№ 3 9 / FA L L 2 0 2 0 R E A S O N I N R E VO LT J A C O B I N M A G .

C O M

FAILURE IS AN OPTION
That aspect of the modern crisis
which is bemoaned as a “wave of
materialism” is related to what is
called the “crisis of authority.” If
the ruling class has lost its con-
sensus, i.e. is no longer “leading”
but only “dominant,” exercising
coercive force alone, this means
precisely that the great masses
have become detached from their
traditional ideologies, and no
longer believe what they used to
believe previously, etc. The crisis
consists precisely in the fact that
the old is dying and the new can-
not be born; in this interregnum a
great variety of morbid symptoms
appear.

— Antonio Gramsci,
Prison Notebooks, 1930
Citoyens
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Features

68 RICHARD LACHMANN 76 NICOLE ASCHOFF

The New American American Capitalism

Exceptionalism Is Working —
That’s the Problem

80 JONATHAN STEELE 91 MEAGAN DAY

Where’s Our Gorbachev? Message in a Bottle

Contributors
cover art by
Mark Pernice

Seth Ackerman is Jacobin’s
executive editor.
Nicole Aschoff is on the editorial
board at Jacobin. She is the author
of The Smartphone Society:
Technology, Power, and Resistance
in the New Gilded Age and The
New Prophets of Capital.
Daniel Bessner is an associate
professor in international studies
at the University of Washington.
He is also a non-resident fellow at
the Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft and a
contributing editor at Jacobin.
Vivek Chibber is a professor of
sociology at New York University.
He is the editor of Catalyst: A
Journal of Theory and Strategy.
Ben Davis is the author of 9.5
Theses on Art and Class.
Meagan Day is a staff writer at
Jacobin. She is the coauthor of
Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go
from the Sanders Campaign to
Democratic Socialism.
Peter Frase is on Jacobin’s
editorial board and is the author of
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.
Amber A’Lee Frost is a writer and
cohost of the Chapo Trap House
podcast. She is currently
completing her first book, on the
rise of social-democratic politics
after the 2008 financial crisis.
Owen Hatherley is the author of
Militant Modernism and Red
Metropolis: Socialism and the
Government of London, among
other titles. He is the culture
editor of Tribune.
Donald Hughes is a writer living
in Cobourg, Ontario.
Eileen Jones is a film critic at
Jacobin and the author of
Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a
podcast called Filmsuck.
Matt Karp is an associate professor
of history at Princeton University
and a Jacobin contributing
editor. He is the author of This Vast
Southern Empire: Slaveholders at
the Helm of American Foreign Policy.
Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large
and founder of Vox and the author
of Why We’re Polarized.
Richard Lachmann is a professor
of sociology at the University
at Albany, State University of New
York. He recently published First-
Class Passengers on a Sinking
Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline
of Great Powers.
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff
writer and the author of Yesterday’s
Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
Philip Rocco is an assistant
professor of political science at
Marquette University and
the coauthor of Obamacare Wars:
Federalism, State Politics, and
the Affordable Care Act.
Luke Savage is a Toronto-based
staff writer for Jacobin. He
is cohost of the Michael and Us
podcast.
Jonathan Steele was the
Guardian’s bureau chief in Moscow
from 1988 to 1994. He is the
author of Eternal Russia: Yeltsin,
Gorbachev, and the Mirage of
Democracy.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor and
publisher of Jacobin.
Abi Wilkinson is a Jacobin columnist
based in Washington, DC.

Photo Attributions ­— Page 40 DON EMMERT/AFP via Getty Images. Page 80 Photo by Sergei Guneyev/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty
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102 Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images. Page 105 Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images. Page 111 https://www.tandfonline.
com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2020.1724035?journalCode=rcaj20. Page 113 http://moscowartmagazine.com/en/issue/44/article/855. Page 113 http://www.
gutov.ru/texti/statue_eng.html
Departments

FRONT MATTERS MEANS OF DEDUCTION READING MATERIEL

07 12 40 46 51 56
party lines the soapbox vulgar transitions field notes canon fodder
empiricist
Failure Is Down and Out The Great America’s Ending
an Option in Pittsburgh America the Divergence Railroad to Federalism as
and Las Vegas Laggard Nowhere We Know It

12 26 47 64
struggle friends & foes uneven & canon fodder
sessioin combined
The General A Very British
Don’t Blame Who Brought Mapping the Dystopia
Polarization Down the Decline
American
Empire

CULTURAL CAPITAL THE TUMBREL LEFTOVERS

101 106 117 121 126 130

red channels ways of seeing girondins thermidor popular front dustbin
John From Your On Being Stories for Blue Order How Abraham
Carpenter, House to Our a Mother the End of Lincoln Fought
Apocalyptic House in America the World the Supreme
Filmmaker Court

111 134 138

ways of seeing dustbin proletoccult
The Collision Socialists Your Quarterly
of Self- Should Be Horoscope
Importance Republicans
and Despair

142
means and ends
Celebrating
Ten Years of
Jacobin
 FRONT MATTERS
PARTY LINES BY SETH ACKERMAN

Failure Is
an Option

Haunted by the specter of

democracy, the Constitution’s
framers blundered into a
historic miscalculation. We’re still
living with the consequences.

You would think a country that
is so fond of calling itself an
experiment would at least be alert
to the possibility of failure. But
this year, with seeming surprise,
millions of Americans became
aware of their failing state for the
first time.
The picture sharpened as the
pandemic progressed, like a photo
coming into focus: The United
States is a rich country that can’t
deliver the mail. It can’t hold
orderly elections or contain disease
outbreaks, nor can it manage
wildfires or build subways. Dozens
of state unemployment systems
collapsed this spring when
their punch-card-era mainframes,
programmed in the digital
equivalent of Sanskrit, balked at
a change in the benefit formula,
leaving millions of jobless people
without income. This was the
American state encapsulated:
the millionaire governor of New
Jersey on TV, pleading for
volunteers to fix the state’s
computers, while thousands of his
citizens quietly faced private
Armageddons.
The American state is hardly
dormant. It criminalizes more
behavior than any democracy
on earth. It imprisons its citizens
at rates that dwarf its peers.
Typically for a failed state where
violence is endemic and the
public is heavily armed, its police
forces kill with impunity —
but they are no less incompetent
or underprofessionalized for
that. This summer, the LAPD was
alleged to have a street gang
housed inside the department:
“The Executioners, a band of
deputies ... sporting tattoos of a
skull with Nazi imagery and an

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 9
 PARTY LINES
AK-47 — celebrates deputy
shootings and the induction of
new members with ‘inking
parties,’” the LA Times reported
in July.
America’s failing state was lethal
long before COVID-19. Twenty
years ago, Clintonite trade policies
combined with the derelict state
of social infrastructure to produce
one of history’s most savage
episodes of deindustrialization in
peacetime. The explosion of
mental illness, disability, chronic
pain, and addiction that ensued
led to a crisis of working-class
mortality with no contemporary
parallel worldwide. No contempo-
rary parallel, since, as the
economists Anne Case and Angus
Deaton have noted, there is
an obvious historical precedent
for America’s “deaths of despair”:
the mass mortality of late- and
post-Soviet Russia.
The Thermidor
of 1787
A single crisis might be a fluke.
But so many overlapping disasters
afflicting so many different
departments of American life
simultaneously can only be seen
as a single phenomenon, a
condition we might simply call
the American Crisis.
Every aspect of the crisis ultimately
stems from the same historic
contradiction: in the absence of
a ruling nobility or established
church, without a Hegelian
bureaucracy or military caste, the
only source of legitimate authority
Americans will recognize is the
10
sovereignty of the people — yet the
concerted exercise of popular
sovereignty is precisely what the
nation’s institutions are designed
to rule out.
The American Sonderweg has its
origins in a thwarted revolution.
In the years immediately after the
Revolutionary War, plebeian
majorities, still imbued with the
ideological radicalism of the
rebellion, demanded and obtained
from their state legislatures
inflationary measures designed to
shift the burden of war debts from
cash-poor farmers to creditors.
More than any other aspect of the
turbulent politics of the 1780s,
it was horror at such spoliation
that inspired James Madison and
his fellow Framers to convene
their wildcat convention in
Philadelphia (the proceedings had
no sanction from any provision
of the existing constitution), where
they resolved that popular
majorities must be prevented from
ever again extorting policies
of property redistribution from
the government.
But in a land-abundant continent
whose free inhabitants enjoyed the
world’s broadest franchise, and
where they had done so even
before the revolution, there was
no question of restricting the
suffrage. The Framers had to
innovate new methods of fettering
popular sovereignty, devices
that could function even in the
presence of a broad electorate.
Madison’s jujitsu solution to this
puzzle, taking its inspiration
from Montesquieu, was to use the
force of democracy against itself:
to divide the state into fragments,
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
arming each with a veto over the
others — fissuring public authority
vertically between the states
and national government, and
horizontally between the different
branches of the state at each
level — so that no electorate,
however broad or narrow, could
exercise real control.
Like a topiary that grows into the
shape of the frame that surrounds
it, the whole culture of US
politics took on the shape of its
Madisonian mold. Nothing
in the Constitution gives the
Supreme Court a veto over duly
enacted legislation; nor is there
anything in Madison’s text about
a supermajority requirement
for ordinary laws to pass the
Senate (a feature shared by no
other representative body in
the world). Yet judicial supremacy
and the Senate filibuster were
smoothly incorporated into the
fabric of national institutions.
The Madisonian stamp on the
party system was especially
consequential. When national
party organizations emerged
in the 1840s, they took the form
of loosely organized patronage
and electoral machines serving
officeholders with intensely local
political horizons. They point-
edly lacked central governing
bodies with the power to impose
uniform national policies on their
elected members. (Parties of
the Left that did have such features
emerged later, but they were
written out of politics by discrimi-
natory ballot laws unknown
in conventional democracies.)
Thus, the programmatic mass
party — the main instrument by
 Failure Is an Option

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 11
 PARTY LINES
which electorates in modern
democracies seek comprehensive
adjustments of policy — was
stymied from an early date.
Legislative
Infertility
To the democrats of the transat-
lantic Enlightenment who had
made the revolutionary cause their
own, the 1787 Constitution
came as a grave disappointment.
Writers and militants like the
English radical Richard Price and
the French abolitionist Jacques
Pierre Brissot saw it for what it
was: a counterrevolutionary
scheme that grafted the features
of English aristocratic rule — a
bicameral legislature, an executive
veto — into the democratic soil
of a postrevolutionary republic.
It was compared unfavorably with
the celebrated Pennsylvania
Constitution of 1776, whose radical
provisions — a veto-free
Madison’s jujitsu solution
to this puzzle was to use the force
of democracy against itself.
12
unicameral legislature, public
proceedings, universal suffrage —
were reviled by John Adams
and Alexander Hamilton but
won the praise of Diderot’s
Encyclopedists.
But the radicals, usually so
insistent on republican vigilance,
failed to sound the alarm. As
the historian Jonathan Israel has
noted, their desire for a living
democratic model led them to
“overstate the Revolution’s
democratic credentials” in their
publicity to European audiences.
For the next century, Europe’s
democrats — in England espe-
cially — adopted an apologetic
discourse about their American
utopia not unlike that of twenti-
eth-century communists vis-à-vis
the Soviet Union.
It fell to the conservative skeptics
of democracy to point out the
Madisonian fine print. During the
parliamentary debates leading to
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
Britain’s 1867 Reform Act, which
extended the vote to working-class
householders, the Conservative
MP Edward Bulwer-Lytton
answered the radicals’ paeans to
America’s wide suffrage, with
its absence of property qualifica-
tions, by pointing out how little
it really mattered:
The wise safeguard of America
against her popular suffrage is
the scantiness of the powers she
leaves to her House of Repre-
sentatives. I daresay you might
grant not only the £7 franchise,
but even universal suffrage in
this country, with safety as to
foreign affairs, with safety as to
making and unmaking Cabinets,
and with safety to everything
except genuine freedom, if you
then left to the House of Com-
mons as little influence, power,
weight, and authority as [the US
lower house].
A similar assessment came from
Henry Maine, the preeminent

Like a toothless monarch,
the American people reign but
are not allowed to rule.
legal scholar of the nineteenth
century, who abhorred the
democratic trend of late-Victorian
Britain and held up the American
Constitution as a wholesome
alternative. “While the British
Constitution has been insensibly
transforming itself into a popular
government surrounded on all
sides by difficulties,” he wrote
in 1885, “the American Federal
Constitution has proved that,
nearly a century ago, several
expedients were discovered by
which some of those difficulties
may be greatly mitigated and
some altogether overcome.”
What appealed to Maine about
American government was that it
placed “nearly insuperable
obstacles in the way of a change
of law,” reducing the volume of
legislation to an amount that,
compared to England, was “almost
trivial.” Crowned by its Article
Five — “the keystone of the whole
Federal fabric” — which makes
amendment virtually impossible,
the US Constitution secured good
government by “skilfully applying
the curb to popular impulses.”
The Vacuum
at the Top
But the Framers miscalculated.
They assumed that once the rabble
was dethroned, command of
policy would automatically
devolve to a “natural aristocracy”:
leisured gentlemen like them-
selves, with classical educations
and an enlightened commitment
to public service — or, in a later
era, the Northeastern elite
descended from the Morgans
and the Rockefellers.
But the existence of a natural
aristocracy is never guaranteed,
and today, the United States
has nothing like a cohesive elite.
Instead, like a toothless monarch,
the American people reign but
are not allowed to rule. They have
voted in roughly eighty federal
elections since the Civil War, but
only once have succeeded in
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Failure Is an Option
effecting a transfer of unified
control of government from one
party to the other (in 1952).
Programs promised in election
campaigns are disposed of in
the courts or blocked by the Senate
and party leaders bank on the
electorate’s inability to tell exactly
who is responsible for what.
Aware that the exercise of suffrage
has only the most tenuous
connection to the enactment of
a program, voters respond by
exercising it more sparingly than
in any other established democ-
racy on Earth.
There is a void at the center of the
state, in the space where popular
sovereignty ought to be — a
deliberately engineered vacuum
that sucks in every kind of
dysfunction, incompetence, and
venality. Incoherent and undemo-
cratic, the American form of
government has turned into a
trap — a recipe for state failure,
scratched out on an ancient
parchment.
13
 FRONT MATTERS
THE SOAP BOX

Down and Out Jia Zhang of FiveThirtyEight built censusAmericans, a

Twitter bot that provides hourly biographies of people

in Pittsburgh
across the country. The bot collects information that
people provided to the US Census Bureau between
2009 and 2013. Each person’s data is stored in a line

and Las Vegas of code, which censusAmericans translates into

personal details — marriages, jobs, health insurance
status, citizenship.

We’ve published some excerpts from the project that

reveal the circumstances of ordinary people in the
United States: veterans working ninety-hour weeks,
A slice of life from a country new parents without health insurance, and noncitizen
in crisis. workers struggling to find employment.

I usually work 72hrs per week. I am looking for work. I was laid off from work. I am looking for work. I have
I only worked around 3 months last year. I don’t have a GED. I don’t have health insurance. I got married
health insurance. in 2008.

I don’t have health insurance. I work in offices of den- I work in animal slaughtering and processing. I don’t
tists. I have a high school diploma. I had less than 2 have health insurance. I am divorced. I went to college
weeks off last year. for less than a year.

I get to work around 2:25 AM. I don’t have health I usually work 99hrs per week. I get to work around
insurance. I am not a citizen. I am fluent in English. 5:10 PM. I served during the Vietnam and Korean Era.
I used to be on active duty.

I usually work 68hrs per week. I work in coal mining. I I usually work 84hrs per week. I work in petroleum
got married in 2003. I started but didn’t finish college. refining. I get to work around 4:20 AM. Last time I got
married was in 1992. I am married.

14 № 39  /  FALL 2020

 Down and Out in Pittsburgh and Las Vegas

I am looking for work. I only worked around 3 months I got married last year. I don’t speak English very well.
last year. Last time I got married was in 2002. I don’t I got married in 2010. I don’t have health insurance. I
have health insurance. am not a citizen.

I had a baby last year. I don’t have health insurance. I work in coal mining. I am divorced. I have an asso-
I got married in 1982. I have a high school diploma. ciate degree. I got married in 1986. I had less than 2
weeks off last year.

I speak French at home. I have a GED. I don’t have I usually work 75hrs per week. I was laid off from work.
health insurance. I am not a citizen. I was born in I worked less than half of last year. I don’t have health
another country. I am divorced. insurance. I am divorced.

I had a baby last year. I am looking for work. I carpool I don’t have health insurance. I have a high school
with another person. I don’t have health insurance. I diploma. I had less than 2 weeks off last year. I get to
am self-employed. work around 6:30 AM.

I was laid off from work. I usually work 80hrs per week. I have trouble with my eyesight. I don’t have health
I work in furniture and related product. I don’t have insurance. I got married in 1982. I work for a private
health insurance. company.

I had a baby last year. I worked less than half of last I am looking for work. I don’t have health insurance. I
year. I get to work around 4:10 PM. I don’t have health moved last year. I work in landscaping services. I have
insurance. I drive to work. never been married.

I served during the Gulf War. I have a GED. I used to I have trouble with my eyesight. I don’t have health
be on active duty. I don’t have health insurance. I have insurance. I work in truck transportation. I have never
been married twice. been married.

I am Guatemalan. I am looking for work. I don’t speak I usually work 72hrs per week. I carpool with two
English very well. I don’t have health insurance. I am others. I work in logging. I have been married twice.
not a citizen. I am married. Last time I got married was in 2006.

I am hard of hearing. I don’t have health insurance. I I have not worked for at least 5 years. I am looking for
am self-employed. I got married in 1990. I have a high work. Last time I got married was in 1980. I don’t have
school diploma. health insurance.

I don’t speak English very well. I carpool with another I was laid off from work. I don’t speak English very
person. I don’t have health insurance. I am not a citizen. well. I don’t have health insurance. I am not a citizen.
I moved last year. I was born in Latin America.

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 15
 FRONT MATTERS
STRUGGLE SESSION
Don’t Blame
Polarization
A discussion on American
partisanship, political dysfunction,
and why it’s not our passions
that are the problem — it’s the
Constitution itself.
Bhaskar Sunkara (BS) What I
really love about Why We’re Polar-
ized is that it’s a 2020 political book
that isn’t just narrowly focused on
Donald Trump. It’s about far deeper,
underlying trends, and about
the structure of the American polit-
ical system.
Ezra Klein (EK) Yeah, absolutely.
One of the moves I tried to make
in the book, and that I try to make
in my journalism more broadly,
is to get people to stop reducing
politics to a narrative about
individuals.
The master story right now of
American politics, to me, is certain
identities becoming more firmly
16
EZRA KLEIN
INTERVIEWED BY BHASKAR SUNKARA
entrenched, locking people much
more firmly into a sense of political
place than, say, fifty years ago, and
a large gap between the parties.
That creates opportunities and
problems. On the Republican side,
that’s one reason why a candidate
as unusual and confrontational
as Donald Trump could consoli-
date Republican support so well.
Something like 60 percent of
Republicans said in polling that
they were primarily voting against
Hillary Clinton, as opposed to
for Trump, in 2016.
That’s also part of what made
Bernie Sanders an interesting
candidate in the Democratic
Party. At another time, running a
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
democratic socialist as a Democrat
would have had a real chance of
fracturing the party. But in this
era, if Sanders had won in 2020, he
would have consolidated the
Democratic base.
I think it changes the way you
look at politics, once you recog-
nize that it’s much harder to
persuade across party lines — but
that as parties weaken and
polarization hardens, it’s perhaps
easier to change things internally
within parties.
BS It’s one reason why I think it
was, and still is, wrong for some
Democrats to expect a Republican
revolt against Trump. In power, after
all, many of Trump’s key achieve-
ments would have been done by
any mainstream Republican.
EK I think that’s right. Although
the thing with Trump — and this
is maybe a place where I fall out of
my “ignore individuals” form of
analysis — is that he’s very lazy as
an ideologist and as an institution

builder. If Donald Trump had
wanted to come in and enforce a
more populist right on the
Republican Party, would he have
been able to do that? That’s a
really interesting question to me.
If he had been thoughtful
about stacking the government
with people who agreed with
him — so you don’t just have
Stephen Miller here, but you have
tons of Stephen Millers every-
where — does his presidency look
different?
The thing about Trump is that
he doesn’t really care about most
issues. He’s very much in it for
Donald Trump. Whereas, if the
Republican Party had elected
Tucker Carlson — who is chan-
neling Trump’s appeal from 2016,
combining some level of compro-
mise on economic issues with
a much more hard-edged form of
“demographic warfare,” to put it
gently — would he have been more
successful in transforming the
Republican Party? Or would it
actually have revealed that you
can’t cross those lines in the party,
and created civil war within it?
BS One question is, does a figure
like Trump, if he did want to go the
Steve Bannon route, actually have
enough cadre to fill the state, in the
way that a political revolution of
that type would need?
EK I would imagine that they
would have enough people to run
the top of departments reasonably
well, but, as you imply, there
is that “deep state” issue where
managing anything is hard.
Managing bureaucracies is hard,
and if you don’t win people over,
it can be very hard to run them.
HOSTILITY TOWARD THE
OTHER PARTY INCREASES
AMONG PARTISANS
Republicans Democrats
100
75
50
25
0
July 2016
So, if you’ve not done that work,
it can be very, very difficult to
stock a government.
Bernie Sanders would have
had the same challenge.
BS That’s definitely true of
Bernie’s ability to deal with hostile
Democratic Party political leaders.
But I think we may underestimate
how pliable the “experts” are. They
aren’t really autonomous actors.
As your book argues, though,
the bigger problem of making
change in today’s environment is
overcoming the bottlenecks the
American political system creates.
EK It’s not that you can’t find
the people to imagine what you
want to do. The problem is how to
move the power centers to do
what you want to do. Some of the
story of the book is about how
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Don’t Blame Polarization
Partisan respondents to a Pew
Research poll were asked to give
the opposite party a cold rating
on a “feeling thermometer.”
Antipathy between Republicans
and Democrats has increased
significantly between 2016 and 2019.
July 2019
polarization paralyzes American
political institutions.
So, yes, one of the arguments I
make is that when you have a
system that creates this many veto
points, you do not, as in a parlia-
mentary system, just win an
election and that means you
automatically have the power of
a governing majority. We could
very well have had a Bernie
Sanders presidency with a Mitch
McConnell Senate majority. And
you would have the filibuster on
top of that — you have all kinds of
veto points throughout the system.
In our system, as you lose the
ability to build bipartisan coalitions
because of party polarization,
you lose the ability to govern. And
that has wider ramifications —
voters keep asking politicians to
help solve their problems, and their
problems keep not getting solved.
17
 STRUGGLE SESSION

STRONG POLARIZATION Democrats and Republicans BS One point you make in Why
ON THE PRIORITIZATION identify different issues as We’re Polarized is that, by a world
OF POLITICAL ISSUES the major problems facing the standard, we’re not really that
country today. polarized in the United States. We
just have a system that can’t cope
with normal levels of polarization.

PERCENTAGE WHO SAY IS A VERY BIG PROBLEM IN THE COUNTRY EK I tell the story in the book of
a political sociologist by the name
of Juan Linz, who did amazing
80
work on comparative politics in
60 the twentieth century. He had
lived in a lot of failing states, so he
40 had seen systems collapse and
turn to authoritarianism, but he
20 had also seen them thrive. One of
the puzzles he was trying to
0 unravel in his work is why
America’s political system didn’t
Ethics in government
treated by the crimi-
ethnic minorities are

The federal budget

The way racial and

work anywhere else.

nal justice system

The coronavirus

There’s no other country that

has a political system like ours
Terrorism
outbreak

with a long history of constitutional

deficit

continuity. Not only that, but

when America invades other
countries, we don’t give them
our system.
For all our veneration of the
American Constitution, we
80 never copy and paste it over to
anybody else. The reason is that
60
this kind of system is inherently
unstable, because you have
40
different political factions with
20
simultaneous democratic legiti-
macy and no actual way to resolve
0 a conflict between them.
The question that naturally
Climate change
Unemployment

occurs then is why America has,

of health care

Violent crime

relative to other political systems,

immigration

actually been very successful.

Illegal

We certainly were in the twentieth

century. Linz’s answer is that
America had this very aberrant
period of mixed political parties.
We were functionally a four-
party system posing as a two-party
system, with Democrats, as we
Republicans Democrats

18 № 39  /  FALL 2020


think about them now, and conser-
vative Southern Dixiecrats —
who basically entered into a power-
sharing agreement with
the national Democratic Party.
Then you had more liberal
Republicans, as well as conserva-
tive Republicans.
Because the parties were
internally mixed and the divisions
were internal to the parties, that
created a lot of compromise and,
on other issues, suppression.
There’s a lot of suppression, say,
of anti-lynching laws and civil
rights laws for much of the early
twentieth century — so it’s
not a moral or just story we’re
telling here.
What we’re seeing today is a
return of a party system that, in
most parts of the world, would be
quite normal — but it’s mixed
with a political system that, in most
parts of the world, is very
abnormal and hasn’t worked. I
think if you look at it without
too much American mythology
clouding your view, it’s not
working here right now all that
well, either.
BS So, you see some of the causes
of the current crisis as a positive
development — as in, it’s good that
the realignment of the Democratic
Party happened and the Dixiecrats
were driven out and that there are
oppressed people with more voice
and representation in the political
system.
EK I titled the book “Why We’re
Polarized,” and something I didn’t
anticipate well enough is that
“polarization” had been so coded
in American politics as bad. That
when you say we’re polarized,
what you mean is that things are
bad, and we shouldn’t be polarized,
and isn’t it sad that everybody’s
so mean to each other and people
can’t agree. And what we really
need is for Ronald Reagan and
Tip O’Neill to go have drinks
together and cut a new deal on
Social Security.
That’s very much the domi-
nant view of how politics should
work, and it has pervaded politics
for years. When I came into
journalism, the people who ran the
institutions wanted to just
cover that Ronald Reagan and Tip
O’Neill deal. That was their
baseline for how American politics
is. One of my efforts in this book is
to change the way we think about
that baseline — to say, as you note,
that that was an abhorrent
period for a lot of people in the
United States.
One of the things I say in the
book is that the alternative to
polarization in political systems
often isn’t agreement or compro-
mise or civility — it’s suppression.
It’s suppression of the things
the political system doesn’t want
to face because if it did face them,
it would break apart coalitions
and polarize them.
BS I’m sure if we were starting
from scratch, we’d both prefer a
parliamentary system. But we don’t
live in that system. So what are
some immediate steps that can
be taken?
EK Let’s say you think, as most
of Jacobin’s audience would, that
if you really give voters a choice,
they would prefer Bernie Sanders–
style social democracy to Kevin
McCarthy–style movement
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Don’t Blame Polarization
conservatism or Trump-style right
populism. Then you can’t stop
there, what you need to say is,
“Okay, but can popular majorities
express these preferences into
power right now?”
Most of the time, they cannot.
Our system doesn’t always allow
a party that’s won big majorities to
actually govern. Hillary Clinton
won more votes for president.
Democrats have won more votes
in the Senate over the last three
cycles. And yet they still don’t
have the White House, the Senate,
or — because of that — the
Supreme Court. Even if a figure
like Bernie Sanders did win an
office, it would be very difficult to
win a large enough majority to
govern. It can be incredibly
demobilizing for a political move-
ment to feel like it has scored
this difficult, impossible victory,
and then to see that amount
to so much less change than they
were promised.
BS What about the viability of
pushing for political reforms to deal
with that?
EK If you want change to be
possible, if you want your theory
of politics to work in practice,
the absolute first thing you need to
do is democratize US politics.
That means front-loading those
types of reforms. The filibuster is
one that you could do relatively
easily, but there are others that you
could do if you had the will —
including things that we should
do anyway, like making the
District of Columbia and Puerto
Rico states, because the people
who live there deserve political
representation.
19
 STRUGGLE SESSION
These things aren’t going to
make the system small-d demo-
cratic, but they would help. If you
don’t do them, first, what’s going
to happen is that people
are going to come into office,
they’re going to try to pass a huge
bill like Medicare for All, and
they’re going to fail. Then the
political movement behind them
is going to be furious and splin-
tered and feel that politics has
nothing for them. It’s very hard to
get people to think about process
first, but if you don’t get the
process right, then you can’t get
the political change right.
BS Some Democrats, even Bernie
Sanders at times, said they feared
abolishing the filibuster because it
would help the Republican legisla-
tive agenda in the short term.
EK It drives me crazy the way
so many people in politics — on all
sides — have this view that they
would prefer the problems of
paralysis, inaction, and unclear
accountability to the possible
problems of actual governance.
The feedback loop of, first, the
public voting some coalition
into power; second, that coalition
governing in the way they
promised and the public getting
to ask whether they like what
happened; and then, finally,
deciding whether they want to
return that coalition to power or
not — it’s so much clearer and
more straightforward than what
we do now. Now, the public votes
some coalition into power, and
maybe that coalition does or does
not get power despite the vote.
And even if it does, they’re only
able to get done 15 percent of what
20
they promised. And then there’s
an endless argument over who’s to
blame. Is it that Larry Summers
didn’t pass a memo to Barack
Obama with enough stimulus, or is
it that there were Republicans in
the Senate who wouldn’t pass it,
or should he have just used budget
reconciliation?
It’s crazy! You have to be a
congressional reporter to actually
understand why things didn’t
happen.
What I hear from liberals
sometimes is that “if there was
no filibuster when Republicans
tried to repeal Obamacare,” we’d
be in trouble. It’s the craziest
argument. First of all, they did
budget reconciliation, so there was
no filibuster when they tried to
repeal Obamacare, and Senate
Republicans couldn’t get fifty-one
votes. And number two, either
health care is important to
people’s politics or it isn’t — but if
it is, people are going to notice
if you take it away from 20 million
people, and it’s going to affect how
they vote in the future
BS You might have had a different,
more popular Obamacare without
the filibuster, too.
EK Very different. It would have
been a much better bill.
BS Obviously, I believe in really
sweeping institutional change. This
is a magazine whose second issue
ran an article entitled “Burn the
Constitution”! But I’m worried about
foregrounding the fact that we want
to radically change the structures
of the US political system.
We have a fairly popular program,
and let’s say we’re elected with a
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
mandate to get things like Medicare
for All passed — wouldn’t it make
more sense to say, “We’re going to
try to get our program, even if it
takes getting rid of the filibuster or
packing the courts,” rather than
foregrounding something that
doesn’t feel very tangible and that
might seem a little scary to people?
EK I’m not a political consultant.
A good thing about being a
journalist is that I get to say what
I think is true, not what I think
will win me votes. That said, the
only thing I’m arguing here is that
if you want to do something like
Medicare for All, you’ll have to do
some set of these things first.
That’s also true if you want to
do something even as modest as
a public option for health care. It’s
also true if you want to do any kind
of Green New Deal.
I am simply saying that I think
it’s true that you have to order
things this way, and I think that
the Left, as I understand it, has
developed a theory of class
mobilization politics — which,
unless it is more married to
a realpolitik theory of political
institutions and institutional
reform, will fail.
Why We’re Polarized is not
a good political handbook for
anybody. It’s just a way of
describing how the system is
working now, and one of the main
arguments that comes out of
that model is that the zone of the
possible is much more limited
than anybody who thinks we have
big problems should want it to be.
So, if you want to change what
is possible, you’re going to have to
change the political system itself.

