s full-throated
support for the war on terrorism: “When
people are insecure, they’d rather have
someone who is strong and wrong than
somebody who’s weak and right.”
September 2021
MARCO DI LAURO/GETTY
A U.S. Marine was trapped in a building in Fallujah, Iraq, during fighting in November 2004.
The swift deposing of the Taliban
appeared to vindicate Bush. But then
the administration pursued a maximal
ambition—building a functional liberal
democratic state in Afghanistan—without
much debate. “I don’t remember anyone’s
seriously laying out a goal of occupying all
of Afghanistan, staying there, stabilizing
it, and reforming it, trying to establish a
Western style of government there,” said
Clarke. “We seemed to stumble into that
without looking at alternatives.” Even
worse, Rumsfeld under-resourced the war
in Afghanistan, convinced that the United
States should use a light footprint. He then
pivoted to Iraq.
As the Bush team campaigned to de-
throne Hussein and possibly others in
the “Axis of Evil,” dissenters within the
establishment appeared. Massachusetts’s
Ted Kennedy joined Wisconsin’s Russ Fein­
gold and 21 other senators and 133 House
members to vote against authorizing Bush
to use force against Iraq. Former nation-
al security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski
and Brent Scowcroft warned that the Bush
administration was acting recklessly and
isolating the United States as it geared up
for war against Iraq.
But the critics were relatively few in
number and weak in influence. Mainstream
media outlets—and, quite infamously at
the time, this magazine—amplified the
administration’s hyperbolic or outright
fantastical claims about Iraq’s weapons
of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda.
Features
From late 2001 to 2003, reporter Judith
Miller printed numerous front-page New
York Times stories hyping Hussein’s nucle-
ar, chemical, and biological capabilities,
information derived from disreputable
exiles and manipulated intelligence.
But she was not alone. Years later, in
the journal Democracy, Council on Foreign
Relations president emeritus Leslie Gelb
analyzed the elite press’s war coverage.
He found that only rarely did top news
outlets “provide the necessary alternative
information to Administration claims, ask
the needed questions about Administration
policy, or present insightful analysis about
Iraq itself.” Gelb confessed why he had
supported the war. He admitted, “My initial
support for the war was symptomatic of
unfortunate tendencies within the foreign
policy community, namely the disposition
and incentives to support wars to retain
political and professional credibility.”
Those dispositions and incentives re-
main. If another attack occurred, “there
certainly would be a lot of pressure to over-
throw the offending government,” said
O’Hanlon. That pressure exists not just
on policymakers but on the media and
think tanks that want to have influence.
As long as the United States has a massive
military at its disposal and a predominant
international position, using force to solve
geopolitical problems will be difficult to
resist. That has been true since the Cold
War’s end. “What’s the point of having
this superb military you’re always talking
about if we can’t use it?” Clinton’s future
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
famously asked Colin Powell in 1993. A
cataclysmic event like 9/11 temporarily
removes the safeguards of public opinion
and allows members of the foreign policy
establishment to be ambitious in shaping
the world through U.S. power.
PHASE TWO:
INTERNATIONALISM
WHEN MILITARY INTERVENTION PROVES
disastrous—as the Iraq War did within
months—public opinion drifts again. That
creates opportunities for new approaches.
Bush shifted from his macho threatening
posture to one focused on freedom, de-
mocracy, and “the ultimate goal of ending
tyranny in our world,” as his second in-
augural address declared. But the war
destroyed his credibility. Barack Obama
offered an alternative. As a presidential
candidate, he declared his opposition to
not just the Iraq adventure but other fea-
tures of the post-9/11 security state. “I don’t
want to just end the war,” he said. “I want
to end the mindset that got us into war in
the first place.” In his first days in office,
Obama issued an executive order banning
torture. It was an important decision, end-
ing one of America’s most glaring human
rights violations of the twenty-first century.
However, the president declined to
officially examine the formation and exe-
cution of Bush’s torture policies, let alone
hold anyone accountable for them, saying
the country needed to look forward rather
than backward. Obama’s commitment to
undoing his predecessor’s policies was
half-hearted in other ways. The day af-
ter he outlawed torture, Obama launched
two drone strikes in Pakistan that killed
as many as 20 civilians. They were the
first of 542 such strikes he would approve
during his two terms, in lands from Paki-
stan to Somalia. According to the Council
on Foreign Relations, those attacks killed
3,797 people, including 324 civilians.
Some were undoubtedly terrorist lead-
ers, and their elimination is welcome.
But recent scholarship suggests that
“drone strikes that kill terrorist leaders
25
may ultimately lead to more, not fewer,
terrorist attacks,” the political scientist
Anouk Rigterink wrote in Foreign Affairs.
That’s because lower-level terrorists can be
even more reckless and violent than their
leaders, and fragmented terrorist groups
are harder to monitor. Rigterink noted that,
while drones killed plenty of terrorist lead-
ers in Pakistan between 2004 and 2015, the
groups they led committed five times as
many attacks in 2015 as they had 11 years
earlier. That’s to say nothing of the civilian
casualties signature strikes cause.
The strategic logic of drone strikes
is at least arguable. Less defensible was
Obama’s agreement in 2009 to add 30,000
troops in Afghanistan. It was clear that the
war was unwinnable. Obama reportedly
felt pressured by the military to support
the surge in Afghanistan despite its evi-
dent fruitlessness. “Obama, he had some
difficulty, because of the position that Dem-
ocratic presidents often find themselves
in, had some difficulty putting forward
that proposition, that policy, and so he
didn’t,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State
Department hand who worked with Gen-
eral Stanley McChrystal’s team to develop
a new strategy for Afghanistan in 2009.
But Obama also offered a Democratic
Party alternative to the GOP’s Hegemonic
conception of foreign policy, pushing liberal
internationalism as the approach that best
defends the United States from terrorism,
sustains global acceptance, and protects
vulnerable people elsewhere. The ill-fated
Libyan intervention was part of that.
It was a well-meaning attempt to avert a
massacre of rebels and civilians by leader
Muammar Qaddafi, whose son had warned
that “rivers of blood” would soon run in Lib-
ya. But in addition to exceeding the United
Nations mandate to protect civilians, the
coalition that invaded the country left be-
hind a failed state marked by jihadis and
grievous human rights abuses. Democrats
were initially triumphalists in the wake of
Qaddafi’s ouster. In 2012, Ivo Daalder, then
the U.S. ambassador to nato, co-wrote an
article in Foreign Affairs saying: “By any
measure, nato succeeded in Libya.” This
was the liberal version of Bush’s “Mission
Accomplished” moment. Daalder, who
26
More than 500,000 people have been
killed or have disappeared during the Syrian
civil war. However, the tragic reality
is that the likelihood of the United States
being able to secure a good outcome
in Syria—while concurrently losing wars
elsewhere—was minimal.
still believes the initial intervention was
justified, concedes now, “I learned from
that that it’s hell of a lot easier to start a
war than to end it.”
The disaster in Libya—coupled with
ongoing failures in Iran and Afghanistan—
had spillover effects, rightly convincing
Obama that invading foreign countries
often backfired. The CIA trained and armed
Syrian opposition fighters, but the program
was small-scale. After recklessly warning in
2011 that Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad
had to step down and later that he would
cross a “red line” by using chemical weap-
ons against civilians, Obama learned that
Assad’s military had used sarin gas against
rebels and civilians. The president none-
theless called off a military strike against
the regime. Some liberals—including his
close aide, Ben Rhodes—lamented the ad-
ministration’s Libya policies.
More than 500,000 people have been
killed or have disappeared during the Syr-
ian civil war. However, the tragic reality
is that the likelihood of the United States
being able to secure a good outcome in
Syria—while concurrently losing wars else-
where—was minimal. “The interagency
players were conscious of and haunted by
the Iraq debacle and to a lesser degree the
Afghanistan and Libya interventions,” said
Jonathan Stevenson, NSC director for polit-
ical-military affairs, Middle East and North
Africa, from 2011 to 2013. U.S. officials knew
that Iran felt Syria was of nearly existen-
tial importance to it, and that Hezbollah
could save the regime at Iran’s behest. Said
Stevenson: “This factor further dampened
any taste for even a covert proxy war over
Syria with Iran: Its stakes, ergo its moti-
vations and its staying power, were much
greater than ours.” He added that, by 2013,
isis was emerging as the strongest and most
effective anti-regime force, which meant
that any weapons supplied to the rebels
by outside parties—including the United
States—could end up in the hands of anti-
American jihadis. And indeed, some of
those CIA-supplied weapons did find their
way to at least one large Al Qaeda–affiliated
group. Finally, the opposition groups in
Syria were deeply fractured and supported
by outsiders. “The mentality of the first
decade of the new century, that the Amer-
icans can fix things, that really needs to be
reexamined,” said Robert Ford, the ambas-
sador to Syria from 2011 to 2012, and the
envoy to the moderate Syrian opposition
until 2014. He was pulled out of Damascus
as the civil war intensified. “We end up go-
ing into a place like Syria, or Iraq, places I’ve
worked, and we don’t understand them very
well, and we don’t understand the history,
and we’re not very good dealing with the
culture. And we just kind of bumble along,
embarrassing our friends, and physically
walking into traps exploited by our foes.”
Obama had undeniable successes. The
daring May 2011 raid that ended with bin
Laden’s death was brilliantly executed.
It was a significant blow to Al Qaeda and
marked a symbolic victory against Salafi
jihadism more generally. The Iran nuclear
deal was the most significant diplomatic
September 2021
achievement since the United States helped
reunify Germany. The opening to Cuba and
the Paris agreement over climate change
were similarly wise maneuvers. Obama’s
popularity enhanced world opinion of the
United States. The Pew Research Center
found that America’s favorable rating
essentially doubled in some places after
Obama was elected and remained positive
throughout his two terms.
And yet Obama was unable to undo the
mindset that got the United States into
Iraq, alas. The urge to intervene in places of
peripheral concern to U.S. interests, to over-
react to threats, to overutilize military force
in dealing with terrorists and others—these
outlasted Obama. He was, however, able to
revive multilateralism, diplomacy, and the
country’s soft power, as well as demonstrate
that the United States could track down
terrorists anywhere. It was “during this
period that the U.S. developed, I think, a
phenomenal killing machine,” said Steven
Simon. Perhaps too phenomenal.
PHRASE THREE:
JACKSONIAN
AFTER 9/11, ISLAMOPHOBIC SENTIMENTS
coursed through the country. Years later,
Donald Trump mainstreamed it. Stoking
panic about isis and Muslims, he exploited
the public’s exhaustion after three failed
wars. By combining anti-Islamic hysteria,
nativism, and belligerency abroad, he res-
urrected a foreign policy tradition that Bush
had flirted with, identified by the political
scientist Walter Russell Mead as Jacksoni-
anism. Like their namesake, President
Andrew Jackson, Jacksonians are “skepti-
cal about the United States’ policy of global
engagement and liberal order building,”
but “when an enemy attacks, Jacksonians
spring to the country’s defense” with over-
whelming force, as Mead wrote.
Severing important institutional ties
with the world, Trump undid Obama’s ac-
complishments, unilaterally withdrawing
from the Iran deal and the Paris agreement
and ending the rapprochement with Cuba.
More generally, he immolated the country’s
reputation. “If you look at America’s soft
power—defined as the ability to get what
Features
you want through attraction rather than
coercion or payment—in 2017, American
soft power starts a precipitous decline,”
said Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who
served in the Defense Department during
the Clinton administration. Rather than just
an idealistic notion of international har-
mony, concern with America’s reputation
reflects an understanding that the country’s
image matters from a self-interested per-
spective. “If you’re relying on carrots and
sticks and have no attraction, and people
are repelled by you; it’s going to cost you
more carrots and more sticks,” said Nye.
A positive global image entices allies and
constricts adversaries, all without using
force. Between Bush and especially Trump,
the United States has ravaged its soft power.
Trump got some things right. “He’s the
first president in ages who didn’t start a new
war,” said William Ruger, vice president for
research and policy at the Charles Koch
Institute and Trump’s final nominee as am-
bassador to Afghanistan. Trump provided
a critique of the consistent interventionism
that defined post–Cold War foreign policy.
But his administration was disastrous in
virtually all other aspects, from inflating
the threat from China to hollowing out the
diplomatic corps.
To its credit, most of the foreign policy
establishment opposed Trump. Demo-
crats, of course, were uniformly horrified
by Trump’s contempt for allies, affection for
tyrants, and his nativism, ignorance, and
impulsivity. But so were most Republican
officials. Before he won the 2016 election,
50 GOP national security experts warned
that a Trump presidency risked the na-
tion’s security and well-being. Four years
later, 70 Republican officials, including two
who served in the Trump administration,
endorsed Biden for president.
But these and other actions demonstrat-
ed the GOP foreign policy establishment’s
estrangement from actual Republican vot-
ers, who adore Trump. “Part of Trump’s
resonance in 2016 for sure, and why a lot
of Republican voters are wary of others
in the party, is because of the fact that he
offered a different approach to thinking
about America’s engagement with the
world,” said Ruger.
While Trump’s affection for Russian
leader Vladimir Putin and erratic outreach
to North Korea have no parallel in U.S.
history, his xenophobia and militarism
are classically Jacksonian.
PHASE FOUR: MODERATE
INTERNATIONALISM
BIDEN IS THE FIRST PRESIDENT SINCE
9/11 to take office with the public un-
derstanding that China, not the Middle
East, is the major security challenge for
the United States. This reflects reality—the
Sino-American competition is on. But
the war on terrorism era is not over.
From the continued troop presence in
Iraq and Syria to widespread Islamopho-
bia to countless wounded warriors to the
open-ended congressional laws authoriz-
ing the president to use force, the terrorism
era continues.
Fortunately, Biden ended the futile
20-year attempt to construct a functioning
state in Afghanistan, pulling out American
troops. “If we haven’t achieved anything in
20 years, we’re not going to achieve any-
thing in another 20 years,” said Anatol
Lieven, a Russia and Middle East specialist
at Georgetown University. Biden’s move
was an implicit admission of the falseness
of the post-9/11 belief that U.S. power was
unlimited. California Representative Ro
Khanna said, “I think [we progressives have]
had a huge impact on foreign policy.” He
points to the Afghanistan pullout, an in-
creased reluctance on drone strikes, and
momentum to repeal the open-ended 2001
and 2002 authorizations for presidents to
use force in Iraq and elsewhere in the name
of the war on terrorism.
However, Biden has delayed rejoining
the Iran deal, insisting that Iran rejoin the
agreement first and be open to a larger
pact that addresses other issues, such
as Iran’s development of ballistic mis-
siles and support for proxies in Syria, Yemen,
and elsewhere. “From the Biden admin-
istration’s perspective, simply rejoining
without some movement from Iran would
appear too concessionary and perhaps lose
already brittle support in Congress,” said
Jonathan Stevenson, now a senior fellow
27
at the International Institute for Strategic
Studies. Iran has increased enriched urani-
um in violation of the deal, which is closer
to expiration anyway. “The Trump admin-
istration did not leave them with a whole
lot of great options,” said the American
Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Pollack,
an influential advocate of the Iraq War
who also supported the Iran deal. “When
Trump pulled us out of the [Iran deal], it
enormously advantaged Iran’s hard-liners,
justified their entire argumentation, and,
as a result of that, it put Iran hard-liners
very much in the driver’s seat right now.”
The Biden administration’s approach
to terrorism and the Middle East so far
looks similar to Obama’s. Indeed, an anal-
ysis by the Miller Center at the University
of Virginia found that 74 of the 100 key
positions in the Biden White House have
been filled by individuals who served in the
Obama administration. But, so far at least,
Biden isn’t replicating Obama’s outreach
to adversaries and frequent drone strikes.
THE DAWN OF SINO-
AMERICAN COMPETITION
TWENTY YEARS AFTER 9/11, THE WAR ON
terrorism is being eclipsed by a greater
security challenge. Biden is convinced that
China has “an overall goal to become the
leading country in the world,” displacing
the United States. For its part, the GOP
has largely united around overhyping the
threat China poses. “Trump really crystal-
lized an ongoing shift in the Republican
Party of skepticism vis-à-vis China,”
a development that will continue, said
Hal Brands of the American Enterprise
Institute. “Anybody who comes to the
presidency from the GOP side in 2024 or
after will be a subscriber to the notion of
getting tough with China.”
The bipartisan front has benefits. In
June, Congress passed a sweeping bill
providing $250 billion in funding for tech-
nology research and manufacturing, hop-
ing to bolster America’s ability to compete
with China. “There is a surprising degree of
agreement between, let’s call it the Trump
tribe, and the internationalist tribe,” said
Joseph Nye, pointing to this legislation.
28
Some Democrats say the United States
should prioritize human rights, pressur-
ing China to stop its genocide against the
Uyghur people and respect individual lib-
erties. “Stressing human rights issues is
about stressing the different systems, and
the differences between the systems,” said
Daalder. “It isn’t used as a cudgel to under-
mine the Chinese regime’s leadership, or
the Chinese regime period, in the way that
[former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo
and some other people do.”
But the potential drawbacks to an ideo-
logical competition with China are high.
Already, anti-Chinese sentiment has spilled
over to hostility against Asian Americans. A
report from the Center for the Study of Hate
and Extremism found hate crimes spiked
during July 2018 when the United States
and China disputed tariffs and the Trump
administration reveled in anti-Chinese
bigotry. “The attempt to tie Covid to China,
calling it ‘the China virus’ and all that, that
you saw Trump and Trump Republicans
doing, has already had a tremendous im-
pact,” said Katrina Mulligan, who worked
at the Justice Department and NSC during
Obama’s presidency. She pointed out that,
unlike Russians, America’s primary foes
during the twentieth century, Americans
of Asian descent look different than white
people, making them easy targets for
bigots wanting to act on Sinophobia. It’s
extremely difficult to compete with China,
opposing its human rights violations and
authoritarianism, while simultaneously
countering homegrown xenophobia, Mc-
Carthyism, and racism. “I don’t think we
know how to do it,” said Heather Hurl-
burt, who leads New America’s New Models
of Policy Change project. “The universe of
people who are willing to act on both
of those ideas is vanishingly small.”
Most alarmingly, the dangers of a nucle-
ar war will grow from increased China-U.S.
tensions. Presuming that China continues
to gain strength, it will have additional
power to assert its interests. That presents
challenges to U.S. dominance, particularly
in East Asia. “It’s an important moment
when one significant power is passing or
catching up in overall capabilities with
another significant power,” said MIT’s
Barry Posen, a leading advocate of a foreign
policy forefronting restraint. Flashpoints
like Taiwan and Hong Kong are particularly
dangerous, since the United States has
staked its credibility on defending lands
of little strategic importance, but which
China considers essential to its territorial
integrity. “This requires a kind of subtle
foreign and defense policy, and that’s not
our strong suit,” he said.
LESSONS FROM THE
9/11 ERA
IN ENVIRONMENTS LIKE THIS, MODEST,
prudent, long-term strategy is indispens-
able. So are prioritizing vital interests,
reducing unnecessary conflict, and husband-
ing resources. Alas, the story of U.S. foreign
policy since 9/11 is largely a story of squan-
dering human lives and wealth, recklessly
damaging the country’s valuable capabil-
ities and soft power. America’s supreme
position in the 1990s meant that it had a
huge cushion of power to squander through
failed military interventions, trillion-dollar
wars, and wasteful defense spending. But
that cushion has shrunk. Al Qaeda failed in
ejecting the United States from the Middle
East—the nation still supports repressive
governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel,
and elsewhere. But the 9/11 attacks were
wildly successful in pushing the United
States to engage in profoundly destructive
acts that damaged U.S. security, to say noth-
ing of the lives lost elsewhere.
In small ways, because of the consistent
string of failures, Washington has become
friendlier to the idea of a foreign policy
oriented around restraint or retrenchment.
The Quincy Institute for Responsible State-
craft, a think tank founded in 2019, is a
vital counterweight in offering the media
and lawmakers policy-relevant research
from a perspective that sees U.S. power
and interests as limited and selective rather
than inexhaustible and global. “Restraint is
now part of the conversation,” said Andrew
Bacevich, the institute’s president. “But I
don’t think something like any kind of a
deal has been closed.”
There does appear to be at least a
temporary injunction in Washington on
September 2021
America’s supreme position in the 1990s
meant that it had a huge cushion of
power to squander through failed military
interventions, trillion-dollar wars, and
wasteful defense spending. But that
cushion has shrunk.
trying to build states abroad. As Khanna
said, the country is now “more cautious
about the ability of military interventions
to transform societies. Do I think that there
could be overreaction still on civil liberties
and certain misguided forays of foreign
policy? Of course, but I do think that we’ve
learned the lesson of Iraq.”
But it’s not clear that members of the
foreign policy establishment believe their
track record is spotty. “If you do the balance
of where we are today and what we’ve done
after 20 years, the war on terror certainly
has been a lot costlier than we wanted,
with very imperfect results in the region,
for the quality of life and governance in
the Middle East—but it’s actually still been
somewhat successful,” said Michael O’Han-
lon. Kenneth Pollack noted that, while the
Iraq War was horribly mismanaged and the
United States made other mistakes, “back
in 2001, nobody believed that, over the next
20 years, there wouldn’t be another major
terrorist attack.”
These accounts suggest that Al Qaeda’s
inability to replicate its attacks means that
U.S. strategy has been effective and wise.
That assessment underestimates the scale
and frequency of foreseeable U.S. failures
in favor of praising an outcome that would
have been easier to attain without spending
trillions of dollars and causing the deaths
of hundreds of thousands. It’s like a person
needing a car worth $25,000 who spends
$1 million on the car at a dealership, has a
few drinks while driving it home, receives
a few speeding tickets, and causes a hit-
and-run that kills somebody—but who
Features
declares success because he did, in fact,
get the car.
What’s more, policymakers in both par-
ties and some foreign policy intellectuals
overlook maybe the key lesson of the past
20 years, which is that the use of armed
force often weakens America’s international
position. Democrats and Republicans alike
worry that reduced U.S. influence globally
would be replaced by China, Russia, Iran, or
other nefarious actors. But this assumes that
the United States is endangered whenever
other countries exercise power. “Foreign
policy should be about interests, not vac-
uums,” Barry Posen said. “If your interests
don’t lie in a place, why do you care?”
The country could use its power advanta-
geously. Few things would benefit the United
States more than converting enemies and
challengers through tough-minded di-
plomacy rather than perpetually trying to
coerce them with sanctions, bombastic
rhetoric, or armed force. The Iran deal,
Russia’s commitment to America’s terror-
ism project from 2001 to 2003, and China’s
continual ideological shifts throughout the
decades suggest that skillful, creative diplo-
macy and due recognition of the interests of
other countries can reduce tensions, offer
opportunities for cooperation, and prevent
the emergence of coalitions that balance
against the United States. “Trying to be-
friend adversaries is an important tool of
statecraft that often gets overlooked,” said
Charles Kupchan, author of How Enemies
Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace.
Domestic challenges and intense polit-
ical polarization make robust diplomacy
and peacemaking difficult, however, not
just with the Taliban circa 2002 but perpet-
ually. “There’s always a nationalist waiting
in the wings to say you’re selling out the
country, you’re being weak in the face of
danger,” Kupchan said. Forefronting di-
plomacy also would mean acknowledging
other countries’ interests, dealing directly
with adversaries, and accepting imper-
fect agreements. Because the best way to
secure the United States is to preserve its
power, narrow its list of vital interests,
and build a better country at home, not
squander blood, treasure, and soft power
in the futile pursuit of global dominance
and armed humanitarianism. That is a
view that hasn’t gained prominence in
Washington. It certainly didn’t after 9/11.
Perhaps one day it will.
For better and worse, the foreign policy
establishment is weaker and more frag-
mented than it has been since the end of
the Vietnam War. But it still exists, and
it has tentatively learned some things
from the wasteful, counterproductive,
and sometimes disastrous U.S. foreign
policy performance of the last 20 years.
“The real problem with Afghanistan was
the decision to try to occupy the country,
and to try to eradicate the Taliban, and
transform it,” said Kenneth Pollack. “I
think that we’ve learned that that was
ultimately impossible.”
But even the withdrawal from Afghan-
istan is highly controversial among some
of the elite. And the demonization of other
countries and peoples, the inability to un-
derstand the worldview of challengers and
adversaries, the overreliance on force: these
traits remain, because they were ingrained
in Washington long before 9/11. Because of
its unchallenged international position, the
United States was able to make major mis-
takes for two decades after the Twin Towers
fell and still emerge predominant. How-
ever, with an emerging China possessing
nuclear weapons, a growing economy, the
world’s biggest population, and expanding
demands, the United States cannot afford
another 20 years of failure.
Jordan Michael Smith has written for
The New York Times, The Atlantic,
and The Washington Post.
29
BEHIND the
GOP STRATEGY
to OUTLAW
TRANS YOUTH
Activists are beating back
Republicans’ virulent attacks
on trans rights.
But the battle is costing the
trans community.
By MELISSA GIRA GRANT

T
his spring, when Libby Gonzales arrived in
Austin, Texas, with her mother, Rachel, and her
little sister, Cecilia, she was already a veteran of the
state’s legislative sessions; this would be her third.
The first time, she testified against laws meant to
ban her from girls’ bathrooms in school. Now she
was facing bills to block her access to lifesaving health care and
to criminalize her medical providers and her parents. Libby is 11.
Since 2017, successive legislative sessions have brought more
anti-trans bills, more long drives from Dallas, and more hours
spent waiting to get “your two minutes to tell your legislators why
they’re wrong,” as Rachel put it when we later met at the Capitol.
Exhausted, she was taking a break on a bench in the basement,
her blonde hair falling around multiple necklaces set with semi-
precious stones. On her sweater, she wore a trans pride flag and
a Texas pin. It was clear how proud she was of her trans daughter
for finding her voice, and how angry she was at the circumstances
that had led Libby—and the rest of her family—into the political
spotlight. While we talked, Rachel twisted a gold ring around her
finger, revealing cursive script crowned with a rose: fuck off.

