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5 The Bad Society
 Editor in Chief Publisher
Chris Lehmann Noah McCormack

Art Director and Designer Executive Director

Lindsay Ballant Valerie Cortés

Senior Editor Web Developer

Jonathon Sturgeon and Content Manager
James White
Managing Editor
Lindsey Gilbert Audience Development Associate
Hannah Gais
Web Editor
Lucie Elven Editorial Assistants
Will Harrison
Associate Editor Zachariah Webb
Dave Denison
Finance Manager
Assistant Editor Dolores Rothenberg
Emily Carroll
Publishing Consultant
Poetry Editor Hamilton Fish
Nicole Terez Dutton
Past Publishers
Contributing Editors The MIT Press, 2012–2014
Barbara Ehrenreich Conor O’Neil, 2009–2011
Susan Faludi Greg Lane, 1993–2007
Evgeny Morozov
Rick Perlstein Founding Editors
Kim Stanley Robinson Thomas Frank
George Scialabba Keith White
Jacob Silverman John Summers, editor in chief (2011–2016)
Astra Taylor
Catherine Tumber No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.
Eugenia Williamson
2 Acknowledgments
The Baffler wishes to thank three particularly
generous backers of its irascibility: Win McCormack,
Noah McCormack, and Anne Germanacos.
Thanks also to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project,
which provided funding for Ann Neumann’s
”Death Trips,” and to researchers Cassandra de Alba
and Adam Przybyl.

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A The Baffler
19 West 21st Street, Suite 1001,
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New York, NY 10010 USA
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L thebaffler.com
E © 2017 THE BAFFLER
R FO U N DAT IO N , IN C.
New Worse Things
nineties youth, we’d
I N T H E B A F F L E R’S F RISKY
designate the random liberationist delusions
of consumer capitalism under the catch-all
running designation “New Bad Things.” This
casual filing system seemed well suited to an
age that was tricked out in every conceivable
sort of lifestyle novelty and far too terminally
infatuated with its innovative excellence to
entertain any nonmarket designations of value.
But the New Bad Things have lately
mutated out of control and captured the bulk
of our public life. We’re now governed at the
highest sanctum of power by a raging,
cable-addled narcissist and his frat-boy retinue
of white nationalists and corporate shakedown
artists. Therapeutic bombings, mislaid aircraft
carriers, and the threat of nuclear showdowns
with other thuggish kleptocracies are now
standard running news stories. Moneyed
corruption and blatant conflicts of interest
are simply business as usual in every facet
of our public life. Our political leaders, sober
mainstream pundits, and business titans
all flail about like deranged mimes, seeking to
carry on as though nothing all that alarming is
happening as the walls close in around them.
We are, in other words, at the shank end
of the postwar social contract that, even in
the benighted nineties, made the promise of
incremental social improvement and a shared
sense of national uplift seem like something
more than fodder for bitter punchlines for
the dispossessed. In a few short political
generations, Lyndon Johnson’s bold vision of
the Great Society has ceded the field to its
photographic negative; we are now marooned
in the sprawling wasteland of the Bad Society.
How did we get here, exactly? That’s what
this thirty-fifth Baffler, now swimming beneath
your disoriented gaze, is determined to explain.
Starting with our rancid head of state, Kimberlé
Williams Crenshaw dissects the stark racist
logic behind Donald Trump’s rise to power—
a tale in which liberal fables of colorblindness
and “postracialism” play no small part. Adele
Stan takes a close look at the networks of
private capital that allow our Trumpian
overlords to ransack the public weal with
impunity. James Livingston chronicles the way
that American culture has yoked itself to the
work ethic, even at the moment when all the
basic conditions of industrial-age labor are
obsolescing before our eyes. Perhaps, then, we
are at last free to pursue glorious, self-deter-
mined leisure of the sort that Marx and Engels
extolled in the rhapsodic socialist reveries
of The German Ideology? No such luck, Miya
Tokumitsu reports: the American romance with
leisure is a rote and joyless affair, resembling
nothing so much as the drudgery of the shop 3
floor. The local cinemas and streaming set-top
boxes offer no relief, notes Tom Carson:
the superhero sagas now stoking the culture
industries are dour studies in social fatalism,
with generic cityscapes furnishing the patho-
logical evil that permits individualist virtue
to continue slouching its beastly way toward
the final reckoning. And as Ann Friedman
notes, fantasies of blue-state secession and
cultural insulation are an even crueler delusion
in the age of Trump than they were during the
dumber stretches of our recent past.
What, then, is to be done? Far be it from
Team Baffler to prescribe a reformist blueprint
with any moral authority. But if we were to
make a start, we could do worse than to build
on the researches of our contributors here, E
D
and resist the dismal refrains offered by the I
T
various best-case scenarists still contami- O
nating our civitas. Heed our own chastened R
’
editorial history, and remember that bad S
things can always get worse. N
—Chris Lehmann O
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 Salvos
6 Hidden Fighters 88 Why Work?
Remembering America’s black Breaking the spell of the
antifascist vanguard Protestant ethic
Molly Crabapple James Livingston

16 The Art of the Real 100 Did the Fun Work?

Disinformation vs. democracy Relaxation as Fitbit app
Katherine Cross Miya Tokumitsu

28 What We Do Is Secret 108 Creative Alibis

Trumpism as a private-capital scam Richard Florida and the ruse
Adele M. Stan of the “creative class”
Daniel Brook
40 Race to the Bottom
How the post-racial revolution 134 The Wrong Stuff
became a whitewash Hero worship in late-capitalist
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw Hollywood
Tom Carson
66 Abortive Reasoning
What’s wrong with 144 You Gotta Serve Somebody
the reproductive rights debate The Christian right’s
Yasmin Nair and Machiavellian morals
4 Eugenia Williamson Dave Denison

80 California Über Alles 164 People Like That

How the resistance is leaving The evolution of Dawn Powell’s
its heart on the Left Coast American satire
Ann Friedman Ben Schwartz

172 Death Trips

Accessorizing the final exit lane
Ann Neumann

Outbursts
58 All Worked Up 118 Childhood’s End
and Nowhere to Go Which Disney princess
The ever more futile politics is Neil Postman?
of left protest Natasha Vargas-Cooper
Amber A’Lee Frost
B 158 No Prophets, No Honor
A
F
On the declining vocation
F of the social critic
L
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Tom Whyman
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 Poems
38 Against Poetry 117 Age of Osteo Collosus
Kaveh Akbar Dzvinia Orlowsky

65 Pony 156 Deep Calls to Deep

Monica Ferrell Emilia Phillips
79 Auto-Correct
Ladan Osman 180 Sanctuary
sam sax

Story
124 Intervention
Lewis Robinson

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Stephan Walter
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 Molly Crabapple

Hidden
Fighters
7

Remembering America’s black

Molly Crabapple

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antifascist vanguard L
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 They exist now mostly in archives. Photos
show a beautiful young woman bent over
an operating table, staring toward the
camera with a mixture of defiance and
exhaustion. A man in a sweater adorned
with the Lion of Judah jauntily holds his
flight helmet in one hand. A military
commander points into the distance of a
rocky Spanish valley. Salaria Kea, John
Robinson, Oliver Law: they’re three of the
tens of thousands of black Americans
8 who, a year before the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade turned up as defenders of Repub-
lican Spain, protested, fundraised, and
fought to save Ethiopia from Fascism, in
an episode that even leftists have forgotten.
In 1934, Ethiopia was one of just two
African countries that had never been
colonized by Europe, but it wasn’t for lack
of trying. Ethiopian emperor Menelik II
had trounced Italian invaders in 1896, and
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nearly four decades later, the Fascist leader
Benito Mussolini yearned to avenge his
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imperial homeland’s “humiliation.” That December, Mussolini’s forces
provoked a confrontation at Walwal, on the border between Ethiopia and
Italian-held Somaliland.
Though Ethiopia belonged to the League of Nations, France and Britain had
little desire to protect their fellow member state—especially when they were still
hoping to persuade Mussolini to join an alliance against Nazi Germany. Why
expend their continental political capital for a poor African nation? The United
States still thought Fascism could be a decent bulwark against the Red Menace,
and so jealously guarded its neutrality. Even the Soviet Union, which paid lip
service to Ethiopian independence, was shown by the New York Times to have
made a killing by exporting supplies to the camps of would-be occupying Italian
forces in Africa.
Though only five years old at the time of the war, playwright Lorraine
Hansberry later wrote, “I remember the newsreels of the Ethiopian war, and the
feeling of outrage. . . . Fighters with spears and our people in a passion over it, my
mother attacking the Pope blessing the Italian troops going off to slay the
Ethiopians.” Black Americans like Hansberry were one of the few groups in the
United States who recognized Fascism’s dangers. Even before Hannah Arendt,
they saw the clear line that led from the horrors of European imperialism to the
puffed-up violence of a Mussolini, and they would not allow Il Duce to swallow
the cultured, defiant, and ancient country that they admired. Langston Hughes
captured the sentiment in “Ballad of Ethiopia”: “All you colored peoples/ Be a
man at last/ Say to Mussolini/ No! You shall not pass.”

9
“Death to Fascism!”
That spring, as Mussolini prepared for war in typically self-dramatizing fashion,
black Pan-Africanists, Communists, churchgoers, and union members all sprang
into action, in protests that raged across the United States. In May, after a black
protester threw a brick through the window of an Italian-owned store in Harlem,
police fired into a crowd of four hundred demonstrators—“rioters,” in the words of
the New York Times—and wounded a man in the leg. During a June demonstration
in Chicago, two young women, one black and one Jewish, chained themselves in
front of the Italian consulate; signs that read “Hands off Ethiopia” hung across
their chests. A local paper noted that Chicago had denied organizers a permit on
the pretext that “Negroes in Chicago had no need to be worried about what was
going on over in Europe.” To the city government, black internationalism was a
more immediate threat than Fascist Italy.
In August, twenty thousand black and white protesters marched through
Harlem chanting “Death to Fascism!” and “Italian and Negro people, unite in a
common front against war!” Union leaders, Communists, Pan-Africanists,
priests, and the Rabbi Michael Alpert all delivered speeches before the Harlem
rally—days after a hundred black and pro-Fascist Italian residents battled each
other with homemade weapons in the streets of Jersey City. Black Communist
Party members in Harlem and Chicago’s South Side organized the Joint
Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, and on August 31, 1934, Communist
S
organizer Harry Haywood defied rampant police violence to lead a series of A
spontaneous demonstrations that blocked traffic and burned Mussolini in effigy. L
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In his memoir, Haywood wrote that “the defense of Ethiopia had now become a O
Molly Crabapple
 fight for the streets of Chicago.” Communist-organized dock workers refused to
load Italian ships. In the famous, aptly named Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam
Clayton Powell raised funds for Ethiopia while delivering passionate speeches in
support of the country’s resistance to Fascism.
Despite such stirring shows of national solidarity, only one black American
ever made it to Ethiopia. On May 2, 1935, pilot John Robinson boarded a train out
of Chicago—the first leg of a month-long journey to Addis Ababa. At the age of
twenty-nine, Robinson was already a pioneer. Forbidden from attending the
Curtiss-Wright School of Aviation because of his race, he worked as the school’s
janitor in order to sit in on classes, and then used the knowledge to lead a group
that built its own plane. This feat netted him a place as the school’s first black
student. Robinson opened the Challenger Air Pilots’ Association, a black flying
club, and then an airfield for black pilots. As chronicled in Phillip Thomas
Tucker’s biography, Father of the Tuskegee Airmen, John C. Robinson, he later
convinced the Tuskegee Institute to open an aviation school, where he planned
to serve as an instructor.
However, the rapid escalation of the colonial wars in Africa upset those
plans. Committed to Pan-Africanism, obsessed with flight, and disgusted with
Europe’s abandonment of a fellow League of Nations member, John Robinson
gave up his career to answer emperor Haile Selassie’s call for skilled technicians.
“The League of Nations is just another White man’s bluff,” Robinson later wrote.
“White people will always stick together when it comes to the color question.” In
August, Selassie appointed Robinson head of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force.
His fleet consisted of eleven planes, and only eight of those were able to fly.
12 “[Robinson’s] flying ability has electrified the populace,” reported the New
York Times after he was appointed to the position, but the aviator was locked in a
battle with time. As he frantically drilled a tiny band of Ethiopian pilots,
Mussolini amassed three hundred thousand troops along the border. With
Ethiopia suffering from an arms embargo by Britain, Robinson repaired, begged,
and smuggled a dozen more planes into the country over the course of the war.
Ironically, Nazi Germany supplied some armaments to Selassie’s monarchy; they
wanted to distract Mussolini as they prepared for the Anschluss in Austria.
On September 28, the day Haile Selassie mobilized the country, Ethiopia had
13 planes to Italy’s 595, 4 tanks to Italy’s 795, and only enough rifles to arm half its
fighters. Ethiopia had no weapons factories, no one to grant it loans, and a League
of Nations rhetorically committed to its collective security that, in reality,
shrugged with contempt at the prospect of Ethiopia’s own Anschluss. Desperate,
Selassie gave the order: on pain of death, every woman without a baby, and every
man or boy old enough to hold a spear, must head to Addis Ababa.

Total-War Trial Run

On October 3, Italian warplanes began to bomb the small Ethiopian market town
of Adwa.
B
In that town, in 1896, Ethiopian emperor Menelik II had once decimated
A Italy’s invading army—but this time, Mussolini made no formal declaration of
F
F war. The Fascists announced their presence with carnage. Italian planes
L pummeled a hospital and strafed civilians while Ethiopian fighters futilely fired
E
R their rifles at the sky. “I saw a squad of soldiers standing in the street dumb-
 founded, looking at the airplanes. They had their swords raised in their
hands,” Robinson told a war correspondent after his narrow escape from Adwa.
The Fascists thrilled to their slaughter. “I expected huge explosions like the ones
you see in American films,” whined Vittorio Mussolini, one of the Fascist leader’s
sons who took part in the battle. “The little houses of the Abyssinians gave no
satisfaction to a bombardier.”
Two years before the Luftwaffe and the Aviazione Legionaria massacred up
to sixteen hundred Spanish villagers in Guernica, Italy unleashed total aerial
bombardment against civilians. In one span of thirty minutes, Italian planes
dropped a thousand bombs on Dessie, the northern city where Selassie had
moved his headquarters. Italy’s Regia
Aeronautica pounded Ethiopia without
If black Americans pause, in what Selassie called an attempt
to “exterminate man and beast.” Incen-
recognized the dangers
diary bombs razed villages and grazing
of fascism abroad early, cattle. Mustard gas fell from the sky in a
it was because they burning rain. Mustard gas, which sears
human skin into excruciating chemical
knew it all too well in its blisters, is banned by the Geneva Conven-
American guise. tions, but Spain had already used it
against Moroccan civilians during the Rif
rebellion in the 1920s, and in Ethiopia,
Italy deployed it even against Red Cross field hospitals. Firebombing, blitzkrieg,
lethal gas assaults on civilians: the tools Fascists tested against Africans would
soon be used, on an equally bloody scale, in Europe. 13
More anti-Fascist protests broke out in New York and Chicago. Police
dispersed a hundred female university students from a picket line in front of New
York’s Italian consulate. “Down with Italian Fascism!” they chanted. In Harlem,
police broke up a four-hundred-person demonstration they termed a riot, injuring
and arresting a protester who waved an Ethiopian flag. Organizations including
the Pan-African Reconstruction Association and the Negro World Alliance
recruited thousands of black men willing to fight. News footage from the time
shows a massive line of Harlem residents, elegantly dressed in suits and fedoras,
signing up as Ethiopian volunteers.
But thanks to diplomatic interference from Washington, their efforts were
for naught. Desperate to hew to the mid-thirties posture of neutrality before the
burgeoning Fascist threat, the U.S. government pressured Selassie to reject
potential volunteers, whom it then threatened with jail, fines, and loss of citizen-
ship. What’s more, due to the grim logic of institutional racism, many African
Americans simply lacked the financial means or bureaucratic documents to travel
to Ethiopia; in Mississippi, for instance, some black babies were not even granted
birth certificates.
Though they lacked planes, bombs, and sufficient bullets (many soldiers
received only sixty to last them the war), the Ethiopian army held off the Italians
for seven brutal months. In planes fit only for ferrying supplies, Robinson evaded
and sometimes battled sleek Italian warplanes as he transported critical provisions
S
and personnel. But ultimately, bravery is little match for gas and bombs. On April A
30, 1936, with the entire Ethiopian Air Force destroyed and the country days from L
V
surrender, Robinson took one of the last trains out of Addis Ababa. Beneath his O
Molly Crabapple
boots crunched leaflets demanding that government leaders in Addis Ababa
submit or see their capital city bombed to the ground.
Robinson’s lungs were damaged from three mustard gas attacks; his arm
bore the scars of Italian bullets. He was the only American who served through
the entire Italo-Ethiopian War. When Robinson’s boat docked in New York,
two thousand admirers greeted him as a hero.

Homefront Fascism
On June 30, 1936, emperor Haile Selassie stood before the League of Nations
and begged its member nations to end their appeasement of Fascism. “Today it
is us,” he supposedly said as he left the podium. “Tomorrow it will be you.”
Eighteen days later, Fascist generals launched a revolt against the elected
government of Spain.
There’s no need here to describe the details of the most mythologized war
in modern leftist history, except to note that of the ninety black Americans who
volunteered to defend the besieged Spanish Republic, many were veteran
activists for Ethiopia (a dynamic explored by Robin D. G. Kelley in Race Rebels:
Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class).
In his memoir, From Mississippi to Madrid, Abraham Lincoln Brigade driver
James Yates described passing out anti-war leaflets and collecting donations for
Ethiopian war survivors. “I was more than ready to go to Ethiopia,” he wrote. A
character in a short story by Lincoln Brigade veteran Oscar Hunter gave this
explanation for his decision to fight in Spain: “This ain’t Ethiopia but it’ll do.”
With fellow Harlem nurses, Salaria Kea raised funds for a seventy-five-bed field 15
hospital in Ethiopia, and then unsuccessfully applied to join the Ethiopian army.
The next year, she sailed for Spain as the only black woman in the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade. Oliver Law, perhaps the Brigade’s most celebrated member, led
the Chicago Communist Party’s “Hands off Ethiopia” campaign. As a black
Communist organizer, Law had been a frequent target of Chicago’s notoriously
brutal police force; in 1930, Chicago cops left him hospitalized after appre-
hending him during an unemployment protest he had organized. Police arrested
Law again weeks before he left for Spain—this time because he spoke at a
demonstration for Ethiopia. In Spain, Law rose to the rank of captain of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade—the first time a black American had ever commanded
a racially mixed unit. Days later, he bled to death on Mosquito Hill, mortally
wounded as he led a charge against Franco’s armies.
If black Americans recognized the dangers of Fascism abroad early, it was
because they knew it all too well in its American guise. They saw Mussolini’s
Blackshirts reflected in the white hoods of the Klan, and Hitler’s Jew-baiting
mirrored by the systematic violence of Jim Crow. While much of the world
slept, they fought Fascists in the streets of Jersey City, in the Ethiopian sky,
and in the dirt of the Jarama Valley.
Crawford Morgan, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, put it this way:
“Being aware of what the Fascist Italian government did to the Ethiopians, and
also the way that I and all the rest of the Negroes in this country have been treated
S
ever since slavery, I figured I had a pretty good idea of what fascism was. . . . I got a A
chance to fight it there with bullets and I went there and fought it with bullets. If I L
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get a chance to fight it with bullets again, I will fight it with bullets again.” O
Justin Francavilla
 Katherine Cross

The Art
of the Real
17

Disinformation vs. S
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democracy L
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 The concept of “the Big Lie”—a brazen
untruth pushed so relentlessly in mass
media that it’s eventually mistaken for
truth—is hardly novel. As is the case with
so many other wretched stratagems of
its ilk, capitalism got there first with the
PR technique known as FUD: fear,
uncertainty, and doubt. FUD campaigns
disseminate plausibly deniable asper-
sions on, say, the safety of a competitor’s
products. Such a tactic works because
18
the advent of mass media flooded public
discourse with info gluts, bubbles,
and echo chambers that can overload
a person’s capacity to sort fact from
fiction. Contrary to all the Luddite
wailing about our social media insu-
larity, biased news streams date back at
least to the storied yellow-journalism
career of William Randolph Hearst,
and have been a fixture of salons and
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coffeehouses since Gutenberg. After all,
there’s a reason some particularly
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venerable American newspapers are called the X Republican or Y Democrat.
So why has “post-truth” only now become the OED word of the year?
Without question, something has shifted in our ever more postmodern world.
What the KGB once called dezinformatsiya, and the Reagan administration
named “perception management,” has now come to dominate public life. Every-
where we turn in the aborning age of Trump, we see the deliberate spreading
of contradictory, misleading, and outright false “news.” The ceaseless fount of
counter-information creates a general climate of mass confusion, causing even
the most resolute auditors to doubt their senses.
This increasingly influential phenomenon is strangling both the internet and
liberal democracy. What separates our brave new world of counterfeit informa-
tion from the ideologically driven news outlets of the past, or even the late Cold
War propaganda initiatives mounted by the United States and the USSR, is that
this time, the Big Lies are bubbling up from grassroots internet cesspools—though
these are increasingly in cahoots with powerful moneyed interests.
Donald Trump stumbled down his golden escalator at a particularly conge-
nial historical moment. Fake news—the original, Facebook-enabled variety, not
the casual slur trotted out against the press on a near-daily basis by the Trump
White House—effectively dominated news cycles the week before Election
Day, steeped in the same ethos that innervated the alt-right Nazis: chan culture.
“Trolling” and online harassment campaigns rely on a brand of perception
management that would have made Reagan’s State Department proud: targeting
individuals or groups, causing them to doubt facts and reality, or even doubt their
senses, but leaving them in a constant state of unknowing terror. These tactics,
bred in a nihilistic and proudly apolitical world, were folded back into the realm 19
of activism, absorbed into right-wing media, and have now made their way into
the White House.

Just a Joke
“Emma, You Are Next,” blared the website’s URL. The website itself was a
simple affair: a poorly cut-and-pasted picture of Emma Watson, the 4chan
cloverleaf logo, and a clock counting down to the moment a batch of the
actress’s nude photos was to be released.
The threat came in the fall of 2014, part of a misogynistic campaign seeking
retaliation for Watson’s feminist speech at the United Nations that September—
an oration that generated tremendous positive publicity. The threat seemed
credible enough, coming as it did on the heels of a multiweek series of similar
celebrity nude-photo leaks revealed and promoted on the troll message board.
When the countdown clock ran out, however, it turned out to have been an
elaborate hoax. The site was replaced by a petition calling on President Obama
to “shut down 4chan,” but this was another “joke,” perpetrated by a group of
spammers. (Meanwhile, Watson was subjected to the successful 4chan leak of her
intimate photos this past March.)
The net effect was terror, confusion, and finally a cynical kind of detach-
ment. Don’t trust anything—especially on the internet, could well have been the
S
moral of the story for many puzzled onlookers. A
Around the same time, the online harassment campaign-cum-movement L
V
known as Gamergate got off the ground, providing a focus for angry videogamers O
 who wanted to purge their hobby playgrounds of unruly women, queers, people
of color, and feminists. Game developer Zoe Quinn and feminist critic Anita
Sarkeesian, among others, were forced to flee their homes after death threats
became ever more specific, complete with addresses, names of family members,
and clandestine photographs.
The odds of actually being murdered by someone who threatens your life
online are quite low, but who wants to take that chance? Is the man claiming to
be standing right outside your parents’ window—whose address he has helpfully
reminded you of—a fraud or for real? Is that a question you want to roll the dice on?
This is abuse, plain and simple. Part of the terror lies in the victims’ inability
to predict the future security of their intimate space, making them doubt their
senses and jump at every shadow, even if, objectively, they are never actually in
danger. This type of harassment is specifically designed to rob its targets of all
empirical certainty. Trapped within this cognitive netherworld, they can never
know whether a dead squirrel left in their mailbox is a juvenile prank or the
precursor to something much worse.
It’s useless to entertain the usual alibi offered by online harassers—that they
think of this abusive treatment as a “joke” they’d never dare take any further.
The fog of uncertainty surrounding such campaigns systematically denies
victims control over their own reality, forcing them to live with the terrifying
prospect of the worst-case scenario.
Meanwhile, outside observers, from the police to online bystanders, are
simply bewildered by the strange mix of sincerity and falsehood. It’s far easier
to detach and write it off as “just the internet being the internet” than to take it
20 seriously, lest you look like a fool when the next hoax comes along.
All of this is sometimes called trolling, though that’s a weak euphemism for
what is, functionally, stalking and abuse. Yet there’s a reason the term is employed
to provide cover for such aggression. Trolling involves the use of insincerity and
deception to get a rise out of someone; you troll by saying things you don’t believe
to people you know will be upset by them. It can be uproarious or nihilistically
abusive depending on what’s being said and done. You can mischievously troll by
posting about the superiority of airplanes on a train-fan messageboard, say.
Or more controversially, you might, as one famous 2006 4chan operation
did, invade a social game popular with children and flood it with profanity and
racism, supposedly in the name of fighting racism. Hearing that some moderators
in the game Habbo Hotel banned avatars with darker skin, 4chan invaded with
dozens of clones of the same suit-wearing black man with an afro. Then, they
stood in the shape of a swastika to anger the moderators—it was ironic, you see.

How the Net Was Won

We should not attribute power to the neo-Nazis on 4chan and Reddit’s r/The_
Donald that they don’t have. They did not create Trump or Trumpism; they didn’t
even create the “alt-right”—a long-held concept in far-right and white-nation-
B
alist circles that certainly predates their dabbling in the dregs of internet culture.
A Trumpism isn’t the unalloyed brainchild of a clutch of online harassers, but a
F
F postmodern twist on some rather venerable geopolitical tactics.
L The “troll” cultures of various online cesspools happen to fit very neatly into
E
R an old fascist propaganda technique that relies on producing an unstable reality for
 democratic subjects. The latter-day incarnation of 4chan, whose political arena is
dominated by the white-nationalist /pol/ board, merely adapts these potent fascist
tactics to the present circumstances. As Gabriella Coleman and her coauthors
have noted, 4chan never had any one ideology, instead spanning generations of
internet users and a wide variety of subcultures and attitudes that admitted both
left- and right-wing political adapta-
tions of 4chan’s online folkways. But a
Trolling happens to fit particular reactionary strain has proven
exceptionally influential. It developed
very neatly into an old fascist
over the course of several years, mani-
propaganda technique festing in forces like Gamergate and the
that relies on producing Twitter/Reddit wing of the white-na-
tionalist alt-right, and has increasingly
an unstable reality been co-opted by institutional powers
for democratic subjects. across the globe. From the Republican
Party to the Russian government to
Marine Le Pen’s National Front, a host
of canny political opportunists have seized on a battery of online reality-destabi-
lizing techniques that can help sow the fear and confusion necessary to systemati-
cally undermine mass faith in pluralist, liberal democracy.
This process hinges on what trolls do best: saying and doing things to upset
people because it seems funny. As it spread across the 4chan world and beyond,
this trolling alibi of first resort soon became a rhetorical end in itself—until,
suddenly, it wasn’t. It had become abruptly and firmly aligned with a reinvigo-
rated, fascistic far right. 21
After a few initial experiments in message-distorting trolling (including
some left-leaning offshoot groups like Anonymous), 4chan’s nihilism became
all-consuming. The channers shifted from merely mocking the sincere world
to wanting to bring it to heel. And the dominant theme of their actions was
to torment those “snowflakes” they see as too naive to grasp the Hobbesian
truth: the gospel of the selfish, brutish übermensch who can be hurt by nothing.
Trolling posts from the openly Nazi /pol/ board gave it all a nakedly fascist spin,
and much of the site became a self-reinforcing message board for what’s now
misleadingly euphemized as the alt-right.
Sowing doubt and chaos for the purposes of anti-feminism and naked racism
became the order of the day; the idea, as in other unruly reaches of the newly
militant white-nationalist right, was to stick it to the arbiters of “political correct-
ness.” 4channers made hundreds of fake social media accounts, posing mostly
as black feminists, attempting to create hyperbolic, extremist personas (like
people who would say it’s impossible for white women to be raped and that it’s
somehow “racist” to suggest otherwise) to discredit black feminists in the eyes
of a white liberal audience.
Many black women on Twitter rallied to humiliate the channers with the
#YourSlipIsShowing hashtag, “outing” the fakes with almost perfect reliability
and in many cases exposing how bad their “disguises” were. If nothing else, such
concerted exposure campaigns provide a model for resistance going forward.
S
They focus on truth, and are wise to the weak spots in progressive movements A
that chan-style trolling might exploit (in this case, the willingness of many L
V
white feminists to believe that the intersectional demands of women of color O
 Justin Francavilla

22 are “toxic” or “divisive”). Public exposure campaigns like #YourSlipIsShowing

turn the viral internet against reactionary harassers, making a meme of their
humiliation and exposing their fragility. This is crucial, since in this case—as with
the many sock puppets posing as women and people of color in the Gamergate
movement to lend it a patina of diversity—the larger point was to sow disinforma-
tion that would cause the left to break ranks. Thus exposed, the trollers’ ability to
distort reality is severely curbed.

Nothing Really Matters

Where does Russia fit into all this? British documentarian Adam Curtis neatly
summarizes the matter in a short film he made for the BBC a few years ago about
how an avant-garde artist, Vladislav Surkov, became an influential figure in Vlad-
imir Putin’s administration. Surkov showed how the same kind of weaponized
propaganda that overtook the message boards of 4chan can work on a geopolitical
scale: if you can make the news a baffling spectacle from whence no truth can be
gleaned, then your political opponents are stymied and the public becomes docile.
This vision of “non-linear warfare” is postmodernist theory made bullet-rid-
dled flesh. All signification floats on an endless sea of doubt and uncertainty.
There is no capital-t Truth to be found. As journalist Peter Pomerantsev put it,
B
this is “a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than
A the twentieth-century strains.” Its chief strength lies in what he calls its “strategy
F
F of power,” based on “keeping any opposition . . . constantly confused, a ceaseless
L shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.”
E
R Visceral terror and a growing propensity to doubt the evidence of one’s
senses—the reliable cognitive legacies of reactionary Twitter mobs and 4chan-
style harassers—are of a piece with the existential doubt that is ubiquitous in,
say, Ukraine, or among Russia’s ethnic minorities. How much of this horror
is real? Which threats are empty and which will effectively redraw the map of
the world tomorrow? What do you protest against when so much is shadow
puppetry? Is the guy commenting on this news article a concerned citizen or
a government plant? Who can say? The Russian government, after using this
tactic to great effect in Ukraine, imported it to the United States for revealingly
selective use in Campaign 2016.
What has changed is that this culture of disinformation, which was histori-
cally the province of governments, is now a mode of extremist resistance coming
up from the rancid grassroots of the internet’s hate communities. Spreading lies,
pretending to be people you’re not (sock-puppeting), “concern trolling,” masking
bigoted abuse with irony, digital hoaxes—it all overstimulates the audience’s
critical faculties and short-circuits democratic machinery.
As The New Yorker’s Adrian Chen put it when he researched Russian trolls
this past summer, “The real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to
brainwash readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content,
seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet
as a democratic space.” Again: fear, uncertainty, doubt.
It’s fitting that in the world of contemporary art, a videogame should present
us with a most apposite insight. Funcom’s videogame The Secret World, set in a
contemporary universe where all our legends and crackpot theories are actu-
ally true, features the Illuminati in all their conspiratorial splendor. One of their
leaders, a sharply dressed businesswoman named Kirsten Geary, gives a speech 23
that might seem familiar to the redditors and channers in her audience:

Stealth is not about hiding; it’s about inundating. We leak the truth.
Then we leak whole zettabytes of other junk. Opposing data. Similar
data. Nonsense data. Ad nauseam. Mesmerism by cat memes.
Hypnotized. Apathy for the win. The human brain has only so much
bandwidth. Critical thought can actually O.D. on input. Bury the ulti-
mate secret of the universe in the shallow grave of the fifth page of a
Google search, and no one would ever find it. Cover-ups are so passé.

At the moment, this is our world. To say that the problem with our media
landscape stems from the “echo chamber” format or even the proliferation
of “fake news” is, at the very best, only dimly right. The issue is far larger:
this widespread, crowdsourced irony corrupts even alternative news sources,
the things we turn to in order to puncture information bubbles or escape echo
chambers. What’s more, this new brand of dezinformatsiya jams the lines; there
are only so many hours in a day, so many journalists, so many fact-checkers,
to correct lies and promulgate the truth—and when so many of the attempts
to correct lies end up amplifying them, with mute chyrons in the background
of the world’s airports spelling out outrageous lie after outrageous lie, even
attempts to undo the damage can deepen it.
S
It’s becoming increasingly acceptable to give up on the truth altogether, to hide A
sincerity behind mass-produced Guy Fawkes masks of irony. Accommodating this L
V
in a liberal democracy, or in a free press, where exchanges of ideas are seen as vital, O
 is like admitting a virus to the very heart of our system. Even news sources that
purport to represent multiple points of view allow their deference to “fairness” to
admit outright lies and Surkovian confusion into discussions, inevitably poisoning
and rendering them useless.
In just one of the cases in which Republicans have repurposed 4chan troll
techniques, Donald Trump’s baseless tweeted claims that President Obama
had illegally conducted wiretap surveillance of the Trump campaign prior to
the 2016 election actually prompted a House Intelligence Committee hearing.
The resulting stout denials of such claims from FBI director James Comey and
others only prompted another round of Trump-orchestrated claims that the
“deep state” is arrayed against the president, and that the media is amplifying
“dishonest” tropes, underlining the White House’s own fathomlessly cynical
untruthfulness. Indeed, the president implausibly sought to troll the panel’s
hearings via his Twitter account, misrepresenting Comey’s testimony as proof
that no Russian interference in the presidential campaign occurred.
Thus the legislative branch’s critical role in executive-branch oversight
is downgraded to the rough equivalent of a hapless forum moderator, lamely
seeking to establish the durable truth value in a relentless blizzard of perception
management, info-terror, and plausible deniability. Chalk it all up to one more
victory for the moment’s Big Lie.
The spectacle of the views of reality-destabilizing trolls being entertained
as even quasi-legitimate is enough to weaken a system that operates on a basic
presumption of good faith. And in excruciating, inch-by-inch fashion, we’re
now seeing that spectacle undermine the instruments of democratic gover-
24 nance itself.

A Post-Truth Presidency
One might suggest that Trump is sincere in his incompetence—that he’s a
hyper-sensitive political naïf whose outbursts honestly reflect his mercurial
emotions. This, one might think, is actually cause for comfort. Maybe he isn’t the
evil psy-ops mastermind envisioned by all those pundits like Jack Shafer, who
accused us of falling for Trump’s tricks when we paid attention to his immature
attacks on the cast of Hamilton. Perhaps, just perhaps, he’s a whining baby rather
than a maestro of disinformation.
But here’s the hard truth: it doesn’t matter. I personally believe that Trump’s
antics have no rhyme or reason beyond ego. But whether he’s a master of distrac-
tion or an overgrown, spoiled brat makes no difference. In either scenario, the
effect—the indiscriminate spread of informational chaos—is the same.
Trump happened to come to prominence at a political moment when his
particular brand of self-important, hyper-fragile whining would be a neat fit for a
hyper-mediated political world where nothing seemed real. His sincerely capri-
cious whims—being for a policy one moment and against it the next, or speaking
off the cuff about a major proposal he’s thought very little about, and then never
B
bringing it up again—match the intentional cunning behind Putin-esque dezin-
A formatsiya. Each has the effect of throwing traditional predictive models and
F
F punditry into chaos. “No one knows what he’s going to do next!” is the baffled
L rallying cry of this world. Many are horrified, others enticed.
E
R Trump inadvertently feeds it, just by being himself: “I’ll keep you in
 suspense.” “I am the only one who knows who the finalists are.” Or in the way he
lies about his own statements: “I never said that!” The contradictions that emerge
from this morass serve much the same function as those that guide the more
deliberate disinformation campaigns mounted by a strategic genius. Trump’s
haphazard, reality-deranging pronouncements massage the truth out of all opera-
tional existence, just as the skilled authors of narrowly targeted agitprop might.
The discursive world that Trump inhabits is like a ruined theme park,
where desolation has turned the bright colors of entertainment into something
profoundly unsettling. He retains all the trappings of the clown he’s always been,
but as president they bestow on him the power to haunt. Think of it as a uniquely
authoritarian horror film: Family Guy meets The Purge.
No one knows quite what to believe, all interlocutors can find evidence for
their own interpretation of events (especially those who desperately need to
believe that Trump isn’t an autocratic dictator on the rise), and some people may
just tune out because they believe there’s no truth to be found. Many ordinary citi-
zens could be forgiven for thinking that their senses should no longer be trusted.

Nothing Left to Ironize

It may be tempting to think that these tools—irony, disinformation, trolling—can
be reclaimed for the left in some fashion. But their political use inherently favors
the status quo. Detached, nihilistic irreverence, à la South Park, tends to harm the
powerless as a rule. The cynicism it inculcates and the unseriousness it demands
are unequal to the task of changing the world for the better. But it’s the ideal gear
for preserving the status quo, or promoting a kind of traditionalism that venerates 25
the status quo’s latent bigotries. To change the world for the better, you have to
care unironically; to help others, you
must take their plight seriously. Troll
Is the man claiming culture lends itself to neither aim.
To detach is simply to allow
to be standing right outside
the world to go on as it has been.
your parents’ window— To seize it for political purposes,
whose address he has à la Gamergate or the neo-Nazis
who’ve rebranded themselves as
helpfully reminded you of— the “alt-right,” is to play into the
a fraud or for real? conservative bias of any society. The
destabilizing thrust of postmodernity
is actually beneficial to conservative
interests, which rely on the plausible deniability of prejudice while polluting
any clear definition of concepts like “racism” or “sexism.” How many times
have we heard something to the effect of “But why is that word racist? It could
mean anything! You have to stop letting it have power over you.” This is indeed
a discursive universe of floating signifiers.
The culture-jamming at work here is ill-suited to progressive ends, which
tend to require a certain amount of moral clarity to ignite the flame of resistance.
What’s more, the destabilization of reality is particularly dangerous for move-
S
ments organizing against powerful institutional headwinds. It’s bad enough to A
have to fight the police, the government, traditionalism, and big business; to L
V
“fight fire with fire,” we would have to surrender even the power of clear goals O
 and ideals. No, there’s no effective way to counter-troll our way out of this mess.
It would demand we be unserious about precisely the things we must treat with
reverential seriousness.
The net effect of Trumpian/chan troll culture is to make democracy
impossible. If no one can agree on the truth, and if there’s social pressure to
appear too cool to care, good work can’t be done. Reform demands a certain
earnestness, after all—if only to sustain the belief that things can change. Troll
culture, regardless of whether it’s branded right- or left-leaning, ultimately
dissolves into a bewildering array of postures and ironic affects; good for
incisive mockery, but not for improving our condition. It’s useful for crowd-
sourcing the kind of animosity that’s sparked countless hate crimes across
the United States since Trump’s election; its shape-shifting meanings, written
into executive orders, are good for inciting immigration officers to unleash their
implicit biases at border crossings. But because liberationist politics is based on
an ethic of care, the outrage that trolling provokes is of only marginal use.
The larger logic of counter-trolling runs counter to the demands of
movement-building. Our politics demands that we build something as well as
diminish the opposition’s social-media brands. That requires unironic action,
not just posturing and memes.

Joke’s on You
Fighting our way out of this morass will require greater, not diminished, moral
clarity. It will mean refusing to speak on the new right’s terms (for instance,
26 by appending Nazi to “alt-right,” as I have, to better reflect the truth) and
refusing to give “equal time” to lies or treat concerted disinformation as “just
another opinion.”
It will also mean refusing to accept the purported logic of “trolling.” After
a backlash to his Nazi conference in Washington, D.C., Richard Spencer told
journalists that the Sieg Heils and Nazi salutes at the conference were done in
a “spirit of irony and exuberance.” This excuse is a match for former Breitbart
editor and Nazi-apologist Milo Yiannopoulos’s insistence that the obvious racism
of the “alt-right” is actually just the ironized jouissance of youngsters who wish
to offend their parents’ “PC” sensibilities. Another Breitbart writer, John Binder,
reinforced this bankrupt reasoning by mocking the media for getting “trolled” by
the conference. Questioning the humanity of Jews, calling white people “children
of the sun,” dubbing the press the Nazi epithet “lügenpresse,” performing the
Nazi salute—all just an edgy joke, and you fell for it. Lulz.
Don’t believe this. Take these people at their word, and do not allow them
to use the power of hateful signs while claiming that they somehow mean
something else. You must resist the temptation to give in to this cultural confu-
sion, which is devised only to allow Hitlerian extremism back into the main-
stream while masking it as indefinable performance art.
This exact stratagem duped New York Times public editor Liz Spayd into
B
rebuking journalist Sopan Deb for posting a harmless tweet referencing the
A parody site “Breitbark News”—provoking arch Nazi-alt-right and Gamergate/
F
F Pizzagate troll Mike Cernovich to mobilize his vast online following to, as
L he put it, “let human trafficking orgs”—and of course Spayd—“know that @
E
R SopanDeb and NYTimes think slavery is hilarious.” Sure enough, Spayd took
the bait and swallowed it whole—without once referencing the Cernovich
trolling offensive, nor the hypocrisy of such charges coming from a Nazi-adja-
cent figure who once wrote, “Have you guys ever tried ‘raping’ a girl without
using force? Try it. It’s basically impossible. Date rape does not exist.”
Reactionary trolls simply feign moral outrage in order to trouble the
lives of their targets, cause chaos, and create busywork for their opponents.
Nothing more or less.
Having a spine at this moment means pushing vigorously back against
the vicious undertow of the trolling world. We must resist the temptation to
compromise with—or accept the terms of engagement set by—the political
equivalent of flat-earthers. Half of a falsehood is still a falsehood, and helps
no one. We must likewise resist the temptation of glib rhetorical solutions like
blaming “identity politics,” when what we’re confronting is a rightist blizzard of
lies whose motivations and justifications change with transparent expediency.
For all the uncertainty of our time, for all its postmodernist chicanery and
misdirection, hard truth will endure. People can let themselves see whatever
they like in Trump, since his bewildering array of public utterances can admit
any number of plausible interpretations if you stare long enough. But policies
will be enacted whose effects are decidedly concrete, and we must be ready. The
rapid response to Trump’s inaugural Muslim ban is a heartening model: activists,
lawyers, and local governments immediately pierced the chameleon rhetoric of
the administration and stood to fight the practical effects of the ban, refusing to
dive into Trump’s discursive whirlpool.
The only hope now is to build on that clarity, to define the truth by the lived
realities of those hurt by this administration. That truth is the new political story 27
we must tell to replace the supine politics of our recent history. That, right now, is
our best hope. As what’s left of society threatens to collapse around us, we must
realize that we cannot live on irony alone.