PERCEIVED CONFLICT
BETWEEN DEMOCRATS
AND REPUBLICANS
REACHES A NEW HIGH
Over the course of three election
cycles, Pew Research found a 24%
increase in the perception of
“very strong conflict” between
Democrats and Republicans.
Very Strong Strong
Conflicts Conflicts
Not Very Strong There Are No
Conflicts Conflicts
Can’t Choose Don’t Know
BS I do think that much of the
Left adopted a very populist mode
of thinking during the Sanders
campaign. “Populist” in the sense
that we argued that there are
these corrupt institutions, but we
are virtuous, and our movement is
virtuous, and our leader is vir-
tuous, and we’re going to elect our
leader and then we’ll be able to
cut through all the red tape and
bureaucracy and make change.
I mean, I believe that, on some
level. And I believe that we could
have made important changes
Jan 8–13, 2020
Nov 30–Dec 5, 2016
with Sanders in power — but that
understanding of politics and social
change is much more populist than
it is Marxist.
EK I couldn’t have said that
better myself.
BS There’s a caveat, because I
think that the rational part of the
strategy is that there is this latent
force out there — of working-class
non-voters and irregular voters —
that has a shared objective interest
in redistribution and these social
programs, and that seems to
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Don’t Blame Polarization
Nov 29–Dec 4, 2017
Nov 28–Dec 5, 2012
broadly support them. And those
people could have been mobilized
in a general election behind a
Berniecrat agenda.
In other words, politics in the
United States is very polarized in a
partisan direction, but we could
create a different polarization, in a
much more straightforwardly
class-oriented direction. And if we
had this overarching identity to
try to subsume some of the other
identities, we’d have the numbers
for real change.
21
 STRUGGLE SESSION

LESS THAN HALF OF 80

AMERICANS TRUST THE
EXISTING FEDERAL 70
GOVERNMENT TO SOLVE
PROBLEMS 60

50
Only 41% of respondents to a
Gallup poll expressed strong trust 40
in the federal government’s
ability to solve domestic problems. 30
This figure has decreased signifi-
cantly since the early 2000s, 20
which showed Americans’ trust
of the federal government 10
between 60% and 70%.
1972
1974
1976

2000

2005

2010

2015

2020
Great deal/ Not very much None at all
Fair amount

We were pursuing the populist
shortcut to get to that point
because, in the United States today,
class organization and class
identity have been completely
shattered. We needed the shortcut
of a campaign, and actual power,
to bring these people in.
EK I think that’s the argument
for Bernie Sanders, for sure. I’m
so glad we got to this, because I
think what’s in the book is of
distinct relevance to the Left. One
of the mistakes I think socialists
make is taking on an overly
materialistic view of how people
express their politics. As if what
everybody is doing is running a
calculator on how much the taxes
are going to go up for them
and how much the benefits are
going to come back for them.
And that then, if the calculator
comes out correctly for them,
they’re going to vote for whoever
you want.
There’s overwhelming
evidence that people are partici-
pating in politics to express
who they are in the world and
what they believe about the
world, to express their identity
in a deep way.
This is true even for Bernie
Sanders himself. Bernie Sanders
is a millionaire who will pay higher
taxes under the Bernie Sanders
plan. He is deeply committed to
things like Medicare for All and a
Green New Deal, because that’s
who he is. Interests are not just so
narrowly about our bank account.
BS There are a few things to
unpack there. But I think there is a
tendency among Democrats to see
their party as a coalition of discrete
interest groups.
The advantage of the more straight-
forwardly class-based appeals of
figures like Bernie Sanders is that
they are obviously concerned about
different forms of oppression, but
they try to ground politics in major-
itarian demands.
To some degree, yes, there is
a portion of the Left that just says
people have this objective interest
and if they’re not acting it out,
then they’re suffering from false
consciousness. I think that’s a recipe
for a very pessimistic and conde-
scending politics. But I do think,
at the very least, that most people
are not going to vote for a
candidate if they think it’ll harm
their most direct material interests.
What’s most worrying to me is the
tendency among some liberals now
who are more concerned with

22 № 39  /  FALL 2020


BUT MOST AMERICANS
BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT
SHOULD DO MORE TO
SOLVE PROBLEMS
For the first time since Gallup
began polling Americans on this
topic in 1992, over half of
Americans expressed the belief
that the federal government should
do more to solve problems facing
the nation. Only 41% of Americans
responded that the federal
government is currently doing too
much, a figure that has dropped
14% since 2015.
talking about privilege than with
making broad-based appeals. They
are basically saying to white
Americans that racial progress is
going to come at their expense —
that they need to kill the colonist in
their head and read White Fragility.
Our message, however, is much
simpler, and even though we’re the
crazy socialists, I think it’s far less
fringe: we’re going to build a pro-
gram to uplift every working-class
and poor person. Unlike many
liberals, we don’t preemptively write
off 60 percent of the country.
EK I agree that there’s a portion
of the liberal left that uses a
frame that sees fighting sexism
and racism as a form of almost
zero-sum rebalancing of the
system, in ways that alienate
potential allies. But your more
60
50
40
30
20
10
1992
2000
Doing too much Should do more
economic-oriented left does
something that parallels that a
little bit.
It seems to me that some
champions of the new class
politics want a zero-sum rebal-
ancing of the system, as opposed
to an expression of values about
how to make a better world. That’s
particularly true in the way some
socialists lately have been attack-
ing the “professional-managerial
class” (PMC) in sharp terms.
They’re saying that if you have
a good office job or you are a
low-level supervisor somewhere,
you’re not part of our coalition,
and you even have something to
fear from us, because we’re going
to start making you into the bad
guy. That’s a very dangerous form
of politics, in particular, because of
how much power the PMC already
wield in politics.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Don’t Blame Polarization
2010
2020
Mixed
In the same way that you don’t
want to alienate people you can
get behind your program on race,
gender, or other lines, you also
don’t want to do it on class lines.
You need economic politics to be
an identity that people can see
themselves in, even if they’re not
going to be a direct beneficiary
of most of it.
BS If you’re talking about low-level
supervisors or foremen, you have
a point. But a lot of things in class
politics are actually zero-sum.
Questions of power and autonomy
on the shop floor are zero-sum. If a
boss is making a worker work fifty-
hour weeks, and then a law
is passed so that you have a shorter
workweek or longer vacations,
that’s legislation that enhances
the freedom of workers but restricts
the freedom of capitalists to
manage their firms.
23
 STRUGGLE SESSION
Income and wealth creation may
not be a zero-sum game. But these
issues are filled with them.
EK Anti-billionaire rhetoric is
something that I totally get as a
political framing. That’s a
tried-and-true form of politics.
The reason people draw that battle
line is that it’s a class war that is
potentially winnable. This is why
I’m a little bit tougher on this rise
of anti-PMC politics, which is a
form of purity politics. It’s almost
a nostalgic form. It’s an importa-
tion of a twentieth-century idea
of what were virtuous and valuable
forms of occupation into twenty-
first-century politics, when a lot of
those people actually have to be
part of your coalition.
BS I think the “PMC” concept is
not completely coherent. Pro-
fessionals are not neatly part of
the same class in the same way
that workers and capitalists are.
Teachers, professors, nurses with
lots of supervisory functions,
sure — and they’re becoming ever
more proletarianized anyway. But
higher-level managers and those
with quite a bit of autonomy and
income? I don’t think they’re part of
your coalition.
Overall, though, I agree that there’s
a tendency in this discourse for
things to devolve into a kind of
culture-war framing — in the UK,
there was a big thing about how tea
was more authentically “working
class” and coffee was for the
cosmopolitan professionals. It
reduces class to affect.
But I think the useful part of this
impulse is that it calls into question
24
who should be leading the move-
ment. There is no doubt that many
of these salaried professionals
need to be in the broad tent of
democratic-socialist politics. There
are simply not enough votes, in an
electoral sense, from the manual
working class anyway. But who
should be running working-
class parties?
To me, democratic-socialist politics
needs to be less about a set of
policy preferences than about
creating a program that could
benefit the vast majority, through
feats of organizing — galvanizing a
working-class base, and then
struggling against those who would
oppose the program. Because
Bernie Sanders broadly embodied
a type of politics, it wouldn’t have
even mattered to me if Elizabeth
Warren was better on policy
points — though, in fact, she wasn’t.
EK Yeah, that always strikes me
as a very complicated form of
politics. Jacobin, for example, is a
popular intellectual space. It’s
read by a lot of people who are
understood not to be the correct
representatives of its movement,
the future mass working-class
movement.
One of the things that Bernie
Sanders, in particular, does very
well is that his politics are almost
purely value-forward. He talks
about millionaires and billionaires —
he doesn’t talk about wonky
details. His is a politics of arguing
for a broad-based vision of justice
that a lot of people can see
themselves in.
I think there are two questions
that people should always
ask about the identities we are
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
constructing: What is that identity
saying about me, aspirationally, if
I support it? And then, what is the
identity saying to the people who
might support it? A question that
is not asked enough in politics is
whether people feel like this
candidate or this movement likes
them. We think so much about
who the public likes, but one of the
questions the public asks intui-
tively is, “Do these people like me?”
That’s why coastal-versus-heart-
land politics are very powerful, as
well as elite-versus-non-elite
politics. If a politics feels like the
people running it don’t respect
you, then it almost doesn’t matter
how you feel about them. I’d think
about that with the PMC debate.
BS What are some of the imme-
diate barriers to mass politics that
you see?
EK What’s striking to me is that
we’ve really seen a reduction in
the mediating institutions and the
civil society of American poli-
tics — unions on the Left, churches
on the Right, that kind of thing.
Some of that role is being played
by social media, but social media is
very different and, by nature,
obviously very factional.
One question that I have about
politics is: Do new outlets arise
that help people participate
politically in spaces that are
otherwise often nonpolitical? A lot
of people don’t want to be
primarily involved in politics.
Among other things, politics is
constantly riven with conflict, and
most people don’t enjoy conflict.
I think that’s something you
hear from thoughtful people on
both the Left and the Right — the
need to rebuild civil society.

INCREASING SHARE
OF AMERICANS FAVOR
A SINGLE PARTY
CONTROLLING THE
GOVERNMENT
According to a Gallup poll, the
number of Americans support-
ing one-party control of the
government has reached a new
peak at 41%. This percentage has
increased by 14 points since 2010.
I’m more pessimistic than
others that we’re going to be able
to rebuild the institutions that
were dominant in the twentieth
century. I think we’re going to
have to find new ones or find new
forms of them that work in the
twenty-first century, but I don’t
think anybody’s quite figured that
out yet.
BS To the extent that I can draw
some hope, it’s by looking at history.
When I think about the early days
of the workers’ movements that
brought much of the world social
democracy, these are movements
that started off with a social base
made up disproportionately of
artisans and intellectuals, then were
later able to become true parties of
the working class.
50
40
30
20
10
0
2002
2005
2010
Same Party No Difference
People who were racist and sexist
and had all sorts of contradictions
were able to come together and
build institutions that broadly
expressed their class interest, and
they did that through a combination
of creating an identity around it but
also having a baseline commonality
in class that is actually real.
The potential that I saw in Sanders
was the return of some of this spirit.
It’s still a make-believe thing; we’re
far from actually having it. But as a
goal, it seems far more viable a
route to progressive politics than
just saying we’re going to keep the
Right out of power through
coalitions of discretely operating
identity groups.
EK I think there’s a lot to that.
But one thing I’m trying to do in
the book is rescue identity from
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Don’t Blame Polarization
2015
2020
Different Parties
the way we’ve come to think of
identity politics more broadly.
BS You mean, pejoratively, as
“tribalism”?
EK I mean that identity is
something that not only marginal-
ized groups have. In politics, when
people say “identity politics,”
they tend to be saying, “Well,
black voters are rallying around
Black Lives Matter, and that’s
identity politics because it comes
from this particularistic experi-
ence. But Donald Trump running
to build a wall, that’s just
normal politics.” All these things
have identities attached to them.
If you can appeal to some-
body’s identity, sometimes you
can flip them around on a policy,
so long as they still feel that their
identity and their group is intact.
25
 STRUGGLE SESSION
Identities tend to activate under
threat. This is one reason why the
most popular move in this
conversation, which I think is
wrong, is always “Well, what if we
just created a civic identity?”
One reason that American
identity was very powerful in the
twentieth century was the real or
perceived foreign threats people
were experiencing. The American
identity was constantly under
threat, first from Nazi Germany,
then later on, for a longer period
of time, from the Soviet Union
during the Cold War. It didn’t
solve every political problem we
had, but it did create a creed
of identity that could be activated.
One thing about racial
identities is that they are activated
constantly. If you’re moving
through the world as an African
American or as a Mexican
immigrant, you routinely feel
threat, often physically, as in
encounters with the police. What
Donald Trump represents, in
another way, is a lot of older white
people who feel political power
slipping away from them, who feel
like they are spoken about in
a way that they don’t like, and it’s
beginning to activate a more
threatened white identity, as they
perceive demographic and cultural
danger to the position they’ve
traditionally held in America.
I have a fair amount of
research on that in the book from
a political scientist named
Ashley Jardina, but that said, the
hardest thing about class identity
is that it doesn’t come under
threat as often, or as explicitly.
The reason that I think populist-
right parties have done better in
26
this era across Europe than their
social-democratic enemies, for
instance, is that those identities
are under perceived threat, and
they’re activated in a constant,
continuous way.
It just hasn’t been the case in
Europe that answering a populist-
right identity with an economically
left identity has proven to be a
consistently usable answer. It’s
going to have to be much more of
a philosophical and justice-
oriented identity.
You talked about progressive
politics not being just a collection
of group identities. I think Obama
was very good at tying those
identities to inclusive values. He
didn’t go around talking to the
party as a collection of groups. He
said, roughly, “You are a growing,
young, diverse America that is
changing this place and that is
connected in a very deep way to a
historical arc and journey that
we’ve been traversing for a long
time.” A lot of people from a lot of
different backgrounds could see
themselves in that.
If you’re building off of
an identity that you think has a
material rooting interest in
working-class politics at its core —
for example, people need health
care, and they don’t have it — you
also need to attach it to these
values that can expand it much
more. People need to feel that
they’re really fighting for it in an
aspirational way, not just in a
self-interested way. Aspiration is
super important in politics.
BS It might come back to haunt
you if you keep giving your socialist
detractors useful advice.
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
EK I think the conditions are
much better right now for
somebody engaged in your brand
of politics. We’re in this era
of what Julia Azari, the political
scientist, calls “weak parties,
strong partisanship.” It’s the ability
to take over a party by being a
well-organized ideological faction
within it, and then to use that
takeover of the party to make your
ideological agenda the party’s
agenda — and it’s much more
plausible now than it would have
been twenty years ago, with
the kinds of media gatekeepers
you had, and the kind of power
that parties had to keep control
internally.
I know you want an indepen-
dent labor party. But if your
political project was taking
over the Democratic Party and
making it into more of a
social-democratic party, I think
there’s a lot in these trends that
is actually working in your favor.
BS And yet, the lesson of the book
is that, even if you’re able
to somehow do that and win an
election, you’ll have a near-
impossible time of carrying out
a program due to the structures
of the political system.
EK Well, that’s where it gets
more pessimistic. What the book
is actually trying to do, more than
anything, is give people a well-
rounded description of how the
system actually works — not how
we wish it worked, and not how
politicians often tell us it works,
but how it actually works.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION 27
 FRONT MATTERS
FRIENDS & FOES
The General Who
Brought Down the
American Empire
In 2002, the Pentagon staged a $250
million war game known as
the “Millennium Challenge.” It was
supposed to be a fixed fight —
until a retired Marine lieutenant
general, playing the role of a
Middle Eastern country, brought
the US military to its knees.
The war began in early 2007.
Several months earlier, an
earthquake had devastated Iran.
From the ashes of that disaster, a
rogue Iranian general broke from
the ayatollah and asserted
iron-fisted control over part of the
country. Most dramatically, he
began charging ships a toll to
guarantee safe passage through
the Persian Gulf.
Washington refused to abide such
a direct threat to its interests —
billions of gallons of oil traveled
28
BY DANIEL BESSNER
ILLUSTRATION BY RICARDO SANTOS
through the Gulf each day,
providing the lifeblood of the
global economy. The United
States immediately dispatched an
aircraft carrier battle group to
Iran’s shores and demanded the
general’s surrender.
In a matter of hours, tensions
between the two countries were
higher than they had been since
the overthrow of the shah in 1979.
The Americans made the first
move. Once the US Navy arrived in
the Gulf, the ships destroyed the
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
microwave and fiber-optic comm-
unication relays that allowed the
Iranian general to secretly speak to
his subordinates. Now, the Navy
assumed, the general would be
forced to communicate with easily
monitored cell phones. Confident
that they could intercept these
conversations and thus learn of
any impending attack, the
Americans issued an ultimatum
demanding the general’s imme-
diate surrender.
The general, however, wasn’t
having any of it.
To evade eavesdroppers, he
communicated with his forces via
motorcycle messengers. To
avoid the Navy’s advanced radar
technology, he used small
and speedy boats to monitor US
movements. And to ensure
no American knew he intended
to assault their carrier battle
group — a shockingly bold move —
he issued his orders to attack
in coded messages hidden in the
call to prayer that was broadcast
from Iran’s minarets.
It worked. As the United States
traversed the Strait of Hormuz,
Iranian forces rapidly unleashed
a barrage of Silkworm missiles
that overwhelmed the Navy’s defen-
sive capabilities. While the
general’s missiles bombarded US
ships, some of his boats launched
kamikaze attacks — a tactic
unthinkable for the Americans,
but not for a massively out-
matched opponent fighting off a
potential invasion.
 Running Hed

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 29
 FRIENDS & FOES
The US admirals were caught
completely by surprise. They
watched in shock as their forces
were demolished. By the end of
the attack, sixteen of their naval
vessels — including an aircraft
carrier — lay at the bottom of the
Persian Gulf. About twenty
thousand US troops had perished
in the battle. It was the worst
naval disaster in American history.
For a day and a half, the admirals
were at a loss — they had no idea
what to do.
Finally, after much deliberation,
they agreed on next steps — they
would refloat the ships and inform
the Iranian general that, in fact,
his attack had failed.
Fortunately for the world, this
particular war wasn’t real. It was a
game — a very expensive one —
being played from within an office
building in Suffolk, Virginia.
And the “rogue general” wasn’t
Iranian. He was American, a
retired Marine lieutenant general
out to win an altogether different
war — one he and others had been
waging within the bureaucracy of
the Pentagon ever since Vietnam.
The Millennium Challenge (MC),
conducted in 2002, was the largest
and most expensive war game
in American history. It involved
13,500 troops, incorporated
twenty-nine different organiza-
tions, and cost $250 million to
stage. It was the jewel in the crown
of the Defense Department’s
“transformation” effort, in which
the military attempted to
30
integrate advanced communica-
tion and information technologies
into its repertoire. It was a
promise to finally cut through the
“fog of war” once and for all.
The MC was supposed to prove
that Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld’s goal of making war
into a science — rationalizable,
predictable, controllable — could
now be achieved.
But the project to make war a
science started long before
Rumsfeld. In the 1920s and ’30s,
officers in the Army Air Forces
claimed that technologies like
metal planes, powerful engines,
and accurate bombsights enabled
the “precision strategic bombing”
of an enemy’s “vital centers” —
the transportation networks,
electric grids, materiel-producing
industries, and communications
centers on which a nation relied to
wage war. Destroying an adver-
sary’s vital centers, airmen
claimed, would end wars rapidly,
cheaply, and with as little loss
of life as possible.
In World War II, the War Depart-
ment embraced this scientific
approach to war, recruited
hundreds of academic experts, and
charged them with making the war
effort more effective. When the
war ended, the military concluded
that these eggheads had, in fact,
been useful and decided to help
found the RAND Corporation, the
first national security think tank in
American history.
Over the course of the 1950s,
RANDites became influential
players in Washington, DC; in
fact, when John F. Kennedy won
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
the presidency in 1960, he invited
RAND analysts to join his adminis-
tration, laying the groundwork for
an intellectual struggle between
those who avow that war can be
rationalized and those who insist
it cannot.
One of the most influential
opponents of the “rationalist” side
was Marine lieutenant general
Paul K. “Rip” Van Riper. The
general, to put it mildly, did not
agree with the RANDites and their
fellow travelers. “These clowns
believe in the pseudoscience that
they come up with,” Van Riper
told me from his home in Virginia.
“There’s no intellectual rigor to
what they’re saying.”
A bald and wiry man with a narrow
face bedecked in thin-framed
glasses, Van Riper enjoyed a
storied career. Born in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, in 1938, he was
eleven years old when the Korean
War began. It was then, at the start
of that brutal conflict, that Van
Riper knew he wanted to serve.
“I recall distinctly one night when
my mom went to the grocery
store, and my brother and I were
in the back seat of the car. My dad
was driving. As we sat, waiting
for her to come back, a newspaper
boy came up, and my dad bought a
paper and spread it out on the
steering wheel. He said to us,
‘Well, boys, the war’s going to be
over soon.’ And we said, ‘Dad, why
is that?’ And he said, ‘Well, they’re
going to send in the Marines.’”
A few years later, after high
school, Van Riper and his identical
twin brother enlisted in the
Marine Corps Reserve program.

In 1963, he was commissioned a
second lieutenant.
After Lyndon B. Johnson escalated
the Vietnam War in 1965, Van
Riper was sent to Southeast Asia
to advise the Vietnamese Marine
Corps. “At that point, the only
action I’d seen was down in Santo
Domingo, when there was a revolt
in the Dominican Republic and I’d
been shot at, but it was certainly
not combat in the way most people
think about it.”
Combat, however, soon caught up
with Van Riper. During his first
tour in Vietnam, he was shot in the
stomach and evacuated to the
United States, where he remained
until 1968, when he returned to
Southeast Asia as the commander
of a Marine rifle company.
It was in Vietnam that Van Riper
learned to respect his enemies and
to appreciate that they had their
own will. Though the national
liberation forces were not as well
equipped as the Marines, they
fought with a ferocious discipline
“These clowns believe in the pseudoscience
that they come up with,” Van Riper told me
from his home in Virginia. “There’s no intel-
lectual rigor to what they’re saying.”
The General Who Brought Down the American Empire
even as they suffered massive
casualties. “Great soldiers — both
Viet Cong and the North Viet-
namese,” Van Riper informed me.
“Very skilled, very professional.”
On the front lines of the war, Van
Riper discovered what a battle for
survival really means. “The only
way I can describe combat,” he
told me, “is to think of sometime
in your life you’ve been truly
afraid. Maybe it was a noise in the
night, you thought somebody was
in your house. And you get a
feeling in the pit of your stomach
like a rock is there.”
This fear, Van Riper found,
“doesn’t go away. It’s there. And
it stays.” And it was an anxiety
that inevitably shrouded the mind.
“Anybody who tells you they’re
not frightened in combat probably
is insane. You pray before combat.
You’re praying during combat. And
you pray after combat.”
War’s sheer horror underlined to
Van Riper that it was ultimately
unrationalizable.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
“I learned as a commander never
to get on the radio and ask
questions when a fight first starts,”
he told me. “The reality is that
those on the scene are just trying
to sort it out, and if you keep
pestering them for information or
updates, all you’re doing is
hindering their efforts.” War, Van
Riper learned in Vietnam, could
not be planned.
But that conclusion was out of
step with the times.
Both the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations were permeated
with so-called Whiz Kids, defense
officials steeped in the rational
choice approaches that had
become popular at RAND in the
1950s. According to Whiz Kids
like Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara, war could be mea-
sured, planned, and predicted.
Thus, Van Riper recalled, soldiers
like him were taught that “the
measurement of success in
Vietnam was quantifiable ...
a numbers game” in which “body
31
 FRIENDS & FOES

counts, number of patrols,
weapons captured, prisoners
captured” were indices of
accomplishment.
But in the rice paddies outside
Saigon, Van Riper understood what
McNamara, sitting in Washington,
didn’t — that no amount of rational
analysis can tame war. “The
computer models showed we were
winning, but on the ground,
we knew damn well we weren’t.”
Van Riper returned to the United
States in the autumn of 1969. He
was, he remembered, “bitter”
that “all we had been taught about
war and warfare was not right.
What we had learned in our
professional education, what we
had seen in our professional
journals, just wasn’t right.”
He remained adrift until attending
the Command and Staff Course at
the Naval War College in the late
1970s, where he studied Prussian
general Carl von Clausewitz’s On
War. This treatise, written in the
wake of Napoleon’s defeat,
forcefully argued that no amount
of thinking, analysis, or planning
could lift the “fog of war.”
Once Van Riper read Clausewitz,
“the light came on” — finally, he
had found someone who appreci-
ated “the uncertainty of the chaos”
of war. For the remainder of his
career, Van Riper remained a
devout Clausewitzian.
He wasn’t alone — many Vietnam
veterans likewise endorsed
Clausewitzian principles. At the
same time, however, a significant
number of civilian and military
officials remained in thrall to the
fantasy of scientific war.
The tensions between these two
camps were relatively muted until
the Gulf War of 1990–1991,
when they exploded into the open.
The Gulf War was one of the
quickest and most decisive in US
history. It began with a thirty-eight-
day bombardment of Saddam
Hussein’s forces and ended with a
four-day rout of the dictator’s

32 № 39  /  FALL 2020


military. Whereas Iraq suffered
tens of thousands of casualties, the
United States lost only a few
hundred troops.
The war not only cured the
“Vietnam Syndrome” that had
made Americans wary of
deploying troops in the 1970s
and ’80s, it also seemed to
demonstrate that a “revolution
in military affairs” (RMA), defined
by the use of advanced weapons,
information, and communication
technologies, had transformed
the very nature of war.
To RMA advocates like William A.
Owens, who served as vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff in the mid-1990s, the Gulf
War revealed that new technolo-
gies like the Global Positioning
System (GPS) and laser-guided
bombs enabled the military “to use
force with speed, accuracy,
precision, and great effect over
long distances.” Similar to the
airmen and RAND analysts before
them, Owens and his fellow
RMA supporters insisted that
cutting-edge technologies fostered
scientific, predictable, and
humane wars.
But Van Riper, who knew war’s
realities better than most,
disagreed.
“Nations don’t have a very good
track record of predicting what
future war’s going to be like,”
he told me. “Clausewitz, who is
still the greatest theorist that
ever lived, said that ‘war is more
than a chameleon.’ When you
think of a chameleon, you think of
an animal that changes color.
What Clausewitz was telling us is
The General Who Brought Down the American Empire
that war is even more than that. Its
character and form are changing all
the time.”
In a coauthored article from 1997,
Van Riper lambasted the “pecu-
liarly American faith in science’s
ability to engineer simple solu-
tions to complex human problems.”
The problem of war, he avowed,
would never have a “technological
solution.” Instead, “real war is
an inherently uncertain enterprise
in which chance, friction, and
the limitations of the human mind
under stress profoundly limit
our ability to predict outcomes.”
For this reason, the general
insisted, “promises of high-tech,
bloodless victory” were lies
to be unceremoniously dismissed.
Van Riper’s view was deeply unpop-
ular in the go-go 1990s. The United
States had just emerged victorious
from the Cold War, and most
defense officials weren’t interested
in listening to someone stress
the limits of their nation’s power.
History was over, capitalism had
won, and the United States was,
in the words of Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, the “indis-
pensable nation” whose military
would foster global peace and
prosperity.
Military planning reflected the
hubris of this “unipolar moment.”
After the striking success of the
Gulf War, the US Armed Forces
initiated a process of “defense
transformation.” In a series of
reports written during the second
Clinton administration, officials
made clear that they intended to
use advanced information and
communication technologies to
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
make the military into a scientific,
efficient, and effective “joint
force” — a force that integrated
all the services into a coherent
whole — that enjoyed “full-
spectrum dominance,” the ability
to win any type of conflict
anywhere in the world.
When George W. Bush was
appointed president, he and his
secretary of defense, Donald
Rumsfeld, heartily embraced
transformation. In the Quadrennial
Defense Review of September
2001, Rumsfeld endorsed the RMA,
the joint force, and full-spectrum
dominance. Then, in November,
he established the Office of Force
Transformation to ensure the effort
proceeded as he wished.
The key to defense transforma-
tion, most officials agreed, was
“information superiority,” which
referred to the process of using
new technologies to gather data
about an enemy’s weak spots
so that the military could attack
these vulnerabilities directly
and thus rapidly end wars.
Rumsfeld wanted his military to
know everything about an enemy —
not only the size and capabilities
of its armed forces, but also its
economic, political, cultural, and
psychological fragilities. This
information, he and his coterie
claimed, would clear the fog of war
and allow defense officials to
become scientists able to predict
precisely the effects of a given
military action (the latter idea was
organized under the rubric of
“effects-based operations”).
Information superiority was
intended to move the military
33
 FRIENDS & FOES
beyond an “annihilation” or
“attrition” model of war — which
measured success in terms of
damage done to an enemy’s forces —
to a “scientific” or “precision”
model of war — which measured
success in terms of damage
done to an enemy’s ability and will
to fight.
As Air Force brigadier general
James B. Smith elucidated in a May
2002 news briefing, “you don’t
just want to shoot something or
blow something up, you want
to create an effect” that prevents
an adversary from waging war.
This was the dream of defense
transformation. Unfortunately for
Rumsfeld and his supporters,
Van Riper had a rude awakening in
store for them. And it would start
with a game.
Van Riper retired from the Marines
in 1997. Like many former officers,
he quickly learned that his pension
wouldn’t allow him to maintain
his lifestyle. To earn money, he did
a little bit of industry consulting
before learning that the military
was looking to hire retired
generals to play in war games.
Van Riper embraced the opportu-
nity. War-gaming was fun, paid
handsomely, and — better yet —
provided him with the opportu-
nity to prove that defense
transformation was a waste of
money premised on a flawed
understanding of war.
Luckily for the general, the turn
of the century was a golden age of
34
war-gaming. In 2000, Congress
directed the US Joint Forces
Command (JFCOM), which was in
charge of joint force war-gaming
(also known as “experimenta-
tion”), to oversee a game that
“explores critical war fighting
challenges at the operational level
that will confront the United
States joint military forces after
2010.” Congress, it appeared,
wanted to discover whether the
money spent on defense transfor-
mation was worth it.
Between 2000 and 2002, JFCOM
planned the Millennium Chal-
lenge, which quickly became,
as Richard B. Myers, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
put it, “the Olympic event of
experimentation.”
The MC, which ran from July 24 to
August 15, 2002, was enormous,
rallying over thirteen thousand
service members operating from
nine live-fire exercise ranges in
the American West and seventeen
simulation locations across the
rest of the country; it linked forty-
two different simulation programs
able to model thirty thousand
battlespace entities; and it involved
all four military services, the
Special Operations Command,
and several government agencies.
It pitted a “Blue” team, repre-
senting the United States, against
a “Red” team, representing an
unnamed Middle Eastern country
that was an amalgam of Iraq
and Iran.
It was the largest war game
conducted in human history.
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
By summer 2002, Van Riper was
already a war game veteran. He
had participated in JFCOM’s 2000
experiment, the Rapid Decisive
Operations Analytical War Game,
in which he controlled the Blue
team’s Marines, as well as its 2001
experiment, Unified Vision, in
which he played the Red team’s
commander.
Van Riper was not impressed with
his experience during Unified
Vision, when it appeared to him
that JFCOM was trying to manipu-
late the game to demonstrate
the validity of the “revolution in
military affairs.” During the game,
Van Riper was informed upon
arriving at his station one morning
that, the previous night, the Blue
team had destroyed his Red team’s
ballistic missiles.
Van Riper considered this impos-
sible. “I was bold enough to go
over to the White cell [i.e., the
game’s referees] and say, ‘I don’t
want to be where I’m not supposed
to be, but tell me, what was the
latitude and longitude you had on
these missiles to take them out?’”
The game’s referees admitted
they didn’t have any such coordi-
nates. Van Riper then asked
them how they could possibly
know where his missiles — which
were buried deep underground —
were located. The referees
explained that, since the game was
set over a decade in the future,
one could assume the US military
would by that time possess
the technology necessary to detect
buried missiles. It was, in other
words, magical thinking.

Van Riper had set out to counter
“the wishful thinking of the dilet-
tantes,” and he had succeeded
beyond his wildest imagination.
“Right away, I said, ‘There’s
nothing authentic about this. It’s
just pure nonsense.’”
Van Riper became particularly
upset when, after Unified Vision,
JFCOM sent a letter to Congress
saying that the game had
proven the new thinking correct.
Foreshadowing the Iraq War,
the Rumsfeld partisans simply
declared victory.
But JFCOM promised the irate Van
Riper that the Millennium
Challenge, the next game in which
he was contracted to participate,
would be a total free-play exercise.
In the MC, the generals claimed,
the chips would be allowed to fall
where they may; the Blue team
would be allowed to lose.
The premise of the Millennium
Challenge was straight out of a
Tom Clancy paperback. In 2007,
an earthquake destabilized an
unnamed Middle Eastern country
The General Who Brought Down the American Empire
(the Red team) that controlled
significant raw materials. In
response to the chaos, a rogue
general (played by Van Riper)
broke away from his nation’s
leadership and attempted to gain
control of the region.
There was a dispute over who
controlled a series of islands in the
Persian Gulf, which Van Riper
solved by seizing the islands. He
then began to charge a toll to
ensure safe passage to ships that
traveled through the Gulf.
The United States (the Blue team)
considered this a threat to its
economic interests and dispatched
its military (led by Lieutenant
General Burwell Baxter “B. B.”
Bell) to discipline Van Riper. The
Blue team’s goals were to secure
the Gulf’s shipping lanes; neu-
tralize the Red team’s weapons of
mass destruction; gain control
of the disputed islands; and, most
important, avoid a major war.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
For the RMA acolytes, it was the
perfect scenario to demonstrate
that an informed, surgical, and
decisive operation could avoid a
catastrophic and costly bloodbath.
For Van Riper, it was something
else altogether — a chance to
reveal a fatal imperial arrogance.
The Red and Blue teams’ head-
quarters were at the Joint Training,
Analysis and Simulation Center
in Suffolk, Virginia. Van Riper and
Bell played from a series of rooms,
each of which contained the
simulations that modeled the
forces of a given military service —
one room for Navy simulations,
another for Army, another for Air
Force, and so on. Van Riper and
Bell were stationed in separate com-
mand centers that held physical
maps representing the ongoing
conflict. To make moves, the two
generals would analyze their
respective maps, decide on a course
of action, and then have subordi-
nates input these moves into the
system. Once input, Van Riper and
35
 FRIENDS & FOES
Bell waited for the computer (and
sometimes the game’s referees) to
determine the consequences of
their choices.
Most of the Millennium Challenge
was conducted in a virtual
environment. The game was
unique for uniting forty-two
different simulation programs —
such as the Civil Environment
Model, which tracked attacks on
civil infrastructure, and the
Fire Simulation, which modeled
field artillery fire — into one
federated structure. About 20
percent of the game was played
with live forces that undertook
real-world operations to test
specific technologies and tactics.
The outcomes of these live
operations, which occurred from
July 26–28 and August 6–8,
were then incorporated into the
larger game.
Theoretically, either the Red or
Blue team was able to win the
game. But in actuality, and despite
It was the $250 million
equivalent of “‘Bang! You’re
dead.’ ‘No, you’re dead!’”
36
promises to the contrary, the
Millennium Challenge’s books
were cooked from the beginning.
While Bell controlled an approxi-
mately 350-person team,
Van Riper’s team had just ninety
people. Indeed, Van Riper’s
intelligence staff consisted of only
four people, which made it
difficult for him to gather informa-
tion about the Blue team. In
contrast, before the game, a fifty-
five-person group had assembled
a database for the Blue team that
included massive amounts of
information about the Red team’s
country. The Blue team was also
given target folders that provided
detailed knowledge of 14,500 Red
country targets. Most important,
the Blue team had access to
post-2007 technologies, such as
guided missile–carrying subma-
rines and airborne laser weapons
(the latter of which still aren’t
operational).
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
When the game began, Bell made
several aggressive moves. He
ordered tens of thousands of
troops and an aircraft carrier
battle group to the Persian Gulf
and demanded Van Riper’s
surrender within twenty-four
hours. He also successfully
destroyed the Red team’s commu-
nication infrastructure, so as to
force Van Riper to relay orders
over cell phones. Bell assumed the
United States’ technological
superiority, combined with his
deep knowledge of the Red team’s
capabilities and assets, would
rapidly deliver him victory.
But Bell wasn’t counting on Van
Riper. The latter knew that
George W. Bush had embraced a
doctrine of preemption — he had
taken to ostentatiously carrying
around a copy of the Washington
Post that announced as much —
and that Bell, as Blue team
commander, was likely to follow
suit. To win, Van Riper decided
that he needed to act quickly.
“If the United States is going to
have a policy of preemption,”
the general concluded, “we will
preempt them.”
As the Blue Navy traversed a
narrow strait, Van Riper initiated
a massive surprise attack that
he ordered through secret
messages encoded in his country’s
call to prayer. “We’d done all the
calculations on how many cruise
missiles their ships could handle,”
Van Riper told Malcolm Gladwell
for his book Blink, and to
defeat the Blue Navy, “we simply
launched more than that” —
a barrage from sea, land, and air.