Photographs by ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN

Lauren Rodriguez
with her 17-year-old
trans son at their
home near Austin, Texas
 This year, more than 110 anti-trans bills have been introduced in
state legislatures across the country, the biggest wave of ­anti-trans
legislation in U.S. history. As of this publication, at least 13 have
been adopted into law. Trans people in Texas faced the most attacks:
During the 2021 regular legislative session, Texas Republicans
proposed some 13 anti-trans measures, more than any other state.
Nearly half of those were school sports bills, which aim to restrict
the teams trans kids are allowed to join. Texas is not alone in its
emphasis on sports; according to reporting by USA Today, at least
36 states introduced more than 70 such bills.
Republican lawmakers’ proposals in Texas were also some of
the most extreme in the nation. One bill barred people under the
age of 18 from being prescribed hormone replacement therapy
or receiving any other transition-related care, such as puberty
blockers (with some exceptions for intersex youth); another de-
fined parents or others who helped trans kids access those forms
of health care as child abusers. The sheer volume and severity of
the proposed legislation were enough to cause some parents
of trans kids, including Rachel Gonzales, to seriously consider
leaving the state. “We wouldn’t have a choice,” Rachel told me.
“If my husband and I were going to be criminalized and we were
facing the potential of our daughter being removed from our
house, we would be gone the next day.”
Republicans across the United States have seized on trans
people as a social and political scapegoat, reprising a strategy used
to great effect in Texas late in the Obama administration. This
strategy bears some surface resemblance to Republican attacks
on marriage equality the decade before, when the GOP succeeded
in getting voters to back dozens of ballot initiatives limiting mar-
riage to one man and one woman, while also securing votes for
Republicans (though it’s unclear whether it was as decisive a factor
as many contemporary commentators claimed). But the fight for
marriage equality started in the lesbian and gay rights movement.
There is at present no analogous fight for trans rights backed with
anything resembling the same level of legal, philanthropic, or
political muscle. Indeed, in the conflict over marriage equality,
trans rights were pushed to the political margins, a dynamic that
set the stage for the current war on trans people.
Cannily, the right has exploited the marginalization of trans
rights, not just within lgbtq rights’ groups, but also within pro-
gressive groups and the Democratic Party. “We need to be as big
a priority amongst our friends as we are amongst our enemies,”
said Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the National Wom-
en’s Law Center. Yet decades of trans exclusion have hamstrung
the fight against these anti-trans bills—which, even when they
fail, as most have, still do significant damage by reinforcing the
­anti-trans stigma that got us here in the first place. Those showing
up to push back on these bills are now living with that damage.
They may also know, from the experience, how to stop this before
R
it escalates any further.
achel Gonzales’s family first spoke out against
anti-trans legislation at the Texas state Capitol in
2017, when Republican legislators introduced the
infamous “bathroom bill,” SB 6, which would have
banned trans people from using public bathrooms,
through discriminatory regulations targeting public
schools, universities, and government buildings. That bill ulti-
mately died, first in the regular legislative session and again in a
special session when Governor Greg Abbott made SB 6 a priority. In
32
a way, Rachel thought, organizers’ victory over previous anti-trans
legislation had led to this fight. “Parents were so effective in shut-
ting down the bathroom bill,” she told me. And that very success
is why they’re coming after parents now. Rachel has worked
with Equality Texas, a state-based lgbtq rights group that has
been helping coordinate testimony against the bills, tapping the
informal networks of families with trans kids across Texas. When
she testified with her daughters this session, she said, “it was the
most violent experience we’ve ever had at the Capitol.”
On one of those days, April 14, Libby spent most of her time
with other trans kids, hanging out in the underground levels of
the massive Capitol complex, where supportive legislators had
reserved space for them away from the fray. The kids had plenty
of snacks, and in the basement they could make signs and talk
without being shushed. Some practiced what they would say in
their testimony, whenever the time came. A few levels up, in the
Capitol rotunda lined with painted portraits of the state’s governors,
the scene was different. There, anti-trans activists tried to disrupt
a trans rights rally the kids took part in. “They’re screaming that
we’re child abusers,” Rachel said, “that we were dismembering
children, that we’re mutilating children.” Sometimes, the harassers
shot video of the kids. “These,” she pointed out, “are the people
calling us child abusers.”
One of the mothers who told me this story was Lauren
Rodriguez, a social worker who lives in Austin with her 17-year-
old son, Greyson. He had come out to his mom about being trans
a few years before; if these bills had been law back then, Lauren
said, she wasn’t sure her son would still be alive. Like Rachel, she
approached the dire stakes with a gentle dose of levity. “I may as
well move into the Capitol,” she once told me with a laugh.
In the Capitol basement, Lauren saw a man begin following
Greyson on his way to the bathroom, with a phone in hand, re-
cording and demanding, “What bathroom are you going to use,
tranny?” She confronted him, took his phone, and deleted the
photos while he protested. When security came, Lauren recalled,
“the cops were like, ‘Sir, how many times have we had to tell you?’”
After that, she and the other moms started cautioning people to
make sure their kids locked the main bathroom door.
The bill that drew the anti-trans activists out that day was
HB 1399, introduced by state Representative Matt Krause. It
proposed to block minors’ access to transition-related care by
penalizing their health care providers. In support of the legislation,
witnesses turned to familiar arguments undermining the truth of
trans kids’ lives, suggesting that such children aren’t really trans,
that they have been unduly influenced by “social contagion” and
encouraged by over-accommodating parents. The testimony was
an opportunity to further spread misinformation and the stigma
against trans kids, and opponents tried their best to counter
the flood of lies. Adri Perez, a policy and advocacy strategist
for the aclu of Texas, testified that they knew who they were at
four years old, even when adults did not respect them. “I hope
that today is the day that we stop bullying all the transgender kids
and teens,” Perez said. Those kids “know better than anyone how
to stand in their truth.”
As HB 1399 was before the state House health committee, the
state Senate took up SB 1646, a bill that would allow parents of
trans kids to be charged with child abuse. Supporters of bills like
these typically advanced a very pointed narrative: that a powerful,
shadowy “trans lobby,” in concert with the media and Big Pharma,
was colluding to sexually exploit—even “mutilate”—children by
September 2021
Rachel Gonzales, mother of Libby, 11, first spoke out against anti-trans measures in 2017. Libby was seven when she testified against the
“bathroom bill” at the Texas Capitol in Austin.
forcibly “transing” them. If the narrative evokes shades of QAnon,
you’re not wrong; Texas Values Action, an organization promoting
HB 1399, prompted people to join it using the same hashtag QAnon
appropriated, #SaveTheChildren. But this conspiracy theory about
trans kids predates QAnon’s specific mix of child sex trafficking
panic, and, in fact, the “transing” story now flourishes across the
far right. It capitalizes on an existing suspicion about the parents
of trans children, one that is hardly harbored exclusively on the
right, and on an ongoing attempt to intimidate and control them.
“My Mother’s Day lunch was interrupted by Child Protective
Services telling me ‘I’m at your house,’” Lauren recalled. At the
time, she was in the middle of a custody fight with Greyson’s
father. She had been supportive of her son, who, when he came
out to her at 13, had already researched puberty blockers on his
own and wanted her affirmation. “It’s not like he came out and
then like two days later, top surgery,” Lauren explained. Getting
the puberty blockers took six months, she said: There were bone
density tests and x-rays and blood work; they had to wait for a
referral for the endocrinologist. When he was 15, they went through
a similar process to get testosterone. “If you told me when he
first transitioned that he would have had any surgery before 18,
I would have told you, absolutely not,” she said. “But as we’ve
Features
gone, I’ve learned.” With Grey about to head to college, Lauren
supported his getting top surgery. She said it was important for
him to get to start a new phase of his life having had those medical
interventions already, to show up as “just Grey,” to choose if and
how he wanted to come out.
One of the things Lauren learned from other moms of trans
kids just coming out was that people could call Child Protective
Services and accuse you of being an unfit parent simply because
your kid was trans. “We have what we call a safe folder,” she told
me, with “letters from therapists, doctors, friends, families.” Es-
sentially, the folder was a compilation of character references in
case of an emergency like the one that Mother’s Day. “When CPS
shows up at your house because some random bigot decides to
call, then you have this file.” In this case, the caller was not ran-
dom. Her ex-husband was using Greyson’s being trans as a way
to fight Lauren for custody. By that point, Greyson’s father had
rejected Greyson’s identity. More than wanting Greyson, Lauren
explained, his father wanted him to stop being Greyson.
As happens with so many far-right conspiracy theories, the
idea that parents are “transing” their children has moved from
the fringe into more respectable-seeming venues. Along the way, a
Texas father named Jeffrey Younger, who claims his ex-wife forced
33
The Reverend Remington Johnson holds a trans pride flag and a Texas gay pride flag outside her home in Austin, Texas.
their daughter Luna into being a girl, has transformed himself
into a kind of right-wing folk hero. Younger took his updated
men’s rights activist bit from Facebook to One America News,
using his daughter’s birth name and broadcasting old photos of
her, even after a judge ordered him not to. Younger’s playing the
victim—and painting his wife as an abuser—have been an asset,
helping him raise more than $100,000 in donations since 2018. He
is now the face of a campaign demanding laws to “save” children
like his from their supportive parents.
“I just kinda feel like Jeffrey Younger is my ex-husband, but
he somehow got a voice,” Lauren said. Younger, who called
transition-related care “child abuse and the sexual mutilation of
children,” has enjoyed support from Donald Trump Jr., Senators
Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and Texas Governor Abbott—who said
in 2019 that the state’s child welfare agency was looking into the
case. Texas Republicans shared Younger’s story during floor de-
bate at the legislature, effectively making misinformation about
Luna’s transition part of the public record. The proposed Texas
child abuse law would give Lauren’s ex-husband more power and
control over Lauren and Greyson. The mere fact that she had
supported his getting puberty blockers or hormones or surgery
could be considered “proof” of abuse, and could lead to loss of
custody. The law could empower other people like Younger, angry
34
at the choices their family members have made, to report anyone
with a trans child they wanted investigated and possibly removed.
Along with Younger, there were activists like Kevin Whitt,
the man who Lauren says had stalked and recorded Grey at the
Capitol. In a few terrifying ways, Whitt embodies the condition of
the Texas Republican Party: A former Texas GOP field organizer,
he staged “White Lives Matter” and anti–Covid restriction rallies,
and lost his job with the state party after he was caught on video
on January 6, near the U.S. Capitol. (Whitt also praised the Proud
Boys and promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory on social
media.) The convergence between anti-trans activism and the
far right is not new, but since the insurrection, researchers have
been giving it more attention. The International Centre for the
Study of Radicalisation cites the Younger case specifically as an
example of an “important narrative that has gained significant
traction within the far right,” namely that “transness poses a
particular threat towards young children.”
Late in the night, when kids who had been at the Capitol for
hours at last got to testify against the bill, some of them weren’t tall
enough to bend the microphone on the podium toward themselves.
Libby didn’t get that chance: The committee cut off testimony at
midnight. Rachel was incensed. “To spend 17 hours at the Capitol
and getting heckled and photographed,” she fumed, “and then
September 2021
The sheer volume and severity of the proposed
legislation were enough to cause some parents of
trans kids to seriously consider leaving Texas.
not be allowed to testify? That’s a pretty rough thing as an adult
to deal with, but really rough as an 11-year-old.” Libby hasn’t gone
back since. “She’s just been like, why do they care about us?”
After the altercation with Whitt, after testimony had been cut
off, Lauren went home and cried for hours. Like Libby, Greyson
had also been denied the chance to speak. Lauren’s crying woke
her husband up, and he asked, “Why are you doing this to your-
self?” Lauren didn’t have an answer. The bills kept advancing;
she kept feeling as if she was failing. It was “like being with
an abusive partner,” she said. “But your abusive partner is the
R
flipping state you live in.”
epublicans’ seizure of the Jeffrey Younger case
was a sign of things to come, Gillian Branstetter of
the National Women’s Law Center told me; it was
clear they were making trans children a political
priority. The right’s goal of creating legal precedents
against trans rights overlaps with its goal of estab-
lishing religious exemptions to lgbtq rights more broadly, and its
goal of chipping away at Roe v. Wade state by state: As Branstetter
put it, it’s all part of “the larger and more frightening project of
legislating extremely strict gender roles into law.” But it can be
hard to focus on that when engaged in the day-to-day struggle to
combat anti-trans bill after anti-trans bill.
You can see these goals laid out in “Promise to America’s
Children,” a shared policy agenda first reported on by Heron
Greenesmith at Political Research Associates in February 2021.
The bills in Texas and across the country may trace their lineage
directly to this “promise,” supported by the Alliance Defending
Freedom, the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation, and the Family
Policy Alliance, among other groups. The agenda laid out many
of the same priorities as those found in the anti-trans bills, from
preventing trans girls’ participation in sports to outlawing puberty
blockers, along with opposition to lgbtq and women’s rights:
“To protect children,” it promises, from “a culture—and sadly,
a government” that want to “sexualize children for the sake of a
political agenda.”
Why now, though, especially when it appears to many pro-
gressives that support for trans people is on the rise, within the
Biden administration and elsewhere? This year is the first full
legislative session after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bostock decision
on anti-lgbtq discrimination in employment, which affirmed
that freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation
and gender identity should be understood as part of the broader
category of discrimination that is prohibited on the basis of sex.
Features
Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian law and policy shop
that, according to its mission statement, “exists to keep the doors
open for the Gospel” by promoting “marriage and family,” lost in
that decision, a blow made all the more crushing by the fact that
the majority opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose
Supreme Court appointment ADF saw as key to its success. To take
down Bostock, and likely just as much to shore up support from
donors, ADF and the GOP would need a new strategy.
Idaho Republicans and the ADF rolled out this ploy—a sexualized
moral panic about trans kids, rooted in strategic misinformation—
in 2020, with one of the first anti-trans sports bans adopted
into law. Its sponsor, Republican state Representative Barbara
Ehardt, acknowledged that the Alliance Defending Freedom had
helped draft it, and that the bill had inspired others, according to
TransLash Media, a nonprofit that reports on trans issues. When
the law was challenged in court, the state—very unusually—ceded
its time in closing arguments to an ADF attorney. Copycat bills
appeared across the country, pledging to protect “fairness” in
women’s and girls’ sports.
“Protecting girls in sports” is a variation on an older theme, one
with some specific Texas roots, too. In 2015, voters in Houston were
asked to consider a broad nondiscrimination ordinance, known
as hero, previously passed and approved by the city council.
Opponents of the ordinance produced scare ads, deliberately
misinforming voters that the ordinance would allow “men in
women’s bathrooms.” Houston Unites, which advocated for keeping
hero, failed to combat this myth, instead releasing a commercial
that “featured a panoply of women as they played, baked, and
made crafts with their children, all while explaining that the
antidiscrimination law was an essential means of protecting
them and their families,” as Marie-Amélie George described in a
Northwestern University Law Review article (the ad is no longer
online). “As wives, mothers, grandmothers, nothing’s more im-
portant than keeping our children safe,” the ad went on, pledging
that hero would not “allow sexual predators to enter women’s
restrooms.” While the initial polling was favorable, hero lost at
the ballot box by 22 points, a “political train wreck,” observed
Monica Roberts, a prominent Black trans advocate and blogger.
With hero, the right wing learned it could use the “protecting
women and girls” story to win. As Roberts warned, such tactics
would be “coming to a civil rights fight near you and y’all better
be prepared from the outset to come out swinging against them.”
The loss in Houston was enormous and felt across the country,
a blow made all the more stinging for how soon it followed the
Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which upheld marriage
35
 If we could stop seeing trans kids as a new kind of
problem, or any kind of problem, we could more fully
confront Republicans’ regressive agenda.
equality. “The bathroom message had, in fact, unraveled the
entire national lgbt rights apparatus,” BuzzFeed’s Dominic
Holden observed. A postmortem analysis commissioned by one
of those groups, Freedom for All Americans, concluded that
any future effort needed to, as Holden put it, “build widespread
familiarity with trans people in advance, and, when it’s time for
the campaign, trans people must lead the way.”
By 2019, the bathroom myth had transformed. As the Young-
er story took off across right-wing media, Jeff Mateer, then the
state’s first assistant attorney general—and an ADF ally who
once said that trans kids were part of “Satan’s plan”—claimed
that Luna Younger was “in immediate and irrevocable danger,”
and implored the state’s child welfare agency to investigate her
mother. In January 2021, state Representative Krause introduced
the anti-trans child abuse bill. Over the following months, as
bill after bill attacking trans rights dropped, the response from
some major lgbtq rights groups was to look to parents’ personal
testimony, and not—in a painful, partial echo of hero—to trans
‘‘I
people’s years of political leadership.
’m not the target, and yet I feel very responsible,”
Remington Johnson reflected, when we met as the legis-
lative session wound down. Remington has been a health
care chaplain, focused on end-of-life care, and she had just
started nursing school. Five years after graduating from
seminary, she came out as trans—just as the bathroom
bill was introduced in 2017. “I feel like my visibility has caused
this.” In fact, trans women had been deliberately scapegoated as
a threat to children in bathrooms and locker rooms, their bodies
blasted across Fox News as objects of derision and portents of
danger. “That’s how it feels, like I am the thing that they don’t
want kids to grow into.”
Remington had first come to the state Capitol in 2019, alongside
other faith leaders testifying against an anti-lgbtq “religious
liberty” bill, before she spoke out against the anti-trans bills this
year. In deciding what to say, she always kept in mind the trans
kids who would also be listening. This time around, she said she’d
particularly wanted to take up space as a trans woman. Tall and
fit, with long red hair, wearing her clerical collar, she meant to
demonstrate that she was not a debate to be had, but a voice of
moral clarity.
In May, she’d gotten a text from someone with the group Texas
Impact, “people of faith for social justice,” giving her 30 minutes’
notice to get to a hearing on SB 29, an anti-trans sports ban. After
being short on votes, the ban had been presumed dead in the House
education committee, chaired by a Democrat, Harold Dutton.
36
But days after it was effectively blocked, Dutton revived the bill
by calling it to a vote again—and voting yes. He didn’t know how
many kids the sports ban would hurt, he told the committee, but
he was voting for it anyway.
It was “wickedness,” Remington said. Wickedness was what
she called the bad-faith maneuvering of Dutton, of all of them.
Only wickedness could describe the idea that these bills were
necessary in order to protect children, when the truth was that
children were harmed even by the attempt to pass them. But for
those who had an evangelical mindset, she said, that was the
point: “Protecting” children meant making it impossible for them
to be trans and survive.
The truth was that protecting trans kids was an urgent matter.
“There’s a conversation to be had here,” Remington told me. “And
I wish that the Democrats in these rooms would help us have it.”
Instead, she said, she felt as if Democrats underestimated both the
stakes and what they could do to fight. Do Democrats view trans
people as a political football? If that’s how they see it, Remington
replied, “they could pick up the political football.”
Avoiding doing so, in fact, seemed to be a deliberate strategy
on the part of some of the bills’ opponents in the Democratic Party
and in some lgbtq rights groups. In this, there were echoes of
the hero campaign, when the anti-trans moral panic was never
directly addressed. Those working to stop the bills this year largely
sidestepped naming that manufactured panic, too, perhaps to
try to win over Republicans. Moms were the strategy to defeat
these bills, I heard over and over—from those who advanced the
strategy, those who were critical of it but were hesitant to say so,
those who saw the danger in it yet accepted that, in this case, in
this session, in this kind of raw emergency, it may have worked.
“The figure of the mom is hanging over everything,” agreed
Jules Gill-Peterson, associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins
University and the author of Histories of the Transgender Child,
when we spoke by phone. Moms have been at the forefront of ADF’s
legal battles to exclude trans girls from girls’ sports—another effort
that fueled this wave of anti-trans bills. These moms are part of a
long history of white women who saw it as their moral duty to the
American nation to speak out as mothers—white moms fought
against school integration and for warning labels on music. “The
moral righteousness accorded to white womanhood” provides a
certain advantage, Gill-Peterson said, “but it also comes at a cost.”
Alliance Defending Freedom may put moms out front, but it
is also working hard to get anti-trans bills into Republican leg-
islators’ hands. The organization’s most recent tax forms show
an annual revenue of more than $65 million in 2019. Now that
fighting these numerous bills is largely “women’s work,” it’s easy
September 2021
to take that work for granted; “it’s a form of care labor” that lgbtq
rights groups are now relying on, said Gillian Branstetter of the
National Women’s Law Center.
Contrast ADF’s resources with those of the Trans Justice Fund-
ing Project, which funds trans rights groups across the country; it
raised $2.7 million total between 2012 and 2017. In the lgbtq groups
leading the fight, trans people are underrepresented. Equality Texas
has eight staff members, its executive director, Ricardo Martinez,
told me, and one identifies as trans; they do work with a trans-led
partner organization, Transgender Education Network of Texas
(tent). Other trans people who work with them are unpaid vol-
unteers, as are the mothers. Community-based organizations like
these “are being met with the full force of the conservative legal
movement,” Branstetter said, and its advocates can outspend those
rights groups at every turn to advance the notion that trans kids
present a new problem, and that they have the solution.
This is hardly the first time in our history that trans children
have been used to define and police sex and gender norms, as
Gill-Peterson’s research going back more than a century shows.
“But I actually think we are in a historically unusual moment,”
she explained, “where it’s presumed that trans youth will be cared
for by their families.” The reality still is, she emphasized, that not
enough trans kids get that care from their families of origin. But
it is telling that just as this norm shifts, anti-trans politics seizes
on trans kids. It’s also easy to see why supporters of restricting
trans kids’ access to health care are the same people who favor a
broader conservative agenda that is invested in privatizing how
we care for one another as a society, while blaming people for their
own failures to do so. If we could stop seeing trans kids as a new
kind of problem, or any kind of problem, and instead name the
problem as that crisis of lack of care, we could more fully confront
T
this regressive agenda.
he last day that the Texas House could take
up new bills was May 25. The health care bans, the
child abuse bill—after the horrible hearings, they
had failed to move any closer to passage. All that
remained was SB 29, the sports ban Representa-
tive Dutton had voted out of committee. The only
reason the trans kids and their families were forced to return to
the Capitol to fight, now, was a Democrat. Far fewer were there
than before.
The House gallery remained tense; activists were keeping a
vigil until the clock ran out on SB 29. Rachel Gonzales was back,
standing in the rotunda with her eight-year-old daughter, Cecil-
ia, who had come in her sister’s place. Pacing around with long
guns, Capitol police looked down from the upper levels. House
members would have to wander a distance from their desks to
see the version of the pastel trans pride flag held by a dad from
the Houston area and his nonbinary kid, a flag they had made
together, emblazoning it with a Don’t Tread on Me snake.
While the House rambled on late into the afternoon, Rachel
showed me the list Cecilia helped her keep as they went from office
to office, visiting something like 22 legislators in the last two days
in an attempt to sway them against the bills. Most of the offices
welcomed them, Rachel said. “I mean, Texas hospitality. Most people
are friendly, even if they turn around and stab you in the back.”
The game now was to keep SB 29 from coming to the floor by
killing time and running out the clock. By evening, the only people
left in the rotunda were the workers cleaning it—and far, far fewer
Features
people were paying attention outside the Capitol. As the hours
wore on, it became clear that there would be no decisive floor
debate, no real climactic moment. For the few members of the
public in the gallery, there was little to witness. Representatives
were mostly away from their desks, taking calls and having side
conversations. When the clock struck midnight, the House was in
the middle of a floor debate about something else entirely. Then,
suddenly, there was applause around the dais, and a few supportive
legislators waved trans pride flags. A much bigger trans flag un-
furled to applause in the gallery above and an immediate scolding
shush from a house usher. That was it. As fast as it began, it was
over. Within minutes, the chamber emptied out. The exhausted
delirium, the relief I would hear from the mothers of trans kids
in the days that followed at not having had to hear the bill come to
the floor at all: That was what was supposed to feel like winning.
“I think where the fight is right now really sums up this en-
tire struggle,” Dr. Ada-Rhodes Short told me a few days later. A
mechanical engineer and trans rights activist who had recently
returned to Texas, she was in the chamber at midnight, with a crew
of other trans women she had helped turn out at the last minute.
Despite beating back the last of the biggest wave of anti-trans
bills in any state in a single year, “we never got to have a moment
where trans lives were affirmed,” Ada-Rhodes said, because the
bills were never rejected with a vote. “Instead, we got to loudly
celebrate being ignored and being invisible and not being heard.”
Ada-Rhodes wanted to help connect activist cis moms and their
trans kids with trans women (some, like Remington Johnson, are
also moms). At the end of June, she invited everyone to a picnic,
out of which grew Trans Resistance of Texas, or trot. Days later,
Abbott convened the legislature for a special session. In time, at
least 15 anti-trans bill were introduced, two more than during
the regular session. On July 12, when two anti-trans sports bans
got a committee hearing, trot, along with Equality Texas and
tent, were back.
No Democrats were present to hear the more than nine hours of
testimony on the proposed legislation. That afternoon, more than
50 House Democrats dramatically fled the state to block a voter
suppression bill from coming to the floor. Even without the House
in session, Republicans went on introducing anti-lgbtq bills at a
record-shattering pace. And the special session won’t be the end:
Governor Abbott has pledged to find a way to ban transition-related
care for trans youth that doesn’t depend on the Texas legislature.
Abbott is now fending off challenges from his right, in part over
trans issues. As such, “he’s going to sound the most extreme,”
said Andrea Segovia, a policy and field coordinator with tent.
Segovia, who lives in Houston with her trans partner and
trans kid, is cisgender. She organized during hero, fought the
bathroom bills, and sat through three legislative sessions: “I’ve
sort of grown, if that’s even the word, with this awful movement.”
tent takes an expansive, intersectional approach: voter sup-
pression laws, abortion bans, gun laws—“they all affect trans
people,” she explained. Texas Republicans, like many of their