S
A
L
V
Leigh Guldig O
Daniel Zender
 Adele M. Stan

What We Do
Is Secret
Trumpism as a private-capital scam

29
the saying goes. The adage implies that money acquired by
M O N E Y I S M O N E Y,
various means all has the same value: a dollar is a dollar is a dollar. But some
dollars are different, because of how their owners obtain them and move them
about. These are the dark dollars of private companies, dollars slithery in their
expert avoidance of taxes, their paths rendered invisible by the absence of
footprints.
Critics of the Trump White House point to the obscene levels of wealth that
you find among the inner circle of President Trump’s appointees and associates.
Just as striking, though, is the provenance of all this loose cash: Trump’s trusted
advisers have come into much of this wealth through private companies, whose
financial balance sheets and so much more are shielded from public view. At least
ten of Trump’s close political associates, including some of his cabinet picks, hail
from the carefully shrouded world of private capital.
Private companies play by a different set of rules than those governing firms
that trade their shares on stock exchanges. Unlike their publicly traded counter-
parts, private companies don’t have to worry about facing irate shareholders.
That’s because a private company’s principals have chosen those shareholders,
who are often drawn from a founder’s family. No proxy fights or hostile takeovers
to worry about; no bending to the will of big institutional investors.
This is not to say that there are no big donors to Democrats who don’t also
get their dough from private companies. For example, Democrats have long
S
enjoyed the largesse of the Pritzker family, who took their Hyatt Corporation A
public only in 2009. Until then, it was a closely held private company. But no L
V
Democratic administration was ever dominated by the owners of privately held O
 entities, and no administration of either party has ever represented so much
wealth derived from such secretive entities.
Little in the way of financial disclosure is required of privately held compa-
nies. When it comes to financial regulation, these companies reap the benefit of
the government’s failure to call them to account. The same is true of private
companies as large as the Koch Industries conglomerate or as adorably tiny as a
startup founded by a lone millennial in a stocking cap.

Sanctums of Privilege
This is not a screed against private companies. As a red-blooded American, I revel
in tales of heroic entrepreneurship—of hatched-in-the-garage ideas that yield
their underdog executors an unlikely pot of gold. This is, rather, a scream, the
wail of a blues tune sung to my fellow red-blooded Americans: Your government is
in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody! And you
can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:
using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to
virtually no one.
These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and
self-dealing. They are also people who have convinced themselves that the
accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large. They like to think
of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy.
Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need
not show us the methods by which they perform their magic. And indeed we do
30 all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot
mansion (with a 6,200-square-foot guest house) that serves as the home address
of secretary of education Betsy DeVos, or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator
inside) owned by Robert Mercer, the Trump donor and patron of chief White
House strategist Stephen K. Bannon. (Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, is said to
have great influence in the West Wing.)
The source of Mercer’s wealth is Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately
owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor, which was built by scientists who
learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of
data in order to generate profitable financial trades. After Renaissance founder and
math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political
action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s
chairman, Mercer became co-CEO with Peter Brown, his longtime research partner.
At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no
sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare
kind of casino—one that moves billions of dollars around the world. Thick
plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from
the public side of the security gate.
Renaissance is spectacularly successful—Investopedia named Renaissance
Institutional Equities, the LLC’s largest entity, the top-performing hedge fund of
B
2016, after it yielded investors a return of 20 percent for the year. Mercer’s genius
A as a data and systems geek is part of the super-secret sauce of this “quant fund”
F
F that turned other people’s assets-minus-liabilities into riches for his investors. It’s
L like a very complicated version of counting cards at the blackjack table. But the
E
R best-performing fund at Renaissance is one that only its employees can join—and
 indeed they must in order to actualize their full compensation package.
Bloomberg’s Katherine Burton described the employee-only Medallion fund as
“finance’s blackest box.”
The wealth of Betsy DeVos, by contrast, comes from a simpler operation: the
marketing of what some have called a pyramid scheme that goes by the brand
name Amway. Founded by her father-in-law in 1959, Amway distributes home
products like dish soap and cosmetics through a network of home-based sellers
who are pressured to recruit more
sellers in order to earn a bonus on the
Your government is in the amount of product the distributor
hands of super-rich people would then sell wholesale to the
recruit. That recruit would also be a
who never had to show distributor, looking for recruits of his
anything to anybody! or her own, in order to sell more
products wholesale in order to get that
bonus. Note the emphasis on recruit-
ment and bonuses rather than the direct-selling to retail customers, who, in the
end, were the ones for whom Amway products were ostensibly intended.
In the business press, Amway is often described as a “multilevel marketing
company.” In the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission described its business
model as an “inherent fraud,” as historian Rick Perlstein reported in The Nation,
and tried to shut the company down. The FTC failed in that effort, but did issue
orders in 1979 slapping Amway for price-fixing and misrepresenting the kind of
money distributors could expect to make. In fact, Amway was made to tell
distributors that they could wind up losing money. 31
Three decades later, in 2010, a class action lawsuit by former sellers (um,
“distributors”) alleging Amway’s engagement in an “illegal scheme” was settled
out of court. According to USA Today,

Amway agreed to pay $55 million to former distributors, closely

oversee high-level distributors who run training businesses,
strengthen refund policies and make other changes estimated to
cost an additional $100 million.

In Forbes’ 2016 listing of “America’s Largest Private Companies,” Amway

clocks in at number twenty-nine.
The education secretary, née Elisabeth Prince, did not come into the DeVos
family empty-handed. Her own family of origin, while not as wealthy as her
husband’s, was quite well-to-do through her father’s enterprise, Prince
Corporation, itself a privately held company until Johnson Controls bought it for
$1.3 billion in cash in 1996. Founder Edgar Prince, seeking to change the political
culture to more closely resemble his own heartless Calvinism, donated,
according to Zack Stanton of Politico, “millions in seed funding to launch the
Family Research Council,” the right-wing organization that represents and
organizes politically conservative evangelical Christians, and was famously
designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
S
Prince’s son, Erik, used his windfall to found Blackwater, the military contractor A
that went on to infamy when, in 2007, its mercenaries gunned down civilians in a L
V
Baghdad city square. Four Blackwater contractors were convicted in 2014 of O
 killing fourteen unarmed Iraqis “in what prosecutors called a wartime atrocity,”
according to the New York Times. Blackwater, since sold and renamed Academi,
was also privately held. It enjoyed more than $1 billion in government contracts.
In 2010, according to the Washington Post, Prince moved to the United Arab
Emirates “amid mounting legal problems for his American business.”

You Get What You Pay For

Both the Mercers and the DeVoses pour millions into the political system.
According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Robert Mercer “gave $22.5 million in
disclosed donations to Republican candidates and to political-action commit-
tees” to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. And that doesn’t
include possible donations to nonprofit advocacy groups, now allowed, since the
2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, to conduct advertising for
and against political candidates. But unlike PACs, these nonprofits—classified as
“social welfare” groups—are not required to disclose their donors.
Politico’s Stanton reports that Betsy and Dick DeVos pretty much own
Michigan politics, having spent “at least $100 million on political campaigns and
causes over the past 20 years.” The DeVoses used political giving and influence to
cut funding to public schools and pave the way for a large influx of charter schools,
and to see Michigan, home to the once-mighty United Auto Workers, turned into a
so-called right-to-work state, an anti-union designation that translates into greater
workplace control for business bosses, but few rights for the bossed.
Different though they be, the Mercers and the DeVoses share another common
32 trait: both families are part of the right-wing political donor network built by
Charles and David Koch, principals in Koch Industries, the second-largest privately
held company in the United States, according to Forbes. Yet each power-donor
family has also built its own assemblage of political organizations and entities. Most
of these are nonprofit organizations, but
a few, such as the Koch-controlled data
One needn’t be an ardent firm i360—a platform for collecting and
conspiracy theorist to behold processing voter data that is poised to
gain operational control over the
the larger currents of Republican Party—are privately held,
moneyed impunity directing for-profit companies.
This makes the Kochs much more
American affairs of state than an outsize example of the
in the Trump era. destructive force of “corporate money”
in the political system; rather, their
efforts exemplify the rapid cartelization
of our public life under a network of private wealth. The Koch donor network is, by
and large, a confluence of capital collected by privately held companies.
In essence, the money that flows through the Koch network of interlocking
political entities isn’t just “dark money”—it’s money double-dipped in darkness,
B
first through the rules governing the companies from whence it came, and again
A as it flows into a political system clogged with equally opaque nonprofit political
F
F operations that exist outside of the political party structure.
L Mercer money is often double-dark, as well. It’s said that the father-and-
E
R daughter team would like to build a constellation of their own institutions to
challenge the Kochs’ sprawling collection of nonprofit think tanks, advocacy
groups, and the occasional for-profit political venture. Witness Robert Mercer’s
investment in a for-profit voter data startup that the Ted Cruz campaign subcon-
tracted to use in the 2016 election cycle. (Both Mercers backed Cruz during the
GOP primary.)
Since Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election, the Mercers have drifted ever
further out of the orbit of Planet Koch, building up their own entities, including
Breitbart News, Cambridge Analytica (the data startup), and the ironically
named Government Accountability Institute, all of them featuring Steve
Bannon, the self-described economic nationalist, in top slots—until he joined
the White House. Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon served, and
Breitbart, where he was the chief executive, are private companies. GAI, which
produced the campaign-season book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and
Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by
Peter Schweizer, is a nonprofit organization.
Schweizer’s book, together with an accompanying movie executive-pro-
duced by Rebekah Mercer, was designed to sully the reputation of Democratic
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. It was part of a Bannon-crafted strategy
to steer the sort of smears that usually bubble up from the right-wing fever
swamps directly into the mainstream media. It worked; in 2015 the New York
Times and the Washington Post both made exclusive agreements with the GAI to
report on advance excerpts of Clinton Cash.
Bannon was wealthy before he met up with the Mercers, first through his
work as a banker for Goldman Sachs back when it was a privately held company,
and then through his own privately held ventures in movie-making and 33
consulting. Though Bannon’s wealth, when compared to that of Betsy DeVos,
makes him a pipsqueak in the Trump money universe (assets worth between $12
million and $54 million, according to the New York Times), it nonetheless derives
primarily from privately held entities.
Others in the Trump inner circle who made their fortunes via privately held
ventures include treasury secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, who got a great deal
during the financial crisis on IndyMac, a mortgage lending bank, thanks to our
government’s penchant for the socialization of risk and privatization of profit
when entities considered “too big to fail” go into a state of distress. Mnuchin and
his fellow investors, a group that included liberal donor and hedge-fund honcho
George Soros, changed the company name to OneWest and began to aggressively
foreclose on homeowners. The bank earned Mnuchin and his partners a profit of
$1.6 billion in its first year of operation, even as the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation was preparing to take a hit of nearly $11 billion “on bad loans that the
Pasadena institution made before it was sold last March and renamed OneWest
Bank,” according to E. Scott Reckard of the Los Angeles Times.
Then there’s commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, worth $2.5 billion according
to Forbes, who started a second career in 2000 with the creation of his epony-
mous investment company, which he later sold to Invesco for a reported $375
million. Reed Cordish, special assistant to the president for intragovernmental
and technology initiatives, is a scion of the family that owns privately held
S
Cordish Companies, involved in gaming and entertainment. He’s said to be tight A
with Jared Kushner. Sonny Perdue, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, founded the L
V
private company Perdue Inc., a trucking outfit, with his wife, Mary, who was O
 reported in 2005 to be the company’s sole shareholder. (An official at Perdue Inc.
declined to confirm to The Baffler whether this is still the case.)
And, while not a rich guy himself, CIA director Mike Pompeo founded a
private company called Thayer Aerospace in the late 1990s with help from Koch
Venture Capital, an arm of Koch Industries. A Pompeo aide told the Washington
Post that the Koch investment amounted to only 2 percent, but there’s no way to
really know, since the transaction took place between two privately held compa-
nies. He later became president of Sentry International, another private company,
before his 2010 run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he won,
again with an assist from the Koch brothers. He’s also a climate-change denier—an
appealing trait in a public official if you’re a fossil fuels magnate looking to buy one.

Island Getaways
You may note that I have, so far, avoided examination of private-company
holdings of the president and his family, because any such attempt would cause a
great pain in my head. Consider this thicket of companies and partnerships and
shell companies for tax avoidance described by Wall Street Journal reporters Jean
Eaglesham, Mark Maremont, and Lisa Schwartz in a December 8 article:

President-elect Donald Trump owns a helicopter in Scotland.

To be more precise, he has a revocable trust that owns 99% of a

Delaware limited liability company that owns 99% of another
34 Delaware LLC that owns a Scottish limited company that owns
another Scottish company that owns the 26-year-old Sikorsky S-76B
helicopter, emblazoned with a red “TRUMP” on the side of its
fuselage.

Nearly all of Trump’s assets, they write, are encased in similar webs comprising
Trump’s many privately held entities.
So-called shell companies, such as Trump’s Delaware LLCs, exist for no other
reason than the receipt and movement of money; both publicly traded and privately
held companies make free use of such protections, but when used by private entities,
the effect is not simply to avoid taxes, but to obscure the sources of capital used by a
company that is already exempt from making the most basic disclosures.
Similarly, the foreign countries supplying the corporate nameplates for
U.S.-based firms seeking tax inversions grant wide latitude to private firms
seeking optimal business environments. Or you can stay closer to home:
Delaware, Nebraska, and Wyoming are likewise regarded as “secrecy jurisdic-
tions”—i.e., states that will ask no questions about the source of a company’s
money or who its owner is. The FACT Coalition, a watchdog group, contends that
because of the financial secrecy laws in these states, the United States is now “the
second easiest place in the world—after Kenya—for a criminal or terrorist to open
B
an anonymous shell company to launder their money.” It’s easier to set up a shell
A company in some jurisdictions here, U.S. senator Sheldon Whitehouse says, than
F
F getting a library card: “A library may actually require you to show up in person
L and sign for your card.”
E
R Secrecy begets secrecy. In January, a very special two-day meeting was set up
 by officials of the United Arab Emirates between a Russian contact said to be
close to Vladimir Putin and Erik Prince, who was reportedly acting as “an
unofficial envoy” for Trump, in the Seychelles Islands, another “secrecy jurisdic-
tion”—and one in which the UAE wields a great deal of influence. (A spokes-
person for Prince denied that he acted on Trump’s behalf, and White House press
secretary Sean Spicer said that Prince had nothing to do with the Trump transi-
tion team.) The Washington Post reports that the meeting took place about ten
days before Trump’s inauguration. Prince was a big donor to the Trump
campaign, coughing up $250,000 for pro-Trump organizations during the
election—among them a political action committee helmed by Rebekah Mercer.
In keeping with its role as a hider of rich people’s money, Barry Faure, the
Seychelles secretary of state for foreign affairs, told the Post that it’s a great place
to have a secret assignation away from the media’s prying eyes; in fact, it’s a
selling point in the tourist board’s promotional materials, he said.

Calamities of Exile
One needn’t be an ardent conspiracy theorist to behold the larger currents of
moneyed impunity directing American affairs of state in the Trump era. The
underlying dynamic is simple: when the state does so little to regulate the flows of
capital, they are encouraged to flow into relationships with people in bad places, or
simply into bad relationships with people in countries other than the United States. If
you maintain your business and lifestyle through these kinds of arrangements and
you’re the president of the United States, you may find yourself someday doing
diplomacy with a government that is also a 35
business partner. And the great part is, the
You can bet they plan to American people may never know for sure.
So say, just for example, you’re doing
run the country the
business with oligarchs from Russia.
same way they have run Nobody gets to be an oligarch without the
their companies: using blessing of Putin, who controls virtually
the entire apparatus of the Russian state,
shell games and including who reaps the wealth of
pyramid schemes, fraud companies either formerly or presently
and shakedown. owned by the state. This is the reason
some are beginning to suggest—though
we may never know with certainty—that
the Trump Organization may function as a money laundering organization for
Russian oligarchs and organized crime figures, as well as agents of corruption
elsewhere in the world.
Just imagine that ethos applied to a $1 trillion government infrastructure
project such as that proposed by Trump as a “public-private partnership.”
Somebody, you can bet, is going to get rich on that, and it won’t be you.
And we know that the privately held companies of the Trump Organization,
from which the president has not removed himself, do business all over the world,
as do the businesses held by the president’s daughter and son-in-law. Jared Kushner
S
presides over his own family’s privately held real estate empire, drawing in capital A
from entities in places as far flung as Israel, Germany, and France. Just a week after L
V
the election, Kushner was in talks with the Chinese conglomerate Anbang O
 regarding a potential deal for a redevelopment of Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue
building in New York. (The talks broke off without a deal in March, when oppo-
nents challenged the ethics of the union.)
Describing the Kushner Companies’ investments in a January 7 story
about the Anbang talks, New York Times reporters Susanne Craig, Jo Beck-
er, and Jesse Drucker wrote that the developer “has participated in roughly $7
billion in acquisitions in the last
decade, many of them backed by
The money that flows opaque foreign money.”
On April 26, the Times’ Drucker
through the Koch network
reported on Kushner’s investment
of interlocking political partnership with Raz Steinmetz,
entities isn’t just “dark nephew of Beny Steinmetz, who is
under investigation by four govern-
money”—it’s money ments—including the U.S. Department
double-dipped in darkness. of Justice—for allegedly bribing the
wife of Guinea’s then-dictator for a
piece of an iron ore mine. Together
with Raz Steinmetz, in 2012, Kushner’s company spent about $188 million for
apartment buildings in Manhattan and New Jersey. Writes Drucker:

The deals came amid an unprecedented flow of overseas cash into

American properties, much of it through opaque corporations and
limited liability companies that make the funds difficult to trace.
36
The giant world-economy private-company scam that enables characters
such as Trump and Kushner is not simply a game that the principals play for their
personal benefit. It is, rather, a transnational syndicate that continually leverages
the opaque capital flowing from authoritarian state actors, with the potential for
laundering that money through legal shell companies and leveraging it back. This
system effectively overweights the value of dollars gleaned in this way, as
opposed to those earned, borrowed, and spent through the means that publicly
traded companies typically employ.

Shell Games
Rarely do private companies find themselves punished for using shell companies
to move capital and avoid taxes. The fine accountants at Ernst & Young cooked
up a complicated scheme in 2008 for a restructuring of Koch Industries via shell
entities in Luxembourg, a notorious tax haven, with the reasonable expectation
that the ruse would never be revealed. But then someone leaked a raft of private
documents from Mossack Fonseca, a law firm in Panama that specializes in the
creation of shell companies. The info dump became known as the Panama
Papers, and among its many revelations was Koch Industries’ bid to reinvent
B
parts of the company, on paper, as tax-avoidant Luxembourg shell companies.
A According to the Center for Public Integrity, the essence of the Koch Industries
F
F deal was to “reorder the ownership of many subsidiaries and centralize them
L under Luxembourg companies that are all served by internal corporate finance
E
R companies, akin to a company’s own bank.”
 Maybe that’s where the Koch siblings got the idea to get behind
DonorsTrust—a sort of house bank for the array of political entities and think
tanks they fund. Of course, as with all of the organizations funded by Koch,
they’re not in it alone. Betsy and Dick DeVos helped fund DonorsTrust, according
to Mother Jones.
And then there are the many Koch-network “pass-through” groups, such as
Freedom Partners and the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which function much
the way that shell companies do in the world of private capital: they add layers of
obfuscation over the provenance of the dollars flowing from one right-wing
organization or institution to the next.
For instance, there’s the Wellspring Committee, a pass-through funded in
part via the Koch network, whose director, Ann Corkery, also sat for six years on
the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a pro-bono law firm,
according to tax filings. With its portfolio of so-called religious freedom cases,
the Becket Fund gained notice as the firm representing the principals of the
Hobby Lobby company in a 2014 Supreme Court challenge to a mandate in the
Affordable Care Act for employer-based health insurance to cover, without a
co-pay, the costs of prescription contraception.
One type of private company is the “closely held” variety, which may
occasionally trade stock publicly, but has only a few shareholders. The Supreme
Court’s decision in favor of Hobby Lobby (number 106 on the 2016 Forbes list of
the nation’s top private companies) specifically cited its “closely held” status as a
qualification for its exemption from the ACA contraceptive mandate.

37
Swallowing the Money
If this is the richest administration in history, it is also likely the one that will move
in strictest concert with the needs and desires of people who keep their companies
off the exchanges specifically to maintain their secrets. Even those in the Trump
administration who are not wealthy likely owe their political success to the dons of
the private company syndicate. The Kochs’ nonprofit advocacy group Americans
for Prosperity all but invented vice president Mike Pence’s career as a leading light
of the small-government right. AFP has for years featured Pence as a speaker at its
events and held up his record as Indiana governor as an example for others to
follow. Many in the Republican majority in Congress owe their seats to the help
they received from Koch-linked groups, including those partially funded by the
current secretary of education. DeVos, under questioning by senator Bernie
Sanders during her confirmation hearing, said it was possible that her family had
contributed $200 million to the Republican Party “over the years.”
And while the Kochs don’t much care for Trump, and the Mercers occasion-
ally butt heads with the Kochs, I’m betting they’ll always find a way to work
together. It’s in all of their best interests, so long as the aim is the unfettered flow
of the darkest of dark money to an increasingly small number of people.
The entry to the seemingly endless driveway at Owl’s Nest, Robert Mercer’s
estate in Head of the Harbor on Long Island, is planted with sunny yellow
daffodils marked by a white picket gate suspended between two stone pillars.
S
Atop each pillar sits a large bronze statue of an owl, wings extended, as if ready to A
swoop down on unwitting prey. L
V
Consider yourself warned. O
 Against Poetry
By Kaveh Akbar

There is no word in English for the circle

left on a table from a cold glass,
or for the difference in flavor
between fresh and dried fruit. There’s no precise
way to say I pushed my thumbs through the eyes
of the old living except to say all that, and then
it barely seems a miracle anymore,
a lamp burned for eight days or
then the prophet split the moon, why bother? We speak
of the divine with the panicked
38 futility of a barn swallow
tossing her eggs out the nest
to spare them a crow—theory proves
useless, confusion
the only true coin of the realm.
The stories stay the same:
this new drug tames
that old one, fat hardens
in a bowl. Three boys
stand naked in a shallow pond
whispering nervously, counting
each other’s bones. Who would

B
A
F
F
L
E
R
want to name any of this? We are wired
to feel comfort at human
voice, and we know nothing
can conquer comfort. Still, the shape
of a bad name is like a toothpick
swallowed—even if you survive,
the splinters will stay
long enough for you to swear off toothpicks forever.
Some have managed it, abandoned language
entirely, the bravest among them
not opening their mouths 39

for decades at a time. They know

what the saints knew: silence
to a tongue is different than silence
to a soul—the difference
is pain or the difference
is light, but either way there is a difference
and it matters, though here in the belly of the present
the difference is shrinking right
in front of us like an oversalted plum, like a sullen
crow disappearing into the horizon.

P
O
E
M
Roderick Mills
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

Race to
the Bottom
41

How the post-racial revolution S

A

became a whitewash L
V
O
 Anyone trying to take the politics of
race seriously over the past decade of
American political life could plausibly be
diagnosed with an acute case of intel-
lectual whiplash. A mere eight years ago,
Barack Obama broke a historic barrier
long taken to be impermeable and
became our first African American presi-
dent. Throughout our mainstream media
and most centers of respectable opinion,
a veritable orgy of self-congratulation
42 ensued. The refrain went like this:
After so many thankless years of stale-
mated racial progress, of a widening
racial wealth gap, of welfare repeal and
elite white retrenchment, of privileged
white uprisings against the putatively
illiberal forces of identity politics and
“political correctness,” America had
put its race problem decisively in the
past. The newly enlightened American
B
A
consensus had magnificently smote
down the petty grievances of all the
F
F
L
E
R
naysayers, from megacelebrities like Kanye West to the grassroots advocates of
reparations for slavery to the ingrates like me in the critical race theory academy.
Yes, in the blink of an eye, the American republic had become “post-racial,”
even as African Americans themselves begged to differ. The cultural revolution
presaged by figures like Oprah Winfrey had been brought to outlandish,
unexpected political fulfillment by Barack Obama, a world-class orator and
impeccably credentialed son of the American meritocracy. From the canyons of
Wall Street to the banks of the Potomac, a cry of rejoicing went forth. The
painful, violent legacy of white supremacy had been repealed, in one miraculous
fell swoop; the guilt-averse white majority and the grievance-prone Black
minority could come together as one, in a blessed state of ur-American forgetful-
ness, and get down to business at last!
As it happened, the shelf life of post-racialism turned out to be far shorter
than its cheerleaders supposed. A mere eight years later, white voters tossed the
historic breakthrough of 2008 into the dustbin of history, alongside other
half-digested political trendlets, like “the year of the woman” and “the peace
dividend.” The symbolic breakthrough of Obama’s election has plainly given
way to a terrifying new political order that is anything but post-racial. White voters
overwhelmingly rallied to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, a leader
whose racist worldview is emblazoned at the base of his career in the same way
that his name is plastered across his global real estate empire. In naming
white-nationalist propagandist Steve Bannon as his closest White House adviser
and elevating Jefferson Beauregard Sessions—a son of Alabama’s white-suprema-
cist political elite who was deemed too racially retrograde for a federal judgeship
in the Reagan era—to the highest position of federal law enforcement, Trump 43
has clearly rendered all talk of post-racialism a laughable dead letter.
Still, how does one account for this mind-bending shift in the prevailing
terms of racial discourse? The temptation is great, when presented with such
dramatically self-canceling evidence for both the obdurate survival of a racist
power structure and the surface appearance of racial progress in the person of
Obama, to declare one of these outcomes simply unreal. The genuine America,
in this binary scheme, would be either the one that voted in Barack Hussein
Obama or the one that voted in Donald John Trump, and the other would be a
short-lived fever dream.
The truth, however, is more complicated. To borrow a turn of phrase that
helped make Barack Obama famous, the country that elected both him and
Trump is “one America.” And to complicate things still further, the very rhetoric
of post-racialism that greeted Obama’s ascension to power has proved instru-
mental in the dumbfounding political rise of Donald Trump, the man who is in
every way the photographic negative of Barack Obama. The feel-good presuppo-
sitions of post-racialism played directly into the evasive habits of the white
supremacist heart, permitting Americans to congratulate themselves for
achieving a historic breakthrough that had very little to do with our actual racial
history. In I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s timely documentary on James
Baldwin’s unaddressed legacy of racial advocacy, a telling moment occurs. U.S.
attorney general Robert Kennedy, keen to assuage civil-rights leaders impatient
S
with the slow pace of progress in Washington, prophesizes that the strides being A
made toward racial equality are actually so dramatic that within forty years L
V
America might well see its first Black president. Kennedy’s timetable was off by O
 a decade or so, but the relevant point here comes in Baldwin’s rejoinder. The
African Americans he knew in Harlem, Baldwin says, were less than bowled over
by the palliative promise of a president to call their very own:

That sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to

white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was
first heard. They did not hear (and possibly will never hear) the
laughter and the bitterness and the scorn with which this statement
was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem
barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he’s
already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four
hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if
you’re good, we may let you become president.

In other words, Welcome to history, Mr. Kennedy. And now that we’re at the
other end of our landmark first African American presidency, we might well say
by way of summation, Welcome to history, white America. The brutal fashion in
which Trump’s rise repealed virtually every plank of post-racialist self-congratu-
lation underlines how flimsy and premature the celebrations of Obama’s top-of-
the-ticket symbolic breakthrough were. What’s more, the contrasting personas of
the two presidents speak volumes about who gets to enjoy what kinds of power
under what terms in our very much still-racialized political life. Where Obama
solemnly obeyed every command that issued from America’s meritocratic
superego, Trump has slithered directly into the Oval Office from the heart of our
44 white business civilization’s political id. Where Obama extolled bipartisan
reason, Trump stokes social-media resentments; where Obama pursued chime-
rical “grand bargains” with the GOP Congress and its private-sector retainers,
Trump claims to embody the sharp-eyed “art of the deal”—i.e., the art of
presiding over a gamed system in which he’s always assured to take the other
contracting party for a ride.

Unreasonable Differences
To better understand how our country’s racial derangements have lurched
into the foreground once more—like Michael Myers in a Halloween sequel—
let’s examine just how vanishingly thin the original conceit of American
post-racialism was, in that long-ago time known as 2009. And this, in turn,
entails taking measure of how its signature enabling myth of colorblindness
worked to reinforce the very structures of racial power that were supposedly
in the process of being overcome. The legal and activist struggles of the first
post-civil-rights generation of African Americans represent a key pivot point
in this story by triggering the emergence of (on the one hand) critical race
theory and (on the other) the embrace of the abstract ideal of colorblindness as
an established historical fact.
B
The prevailing understanding of racial justice that had come to a head in the
A early 1980s premised racial liberation on the enlightened terms of rationality.
F
F Accordingly, racial power was seen as “discrimination,” a deviation from reason
L that was remediable through the operation of legal principles. Civil rights lawyers
E
R and liberal allies may have differed on the need for targeted interventions to help
 along the universalist repudiation of racial distinction. But they shared a baseline
confidence that once the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the under-
lying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign state of
impersonally apportioned justice.
Yet by the 1980s and 1990s, this liberal equation of the rule of law with racial
liberation was ripe for reconsideration, as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and my
other colleagues in the emergent legal movement of critical race theory insisted.
The problem, from our vantage, was not simply the takeover of the judiciary by
right-wing judges, but also the broader political and institutional limits of
“reason” itself. And this epistemological critique was not simply a “philosoph-
ical” one—it was embodied in a new protest politics by critics who argued that no
neutral concept of merit justified the lack of minority law professors at elite law
schools, or that no neutral process of principled legal reasoning could justify the
racialized distribution of power, prestige, and wealth in America.
Critics of white supremacy in the broader academy—working in the
tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois and other trailblazing scholars of color—had
demonstrated in various disciplinary settings just how notions of scholarly
objectivity and other canons of academic professionalism served to rationalize
the existing American racial order. Law’s apparent intimacy with that order,
however, presented a unique site for an intellectual sit-in. And for those of us
advancing critical race theory, the considerable blowback we encountered,
from the legal academy to the liberal press, worked to confirm our own
intuitions that the voices of mainstream civil rights advocates and liberal
university administrators were effectively drowning out more urgent claims on
behalf of racial justice and reparations. Without entirely meaning to, we 45
happened upon a crack in the facade of the status quo that provided a fuller
vision of a social order “caught in the act” of reforming.
What lessons might we draw from this intellectual odyssey? Chiefly, the
precedent of the critical race movement’s broader public reception serves to
remind the disenchanted race reformers of the post-Obama age that things have
been ever thus. Consider the striking
parallels between the alleged
The shelf life of post- post-racial dispensation ushered in by
Obama’s election and the impasse that
racialism turned out to be
civil rights activism met head-on in
far shorter than its the 1980s. Barack Obama’s shattering
cheerleaders supposed. of the glass ceiling resembles nothing
so much in our civic culture as the
removal of the “White Only” signs
that came down in the 1970s in the last redoubts of the Jim Crow South. And
like that undeniable symbolic victory, Obama’s moment of deliverance proved
astonishingly short-lived. The continuing battle over racial power simply
expanded to a new frontier.
In the same way that the triumph of formal equality did not signify the end of
racism, President Obama’s victory did not symbolize its demise in 2008. Now that
we’ve begun to live under the race-baiting rule of our first modern white-nation-
S
alist president, this point shouldn’t need belaboring. But the unfinished business A
represented by this sea change needs urgently to be acknowledged and addressed. L
V
The luxury of mistaking symbolic breakthroughs at the top of our political order O
 for organized and sustained racial progress throughout is no longer on the table.
Our challenge now, as it was in the 1980s, is to preclude efforts to repress the
ongoing contestation over racial power.1 We can’t permit the legacy of post-ra-
cialist error that has helped to create the conditions for the white-nationalist
risorgimento under Trump to be more of the same faux-enlightened talk of racist
barriers definitively overcome. Now is hardly the time to effectively banish all talk
of racial injustice to the unincorporated nether reaches of political discourse.

Post-Racial Nonsense
Within the Obama-era bid to characterize America’s newly transformed social
order as “post-racial,” a striking bit of legerdemain took hold. The term worked
both to de-historicize race in American society and, perversely enough, to
reframe the idea of racism as something that was very much the opposite of the
lived experience of race in America. Under this inside-out account of our racial
history, a post-racial America was, by
definition, a racially egalitarian
The very rhetoric of post- America, no longer measured by
racialism that greeted forward-looking assessments of how
far we have come, but by congratula-
Obama’s ascension to power tory declarations that we have arrived.
has proven instrumental In one sense, there’s nothing
in the political rise of Donald conceptually new about this. For two
decades, an entire industry of lawyers,
46 Trump, the man who is in politicians, pundits, and foundations
every way the photographic rallied around the banner of color-
blindness in an effort to convince
negative of Barack Obama. judges, policymakers, and voters that
the project of racial reform was
completed long ago.2 Colorblindness fueled a host of right-wing projects
throughout the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, including Ward
Connerly’s assault on both affirmative action and the collection of racial data,3
along with efforts by others to attack the Voting Rights Act and Title VII. With
the rhetoric of colorblindness thus conscripted as a justification of first resort
for rolling back the gains of the civil rights revolution, moderates and liberals—
together with the traditional civil rights establishment—regarded it with a good
deal of justified suspicion. In his 2000 presidential run, for example, Al Gore
likened the colorblind rhetoric of the nineties GOP to a “duck blind” offering
cover to the forces of racial reaction.
On the right, meanwhile, this faux-colorblind consensus found its bottom-

1. The tension between symbolic and material trans- 2. Buying a Movement: Right Wing Foundations and
formation is also merely an extension from the earlier American Politics (People for the American Way, 1996)
period in which segregation formally fell. As I argued details how right-wing foundations worked to foster a
in “Race, Reform and Retrenchment” (Harvard Law climate of hostility to affirmative action, for example,
B Review, 1988) racial oppression is constituted by both and then launched legal and legislative assaults.
symbolic and material dimensions; however, symbolic
A
change is often taken as indicative of the whole. See 3. In “It Is Time to End Race-Based ‘Affirmative Action’”
F also my ”Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking (2007), Connerly argued that “affirmative action” is no
F Back to Move Forward” (Connecticut Law Review, 2011), longer necessary and that it represents a “betrayal of
L from which parts of this salvo are adapted. one of our nation’s basic civic values, namely a nation
E in which all of its citizens are of equal value in the eyes
R of the government.”
feeding nadir in Dinesh D’Souza’s counter-empirical 1995 tract The End of
Racism. According to D’Souza, race exists only as an opportunistic political
“card” to be played in a never-specified game. The impression of enduring
structural racism—self-evident to anyone spending more than twenty minutes
or so studying actual American history—comes off in this right-wing fantasia as
an unfounded moral panic spread by identity politicians.
Regrettably, a host of similarly ahistorical thinkers saw their moment after
the election of Obama and sought to insert the colorblind politics of racial
denial into nearly all mainstream discussion of race. To borrow a simile from
the same era’s pop-culture discourse, colorblindness resembled a cult music act
or arthouse movie hit that never quite broke through to a mainstream following.
It was post-racialism that conferred rock-star status on the marketing strata-
gems of colorblindness, and rebranded the product with an internationally
recognized symbol attached to its conservative rhetorical posture.
And so it was that when post-racialism rode to the center of American
political discourse on Barack Obama’s coattails,4 it carried along with it both a
longstanding liberal project of associating colorblindness with racial enlighten-
ment and a conservative denunciation of racial justice advocacy, reverse
discrimination, and grievance politics. Obama’s widely heralded avoidance of
so-called racial grievance not only opened the door to a new era of American
politics5—it also opened up liberal and progressive civil rights constituencies to
the strategic evasions of racial justice agendas forged among leading practi-
tioners of retrenchment politics such as Dinesh D’Souza and Newt Gingrich.

47
Politically Corrected
Indeed, in retrospect, it’s astonishing just how quickly this project of ideological
fusion was carried out. On the day of Obama’s election, CNN’s confident panel of
experts declared that the biggest losers in Obama’s victory were Jesse Jackson, Al
Sharpton, and by extension, the entire civil rights leadership, who were presum-
ably now the newly unemployed.6 This same “Mission Accomplished” refrain
caught on among a host of white liberal pundits who proclaimed that the great
attraction of president Barack Obama was that he entered the sanctum of
American executive leadership unburdened by any confrontational old-school

4. The opinion pages were especially sanguine. “Mr.
Obama is in the vanguard of a new brand of multi-racial
politics. He is asking voters to move with him beyond
race and beyond the civil rights movement to a politics
of shared values,” Juan Williams wrote in the New York
Times in November 2007. And two days after Obama’s
election, Phillip Morris pronounced in the Cleveland
Plain Dealer, “America has done its part. Without a
blink of an eye, we have just boldly ushered in a new,
post-racial era. Once again, we have proven ourselves
a nation of leaders: A representative democracy in its
truest sense.”
5. Carol Costello had this to say on CNN’s Situation
Room: “Let’s face it, Obama has been genius at tran-
scending not race but racial issues. He’s very careful
to deliver a message that’s not exclusionary. In other
words, he’s a member of the black community, but he
doesn’t vocalize racial grievances. So far, so good”
(Jan. 11, 2008). In the Los Angeles Times, Shelby Steele
argued that Obama’s post-racial idealism sounded to
whites like what they most wanted to hear—that racism
was no longer an issue (Nov. 5, 2008).
6. “If Barack Obama wins the presidency, what happens
to the people who went before him, people like Jesse
Jackson, people like Al Sharpton?” John Roberts
wondered on CNN’s American Morning on election
day in 2008. In Texas, a Fort Wayne News-Sentinel
columnist, searching for the cause of Jesse Jackson’s
election-night tears, arrived at this conclusion: “Maybe
it was simply the realization that Barack Obama’s
victory signaled the long-overdue demise of the type of
divisive racial politics Jackson, Al Sharpton and others
have perfected over the past several decades—the
kind built on the premise that America is a hopelessly
racist country that refuses to give minorities a chance
to succeed.”
S
A
L
V
O
 civil rights baggage. In this moment, the human tragedies and acts of sheer
courage that characterized the civil rights struggle were reduced to historical
dead weight. As if on cue, an admiring chorus of observers took immediately to
marveling at the new president’s unflappably cool demeanor and temperamental
intolerance for “drama”—and most especially the racial kind. With palpable
relief, the guardians of official discourse came together as one to announce that
“with Obama now in the White House, we can put race behind us.”
Now that we are battling the Trump White House, we can see more clearly
the many hidden costs of the premature stampede to “put race behind us.” Not
only did Trump’s successful white-backlash candidacy for the Oval Office
revive Nixonian tropes of Black lawlessness and depravity—complete with
gruesome caricatures of life in Black-majority inner-city neighborhoods and
calls for a return to white-authoritarian “law and order”—but it also relied on an
overt platform of racist retrenchment that prior Republican presidents had
voiced only in code.
Ronald Reagan famously launched his 1980 presidential run with a brash
stump speech steeped in states’-rights rhetoric—the already amply coded
discourse of choice for white supremacists—in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the
site where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. But Trump’s
strategy upstages the dog whistles of the Reagan years and rouses the walk-
ing-dead body of white redeemer politics circa 1876. In promulgating the false
narrative of rampant voter fraud in southern states such as Florida, Trump
directly summons the specter of Black “mob rule” that rationalized the institu-
tion of Jim Crow voting restrictions in the late nineteenth century. And in his
48 notorious stump refrains about the dismal (and mostly fabricated) violent crime
waves in our multiracial inner cities, Trump summons an image of Black and
colored bodies strewn throughout America’s urban scene that harkens back to
the murderous license of the lynching age. Lest anyone think this is mere
rhetorical exaggeration, the Southern Poverty Law Center has tallied more than
one thousand racial hate crimes since Trump’s inauguration—a dramatic
increase over the baseline rate of such attacks, which would normally number
around fifty nationwide in a ten-week period, according to Heidi Beirich,
director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.
More deranging still, the effacement of racial history propounded under
the gentler banners of “colorblindness” and post-racialism has now become a
pathological disorder in Trump’s Oval Office. As Black History Month
commenced in February, Trump delivered a rambling statement asserting
that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing
job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” This bizarre aside
strongly suggested that Trump was under the impression that America’s most
famous Black abolitionist, who died in 1895, was somehow alive and active
today. This impression only gained currency when Trump White House
spokesman Sean Spicer sought to clarify the president’s remarks and seem-
ingly made the same error, saying, “The contributions of Frederick Douglass
B
will become more and more.”
A One might write this off as an unfortunate series of blunders in an adminis-
F
F tration’s chaotic transition days. But during attorney general Jeff Sessions’s
L confirmation hearings, the new Republican racial amnesia took a decidedly
E
R more sinister turn. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who opposed the
 49

Roderick Mills

Sessions appointment, began to read a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King
detailing the extraordinary measures that Sessions undertook as attorney
general of Alabama to suppress the Black vote there—a series of intimidation
tactics that left many Black people determined never to vote again. Senate
majority leader Mitch McConnell silenced Warren on the floor, citing an obscure
provision of Senate etiquette forbidding members to directly criticize each other
during floor speeches. That this absurdly genteel dictum didn’t apply to
Sessions, who was in that moment engaged in the process of no longer being a
senator, was of course beside the point, which was to silence anyone voicing a
criticism of his record in the august legislative chamber.
Warren was silenced, and censured for her trouble, but the chilling epilogue
came once more from Sean Spicer’s briefing-room podium, where the combative
press secretary suggested that King’s widow, were she alive today, might well
support Sessions’s nomination, as though the state official who worked in the
eighties to directly undermine the political legacy of her slain husband would be
given a mulligan. The officially sanctioned posture that Trump officials urge on
S
minority communities suffering from abject racism is, in short, forgive and A
forget—and anyone refusing that posture is immediately dismissed as a L
V
racial-grievance-monger. O
 Then again, that’s now the official Trump White House line on the entirety of
our recent racial past: history doesn’t possess any controlling legal authority over
the administration’s chosen narratives of power. After the first presidential
election cycle taking place under the de facto reversal of the Voting Rights Act
under the Roberts Court, the storyline in mainstream political discourse is not
how voter suppression in southern districts formerly monitored under the Act’s
provisions helped Trump win key southern swing states. No, the story is Trump’s
Big Lie about southern voter fraud. Even when Trump’s critics and media outlets
fact-check that transparently false claim, few have bothered to note that the
reality is, in fact, the obverse—that far from being abetted by rampant fraud, the
Black vote in America is now systematically suppressed under a softer-focus
brand of resurgent Jim Crow tactics, empowered by a proudly colorblind set of
Supreme Court decisions.
Such, in short, are the real-world wages of colorblind, post-racialist rhetoric:
historical Black resistance leaders who bled and suffered for each incremental
gain in racial justice are whitewashed into anodyne supporters of actively racist
political leaders and agendas. And the core electoral grievances of the African
American citizenry are simply erased from elite-led discussions of the Black
franchise. Just as the civil rights movement was hailed at the time as America’s
Second Reconstruction, it’s probably long past time to ask whether the Trump
White House is presiding over a Second Redemption—the odious 1877 social
compact that won Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency and established the Jim
Crow regime across the postbellum South. One certainly doesn’t have to strain
hard to hear the Redemptionist echoes of Trump’s campaign vow to “make
50 America great again,” or of his many stump appeals to put “our country” back in
the hands of his aggrieved white supporters.