The general then made use of
kamikaze assaults undertaken
with small seacraft.
Van Riper’s strike overwhelmed
the Blue Navy’s defensive
capabilities. Within ten minutes,
the Red team had destroyed
sixteen American ships —
including an aircraft carrier — and
killed twenty thousand US service
members. If the battle had been
real, it would have dwarfed the
attack on Pearl Harbor, in which
two battleships were destroyed
and 2,400 troops were killed.
But Van Riper’s attack was far
more than an attack on the Blue
team — it was an attack on
the very idea of a revolution in
military affairs.
The General Who Brought Down the American Empire
In one fell swoop, Van Riper’s
assault demonstrated the
pointlessness of defense transfor-
mation. If an understaffed, not
especially knowledgeable,
technologically inferior enemy
could so easily surprise and defeat
a US Navy armed to the teeth,
why had the Pentagon wasted so
much time, money, and effort
on transformation?
The mood that day at the Joint
Training, Analysis and Simulation
Center was icy, to say the least.
“There was shock,” Van Riper told
me. “When I would walk out
into the passageway, nobody was
talking. Nothing was happening.
Everything was still. I think the
leadership at that point was trying
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
to say, ‘What the hell happened?
What are we going to do?’”
Van Riper had set out to counter
“the wishful thinking of the
dilettantes,” to borrow a phrase
he used when talking to Inside the
Navy, and he had succeeded
beyond his wildest imagination.
But that wishful thinking — backed
up by billions of government and
defense industry dollars — would
prove tough to defeat.
JFCOM scrambled for a solution.
After a day and a half of internal
deliberation, the referees decided
to refloat the sunken ships,
which was the only way the game
could proceed. Or, as the Millen-
nium Challenge’s final report dryly
37
 FRIENDS & FOES
Van Riper had won —
but at an enormous cost in
blood and treasure.
noted, “some of the potential
impacts due to [Red team]
operations were adjudicated out ...
to keep the experiment on track.”
It was the $250 million equivalent
of “‘Bang! You’re dead.’ ‘No,
you’re dead!’”
After this humiliation, the rest of
the game was conducted on
JFCOM’s terms. Van Riper was
not allowed to win.
When the Blue team’s Marines
prepared to assault the Red team’s
territory, the referees instructed
Van Riper’s chief of staff not to
shoot down attacking planes. They
then told the chief to position
Red’s air defenses in the open so
they could be destroyed. In
response, Van Riper decided to
blanket his territory with chemical
weapons, but he was forbidden
from doing so.
These restrictions infuriated Van
Riper. He had been lied to
38
again — the Millennium Challenge
was just another sham manipu-
lated to validate Rumsfeld, the
RMA, and defense transformation
as a whole. On July 29, the game’s
sixth day, he stormed out of his
command center to complain to
Army general William F. Kernan,
JFCOM’s commander. According
to the reporter Micah Zenko,
Kernan replied to Van Riper’s
protests by telling the general he
was “playing out of character”
because a real enemy “would
never have done what you did.”
Apparently, in 2002, chemical
warfare in the Middle East was
unthinkable.
In response to Kernan, Van Riper
unofficially resigned his position
as Red team commander. He went
back to his command center,
gathered his staff, and notified
them that he’d act only as their
adviser. As the game wound down,
Van Riper began to collect emails
and PowerPoint briefings,
presumably to act as a whistle-
blower should JFCOM inform
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
Congress that the Millennium
Challenge had proven the
sanguine arguments about the
revolution in military affairs
correct.
After Van Riper quit, the referees
continued to restrain the Red
team’s actions — they forbade Red
from launching major assaults
at night, stalking the Blue Navy,
and destroying an attacking
Marine force. The final official
report went so far as to admit that
the game’s “end state was
scripted” to guarantee “a Blue
operational victory.”
Van Riper was furious. As he told
Zenko, the Millennium Challenge
“was prostituted; it was a sham
intended to prove what [JFCOM]
wanted to prove.”
On August 14, the incensed
general dispatched an email to
several colleagues in which
he declared that “neither the
construct nor the conduct of the
[Millennium Challenge] allowed
for [revolution in military affairs]
concepts ... to be properly
assessed.” This email was leaked
to the Army Times, which
published an article on August
16 — one day after the game
ended — avowing that “the most
elaborate war game the U.S.
military has ever held was rigged
so that it appeared to validate
the modern, joint-service war-
fighting concepts it was supposed
to be testing.”
The Guardian, the New York
Times, and the Washington Post
soon picked up the story, and
a scandal erupted.

To Van Riper, the game’s rigging
reflected the culture of acquies-
cence, naivete, and false hopes that
characterized Rumsfeld’s Defense
Department. “A culture not
willing to think hard and test
itself,” he presciently told the
Guardian, “does not augur well
for the future.”
Throughout the late summer and
autumn of 2002, JFCOM officials
blamed the referees’ heavy hand
on the experimental nature of
the Millennium Challenge itself.
Whereas before the Millennium
Challenge began, Van Riper
was promised that it would be a
free-play game, after it ended,
JFCOM officials affirmed that it
was, in actuality, an experiment
defined by strict oversight. As
Van Riper aptly put it, JFCOM and
the Defense Department “never
could decide” whether the
Millennium Challenge was a game
or an experiment: “They kept
changing what it was, and then
defining it in retrospect.”
Still, no amount of excuses could
hide JFCOM’s embarrassment,
which was reflected in the fact that
the command waited a decade
to release the final Millennium
Challenge report publicly. By that
time, hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis and thousands of Americans
had perished in a war initiated by
adherents of the very thinking Van
Riper had defeated in the game.
Van Riper spent the years after
the Millennium Challenge telling
anyone who would listen that,
regardless of what they heard from
The General Who Brought Down the American Empire
Pollyannaish military officers and
Defense Department officials,
“the fundamental nature of war
hasn’t changed, won’t change,
and, in fact, can’t change.” War-
making would always remain more
art than science.
As the situation on the ground in
Iraq deteriorated, Van Riper
started to name names, comparing
Rumsfeld to his old Vietnam-
era bête noire, Robert McNamara.
“I don’t believe either Mr.
McNamara or Mr. Rumsfeld are
professionally schooled [in
military thinking],” he explained
to Frontline in 2004. “They’re
ignorant of military operations, of
strategy and policy.”
But Van Riper’s criticisms had
little immediate effect. Much
as the general feared, JFCOM cited
the Millennium Challenge’s
results to justify and continue
defense transformation. The
project to make war a predictable,
inexpensive, and humane science
endured, hardly diminished.
On March 19, 2003, seven months
after the Millennium Challenge
ended, the United States invaded
Iraq with a campaign designed
to “shock and awe” Saddam
Hussein’s military into submission.
The “unbeatable” Blue team was
again set loose in the real world.
Throughout the Orwellian-named
“Operation Iraqi Freedom,”
the United States used precision
weapons and advanced informa-
tion, surveillance, and recon-
naissance technologies to rapidly
destroy the Iraqi military —
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Baghdad was captured in only
twenty-one days. Indeed, several
technologies tested in the
Millennium Challenge — including
the Marine Corps’s Dragon Eye,
a surveillance drone with a range of
six miles — were deployed in
the invasion.
One must admit that very few
Americans were killed during the
initial stage of the war: 139
compared to about ten thousand
Iraqis. While the revolution in
military affairs didn’t make war
less awful for US enemies, it did
save American lives.
But, of course, the United States’
initial operational victory did not
lead to the pacification of Iraqi
society. Upon occupying Iraq,
the US military was forced to fight
a years-long insurgency that
eventually gave rise to the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria, which
persists in conducting brutal
attacks today. In 2020, Iraq
remains volatile, as thousands of
US troops continue to be indefi-
nitely stationed in the country.
The “revolution in military affairs,”
it seems, had little to contribute to
“stabilizing” Iraqi society.
The present conditions in
Afghanistan and Libya, the two
other sites of recent major US
military interventions, likewise
emphasize war’s unpredictability:
in Afghanistan, seven thousand US
troops continue to struggle with
the Taliban; Libya, for its part, is
mired in turmoil.
The last seventeen years have
proven Van Riper correct — war is
simply an uncontrollable force.
As the general puts it, saying one
39
 FRIENDS & FOES
is going to control war is like
saying, “‘I’m going to put my
canoe in a mountain stream. Not
only am I going to control the
canoe, I’m going to control the
stream.’ No. The stream has
its own dynamics. War and battles
have their own dynamics. And
so the best you can hope to do is
keep some sort of order within
the chaos.”
Van Riper blames the failures
of Iraq on the intellectual failures
evinced in the Millennium
Challenge. In both cases, he avows,
military officers and Defense
Department officials displayed
“an unwillingness ... to study
beyond weapon systems, to study
cultures,” and to appreciate that
the enemy might think differently
than they do.
The “revolution in military
affairs” not only failed to make
war scientific — it distorted
the military elite’s thinking.
Happily for Van Riper, by the
mid-aughts, he had several highly
placed allies who also rejected
the RMA, none of whom was more
influential than fellow Marine
lieutenant general James “Mad
Dog” Mattis.
Similar to Van Riper, Mattis
considered the idea that war could
be made scientific ridiculous.
Soon after he became head of
JFCOM in 2007, Mattis — who was
in regular contact with Van
Riper — purged the idea of
effects-based operations from the
command’s doctrine.
In a bracing memo released on
August 14, 2008, Mattis declared
40
that “it is not scientifically
possible to accurately predict the
outcome of [a military] action”
and that “to suggest otherwise
runs contrary to historical
experience and the nature of war.”
Against RMA advocates, the
general insisted that “the joint
force must act in uncertainty and
thrive in chaos, sensing opportu-
nity therein and not retreating
into a need for more information.”
From this point onward, effects-
based operations were no longer
part of JFCOM’s remit. Twelve
years later, the concept is almost
nowhere to be found.
The same is true of JFCOM, which
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
shuttered in 2011. According
to Gates, the command was too
expensive and offered too few
benefits to remain open. Or, as
Van Riper acidly tells me, JFCOM
was “spending a lot of money
on foolishness” and suffered the
consequences.
Van Riper had won — but at
an enormous cost in blood and
treasure.
In 1827, Clausewitz, a veteran of
the Napoleonic Wars, reflected on
war’s character. “War,” the major
general mused,
is the province of uncertainty:
three-fourths of those things
upon which action in War must
be calculated, are hidden more
or less in the clouds of great
uncertainty ... The actor in War
constantly finds things different
from his expectations.
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
War cannot be planned, it cannot
be predicted, and it cannot be
made safe.
Yet Americans continue to pursue
the dream of clean, scientific war.
What are drone strikes, if not the
latest instantiation of the fiction
that war could be made more
efficient and precise, and therefore
more humane?
This fantasy of clean war reflects
and empowers the fantasy
of American empire, which is
premised on the idea that armed
primacy can force the world to
become peaceful and prosperous.
But there are hopeful signs on the
horizon. Even someone like
Van Riper, who dedicated his life
to defending the empire, is
beginning to have his doubts about
its desirability. When I asked
the general if the United States
should continue to lead the global
order, he responded, “Not at
any great cost. Yes, in terms of
presenting examples of how
democracy should work .... If
we had the sturdy leadership that
we’ve been used to in the past
and weren’t going to break the
bank, yes.”
Yet what Donald Trump’s election
has revealed is that we can’t rely
on sturdy leadership, and what the
last twenty years have shown is
that governing the world is quite
expensive in lives lost and money
wasted.
The only way to make war safe is
not to fight in the first place, and
the only way to make empire just
is to dismantle it.
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
VULGAR EMPIRICIST

America
the Laggard

By virtually any measure,

people in the United
States are worse off than
those in other rich
countries. There’s no
disputing the impact of
our weak entitlements and
paltry labor protections.

Right: Hundreds of people line up to try for jobs

at the City University of New York’s Big Apple
Job Fair in March 20, 2009 at the Jacob Javits
Convention Center. An estimated 6,000
students and alumni showed up to apply for jobs
offered by about 100 employers.

42
 America the Laggard

Percent of workers
Workers’ Rights earning less than 2/3
The United States treats its workers
of the median income
worse than any other peer nation. We
not only have the lowest percentage Belgium
of workers covered by a collective New Zealand
Finland
bargaining agreement and the largest
Italy
share of low-income workers (those Denmark
earning less than 2/3 the median Switzerland
income), but American workers also Japan
enjoy the smallest slice of the overall Austria
economic pie. Income inequality in the Australia
Iceland
United States is greater than in any
Korea
other comparable country. Germany
Great Britain
SOURCES: Unionstats.gsu.edu, Czech Republic
the Organisation for Economic Canada
Co-operation and Development Israel
United States

0 25
% of workers

Workers covered by Income inequality

collective bargaining
agreements Slovenia
Czech Republic
Norway
Austria Belgium
Belgium Finland
Iceland Austria
Sweden Sweden
Spain Germany
Denmark France
Italy Ireland
Netherlands
Switzerland
Slovenia
Canada
Luxembourg
Luxembourg
Switzerland
Spain
Germany
Italy
Czech Republic
Israel
Canada
Korea
Great Britain
Great Britain
Japan
Lithuania
Korea
United States United States

0 50 100 0 0.20 0.40

% of workers Gini coefficient (0–1 scale:
lower values = lower inequality).

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 43
 VULGAR EMPIRICIST

Trust in Public Preference for military rule

Institutions
Iceland
Americans not only have less trust in
Germany
national politicians and government Japan
officials ( less confidence in civil New Zealand
service), but also, nearly one-fifth of Netherlands
Americans would prefer we scrap our Norway
democracy altogether. Our lack of Switzerland
trust in government is eclipsed only Denmark
Slovenia
by Italy, with its famously corrupt civil
Australia
service, and two high-income Sweden
post-communist countries (Czech Finland
Republic and Slovenia). Czech Republic
Spain
SOURCE: World Values Survey Italy
Australia
France
United Kingdom
United States

0 10 20
% of respondents

Little or no confidence Little or no confidence

in Congress in civil service

Norway Norway
Sweden Switzerland
Switzerland Sweden
Denmark Iceland
Australia Germany
Finland Australia
Germany United Kingdom
Japan Korea
France Finland
Iceland Denmark
Spain France
United Kingdom Japan
Italy Australia
Australia Spain
Korea United States
Slovenia Italy
Czech Republic Czech Republic
United States Slovenia

0 40 80 0 40 80
% of respondents % of respondents

44 № 39  /  FALL 2020

 Spending on job support
programs

Denmark
France
Finland

Social Belgium
Spain

Safety Net Austria

Netherlands
Italy
These indicators provide a snapshot Sweden
of welfare spending generosity Germany
across the OECD, and show that Luxembourg
falling on hard times in the United Ireland
States is more dangerous than in any Switzerland
peer nation. We have the lowest Norway
floor for minimum income supports, Australia
Canada
the least generous benefits for needy
Korea
families, and the weakest aid for
New Zealand
unemployed workers. Israel
Czech Republic
SOURCE: The Organisation for Japan
Economic Co-operation and United States
Development
0 1.5 3
% of GDP

Public spending on Adequacy of minimum

family benefits income benefits

Sweden Japan
Great Britain Denmark
Denmark Netherlands
Iceland Ireland
Luxembourg Great Britain
Norway Finland
Finland Iceland
France Switzerland
Belgium Sweden
Australia Germany
Austria Austria
New Zealand New Zealand
Israel Luxembourg
Germany Belgium
Ireland France
Czech Republic Norway
Italy Australia
Slovenia Czech Republic
Chile Israel
Switzerland Canada
Canada Italy
Netherlands United States
Japan
Spain 0 35 70
Korea % of median disposable income (higher
values = more money for the jobless)
United States

0 2 4
% of GDP

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 45
 VULGAR EMPIRICIST

Poverty rate

Quality of Life Czech Republic

Finland
Since the United States treats its France
workers worse than any comparable Norway
nation, since Americans are more Slovenia
disillusioned with public institutions Ireland
than citizens of any peer country, and Switzerland
since we are particularly cruel to our Sweden
most vulnerable citizens, it should not Austria
Belgium
come as a surprise that we also look
Germany
awful across a range of quality-of-life
Great Britain
measures, including life expectancy, Canada
incidence of poverty, infant mortality, Luxembourg
obesity, and violence against women. Italy
Spain
SOURCE: The Organisation for Korea
Economic Co-operation and Israel
Development United States

0 10 20
% of population

Prevalence of violence
against women Infant mortality

Canada Slovenia
Switzerland Iceland
Slovenia Japan
Spain Sweden
Austria Finland
Ireland Norway
Japan Czech Republic
Korea Spain
Australia Austria
Italy Korea
Italy
Czech Republic
Ireland
Luxembourg
Israel
Germany
Australia
Iceland
Germany
Belgium
Switzerland
Netherlands Netherlands
France Denmark
Norway France
Sweden Belgium
Great Britain Great Britain
Finland New Zealand
Denmark Luxembourg
New Zealand Canada
United States United States

0 20 40 0 3 6
% of women Deaths per 100 births

46 № 39  /  FALL 2020

 America the Laggard

Life expectancy

Japan Hell on Earth

Switzerland
Karl Marx wrote that “Religion is the
Spain
sigh of the oppressed creature, the
Italy
Israel
heart of a heartless world, and the
Iceland soul of soulless conditions.” It should
Norway hardly come as a surprise, then, that
France in the face of unparalleled cruelty
Australia and oppression among wealthy
Korea industrialized nations, two-thirds of
Sweden Americans believe hell is real.
Luxembourg
Ireland
Canada
Netherlands
New Zealand
Finland
Austria
Belgium
Slovenia
Belief in hell
Great Britain
Germany Denmark
Denmark Sweden
Chile Iceland
Czech Republic Norway
United States Netherlands
Finland
75 80 85 Germany
Years Czech Republic
Switzerland
Japan
New Zealand
Slovenia
Australia
France
United Kingdom
Spain
Obese or overweight Australia
Italy
United States
Japan
Korea
0 35 70
France
% of population
Israel
Belgium
Canada
Ireland
Great Britain
New Zealand
Australia
Finland
United States

0 40 80
% of population (over 15)

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 47
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
TRANSITIONS

It used to be better to be a
The Great low-wage worker in the United
States than in France. That hasn’t
Divergence been the case for a long while.

$25,000

1967:
Increase to
$1.40 an hour
1980: After several
increases, minimum
wage is $3.10 an hour

1974:
1961: Increase to
Minimum wage protections $2.00 an hour

US established in the 1938 Fair

Labor Standards Act extended
to most construction, service,
and retail workers
$15,000

1968:
Real Annual Minimum Wage

Monthly minimum wage

increased through
post-May 1968
Grenelle agreements
1970: New national minimum
wage for workers in all
industries, indexed to prices
and wages

France
$15,000

1960 1975 1990

48 № 39  /  FALL 2020

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
UNEVEN AND COMBINED

This figure shows the real annual value of the national minimum
wage in France vs. the United States since 1970. The French minimum
wage, known as the “SMIC,” sets an automatic floor for minimum Mapping
wage increases based on inflation and overall salary growth. As a
result, it has grown steadily, while the real, inflation-adjusted value of
the federal minimum wage in the United States has stagnated.
the Decline

1998:
Workweek shortened How the neoliberal
to 35 hours and minimum project’s very own
wage revised to
ensure no fall fifty-state strategy
in salaries left poverty and low
wages in its wake.

For decades, free-market

economists have claimed that the
2009: slashing of state spending and the
Most recent rollback of workers’ rights would
increase in the federal unleash abundance and prosperity
minimum wage brings for all. And, over the past several
1997: it to $7.25 an hour decades, legislators have put that
Minimum claim to the test using our very own
wage stands “laboratories of democracy” to pass
at $5.15 relevant laws state by state.

But now the lab results are in. By

using the conservative think tank the
Fraser Institute’s own metrics of
“economic freedom,” we can see
exactly what happened after these
neoliberal policies were unleashed.

SOURCE:
OECD.stat

2005 2020

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 49
 UNEVEN AND COMBINED

Government
Austerity
Between 1985 and 2016, government
spending as a share of state
income decreased all across the
country (except for Washington).

1985

The government austerity scale is an

aggregated measure that incorporates
government spending, general
consumption expenditures by
government as a percentage of income,
transfers and subsidies as a percentage
of income, and insurance and retirement
payments as a percentage of income.

Less More

2016

18 US Government Spending
MS

LA
NM
15 VW
AR
AL
Even after adjusting for a KY
NC
OK FL
state’s median income TN
GA
Poverty

level, there is a clear SC MI

MO ME
correlation between levels 12 TM SD
YW OH IN ID
TX
of government spending AZ WI KS
NV
ND RI PA
and poverty. NY IA NE
DE
OR TV IL
CA CO
9 MN
AK
VA TU NJ
CT WA
HI NH
MA

MD
6
6.0 6.5 7.0 7.5

50 № 39  /  FALL 2020

 MappingRunning
the Decline
Hed

Labor Market
Freedom
Using the Fraser Institute’s index of
“labor freedom,” defined as policies
that empower employers over
employees, we see a universal
decline in workers’ rights since the
mid-1980s.
1985

Their “Labor Market Freedom” measure

is an aggregate score of minimum wage
legislation, government employment as
a percentage of total state employment,
and union density. The higher the score,
the more “freedom,” which means
weaker labor rights.

Less More

2016

Labor Market
40
Freedom
MS

LA
NM
35
WV AR

AL
KY NC
OK TN Data from the Bureau of
Low-Wage Jobs

FL
30
MT GA Labor Statistics shows a
ME MO SC
SD clear correlation between
MI IN
OH AZ
ID TX WY the rollback of workers’
WI
NV PA ND rights and the prevalence
25 NY KS
RI IA
NE of low-wage jobs in a
OR DE
VT IL given state.
MN CO
AK CA
UT VA
20 CT NJ
HI WA
MA NH

MD
15

8.45 8.50 8.55 8.60 8.65 8.70

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 51
 READING MATERIEL
FIELD NOTES ILLUSTRATION BY JOE O'DONNELL

America’s
Railroad to
Nowhere

We know the US rail network is

no match for trains in France or
Japan. But Barack Obama’s plan
for high-speed rail couldn’t even
match that of Morocco or
Uzbekistan.

In 2009, Ray LaHood, Barack
Obama’s transportation secretary,
presented a report to Congress:
Vision for High-Speed Rail in
America. It set out a plan for the
$8 billion allocated to high-speed
rail construction under the
post-crash American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
The project, one of Obama’s
flagship policies, was supposed to
remedy decades of neglect. The
Johnson administration passed the
High Speed Ground Transpor-
tation Act in 1965, inspired by the
launch of Japan’s Shinkansen
“bullet train” the previous year.
The act gave rise to the Metroliner
train service between New York
and Washington, DC, which began
running in 1969, but little more.
France unveiled its TGV network
in 1981; however, it was another
two decades before Amtrak rolled
out its Acela Express along the
Northeast Corridor from Washing-
ton, DC, to Boston. Still the
fastest line in the United States,
the Acela Express can only reach
its top speed for a small portion
of the route; its average speed is far
below the levels in France or Japan.
By the time LaHood published
his proposal, China had begun oper-
ating its own high-speed trains.
Having started from scratch,
within a decade, the Chinese
network was the world’s largest.
Meanwhile, the United States still
lagged behind Turkey, Uzbekistan,
and even tiny Luxembourg.
Republican governors had termin-
ated federal projects in Florida
and Wisconsin; Congress had
obstructed new funding initiatives;
and the flagship high-speed rail
line in California was plagued by
budget overruns, thanks to a
heavy reliance on outsourcing to
private contractors.
The saga of US rail transport shows
how difficult it is for the American
system of government to complete
large-scale projects of incontest-
able social and environmental value
that other leading capitalist states
have managed to execute in the
same time frame. Federal and state
governments lack the capacity to
administer such projects effec-
tively, while the division of powers
between them gives ample oppor-
tunity for spoilers to intervene.

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 53
DEAR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS:
It is with great enthusiasm that I submit this
strategic plan for high-speed rail. In the last century,
a national vision led to the creation of the world’s
most advanced highway and aviation networks —
helping spur unprecedented economic growth and
urban development.⁰¹ Now, President Obama
is ready to make a renewed commitment to the
Nation’s travelers — not just to upgrade and
maintain our aging highway and aviation systems,
but to build a world-class network of high-speed
passenger rail corridors.
We face a complex set of challenges in the 21st
century — building a robust, green economy, gaining
energy independence, reversing global climate
change, and fostering more livable, connected
communities.⁰² These new challenges require
creative new transportation solutions. A combina-
tion of express and regional high-speed corridors,
evolving from upgraded, reliable intercity passenger
rail service, has proven effective in addressing
many of these challenges around the world and
in selected US corridors. The President is committed
to bringing this successful approach to key travel
corridors across America.
High-speed intercity passenger rail can play a
critical role in certain travel markets, but the United
States has historically failed to invest in this mode.⁰³
The President proposes a long-term strategy
intended to build an efficient, high-speed passenger
rail network of 100–600 mile intercity corridors, as
one element of a modernized transportation system.
SAFE AND EFFICIENT TRANSPORTATION OPTIONS Rail is a
cost-effective means for serving transportation
needs in congested intercity corridors. In many
cases, modest investment on existing rights-of-way
can result in high-speed rail (HSR) and intercity
passenger rail (IPR) service with highly competitive
trip times, while also providing ancillary benefits
to energy-efficient freight rail service. IPR and HSR
also have a strong track record of safety in the
United States and overseas. In Japan, for instance,
the Tokaido Shinkansen trains have operated
without a derailment or collision since the inception
of operations in 1964.
While it was once the preeminent mode of travel,
intercity passenger train travel in America has
played a relatively minor role in the second half of
the 20th Century. With the expansion of the
highway and aviation systems, total intercity travel
in the United States has grown dramatically.
Intercity passenger rail traffic, however, after peak-
ing during World War II, collapsed in the late
1950s and 1960s, reaching a low point of 4.3 billion
passenger-miles in 1972, after the private railroads
got out of the business.

⁰¹ In 1956, the Eisenhower
administration launched a major
program of interstate highway
construction. Completed by the
early ’90s, the program cost over
half a trillion dollars in today’s
money, with the federal govern-
ment covering 90 percent of
the cost, and states accounting for
the rest. While this vast subsidy
to car transportation was being
rolled out, the privately owned US
rail network was left to wither
on the vine.
⁰² According to the EcoPassenger
website, a train journey from
London to Paris (slightly longer
than from New York to Washing-
ton) produces 15.8 kg of carbon
dioxide, compared with 122 kg for
the same trip by plane. Taking
the train from London to Marseille
(slightly longer than from New
York to Chicago) produces 15.7 kg;
the air journey produces nearly
260 kg and is only slightly faster.
⁰³ The Nixon administration
formed Amtrak in the early ’70s
by amalgamating what was left
of the private rail network in the
United States. Although Nixon
expected Amtrak to die a quiet
death, it survived. Plagued by under-
investment and threats of

54 № 39  /  FALL 2020

 America’s Railroad to Nowhere

Much of this growth in intercity travel has been
fueled by an aggressive public investment strategy.
For six decades, Federal transportation policies
have focused most intercity transportation invest-
ments in the highway and aviation systems.
Passenger rail has represented less than 3 percent
of the rapidly growing Federal investment in
intercity transportation, and until this year, that
share has been shrinking.⁰⁴
In 1970, Congress created the National Railroad
Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) to preserve
remaining passenger service over a national system
of routes. Amtrak was formed as a private, for-
profit Federally-sponsored corporation. The
company was granted rights of access to tracks
owned by the private railroads at incremental
States like California, Illinois, North Carolina,
Washington and others have independently
sponsored rail services and capital investments, but
significant modernization of rail systems and
service has remained out of reach of many States.
While other modes have historically benefited
from dedicated federal funding for infrastructure
investment, rail has had no such Federal capital
matching source.
Against this backdrop of limited historical investment
and unique institutional arrangements, there are
a number of challenges inherent in advancing a new
passenger rail vision.
LACK OF EXPERTISE AND RESOURCES The relatively small

cost, along with operating priority over freight
trains, in exchange for relieving the railroads of
their direct passenger service obligations and
associated financial losses.
Moreover, Amtrak relies almost exclusively on
annual Federal appropriations to cover both its
capital needs and operating deficits, making
long-term planning decisions difficult. Amtrak’s
capital investments have largely failed to keep
up with the needs of its existing fleet and infrastruc-
ture, and aside from the Northeast Corridor
(NEC) Improvement Project, few upgrades to the
system have been made.
investment in passenger rail in recent decades and
growing retirements of personnel throughout the
rail sector have resulted in a shrinking pool
of experts in the field, including engineers skilled
in signal, track, and rolling stock design, along
with experienced rail planners and managers.⁰⁵
A renewed investment program will eventually bring
more expertise back into the industry, but that
process is likely to lag behind the need to plan,
implement, and manage a major new program.
Moreover, the Federal and State agencies respon-
sible for administering this effort will need to
aggressively build capacity to manage their new
portfolios; and the freight railroads and Amtrak
will need to identify resources to support the new

privatization, the company has
never been in a position to match
its counterparts in Europe or Asia.
⁰⁴ In 2012, Florida Republican
John Mica, chair of the House
Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee, announced a
“holy jihad to try to get Amtrak’s
operations under control.”
Questioned by Mica, Amtrak’s
CEO, Joe Boardman, reminded
him that road transport had always
received far more in subsidies
than rail: “In the past four years,
the federal government has
appropriated $53.3 billion from
the general fund of the Treasury to
bail out the Highway Trust Fund.
That’s almost 30 percent more
than the total federal expenditure
on Amtrak since 1971.”
⁰⁵ California’s High-Speed Rail
Authority opted to rely on outside
consultants instead of in-house
staff; when the project began in
2008, it had just ten employees. A
2019 investigation by the LA
Times found that the authority was
“overly reliant on a network of
high-cost consultants who have
consistently underestimated the
difficulty of the task.” Its outside
contracts cost an average of
$427,000 per engineer, compared
with $131,000 for the in-house
equivalent.

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 55
 FIELD NOTES

effort without diverting from their core operating
and maintenance responsibilities.
STATE FISCAL CONSTRAINTS The current economic
downturn has left many States in a precarious fiscal
condition. Many lack resources to make capital
investments or take on potential rail operations
expenses. In spite of these fiscal constraints, some
States have continued to invest in passenger
rail, even without Federal support, and many have
funded operating costs for running intercity
passenger rail services. While an expansion of
passenger rail and development of HSR fit well
into the transportation vision of many States,
decisionmakers will have been confronted with
difficult budget decisions to advance these
programs in coming years, even with an expanded
Federal commitment.⁰⁶
PARTNERSHIPS WITH PRIVATE RAILROADS Although
Federal law provides Amtrak a right of access to
private railroad facilities, that access has been
constrained by the capacity of rail lines and by
freight traffic. With the prospect of significant
public funding flowing through States to support
capital investments — often in existing, privately
owned rail lines — for expanded and improved
passenger services, partnerships will be needed
between States and the private railroads that
own the infrastructure. Whether for comprehensive
corridor improvement programs or discrete
projects, State-railroad agreements will be needed
to ensure that public investments will fulfill, and
continue to be available for, their intended
purposes.
MULTI-STATE PARTNERSHIPS Most intercity passenger
rail corridors, including designated high-speed
rail corridors, cross State boundaries. Viable HSR
corridor strategies will, therefore, require a multi-
State partnership in many cases. To successfully
plan, fund, build and operate these corridors, the
States involved will need to act in a coordinated
fashion, through an interstate compact, a multi-State
agreement, or other instrument. Any such multi-
State understanding will require the backing of
several political and administrative entities within
each State.
While the $8 billion provided in ARRA is a substan-
tial Federal commitment to high-speed rail
development, it represents only a down payment on
a longer-term passenger rail development
strategy.⁰⁷ Coupled with reliable funding of Amtrak
assets and services, an ongoing annual investment
program is needed to build a 21st century transpor-
tation network that includes a central role for
high-speed passenger rail in corridors of 100–600
miles.⁰⁸ President Obama has proposed to begin
that ongoing investment in his FY 2010 budget
proposal, which calls for high-speed rail funding
of $1 billion per year for 5 years.

⁰⁶ In 2010, two newly elected
Republican governors, Wisconsin’s
Scott Walker and Ohio’s John
Kasich, pledged to scrap high-
speed rail projects in their states,
prompting Ray LaHood to
withdraw federal funding offered
under ARRA’s terms. Florida’s
Rick Scott followed their example
the following year.
⁰⁷ Obama’s 2011 budget deal
with Republicans in Congress
included massive cuts to the
high-speed rail program. The
defense budget that year was the
highest since World War II: $676
billion, including $118 billion for
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
⁰⁸ With other projects scrapped
or cut to the bone, California’s
would-be bullet train had to carry
the weight of expectation. But the
High-Speed Rail Authority’s
reliance on outside consultants
resulted in massive cost and time
overruns: by 2019, it was $44
billion over budget and thirteen
years behind schedule. The Trump
administration seized on the delays
to cancel a federal grant worth
$929 million. A line from Merced
to Bakersfield is now expected to
start running in 2027; in the years
since the project began, Morocco —
with an economy barely one-tenth
the size of California’s — has
completed its own high-speed line
from Casablanca to Tangier.