counterparts across the country, are clinging to their obsession
with trans youth, despite activists’ defeating these bills, because
the GOP can lose and still succeed at wearing down their targets.
“We’re just trying to keep up, and at the same time, not have our
community in panic mode 24/7,” Segovia told me. “I really look
forward to the day that trans people don’t have to be brave.”
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic.
37
CAN
BIDEN
DEFY
HISTORY?
Conventional wisdom says
the Democrats are finished
after the midterms.
But the conventional wisdom
might be wrong.
By Walter Shapiro
In politics, the rule is treated as immutable,
like the law of gravity that Isaac Newton
supposedly conceived while sitting under an
apple tree in 1666. The political equivalent
is the dictum that the party that controls the
White House is doomed to lose congressional
seats in every off-year election. Presidential
victories are invariably followed by an
outgoing tide that takes away the winning
party’s congressional seats.
Like Newton’s laws of physics, this one
is based on intense observation of the real
world. Since the Civil War, the president’s
party has gained off-year House seats only
three times. And many of these repudiations
of a sitting president have been stunningly
unequivocal: Since 1934, the Oval Office
party has lost 40 or more House seats in
nine off-year elections. The Senate numbers
are less dramatic, but still lopsided: The
party in power gained seats in just seven of
26 off-year elections since 1913, when the
Seventeenth Amendment mandated direct
election of senators.
40
These historical numbers would be
PREVIOUS SPREAD: STRATOS BRILAKIS/SHUTTERSTOCK (BIDEN); SHUTTERSTOCK (CROWD)
daunting for any new president. But
because of Democratic down-ballot disap-
pointments in 2020, Joe Biden currently
holds the kind of congressional majorities
that could be temporarily jeopardized if
a small private plane of legislators was
grounded by fog at Martha’s Vineyard
Airport during fundraising season. In
the 50-50 Senate, Kamala Harris is the
Democrats’ majority. And in the House,
where Democrats hold just a three-seat
edge and both the far left and the skittish
moderates have veto power, Nancy Pelosi’s
legislative genius is demonstrated each
time the House passes a complex measure.
At first glance, there seems to be an
inherent logic to this off-year pattern, es-
pecially for Democratic presidents. In 1992,
Bill Clinton won just 43 percent of the vote,
and by 1994 may have overreached his
shaky mandate. In 2010, Barack Obama
suffered because an inadequately sized
stimulus failed to solve the problem that
afflicted voters: the economic pain from the
Great Recession. The successful Republican
cry that year was “Where are the jobs?”
Small wonder that Democrats regard
the first off-year election of a president’s
term with a trepidation not unlike that
which Jaws inspires in ocean swimmers.
In 1994, after they lost 52 House seats and
eight Senate seats, Democrats were unex-
pectedly confronted with the specter of
Speaker Newt Gingrich. In 2010, Obama
topped that record by enduring the worst
off-year drubbing since 1938: 63 House
seats plus six Senate seats.
The result is that the Democrats govern
with the frenzied desperation of a sailor on
a 24-hour shore leave. The default strategy
is to pass as much as humanly possible in
the first 18 months of a presidency, be-
cause after that, as Clinton and Obama
demonstrated, governing will presumably
be limited to erasable executive orders and
foreign policy. These days, this sense of
urgency is fanned by Democratic activists
and cause groups. Biden—with the flimsiest
congressional majorities since Dwight D.
Eisenhower in 1953—is expected to rebuild
the nation’s infrastructure, aggressively
battle climate change, uphold voting rights,
break the logjam on immigration, and,
if Stephen Breyer retires, fill a Supreme
Court vacancy. And he must do it all well
in advance of the 2022 elections.
Adding to Democratic despair is the
conviction that gerrymandering and
voter suppression have rigged the wheel
September 2021
for the Republicans in 2022. A decade of
Democratic setbacks in state legislative
races will allow the Republicans to shape
House redistricting in such key states as
Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia,
and Ohio. At least redistricting is a two-way
street, and Democrats will have some op-
portunities at self-interested map-drawing
in New York and Illinois. But there is noth-
ing fair about Republican efforts to depress
minority turnout by limiting early voting,
creating new obstacles for mail-in ballots,
and purging the voter rolls.
It all sounds bleak enough to believe that
maybe, pretty soon, they will be carving
Donald Trump’s head on Mount Rush-
more. In this telling, the Democrats will
always remember the early days of the
Biden presidency as the last moment when
far-reaching legislative change was ever
possible. An emblematic Farhad Manjoo
column in The New York Times was head-
lined: “democrats have a year to save
the planet.” That brief, shining moment
will end in November 2022, as the invisible
hand of historical inevitability passes con-
trol of Congress back to the Republicans
for eternity.
Democrats these days make Cassandra
from the Trojan War seem like a cockeyed
optimist. Intimations of doom appear to
be as large a part of the Democratic credo
as the belief in health care for everyone and
the commitment to diversity. Instead of the
donkey as the symbol of the Democratic
Party, it might be appropriate to go with a
man and a woman holding aloft a placard
that declares, the end is nigh.
Enough with the black crepe and ashes.
It is time to treat the supposedly dread
Off-Year Curse like it is nothing more
than the title of a cheesy horror movie.
Because a strong case can be made that the
Democrats could actually gain House and
Senate seats in the 2022 midterm elections.
Fourteen months before the congressional
elections—with the House district lines
not even drawn yet—it is folly to make
precise predictions. But the omens do look
propitious for the Democrats.
W
‌hat about those
fearsome historical
precedents?
Let’s begin by ex-
amining those three
pesky post–Civil War exceptions to the
Iron Law that the party that controls
the White House invariably loses midterm
House seats. In 1934, in the depths of the
Features
Depression, the Democrats under Franklin
D. Roosevelt bucked the trend by gaining
congressional seats. It is hard to derive a
larger moral from that year beyond FDR
being wildly popular, and his predecessor
Herbert Hoover being reviled.
But a different story emerges when we
look at the last seven off-year elections—a
period beginning in 1994 that roughly cor-
responds to the rise of cable TV news and
increased political polarization. Two recent
exceptions—1998 and 2002—hold major
lessons for 2022. (No one, it should be said,
would be rushing to notify Guinness World
Records if he or she tossed a penny seven
times and it landed heads twice.)
In 1998, the Republicans went into full
frenzy over Clinton’s lying about his tawdry
behavior with a White House intern. Repub-
lican strategist David Winston, who was
then a top Newt Gingrich adviser, recalls
major internal GOP debates over whether to
go into the off-year elections with a positive
message or whether to just fan the flames of
impeachment fever. Winston, who was on
the losing side of that strategic argument,
points out that in 1998 the Republicans had
a political case for themselves based on the
record of the GOP-controlled Congress in
balancing the budget, reforming welfare,
helping lower the unemployment rate, and
producing economic growth.
What the Republican zealots failed to
understand in 1998 was that the voters pos-
sessed the ability to separate Clinton’s job
performance from his disturbing personal
conduct. A Gallup analysis found that,
counterintuitively, Clinton received some
of the highest job approval ratings of his
presidency during the impeachment saga.
The exit polls after the 1998 congressio-
nal elections backed this up; 55 percent of
the voters approved of Clinton’s handling
of the presidency, while only 35 percent
had a favorable view of him as a person.
Reflecting this realistic view of Clinton’s
governing strengths and moral weaknesses,
63 percent of the voters in the exit polls
believed that Congress should drop the
entire impeachment inquiry.
The 1998 results: The Democrats gained
five House seats that year and held their
own in the Senate. Winston, who is a long-
time adviser to congressional Republicans,
grasped the obvious current parallels to
1998. As he put it to me, “If the entire
Republican message becomes all about
how awful Joe Biden is and how bad the
Democrats are, we could have a repeat
in 2022.”
The 2002 elections took place in the
shadow of the September 11 attacks—an
unprecedented event that rocked the na-
tion to its core, and the closest analogue
in modern times to the pandemic. George
W. Bush and the Republicans that year
benefited from reapportionment and the
shift of House seats from the East and
the industrial Midwest to the Sunbelt.
In the South, the Democrats also suffered
from realignment, as conservative white
voters continued their migration to the
Republican Party.
Summarizing the 2002 results in his
forthcoming book on the last half-century
of House races, The Long Red Thread, elec-
tion analyst Kyle Kondik writes, “Had Bush
been a liability in 2002 instead of an asset,
Republicans might have lost the House any-
way. But the combination of redistricting
and reapportionment protected against a
Democratic comeback, and Bush and the
national political environment took care
of the rest.”
No modern president, certainly including
Biden, has ever embodied a rally-round-
the-flag effect as Bush did after 9/11. His
approval rating hit 90 percent after the
Twin Towers toppled in 2001 and stayed
above 60 all during the run-up to the 2002
elections. Republicans also displayed no
compunction about assailing the patriotism
of incumbent Democrats such as Georgia
Senator Max Cleland, who had lost both
legs and an arm in Vietnam. A scurrilous
attack ad by GOP challenger Saxby Cham-
bliss against Cleland featured photographs
of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hus-
sein. This kind of fearmongering worked,
because 83 percent of voters in the 2002
national exit polls were at least “somewhat
worried” about another terrorist attack. In
the end, Bush and the Republicans gained
eight House seats and picked up two Senate
seats, including Cleland’s.
No prior election provides automatic
guideposts to 2022. House elections were
more likely to pivot around local factors
and incumbency in 1998 and 2002 than
they do now. Also, the turn of the twenty-
first century was at the tail end of an era
defined by ticket-splitting. In 2000, vot-
ers in 86 House districts voted one way
for president and the other way for Con-
gress. In sharp contrast, that number
dwindled in 2020 to just 16 such Janus-
faced House districts.
But all the caveats in the world still
leave us with lasting lessons from these
two elections that defied the Off-Year Curse.
41
In 1998, the Republicans played to the
passions for vengeance among their red-
meat partisans instead of appealing to
swing voters who had more pressing per-
sonal concerns than the morality of the
incumbent president. And, in 2002, Bush
and the Republicans beat the historical
precedents in large measure by being per-
ceived at the time as having successfully
surmounted a devastating crisis.
S
ince redistricting has
yet to begin and state voting
laws are still in flux, no final
verdict is possible on GOP
efforts to rig the 2022 elec-
tions. But the way that Democrats these
days reflexively link “gerrymander” with
“voter suppression,” it seems as if the words
have been mushed into one phrase rather
than remaining two distinct problems
with differing implications for 2022. On a
national basis, gerrymanders, of course,
only affect House races, because you can’t
redistrict states, as tempting as it might
be in the case of Texas. In contrast, voter
suppression is more likely to manifest itself
in statewide races rather than individual
congressional districts. Most Democratic-
held seats in the South—where GOP efforts
to discourage Blacks from voting are the
most insidious—are majority minority
districts. It doesn’t really matter whether
the Democrats carry John Lewis’s old,
mostly Atlanta-based House district with
85 percent of the vote (Nikema Williams’s
winning margin in 2020) or 82 percent. But
those potentially lost votes might affect
Raphael Warnock’s reelection campaign
for the Senate.
Because of the pandemic, states still
haven’t received the block-by-block Census
42
data, which is the raw material needed for
redistricting. In a state like Texas, which
gains two House seats in 2022, it will be
pivotal to know precisely where in the state
the population growth is centered. But
in keeping with their the-sky-is-falling
mentality, many Democrats assume that
double-digit Republican gains from redis-
tricting alone will guarantee a long line
of GOP House speakers, probably cul-
minating with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But this ingrained pessimism leaves out
the inescapable reality that if you keep
gerrymandering the same states, you do
not gain new House seats. “There are
states that can’t get worse, like Michigan
and Ohio,” said Ali Lapp, the founder and
president of House Majority PAC, which
raised $160 million for the Democrats in the
2020 election cycle. Pointing to New York
and Illinois, where the Democrats have a
redistricting advantage, she concluded, “I
think the national result of all these states
will be a wash.”
Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of
Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a political handi-
capping newsletter at the University of
Virginia, believes that GOP redistricting
gains might go as high as five or six seats.
But Kondik stresses that just because the
Republicans can rig more districts than
that does not mean they actually will. It
is not as if the GOP suddenly will become
the party of good-government reformers.
But Kondik points out the forgotten part of
the equation “is what House members want
and what state legislators want.”
House members, who often have major
backstage roles during redistricting, have
motivations beyond trying to maximize the
number of seats that their party will win.
Most GOP incumbents, for example, would
prefer to run in a 64 percent Republican
district rather than in a 54 percent district,
even if absorbing some additional Demo-
cratic turf meant that their party would
gain House seats elsewhere in the state.
In politics, as in life, self-interest usually
trumps everything. And the true goal of
most incumbents is to have as relaxed a
road to reelection as possible.
A prime example is Mitch McConnell’s
home state of Kentucky, where the Repub-
licans control every lever of redistricting.
In theory, that means that the GOP could
eliminate the lone Democrat in the state’s
congressional delegation by splitting Dem-
ocrat John Yarmuth’s Louisville-based
district into three parts. Politico reports
that McConnell and most of the Republi-
cans in the congressional delegation are
resisting the temptation to erase Yarmuth’s
district. Their reasons range from fear of
protracted court challenges to the risk that
demographic change around Nashville
would reshape the political makeup of the
new districts by the end of the decade.
The Politico article quotes North Carolina
GOP Representative Patrick McHenry as
saying, “There’s an old saying: Pigs get fat.
Hogs are slaughtered. And when it comes
to redistricting, that is, in fact, the case.”
Voter suppression brings with it a
conundrum: Just because a tactic is rep-
rehensible does not automatically make it
effective. Trying to measure the electoral
results of Republican legislative efforts to
depress minority turnout is the political
equivalent of a Labor of Hercules, espe-
cially since the pandemic distorted normal
turnout patterns in 2020 (46 percent of
the electorate voted by mail or absentee).
Moreover, Democrats in Washington and
liberal think-tank experts resist quantifying
September 2021
IT’S TIME TO TREAT
THE DREAD OFF-YEAR
CURSE LIKE IT IS
NOTHING MORE THAN
THE TITLE OF A CHEESY
HORROR MOVIE.
voter suppression out of a reluctance to
minimize the impact of this coordinated
legal assault on democracy.
Some of these efforts to restrict minority
turnout could have a boomerang effect. An-
ecdotal evidence in Georgia and elsewhere
in the South suggests that Black voters are
willing to endure massive inconvenience
and long waits at the polls to ensure that
they do not lose their hard-won right to
vote. That in no way justifies the Repub-
lican assault on voting rights. But it does
suggest that these gutter tactics are not
nearly as effective as many Democrats fear.
Justin Grimmer, a political scientist at
Stanford University who has studied these
issues, makes the point that many of the
legal changes mandating IDs at the polls,
restricting early voting, and toughening
the standards for absentee ballots also af-
fect Republicans. The laws on absentee
voting, for example, may be aimed solely
at Democrats, but they easily could also
catch elderly Republicans in the crosshairs.
In a democracy, as Grimmer stresses, it is
appalling if 1,000 people lose their votes
in a statewide race. But, as he put it, “If the
breakdown is 60 percent Democrats and
40 percent Republicans, it may not have
much of an effect on the outcome.”
Missing in many Democratic laments
over gerrymandering and voter suppression
is a sense of proportion. By exaggerating
the powers of Republicans’ cynical behav-
ior, Democrats risk falling into a slough of
despond. A sense of foreboding about 2022
can easily lead to depressed Democrat-
ic turnout. Remember that Republicans
would not feel forced to resort to desper-
ation tactics like voter suppression if they
believed that they were on the right side of
history and the coming decade.
Features
T
he most evocative
campaign commercial of the
last four decades began with
the words, “It’s morning again
in America.” Ronald Reagan’s
1984 spot, in the spirit of McDonald’s and
Pepsi’s feel-good ads of the era, celebrated
an America on the rebound, with men
in business suits stepping into taxicabs,
paperboys on bicycles roaming suburban
neighborhoods, and, of course, a bride
and groom at the altar. A soothing male
voice-over declared, “This afternoon,
6,500 young men and women will be
married. And with inflation at less than
half of what it was just four years ago,
they can look forward with confidence to
the future.”
You wouldn’t know from the ad that the
unemployment rate stayed above 7 percent
all through 1984, or that, during the start
of 1983, Reagan’s own approval rating had
gotten as low as 35 percent. In 1984, what
mattered for Reagan in his landslide re-
election was not the actual numbers, but
the trajectory. As a Labor Department re-
port reviewing the year summarized, “The
employment situation in 1984 reflected
extraordinary rates of employment growth
in the first 2 quarters.”
The strongest case that the Democrats
could make for themselves in 2022 would
be to reprise “Morning in America.” That,
of course, assumes that the pace of vac-
cinations keeps the Delta variant (and
other future mutations) at bay—and that
Americans continue to revel in the return
to mask-less, Zoom-free, and hug-filled
lives. Similarly, for this strategy to work
for Democrats, the economy needs to keep
expanding, with bursts of inflation limited
to temporary bottlenecks.
Fourteen months before the 2022 elec-
tions is far too early to place too much stock
in Biden’s approval ratings (consistently a
few ticks above 50 percent). Most pollsters
have not even begun asking voters about
what party they prefer (the generic ballot
question), while any head-to-head Senate
matchups are evanescent tests of name
recognition. As a result, the best gauges
about the national mood can be found in
surveys that do not even mention politics.
Since 2008, Gallup has been asking
online panels to rate how they feel about
their lives (on a 0–10 scale) and how they
envision their lives in five years. A June
survey found that Americans reported
higher life satisfaction now and in the fu-
ture than in any prior Gallup survey—a
sharp jump from a historic low point during
the Covid spring of 2020 and a significant
improvement over the mixed ratings at
time of Biden’s inauguration.
To put it in the simplest possible terms:
With Joe Biden in the White House, life is
getting better for most Americans, and they
anticipate that the good times will contin-
ue. As the Gallup write-up of the survey
notes, “Beyond the vaccination rollout and
improving economic conditions, though, is
the critical psychological benefit of renewed
social interaction. Reuniting in person with
family and friends and joining in large gath-
erings of people such as at sporting events
is a crucial part of social wellbeing.”
(Full Disclosure: I have been part of an
online Gallup panel for years. While I can-
not recall if my upbeat post-vaccination
assessment was part of the June survey,
I do know that the question in the past
has caused me to seriously ponder in a
way that I do not with queries on political
preferences and policy issues. Why as a
43
journalist do I participate in such surveys?
Much as conscience-stricken hedge funders
give back by donating wings to major
hospitals and buildings to Ivy League uni-
versities, I give back as a political reporter
by honestly answering questions from rep-
utable pollsters.)
Many left-wing Democrats believe
that the 2022 elections will pivot around
a lengthy legislative to-do list on Capitol
Hill. This line of thought suggests that un-
less Biden delivers on epic climate-change
legislation, immigration reform, voting
rights, and a CVS-receipt–size list of other
pet issues, the Democrats will be viewed as
failures. But activists with these unrealistic
expectations fail to appreciate that Biden
has already accomplished far more than
most presidents going into the midterm
elections. Consider his $1.9 trillion stimulus
package, his vaccination rollout, and the
dramatic change of tone in Washington.
As the Democratic pollster Mark Mellman
told me, “People are not going to evaluate
Joe Biden on the number of bills that he
passed, but on the direction of the country.”
This far in advance, the list of senators
and House members who are retiring in
2022 can serve as a rough proxy for each
party’s prospects for holding a majority.
The assumption is that the frustrations
of serving in the minority make the life
(and the paycheck) of a lobbyist far more
alluring than running for another term
with diminished power. That is why it is
telling that so far only a handful of House
Democrats have announced plans to run
for other offices or leave elective politics.
In contrast, five Senate Republicans whose
seats are on the ballot in 2022 have already
announced their retirements, with the fu-
ture plans of Trump toady Ron Johnson in
44
Wisconsin and 87-year-old Chuck Grassley
in Iowa still undetermined.
Unlike 2018, when the Democrats had
to defend Senate seats in such flaming red
Trump states as North Dakota, West Virgin-
ia, Montana, and Missouri, the 2022 map
gives the party reason for optimism. This
time around, the rough consensus is that
the most endangered Democratic incum-
bent is New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan,
since popular Governor Chris Sununu (a
68 percent approval rating) may well be
her formidable Republican challenger.
When the Democrats’ toughest state is
New Hampshire, which last opted for a
GOP presidential candidate in 2000, it is
a far cry from even 2020, when the party
knew from the outset that Doug Jones was
doomed to defeat in Alabama.
In 2022, no Senate Democrat will be on the
ballot in a state that Trump carried in the last
election. But Raphael Warnock in Georgia
and Mark Kelly in Arizona—two states where
Biden’s 2020 margins were somewhere
between an eyelash and a whisker—are
running again after being elected to just
partial terms. It is premature to give Daily
Racing Form rundowns of key Senate races.
But the Democrats are well-positioned to
make gains with open GOP-held seats in
Pennsylvania and North Carolina, as well
as in Wisconsin, whether or not Johnson
runs for a third term. Perhaps the biggest
Senate advantage the Democrats will have
in 2022 is the likelihood of divisive Repub-
lican primaries in battleground states.
In 2017–2018, the Democrats won six key
Senate races (Alabama, Arizona, Michigan,
Montana, West Virginia, and Wisconsin)
following scorched-earth GOP primaries.
The most enduring joke in politics—a
joke that has launched enough memes to
sustain Twitter for a century—is that “it all
comes down to turnout.” It may be a laugh
line, much like Infrastructure Week under
Trump, but it is also the biggest unknown
about 2022. Nancy Pelosi is speaker for a
simple reason: Democratic turnout in 2018
was the highest for an off-year election in
more than a century and produced a 40-
seat pickup in the House that sustains the
party’s narrow majority today.
But will Democrats and Democratic-
leaning independents again vote in record
numbers in 2022 without Trump in the
White House or on the ballot? A strong
argument can be made that Tip O’Neill’s
dictum has been reversed, and these days
“all politics are national,” as ticket-splitting
appears to be going the way of the Prohi-
bition Party. True, the Republicans have
been adept at locating forgotten pockets of
rural white voters. But the Democrats, with
a long history of their voters going awol
in non-presidential years, probably have
the most to gain from the fervent attitude
that both sides now bring to all elections.
The political scientist and election fore-
caster Rachel Bitecofer is a strong adherent
to the concept of negative partisanship, the
idea that voters are primarily motivated by
scorn for the other party. For 2022, she is de-
voting her energies to launching StrikePAC,
a political group trying to brand the entire
Republican Party as far-right extremists.
Her motivation: fear that the Biden White
House and most Democratic consultants
are too reasonable and too reluctant to go
for the jugular. As she said in an interview,
“Happy people don’t vote. You know who’s
always unhappy? The Republicans.”
Bitecofer believes that the most im-
portant measure going into 2022 will be
the level of enthusiasm of the Democratic
September 2021
coalition. But a strong case can be made
that the makeup of the 2022 Democratic
coalition also matters, since higher-income
and better-educated voters tend to be the
most reliable voters. These days, for better
or worse, the Democrats are increasingly
the party of high SAT scores. According
to the data analysis firm Catalist, the
Democrats’ performance among white
college-educated voters jumped from
46 percent support in 2012 (when Barack
Obama won 51 percent of the vote nation-
ally) to a comfortable 54 percent in 2018
and 2020. The upshot of these demographic
changes, Ali Lapp from House Majority PAC
argues, is that “the idea that the Democrats
are the party of inconsistent voters is no
longer true.”
But the Democrats have a secret weapon
in 2022: Donald J. Trump.
Unlike any defrocked president since
the nineteenth century, Trump seems de-
termined to make the midterms, especially
the GOP primaries, into a crusade for his
personal vindication. It is as if Herbert
Hoover stumped for Republican candi-
dates in 1934—two years after he carried
just six states in his reelection bid—by
claiming that it was “fake news” that he
was paralyzed in the face of the Depres-
sion. Imagine if in 1974, just months after
he resigned in disgrace, Richard Nixon
toured the nation with an “I should have
burned the White House tapes” rehabili-
tation tour. But Trump—whose ego needs
were never going to be sated by crashing
a wedding at Mar-a-Lago to rant about a
stolen election—has embarked on a single-
minded mission to quash all dissent within
the Republican Party.
Pollster Mark Mellman captured the GOP
dilemma: “The problem that the Republicans
THE STRONGEST CASE THAT
THE DEMOCRATS COULD
MAKE FOR THEMSELVES IN
2022 WOULD BE TO REPRISE
REAGAN’S “MORNING IN
AMERICA.”
Features
have is that they think that Donald Trump
is the secret for turning out the base. And
for Democrats, he’s a red flag in front of a
bull.” In 2020, Trump did inspire a hidden
battalion of maga-hatted voters who had
skipped both 2016 and 2018. According to
an in-depth Pew Research Center study,
which combined poll results with the re-
cords of actual voting turnout, 19 percent of
2020 voters had not cast ballots in the prior
two elections. That group of occasional
voters was evenly split between the two
2020 presidential candidates, although the
Biden supporters skewed much younger.
The Republican strategy for creating
repeat voters out of this off-and-on cohort
is predicated on nonstop fearmongering.
Some of the issues that the GOP is flog-
ging are perennials that have worked for
Republicans in prior elections—especially
crime and immigration. The weaponiza-
tion of these issues concerns Democratic
strategists looking ahead to 2022. But for
the Republicans these days, everything is
a threat, from door-to-door vaccination
drives to elementary school curricula. The
GOP seems more obsessed with critical race
theory than the John Birch Society during
the Cold War ever was with The Communist
Manifesto. H.L. Mencken would proba-
bly have mocked this kind of Fox News
fanaticism as “boob bait.” As a skeptical
Republican consultant, who works almost
exclusively in swing states, put it, “In the
quiet moments before people vote in 2022, I
don’t think that they will be thinking about
critical race theory.”
Perhaps the Democrats’ biggest hope
for 2022 is that Republican primaries for
winnable Senate and House seats will be
dominated by candidates who might seem
extreme even to QAnon believers. Fealty
to Trump is not just a popular approach
among Republicans—it is a job require-
ment. Washington Post cartoonist Michael
de Adder conjured up a 2021 version of
Joseph McCarthy, including the jowls and
the five o’clock shadow, badgering a brow-
beaten GOP witness, “Are you now, or have
you ever been, disloyal to Donald Trump?”
Republicans with long memories, start-
ing with Mitch McConnell, know how easy
it is to squander a Senate seat if the wrong
candidate prevails in a primary. In 2012,
Democrat Claire McCaskill won an extra
term in the Senate after her Republican
opponent, Todd Akin, began talking about
the repugnant concept of “legitimate rape.”
And in 2010, Christine O’Donnell, the GOP
Senate nominee in Delaware who had once
bragged about her occult experimentation,
was forced to begin her first TV ad by saying
earnestly to the camera, “I am not a witch.”
The hardest things for the Democrats to
accept 14 months before the 2022 elections
are the virtues of patience. If activists allow
themselves to take off their dark glasses
of gloom and see all the scenarios under
which the Democrats could hold Congress
in 2022, they might temper their unrealistic
expectations about what Biden and the
congressional leaders can accomplish in
the next year with micrometer majorities
on Capitol Hill. In a sense, one of the gravest
dangers ahead—both for the Democrats and
for American democracy—is the possibility
of younger voters giving up on electoral
politics because utopia was not achieved in
the first two years of the Biden presidency.
In truth, as even Isaac Newton might agree,
taming a pandemic and reviving a stricken
economy is a hell of a ticket to run on.
Walter Shapiro is a staff writer at The
New Republic.
45
ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM

September 2021
46
Books & the Arts
Decades
Of Fear
How the War on Terror
undermined American
democracy
By Patrick Iber
ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2016, two months
before the Electoral College victory of
Donald Trump, an essay published un-
der the pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus”
appeared in the conservative intellectual
journal the Claremont Review of Books.
Aimed squarely at never-Trump conserva-
tives, its author—later identified as Michael
Anton—insisted that there was no choice
but to support Trump. “A Hillary presiden-
cy will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire
Progressive-left agenda,” he wrote. To his
fellow conservatives, he pleaded: “If you
genuinely think things can go on with no
fundamental change needed, then you have
implicitly admitted that conservatism is
wrong.” Like Trump, Anton saw before him
a sick country. He diagnosed the disease as
a political left busy dismantling everything
that he thought made the country great,
and a conservative intellectual apparatus
that has accepted losing in a system stacked
against it. The most fundamental problem,
according to Anton, was that “the cease-
less importation of Third World foreigners
with no tradition of, taste for, or experi-
ence in liberty means that the electorate
grows more left, more Democratic, less
Republican, less republican, and less tradi-
tionally American with every cycle.” Failing
to support Trump courted national suicide.
“2016 is the Flight 93 election,” wrote An-
ton, “charge the cockpit or you die.”
Anton’s essay demonstrates the com-
bination of projection and paranoia that
characterized the administration he would
Books & the Arts
soon join. While it is consumed with fear of
immigrants as the threat to the body politic
and the American way of life, its title, “The
Flight 93 Election,” calls back to a different
threat. The attacks of September 11, 2001,
are otherwise unmentioned in the essay.
But the implication of the title is clear: Just
as the passengers of Flight 93, realizing their
hijacked plane was a part of a coordinated
attack on America, tried to storm the cock-
pit, causing the plane to crash into a field
rather than reach its intended target, so,
too, was sacrifice now required to confront
a civilizational threat. “You may die any-
way,” writes Anton, encouragingly. “You—
or the leader of your party—may make it
into the cockpit and not know how to fly or
land the plane. There are no guarantees. Ex-
cept one: if you don’t try, death is certain.”
As it happens, it is believed that the
intended target for Flight 93 was the U.S.
Capitol Building. That attack on the Cap-
itol was foiled by the passengers on the
doomed plane. Some 20 years later, on
January 6, 2021, the Capitol did come un-
der attack. But it was neither the left, nor
recent immigrants, nor Al Qaeda who car-
ried it out. It was the group that Anton
thought of as “traditional Americans”—a
mob of private-plane passengers, white
supremacists, and conspiracy theorists for
Trump—who sought, with the approval of
the president, to overturn the results of a
democratic election.
These two attacks on the Capitol, sep-
arated by approximately two decades,
bookend Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of
Terror. But what connects them? In the
wake of Trump’s election, two principal
explanations for his victory emerged: one
centered on the divisions and wounds of
race, another on the divisions and wounds
of economic inequality. Ackerman offers
a third explanation—or perhaps, more
precisely, a way of tying various threads
together. “The War on Terror,” he writes,
“was by no means the only factor enabling
Trump’s rise.” But it created ways for the
other factors, such as racism, to find pow-
erful forms of expression: “It revitalized
the most barbarous currents in American
history, gave them renewed purpose, and
set them on the march, an army in search
of its general.” It has also misled us. The
threat to democracy comes not from terror-
ism but the apparatus of counterterrorism,
at the level of the state and at the level of
politics. The book argues powerfully that
the open-ended War on Terror has been an
exceptionalist fantasy, a bipartisan failure,
and a profound risk to American democ-
racy. Whether ending the War on Terror
would be enough to diminish that threat
now is another matter.
ACKERMAN BEGAN HIS professional
career as an intern at The New Republic in
2002. Like the magazine of that era, he ini-
tially favored the war in Iraq. But he grew
disillusioned quickly; by 2005, he was ar-
guing for immediate U.S. withdrawal. And
though TNR published his case, he was
clearly diverging from the editorial position
of the magazine. He started a blog called
Too Hot for TNR, and told a colleague that
it “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world”
to get fired “for being too left-wing.” Some-
thing like that happened in 2006, and he
has been writing for other outlets—from
The American Prospect to The Guardian to
The Daily Beast—ever since.
The result of nearly two decades of
reporting on the wars from a skeptical po-
sition, Reign of Terror is attuned to their
costs. Ackerman has done much tradi-
tional reporting: embedding with the U.S.
military, visiting Guantánamo, talking
to sources on background. But like many
in his generation of bloggers, he has
mixed reporting with analysis and opin-
ion. That Reign of Terror begins with three
epigraphs—one from James Madison, one
from the French poet Alfred de Vigny, and
one (“Sick of living in America / Sick of mass
hysteria”) from the punk band Ceremony—
communicates his tone and sensibility.
47
 The book begins not in New York City
but in northeastern Oklahoma, in a small
community called Elohim City overseen
by a racist, polygamist, Christian suprem-
acist leader named Robert G. Millar. In
1994, Timothy McVeigh visited, sharing
the compound residents’ white supremacist
thinking and anti-government views. A for-
mer soldier, McVeigh planned and carried
out the bombing at the federal building in
Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Many re-
sponded to that attack by leaping to blame
Muslims. When the investigation revealed
McVeigh’s responsibility, he was given rep-
resentation, tried, and sentenced to death.
Meanwhile, Congress passed a law making
it easier to convict people of ties to terrorist
groups outside the United States.
The contrast between the response to
McVeigh’s act of terrorism—at that point the
deadliest attack of its type in U.S. history—
and 9/11, was remarkable. The attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
unleashed a new era, reorienting Ameri-
can society and government. Hate crimes
against Muslims (and Sikhs assumed in-
correctly to be Muslims) skyrocketed.
Conspiracies seeking to explain the attack
proliferated. Law enforcement agencies
began operating with the assumption of
guilt-by-religious-association. Fourteen
thousand Arabs and Muslims who were
registered for a database kept by Attorney
General John Ashcroft were subject to de-
portation proceedings.
It is impossible to look back at the Bush
administration’s actions and not see the
groundwork for Trumpism. Like Trump’s
“Muslim ban” 15 years later, Ashcroft’s
database targeted Muslims, but threw in
North Koreans for cover. Deliberate acts
of cruelty were the hallmark of the Bush
administration’s program of torture, car-
ried out by the CIA at black sites around
the world and at Guantánamo Bay. Nor was
that the only place that abetted lawbreaking
among government officials. It is hard to
square Stellar Wind—the massive, secret,
and warrantless collection of Americans’
communications data—with the Consti-
tution, though the Bush administration’s
lawyers tried. When CIA Director George
Tenet told Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney that the National Security Agency
director would go to jail for the way he was
intercepting and using data, Cheney said
he would post bail.
It is true that Bush decided to frame the
conflict as a “Global War on Terror” rather
than a conflict with Islam, but he acted in
48
Reign of Terror:
How the 9/11 Era
Destabilized America
and Produced Trump
by Spencer Ackerman
Viking,
448 pp., $30.00
ways that virtually guaranteed that this
would be a distinction without a difference.
Bush proffered a “with-us-or-against-us”
mentality and used the attack on 9/11 to
build a case for war on Iraq based on dis-
tortions and selective intelligence. The
public believed it: In 2003, 69 percent of
Americans thought there was likely a con-
nection between Saddam Hussein and the
attack. The weak case for U.S. intervention
was bolstered for many Americans by the
sense that the United States was engaged
in a civilizational conflict. And even if Bush
did not, many conservative churches did
blame Islam for 9/11; Bush’s use of the word
“evil” helped supply a comfortable frame-
work for conservative Christians. When
the invasion of Iraq proved catastrophic,
conservatives were furious not with Bush
but with Iraqis themselves, who were not
playing the part assigned to them by their
narrative of American heroism and inno-
cence. “I’d like to see one other thing in
Iraq,” wrote Fred Barnes in The Weekly
Standard in 2004, “an outbreak of grat-
itude for the greatest act of benevolence
one country has ever done for another.”
Tucker Carlson was more colorful: Iraqis,
he thought, who “don’t use toilet paper or
forks … can just shut the fuck up and obey.”
Republicans turned what they thought
was their war on evil against their domes-
tic opponents. When Vietnam veteran
John Kerry ran against Bush in 2004, he
portrayed himself as a good soldier and
steward of the post-9/11 environment. A
murky group calling itself the “Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth” emerged to challenge
Kerry’s account of his service. “Its pur-
pose,” writes Ackerman, coining a phrase
that brilliantly captures the logic of the
attack, “was to un-Troop its targets, ex-
cluding them from the public veneration
that the post-9/11 era afforded to military
service.” Meanwhile, the new vocabulary
of “Homeland Security” linked terrorism
to immigration. In Bush’s second term,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
raids increased in pace and intensity.
One 2007 sweep through a factory mak-
ing vests and backpacks for the military
resulted in 361 arrests. “It’s inhumane to
take a mother away from her children,” one
man said that night. “She’s not a criminal.”
When Barack Obama was the Democratic
presidential candidate in 2008, he faced a
right wing that was well-prepared and eager
to associate him with foreign enemies. His
candidacy united the War on Terror and the
culture war in the minds of the Republican
base. In a time before widespread adoption
of social media, email chains proliferated
suggesting that Obama was a secret Mus-
lim. Sarah Palin, as the nominee for vice
president, told crowds that Obama “pals
around with terrorists.” People shouted
at rallies for his head. When Obama was
elected in the midst of economic collapse,
anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and xe-
nophobia all came together in Tea Party
activism. Tea partiers, encouraged by Fox
News, could mobilize panic around a Mus-
lim cultural center in Manhattan, calling it
the “Ground Zero Mosque” and its moderate
cleric a terrorist sympathizer. The ultimate
expression of this framing of Obama as an
un-American outsider was “birtherism,” the
charge that Obama had faked his place of
birth and therefore was not truly American.
It was an absurd and obvious lie that was
encouraged and repeated most notably by
Donald Trump. It helped Trump establish
a political persona and a connection to the
voters who would once have been described
as “fringe” but had become the core demo-
graphic of the Republican base.
IF REIGN OF TERROR builds toward an
explanation of Trump by showing how
the post-9/11 environment turbocharged the
darkest elements in the American right,
Ackerman also argues that Democrats share
responsibility. Fearful of being labeled
unpatriotic at a time of intense patrio-
tism, they partnered with Bush in the days
and months after 9/11. Only one senator
voted against the usa patriot Act. Most
Democrats voted to authorize the war in
Iraq. Obama’s stated opposition to the war
in 2002 probably provided him with the
margin of victory over Hillary Clinton,
who had supported it, in the 2008 pri-
mary. (Though after a meeting with Code
September 2021
Pink protesters in March 2003, Clinton had
muttered to an aide, “I can’t believe I signed
up for this fucking war.”) Nevertheless,
in office, Obama mostly sought to build
what Ackerman describes as a “sustain-
able” War on Terror. He sought to end
the legal murk around Bush’s practices,
halting authorized torture and closing
secret prisons. But he increased the troop
presence in Afghanistan, and expand-
ed the use of drone strikes, linking him
to the security state in ways that prevent-
ed a more thorough reckoning with what
had gone wrong.
In a book largely without heroes, Acker-
man commends the figures who spoke out
against abuses and exposed the misdeeds
of the government. These include some
politicians, mostly figures on the left like
Bernie Sanders, who eventually called for
an end to the very concept of the War on
Terror. He devotes a chapter to whistle-
blowers who, from within the security state
itself, revealed its wrongdoing. These in-
clude the well-known and controversial
cases of Chelsea Manning, who provided
diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks in 2010,
and Edward Snowden, who revealed on-
going mass surveillance in 2013. Less well
known is the case of Dan Jones, a Sen-
ate investigator studying the history of
the CIA torture program. Jones, realizing
that the CIA was underplaying the bru-
tality, overplaying the effectiveness, and
actively concealing information, smug-
gled documents to the Senate to ensure
that investigators would not lose access to
evidence of agency lies.
Many of these beats will be familiar to
those who lived through them; they should
be required reading for anyone too young
to remember. But one aspect of the book
that is both unusual and important is that
Ackerman gives attention to the lives of
people on the wrong end of U.S. violence,
human beings who remain shockingly
unfamiliar to most Americans. These in-
clude Omar Khadr, a child of Canadian Al
Qaeda sympathizers who, at age 15, may
have thrown a grenade that killed a U.S.
soldier in Afghanistan. He was tortured in
Guantánamo, hog-tied, held upside down,
and his head was used to clean the floor,
like a human mop. It includes Faheem
Qureshi, a young man who spent 40 days
in the hospital after being hit by a missile
fired by a drone on the third full day of
Barack Obama’s presidency.
And that brings us to Trump. Super-
ficial readings of Trump would portray
Books & the Arts
If you are looking for examples of
executive lawbreaking and ex
cathedra mendacity, it is not
necessary to reach back further
than Bush.
him as an opponent of the War on Terror.
He claimed to have opposed the Iraq War;
he insulted Bush and military families; he
said he would bring troops home. But Ack-
erman argues that Trump’s victory in 2016
did not present a repudiation of the War
on Terror. Rather, it was a product of it.
By the time Trump was running for pres-
ident, fears about immigration and the
rise of isis were feeding what Ackerman
describes as a “white nativist appetite for
a narrative of besiegement, replacement,
abandonment, and betrayal.” Ted Cruz
tried to tap into these sentiments, argu-
ing that “the front line with isis isn’t just
in Iraq and Syria, it’s in Kennedy Airport
and the Rio Grande.” But it was Trump
who knew how to use the jingoism of the
War on Terror to stoke grievance and offer
a respite from its humiliations.
Rather than breaking with the War on
Terror, Trump removed Obama-era restric-
tions and brought it home. He intensified
bombing campaigns in Afghanistan that
increased civilian casualties. Over his first
two years, he launched more drone strikes
than Obama had in his most intense period
of their use. At home, Trump empowered
ICE and Customs and Border Protection to
act with special brutality: famously separat-
ing families, but also using prolonged cold
and light exposure in ways that resembled
the techniques of CIA torture. He treated
anti-fascist activists as domestic terror-
ists, and when Black Lives Matter protests
surged in 2020, he turned the apparatus of
counterterrorism against them, too. Though
there was no danger to him whatsoever,
Trump spent the first Sunday of protests
over the police murder of George Floyd in
the bunker where Dick Cheney spent 9/11.
IN THE GENRE of books that seek to
explain why we are in the mess we are in,
Reign of Terror is a formidable entry. To
those who want to portray Trump as wholly
exceptional, and discontinuous with the
recent past, the book is an essential cor-
rective. It roots Trump in white racial
grievance of long standing, and shows
how militarized counterterror prepared a
significant minority of Americans to turn
to him to escape the indignities that, for
Trump’s base, included 9/11 itself, Bush’s
failures, and Obama’s existence. It is not to
deny that Trump presented in some ways
novel challenges to American society and
government to note that if you are looking
for examples of executive lawbreaking,
ex cathedra mendacity, administrative
incompetence, and intentional cruelty
inflicted as policy, it is not necessary to
reach back further than Bush.
Despite the links between the Bush and
Trump administrations, many of Trump’s
opponents have worked to rehabilitate
Bush, by pointing to his displeasure with
Trump, or to small acts of civility like pass-
ing a candy to Michelle Obama in 2018.
Though Bush left office with an approval
rating as low as Trump ever had, by 2018
54 percent of Democrats viewed him fa-
vorably. Similarly, Mitt Romney and Liz
Cheney may have mounted principled
opposition to Trump’s behavior, and be-
come victims of a Trumpified Republican
Party, but they, too, were complicit in cre-
ating the atmosphere that brought the
country to this point. Seeking votes in
the 2008 primary, Romney had called for
a doubling of Guantánamo. For her part,
Cheney co-founded a group called Keep
America Safe and spread the CIA’s line that
torture had made possible the killing of
Osama bin Laden. Even the “adults in the
room” who became so prominent on liber-
al msnbc were mostly veterans of the War
on Terror. In Ackerman’s view, Trump’s at-
tacks on the “Deep State” led some liberals
to overidentify with individuals who have
themselves misled the public and avoided
responsibility for their actions.
49
 Ackerman’s book lands at a pivotal crisis, it might logically follow that stepping the Nixon era destabilized America and
moment. Like many ideas once dismissed away from it now can repair the damage produced Trump” be any less plausible?
as implausibly left-wing, antiwar views now done. But this is far less clear. Shifts in the If we began the tape in the 1970s, for
have more solid representation in politics balance of power in the Republican Party example, we would see the conclusion of
and media. The entire Democratic field in cannot be so easily unwound, the market a war interpreted as a humiliating defeat.
2020 spoke out against “endless wars,” and demand for extreme views remains strong We would see some veterans returning from
even Trump clashed with his more hawkish and untethered from real problems. Dem- Vietnam and embracing the white power
advisers like John Bolton. A critique of the ocrats, for their part, still fear the political militia movement. We would see Nixon’s
“Forever Wars” and arguments in favor of a consequences of rethinking public safety, criminal behavior in office pardoned by
more restrained foreign policy posture for internationally and domestically. his successor, setting a foundation of elite
the United States have taken institutional impunity that remains a powerful feature
form in the Quincy Institute, which brings IT WOULD BE churlish to fault a book of American life. We would see Congress
together left-wing and conservative think- subtitled How the 9/11 Era Destabilized investigating the security state’s abuses
ers with funding from George Soros and America and Produced Trump for making of that era’s surveillance technology. In
Charles Koch. President Joe Biden plans its case forcefully. But I also wonder if, when the years that follow, we would see Newt
to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan considered in broader historical terms, the Gingrich rise in the Republican Party on
on or before September 11, 2021. War on Terror will seem like such a pivot- the back of a legislative strategy of total re-
These are all positive developments; al moment. 9/11 certainly put a pin in the jection of cooperation with the Democrats,
bringing an end to the ill-conceived War balloon of 1990s triumphalism. And counter- and right-wing media embrace increasingly
on Terror is the right thing to do for the terrorism continues to shape consciousness extreme positions and identities. All this,
United States and the world. “Of all the end- in ways that may sometimes be hard to rec- all before 9/11. In this framing of the recent
less costs of terrorism,” writes Ackerman ognize. But there is nothing new about the past, the War on Terror made it possible to
cogently, “the most important is the least United States launching destructive wars, sustain a politics of fear as domestic crime
tallied: what fighting it has cost our de- or in the American right finding ways to rates dropped to historic lows. Important,
mocracy.” If the War on Terror brought demonize internal enemies in apocalyp- but not era-defining in the way that it felt
the United States to its current democratic tic tones. Would a book that argued “How to those living through it.
I’m not sure that Ackerman would dis-
agree. He states that our inability to step
out of the intellectual and strategic quag-
Chronicle of Drifting mire of the War on Terror is a result of the
clash between America’s position as a glob-
by Yuki Tanaka al hegemon and its exceptionalist concept
of American innocence. “Trump brought
aspects of the war home,” he writes, “but
When I look into a puddle, there is no me but just light gliding fundamentally the war was always home.”
Even if political leaders are ready to put an
over. If only the sky were kind enough to lend me his blue coat. I
end to the “Forever Wars” (and they may
bought a piece of tuna at the fish market, the owner’s apron so not be), economic growth elsewhere in the
clean he must have one for greeting, one for gutting. The fringe of world virtually guarantees that the near fu-
his right thumbnail a red crescent. I gave him two 500-yen coins ture will see a relative decline in U.S. power.
Only time will tell if the War on Terror
beaded with my sweat, and he wiped them on his chest. Summer is
will become a permanent feature of our
coming to a close—autumn ahead, trailing with orange hair. politics, or perhaps a footnote in what the
Walking down the alley lined with small buddha statues, I was United States did between Cold Wars. But
reminded of a friend who would pray at night. She kneeled and it will be a painful transition if the United
States tries to hang on to global dominance
prayed to a picture of her altar on her laptop so hard she cried for
by abusing the power it retains, in the same
the health of her parents. I thought, Dark-haired cloud with way that Trump’s followers try to cling to
beautiful rain. power even as they have become the nu-
merical minority within the United States.
Seeing this danger clearly will be essential
to navigating the next decades, which are
likely to feature a loss of status that will
be difficult for many in the United States
to accept. Americans are still so powerful,
and so afraid.