Merit Badges
To review the career of Barack Obama, meanwhile, is to see the narrow strictures
of expression and conduct that confront any Black candidate aspiring to be a
national political leader. If Donald Trump routinely engages in a white rhetorical
brand of “wilding”—an unlicensed wave of crime and vandalism attributed to
Black youths in a libelous moral panic of the 1980s—Obama is a case study in
closely scrutinized rhetorical self-control in matters of race.
In the same way that elite institutions have congratulated themselves as sites
where merit flourished, American society held up Barack Obama as conclusive
evidence that power is indeed colorblind.7 Yet Obama’s election proves very little
about the triumph of colorblindness either as a tactic for gaining power or as a
frame for how it is exercised. In fact, upon closer inspection, the election of Obama
supports the opposite inference. Despite the common refrain that Obama made
history as the nation’s first post-racial Black candidate, the Obama campaign
reflected the ongoing salience of race-consciousness among the electorate, the

B 7. In the Chicago Tribune, Clarence Page wrote,

A “America is a better country . . . not because so many
F of us voted for Obama but because many more of us
F have made a place where Obama’s victory is possible”
L (Nov. 9, 2008).
E
R
 pundits, and the candidates. Obama’s steadied posture of racial avoidance was
actually one of highly selective racial engagement, showcasing the candidate’s
talent for deftly navigating the complex terrain of race and emerging with a
reassuring tale of individual uplift—a moral, as it happens, best illustrated by the
candidate’s own life story. The public image of Obama’s so-called race neutrality
masked an intensely race-conscious campaign to counter Obama’s racial deficit on
the electoral map. In key swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, whites were
mobilized to talk about race with other whites to neutralize Obama’s racial disad-
vantage. Even the celebration of Obama as “race-neutral” was obviously not
colorblind, but rather a reflection of the
opposite impulse. Voters and pundits of
While the celebratory social all races engaged in a complex assess-
ment of Obama’s racial performance to
amnesia of the “Obama
determine what kind of Black Obama
phenomenon” pulled was going to be.
countless people into its This race-conscious “reading” of
Obama was not the sole province of
orbit, the rhetoric of denial wary whites and suspicious African
at its core worked to strip Americans. Many thinkers who might
critiques of racial power of be styled as lay critical race theorists
graded Obama’s performance as a
both legitimacy and racial leader on a generous curve,
audience. believing that he was precariously
trying to propel himself—and the
country—forward on the narrowest of 51
tightropes. Understanding the ever delicate politics of racial performance, many
critics of the dominant racial discourse gave Obama a pass when his widely
applauded speech on race seemed to follow the classic script of “race relations”
comity,8 an approach that assiduously frames racial conflict as a basic misunder-
standing between social equals. That speech, recall, was a pivotal bid on the part
of the Obama campaign to distance the candidate from his former Hyde Park
pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright—the figure who gave the title to Obama’s
2006 book The Audacity of Hope, but who had also been videotaped in a
mid-sermon burst of rage apparently calling down damnation on white America.
In order to decisively put Wright and his performance into the forgotten
reaches of the racialized past, candidate Obama cannily positioned himself as a
maestro of golden-mean-style moral equivalence in assessing the disparate
harms wrought by American racism. In perhaps the most memorable passage of
the address now simply known as “the race speech,” Obama drew out a paral-
lelism between whites and African Americans that framed them as merely two
sides of roughly equatable warring factions. In this account of past racial injury,
both white and Black America shared in a pain that was at once equally legitimate
and equally misunderstood by the other.

8. For a critical history of the race relations school

of sociology, see Stephen Steinberg, Race Relations:
A Critique (2007). Steinberg argues that the race S
relations school represented by the Chicago School A
of Sociology suppressed structural accounts of racial L
power to create a relatively benign portrait of race V
relations.
O
 This formalist reading of race places the grievances that reflect centuries of
slavery and segregation on par with white anger over affirmative action. And as a
rhetorical campaign performance, it was widely hailed as a watershed moment
that reset the basic terms of racial debate. Instead, though, it fatally scrambled
the hard-fought basis of racial understanding in America, mixing realities with
fantasies, injuries with remedies, and minority rights with majority power. In its
deft circumvention of the structures and institutions reinforcing white domi-
nance, Obama’s race speech has come to define a certain sensibility that, if not
strictly “post-racial,” expresses a weary impatience with the familiar terms by
which African Americans have voiced their grievances and pressed for justice.
Indeed, the speech in general and Obama’s overall performance in office jointly
came to define the post-racialist gloss on colorblindness.
The basic elements of this post-racial rhetoric stem from the conservative
co-optation of colorblindness that gained currency in the 1980s and ’90s. And the
deeply conservative thrust of this rhetoric, we can now clearly see in retrospect, is
that the intergenerational residue of white supremacy in the United States
consists mainly of fairly superficial wounds that are fast-obsolescing anachro-
nisms. This view of racial power shares strong affinities, in turn, with the
formalist conception of equality embraced by the post-civil-rights judiciary. In
this fanciful view of our segregated republic, the Voting Rights Act has outlived
its mandate, and material remedies of racist abuses of power are outstripped by
feel-good shows of cultural tokenism.

From Colorblind to Simply Blind

52
It’s important to fasten onto this point clearly: colorblindness not only under-
mines law and social policy that rely on race-conscious analysis, but also soothes
anxiety about the stubborn endurance of the structures of white dominance. In
the giddy counter-historical account of racial progress, the entire messy, disheart-
ening business of redressing the legacies of racial exclusion and exploitation can
be written off as another outgrown vestige of a bygone era. The palpable relief of
the white commentariat was as unmistakable as the sixties liberal establishment’s
celebration of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Both proved
grossly premature, but both seemed to be punctuated with a culture-wide sigh
reverberating through white America: At long last, that’s over with!
And it stands further to reason that if colorblindness marked race as a
forgettable chapter in our history, then post-racialism ensured any as-yet unper-
suaded stragglers and doubting Thomases that this mercifully retired saga of
American racism no longer casts its shadow over contemporary affairs.
While the celebratory social amnesia of the “Obama phenomenon”9 pulled
countless people into its orbit, the rhetoric of denial at its core worked to strip
critiques of racial power of both legitimacy and audience. In its wake, the
material consequences of racial exploitation and violence—including the
persistence of educational inequity,10 the disproportionate racial patterns of
B
A
F
F 9. See Robert Justin Lipkin’s article of that name, “The 10. In Racism Without Racists (2003), Eduardo
Obama Phenomenon: Deliberative Conversationalism Bonilla-Silva argues that the refusal to acknowledge
L
and the Pursuit of Community Through Presidential race perpetuates disparities in the quality of education
E Politics” (University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and that blacks and whites receive.
R Social Change, 2008).
 criminalization and incarceration,11 and the deepening patterns of economic
stratification12—slid further into obscurity. Under the thrall of post-racialism,
these stubborn conditions posed no serious challenge to the belief that the
election of one leader could somehow signify the end of a trans-generational,
intersectional, and structural system of racial dominance.
There is, of course no inherent reason why post-racialism would have to
signal the insignificance of race. But by the same token, post-racialism didn’t
need to be “post” at all. By the logic of its own sleight-of-temporal hand,
post-racialism became tied to a rhetoric that stigmatizes all race-consciousness.
From policy intervention to civil rights advocacy to basic acknowledgment of
racial disparities, post-racialism potentially discredited all talk of racism as
racial grievance. Thus, to be post-racial was to cease any engagement with, or
acknowledgment of, racial injustice.

Race Against Justice

That some forms of race talk are punished while others are permitted was hard
to miss when Obama spoke. Conservatives complained that he was playing the
race card when he urged voters not to let his nontraditional image stand in the
way of his becoming president,13 but when he singled out Black fathers as
irresponsible in a Father’s Day speech, it was warmly received. The white
American mainstream’s longstanding and insatiable demand for the stern
rhetoric of patriarchal self-discipline from Black American leaders stands out in
especially stark relief now, when Black American men are routinely dealt a
much more immediate and life-threatening form of discipline from law
53
enforcement officers.
And speaking of racial disparities
The officially sanctioned in law enforcement, hindsight now
also greatly illuminates the acute
posture that Trump
“post-racial” curbs on justice
officials urge on minority discourse in an early race-themed
communities is, in short, contretemps in the Obama era: the
piece of racial political theater that
forgive and forget. followed upon Harvard African
American studies professor Henry
Louis Gates Jr.’s arrest in Cambridge, MA, for the crime of breaking into his
own house after he couldn’t unlock his door. Many commentators across the
spectrum characterized Obama’s observation that the arresting officer “acted
stupidly” as uncharitable at best, and at worst, racist.
In this revealing “post-racial” set piece, it was somehow beyond the pale to
suggest that Henry Louis Gates might have been the victim of racism; it was

11. In “Post-Racial Racism: Racial Stratification and 13. As Michael Cooper and Michael Powell reported
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Obama” (California in the New York Times on Aug. 1, 2008, John McCain’s
Law Review, 2010), Ian F. Haney López argues that the campaign characterized Obama’s mention of his race
lack of racial discourse helped to persuade voters to re- as “divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”
place civil rights and social welfare with crime control.
S
12. In “Laying Down the Law: Post-Racialism and the A
De-Racination Project” (Albany Law Review, 2009), L
Peter Halewood argues that colorblindness and V
post-racialism contributed to this decade’s rapid and
pronounced expansion of economic inequality.
O
 almost axiomatic to many of Obama’s detractors that the officer was. Such are the
slippery and contradictory politics of post-racialism. And one needn’t look very
far to see the human costs of reflexive victim-blaming in botched police encoun-
ters. Many Black suspects much less influential than Gates have lost their lives in
such episodes, with the police shooters continuing to enjoy the lavish presump-
tion of innocence, facing prosecution in only the most extreme and incontrovert-
ible cases of unprovoked brutality, and even then usually evading formal charges
in grand-jury proceedings. There is, in short, a continuum of police impunity
stretching from the “Gates-gate” contretemps to the citizen killings that have
sparked the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
It’s exceedingly difficult, though, to discern and drive home such connec-
tions against the background glare of Black political celebrity. The triumph of a
competent Black man in the White House offered an undeniable sense of hope to
the long-demoralized advocates of racial justice. Yet in an only-in-America
political epilogue, Obama’s presidency lent powerful argument-clinching cover to
a premature censure of racial discourse.

The Race Card, Trumped

More than that, though, the country’s lurch into a profoundly unearned
consensus of colorblind self-congratulation has enabled the elevation of a racist
and unapologetically authoritarian anti-Obama figure to the position of
maximum federal power. Donald Trump famously thrust himself onto the
national political stage with a battery of lies about Obama’s allegedly disquali-
54 fying Kenyan birth. (Just as significant, the “birther” crusade on the racist
American right branded Obama as irredeemably foreign and decidedly
unpost-racial, since nothing more forcefully conveys otherness in the white
racist mind than the image of African
origins—an ugly intellectual legacy
Just eight years after shared by overt white supremacists of the
South and respectable eugenics-addled
the ballyhooed dawn of
Progressives of the early twentieth
a post-racial social order, century alike.)
racial grievance has In reality, though, Trump’s racist
bona fides harkened back to the dawn of
returned to the center his business career, when he settled a
of American politics— federal lawsuit charging that he steered
only this time it’s white. prospective Black tenants away from
Trump family properties. He also gave
respectable voice to racist fantasies of
mass lynching at the height of the prosecution of the Central Park Five, by
purchasing a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the death penalty to
be reinstated only for the sake of killing the railroaded Black and Hispanic
suspects in the case. (Even though the convicted Central Park Five have since
B
been exonerated by DNA evidence and the identification of the crime’s actual
A perpetrator, Trump insists on their guilt to this day, on no evident basis beyond
F
F their status as non-white people who happened to be near the park when the
L brutal rape occurred.)
E
R Surely if the reverie of a post-racial America had any meaning or analytical
power, it would have decisively ruled out the prospect that an overtly racist
successor to Obama could move into the White House so soon after the country
had symbolically transcended the last vestiges of its racist past. No genuinely
post-racial America could have called forth the spectacle of Steve Bannon, the
Breitbart mogul who’s made a fortune and a political career of preparing racist
conspiracy theories for mass consumption, serving as a White House adviser—to
say nothing of Richard Spencer’s college protégé Stephen Miller or bona fide
European fascist Sebastian Gorka. Nor would a mature, racially neutral
American polity have harbored the ugly vision of David Duke renewing his
political career in open emulation of Trump’s success.

The Diversity Dodge

This ugly new corps of white-nationalist reaction has exploited an intellectual
vacuum opened up, in significant part, by the scattered and incomplete legacies
of the civil-rights-era crusade for racial justice. The decreased potency of civil
rights advocacy is, of course, nothing new. At least one feature of the moribund
discourse of civil rights in particular, and antiracism more broadly, involves the
disintegration of the basic framework that helped conceptualize and prosecute
past claims of racial injustice. In a still-painful irony, the reforms that sought to
rectify the yawning gap between American ideals and racial realities at the same
time diminished the galvanizing power of this injustice frame.
But the lapsed project of remedying racial injustice also stems from
contradictions within the rhetorical posture of race liberals that eventually
imploded. Many race liberals grew squeamish about demands for racial justice 55
seeking to give power to historically marginalized and underserved racialized
communities. Community empowerment conflicted with seeing the race
problem as a problem of seeing race. For liberals, the eventual solution was to
transcend race altogether. Yet they were caught between their fantasy of the
future—a world in which race doesn’t map onto to anything—and a real world in
which it mapped onto everything. Diversity provided a livable compromise—a
way of acknowledging “difference” between racial groups while ignoring the
power relations between them.
The embrace of diversity in the affirmative action debate was a synec-
doche of sorts for a broader concession normalizing an equivocal—at best—set
of remedies for longstanding racial social deficits throughout American life.
The broad-ranging diversity consensus erased the particular dimensions of
racial subordination in education—and especially downplayed the institutional
and structural synergies that carry injustice beyond these formative educa-
tional settings. And the widespread promotion of diversity as the stand-in for
race reform helped to keep racial injustice from being seen as a pressing
contemporary issue.
Outfitted with the dominance-flattening rhetoric of diversity, the media
proceeded, in turn, to airbrush the basic dynamics of racial power out of its
portraits of racial disparities and conflict. In this reactionary mode, the media
has helped frame racism as a thing of the past—and the continued insistence on
S
its contemporary relevance as a dangerous illusion. Examples of this practice A
abound, from the libelous Breitbart-branded misportrayal of Agriculture L
V
Department official Shirley Sherrod’s nuanced race-conscious discussions of O
 past discrimination to the sickening eagerness of cable news crews covering
recent protests over the police slayings of unarmed Black men to depict all Black
protest as destructive. “Riot Erupts in Baltimore,” one CNN scare-chyron blared
in the wake of the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray, amid onscreen images of a
construction-site fire unrelated to the protests.
This disjuncture comes across most sharply in a foundational conceptual
contrast—namely, between discourses on racial deficits of people of color, which
are largely permissible, and discourses on racism, which are stigmatized, sharply
proscribed, and almost always accompanied by some commentary to cast doubt
on the offending expression of grievance. The self-cancelling vise-grip of this
containment strategy entrapped even the former president of the United States,
who was forced to backtrack on relatively tepid comments that glancingly
acknowledged the persistence of racism.
In a corresponding set of strategic erasures, white post-racial propaganda
grievously distorts our understanding of contemporary social problems, often by
banishing the racial histories pertaining to these problems to the land of unspeak-
ables. The widely heralded 2010 school-choice documentary Waiting for
“Superman” is a particularly compelling example. The very idea of our deterio-
rating public school system conjures up images of racial isolation, and yet the film
manages to tell a story about the tragedy of a largely abandoned project of public
education without any reference to the racial history that shaped public educa-
tion today. Neither the massive white flight touched off by Brown v. Board of
Education nor the tracking and magnet schools that arose in its aftermath are
presented within the narrative context of reversing basic racial injustice. Indeed,
56 this whitewashed account of the contemporary school wars never acknowledges
the central role of racial power in the story—even though the savage inequalities
of racial power are shown in almost every frame.
Waiting for “Superman” is like a silent film, one in which the viewers can see
the action unspooling before their eyes, but can hear nothing that speaks about it.
But Waiting for “Superman” is more than a silent movie about race in America. It
marks a triumph of the post-racial paradigm. Its ability to engage, move, and
inspire millions of Americans, many of whom are destined to live within the
racialized contours of opportunity that it fails to name, makes it perhaps the most
significant accomplishment of post-racialism to date. And one can readily
measure its impact on the real-world delimiting of education policy with five
chilling words: Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos.

The Organization of Hatreds

And in this way, we come full circle, back into the heart of our present dismal
racial impasse. Donald Trump is not merely the crudest, most destructive
possible rebuke to Barack Obama’s beguiling dream of a post-racial, purely
meritocratic social order. He’s also a bitter reminder that the playbook of white
supremacy has not altered in any fundamental way since the height of the civil
B
rights insurgency in the 1960s.
A Politics is the organization of hatreds, GOP strategist Kevin Phillips reminded
F
F us back when he crafted Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy of laser-focused white
L resentment in 1968. And indeed, observers who have long been tutored in
E
R white-backlash rhetoric could not help but notice that Trump’s major campaign
themes all echoed Nixon’s scurrilous coded appeals to “law and order” in an
American racial order held—then as now—to be teetering on the brink of license
and anarchy. Like Nixon, Trump managed to stir the demagogic specter of racial
confrontation into being amid remarkably stable economic conditions (even
though both the Trump and Nixon white panics did unfold amid conditions of
growing class and racial inequality). But unlike Nixon, Trump has openly
fomented violence within his white following. Just eight years after the ballyhooed
dawn of a post-racial social order, racial grievance has returned to the center of
American politics—only this time it’s white. Indeed, the largest margins of victory
for Trump in a popular vote he resoundingly lost came among white voters.
More than any affinity white voters felt for Trump as a celebrity, a billion-
aire, or an unlikely tribune of populist working-class revolt, they recognized in
their leader a dramatic and seemingly unanswerable vindication of the social
wages of whiteness. Trump is an unreflective beneficiary of every sort of white
privilege on offer, from his inherited fortune to his mass-media celebrity to his
ability to lie with utter impunity about his career, his finances, and his easily
documented record of public statements. If Barack Obama had committed but
one of the transgressions Trump reveled in during his 2016 presidential
run—deriding John McCain’s war record, to take a comparatively minor
instance—he would have suffered a torrent of righteous white moralizing that
would have been unprecedented even in a country renowned for its righteous
white moralizing. And if he’d been caught on tape bragging about a celebri-
ty-enabled history of sexual assault—well, suffice it to say that it would have
been a high-tech lynching on a scale that Clarence Thomas could scarcely
begin to imagine. 57
More than a simple double standard is at play here—even though, of course,
it is a racial double standard of truly cosmic proportions. But it’s not merely that
Trump is escaping punishment for utterances and behaviors that would have
been surefire career killers in Obama’s case; he is, rather, being rewarded for
them. By saying what, in polite adult political company, has been deemed
unsayable, and by mocking and marginalizing the orthodoxies of “political
correctness,” Trump has acquired among his white-nationalist supporters the
image of a bold truth-teller, of a movement leader who will never apologize for
past trespasses and crimes.
A trickster god of the right-wing faith, Trump has casually authored a
series of presidential breakthroughs of his own—all of which fall under the
aegis of what neocon culture warrior Charles Krauthammer liked to call, by
way of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the penchant for “defining deviancy down.”
From his refusal to address any substantive conflicts of interest stemming
from his business holdings to his refusal, for a host of transparently untrue and
self-contradictory reasons, to release his tax returns to his dumbfounding
claim to have cleared up the noncontroversy over Obama’s citizenship status
that largely existed only because of Trump’s own lies and innuendos, there’s
no longer much of anything he could do to further shock or outrage the
American voting public. A significant segment of Trump’s base evidently
expects him to derogate basic principles of constitutional order—and indeed,
S
that hard core of Trump supporters seems inclined to think more of him for it. A
But that’s the thing about symbolic breakthroughs: nobody said they had to L
V
serve the cause of progress. O
 Amber A’Lee Frost
All Worked
Up and Nowhere
to Go
The ever more futile politics of left protest
I D I D N OT A N T I C I PAT E how the death of the
radical British writer and theorist Mark
58 Fisher would haunt me, but I am reminded of
him more and more often, and I find myself
returning to his work regularly. And it’s not
just me. Recently, a magazine editor asked if
I would cowrite an autopsy of contemporary
radical activism; we both felt a postmortem
was needed before a reanimated left could
emerge to fight capital and seize power. “We
could be like Mark Fisher!” he said excitedly.
“We could tell the hard truths!” I had to
remind him not only that neither of us is half
as smart as Fisher, but that the “hard
truths” essay the editor was referring to got
Fisher crucified by his peers. And that Mark
Fisher had recently committed suicide.
Although Fisher’s work demonstrates a
sprawling awareness of life deranged by
capitalism, he is best remembered for the
prescient, infamous essay “Exiting the
Vampire Castle,” which infuriated much of
the self-identified left by arguing that a
B
A shallow and noxious liberal identity critique,
F
F delivered mostly on the internet, was being
L used to undermine class politics and
E
R paralyze left discourse. I remember not
thinking too much of his diagnosis at the
time, which was late 2013, agreeing with
some points, but not buying in wholesale.
Later I realized it was spot-on, a preview of
the farcically doomed Clinton campaign; but
by then Fisher had been written off as a
“toxic” white brocialist, a man doing
“violence” to the “most vulnerable” people
in “the movement.” Even worse, after Fisher
died at forty-eight in January of this year, he
was still being denounced by po-faced critics
for his frankly gracious critique of the left.
And I’m talking right after his death—within
hours of the information going public.
The Trump administration has rekindled
the internal hysteria that Fisher warned
against. And though it was heartening, the
first wave of solidarity marches and general
actions is now fading into memory; we’re left
with a familiar hostility, a recurring bad
faith that so recently has smeared greater
minds and gentler hearts than my own. The
economic ambitions of the so-called
“Sanders Effect” appear to have waned, and
the focus has predictably turned to the
glittering, bilious spectacle of Trumpism.
Just as Trump remade politics as television,
João Fazenda
we’ve allowed political action to mimic the
spiteful, futile patterns of online bickering:
our fellow anti-capitalists betray us all by
enjoying or creating the wrong art, reading
the wrong articles, championing the wrong
theories, or even laughing at the wrong
jokes. The left is at once flailing and scle-
rotic. Afflicted by a vague autoimmune
disorder, we cannot even retain what little
power we have, nor do we have any institu-
tions capable of doing so; thus, we are able
to smack only those within arm’s reach of
us—ourselves. Meanwhile, the bigger and
stronger the right gets, the more insular we
become, single-mindedly obsessed with
purifying our own ranks and weeding out the
problematic among us. Of course, the left
requires large portions of the problematic
and disparate working class to sign on, but
the range of acceptable comradely thinking
is becoming ever-stricter, and “deviants are
sacrificed to increase group solidarity,” as
the artist Jenny Holzer warned.
59
Marxist writer David Harvey notes that
even Warren Buffett acknowledges the
neoliberal era is marked by a one-sided
class war, waged only by the capitalists.
(“Sure there is class war, and it is my class,
the rich, who are making it and we are
winning,” Buffett has said.) The left lies
sputtering on the mat, unable to maintain
its ground, much less make any material
gains. It’s hard to disagree when our
gestures lack bite and our political parties—
and most of our unions—are feckless at
best, and capitalist quislings at worst.
Whether it takes the form of insular campus
activism, reactionary internet sermonizing,
or impotent calls for general action, what
passes for “the left” today is both parochial
and completely disconnected from power.
O
To put it bluntly, we have lost; we are
U
decimated and we are feeble. What’s worse, T
B
we refuse to admit our failures, repeating U
them over and over and over again, casti- R
S
gating anyone who might question this T
 pattern. In “Exiting the Vampire Castle,”
Fisher alerted us to a “witch-hunting
moralism”—in this case, against anyone who
might try to raise class consciousness—that
inevitably devolves into guilt and ineffectu-
ality. In the wake of the election, it’s a lesson
that seems to have gone largely unlearned
by a self-sabotaging left.
Scabs and Flirts
I was introduced to the idea of a Women’s
Strike while speaking on a panel of leftist
feminists shortly after Trump was elected.
During the Q&A afterwards, a feminist from
the audience took the microphone and
delivered an impassioned speech. Among the
things participants were to abstain from:
Paid jobs
Emotional Labor
Childcare
Diapers
Housework
60 Cooking
Sweeping
Laundry
Dishes
Errands
Groceries
Fake smiles
Flirting
Makeup
Laundry
Shaving
At the end of her speech, I jokingly asked
if I was allowed to flirt with other women
during the strike, or if that would be
scabbing—I did not get a laugh. Of course,
tensions were high and good humor was in
short supply, but there was also something
genuinely irksome about the perceived
usefulness of such a “strike,” and my
glibness betrayed my skepticism.
B
A For one, general strikes require a
F
F massive amount of organizing, and the
L proposed date for the strike was a few
E
R short months away. Also, the National
Planning Committee was much heavier on
academics and writers than on labor
organizers. And if the turnout was low,
would anyone even notice? (If a tree
strikes in the woods, where no boss is
there to feel it, can the tree really get the
goods?) These questions were frustrat-
ingly overshadowed by criticisms from
liberals insisting that only the “privileged”
women would be striking. This framing, of
course, misses the point; the success of a
strike is not dependent on the relative
“privilege” of the workers participating,
but in the chaos those workers can inflict
by withholding their labor.
Striking works because it fucks up
someone’s day, but whose day would the
participants of the Women’s Strike affect?
Would the event, billed as “A Day Without
Women,” amount to anything more than a
day without adjuncts and freelance graphic
designers? As an adjunct myself, I believe
my job is important, but if I’m being
perfectly honest, no one notices when I don’t
show up for one day of work. It costs no
money, and it doesn’t plunge the university
into chaos, and without cost or chaos, a
strike is an impotent performance.
In my little lefty circles, these concerns
were not received graciously. Men who
questioned the strike’s utility were branded
sexist; women who did the same were
simply ignored. It was reminiscent of the
Hillary campaign’s rhetoric: every feminist
who didn’t fall in line was suddenly invisi-
ble; every man with a criticism of a woman
was suddenly manifesting a deep-seated
and pathological misogyny. When I asked
my more enthusiastic comrades why I
should be striking, or what I would even be
striking for, the best answer I got was “Why
not? We’re just trying to see what sticks.”
The worst I got was silence. There were a
lot of passive-aggressive Facebook manifes-
tos about how lefties who questioned the
action were just scared, or closet liberals,
or worse, “scabs.”
As early as January, many leftists
expressed skepticism about calls for a
general strike, but by March there was a loss of faith was considered a personal
self-justifying urgency to defend the tactic failing, and any hint of creeping atheism
against all doubts. Maybe it was due to the could get you purged, lest you infect the
reorienting of the action as a “Women’s brethren with your demonic skepticism.
Strike”—no one wants to be called a The arbitrary piety was there, too. During
brocialist or a mansplainer—but I think the the strike, I remembered when my Papaw
bigger culprit was in our general panic. We tried to sell a car to my mother, but then
are living in an era of Post-Trump Hysteria. refused to accept her check on a Sunday,
It’s scary out there, and so we cling to the since he couldn’t do business on the
delusion that what we are doing is working. Sabbath. That event—like the Women’s
The naysayers, the thinking goes, must be Strike—was a strangely un-materialist
politically backward or reactionary; we initiative, one underwritten by the idea that
should be quick to root them out. Mean- we should abstain from work merely out of
while, the world goes on. observance and reverence,
In the end, I called off my and not to “get the goods.”
classes. I told myself I was The self-appointed I still flirted that day. I
setting an example for my Trump Resistance have never understood this
students, but I still put is stuck in a tactic of chastity, but then
“Women’s Strike” in quota- compulsive loop, again, I’ve always viewed
tion marks when I explained perseverating sex and romance as
why class was cancelled. I on symptoms and properly proletarian
told myself the students self-help rather pursuits. (It never felt like
were critical thinkers, and than tackling the work to me, but maybe I’ve
that it would do them good disease. been doing it wrong.) I also
to see a politically active did my dishes. God might 61
teacher; but really, I not want you to be
cancelled class for the same reason I do so prurient or fastidious on the day of rest, but
many fruitless and potentially self-destruc- capitalism doesn’t actually give a shit about
tive things—so that no one can call me a your unpaid emotional labor. It’s kind of a
coward. In the meantime, I peeked at the bro like that.
rally; it was small by New York standards. What the Women’s Strike did reveal is
Weeks later, I still saw colleagues and that the self-appointed Trump Resistance is
comrades defending the action as “radical.” stuck in a compulsive loop, perseverating
Some were denouncing those who consid- on symptoms and self-help rather than
ered the strike a failure—even those who tackling the disease. The “battles” you see
went on strike themselves—as insufficiently making headlines in our claustrophobic
supportive of this promising new vanguard community have become microscopically
of women college professors. petty: Who speaks at what campus? Who
The pervasive mood reminded me of made what problematic joke? Which left
church, and specifically the churches of my magazine has a bad take and who will “take
grandparents, who cycled through about a responsibility”? None of these squabbles
hundred tiny Protestant evangelical sects, are politics; none of them build power. I’m
each one seething with mistrust of its own sorry to say, even punching the odd Nazi
parishioners. Belief, in those denominations, doesn’t build power. (It raises spirits, but
little else.) We’re forever resting on the O
was fervent, and turnover was high. I grew
U
up with a certain envy of Catholics and laurels of feel-good symbolic outcry rather T
B
Jews, who are allowed to attend services than the material victories that make our U
regardless of their connection to God. For day-to-day lives better. It suits the ruling R
S
these evangelical Protestants, however, a class just fine. T
 In his 2009 barnburner Capitalist
Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Fisher
diagnosed this rut as an acceptance of our
own political futility:
Since [the anti-capitalist movement]
was unable to posit a coherent
alternative political economic model
to capitalism, the suspicion was
that the actual aim was not to
replace capitalism but to mitigate
its worst excesses; and, since the
form of its activities tended to be
the staging of protests rather than
political organization, there was a
sense that the anti-capitalism
movement consisted of making a
series of hysterical demands which
it didn’t expect to be met.
These lines come from the second
chapter, titled “What If You Held a Protest
and Everyone Came?” The Women’s Strike
listed in its platform: “An End to Gender
62 Violence,” “Reproductive Justice for All,”
“Labor Rights,” “Full Social Provisioning,”
and “Environmental Justice for All.” If those
are the expectations of the Women’s Strike,
they are exactly of the kind Fisher
describes—the sort you never expect to be
met. Conversely, if the platform wasn’t
listing demands, it was a strike without
demands, which means it was not a strike at
all, but a rally.
Rallies are fine. I’m not suggesting we
retire the rally, but let’s remember what
political theater actually does and does not
accomplish: marches are for morale,
protests are for pathos, but strikes? Strikes
are for getting the goods, and that requires
organizing workers. The hub of political
power is not academia; it is not the internet;
it is not the media, or comedy, or romance,
or friendship, or art, or theory. It’s the
workplace. And however “deviant” or
B
A unwanted this message may be, there are
F
F workers—mostly ignored by the broader
L left—who are nonetheless transmitting it
E
R loud and clear.
The Deft and the Militant
It was difficult getting ahold of Bhairavi
Desai. She’s busy. The New York Taxi
Workers Alliance is very active, very
understaffed, and very underfunded, but it’s
a force to be reckoned with, even though the
majority of its more than 19,000 rank-and-
file drivers feel the exacerbated sting of
institutionalized racism under Trump.
On January 27, Trump issued an execu-
tive order crookedly titled “Protecting the
Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the
United States.” The NYTWA was administer-
ing an exam for a driving class at the time,
and around forty members were gathered in
the office, alarmed by what they immedi-
ately recognized as a Muslim ban. Phone
calls poured in. Drivers were angry and
scared; they turned to their union first. The
next day the union tweeted “NO PICKUPS @
JFK Airport 6 PM to 7 PM today. Drivers
stand in solidarity with thousands protest-
ing inhumane & unconstitutional #Muslim-
Ban.” With a useful tweet—uncharacteristic
of the medium—the strike went public.
The anti-ban rally at JFK was a big story,
and with good reason—it was an uplifting
sight. Somewhat underreported, though,
was the labor action that helped stir the
beautiful chaos. Any New Yorker will tell you
getting to or from an airport is an absolute
nightmare—taxis are essential. In less than
twenty-four hours, the NYTWA threw a fat
wrench in the daily functioning of an
international airport, marooning travelers in
a rapidly expanding and unruly crowd.
Off-duty drivers even showed up to hold
down the lot. Uber tried to scab, of course,
but everyone saw through it, and a mass of
customers deleted their app in response. It
was only an hour, but an hour was all it took.
The protest combined with the taxi strike is
what broke JFK.
Though the protest got the brightest
spotlight, the Taxi Workers did get plenty of
attention on social media that night. When I
asked Desai if she was shocked by the
response, she said, “We were so caught up
in the protest, we didn’t think anybody Add to this the rise of “the sharing
knew. It wasn’t until we got home late [that] economy.” Not only do service apps like
night, after we had lost our voices, that we Uber spend millions to fight labor regula-
knew people were talking about it. We were tion, but Uber itself has run an attack
blown away.” campaign against the NYTWA, going so far
Desai was shocked because NYTWA as to send their drivers misinformation
members are used to working unnoticed, about the union thugs who might try to woo
even when they win (they do), and even them. Meanwhile, other unions have cozied
when they fight hard (they always do). Still, up to Silicon Valley by throwing their
it should surprise no one that they’ve shut principles out the window. The Machinists
down the airport before. In September Union struck a deal to form the Indepen-
2015, a driver was assaulted by a dispatcher, dent Drivers Guild, a pseudo-union that is
and the union staged a in fact unilaterally operated
sit-down. The Port Authority by Uber itself.
came with dogs, but the Capitalism doesn’t Despite all of this, the
drivers refused to get up or actually give NYTWA is vibrant and
move their cars, saying, “We a shit about your growing. Where others see
move when the union tells us unpaid emotional walls, Desai sees chal-
to move.” labor. It’s kind lenges. We fret over the
On paper, the NYTWA of a bro like that. rise of the millennial
looks like it’s poised to be “precariat,” but the
devoured by neoliberalism. nonemployee status of the
After a mere two years of organizing, it was drivers did not faze Desai—“organizers
officially formed in 1998—a younger union, have to be creative,” she said. They are
born under the Clinton administration, fighting Uber’s propaganda with their own 63
hardly a golden era for organized labor. And information campaign, and they’re
19,000 drivers may sound like a large watching their backs, guarding against
membership, but compared to the big raids from other short-sighted, opportu-
unions it’s a blip. What’s more, NYTWA nistic unions. Most impressively, they flex
members had been vulnerable workers even labor muscle against state power, which is
before Trump. For one thing, none of the now firmly in the hands of the right.
drivers are legally classified as “employees,” It’s true that it was inspiring to see so
making the NYTWA the only non-employee many people standing against racism at an
union with an AFL-CIO charter since the airport, which is essentially purgatory
United Farm Workers of the 1960s. Without with Starbucks and duty-free booze. But
employee status, they aren’t guaranteed what about the deft and militant saboteurs
employee rights. Nor was the charter a who monkey-wrenched everyone’s ride
windfall for the NYTWA; it was only home? Watching the live feeds, my head
supposed to protect them from other larger was spinning, and the world was filled with
unions that might try to “poach” their promise again: We can still shut down
drivers. Unfortunately, the charter raised ports. What else can we do?
the Taxi Workers’ profile, and they’ve
experienced even more interference from
A More Perfect Union
other unions—one incident of a competing
O
union organizing on their turf completely I have spent a lot of time trying to find a U
derailed a campaign in a large metropolitan novel way of delivering this very cold take, T
B
area. Desai asked that I not name names so but there’s just nothing new about the one U
as not to exacerbate tensions between the and only prescription for socialism, however R
S
two organizations. aberrant it sounds. T
 More than Twitter-style rhetoric, need an overhaul. After a notoriously failed
amputated “strikes,” and academic strike effort, the Communications Workers
posturing, the left needs radical, militant of America cleaned house, replaced an
unions with a political vision beyond the incompetent leadership, assessed their
protection of their own rank and file. When failure, and regrouped. (It led to a
the Muslim ban was declared, the drivers of successful strike against Verizon in 2016,
the NYTWA immediately turned to their one that yielded 1,300 new jobs and a 10.5
union, because they know it’s how they fight; percent raise over four years.) Other
that’s what unions need to be. unions, like the aforementioned Machinists,
We need to be able to build labor must be gutted entirely, their membership
coalitions and strike for reorganized into new
real—meaning we can shut institutions. Mostly,
everything down until our The hub of political though, we need to start
demands are met. Some- power is not organizing the unorga-
times this will be illegal. academia; it is nized (i.e., most workers)
Sometimes workers will have not the internet; and focus heavily on
to camp out and occupy it is not the strategic points of
workplaces. Sometimes they media, or comedy, employment. As much as it
will have to sabotage or romance, or would flatter my ego to
machinery or bully the boss. friendship, or art, believe otherwise, I am not
Maybe there are gains to be or theory. at a particularly strategic
had in local elections, but It’s the workplace. point; I’m an adjunct
even as Bernie Sanders is professor at a private
currently the most popular university, and even when
64 politician, the Democrats still seem we all strike, it’s only a problem for our
hell-bent on fighting winners and running little university microcosm.
losers. If we’re ever going to have any sway But take heart, fellow atomized and
in electoral politics, we need union muscle. expendable neoliberal subjects: there is a
For his part, the Marxist NYU professor, place for us in the coming wars! The
writer, and sociologist Vivek Chibber put it microcosms still need to be organized
nicely in “Why We Still Talk About the (every bit helps), and established unions
Working Class”: can be refreshed and steered toward
radical ends. Nevertheless, I regret to
The working class is unlike any inform you that much of this endeavor will
other social grouping in the be quite dull. Organizing is not usually as
non-capitalist section of modern invigorating as rallying; it’s mostly meet-
society. However penurious it is, ings, planning, phone calls, emails, spread-
however dominated it is, however sheets—you know, women’s work. There are
atomized it is, it is the goose that a lot of tedious administrative tasks that go
lays the golden egg. It is the source into forming and maintaining a union, and
of profits, because unless workers the work is rarely as romantic or cinematic
show up to do their work every day as a bunch of taxi drivers locking down
and create profits for their JFK. But those moments do happen.
employers, that principle of profit They’re sustaining, and they compound one
maximization cannot be carried another. Only labor can make it happen.
B
A out. It remains a dead letter. Only workers can shut down production.
F
F Only workers can close the ports. Only
L It’s true that many traditional labor workers can take capital hostage and make
E
R unions are backward or weak; some will the whole world stand still.
Pony
By Monica Ferrell

After the snakebite, I tried to make noises

With the clouds in my throat, the dissolving
Snow of my tongue: but the young ones
Kept crying and calling and couldn’t hear me.

How could I have explained anyway my surprise?

Not the kiss of the branding iron’s signature,
Not the crop’s electric shock, the bit’s silver
Felt ever as sweet to me as his firm teeth.

Decline is a river you fall into, your hind legs

Unsteady on the slippery bank.
Your last sight a spray of delicious gillyflowers
Bright enough to be suns.

65
There’s so much you realize you’ll never miss.
Mornings in the sludgy mist. The saddle hours.
The way children comb and braid your mane
Then look at you as though for repayment.

In the ring, on the bridle path, how enormous I

Was floating above them while they rode me
As I practiced the art of surrender,
Holding my thoughts separate as a kite—

I might as well have been on my own planet of dust,

Forever careering through shadow fields
Till I saw those eyes sparking green from the dark,
Till I let him shake my body with one touch.