56 № 39  /  FALL 2020

 READING MATERIEL
CANON FODDER
Ending
Federalism as
We Know It
A new book shows how the
fragmented American state arrests
democracy. What we need is
nothing short of a reconstruction.
The early days of the COVID-19
pandemic were heady ones for
federalism apologists. As the
Trump administration dithered,
governors took center stage,
issuing emergency declarations,
holding daily press conferences
clad in polo shirts, brandishing
slide decks from McKinsey &
Company, and outlining their
strategies for controlling the
spread of the virus while “safely”
reopening state economies.
Indeed, to early observers,
American federalism — which
divides authority between central
and regional governments —
seemed like a crucial element of
58
BY PHILIP ROCCO
REVIEW OF REVIEW OF THE
DIVIDED STATES OF AMERICA: WHY
FEDERALISM DOESN’T WORK BY
DONALD F. KETTL
crisis management. Across nearly responses to the context — just
all fifty states, gubernatorial what the United States needed.”
approval spiked. As the political
Paeans to decentralized govern-
scientist Kathleen Hall Jamieson
ment sit at odds with bleak
put it, “A person from Mars
realities in the states. As recent
observing the rhetoric and actions
research has suggested, states’
of our leaders would reasonably
decisions about social distancing
assume that Andrew Cuomo is the
didn’t reflect local conditions
president.” Some scholars even
so much as the partisan identity
lavished praise on the decentral-
of the governor and the state
ized, federal structure of the
legislature. Moreover, as soon as
American state itself. Writing in
social-distancing measures were
Foreign Affairs, Danielle Allen —
imposed, most states quickly
director of Harvard’s Edmund J.
reopened their economies, despite
Safra Center for Ethics — praised
lacking adequate test-and-trace
federalism as an essential asset
infrastructures. In several Republican-
in pandemic response, suggesting
led states, most notably Arizona,
that local control “provides
Florida, and Texas, new viral hot
flexibility and the ability to tailor
spots have appeared.
№ 39  /  FALL 2020

As the public-health emergency
cascaded into an economic crisis,
state and local governments were
set to experience combined
revenue shortfalls of at least $500
billion between 2020 and 2022.
Constrained by balanced-budget
provisions in state constitutions
and abandoned by Congress,
governors have prepared to
make excruciating budget cuts.
Amid a pandemic, one of the first
programs on the chopping block is
Medicaid, which provides health
insurance to one in five Americans
and may cover nearly half of all
those losing employer-sponsored
insurance due to COVID-19-related
job losses. With the prospect
of a pandemic election looming,
political crises join fiscal and
humanitarian ones. Many states
seem primed to repeat the
experience of Wisconsin’s disas-
trous spring primary, which
disenfranchised thousands of
voters and likely contributed to
the spread of the virus.
Slide decks and press conferences
notwithstanding, COVID-19
exposes not merely failures of
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Ending Federalism as We Know It
leadership, but the structural
defects of America’s brand of
federalism as well. The allocation
of critical responsibilities to state
governments — from the financing
of social programs to the adminis-
tration of elections — has left
civil and social rights dependent
on one’s state of residence. States’
limited fiscal capacities make
them particularly ill-suited for
financing key responsibilities,
including and especially public
health, in the midst of an eco-
nomic crisis. Furthermore,
interstate competition for capital
59
 CANON FODDER
investment incentivizes states
to decrease tax stringency and
weaken labor protections. As
Harold Laski put it in 1938, for
states to compete with “the
integrated power of giant capi-
talism is to invite defeat in every
element of social life.”
Given federalism’s impact on the
COVID-19 response, the publica-
tion of Donald F. Kettl’s The
Divided States of America: Why
Federalism Doesn’t Work
could hardly be more timely. A
renowned scholar of public
administration and intergovern-
mental relations, Kettl offers a
lucid, searing critique of American
federalism as a contributor to
growing socioeconomic inequali-
ties, both within and among
states. Moreover, this inequality,
he argues, has fueled a broader
decline in Americans’ trust in
government, as well as polarization
and dysfunction in Washington,
DC. Reversing these outcomes,
Kettl suggests, will require major
changes to the fiscal and adminis-
trative relationships among
federal, state, and local govern-
ments. Yet in the absence of
a more fundamental political
reconstruction — including
a restoration of the right to vote,
a recovery of the right to organize
and join a union, and the abolit-
ion of the carceral state — the
structural inequalities of American
federalism are likely to endure.
Federalism Against
Democracy
At the center of Kettl’s critique is
how American federalism has,
from its origins, locked in deep
60
inequalities that are fundamentally controversial issues to remain
incompatible with the values of open to “political and judicial
democracy. The Constitution’s dispute.”
federal architecture was itself the
Yet what both poles of the
product of a crude political
Riker–Derthick spectrum neglect
bargain, in which delegates from
is that the democratization of the
slave-owning states were pivotal
American polity has always hinged
coalition members. Yet not
on fundamental renegotiations
only did the internal division of
of federalism — enduring shifts in
authority between state and
authority that have empowered
federal governments allow slavery
the federal government to engage
to endure, the creation of a newly
in redistribution (the Sixteenth
powerful federal government
Amendment’s construction of the
would help stamp out egalitarian
income tax) and to delimit undemo-
state-level schemes for the more
cratic tendencies in the states
equal division of property and
(the Fourteenth Amendment’s
the abolition of debt, which James
equal protection clause, the civil
Madison referred to in Federalist
rights legislation of the 1960s,
No. 10 as “wicked projects.”
Baker v. Carr’s challenge to
The history of American feder- legislative malapportionment).
alism, specifically its relationship But these renegotiations are often
to the institution of slavery and incomplete and subject to
Jim Crow, has generated a debate dramatic political reversals.
among political theorists. One
Most telling, federalism allowed
side, best represented by political
authoritarian enclaves in the South
scientist William H. Riker, views
to endure for nearly a century
federalism’s sour fruit as cause for
after Reconstruction. They were
chopping down the tree — aban-
snuffed out not through modest
doning the federal bargain entirely.
reforms, but through the 1965
If the main beneficiaries of
Voting Rights Act’s sweeping
federalism in US history have
revision of the federal role in
been capitalists and racists, he
election administration, which
argued, perhaps it is not much of
dramatically enhanced black
a bargain after all. The other
political incorporation and stalled
position, articulated most
numerous state efforts at disen-
powerfully by public administra-
franchisement. Yet in subsequent
tion scholar Martha Derthick,
decades, a legal and administra-
essentially argues that history
tive mobilization of conservatives
alone is no cause for giving up the
gradually chipped away at the act’s
compound republic. “As the
protections over time. By 2013,
burdens of governing grow,” she
the Supreme Court’s five-to-four
suggested, “the inability or
decision in Shelby County v.
unwillingness of the federal
government to bear them alone is
Holder effectively erased the
Voting Rights Act’s preclearance
manifest.” Whatever federalism’s
process, its most powerful tool for
sins, the existence of local
combating voter suppression.
governments allowed
№ 39  /  FALL 2020

Reconstructing the federal bargain
requires overcoming the essential
obscurity of subnational politics,
which allows local elites to
suppress conflict and maintain
their power. As Grant McConnell
wrote in 1966, while public
attention is occasionally drawn to
“scandalous” conditions in the
states, “These moments pass; state
affairs recover their wonted
obscurity and it is assumed that
the wrongdoers have been exposed
and punished.” In other words,
states’ ills are not one-off incidents
or failures of leadership, they are a
structural product of federalism.
One of the virtues of Kettl’s book,
then, is the extensive space he
devotes to mapping inequality
in the states. By tabulating a wide
variety of social indicators,
Kettl shows how subnational
policy regimes produce consis-
tently unequal social and
economic outcomes. Income
inequality is 3.4 times higher in
New York than in Alaska. In
Mississippi, more than 20 percent
All large polities contain a
modicum of regional variation, yet
the United States stands apart
in inequality, even when compared
to other federal countries.
Ending Federalism as We Know It
of the population lives below the Medicaid expansion in many
poverty line, compared to just Republican-led states, weak
over 5 percent in New Hampshire. electoral competition, ambivalent
States that expanded Medicaid saw interest-group support, and
significant declines in mortality limitations on popular referenda
rates for both infants and adults, have stifled its advancement.
yet state Medicaid coverage varies
so widely that it has spawned
Inequality Engineered
the phrase “If you know one state
Medicaid program, you know Divided States goes well beyond
one state Medicaid program.” merely tabulating and mapping
interstate inequalities, by analyzing
All sufficiently large polities —
how the evolution of American
federal or otherwise — contain a
federalism has helped to generate
modicum of regional variation, yet
and reinforce them. Essentially,
the United States stands apart
Kettl claims that the centralization
in inequality, even when compared
of governance brought on by
to other federal countries. Kettl
the civil-rights reforms and social
effectively shows how state policy
policies of the 1960s caused a
choices reproduce inequality by
pendulum-like political reaction.
offering meager financing for
“Even though the federal govern-
Medicaid and public schools, the
ment aggressively promoted
regulation of air quality, and the
equality through law,” he argues,
management of a significant part
“it also increasingly relied on
of the carceral state. It’s important
the states as administrative agents
to note that these choices do not
for federal policies and reinforced
simply reflect variations in the
their role as independent decision-
tastes and preferences of popular
makers.” Drawn into a growing
majorities in different states.
range of partisan conflicts over
Despite broad popular support for
social and regulatory policy, states
FAILURE IS AN OPTION 61
 CANON FODDER
As labor’s power declined,
Democrats in turn sought out
resources from wealthy donors.
chose divergent paths that
reflected the interests of increas-
ingly nationalized political parties.
While Kettl’s story about the
nationalization of American public
policy and the subsequent
polarization of state politics is true
as far as it goes, it can only take us
so far. After all, there was rampant
inequality in the American states
at the dawn of the twentieth
century, too, even though parties
and policy-making were highly
localized. Understanding federal-
ism’s impact on inequality
requires attention to several
important shifts in the American
political economy that have
weakened the power of workers
and imperiled the capacity
of state governments to mitigate
inequality.
Perhaps most important, the
decline of labor unions left
working-class Americans with less
power to make demands on both
their employers and the state. As
Laura C. Bucci’s research shows,
unionization has played a crucial
role in reducing income inequality,
a process that was halted by the
passage of right-to-work
62
legislation. If Michigan had kept more than half of the states
its 1976 unionization rate, for experienced an increase in electoral
example, its level of economic class bias — with the poor voting at
inequality would decrease by more declining rates relative to the rich.
than 10 percent. This bias helps to erode the
connection between mass public
In parallel to the decline of
opinion and government policy,
working-class power resources,
skewing the distributional
conservatives consolidated
outcomes of government in favor
power at the subnational level in
of the rich. State election adminis-
ways that ultimately enhanced
tration policies, more fully
inequality. The formation of org-
unfettered in the wake of the
anizations like the American
Shelby decision, create barriers to
Legislative Exchange Council and
the ballot box that depress voter
the State Policy Network helped
turnout. Moreover, as Jamila
to speed up the passage of
Michener has shown, states can
right-to-work legislation, weak-
depress turnout among low-
ening the power of the labor
income Americans by depriving
movement and strengthening
them of key social policy benefits,
Republicans’ state-level prospects.
namely health care. This feedback
As labor’s power declined,
process can also reinforce inequali-
Democrats in turn sought out
ties over time.
resources from wealthy donors. At
both the federal and state levels, Finally, several developments in
the Democratic Party has foregone monetary and fiscal policy further
numerous opportunities to entrenched economic inequality.
support greater labor organizing Combined with the Federal
in the states. Reserve’s 1979 credit crunch, the
Reagan administration’s program
Shifts in the class composition
of “New Federalism” further
of the electorate have contributed
decentralized the economy, forcing
to rising inequality. As William
states to compete more intensely
Franko and his colleagues
for capital investment, which
illustrate, between 1976 and 2006,
№ 39  /  FALL 2020

allowed businesses to reset the
terms of class compromise.
Measures limiting the growth of
the local property-tax levy,
which emerged with increasing
rapidity in the late 1970s, have
constrained spending in the public
sector, with significant implica-
tions for the quality of education,
health, and social services. As
state governments began to take
on an increasing array of policy
responsibilities, they continued to
rely overwhelmingly on their own
revenue rather than on federal
transfers as a source of financing.
With the rise of deficit-reduction
politics in the 1980s, the federal
government politely discarded the
program of general revenue
sharing it had embraced in the
early 1970s. In 1996, Congress
shuttered the Advisory
Commission on Intergovernmental
Relations (ACIR), which had
once advocated for a more
expansionary approach to fiscal
federalism. During its heyday
in the 1970s, the ACIR endorsed
public jobs programs as well
State governments are not
“laboratories of democracy,” but
regimes with highly variable — and
often deeply reactionary —
as automatic stabilizer payments
to state and local governments.
By the time of the Great Recession,
such ideas were a vague memory
at best.
Reconstruction,
Not Reform
Redressing the inequalities caused
by American federalism will
require a fundamental political
reconstruction of the federal
bargain. Kettl argues that feder-
alism has evolved through four
historical “generations” punctu-
ated by significant political
upheaval as well as legal reinter-
pretations of state and national
sovereignty. If this is correct, any
proposal to “democratize”
federalism will necessarily fall
closer to the left side of the
Riker–Derthick spectrum: an
aggressive renegotiation of the
status quo on all fronts.
Curiously, however, Kettl’s
proposal for reforming federalism
appears far more limited in
scope, focusing primarily on a
characteristics.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Ending Federalism as We Know It
transformation of federal grants-
in-aid targeting inequality-
reducing initiatives. This is a
worthy goal in principle, but the
devil is in the details. Does it
include Canadian-style gener-
al-purpose equalization payments
to the states? Will these payments
be apportioned on the basis of
per-capita income, state fiscal
capacity, or some combination of
the two? These sorts of questions
have plagued past efforts at
renegotiating federalism, and thus
they merit serious scrutiny.
Federalizing Medicaid financing,
as Kettl suggests, would indeed
help to stabilize the program
during moments of crisis. Yet if
eliminating inequality across the
states is the goal, why should we
prefer a means-tested program
administered by the states rather
than universal social insurance?
Kettl also calls for a greater role
for local governments in the
federal system. To accomplish this
goal, it is imperative that we
eliminate state preemption laws,
which have been used as a cudgel
63
 CANON FODDER
to strike down local efforts to raise
the minimum wage, strengthen
labor protections, and combat
climate change. In the same vein,
voters in urban areas deserve
better representation in Congress,
which we could accomplish
by enlarging the House of Repre-
sentatives and reapportioning the
Senate. During the COVID-19
pandemic, state and local govern-
ments have been treated as just
one more lobbying sector, but one
with far less political capital than
finance or health insurance. If
anything, this suggests that we
need to replace the defunct White
House Office of Intergovernmental
Affairs with a formal venue for
considering and acting on state and
local fiscal issues, along the lines
of the Council of Australian
Governments.
A renewed program of fiscal
federalism is, no doubt, urgently
needed, especially as Congress
appears to be telling states and
cities to drop dead. Ending the
bias of state and local government
toward austerity is an important
point, one missed by legal scholars
like Heather Gerken, who call for
a “progressive federalism” consti-
tuted primarily by left-leaning
states’ resistance to national policy
interventions coupled with
incremental policy changes. If
state and local governments
cannot find some way of relaxing
their own fiscal constraints
(such as through issuing comple-
mentary currency), we should
not be forced to rely on them to
support the provision of vital
services. Rather, we should follow
the ACIR’s old maxim that policy
64
functions should be assigned to
“jurisdictions that have adequate
fiscal capacity to finance their
public service responsibilities in a
manner which insures interper-
sonal and interjurisdictional fiscal
equalization.”
Putting this logic into practice,
however, will require tying
relatively obscure efforts to reor-
ganize fiscal federalism to broadly
popular demands. This could
include enacting Medicare for All
to alleviate states’ need to pay
for Medicaid — currently more
than one-fifth of state budgets —
and health care for public
employees and retirees. It could
also include a jobs guarantee,
which would provide a significant
fiscal stimulus to states, as well as
a federal fiscal stabilization
program of the sort recently
proposed by Alex Williams, which
would eliminate the need for
state and local governments to
engage in painful cuts in the midst
of an economic recession. We
should ideally recognize the federal
government’s fiscal primacy —
and the structural limits on state
and local finances — by cementing
these automatic stabilizers in
the Constitution.
Yet the inequalities that define
American federalism are not
merely fiscal — they are political.
State governments are not
“laboratories of democracy,” but
regimes with highly variable —
and often deeply reactionary —
characteristics. And since the
1980s, political leaders have
increasingly instrumentalized
federalism to undermine working-
class power. Creating a more
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
democratic society thus demands
politically reconstructing the
federal system to strengthen
working-class power. We can start
by using the power of the federal
government to protect workers’
rights to organize and join unions.
This means flexing federal author-
ity to preempt state right-to-work
laws, establish geographical and
sectoral bargaining agreements,
and expand labor protections to
include informal and self-employed
workers, as well as the incarcer-
ated, the disabled, and the
undocumented.
Simultaneously, we must signifi-
cantly expand voting rights,
reimposing and broadening the
Voting Rights Act’s preclearance
provision, making elections a
national holiday, mandating
automatic voter registration, and
enfranchising the currently
incarcerated. Finally, redressing
federalism’s inequalities requires
abolishing the carceral structures
that lock inequality in place —
ending intergovernmental
programs that militarize the police,
repealing cash-bail policies and
predatory fines and fees that prop
up state and local revenues
by criminalizing poverty, and
dramatically reducing incarcera-
tion rates.
However necessary, tinkering with
the details of federalism —
whether by reengineering federal
grants-in-aid or retooling inter-
governmental relations — will not
reduce inequality in the states.
The only way to do that is by
ending American federalism as
we know it.
 READING MATERIEL
CANON FODDER BY LUKE SAVAGE

REVIEW OF THE FRIENDS OF HARRY

PERKINS BY CHRIS MULLIN

A Very British
Dystopia

A Very British Coup embraced the

intrigues of class war, but its sequel
falls prey to the mundanities of
culture war.

Nearly four decades on, Chris
Mullin’s 1982 novel A Very British
Coup remains a classic piece of
leftist fiction and, though billed as
“a delicious fantasy” by the
Observer, its impact was largely
owed to the real-world resonance
its story carried. Pitting the
fictional Sheffield steelworker
Harry Perkins and his Labour
majority government against a
shadowy cabal of interests from
across the British establishment,
the book is an all-too-plausible
rendering of exactly what would
happen if an unapologetically
socialist administration ever did
come to power.
Later adapted into a captivating
three-part miniseries by Channel 4,
A Very British Coup’s prophetic
quality has only grown since its
publication, thanks to what is now
known about the extent of the
efforts made by Britain’s political
and security establishments to
undermine the socialist left. MI5
even kept a file on Labour prime
minister Harold Wilson, who, it
has since emerged, narrowly
avoided a 1968 coup plot with
origins inside the royal family.
Police spied on Tony Benn (with
whom Mullin was aligned
when the book was written) and
other Labour MPs, including
future leader Jeremy Corbyn.
A Very British Coup may have been
the product of a different moment
in British politics, but Corbyn’s
surprise ascendency in 2015
undeniably gave it a second life.

66 № 39  /  FALL 2020


When the former head of MI6,
Sir Richard Dearlove, wrote
ominously in the Daily Telegraph
that the MP for Islington North
was “a danger to this nation” and
“unfit to govern,” he could easily
have been ventriloquizing the
novel’s antagonist, Sir Peregrine
Craddock, who fights Perkins at
every turn in his capacity as the
head of Britain’s security services.
Though Mullin’s recently
published sequel, The Friends of
Harry Perkins, takes place in the
same narrative universe and
features many of the same charac-
ters, its world is decidedly
different from the one readers of
the original may expect.
Set in a post-Brexit Britain
some-time during the mid 2020s,
the novel centers Fred
Thompson — a loyal adviser to
Perkins who features prominently
in A Very British Coup — as he
embarks on a career in Parliament
amid a political climate clearly
inspired by the second half of the
2010s. The Tories are in power,
having defeated Labour in five
successive general elections and
seen off the same number of
Labour leaders. Brexit, it would
seem, has not delivered the
To its credit, The Friends of Harry Perkins
mostly portrays Parliament as a forum
for empty theatrics and intra-elite
self-congratulation.
promised national renewal, and
Britain’s economy continues to
decline, even as the Conservative
hegemony appears impregnable.
As Mullin writes early in the book:
Brexit Britain was a gloomy
place. True, the Armageddon
that some had prophesied
had not occurred, but neither
had the economic miracle
promised by the Brexiteers.
The value of the pound had
fallen steadily against the euro,
the dollar and the yuan. The
much-vaunted increase in
trade with the Commonwealth
had not materialised. The
Americans, too, were proving
particularly obstreperous.
As events unfold, the United
States appears dangerously close
to an all-out war with China —
having apparently grown no more
stable in the post-Trump era.
Perkins, incidentally, gets his
farewell in the book’s memorable
opening line: “Harry Perkins
was buried the day that America
declared war on China.”
The novel is at its best when it’s
dealing with the procedural
banalities and tiresome grunt
work that makes up much of
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
A Very British Dystopia
professional political life. Talked
into standing for Perkins’s
old seat, Thompson’s experiences
running for Parliament and
working as an MP are clearly
informed by the author’s own.
(Mullin was himself MP for
Sunderland South from 1987 to
2010, serving as a junior minister
in Tony Blair’s government.)
At Thompson’s nomination, for
example, we meet a woman named
Vera, who is described as being
“[f ]iercely loyal, relentlessly
parochial and always on the side of
the established order, whatever
the established order might be.”
(I’ve personally attended plenty of
local nominations and have met
“Vera” many times.) His constitu-
ency office, we learn, entertains
a recurring cast of characters that
includes a mix of harmless
eccentrics, outright cranks, and
citizens who have been genuinely
wronged by some official authority
or other. (My first real political
job involved handling casework in
an MP’s constituency office, and
I can attest to this, too.)
Mullin, at least at times, maintains
a refreshing cynicism toward
professional politics and the kinds
of people so often drawn to them,
67
 CANON FODDER
Mullin’s sequel is undeniably more cynical
than its predecessor in its depiction of British
society and the fissures that define it.
particularly in the Labour Party
after Blair. To his credit, The
Friends of Harry Perkins mostly
portrays Parliament as a forum
for empty theatrics and intra-elite
self-congratulation. (“In the
absence of approbation from the
world outside, Britain’s unloved
legislators tend to spend an
inordinate amount of time congrat-
ulating each other on minor
triumphs.”) The party’s new leader,
Sylvia Jones, we learn at the
novel’s outset, took the classic New
Labour route to power: through
Harvard and Oxford, studies in
classics, and work as a ministerial
special adviser rather than on
a shop floor. Impressed by
Thompson’s rhetorical evisceration
of a Tory MP, she asks him to
be Labour’s housing spokesperson,
despite his near-total lack of
knowledge about the file. “Oh,” she
says, “you could learn it all up ...”
Later, “That was the thing about
clever people,” Thompson thinks
to himself. “They thought politics
could be learned.” Also cleaving
close to reality is the public
acclaim apparently enjoyed by
Harry Perkins now that he is
no longer a threat to Britain’s
68
establishment, the trajectory very
much experienced by Benn,
Mullin’s former colleague — who
was once demonized as “the
most dangerous man in Britain”
and who ended his life, much
to his own chagrin, as an avuncular
national treasure.
Despite these laudable flourishes,
The Friends of Harry Perkins
and its overall vision of politics
ultimately disappoint. Though it’s
briskly paced and entertaining
enough as drama, Thompson has
none of the firebrand socialism
of his former boss, and even the
former Perkins cabinet members
who reappear seem to have lost
their original élan. Aided by a
friendly Tory informant (and later
by none other than Perkins’s old
nemesis, Sir Peregrine Craddock),
Thompson swiftly gains visibility
in Parliament and risks his
marriage to ascend to the top of
the Labour Party. Triangulating
on both nuclear disarmament and
immigration, he tempers the
traditional hysteria of the right-
wing press and eventually leads
Labour to victory on a pledge to
reverse Brexit. Save an extended
arc about its main character’s
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
personal life and one final twist in
its closing pages, this is the plot
of The Friends of Harry Perkins in
near entirety.
Though it’s open for debate how
sympathetic we are actually meant
to be toward the protagonist,
Mullin’s sequel is undeniably
more cynical than its predecessor
in its depiction of British society
and the fissures that define it. In
this respect, an early line spoken to
the protagonist by a secondary
character is but an ominous sign of
things to come: “Always remember
that all the instincts of the working
class are conservative. On race,
patriotism, the bomb, Brexit — you
name it. It’s just that they happen
to vote Labour.”
In this vein, The Friends of Harry
Perkins trades class war for a
post-Brexit Britain where politics
are mostly cultural and Labour’s
only electoral recourse is a blend of
communitarian rhetoric and social
revanchism. “The traditional, class-
based fault lines,” Mullin writes,
“were rapidly eroding”:
What mattered now was where
you stood on Brexit. You were

either for or against. There
was no middle ground. The
result was that Thompson and
his party polled surprisingly
well in parts of the Home
Counties that had not returned
Labour candidates for decades
while, by contrast, disaffection
ran high in what were once
Labour’s northern strongholds.
Though the latter part of this
passage is lamentably close to
real-life outcomes last December,
The Friends of Harry Perkins
disappointingly offers us a world
where idealism is scarce, political
antagonisms are nebulous, and
the working class is reactionary
by default.
In A Very British Coup, a coalition
of old Etonians, press barons,
and deep-state operatives conspire
to undermine a working-class
government and preserve their
class interests; in The Friends of
Harry Perkins, the protagonist is
aided by benign, one-nation Tories
so exhausted by the ideological
fanaticism that has gripped their
party in the wake of Brexit that
they implausibly long for the bland
The Friends of Harry Perkins disappointingly
offers us a world where idealism is scarce,
political antagonisms are nebulous, and the
working class is reactionary by default.
stability of center-left rule.
As David Runciman pointed out
in his review for the London
Review of Books, this represents
a major pivot from the first
installment, where even the most
chaotic events did at least have
an observable origin in the British
establishment: “In The Friends of
Harry Perkins,” by contrast, “bad
things just happen.”
Popular opinion, by the same
token, seems to lurch wildly and
unpredictably. Dark hints of a
surging right-wing nationalist move-
ment sound perfectly plausible,
given the relative success of
parties like the UK Independence
Party over the past two decades,
but these are made to feel more
like random outbursts of prejudice
than the toxic political by-products
of an unequal society. Despite
its somewhat jaundiced attitude
toward Westminster, too much
of the book unfolds from within
the bubble of professional politics.
The shifting sands of both global
events and public opinion seem
about as arbitrary as the weather,
and Labour members themselves
(over half a million strong in real
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
A Very British Dystopia
life when Mullin wrote the book)
are reduced to window dressing in
Thompson’s story.
The extent to which Mullin
intends his main character’s arc to
be an earnest statement about
British politics is not entirely
clear. But whether he means it or
not, the politics of The Friends of
Harry Perkins represent an
all-too-real retreat from those of
its predecessor. Though the
author didn’t know it at the time,
Corbyn’s Perkins-esque leadership
would soon be followed by the
ascendency of Keir Starmer — who,
so far, shows every sign of being
the kind of triangulating politician
on whom the latter-day Fred
Thompson is modeled. In this
respect, at least, the world offered
to us in Mullin’s follow-up is an
inadvertently apt rendering of
how things presently stand in the
party of Tony Benn, Jeremy
Corbyn, and Harry Perkins.
It’s unfortunate, in both a real and
a fictional sense, that we didn’t get
a different sequel.
69
 THE NEW
AMERICAN
EXCEPTIONALISM
Richard Lachmann
THE FIRST AMERICAN CORONAVIRUS CASE was diagnosed on
January 20, 2020, with the first death arriving on Feb-
ruary 6. As of October 2020, the United States is still
unable to implement mass testing for COVID-19. Nor
has it established a system of contact tracing. These are
the essential measures that have allowed countries in
East Asia and Europe to stem the virus and return to
relatively normal life.
The problem is not lack of money. The United States
spends 50 percent more per capita on medical care than
any other country in the world.
The CARES Act, which was passed on March 27,
2020, devotes $2.2 trillion for economic relief. This is
far more, in both total amount and per capita, than any
other country in the world has spent.
And yet millions of Americans are now both going
hungry and in danger of being evicted from their homes.
The mass quarantines necessary to slow the spread of
COVID-19 have produced far more economic suffering
in the United States than in other rich countries. If we
include discouraged and part-time workers, the August
unemployment rate is 14.2 percent.
The problem is not a lack of spending but instead
the misdirection of much of those funds into yet another
round of tax cuts for the rich and subsidies for large
corporations. Making matters worse, decades of neo-
liberal efforts to dismantle public benefits agencies
at the federal and state levels ensure that the United
States is unable to identify many of those in need and
get money to them.
70 № 39  /  BYFALL
ILLUSTRATION
Effective states can enforce
discipline on elites. The United
States is not one of them.
Despite having all summer to prepare, no funding
at all was provided for the safe reopening of schools.
Parents and school districts face a choice between two
terrible options: They can send children back to schools
that have not been prepared physically or programmat-
ically to educate students safely. Or they can continue
with online learning, which is far less effective than
normal schooling, especially for elementary-age chil-
dren and disadvantaged students of all ages. It is no
surprise that more and more teachers and parents are
seeing emotional deterioration in children trapped at
home and isolated from their friends.
These spectacular recent failures expose long-
standing inadequacies in the American state. Despite
the country’s vast wealth, the United States is ranked
thirty-fourth among nations in life expectancy. People
living in the country today can expect to live shorter
and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other
rich democracy — and this health gap was growing even
before the pandemic.
Student achievement at all levels has fallen from the
top ranks. American students, who attend ever more
decrepit schools, are performing more poorly than their
peers in countries with much lower levels of income
and educational spending. The United States — which
pioneered mass higher education with the 1944 GI Bill
and held the lead in the percentage of its population
with university degrees for the following five decades —
has now fallen to fourteenth among developed nations.
MARK2020
PERNICE