Patrick Iber is an associate professor of history

at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and
Yuki Tanaka is the author of the chapbook Séance author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The
in Daylight. He teaches at Hosei University in Tokyo. Cultural Cold War in Latin America.

50 September 2021
 Lengthening
Shadows
Why W.G. Sebald kept returning
to the horrors of the past
By Ryu Spaeth
ILLUSTRATION BY ALVARO TAPIA HIDALGO
PHOTO REFERENCE: ULF ANDERSEN/GETTY
Books & the Arts
THE FOUR GREAT prose works of W.G.
Sebald were published around the turn of
the millennium, a period once perceived
by some as the end of history. Vertigo was
quietly released in Germany a year after
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Em-
igrants and The Rings of Saturn followed
in the 1990s, as Europe was completing
a utopian project to bind its warring pol-
ities into a single, peaceful union. And
Austerlitz, his masterpiece, was pub-
lished in early 2001, mere months before
the terrorist attack that, among its many
world-upending consequences, remind-
ed Western democracies that the events
of the past cannot be left behind. Rather,
as Sebald once wrote of the dead, they are
ever returning to us.
Sebald died later that year at the age
of 57, likely of a heart attack as he was driv-
ing near Norwich, England, where he had
made his home since leaving West Ger-
many in the 1960s. He did not live to see
the resurgence of ethno-nationalist forces
across Europe, part of a broader backlash
to a postwar liberal democratic order that
has never seemed shakier. But he prob-
ably would not have been surprised by
these developments, since his books do
not carry a trace of the triumphant tenor
that marked the era in which they were
produced. To the contrary, they are more
like the tombstones that often appear in the
grainy photographs interspersed through-
out his work: mournful monuments to all
that has been lost and destroyed over the
course of European civilization; glimps-
es of the vast necropolis just beneath the
surface of things.
Sebald wrote in this pessimistic vein
partly because he was, by nature, given to
brooding. “Wittgenstein was right,” says
Carole Angier in Speak, Silence: In Search
of W.G. Sebald, the first major biography
of the writer. “It is not just that a happy
man is different from an unhappy one.
It is that the world of the happy man is
different from the world of the unhappy
one.” Sebald also wrote this way because
he was German, and, like many others of
his generation, would always be ashamed
of what his parents, particularly his father,
had done during the war. Indeed, he is best
remembered as a writer of the Holocaust,
which for him remained both the ultimate
symbol of humanity’s destructive urge and
the black apotheosis of European history,
whatever attempts the continent made in
the subsequent decades to forge for itself
a new fate.
51
 Yet despite the pervasive gloom of his
books, Sebald was, and still is, an intense-
ly beloved writer. And despite the reserve
he showed in his life (one close associate
said he resembled a “block of ice”), he
could be warm and playful and bitingly
funny, and was adored by his sisters, his
friends and colleagues, and his students
at the University of East Anglia, where
he taught German literature for the bulk
of his career.
“People lose the faculty of remember-
ing,” he once told his students. “This is the
function of literature.” His compulsion to
remember and resurrect is central to the
appeal of his work, which, in addition to
the somber business of saving the forgotten
souls of the Holocaust, is full of curiosities
and wonders. His method is now widely
imitated: a bricolage of history and fabri-
cation, images and narrative, memoir and
borrowed text—“a most satisfactory form
of essayistic semi-fiction,” as his friend, the
writer Michael Hamburger, told him. The
lost world Sebald stitches together feels
alien and deeply familiar at the same time,
which is another way of describing that
foreign country we call the past.
Another friend told Sebald that when
he read Vertigo for the first time, it felt like
“real literature”—as if literature was also
one of the lights going out of the world.
This, too, is part of Sebald’s appeal, or was
at least for influential champions like Su-
san Sontag: the discovery that there are
still Kafkas in our midst. And just as Kafka
seemed to prophesy the totalitarian state
in his depictions of helpless individuals
terrorized by bureaucratic forces, so Seb­
ald may have seen what lies in store for us
in his recurring vision of an abandoned
Earth cast in perpetual twilight—a “secret
sickening away of the world,” as he wrote in
his narrative poem After Nature. He came
to this vision not by looking forward but by
looking back. As he once wrote to a friend,
“The future is in the past.”
WINFRIED GEORG SEBALD was born in
1944 in Wertach, in the Bavarian Alps. His
mother was a homemaker, “the perfect
Hausfrau,” Angier writes. His father was a
prisoner of war. He returned from France
when little Winfried was three years old; as
the son would later recall of the reunion,
one day a stranger showed up at their door
and claimed to be his father. Sebald père
had entered the army in the late 1920s be-
cause, like other working-class men of that
depressed era, he needed the job, eventually
52
serving in the Wehrmacht as a technical
support officer in charge of vehicles. At his
wedding in 1936, he wore a Nazi uniform.
Sebald hated his father from the begin-
ning, a feeling that only hardened as he
became aware of his Nazi past. (The ide-
alized father figure in Sebald’s life was his
mother’s father, a kindly village policeman
who died when Sebald was 12.) Nazism
was the cataclysmic event whose reper-
cussions defined his youth, even if hardly
anyone spoke of it. Wertach and nearby
Sonthofen, where the family moved when
Sebald was eight, were remote enough that
they were largely untouched by the war.
There were not many Jews in these towns
either, and the few who were there were
stripped of their livelihoods and often com-
pelled to emigrate. (“I never even knew
what a Jew was,” Sebald’s sister Gertrud
tells Angier.) There was, in other words,
scant trace here of the Nazi past, so that
the past ended up being both nowhere
and everywhere—an abomination that was
deeply felt but not properly remembered;
a silence that rang out across the majestic
mountains of Germany’s southern edge.
This was where Sebald grew up: an
almost premodern idyll of breathtaking
beauty, the atmosphere of which was nev-
ertheless laden with trauma and terror.
If that sounds like a fair description of
Sebald’s work, it’s because he plumbed
his childhood home for material in sto-
ries like “Il ritorno in patria” in Vertigo,
in which a Sebald-like narrator returns to
his hometown of “W.” after a long absence,
and “Paul Bereyter” in The Emigrants, in
which a different Sebald-like narrator re-
counts the story of a primary school teacher
who lost his job during the Nazi years be-
cause he was part-Jewish (based on the
travails of a real person, Sebald’s former
instructor Armin Müller). These stories are
Speak, Silence:
In Search of
W.G. Sebald
by Carole Angier
Bloomsbury Circus,
656 pp., $32.00
marked by the “private silence of German
families,” as Angier writes, belying Ger-
many’s postwar reputation for publicly
flagellating itself for its past atrocities. The
profound disconnect between surface re-
ality and its hidden currents would haunt
Sebald his entire life. “It is the simultaneity
of a blissful childhood and these horrific
events that now strikes me as quite incom-
prehensible,” he once said.
Like his fictional counterpart Paul Be-
reyter, Armin Müller would take his young
charges on rambles through the country-
side to study the flowers and trees. He
would also show them the quaint hallmarks
of the town’s industry: the wickerwork
factory, the brewery, the cheesemaker, the
mill, the gunsmith. (In “Paul Bereyter,” Seb-
ald’s narrator recounts how the gunsmith,
upon fixing the complicated lock on an
old firearm, would take the gun out into
the garden “and fire a few rounds into the
air for sheer pleasure, to mark the end of
the job.”) Sebald was an active boy, swim-
ming in the lakes in the summer, skiing in
winter. He romped about the fields with
his friends, once falling into a river when
they tried to cross a bridge on its handrails
like a balance beam. When the outside
world intruded, it came as a shock. During
a family holiday in 1947, he got his first
glimpse of a city: Munich, still ravaged by
the war, a wasteland of blasted ruins. As his
narrator recalls in “Paul Bereyter,” “ever
since I had once visited Munich I had felt
nothing to be so unambiguously linked to
the word city as the presence of heaps of
rubble, fire-scorched walls, and the gaps
of windows through which one could see
the vacant air.”
The other great intrusion was the re-
ality of the Holocaust, epitomized by the
showing in school one day of Billy Wilder’s
Death Mills, a film sponsored by the U.S.
Department of War to educate Germans
about the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp. Sebald was 17 years
old, but was still unprepared for what he
saw. “It was a lovely spring day, he always
said, and they were expecting some light
entertainment as usual,” Angier writes.
“Instead emaciated corpses were piled on
their desks. Afterwards nothing was said.
No one knew how to react, so they just went
off to a football match.”
It was in adolescence that Sebald raged
even more against his father, demand-
ing to know what he had done during
the war, only for the elder Sebald to stub-
bornly respond, “I don’t remember.” He
September 2021
rebelled, too, against his family’s Roman
Catholicism, its hollow bourgeois affecta-
tions, its fetishistic obsession with order
and cleanliness. He insisted on wearing
jeans even on Sunday, much to his moth-
er’s chagrin, and shrank them so tightly
(by soaking them in the bathtub) that he
had trouble peeling them off.
His emerging politics—“anti-bourgeois,
anti-military, anti-clerical, anti-establish-
ment,” in Angier’s summation—were part
of a broader flourishing. Contrary to the
morose figure he cut as a famous author,
his friends at the time thought he was “heit-
er, lustig, ganz normal—cheerful, funny,
completely normal,” Angier reports. Lit-
erature became a passion, a rare ember of
truth amid the dark cone of silence that
surrounded him, and he read everything
from Hemingway to Bernhard. His friends,
an eclectic group who shared his politics
and artistic interests, meant the world to
him—not just companions, but fellow con-
spirators in the campaign against their
parents’ morally repugnant generation. He
was handsome, charismatic, and intensely
serious about life, the kind of boy girls fall
in love with. One of these girls was Marie,
a French exchange student who spent two
magical summers in Sonthofen with Sebald
and his crew and never forgot it. But even at
that tender age, Sebald was already show-
ing the reserve that would characterize his
later years. “He was alone,” says another
girl who had loved him. “I’m sure of that.”
He was also struggling with psycho-
logical difficulties, undergoing his first
breakdown toward the end of high school.
He hid it from his friends and family, and
the specifics are elusive, but Angier spec-
ulates that he fell into a deep depression
laced with panic and anxiety. These break-
downs would dog him throughout his life,
and inflict the various Sebaldian personae
who proliferate in his books. “I was taken
into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost
total immobility,” the narrator declares on
the first page of The Rings of Saturn. “I went
through a difficult period which dulled my
sense of other people’s existence,” says the
narrator in Austerlitz.
When Sebald enrolled at Albert-Ludwigs
University in Freiburg in 1963, his occa-
sional lapses into a distant silence were
interpreted as evidence of a poet’s romantic
soul, as if he were “a young Hölderlin,” ac-
cording to a fellow student. Otherwise, he
was the charming figure of his high school
days, surrounded by artists and rebels in
the dormitory known as Maximilianstrasse
Books & the Arts
Nazism was the cataclysmic
event whose repercussions
defined his youth, even if hardly
anyone spoke of it.
Studentenheim, “an island of freedom and
openness in what was still a reactionary
and authoritarian world,” Angier writes.
The faculty was home to former Nazis (as
was the case at other German schools; the
university at Göttingen even required ap-
plicants to prove they were not Jewish up
until the early 1960s), and they were de-
tested by Sebald and the other members
of the Maximilianheim. It was in Freiburg
where Sebald developed an abiding enmi-
ty toward German academia and began to
think of leaving the country for good. “He
was always searching for his way and his
place,” says Sebald’s college friend and ri-
val Albert Rasche, “not just geographically,
but in himself.” It was also at this time that
he adopted the name that he would use for
the rest of his life: Max.
BY THE TIME Max Sebald had settled into
the University of East Anglia in 1970, he had
married a woman from his Sonthofen days
named Ute (who refused to speak to Angier,
a significant lacuna in her biography). He
had spent some years in Manchester, the
gloomy setting of one of his most famous
stories, “Max Ferber” from The Emigrants,
about a Jewish émigré painter haunted by
loss. He had written a novel based on his
university days that was never published,
as well as a slashing attack on a dead au-
thor, Carl Sternheim, who he thought had
been improperly elevated by a German
scholarly establishment bent on white-
washing the country’s racist militarism.
He spent the next decade on this sort of
barn-burning academic work, which won
points for originality but was full of inac-
curacies, sloppy citation, and tendentious
arguments, all fueled by a towering anger
toward his rivals in Germany.
He turned to literature in the 1980s, af-
ter what he described as a “midlife crisis.”
“The illusion that I had some control over
my life goes up to about my 35th birthday
and then it stopped,” he told an interviewer
the year he died. This crisis was brought
on not by the perception that he was a
failure—quite the opposite. He was by then
established in his career; he was married
to a woman his friends described as beau-
tiful and sophisticated; he had a daughter
to whom he remained devoted until the
end of his life; he lived in a grand coun-
try house in Norwich, known as the Old
Rectory, that he had lovingly refurbished
himself. His sister Gertrud thinks it was
his ostensible success that left him want-
ing. “Until his house was built, she says,
Max was just an angry young man,” Angier
writes. “Once he had realized his dream,
his real suffering began.”
He began with poetry and plays. He
even made a misguided foray into tele-
vision screenwriting, trying for years to
sell a script titled, in what now reads like
a parody of Sebaldian self-seriousness,
Now the Night Descends: Scenes From the
Life and Death of Immanuel Kant. His first
book, the poem After Nature, was published
in 1988. But it was during the year before
that he struck on his true calling, filing a
grant application for a “prose work with
pictures.” This work was the seed for two
books, Vertigo and The Emigrants.
His vision and his voice are already
fully formed in these books. The prose
is precise, pristine, moving always at the
same lugubrious pace, but nevertheless
the reader feels swept up, carried along,
in a slow, mighty current. It is clearly not
the writing of a young man, but one who
is already well into middle age, for whom
history is not an abstraction, not the area
of darkness before he was born, but actual
experience, the past overlapping constant-
ly with the present. His books can feel
like a metaphor for getting old: If youth
is a belief in autonomy, in the notion that
you can be free of your origins and your
family, then age is the growing conviction
that the secret of yourself lies waiting to be
discovered in the darkening mists of the
53
past. For Sebald, this search can result in
moments of perfect clarity, of light parting
the clouds, but also leads to cul-de-sacs
of absurdity and awfulness that offer no
meaning at all, let alone redemption.
The black-and-white photographs—
some taken by Sebald himself, others found
in thrift stores or purloined from friends
and family—function exactly in this ambig-
uous manner. Their purpose is expressed
most explicitly in Austerlitz, which is about
a Jewish orphan who, late in life, tries to
discover what happened to his parents
during the war. As the eponymous hero
says of developing prints in a darkroom:
“I was always especially entranced … by
the moment when the shadows of reali-
ty, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on
the exposed paper, as memories do in the
middle of the night.” Yet the meaning of
these blurry photos of rucksacks and land-
scapes and dead moths and long forgotten
people remains difficult to pin down, as if
Sebald has returned the past to us in a way
that makes it only more mysterious, even
sinister. The photos are the great formal
innovations of his work, marking him as
both a postmodernist and a post-Holocaust
artist—his human subjects in particular,
in their pronounced muteness, are evoc-
ative of the silences of Celan and Beckett,
of ghosts.
In a more basic sense, the photos also
make the books feel “real,” as if they are
closer to newsmagazines than novels.
When I first read The Emigrants, not know-
ing anything about Sebald, I assumed it
was nonfiction (my copy is categorized
by the publisher, nonsensically, as “his-
tory/fiction”). And indeed significant
swaths of his work are real, the events
either taken from his own life or stolen
from others. Sometimes the stories are
taken from famous authors—Stendahl,
Kafka, Chateaubriand—whose identities
are obscured. Others are pilfered from
less exalted figures: the inhabitants of his
hometown of Wertach; his former landlord
in a place near Norwich called Abbotsford;
a Jewish friend who escaped the Nazis
on a Kindertransport, providing materi-
al that Sebald used in both “Max Ferber”
and Austerlitz.
Almost to a person, the real-life inspi-
rations for Sebald’s fictions hated what
he had done to them. The main source
for the scenes of village life in “Il ritor-
no in patria” became a reviled outcast in
Wertach because he talked to Sebald—“No
one ever forgave him,” one villager tells
54
It is the disorienting nature of his
books—is this real or not?—that
changes our understanding
of the past and makes it strange
and new.
Angier—and he blamed Sebald for his
woes. The family of Philip Rhoades Buck-
ton, the inspiration for the main character
in “Dr. Henry Selwyn” in The Emigrants,
was miffed that Sebald turned Buckton, a
gentile, into an exiled Jew in Abbotsford
suffering from a loss of identity. Worse, Seb-
ald lied to Angier and other interviewers
about the genesis of that story, claiming
he could discern that his former landlord
was “not a straight English gentleman”
but secretly a Jew. This tall tale was so
widespread that the novelist Will Self once
gave a lecture in which he claimed that
Dr. Henry Selwyn was based on a “real
Jewish émigré.”
Sebald’s most egregious appropriation
involved his friend Peter Jordan, an actual
Jewish émigré who met Sebald in Manches-
ter, and who later became a distinguished
figure in the world of European opera. Seb-
ald not only used Jordan’s experience on
the Kindertransport to create the central
backstory for his character Jacques Aus-
terlitz, but also lifted passages verbatim
from a memoir by Jordan’s aunt, a Jew who
grew up in Germany before the war, to fill
out the fictional diary of Max Ferber’s lost
Jewish mother. Jordan is one of the rare
subjects who feel honored to be included
in Sebald’s books, even in quasi-fictional
form, though he believes his aunt should
have been credited as a primary source.
Angier agrees.
Furthermore, Ferber himself is partly
based on the Jewish artist Frank Auer­bach,
who condemned Sebald’s story, which orig-
inally contained images of Auer­bach’s
paintings (these were removed in later
editions), as a “presumptuous” misuse of
other people’s lives to bolster what was
otherwise a “narcissistic enterprise.” Angier
sides against Sebald on this score as well,
saying he had callously treated Auerbach
as if “he were already dead.”
I’m not sure I agree with Angier on
either of these points. While I find it hard
to square Sebald’s mendacity in real life
with the painful honesty of his work—not
to mention his scrupulous tact, evident
in his steadfast refusal to theatricalize
any aspect of the Holocaust—the obfus-
cation of his sources and the blurring of
fact and fiction are crucial to maintaining
the integrity of his project. It is the disori-
enting nature of his books—is this real or
not?—that changes our understanding of
the past and hence makes it strange and
new. There is a related point, too, about
a non-Jew using the Jewish experience
of the Holocaust to make broader claims
about humanity. Sebald’s suggestion is
that its specific themes of exile and trauma
and genocidal destruction say something
important about us all, that the plight of
European Jews is a source of tragic empathy
precisely because European civilization at
its height was composed of industrial em-
pires built on mass death from the Congo to
the Americas—and, forebodingly, the poi-
soning of the planet. Some, like Auerbach,
might call Sebald’s identification with the
Jews exploitation. Others would call it art.
IT WAS THE English-language publication
of The Emigrants in 1996, originally pub-
lished in German in 1992, that made Sebald
famous. He was feted at literary events
across Europe and the United States. He
became a client of the superagent An-
drew Wylie. Even the slighted denizens
of Wertach ultimately came around, creat-
ing a “Sebald Way” that shows pilgrims the
path Sebald’s narrator takes in “Il ritorno
in patria.” But he was not in a good way
during this time. His heart and his eye-
sight were deteriorating. His writing took
an immense toll on him—he emerged from
marathon sessions “totally beaten up,” as
he once put it—which was exacerbated by
September 2021
bitter disputes with his English translator, demand his dues,” Austerlitz says, “who then economic collapse, then right-wing
Michael Hulse, over the books he had al- was waiting in the gray light of dawn on nationalism, then climate disaster. He
ready written. He was in a hole, struggling the empty field for me to accept the chal- had more foresight than most because
to finish Austerlitz. lenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead he did not let his backward gaze waver. The
Then a miracle happened: He fell in love. of him.” In reality, Sebald discovered the boy he once was, like the boy peering at
Although he remained married to Ute, the photo in a junk shop, paying 30 pence for Jacques Austerlitz, expected something of
person who saved him, and who became it (and later lying about its origin). him. So all the dead expect something
the most important figure in his life, was None of that makes his gaze any less of us, too.
none other than Marie, the girl who had demanding. Sebald died before he could Ryu Spaeth is an editor at New York
first fallen in love with him back in their see the upheavals wrought by terrorism, magazine.
Sonthofen days. In the intervening years,
she had become a doctor. She had married
and divorced and had three children. In
1999, she read about this world-renowned And Ode
author who grandly called himself W.G.
Sebald, and deduced that this person was by Alyse Knorr
her Winfried. She wrote him a letter, and
they reconnected during his book tour later
that year in Paris. I love your promises, your curse, your insistence
One of the remarkable aspects of Seb­ald’s on all three letters, the way the “d” creates
books is that there are almost no women.
The narrators show flashes of desire and
a tunnel for you to plummet through yourself,
longing, but these little fires are quickly
extinguished in the ash of their dark ob- the way you create out of nothing a list:
sessions. For such an autobiographical
cut flowers and Hostess cakes and thunder
writer, it suggests that Sebald had difficulty
loving people. The exception was Marie, and fractured glass on the highway and mice
and indeed a character named Marie de
Verneuil in Austerlitz is one of the few and Boeing jets and letters like U and R
romantic interests to appear in Sebald’s
and S and E and how you make a sentence
books. She was able to bring him back to
himself. “When he thought of happiness, pivot on its axis and launch down a new path,
he told her, he thought of return,” An­gier
writes, “and he had always half hoped streaming reckless til it dies.
his books might make someone like her
You are small and common as I am yet you
reappear.” They traveled across Europe
together in those final years, but, because must be a word, as I must be a word despite
of his marriage, they were also kept apart
for long stretches of time, during which he grocery stores full of me, and I am quite sure
would write her copious letters. Half their
if I were to disappear into a curving swirl of black
relationship was in writing. He thought of
her so often, he wrote, that when he walked then only a handful would notice, or if they did
down the street he leaned toward France.
There are no coincidences in Sebald’s they’d shrug and say this was just my “Andy”
work—only connections in a subterranean
phase and once the fashion changed I’d go back
network of meaning. It is no coincidence
either that a person who invoked his youth, to living in my jeans and plain white oxfords.
and all the hopes he might have harbored
then, rescued him in those dark days, help-
ing him finish Austerlitz. The book was
his crowning achievement, released just
as Europe was entering a brave new world
that, in hindsight, also resembled a forget-
ful senescence. The cover featured one of
Sebald’s enigmatic images: a boy in a bril-
liant white costume with a gossamer cape,
playing the page to the fabled Rose Queen.
In the book, the boy represents the young
Austerlitz. “I always felt the piercing, in- Alyse Knorr’s most recent book is Mega-City Redux. She
quiring gaze of the page who had come to co-edits Switchback Books.