P
O
E
M
Amrita Marino
 Yasmin Nair and
Eugenia Williamson

Abortive
Reasoning
67

What’s wrong with S

A

the reproductive rights debate L

V
O
 Like the darling buds of May, the
migrating swallows of Capistrano, and
the Saturday tweetstorms of Donald
Trump, a Lena Dunham controversy is
always on time. The inveterate internet
agitator delivered another trademark
micro-scandal late last year, not long
after the election, precisely at a moment
when feminists everywhere had become
terrified of the tribulations promised
by Trump’s impending presidency.
68 In December, Dunham posted an
episode of her podcast, Women of the
Hour, titled “Choice.” The episode
discussed a range of women’s decisions
about reproduction and childcare. True
to form, Dunham ruined an otherwise
well-meaning show with a comical note:
she offered that although she’d never
had an abortion, she wished she had.
After all, Dunham asked with a laugh,
B
A
how hard could it be?
F
F
L
E
R
 Or at least that was how the internet chose to translate what she’d said.
The truth—lost in the hot air of the Angry Twitter Steam Bath—was much
more complicated.
Dunham’s podcast is aimed at a politically non-specific audience, but she is
pro-choice, something she made clear when discussing the stigma around
abortion during “Choice.” At one point, Dunham described her response to a
young Texan woman’s request that she, Dunham, participate in a project that
shared women’s personal abortion stories. As Dunham put it:

I sort of jumped. “I haven’t had an abortion,” I told her. I wanted to

make it really clear to her that as much as I was going out and
fighting for other women’s options, I myself had never had an
abortion. And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself
stigma around this issue. Even I, the woman who cares as much as
anybody about a woman’s right to choose, felt it was important that
people know I was unblemished in this department.

She went on to say that many members of her family, including her mother, and
several close friends had had abortions:

I feel so proud of them for their bravery, for their self-knowledge,

and it was a really important moment for me then to realize I had
internalized some of what society was throwing at us and I had to
put it in the garbage. Now I can say that I still haven’t had an
abortion, but I wish I had. 69

That last sentence, showing Dunham engaging in a rare bit of self-reflection,

was taken out of context, and, in the tradition of out-of-context sound bites
everywhere, it became the source of all subsequent controversy. The commen-
tariat dismissed Dunham as arrogant and naive. In The Daily Beast, Erin Gloria
Ryan excoriated the celebrity, insisting that she had given anti-abortion activists
too much ammunition:

Dunham’s comments are free red meat for the sort of troll who
believes pro-choice feminists spend their days praying to their lord
and savior Margaret Sanger that they’ll get accidentally impregnated
so they can have one of those abortions the gals at the nail salon
can’t stop gabbing about. It’s not compassionate; it’s bizarre, a more
obnoxious version of telling a person who has had their appendix
removed that you, too, wish you could have your appendix taken out.

Ryan’s comments were typical of many internet responses. One of us

witnessed, for instance, a Facebook conversation among coastal, pro-choice
feminists who disavowed Dunham specifically, and the left in general, for not
approaching the issue of abortion with the appropriate solemnity. Abortion, you
see, is a potentially devastating choice, one with the ability to shatter a woman for
S
life, or at least to cause her a great deal of trauma. This is the crushing truth A
behind the abortion debate that pro-choicers supposedly refuse to acknowledge L
V
in their eagerness to cast abortion as nothing more hurtful than a stubbed toe. O
 Such conversations, raising the unseen ghosts of callous pro-choicers
stomping on the traumatized bodies of women who had experienced abortion,
happened all over the internet, and they all had at least one thing in common:
participants were required to declare their own experiences of abortion and
discuss the pain it should have caused. Those who had not had an abortion, like
Dunham, or those who would not affirm the same trauma narrative, were
admonished to be silent.

Songs of Experience
In these discussions, experience became a substitute for any and all political
analysis. As we watched this rather formulaic argument take shape with mount-
ing dismay, it became clear that the conversation around abortion had long since
been ceded to the right and their narrative of victimhood, even by pro-choice
left feminists. We also noticed that commenters who weighed in on the ex-
tended fallout from Dunham’s podcast, to a person, ignored the experience,
retold in wrenching and gruesome detail, of podcast guest Mindy Swank, an
erstwhile pro-lifer turned fierce pro-choice activist who had described her
abortion on the episode.
Like so much of Dunham’s work, the podcast drew entirely on her insular
Brooklyn community, with a brief segment from a recorded Planned Parenthood
event. The celebrity is notorious for refusing to engage with the experiences of
people she does not know—a group that emphatically includes non-white people,
whom Dunham claims she could never represent adequately. Her guests included
70 a woman with ten children and another who felt pressured by her community to
justify her decision to feed formula to her baby. All were friends or family
members of friends.
Swank, a former conservative Christian from Illinois, was an exception, but
her segment had been culled from Rewire, a website devoted to reproductive
health. When she was twenty weeks into her pregnancy, by which point her water
had broken, Swank’s doctors confirmed that her baby had so many malformations
it could never survive. Waiting to deliver the baby could cause a severe infection
that risked her fertility and even her life, but her local hospital, the only one where
she could afford an induction, adhered to Catholic health care restrictions and
thus refused to perform the procedure until Swank was bleeding “enough”—at
twenty-seven weeks. Swank was forced to hold a dying baby for three hours and
eighteen minutes—a period she described in poignant detail—while he turned
blue and struggled for breath. The experience turned her into a pro-choice activist.
This profound experience, relayed in a well-meaning and even comprehen-
sive episode, got zero serious attention amid the Dunham kerfuffle. Fixating on
a few words taken out of context allowed commenters to perform abortion
politics as a kind of martyrdom refracted through the mystical lens of experi-
ence—but in this case, a very particular kind of experience, one that focused
implicitly on the subject’s sense of guilt. Under the reigning terms of debate in
B
abortion politics, there was little room for Swank’s torturous and visceral but
A also political experience.
F
F The right, of course, diligently ignores the plight of women who undergo the
L horror of bodily risk in order to fulfill full-term pregnancies that involve dying
E
R babies with no chance of survival. But even purported pro-choicers inevitably buy
 into this tyranny of experience. A more considered response to Dunham would
have acknowledged that, even if her words seemed insensitive, she had presented
another person’s experience, one that was meaningful and relevant to the debate,
in a way that mitigated her apparent callousness. Instead, Swank’s story, which
powerfully lays bare the duplicity of the supposed “pro-life” movement, was
quickly buried under mounds of misdirected, disingenuous ire. Swank’s experi-
ence, which she had forcefully politicized, simply did not count. Instead,
commenters focused on those, like Dunham, whom they saw as failing to pay lip
service to their preferred narratives about abortion.
The tyranny of experience in abortion rights discourse has potentially
disastrous consequences. By definition, at least half the world will never
directly experience the procedure,
but this does not mean they cannot
Cultivating a self-abnegating understand the need for it to be safe
impulse to surrender to and legal.
Predictably, Dunham issued an
conservatives, even Planned apology—a routine, face-saving
Parenthood has established maneuver of hers—but then,
bizarrely, she mischaracterized her
a policy of non-engagement. own words: “I truly hope a distasteful
joke on my part won’t diminish the
amazing work of all the women who participated.” But Dunham had never
actually joked about anything. Her apology was the natural outcome of decades of
abortion rights activism deferring, with troubling docility, to the right’s efforts to
mute any vigorous defense of abortion rights. The mischaracterization of 71
Dunham’s words, even by Dunham herself, represented exactly what her liberal
and progressive critics claimed she was doing wrong.
Dunham’s PR-approved damage-control backtracking, which saw her
recasting her own words in the shape of the accusations she could have weath-
ered or fought, reflects an anxiety about abortion that has long hampered
effective left activism around the subject. Nearly every response to Dunham
replicated the misrepresentation. Many reports and tweets assumed she made
the comment in a condescending fashion, and then repeated some variation of
the oft-made assertion, popularized by Hillary Rodham Clinton, that abortion is a
“tragic” choice that needs to be “safe, legal, and rare.”
Cultivating this self-abnegating impulse to surrender to conservatives, even
Planned Parenthood has established a policy of non-engagement; the leaders of
the embattled women’s health service have asked their supporters to refrain from
directly confronting the pro-life groups harassing women and their partners in
front of the organization’s facilities. Pundits like Ryan seem beholden to compa-
rable tactics. Rather than question the inhumanity of a country that would
compel a woman to hold her dying baby for three hours and eighteen minutes,
they elect instead to worry over the ways in which high-visibility, white
pro-choice advocates express their support for the cause. And all of this conspicu-
ously inward-looking anxiety is playing out, grotesquely, against the backdrop of
a full-scale rollback of abortion rights for poor and often non-white women.
S
What does this collective decision to repackage, resell, and cynically advertise A
a particular mode of traumatic experience at the expense of others say about the L
V
present state of the abortion rights movement? What does it mean that the O
 Dunham nontroversy came one month after Trump’s election and about one
month before Trump reinstated a federal ban on funding for international health
organizations that perform abortions? If the experience of trauma and its progres-
sively instrumentalized narrative is the only way we can justify the need for full
abortion rights without apology—our essential demand—how can we develop a
truly radical and liberatory politics around the issue? If the specter of millions of
women marching does not convince governments to scrap anti-women measures
in the guise of “pro-life” policies, what has happened?

Personhood Is Political
We’re witnessing the quiet takeover of feminist politics by an individualist
depiction of women’s experience. When women march as “women,” and not as
feminists, they reinscribe themselves as subjects deserving of fundamental rights
based only on their bodily integrity. We argue that for women to gain rights, they
must first agitate as feminists, and for feminists to gain rights, they must move
beyond demands for narratives about pain and experience—the only kind of
stories that have any efficacy under neoliberal policy presumptions.
This argument by no means denies that abortion may cause pain and trauma.
But in the ongoing war on abortion, the left has failed to translate the experience of
being denied rights to abortion into political and economic terms that affect
everyone—even the anti-abortionists to whom they’ve ceded their authority on
the matter. In casting abortion as something that should cause guilt, the left has
forfeited any way to demand rights as rights. Instead, it has tried to negotiate a
72 paltry version of abortion rights based on an exclusive idea of abortion configured
only through victims. And this bankrupt strategy means the left can only argue for
abortion rights if the women who need
those rights are victims—women like
If the experience of trauma Bei Bei Shuai, a pregnant Chinese
immigrant who attempted suicide and
is the only way we can justify
was subsequently charged with feticide
the need for full abortion when she miscarried.
rights without apology, In the tacit social contract under-
writing such displays, all other
how can we develop a truly women—and in particular those who
radical and liberatory weren’t traumatized—make lousy
politics around the issue? representatives of the need for abortion
rights. By this logic, whether you oppose
abortion rights or support them, you are
granted entrance into the conversation if you can first claim to have had the
experience; and even then, you can speak only if you echo a very particular
narrative that involves your guilt at having had an abortion. In effect, the capitula-
tory left has served to create its own version of personhood around abortion: the
woman is a victim, no matter where you stand.
B
Throughout the past four decades of the abortion wars, the question of
A personhood has been defined through the fetus. In view of the entrenched and
F
F damaging duopoly upheld by right-wing foes of abortion and wan neoliberal
L apologists for reproductive rights, there is a dire need to recalibrate the conversa-
E
R tion—to inspire a better set of questions about the personhood of feminists. What
if the conversation around abortion was based on feminist questions that
challenged the diminution of abortion rights on economic and political grounds,
not on the grounds of feeling and affect?
In light of how abortion has subtly come to be redefined not as a feminist
issue but as a women’s issue, we are compelled to ask: Is the feminist a person? To
pose this question at all is to reorient abortion rights as a set of fundamental
economic and political matters. It is also to state that feminism itself is not just
about women, or about who has or does not have a womb. We argue for a politics
of feminism that goes beyond personhood, one that encompasses the lives and
desires of all who search for a more just and egalitarian world. But first we must
ask how we arrived at this dark climacteric in abortion politics.
The current administration has been cast as the ultimate villain in the fight
for abortion rights. And while the Trump White House and its policies are deeply
wretched, to frame the struggle this way elides the complex history of legal
abortion in the United States, as well as the left’s complicity in its endangerment.
In abortion discourse, much rests upon the idea of personhood. In fact, in
2009, a pro-life group called Personhood USA formed to lobby the United States
government to grant fetuses the same rights as people. Is the fetus a person? This
simple but dramatic question has been the hinge upon which much of the
abortion battle has rested, with lawmakers drafting legislation to ensure a
decision either way. In the United States in particular, the idea of personhood has
been the reason for legislated waiting periods and for restrictions on abortions
after twenty-four weeks, when some have determined that the conglomeration of
cells can feel pain. Of course, for hardline abortion opponents, “life begins at
conception,” as every “pro-life” politician is bound to say. 73
The same position was nearly endorsed by Bill Clinton, who, in his memoirs,
confessed his moral struggles with abortion, and famously announced his wish
for the procedure to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Fifteen years later, his wife would
repeat the sentiment, only to walk it back when it threatened her popularity with
left women and influential donors. In the intervening years, the Clintons, who ran
a co-presidency, had initiated welfare reform measures that required poor
couples seeking abortion to receive marital counseling. This ultimately made it
possible for conservative states to fund anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers”
with money allocated to help the poor.
Recent abortion legislation has affected American women in different
ways—often according to their race or class or relative privilege. For urban women
of means, abortion remains accessible through private health care or at affordable
nearby clinics. For poorer women, especially in rural areas and small towns—and
particularly women of color and immigrants—abortion has become, in many
cases, inaccessible and unaffordable. And, as in the case of Purvi Patel, an Indiana
woman who faced charges of fetal homicide in 2015, it has even been criminalized.
Patel’s case was abandoned by Planned Parenthood, until she finally gained
her freedom—the organization had, after all, endorsed the legislation that resulted
in her arrest. This betrayal of the most vulnerable was possible because the
landscape of abortion rights features a clear division between sympathetic and
unsympathetic women. Countless women of means carry out successful abortions
S
without being charged with feticide. Planned Parenthood, in endorsing legislation A
that criminalized women like Patel who needed affordable abortion access in a L
V
small town—not to mention its recent policy of nonconfrontation with the O
 anti-abortion right—is in fact disengaging from the basic needs of a vast number
of women, even as it asks for and gets additional funding from wealthy donors.

F*cking Bildung
Within this sham discourse, which obsessively scripts “good” and “bad” women
as deserving or undeserving persons, the issue for the mainstream abortion rights
movement becomes one of finding the perfect pro-choice advocate who would
embody an idealized personhood vis-a-vis abortion rights: a social progressive,
certainly, but also a woman whose story is suffused with the right amount of
gravitas and regret.
Enter Kassi Underwood. Underwood’s recent book May Cause Love could and
probably should have been titled Abortion: A Love Story. Billed by the author as the
Eat, Pray, Love of abortion memoirs, May Cause Love follows Underwood’s multi-
year struggle to recover from the abortion she got when she was nineteen. She also
recounts her attempt to find the perfect partner. Title option #2: Abort, Pray, Marry.
Underwood is ostensibly a pro-choicer, someone who found her place as a
Christian slightly later in life as she wrestled with guilt following her abortion.
She claims she wrote the book because she couldn’t find any person or group to
grant her the latitude to fully express her feelings about her abortion, which
caused her an ungodly amount of pain and regret. She iterates the unfounded
complaint echoed by so many who lambasted Dunham, that feminists (a term
used broadly) and the pro-choice movement expect that women who experi-
ence abortion treat it as nothing more painful than a pedicure. (In fact, many
74 anthologies and essay collections about abortion by pro-choice women—and
there are plenty—painstakingly record a range of experiences, including, yes,
for many, the sensation of it not being a big deal.) In the end, however,
Underwood is most concerned with how to feel like a proper feminist despite
her guilt about her abortion, her conventional desire to marry her high school
sweetheart, and her conflicted pursuit of both a career and (eventual) mother-
hood on her own terms.
“Marriage and children? That’s not feminist,” Underwood’s inner voice tells
her. Then the clouds part: “Being feminist doesn’t mean I disavow all that’s
traditional and feminine. It means I’ve got an expanded range of possibilities.”
Underwood’s memoir is aimed at liberals who understand abortion through
the lens of religion; it attempts to bridge the divide between the unapologetically
pro-choice and those who might second-guess abortion rights. At times, she must
contort her language to appeal to these demographics. She cannot, for instance,
spell out the word “fuck,” writing it instead as “f*ck”—a strange tic for an author
who cheerfully reveals how much she likes sex or, as she might refer to it, “f*cking.”
Despite its promise of a radical third way to bridge the divide between
anti- and pro-choicers, May Cause Love may in fact cause readers to experience
anger and resentment at its author’s manipulative attempt to construct a bildung
around the experience of abortion. The book is part of a recent crop of confes-
B
sional memoirs written by charming and winsome young women who follow
A episodes of embarrassment with various postures of guilt. On several occasions,
F
F much to our germophobic horror, Underwood debases herself by kneeling in
L public toilets, praying to her God to deliver an answer. In the well-worn tradition
E
R of white women acting as spiritual tourists—mined with great success by
 Elizabeth Gilbert—she travels to faraway and presumably expensive places to
mentally and emotionally bury her fetus.
But what is the question to which she seeks an answer? Much like the case of
“42”—the ostensible answer to everything and nothing in Douglas Adams’s
Hitchhiker’s books—it’s the question that is more elusive.
Like an episode of Dunham’s hit HBO series Girls, Underwood’s book is
surreptitiously a self-obsessed love story in search of a plot. Much of it is
absorbed with the question of whether she should get back together with the
man she refers to as “Will B.” (Say that out loud and the pun becomes obvious,
particularly to Doris Day fans.) This winning lad is not actually the father of the
fetus she chose to abort. That’s Noah, a drug-addled young man who eventually
hooks up with another woman and gets her pregnant as well. That pregnancy,
unlike Underwood’s, is taken to term,
and the child is named Jade, the same
In the current landscape name that Underwood had consid-
ered for the child she chose not to
of abortion rights, regrets
have. Bizarrely, Noah’s daughter Jade
have been weaponized becomes, for Underwood, a replace-
as battering rams against ment for her own child.
May Cause Love is a confused paean
women, treating them not to regret. Over and over, Underwood
as political and economic insists that she could have had that
agents but as sad creatures child. This insistence reflects her
privilege as a solidly middle-class
enslaved entirely by white woman. It also acts as a testa- 75

their emotions, in need of ment to her own perceived failings;

she feels that pregnancy and mother-
a patriarchy to save them
hood are rewards for those who have
from themselves. achieved what women of her station
ought to have achieved—namely, a
career and a stable home life, neither
of which she is able to supply at present, although she knows with a guilty
certainty that she should. True to the self-policing rhetoric of prevailing abortion
politics, she questions the amount of regret she felt at the time of her abortion,
deems it inadequate, and spends years (and presumably some of her book
advance) pursuing a series of self-flagellating moral remedies meant to help her
overcome her regrets. Much of the book is an account of Underwood trying out
varieties of therapy aimed at helping women like her come to terms with guilt
over their abortions. In effect, all of this is supposed to restore harmony and
balance, to create the perfect Person Who Has Had an Abortion.
By going so far as to name and claim the unborn fetus Jade (she had a first
trimester abortion, which technically involves an embryo), Underwood instanti-
ates it as a human. Like the self-reforming Dunham, she fetishizes experience,
and, in her case, it’s the experience of giving birth.

Guilt and Girls S

A
But this finely reticulated song of guilt and experience opens onto a host of L
V
other, more urgent political questions. What would the personhood of the O
 Woman Who Has Had an Abortion look like if abortion were free and on-de-
mand and did not require such convoluted, epic journeys toward self-actualiza-
tion? What if having an abortion did not require judgment? What if having an
abortion was so widely accepted that neither guilt nor its absence were consid-
ered abnormal or even interesting? Instead, today, abortion rights are dictated
according to the extent to which women can recover their purity through the
elaboration of guilt. Underwood effectively rewrites her life history and
reinscribes her chastity. Unsurprisingly, this purity narrative culminates in a
marriage to her one true love.
Underwood’s narrative is a popular one among liberal feminists—she first
came to prominence because of a widely circulated New York Times “Modern
Love” column, where she introduced the themes explored in the book.
Dismayingly, her attitude toward abortion, as something that should be regretted
even when its subjects don’t experi-
ence such regret in real time, is a
We write this to reclaim pervasive one that serves to feed the
dominant anti-choice narratives about
abortion as a feminist
abortion as an unseemly matter.
issue, and feminism as a Cultural representations of abortion
set of issues that affects have, even in the last five years,
become more conservative than those
people regardless of gender. of the 1970s, with liberals and lefties
vying amongst themselves to see who
might be more apologetic. The issue became a hot topic on Girls, but even there its
76 treatment shows the gradual erosion of the idea that abortion politics should be
anything other than naively diplomatic. In Season 1 (2012), for example, Jessa (one
of the Girls) decides to have an abortion, and so her friends clear their schedules to
accompany her to a clinic. It turns out to be a false alarm. Later, in Season 4,
Mimi-Rose, Hannah’s rival for Adam’s affections, tells Adam about her recent
abortion matter-of-factly, which inspires Adam’s moral outrage over not being
informed beforehand. Ultimately, any serious engagement with the idea of
abortion on-demand is nullified by Adam’s idiocy.
“There were no tears, no big consultation conversation,” wrote MSNBC’s Ali
Vitali of the episode. “Like the show in general, it was casual, weird and uncom-
fortable, but it was also refreshing.” For its part, Jezebel deemed the show’s
treatment of abortion “very chill.” In solidarity with the broader media, these
admiring write-ups took the Girls’ lack of moral and political debate about
abortion—as well as its non-depiction—to be a sign of progress. It seems never to
have occurred to these writers that Dunham might have instead hurled herself
into the politics of abortion; nor did anyone ask whether she might have
portrayed abortion as a nontraumatic fact of life.
Given its policy of light engagement, the show unsurprisingly took to the
theme of pregnancy in its final season. Early on, Hannah gets knocked up by a
rando and, after being told by a woman writer that pregnancy and the writer’s life
B
are incompatible, to everyone’s surprise, decides to have a baby. In subsequent
A episodes, Hannah must remind herself and everyone who will listen, “I’m three
F
F months pregnant.” The implication is clear: the window of time in which she
L might be able to have an abortion is fast closing. Eventually, roommate Elijah
E
R confronts Hannah by saying she’ll make a terrible mother—an admonition that
cements her resolve. She will have a baby, just as she will move to Bronxville to
accept a faculty position in the Sarah Lawrence College writing department. The
show concludes with Hannah’s son latching at her breast. It’s 2017, nearly fifty
years after Roe v. Wade, and this is considered cutting-edge feminist dramedy? It’s
more like popcorn politainment under a TV-president and a Gorsuch court.
Similarly, in the recently revived Gilmore Girls, released in 2016, the show
concludes with Rory Gilmore’s announcement that she is pregnant. Unsurpris-
ingly, critical responses to the show never discuss abortion. (The show’s creator
has asserted that she thinks it’s a possibility, should the show return. But we
assume this will be dictated entirely by the cultural climate around the topic
should that happen.)
As the years go by, abortion rights activists increasingly adopt the language
and tactics of the right. Instead of seeking ways to defend their own politics,
pro-choice advocates now twist themselves into mirror versions of pro-lifers, with
the comparatively slight difference that they believe abortion should remain
legal. And more and more, even among pro-choicers, women are depicted as
dithering about their choices. It’s as if watching young—white, middle-class—and
supposedly feminist women agonize over the question of abortion is itself
prime-time entertainment.

The Neutral Zone

So is non-white and/or non-guilt-ridden experience of abortion to be discounted
entirely? Does it have no place in the discourse of abortion rights? To answer that,
we return to Mindy Swank. 77
What if the initial discussion around Dunham’s podcast had in fact focused
on Swank’s explosive account? A young and attractive white woman, a Christian,
unblemished by a lascivious sex life, already a mother of one—her story hit all the
right notes. Centralizing Swank’s experience would have meant turning the
right’s strategy on its head: “You want experience? Pain? Trauma? This is what
happens when you deny women choice.” Instead, a crucial discursive opportunity
was cast aside.
It’s not hard to see why this happened, given the prevailing terms of
engagement on the abortion question. The emphasis on experience flattens
issues like abortion into zones of feeling. When it comes to abortion, we focus
on all the feelings women, we decide, must have about it, but we don’t contex-
tualize the experience within the political and economic questions about
feminism and women’s rights. But what if we focused on the experience of
what it means for women like Swank and numerous others to be denied free
access to an abortion?
If we must talk about experience, we should talk about what happened to
women like Patel and Swank. Patel entered an emergency room bleeding, with
her umbilical cord hanging from her vagina and her placenta needing to be
surgically removed. Swank was forced to cradle a baby desperately trying to
breathe and slowly turning blue as he lost oxygen. As she put it, “I wanted to
choose death’s timing, not death itself.” Instead of being allowed to terminate an
S
unsustainable pregnancy, she was forced to witness and undergo unnecessary A
suffering. Such horrific details—such experiences—should, surely, be recounted L
V
more often, if we’re to press the importance of full access to abortion for all. O
 Instead, we approach the question with a weirdly abstracted and disem-
bodied mood of cultural guilt. This guilt, gathered from a growing pool of trauma
and purity narratives, experienced by women whether they’ve had abortions or
not, is translated into a political language of national remorse about the need for
anyone to have an abortion in the first place. In this blighted landscape, where
abortion is never a neutral act, we turn to the words of Dr. Willie Parker, a black
OBGYN, abortion practitioner, and Christian. His new book, Life’s Work, squarely
addresses the matter of regret:

Unlike the government patriarchs, I do not presume to be able to

protect a woman from her own regret. Nor do I try to. Regret is the
natural consequence of life, lived in maturity, full of mistakes. An
adult is entitled to have regrets. What I can do is try, in the abortion
clinics where I work, to create a safe haven where a woman’s
decision-making is not unduly influenced by other people’s ideas
about what’s right or wrong, or the regrets they think she ought to
have. A woman’s regrets, if she has them, should be her own.

In the current landscape of abortion rights, regrets have been weaponized as

battering rams against women, treating them not as political and economic
agents but as sad creatures enslaved entirely by their emotions, in need of a
patriarchy to save them from themselves. We write this to reclaim abortion as a
feminist issue, and feminism as a set of issues that affects people regardless of
gender. In this, we do exactly what neither the right nor the so-called progressives
78 would have us do—namely, we imagine a future beyond the present moment, a
future not saturated with guilt, one in which abortion is not debated and denied,
not agonized over, but indeed, chattered about in nail salons as a natural and
even boring part of life.

B
A
F
F
L
E
R Leigh Guldig
Auto-Correct
By Ladan Osman

“Lynch whenever works best for you.”

I mean, “Lunch.” It’s too late. So come
archived images of black bodies, hot.
I can tell they’re hot, even dead,
by their skin. Later, I find a market
with the cheapest eggplants I’ve ever seen.
In perfect rows. I want their bitter skin,
the color a little like what’s left after a burn,
or sunburn, especially where my arm bends.
Then, all I can talk about is history class,
social studies, how the teachers, even black
ones, don’t tell you they’re going to talk
about hot black bodies with balls and dicks
and maybe other meat stuffed in their mouths,
why it’s so important to see, without knowing
79
anything else about her, a black girl, woman,
who can tell with those full white skirts,
knocked down by batons or water or dogs onto
the pavement. And when you’re little and also
wear good socks, frilling socks with good shoes,
you think about the lace getting dirty, blood
on a white skirt, white socks, on shining black
or dark shoes. I keep saying: they should give us
a warning, a trigger warning.
What are the pictures for anyway, more than
blame on white people (I can tell their skin
is dry by the pictures), holding their hats,
cameras, each other. Looking up at a tree,
down at the ground. Why didn’t each black
person kill a white person. That’s what I thought
in school, looking at my book, or TV screen,
or projector, or Black History Month posters,
or the white students and the white teacher,
the few other blacks. I sweated a little.
Did I look hot? In a picture, I’d have wet skin.
P
There, one could point a hundred years later O
E
or less, an eggplant shine on my forehead. M
Greg Kletsel
 Ann Friedman

California
Über Alles
How the resistance is leaving its heart
on the Left Coast

81
a friend posted a photo to Instagram of the
A F E W M O N T H S A F T E R T H E E L ECT I O N ,
California state flag waving above his porch. “Never thought I’d fly a rebel flag on
my house,” read the caption. “Also never thought I’d consider this a rebel flag.
But here we are.”
Californians, always eager to see ourselves as the cultural and social
vanguard, have never been more smug about our relationship to the rest of the
country. Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory here was 4.3 million votes. When you
consider this fact alongside the new president’s agenda, which contradicts our
stated values on almost every issue, California has never felt more separate from
the rest of America. We think of ourselves as beacons of how the country could
function—if only more people had rejected Trump’s siren song to return to the
golden age before civil rights and smartphones.
I’ve never been so happy to live here, and yet I’ve been second-guessing my
choice to leave my hometown in Iowa. As I watched the returns roll in on election
night, sharing my despair with friends who came to California from places like
Ohio and Georgia and North Carolina, I couldn’t help but wonder how things
might have been different if we hadn’t all moved West to write magazine articles
and select the music for Apple commercials and design websites. What if we’d
stayed in our hometowns and cast our lot with—and our votes in—the counties
that raised us?
Of course, we can’t know. What is clear is that none of us are going back—
S
especially not now. We’re secure in the certainty that California, for all of its A
L
problems, does not need to be made great “again.” Unlike voters in many states, V
we appreciate environmental regulation and clean-energy incentives. We’ve got O
 lots of high-paying jobs in fields like tech and aerospace and entertainment. To
many of us, drug policy means decriminalization and easy access to high-quality
organic weed, not public-health initiatives to combat opioid addiction.
Immigrants are our friends and neighbors and family members, not an abstract
threat. When’s the last time you read about a white-nationalist group gaining
traction in our state? Nope, not here. And I haven’t even mentioned the weather.
This line of thinking has led to a post-election surge of support for California
to secede from the union. Though the case for California’s exceptionalism is
usually made in liberal terms, the men behind Yes California were registered as
Republicans when they began their campaign for independence—and one of
them, Louis J. Marinelli, resides in Russia. They formed the group three years
ago, and their puckish crusade gained fresh momentum as liberal Californians
began to see themselves as rebels holding on to their core values in the face of the
excessive cruelty of the Trump regime.
A Reuters poll in January found that 32 percent of respondents in California
voice support for a so-called “Calexit,” the highest since Yes California was
formed. In April, movement leaders announced they were withdrawing their
secession ballot initiative—Marinelli said he would seek permanent residence
in Russia to live “a life without the albatross of frustration and resentment
towards ones’ homeland”—but another Yes California leader, Marcus Ruiz
Evans, has promised to come forth with a new California nationhood proposal
by the summer.
“California is an economic [and] cultural powerhouse, and nationhood is the
next logical step,” argued Ruiz Evans in an op-ed published in the San Jose
82 Mercury News in January. “Events in Washington, to say nothing of the attitudes in
the red states, make the possibility much more likely.” While Ruiz Evans cited
secession-provoking federal actions ranging from Trump’s Muslim ban and
border wall to climate-change denial and the bid to repeal Obamacare, it’s
California’s economic advantages that allow him to make his case persuasively.
California is a rich state that contributes more in federal taxes than it sucks up.
Why should we be subsidizing people beyond our state lines when they’re
actively undermining our values?
“States’ rights” has long been a rallying cry for reactionary conservatives
hoping to stem the tide of social progress—a way of communicating that we are
not all in this together. After Obama’s election, the every-state-for-itself model
was in vogue among Southern conservatives. Now, apparently, it’s liberals’ turn
to be alienated from the federal government and lash out petulantly. It’s an
understandable impulse: if the bulk of America wants to roll back voting rights
and abortion access and environmental protections, let it. California’s millions of
Hillary voters have seen the charts that show how working-class Trump
supporters will be hurt more than helped by his proposed policies, and our
schadenfreude is palpable. Back in the Bush era, coastal liberals asked, “What’s
the matter with Kansas?” In the Trump era, the answer is, “Who cares?”

B How to Secede in Business

A
F
F In a sense, I seceded from Middle America thirteen years ago, when I graduated
L college and took my education and earning power with me to the coasts.
E
R Countless others made the same decision. Having surveyed the economic and
 cultural landscape in the small towns and mid-sized cities where our parents still
live, we decided to head for urban centers thousands of miles away. For some
people, this was a life-or-death decision. (Rural LGBT kids are more likely to be
assaulted at school than their urban peers—not exactly an enticement to stick
around.) But for me and many others, it felt more like a lifestyle choice. If you’d
asked me at the time why I was moving away from the Midwest, I would have told
you it was cultural—that I just felt more in tune with city people than I did with
the folks I grew up with, or that I liked going to museums on the weekends.
But it was, of course, also an economic decision. The jobs are better in big
cities. My earning potential is greater because I picked up and moved. And
California’s economy is strong because it continues to attract people like me.
It’s tempting to interpret the waning economic prospects and cultural
relevance of rural America as an inevitable consequence of casual bigotry. If
these people were just a bit more forward-looking—more accepting of immi-
grants and gay people, more interested in
new technology—then maybe people like
Back in the Bush era, me would stay put. And maybe those
coastal liberals asked, states would still be attracting employers.
Maybe there would be TV shows and
“What’s the matter movies set there. Maybe they’d even be
with Kansas?” In the drawing in transplants rather than
hemorrhaging the best and brightest of
Trump era, the answer is,
each generation. Oppressive state laws
“Who cares?” can drive people away; in several states,
for example, major businesses have 83
scuttled investment plans in response to
anti-LGBT legislation. The Associated Press found that North Carolina’s
so-called bathroom bill, passed last year, will end up costing the state at least
$3.76 billion over twelve years in canceled business.
Yet in the end, this vision of culture-wide economic payback for the
politically backward interior is as much a fantasy as the notion that Trump can
bring back manufacturing jobs. The real reason that jobs have disappeared
from large swathes of the country has more to do with neoliberalism than with
social issues. Broadly speaking, California is a winner in this system. Most
other places in America are not.
The Golden State has long contained some of the richest zip codes in the
country, but it’s increasingly becoming a state where only the wealthy can build
a decent life for themselves. This is apparent in places like Los Angeles’ Boyle
Heights, where my friend flies his rebel flag but rising housing prices are
breaking up the Latino community that’s called the neighborhood home since
the 1950s. Zoom out the lens, and you can see that it’s not just a local issue: since
2011, housing prices across the state have gone up 71 percent. That’s had real
consequences. Between 2007 and 2014, more people left California than
migrated here. Leading the exodus were people without college degrees—in
other words, the same demographic that’s credited with delivering Trump a
landslide victory in red states.
S
The hard truth about liberal secession fantasies is that California is not a A
place where progressive policies enable everyone to become successful. It’s a L
V
place to which people move to enjoy their success when they’ve beaten the odds O
 elsewhere. As Kendrick Lamar reminded us, people come to California for
“women, weed, and weather”—not decent wages, affordable education, and
accessible health care.
Ruiz Evans’s case for secession rests on the claim that Californians’ “views
on education, science, immigration, taxation and healthcare are different” from
those prevailing in much of the rest of the country. This is certainly true when
you look at polling on the issues. But when it comes to policies and outcomes,
California’s unique values are less apparent. To take just the first example on
Ruiz Evans’s list, California’s per-pupil spending on K-12 education has declined
for years, falling well below the national average. In this realm, California is
comparable to states like Florida and Texas—even though California also boasts
some of the highest-performing high schools in the nation. This is not a sign of
our more progressive views on education; it’s an indication that the state is
deeply segregated along lines of race and class.

Flipping Out
Secession is a pipe dream that distracts us from the problems keeping
California from being the liberal paradise we’d like to think it is. It also allows
Californians to reject the parts of the country we disagree with politically—and
the administration they voted into office—rather than accept the challenge of
figuring out how to engage with them.
Despite hundreds of protest signs airing sentiments to the contrary, Trump
is our president, and we are still bound to the states that voted for him. (This
84 should be most apparent to those of us who defected to the coasts.) The sooner
we let the implications of that sink in, the sooner we can go about containing his
agenda—and eventually, replacing him with someone better. And the sooner we
acknowledge our disproportionate
command of economic and cultural
What if we’d stayed in resources, the sooner we can go about
our hometowns and cast our putting them to better use.
The election was the wake-up call
lot with—and our votes in— that some activists needed to under-
the counties that raised us? stand this. New projects like
Flippable, Sister District, and Swing
Left are organizing liberals to invest
their attention and money in state-level races outside of safely Democratic
enclaves. This is something that right-wing strategists figured out decades ago:
state and local elections matter. They spent a generation taking over state
legislatures to ensure that Congress would be good and gerrymandered once
they regained control of it.
This is not a strategy that liberals have embraced in recent decades. Talking
points aside, the metropolises have evinced surprisingly little interest in following
through on a politics that benefits the American interior, be it in trade accords,
B
agricultural policy, or the union movement. “What are they gonna do, vote
A Republican?” was the rationale that the Clinton administration floated as it
F
F dismissed organized labor’s objections to NAFTA, and it’s a refrain that has been
L taken up by Democratic leaders ever since. The first major policy promise the
E
R Obama White House blew off was card check, taking a page from the Clinton
Greg Kletsel

85
White House playbook. Now we know that the answer to that question is “Yes,
they will vote Republican.”
Calling for policies that benefit the working class, though, is not synony-
mous with pandering to Trump supporters. According to the Economic Policy
Institute, people of color will be a majority of the American working class by
2032. And despite the easy caricature of the Trump base as hillbillies and
out-of-work Rust Belters, it’s bound together more by race than by class. Trump
outperformed Clinton among college-educated whites, too: the people at the top
of the economic and social heap who have no interest in extending the rights
they enjoy to everyone.
For efforts like Flippable and Swing Left to really take root, liberals have to
embrace not only a long-game majoritarian strategy without a short-term payoff,
but bridge some deep divides within the movement. Arguing for a renewed focus
on economic uplift for the working-class residents of America’s rural interior has
often gone hand-in-hand with writing off the concerns of women and people of
color as mere identity politics. It’s telling that the liberals arguing in favor of more
empathy for working-class rural Trump voters tend to be white. In the wake of the
Trump insurgency, social scientists and journalists have filed hundreds of
dispatches from rural America, making the alienation of working-class whites the
most-covered story of the election.
Some of these dispatches deliberately downplay racism and go beyond mere
S
empathy to imply, obnoxiously, that members of the middle-American working A
class are morally superior in their own way. J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, L
V
praises his people for their “loyalty, honor, and toughness.” He recently wrote a O
 treacly op-ed about his plans to move from Northern California back home to
Ohio, bringing venture-capital investment with him. He’ll keep his job with
Mithril Capital Management, the Peter Thiel–backed fund where he works. Still,
it’s an extreme decision, one that will probably be the basis of his next book.
Frank Rich has decried such efforts to understand Trump voters as “hillbilly
chic”—an exercise in cheap, sentimental pandering steeped in liberal guilt.
Writing in New York magazine, he asked, “After the debacle of 2016, might the
time have at last come for Democrats to weaponize their anger instead of
swallowing it?” Trump voters are unreachable, he argued, so let them go. “Let
them reap the consequences for voting against their own interests,” he wrote.
Such sentiments may feel like satisfying emotional payback in response to a
Trump movement that reveled in the social-media taunt “fuck your feelings”
when it was reproached for its bigotry and xenophobia. But the larger problem
here should be obvious: even if you relish the misfortunes of Trump supporters,
they aren’t the only ones who suffer when morally bankrupt and politically
unaccountable Republicans control every branch of the federal government and
most state legislatures. What’s bad for those working-class white folks tends to be
even worse for the nonwhite working-class people who voted against Trump in
droves. What’s more, as working-class whites suffer, they don’t typically blame
Republican leaders. They scapegoat minorities. The secessionist impulses
expressed by Rich and other liberal pundits would, in practical terms, stoke an
already toxic climate of mounting racial animus in American politics.