Spending on infrastructure has stagnated as bridges
collapse, pipes and dams burst, air and road traffic
become ever more snarled, and passenger trains on a
shrinking network struggle to reach even early-twenti-
eth-century speeds. Even if money were suddenly made
available, as Donald Trump (in 2016) and Joe Biden (in
2020) have both proposed, the government’s capacity
to plan and execute large-scale projects has atrophied
after decades of declining spending and the resulting
dismissals or retirements of skilled government engi-
neers, architects, and planners.
Compare Barack Obama’s meager 2009 stimulus
package to the New Deal’s government jobs programs
like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian
Conservation Corps, which together employed just
under 12 million people. In contrast, China’s 2009 stim-
ulus spending was a resounding success — launching
countless projects to rebuild and expand the nation’s
infrastructure.
In the absence of agencies capable of preparing
engineering or architectural plans, the “shovel-ready”
projects undertaken in the United States in 2009–10
were small in scale and incremental, focused mainly on
repaving roads and repairing existing infrastructure.
The contrast with the monumental dams and other proj-
ects constructed during the New Deal — and with the
high-speed rail lines, subways, airports, and city centers
jump-started by the Chinese stimulus — is striking.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
The New American Exceptionalism
The military is the only area besides health care in
which the United States spends far more than any other
country. Nevertheless, even though its military advan-
tage has widened over its actual and potential rivals to
a level unprecedented in world history, the country is
unable to win wars. America’s only unambiguous mili-
tary victories since World War II came in the first Gulf
War, a war with the limited objective of expelling Iraq
from Kuwait, and in various “police actions” against
weak opponents in the Dominican Republic in 1965,
Grenada in 1983, and Panama in 1989.
Sooner or later, the United States will withdraw
from Afghanistan and Iraq, and even if those wars do not
represent the outright defeat experienced in Vietnam,
America has failed in both countries to achieve its objec-
tive of installing subservient governments that are able
to control their territories and citizens.
AN IMPOTENT
REPUBLIC
We need to be careful not to conflate a failed state with
capitalism’s normal cruelties. Capitalists in America
seek to limit social welfare benefits, break unions, and
force workers into unsafe jobs at low wages — but so do
capitalists in every other country. While all capitalists
benefit by minimizing their taxes and making workers
as vulnerable to exploitation as possible, they also have
an interest in suppressing pandemics, winning wars,
71
RICHARD LACHMANN
SUB-DEPARTMENT NAME
fostering technological innovation, and building infra-
structure. The American state today is quickly losing
the capacity to achieve all of those goals.
Through much of the twentieth century, the US state
successfully accommodated capitalists’ interests while
creating conditions that allowed for growing profits
and capital accumulation over the long term. With the
exception of the New Deal and World War II eras, the
United States was never a world leader in offering social
benefits. But neither has it ever been as dysfunctional
as it is now.
Since its inception, the American state has fostered
economic growth and technological innovation, built a
national infrastructure, increased the educational level
of much of its population, and constructed a public
health and hospital system that advanced life expec-
tancy throughout the twentieth century. It was also able
to build and maintain a world empire with military and
diplomatic corps that cost a declining percentage of GDP.
With the exception of imperialism, all of these
accomplishments benefited ordinary people as well
as capitalists.
So how do we explain the American state’s declining
ability to yield concrete results from its enormous expen-
ditures? Why is the US state failing at tasks it was able
to successfully accomplish in the past? After all, the
American state turned a collection of small colonies into
first a regional and then a world power, before finally
achieving global hegemony in the middle of the last
72 № 39  /  FALL 2020
century. Despite high levels of inequality and the enor-
mous toll of slavery and institutional racism, it delivered
a rising standard of living for much of its population,
who became, for a time, the most prosperous people
in the world.
Where did all that money go? And how were pow-
erful state capacities lost?
FROM A CAPITALIST
CLASS TO AUTARKIC ELITES
Most of the time, individual capitalists don’t act as a
single class. They are unwilling to sacrifice their partic-
ular interests and their immediate profits for the good of
their class, let alone their nation. Instead, they identify
and conceive their personal interests in terms of the
firms or organizations that they control.
Capitalists in America, in fact, rip off the public
and even one another in uniquely egregious and conse-
quential ways. Pharmaceutical corporations and their
managers realize outsize profits through their virtuosic
ability to enforce patents and bribe physicians to pre-
scribe overpriced drugs rather than cheaper generics.
Hospitals and other providers get rich by overcharging
and mistreating patients, forcing the companies that pay
for their employees’ health insurance to bear the cost.
Enron used its connections to politicians to enrich itself
by manipulating state energy markets, defrauding large
industrial firms as well as ordinary consumers. Most

fatefully, financial firms manipulate markets and engage
in self-dealing and outright fraud to siphon profits from
homeowners, local banks, and even corporate clients.
Executives at big corporations and banks reward them-
selves with cartoonishly large pay packages and stock
options, thereby robbing the shareholders for whom
they supposedly work.
It does not have to work this way. Effective states
are able to enforce discipline on elites — limiting their
competition with one another while preventing them
from looting both taxpayers and their own organizations.
The New Deal created an architecture of regulations that
divided industries and markets between national and
local banks and firms, protecting smaller, locally-based
businesses from being crushed by large corporations.
National firms were linked together by interlocking
directorates centered on the largest banks. Those ties
allowed large corporations to devise joint positions on
government policy. However, the biggest firms’ power
was limited and balanced by local firms that exercised
influence on congressional members, who are elected
locally, and in state governments.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, American elites
were constrained thanks to unions and other mass
organizations. It was this worker strength that limited
capitalists’ ability to reduce their own taxes, demand
subsidies, engage in unproductive speculation, evade
regulation, and impose their particular interests on US
foreign policy. This created space for the state to raise
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
The New American Exceptionalism
Running Hed
enough revenues and allocate those funds to projects
of economic development and social investment that
improved life for millions.
It’s true that workers’ gains here were limited in
comparison to European social democracies, especially
for oppressed groups. Nevertheless, the American state
was successful in pursuing policies over decades that cre-
ated global hegemony, tamed economic fluctuations, and
produced a skilled and productive working class. The US
state had a depth of expertise and capacity that allowed
it to respond to geopolitical and economic challenges. It
was this state that was able to exploit opportunities to
dominate emerging industries and technologies and to
subordinate rivals, above all the Soviet bloc.
But when the federal government, beginning with
the Nixon administration, stopped enforcing antitrust
laws, this capacity began to unravel. These policies,
followed by Democrats as well as Republicans, upset
the New Deal–designed balance between national and
local firms. From the 1970s to the present, each merger
eliminated a firm that had an interest, and a degree of
political sway, in blocking further mergers and regula-
tory changes.
The banking and telecommunications reform acts of
the 1990s had failed to pass Congress in earlier decades
due to counteractive lobbying by sectors of those indus-
tries with opposed interests. Mergers resolved those
disagreements by simply absorbing secondary sectors
into larger firms, resulting in enterprises that came
73
RICHARD LACHMANN
to share the most general interest of their industries.
Deregulation then opened the way to further waves of
mergers and acquisitions, intensifying elite consolida-
tion within major industries at the expense of the public.
Consolidation within sectors facilitated the capture
of government agencies and powers by elites, narrowing
the room for state officials to initiate new programs or
expand the scope of existing ones. That, in turn, reduced
opportunities for politicians to offer benefits that could
build alliances among non-elites, demobilizing workers
and other mass groups.
Facing such weak state and class actors, elites are
able to block new social programs that threaten both
their hold over existing budget items and their capacity
to profit by providing services such as health care, educa-
tion, credit, and retirement benefits. These are services
that could be offered directly through the government
but that instead are left to the private sector, with the
government often paying inflated prices for them, either
directly or through tax subsidies.
Elites’ leverage over the state has been strengthened
further as business leaders have formulated and lobbied
for NAFTA and other free trade treaties, deregulation,
and tax cuts.
US fiscal policy and budget priorities are increas-
ingly set by such deals, which reflect the power of
consolidated corporate elites over politics and policy.
This is different from the unified national elites of the
1945–68 period. Contemporary elites do not use their
74 № 39  /  FALL 2020
financial and organizational muscle to push for broad
national policies, with the exceptions of anti-labor leg-
islation and trade agreements. Rather, they use their
leverage over legislators and regulators to win privileges
that can best be described as autarkic.
The goal of an autarkic elite is different from that
of a capitalist. They’re not interested in shaping the
overall economy or formulating programs and policies
with national reach. Instead, they seek to appropriate
resources from the federal, state, and local govern-
ments — and to secure laws and regulations that protect
their particular, narrow interests and profit opportuni-
ties from competitors, both foreign and domestic, while
undermining the rights of their customers, clients, and
employees.
HOW ELITE LOOTING
CREATES STATE FAILURE
A growing portion of the federal budget is now allo-
cated to the long-standing financial claims of existing
elites that also enjoy the right to shelter portions of their
income and assets from taxation. By locking up public
resources and paralyzing the state’s regulatory power,
these elites create state failure in a variety of arenas.
Current examples include:
1. Subsidies, water rights, and access to federal lands
for the overproduction of agricultural commodities

that can then be sold abroad, thanks to provisions
that US negotiators have placed in trade treaties.
This results in pollution of the land, monocultures
that are highly vulnerable to disease, and poor diets
for Americans, while impoverished farmers else-
where in the world are bankrupted by imports of
US commodities.
2. Federal lands that are opened to oil, gas, and
coal extraction, contributing to global warming
while undercutting green energy. The holders
of these underpriced leases are joined by loggers
and ranchers, who have no obligation to pay for
the environmental effects of their exploitation of
public lands, which are then borne by public funds
and health.
3. The commitment of a sector of the federal budget to
a Medicare drug plan that pays prices significantly
higher than anywhere else in the world for drugs
developed mainly in government and university
labs, or for copycat drugs designed to extend patents
that have no medical advantage over older generic
drugs through “product hopping” — small, clinically
insignificant changes in drug formulations.
4. Federal tax and direct subsidies for the export of
technology and capital to foreign subsidiaries and
customers, which reduces US tax revenues, exports
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
The New American Exceptionalism
jobs, and makes it impossible to pursue the sort of
industrial policies that propelled American eco-
nomic growth in the century between the Civil
War and the 1970s, and that are today followed by
successful governments throughout the world.
5. The growing share of federal student loans that are
channeled to for-profit colleges and trade schools,
even as they charge much more than state schools,
fail to graduate most of their students, and account
for almost half of all student loan defaults, despite
enrolling less than one-tenth of post-secondary
students.
Together, these financial claims and immunities
ensure either growing deficits or, even in times of fiscal
stability such as the late 1990s, an inability to finance new
public projects for infrastructure and the development
of human capital.
ELITE POWER AND
POLITICAL PARALYSIS
In theory, electoral politics can provide a mechanism
both to challenge elite power and for capitalists collec-
tively to rein in predatory autarkic elites who threaten
the entire system. American elections served that pur-
pose in both the 1860s and 1930s and, to a lesser degree,
in other eras.
75
RICHARD LACHMANN

Capitalists in America seek to

limit social welfare benefits, break
unions, and force workers
into unsafe jobs at low wages —
but so do capitalists in every
other country.

However, in the twenty-first century, US voters
are unable to challenge the elites that have created a
permanent state fiscal crisis and that perpetuate their
privileges in the tax code, in the federal budget, and in
biased regulations, laws, and court decisions.
Democratic failure sustains and deepens this unrav-
eling. Voters’ waning influence builds on itself, leading
to justified cynicism and declining participation, which
only deepens elite control over the state. Most of the
techniques that work to undermine electoral democ-
racy have been pioneered by the Republican Party, but
mainstream Democrats have reacted in ways that for-
tify rather than challenge Republican subversions of
democracy, thereby stymieing possibilities for reform.
The twenty-first-century Republican Party, like the
southern Democratic Party from Reconstruction until
the 1965 Voting Rights Act, has sought to overcome the
unpopularity of its policies with a strategy of ensuring its
opponents are simply unable to vote. The Supreme Court
and lower federal courts have been essential to these
voter suppression strategies. Judges allow a broadening
array of methods that make it difficult for the young and
poor to vote. People are needlessly required to show
identification when they vote, and Republicans in Texas
recently passed a law that accepts a concealed handgun
permit but not a university ID as proof of identity.
Even more egregious is the fact that a growing
number of states now purge their voter rolls. The
Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County V.
Holder eliminated the section of the Voting Rights
Act that required states and localities with histories of
racial discrimination to receive preclearance from the
Department of Justice before making any changes in
voting laws. This opened the floodgates, as Republican-
controlled states rushed to enact provisions that make
it even harder to vote. Polling sites in African American
neighborhoods were swiftly closed, and early voting was
severely restricted.
State legislatures now engage in ever more extreme
forms of gerrymandering, drawing congressional and
state legislative district lines in ways that favor one
party, a strategy that until recently aided conservative
Democrats as well as Republicans. However, recent vic-
tories by leftists in Democratic primaries, most notably
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, show how gerrymandering
can backfire.
People vote in hopes that, if their candidates are
successful, they will be able to implement their elec-
toral promises. But the elite stranglehold over much
of government policy blocks reform, making elections
seem meaningless and further discouraging political
mobilization.
Political campaigns are privately financed in the
United States, giving capitalists enormous leverage
over candidates and then elected officials. The volume
of money the rich can invest in campaigns has been
magnified by Supreme Court decisions that have done
away with most limits on contributions and spending.

76 № 39  /  FALL 2020


The flood of money from corporations and the rich has
overwhelmed the lesser amounts that labor unions can
afford to spend on campaigns.
Privately financed campaigns offer an inherent
advantage for Republicans, the party that openly adopts
pro-rich policies. Democrats face a choice of either aping
Republican positions in the hopes of getting campaign
contributions from the rich — thereby disillusioning
their working-class base — or championing social-
democratic policies. The latter was the New Deal
strategy adopted by FDR and continued, to a lesser
extent, from Harry S. Truman’s administration through
Lyndon B. Johnson’s.
Such a strategy was feasible when Democrats could
count on campaign financing and volunteers from labor
unions, which included more than a quarter of the US
labor force until the mid-1970s. Democrats could also
count on receiving money from capitalists who adopted
the pragmatic strategy of donating to incumbents, which
benefited Democrats while they remained in the majority
in Congress until 1980. Since then, almost all Democrats
have adopted policies designed to elicit contributions
from the rich while pivoting to cultural issues.
This leads the poor to question why they should go
to the trouble of obtaining an approved form of identi-
fication and waiting in long lines on Election Day if all
they will receive, should the Democrats win, is access to
complex programs that provide only limited assistance of
the sort that Biden offers now, Hillary Clinton promised
in 2016, and Obama delivered in 2009–10.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
The New American Exceptionalism
THE ROAD FROM FAILURE
Labor strikes and mass protest have long created open-
ings to challenge capitalists.
Autarkic elites are particularly vulnerable to pop-
ular pressure, because their special privileges do not
necessarily benefit other elites. This means that, if push
comes to shove, they can more easily be sacrificed than
the interests of a unified capitalist class.
Elites first undermined popular political agency by
robbing the US state of the resources and thus the ability
to deliver social benefits. As strikers and protesters
increase the frequency and intensity of their actions and
widen the scope of their demands, they can counter this
by building a virtuous political cycle.
Each success in changing government policies and
redirecting spending creates a picture of political effi-
cacy and shows the benefits of electing socialists and
progressives who can enact programs — and block elite
demands — without having to wait for people to mount
yet another protest. Such victories can rebuild the US
state’s capacity as it undermines elite autarky, con-
verting a failing state into one that can become a viable
instrument for delivering a decent life to all people.
It’s no doubt a gargantuan task that lies ahead. But
after the last few decades, we have no other choice but
to kick-start what Bernie Sanders called a “political rev-
olution” — because as brutal as a functioning capitalist
state can be, a failed one only holds new nightmares
for us all.
77
NICOLE ASCHOFF The United States is not a failed state — just ask
any American capitalist. But we desperately need
something better for everyone else.

78 № 39  /  FALL 2020

The United States is the richest, most powerful nation
in the world. But these days, failure, not success, is the
word most associated with it.
Writing in the Atlantic, George Packer said, “Every
morning in the endless month of March, Americans
woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.”
Our national response to the coronavirus pandemic,
Packer contended, has forced us to ask questions we’ve
never before had to ask, such as, “Are we still capable
of self-government?”
In an interview with Salon, economist Richard D.
Wolff compared America to “a patient who has had
a really bad cancer or a heart attack, and is now kept
alive with tubes and chemicals and all the rest of it. He
is not dead, but is in deep trouble.”
Tom Engelhardt even suggested in the Nation that
we might need a new term for the contradiction that is
America. The United States may be rich and powerful,
he argued, but it “is also afloat in a sea of autocratic,
climate-changing, economic, military, and police car-
nage that should qualify it as distinctly third world as
well.” Perhaps “fourth world,” to capture the fact that
we are “potentially the most powerful, wealthiest failed
state on the planet.”
It certainly feels like we’re failing. What kind of state
deploys the National Guard to menace peaceful pro-
testers while elderly people are being decimated by
COVID -19 and forest fires are raging? What kind of state
forces its nurses and doctors to work without proper
protective equipment? Or allows its people to go hungry
and get evicted, while handing out trillions to the wealth-
iest few amid a nationwide crisis?
Americans are right to be furious at the Trump
administration’s ineptitude and willingness to dump
the costs of the coronavirus pandemic onto working
people. But despite its obvious failures, the United
States is not a failed state — and why this distinction
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
matters goes beyond semantics. Diagnosis shapes
response. If we’re going to get ourselves out of this
mess, we need a clearer picture of what is broken and
how to begin fixing it.
The Sum of All Failures
Even among the observers cited above, there is broad
disagreement on the path that led the United States
from capitalist success story to alleged basket case.
Wolff thinks America has been a terminally ill patient
since the postwar boom ended in the 1970s. Packer
thinks America is in the midst of a cyclical “unwinding”
punctuated by major crises. Engelhardt blames post–
Cold War hubris.
There is remarkable agreement, however, on the
end point — America as failed state. This consensus is
a bit surprising, given the history of the term.
The term “failed state” came into use after the col-
lapse of Somalia. In 1994, the CIA created the State
Failure Task Force to work out the causes of state
failure. A few years later, the Clinton administration
declared a new foreign policy emphasis that advo-
cated humanitarian, diplomatic, economic, military,
and various other flavors of imperialist intervention to
purportedly rescue and fix failed states.
Then 9/11 happened, pushing the issue of failed
states into the mainstream. Afghanistan, designated
a failed state under Taliban leadership, had har-
bored Al-Qaeda. Policymakers and elected officials
warned that failed states were dangerous, that they
created lawless playgrounds where terrorists and
other ne’er-do-wells thrived. George W. Bush’s 2002
National Security Strategy announced that “America
is now threatened less by conquering states than by
failing states.” In his 2004 book State-Building, Francis
Fukuyama deemed weak and failed states “the single
most important problem for the international order.”
79
 Nicole Aschoff
When did a state
become a failed state?
Harvard University’s Robert I.
Rotberg offered a list of political
goods that successful states provide their residents:
security, an independent judiciary and a predictable
system for adjudicating disputes, the ability to partic-
ipate in the political system, medical and health care,
schools and educational instruction, good infrastruc-
ture (physical, communications, commerce), a sound
money and banking system, a free civil society and
entrepreneurship opportunities, and environmental
protection.
Failed states were states that couldn’t provide these
political goods, that had become subsumed by violence,
corruption, and dysfunction. Lists of countries, many of
them former colonies, were produced (Angola, Burundi,
Côte d’Ivoire, East Timor, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Somalia,
and Sudan, to name a few) and held up as examples of
“classical failed and collapsed states.” Restoring order
in these broken states became a matter of national
security; indeed, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan
were sold in part as state-building initiatives.
But as the first decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury drew to a close, the concept lost its luster. It had
become painfully obvious, after countless lives were
destroyed and trillions of dollars wasted, that the United
States wasn’t very good at state-building. Moreover,
scholars decided that the term itself yielded little of
theoretical value, reflecting, as Charles T. Call noted,
“the schoolmarm’s scorecard according to linear index
defined by a univocal Weberian endstate.” In his 2006
book Failed States, Noam Chomsky used the term as
little more than a throwaway foil to point out that honest
observers would have “little difficulty in finding the
characteristics of ‘failed states’ right at home” in the
United States.
So why is the term being revived today?
No doubt, things are bad in America. Income and
wealth inequality have widened considerably over
the past four decades, and many indicators show
a deteriorating quality of life for poor and working-
class people. The United
States has dropped
to the twenty-eighth
80
position on the global Social Progress Index (down from
nineteenth in 2011), and a Pew Research Center poll of
how people in thirteen countries view America shows
global regard for the stars and stripes at an all-time low.
Much of the country’s infrastructure needs upgrading;
housing and food insecurity is persistent; millions lack
access to high-quality, affordable medical care; educa-
tion has become more segregated and expensive; and
police violence is a major problem. On top of all this, the
country is being ravaged by a viral pandemic and its
accompanying economic, social, and political fallout.
Nonetheless, the United States doesn’t fit the
definition of a failed state as the term has tradition-
ally been used. The dollar hasn’t become worthless
paper, and the economy hasn’t collapsed. The country
hasn’t split into clashing states ruled by warlords or
been torn asunder by civil strife. Rule of law and the
judiciary remain robust, and government institutions
aren’t hobbled by corruption. Hospitals and schools
function, for the most part. Planes fly, the lights
turn on, the mail gets delivered, and highways are
easily traversable.
Is the current popularity of the term simply a
shorthand, used to underscore the ineptitude and
inadequacy of the US government’s response to the
coronavirus? Is it just an evocative label to signify the
depths of our disgust for how low President Trump has
brought us, to capture the taste of our collective despair
as we try to imagine what the next four years hold?
Perhaps. But we should be cautious about throwing
it around. Referring to America as a failed state can
obscure both the nature of the crisis at hand and the
demands democratic socialists should be making to
get someplace better.
Great Success
Part of the confusion lies in how the role of the state is
imagined in popular accounts. Rotberg, in delineating
the rubric for a failed state, relied on a widely shared
belief that “the responsibility of a nation-state [is] to
maximize the well-being and personal prosperity of
 AMERICAN CAPITALISM IS WORKING —THAT’S THE PROBLEM
all of its citizens.” This isn’t wrong. States must ensure
order and welfare, broadly speaking, in order to retain
legitimacy. But in capitalism, a greater determination of
legitimacy is how well the state protects and nurtures
capital accumulation.
And in its role facilitating capital accumulation, the
US state is a great success. Over the past half century, it
has proven itself quite nimble at creating the conditions
for American corporations to thrive, both at home and
abroad. Trade agreements, taxpayer-funded research,
deregulation, sweetheart tax deals, and a wholesale
attack on the social safety net and organized labor
have revived the conditions for profit-making again
and again.
T C
A SU
At the same time, the US state and its elected offi-
cials have been willing and able partners for elites
E
seeking to protect their interests. Like corporations,
America’s millionaires and billionaires have enjoyed
an open door to power, achieving tax breaks and
R argued long ago, the
G
many other benefits through legislation tailored
precisely to the needs of the ruling class.
Even during the coronavirus pandemic,
the US state has shown its mettle in protecting
the interests of capital. The government made little
effort to supply its health care workers with protective
equipment, to establish a nationwide testing program,
or to ensure access to health care, food, and housing for
Americans impacted by the outbreak — but the Federal
Reserve and the Treasury Department deftly maneu-
vered to calm the markets, pumping trillions of dollars
into Wall Street through bailouts, grants, and bond
purchases, as well as promises to keep interest rates
low indefinitely.
A Financial Times story
illuminates the results
of this maneuvering.
Trading volumes in
the spring were six
times higher than
normal, as global
elites took advan-
tage of surging stock
prices. In Monaco, a
popular coronavirus
refuge, wealthy foreigners “spent much of their time
frantically trading their portfolios.” “[W]e will have a very
good year,” commented one private banker.
That the state failed to provide the same financial
and social protection for working families, aside from
a short-lived federal unemployment subsidy and
an ill-conceived Paycheck Protection Program,
was not a result of incapacity or general-
ized failure. It is the response of a state
S
that has been fine-tuned to meet the
S
E
needs of the country’s wealthiest
C
citizens and corporations,
and to ignore or minimize
the
needs
of ordinary
people. As
Nicos Poulantzas
state is not a static or
intrinsic entity; it’s a dynamic, historically
grounded relationship of class forces.
If we see America as a failed state on the verge
of disintegration, collapse, or slide into dictatorship,
our policy goals will reflect that focus. If we accept that
we live in a failed state, how do we go about fixing it?
We might, like Engelhardt and many others, view
getting Trump out of office as the top priority. Or, like
Packer, we might emphasize the need to take citizenship
seriously and value solidarity. These are worthy goals.
But, on the whole, fixing a failed state is a nebulous, often
apolitical project.
In this moment, a clearer vision of renewal is both
necessary and possible when we focus on who and
what the US state directs its resources and energies
toward, rather than whether or not it has lost its capac-
ity to rule.
Framing the problem this way highlights the goals
of democratization, decommodification, and redistri-
bution. It underscores the need to build working-class
institutions capable of transforming the state itself into
an institution that works for ordinary people.
It is also a reminder that if we want a state that
doesn’t fail us, we’ll have to fight for one.
81
 by Jonathan

Where’s Our Steele

Gorbachev?
82 № 39  /  FALL 2020

The United States today
isn’t on the verge of a Soviet-
style disintegration — but
neither is there any force at
the top willing and able to
reform our political system.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
It has been almost thirty years, the span of a generation,
since the Soviet Union disappeared virtually overnight.
Along with it went the Soviet empire. Eastern Euro-
pean countries that had been vassals of Moscow since
the end of World War II became independent and free.
Other European empires had come to an end a few
decades earlier, only after Britain, France, and Por-
tugal fought with atrocious brutality to resist nationalist
liberation forces. In contrast, the Russian elite gave up
their colonies over the course of little more than a few
months, without a single shot being fired. The Warsaw
Pact, the Soviet Union’s military alliance of Eastern
European states, simply dissolved.
In the Soviet Union itself, nationalist passions, led
by the Baltics, swept through the federation’s fifteen
constituent republics. By 1991, they had all become
independent, too. Russia was left on its own, shrunken,
deprived of large expanses of its seashore, and politi-
cally separated even from its Slavic cousins in Belarus
and Ukraine.
The West’s enemy number one, a superpower with
a formidable nuclear arsenal and the stated intention to
bury capitalism, was suddenly gone. The Soviet Union’s
existence had been used by the US military-industrial
complex to justify an ever-increasing arms race and
perpetuate the Cold War. Now there was a vacuum.
An Unexpected Fall
Western Kremlinologists and governmental analysts
were taken by surprise. While many boasted that they
had always claimed the Soviet Union was brittle and
could break apart at any moment, none foresaw the
mechanism that would trigger what they hoped might
one day happen.
Inside Russia, dozens of dissidents in the 1960s
and ’70s had risked their lives to denounce repression
and demand reform. By the mid-1980s, however, when
change actually happened, the dissident movement was
voiceless and defunct as a result of emigration, impris-
onment, and the silence of despair.
Why, then, did the Soviet Union meet its demise?
Are there parallels for the future destiny of the world’s
remaining superpower? Given the differences between
83
JONATHAN STEELE
Mothers at a bench with their babies, Soviet Union, 1988
the Soviet Union’s authoritarian political structures
and its state-owned economy on the one hand, and the
chaos and cacophony of American democracy on the
other, could the United States nevertheless implode?
There are many ingredients that define a failed state:
the loss of a government’s monopoly of violence and the
rise of militias, mercenaries, and warlords that leads to
civil war; the collapse of the publicly accepted tax and
welfare system and the growth of pervasive corruption
at all levels of the economy; the breakdown of the rule
of law, which leads to citizens losing faith in the official
justice system and turning to revenge-seeking and pri-
vate enforcers; the decline of independent and honest
media in favor of cynical lies peddled by narrow-minded
and self-interested press tycoons.
The Soviet Union had some of these phenomena,
particularly widespread corruption and heavily censored
media, but it did not come to an end as a result of being
a failed state. It was a failed system whose structural
flaws led to regime change.
84 № 39  /  FALL 2020
Loss of Legitimacy
The essential element that produced failure was a loss of
legitimacy at the elite level. This loss encompassed ide-
ology, politics, and economic management. The Soviet
Union was an authoritarian system with only one legal
party, the Communist Party (CPSU). On a day-to-day
basis, the country was run by a group of roughly a dozen
decision-makers known as the Politburo. They were
advised by experts, academics, technocrats, and other
officials working for the CPSU’s Central Committee.
By 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as
general secretary at the pinnacle of this pyramid, a sig-
nificant number of these advisers had lost faith in the
effectiveness of the system. They wanted reform of some
kind. But because the Soviet Union had tight censorship
that prevented free discussion, even in private meetings,
they feared articulating their views openly.
Certain subjects were completely taboo. In his mem-
oirs, for example, Gorbachev revealed that even after
becoming general secretary, he dared not ask for the
file held by the security services on his grandfather,

Mikhail Gorbachev and Andrei Gromyko during a Soviet Central Committee plenum, 1987
despite knowing from family conversations that one of
his grandfathers had spent time in prison as an “enemy
of the people” during Joseph Stalin’s rule.
Nevertheless, by the mid-1980s, internal policy
papers were hinting at the need for change. Advisers
who had traveled to the West on government business
or lived there as diplomats (Soviet citizens could not
travel privately on vacation to capitalist countries) could
see that the Soviet Union was not able to compete with
the standard of living in advanced capitalist countries
or match their technological progress. They saw that
the Soviet Union’s claim to be on a path to overtake
Western economies was hollow.
They no longer supported the ideological tenet that
world development was a class struggle between capi-
talism and the forces of socialism led by the international
working class. They also rejected a key element of the
analysis that had been used to justify the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan in 1979, namely the idea that states of
“socialist orientation” should not be allowed to defy the
march of history and slip back into feudalism. Instead,
they argued that the world was a complex amalgam of
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
WHERE’S OUR GORBACHEV?
states and societies with multiple internal stress points
of race, religion, language, and cultural tradition.
Finally, this wide cohort of advisers recognized
the enormous economic burden imposed by the arms
race with the United States. Although the Politburo
was not bent on countering the United States weapon
for weapon — in particular, they saw no need to match
Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star
Wars,” which in their view would never work — they
knew the costs of the huge Soviet defense arsenal were
diverting investment away from the domestic economy.
From the Top Down
The Soviet Union’s policy-forming elite was becoming
increasingly disaffected, but was their loss of faith
matched in the minds of ordinary Soviet citizens? The
question is hard to answer in the absence of any public
opinion polls — but, in a sense, it’s irrelevant. The
USSR’s lack of democracy meant that Soviet citizens
were never consulted. They had no tradition of having
85
JONATHAN STEELE
Assembly electing nominees for the upcoming election to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the new legislative body
their views heard by decision-makers, let alone having
those views taken into account.
In general terms, however, we know what they
thought about some basic issues. They were grateful
for and proud of having won the war over Nazi Germany.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, they welcomed the end of
the dictator’s wild terror, which had killed hundreds
of thousands of innocent people and put millions into
labor camps.
Under Stalin’s successors, they experienced some
economic improvement and hoped for more, but any
disappointment they felt was expressed only at home
in the privacy of their kitchens. In other words, Soviet
citizens were disenfranchised. They had no legal way
of calling for change, either individually or through
collective action with people who agreed with them.
What mattered was the point of view of the Commu-
nist Party’s policy elites. They hoped for a leader who
would advocate reform. This would give a green light
for them to become bolder in their recommendations
for change. Gorbachev was the man who fit the bill.
86 № 39  /  FALL 2020
Gorbachev’s Choice
Some of Gorbachev’s predecessors, in particular Nikita
Khrushchev and prime minister Alexei Kosygin, had
tried to reform the economy, but they found them-
selves blocked by their Politburo colleagues in the 1960s
and ’70s. Initially, Gorbachev’s own efforts at reform
were cautious. They consisted of putting more state
investment into agriculture and technology, as well as
a campaign to stop excessive drinking. He also reshuf-
fled the system of economic and political management
by dismissing men considered too conservative and
replacing them with reformers.
When none of this produced dramatic change, Gor-
bachev took a radical step. He decided that the CPSU
needed the cold shower of political competition. In 1988,
after three years in power, he persuaded the Central
Committee to agree to a proposal to create a new Soviet
parliament (known as the Congress of People’s Depu-
ties), with candidates chosen in contested elections.
For the first time in seventy years, CPSU officials
faced criticism and opposition at public meetings. To
 WHERE’S OUR GORBACHEV?

Voters cast their ballots in the privacy of curtained booths during the Congress of People’s Deputies election.

allow for genuine contests, the rules banning free speech

Gorbachev noted and assembly had to be dropped. Suddenly, the entire
top-down authoritarian system collapsed. Those of
his priorities on us who attended these meetings as reporters were as
a sheet of paper: amazed as Russians themselves.
Gorbachev had decided that political reform must
“Stop the arms race, precede economic reform. Many of his subsequent
critics, including the Chinese Communist Party leaders,
withdraw troops claim this was a cardinal mistake. He should have done
it the other way around, they maintain.
from Afghanistan, Even before the 1988 decision to permit political
change the spirit pluralism, Gorbachev had relaxed censorship of the
media. Previously taboo subjects were open for discus-
of the relationship sion, ranging from aspects of Soviet history, like the
arguments between Stalin and Leon Trotsky or Nikolai
with the USA, Bukharin in the 1920s, to the problems of contempo-
rary Russia: drug use, domestic abuse, and industrial
restore cooperation accidents — for example, the nuclear reactor explosion
with China.” at Chernobyl.
Gorbachev had dual motives. He saw it as a moral
necessity to bring honesty into public debate. He also
hoped that by permitting openness, he would help

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 87
JONATHAN STEELE
A group of Lithuanians demonstrate for independence from the Soviet Union, 1989.
reformers to criticize conservatives and mobilize against
them. This was the essence of what Gorbachev called
“perestroika” and “glasnost”: restructuring and open-
ness, or, in another of his mantras, new thinking.
American Parallels
How does any of this relate to the United States of 2020?
Clearly, the differences between today’s America and
Gorbachev’s Soviet Union are huge. But there are also
similarities. A wide section of the US population, on the
Right as well as the Left, has lost respect not merely for
discrete aspects of the country’s economic management,
but for the entire system.
Thanks to thirty years of neoliberalism in the
economy, compounded by the 2008 financial crash,
people see structural unemployment growing relent-
lessly as well as widening income inequalities. They also
see a political elite that appears unable or unwilling to
rectify the problems, and an increasingly dysfunctional
political system.
88 № 39  /  FALL 2020
The electoral system is distorted by the role of
money to support campaigning and buy ever more
expensive media advertising spots. The rise of social
media has made some inroads into the old system, but
it has not fundamentally changed the fact that money
leads to power and power leads to money. In short, the
capitalist system is losing legitimacy.
On the Right, the response is to bash immigrants,
scapegoat ethnic and other minorities, and look for
a mythical strong leader. On the Left, particularly in
the politically conscious younger generation, a sizable
number of people are willing to call themselves socialists.
Of course, this does not mean they support or admire
the Soviet Union’s centrally concentrated economy or
its authoritarian politics, but rather that they want a
greater role for government to democratically control
profit-making, redistribute wealth, create a national
health service to provide care for every citizen free at
the point of delivery, and develop other mechanisms to
guarantee social justice.
The traditional ideological premises of the United
States, especially the notion that every citizen can

Red Army soldiers cross the Amu Darya river at the Soviet-Afghan border in Termez on February 15, 1989, during the
Soviet Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
achieve upward social mobility through hard work and
smart entrepreneurship, are also losing support. Cele-
bration of personal ambition is giving way to notions
of social and intergenerational solidarity. The climate
crisis is adding to the prevailing system’s loss of legiti-
macy. Mindless consumerism and the values of endless
growth are being challenged more vigorously than ever.
Foreign Entanglements
The failure of the Soviet system was not predicated
solely on the loss of its domestic legitimacy. It arose
from a sense on the part of the elite that foreign policy
needed radical change. Anatoly Chernyaev, one of Gor-
bachev’s main advisers, recalled in his memoirs that
after becoming general secretary, Gorbachev noted
his priorities on a sheet of paper: “Stop the arms race,
withdraw troops from Afghanistan, change the spirit
of the relationship with the USA, restore cooperation
with China.”
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
WHERE’S OUR GORBACHEV?
He later added another element: a new relationship
with the states of Eastern Europe, which were members
of the economic organization known as Comecon and
the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.
Gorbachev decided that the economic costs of main-
taining this empire were unacceptably high. The satellite
states had long been allowed to pay low, subsidized
prices for Soviet oil and gas, which Moscow could more
profitably have sold to hard-currency Western countries.
To end this practice, Gorbachev proposed in 1986 that
economic relations within Comecon should be built on
real market conditions.
A few months later, he went further by declaring that
a basic tenet of the philosophy of “new thinking” was
“freedom of choice” in international relations as well
as domestic governance. This meant that the so-called
choice of Soviet-style socialism by Eastern Europe after
World War II was reversible.
Andrei Grachev, one of Gorbachev’s last spokes-
people, put it like this:
The “choice” of socialism, which until then was
presented as the fulfilment of historical destiny,
89
JONATHAN STEELE

Margaret Thatcher meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at Heathrow Airport on April 5, 1989

was downgraded to become a conventional political

question which ... was entrusted to the decision of Even after becoming
ordinary people.
general secretary,
While he was still in power, Gorbachev never spelled
out publicly what might happen in Eastern Europe Gorbachev dared
under “freedom of choice.” He hoped that people in
the Warsaw Pact states would freely elect the local Com-
not ask for the file
munist parties and thereby keep them in power with a held by the security
democratic mandate. Gorbachev told the Politburo: “We
shall keep the initiative without depending on force but services on his
rather on our intellectual activity and mutually advan-
tageous comradely dialogue.” grandfather.
This did not happen. The satellite countries voted
non-Communist and anti-Communist parties into
power. The Warsaw Pact dissolved, and Gorbachev’s
many critics in Russia have subsequently accused him
of undermining Moscow’s strategic interests through
naivete at best, and treachery at worst.