Books & the Arts 55

Empathy
Exams
Is there a place for human
connection in Richard Powers’s
intricate novels of ideas?
By Gish Jen
THE NOVELIST Richard Powers has made a
name for himself as a gloriously geeky writ-
er, unafraid of big ideas. Over 12 novels, he
has tackled race, religion, identity, politics,
music, technology, surveillance, genet-
ics, the environment, and more, often in
startling ways. In The Gold Bug Variations, he
interwove Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,”
the four base nucleotides of DNA, and
the two pairs of lovers of the plot. In The
Echo Maker, he juxtaposed a man’s lost
memories and connections with the tran-
scendent echoes animating the great,
ancient migrations of the sandhill cranes.
And in his recent, Pulitzer Prize–winning
book, The Overstory, he foregrounded the
complex, social, interconnected lives of
trees, asking what it would mean to be
“bound back into a system of meaning
that doesn’t begin and end with humans.”
The Overstory sealed Powers’s reputa-
tion as a visionary. More contested has been
his status as an artist. T.S. Eliot famously
described Henry James as having “a mind
so fine no idea could violate it”—something
no one would say of Powers, whose in-
spired schema often unfold at the expense
of his characterization. Thomas Mallon
wrote of his 2003 novel, The Time of Our
Singing, that Powers “plays his people like
thematic violins,” and, along similar lines,
Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that his “inter-
est in his characters does not go beyond
their usefulness as symbolic elements in
56
grand theoretical assemblages.” Of course,
all novels are at some level assemblages.
At the same time, while rich with artistic
intention, they ideally evince what Kant
called “purposiveness without purpose.”
Or, at least, this is the view of the domi-
nant literary culture right now—that novels
are essentially playful. They explore and
reveal—indeed, reveal deeply. But they
are not instrumental. They are rather, like
people, autotelic, ends in themselves. And
so, too, ideally, are their characters, which,
Pinocchio-like, come to life, escaping the
control of Geppetto.
Powers has rejected this consensus.
When a review by Nathaniel Rich placed
The Overstory in the “grand realist tradi-
tion,” Powers was skeptical. “I’m flattered
that someone could read any of my books
like that,” he told The Guardian, “but
they’re myths.… And they’re allegories,
which is even worse.” Powers is trying to
write novels of ideas, he has said, while
“knowing that the novel of ideas [has] had
its day, and that day is not now.” The dif-
ficulty, in his view, is “how do you tell a
story of intellectual passion while making
it warm enough to be accessible?”
This difficulty is central to his latest nov-
el, Bewilderment. Its premise is inspired
by Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, a
science-fiction classic published in 1965. As
Powers writes in an opening author’s note,
Algernon came to mind as he pondered
a new neurofeedback technique he’d come
across. Recalling how, in Algernon, first a
mouse, and then a human, undergo an
operation that radically expands their in-
telligence, Powers began to wonder what
would happen if this new neurofeedback
technique could expand a person’s capac-
ity for empathy. Happily, too, it seems, the
Algernon model brought aid on the warmth
front, as it is an unabashed tearjerker: What
starts out as hope boomerangs tragically.
To this basic arc, Powers added a single
father, a neuro-atypical son, and the back-
to-back deaths of the child’s extraordinary
lawyer-activist mother and the family’s
beloved dog. And voilà—Powers was set
to go about his real business.
THEO BYRNE, A 45-year-old father and
the narrator of Bewilderment, is an astro-
biologist—a scientist who, in predicting
the gases that might be present in the at-
mosphere of a given planet, predicts as
well which planets might support life. He
is, in short, alive to possibilities others ar-
en’t, and we first meet him on a camping
trip full of magic.
A full Hunter’s Moon hung fat and red
on the horizon. Through the circle of
trees, so sharp it seemed within easy
reach, the Milky Way spilled out—
countless speckled placers in a black
streambed. If you held still, you could
almost see the stars wheel.
His precocious nine-year-old son is a splen-
did companion. Though already, in Theo’s
words, “sad,” “singular,” and “in trouble
with this world,” Robin—a.k.a. “Robbie”—is
galvanized by natural phenomena, and as
riveted as Theo by the question of whether
extraterrestrial life exists. Even if we never
hear any sign of them, “like ever,” Robbie
and his dad agree, that means “Nothing de-
finitive.” Is the whole huge universe really
barren of life besides ours here on Earth,
or is it teeming with life we simply can’t
apprehend? Theo and Robbie fervently
believe the latter.
It’s touching. Still, it is unclear how we
are to read Theo in particular. Most of what
he says suggests that Powers wants us to
believe in him and side with him. When he
looks at his son and says, “Such defiance.
Such radical skepticism”—recognizing these
things to be “so me” and, referring to his late
wife, Alyssa, “so her”—we are fans of them
all. And I, for one, could not help but react
sympathetically at first when Theo says:
September 2021

ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH MEYER
I never believed the diagnoses the
doctors settled on my son. When
a condition gets three different
names over as many decades, when
it requires two subcategories to
account for completely contradictory
symptoms, when it goes from
nonexistent to the country’s most
commonly diagnosed childhood
disorder in the course of one
generation, when two different
physicians want to prescribe three
different medications, there’s
something wrong.
By Theo’s own account, though, Robbie is
unusually sensitive to noise; refuses to give
up clothing he has outgrown; occasional-
ly wets his bed; and has thrown a thermos
at a classmate, fracturing his cheekbone.
He is also preternaturally intelligent. He
can quote whole scenes from movies after
PHOTO REFERENCE: DAVID LEVENSON/GETTY
seeing them once; he sketches uncannily
well; and he can focus for long periods on
anything formatted in a table, whether it
is the Minerals of Nevada or the Kings and
Queens of England. Like his late mother,
an ardent wildlife advocate, he is especially
attuned to the catastrophic and ever-
accelerating decimation of whole animal
species. But whereas Alyssa brought law-
suits, Robbie acts out—one day biting
Books & the Arts
Theo’s wrist, for example, and arguing,
“there’s no point in school. Everything will
be dead before I get to tenth grade.” When
Theo finally allows him to stay home, it is
only to hear “a skin-freezing scream turned
into the thunder of toppling furniture.”
Robbie has overturned “a five-foot-high
bookshelf,” and smashed his mother’s uku-
lele through a window.
Whatever the fads in diagnoses, and
however split his doctors, Robbie appears
to have a problem. So, too, does Theo, when
he demands,
What was there to explain? Synthetic
clothing gave him hideous eczema.
His classmates harassed him for not
understanding their vicious gossip.
His mother was crushed to death
Bewilderment
by Richard Powers
W.W. Norton & Company,
288 pp., $27.95
when he was seven. His beloved dog
died of confusion a few months later.
What more reason for disturbed
behavior did any doctor need?
Theo crusades against placing Robbie on
drugs—claiming that the school is man-
dating this, although it is unclear that the
school is, and implausible that it could. Of
course, intelligent, educated, dedicated par-
ents can have blind spots, particularly with
regard to their children. Theo’s, however,
seem tailor-made to explain his enrolling
Robbie in the Algernon-reminiscent ex-
periment in which Powers is interested.
Do we really believe an unproven therapy
never before tried on children will, as Theo
maintains, get the school off his back? Well,
never mind.
The researcher is an ex-boyfriend of Al-
yssa’s named Martin Currier. Armed with
a color wheel of emotions, Currier has en-
joined a number of subjects to simulate
these emotions in the lab and, by extracting
common patterns of neural activity from
their fMRI scans, made “brain prints” of
these states. He is now hoping to use them
in a kind of behavioral therapy with instant
biofeedback. Currier explains that
the scanning AI would compare the
patterns of connectivity inside
Robin’s brain—his spontaneous brain
activity—to a prerecorded template.
“Then we’ll shape that spontaneous
activity through visual and auditory
cues. We’ll start him on the composite
patterns of people who have achieved
high levels of composure through
years of meditation. Then the AI will
coax him with feedback—tell him
when he’s close and when he’s
farther away.”
It is, in effect, a kind of AI-assisted empathy
training, except that the trainee is not be-
ing trained to feel another person’s whole
range of feelings but only a slice of it, and
the object is not to understand what it is to
be the other person but only to modify the
trainee’s behavior. The twist, in Robbie’s
case, is that Currier has a brain print made
by Alyssa before she died, so that Robbie
can actually be “trained” to match his brain
activity to hers. This is a particularly felici-
tous opportunity, since she was, after all, his
mother—making this a kind of posthumous
mothering. But what’s more, while she
was always, like Robbie, strung out by the
plight of Earth’s animals, she was, unlike
57
Robbie, extraordinarily resilient, with a
marked gift for bliss. As Currier remarks,
she “had some prize brain-body chemistry.”
The training is transformative. It raises
a host of questions (Can we call emotions
acquired this way our own? Would a sci-
entist father really not think through the
risks?), but the issues in which Powers
seems interested have more to do with
the relationship between our broken selves
and our broken world. At one point, an in-
terviewer observes, “You seemed so hurt
and angry,” to which Robbie answers, A lot
of people are hurt and angry. “But you’re
not, anymore?” says the woman. In answer
to which, “He giggles … No. Not anymore.”
As for what he now understands,
Everybody’s broken … That’s why we’re
breaking the whole planet.
“We’re breaking it?”
And pretending we aren’t … Everybody
knows what’s happening. But we all
look away.
Might wholeness, courage, and empathy
save creation? And could Powers have erect-
ed the whole creaky edifice that is this novel
in order to air this idea? It does seem so.
Theo says that Alyssa “used to claim” that
“if some small but critical mass of people re-
covered a sense of kinship, economies would
become ecology. We’d want different things.”
And along similar lines, Robbie proposes
that brain prints of animals be made, that
people might be trained on them.
I mean, think about it, Dad. It could
just be a regular part of school.
Everyone would have to learn what it
felt like to be something else. Think of
the problems that would solve!
To this, Theo responds:
Robbie was right: we needed universal
mandatory courses of neural feedback
training … The template animal could
be a dog or a cat or a bear or even one
of my son’s beloved birds. Anything
that could make us feel what it was
like to not be us.
One can agree that human solipsism has
wreaked incalculable damage yet still see
why Powers might be accused of playing
“his people like thematic violins” here.
­Alyssa, Robbie, and Theo are not Pinoc-
chio come to life but firmly in thrall to
Geppetto’s strings.
58
There are yet other points to be made.
As Alyssa, when she was alive, once argued,
only 2 percent by weight of the animals left
on Earth were wild. “Either Homo sapiens
or their industrially harvested food” ac-
counted for the other 98 percent. “Didn’t
the few wild things left need a little break?”
And Robbie asks things like, “Did you know
that the world’s corals will be dead in
six more years?” while Theo reports that
a prominent ecologist foresees a wave
of mass extinctions as a consequence of
warming, with “thousands of interconnect-
ed species failing in a series of cascading
waves. Not a gradual decline: a cliff.”
POWERS’S INTEREST IN Alyssa, Robbie,
and Theo is not strictly limited to their the-
matic usefulness. Take Theo’s description
of Robbie’s preparations to stage a protest
at the Capitol:
He dressed up. He wanted to wear
the blazer he’d worn to his mother’s
funeral, but after two years, putting it
on was like squeezing a butterfly back
into the chrysalis. I made him wear
layers; any kind of weather could
blow in over the lake that time of year.
He wore an oxford shirt, a clip-on tie,
slacks with a crease, a sweater vest, a
windbreaker, and boy’s dress shoes
that shone from long polishing.
How do I look?
He looked like a tiny god. “Commanding.”
I want them to take me seriously.
That mix of parental concern, tact, and
pride, that desire to stand up and be counted
way before the world is prepared to give you
notice: How I would have loved to see more
of this sort of thing in the book. Or what
about Theo’s ambivalence about Robbie’s
condition? He does provocatively muse,
“I couldn’t imagine Robbie toughening
up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme
of a planet. Maybe I didn’t want him to. I
liked him otherworldly … I enjoyed being
the father of a kid whose favorite animal
for three straight years had been the nu-
dibranch.” Powers doesn’t delve into this
further, however. More satisfyingly drawn
are Theo’s frustration with the vagaries of
scientific funding and his quixotic belief in
his work. When his colleagues question the
point of “simulating so many worlds, many
of which might not even exist,” he poignant-
ly answers, “What’s the use of childhood?”
It is ironic to see Theo make so autotelic
an argument in so instrumental a novel.
For all his brilliance, Powers can be
sloppy in his use of language. To cite just
two examples: “To pony up” means, of
course, to pay up, not to ride as if on a
pony, but Powers gives us, “Robin ponied
up to his desk.” And in talking about the
neurological changes he’s noticing in Rob-
bie, Theo says, “Each day’s small changes
blended into him and went native,” as if
they were somehow able to adopt local
customs, abandoning their home culture.
It is impossible not to wish Powers would
take more care with his phrasing, if only
not to distract from his themes.
He seems, after all, to be going for broke
for them. In the course of giving a talk,
Theo recalls Carl Sagan’s emphasis on “the
courage of our questions and the depth of
our answers.” If Powers likewise channels
Sagan more than he does Henry James,
it is with nothing less than the healing
of humanity and the saving of the earth
in mind: We must, we must, he tells us,
re-embrace the wilderness and heal our-
selves with its true medicine before we
destroy our planet. In the meanwhile, like
Theo, we lie to ourselves and our children,
with catastrophic results. Where are our
courageous questions?
As for whether readers are persuaded
that the urgency of this message justifies
the instrumentality of its vehicle, I predict
a split between those who do and don’t be-
lieve the novel must, above all, live. How do
we feel about Pinocchio? Do we recognize
the puppet’s waywardness as revealing of
human truths that fealty to Geppetto could
not? And do we see that waywardness, too,
in, say, John Milton’s portrait of Satan in
Paradise Lost—in the undertow of admi-
ration that led William Blake to describe
Milton as being “of the Devils party without
knowing it”? If we feel something import-
ant about humans is glancingly captured
there—something about grudging respect
and all we can’t help but feel—we might
well agree with Powers’s message but still
not press this book upon our friends, find-
ing it, ironically, not wild enough. If we
believe, on the other hand, that the saving
of the earth comes before all, including
what Powers might see as the arrogant,
individualistic, humanist product that is
contemporary literature, we are likely to
embrace Bewilderment whole hog—even
to find this the most moving and inspiring
of all Powers’s books.
Gish Jen’s most recent novel is The Resisters.
Her new book, Thank You, Mr. Nixon, will be out
in January.
September 2021
 FOR THE AMERICAN left of the 1960s and
MICHAEL ABRAMSON/HAYMARKET BOOKS

early 1970s, the past refuses to stay past.

Two of the most popular films nominated
for Best Picture this year—Shaka King’s
Judas and the Black Messiah and Aaron
Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7—daubed
the radicals of that era in seductively hero-
ic hues. Reports of last summer’s massive
protests against police killings of African
Americans often evoked the civil rights and
Black Power movements led by figures such
as Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmi-
chael, and Angela Davis. Unknowingly or
not, contemporary critics and defenders of
wokeness are recapitulating the old argu-
ments about political correctness that first
erupted during the Nixon presidency. And
the recent meteoric growth of Democratic
Socialists of America—now approaching
100,000 members—was last matched on
the left by Students for a Democratic So-
ciety, the mostly white group of similar
size that boomed with the escalation of
the Vietnam War and then imploded into
warring sects before the decade ended.
Yet, persistent memories are not evi-
dence of enduring success. The fundamental
question to ask about the New Left, in
whole or in fragments, is the same one
that should be posed about any social
movement: So what? Did the actions of
radicals transform the nation in any funda-
mental way? Or did they blaze too quickly
across the landscape, drawing more than
their share of media attention while pro-

Unfinished
voking the anger of “Middle Americans”
who responded by electing the likes of
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to run
the country? How should we balance the

Business
What the revolutionary groups of
the 1960s left undone
accomplishments of the New Left with its
failure to build a sturdy rival to the cautious
liberals and confident neoliberals who have
dominated the past half-century of U.S.
politics and governance?
David Talbot and Margaret Talbot, sib-
lings and veteran journalists, have crafted
a book of personal narratives rich with
the kinds of details that might help an-
swer such queries. Beginning with the
activist-celebrity couple Tom Hayden (an
SDS founder) and Jane Fonda, the Tal-
bots move briskly to chronicle the lives,
loves, and occasional second thoughts of
leading figures in the Black Panther Par-
ty, the women’s liberation movement, the
California farmworkers’ union, the gay

Political activists in the Young Lords Party

demonstrated in the Bronx, New York, in
By Michael Kazin March 1971.