A Long Engagement
86
It’s easy to write off Trump-supporting regions when you’re a liberal who sees
little or no reason to ever pass through the benighted red-state interior. But
despite what both the Vances of the world and their critics would have you
believe, “Trump supporter” is not synonymous with “rural American,” and “rural
American” is not synonymous with “white person.” According to Census data
cited by the Wall Street Journal, “Small towns in the Midwest have diversified
more quickly than almost any part of the U.S. since the start of an immigration
wave at the beginning of this century.” Cutting ties with rural areas means
relinquishing the fastest-diversifying parts of America. Another Wall Street
Journal analysis of Trump voters prior to the election found that the GOP
candidate did particularly well in counties that have more than doubled in
diversity since the year 2000. It’s easy to argue that white people should suffer
the consequences of their willful political ignorance. It’s harder to argue that
people of color should go down with them.
The heartland isn’t monolithically conservative. My home state of Iowa split
its Senate seats for decades, electing both a liberal member and a conservative
one, and many of the midwestern states that delivered Trump the Electoral
College have a similar history of mixed representation. Now that Trump is going
to fail to deliver on his promises to improve the economic prospects of the people
B
who voted for him in these states, the time is ripe for liberals to put forth an
A economic agenda that rests not on racial fearmongering but on guaranteed access
F
F to health care, fair wages, education, and affordable housing.
L And as it turns out, these needs are every bit as acute in California as they are
E
R in Iowa. To move toward a true majoritarian liberal strategy means we must
 challenge more than a few ingrained narratives about American politics. It means
rejecting the fallacy that California is a liberal utopia, a place where we coastal
transplants can enjoy the moral high ground over our high school classmates who
remained in our hometowns to raise their families. It also means dispensing with
the opposite fallacy: that those who stayed behind have some sort of shopworn
dignity that the rest of us lack.
And this is because, ultimately, division helps Trump advance his agenda. It
keeps Republicans firmly in control of state legislatures and the House. So we
must resist the urge to smugly turn our backs on the glum spectacle of the
self-inflicted economic immolation of Trump country. We must keep it together.
If you had a choice about where to build your life, you now have an obligation—
not to move back to your beleaguered homeland, but to stay engaged with it.
And if you hope to maintain any
genuine sort of moral high ground in
The hard truth about liberal your adopted state, you have an
obligation there, too: to work to make
secession fantasies is that
its policies align with your beliefs.
California is not a place This is not, as Rich suggests, as
where progressive policies simple as adopting Trump’s shoot-
from-the-hip rhetorical style. Nor is it
enable everyone to become a question of luring venture capitalists
successful. It’s a place to to rural Ohio—where, in all likelihood,
which people move to enjoy they would bring the same mounting
inequality and diminished returns that
their success when they’ve have made Silicon Valley a fortress of 87

beaten the odds elsewhere. paper wealth. It’s a matter of

supporting candidates who share our
values and have a track record of
actually getting them enacted in policy. That’s a hard thing to prove when
Democrats are not in power. But as I write these words, opinion polls show that
Bernie Sanders is the most popular political leader in the country. Surely that
suggests an opportunity to build on the best parts of his 2016 platform and to get
behind other Democrats who are known for supporting such policies. There are
several, like Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, who enjoy a cross-demo-
graphic appeal. The time is also ripe to capitalize on the fiasco of Trumpcare and
place single-payer health reform back on the table. Similar opportunities will
surely present themselves on other issues, from education reform to infrastruc-
ture investment, as the president fails to deliver on promises to his base. The
trick will be to continue to frame these issues as nationwide problems that we all
have a stake in solving.
Those of us who have the economic freedom to migrate to pursue better jobs
and a broad range of economic opportunities are the ones who bear the greatest
burden for bridging the country’s internal geopolitical divides. Believe me, I
understand the temptation to separate yourself: it’s true that I am different from
the people I grew up with who chose to stay in Iowa. Part of that difference is,
now, an economic and cultural advantage. So I have a dual responsibility: to see
S
that California actually makes good on its professed values, and to ensure that A
those values incorporate the rest of America. Refusing to rationalize elite neglect L
V
is the real rebellion. O
Bran Dougherty-Johnson
 James Livingston

Why
Work?
89

Breaking the spell S

A

of the Protestant ethic L

V
O
 Last year we kept hearing that Bernie
Sanders and Donald Trump were
marginal figures of the left and right—
over here an avowed socialist, over there
a fan of “alt-right” idiocies—and that
neither would stand a chance in the
general election. It turns out we heard
wrong. Each represented the program-
matic mainstream of his party as it had
evolved in response to Occupy and
the Tea Party. And that mainstream
90 was constituted by equal parts nostalgia
for “good jobs” and commitment to
“full employment,” often sprinkled
with a new ingredient, the suspicion
and resentment of elites.
How can the left and the right be
devoted to the same universal remedy—
“Get a job!”—for what ails us? (In
this case, the sickness started with
the breakdown of the labor market
B
A
along with all others in the slow-motion
F
F
L
E
economic collapse that began in
R
October 1987, not in 2000 with the dot.com bust, nor in 2007 with the Great
Recession.) This consensus seems both impossible and inevitable. Impossible
because nobody agrees on who the “job creators” are, government deficits or
private investors; inevitable because everyone, left to right, somehow agrees that
work is essential to human dignity and individual achievement.
The great irony here is that both sides are heirs to the Left-Hegelian
intellectual tradition, which, under Karl Marx’s auspices, designated the
compulsion to work as the trans-historical element of human nature. “Hegel
takes the standpoint of modern political economy,” as the young Marx put it in
1844. “He grasps labor as the essence of Man.” Marx knew full well that Hegel
himself had named Luther the founding father of modernity because
Protestantism sanctified work as the wellspring of grace. In this sense, the
Protestant ethic still regulates most debates about the future of work.
We’re not all card-carrying Marxists now, but we’re properly fellow travelers
because “full employment” appears to many, left and right, a self-justifying
project. Certainly the left remains the captive of the Marxist tradition, which still
peddles two ideas that now threaten to distract us from the realities of our time.
These are that human nature resides in its capacity to create value through work
and, consequently, that the proletariat (the “universal class”) is the appointed
engine of social change and progress through class struggle.
Critics of Marxism have always ridiculed it because Marxists sound, by
and large, like religious sectarians who act on faith rather than reason. But
these detractors have missed the point, for that intellectual tradition is more
narrowly and thoroughly Protestant than merely Christian—surely Hegel’s
designation of Luther as his philosophical antecedent and Marx’s impromptu 91
genealogy would suggest as much. Before the Reformation, almost no one
believed that socially necessary labor was an ennobling activity. After the
Reformation, almost everyone did.
In this sense, the Protestant ethic was never just a matter of church schism
and doctrine. “But at least one thing was unquestionably new,” as Max Weber
explained, “the valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the
highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume.”
Now we have reached the point in the development of the human species
where this fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs—work itself, necessary labor, a
calling, a vocation, call it what you will—has become a fetter on the moral activity
of individuals. It actually prevents such activity. Let me explain.

Politically Unconscious
The original title of my book on the looming collapse of the modern work ethic
and all that entails was Fuck Work. It was a hard sell, in-house and out. But not
just because it sounds obscene—a lot of our everyday experience is composed
of obscene phrases, visual and aural, whether we’re watching YouTube videos,
or listening to congressmen describe the deleterious moral effects of universal
health care, or laughing with John Oliver about Donald Trump. Besides, books
with titles like On Bullshit and Ratf *cked have met with notable commercial
S
success. Why, then, did my interlocutors—friends, enemies, family, colleagues, A
editors, students, and acquaintances—respond uniformly, with anger or L
V
exasperation and no hilarity, when I announced the title of the book? O
 I’m not suggesting that their response is irrational. Quite the opposite. In
fact, I’d say that the burden of proof is mine, not theirs. Their deeply felt response
derives from two assumptions that can’t be ignored as quaintly neurotic psycho-
logical imperatives or dismissed as wishful political thinking; these assumptions
are, instead, latent components of a political unconscious. They lie dormant until
challenged—in most if not all of us.
The first assumption I’m contending with here is that work, broadly
conceived as a “metabolic exchange” with Nature, as “the everlasting
Nature-imposed condition of human existence” (Marx, from Volume 1 of
Capital) and thus as the trans-historical element of human nature, is the site
on which human subjectivity—individuality—is conceived and constructed. In
modern times, and in modern terms,
it is where character and conscience
Everybody wants to put us get built.
To put this proposition in the
back to work. The left
idiom originally provided by Luther,
demands “full employment,” Hegel, and Marx, the socially
and the right answers by necessary labor of the slave, the serf,
or the proletarian was not—as both
chanting “jobs, jobs, jobs.” classical and Christian specifications
had it—the most significant impedi-
ment to knowledge, grace, and freedom; that labor was instead the only
available road to redemption. In the specifically Hegelian terms of The
Phenomenology of Spirit, which Marx used to periodize human history, the
92 deferred desire that constituted the work of the slave was also the active
predicate of the slave’s morality and self-consciousness. The slave’s work
allowed him a glimpse, a preliminary consciousness, of freedom, but like the
natural right of property that marked the advent of modernity, it was merely a
first approximation, a down payment. In any event, freedom and necessity,
mind and body, imagination and drudgery, interiority and embodiment,
ethical principle and historical circumstance, grace and sin—these had once
appeared as antithetical moments in every life. Each was now conceived as an
indissoluble element of the other. The “modern time,” Hegel explained in The
Philosophy of History, arrived when “the repudiation of work no longer earned
the reputation of sanctity.”
The second assumption here resides in the Marxist theory of historical
progress, or “prophecy,” to again recur to the idioms of his own intellectual
heritage. In Marx’s scheme, the proletariat can constitute itself as a class-con-
scious agent of progressive historical change—overthrow capitalism, install
socialism, and so forth—only insofar as its avowed political purpose becomes
the abolition of the social conditions that created it in the first place: alienated
labor. Conversely, in the absence of this social stratum as the agent of progress,
talk of opposition to capitalism or transition to socialism becomes intellectually
ungrounded, creating the hot air that inflates liberal balloons. What’s more,
B
non-proletarian opposition efforts are doomed by definition to be socially
A scattered, validating the kind of commitment you fulfill by signing a Change.org
F
F petition. Without a working class defined by its opposition to capitalism and
L alienated labor, the argument goes, progress has no social groundwork, no
E
R palpable constituency, and no political valence.
Desire Deferred

The doubters of my proposed book title ask me how we can relinquish these
politically unconscious assumptions about the intrinsic dignity, epistemological
consequences, and political implications of work without also renouncing the
kind of moral commitment to the poor and the oppressed that produces
progress. The short answer is that we don’t have much of a choice. Insofar as
socially necessary labor recedes—that is, insofar as we can experience and
measure the end of work—we move beyond the moral universe we call the
Protestant ethic. In navigating this historic transition, we see that a world
unmoored from the safe harbor of necessity could be full of moral promise, but
only if we grasp it as such.
How so? I have paraphrased Hegel to the effect that deferred desire, allego-
rized as the work of the slave, became the engine of morality and self-conscious-
ness. This deferral, this inhibition and delay, was according to Hegel a response
to the Absolute Terror that follows from Absolute Freedom, when all existing
impediments to heaven on earth would be abolished—including those etched in
our consciousness as the external limits imposed by the past or material neces-
sity. Tarrying with these negatives—treating those external limits as the condition
rather than the antithesis of true freedom—was the work of the slave, the duty of
the philosopher, and the errand of modernity. Hegel was the first to break with
the inherited classical wisdom on all three counts.
The slave as Hegel conceived him was the conscience of the philosopher, the
herald of the Stoic, and the exemplar of modernity. For the slave experiences
freedom as self-denial, as the renunciation of desire and the acknowledgement of 93
external limits he carries out in his work. He remakes the world only to realize
that he has built a prison house, an iron cage—and yet he keeps on striving.
Morality so conceived—as the slave time of deferral, inhibition, and delay that
work presupposes and teaches—has become not only anachronistic but chafing
and corrosive, simply because it is no longer needed.
There, I’ve said it. The safe harbor of necessity is gone, washed away along
with the jobs that convinced us that “full employment” was a good idea. Deferral,
inhibition, and delay have become excuses for political inaction and causes of
psycho-economic dysfunction: ways of rewriting failure as spiritual success, means
of realizing the left’s insistent will to powerlessness. In this sense, the Protestant
ethic and its vestigial bourgeois virtues have become a deadly contagion—a
disease, not a remedy. Possessive individualism has finally become destructive.
It’s time, then, to let work go rather than to stay melancholic or anxious
about it. But how? Our task, as historians or social theorists or activists, is to make
our ethical principles legible not merely to ourselves but to our fellow citizens—
legible in the sense that they are clearly etched in the historical circumstances of
our time, so that we can deduce ought from is. If our principles are already
grounded in familiar practices and traditions, so that the future we want resides
in and flows from the past, then, and only then, we have more to offer than pious
wishes that things should be better.
Until recently, the ethical principle that animated the left insisted that true
S
freedom lies somewhere beyond material necessity, after the abolition of alienated A
labor—after the end of work. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that, until L
V
recently, the left was of two minds on this question. On the one hand, it grounded O
 its moral compass in the magnetic field the Reformation had unearthed in
“warrantable” callings—in the transcendental possibilities of work. On the other,
its moral compass pointed to an “existing beyond”: an ancient past or a distant
future when the criterion of need was or will be the sole regulator of the allocation
of resources, including labor—“from each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs.” The prospect of a world without material scarcity, or at least one
regulated by need alone, sounded like news from nowhere until the second half of
the twentieth century. By the end of that century, its emergence had become a
historically measurable trend, almost a commonplace remit of social science.
The left’s perennial aspiration has become a live option—if we can cut the
Gordian knot. For now everyone worships at the shrine of work, and everyone
agrees that the end of work is in sight. The question is not whether these princi-
ples are legible—or realizable—in the historical circumstances of our time, but
which of these principles will take precedence. This choice will dictate how we
expend our political energies.

The Un-Exquisite Corpse

Once upon a time in America, work was where you learned discipline, initiative,
honesty, and self-reliance—in a word, character. It was also the source of your
income. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. But if you worked hard, you could
earn your way and make something of yourself. In this sense, a market in labor
both produced character and distributed income: it developed the individual’s
moral capacities and allocated economic resources, imperfectly but transpar-
94 ently. The work you found there created most of what you called your self or,
nowadays, your identity.
Not anymore. Work no longer serves these dual purposes of building
character and providing income commensurate with effort. There’s not enough
work to go around, and what there is has been reduced to a simulation of effort—
pretend work in the cubicles and at the academic conferences—or backbreaking
toil in the sweatshops, the office towers, and the offshore factories. The working
world as we now experience it is an exquisite corpse, a collaboration between
Charles Dickens, David Lodge, and William Gibson.
By now the factory hand and the industrial worker have gone the way of the
yeoman farmer, as manufacturing jobs have moved overseas or have been
casually appended to the to-do lists of smart machines. Editors from Wired
magazine, Silicon Valley types, and MIT and Oxford professors have all
converged on the idea that workers will lose their race against these machines,
while Thomas Byrne Edsall, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks seem to think
that the question we should be asking is how to get good jobs as their servants.
The downsizing or outsourcing of middle managers and the virtual disap-
pearance of white-collar and clerical workers has become a premise or a cliché in
dozens of novels and movies, while numerous political campaigns ask, “How to
restore the American middle class?” The temporary or “contingent” labor force is
B
the fastest growing component of job creation since 2009, when the Great
A Recession supposedly ended. Since 2000, there has been no net gain in full-time
F
F “breadwinner” jobs. So labor-force participation rates keep falling for every
L demographic segment, except for old people and women. The latter are twice as
E
R likely as men to work for the minimum wage.
 It gets even worse. A quarter of the adults actually employed in the United
States are paid wages too low to lift them above the federal poverty line; almost
half of them are eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. Nearly a quarter
of American children live in officially defined poverty: food stamps and emer-
gency rooms keep them alive. The direct result of this severance between hard
work and a living wage is the recent
explosion of transfer payments and
The Protestant ethic and so-called entitlements.
Put it this way: every Walmart with
its vestigial bourgeois virtues
three hundred or more “associates”
have become a deadly costs taxpayers roughly a million
contagion—a disease, not dollars in public assistance each year
because the wages paid these
a remedy. Possessive employees don’t cover their food and
individualism has finally health care. In the absence of such
become destructive. assistance, at least half the labor force
would be officially poor, and Mitt
Romney’s notorious pronouncements
on the 47 percent would become an understatement. The requisite jobs don’t
exist, and almost half of those that do don’t pay enough to live on (much less
build anyone’s character). The United States may be the indispensable nation,
but it is clearly a less-developed country—a place where hard labor means a
prison sentence, not a living wage, and work means economic impoverishment,
not moral possibility.
And yet everybody from left to right wants to put us back to work, one way or 95
another. The left demands “full employment,” and the right answers by chanting
“jobs, jobs, jobs.” The left wants increased public spending to create more jobs
and more consumer spending, which will presumably encourage private invest-
ment that follows the demand curve. The right wants reduced public spending to
restore “confidence,” thus giving more scope to private investment, which will
presumably create more jobs and more consumer spending. These are disagree-
ments on means, not ends. But again, given what we know about the shrinking
American work regime, how is this consensus even conceivable?
It’s understandable, in a way. The urge to put everybody back to work
appears both rational and humane because without jobs, people lack incomes
adequate to their needs. Unless they can work for wages, their access to the goods
available in the marketplace is diminished. So job creation has become the
obvious, bipartisan goal of public policy, and small businessmen, who apparently
create most of the jobs, have become the heroes of both left and right.
For the right, this urge makes perfect political and psychological sense.
Most people with regular jobs aren’t on the dole, and they’re more likely to
acquire the kind of familial obligations that make them law-abiding citizens:
work disciplines their unruly desires and energies, making them more likely to
marry and take on the responsibility of children, thus reproducing the “social
capital” that civilization requires. But for the left—broadly construed, from
apologetic liberals to avowed socialists—the same urge to put everyone back to
S
work makes much less sense. A
The left has arguably won the culture wars. It is also winning the debate on L
V
the distribution of income—we, the people, have finally agreed that the rich must O
 pay more taxes—and it has even mounted an effective defense of the welfare
state. Why, then, does it still worship at the shrine of the self-made man, the
entrepreneur who is “inner-directed” because, as his own boss, he remains the
proprietor of himself? Why does the left, no less than the right, treat this bour-
geois individual, the man who works for himself, as the paradigm of genuine
selfhood? Why does it want us to be fully employed? In short, why has the left, no
less than the right, made itself the prisoner of the Protestant work ethic?

Slapitalism
Since the advent of bourgeois society and the rise of capitalism, work has served
as the crucible of your character and the source of your income: in sum, your
individuality. With your labor—your capacity to produce value through work—
you produced a self capable of deferring gratification as well as material goods.
You made profits or wages, and with them you acquired legitimate access to a
share of those material goods.
Your consumption of goods was enabled and justified, in this sense, by
your prior production of goods. By the same logic, the detachment of income
from work—getting something for nothing—signified aristocratic privilege,
subaltern sloth, bureaucratic chicanery, or criminality (in other words the
absence or decline of the bourgeois virtues). How could it be otherwise?
Income derived from privilege, sloth, bureaucracy, or criminality was
unearned. Luck never counted in
these moral sequences because it was
96 Everyone worships at occasional and entirely inexplicable.
Until the 1920s, this strenuously
the shrine of work,
bourgeois and thoroughly Protestant
and everyone agrees that logic animated left-wing critiques,
the end of work is in sight. liberal analyses, and reactionary
defenses of capitalism. In the late
nineteenth century, for example, the
Knights of Labor excluded capitalists, drunkards, lawyers, and bankers from
membership because the men and women in these occupational categories
performed no “productive labor”—their income was a deduction from the sum
of value created by others. The Knights’ ideological successors, the Populists
and the Socialist Party USA, had no membership requirements, but they agreed
with the indictment of those who consumed without producing anything of value;
in this sense, they, too, lived by Lutheran criteria.
Meanwhile, liberal economists and progressive politicians devised theories
and programs showing that capital’s share of national income—its profit
margin—was justifiable as a contribution to “total factor productivity.” This
recondite share in production also quite possibly exceeded the contribution of
labor: income from large property was not theft, after all. And the reactionaries
in the National Association of Manufacturers defended their open-shop drives
B
as a means to the ends of improved labor productivity and higher wages, which
A would be limited, they stoutly maintained, if trade unions could determine
F
F working conditions.
L Since the 1920s, this case for the Protestant work ethic has become much
E
R harder to make (which should, but somehow does not, mean that the case for
capitalism has also become much harder to make). Under corporate auspices,
the mechanization of the labor process accelerated via electrification, instru-
mentation, and automation; the result was a net loss of two million jobs in
manufacturing, mining, and transportation between 1919 and 1929, even as
industrial output increased 60 percent and non-farm productivity increased 40
percent. This astonishing subtraction of the “human element” from goods
production might be construed as merely another stage in the development of
“labor-saving technology”—except that the technology was capital-saving as
well. As a result, the value of past labor-time congealed in capital equipment
now shrank as fast as the value of the present labor-time personified by
employed workers. Marx’s labor theory of value stopped making sense, exactly
as he predicted it would in the Grundrisse (1857) and Capital, Volume 1 (1867).
In other words, socially necessary labor, whether owned by capital (past) or
performed by workers (present), began declining in the 1920s. When that
happened, the proletarian’s production of value through work could no longer
appear as a more fundamental, more legitimate claim on a share of society’s
goods than the capitalist’s claim of ownership—and so the larger distribution of
income began to look arbitrary. By the same token, the creation of character or
individuality through work increasingly strained belief, explicable only as the
occasion of comedy. Witness the slapstick humor of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton,
and Charlie Chaplin.
Stuart Chase exemplified the intellectual distress induced by these novel
facts about the necessity of labor in a 1934 book called The Economy of
Abundance. “Under modern conditions of production,” Chase wrote, “no
measurable relation can be found between work contributed and goods 97
consumed. . . . A whole moral fabric is thus rent and torn, with the most alarming
and far-reaching consequences.” Chase wrote in a state of panic: by this time,
America had suffered through four years of the Great Depression, which blithely
obliterated every inherited truth about the meaning of work. At this point, the
“stigma of relief ” had disappeared in the cities, according to Labor Department
surveys, and the dole was just another way of making a living.
Chase’s prescription is mine: “With this alarming and wholesale denial of
claims to consume based on productive labor . . . and with power-age industry
roaring and straining to produce goods, titles to consumption must be found
elsewhere, and speedily.” Since the 1920s, socially necessary labor—what it takes
to reproduce the material rudiments of civilization as we know it—describes a
smaller and smaller proportion of everyday transactions. Every year, we produce
more output without any increase of inputs (whether of capital or labor), and this
holds true globally, not just within the United States. We’ve solved the problem of
production and are now, finally, facing the problem of distribution. So we’re
already passing beyond the historical moment when “the social relations of
goods production,” as a Marxist might put it, organized and indeed determined
social relations as such—when your occupation determined your social standing,
your position in the class structure.
And yet we can’t seem to let go of the Protestant principle that tells us our
work defines us and gives us morally sound “titles to consumption.” We hate
S
the idea that anybody is getting something for nothing, especially if the A
recipient is a paper-pushing bureaucrat, or a class-action lawyer, or a Wall L
V
Street banker—or a “welfare queen.” O
 In American Dreams Begin Responsibilities

We’re living through a historical moment when the piling on of more work and
more productivity has become pointless, absurd, or positively dangerous—when
we “work” tirelessly at failed marriages, demand that academics “add value” to
the human capital that comes within range of the classroom, “reward” cops for
more collars as crime rates decline, and produce more atmospheric toxins in the
name of “energy independence.”
Why do we still think that a job well done is our goal in life? Why do we locate
our identities in the production of goods, as against the consumption of goods?
More to the point, why does the left want to restore the ego boundaries
determined by the emotional austerity and psychological renunciations that
work requires and reproduces? Why reinstate the ego ideal of the bourgeois
individual, rather than ask—as both
Weber and Freud did—whether it’s
Why reinstate the ego adequate to our present historical
condition?
ideal of the bourgeois
Intellectuals on the left still
individual, rather than ask— conceive of work in the same way that
as both Weber and Freud Luther, Hegel, and Marx did, as the
“essence” of human nature, as the
did—whether it’s adequate setting in which genuine selfhood is
to our present historical enacted. How else to explain their
condition? devotion to the transcendent value of
98 socially necessary labor? In this
crucial sense, the left, no less than the
right, is still committed to the bourgeois virtues—and to their material frame-
work, a self-regulating market where no firm is “too big to fail.” The right has
fetishized love as sanctified by marriage and the family: keep working at it! The
left has fetishized work as such. As always, Freud’s exaggerations about love
and work have come true, thus confirming Adorno’s judgment of psychoanal-
ysis—that only its hyperbole was accurate.
The question is, what happens if we dispense with this bourgeois conception
of work and the ego ideal that attends it? Instead of repatriating work from
overseas, or reclaiming factory labor from the robots on the shop floor, or
increasing public spending to create full employment, what if we said, fuck work?
Or, more politely: “We prefer not to. Work and life are not the same thing. And
now that work matters less in the making of our character because socially
necessary labor is, practically speaking, unavailable, we can create lives less
burdened by its demands.”
Then, and only then, will we be able to address the real questions: How to
detach income from work without hating ourselves, the recipients, for doing so?
How to justify getting something for nothing—receiving income and consuming
goods without producing anything of value? How to build individual character in
B
the absence of real or meaningful work that pays a living wage? What is mean-
A ingful work, anyway?
F
F And how to pay for a civilization no longer constrained by the imperatives of
L material scarcity—how to distribute income when the problem of production has
E
R been solved and the labor market can no longer allocate resources rationally?
How to get beyond the austere moral universe of bourgeois society, which still
regulates its corporate successor, that baroque stage of capitalism we call
post-industrial society?
My answers turn on the history of work and the recent decline of socially
necessary labor. The meaning and significance of work have already changed
fundamentally. The possibilities of increasing and using leisure time have
meanwhile increased exponentially. To ignore these facts is to remain trapped in
the gravitational field of classical social theory—from Hegel to Freud via
Marx—and to make work a fetish. It’s also, not incidentally, to dismiss the moral
promise and the historical momentum of a society that is passing beyond
necessary labor, “the realm of necessity,” on its way toward a new kind of
freedom, a new version of genuine selfhood.
The future of selfhood and society is written in what we now think about
the meanings of work. Either we continue to treat it as the source of both
character and income—let’s reconvene the American Dream!—or we find ways
of developing individual moral capacities and allocating economic resources
outside the market in labor.
We don’t have much of a choice. We’ve already changed the address of our
moral personalities—where we recognize and realize our capacities as individ-
uals, where we make choices—from the supply side to the demand side, which is
to say from work to leisure, from production to consumption. It’s time we
explored this new side of town. By now, we can’t afford not to.

99

S
A
L
V
Leigh Guldig O
Stephan Walter
 Miya Tokumitsu

Did the Fun

Work?
Relaxation as Fitbit app

101
it is the German compound
I F A N Y T H I N G CA N M A K E E N C H A N T M E N T T E RS E ,
noun. Through the bluntest lexical conglomeration, these words capture
concepts so ineffable that they would otherwise float away. Take the Austrian art
historian Alois Riegl’s term, Kunstwollen—Kunst (art) + wollen (will), or “will to
art”—later defined by Erwin Panofsky as “the sum or unity of creative powers
manifested in any given artistic phenomenon.” (Panofsky then appended to this
mouthful a footnote parsing precisely what he meant by “artistic phenom-
enon.”) A particular favorite compound of mine is Kurort, literally “cure-place,”
but better translated as “spa town” or “health resort.” There’s an elegiac
romance to Kurort that brings to mind images of parasols and gouty gentlemen
taking the waters, the world of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Nevertheless,
Kurort’s cocktail of connotations—mixing leisure, self-improvement, health,
physical pleasure, relaxation, gentility, and moral rectitude—remains as fresh as
ever. Yoga retreats and team-building ropes courses may have all but replaced
mineral baths, but wellness vacations and medical tourism are still big business.
What continues to fuel this industry (by now a heritage one) is the durable
belief that leisure ought to achieve something—a firmer bottom, new kitchen
abilities, triumph over depression. In fact, why not go for the sublime leisure-suc-
cess trifecta: physical, practical, and spiritual? One vacation currently offered in
Sri Lanka features cycling, a tea tutorial, and a visit to a Buddhist temple, a
package that promises to be active (but not draining), educational (but not
S
tedious), and fun (but not dissolute). The “Experiences” section of Airbnb A
advertises all kinds of self- and life-improving activities, including a Korean food L
V
course, elementary corsetry, and even a microfinance workshop. O
 Of course, moral and physical uplift do not have the sole claims to leisure,
and certainly not to pleasure. The chaste delights of the wellness vacation do
not appeal universally. In Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy, Sylvia
Tietjens (perhaps the most diabolical bored wife in English literature) prefers
the filthier pursuits of social climbing and ruining her doltish lovers. For her, the
genteel health resort is enraging rather than soothing. “How rotten it must be
for her,” she imagines her friends sympathizing, “to be shut up in a potty little
German kur-ort when the world could be so otherwise amusing.” Yet even
Sylvia is not immune to the allure of the self-improving retreat, or at least the
social esteem it can bestow. At one point, Sylvia decamps to a convent to make
a show of trying to get right with the Lord, and perhaps also her husband. For
those who can afford it, a spot of leisure done right can be the necessary
corrective to life’s wrong turns.

Danger: Relaxation Ahead

The Tietjenses are English landed gentry, and so it would not surprise a
midwestern American moralist like Thorstein Veblen, the disapproving theorist
of the so-called leisure class, that someone like Sylvia would approach leisure
with entitlement and cynicism. Leisure has always made middle-class
Americans (and their bourgeois counterparts throughout much of Europe)
rather anxious.
In Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, Cindy Aron
notes that though the American middle class invented the modern vacation as a
102 social institution, they were also wary of its hazards. If industry and work were
fundamental to the success of both individual and nation, leisure could expose
America to “moral, spiritual, financial, and political danger.” As the middle class
cohered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, vacationing
became an institution shot through with
contradiction. The hard work and industri-
Was the restoration ousness that helped define the middle
class seemed to entitle its members to
sufficient?
vacations (as well as other consumer goods
The self improved? betokening self-conscious respectability,
The fun had? like pianos), but at the same time, vaca-
tions embodied the very opposite of what
the middle class valued. The wellness
vacation was one solution to this quandary. From the mid-nineteenth century,
Saratoga Springs, Cape May, and a host of other destinations became associated
with good times that were restorative to both body and soul. The nagging
question nevertheless remained: How could you enjoy leisure without jeopar-
dizing commitment to work? “This tension pervaded and shaped the history of
vacations in the nineteenth century,” Aron writes. Indeed, it determines our own
attitudes toward leisure to this day.
B
The social ascendancy of the middle classes, and especially the upper middle
A classes in America and Europe, is essential to this story. While some of these
F
F people may have pined for the splendor of aristocratic life, the members of the
L bourgeoisie mostly savored the knowledge that their material comforts were
E
R earned, not given. They embraced personal virtue as the key to challenging the
aristocracy’s traditional place at the center of political and cultural life, and
developed elaborate patterns of consumption and social rituals to enact this
moral superiority: athenaeum memberships for men, Italian lessons for women,
park promenades for the whole family. A ceaseless drive toward self-improve-
ment undergirded these leisurely pursuits. Even when the duties of bureaucratic
paperwork and homemaking were done for the day, the impetus to self-improve
remained constant. Thus did the bourgeoisie distinguish itself from the parasitic
leisure class excoriated by Veblen.
Today’s middle class still proudly embraces this moral distinction—and none
more fully than those near its upper end. In fact, the ceiling of the self-identified
“middle class” seems to keep creeping upward, not because the very wealthy feel
any special solidarity with schoolteachers and postal workers, but because to join
the “upper class” would be to join the ranks of the useless and the idle. The
victory of bourgeois values is so complete that much of the world’s elite has
embraced them. The Trumps, for instance, owe their class position to inherited
wealth, but they—especially Donald and Ivanka—still brand themselves as
successful workers for the status and self-esteem that it imparts. Both have
produced (“written” may not be entirely accurate) entire books about how hard
they toil and how good they are at it. These people may be obscenely rich and
control more than their fair share of resources, but they will have you know that
they are darn productive.
Maybe this is why some of the only people in America who could feasibly
enjoy that thing we call a “work-life balance” end up bragging about how they
renounced it. Together with Marissa Mayer and Victoria Beckham, Ivanka
Trump is part of a rarefied coterie of hyper-elite working mothers whose 103
financial fortunes and powerful networks would allow them to take extended
maternity leave—in fact, not to work at all, not even at child-rearing or home-
making—but who ostentatiously return to work within a few weeks after
childbirth. While it should be up to each family to determine how much
parental leave is necessary, it is as if these very publicly announced returns to
the workplace somehow validate the outsize wealth of these women, both to
themselves and to the rest of us. These are only a few extreme examples from
our peculiar cult of busyness, in which energy-intensive but culturally femi-
nized tasks like childcare, along with private biological needs like sleep, are
cruelly recast as leisure in order to be devalued. These women will make body
and family bend to accommodate the demands of work. The idle rich they
emphatically are not.

The Enemy Below

If the bourgeoisie—and now much of the One Percent as well—disavow the
lifestyle of the idle rich, they detest the idle poor even more. The history of
ascribing laziness and moral failure to indigence is long, and capitalist societies
never tire of finding new ways to spread moral panic about the perfidious poor.
Recall President Reagan’s mythical Welfare Queen, defrauding the hardworking
American taxpayer in order to bankroll her supposedly recreational child-
S
bearing. The sheer absurdity of the idea that single-parenting a brood of babies A
and toddlers constitutes leisure did not diminish the extent to which the Welfare L
V
Queen spooked the populace, so alarming was the thought of her lurking in their O
 midst. The Welfare Queen was such a powerful straw-woman because she put
pressure on a nexus of particularly American anxieties: about leisure, about
getting ahead, and especially about being duped. For a people invested in an
ethic of work and an ideology of self-determination, both propped up by
complete faith that the wit of the common man will beat that of esoteric
academics and wily city slickers any day of the week, the idea that a woman of
leisure might be making off with their just reward—and laughing at them!—was
unconscionable. She needed to be slain, and if she didn’t exist, well then the idea
of her needed to be destroyed.
Although the supposedly idle poor are the ultimate pariahs—they are poor,
after all, and it’s always easiest to punch down—they and the idle rich share the
same fault: both approach leisure incorrectly. Both the spoiled Prodigal Son
and the guy sipping bottom-shelf whiskey in front of the supermarket all day
are doing it wrong. Their leisure is excessive, undeserved, and not directed at
self-improvement. There has long been a proper way to do leisure, and now
there are more apparatuses and feedback systems than ever to tell us how good
we are at it.

The Fun Meter

Leisure, it turns out, requires measurement and evaluation. First of all, our
irksome question remains: When partaking of leisure, how can you know that you
aren’t slipping into idleness? Second, because leisure is a deserved reward, it
should be fun, amusing, diverting, or otherwise pleasurable. This requirement
104 begets another set of questions, perhaps even more existential in scope: How do
leisure seekers even know whether they’re enjoying themselves, and if they are,
whether the enjoyment . . . worked? Was the restoration sufficient? The self
improved? The fun had?
These questions are most easily, if superficially, answered via the medley of
social media platforms and portable devices bestowed on us by the wonders of
consumer-product-driven innovation. Fitbit points, likes, and heart-eyed emoji
faces have become the units of measurement by which we evaluate our own
experiences. These tokens offer reassurance that our time is being optimally
spent; they represent our leisure accomplishments. Social media and camera-
equipped portable devices have given us the opportunity to solicit positive
feedback from our friends, and indeed from the world at large, nonstop. Even
when we are otherwise occupied or asleep, our photos and posts beam out, ever
ready to scoop up likes and faves. Yet under the guise of fun and “connection,”
we are simply extending the Taylorist drive to document, measure, and analyze
into the realm of leisure. Thinkers from Frank Lloyd Wright to John Maynard
Keynes once predicted that technology would free us from toil, but as we all
know, the devices it has yielded have only ended up increasing workloads. They
have also taken command of leisure, yoking it to the constant labor of self-
branding required under neoliberal capitalism, and making us complicit in our
B
own surveillance to boot.
A Not that there’s anything inherently wrong or self-exploitative about
F
F showing off your newly acquired basket-weaving skills on Instagram—and
L anyway, the line between leisure and labor is not always clearly drawn. From
E
R gardening to tweeting, labor often overlaps with pleasure and entertainment
 under certain conditions. But the fact that the platforms on which we document,
communicate, and measure our leisure are owned by massive for-profit corpora-
tions that trade upon our freely given content ought to make us wonder not only
what, exactly, they might be getting out of all this activity, but also how it frames
our own ideas of what leisure is. If the satisfaction of posting on social media
derives from garnering likes in the so-called attention economy, then posters will,
according to a crude market logic, select what they believe to be the most
“likeable” content for posting, and furthermore, will often alter their behavior to
generate precisely that content. The mirror of social media metrics offers to show
us whether we enjoyed ourselves, but just as with mirrors, we have to work to get
back the reflection we want to see.

So Many Feels
The cult of productivity is a greedy thing; it sucks up both the time we spend in
leisure and the very feelings it stirs in us. Happiness and other pleasant sensa-
tions must themselves become productive, which is why we talk of leisure being
“restorative” or “rejuvenating.” Through coffee breaks and shorter workweeks,
employers from municipal governments to investment banks are encouraging
their workers to take time off, all under the guise of benevolent care. But these
schemes are ultimately aimed at maximizing productivity and quelling discon-
tent (and besides, employers maintain the power to retract these privileges at
their own whims). Work depletes us emotionally, physically, and intellectually,
and that is why we are entitled to
periods of leisure—not because 105
Happiness and other leisure is a human right or good in and
of itself, but because it enables us to
pleasant sensations are
climb back onto the hamster wheel of
themselves meant to marketplace activity in good cheer.
be productive—hence the As neoliberalism reduces happi-
ness to its uses, it steers our interests
common rhetoric about toward confirming our own feelings
leisure being “restorative.” via external assessment. This
assessment just so happens to require
apparatuses (smartphones, laptops,
Apple watches) and measurement units (faves, shares, star ratings) that turn us
into eager buyers of consumer products and require our willing submission to
corporate surveillance. None of which means that your Airbnb truffle-hunting
experience—as well as subsequently posting about it and basking in the
likes—didn’t make you happy. It simply means that the events and behavior that
brought about this happiness coincide with the profit motives of a vast network
of institutions that extends far beyond any one individual.
So they want us to buy their stuff and hand over our data. Fine. But why do
they demand that we be so insistently, outwardly happy? Why do they care?
Barbara Ehrenreich and, more recently, William Davies have explored the
dubious motives of these happiness peddlers. As Davies points out in his book,
S
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, A
the obsession with how to register and measure human happiness has been L
V
around at least since Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of O
 Morals and Legislation of 1780. Bentham was primarily interested in happiness
as a gauge of effective governance; good governance ideally produced happy
citizens, and therefore an objective means of measuring happiness would be
the key to appraising its quality. Indeed, Bentham’s theories live on in annual
rankings of “most liveable cities” and “happiest countries.”
Well into the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred years after Bentham,
in a firmly established capitalist culture, consumer goods had emerged as the
medium of happiness. “In short,” Davies writes, “capitalism could now be
viewed as an arena for psychological experiences, in which physical things were
merely props for the production of
sensations, to be acquired through
Capitalism has proven cash.” One of the most lyrical descrip-
tions of the malevolent pleasure of
time and again that it will
consumption comes from this same
always goad its subjects mid-nineteenth-century moment, in
to be productive, even Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
To disrupt her stifled existence,
when they think they’re Emma Bovary begins buying tacky
hard at leisure. knick-knacks. Her husband, Charles,
is delighted by her purchases: “The
less Charles understood these
refinements, the more they seduced him. They added something to the
pleasure of the senses and to the comfort of his fireside. It was like a golden
dust sanding all along the narrow path of his life.” The narcotic lull of shopping
106 is palpable; one can feel the Bovarys getting high on watch-chain charms and
silver-gilt thimbles. The trinkets themselves are the waste products of this
pleasure-seeking economy.
The notion that we are trading primarily in affect (as opposed to, or at least
as much as, goods and services) may be more true than ever in our present
post-industrial moment, making it absolutely imperative that happiness and
other positive sensations be sorted, measured, and ranked. If it really is positive
experiences and feelings that we’re after, then leisure—a critical source of these
validations of discretionary time for the leaders of society—is especially ripe for
this kind of empirical-seeming scrutiny. And that scrutiny, in turn, will come to
define what leisure, and more fundamentally, happiness, is to us.

Rentiers At Play
In “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” a 1930 essay that has
become famous in recent years for its dramatic historical irony, John Maynard
Keynes cautioned that in the coming decades, humanity would probably become
disoriented by all the free time on its hands, as technology was bearing down on
the ability to free us from significant amounts of toil. We would have to prepare
ourselves for feelings of loss and struggle to find meaningful nonwork activities.
B
He needn’t have worried on that score. Capitalism has proven time and
A again that it will always goad its subjects to be productive, even when they think
F
F they’re hard at leisure. And yet the question of how leisure, or at least
L nonworking time, might play in our lives is pertinent yet again, due not so much
E
R to predictions of tech utopias à la Keynes, but to re-emergent debates over
universal basic income, the meaninglessness of whole categories of work, jobless
economic recoveries, work refusal, and renewed attention to the un- or under-
compensated labor of care work.
Writers like Thomas Piketty and Matt Bruenig point out that for a culture
that holds hard work as one of its sacred tenets, a remarkable amount of
capital flows to certain individuals as what Bruenig calls “passive income” in
the form or rents, interest, and dividends—that is, not as wages for work. Does
this lot—landlords, shareholders, and the like—constitute a leisure class? They
would vigorously deny it. In fact, that’s what our recent presidential candidates
have done in their stilted appeals to the working class, from Mitt Romney’s
laughable characterization of the One Percent as “job creators” to Donald
Trump sporting a cheap trucker’s cap with his suits. Regardless, these people
no doubt invent endless ways to keep themselves extremely busy, to the point
of suffering from stress. Bored as she perennially is, Sylvia Tietjens would at
least have the good sense to roll her eyes at that.

107

S
A
L
Leigh Guldig V
O
Office of Paul Sahre
 Daniel Brook

Creative
Alibis
Richard Florida and the ruse
of the “creative class”

109
in the thick of the financial crisis, retired Federal Reserve
O N O CTO B E R 2 3, 20 08,
chairman Alan Greenspan was brought before a congressional oversight
committee. For decades, official Washington had mythologized the jowly liber-
tarian economist as “the oracle,” the man who pulled the levers of an American
economy showering unprecedented riches on the already rich. Initially appointed
by Ronald Reagan, Greenspan also found favor with market-friendly New
Democrats, elected on the then-novel premise that the party of Roosevelt could be
just as pro-business as the GOP. In 1996, Bill Clinton reappointed the dyed-in-the-
wool Ayn Rand disciple. Greenspan paid Clinton back by duly cheering on the
New Democrat president’s great deregulatory binge, which culminated in 1999
with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the landmark New Deal legislation that
had walled off the worlds of commercial and investment banking.
Now, nearly a decade later, as Greenspan took his seat at the witness table in
the Capitol Hill committee room, the banks the Clinton administration had
turned loose into the deregulated frontiers of finance were imploding. In March,
opaque derivatives brought down Bear Stearns; in September, Lehman Brothers
collapsed. The global economy was in free-fall; millions of Americans had lost
their homes and life savings.
The committee chair, Henry Waxman of California, led a dazed old
Greenspan through a CliffsNotes version of his march of folly:

S
In 1994, you testified at a congressional hearing on regulation of A
L
financial derivatives. You said, “There’s nothing involved in federal V
regulation which makes it superior to market [self-]regulation.” In O
 2002, when the collapse of Enron led to renewed congressional
efforts to regulate derivatives, you wrote the Senate, “We do not
believe a public policy case exists to justify this government
intervention.” Earlier this year, you wrote in the Financial Times,
“Bank loan officers, in my experience, know far more about the
risks and workings of their counterparties than do bank regulators.”
My question for you is simple. Were you wrong?

“Partially,” Greenspan began. “I made a mistake,” he went on to announce to

all-but-audible gasps in the world’s major financial centers. His dogmatic liber-
tarian ideology, Greenspan admitted, had been exposed as no more valuable than
a share of Lehman Brothers stock. “To exist, you need an ideology. The question is
whether it is accurate or not. And what I am saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw.”
Greenspan, disgraced though he was, retained some powers to divine the
future. With the oracle establishing a key precedent, other influential policy
sachems stepped forward to allow that mistakes had been made in the mad rush
to remove the guardrails from the American economy. From former treasury
secretary Lawrence Summers to former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, Very Serious
People confessed some very serious sins.
This chorus of public apology was also striking because nothing close to it
ever took hold in the ever-bullish realm of tech-driven social forecasting.
Exhibit A would be urban-economics guru Richard Florida—the nimble city-plan-
ning professor who leapt to the top of the bestseller list and into the sanctums of
the Aspen Institute power elite with the publication, in 2002, of his reputa-
110 tion-making work, The Rise of the Creative Class. With his cheerleading for
gentrification and his paeans to the tech plutocrats, there were plenty of reasons
to resist his particular flavor of artisanal, farm-to-table Kool-Aid even back then.
Yet it is not until now, a decade and a half later, that Florida has finally embarked
on his own belated apology tour.