90 № 39  /  FALL 2020


Young people dancing to rock band Brigada S (a self-described “proletarian jazz orchestra”) at Luzhniki Stadium
in Moscow, 1989
The Logic of Withdrawal
No one in the West or the Soviet Union had anticipated
such a radical decision by Gorbachev. Any analyst who
predicted it would have been laughed out of court. In
fact, we now know from transcripts of Politburo discus-
sions, disclosed since the Soviet Union’s demise, that
some of Gorbachev’s predecessors were also concerned
about the political and economic cost of maintaining
their country’s Eastern European empire.
During the Polish crisis in December 1981, when
the trade union movement Solidarność was challenging
Communist Party rule with street protests and indus-
trial strikes, the Politburo rejected the request of their
Polish allies for military intervention. Soviet troops
were already mired in the Afghan quagmire. To launch
a second hot war would be a step too far.
Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief, told his Polit-
buro colleagues that the Soviet Union could not risk
sending troops:
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
WHERE’S OUR GORBACHEV?
I don’t know how things will turn out in Poland, but
even if Poland falls under the control of Solidarność,
that’s the way it will be ... we must be concerned
above all with our own country and about strength-
ening the Soviet Union.
There are striking echoes here of recent US debates.
More and more Americans have been questioning the
wisdom of sending troops into foreign wars. The very
concept of empire is under challenge, as well as the costs
involved in maintaining NATO and keeping garrisons in
Asia and the Middle East.
Critics may claim that this is led by age-old American
instincts of isolationism, but the new anti-imperialism,
at least on the Left, is profoundly distinct from the
“America First” line of the 1930s and from Trumpism.
It rests on internationalism and a rejection of the excep-
tionalist ideology that claims the United States has a
uniquely benevolent foreign policy and a responsibility
to lead the world.
91
JONATHAN STEELE
McDonald’s supply truck outside factory of first McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow, 1990
Paths to Change
One big difference between the Soviet experience of
the 1980s and the United States today is the compar-
ative rigidity of each system. Before Gorbachev came
to power, the Soviet system seemed immobile. Those
who tried to predict its disintegration thought the even-
tual trigger might be a sustained outbreak of riots and
demonstrations, or nationalist uprisings in the Soviet
republics. They never imagined that the man at the top
would launch a revolution.
It seemed inconceivable that the general secretary
of the CPSU would take the risk of advocating radical
change, or that his Politburo colleagues would allow
him to stay in power if he did. Kremlinologists remem-
bered the Khrushchev and Kosygin precedents. But
Gorbachev did take the risk, and by the time conserva-
tives attempted to topple him with an August 1991 coup,
the country’s political changes and public mobilization
in their favor had gone too far to be stopped.
92 № 39  /  FALL 2020
The United States, by contrast, has a much less cen-
tralized system than the Soviet Union. The US president
is much weaker than the Soviet general secretary was.
That person has to work through a Congress, which
has a long history of defending the vested interests of
the wealthy and large corporations, as well as blocking
progressive reform.
Change will have to come by way of a sustained
struggle to bring different ideas to the fore at municipal
and state levels as well as in Congress, and not just via a
change of face in the White House. Meanwhile, stagna-
tion and gridlock will remain entrenched.
A presidential contest between two men in their
seventies carries echoes of the late Soviet gerontocracy.
US mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic puts
Chernobyl in the shade. But there’s no American Gor-
bachev waiting in the wings. If a system failing much
of the population is going to be transformed or dis-
mantled, it’ll have to come from below — step by step,
brick by brick.
 Message
in a
Bottle
In the United States of 2020,
millions are desperate for
help, and they’re forced
to compete for scraps from
Twitter philanthropists.
by
Meagan
Day

1
Meagan Day
What would you do if I
dm’ed you?
“What would you do if I dm’ed you?” tweeted philan-
thropist Bill Pulte on June 12.
By then, the coronavirus pandemic had been rav-
aging the United States for three months. The previous
day, the Department of Labor had announced that
more than one in five people in the American workforce
were either receiving unemployment insurance or had
applied for it. Earlier that week, the Census Bureau
had reported that 14 million American children were
not getting enough to eat.
“I’d be forever grateful considering my current
condition,” replied a woman in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
“I would be ecstatic as I just lost my job due to the
covid pandemic and I am quite worried on what I will
do next for a career,” replied a man in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Later that day, Pulte posted a selfie of a woman
from South Carolina, beaming in the driver’s seat of
her car, showing off a $7,500 check from Team Pulte
LLC. In previous tweets, the woman had said that if she
won one of Pulte’s lotteries, she’d use the money to
pay rent, fix her car and computer, and pay off debts.
The self-proclaimed “inventor of Twitter philan-
thropy,” Bill Pulte is the grandson of billionaire
home developer William J. Pulte and the CEO
of private equity firm Pulte Capital Partners.
In the past two years, he has gained notoriety
by giving his money away on Twitter — to the
tune, he claims, of nearly half a million dollars so far.
“If you’re dying of cancer, if your teeth are falling
out, if your son just committed suicide after being in
Afghanistan, Bill Pulte is your best friend,” Pulte told
reporters last year. His selection process is mysterious,
but he issues frequent reminders that, in order to be
eligible for his sweepstakes, people must follow him on
Twitter. He has more than 3 million followers. He calls
his method “twenty-first-century charity.”
If there’s anything that substantiates the allegation
that the United States is a failed state, it is Bill Pulte’s
94 № 39  /  FALL 2020
Twitter mentions. To read them is to grasp the cruelty
and irrationality of American capitalism.
For five full decades, the nation has undergone
a systematic, large-scale upward redistribution of
wealth. Meanwhile, for reasons ranging from public
relations to personal gratification and absolution,
the rich are occasionally obliged to engage in a little
charity, which is acceptable to them so long as it is in
the amount and to the beneficiary of their choosing.
Public records reveal that Bill Pulte donates exclusively
to Republican candidates — a bleeding heart in the
streets, a fiscal conservative in the sheets.
Disquieting in ordinary times, the spectacle
of Twitter philanthropy is bone-chilling during the
COVID-19 crisis, when an uneven and insufficient gov-
ernment economic response has left tens of millions
of people high and dry.
“I’m going give someone random who retweets this
tweet $10,000 because it’s my birthday and I feel like
being nice (you have to be following me so I can dm
you if you win),” Pulte tweeted in late May, as more
than 20 million Americans reported that they were
unemployed. His solicitations, adorned with
smiley-face and heart emojis, were retweeted
hundreds of thousands of times.
In the replies, people posted GIFs of flick-
ering birthday candles atop picture-perfect
birthday cakes, accompanied by recitations of their
problems: unemployment insurance hasn’t come
through and the power is about to be shut off; they
need help covering unaffordable car repairs so they
can make it to a high-risk job that offers no hazard
pay; and so on.
“I will pick The $10,000 Winner in 72 hours on a live
stream,” the Twitter philanthropist promised. “And
thank you for saying ‘Happy Birthday Pulte’, I see you,
and it is making me feel so good!”

Down and Out in Jupiter
“He annoys me,” says Karin Smith of Jupiter,
Florida, adding that she hates seeing people com-
pete for scraps from Bill Pulte and other social media
philanthropists who have cropped up in his image.
Why, then, did I come across her in Bill Pulte’s
mentions, where she divulged that she is unemployed
due to the pandemic and on the verge of eviction?
“Because what happens is other people are watching,”
Smith says. “I’ve received several hundred dollars
because I have my PayPal and my Venmo in my Twitter
bio. It just appears magically from people that you’ve
never been involved with who just want to help.”
Smith is a fifty-year-old single mother. She moved
to Florida from Pennsylvania three years ago for the
health of her teenage son, who has a medical condi-
tion that is alleviated by warm weather. She has had
hard luck ever since. At first, Smith was hired to teach
at a college on Key West, but she lost her position
when Hurricane Irma devastated the Keys. She then
moved to Jupiter and took a job with the Department
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
of Education, but she was laid off in March
due to the coronavirus crisis.
For the first few months of the pandemic, Smith
depleted her savings as she struggled to navigate a
dysfunctional state benefits system, and even when
she was able to access benefits, they weren’t enough.
She was relying on $600 per week in expanded federal
unemployment benefits to keep her and her son afloat
through the summer. But Congress allowed these ben-
efits to expire on August 1 without replacing them.
Smith isn’t naïve about politics, but even she was
astonished when the Senate took a recess without
passing a new coronavirus economic relief package.
“We’re all just sitting here like, what the hell do we
do?” she says. “We’re in a crisis, it’s only going to get
worse, and for Congress, it’s not a priority.”
Smith’s options are bad. “Higher ed is not hiring
right now,” she says. The only jobs available in her area
are low-wage, high-risk jobs. If she takes one of these,
she risks contracting COVID-19 — a risk that she says
isn’t worth it since, as the sole earner in her household,
she likely still won’t be making enough to cover rent.
95
Meagan Day
Jobs that pay above minimum wage are scarce, but
they’re also potentially undesirable, because if she
makes too much money, she will lose means-tested
benefits, including state unemployment payments,
food stamps, and Medicaid. Her son’s health is better
now, but he’s had “million-dollar years” before, and
she doesn’t want to risk a period without insurance.
“My landlord, who I thought was a nice man, told
us in April that if rent was even a day late, he was
going to evict us on the first day that evictions open,”
says Smith. The federal eviction moratorium ended
in July, and Florida’s state eviction mora-
torium is full of loopholes. Smith knows for
a fact that evictions have been underway:
she even opened up her home to a mother
and daughter who were kicked to the curb.
When I spoke to Smith in late August,
she was not certain she’d be able to scrape together
September rent. She was looking online for a used
camper van, thinking she could sell her furniture and
buy one to sleep in. She’d heard that people sleeping
in vehicles in the nearby Walmart parking lot weren’t
being run off overnight. “This is really where my head
is right now,” she said with astonishment. “Like, I’m
actually contemplating moving into an old RV with my
I’m going give someone
random who retweets this tweet
$10,000 because it’s my birthday
and I feel like being nice
(you have to be following
me so I can dm you if you win).
96 № 39  /  FALL 2020
son and our cats and the dog. I’ve never even driven
one, but it looks better than a tent. But where will we
go to the bathroom?”
Smith, who was raised in the suburbs of Phila-
delphia and matriculated at private schools, has a
doctorate in education from Harvard. Most people
facing unemployment and eviction during this crisis,
of course, have nothing close to that kind of pedigree.
But her situation just goes to show the extent of the
economic damage, says Smith.
“I know lots of people who have graduate degrees
from great schools who’ve been laid off and who
are panicked because they’re in their fifties
and thinking, ‘How am I ever going to get a job
again?’” She’s had to teach friends who work
white-collar, professional jobs how to navigate
unemployment and social services since the
pandemic began. “I’m explaining to people like me
how an EBT card works, telling them that the food bank
opens at nine o’clock in the morning, but if you’re not
there by five or six, there’s nothing for you.”
Smith managed to pay September rent with
donations that she received from strangers through
Twitter — not flamboyant philanthropists like Bill Pulte,
but ordinary people who empathized with her situation.
She was relieved when President
Donald Trump signed a new fed-
eral eviction moratorium, but it
contains no rent forgiveness
and appears to merely kick the
eviction can down the road. She
wants to stay current on rent, or
else she fears that the moment
the moratorium expires, she and
her son will be out on the street.
“I’m breathing a little easier,”
she says, “but taking nothing
for granted.”
“Twitter generosity is an
unexpected development in this crisis,” says Smith.
Belly Up in Tulsa
She tweets about her situation in the replies of In August, the twenty-two-year-old YouTube star
philanthropists, politicians, journalists, and even Jimmy Donaldson, who goes by the name MrBeast,
megachurch pastors. “Joel Osteen is the most announced a crossover sweepstakes event with
useless piece of crap that you can imagine,” Bill Pulte on Twitter.
she says, “but the people who follow him on “I’m going to give 10 random people who
Twitter are actually really good people. And retweet this tweet $10,000 EACH! You must be
the people who are the brokest are often the following @Pulte and me so we can dm you if
ones most willing to help.” you win $10,000! Ends in 72 hours, will show
proof.” He added by way of an explanation,

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 97
Meagan Day
I will pick The $10,000
Winner in 72 hours
on a live stream.
“With everything going on we thought it would be fun
to help some people!”
The tweet received more than 630,000 retweets
50,000 replies. Buried in this avalanche was one reply
from Jaxon Chaney. “I could really use your help,” it
said. “I’m a single mother & I was displaced due to
COVID. I was living off savings but I’ve recently run out
& had to place my son with a family member because
I’m about to get evicted.”
Chaney, a nineteen-year-old from Tulsa, Okla-
homa, gave birth to her son, Ezra, in February. When
the crisis hit, she was living outside of San Diego with
her twenty-year-old boyfriend, Steven Bonilla. “I had
everything planned out to have a job after I recov-
ered from having Ezra,” says Chaney, who was in the
process of being hired at Sam’s Club and was hoping
to start working at the end of March.
But when the pandemic hit, the plan went belly up.
Chaney is immunocompromised. Due to a blood dis-
order, a common cold can put her out of commission
for weeks. Frightened that COVID-19 could kill her, she
began to question the wisdom of working at Sam’s
Club. Ultimately, she had no choice in the matter, she
says, as the company was flooded with newly unem-
ployed applicants who could start at the drop of a hat.
A few weeks into the pandemic, she stopped hearing
from Sam’s Club altogether.
Meanwhile, Bonilla stopped getting hired to work
freelance construction for a company that builds hos-
pitals all over the state. They each received a $1,200
stimulus check, which Chaney calls “cute,” but the
money quickly vanished. Though both have applied,
neither has been able to successfully prove eligi-
bility and collect unemployment benefits.
98 № 39  /  FALL 2020
“When the pandemic started, he and I only had
$110 to stockpile food,” says Chaney. Desperate, she
started a GoFundMe and made a post about her situa-
tion on Twitter. A friend covered the cost of promoting
that tweet so it would appear in the feeds of people
living in the San Diego area. She went to bed with $300,
feeling relieved. She woke up with
$1,600 and nearly cried tears of joy.
The donations they received
from Twitter covered basic neces-
sities, but nothing else. Chaney and
Bonilla stayed indoors with their
newborn and subsisted mostly on
canned food until late April, when
they packed their possessions in
their car and drove to Tulsa. They
were drawn by the cheap cost of
living, the comparatively low rates
of COVID-19 infection, and word of
an available apartment passed on
by members of Chaney’s family.
When Chaney and Bonilla
arrived in Tulsa, they learned that
they needed to quarantine in a
motel for fourteen days before they
could go to the apartment rental
office and complete the necessary
paperwork. They had to pay for
the motel themselves. “That took
most of our money that we would
have put down for the apartment,”
Chaney says. They sold
their car, but it still wasn’t
enough for a successful
move-in.

And thank you for saying ‘Happy
Birthday Pulte’, I see you, and
it is making me feel so good!
They briefly moved in with Chaney’s mother, but
their already-strained relationship buckled under the
pressure of the situation. They moved out when Bonilla,
who had started working at a Macy’s distribution center
and as a driver for DoorDash, was able to afford a new
apartment for them, but their time there was short-lived.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
Bonilla began to learn of active coronavirus cases in
the Macy’s warehouse where he worked. Afraid of
infecting Chaney, he quit. Driving for DoorDash wasn’t
enough to cover the next month’s rent.
When I spoke to Chaney in late August, her mother
was looking after Ezra while Chaney and Bonilla slept
Meagan Day
on friends’ couches, separately. They try not
to spend too much time together, since Bonilla’s
work leaves him highly exposed to the virus. “You
could say it has taken a toll on our family dynamic,”
says Chaney. By summer’s end, she and Bonilla were
no longer in a relationship, though they planned to try
living together when they could afford it again.
Chaney says the entire crisis has left her isolated
and depressed. The only bright spot has been the dona-
tions and encouragement she has gotten from people
online. “I’ve never received that type of support to
this day from anyone in my life at all,” she says of the
people who contributed money after seeing the tweet
she promoted before she left California. “They were
so nice. I still talk to some of those people today, and
they consistently check on me and my son.” Several
people who donated to her told her that they had once
100 № 39  /  FALL 2020
been in her situation, as young parents
with no means of self-sufficiency and
nobody to turn to.
As grateful as she is for compassionate strangers,
Chaney is equally contemptuous of the political estab-
lishment. In her view, people shouldn’t have to appeal
to the generosity of social media philanthropists — or,
more reliably, ordinary people who happen across
their digital message in a bottle.
“I feel like they could have prevented the impact of
this, but they didn’t, because they didn’t care,” Chaney
says. “How could you allow millions of people to suffer
like this and then make them pay taxes? Like, what are
the taxes for?”
“That just doesn’t sit right with my spirit,” she says.
“I think it’s a crime.”
FAILURE IS AN OPTION 101
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
RED CHANNELS BY EILEEN JONES

John Carpenter,
Apocalyptic
Filmmaker

John Carpenter’s movies provide

visions of societies falling apart. No
wonder his work is resonating now
more than ever.
Halloween ( 1978)

It may come as a surprise to
those of us who always loved his
films, but the reputation of
director John Carpenter wasn’t
always so sterling.
Today, Carpenter is universally
regarded as one of the great
American genre filmmakers, the
auteur of a half dozen gritty
classics renowned for their steady
pacing, pulsing electronic scores,
and raw action. In an attempt to
cash in on this new consensus,
Hollywood has spent the last
decade announcing a flurry of
remakes, reboots, and reimagin-
ings of his classic films.
In 2018, Blumhouse Productions’
Carpenter-sanctioned (and scored)
Halloween sequel brought in $255
million on a $10 million budget.
It’s now the highest grossing
slasher film in history. And this
summer, that same studio
announced it was working with
Carpenter on yet another reboot
of one of his classics — 1982’s
The Thing — despite the fact that
there was already a prequel made
by another studio less than a
decade ago.
It’s quite a shift from the late
1990s, when Carpenter couldn’t
even get a low-budget film off
the ground. By the turn of the
millennium, he’d faded out of
filmmaking almost entirely. He is
now dedicated to a career in
music, touring with his son, Cody,
to perform his increasingly
celebrated film scores and other
compositions worldwide.
After such a steep fall from grace,
how do we account for the current
widespread reverence for all
things John Carpenter? You’d
never know now that the majority
of his films did poorly at the box
office. After a cluster of major
and minor hits in the 1970s and
early ’80s — including Halloween
(1978), The Fog (1980), Escape
From New York (1981), Christine

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 103

 RED CHANNELS
The Thing ( 1982)
(1983), and Starman (1984) —
Carpenter’s pileup of commercial
failures, such as Big Trouble in
Little China (1986), Prince of
Darkness (1987), Memoirs of an
Invisible Man (1992), In the Mouth
of Madness (1994), Village of the
Damned (1995), Escape From L.A.
(1996), and Ghosts of Mars (2001),
made him increasingly unbankable
and doomed his career.
Carpenter’s masterpiece, The
Thing, was perhaps his most
shocking flop, ignored by audi-
ences and widely dismissed by
critics in that tragic year of 1982,
when Blade Runner also failed
dismally. Americans preferred the
sunny and suburban E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial to those dark
and dreary classics. According to
one of Carpenter’s staunchest
admirers, director Guillermo del
Toro, this failure “fragmented
104
Carpenter’s heart somewhat,” and
he reported that Carpenter spoke
bitterly about his newly stellar
reputation, saying, “What fucking
good does that do to me?”
In 2016, Del Toro posted a
marathon series of twenty tweets
in tribute to John Carpenter, “a
true auteur,” that began, “When
I think of John Carpenter, I am
amazed at the fact that we take
him for granted. How can we?
Why should we? He is lightning
in a bottle.”
After praising individual Car-
penter films in terms of their
“unsparing precision, simplicity
and elegance” and the perfectly
“spare rhythmic punctuation” of
his scores, Del Toro generates a
fusillade of tweets praising The
Thing as the peak of Carpenter’s
achievements and saying “fuck
them all” to the critics who
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
slighted it. He ends by saying,
“Final thought for the day:
Carpenter creates masterpiece
after masterpiece and they are
often ignored. Now, go to bluray
church and pray.”
It’s not just Del Toro, either.
Quentin Tarantino, Bong Joon Ho,
Robert Rodriguez, Olivier
Assayas, Danny Boyle, Edgar
Wright, Nicolas Winding Refn,
James DeMonaco (of the Purge
franchise), David Robert Mitchell
(of It Follows), and Kleber Men-
donça Filho (of Bacurau) are
among the filmmakers that have
sung Carpenter’s praises in
interviews, cited his influence on
their own filmmaking, and
sometimes adoringly referenced
his films in their own.
Young people today tend espe-
cially to rave about Carpenter’s
so-called Apocalypse Trilogy: The
Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In
the Mouth of Madness. Those
films, along with Halloween,
Escape From New York, and They
Live, are probably the most cited
as evidence for his genius.
There’s a simple reason for
that — they’ve aged well.
Carpenter’s apocalyptic outlook,
which might have seemed overly
dour in the era of Ronald Reagan,
George H. W. Bush, and Bill
Clinton, now feels prescient.
Coming out of the dashed
left-wing political hopes and
failing economy of the 1970s with
his cynical, antiauthoritarian
inclinations already developed,
Carpenter began identifying the
United States as a failing state way
back in the 1980s, concurrent with
Reagan’s two terms as president.

His most explicit attack on the
American nightmare is the
pseudo-Marxist They Live, in
which a working-class hero, played
by professional wrestler Roddy
Piper, battles aliens who’ve
cleverly disguised themselves as
the Reagan-era bourgeoisie. “It’s a
documentary,” Carpenter is fond
of saying. “It’s not science fiction.”
The film’s narrative conceit
involves special sunglasses
distributed by an underground
political organization that allow
one to see the aliens in our midst,
controlling the human population
with sophisticated surveillance
devices and omnipresent sublim-
inal messaging like “Consume”
and “Obey” and “Do Not Ques-
tion Authority.” The sunglasses
arose out of Carpenter’s desire for
a straightforward, tangible way to
represent political awakening: “I
tried to put myself in the eyes of
the revolutionaries. How can we
wake people up to the world that
they’re in?”
But Carpenter’s dyspeptic views
on American capitalism go beyond
They Live. Consider the antihero
John Trent (Sam Neill) in 1994’s In
the Mouth of Madness. A callous
and well-dressed insurance
investigator, Trent is so engaged
in a lunch-hour conversation with
an executive that he doesn’t see
the ax-wielding religious maniac
coming for him until the assailant
breaks through the restaurant
window and lands on the table.
The maniac is a former career man
himself, once the literary agent of
an ultra-successful pop horror
writer named Sutter Cane and
now a fanatical Cane worshipper.
There’s a grim underlying
pleasure in watching Trent come
undone as he discovers that the
works of Cane — a publishing
phenomenon — are unleashing a
monster-ridden apocalypse
straight out of an H. P. Lovecraft
story. “This book will drive people
crazy,” he warns Cane’s publisher.
“Let’s hope so,” the executive
replies. “The movie comes out
next month.” Trent ends the film
in a movie theater, watching
himself on the big screen as
nothing more than a character in
the sure-to-be hit adaptation of
Cane’s latest novel — not just any
book, but a monstrous capitalist
achievement with the power to
devour reality itself.
It’s no coincidence that politically
left filmmakers should respond so
strongly to Carpenter’s films, or
that increasingly left-leaning
young Americans keep returning
to them. Carpenter’s characters
are typically working-class types,
leading precarious lives that are
already difficult before the
monsters in their landscapes
reveal themselves. Just think of
Carpenter spoke bitterly
about his newly stellar
reputation, saying, “What
fucking good does that
do to me?”
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
John Carpenter, Apocalyptic Filmmaker
protagonists such as hulking,
sad-eyed “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as
John Nada, the homeless blue-
collar guy hunting for a job, who is
befriended by black construction
crew member Frank Armitage
(Keith David) in They Live. And
think of the way Frank groans
contemptuously when Nada
stubbornly insists that hard work
and perseverance will provide him
opportunities, against all the
evidence of urban decay and
human suffering around them,
because, as Nada says, “I still
believe in America.”
The frequently noted “siege
structure” of many Carpenter
films, entrapping the main
characters in tight spaces ringed
by multiplying and intensifying
sources of danger, is mirrored in
our lives of continual
catastrophe — wondering where
we can hole up to survive pan-
demics, climate change disasters,
a teetering economy, collapsing
civil rights and social programs,
and the appearance of a political
swing toward breakdown and,
possibly, fascism.
105
 RED CHANNELS
The city in Assault on Precinct 13
marks the beginning of this
structuring device for Carpenter.
But he often complicates the
framework, with the source
of danger infiltrating the confined
“safe space” early on, making it
unclear whether one should stay
in and defend the refuge, break
out and battle the complicating
threat from outside, or fight a
two-front war.
Other Carpenter “siege struc-
tures” include the suburban house
as terror trap in Halloween, the
Antarctic station infiltrated by a
body-snatching alien in The Thing,
the church ringed by demon-pos-
sessed homeless people in Prince of
Darkness, and the Manhattan of
Escape From New York, a metrop-
olis so degenerated by poverty and
crime that it’s been turned into a
maximum-security prison. It’s no
wonder George A. Romero, with
his many famous “siege structure”
zombie films, shared such mutual
admiration with Carpenter. Both
fell out of Hollywood’s good graces
just as the Reagan Revolution was
revving up, and both saw Amer-
ican society careening toward its
disastrous end way back when it
was deeply unpopular to do so.
Carpenter is certainly not a fancy
director, and his stark, clear,
unfussy approach to filmmaking is
easy to misread as a lack of
ambition. In fact, clarity is a rare
and precious quality in a cinematic
world where pretentious, convo-
luted, symbol-laden pontificating
is taken as proof of intellect and
importance — the logic being that
if a movie is hard to follow, it must
be good.
106
In fact, Carpenter’s style is so
clean-lined, you may miss his
expertise. He gets insidiously
terrifying effects from seemingly
simple directorial choices. His
preferred wide-angle shooting
style not only increases the impact
of movement in action scenes, it’s
also deceptively “open,” giving us
the vague sense that we’re taking
in the entirety of a setting even
though we often can’t locate the
danger. Or else the danger is
already present as an element in
the frame, yet it’s downplayed in a
way that accentuates the frighten-
ingly deceptive “normality” of the
surroundings.
In the original Halloween, the
psychotic killer stands unnaturally
still in broad daylight but is largely
unnoticed next to a tall fence, or
among the sheets hanging on a
laundry line, or alongside young
children trick-or-treating with
their parents.
You can see a similar kind of
no-frills craftsmanship in the films
of Carpenter’s directing idol,
Howard Hawks, who also special-
ized in genre filmmaking, and
who, in fact, was noted for being
able to turn his hand to seemingly
any popular genre and work
wonders. Carpenter returns to
Hawks repeatedly for both formal
and narrative inspiration, most
obviously taking Hawks’s Rio
Bravo as the basis for his own
Assault on Precinct 13, and
inventively remaking the
Hawks-produced 1951 monster
movie The Thing From Another
World as 1982’s infinitely grimmer
The Thing.
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Carpenter’s adaptation, like
Hawks’s, is based on the 1938
novella Who Goes There? But his
rendition is a wonder of insinu-
ating terror that removes every
reassuring element from Hawks’s
version, particularly Hawks’s
answer to chaos — which, in his
serious, action-oriented films, is
generally the strength, profes-
sional competence, and code of
conduct of one man or a group of
men who are, or should be, experts
at their work.
In Carpenter’s film, the members
of the crew that first encounters
the alien are all dead almost as
soon as the movie starts. And
instead of the alien assuming a
single, stable shape (originally
played by Gunsmoke’s James
Arness as a hulking Frankenstein’s
Monster), Carpenter opts for a
shape-shifting creature.
Anyone — or any living thing —
could be the alien. He begins his
film with a tour de force chase
scene that starts from a slightly
wavering Steadicam point-of-view
shot, looking up at a formidable,
frozen cliff face. Whose point of
view is it? It turns out to be the
alien, but in a form that no one in
the audience can yet recognize, or
wants to recognize — a lone
husky running across frozen
tundra, chased by an apparent
madman in a helicopter taking
shots at the dog below.
The madman raving in Norwegian
is killed by the American crew, in
what they think is self-defense.
The dog is brought inside to
shelter with the other huskies,
who whine in terror at the

The Thing ( 1982)
interloper but are ignored. From
then on, we witness total social
breakdown in the barracks, where
it soon becomes clear that
conditions are as deadly inside as
out, for the alien is on a stealthy
rampage, occupying and
destroying the body of one crew
member after another.
In the beginning, the men are
shot in large, congenial groups.
Then, under the pressure of
increasing paranoia and distrust,
the groups shrink to uneasy
alliances of three men per shot,
or just two, and, toward the
end, one — no man shares
a “frame” with another, as each
fights a lone battle to survive
the alien takeover.
John Carpenter, Apocalyptic Filmmaker
In Hawks’s rendition, there’s no live long enough to prevent the
single hero. It’s a team of equals. alien from escaping the flames.
And their bond only grows
It turned out not to be a recipe for
stronger, until they finally defeat
box office success. Carpenter later
the alien together. Hawks ends his
expressed regret at his own
film with the crew broadcasting a
attachment to such bleak endings,
warning to the world: “Watch the
suggesting that some of his films
skies — everywhere. Keep
might’ve done better with
looking.” It’s the can-do spirit of
audiences if he’d given them more
an America fresh from its victory
to be happy about at the end.
in the Second World War.
But Carpenter’s darkly ambivalent
Carpenter’s film, though, ends
conclusions are entirely in keeping
with his hero, R.J. MacReady,
with his overall vision — a society
tentatively rejoining forces with
falling apart and, as a result, the
his chief rival for leadership,
people devolving into paranoia,
Childs (Keith David), as they
cynicism, and an increasing
freeze to death, together in a
inability to overcome distrust and
frame, outside their burning
fight back. Truly an American
barracks. Their only mission is to
filmmaker for our times.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION 107
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
WAYS OF SEEING
From Your House
to Our House
America’s experiment with public
housing was far less successful than
Europe’s — but this hasn’t made it
any less influential.
Like many English people, my first
encounter with the United States
was in Manhattan. On a cold
December afternoon, I walked
from the Upper East Side all the
way down to the Brooklyn Bridge.
At the end, I found myself in an
area I later realized was called
“Two Bridges.”
A large part of it was made up of
what the British would call
“council estates” — publicly
owned housing rented from the
local government, built in the
twentieth century. The differences
between these places in the UK
and the buildings I was looking at
were as notable as the similarities.
108
OWEN HATHERLEY
Sure, the basics were the same —
affordable apartments, built and
laid out on modern movement
planning principles that empha-
sized access to light, air, and (here,
rather scrubby) greenery over
proximity to main streets and
workplaces. But aesthetically, I
had seen little like it.
I was looking at the Alfred E.
Smith Houses, built between 1950
and 1953. A British council estate
from that period would have large
windows, a mix of low-rise and
high-rise buildings, and carefully
considered surface materials —
different colors of brick or
concrete and balconies. And all of
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
that created in a bankrupt country
whose cities were emerging from
six years of aerial bombing. But
here, everything was covered in
one brick, in one color, with no
balconies, and — the most obvious
difference — only the most
minuscule windows. Why were
they so small? Were people not
meant to look out the window?
On another level, it was extraordi-
nary to see this place still
surviving, given just how gentri-
fied most of New York City has
become. Here was residential
housing on a site that could be sold
for enough money to buy several
entire islands. As in London,
public housing has been the last
line of defense for working-class
communities, as the forces of wild
property speculation spread.
Nonetheless, it was astonishing to
see housing so dour on such a
presumably desirable site —
between the Brooklyn Bridge and
the Manhattan Bridge, with a view
of the Statue of Liberty and the
downtown skyline. How had this
happened?
The answer to this question
reveals the strange reality that
while the United States was at the
zenith of its power, it was already
falling behind on social policy in
many important respects. Public
housing, which had been built
sporadically in left-leaning
cities — from tenements in New
York to modernist low-rise
courtyards in Los Angeles, from
cottages in Socialist-run Mil-
waukee to high-rises in
Chicago — was constructed in
large part due to the federal
funding and decentralized

operation structure created by the
1937 Wagner-Steagall Act; Harry
S. Truman’s Housing Act of 1949
cemented federal backing for
public housing as part of a “slum
clearance” program.
This can be seen as a parallel to the
way in which war-ravaged Europe
embarked on enormous public
building programs, based on the
idea that housing was a human
right. But in the United States,
this right was never recognized.
The overwhelming emphasis for
housing spending was on private
housing, underwritten by the
state, in new low-rise suburbs that
grew around each American city.
In the same period when Britain
Alfred E. Smith Houses in Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan, with Brooklyn Bridge in the background, 2020
was trying deliberately to move
away from the sprawl it had
favored in the interwar years, the
United States gave suburbia a new
lease on life. And while more
public housing was built as a result
of the Wagner-Steagall Act, that
bill also added an income ceiling
for tenants — a requirement that
public housing be solely for the
poor — and stipulated it be built to
lower standards so that it wasn’t in
“unfair competition” with the
market product. This was the
exact opposite of the situation in
Britain, where, in the 1940s, a
Victorian requirement that public
housing be solely for “the working
classes” was removed so that it
could be for everyone.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
From Your House to Our House
American policy was encapsulated
in the developer William Levitt’s
quip that “no man who owns his
own house and lot can be a
communist.” Single-family
housing was lavished with
government sponsorship to head
off the threat of socialism; the
concurrent building of public
housing received much less
investment. In 1961, James
Baldwin wrote that “the projects
(in Harlem) are hideous ... there
being a law, apparently respected
throughout the world, that
popular housing shall be as
cheerless as a prison.” There was
indeed such a law — but only in
the United States.
109
 WAYS OF SEEING
When Britain
was trying
to move away
from sprawl,
the United
States gave
suburbia a new
lease on life.
Of course, the basic level of
provision — space, air, building
quality — was superior to the
slums being replaced, and the
problems were more aesthetic
and comparative than functional;
but people know when they’re
being discriminated against.
Some critics noticed at the time,
too. The state of American housing
was one of the targets of John
Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 polemic
The Affluent Society, which pointed
to the clear difference in postwar
American capitalist life between
the private sphere — opulent with
consumer goods, gadgets, and
labor-saving devices — and the
world outside, where public
buildings, public infrastructure,
and public amenities were allowed
to become dilapidated. But others
110
had different problems in their
sights. Jane Jacobs, in her attacks
on “projects,” deliberately lumped
together such contrasting schemes
as the luxury housing and cultural
complex of Lincoln Center,
Harlem public housing like the
George Washington Houses, and
the segregated middle-income
housing of Stuyvesant Town as
similar destroyers of traditional
street life. Whether a particular
area was unpopular with its
residents or a social success,
whether it was well maintained or
left to rot, were fundamentally
irrelevant. The problem was formal.
A few years later, the geographer
Oscar Newman, studying New
York’s public housing, came up
with the theory of “defensible
space,” arguing that public spaces
in public housing were not
understood by their residents.
Nobody “owned” them, so they
were smashed up and neglected.
This was easily falsifiable on an
empirical level — similar “in-be-
tween” spaces in Sweden and
Poland were given picnic-style
benches, planted with flowers, and
have been well maintained ever
since — but Newman’s work
became wildly popular as an
explanation for the poor condition
of the American city.
Not long after that, the architec-
tural historian Charles Jencks
declared that the modern move-
ment in architecture and planning
had “died” on the day that St.
Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe complex was
demolished in 1976 — as if the
reason the development had failed
was its flat roofs, lack of ornament,
and absence of “real streets,” as
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
opposed to white flight, the failure
of desegregation, the collapse of
public funding, and the tendency
in the 1970s for American
bureaucrats to abandon deindus-
trializing cities to decay through a
deliberate process of “planned
shrinkage.” Jencks’s outrageously
facile version of Pruitt-Igoe’s
history would be taken as gospel
for decades in architecture schools,
until residents finally talked
back in the 2011 documentary The
Pruitt-Igoe Myth. By then, it
was too late for many of the places
like it, as the Clinton administra-
tion’s HOPE IV housing-reform
program, based on these now-
discredited ideas, condemned
dozens of projects to demolition.
In the 1970s and ’80s, there was
an entire subgenre of documenta-
ries in which men stood in front
of public housing and bellowed
“There is nobody here!” while
children frolicked around.
Newman traveled from the Bronx
to London’s Aylesbury Estate in
The Writing on the Wall; Milton
Friedman lingered on the broken
windows of New York City
projects in Free to Choose; and
Robert Hughes denounced the
“social scar tissue” of public
housing in Nanterre in The Shock
of the New. These programs
cemented a consensus that public
housing, planning, and modern
architecture had been a compre-
hensive and global failure,
expanding insights garnered from
America’s efforts into eternal and
transhistorical rules.
Much as American music and
movies were modish and exciting,
so were the theories of Jacobs and