Books & the Arts 59

rights movement, and the American Indian
Movement. John Lennon and Yoko Ono
get their own chapter, too, illuminating
how, after the Beatles’ breakup, the duo
promoted left-wing causes with their
words, music—and oodles of cash.
The book brims with vivid descriptions
of how all these characters looked, dressed,
got along with one another (or didn’t), and
how they came across in public. The Talbots
sprinkle in factual nuggets that might sur-
prise even former activists from those years
or the historians who write about them
(this reviewer belongs to both clusters).
I did not know Aretha Franklin and Len-
non and Ono performed at the same 1971
concert in Harlem to benefit the families
of prisoners murdered during the iconic
uprising at Attica prison. Nor had I heard
that Craig Rodwell got the idea of opening
the first openly gay bookstore in Green-
wich Village from the Christian Science
reading rooms he had frequented in his
childhood—or that he refused to sell porn
magazines in his shop because he believed
their publishers exploited the people pho-
tographed in their pages.
Nothing in these portraits, however,
backs up the notion of a “second Ameri-
can revolution” in the book’s subtitle. Talk
of “revolution” was as common in the 1960s
left as raised fists, civil disobedience, and
roach clips. But few of the radicals who
yearned for it had a clear idea of how they
might overthrow the political system or
the circumstances that would make that
possible. As a social democrat, I am not
in the habit of quoting Lenin. But the old
Bolshevik was on the mark when he wrote,
in 1915, that revolutionary situations
emerge only when the people refuse to
live in the old way and the ruling elite is
unable to rule in the old way. In the United
States some 50 years ago, neither condition
came remotely close to occurring. In fact,
it was the right, not the left, that emerged
from the long 1960s far stronger than when
the era began.
The burning dreams of the Talbots’ ti-
tle, on the other hand, are what the young
radicals did leave behind. While their rev-
olutionary dreams turned to ashes, their
egalitarian ambitions inspired some to
launch more practical endeavors, whose
consequences, as the philosopher Richard
Rorty wrote back in 1998, helped “decrease
the amount of sadism in our society.” The
stories the Talbots tell reveal that some
prominent leftists learned from their mis-
takes, if not their tragedies, while others
60
Some prominent leftists learned
from their mistakes, while others
kept believing, to their peril,
in a revolution that was never
going to happen.
kept believing, to their peril, in a revolution
that was never going to happen.
One can draw both these lessons from
the short, floodlit history of the group
christened the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense in 1966. Its creators, Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale, first recruited
members by arming themselves to con-
front Oakland police who sought to arrest
local residents, often brutally, for no good
reason. Subsequent battles with police,
there and elsewhere, turned survivors, the
charismatic Newton most famously, into
potent symbols of resistance to a brutal
carceral state. The “Black Messiah” of the
acclaimed recent film was Fred Hampton,
leader of the Chicago chapter, whom Chi-
cago police gunned down in his bed early
one December morning in 1969. He was
just 21 years old.
As the Talbots write, “firearms assume
their own inevitable logic in political life.”
Leftists of every race lauded the Panthers’
eagerness to “pick up the gun” as a daring
break with the nonviolent movement’s long
slog to pass legal reforms that seemed to
leave Black people scarcely better off than
before. They were not the only radicals at
the time who thought violent acts could
advance their mission. A bombing cam-
paign by the Weather Underground kept
the FBI busy through the 1970s but never
resembled the “white fighting force” the
former SDS activists vowed would back up
wars by rebels of color both in the United
States and abroad. More successful were
the activists in the American Indian Move-
ment, who engaged in a 1973 battle with
federal agents on a South Dakota reser-
vation over the ousting of a corrupt tribal
leader. Their monthslong occupation of
the town of Wounded Knee, and the taking
of 11 hostages, got their cause a national
hearing and a rush of sympathy for the
plight of the continent’s first inhabitants.
The Talbots report that an opinion poll took
the side of the Native warriors.
The BPP’s militancy helped spur emu-
lators like the Young Lords Party among
Puerto Ricans in Eastern cities and the
Brown Berets among Mexican Americans
in Southern California. In nations from In-
dia to Britain to Israel, activists from ethnic
minorities adopted the Panther name as a
kind of shorthand for militant opposition
to the discrimination they suffered. Alas,
Newton’s 1973 book Revolutionary Suicide
provided an apt, if unintentional, description
of how the BPP expired back home. The free
breakfast and health programs that the
Panthers sponsored in Black communities
did not survive the group’s bitter internal
divisions or Newton’s own descent into
megalomania and cocaine addiction, before
he was murdered by a drug dealer in 1989.
The renown of young African Ameri-
cans willing to risk their lives to free their
people also helped catalyze worthy initia-
tives by supporters who had no taste for
martyrdom. In colleges around the nation,
departments of and courses in Black and
ethnic studies sprouted, giving intellectual
depth to the brand of radical nationalism
the Panthers championed. Although Bobby
Seale lost his race for mayor of Oakland
in 1973, his candidacy pioneered the way
for other leftists to get elected to office in
districts, towns, and cities with Black ma-
jorities. Since the early 1990s, Bobby Rush,
who co-founded the Illinois chapter of the
BPP, has represented the South Side of Chi-
cago in Congress as a reliable progressive,
if one who avoids discord with Democratic
leaders. The political gains and limits of
Black Power are encapsulated in the con-
trast between Rush’s long, if undramatic,
September 2021
career, and the inspirational yet violent life
of Huey Newton, leader of the party that
flamed out less than a decade after its birth.
In chapters on radical feminists and gay
rights activists, the Talbots choose to write
about groups that did not let revolutionary
rhetoric get in the way of building new in-
stitutions and defying bad laws. Outlasting
the eruptions of the 1960s, these groups
kept growing into the 1970s and beyond.
The Talbots devote most of one chapter
to the Jane Collective, which arranged and
performed abortions in Chicago at a time
when the procedure “was fully legal in
just four states in the country.” The Janes
educated themselves about obstetrics and
gynecology and became adept at counsel-
ing women who needed their help. Some
got busted but stayed out of jail long enough
to celebrate the Roe v. Wade decision that
essentially voided their convictions.
A central figure in that courageous
group was Heather Booth, a young Jew-
ish woman from a middle-class suburb
who began her activist life in Mississippi
in 1964, registering Black voters and teach-
ing in Freedom Schools. She remains an
effective and beloved organizer for left
causes, almost six decades later. Vital to
that endurance is the kind of empathy
she learned to practice in the ’60s. Of her
peers, the Talbots write, “They wanted
to build a radical movement that would
encourage people to change their lives.”
But, quoting a comrade of Booth’s, they
observe it had to be one that would “steer
a generous course away from denouncing
women for the choices they made in their
efforts to get through the day.”
Some violent disruptions could encour-
age people, long accustomed to accepting
mistreatment from on high, to rise up. That
was the case for the Panthers, who started
to patrol the Oakland streets, loaded rifles
in hand. The patrons of the Stonewall Inn in
Lower Manhattan did not plan to resist
the police raid on the bar in June 1969, but
their confrontation quickly turned into as
crystallizing an event for their burgeoning
movement as the Montgomery Bus Boycott
of the mid-1950s was for the civil rights cru-
sade. And who could not delight in hearing
that some of the queens that night sang,
“‘We are the Stonewall girls / we wear our
hair in curls / we wear no underwear / we
show our pubic hair’ to the tune of the
Howdy Doody song” as they dashed away
from the cops? But after Stonewall, activ-
ists largely picked up megaphones, picket
signs, and lawbooks instead of fighting the
Books & the Arts
cops. Over the next decades, they lobbied
to pass anti-discrimination statutes, ral-
lied to demand funding for victims of aids
and speedy approval of drugs to combat
the disease, and fought through state and
federal courts to make marriage equality
the law of the land.
NO ONE CAN accuse the Talbots of
neglecting the fierce, diverse identities that
composed and animated the ’60s left. They
devote equal space to Native American rebels
like Russell Means and Dennis Banks, Black
leaders like Seale and Newton, the Chicano
unionist Cesar Chavez, the white antiwar
activists Hayden and Fonda, feminists like
Booth, and gay liberationists like Rodwell.
They also describe how inequalities of race
and gender—and fame—often kept like-
minded rebels from accomplishing more.
The big piece nearly absent from their
mosaic is one that radicals themselves large-
ly neglected at the time: the injuries of class.
John Lennon is the only major character in
the book who makes an explicit reference to
a kind of economic inequality, and it comes
in his song “Working Class Hero,” which
inspired no protest marches and launched
no organization. The Talbots’ chapter about
the United Farm Workers (UFW) focuses on
Chavez himself, the former migrant work-
er who led the national grape boycott that
began in 1965. Three years later, it gained
the passionate backing of Robert Kennedy
during his campaign for president.
But La Causa that both liberals and radi-
cals embraced never matured into a sizable
or powerful union. Most farmworkers in
California and elsewhere continue to be
among the worst paid, with perhaps the
most precarious jobs in the nation. What
the authors call Chavez’s “martyr com-
plex” was part of the reason for the union’s
By the Light of Burning
Dreams: The Triumphs and
Tragedies of the Second
American Revolution
by David Talbot
and Margaret Talbot
Harper,
400 pp., $28.99
collapse. He put himself through a series of
lengthy fasts to promote the union cause
and subsequent strikes. By the mid-’70s,
when those acts of self-sacrifice did lit-
tle to advance the struggle, he compelled
members of the union’s executive board to
participate in a manipulative “mind-control
technique” developed in a recovery center
for drug addicts in San Francisco. His goal
was evidently to discipline the staff to fol-
low his commands. But, according to the
Talbots, “the exercise fed Chavez’s growing
paranoia about conspiracies against his
leadership.” Most of his old comrades de-
serted him, and the union declined from a
peak of 80,000 members in 1973 to a mere
5,000 by his death in the early 1990s. Even
during the UFW’s brief heyday, most on
the left regarded it more as a civil rights
crusade for Mexican Americans than as an
opportunity to expand the labor movement
to include the majority of wage earners
who still lacked a union to represent them.
In retrospect, the absence of a language
of class and of a strategy to organize wage
earners across racial boundaries is un-
derstandable. The movement for Black
freedom and the horror of the Vietnam War
were what radicalized young Americans;
at a time of general prosperity, few paid
attention to the drudgery and indignity
of labor suffered by millions who did not
share their views about racism or military
intervention. It did not help that the leaders
of the AFL-CIO, anti-Communists to a man,
strongly endorsed the war in Southeast
Asia. Those on the left who did routinely
employ terms like “the working class” and
“capitalism” tended to do so in dogmatic
ways for sectarian purposes. Most New
Leftists shunned them.
So, when radicals chanted “Power to
the People” (a slogan coined by the Black
Panthers but adopted by activists of many
stripes), they did not really mean a major-
ity of them. After all, most Americans at
the time either had turned cynical about
politics or favored using power to do things
leftists abhorred. Half a century later, a
broad coalition that would represent work-
ing people of all races remains to be built,
by progressives inside and outside the
Democratic Party. The leftists of half a
century ago never really tried; their suc-
cessors must and can.
Michael Kazin is a professor of history at
Georgetown University and emeritus co-editor
of Dissent. His next book, What It Took to Win:
A History of the Democratic Party, will be
published in March 2022.
61