Gentrifiers of the World, Unite!

The Rise of the Creative Class was a straight-faced celebration of high-tech gentrifi-
cation as a free-standing engine of economic development. With enough charts
and graphs to satisfy the think-tank gatekeepers and a readable enough prose
style to decorate a corner-office bookshelf, Florida rose from obscure academic to
high-priced consultant and convention speaker. If innovation-minded leaders of
the nation’s slumping metropolitan economies would just chase college-educated
workers by tolerating gays and liberals and upping their indie rock scenes and
food-truck menu prices, even Scranton could become the next Austin. In short
order, traditionally liberal political organs like The Washington Monthly and The
Atlantic—the latter still employs Florida as the editor of a well-funded, multi-part-
nered “vertical” devoted to urban policy—hailed the daft postcards from nerd-
istan collated in The Rise of the Creative Class as a blueprint for a business-friendly
B
Democratic policy portfolio. With fellowships at ur-mainstream outlets like the
A Brookings Institution, Florida could convince himself and the world that he was a
F
F Very Serious Person, albeit one with an aversion to neckties—never mind that he
L was acending via the tried-and-true apparatchik method of flattering the donors
E
R and comforting the comfortable. No, no: Florida was a vanguardist—an honest-
 to-god futurist, heralding a fairer, smarter, more prosperous America, and his hip,
chunky glasses proved it.
Those paying closer attention to Florida’s background and career would have
had to greet his rise to edgy social-forecasting glory with bitter, disbelieving
guffaws. Florida, who finished his graduate studies at Columbia University, had
launched his academic career in the
1980s editing a five-hundred-page
As usual, Richard Florida work of policy prophecy entitled—
is late to the party. The yes—Housing and the New Financial
Markets. In it, Florida explained how
caste-society nightmare “residential finance [had] been
is already upon us. transformed from a relatively sheltered
to a completely deregulated system
[that] sell[s] adjustable-rate mort-
gages, like securities, on the secondary mortgage market.” The young scholar
breezily noted that “mortgage-lending [had] changed from its emphasis on
long-term commitments to a process in which mortgages function similarly to
short-term investments.” While Florida flagged “a host of questions [that] have
been raised” by deregulation, all of his queries were technical ones concerning
how the new system worked. Like most New Economy boosters, he sped right by
the $64-trillion question of whether the removal of Depression-era safeguards on
the fabrication of speculative new financial instruments might lead to a
Depression-style crash.
The figures Florida recruited for this bold new prospectus offered similar
wide-eyed tributes to the glories of the deregulated financial system. “I believe that 111
with the savings and loan industry’s receipt of new powers from Congress, it will
eventually prosper,” one collaborator, Thomas P. Vartanian, a Reagan administra-
tion housing official turned corporate lawyer, suggested. Soon after publication, the
massive implosion known as the S&L Crisis took hold, triggering an almost
ten-year federal cleanup that cost more than $152 billion and featuring the all-too-
late revelation that the industry had used congressional campaign contributions to
avoid regulatory scrutiny. In another chapter, “Mortgage-Backed Securities: The
Revolution in Real Estate Finance,” Charles M. Sivesind, a very serious economist
at the New York Fed, assured credulous readers that “mortgage-backed securities
help moderate the traditional ‘boom and bust’ cycles.” Revisiting the confident
preachings of Florida and his free-market choir after the Great Recession of 2008,
it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at (to take just one particularly egregious
example) the sight of a chapter entitled, “The Adjustable Mortgage Loan: Benefits
to the Consumer and to the Housing Industry.”

Let Them Drive Beemers

When The Rise of the Creative Class stormed into the center of liberal policy
debate, it was largely the old deregulatory gospel repackaged in the shiny new
wineskin of lifestyle liberalism. In one fell swoop, Florida repurposed his core
message from the celebration of the housing market’s complete financialization
S
to apologetics for the growing inequalities of the New Economy more generally. A
In post–New Deal America, Florida assured us, we could all keep up with the L
V
Gateses by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. O
 True, the repeal of the corporate social contract and the governmental
safety net may mean that “there is no corporation or other large institution that
will take care of us . . . we are truly on our own.” But this was no grounds for
despair—at least not for the truly innovative souls who live, work, and play in the
trendiest of knowledge-inebriated American cities. Simply by harnessing our
own creativity, we can all stay afloat—and indeed prosper in dramatic fashion—
no matter how humble our nominal social position might be. “The person who
cuts my hair is a very creative stylist, much in demand, and drives a new BMW,”
Florida enthused in one of his classic
Panglossian proofs-by-anecdote. “The
The man who rose to woman who cleans my house,” he
continued, “is a gem: I trust her not
prominence as a libertarian
only to clean but to rearrange and
foot soldier making the suggest ideas for redecorating; she
world safe for plutocracy takes on these things in an entrepre-
neurial manner. Her husband drives a
now endorses a guaranteed Porsche.” With the assurance that
basic income. gentrification and plutocracy were in
the best interests of even the least
among us, Florida leapt from bush-
league libertarian training camps like the American Enterprise Institute and
George Mason University to the vital center. He now teaches at the University of
Toronto and NYU as a professor at both institutions.
But as Greenspan and company ultimately learned, when you have a flawed
112 ideology, eventually the facts catch up with you. No matter how many Beem-
er-driving barbers may cross your path, the hard numbers of the past few decades
utterly contradicted Florida’s forecasts in nearly every particular. In our winner-
take-all society, just about everyone, by definition, ends up a loser. Post-crash,
especially, the results of the upward redistribution of wealth were evident every-
where. The return to Roaring Twenties levels of wealth inequality was thoroughly
documented in academic journal articles, in seven-hundred-page books by
Thomas Piketty, and even in charts and graphs published by right-leaning outlets
like The Economist. But it was most acutely felt on the streets of America’s leading
cities, Richard Florida’s area of feverishly professed expertise.
After he’d spent his early career touting the creative prowess of global
megacities like New York and Los Angeles and his cherished roster of smaller
tech hubs, where the working-class row houses of yesteryear now go for a million
dollars a pop, even Richard Florida realized something had gone awry. Middle-
income neighborhoods were disappearing; cities and regions were resegregating
along lines of race and class; and social goods such as higher education, once
broadly accessible, were becoming de facto totems of hereditary privilege.
Belatedly facing up to the savage inequalities that had overtaken the nation in the
long wake of the Reagan Revolution, Florida went into what he calls “a period of
rethinking and introspection, of personal and intellectual transformation.” His
B
latest book, The New Urban Crisis, is the result.
A
F
F Mea Sorta Culpa
L
E
R So it is a chastened Florida who now steps forward to acknowledge that “the
middle class has been eviscerated . . . the poor and disadvantaged truly are falling
further and further behind . . . [and] even the affluent . . . don’t feel as prosperous
as they did in the past, because they live in expensive cities where securing their
own, and their children’s, futures is growing more costly and increasingly
difficult.” (One presumes that this means the BMWs and Porsches of the lavishly
compensated service class of the early aughts have long since been repossessed.)
Moreover, Florida glumly admits that only a small handful of cities, “maybe
a couple of dozen [are] really making it in the knowledge economy; many more
[are] failing to keep pace or falling further behind.” Scranton is not becoming
Austin—and Austin is not keeping itself weird. Life in America has become a
game with few winners beyond the D.C. revolving-door spinners, the derivative
hustlers on Wall Street, and the lucky bearers of timely vesting stock options in
Silicon Valley. For Americans stuck in more typical cities, opportunities are
scarce. And even for those in the places that are “making it”—de facto gated
communities that now typically require well-heeled parents to co-sign inflated
leases for their newly graduated progeny—life is more precarious. When a 2013
poll asked New Yorkers if the city had become “too expensive for people like you
to live in,” fully 85 percent said yes.
Yet the curious thing about this unrelieved portrait of urban despair and
displacement is that this new reality all seems to have unfolded without any of
Richard Florida’s help. Even faint suggestions to the contrary promptly get the
big thinker’s dander up. To those “mainly on the left [who] blamed . . . me
personally for everything from rising rents and gentrification to the growing gap
between the rich and the poor” he concedes only that “this criticism provoked
my thinking in ways I could never have anticipated, causing me to reframe my 113
ideas.” It appears Florida genuinely sees himself as a fly-on-the-wall social
scientist, not a debate-altering propagandist. And he seems genuinely puzzled
that anyone would take him to task for failing to notice economic problems that
began in the Reagan era and unspooled over the course of three-plus decades.
In The New Urban Crisis, Florida finds himself gobsmacked to read in a
2016 Pew study that “from 1970 to 2012, the share of American families living
in middle-class neighborhoods declined from 65 to 40 percent, while the share
living in either poor or affluent neighborhoods grew substantially.” Yet more
than a decade ago, a nearly identical study from the Brookings Institution
(where Florida was, at that time, a senior fellow) found that the proportion of
metro area neighborhoods that were middle-class had declined from 58
percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2000. Similarly, Florida now reports with
alarm that levels of economic inequality in major American metropolitan areas
match those of developing-world countries. The New York metro area, he
informs us, is on par with Swaziland; Greater Miami matches Zimbabwe; San
Francisco is El Salvador; Chicago is Bolivia; and Boston is Rwanda. But this
trend, too, predates his mea culpa by decades. The 2000 Census, for example,
showed Manhattan suffering the same level of economic inequality as
Namibia, the most unequal country in the world. This fact was reported by
such obscure publications as the New York Times, which introduced its
coverage with this observation: “Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue is only about
S
60 blocks from the Wagner Houses in East Harlem, but they might as well be A
light years apart.” As that prescient sentence makes clear, you don’t need a L
V
Census taker to know which way the demographic wind blows. O
 To sense that American cities were becoming more unequal only took a pair
of walking shoes and eyes unshielded by rose-tinted hipster glasses. You’d think
Richard Florida, who grew up in an economically integrated New Jersey suburb in
the 1960s, would have been able to see this happening in real time and maybe
even sound the alarm. By the time The Rise of the Creative Class came out, the idea
of a town where his father, a factory worker with a seventh-grade education, and
his uncle, a Colgate-Palmolive executive with a master’s degree, could be
neighbors already sounded like something out of a sci-fi novel or (more fantasti-
cally still) a Scandinavian welfare state.
As for the Cassandras who had been inveighing against the follies of deregu-
lation and financialization for decades, even now, Florida refuses to credit them.
It is as if these problems didn’t exist until the moment Florida discovered them.
But the lineage of unheeded oracles goes all the way back to Jane Jacobs—
perversely enough, the figure Richard Florida has long claimed as his mentor. A
public intellectual who deserved her plaudits, Jane Jacobs foresaw the dangers of
gentrification in their earliest stirrings. As the seminal sidewalk critic warned in
The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961[!]:

So many people want to live in [a] locality that it becomes

profitable to build, in excessive and devastating quantity, for
those who can pay the most. These are usually childless people. . .
. Accommodations for this narrow, profitable segment of the
population multiply, at the expense of other[s]. Families are
crowded out, variety of scene is crowded out, enterprises unable
114 to support their share of the new construction costs are crowded
out. This process is now occurring, very rapidly, in much of
Greenwich Village.

For all of Florida’s resistance to relitigating his own checkered past, his
proposals going forward do bespeak a stunning transformation. The man who
rose to prominence as a libertarian foot soldier making the world safe for
plutocracy now endorses a minimum wage pegged to 50 percent of the median
wage and backs a guaranteed basic income to be distributed through a negative
income tax. He even praises Scandinavian socialism, hailing it in glowing terms
as “the high-road path of the Nordic countries, where income inequality is low.”
But the elite he long flattered will have little use for these egalitarian solutions.
One can imagine the reaction all of this would get should Richard Florida pitch it
to the crowd at the next Aspen Ideas Festival, let alone the Trump White House.

Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity

A funny thing happened on the way to reviewing The New Urban Crisis. A few
months after receiving a review copy from the publisher, I was emailed a new
version of the same book. In the old New Urban Crisis, Donald Trump was just “a
B
deeply flawed candidate [who] mobilized ranks of anxious voters . . . who have
A lost their jobs, their income, and their status and are lashing out against groups
F
F they believe are getting ahead or threatening them.” In the new New Urban Crisis,
L Donald Trump was the president of the United States. Yet again, Richard Florida
E
R only realized the danger after it was too late.
 Of course, Florida has plenty of company in the ranks of shame-faced
pundits who underestimated Trump. But for Florida, the oversight is less
excusable. After all, he had just completed a book on the very geographic
inequalities and economic frustrations that powered Trump’s campaign. And,
as a professor in New York City and Toronto, he’d long had a front-row seat to
the rise of the new populism, both left and right. Even his original text had
devoted copious ink to how rising inequality had spawned the Jekyll-and-Hyde
populist mayors, Bill de Blasio and Rob Ford. From the left, de Blasio had
dispatched billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg’s handpicked successor—the
openly gay, neoliberal City Council speaker Christine Quinn—by arguing that
life in New York had become a “tale of two cities” and vowing to represent
those left out of Manhattan’s plutocratic prosperity. De Blasio’s victory was, in
Florida’s words, “a shock [to] pundits and political prognosticators in the city
and just about everywhere else.”
In a more farcical version of populist upheaval north of the border, the
tough-talking, crack-smoking Rob Ford took city hall by railing against
Toronto’s downtown elites on behalf of his conservative working-class constitu-
ents in the outlying neighborhoods. Florida was similarly dumbfounded:
“somehow, this progressive, diverse city . . . chose Rob Ford.” The original
version of The New Urban Crisis even flagged the surprise outcome of the Brexit
vote, a hinterland revolt against London’s cosmopolitans and oligarchs, as part
of the same phenomenon. But despite observing all of these premonitory
tremors along our deepening socioeconomic fault lines, Florida was blindsided
by Trump. Holding the two versions
of The New Urban Crisis side by side 115
To sense that American provides a rare and instructive
real-time vision of a pundit pulling his
cities were becoming more
head out of the sand just moments
unequal only took a pair past the point when his disinterment
of walking shoes and eyes could be of any plausible use.
With Trump now ensconced in the
unshielded by rose-tinted White House, Florida’s revised
hipster glasses. blueprint for post-meltdown urban
revival is a study in futility. Florida
notes with predictably startled tardi-
ness that America’s Gini coefficient—the economic profession’s metric for
inequality—is worse than Russia’s and Nicaragua’s. But the real question is not why
America now has Russian-style monopolist oligarchs and a Latin American–style
rally-addicted caudillo as our supreme leader, but why it took so long.
For the next four years, the 2016 election has made a pipe dream of Florida’s
Scandinavian-inspired prescriptions for tackling inequality—and he knows it.
“Nothing remotely like what I envisioned and hoped for is likely to happen now
with Trump in office and the Republicans in control of both houses of Congress,”
Florida confesses in the new version. The idea of Florida getting a meeting with
Dr. Ben Carson, the conspiracy-minded brain surgeon now charged with ordering
America’s urban affairs, let alone pitching him on, say, a guaranteed basic income
S
is unthinkable. “I can’t tell you how depressing it’s been for me to contemplate a A
future . . . where the causes of concentrated poverty remain unaddressed, and L
V
where our socioeconomic classes harden into castes,” Florida writes. O
 But, as usual, Florida is late to the party. The caste-society nightmare is
already upon us. In explaining his maps of growing racial and economic
inequality in America’s major metropolitan areas, Florida credits Robert Ezra
Park, the early twentieth-century sociologist who pioneered this form of data
visualization. Florida prefaces his brief biography of the thinker by noting,
“Park’s odyssey is so remarkable that it seems the stuff of fiction.” As Florida
recounts, Park was born in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. He worked on
the railroads before attending public universities in Minnesota and Michigan,
where his professors discovered that he was unusually bright. Park got into
Harvard for graduate school and studied abroad in Germany, at the University of
Heidelberg. He went on to teach at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute
and eventually landed at the University of Chicago. No doubt, Park was a
spectacularly talented and influential social scientist—how many academics
write papers that are still routinely assigned to students a hundred years after
they were first published?—but his rise from the working class to the ivory tower
was not, in his day, all that shocking. Back then, they had a name for it. They
called it the American Dream. By the 1960s and ’70s, it was being democratized
to include Americans who did not share Park’s privileged race or gender. But to
our ears, his quintessential American tale now sounds like fiction—in part
because Park’s meritocratic rise so manifestly relied on the egalitarian public
institutions that Richard Florida so blithely dismissed until just last week.
We tend, in retrospect, to stereotype the heyday of American social mobility
as an era of gray-flannel-suit conformity. But it was a time when a creative kid like
Robert Ezra Park could rise from obscurity to prominence on the strength of his
116 own talent. Maybe someone should write a book about that era and its demise.
They could call it, oh, I don’t know, The Fall of the Creative Class.

B
A
F
F
L
E
R Leigh Guldig
Age of Osteo Collosus
By Dzvinia Orlowsky

Thank you doctor,

it must be so, each bone depleted—
each wish revealed.

Doll of fired clay & dried fruit,

of glassy-winged genitalia,
detritus of peanut brittle, cold

steel, pumice stone, partial

knee, rubble swan neck,
taxidermied hummingbird, 117

tumbling twigs, tumble weed

joints, flared hand fans, ivory
splints, abridged bridge, thread

bare spine, hips—exotic endangered

reefs, Porous Taurus, X men, me.

P
O
E
M
 Natasha Vargas-Cooper
Childhood’s
End
Which Disney princess is Neil Postman?
IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR a clear marker of
cultural decline, something that represents
an inescapable cul-de-sac in the American
ideal of forward progress, just ponder the
118 all-too-familiar image of the kindergar-
ten-aged child whose parents have
outfitted him (it’s usually a him) with a
Mohawk haircut. A friend of mine who
teaches young children is forever
complaining that the Mohawked boys have
chronic self-discipline issues. “They are
always the ones who have the behavioral
problems,” she says.
When I ask her why that is, she explains
that “they are being raised by adult-aged
children”—in other words, people who are
too immature to know better.
That shocking thatch of hair flanked by
pallid scalp, once a symbol of rebellion,
marginalization, and class rancor is now
being buzzed onto the heads of children in
Minion T-shirts who barely know how to
wipe their own asses. The problem is not
simply an aesthetic one (though the
child-sized spikes are undeniably vulgar); it
B
A is also that parents are styling their
F
F not-yet-literate offspring in the garb of
L disillusionment. Just what it does it mean
E
R when parents use their children as
signifiers of their own neuroses about
being grown-ups?
The kiddie-hawk represents the ultimate
erosion of the modern era: the now
completely trampled-down barrier between
childhood and adulthood. No doubt, the
nineteenth century was full of shit ideas,
especially those devoted to shoring up social
hierarchies. However, the firm demarcation
between children and adults was a decidedly
good idea—not just when it comes to
manner of dress and speech, but in totality.
The world of adults was vested with knowl-
edge, power, authority, restraint, and
wisdom, while the world of children was one
of wonderment, secrets, mystery, and
naïveté. Today those two worlds are all
mushed together in a counter-develop-
mental clusterfuck. Not only do adults
fetishize the virtues of childhood and adopt
the dress of children, but they also resent
the liberation that comes with adulthood. In
internet parlance, they resent “adulting.”
The indiscriminate flattening logic of this
resentment—channeled through our mass
media, consumer capitalism, and the general
impoverishment of public intellectual
life—has turned adults into floppy
Child-Adults.

João Fazenda
The Child Is Babysitter to the Man
And that means, in turn, that children
themselves are becoming strange hybrids
of infants and adults, with their Mohawks
and sticky hands swiping furiously across
iPads, getting the sort of instant gratifica-
tion that no other technology provides.
Tweens are now glorified entrepreneurs
and pitchmen, hawking gadgets and
lipsticks for brands through their social-
media empires. Teenage girls wear the
clothes of streetwalkers and use the
language of ninth-wave feminism to declare
their tiny crop tops “empowering.” And
young boys dress basically the same way
that most adult men now do: in sloppy,
baggy hipster attire, with untucked dress
shirts or ironic T-shirts, all topped off, as
119
often as not, with a baseball cap. Via the
same principle of cranial cultural deter-
minism that gave us the baby Mohawk,
consider here for a moment the baseball
cap: the one item of clothing a three-
year-old and a thirty-year-old could wear
without telegraphing any gap in their ages.
Now, you might say, “Pish posh! These
parents are just letting their children
indulge in a little self-expression! And iPads
keep them quiet instead of screaming when
we go to Whole Foods, or the nearest
artisanal coffee bar! Mohawks are better
O
than those horrible bowl cuts that were
U
standard issue in the 1980s; shouldn’t we let T
B
the little wigglers have some fun?” U
No. Childhood is a relatively new and R
S
fragile thing in the history of humankind, T
 and we are fucking it up. Less than a apply to the digital-age mediascape with
hundred years ago, we stuck children in redoubled force:
coal mines or behind spinning mules to
waste away for a sub-living wage. Before The world of the known and the not
that, we didn’t expect most of them to live yet known is bridged by wonder-
into adulthood. Now the young are the ment. But wonderment happens
consumer vanguard of first resort, which largely in a situation where the
both diminishes the discrete experiential child’s world is separate from the
character of childhood and fatally adult world, where children must
degrades whatever may remain of the seek entry, through their questions,
dignity of adulthood. into the adult world. As media
Anyone familiar with the work of the late merge the two worlds, as the
sociologist and media theorist Neil Postman tension created by secrets to be
will recognize these unraveled is dimin-
arguments. In his books ished, the calculus of
The Disappearance of I wanted answers: wonderment changes.
Childhood (1982) and to sex, to Curiosity is replaced by
Amusing Ourselves to violence, to war, cynicism or, even
Death (1985), Postman to disaster, to death, worse, arrogance. We
makes the case that as to the purpose are left with children
society moves away from a of garter belts. who rely not on
print culture—wherein authoritative adults but
knowledge is amassed in on news from nowhere.
stages, sequentially, forcing greater levels We are left with children who are
120 of rigor, maturity, and comprehension on given answers to questions they
the reader—and toward mass media, we never asked. We are left, in short,
begin to lose the mechanism for civic life. without children.
Indeed, Postman contends that greater
literacy is inextricably linked with the core
Body Horror School
defining traits of adult cognition and
discourse: “A child evolves toward adult- Here is a current representative example of
hood by acquiring the sort of intellect we the promiscuous mingling of the genera-
expect of a good reader: a vigorous sense of tions: a few years ago, a movement of sorts
individuality, the capacity to think logically began to make its way through public
and sequentially, the capacity to distance schools in the United States and Canada.
oneself from symbols, the capacity to Young girls started protesting their schools’
manipulate high orders of abstraction, the dress codes—specifically, the provisions
capacity to defer gratification.” within them that forbade tummy-flashing
Postman was writing in the pre-digital crop tops.
age of the 1980s and focused mainly on the Of course, this is the wont of all teen-
effects of television and advertising. But his agers. They have just come into possession
arguments fit right in with the rise of the of adult bits and want to show them off.
database culture of the internet, where These early bids to flaunt sexuality and skin
two-minute clips of orgies, the complete are a sacred rite of adolescence. I grew up
works of El Greco, and major historical under a similar dress code, and I was sent
B
A events are atomized into single-serve pages home more than once for wearing spaghet-
F
F without sequence or consequence. If ti-strap tank tops that revealed my conspic-
L anything, his arguments about the steam- uously colored bra straps. A suspension was
E
R rolling cultural effect of postwar mass media annoying—but then again, the whole point of
exposing my bra straps was to be risky,
sexy, and subversive. At no point did I want
bra straps to be sanctioned by a bunch of
polyester-clad high-school bureaucrats—
they would instantly rob my raunchy straps
of their verboten power. This was the game
we played with adults, testing how much we
could get away with until we were
restrained. Without such artificially imposed
limits, I’m pretty sure my friends and I
would have come to school wearing nothing
but nipple tassels from the waist up, so
profound was our desire for male attention.
The young girls nowadays, however, claim
that they are not trying to be seen as sexual
objects. Rather, they insist that their schools
are punishing and shaming them for wanting
to wear shirts that could essentially double
as sports bras. In Toronto, a student named
Alexi Halket was called into the principal’s
office for wearing a very small crop top.
“I told [the principal] that I had a bunch
of similar outfits lined up, because they
made me feel really beautiful,” Halket told
People magazine.
The school’s dress code had a ban on any
clothes that were “too revealing.” So Halket
created a call to action: a Facebook event,
Crop Top Day, encouraging other girls to
wear their crop tops to school. Other
schools joined in solidarity. The momentum
was already there—in 2014, Canadian school
kids had put up signs that read: “Instead of
shaming girls for their bodies teach boys
that girls are not sexual objects.”
I interviewed one of Halket’s school-
mates for a women’s site about the crop-top
fracas in 2015, and her response floored me.
When I asked about why the right to bare
navels was a feminist issue, as she had
suggested on her social media accounts, this
was her response:
The dress code’s perpetuation of
females needing to dress
“modestly” implies that revealingly
dressed females are to be looked at
negatively. If a young child sees one
of their female peers being pulled
out of class and punished for
wearing short shorts, they will
think that people in short shorts
deserve to be punished.
Thus is youthful cynicism dressed up in the
rhetoric of adult liberationism. These girls
were using the language of empowerment
and liberation to justify showing off their
bodies. What’s more, many of the girls’
parents supported the crop-top crusade.
Several mothers whose daughters joined
Halket’s protest agreed that allowing girls
to wear revealing clothing to school was
somehow dismantling a double standard.
There’s another core, and disastrous,
cultural misunderstanding at the bottom of
this incoherent stance: children and adults
today confuse the concepts of shame and
restraint. This ensures that we systemati-
cally misread calls for restraint as some sort
of petty bureaucratic bullying—or worse, as
a deliberate campaign of cultural shaming.
Asking children to dress somewhat
modestly at school is a perfectly reasonable 121
request. Sending them home when they fall
short is not a form of shaming: it is imposing
restraint where teenagers (a species not
typically known for self-restraint) fail to do
so. Further, no one is being “shamed” for
their sexuality. Postman is crystal clear on
this point:
It is one thing to say that human
sexuality is base and ugly, which, in
my opinion, is another dangerous
idea. It is altogether different to say
that its public display deprives it of
its mystery and awe and changes
the character and meaning of both
sexuality and child development.
Here is a sentence I never thought I
would have to write: when parents stand
O
against schools imposing some level of
U
restraint on the sex hamsters known as T
B
teenagers, that’s a bad thing. Parents who U
do not understand the difference between R
S
shame and restraint are fucking up. T

Suspended for Reasons of Passivity
Postman was largely concerned with
children—and what was already, in his day,
the failing effort to quarantine them from
the tawdriness and melodrama of the
adult world. My main concern, a genera-
tion later, is the degradation of modern
adulthood as it surrenders more and more
of its waning moral authority to witless
youth.
When I was a child, I craved nothing
more than to be a grown-up. While my
friends were building forts from pillows, I
was practicing smoking in front of a
mirror with a piece of chalk, as though I
were a femme fatale ready to bump off my
no-neck husband for the insurance money.
The dream of escaping the tyranny of
childhood—of no longer having my body,
dress, and studies regulated by an assort-
ment of indistinguishably bland authority
figures—intoxicated me. I also wanted
answers: to sex, to violence, to war, to
122 disaster, to death, to the purpose of garter
belts. When they arrived, some of those
answers came too fast to absorb without
trauma. Now I wish they had been revealed
to me more gradually, when I had more
wisdom and maturity to contend with their
many implications in full. Now that I’ve
come to know (voluntarily or otherwise)
the grit and glamour of the adult world, I
never ache for the nostalgia of childhood.
In other words, I do not participate in flash
mobs, pillow fights, or any sort of costume
play. Why? Because all this prolonged
adolescent posturing is beneath the
seriousness of adulthood—a seriousness
that I fought years to possess.
This is also why I (again, like Postman)
find adults who read young adult books so
repellent. In The Disappearance of Child-
hood, Postman is a prescient critic of the
burgeoning genre of YA literature, particu-
B
A larly the wildly popular works of Judy
F
F Blume, which reconfigured the image of
L childhood into a sort of adult debauch on
E
R training wheels:
The work of Judy Blume has been
emulated by many other writers
who, like Ms. Blume, have grasped
the idea that “adolescent litera-
ture” is best received when it
simulates in theme and language
adult literature, and, in particular,
when its characters are presented
as miniature adults. . . . We are now
undergoing a very rapid reorienta-
tion in our popular arts in regard
to the image of children. One might
put the matter, somewhat crudely,
in this way: Our culture is not big
enough for both Judy Blume and
Walt Disney. One of them will have
to go, and as the Disney empire’s
failing receipts show, it is the
Disney conception of what a child is
and needs that is disappearing.
As farsighted as his overall social
vision was, Postman got the particulars of
this prophecy wrong. He underestimated
the combined appeal Disney and Blume
would have on a generation of Adult
Children who pine for the sentimentality
and passivity of childhood—people who
associate comfort with television and
Disney cartoons and who indulge in the
dead time of nostalgia. Postman would
spin in his grave if he could witness the
bacterial bloom of “Which Disney Princess
Are You?” quizzes that have become the
scourge of the internet—especially if he
were to see the overwhelming number of
adults, rather than children, who click
through such infantilizing surveys and
share them in the social-mediasphere.
Nostalgia, however cloying, can be
excused as a symptom of ambivalent aging.
What’s more disturbing is how many adults
prefer to read today’s YA literature because
they relate more easily to the inner lives of
teenagers (who, to judge by the thematic
thrust of said literature, want only to fuck
vampires) than to the higher-stakes
emotional quandaries of adulthood.
What explains this state of willful
cultural regression? Nothing good, but two laundry, go to the DMV, clean their base-
related trends stand out in high relief here. boards, or just go to bed early, they will
First, people now entering their thirties commemorate the unique event by posting
were weaned on television when it was at about it on social media under the
its nadir and was often used as a behav- “adulting” hashtag. In this foreshortened
ior-controlling device (leaving children view, adulthood is not a permanent state of
stupefied and quiet), so their relationship existence but a collection of tasks between
to print and reading is flimsy. Second—and hobby cons and Snapchats.
more balefully—virtually all the cultural Is it any wonder, then, that so many
logic of digital-age capitalism upholds the adults find comfort in books that are
conception of a teenager or populated by children
young adult as the model caught up in grown-up
progenitor and consumer of If television crushed drama, struggling to
culture. As a result, the the social and cope? (Also, wizards are
traditional role of the adult intellectual barriers neat, I suppose.) Did you
has been “childified.” between childhood know, by the way, that if
Television is a perfect case and adulthood, you Google the phrase
in point. While many of us then the internet “literary tattoo,” the
may pat ourselves on the has obliterated results are a wash of
backs for dutifully ingesting them. adults with Harry Potter
prestige dramas on phrases and references on
subscription networks, the their bodies?
majority of Americans watch network If we extend the basic lineaments of
sitcoms. The sitcom genre, in our age as in Postman’s arguments a bit further, we can
Postman’s, hinges on its understanding of safely conclude that if television crushed the 123
adult life as an unrelieved study in termi- social and intellectual barriers between
nally arrested development. (It hardly childhood and adulthood, then the internet
seems an accident that the most reverently has obliterated them. Places like Reddit,
fetishized sitcom of our own age is called— Twitter, and Tumblr have no mechanism to
in a flourish of self-undercutting irony— demarcate who is a fourteen-year-old
Arrested Development.) In the stunted land arguing about a meme and who is a stunted
of the sitcom, Postman writes, adults forty-year-old wannabe lurker. This is the
developmental wading pool that we uncriti-
do not take their work seriously (if cally endorse as the stuff of self-empowered
they work at all), they do not digital liberation.
nurture children, they have no The Adult Child, defined by Postman as
politics, practice no religion, “a grown-up whose intellectual and
represent no tradition, have no emotional capacities are unrealized and,
foresight or serious plans, have no in particular, not significantly different
extended conversations, and in no from those associated with children” is
circumstances allude to anything now a permanent fixture of the digital age.
that is not familiar to an eight- As Postman points out, cultures vary in
year-old person. the degree to which they encourage or
discourage adults to act in this fashion.
We, of course, encourage it, and we should O
As a result of this shared cultural
U
surround, adult behavior is increasingly all be embarrassed. Is there a good emoji T
B
treated as an aberrant novelty among the for that? U
digiterati. When people in their early to R
S
mid-twenties do things like pay bills, fold T
 Intervention
Lewis Robinson