A group of teens in the courtyard of the Alfred E. Smith Houses, 2020
Newman — both the romanticism
of the former’s “ballet of Hudson
Street” and the communitarian
notion of “defensible” spaces
protected against the outside
world. But they had little connec-
tion with the actual reality of the
places they were describing
outside of the United States, and
much less so as time went on. By
the twenty-first century, the
Aylesbury Estate, which Newman
denounced as a magnet for crime
and social collapse, actually had
one of the lowest crime rates in
London — and a waiting list of
people trying to get apartments in
it. Yet its demolition was justified
by these decades-old polemics.
It would be wrong to suggest that
everything was fine in public
housing and modernist planning
outside of the United States. But it
was consistently different. In
2020, a great deal of public
housing in Denmark, France, and
Sweden has become racially
segregated, but none of it was built
as such. In places like Husby in
Stockholm, the alleged “ghetto”
possesses a level of quality — of
space, materials, public amenities,
and connections to public
transit — well beyond that of most
luxury housing in the United
States. Criticism of how aestheti-
cally drab it often is shouldn’t
blind us to the real conditions of
American public housing, which
has a diverse and complex history
and is generally popular today,
providing rare enclaves in cities
that have otherwise given
themselves wholly over to
developers, with terrible effects
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Running Hed
for urban working-class communi-
ties. It is striking how much this
outlier’s very specific problems —
punitive aesthetics, government-
backed suburbanism, racial
segregation — were ignored, in
favor of allegedly universal
theories based on a critique of
form and aesthetics.
It’s easy to understand how this
took place. The real problems that
were emerging — while “urban
renewal” tore up and recon-
structed huge swaths of US cities
and suburbs, and highways
obliterated much of the country-
side — had deep roots. As the civil
rights movement led to the
desegregation of whites-only
housing developments, and
struggles over the lack of public
control and consultation led to the
111
 WAYS OF SEEING
end of “slum clearance,” several
chickens were coming home to
roost: the legacies of slavery and
segregation, the creation of
“Americans” out of migrants, and
the outsize influence of big
business in the US government. It
was always much easier to imagine
that the real issue was one of
public ownership — which simple
people couldn’t possibly under-
stand — and modern architecture,
which, as Tom Wolfe argued in his
historically illiterate but highly
influential 1981 book From Bauhaus
to Our House, was a European and
socialist import anyway.
Even worse, this view then became
influential around the globe, as
Vents near the entrance of a pubilc housing tower in the Alfred E. Smith Houses, 2020
112
everywhere else rushed to be more
like the United States. Developers
tried to re-create a “ballet of
Hudson Street” in cities like
London, where public life has
seldom taken place on the street
but is more likely to exist in
planned spaces like parks. The
previously unsegregated council
housing of the UK became much
more so in the 1980s, as the “Right
to Buy” scheme, justified via
Newman’s notion that residents
didn’t feel a “sense of ownership”
over publicly owned houses and
spaces, overwhelmingly resulted
in white tenants being able to get
mortgages while black tenants
could not.
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
Hundreds of perfectly decent
places to live were literally
detonated because of what
happened to Pruitt-Igoe. Devel-
opers and builders, who always
resented having to build for the
poor, have been the main benefi-
ciaries, along with private
landlords and mortgage lenders.
Police forces around the world
began to remove everything from
streets, from public walkways to
trees, as a way of making spaces
more “defensible” — that is, more
easily policed.
Rather than the United States
learning from the rest of the
world’s successes in planned
housing, it exported its failure.
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
WAYS OF SEEING BY BEN DAVIS

The Collision of
Self-Importance
and Despair

In the United States today, as

in 1990s Russia, for a lot of
intellectuals, total nihilism
seems more plausible than hope Oleg Kulik and Aleksandr Brener, The Mad Dog,
or, The Last Taboo, Guarded by Lone Cerberus,
for even modest reform. November 23, 1994

If you want to sift for clues as to
what the cultural fallout of the
United States’ current meltdown
might look like, you could do
worse than to look to Russia in the
1990s — the other Cold War
superpower that self-destructed.
In art, the movement that
characterizes that time is Moscow
Actionism.
You may already know some
latter-day “actionists.” The late
aughts saw international press for
the art group Voina, which
performed guerrilla stunts that
involved group sex in a museum as
an anti-government protest (Fuck
for the Heir Puppy Bear!, 2008),
drawing the outline of a huge cock
and balls on a drawbridge facing
Saint Petersburg’s secret police
headquarters (Dick Captured by
the FSB, 2010), and overturning a
cop car as performance art (Palace
Coup, 2010). The latter earned two
members hooliganism charges.
The anarcha-feminist art collec-
tive Pussy Riot sprang from the
side of a Voina splinter group.
They became an international
cause célèbre in 2011 after
members were arrested for their
chaotic Punk Prayer performance
at the Cathedral of Christ the
Savior, protesting the Orthodox
Church’s support for Vladimir
Putin. A Pussy Riot solidarity
action by another artist, Petr
Pavlensky, made its own headlines
when he sutured his mouth shut
outside Kazan Cathedral in 2012.
He became more famous still —
and the subject of many
jokes — when he nailed his
scrotum to the pavement in front
of Lenin’s tomb to protest political
apathy in 2013.
You can interpret such actions
through the lens of Western punk
and performance art — but their
particular combination of
go-it-alone offense, bodily
taboo-breaking, and moral
mission leads straight back to
Russia’s ’90s calamity.

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 113

 WAYS OF SEEING
The outline of that decade’s
disastrous transition to capitalism
is well known. Epic fortunes were
accumulated, with explosions of
nouveau riche consumption and
ecstatic nightlife, off the back of
let-‘er-rip privatization. The result
was millions of “excess deaths”
due to dispossession and despair.
This wrenching reform program is
often called shock therapy — the
goal was to break the state so badly
that there wouldn’t be anything
for socialist holdouts to go back to.
It’s no coincidence that art in that
moment pitched itself as a sort of
shock therapy of its own.
The names most associated with
Moscow Actionism are Alexander
Brener, Oleg Kulik, and Anatoly
Osmolovsky. An April 1991 work
by a group that included
Osmolovsky, Expropriation of the
Artists drove needles through
each other’s tongues on live
radio and then sat in silence, as a
protest against empty talk.
114
Territory of Art, saw members
spell the word “khui” (cock) on
Red Square with their bodies.
Given what was going on at the
time — the USSR in economic
paralysis, waves of street protests,
labor unrest, Mikhail Gorbachev
banning demonstrations and
then being forced to pull troops
from Moscow, a coup attempt
brewing — this human graffiti
was both timely and strikingly
anti-political.
At decade’s end, such was also the
tone of Moscow Actionism’s most
well-remembered action, again
associated with Osmolovsky:
Against All Parties, waged in the
thick of the 1998 ruble crisis that
brought Russia to its brutal
post-transition low. For one year,
the artists calling themselves the
“Non-Governmental Control
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
Commission” led an election
campaign to rally the public to
vote “Against All Parties, Groups,
and Candidates,” an option on
Russian ballots. Conceived of as
an anarchistic “critique of political
representation,” the campaign
involved erecting a street barri-
cade as a sculpture and scaling
Lenin’s mausoleum to unveil a
banner reading “Against All
Parties.” It had little effect on the
elections, which ended up being
the occasion for Putin’s arrival at
political center stage.
The public outrages of Moscow
Actionism were fed by the
combination of thin art institu-
tions and a newly hungry and
frenetic capitalist media. Kulik
butchered a hog in an art gallery in
1992 as a commentary on the
carve-up of the state, drawing
violent protests. Brener stood in
Red Square and futilely demanded
that prime minister Boris Yeltsin
fight him in 1995. In ’96, for
Minute of Silence, artists Oleg
Mavromati and Emperor Wawa
drove needles through each
other’s tongues on live radio and
then sat in silence, as a protest
against empty talk. Mavromati
nailed himself to a wooden cross in
2000, declaring that “self-sacrifice
and pain” were the only true art.
The Orthodox Church charged
him with inciting religious hatred.
Clearly, in some ways, this art is
extremely Russia-specific.
Without US-style consumerism,
the Soviet Union never truly had
its ironic ’60s pop art moment.
Communism preserved bourgeois
culture’s sense of importance
better than actually-existing

bourgeois culture. Russian artists
in the ’90s retained a deep
seriousness of purpose, but they
were set adrift in a gangster
capitalist context where art
couldn’t even pretend to play its
traditional role as a civilizing
wrapper around mercenary
materialism.
In 1994, for a performance called
Plagiarism, Brener went to the
Pushkin Museum and shat his
pants in front of a Van Gogh
painting, crying out “Vincent!
Vincent!” — taking the idea of
being moved by art so seriously
that it became grotesque.
Nevertheless, what might make
Moscow Actionism resonant with
our own fallen US context is what
Russia Without Putin author Tony
Wood calls the central defining
Against All Parties, E.T.I. Movement performance in Red Square, 1991
The Collision of Self-Importance and Despair
contradiction of Russia’s post-’90s
identity: the mismatch between a
sense of historic importance and
newfound impotence. This climate
is another way to read Actionism’s
particularly intense combination
of self-importance and self-de-
struction. Brener, again, is the
prophetic figure.
In a legendary scandal in 1996,
Kulik and Brener were invited to
participate in an art show in
Sweden dubbed “Interpol.” A very
’90s affair, the curatorial conceit
was all about creating new
dialogues between West and East,
Swedes and Russians; the former
opening up their social democracy
to the European Union, the latter
coping with the bitter fall of
communism. Meant to inspire
cooperation, it instead showcased
incommensurable ideals.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
On the opening night of
“Interpol,” Kulik assumed the
persona of a rabid dog, attacking
and bloodying visitors, until
police were called (he is the basis
for “Oleg,” the performance artist
who becomes a brutish ape in
Ruben Östlund’s 2017 art satire
The Square). Brener tore apart
another artist’s installation,
declaring its destruction his art.
Afterward, the Western partici-
pants circulated a letter warning
the art world that the Russians
represented “hooligan and
skinhead ideology” masked as art.
In the new millennium, Russia
was incorporated into interna-
tional finance as the R in the BRICs
grouping of “emerging econo-
mies,” and into the international
art circuit as well. Most of the
Moscow Actionists, including
115
 WAYS OF SEEING
The Forefinger, E.T.I. Movement, 1991
Kulik and Osmolovsky, went on to
normal gallery careers, following
the pattern of Western perfor-
mance artists — most of them,
except, notably, Brener.
After “Interpol,” Brener decided
he was too big for decrepit Russia,
and he embarked on a career of
vandalizing art spaces as art. Most
notoriously, in 1997, he entered
the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam and spray-painted a
green dollar sign on a painting by
Kazimir Malevich, the Russian
Suprematist associated with the
heroic age of Russian avant-garde
art. Brener spoke earnestly about
this action as a protest against the
debasement of art by modern
society: “Mine is a human scream
against the extent to which failure
prevails in our culture,” he told
Flash Art. “It is a crisis comparable
to the other great crises of the 20th
century, the World Wars. The
human voice has ceased to be
heard within culture.” He was
sentenced to five months in prison.
116
In the late 2000s, Voina began the
fresh cycle of actionism, getting
their start based out of Oleg
Kulik’s studio. Brener, meanwhile,
was known on the London scene
for unauthorized acts of defeca-
tion in galleries and at art events,
sometimes writing the words
“Sold Out” in his feces.
The debasement of artistic ideals
by capital is beyond question.
You might, of course, look for
social movements that change the
economic calculation — but in
the United States today, as in
1990s Russia, for a lot of intellec-
tuals and ordinary people alike,
total nihilism seems more
plausible than hope for even
modest reform. The collision of
self-importance and despair turns
to spectacular petulance and
willful self-immolation, and that
seems prophetic of a certain
cultural pathology that we should
get to know.
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
 THE TUMBREL
GIRONDINS BY ABI WILKINSON

ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL ZENDER

On Being a
Mother in
America

Within ten days of giving birth,

a quarter of us are forced to return
to work. If liberals truly want
to support parents’ choices, they
need to back the subsidies and
employment legislation that are
vital to child-rearing.

I kept a squeeze bottle by the
toilet for the first two weeks after
giving birth. I’d had a straightfor-
ward labor, but nonetheless there
was a small, superficial wound
next to my urethra. My midwife
described it as a “little scratch,”
breezily informing me that I was
fortunate to not need stitches. So
whenever I needed to relieve
myself, I filled the squeeze bottle
with cool water and aimed it at
my crotch, diluting the stream
of urine and reducing the excruci-
ating, searing pain I felt to a
bearable level.
Though I knew that the United
States was a harsh outlier in how
it treats mothers and newborn
babies, I don’t think I fully
grasped the cruelty of this regime
until I experienced childbirth
myself. Not only is there no
guaranteed paid maternity leave
for American mothers, 40 percent
of women are not even covered
by the Family and Medical Leave
Act, which grants twelve entirely
unpaid weeks off.
Here, one in four new mothers is
forced to return to work within
ten days of giving birth. Ten days!
When their wounds are still
healing, their uteruses have only
partially deflated, and their brains
are a swirling mess of exhaustion,
love, and animal terror that the
tiny, helpless creature who relies
on them might come to harm.
Ten days in, I was still desperately
trying to breastfeed a baby
who struggled to latch. For months
longer, I averaged around four
(broken) hours of sleep a night.
Most days, my daughter would
scream if she was not worn or held

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 119

 GIRONDINS

almost constantly — including
while napping. I developed
elaborate rituals to try to coax her
into slumber. What worked
one day could not be guaranteed
to work the next. It helped that
my husband took a comparatively
generous six weeks of paternal
leave, but even with that support,
I found the newborn phase to
be a brutal physical and mental
endurance challenge.
The physical toll is only a small
part of the story. Though mothers
have varying feelings about
returning to paid employment
after the initial four-to-six-
month period, few relish the idea
of handing a newborn over to
strangers for eight to ten hours
each day. The social media
support groups I joined are
crammed with posts from women
describing how much they’re
dreading being forced to put their
babies in day care and return
to work. How guilty they feel when
they leave each morning, how
nerve-wracking they find the sep-
aration, how they feel like
something important has been
stolen from them. Where it’s
possible, entrusting care to close
family members seems to be a some-
what less daunting option, but
there are powerful reasons for
parents to prefer to remain close
to their infants.
It’s rational to worry that, no
matter how well-intentioned they
might be, nobody else will be as
in tune with and responsive to your
baby’s needs as you are. What’s
more, the flood of oxytocin you
experience as you tend to them
plays an important role in bonding
— helping you forge a close
relationship that can have lifelong
mental health benefits for
your child. (This chemical process
works exactly the same way for
non-birthing parents and non-
biologically-related caregivers,
which is one of the many reasons
paternity leave and leave for
adoptive parents is more than just
a nice bonus.) For the first few
months, close physical contact
with their primary caregiver helps
newborns regulate their breathing,
temperature, and arousal patterns.
When nursing occurs, the compo-
sition of breast milk changes
throughout the day. Amino acids
that are precursors to activity
neurotransmitters peak during
daylight hours. Levels of tryp-
tophan, a precursor to
drowsiness-inducing melatonin,
are higher at night. Along
with exposure to light and
darkness, this helps babies develop
their own circadian rhythm.
Breast-milk composition also
changes when infants are ill
— samples taken from nursing
mothers show higher levels
of infection-fighting lymphocytes
and granulocytes. Researchers
currently believe that substances
in a sick infant’s saliva send
a signal to their mother’s body.
Though expressed milk still
has many health advantages for
babies, it’s simply not possibly
to replicate all of the benefits of
direct breastfeeding.
In many cases, working mothers
are not given the opportunity
to breastfeed at all. Federal law
requires employers to provide
regular breaks and a private space
for expressing milk, but in
practice, 60 percent of recent
mothers are denied their legal
rights. Inevitably, low-income
women are disproportionately
affected.

40 percent of women are

not even covered by the Family
and Medical Leave Act.

120 № 39  /  FALL 2020


What this liberal obsession with
“choice” obscures is how few
mothers actually have a choice.
Outside of conservative circles, it
feels almost subversive to acknow-
ledge this fact — that returning
to work soon after birth is generally
suboptimal for mother and baby
alike. Reactionaries tend to
valorize, at least rhetorically, the
role of stay-at-home mothers —
while condemning women who
“prioritize their career” as selfish
abandoners.
In response, a dominant strand of
liberal feminism posits that any
focus on the way babies benefit
from their mother’s presence risks
“shaming” women who choose to
work. This is far from my inten-
tion. Mothers who return to paid
employment quickly, because the
alternative is financial hardship or
uncertainty, are quite obviously
doing the best by their child in the
circumstances that exist. Similarly,
women who find motherhood
particularly isolating or stressful
may reasonably decide that
working outside the home is impor-
tant for their mental health,
making them a better parent in the
hours they are around.
What this liberal obsession with
“choice” obscures, though, is how
few mothers actually have a
choice. The United States is one of
a tiny handful of countries that
don’t require employers to
provide paid parental leave. (The
others are Papua New Guinea,
Suriname, and a few South Pacific
island nations.) The very notion
of “prioritizing a career” assumes
a particular type of middle-class
subject — but even those parents
aren’t making a genuinely free
choice, if taking a few months or a
year away from paid employment
is enough to destroy their future
prospects for work. For women
who view their jobs primarily as
a way to put food on the table, the
options are usually even more
limited.
In most comparable countries,
paid maternity leave is so estab-
lished as a fundamental right that
legislators have moved on to
solving second-order problems. In
Sweden, for example, the govern-
ment provides three months of
maternity leave and three months
of paternity leave, then another
ten months for parents to split as
they wish, all paid at roughly
80 percent of each parent’s usual
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
On Being a Mother in America
salary. One of the goals of such a
policy is to reduce the workplace
discrimination that women of
childbearing age may experience
by making men just as likely (and
just as able) to take parental leave.
In 2015, under a Conservative-led
government, the UK introduced
a similarly structured, if much less
generous, plan.
For all of their hollow praise for
“traditional” family structures,
American conservatives are highly
resistant to policies that would
enable more parents to care for
their own children. Adequately
paid maternity and paternity leave
is the absolute minimum that is
required, if we are to treat
parenting as valuable in the way
conservatives claim to believe
it is. A longer-term stipend for
parents who stay home would
make doing so a realistic alterna-
tive to day care for far more
of us. And if liberals truly want to
support mothers’ choices, they
need to back subsidies and
employment legislation that make
all options financially viable:
both staying at home and making
use of good-quality, nurturing,
professional childcare.
121
122 № 39  /  FALL 2020
 THE TUMBREL
THERMIDOR BY BRANKO MARCETIC

Stories for the

End of the World

From the mutant animals of

Chernobyl and Marie Antoinette’s
perverted orgies, to QAnon and
Russiagate, conspiracy theories
flourish in times of crisis and
collapse of political legitimacy.

Little made sense. Amid a swirl
of confusion and panic, rumors of
mutant creatures — giant
mosquitos, three-headed birds,
spineless hedgehogs — made the
rounds. People spoke of children
with yellow fluid for blood
and secret camps where they were
putting the sick. Some claimed
cucumbers and vodka could cure
the illness.
What had caused it all? Witnesses
said they’d seen an otherworldly
light floating in the sky before the
accident. Many blamed foreign
spies and saboteurs. Others
whispered that the government
itself had been behind what
happened. All anyone knew was
that there was no point in looking
to newspapers, television, or
radio for answers; they were never
going to give people the truth.
Thirty-four years ago, this is
how Soviet citizens reacted as the
Chernobyl disaster unfurled
before them, irreparably tainting
their faith in the system that had
caused it.
Though no single factor broke the
Soviet Union apart, Chernobyl
was arguably its first big fracture.
The scope of official lies, incompe-
tence, and callousness it laid
bare shocked the country. Afraid
of stoking panic, the government
publicly played down the disaster
and dragged its feet on evacuating
the closest city, Pripyat. It went

FAILURE IS AN OPTION 123

 THERMIDOR
ahead with the annual May Day
rally in Kiev, insisting its people
bring their kids to project a sense
of normality, only for changing
winds to blanket the city with radi-
ation. Residents later learned
that party bureaucrats had already
flown their children out of
harm’s way.
It had, as then-president Mikhail
Gorbachev later wrote, shown
“the system as we know it could no
longer continue.” The secrets,
cover-up, and other government
measures meant to maintain the
people’s faith in a supposedly
infallible system ironically sped up
its fall. Within six years, the Soviet
Union ceased to exist.
In the face of official silence
and deceit, people turned to
124
rumor and speculation. Forced
to reckon with ideas that were
equal parts unthinkable and
incomprehensible — an irradiated
dead zone that would last genera-
tions, an apocalyptic disaster
caused by simple human error —
the fantastical was suddenly not
out of the question. And, eager to
distract from its own failures, the
government heaped blame on
the West for both causing the crisis
and sowing panic and confusion
in its wake.
“The vocabulary of the Cold War
was revitalized,” writes Anastasiya
Astapova, a research fellow at
the University of Tartu. “The
disaster was too contradictory for
the idea imposed by Soviet
propaganda about Communist
stability.”
All of this is worth examining
today, as large numbers of
Americans descend into conspira-
torial thinking in the middle of
another apocalyptic crisis shaking
their own faith in their system
and institutions.
This year has already seen an
explosion in the popularity of
QAnon, the bizarre theory
that Donald Trump and other
right-wing officials are secretly
battling a cabal of liberal and
cannibalistic pedophiles. At least
twenty-three Q adherents are
on the ballot in November. Talking
to voters in the Milwaukee suburbs
this September, Time correspon-
dent Charlotte Alter found at least
one in five expressing some kind
of conspiratorial belief, from
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
pedophilic elites holding an iron
grip on the US political system
to COVID-19 being a hoax. As the
West Coast burned to cinders,
rumors swirled in small-town
Oregon that antifa arsonists were
to blame, riling some to take
up arms and follow an innocent
couple taking photographs.
The rise of this current crop of
conspiracy theories is typically
thought of as a collective madness
particular to the Right. QAnon
is, after all, explicitly aligned with
Trump, and there is a long history
of conspiratorial thinking in US
conservatism, from McCarthyism
and the Birchers to birtherism
and the fear of Sharia.
If only that was the case. QAnon’s
appeal is not limited to the
political right, thanks partly to the
Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which
revealed there really was an elite
network of rich and powerful
people abusing underage teens.
And it was Democratic politicians
who first floated the specter of
shadowy anti-authority extremists
directing domestic events, with
Minnesota governor Tim Walz and
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey
baselessly blaming “white suprem-
acists, members of organized
crime, out-of-state instigators, and
possibly even foreign actors”
for the protests and rioting that
followed May’s police murder of
George Floyd.
In fact, the most influential
conspiracy theory of the past four
years was the liberal mirror
image of QAnon: the belief that
Donald Trump was being influ-
enced, and even controlled, by

Russian president Vladimir Putin,
variations on which included the
idea that he had been recruited
by the KGB around the same time
that Chernobyl happened.
Like QAnon, these conspiracies
saw Americans breathlessly waiting
for every new “drop” of informa-
tion, internet sleuths spending
hours obsessing over new clues and
developments, talk of secret
indictments and other unproven
claims, and wild charges of sexual
debauchery: a “golden shower”
party with prostitutes in a Moscow
hotel, in this case. Unlike QAnon,
this belief was advanced on
mainstream cable news shows and
in some of the most prestigious
liberal publications, including the
New York Times, the New Yorker,
and New York magazine — the
information sources most widely
trusted by liberals and loathed by
conservatives. What causes such
conspiratorial thinking to take hold
of a society? Experts point to a
loss of trust in institutions, a sense
of crisis, and a widespread disill-
usionment with political systems.
“Once we mistrust official or
authoritative accounts of events,
we become vulnerable to filling the
resulting informational void with
other opposing claims that we
encounter when falling down the
misinformation rabbit hole that is
the Internet,” wrote Joe Pierre,
health sciences clinical professor
at UCLA. “With QAnon, the
conspiracy theories are fundamen-
tally rooted in mistrust of the U.S.
government.”
“Conspiracy theories are born
during times of turmoil and
Stories for the End of the World
uncertainty,” writes Jim Kline,
psychology professor at Northern
Marianas College.
It’s no coincidence that both
QAnon and Russiagate came out
of the tumultuous 2016 presiden-
tial election — one riven with
anti-elite fervor, widespread politi-
cal disillusionment, and intense,
often highly partisan popular
dislike of both candidates. And
neither is their obsession with
sexual deviance.
Eighteenth-century France was
going through its own epochal
crisis when Marie Antoinette was
beset by a flood of lurid rumors
and pornography alleging that
she was squandering precious tax
dollars on orgies and other
“disorderly pleasures” involving
homosexuality and incest, with
an ever-expanding cast of top
political and religious officials. As
Robert Darnton argued, the crackdown on vagrants, who were
stories “attacked the legitimacy of driven to the city by a recent
the Bourbon monarchy at its famine. But it came to mix with
very foundation.” Alleged sex with the rising anti-elite fervor of
her son even made it onto the list the day, “an important milestone
of indictment at her trial after the on the road of antagonism which
revolution. distanced the sovereign from
his people throughout those
In fact, this kind of antiestablish-
years,” as historians Arlette Farge
ment libel had started in an earlier,
and Jacques Revel wrote.
more familiar form. Decades
before, rumors that children were We’re now coming upon a similar
being abducted off the streets moment. Not only is popular
of Paris, in some versions so that regard for the country’s leadership
nobles and even the king could scraping new lows, we’re also
bathe in their blood, led to a series facing a set of what feel like unreal,
of anti-authority uprisings in incomprehensible crises that those
the city in 1750. Like QAnon and officials seem impotent to do
Russiagate, this, too, was based anything about, including climatic
on a kernel of truth: police really changes that threaten to one day
had started arresting large unravel civilization itself.
numbers of children as part of a
FAILURE IS AN OPTION 125
 THERMIDOR

Like Chernobyl, the pandemic, in country’s corporate elite, many

particular, seems to have exposed
the rot of the US system. Its
political institutions have dropped
the ball, serially failing to guar-
antee Americans the economic
security so many other countries
secured for their citizens. Deceit
and misinformation have ruled
at the highest levels, with Trump
lying to the public about the
danger of the virus, senators
indulging in insider trading while
offering their constituents
reassurances that they contradicted
to donors behind closed doors,
and even public health authorities
giving people inconsistent,
sometimes false, information.
Ordinary people have either lost
everything or been forced to
risk their lives to hold on to what
they have, all while funding
another colossal bailout for the
of whom have only gotten richer
during the crisis. All in what
politicians insist, to an increasingly
doubtful populace, is the greatest
economic system in the world,
in its greatest country.
Vast swaths of the public channel
their rising panic into stories
of a normal world subverted by
alien forces — all the while
dehumanizing the political elites
they loathe.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the
United States is taking its first
steps on its last legs, as the Soviet
Union and Ancien Régime did
under similar conditions. But the
American people are clearly in
the mood for some form of radical
overhaul, even if they don’t
know exactly what quite yet.

The American people are clearly

in the mood for some form
of radical overhaul, even if they don’t
know exactly what quite yet.

126
 LEFTOVERS
POPULAR FRONT BY PETER FRASE

ILLUSTRATION BY PETE GAMLEN

Blue Order

In an increasingly unstable
country, what if a “deep police
state” threatens to undermine
our electoral gains?