State of
The Union
The early history of the American
republic has come to carry too
much meaning.
By Osita Nwanevu
IT’S BEEN SOME time since public school
curricula sat at the center of America’s
culture wars, but panicked parent poli-
tics have returned with a vengeance. By
mid-July of this year, 10 states had banned
the teaching of “critical race theory,” a pro-
gressive school of legal scholarship that
conservatives have redefined as an attack
on American patriotism and a conspira-
cy against white K-12 students. In Texas,
62
a representative bill signed into law by
Governor Greg Abbott specifically bans
the state’s educators from teaching that
racism and slavery are “anything other than
deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to
live up to, the authentic founding principles
of the United States, which include liberty
and equality.” The right’s motivations here
are plain. Conservatives are hoping to en-
gineer a wide and enduring backlash to
the examinations of racial inequality and
ILLUSTRATION BY JOAN YANG
America’s past that have been shaking up
Democratic Party politics and popular cul-
ture for the better part of the last decade.
It should be said that this is an effort
doomed, in the long run, to fail: Our cultural
moment didn’t begin in America’s public
schools and it won’t end in them either. It
will take more than the antics of Republican
state legislators to inspire a conservative
national pride in a generation of children
who learned their civics under Trump. And
for those, young and old, who have found
themselves newly hungry for unvarnished
perspectives on our history, there is more
reading material available than ever. Try
as the right might to muzzle our teachers,
we all have the 1619 Project and far more
provocative material at our fingertips.
Still, much of the soundest scholarship
on our history remains largely inaccessible
to lay readers—either sequestered away
from the general public behind academic
paywalls or too dense and dry to hold the
interest of broad nonacademic audienc-
es. Alan Taylor, a professor of history at
the University of Virginia and a two-time
winner of the Pulitzer Prize, isn’t among
the historians who have prominently uti-
lized social media and other platforms to
open up that work in recent years. But he
has written three highly accessible intro-
ductions to early American history that be-
long on every American bookshelf: 2001’s
American Colonies, on the European arriv-
als to the New World and the Colonial era;
2016’s American Revolutions, on the Rev-
olutionary War; and this year’s American
Republics, which covers the early republic
from the end of the war through the Com-
promise of 1850. Their power lies not in the
provision of a tidy counternarrative to our
cherished national myths, but in their sug-
ART REFERENCE: WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE BY EMANUEL LEUTZE
gestion that we can afford to dispense with
sweeping narratives altogether—that we
can find what we really need from American
history in its chaos and contingencies.
OF THE THREE books in Taylor’s series,
American Colonies reads the most like a
conventional textbook, albeit an unusually
frank one. The pages teem with statistics and
dates, the chapters are organized in tight
chronological order, and the subheads (e.g.,
“Land and Labor,” “Epidemics,” “Family
Life”) are straightforward. But in American
Revolutions and American Republics, Taylor
takes on a more thematic approach. Chapter
subheads in the latter include “Terror-
Death” and “Hell-Carnival,” both borrowed
September 2021
from harrowing primary documents of the
period that the book covers.
This is American history narrated through
gritted teeth, and there’s never been a larg-
er audience for it. But although the liberal
reading public is in an iconoclastic mood,
reverence for one obviously significant
part of our founding story—the American
Revolution itself—seems poised to survive
the cultural moment mostly unscathed.
Even as the hypocrisies of the Founders
have been subjected to new scrutiny, lib-
erals routinely frame those hypocrisies as
betrayals of the principles that motivat-
ed the break from Britain and were given
expression in our founding documents.
Whatever the flaws of the men who made
it, Americans across the political spectrum
believe, the Revolution was a well-justified
insurrection that united colonists, animat-
ed by reason, against their irrational and
tyrannical British overlords.
In American Revolutions, Taylor chal-
lenges that narrative and nearly two and a
half centuries’ worth of rocky schoolhouse
fables with a thorough and complex exam-
ination of the Revolutionary War and its
intersecting causes, including major fac-
tors largely lost to public memory. With the
Proclamation of 1763, for instance, Britain
had barred settlement west of the Appala-
chians, in a vain attempt to both prevent
expensive conflicts over Native American
lands and keep Colonial goods flowing to
British-controlled markets. Just over a de-
cade later, the Quebec Act of 1774, which
expanded that territory and the rights of
French Canadians and the church within it,
aggravated anti-Catholicism in the Colonies
below. These and other edicts fed suspicions
among some colonists, who had grown
accustomed to a lighter hand from British
authorities, that a wayward Parliament
sought to crush their freedoms altogether.
Taylor gives taxation and representation
their due, of course. In the 1760s, citizens
in England were paying roughly 26 shil-
lings per capita to the empire each year.
Colonists in America paid roughly 1 shil-
ling per capita, despite broader Colonial
prosperity and the expense of the French
and Indian War. Given that the colonists
were ostensibly among the war’s major
beneficiaries, most Britons reasoned that it
would be fair to have them pay down more
of its costs. But the British mishandled the
implementation of their new taxes as bad-
ly as they would go on to mishandle the
next war—they came just as colonists were
entering a real economic downturn. The
Books & the Arts
demobilization of the British army at the
end of the French and Indian War triggered
a depression as the British slashed their
military expenditures and former troops
entered Colonial labor markets, bringing
wages down. The new taxes felt steep to
many of those struggling, and revolution-
ary elites worked diligently to channel their
discontent in directions that served their
own immediate interests.
The Boston Tea Party is perhaps the par-
adigmatic example of how elite messaging
drove outrage, and Taylor debunks our folk
history of the event—the British overtaxed
our tea!—with palpable exasperation. To
help the struggling British East India Com-
pany undercut smugglers importing tea
from the Dutch, “Parliament in May 1773
reduced [his italics] the tax on tea shipped
by that company to the American colo-
nies,” Taylor explains. That move angered
Colonial merchants, especially those who
had been selling smuggled Dutch tea, and
they scrambled to protect their businesses
by denouncing the Tea Act, Taylor writes,
“as a plot to seduce Americans to sell their
liberty for the tea of a British monopoly.”
That December, over 90,000 pounds of
cheap tea were dumped into Boston Harbor
to the benefit of that city’s merchant class.
As elite Patriots stoked anti-British fer-
vor, they also mitigated class tensions by
controlling or sidelining radical popu-
lists like the shoemaker and mob leader
Ebenezer Mackintosh, whose followers had
raucously demonstrated against both the
Stamp Act and wealth inequality. “Samu-
el and John Adams sought to marginalize
Parliament’s supporters and nullify the
stamp tax without unleashing class war-
fare,” Taylor writes. “Rich Patriots needed
reassurance that the resistance did not
threaten them.” They were given it as or-
ganizations like the Sons of Liberty—a
network of underground political clubs cre-
ated to oppose British policies—gradually
grew in influence. “The leaders,” Taylor
explains, “were respectable tradesmen
and merchants, but most had achieved
wealth rather than inherited it, and they
often worked beside common journey-
men and apprentices in their shops or on
their wharves.”
Those connections with common colo-
nists facilitated the organization of parades,
rallies, and other events that encouraged
mass participation. At the same time, the
initial grievances of protest discourse were
joined by a heady conspiracism. Boston’s
town meeting insisted that “‘a deep-laid
and desperate plan of imperial despotism
has been laid, and partly executed, for the
extinction of all civil liberty,’” Taylor re-
lates. “That rhetoric struck Britons as so
irrational that it must cover a colonial
conspiracy by reckless demagogues out
to destroy the empire by seeking American
independence. Neither plot existed save
in the powerful imaginations of political
opponents who distrusted one another.”
TAYLOR RIGHTLY CHARACTERIZES
the war that finally broke out at Lexing-
ton and Concord in 1775 as a world war
that triggered clashes as far away as In-
dia between Britain and its European
enemies—the French, the Spanish, and
the Dutch—and as a civil war that pitted
revolutionaries against both the British
and their fellow colonists. Historians es-
timate that 40 to 45 percent of the white
American population was for the Revo-
lution at its outset. About 40 percent are
believed to have been warily neutral, while
15 to 20 percent were likely Loyalists who
opposed the war outright, including reli-
gious and white ethnic minorities—Scots,
Anglicans, Quakers—who feared abuse if
the distant crown lost authority to their
prejudiced Colonial neighbors.
The Patriots would ultimately prevail
over the Loyalists not just militarily, but
through ostracism, forced oaths and apolo-
gies, ritualistic shaming, and the destruction
of Loyalist literature before, during, and
after the conflict—activities endorsed ex-
plicitly by many revolutionary leaders (“So
universal has been the Resentment of the
People,” John Adams wrote excitedly in his
diary, “that every Man who has dared to
speak in favour of the Stamps … has been
seen to sink into universal Contempt and
Ignominy”) and implicitly by the Conti-
nental Congress, which recommended the
creation of local “committees of inspec-
tion” charged with identifying and outing
opponents of the British trade boycott as
“enemies of American liberty”:
Inviting everyone to spy on their
neighbors, the committees ferreted
out, seized, and burned stashes of tea
and conservative books while a crowd
gathered at the county courthouse to
hoot at the culprits. After confessing,
the suspects had to ignite the
condemned items in festive bonfires
that rallied public support for the new
committees and intimidated
the wavering.
63
 Cancel culture—“‘I never knew how
painful it is to be secluded from the free
conversation of one’s friends,’ a Pennsyl-
vanian lamented”—was a weapon in a
revolutionary arsenal that also included
mob and military violence against dissent-
ers. In 1775, Thomas Brown, a Loyalist, was
visited at his home in Georgia by a gang of
Patriots and beaten, tied to a tree, tarred,
set on fire, and partially scalped for refusing
to boycott British goods. In Connecticut,
a critic of Congress, one Dr. Abner Bee-
be, was abducted, stripped naked, and
covered in hot tar and pig feces. In 1777,
a Virginia shoemaker who had shouted
“Hurrah for King George” at passing Conti-
nental soldiers was thrown into the James
River, but continued jeering his assail-
ants, even as he was tarred and feathered
in punishment.
It should come as no surprise—but likely
would to most Americans—that the war
itself was as replete with the disposses-
sion, torture, and rape of civilians as any
other major conflict. During a particularly
brutal period in the Carolinas and Georgia
from 1780 to 1781, Taylor writes, the “taboo
against harming women broke down,” on
both sides. “Women and Children have
been tortured, hung up and strangled, cut
down, and hung up again,” one resident of
the North Carolina backcountry recorded,
“som[e]time branded with brands or oth-
er hot irons in order to extort Confessions
from them.” In Georgia, Taylor adds, “Loy-
alists tortured a Patriot woman by using a
musket lock as a thumbscrew. A French
officer reported finding a pregnant Patri-
ot murdered in her bed with a message
scrawled on the bed’s canopy by her Loy-
alist killers: ‘Thou shalt never give birth
to a rebel.’”
One of the major atrocities that Tay-
lor highlights elsewhere during the war
implicates George Washington directly.
In 1779, Washington ordered an offensive
against the Haudenosaunee Confederacy
of Natives in retaliation for guerrilla raids
against the Continental Army. In April,
the main village of the Onondaga people
was destroyed, and women of the tribe
were captured, raped, and killed. “Because
the most militant Onondagas had already
withdrawn westward to Niagara,” Taylor
explains, “the attack victimized peace-
able villagers who were easy pickings for a
surprise attack.” This was nevertheless fol-
lowed by another summer offensive under
Major General John Sullivan, who had been
ordered by Washington to bring about “the
64
total destruction and devastation of their
settlements … that the country may not be
merely overrun but destroyed.”
Washington’s appearances in American
Revolutions are scantier than one might
expect, but the glimpses Taylor does offer
the reader suggest a ruthless and image-
conscious man beset by anxieties that
occasionally swelled into a state of sup-
pressed panic, as illustrated by his private
reaction to the proclamation from Lord
Dunmore, the Colonial governor of Virgin-
ia, offering freedom to Patriot slaves who
joined British forces. The escapees hoping
to join up included runaways from Wash-
ington’s Mount Vernon, and Washington
personally denounced Dunmore as not
only a military enemy but an “Arch Traitor
to the rights of Humanity.” “If my Dear Sir
that Man is not crushed before Spring,” he
worried in one 1775 letter to Richard Henry
Lee, “he will become the most formidable
Enemy America has—his strength will
Increase as a Snow Ball by Rolling.” Were
Dunmore to be killed in battle, Washington
mused in another letter, “the World would
be happily rid of a Monster.”
American Colonies: The
Settling of North America
by Alan Taylor
Penguin Books,
544 pp., $21.00
American Revolutions:
A Continental History,
1750–1804
by Alan Taylor
W.W. Norton & Company,
704 pp., $40.00
American Republics:
A Continental History
of the United States,
1783–1850
by Alan Taylor
W.W. Norton & Company,
544 pp., $35.00
The Continental Army had less to fear
from Dunmore than Washington imag-
ined. In 1776, he cut his losses and fled
Virginia for New York with 500 of his Black
recruits, leaving another 1,000 behind on
Virginia’s Gwynn Island to die of a smallpox
outbreak. “Their fate provided fodder for
Patriot propaganda that cast the British as
duplicitous seducers of foolish slaves,” Tay-
lor writes. “Many blacks survived capture
at Gwynn Island only to die gruesomely
when vindictive Patriots set fire to their
flimsy brush huts, ostensibly to stop the
spread of smallpox.” Nevertheless, a sub-
stantial number of ex-slaves did manage
to find opportunity in British opportun-
ism—their war effort amounted to the first
mass emancipation on American soil. An
estimated 20,000 ex-slaves fought against
the American Revolution, over twice the
number of Black soldiers that fought for it.
“Upon the approach of any detachment of
the King’s troops,” the British soldier Ban-
astre Tarleton observed, “all negroes, men,
women and children … thought themselves
absolved from all respect to their American
masters, and … they quitted the plantations
and followed the army.”
Eventually, of course, that army was
defeated—a disaster for Loyalists who,
fearing further persecution, fled America
by the tens of thousands, as well as for Na-
tives who fell victim to vindictive settlers
before the war had even ended. In 1782,
a band led by one David Williamson in-
vaded Indian country seeking vengeance
on tribes that had assisted or fought for
the British. “Unable to track down elusive
enemies, the vigilantes instead seized
Gnadenhutten, a peaceful Delaware vil-
lage led by Moravian missionaries,” Taylor
writes. “At Gnadenhutten, Williamson’s mi-
litiamen interpreted the European kettles
and clothing as damning proof that the vil-
lagers had raided settlements rather than
as evidence of their Christian conversion
and civility. The militiamen butchered
96 captives—28 men, 29 women, and 39
children—by smashing their skulls with
wooden mallets before scalping them for
trophies. The natives died while singing
Christian hymns.”
Such were the wages of liberty as set-
tlers understood it and as purchased by
war debts partially financed after the war
with—and one can tell Taylor relishes the
irony of this—regressive taxation. “In 1786,
for example, taxes in Massachusetts were at
least four times higher than before the war,”
he notes. “Many states relied on poll taxes
September 2021
levied at the same rate on every man, poor
and rich. Recalling the prewar protests over
small British taxes, some rural people com-
plained, ‘Our Grievances Ware Less Real and
more Ideal then they are Now.’” These
and other economic complaints—from rural
colonists, commoners, and ex-soldiers—
metastasized into a revival of mob activity
and uprisings like Shays’ Rebellion, driving
Colonial elites to consider drastic measures
to curb, in Alexander Hamilton’s words,
“the depredations which the democratic
spirit is apt to make on property.”
“Losing faith in republicanism,” Tay-
lor writes, “some gentlemen wanted to
substitute a constitutional monarchy to
control democracy in the states.” In March
1787, Washington considered “the poten-
tial ‘utility’ and perhaps ‘necessity’ of a
switch to monarchy” but doubted that
the country could recover from a counter-
revolution. The Founders opted instead
to replace the Articles of Confederation
with a new Constitution—a document that
would subordinate state governments sub-
ject to capture by an unruly public to the
sovereign and less accessible national gov-
ernment that stands today.
MANY AMERICANS—OR at least many
Americans above the Mason-Dixon line—
have been taught that the union the Con-
stitution forged was tested by steadily
escalating sectional tensions over slavery,
an issue that a series of strained compro-
mises failed to resolve and that gradually
led to a breakup and bloody conflict few
intended or imagined possible until it hap-
pened. But in American Republics, Taylor
tells a different story—one of an extremely
fragile union perpetually on the verge of
fracture and collapse, over slavery and less
well-remembered tensions, from the mo-
ment the ink on the Constitution was dry.
As early as 1802, for instance, Madison
and other American diplomats worried that
French control of the port of New Orleans
would lead to a grand secession crisis—
not between the North and the South but
between the East and settlers in the West.
Settlers needed access to the Mississip-
pi in order to sell their goods abroad. It
was thought that Napoleon might cut off
American trade on the river, encouraging
settlers to secede and join the French to
regain access to overseas markets. This
was among the concerns that led to our
purchase of the entire Louisiana Territo-
ry in 1803. More famously, at the Hartford
Convention, some Federalist opponents of
Books & the Arts
Alan Taylor tells of an extremely
fragile union perpetually on
the verge of fracture and collapse,
from the moment the ink on the
Constitution was dry.
the War of 1812 considered splitting New
England from the Union.
We were a country wrestling with both
our internal divisions and our geopolitical
weakness on a continent dominated by
European powers—empires that expected,
quite reasonably, the union’s imminent
failure. And, as Taylor argues, the push
for westward expansion, imagined now as
a manifestation of America’s confidence
in its own future, was animated largely
by America’s insecurities. The concept
of “manifest destiny,” he writes, not only
justified settlement for its own sake but
also reinforced “the defensive imperialism
so long nurtured by fearful Americans.”
Chief among their fears was that runaway
slaves, Natives, and foreign troops might
hatch destabilizing plots from territories
uncontrolled by American settlers, a no-
tion that made enlarging the nation seem
strategically prudent.
Senator Robert Walker of Mississippi
and other expansionists argued, for in-
stance, for the annexation of Texas on the
grounds that the British would otherwise
emancipate slaves there and send north
into the United States “the millions of the
Negro race whom wretchedness and crime
would drive to despair and madness.” An-
drew Jackson, whose star rose on both his
military exploits and his crude xenophobia
after the War of 1812, nurtured similar delu-
sions up to his death. Slaves in Mississippi,
he speculated in an 1844 letter, would be
“worth nothing because they would all
run over to Texas and under British in-
fluence [be] liberated.” He feared a future
in which “hordes of savages” and former
slaves, stirred up by the British, would wage
war throughout the South.
By then, America had itself backed
insurrections to further its own growth.
The annexation of West Florida in 1810
began with a rebellion by wealthy planters
against the Spanish, secretly supported by
the Madison administration and quickly
followed by the deployment of American
troops. Denying that his government had
rallied the planters to begin with, Madison
claimed the military had been sent in mere-
ly to restore order. The episode inaugurated
a new strategy for American expansion,
Taylor notes: “American settlers would
rebel against a colonial power, establish a
free republic, and create disorder that the
United States could exploit to seize control.
This model fostered aggression cloaked
by claims of honoring international law.”
The model was attempted again in the
remainder of Spanish Florida—before
the territory was invaded by Andrew Jack-
son and ceded by Spain after the War of
1812—and, more gradually, with the annex-
ation of the Republic of Texas in 1845. In
1846, President James Polk ordered 4,000
troops onto Texas’s contested borderland.
“We have not one particle of right to be
here,” an American officer at the time re-
flected. “It looks as if the government sent
a small force on purpose to bring on a war,
so as to have a pretext for taking Califor-
nia.” After the inevitable Mexican attack,
Polk claimed that Mexico had “shed Amer-
ican blood on the American soil,” and that
conquering California would help “defray
the expense of the war which that power
by her long continued wrongs and injuries
had forced us to wage.” Taylor: “We have
a long tradition of presidents seeking to
make Mexico pay for American ambitions.”
The Mexican-American War is the central
event of American Republics and arguably
the period it covers. And, as with the Revo-
lution, Taylor augments his analysis of war
politics, including the conflict’s impact on
the slavery question, with an unvarnished
look at the war as it was actually conducted
and, even at the time, condemned—not
only by its political opponents but by voic-
es within the American military. General
Winfield Scott told Secretary of War William
65
Macy that American troops had “committed
atrocities—horrors—in Mexico, sufficient
to make Heaven weep & every American,
of Christian morals, blush for his coun-
try. Murder, robbery & rape of mothers &
daughters, in the presence of the tied up
males of the families, have been common
all along the Rio Grande.”
Ulysses S. Grant, who served as a ju-
nior officer during the war, was among
those sickened by it. “I do not think,” he
would later write, “there was ever a more
wicked war than that waged by the United
States on Mexico.” One of the events that
built that impression for the war’s crit-
ics was the 1847 massacre at Agua Nueva,
where an Arkansas company called the
Rackensackers, commanded by a friend of
President Polk, avenged the death of one
of their own by herding civilians into a cave
for execution. “Women and children were
clinging to the knees of the murderers and
shrieking for mercy,” an American witness
later recounted. “Nearly thirty Mexicans
lay butchered on the floor, most of them
scalped. Pools of blood filled the crevices
and congealed in clots.’”
IT’S PLAINLY IMPORTANT to Taylor that
his books stand as accounts of all the blood
we’ve let seep through the cracks. Histori-
cal ignorance and denial obviously aren’t
exclusive to the United States. But outsiders
have long found American self-regard in the
face of uncomfortable realities extraordi-
nary. “Newspapers, politicians, and orators
praised fellow Americans as ‘the greatest
people under the canopy of heaven’ and
expected confirmation from European vis-
itors,” Taylor writes of the early republic.
“A Briton reported that Americans had ‘a
restless and insatiable appetite for praise,
which defied all restraint of reason or com-
mon sense.’ Another traveler thought that
they practiced ‘the self-deception of be-
lieving that they really are that which they
only wish to be.’”
That habit of self-deception can imbue
the reading of work like Taylor’s with the
thrill of accessing illicit knowledge. And
one of the most subversive and challeng-
ing ideas all good works of history offer is a
sense that history can also move backward.
In American Colonies, Taylor takes a mo-
ment to describe the initial racial order in
Virginia, where Black slaves were, at first,
allowed to accumulate enough proper-
ty to purchase their freedom and go into
planting themselves. “Because the colonial
laws did not yet forbid black progress, the
66
Once we’ve settled whether the
American conscience is defined by
original sin or high ideals, we
seem to believe, we’ll understand
our destiny as a nation.
black freedmen and women could move
as they pleased, baptize their children,
procure firearms, testify in court, buy and
sell property, and even vote,” he writes.
“Some black men married white women,
which was especially remarkable given
their scarcity and high demand as wives
for white men. A few black women took
white husbands.”
All this collapsed when population
growth among slaves allowed the preser-
vation of African cultural practices, and
laws that codified racial differences were
introduced, obscuring white class dis-
tinctions under the shroud of white racial
solidarity and rendering “white Virginians
indifferent to the continuing concentra-
tion of most property and real power in the
hands of the planter elite.” Similarly, in
American Republics, Taylor notes that the
early years of the American republic, which
saw slavery collapse in the North, also saw
attempts to constrain or roll back the rights
of free Blacks who “lost the vote in Connecti-
cut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and
Tennessee between 1806 and 1838.”
Reversals like this don’t jibe well with
the way most of us are taught to un-
derstand our history—through strictly
forward-moving narratives that often pre-
suppose an astounding moral ignorance
on the part of our forebears. The Found-
ers, the preferred story goes, were radical,
earthshaking visionaries strangely blind
to or powerless against injustices that now
strike us as obvious. The evils of slavery
and Native dispossession, we imply to our-
selves, had to be discovered like gravity or
the atom—true human equality was an
idea whose time had simply not yet come.
But Taylor’s work highlights figures who,
while flawed and decidedly less than fully
egalitarian, were clearly more ready for it
than others—from Bartolomé de las Casas
and other early critics of the treatment of
Natives by Spanish conquistadores to more
familiar figures like Benjamin Franklin, a
former slave owner himself, who submit-
ted a petition to Congress in 1790 urging
not only an end to the slave trade but the
formation of a plan “to extend liberty ‘with-
out distinction of color, to all descriptions
of people.’”
Similar petitions in the antebellum era
gathered the signatures of hundreds of
thousands of Americans who were not,
actually, “ahead of their time”—a perni-
cious and illogical phrase. They were as
inescapably of it as the slave drivers and
equivocating politicians they opposed—
including the many figures who left behind
ample evidence of their private guilt and
moral embarrassment over the wrongs we
rightly castigate them for. The generaliza-
tion that our predecessors couldn’t have
known or done better is challenged by the
examples of those who did. Many intel-
lectually capable of making more morally
defensible decisions simply found material
and ideological reasons to make others.
One leaves Taylor’s work understanding
this fully—this isn’t Great Man history, but
Some Guys history. The political leaders
and famous personages that tower over our
imaginations are condensed to life-size.
They make grubby, horrid choices; they
bumble, fumble, and scheme their way
through moments of import alongside the
extraordinary supporting cast of madmen,
buffoons, and grifters that Taylor brings to
life. One William Augustus Bowles appears
before the British in a feathered turban to
convince them that Creeks, Cherokees,
and American settlers can be united in a
campaign to push the Spanish out of Lou-
isiana and conquer Mexico. He presented
an ultimatum, vowing to invade Canada if
the British did not back him. Aaron Burr
pads out his life after killing Hamilton with
a plot to seize Spanish territory, perhaps for
his own new nation, and is captured and
September 2021
tried for treason—but not before fleeing a
double-crossing co-conspirator “disguised
as a common farmer, complete with a fake
beard.” José de Gálvez, inspector general
for the Spanish crown in New Spain, has
a mental breakdown in 1769 trying to sub-
due frontier Natives. “One night, Gálvez
burst from his tent to announce a plan to
‘destroy the Indians in three days simply
by bringing 600 monkeys from Guatemala,
dressing them like soldiers, and sending
them against’ the natives,” Taylor writes.
“He then assumed, in succession, the iden-
tities of Moctezuma, the king of Sweden, St.
Joseph, and finally God. But none of them
could defeat the Indians.” Two years later,
Gálvez returned to Spain and was placed
in charge of American policy as secretary
of the Indies.
“Hell-carnival”—the phrase of one
James Davidson, a Jackson-era emigrant
to the lawless Mississippi frontier—is the
best conceivable description for all this.
American history for Taylor is both a horror
and a farce. American Colonies is as much
about kidnapped Native children being
thrown overboard and shot for sport by
Jamestown colonists as it is about wayward
Puritans copulating with pigs. “In 1642, the
New Haven authorities suspected George
Spencer of bestiality when a sow bore a
piglet that carried his resemblance,” Tay-
lor writes. “He confessed and they hanged
both Spencer and the unfortunate sow.
New Haven also tried, convicted, and ex-
ecuted the unfortunately named Thomas
Hogg for the same crime.” In American Re-
publics, the requisite material on the Bank
of the United States, the Wilmot Proviso,
and the dawn of the industrial age share
space with the death of Secretary of State
Abel Upshur—accidentally killed during a
public demonstration of a large naval gun
called “the Peacemaker”—and an account
of violent competitions between urban
fire brigades. “If two or more companies
reached a fire, brawls broke out over pri-
ority, while buildings burned,” he writes.
In Philadelphia, the rivalry between two
companies, named after Washington and
Franklin, grew so intense that each joined
forces with ethnic gangs, “including the
Notorious Killers, who liked Washington
better than Franklin.” In December 1842,
a false alarm set by the Washingtons lured
the Franklins into “an ambush by several
hundred foes.”
WHEN WE SET aside the romance of
powdered wigs and the prose of eloquent
Books & the Arts
slave owners and genocidaires, this is mostly
what’s there—an unfathomably stupid and
cruel world both totally alien and imme-
diately recognizable to us now, living in
what is nevertheless, from an egalitarian
standpoint, the very best America anyone
has ever known. Are the historical record
and the historical trajectory we’ve tak-
en causes for optimism or despair? The
answer, if we’re honest with ourselves, is
probably neither.
Some on the right are fond of saying
that America is a nation and not an idea.
What they actually mean by this is that
America is, conceptually, the rightful in-
heritance of a particular segment of the
country with a particular set of ideas about
America. Their perennial debates over this
with liberals—which they tend to frame
as clashes between realism and naïve
idealism—are really debates between duel-
ing idealisms. But the initial assertion taken
in itself is more right than wrong. Before
it’s anything else, America is a polity—a
material entity governed by a particular set
of durable institutions and populated by
330 million people inextricably bound up
together here in our present. It is a field of
contestation where our present—and our
future—might be shaped to our benefit
and the benefit of all humanity. And that
great contest fully justifies itself. That is
identity and purpose enough.
The angst over statuary, school curricu-
la, and all the rest in recent years has been
underpinned by the conviction that asking
what we’re to do with American history
amounts to asking what we’re to do with
America—once we’ve settled whether the
American conscience is defined by origi-
nal sin or high ideals, we seem to believe,
we’ll understand our destiny. But Amer-
ica has no destiny. It has no conscience.
There is no American DNA, no American
soul. America will not be carried off into
hell for its crimes; it is not fated to repeat
them. But no moral engine will pull this
country and the world inexorably forward
either. In the last century, the world has
seen both extraordinary expansions of so-
cial and political freedom and bloodshed
on an extraordinary, technologically fa-
cilitated scale. We live longer and we live
better thanks to an economic system that
has nevertheless produced previously un-
fathomable levels of inequality and that,
for the short-term profit and convenience
of a relative few, is gradually undoing the
basic systems that have sustained stable
human life on this planet.
The popular narratives we construct, to
noble and ignoble ends, do not and can-
not do justice to the interplay of agents,
institutions, systems, and ideologies that
actually shape history. We can find logic
in the chaos. We might discern, in histor-
ical material, forces and circumstances
that may have made, and may still make,
certain outcomes likely or liable to recur.
None of this amounts to spiritual predes-
tination. You simply will not find, even in
the best histories, binding instructions
from the dead as to who or what the living
ought to be.
Our tendency to look over our shoulders
for direction has understandably given
American historians a profound sense of
responsibility. In some, that sense of re-
sponsibility has given rise to anxieties that
darker readings of the American past might
exacerbate our political divisions and prove
corrosive to our national ambitions. And
those anxieties come through in Gordon
Wood’s recent review of American Repub-
lics for The Wall Street Journal, a piece
that hits Taylor not for factual errors, but
for his seeming antipathy toward Thomas
Jefferson—a sin, Wood suggests, for the
Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair at
the University of Virginia—and his chosen
emphases. “Unfortunately,” Wood writes,
Taylor “never offsets his depressing story
with an account of the exhilaration, enthu-
siasm and promise inherent in this flawed
democratic country that attracted millions
upon millions of European immigrants.”
Although Taylor isn’t technically wrong,
Wood implies, he is unacceptably dour—as
though the final obligation of the American
historian is to be an unfaltering cheerleader
for the American project.
But the fate of that project depends less
upon historians than it does upon us, their
readers, and the contours of the histori-
cal moment we happen to find ourselves
within. And the most valuable things his-
torians have to offer those of us who want
to take the country in new directions are
the missing pieces in our understanding of
how we got here—suppressed memories,
lessons, and legacies to wrestle with, and an
appreciation of forgotten events and de-
cisions that continue to shape our lives
today. If they correct or omit the official
catechisms we’ve spent generations re-
citing millions of times over, so much the
better. We needn’t believe in myths to
believe in ourselves.
Osita Nwanevu is writing a book about
American democracy.
67
Res Publica
by Win McCormack
The First Amendment
Under Fire
Can the ideals of free speech and
social justice be reconciled?
O
ne way of interpreting the controversy currently
roiling the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu)
over the relative importance of civil liberties and
free speech on the one hand, and the pursuit of
social justice goals on the other, is to view it as
a conflict between advocates of classical liberal
principles of individual freedom and proponents of classical
republicanism, which emphasizes pursuit of the common good.
In this framing, the civil libertarians want to
exalt individual freedom of expression above
all other considerations, while the latter insist
that the right to individual self-expression must
sometimes yield to the greater good of society
as a whole. Might it be possible, though, in this
particular context, to harmonize these two
apparently contradictory ethics?
The aclu was founded in the aftermath
of World War I in reaction to the trampling of
the constitutional right to freedom of ex-
pression by the administration of Woodrow
Wilson, which jailed vocal critics of that war
and sympathizers of the Bolshevik Revolution
in Russia, notably the socialist Eugene Debs.
Members of the current American left observ-
ing today’s free-speech controversies would do
well to note that the aclu came into being as a protective shield
for the constitutional rights of their predecessors in that era.
The aclu founders, from their liberal vantage point, de-
termined that they were obliged to protect the right to free
expression of all actors in the political arena, not just those in
their own ideological camp; otherwise, they felt, they would not
be true to their overall mission of protecting the precious First
Amendment. Furthermore, they would lack credibility with the
courts when it came to defending and protecting one of their
own. It is this fundamental premise that a new generation of
political activists is now calling into question.
As illuminated by journalist Michael Powell’s article on the
subject in the June 7, 2021, issue of The New York Times, there are
three distinct points of view on this subject within the aclu itself.
First, there is the view of the organization’s Old Guard, those
stalwarts of a previous generation who adamantly argue in favor
of the traditional purist line. David Goldberger, who successfully
presented the case for the right of a group of Nazis to march in
the streets of Skokie, Illinois, back in the 1970s, said after hear-
ing speeches from some of the new aclu activists at a luncheon
honoring him: “I got the sense it was more important for aclu
68
staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand
GETTY IMAGES
on principle. Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”
Next, there are those who contend it is possible to achieve
a reasonable balance between defending the basic principle
of free speech and the pursuit of social justice causes. This
is the official stance taken by the aclu in guidelines issued after
the fiasco in Charlottesville in 2017, where the aclu obtained a
court order allowing a right-wing group to parade in the down-
town area, culminating in a paroxysm of antisemitic and racist
expression and the death of a woman counterprotester. The new
guidelines suggest aclu lawyers weigh the importance of any
free-speech case involving groups whose “values are contrary
to our values” against the possibility it might give “offense to
marginalized groups.”
Finally, there are those within the aclu who scoff at the First
Amendment completely, arguing that it is “disproportionately
enjoyed by people of power and privilege” and therefore, pre-
sumably, of little or no value to others. And Powell reports that
some aclu lawyers believe free speech (presumably meaning
disagreement with the organization’s new direction) is now being
suppressed within the organization itself.
Nadine Strossen, who served as president of the aclu from 1991
to 2008, believes that, contrary to all of these
single-minded perspectives, free speech and
social justice not only are compatible with each
other but are actually symbiotic and mutual-
ly reinforcing. She has made a powerful case
for this thesis in an essay scheduled to appear
in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Free
Speech Law. Contradicting the supposition that
free speech is solely the province of the mighty,
she points out that it has rather been the most
essential tool for the advancement of the rights
of oppressed minority groups throughout
all of American history, and that these groups
achieved progress not through suppressing the
free speech of their opponents, but by counter-
ing and overcoming their ideas with arguments
more consonant with American ideals and the
Constitution. What Strossen is arguing for, in effect, is the com-
plete compatibility in this area of the liberal goal of individual
freedom and the republican standard of the public interest.
One of the most compelling examples of the use of free speech
on behalf of the greater good is that of Frederick Douglass, an ex-
slave whose writings and oratory helped inspire the abolitionist
movement. Douglass’s views on free speech were unequivocal:
“To suppress free speech is a double wrong,” he said. “It violates
the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has spec-
ulated that the divide within the left over the value of the
First Amendment might soon begin to close as the growing
and “multipronged” right-wing attacks on free speech of the
left—including those aimed at the promulgation of critical race
theory—reawaken its members to how dependent they them-
selves are on the protections of the First Amendment. She also
imagines they might discover as well the importance of the
credibility of their potential defenders—the kind of credibility
that comes with a record of defending the free-speech rights of
everyone, not just of those with whom they are politically aligned
at a given moment in history.
September 2021
 “I always leave Netroots Nation feeling inspired,
determined, and proud.” —Senator Elizabeth Warren

A HYBRID EVENT OCTOBER 7–9

“Netroots Nation is the best organizing conference for progressives. I attend every
year to learn new tactics, connect with key influencers in the movement, and share
best practices I have learned over the past year. It’s a can’t-miss!” —Laura, attendee

TWO WAYS TO ATTEND:

IN PERSON IN WASHINGTON, D.C., OR VIRTUALLY
Join fellow progressives for three days of inspiring keynotes, engaging panels, practical
training sessions, networking, and more. Get info and tickets at netrootsnation.org.

SPECIAL DISCOUNT FOR TNR READERS:

Visit netrootsnation.org and enter promo code TNR at checkout for 10% off!
 A Better Way
to Work
As headlines clamor about companies struggling to fill positions, it would be easy to
conclude that a job is available to anyone who wants one. The truth is, for millions of
Americans striving to build a better life after experiences with homelessness or incarceration,
traditional hiring practices slam the door shut on opportunity.

There’s a better way to work. Innovative businesses known as Together, we can create an
employment social enterprises leverage the power of this economy that works for all of us.
untapped talent. By combining a quality job with paid training Learn how at redf.org/tnr
and support services, they provide a springboard to success.

For over 20 years, REDF has invested in these purpose-driven

businesses and the entrepreneurs who lead them.

An investment that works.