My father called to tell me that my sister was going off the rails at
college. According to him she was distracted by trivial fascinations, like
communal living, and now owned a ferret. She was a sophomore at Oberlin
and I hadn’t yet visited, so I used dad’s concern as an excuse for a trip north.
During the first hour of my drive I cranked Johnny Cash, thinking about what
I might say. I had plenty to say to her, not just the things my father wanted
me to say on his behalf.
I drove in one shot all the way from Louisville, where I’d just started
working in the warehouse at our cousin’s shipping company, to the place in
north-central Ohio where corn fields yield to public parks, protected woods,
and village streets. Five miles from Oberlin, I pulled over next to someone’s
pumpkin patch and peed beside my front tire, looking at the dried-out
pumpkin vines in my headlights’ periphery and the steam rising from the
dead grass, hearing the muffled music from inside the car.
I wanted Katherine to be shocked by my arrival, and to catch her off
124
guard—to remind her of our family’s spirit—I’d packed a costume before I’d
left Louisville. We’ve always been a family that reveled in surprise. Beside the
pumpkin patch I took off my windbreaker and unbuttoned my oxford shirt,
stripping down to jeans and boots, then clicked the trunk open and from a
white shopping bag pulled a can of silver aerosol paint. I began by spraying
my arms and neck. My stomach was soft and hairy and my nipples looked
larger than usual. I applied the paint so thickly that it matted down my chest
hair until the contours of my body shone in the oncoming headlights. I’d
done this once when I was a student, for a homecoming game, and I’d been
so drunk during my morning walk to the stadium that I curled up in the back
of a stranger’s pickup.
The other part of my homecoming costume had been a mask, a wildcat,
but I couldn’t find it anywhere in the cardboard boxes I kept in storage, so I
settled for a replacement from the drug store. I grabbed it from the trunk, a
waxy rubber mask, and before pulling it on, I held it out in front of me and
looked into its dark eye holes: the face of a cartoon dog, different from the
wildcat but still quite menacing with its impish grin and long, red tongue. I
pulled it over my head and drove the last few miles in disguise.
B
A A year earlier, when Katherine had planned an intervention for our fa-
F ther, I rejected the idea, telling her it would be silly to bully the old man out
F
L of his evening cocktails. She asked me if I remembered the time he’d taken
E
R us sledding in the middle of the night in our pajamas. Of course I did—it was
one of my fondest memories. She said that all of the best times we’d had
with Dad had been when he was drunk. When I asked her what was wrong
with that, she thought I was joking. She sent me some books about interven-
tions and I thought they were asinine, but I read them.
When my father called me with his concerns about Katherine’s well-be-
ing, he asked me, in his quiet evening voice, why she’d acquired the ferret.
He seemed genuinely confused. Maybe it’s part of the Biology curriculum, he
asked, or Environmental Studies? When I thought of Oberlin I had an image
in my head of entire buildings, entire groups of buildings, entire quadrants
of campus donated by Hollywood Marxists, and within these buildings and
on these quadrangles, students were unwittingly absorbing mindless trivia
relevant only to future investors, moviegoers, refreshment manufacturers, pet
shops, and puppy mills. In this vision I saw my sister wearing a fedora, smok-
ing a cigar, holding a ferret. I didn’t care that she had a ferret as much as our
father did, though it did seem to suggest that she had changed.
The streets of Oberlin are flat and straight and dimly lit by sodium lights.
I parked beside the town green and walked the last few blocks to her house
to make sure my Caprice wouldn’t give me away.
The house Katherine shared with twelve other hippies was a three-story
mansion with a neglected lawn and a fleet of ramshackle bicycles parked
out front. As I walked up the driveway, my chest gleaming silver in the cool
darkness, I felt especially giddy about my disguise. What I liked about wear-
125
ing the mask was that a dog seemed the opposite of a ferret. I couldn’t wait
for Katherine to see me. I briefly imagined the look on her face, stunned, like
when I used to throw her into the town pool before she’d changed into her
bathing suit. My hands were cold, but the paint made my body feel snug and
insulated, and inside the mask my face was pleasantly humid. When I arrived
at the door, instead of opening it, I started barking. It was hard to believe
that twenty-four hours earlier, I’d been forklifting boxes of paper towels into
a semi bound for Tallahassee. As I barked I felt unencumbered, like a border
collie that stays cooped up most of the day but gets to run in the park at
night. After barking for a minute or so, the door swung open, and a small
young woman with fierce brown eyes and shell-shaped earrings, her hair
cropped short, stared out at me. She barely smiled, as though she was tired
of answering the door and finding bare-chested men dressed as dogs on her
stoop. “You sure you have the right house?” she asked.
I nearly explained to her that I was Katherine’s brother, but instead I
barked a few more times. It had been feeling so good.
“Are you friends with Delmon?” she asked.
I barked again, a short, deep “Woof.”
The small, needle-eyed woman shook her head and stepped out of my
way. S
T
When I was in college, my classmates and I would assemble in the O
R
basement corridors of one of the high-rise dormitories, where we played a Y
 version of kickball involving trashcans full of yellow beer. The scene inside
Katherine’s house was not familiar. It felt like a movie set. The first room I
passed was lit by candles, and inside was a group of lackadaisical students
sitting on the carpet, grinning at a young man with a beard dressed only in
loose-fitting soccer shorts, a hula-hoop gyrating on his thin tan hips. Further
down the hallway in a darkened corner were two women in tank tops and
sweatpants at a card table constructing an intricate sculpture with tooth-
picks, dried beans, and glue. I barked gently at them. They glanced up from
their project with interest, each of them flashing me a generous, unbiased
grin before turning again to their sculpture.
The kitchen was packed with other happy people dressed in muted
tones, a few wearing corduroy pants, some dancing languorously with droop-
ing eyelids, but most of them just standing close to one another, shooting
the breeze, holding their drinks up near their throats. It seemed as though
I’d arrived in the midst of a party.
The room smelled like avocados.
We’ve always been a family
All the men had some variety of
that reveled in surprise.
facial hair: long sideburns, silly
moustaches, untended chin whisk-
ers. I didn’t see Katherine in the crowd. After a few minutes of standing and
staring I walked over to one of the kitchen cabinets and found myself a glass.
I opened the refrigerator with my silver hand and peered at the neat rows
126
of brown beer bottles and unfamiliar condiments. I spotted a waxy box of
fake milk on the door, so I poured myself half a cup, then filled the rest with
rum from the counter. I could tell people were looking at me but not want-
ing to stare. I tried taking a few small sips through the air hole at the back
of the mask’s tongue. This method worked fine, and I started getting more
attention from the revelers. They had assembled in a group around me and
were talking as though I couldn’t hear. I thought about what my body looked
like to them, metallic and lustrous. Perhaps they recognized it as an older
body than theirs, because of the fat nipples. I finished the drink and placed
the glass in the sink. Then I sounded a few sharp yipping barks to the crowd.
One of the students who’d been dancing—his long straight brown hair was
gathered in a ponytail and he wore mirrored sunglasses—approached me
and started baying like a wolf. I barked again. Then the kid acted as though
he was sniffing me—my silver belly, then the seat of my jeans.
I figured this little show was okay as long as Katherine was watching,
but I scanned the crowd and still didn’t see her, so I pushed him away. This
got some laughs. I couldn’t see his eyes through the mirrored lenses but he
stepped closer and latched both arms around my right leg and began hump-
B
A ing me. The hippies loved this, watching him pump away at my leg. Someone
F said, “Delmon is awesome” and someone else said, “Delmon is psycho.”
F
L I’d been at the school for ten minutes and already I was encountering
E
R the lack of hospitality I expected. I felt sorry for Delmon, who was still hump-
ing my leg and getting laughs. I think he might have been looking into the
eyeholes of my mask, hoping to intimidate me, so I said, “I’m here to see my
sister.”
Delmon stopped humping and asked, “Who is she?”
“Katherine MacArthur.”
His smile was oddly defensive and he didn’t speak. The woman with the
shell-shaped earrings stepped forward and said, “Kat’s right over here.” She
took me by the arm and led me to the wide doorway into the living room.
Against the far wall, sitting on the carpet with her knees up by her chin
huddled over a game of chess with another guttersnipe, was my sister. At
first I wondered if Katherine was just wearing rags, a bunch of miscellaneous
tatters which she’d sewn together into an outfit, but then I saw it was an old
T-shirt of dad’s, his BSA motorcycle shirt with a large rip in the armpit, and
oversized paint-splattered Dickies. She was barefoot and her hair had a big
“I’ve just woken up” snarl on one side. When she turned toward me, her face
was bright and cheerful—she looked much more like our father than I’d ever
recognized—and I knew she didn’t know how she appeared to me, her broth-
er in disguise.
I took off my mask and yelled, “Katherine Whitmore MacArthur, it’s
intervention time!” Her eyes widened but she remained seated. “Holy shit,
that’s my brother,” she said to the woman across the chessboard. Finally she
pushed herself up off the carpet, padded across to the doorway and before
127
giving me a hug pointed at my chest and asked, “What’s with the paint?”
“It’s my intervention costume,” I said.
I thought this might anger her, but she put a finger on my chest and
asked, “Will it rub off on me?”
“Oh, I’d hate to ruin your outfit.”
She hugged me quickly, and said, as if she’d missed the punchline of a
joke, “How do you mean, intervention?”
“Denial is a very typical reaction,” I said, jabbing her back with my index
finger.
She smirked, holding my gaze for a second or two, and I felt a twinge of
satisfaction that she wasn’t completely comfortable with my presence. She
said, “So you read the books I sent.”
“Oui, Madame.”
“I wish you’d called ahead.”
“I’ll just sleep on the floor in your room.”
“Maybe on one of the couches out here?”
“Sounds fine,” I said. “Come on. Let’s walk around.” I wrapped my arm
around her thin shoulder.
“Where do you want to walk?” she asked.
With my arm still around her, I tried to steer her forward, but her feet S
T
were planted. I asked, “Can’t you give me a tour?” O
R
“There’s not much to see. I could show you the solar panels that run the Y
 stereo and the fridge, but it’s too dark out.”
“You could show me your room,” I said.
“It’s a bit of a mess right now,” she said, coming out from under my arm.
“Maybe you’d want to play some chess? Or I could get you some food?”
“I had a glass of fake milk,” I said.
“Want to meet some of my friends?”
“I met Delmon. I love that guy. He’s ‘psycho,’” I said.
She narrowed her eyes. “Okay, I’ll show you my room.”
I kept my mask off and we wound our way through the party. Shadow-
ing my sister, my presence in the co-op was now legitimized, which was a
disappointing feeling. I followed Katherine to a hallway of rooms reeking of
lentils and wet cardboard, and when she opened the door to her room, the
sharp stench, like a horse stall, gave me chills. Depressing paisley tapestries
covered the walls. I had never seen anything remotely like this in her room at
home. We stood close together in the narrow space between her bureau and
her desk, the top of which was adorned by a few shiny textbooks, a jogbra,
a stick of charred incense, and five or six soggy cigarette butts floating in a
glass of water.
I said, “I love what you’ve done with the place.”
“See? You wouldn’t want to stay in here.”
The one serious conversation we’d had about the intervention hap-
pened Columbus Day weekend, at a family reunion on a riverboat in Louis-
128
ville. We disagreed about the unhealthiness of our father’s drinking, and I
argued that confronting him would make him feel like a stranger in his own
family. Katherine still wanted to go through with it even though she knew he
would feel betrayed. With Dad getting fired by the ad firm and trying to sell
precious gemstones to his friends and relatives, I felt strongly that the timing
of her plan was bad. I’d read the books but couldn’t imagine delivering a
canned statement to him like I’ve reserved an appointment with Dr. So-and-
So to help you with your recovery.
I’ll drive you. Finally Katherine
The house Katherine shared yelled at me, really shouted
with twelve other hippies full bore. “Take some goddamn
was a three-story mansion responsibility, Ned!” She knew she
with a neglected lawn couldn’t carry out the intervention
and a fleet of ramshackle without me, especially with Mom
bicycles parked out front.
out of the picture. We were lean-
ing against the rail of the casino
boat, looking out at the shabby banks of the Ohio River. Plastic bags caught
in the reeds flapped in the twilight. Eventually she calmed down and said
B
A that mostly, she just wanted to talk to Dad, just talk to him. That surprised
F
F
me, and though it didn’t change my mind, I understood what she was saying.
L I recalled this conversation in the moment, because I didn’t want to
E
R come at her guns-blazing about the ferret.
 She said, “Hey, let’s go back to the party. I have friends I want you to
meet. We’ll find you a good place to sleep.”
Before we left, I spotted a pair of running shoes in the trashcan—each
sneaker had its toe and heel chewed away, gaping holes at both ends. I had
no choice but to raise the issue. “You been running a lot?” I asked.
“Tons,” she said. She tugged at my arm and said, “Let’s go.”
“Katherine, I know about the ferret. Dad told me.”
She looked confused. “What did Dad say?”
I bent down and looked under the bed, but the view was blocked by
laundry. “Where do you keep him?” I asked.
“I don’t have a ferret,” she said.
I shook my head. “Okay, now we need some honest talk. I’m concerned
about you and I’d be happy to drive you to Dr. So-and-So’s office.”
“Look at you, so proud of yourself, mocking me.”
“You know, Katherine, holidays and social functions are uncomfortable
when you’re with your ferret.”
“Fuck off, Ned. Don’t joke about Dad’s intervention,” she said, grabbing
my arm and trying to yank me out of the room. That’s when a pause came in
the music from the kitchen. In the quiet of Katherine’s room, I heard a gentle
squeaking sound. It was such an obvious noise I was shocked I hadn’t noticed
it earlier.
“Ah-ha!” I shouted, and crouched to look under Katherine’s desk. A
129
brown furry animal, the size of a football, was nested atop a pair of jeans.
The creature darted under the bed, so I lay down on my stomach and pushed
aside the dirty laundry, extending an arm beneath the boxspring. I saw a
blur of brown and heard a little squeal; it fled to the far corner, wedging itself
between the wall and a potted jade plant.
“That’s a fast ferret,” I said.
“It’s a woodchuck,” said Katherine, staring blankly at it.
“Why is there a woodchuck in your room?” I asked.
“Long story,” she said, and sighed as though I was boring her. “They were
eating stuff from the garden, really tearing things up, so Delmon trapped
one and we were going to release him on the other side of campus, or in
town someplace, but the garden was still getting eaten, so he kept setting
the trap, and caught a few more. Then we started wondering about tamper-
ing with the ecosystem, you know?”
“What ecosystem?” I asked.
She opened the thin doors of her wardrobe. Inside were three more
woodchucks, each in their own nest of clothes. There was a large water bot-
tle affixed to one of the shelves, with a metal spout like a hamster might use.
“Jesus. How many?”
“Five in all. Well, and there’s a baby fox in the bottom drawer of my S
T
desk.” O
R
I felt a familiar anger burn in my chest. People in my family often act Y
 irresponsibly. “You let that guy with the sunglasses do this to you? Delmon?” I
asked.
“Oh, come on. Take that face off your face,” said Katherine. “It was a
house decision. But I kind of volunteered, too. Delmon’s got a big room, and
I figured I could stay with him for a while. At least until we harvest all the
vegetables.”
“You slept with Delmon?”
She folded her arms on her chest and stared at me. “Shut up, Ned.”
I sat beside her on the bed. I stared at the only animal I could spot. I
couldn’t see much of him behind the jade plant, just his whiskers and part of
his tail. Katherine took a flannel shirt off the floor and put it on, and we sat
like that for several minutes, listening to the chewing sound.
Finally she nudged me with her forearm and said, “Have you ever heard
of consensus? That’s how we make decisions in this house.”
It was conciliatory, the way she said it, but still I couldn’t help but tell her
what I thought. “Consensus? Consensus is idiotic.”
“Oh, yeah? What the hell do you know about consensus?”
“I just know that you’ve got to take everyone’s opinion seriously. And a
quarter of the people in any given group are extremely stupid. Their opinions
suck.”
“You suck,” she said, but I could tell she recognized the kernel of wisdom
in my words.
130
“Watch this,” I said, and I grabbed her hand, pulling her up off the bed.
Now was my time to take responsibility. I walked her back into the kitchen
area, into the heart of the party. I yelled out, “Listen up, everybody!”
No one paid attention. I yelled again, “Hey! I have an announcement!”
Katherine leaned against me and said, “Ned, please. No one wants to
listen to this.”
I walked to the stereo and turned down the volume. The crowd was still
loud, so I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled. Within a few seconds,
everyone in the house was quietly looking at me.
“Okay, people. I hereby call an emergency house meeting. There are six
wild animals in my sister’s room. This is obviously unacceptable. Do I hear a
motion for a vote to remedy this situation?”
The bearded guy who’d been hula-hooping earlier started chanting,
“Wood-Chuck! Wood-Chuck! Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” and a few others joined
him, until I yelled, “Quiet!” and they stopped chanting, though some contin-
ued to laugh. I said, louder, “Do I hear a motion?”
Delmon sat up from his place on the couch. “She likes animals,” he said.
“She got bullied into it,” I said.
B
A “No, I didn’t,” said Katherine.
F
F
“We don’t tolerate bullies,” said the girl with the needle eyes.
L “I move to exterminate the woodchucks,” I said. “Will someone second
E
R this motion?”
 “Fuck no!” yelled the hula-hooper. Though I disagreed with his opinion, I
admired him for having one. I prefer this kind of person, actually—someone
who is memorable even if they’re deeply flawed. The mood in the room was
still light; no one really seemed to think I was hoping to vote on this issue.
The people on the dance floor laughed and no one offered to second my
motion.
“Listen, people, get serious for once. You think the world is going to pay
attention to your hippie bullshit after graduation? Those woodchucks cannot
live in my sister’s room!”
“Fuck off, Ned!” said Katherine. “I like them.”
“Yeah, fuck off, Ned,” added Delmon. “Your sister can take care of her-
self.”
But I sensed a palpable shift; the room was warming to debate. I said,
“Okay, okay, how about this: How many of you want the freaky zoo to be in
your room? Let’s see a show of hands.”
Another chant of “Wood-Chuck! Wood-Chuck! Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!”
started, but only a few people
actually raised a hand. Many in
I saw a blur of brown and
the room seemed scornful of this
heard a little squeal; it fled
democratic procedure.
to the far corner, wedging
“Fine,” I said. “And how many
itself between the wall and
of you like roasted woodchuck?”
a potted jade plant. 131
The hippies laughed—I even saw
Delmon chuckling behind his sun-
glasses. I was annoyed that they perceived this question as merely academ-
ic. I laid it out more plainly. “Look, people. I know how to kill an animal, and I
know how to cook one, too.”
This caught them off guard. The hula-hooper looked pissed. “We’re veg-
etarians.”
“So no one’s voting for roasted woodchuck?” I asked.
“No,” said Katherine, and many others in the room shouted their disap-
proval, too. I had finally ignited some real dissent.
“Well, I vote for roasted woodchuck,” I said. “And by the rules of consen-
sus, you’re going to have to deal with me.”
“You’re not a member of this house,” said Delmon.
He had a point there, so I calmly walked up to the dish rack by the sink
and took a paring knife from the utensil basin. As I passed Katherine, she
said, “Very funny, Ned.” So I lengthened my stride and began sprinting to-
ward her room. Katherine and several others ran after me. I heard someone
say, “Is this for real?” and someone else said, “He better not hurt the baby
fox!”
Our father had always been the kind of guy who needed a lot of private S
T
time in the early part of the day. Katherine and I—and our mother, before O
R
she moved to Wisconsin—knew to give him a wide berth. Get him his coffee Y
 and maybe an egg but otherwise steer clear. Was there anything wrong with
that? By dinnertime, after work, he was as warmhearted and fun-loving as
anyone.
By the time I got to Katherine’s room with the knife, it was a trick to
spin my way inside, shut the door, and click the lock on the doorknob before
Katherine and the others arrived.
As I’d seen in movies, I wedged the
“I’m finally going to say
desk chair underneath the door-
the things I’ve been
knob to keep the thunderous mob
meaning to say forever,
from entering.
and I’m going to speak
From the other side of the
them clearly, and I’m not
door, someone shouted, “You’re
going to stop until I’m
fucking with house property!”
done. I’m going to talk to
I yelled back, “I’m practicing
you like I’ve always wanted
consensus.” I got down on my
to talk to you.”
hands and knees and spotted
one of the woodchucks, who’d
returned to his nest atop Katherine’s jeans. All I did was look at him and he
darted under the bed.
As more and more people assembled outside the door, I considered my
various options. What I wanted to do was to teach the unwashed heathens
a lesson. While I described the process to them in a loud voice—capturing
132
the animals one by one, holding them by the scruff so they couldn’t bite,
popping their necks swiftly so as to paralyze them, stringing them up by one
leg with a shoelace tied to the light fixture, cutting off their heads, skinning
them, pulling out their guts, creating a hand-cranked rotisserie contraption
out of coathangers, building a fire and roasting them slowly—the audience
outside the door responded in kind. “Killer!” they yelled. “Terrorist!” they
shouted. I couldn’t hear my own sister’s voice, but I knew she was out there.
I must have been fairly convincing as I narrated these fake details; my
sister’s friends continued shouting and pounding for several minutes. But
eventually their outrage began to wane, and finally, quiet.
A single knock on the door. “Hey, man—it’s me. Delmon.”
“My hands are covered in blood, I can’t turn the knob,” I said.
“That’s fine. We can talk through the door. Everyone’s gone. Let’s talk
man to man.”
“Go ahead.”
“Your sister’s a badass. She’s a truly good person.”
“I know that.”
“You’re upsetting her.”
B
A I laughed.
F
F
He said, “I’ll keep the woodchucks in my room from now on, okay?” I said
L nothing, and eventually I heard him walk away.
E
R I flipped over Katherine’s mattress. Using her blanket as a net, I cast it
atop one of the woodchucks huddled in the corner. The frightened animal
chattered while I bundled him up in the blanket and opened the window.
But when I set him free, he was quiet again, limp in the grass for a second or
two, looking much smaller, like a stray mitten, before ambling away, van-
ishing among the other dark grays of the back yard. I repeated this process
four more times. Each time, the woodchuck cries got my adrenaline going.
The baby fox was easy to snatch from the desk drawer and deposit on the
lawn, one hand under its belly. After all the animals had been freed, I was
reminded again of my father’s concern, and I wanted to get the whole house
screaming again, so I busted up Katherine’s wooden chair, then ripped a
few pages out of her semiotics textbook and crumpled them beneath the
kindling. In the desk’s top drawer, I found a Bic lighter, and lit the mess.
The smell of burning wood got the hippies to return to the hallway
again, which should have been gratifying, but the noxious smoke in the small
room, and the searing heat of the flames, made me think not only about the
reaction I was inciting, but also about my own plight. I saw my silver hands
darkened with soot and realized I was very close to roasting myself, like an
ill-behaved witch. I truly wonder what might have happened had the sprin-
kler system not engaged. Torrents of water sprayed down on me and the
crackling chair.
Not much later, Katherine found me in the backyard. Like me, she was
soaked and shivering. She sat down beside me on the cold, wet grass, her
133
knees tucked beneath her chin.
“Ned,” she said, staring straight ahead, out into the dark where the an-
imals had gone. And then again she said, “Ned.” It was as though she were
catching her breath, but she wasn’t winded. “I’ve decided to talk to you as
though you’re not out of your mind, even though you are. I’m finally going to
say the things I’ve been meaning to say forever, and I’m going to speak them
clearly, and I’m not going to stop until I’m done. I’m going to talk to you like
I’ve always wanted to talk to you.”
“That’s fair,” I said. From her tone of voice I knew it was probably time to
listen.

S
T
O
R
Y
Joe Castro
 Tom Carson

The Wrong
Stuff
Hero worship in late-capitalist
Hollywood

135
first and foremost, a reckoning. You sure can’t say “the best
L I F E I N T RU M P L A N D I S,
lack all conviction,” because activists nationwide contradict poor old W. B. Yeats’s
“The Second Coming” on that count every day. But the worst are definitely full of
passionate intensity, not to mention unlikely to get less full of it anytime soon.
Both sides are convinced they’re defending fundamental American values
from people aiming to ruin everything “America” means. Liberals’ rediscovery of
the ardent, outraged patriotism that’s been a right-wing cultural monopoly since
the 1960s may even be among the most salutary effects of Trump’s presidency.
But because neither crew is wholly wrong in claiming ownership of this country’s
enduring traditions, let’s try to understand the fissure. That involves recognizing
how ideals we consider fixed, immutable, and above all, shared turn out to be
salad-bar Americanism at crunch time.
Proof is in our national character’s longest-lasting tug-of-war, between
hell-raising individualism and the placid common good. When we’re feeling
optimistic, we strive to accommodate the demands of both, which isn’t as
delusional a goal as it first sounds. But usually our factions seize on one end or the
other—a choice that, more than we’d like to admit, tends to fluctuate with the
fashions of ideological self-righteousness.
Because consistency is the hobgoblin of recent immigrants, it’s no sweat for
the rest of us to reconfigure yesterday’s transcendent moral imperative into
today’s root of all evil. On the left and right alike, Americans who’ve had some
S
practice at the gig can switch on a dime from condemning individualism as A
L
heedless (if not criminal) irresponsibility to damning somebody else’s notion of V
the common good as the template for a society fit only for automatons. O
 What makes Trumpism unique is how its leader’s voracity for contradictory
extremes lets him embody the dismaying attractions of heedless-if-not-criminal
irresponsibility and a society fit only for automatons simultaneously. His idea of
community is balefully exclusionary, defined by its enemies and galvanized by
the prospect of threatening, persecuting, and finally smiting them: a recipe for
authoritarianism, in short. But his idea of individualism—by which he means his
own, although any fellow white lardbutt in a red MAGA cap is implicitly welcome
to mimic him—is terrifyingly stripped of concern for consequences, anyone else’s
good opinion, or basic decency.
To oppose him, we can champion more humane versions of both poles of our
national identity crisis, doing our best to locate a sensible balance between the
two. But with the exception of rare interludes—you screwed-from-birth millen-
nials will never know how good life briefly seemed in, oh, 1964—the United
States has never had much luck with that before things turn wacko and acrimo-
nious again. We’re left with an ongoing dichotomy, not a sustainable blend, and it
isn’t a choice we make only at the ballot box. We make it at the multiplex too, or
lately on Netflix or Hulu.
Sometimes in herds, sometimes in a state of gloomy eccentricity, we’re always
either confronting or fending off the kind of profound question that only our robust
national shallowness can inspire. To wit, when does America’s right stuff turn into
its wrong stuff from our unavoidably biased POV, and vice-versa? Luckily, one
handy way to start mapping this dilemma is to revisit The Right Stuff itself.

The Skies, the Limits

136
Launched with a whole Alpha Centauri’s worth of hype, director Philip
Kaufman’s idiosyncratic adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s bestseller about the original
Mercury 7 astronauts was the most unexpected box-office bomb of 1983: the high
Reagan era, so to speak. That is, unless you count the concurrent demise of John
Glenn’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Glenn’s vogue fizzled almost overnight after Newsweek put his charismatic
screen impersonator (Ed Harris) on its cover and solemnly wondered whether
the movie would help vault Glenn into the White House. There’s a nexus
here—Kaufman the Bay Area liberal’s misreading of the public mood, Glenn the
genuine America hero’s failure to convert stature into votes, and our first
movie-actor president’s rather more successful mashup of craggy pioneer
verities and rank Hollywood artifice—that’s oddly fraught with embryonic
anticipations of Trumpland.
At least in my tattered corner of Cinephileville, where the rum comes
cheap and policemen’s winks at our petty crimes come cheaper, Kaufman’s
flavorful movie has plenty of fans. All the same, it’s not hard to see why 1983
audiences had trouble grasping just what he was driving at. As exuberant as The
Right Stuff often is, it’s also a meandering pop essay disguised as an epic
docudrama, prizing waggish sideshows over narrative drive. But the director’s
B
formal insouciance wasn’t really the problem. Anyone expecting to see Glenn
A and his silver-suited coevals lionized as heroes or pining for a celebration of the
F
F space program as a gigantic national achievement got treated instead to an
L ambivalently derisive look at the whole shebang as a cavalcade of PR stunts,
E
R political posturing, and manufactured goals.
 What gave the space program urgency and drama during JFK’s New
Frontier was the larger contest with the Soviet Union that Reagan was ramping
back up again twenty years later. That’s the sort of geopolitical synchronicity
that, in a different filmmaker’s hands, might have provided the material with
jingoistic or triumphalist topical brio. But the Kennedy administration’s
anxious belief that we’d darned well better overtake the Russians to score a
propaganda victory after multiple Cold War setbacks was much too square an
idea, post–Dr. Strangelove, for Kaufman to bring himself to play it straight. His
sinister Soviet rocket scientist is a
Boris Badenov caricature of gloating
Long before Trump commie evil, mocking American
came along, the “Great perceptions of Red diabolism rather
than coming to grips with the USSR’s
Communicator” was dismal apparatchik reality. While the
the guy who invented the astronauts themselves aren’t outright
ridiculed, they’re depicted as
template for turning sometimes disgruntled, sometimes
movie-fed nostalgia for puckish accomplices in an orgy of
a bygone America into a Camelot-era media hype.
As far as Kaufman was concerned,
revanchist call to arms. the true, uncorrupted, and incorrupt-
ible right stuff resided exclusively in
test pilot Chuck Yeager. The movie’s
epitome of retro male cool was played by Sam Shepard, who was almost
unforgivably good back then at making mythomania seem winsome. But 137
Yeager gets an awful lot of ultra-romanticized screen time for a guy whose only
relationship to the main story is one of symbolic rebuke.
All laconic, self-reliant prowess, he’s presented as the last of a dying breed,
too pure for NASA’s fripperies. As the astronauts grow famous even before
they’ve accomplished anything, the frenzy surrounding them is counterpointed
by glimpses of Yeager going about his gutsy, solitary business without any
nonsense about celebrity being his reward or his due.
Because Kaufman is no fool, or anyhow wasn’t back then—his later
filmography tells a sorry tale of someone trying to commercialize increasingly
oddball fixations—he probably knew he was overdoing the contrast between
Yeager’s old-school pluck and the space program’s hoopla. But he was too
much of a popcult enthusiast not to relish pitting one genre of movie-fueled
Americana against another. A lot of The Right Stuff plays like a Billy Wilder
mashup—half Ace in the Hole, and half Some Like It Hot with moon helmets
instead of flapper wigs. But the Yeager scenes combine John Ford at his most
adulatory, the Howard Hawks of Only Angels Have Wings, and vintage
Marlboro commercials.
Making the connection to an earlier era’s heroes explicit, Yeager is often
shown cantering around Western vistas on horseback between experimental
flights. Yet because Kaufman can’t figure out how to keep Yeager’s recurring
presence meaningful otherwise, he settles for the bewilderingly accusatory
S
implication that this is the man we should have sent to the moon—if, that is, A
we’d just stayed true to our frontier values instead of getting all corporate about L
V
the endeavor. O
 Dutch Treats

All this is more than a little absurd. Yeager’s heroics were every bit as dependent
on taxpayer dollars and swarms of hard-working government drone bees as the
Mercury astronauts’ missions, not to mention every bit as much an offshoot of
our Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. The only difference is that his exploits
were less publicized, although Wolfe’s book did bring him some late-life fame.
But Kaufman’s premise required sanctifying Yeager’s illusory autonomy while
satirizing the astronauts’ roles as the public faces of a huge collective project.
If the director thought he was making a movie attuned to Reaganite values,
he certainly missed the mark, not least by being too much of a smartass for his
own good. Treating Yeager’s brand of valor as if it had become archaic in an age
of media packaging didn’t jibe very well with Reagan’s shrewd conflation of the
two. Long before Trump came along, the “Great Communicator” was the guy
who invented the template for turning movie-fed nostalgia for a bygone America
into a revanchist call to arms.
Besides, planting an American flag on the moon had been just about the only
large-scale government initiative of the 1960s that heartland patriots had liked, at
least once winning the Vietnam War began to look hopeless. As Norman Mailer
recognized at the time, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo represented Squaresville’s
crewcut triumph over all those un-American hippies, hairy antiwar activists, and
demanding black folk. Middle America wanted The Right Stuff to hail a famous
victory, not denigrate it as a public-relations boondoggle.
Hollywood took the lesson to heart. Ever since Kaufman’s misfire, popular
138 dramatizations of the space program, from Apollo 13 and Tom Hanks’s HBO
miniseries From the Earth to the Moon to last year’s Hidden Figures—every bit as
much of a surprise hit as The Right
Stuff had been a surprise flop—have
If you want movies that celebrated teamwork, summonses to
greatness, and can-do American grit
convey a sense of a vibrant
as the key inspirational values in play.
community that’s able (The African American heroines of
to get important things done, Hidden Figures hardly want to be
troublemakers; they’re campaigning
you’re pretty much stuck for an opportunity to participate.) Yet
with Pixar. what’s striking is how few other
movies tell that kind of success story
anymore, not least for the obvious
reason that this country hasn’t had that kind of success story—premised on
shared national resolve—in quite some time. It’s either NASA or World War II,
and World War II is just about used up.
That’s why, from our own time’s perspective, Kaufman’s definitions of the
right stuff and the wrong stuff can seem almost bizarrely wrongheaded. In 2017
the demise of intransigent individualism hardly seems like the worst problem
B
that ails us. The demise of an intelligible, non-dysfunctional social fabric does.
A From vigilante superheroes to randomly (and weightlessly) anarchic farces like
F
F 2013’s This Is the End, Hollywood reflects this lack by treating it as either irrele-
L vant or no great loss. If you want movies that convey a sense of a vibrant
E
R community that’s able to get important things done, you’re pretty much stuck
with Pixar. As for Chuck Yeager, who’s still with us at age ninety-four, the last
time he made the news was when he felt obliged to deny, not very convincingly,
that he’d endorsed Donald Trump for president.

Men of the West

The tension between noble group effort and unrestricted autonomy in American
life dates back at least to the Mayflower Compact. That 1620 accord was
cobbled together from hunger just to convince the malcontents aboard—they’d
been promised Virginia, not God-damned Massachusetts—not to strike out on
their own. Some of us still think the malcontents should have swum for it
instead of caving.
In our movies, this seesaw’s fulcrum has always been that most (and in part
literally) indigenous of American screen genres: the Western. Yet its conclu-
sions on the matter haven’t always been as lopsidedly in favor of lone
gunslingers as people with hazy memories believe. The gunslinger’s metaphor-
ical antipode is the barn-raising—or the schoolmarm teaching pioneer children,
or ranch hands sharing a bunkhouse meal, or any of the rustic community
rituals so beloved by John Ford.
Even when great collective projects aren’t their subject—as the completion of
the first trans-continental railroad was for, most famously, Ford’s 1924 silent epic
The Iron Horse—classic Westerns tend to treat unreconstructed, violent individu-
alists as necessary preludes to, enablers of, or obstacles to the important job of
organizing a coherent, orderly, and ultimately thriving society. When they die or,
more euphemistically, ride off into the sunset, they die or ride off into the sunset 139
for our sakes, like so many cigarette-rolling Jesus Christs in ten-gallon hats.
But what about John Wayne, you ask? Exactly. Wayne’s mythos as the movie
West’s ultimate avatar of unadulterated, bellicose autonomy is borne out only
sporadically at best in his filmography. In Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), the movie
that made him a star, he is indeed a loner and an outlaw—one who ends up
making his getaway, with fellow misfit Claire Trevor in tow, to escape what
another character sardonically calls “the blessings of civilization.” But Ford
almost never used him that way again, except to much darker effect. Seventeen
years later, Wayne’s brutalized, vengefully racist irreconcilability to civilization’s
blessings in The Searchers is no advertisement for the bliss of untrammeled
freedom in the great outdoors.
In Rio Grande, Fort Apache, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—Ford’s “cavalry
trilogy”—he’s a humane and thoughtful career Army officer, devoted above all to
the military’s institutional values. From Ford’s point of view, he’s admirable for
his steadfast loyalty to a greater good, most fascinatingly in Fort Apache’s
enigmatic conclusion, which has him stoically praising (and emulating) a
Custer-ish superior he knows perfectly well to have been a vainglorious
blunderer. However exotic this particular “greater good” might seem to viewers
today, it’s the opposite of every-man-for-himself individualism. In The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance, his real swan song with Ford, Wayne is once again a violent
outsider, but his most decisive act is a self-abnegating one; he gives up his own
S
happiness to help foster the more civilized future he knows he won’t be part of. A
For that matter, Wayne’s dream project, The Alamo, centers on three L
V
prickly, idiosyncratic, mutually suspicious men—Wayne’s own Davy Crockett, O
 Richard Widmark’s Jim Bowie, and Laurence Harvey’s William B. Travis—
coming together to sacrifice themselves for a shared ideal. Yet their progress
from braggart frontier vanity to selflessness hardly wins the movie plaudits
from left-wingers, because the cause in question—making Texas safe for
predatory gringos by wresting its independence from Mexico—no longer
seems especially enlightened.
Similarly, right-wingers are likely to discover there’s no merit in old-fash-
ioned, frontier-style American autonomy the minute it’s waywardly incarnated
by, say, Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. Part of what makes this ongoing tussle in our
movies—between Mayflower Compacts and malcontents we’re hoping will dive
overboard, between barn-raisings and gunslingers, between Hidden Figures and
Chuck Yeager—such a telltale map of our national character is that which choice
looks virtuous is, from a political point
of view, endlessly mutable.
Autonomy now comes at us Consider, for instance, two of the
most celebrated Westerns of the 1950s,
masked, vengeful, and
only one of which stars Wayne. In the
stoppable only by Kryptonite. first, a haggardly determined frontier
marshal stays true to himself by
confronting the bad guys alone once
everybody else craps out on him. In the second, conceived in indignant response
to the first, a sheriff relies on an amiable crew of nonconformists—a nasty old
geezer, the town drunk, a callow singing cowboy, a Mexican-American hotel
owner, and a prostitute who’s just passing through—to help him out of a similar
140 bind. Off the top of your head, which would you say is the “liberal” one?
Guess again. The first movie is, of course, High Noon—left-wing screen-
writer Carl Foreman’s bitter transposition to the Old West of his isolation in
Hollywood once the House Un-American Activities Committee came after him.
(Refusing to name names, Foreman ended up self-exiled to England soon after
the movie’s release; the whole behind-the-scenes saga is superbly reconstructed
in Glenn Frankel’s very enjoyable new book, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist
and the Making of an American Classic.) The second is Rio Bravo, which Wayne
and director Howard Hawks cooked up to express their contempt for High Noon.
“The most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Wayne was still
calling Foreman’s and liberal producer Stanley Kramer’s unduly rigged morality
play years later.
To later generations, however, High Noon is the one that looks like a
conservative tract. That’s partly because it’s so moralistic—no shades of gray
in Foreman’s mousetrap—and partly because star Gary Cooper so plainly
incarnates upstanding, conformist values. He just can’t find anyone to conform
to them except him. As for Rio Bravo, which is by far the better movie, it’s a
safe bet that moviegoers never saw anything “political” in it at all. But its
merry, flexible sense of the variety and unpredictability of human virtues—the
Hollywood version of “From each according to his abilities,” more or less, and
B
perhaps the ideal mean between community and individualism—isn’t radically
A at odds with the 1960s counterculture Wayne would loathe every bit as much
F
F as he’d loathed Carl Foreman.
L The counterculture returned the favor. Even now, anyone trying to sell
E
R left-leaning audiences on Wayne’s greatness as an actor (and he was formidable)
 141

Joe Castro

has to contend with the atrocious public figure he became in his later years: a
blustering, crapulous spokesman for reactionary politics at their worst. It’s no
easy job convincing people that this was a travesty of his screen persona, not its
logical culmination—though it did have elements of both. But even at the time,
left-wing folksinger Phil Ochs knew better. When Wayne told Playboy magazine
that he’d made 1968’s jingoistic, abysmally crude Vietnam epic The Green Berets
“to counteract the lies that people like Phil Ochs and Joan Baez are spreading,”
Ochs supposedly replied, “I’m thrilled. John Wayne is one of my heroes.”

From Gangsters to Superheroes—

and What’s the Difference Again?
The earliest movie insurrectionists were the clowns of the silent era. The
S
resourceful, sap-headed romantics played by Harold Lloyd did aspire to normality, A
but they had mighty unconventional ways of achieving it. Chaplin preferred the L
V
pathos (and sometimes the nose-thumbing anti-authoritarianism) of permanent O
 outsider status, and Buster Keaton was just imperturbably, impassively Keaton; it’s
a shame he never got home to Easter Island to see his parents again. But during
the Depression years, the Marx Brothers aside, the most prominent—and the
cockiest—American individualists on the silver screen were gangsters.
They paid for their charisma in the final reel, even if something as trivial as
death seemed unlikely to squelch James Cagney’s impudence. But then some-
thing odd happened. Humphrey Bogart, who’d spent most of his first decade in
movies playing antisocial reprobates, got transformed into Hollywood’s first
antisocial leading man in 1942’s Casablanca. (The year before, both High Sierra
and The Maltese Falcon had anticipated this—one by turning Bogart’s desperation
sympathetic, the other by turning his cynicism sexy.) Because his contempt for
authority went unpunished from then on, he became the first officially sanctioned
rebel in Hollywood’s history.
In both Casablanca and 1944’s To Have and Have Not, however, he plays
rebels ennobled by their conversion to a certifiably worthwhile cause: defeating
the Axis. (“This time I know our side will win,” Paul Henreid purrs in
Casablanca, as if roping in Bogey clinches the victory.) In one of his more
conventional wartime roles, 1943’s Sahara, he’s a U.S. tank sergeant organizing a
raft of international allies: a dapper Brit, a roguish Frenchman, the great Rex
Ingram as a grizzled Sudanese, and even (this is fun) an Italian POW won over to
the Allied side. One of the most enjoyable propaganda movies ever made,
Sahara is chockablock with idealistic messages about disparate people—that is,
nations—learning to work together for a better world. You just know the screen-
writers would have included a Russian
142 if they’d figured out how to get one to
John Wayne’s mythos as North Africa.
With the war safely won, Bogart
the movie West’s ultimate
went back to being a cagy, wry lone
avatar of unadulterated, wolf. But the postwar crop of screen
bellicose autonomy is borne rebels—Marlon Brando and James
Dean above all—represented some-
out only sporadically at thing new by not being susceptible to
best in his filmography. conversion to anything, and certainly
not the common good. (Drolly enough,
the one time a 1950s Brando antihero
is induced to do the right thing, it’s in On the Waterfront, screenwriter Budd
Schulberg and director Elia Kazan’s defense of informing; its transparent
apologia for both men’s friendly HUAC testimony drove Foreman and other
victims of the McCarthy-era witch hunt up the wall.) By and large, their epigones
still rule the screen today, to increasingly deformative effect.
Ever since the 1970s, thanks to Robert De Niro’s imposing if thematically
narrow example—and, more distantly, Brando’s as well—several generations of
gifted male stars have been mysteriously convinced that playing alienated loners
and obsessives is their only meaningful job. Tackling another psychopath is no
B
problem, but they wouldn’t be caught dead playing family men, for instance, or
A anyone defined (never mind fulfilled) by his job or community. You could say
F
F this has cheated us of a whole lot of interesting social dynamics onscreen, except
L that the audience no longer seems much interested in social dynamics either.
E
R Yet it’s rare for these priorities to actually produce fresh insights—as they did
when Leonardo DiCaprio, in Baz Luhrmann’s underrated The Great Gatsby,
became the first actor to recognize that Jay Gatsby is a somewhat unnerving
crackpot, not a dreamboat.
All the same, such actors are still chasing capital-a Art, however fatuously.
Commercially, along with Star Wars, the two most predictive new genres to
emerge in the 1970s were the urban-vigilante film—Charles Bronson’s bread and
butter for decades once 1974’s Death Wish invented the form, and still with us in
Liam Neeson’s Taken movies—and the superhero franchises that followed on the
heels of 1978’s Superman. What nobody could have guessed back when Bronson
was grimly stalking the big city in search of vengeance while red-caped
Christopher Reeve flew around championing the American way was that,
eventually, these two opposites would merge.
Beginning with Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, which now looks positively sunny
next to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight dystopias, caped-crusader movies and
urban-vigilante flicks have increasingly come to share a view of social breakdown
as neither a problem with any plausible civic solution nor even much of a tragedy.
Today, it’s simply a given.
In a way, we’ve come full circle to the buccaneering gangster flicks of the
1930s. But now, without any apparatus of justice to hold either in check, our
vigilante superheroes and their latest nemeses aren’t much more than rival crime
lords brawling for turf. In 2013’s Man of Steel, Superman even killed his enemy,
something unimaginable when Reeve had the job. The Marvelverse does better at
preserving some vestiges of idealism than its DC Comics equivalents, especially
in The Avengers—if nothing else, a showcase for collaborative resourcefulness, not
solo derring-do. But for the most part, seldom do superhero franchises even pay 143
lip service anymore to the idea that the protagonist is defending benign values,
protecting a system, or making the world safe for democracy. He’s simply the
strong man we root for to defeat the strong man we root against. Meanwhile, the
ordinary citizens of Metropolis and Gotham have been demoted to CGI herds,
midway between props and pawns.
In other words, in movies—and perhaps in life—the Mayflower Compact’s
appeal has gone the way of the dodo. As for barn-raisings, who even knows
anymore what they were? The counter-tradition of baleful individualism rules the
multiplex, but without the benefit of having anything stable to rebel against—or
in favor of. Autonomy now comes at us masked, vengeful, and stoppable only by
Kryptonite. Movies contradicting the trope’s power are few and far between, and
even fewer are set in the present.
If social compacts without any leeway for idiosyncrasy or dissent tend
toward dictatorship, untrammeled individualism tends toward nihilism. The
once-again great America Trump envisages is a fusion of the worst of both, and
you can’t say our movies didn’t predict him. Wherever America’s right stuff now
elusively resides, its wrong stuff in right-stuff disguise is on display for all the
world to see—at multiplexes everywhere, not just on Fox News.

S
A
L
V
O
Lyall Wallerstedt
 Dave Denison

You Gotta Serve

Somebody
The Christian right’s
Machiavellian morals

145
Christian leaders will often turn to Bible verses that
I N T I M E S O F T R I B U L AT I O N ,
proclaim God raises up leaders to carry forth His plan. Divine purposes are
mysterious, of course. It is not for us to know why despots would be called to lead.
Nor can good believers ever confidently explain why, in American politics, a
president such as born-again Jimmy Carter would not be blessed with success, or
why Bill Clinton would be raised up at all.
But even so, it’s safe to say that nothing in recent years could have prepared
American evangelicals for the test of faith known as Campaign 2016. The
Republican Party presidential standard-bearer—and by definition, heir to the
array of pet conservative evangelical cultural crusades, from turning back the
“war on Christmas” to overturning Roe v. Wade—was as crass, worldly, and
cheerfully counter-virtuous as any national political leader could possibly be. The
party that two decades ago inveighed against the adulterous amours of President
Clinton was naming a confessed serial sexual abuser to the top of its ticket—a man
who botched the basic names of New Testament scripture, and while campaigning
in Iowa answered an interviewer’s question, “Have you ever asked God for
forgiveness?” by saying, “I’m not sure I have . . . I don’t think so . . . I don’t bring
God into that picture. I don’t.”
It became clear in the evangelical encounter with Trumpism that character
was no longer king. Evangelicals turned out to support Trump last November in
unprecedented droves. This twice-divorced avaricious sybarite commanded
S
more than 80 percent of the evangelical vote—a greater share than the tallies A
L
registered by Mormon bishop Mitt Romney in 2012 and the revered born-again V
movement leader George W. Bush in 2004. O
 Yes, the Bible teems with stories of souls with unsavory personal histories
cast into the role of spiritual leadership—from Joseph in Egypt to King David to
the Apostle Paul. Still, the Bible also tells us it’s easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of
Heaven, and offers no intelligible defense of the serial lying and flagrant
racism that have propelled Donald Trump to the center of national life.
Shouldn’t true-believing Christians be rising up in prophetic, righteous anger
against such a pharaonic figure? Or are they merely hypocritical worshipers of
power for power’s sake?

Believers Beclowned
Hard as it may be to recall, there was a spirited debate on the evangelical right
over just such questions at the height of last year’s election season.
Conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson wrote two months before the
election that seeing fellow evangelists—he named Phoenix Seminary theolo-
gian and author Wayne Grudem, among others—“beclown themselves trying to
justify support of a man like Trump makes me weep for the shallow faith of a
church more wrapped up in its Americanness than its Godliness.” Then, weeks
after Trump was inaugurated, Erickson made this startling accusation: “If
Donald Trump said tomorrow that God is bad and the Devil is his hero, a
sizable portion of the Christian population in this country and many others
would be lining up to join the Church of Satan.”
Grudem, for his part, rescinded his endorsement of Trump a month
146 before the election, writing: “I have now read transcripts of some of his
obscene interviews with Howard Stern, and they turned my stomach. His
conduct was hateful in God’s eyes and I urge him to repent and call out to God
for forgiveness, and to seek forgiveness from those he harmed.” He also
called on Trump to “withdraw from the election.” Ten days later, in another
column, he concluded he had no choice but to vote for Trump: “Again and
again, Trump supports the policies I advocated in my 2010 book Politics
According to the Bible.”
Seasoned evangelical camp followers in Washington experienced similar
torment. Michael Gerson, a born-again Bush speechwriter, wrote three days
after the inauguration that Christians allied with Trump “are in grave spiritual
danger.” Gerson and his fellow Bush wordsmith Peter Wehner have kept up a
volley of philippics against Trump; Gerson with a column in the Washington Post
and Wehner as a contributing writer for the New York Times op-ed page.
Other evangelical consciences were not especially troubled by Trump;
some extended ready forgiveness for the sins he wasn’t sure he needed to be
forgiven for. It took no stretch of the imagination to see why, for example,
Florida televangelist Paula White-Cain made her way to Washington, D.C., for
the inauguration of the 45th president. She had been visiting Trump Tower ever
since the Great Man saw her on television some years ago and asked her “Are
B
you ever up in New York?” White often gets credit for having led Trump to
A Christ. She says she “prayed over him” for “about six hours” with several other
F
F ministers in 2011 when he was considering a run for the presidency. “I’ve laid
L out the Gospel very clearly and I know that Donald is saved,” she told NBC
E
R News early this year.
 There are genuine theological affinities that Trump shares with White. He
came of spiritual age in the pews of the echt-capitalist, positive-thinking guru
Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church, while White is an enthusi-
astic preacher of the latter-day prosperity gospel, which holds, much as Peale did,
that God visits health and riches upon those who intone the right success
incantations wrenched out of Holy Scripture. Paula White Ministries, operating
out of the New Destiny Christian Center in Apopka, Florida, peddles the pros-
perity message in the debt-ravaged Sunshine state, while on his own bully pulpit,
Trump preaches the allied political
wish-fulfillment fantasy of making
Shouldn’t true-believing America great again.
Christians be rising up And chosen success homilies
aside, the two have other reasons to
in prophetic, righteous
feel a personal bond: both enjoy
anger against the pharaonic luxurious Florida living and televi-
figure that is Trump? sion celebrity, and both had seen the
ways ethics meddlers in government
and the judiciary can complicate the
free exercise of wealth-building. White’s previous megachurch, Without Walls
International Church, was under investigation from 2007 to 2011 by the
Senate Finance Committee after reports in the Tampa Tribune suggested that
she and her then-husband and co-pastor, Randy White, were using church
finances to support their lavish lifestyle. (Until their divorce in 2007, the
Whites owned a $2.6 million waterfront home on Tampa Bay and, according
to a staff report of the Senate committee, a $3.5 million condo in Trump Tower 147
in New York City.) Ultimately, the Whites faced no legal consequences other
than their church’s default on multimillion-dollar loans and a bankruptcy
restructuring. Meanwhile, the latest entry in Trump’s own checkered dealings
with the civil authorities was the $25 million settlement of fraud claims filed
by aggrieved former students of his success-shilling for-profit Trump
University boondoggle.