In August, as uprisings continued
to sweep the United States in
the wake of the police killing of
George Floyd, Virginia state
senator Louise Lucas found herself
charged with a felony, in connec-
tion with damage to a Confederate
monument in the city of Ports-
mouth. The police cited a rarely
used law against damaging war
memorials, and they went so far as
to name the city’s elected com-
monwealth attorney, Stephanie
Morales, as a potential witness, in
an apparent attempt to force her
to recuse herself from the case.
The audacity of this story, fea-
turing the targeting of two black
elected officials by mostly white
cops, made national headlines. But
it highlighted a much more
widespread problem: the willing-
ness of police departments to
interfere in local politics, some-
times with apparent indifference
to the elected officials who are,
in theory, their bosses. In a period
of democratic-socialist success at
the ballot box, as well as growing
criticism of the carceral state,
these dynamics present the Left
with some difficult questions.
The problem is not new, and
it’s not even just progressives who
face this threat. Journalist Jake
Blumgart spoke to elected officials
around the country who described
acts of intimidation against
those who would challenge police
power. In the city of Costa Mesa,
California, for example, conserva-
tive Republican council member

128 № 39  /  FALL 2020


Jim Righeimer described being
followed home and intimidated by
a private investigator working
for a police union.
If anything, the uprisings of
2020, along with the general atmos-
phere of Trump-era America,
have only emboldened this kind of
activity. In Utah, state senator
Derek Kitchen was investigated for
allegedly helping pay for paint
used by protesters on the street in
front of a district attorney’s office.
District attorneys have, until
recently, largely been pro-police,
and have generally come from
backgrounds as prosecutors. But
in cases where more progressive
prosecutors have been elected, the
police will turn their hostility
toward them as well. In Portland,
Oregon, a recent hot spot of
protest activity and state repres-
sion, police expressed their
anger at newly elected DA Mike
Schmidt for insufficient willing-
ness to prosecute protestors,
with one reportedly calling him
“antifa” and “George Soros–
backed.” Other tactics are less
flashy but perhaps more powerful.
In Minneapolis, Steve Fletcher,
a city council member who has
supported defunding police,
accused the police of targeting his
ward for slowdowns, delaying
response times to people’s calls.
Similar slowdowns have been
deployed repeatedly in New York
City as part of pressure tactics
on mayor Bill de Blasio.
In some cases, the police will
attempt to leverage presumed
public support to undermine
the legitimacy of public officials
who criticize them. In one New
York state case, a Poughkeepsie
city council member, Sarah Salem,
was attacked by a police union
that called for the governor to
remove them from their seat due
to alleged anti-police bias.
All of this raises an unsettling
question for those of us arguing
for defunding police in our local
contexts. Our demands are
directed at mayors, city councils,
and legislators — the ostensible
bosses of the police. But this
nominal relation of authority often
turns out, in practice, not to be
the real one, as elected officials
either act as though their position
is actually subordinate to that
of the police, or face reprisals for
attempting to exercise oversight.
In any given case, it may be diffi-
cult to decipher whether the police
are exercising independent power
over elected governments, or
simply providing politicians with
cover for things they would
have done anyway. Mayor De
Blasio, for example, has insisted
on sheltering the NYPD from
cuts in his post-pandemic auster-
ity budgets. This is despite
their sometimes outlandish public
attacks on him, including releasing
internal arrest reports on his
twenty-five-year-old daughter. Is
this because he is afraid of the
police, or is it because the police
are a necessary component of
the governing strategy preferred
by his big donors, especially real
estate developers?
Perhaps it is more useful to think
of the police as a particularly
visible, relatively autonomous
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Blue Order
component of capitalist rule in its
local form. In the Trump era,
right-wing conspiracy theories
involving a “deep state” have
come to prominence. These posit
a network of nefarious actors
within the permanent government
bureaucracy, engaged in under-
mining the work of the president.
But if the lurid fantasies of
Trumpists are easy to dismiss,
there is a real institutional
structure that persists across
elected governments.
This actually-existing deep state
resides not just in the shadowy
back corridors of the federal
government, but especially in local
government, where voter engage-
ment is lower and press scrutiny,
particularly outside of the biggest
cities, is scant. The police, along
with bureaucrats and business
interests, should be understood as
a critical part of its apparatus.
The connections between local
police and local capitalists are often
noted in the literature of radical
urban theory. In particular,
Marxist analysts of gentrification
have shown how policing tends
to follow the flows of real estate
capital, with cops serving to make
the city appear safe for the
kinds of residents landlords seek
to attract.
What does this all mean for the
Left as it attempts to win power,
particularly at the local level?
Debates on socialist strategy
frequently coalesce around the
question of how, and whether,
to engage with the state, particu-
larly through the vehicle of
electoral politics. These debates
129
130 № 39  /  FALL 2020

The possibility looms that
mass resistance will be needed
simply to force the ordinary
electoral transfer of power.
often stipulate, or simply presume,
that a clear distinction can be
made between situations in which
bourgeois electoral democracy
exists and those in which it does
not. In the former, electorally
oriented socialists generally argue
that the Left should run candidates
and attempt to take power at
the ballot box, though with many
disagreements over the degree to
which substantive socialist
reforms are possible in a system
that has not fundamentally
uprooted capitalist property
relations.
The existence of the “deep police
state” complicates this narrative
somewhat. What are we to do
if there exists an institution that
not only is not answerable to
elected authority, but also
commands the support of local
capitalists and holds a monopoly
on the state-sanctioned use
of violence? Abandoning the elec-
toral terrain is hardly advisable,
since a purely extra-parliamentary
strategy will be easily isolated.
Yet we must be prepared for the
possibility that electoral socialism
can be turned back not only by
big, national-level coups like the
one that took down Salvador
Allende in Chile, but by dozens of
less noticed mini-Pinochets,
backed by local capitalists.
Simply winning elections isn’t
necessarily enough to dislodge
local authorities that are com-
mitted to undermining democracy.
This is why continued direct
resistance, through street protest
and other non-electoral organizing,
is so important. It isn’t because
the police can be “defeated” in a
military sense; it’s because their
power stems not only from their
guns but also from their popular
legitimacy.
In the months after George Floyd’s
killing, polls showed dramatic
shifts in public opinion, with large
majorities saying that Floyd’s
death was indicative of broader
problems with law enforcement.
This was a minority position as
recently as 2014, after Mike Brown
and Eric Garner were killed.
And while polling on this and
related questions has fluctuated
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Blue Order
over the course of 2020, the
volatility of opinion shows that
police legitimacy can be under-
mined by movements and should
not be taken for granted as an
immutable fact.
As I write this, the uncertainty
around the 2020 elections makes
the task of confronting police
power even more urgent. As the
Right attempts to sow doubt
about the legitimacy of a possible
Trump loss, the possibility
looms that mass resistance will
be needed simply to force the
ordinary electoral transfer of
power. The police, many of whose
unions have endorsed Donald
Trump, will be important in any
reactionary strategy to hold on
to power, particularly given their
increasingly open coordination
with private, far-right militias.
Combating police power is not a
substitute for seizing elected office
where possible, nor for making
fundamental changes to capitalist
property relations. But it may be a
necessary condition for achieving
either goal.
131
 LEFTOVERS
DUSTBIN
How Abraham
Lincoln Fought
the Supreme
Court
It is not enough to question the
decisions, the justices, or even the
structure of the current court —
we need to challenge, as Abraham
Lincoln did, the foundation of
its power to determine the law.
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
just weeks before a presidential
election, is a scenario out of
nightmares. But in many ways, it
only dramatizes a fundamental
problem that has faced the country
for years: the likelihood that the
Supreme Court, dominated by
extremely conservative justices for
decades to come, will act as the
far right’s major bulwark against
democratic reform.
Faced with this prospect — and
stung by the ruthlessness with
which leading Republicans have
pursued it — many liberals
132
BY MATT KARP
have come to support major judi-
cial reforms, most of them modeled
on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan
to expand the court in the 1930s.
Yet in some ways, the emphasis on
FDR’s “court-packing” idea
obscures a historical moment when
progressives mounted an even
more radical challenge to judicial
supremacy: the antislavery
struggle of the Civil War era.
In 1857, a Southern-majority
Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott
v. Sandford that Scott had no
legal right to bring suit in federal
court — that, in Chief Justice
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
Roger B. Taney’s famous words,
colonial and US history showed
that black Americans “had no
rights which the white man was
bound to respect.”
Equally inflammatory was the
court’s ruling that Congress had no
constitutional right to ban slave
property in the federal territories.
This decision outlawed the
national platform of the antislavery
Republican Party, which was
premised on blocking slavery’s
expansion to the West.
Slaveholders and their allies —
including Democratic president

James Buchanan and the over-
whelmingly Democratic US
Senate — embraced the decision
as a final settlement of the
slavery question. Taney had pro-
claimed Dred Scott “the law
of the land,” and the ruling party
in government agreed with him.
Abolitionists like Frederick
Douglass, meanwhile, condemned
the decision as the “judicial
incarnation of wolfishness.” Yet
they knew that the problem
of proslavery jurisprudence could
not be solved by antislavery
jurisprudence alone. “We can
appeal from this hell-black
judgment of the Supreme Court,”
said Douglass, “to the court
of common sense and common
humanity.” The remedy for
Dred Scott did not reside in a
lawyer’s plea or a judge’s opinion,
but in mass political struggle.
For the Republican Party, that
struggle meant declaring political
war on the idea of an all-powerful
judiciary. After 1857, Republicans
responded to Dred Scott, as the
historian David M. Potter wrote,
not with “an attack on the
decision,” but with “an attack on
the court.”
“The Supreme Court of the
United States,” announced the
New York Tribune, the largest
Republican newspaper in the
country, has
polluted its garments in
the filth of pro-slavery politics.
From this day forth it must
stand ... as a self-disgraced
tribunal. And from this day
forth it will be one of the great
and leading aims of the people
How Abraham Lincoln Fought the Supreme Court
of the Free States to obliterate
the shameful record and undo
what has been done.
But what could Republicans
actually do? By 1858, the court
contained five proslavery South-
erners, three of their Northern
Democratic “dough-faced” allies,
and only one (moderately)
antislavery justice, John McLean
of Ohio. Some suggested imme-
diate reforms, including the
appointment of up to five new
justices. “This Court is the citadel
of Slavery,” reported one Cincin-
nati newspaper, “and Republicans
intend to storm it.”
Probably the most popular
idea — maybe even more radical,
in its way, than court packing —
was a plan to “reorganize” the
entire federal judiciary on the basis
of the circuit court population.
In 1858, William H. Seward
introduced a bill of this kind, which
would have created an instant
and enduring free-state majority
on the Supreme Court. “The
Supreme Court,” said Seward,
attempts to command the
people of the United States to
accept the principles that
one man can own other men
... The people of the United
States never can, and they
never will, accept principles so
unconstitutional and so
abhorrent ... Let the Court
recede. Whether it recede or
not, we shall reorganize
the Court, and thus reform its
political sentiments and
practices, and bring them into
harmony with the Constitution
and with the laws of nature.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Seward’s plan went nowhere in
the Democratic Senate, but it kept
the national focus on the court
as a bulwark of slavery. Ultimately,
the most important Republican
response was not any of the various
technical reform proposals, but
a concentrated political attack on
the court’s authority as an elevated
and impartial arbiter of the law.
Famously, both Seward and
Abraham Lincoln accused the court
of advancing a proslavery con-
spiracy: Chief Justice Taney had
plotted with President Buchanan
to craft a piece of legal “machin-
ery” that would make slavery
lawful everywhere. Republicans
also denounced “superstitious
worship” of the Supreme Court,
mocking the “fulsome flattery” of
life-tenured judges who, by
virtue of their high position, some-
how transcended mortal politics.
In fact, they were just political
appointees like any other.
The Tribune even published a
general roast of the court, noting
Taney’s “sinister expression,”
and describing the dough-faced
justice Robert Cooper Grier as
“a blonde of rotund figure” whose
“soft and rosy nature ... succumbs
under touch and returns into
shape on its removal.” A judicial
decision on slavery from the
“fanatical” Justice John Archibald
Campbell of Alabama, meanwhile,
was “of no more value than the
cawing of a raven. He is a middle-
aged, middle-sized man, bald,
and possessed of middling talents.”
Above all, the Republican assault
struck at the fundamental power
of the judiciary. The Supreme
133
 DUSTBIN
Court, they argued, had
the authority to decide particular
cases but not to settle larger
political disputes over the meaning
of the Constitution.
Today, we call this power “judicial
review,” but as scholars like
Keith E. Whittington have argued,
it really amounts to something
much more like “judicial
supremacy,” and its roots are not
legal or constitutional but
themselves political. After Dred
Scott, Republicans launched
perhaps the most aggressive attack
on judicial supremacy in US
history. “A court makes a decision,”
argued one New York legislator,
“but does not make the law.”
Nor was this argument confined
to the most self-consciously radical
Republicans. Maine senator
Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s future
vice president, offered a blanket
rejection of the court’s authority to
decide a political question for
us ... We make the laws, they
interpret them; but it is not for
them to tell us ... what is a
political constitutional right of
this body ... Of all the
despotisms on earth, a judicial
despotism is the worst. It is a
life estate.
In 1858, Lincoln’s famous debates
with Stephen Douglas turned on
the Republican attack on judicial
supremacy. Douglas, like other
Democratic conservatives, accused
Lincoln’s party of seeking
to destroy public confidence
in the highest judicial tribunal
on earth ... From that decision
134
there is no appeal, this side of
Heaven. Yet, Mr. Lincoln says
he is going to reverse that
decision. By what tribunal will
he reverse it? Will he appeal
to a mob? ... Will he stir up
strife and rebellion in the land,
and overthrow the court by
violence?
Yet Lincoln persisted in rejecting
judicial supremacy — as well as the
basic idea underlying it, that law
somehow exists before or beyond
politics, and thus it was illegitimate
to resist the proslavery court
through popular antislavery
mobilization. “We do not propose
to be bound by [Dred Scott] as
a political rule,” he said. “We
propose resisting it as to have it
reversed if we can, and a new
judicial rule established upon
this subject.”
Across the late 1850s, Lincoln
argued that “the American
people,” not the Supreme Court,
were the true arbiters of the
Constitution, and that the only
way to defeat the proslavery
judiciary was through mass poli-
tical struggle. And after Lincoln
and Hamlin were elected in 1860,
the new president’s inaugural
address articulated this view in the
strongest language he ever used:
[I]f the policy of the govern-
ment, upon vital questions,
affecting the whole people, is
to be irrevocably fixed
by decisions of the Supreme
Court, the instant they are
made ... the people will have
ceased, to be their own
rulers, having, to that extent,
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
practically resigned their
government, into the hands of
that eminent tribunal.
Once in power, Lincoln and congress-
ional Republicans “reorganized”
the federal judiciary and “packed”
the court, adding an additional
justice in 1863. More fundamen-
tally, though, they simply ignored
the proslavery precedents
established in the 1850s. In June
1862, for instance, Congress
passed and Lincoln signed a bill
banning slavery from the federal
territories — a direct violation
of the majority ruling in Dred
Scott. The court meekly acqui-
esced, recognizing that its
political power was long since
broken.
As the legal historian Charles
Warren later lamented, Republi-
cans’ popular assault on the court
crippled the institution for
more than a decade. He wrote:
During neither the Civil War
nor the period of Reconstruc-
tion did the Supreme Court
play anything like its due
role of supervision, with the
result that during the one
period the military powers of
the President underwent
undue expansion, and during
the other the legislative
powers of Congress ... The
loss of confidence in the Court
was due not merely to the
Court’s decision but to the false
and malignant criticisms and
portrayals of the Court which
were spread widely through
the North by influential
newspapers.

Warren’s point, in other words, is
that the greatest democratic
expansion in US political history —
the era of emancipation and
Reconstruction — demanded
a direct attack on the power of the
Supreme Court. Nor is it a
coincidence that the court, as it
began to recover its strength in
the 1870s, led a counterrevolution
against this democratic project.
Drawing direct lessons from
the past is a fool’s errand, but this
history should remind us that
judicial power — however grandly
it may be imagined by friends
and foes alike — is critically
dependent on political currents.
How Abraham Lincoln Fought the Supreme Court
In some ways, the Left today
shares the position of antislavery
forces in the 1850s. It confronts
a rich, well-organized sect, whose
commitment to property far
exceeds its belief in democracy,
and which has made the Supreme
Court a citadel of reaction,
under the banner of what law
professor Jedediah Purdy has
called the “Bosses’ Constitution.”
Yet, in a deeper sense, the Right’s
resort to judicial supremacy is
not a sign of strength but an
admission of weakness: a belea-
guered regime calls upon the
authority of the court only to
achieve what it cannot accomplish
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
through electoral politics. The
Bosses’ Constitution has no more
chance of winning majority
support today than the slave-
holders’ agenda of the 1850s. It is,
almost surely, the least popular
wing of a larger conservative
politics that has come to depend
on minority rule.
To make this undemocratic project
vulnerable, it must be made visible.
It is not enough to question the
decisions, the justices, or even the
structure of the current court —
we need to challenge, as Lincoln
did, the foundation of its power to
determine the law.
135
 LEFTOVERS
DUSTBIN
Socialists Should
Be Republicans
The first generation of the GOP
tried — and failed — to build a
modern republic. Socialists today
won’t get very far unless we
finish their work.
Amid the chaos of America in
2020, a number of opportunistic
political operatives have been
inspired to “rebrand” in an effort
to convey some sort of timely
political realignment.
Not so much the major players
of the Democratic Party. Most
of them have either remained
staunchly opposed to anything
from the Bernie Sanders agenda,
or they have doubled down on
the party’s rightward drift to
appeal to those elusive “moderate
Republicans in the suburbs.”
No, it’s a number of enterprising
Republicans who have acquired a
136
BY AMBER A’LEE FROST
new coat of paint — namely the Joe Biden, the sort of Democrat
“Never Trump” faction of conser- that many wealthy Republicans
vatives who bemoan the incivility would love to see in office.
and chaos that Donald has wrought
As is so often the case with
upon our country and their party.
Republicans selling their moral
Of the Never Trumpers, among
bona fides, the Lincoln Project
them high-profile conservatives
invokes our sixteenth president,
like Max Boot, Bill Kristol, and
who oversaw a devastating
Jennifer Rubin, none are quite so
war to preserve the Union and
seemingly counterintuitive as the
abolish slavery. Of course,
Lincoln Project, the political
Republicans love to claim they
action committee formed in 2019
belong to “the party of Lincoln,”
to “hold accountable those who
even as the party itself bears
would violate their oaths to the
absolutely no resemblance to
Constitution and would put others
Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans.
before Americans.” In practice,
And though this point may be
this means a massive press and
obvious, it does raise a bewildering
social media campaign to support
№ 39  /  FALL 2020

question: What the fuck is
a republican, as distinct from
a Republican?
Richard Bensel’s classic 1991
history, Yankee Leviathan: The
Origins of Central State Authority
in America, 1859–1877, explains
the trajectory of the former into
the latter — from the Party of the
Union to the Party of Finance —
with a thorough account of Civil
War party politics and the
subsequent failures of Reconstruc-
tion. It’s true that it was the
Southern Democrats who led the
charge to secession. At the time,
these were whites who favored
Jacksonian democracy, meaning
they endorsed the “democracy”
of extending suffrage to all white
men, alongside laissez-faire
economics and limiting the role of
the federal government to do
things like, say, abolish slavery.
By contrast, Abraham Lincoln was
the first president elected on
the Republican ticket, a brand new
party favored by Northerners who
opposed slavery for any number
of reasons, often in combination:
some recognized it as a moral
abomination, some saw it as the
feature of a corrupt oligarchy
in Washington, DC, and some were
concerned about its devastating
drag on economic development.
All, however, advocated limiting
the expansion of the institution
westward. These Republicans also
favored economic protectionism,
investment in infrastructure, and
building the sort of active, planned
state necessary for developing
a diversified and increasingly indus-
trial economy.
The kind of state Republicans
were trying to construct is,
unsurprisingly, called a “republic,”
and it was met with fierce
resistance from Southern leaders.
Secession was an attempt to
thwart this larger project, but as
Bensel shows, Republicans
continued working to build a repub-
lic during the war — not only
by crushing the slaveholding class
and strengthening federal power
over the states, but by coordinating
a war finance plan, improving
national infrastructure, and using
federal aid to spur diversified
economic development.
Spoiler alert: the Union won,
slavery was abolished, and the
ambitiously named period of
Reconstruction should have set the
stage for that great American
republic the party of Lincoln had
dreamed of. But this was not to be.
In the defeated South, the white
planter elite fought the Northern
occupation tooth and nail,
mounting a deadly resistance to
Republican efforts to extend
civil and political rights to former
slaves. Meanwhile, the rapid
ascendency of finance capital had
no use for the broader industrial
and economic ambitions of
Reconstruction. Bensel notes that
the decimated and still underde-
veloped South required massive
investment to reintegrate itself
into the United States, but instead
of sending capital down to the
region, Northern Republican Party
politicians began to side with
high finance by the 1870s. In direct
opposition to their supposedly
republican ambitions, they voted
against planning, infrastructure,
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Socialists Should Be Republicans
investment, taxes, and tariffs.
Republicans also made disastrous
concessions to Southern elites —
and so the grand ambitions of
Reconstruction were smothered
by Northern economic conserva-
tism, while racist violence,
disenfranchisement, and segrega-
tion were codified in the South.
Republics were passé, and laissez-
faire capitalism was the future.
That’s how the Republican Party
became distinctly anti-republican.
It’s why Joe Biden doesn’t horrify
the GOP, why he even has a
few “big names” in the Republican
punditry and campaign industries
boosting him, and why we have
two political parties that you can
barely distinguish from each other
on economic policy. In fact, the
abandonment of republicanism
is the first — but not the last —
barricade to anything approaching
a workers’ party in the United
States.
If socialists want to transform the
United States in our lifetime,
then they should first take up that
small-r republican struggle for
themselves. Because Reconstruc-
tion is not complete, and no
one else is even up to the task. It’s
clear that the Union is not whole,
and that this fractured country
based on regional economic compe-
tition and exploitation favors
capital above all else. Capitalism is
given unlimited growth over
and across state borders, while left
movements are largely penned
in and restricted to one of fifty little
semi-independent nations.
The more anarchist strains of left
thought argue for the superiority
137
 DUSTBIN
of allegedly organic social forma-
tions like community, localism,
regionalism, and municipalism —
all of which were justifications
for the succession of the American
Confederacy as well. Not only
are these ideals thoroughly and
inherently conservative — a
variation on “states’ rights” made
palatable with a convenient
left affect — they keep popular
movements small.
It’s a grave error both politically
and strategically to assume that
“small is beautiful.” The tendency
of smaller social units to be more
socially and economically conser-
vative, obstacles to mass politics
in general and social-democratic
reforms in particular, is not a
coincidence — it’s a natural feature
of smallness.
Nearly every major democratizing
program and institution in our
country’s history has had to fight to
be big. The New Deal, the Civil
Rights Act, and the Voting Rights
Act were all major advances for
American democracy — and they
were all fought viciously by
states’ rights advocates intent on
controlling their bailiwicks
If socialists want to transform the
United States, then they should first
take up that small-r republican
struggle for themselves.
138
through the formal dissection and “developmental separatism” and
segregation of the country. “self-determination” for black
people in New York City, granting
Despite the obstruction of
them the “freedom” to experiment
universalist New Deal benefits,
with local initiatives and programs
often by a still-segregated South,
among their own rather than
the improvements in American
“assimilate” — that is, desegregate,
life extended across racial lines.
a project that would require
With these gains outsourced to
both redistribution and a standard-
states, however, their vulnerability
ization of resources and funding.
to erosion has proven all too
More recently, “school choice”
obvious. Redlining, public housing
was the preferred euphemism for
policy, education budgets, and
disastrous charter school programs,
voting laws — all determined at a
another round of “autonomy”
local level — have consistently
sold as the alternative to equality.
proven effective means by which
At the international level, Bill
to segregate and disenfranchise.
and Melinda Gates invested
Meanwhile, state attacks on
in microlending to the Third
Planned Parenthood and restric-
World — as opposed to large-scale
tions aside, no woman will ever
industrial development — insist-
truly have the right to abortion
ing that it was better to have
without a guarantee of free health
peasants take out small business
care at the point of access. The
loans rather than, say, investing
laws aren’t useless, but without a
collectively in developing an
big, fat republic to back it up, they
industrial economy and welfare
have no fortification from
state. Go ahead and search
reactionaries and retrenchment.
for “microfinance, repayment,
At the same time, state and suicide” to figure out how so many
community initiatives have always of those “entrepreneurs” fared.
found champions among the
Moreover, the deliberately byzan-
liberal ultrawealthy. It was
tine nature of state variation
the Ford Foundation that advo-
absolutely paralyzes any popular
cated for and invested heavily in
№ 39  /  FALL 2020

movements. Labor law varies
so wildly at a state level that
organizing a national action or
campaign immediately becomes
a house of cards. Ever wonder
why it’s so difficult to hold police
accountable for violence or
murder? Well, you’re looking at
one of America’s finest “commu-
nity institutions.”
There is often a temptation to work
toward passing major programs
at a state level, particularly if you
live in a wealthy, “progressive”
state that you believe will be more
amenable to a new social program
than the country at large. But
the idea that you could pass a single-
payer health care program in a
wealthy blue state not only over-
estimates how progressive your
state is, it forgets exactly why such
states are wealthy enough to
theoretically afford such a program —
primarily because they generate
revenue from industries that exist
to commodify that which socialists
fight to de-commodify. California
is a Bernie state and a Medicare for
All state, but more important, it’s
the home of Kaiser Permanente.
Even if you could win universal
health care in California, it would
be weak, flimsy, and easy to cut —
California used to have free public
universities, and look how well
those held up. Meanwhile, as the
only constitutionally authorized
government service, the United
States Postal Service has endured
steady attacks from both parties,
but as a fundamentally republican —
and therefore strong — institution,
it has weathered the onslaught
longer than any state program.
Socialists Should Be Republicans
Over and over again, Democrats
and Republicans alike have
championed the idea of states as
the “laboratories of democracy,”
and over and over again, this has
meant that human beings are
little more than lab rats. These
mercenary chop-shop artists are, of
course, correct to fight on behalf of
localism, “community solutions,”
states’ rights, and every other poli-
tical unit smaller than the nation
itself. Their goal is to divide and
isolate the working class in an
effort to preclude the mightiest
sum of parts.
Today, socialists are faced with a
choice: Do we want to be big and
strong, or do we want to be small
and weak? Should we choose the
former, we have to finish the
project that the very first Republi-
cans began more than a century
and a half ago.
In the late 1930s, American
Communists held their convention
in a large arena in New York,
under a giant bust of Abraham
Lincoln’s head, dwarfing the Lenin
and Stalin portraits below. It’s a
patriotic decor that might surprise
radicals today.
But those party members under-
stood something that eludes
and rankles many liberals, conser-
vatives, and even leftists in
2020: that it’s socialists who are
Lincoln’s true heirs. And it’s
socialists who will lead the fight to
finally achieve the goals of an
American republic: “a government
of the people, by the people, for
the people.”
FAILURE IS AN OPTION 139
 LEFTOVERS
PROLETOCCULT BY DONALD HUGHES

Your Quarterly Real left strategy isn’t found in

socialist magazines. It’s found
Horoscope in the stars.

140 № 39  /  FALL 2020


SCORPIO
A great unexpected challenge greets you in the near
future. To face this difficult time, you will need to
abandon all of your other responsibilities to do a close
reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic, just as you always
knew you should.
SAGITTARIUS
Focus on your health for the foreseeable future. Even
small changes will help you prepare for a series of
brazen assassination attempts, after international
agents misinterpret something you wrote in a product
review online as secret code.
CAPRICORN
You will meet a new group of friends, each of whom has
written a book about the retrieval of a historical figure
for the Left. Be careful! You will forget who wrote
about whom — just tell each of them you appreciated
the burning relevance of such a person for our times.
AQUARIUS
You will develop a new synthesis of revolutionary
thought that sums up the experiences of the workers’
movement in the twentieth century and points the
way forward for our times. Unfortunately, you soon
find out it is plagiarized, almost word for word,
from Revolutionary Communist Party chairman
Bob Avakian, and you can tell no one.
PISCES
Upon hearing that “class is at the center,” you will
set out on a great journey to find this mythical center.
After spending months traveling in difficult condi-
tions, you will finally realize that the center was in our
hearts all along.
ARIES
After years of being annoyed by a particular rival left
faction, you will think of the perfect biting insult
to devastate them in an argument. Shocked by your
insightfulness, they will rally to your side.
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Your Quarterly Horoscope
TAURUS
The next few months prove lucrative to you. Unfor-
tunately, this is part of a long-term strategy of
“lawfare” against you that will ultimately see you
removed from office for corruption by a far-right judge.
GEMINI
A Freudo-Marxist critique of social media will go viral
and encourage many of your friends to stop using
group chats. In crazed desperation, you will want to
turn to the works of Karl Popper to debunk both
Freud and Marx. Have strength: the urge will pass.
CANCER
Your natural altruism will come under great strain in
the next few weeks. Keep Peter Kropotkin in your
thoughts: cooperation advances the species better than
naked self-interest.
LEO
You are at risk for burnout if you don’t relax more.
Consider using your deep knowledge of political
economy to end global capitalism and give yourself
more leisure time.
VIRGO
Your detailed private notes on every frustration you
have with the Left are lost in an internet hack and end
up on social media. To your surprise, these notes
will be studied for years on equal standing with Marx’s
Grundrisse.
LIBRA
After a long process of introspection, you will attempt
to drop one of your activist commitments. It soon
becomes apparent that the process of quitting is taking
more energy than simply continuing the work, and
you decide to soldier on indefinitely.
141
142 № 39  /  FALL 2020
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 LEFTOVERS
MEANS AND ENDS
Celebrating Ten
Years of Jacobin
And our decades to come.
There is much to celebrate in
Jacobin’s ten-year anniversary. In
a remarkably short time, what
started as a tiny online nook has
grown to become a major voice
on the global left. This is no doubt
partly a sign of the times. It is
hard to imagine that it would have
met with a similar success if it
had started in 2000, as opposed
to 2010.
Jacobin came at the perfect
moment, when a global rebellion
against neoliberalism was starting
to gain momentum and, most
remarkably, discussions around
socialism suddenly reentered
144
BY VIVEK CHIBBER
the political culture thanks to
Bernie Sanders. But while these
factors have served as a fertile
environment, they cannot of
themselves account for Jacobin’s
success. Plenty of other socialist
ventures have failed during these
years or remained confined
to a tiny corner of the Left online
arena. Jacobin’s success is very
much an achievement, however
much it has been buoyed by
the growing interest in socialism.
I would suggest that two aspects of
Jacobin’s efforts are particularly
noteworthy, one political and the
other institutional. Politically,
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
the magazine has had a remarkably
clear vision and a focus that is
unmatched on the intellectual left,
not just among new magazines
but more widely.
From its inception, Jacobin has
never wavered from its basic
commitment to a democratic and
internationalist vision of
socialism. This clarity of purpose
has been accompanied by an
even more remarkable openness
to discussions of strategy and
tactics, something that one might
think ought to come naturally
to anyone serious about politics but
that is, in fact, on the verge of

extinction on the Left. Hence,
along with their sharp interven-
tions on current politics, Jacobin
has reignited an examination
of older strategic debates — most
notably those during the halcyon
days of the Second International,
but also in the years of social-
democratic advance in the postwar
era in Europe, and after decoloni-
zation in the Global South. It
has revisited those discussions with
an intensity and openness that
is remarkable, not just for its
seriousness, but for the maturity
that belies the young age of many
of its participants.
The very seriousness of Jacobin’s
interventions is matched by the
lucidity of its writing. Jacobin
stands out on the Left in its lack of
pretension. It is obvious that every
article published by the magazine —
whether online or in print — is
vetted for its readability as much as
its content. There was a time when
this could be taken for granted
on the Left, but it is just one of
the components of socialist
culture that has frayed as we have
lost touch with the working class.
Jacobin is a magazine that seeks to
be read, not just admired. And
this is no doubt part of the reason
why it has attracted so much talent
to its pages. Authors want to
write for it because they know their
articles will actually reach a mass
audience, not just some section of
the chattering classes. Hence,
in this short span, not only has
Jacobin grown beyond anyone’s
widest expectations, but it has
become a magnet for the Left’s
strongest thinkers.
This brings us to the second achieve-
ment, more institutional in nature.
Through its rapid expansion, the
depth of its intellectual commit-
ment, and the platform it provides
for debate, Jacobin is helping
create an intellectual space that is
free from the university system.
From its inception in the nine-
teenth century, and in the decades
that followed, the Left always had
its own magazines, newspapers,
and theoretical organs. It produced
its own intellectuals, typically
outside the universities but some-
times embedded in them. Even
when they came from the profes-
soriate, they were disciplined
to a great extent by the culture of
the socialist movement, whose
center of gravity was found among
working people.
This space was sustained by the
various organizations of the
Left, of which trade unions and
working-class parties were
the most important. And it was
absolutely crucial in the develop-
ment of strategy and political
engagement. Some of the publica-
tions were narrowly concerned
with organizational matters,
others devoted to tactical ones,
and yet others to more abstruse
theoretical or philosophical
debates. But their moral universe
was consistent across these
domains, and they inhabited a
moral culture that was shaped
by political commitments — not
professional ones. This quite
autonomous intellectual sphere
was not the creation of the
socialist movement alone, it was
also inhabited by left-liberals;
FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Celebrating Ten Years of Jacobin
but it was nourished tremendously
by the former.
By the closing decades of the
century, as the Left’s organizational
strength receded, so did its
intellectual autonomy. Discussion
and debate around political
strategy was increasingly taken
over by mainstream outlets,
and intellectual debate was colon-
ized by the professional academics —
as it continues to be today.
For the state of debate on the Left,
the consequences have been
devastating. It has meant that both
the form and content of “left”
discourse has come to reflect the
style and interests of the profes-
sional class — of professors, jour-
nalists, and media personalities.
Even in the case of self-styled
Marxist journals, the content is
almost entirely filled by academics,
whose links to the world outside
academia are so thin as to be
mostly irrelevant. These outlets
have been folded into the moral
and political universe of the
professional-managerial class,
rarely read by other actors and,
in turn, quite uninterested in them.
One of the most pressing tasks
for the Left today is to pull itself
out of the intellectual culture
of the professional classes and to
revitalize its own organs of debate
and discussion. It will still have
to draw on the university system
and even the corporate media,
for obvious reasons, but it has to
wrest free of the latter’s moral
and political universe. This is
where Jacobin has made its most
important contribution. As it has
grown in stature and readership,
145
 MEANS AND ENDS
it has managed to attract some
of the best elements of the
professional intelligentsia, who
otherwise would have been
absorbed by the university system.
But precisely because it is
economically independent and
politically engaged, it has
been able to draw on the resources
of the academy without being
colonized by it.
Even more important, the
magazine is fostering a stable of its
own researchers and journalists —
intellectuals who, in many cases,
have been trained in the university
system, have cycled out of it,
but are not themselves aspirants
to academic or professional
146
lorem
celebrity. They can deploy much
of the same technical apparatus as
the professoriate, but toward
ends that are dictated by their poli-
tical commitments.
Events are moving fast. Socialists
are still a minority within the
self-styled left, and the Left itself
is still too dependent on the
professional strata. The only
chance socialism has of surviving
as a political force, rather than
as a subculture among young
professionals, is if it breaks out of
the middle class and embeds itself,
as it once did, among working
people. The task is daunting,
maybe even out of reach. We are
only at the very beginning of
№ 39  /  FALL 2020
re-creating a Left that is capable
of it.
Jacobin has already proven itself an
indispensable contributor to the
mission. May it continue on this
path, and may its integrity inspire
others to join in the struggle.
If you care about the Jacobin
project, and you’re financially able,
you should make a contribution
to us at jacobinmag.com/donate
or via check to Jacobin Foundation,
388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn,
NY 11217.
With your help, we’ll stick around
until our fight is won.
 “Society from which justice
and morality are banished clearly
cannot long survive.”
—Vilfredo Pareto