Another Brick in the Wall

Somewhere between the alarms raised by Gerson and Wehner and the
enthusiastic prosperity preachments of a Paula White we encounter the
mainstream-evangelical figure of Robert Jeffress, pastor at First Baptist
Church in Dallas. Back in 2011, Jeffress had warned the Republican Party
against nominating Mitt Romney, who as a Mormon was a leader in what
Jeffress calls a “theological cult”—a widespread dismissal of Mormonism in
evangelical circles, going back to the initial founding of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1830s. Still, it’s hard to overlook the plank-
in-the-eye contradictions that dogged Jeffress’s early and enthusiastic support
for the eventual 2016 GOP nominee: Romney was not upright enough but
Trump was? Nor does Jeffress approve of the prosperity preachers, fearing
they stray into “heresy” when they teach that blessings equate with wealth.
S
Yet there was Jeffress on inauguration morning 2017, delivering a guest A
sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, with Trump and family in L
V
attendance. From the pulpit, he said: O
 When I think of you, president-elect Trump, I am reminded of
another great leader God chose thousands of years ago in Israel.
The nation had been in bondage for decades, the infrastructure of
the country was in shambles, and God raised up a powerful leader
to restore the nation. And the man God chose was neither a
politician nor a priest. Instead, God chose a builder whose name
was Nehemiah.

And the first step of rebuilding the nation was the building of a great
wall. God instructed Nehemiah to build a wall around Jerusalem to
protect its citizens from enemy attack. You see, God is not against
building walls!

Later that day, Trump placed his hand on a Bible and swore to uphold the
Constitution and then delivered his magisterial address vowing to end “this
American carnage.” The skies drizzled and former President George W. Bush
squirmed around under a rain poncho—and was reported to have commented
as the brief address came to a merciful end: “That was some weird shit.”

Blow Them Away in the Name of the Lord

Had Bush’s brother Jeb been the one up there on the stand with his hand on the
Bible, the scene would have been less jarring, at least to the Washington estab-
lishment. Perhaps Jeb would have given a high-minded exhortation after
148 huddling with Michael Gerson, and perhaps a respected Episcopalian or Catholic
priest would have prayed with Jeb that morning. Nehemiah and his wall would
have been left out of it, and Paula White, in all likelihood, would not have made
the trip from Florida.
Would all have been harmonious in Christendom? No. You only need to
think back to George W. Bush’s own difficulties in governing the godly republic
to see the perils of mixing religion
and politics. Bush campaigned as a
Under evangelical “compassionate conservative” and
alarmed liberals by setting up an
conservatism’s modern
office for “faith-based initiatives,”
activist phase, the precepts staffed with believers who dreamed
of honorable Christian of powerful collaborations between
ministers, missionaries, and the
living have intermingled United States government. Before
with the raw imperatives of long, the believers were grumbling.
getting, holding, and The air went out of their balloons
after John DiIulio, who’d briefly
exercising worldly power. captained the faith-based project,
told New York Times Magazine writer
B
Ron Suskind that political consider-
A ations always trumped policy concerns, especially where Bush’s powerful
F
F strategist Karl Rove was concerned. “What you’ve got is everything—and I
L mean everything—being run by the political arm,” DiIulio said. “It’s the reign
E
R of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
 Indeed, the faith-based initiatives that stood out in the Bush era turned out to
be the ones with a decidedly Crusades-like profile, most notoriously the
American wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan. And like the original Crusades,
these imperial missions didn’t exactly salve longstanding hostilities between the
Christian and Muslim worlds. Recall that soon after the attacks of September 11,
2001, Bush had to be instructed not to continue to use the word “crusade” in his
explanation of the battle against evildoers; recall also that the planners of the first
raids into Afghanistan were forced to scrap their working title for the project,
“Operation Infinite Justice”—trans-temporal justice being, for Muslim believers,
the sole concern of Allah.
On the more militant wing of the Christian evangelical world, meanwhile,
there was no shortage of bloodlust in the steadily advancing clash of civilizations.
“You’ve got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops,” said Jerry Falwell on
CNN in 2004. “And I’m for the president to chase them all over the world. If it
takes ten years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord.”
In other words, the Bush years had seen plenty of weird shit tolerated, and
indeed fomented, on the Christian right. Soon after 9/11, Falwell appeared on
Pat Robertson’s television show The 700 Club and he started naming culprits.
“Throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system,
throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools,” he began. “The
abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be
mocked. And when we destroy forty million little innocent babies, we make
God mad.” He continued: “The pagans and the abortionists and the feminists
and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alterna-
tive lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have 149
tried to secularize America.” Falwell continued, “I point the finger in their face
and say ‘you helped this happen.’”
“Well, I totally concur,” responded Robertson—at least until the ensuing
public outcry forced both Falwell and Robertson to retract their remarks.

The Wound That Never Healed

It was during those Bush years that I first came across Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The
Originality of Machiavelli.” Reading it then, I felt I’d been knocked upside the
head by something obvious about the kind of crusading that Falwell, Robertson,
and the rest of the religious right had embraced going back to the 1970s and
1980s. The lust for worldly power and influence that these apostles of Christian
political redemption preached in a shared political argot over the past four-plus
decades indeed has produced, in Gerson’s phrase, a mounting “grave spiritual
danger” in the houses of evangelical worship. Under evangelical conservatism’s
modern activist phase, the precepts of honorable Christian living have freely
intermingled with, and have often been overtaken by, the raw imperatives of
getting, holding, and exercising worldly power.
This peril stems not merely from the well-chronicled temptations and other-
than-strictly moral excesses of political life. Rather, it arises from a simple fact of
life: national political rule always runs afoul of the “What would Jesus do?” test. The
S
politicized, warmongering, nationalistic Christians jockeying for maximum A
political influence in the American republic were always quoting the Bible, but they L
V
seemed inspired, wittingly or otherwise, by the restive spirit of Niccolo Machiavelli. O
 This requires filling in some background, going back five centuries or so.
The incompatibility between Christian teachings and Machiavelli’s advice to
rulers was amply clear from the moment his worldly counsels appeared. The
Prince was published five years after Machiavelli’s death in 1532. By 1559, Pope
Paul IV placed the work on the Index of Prohibited Books—the severest
category of Pope-forbidden reading. The Jesuits considered Machiavelli “the
devil’s partner in crime,” and, as Berlin notes, there are four-hundred-odd
references to the murderous or conniving “Machiavel” or “Old Nick” in
Elizabethan literature.
So Berlin’s starting place was not unusual: Machiavelli’s best-known work
clearly divorced politics from ethics. Christian morality, specifically, was not just
impractical in the political world but potentially harmful, in that if a ruler
attempted to take Christ’s message literally, it would be impossible to hold power.
As Berlin explained:

The ideals of Christianity are charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God,

forgiveness of enemies, contempt for the goods of this world, faith
in the life hereafter, belief in the salvation of the individual soul as
being of incomparable value—higher than, indeed wholly incom-
mensurable with, any social or political or other terrestrial goal, any
economic or military or aesthetic consideration.

And it’s not just the unattainability of Christian ideals that make it, for
Machiavelli,
150
impracticable to establish, even seek after, the good Christian state.
It is the very opposite: Machiavelli is convinced that what are
commonly thought of as the central Christian virtues, whatever
their intrinsic value, are insuperable obstacles to the building of the
kind of society that he wishes to see.

There is, after five hundred years, a vast library of scholarship on Machiavelli, and
some scholars interpret his wider output (relying on his longer, more nuanced
work The Discourses) to be primarily concerned with how to create a virtuous
republic, not a lawless or demonic one. But it’s The Prince that has always found
an avid readership and that has thrilled political operatives with its brash advice
to the aspiring prince to practice secrecy, deception, and force in order to fend off
pretenders to the throne and other wolf-like competitors. In Chapter 18, where he
makes his famous pronouncement that a prince must be able to imitate both the
fox and the lion, Machiavelli writes: “And, therefore, he must have a mind
disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune
dictate, and, as I said before, not deviate from what is good, if possible, but to be
able to do evil if constrained.”
The originality that Berlin pinpoints about Machiavelli’s famous writings,
B
though, is not quite that. Old Nick was not the first to understand that good
A purposes sometimes involve not-so-good means. Aristotle asserted in his Politics
F
F that being a good person may not mean the same thing as being a good citizen.
L And what was the development of Augustine’s “just war theory” other than the
E
R recognition that certain ends could justify less-than-apparently-just means?
 What Machiavelli accomplished, Berlin says, struck deeper. He wasn’t
proposing that morality was one choice and politics another, or that evil wins the
day; he was recognizing two distinct moralities. One was found in Christ’s
teaching in the New Testament. The one he preferred was a pagan morality that
looked back to the halcyon moments of the Roman empire. “The choice is painful
because it is a choice between two entire worlds,” Berlin writes. “In choosing the
life of a statesman, or even the life of a citizen with enough civic sense to want his
State to be as successful and as splendid as possible, you commit yourself to
rejection of Christian behavior.”
In Machiavelli’s eyes, moral actors
For a certain kind of must choose between a Roman (pagan)
idea of how to achieve a strong and
Christian warrior,
virtuous republic and a Christian ethic of
the question really is as kindness, meekness, and suffering in
stark as this: Are you order to join the Kingdom of God. In our
own time, the available choices, for the
following Machiavelli citizen at least, seem not quite that
or Christ? binary. One could attempt an end run
around Machiavelli by following Gandhi.
One could attempt to subvert the brunt
of Machiavelli’s counsel, as James Madison et al. did, and envision a multiply
constrained executive leader, bound by constitutional law and separation of
powers. One could move back to the land, get off the grid, and ignore the
teachings of Machiavelli, Christ, Gandhi, and Madison. You could do that in the
suburbs, too. 151
But for a certain kind of Christian warrior, the question really is as stark as
this: Are you following Machiavelli or Christ?

The Little Princes

As a young reporter in Texas, I watched the rise of a cunning Austin-based
political consultant named Karl Rove. He had gained a reputation for dirty
trickstering harking back to his days as national chairman of the College
Republicans—the school for conservative electoral backbiting that also
incubated Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, and Ralph Reed, among others.
Even in this company, Rove stood out: he modeled himself after Lee Atwater,
who had helped George H. W. Bush become president in 1988 by savaging
Michael Dukakis. Atwater had memorably said of Dukakis that he would “strip
the bark off the little bastard,” and would “make Willie Horton his running
mate.” (Suffering from a fatal brain tumor at age forty, Atwater delivered a
well-publicized death-bed confession, apologizing to Dukakis for the “naked
cruelty” of those statements.)
Atwater liked to say that he had read The Prince twenty-three times, though
his biographer John Brady says he wasn’t that kind of diligent reader. At Atwater’s
funeral in April 1991, former secretary of state James Baker said, “He referred to
himself as Machiavellian, and he was, in the very best sense of that term.” Rove
S
had the same reputation as a fan of The Prince, though he wisely stopped short of A
characterizing himself as a full-blown Machiavellian. Asked about The Prince by L
V
the New York Post in 2009, he said, “Oh yeah. It’s supposed to be my favorite. It O
 was Lee Atwater’s favorite, but I reread it occasionally. I have a wonderful old
copy, but it would not be in my top 10.”
I was thinking about Rove and Atwater when I first read the Isaiah Berlin
essay, knowing that they didn’t mind destroying the careers of political
opponents—and about Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney, who embodied the
dark side, defending a kind of Kissingerian realpolitik that involved a decep-
tively sold war and even torture, which sounded better when referred to as
“enhanced interrogation.”
But what of it? They didn’t seem to make a show of following the Bible.
Their president did, and was a Christian candidate from the start, telling
televangelist James Robison, “I feel like God wants me to run for president.”
And once he took office, his wars received the blessings of preachers like
Falwell and Robertson. Highly placed evangelicals in the Bush White House
such as Gerson and Wehner helped Bush find the moral language that would
sound high-minded to less religious
audiences while including key
Machiavelli would no doubt phrases that had special meaning to
evangelical supporters.
affirm that those who take
Now, in the early presidency of
New Testament teachings Donald Trump, the hardball tech-
literally are in no position to niques of Atwater and Rove seem
mild compared to the bitter white
lead the political march for nationalism encouraged by Trump’s
nationalistic glory. malevolent strategist Steve Bannon
152 and advisers such as Steven Miller,
Julia Hahn, and Sebastian Gorka. On
the other hand, Trump himself seems less Machiavellian than Dick Cheney,
only because he lacks the ruthless bureaucratic in-fighting skills Cheney had
honed over the years.
Meanwhile, there’s been no shortage of pious certitude among Trump-
aligned preachers—which has, in turn, triggered a telling outpouring of
Machiavellian candor in right-leaning evangelical pulpits. Robert Jeffress was
among the earliest pastoral backers of the Trump insurgency, signing on to
make America great again just weeks after the Caligulan real-estate baron had
announced his candidacy. Peter Wehner had written a column in the New York
Times on “The Theology of Donald Trump” arguing that the “fulsome
embrace” of Jeffress and other pastors was deeply misguided because Trump
“embodies a worldview that is incompatible with Christianity.”
Wehner was then invited onto the popular talk radio show of Mike Gallagher
(who calls himself “the happy conservative warrior”) to debate Jeffress. The
disagreement took the usual course, with Jeffress nailing Wehner to the Hillary
cross. When Wehner suggested he could not in good conscience vote for either
candidate, Jeffress asked how a Christian could possibly justify a non-vote that
might give the race to Clinton. But the telling moment was when Jeffress
B
explained his confidence in Trump:
A
F
F You know, I was debating an evangelical professor on NPR, and this
L professor said, “Pastor, don’t you want a candidate who embodies
E
R the teaching of Jesus and would govern this country according to
 the principles found in the Sermon on the Mount?” I said, “Heck
no.” I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the
Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this
nation. . . . Government is to be a strongman to protect its citizens
against evildoers. When I’m looking for somebody who’s going to
deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don’t care about that candi-
date’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a
you-know-what I can find—and I believe that’s biblical.

Biblical, yes, in the Old Testament sense of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth.” But when you hear the call for a “strongman” whose chief role is to protect
the nation against enemies, do you hear the voice of Jesus or of Machiavelli?

Strong Motion
For the longest time, I’ve wanted to put that question to true-believing politi-
cized Christians. Jeffress is a busy man with a twelve-thousand-member
congregation and a regular schedule of pro-Trump appearances on Fox News
and elsewhere. He did not respond to requests for an interview. But Peter
Wehner is out of power and safely ensconced in a think tank called the Ethics
and Public Policy Center. So I asked Wehner to talk. He agreed, and one
morning in March we had a searching and illuminating phone conversation
about Christian ethics and politics.
I reminded Wehner of the moment in his debate with Jeffress when the
pastor stated his preference for a strongman who would protect against evildoers. 153
That sounded to me like a Machiavellian declaration, I said. Did you think so?
“Yeah, I think so,” he responded. “I thought about it in terms of Nietzsche
and the will to power, and that power trumps all, and that morality is defined by
the strong not the weak. And indeed the weak and the vulnerable and the
dispossessed are less worthy of protection and they have less value inherently
than the strong. But Machiavelli made that point, too.”
From there, of course, we needed to reel backward into his experiences in
the Bush administration. Weren’t there Machiavellian moments in those years
too? Isn’t it impossible for any president to follow the path of Christ?
“There can be tension but I don’t think it’s an irreconcilable tension,”
Wehner said. This is the message that comes through in the book that Wehner
wrote with his former colleague Michael Gerson, City of Man: Religion and Politics
in a New Era (2010). Politics is full of “tensions” and “temptations” and there are
no easy answers.
But my question, I told Wehner, wasn’t whether there are difficulties for
political leaders in following the Christian gospel—my question was, “Is it
impossible?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. He said he had never found himself in a
political predicament where he felt he had to act “contrary to my Christian faith.”
But you were part of an administration that slipped into war and then even
sought justifications for the torture of prisoners of war, I reminded him.
S
True, he noted, but suppose an administration does not resort to war and A
torture. It is obviously possible to escape those particular conundrums, so the L
V
ideals are not disproved by the failings. But then Wehner, who had written a O
 column for National Review Online in 2007 saying that torture “is surely wrong in
almost every instance,” could not help taking what seemed like a devil’s advo-
cate position.
“Would you use waterboarding on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for sixty-eight
seconds if it elicited information that would save 1.2 million lives?”
I suggested a follower of Machiavelli would say yes—and that a follower of
Jesus would say no.
“I don’t think the choice is between Christ and Machiavelli,” he said. “I think
there are prudential moral decisions that you have to make at any moment in
time in which you have to weigh the
consequences and the actions. I just don’t
In politics and national think there is a nice neat recipe book that
tells you, you can never do this. I think
security, the higher
there are some forms of torture that
good means victory, would be off limits at some point.”
never defeat. So there it was: the ends can some-
times justify the means. All of us who live
in the real, practical political world know
in our bones that in some circumstances we would choose the lesser evil for the
higher good. And in politics and national security, the higher good means victory,
never defeat.

The Power and the Glory

154 About eight out of ten white evangelical voters supported Trump. The choice can
be explained simply enough by Alan Wolfe’s neat phrase that white Christian
voters may care more about the Supreme Court than the Supreme Being. But they
also were going with a candidate who had made “winning” his true religion.
A couple months before the election, Matthew Schmitz, writing in First
Things, noted the disconnect between Trump’s win-at-all-costs mentality and the
teachings of Jesus. He wrote:

Christianity is a religion of losers. To the weak and humble, it offers

a stripped and humiliated Lord. To those without reason for
optimism, it holds up the cross as a sign of hope. To anyone who
does not win at life, it promises that whoever loses his life for
Christ’s sake shall find it. At its center stands a truth that we are
prone to forget. There are people who cannot be made into winners,
no matter how positive their thinking. They need something more
paradoxical and cruciform.

This is one reason why some Christians are so leery of politics. Toward the end of
the Bush administration, when disenchantment had spread in evangelical circles,
a New York Times reporter quoted one pastor’s resigned plaint: “When you mix
B
politics and religion, you get politics.”
A It’s possible to waste time thinking about how this applies to Christians on
F
F the left, who advocate for “the social gospel” or liberation theology. But the
L Christian left is tiny in the United States and seems in no danger of being seduced
E
R by dreams of ultimate victory.
 Yet there are radical Christians, it must be acknowledged, who manage to
wholeheartedly reject the counsels of Machiavelli. The theologian Stanley
Hauerwas, a pacifist who spoke out against Bush’s “war on terror” in the after-
math of 9/11 is one. Gregory Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul,
Minnesota, is another. In Boyd’s 2005 book, The Myth of a Christian Nation, you
find the voice of a Christian who warned, well before Trump’s “America First”
rantings, that “I believe a significant segment of American evangelism is guilty of
nationalistic and political idolatry.”

No version of the kingdom of the world, however comparatively

good it may be can protect its self-interests while loving its enemies,
turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, or blessing those who
persecute it. Yet loving our enemies and blessing those who
persecute us is precisely what kingdom-of-God citizens are called to
do. It’s what it means to be Christian. By definition, therefore, you
can no more have a Christian worldly government than you can
have a Christian petunia or aardvark. A nation may have noble
ideals and be committed to just principles, but it’s not for this
reason Christian.

Machiavelli would shake his head sadly to see that Boyd was not won over by
The Prince, but he would also no doubt agree wholeheartedly with Boyd’s
point: that those who take New Testament teachings literally are in no position
to lead the political march for nationalistic glory. All of which leaves the
leaders of today’s Christian right unable to justify their nationalism in 155
anything other than Machiavellian terms. Perhaps they might regain some
desperately needed critical detachment by revisiting the testimony of Frank
Schaeffer, the liberal son of Francis Schaeffer, the great movement theorist
whose eighties preachments against the secular ethos roused the modern
religious right into being. As his father neared the end of his life, the young
Schaeffer recounts, he grew disenchanted with the evangelical insurgency’s
cynical leadership; Focus on the Family impresario James Dobson and his
fellow Christian right leaders, in the elder Schaeffer’s view, were “idiots” and
“plastic” figureheads who only worshiped power. And sure enough, come
2016, Dobson was championing Trump as a recent evangelical convert—
calling him a “baby Christian,” in point of fact. Somewhere, one can only
assume, Old Nick is smiling broadly over his progeny.

S
A
L
V
O
 Deep Calls to Deep
By Emilia Phillips

Until I reached the paddock

where the gelding grey
collapsed, back hooves
clacking like stones to
fire, I didn’t know of the melanoma
buried like a rotten black

bulb in his cheek & neck. I came

only to see his viscera

156 tagged & marked, some,

like the penis, knotted

with tumors metastasized

from the initial onyx
jewel, sunk in a bucket for later
jars, a class next fall. The spleen
enlarged to a tumid berry-purple
from minutes-ago euthanasia. I know
that empathy is just the body’s
twinging, its infinite note

B
A
F
F
L
E
R
held on self, but as I cupped
the black cancer, so much like

my own, warm & dense

as hope, I felt that design

held me in belief’s cold

rigor. No, I felt alone—

among the bio students

chorusing Wolff’s Law, 157

bone will adapt to loads

of pressure—me in my inappropriate

shoes, cotton flats wet

from the dewy pasture,

awkward as a severed
horse’s leg twitching

in the grass, my heart

of muscle remade.

P
O
E
M
 Tom Whyman
No Prophets,
No Honor
On the declining vocation of
the social critic
AS THE INTERNET AGE OF AUSTERITY continues
to accelerate, few of us could be blamed for
barely holding on, living paycheck-to-pay-
check at our humiliating, precarious
158 gig-jobs. Still, if there’s one group of people
who really need to tug hard on their
bootstraps—if only to find an anchor as the
shitstorm of Progress rages from the
heavens—it’s people like me, and a lot of
the rest of us who write for this magazine:
“cultural critics,” if that label doesn’t sound
too grand—book-learned nonconformists
who have made it our business to under-
stand, see through, and perhaps even
transform society and culture. As Theodor
Adorno puts it in his essay “Cultural
Criticism and Society,” our unsolicited
charge is to help the mind identify and
“tear at its bonds.” If this is indeed our
vocation, just look at how badly we’re
failing to honor it. In the face of historical
cataclysms like Brexit and Trump, our
positive contribution is pathetically
marginal, our insight vanishingly small.
Maybe it’s just that the pool of ideas has
B
A become supersaturated, a dank swamp. Our
F
F public discourse is dominated by peppy TED
L talkers, cheerleading for the Three
E
R Horsemen of technological barbarity: AI,
Automation, and Neuroscience. Dull-as-
dishwater professional atheists like Sam
Harris and Daniel Dennett pose as swash-
buckling freethinkers as they pedantically
reduce everything that matters about
human experience to dead, grey matter.
Our most prominent political commenta-
tors are greasy petty-fascists and dogmatic
party hacks; the left’s loudest voices in the
media contribute little more than morale-
boosting for causes that we know to be
already lost. Our best known “public
philosophers” seem determined to conceal
whatever wisdom they might conceivably
possess behind blithering idiocy, from the
empty platitudes of Alain de Botton, to the
edgy nonsense of Slavoj Žižek.
Who knows? Perhaps this only seems like
a problem because of my epistemological
position. Perhaps there are effective cultural
critics working today—it’s just hard for me
to see what impact their work is making
because, you know, ideas work slowly and I’m
living through their development, day-to-day.
Perhaps if I were living in the 1830s, reading
The Edinburgh Review, I’d be lamenting the
crassness of Carlyle and wondering why he
couldn’t be more like Coleridge. Perhaps
come 2117, when all news is filtered through
João Fazenda
Snapchat, my future-equivalent will be
looking back on the early days of the
internet as some sort of hallowed golden
age. Perhaps all of this is just projected
self-loathing: a sign that I need to stop
writing, get off my computer, and take to the
barricades (although frankly, even our most
industrious activists seem unlikely to achieve
anything beyond the physical expression of
their own defiance). But I’m not so sure
about that. Rather, it strikes me that today
there are identifiable reasons that cultural
criticism might find itself in crisis.
Theodor Adorno, Beverly Hills
Traffic Cop
This might sound perverse, but to under-
stand the crisis of cultural criticism in 2017,
I’m going to start by taking us back to 1951,
the year of the publication of that Adorno
essay, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” that
I mentioned above. Adorno was famously
159
disapproving of most things—except
perhaps serialist composition. And, given
that cultural criticism is not a form of
serialist composition, it should hardly
surprise us that Adorno is pretty down on
cultural criticism as well.
Adorno’s essay nevertheless attempts,
first, to outline the proper function of the
cultural critic. Second, he offers a brief
history of the cultural critic’s role in
bourgeois society. Third, he strives to show
how, as this role has developed, cultural
critics have been left unable to perform
their proper function effectively.
According to Adorno, cultural critics
ought to be able to justify their existence in
at least two ways. To begin with, they should
be able to claim “a more profound knowl-
O
edge of the object.” By means of intuition,
U
experience, or expertise, cultural critics are T
B
able to claim an understanding of culture U
that their audience cannot, offering some R
S
special insight. T
 Next, Adorno tells us, the cultural critic the traffic cops teeming about his paradi-
should anticipate an implicit “promise of saical prison.)
culture.” The critic, he posits, has “inde- At any rate, by the time Adorno was
pendence and autonomy”—an intellectual writing, the cultural critic had received a
and moral separateness from the all-con- promotion: after years of service as a traffic
suming, compulsive purposiveness of cop, he was now working as a “judge.”
industrial society—which, again, is a Cultural critics were now recognized as real
capacity the audience is presumed to lack. authorities on cultural products, articu-
This resonates with what Frankfurt School lating not only how to consume them but
authors (from Horkheimer onward) have why they are supposed to matter to us. The
often envisaged as the cultural critic was there-
ultimate purpose of critical fore afforded a genuinely
theory: the emancipation of Our public discourse important status (no
humanity from the various is dominated by matter what, Adorno
unfreedoms that charac- peppy TED talkers, quips, the “objective
terize our social world. cheerleading for qualifications” of any
Cultural critics, in their the Three Horsemen individual critic might be).
work, perform this emancipa- of technological But this status came at a
tion; they allow their audi- barbarity: price: it firmly installed
ence, directly or indirectly, to AI, Automation, and the cultural critic as part
catch a glimpse of a more Neuroscience. of the ruling element in
liberated society. society. The critic-as-
On both counts—insight judge, Adorno tells us,
and emancipation—capitalism compromises collaborates with culture as “its salaried
160 the cultural critic. Despite whatever and honored nuisance.”
pretensions cultural critics might have Far from serving a progressive and
about the autonomy of their intellectual emancipatory function, under this para-
labor, in truth they play an economic role digm, cultural criticism will be much more
analogous to that of any specialized profes- inclined toward conservatism. This conser-
sional. Just as any skilled worker makes a vatism might be explicit—Adorno gives the
living by marketizing his or her expertise, so example here of Paul Valéry—or it could be
the cultural critic is obliged to marketize his inadvertent: the involuntary shudder of the
or her thoughts. intellectual who makes a good living in print
According to the genealogy Adorno media from posturing as a revolutionary, for
sketches, cultural critics were first of all example, at the possibility of political
“reporters,” orienting consumers in “the changes that might cause the value of his
market of intellectual products.” They pension fund to depreciate. Adorno himself
were useful to capitalist society because is a good example of this sort of critic.
they told people what to consume, and Witness his clashes, later in life, with the
how. “In this,” Adorno tells us, “they radical West German student movement.
occasionally gained insight into the matter Adorno went to great lengths to dismiss the
at hand, yet remained continually traffic student activists intellectually, but also
agents, in agreement with the sphere as literally—as in physically, from the Institute
such if not with its individual products.” for Social Research, by calling the police. He
(One wonders if, in invoking this image, would eventually die of a heart attack
B
A Adorno was drawing on bad memories of shortly after a group of female students
F
F his 1940s exile in Los Angeles; perhaps retaliated by disrupting one of his lectures,
L this curmudgeonly German intellectual draping flowers around his head and baring
E
R couldn’t help but attract the attention of their breasts.

No Exit
Even if they wanted to, cultural critics
probably could not escape the prevailing
social tendency. “The spontaneous move-
ment of the object,” Adorno tells us in his
essay, “can be followed only by someone who
is not entirely engulfed in it.” By remaining
materially dependent on society, cultural
critics find themselves to be “necessarily of
the same essence as that to which [they]
fanc[y] [themselves] superior.”
In the most technical passages of his
essay, Adorno spells this out by distin-
guishing between what he calls “immanent”
and “transcendent” social criticism. Tradi-
tionally, he writes, the cultural critic mea-
sured society and culture according to some
“transcendent” standard that had little to do
with the critic’s contemporary society and
culture. Good examples would be abstract,
mathematical laws of beauty or hippyish
ideals of “naturalness.” This method, as
Adorno points out, seems like it should be
radical, since it need not have anything to do
with the society the critic is calling into
question. “The transcendent critic assumes
an . . . Archimedean position above culture
and the blindness of society, from which
consciousness can bring the totality, no
matter how massive, into flux.”
But in truth, Adorno tells us, this
Archimedean position is “fictitious”: it is
based on the delusion that individuals might
step out from the society within which they
were raised, into the eternal out-there from
which said society can be criticized. In fact,
transcendent standards are themselves the
product of history—and will, therefore,
inevitably reflect harmful developments
within the society they are supposed to help
us criticize. Thus, representing said stan-
dards as “transcendent” merely excludes
them from real critical analysis. “From
there,” Adorno says, “it is only a step to the
official reinstatement of culture.” Consider,
for instance, how readily hippy peace-and-
love, back-to-the-earth primitivism might
give way to survivalist Darwinism.
One way of overcoming this problem is
to swap “transcendent” for “immanent”
criticism. Immanent criticism assesses
society and culture according to standards
it explicitly affirms as its own. So for
example, if our society holds that “All men
are created equal,” but then uses the police
to systematically brutalize members of
certain ethnic minority groups, the imma-
nent critic could hold the powers-that-be to
account for this dissonance, skewering them
with a shard of their own frozen bullshit.
The immanent method might, at times,
be critically effective—at least to a limited
extent. But in a world whose standards are
as damaged and distorted as the practices
they reflect, this method will, Adorno tells
us, eventually be “overtaken . . . It is dragged
into the abyss by its object.” This is why,
according to Adorno, neither immanent nor
transcendent social criticism is at all
sufficient. His essay thus ends at an impasse.
If cultural criticism is going to be truly
effective, then it must perform the trick of
reading the signs and wonders within 161
culture while nevertheless partially escaping
it. Perhaps we even have—in the work of
Walter Benjamin, for example—some
examples of what a successful performance
of this trick might look like. But how are we
supposed to perform it? That is left—at
least by Adorno—something of a mystery.
If in Adorno’s time cultural critics were
compromised by their being “salaried and
honored” in their role as society’s profes-
sional “nuisance,” nowadays they depend on
society in a much more desperate way: to
support them, piecemeal, in a financially
precarious existence. Whether as traffic cop
or judge, the cultural critic appears to have
become a material irrelevance. The
economy, of course, hardly needs any human
being to traffic cultural products for it: that
can be given over to Amazon’s “Recom-
O
mended If You Like . . .” algorithms and
U
Facebook’s user-data-guided ads. Mean- T
B
while, as Tom Frank explored in the last U
issue of The Baffler, the role of cultural R
S
arbiter has been usurped by the figure of T
 the “curator”—a term that has come to
indicate anyone who arranges and presents
objects, from fine art to news, in such a way
as to give them the stamp of bankable
expert authority.
In a purely academic way, all of this
might be seen as an advantage: shorn of any
additional material function, the cultural
critic is now free to focus on being,
precisely, critical. But such optimism would
of course be naive, since in the Age of
Austerity the critic’s material uselessness
curtails his or her opportunity to earn a
living, and makes the vocation’s obsoles-
cence more and more likely each day.
The Socialism of Trepidation
Today’s cultural critics—when, if ever, they
emerge—typically stagger out of the
wilderness from either journalism or
academia. In my case, it’s both—I have a
PhD in philosophy and have taught as a
university lecturer, but I currently make
162 most of my money from writing articles for
newspapers and magazines.
My own career has made me all too
familiar with the ways in which both of these
industries succumb to the craven iniquity of
austerity management. And what does
austerity do? Well, it leaves people destitute
and unemployed—in a word, precarious.
Plenty of cultural critics, from Benjamin to
Ellen Willis, have lived precarious lives,
whether inflicted on them by National
Socialism or Reaganite magazine editors,
and sometimes even written about them. But
today, accelerated conditions of general
precarity—under which atomized workers
are united solely on the basis that they might
lose their jobs at any moment and be turfed
out on the streets—engender a culture of
conformity through fear. This socialism of
trepidation is likely to prevent the cultural
critic from heralding a more emancipated
B
A world; like any other worker, critics are left
F
F unable to act except in their capacity as
L prisoners. Moreover, it threatens to obscure
E
R critics’ outlook on their own unfreedom.
In a journalistic context, precarity
disincentivizes the cultural critic from ever
engaging in the sort of careful thought,
nurtured through meditation and—
crucially—sufficient time, that is most likely
to lead to genuinely insightful writing. Most
critics, nowadays, are employed as free-
lancers, but even the best-paying outlets
offer too little for op-ed pieces, or on too
irregular a basis, to support a freelance
critic who doesn’t publish at least some-
thing every week. And of course, these
pieces must fit the demands of the intended
publication; even the most generous,
sympathetic editors are obliged to shackle
the expression of their critic’s thoughts at
least within the confines of a word count.
In academia, by contrast, precarity
discourages anything but the most careful,
and thus the most conformist, sort of
thought. To finally be saved from the
underpaid, energy-sapping grind of part-
time teaching jobs, one needs to be hired
into a tenured position. To do that, the
prospective instructor must appear a safe
bet to a hiring committee, in particular by
publishing in the “right” peer-reviewed
journals. These journals place their own
demands on their authors’ expression: their
ideal article is of a uniform length, is written
in uniform academic prose, and advances
the state of “the existing literature” to a
uniformly incremental degree.
Another important factor, at least where
I live in the United Kingdom, is how desper-
ately underfunded most humanities
departments are. New permanent hires
must typically demonstrate the potential to
bring in external research funding, but no
grants exist for those marching out of
lockstep with the culture industry (or
science, or whatever). There is plenty of
money around nowadays for philosophers
who want to work on the future of human-
ities-destroying technologies such as AI.
But the money is coming from tech gurus
who want to rope in some sap “ethicist” to
help them justify the total technological
administration of our day-to-day lives.
 Of course, some cultural critics are emancipation from a bad social world was
lucky enough to avoid all of this because, truly possible.
for whatever reason, they are not subject
to the demand to sell their labor for a
The Abyss of Culture
wage. Historically, a lot of very important
philosophical figures have been born into Like Adorno in the 1950s, today we can
wealth, perhaps deriving the strength of imagine two sorts of cultural critics:
their originality from the fact that they immanent and transcendent ones. But
never really needed to work for anyone rather than representing a methodological
else. Plato, at the very founding of western choice, this dichotomy is largely a product of
philosophy, was from one of the richest their socioeconomic positions. The imma-
aristocratic families in Athens. Kierkeg- nent critics will remain the most common,
aard and Schopenhauer both lived off or at least they will have the voices that can
money they had inherited from their most readily be heard: they are the journal-
fathers, wealthy merchants. Bertrand ists and academics caught up in the system,
Russell was a hereditary and thus able to see its
British peer whose grand- conditions for themselves.
father had been prime If cultural criticism But the struggle that is the
minister. His student is going to be truly very source of their insight
Wittgenstein’s father had effective, then stifles their ability to
once been among the it must perform express its truth—they will
richest men in Europe. the trick of reading shortly be dragged into the
But even for the brilliant, the signs and Adornian abyss.
such detachment can wonders within The transcendent
obscure as much as it is culture while critics, by contrast, will be 163
enables. Independently nevertheless positioned somehow outside
wealthy individuals have all partially escaping it. of the system. They will be
the time and comfort they independently wealthy, or at
need to criticize society, and least they will have a
yet, having been coddled from its worst secondary source of income; they will have
excesses since birth, they tend to be blind leisure enough to contemplate a presumed
to them. This might manifest itself in totality, and they will not need to sell their
something like Plato’s patrician authoritari- insights for a fee. But the privileged position
anism, for instance. Kierkegaard, for his they occupy will inevitably blind them to the
part, was a dedicated and in many ways object they are attempting to examine. And
extraordinarily insightful social critic: in even if they do manage to say something of
particular, his Two Ages literary review interest, it is unclear to me how anyone
diagnoses the sources of political apathy in would ever be able to hear them: the truest
liberal democracies in a way that continues of the transcendent critics must necessarily
to resonate profoundly today. And yet, as deny themselves the bullhorn of media or
Adorno remarks in his study Kierkegaard: specialist-institutional channels.
Construction of the Aesthetic, Kierkegaard’s Cultural criticism only functions properly
solution to everything—retreating into if it is able to partially escape its object. But
private, religious inwardness—betrays his today, society has conspired to close off all
O
bourgeois roots, his exclusion from the escape routes, hermetically sealing itself off
U
necessary grind of the capitalist economy. in a vacuum. From either inside or out of it, T
B
Only someone who was always able to fall today’s cultural critics must work by U
back on his trust fund could have ever struggling to breach this divide—or else find R
S
thought that spontaneous, individual themselves spluttering and choking for air. T
Tina Berning
 Ben Schwartz

People
Like That
The evolution of Dawn Powell’s
American satire

They are horrid,” Dawn

“ T H E S E A R E N OT P EO P L E O N E WO U L D CA R E TO M E E T. 165
Powell wrote in her January 1933 journals, mocking the New York theater critics who
were at that moment tearing apart her debut play, Big Night. “It was like old ladies
on weekly county papers saying, ‘The test of a good novel is, are these people such
as you would like in your own drawing room?’—if not, then it isn’t a good book.”
Big Night, a sexual satire set in the advertising world, closed in a week. Today,
Powell is widely regarded as one of our great comic novelists, a reputation that
began a few years later with her 1936 novel, Turn, Magic Wheel. But Big Night was
produced in 1933 and, as theatrical outings go, a disaster. Powell had crossed
imagined lines of taste and propriety for which critics still roast funny people
today. In modern terms, we might say that in Big Night, Powell wrote “unlikable”
people, she “punched down,” and she presented a woman who only achieves
what she wants as an object of male desire.
Powell had written jokey, casual stuff in magazines like College Humor for
years, and had been publishing novels throughout the 1920s, mostly based on her
rural Ohio upbringing. But Powell had been in New York since 1918 and wanted
to write about her life there. And she wanted to be funny about it.
Powell’s later prose, which forms the basis for the posthumous renaissance
her work has enjoyed, is light and sharp. It gives an impression of effortlessness,
and the satirical voice that appears on the page seems every bit as natural and
unforced as a spoken one. But finding that satirical voice at age forty—as well as
managing her “unlikable” people, punching down at recognizably middle-class
S
characters during the height of the Depression, and presenting women of A
L
self-possessed sexuality—was not effortless or natural. It took several frustrating, V
daunting years to perfect. O
 Persons of That Class
In 1920, Powell married poet and advertising executive Joseph Gousha. Big Night
is a comedy set in the unpleasant, careerist middle-management world of her
husband’s work life and focuses on the petty intrigues of ad men and their wives.
The play takes place in the middle-class Tudor City apartment of Ed and Myra
Bonney, a young couple climbing the career and social ladders of the 1930s. This
is not the carefree upper-class sexual comedy of Noel Coward (Design for Living),
Ernest Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise), or George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber
(Dinner at Eight)—no champagne satire for the Bonneys. The women of Big Night
don’t wear minks, they drop in on their upstairs neighbors in robes and feather
mules to borrow clothes for house parties.
Ed Bonney is a down-on-his-luck account exec, hosting a party in his
apartment for Bert Schwartz, a Chicago garment-industry executive with a
million-dollar ad budget to spend for the upcoming year. Ed’s wife, Myra, a
twenty-one-year-old former model in the industry, has suffered Schwartz’s
unwanted advances in the past, and slapped him more than once. Now Ed
hopes Myra’s allure will swing the deal. Ed proposes to Myra that if
“Schwartzie” still wants to sleep with her, and if their drink-fueled dalliance
can win the contract for Ed’s firm, maybe she should do it—a million-dollar
account is a million-dollar account.
It’s a controversial premise. Certainly, the idea that a woman in the depths
of the Depression would be willing to trade sex for money was not unique to
Powell. Barbara Stanwyck seduced her way to the top in Baby Face just six
166 months after Big Night debuted, and Marlene Dietrich’s Shanghai Express had
asked whether female sexuality was a marketable commodity in early 1932. But
those were dramas about sex workers, and Powell’s was a light comedy about a
young wife, not a “fallen woman.”
Powell’s take on sex and class was radical then and now. Big Night confused
even Powell’s collaborators at the left-leaning Group Theater. Powell herself was
conservative, but not so strident that she would not work with the Group or, a few
years later, lampoon Republican congresswoman Clare Booth Luce with the novel
A Time to Be Born (1944). The stridency, it turned out, was in the Group. Stella
Adler, who played Myra, was clueless when it came to delivering Powell’s humor.
Adler portrayed Myra as a woman tragically prostituting herself to capitalism.
Powell saw something else. When Myra explains to Ed what happiness is to her,
she says it’s “a feeling that there’s something you want more than anything—
something like the Atlantic Ocean or the sky—something you never could have
only it’s swell just to be wantin’ it. It’s a feeling that just lasts a minute . . . and then
you see a fur coat in Jaeckel’s window and you figure, I guess that’s what I meant.”
In Tim Page’s biography, Dawn Powell, Group member Robert Lewis
recalls, “So we came to that line, and Stella gasped it out, with tears and
weeping and apology and this terrific intensity—Stella cried through all of her
parts anyway, she was a famous crier. And Dawn was sitting there, looking on,
B
sort of amazed. And she turned to me and said, ‘Isn’t that strange? When I
A wrote that line, I thought it was funny.’”
F
F In order to make Big Night fly with the Group, Powell watered down her
L original ending—in which Myra bails on Ed’s middle-management scheming
E
R for an equally seedy marriage to Schwartz—and tacked on a safer, uplifting
 one. In the empowering version, Myra walks out on both men, determined to
make it on her own, with her brains, not her body. But as reviewers noted, this
closing burst of personal redemption rang entirely false—it was an unpersua-
sively preachy move that defied the moral logic of the rest of the play. Powell
did not admire what she had witnessed in the advertising world, and originally
wrote her characters to satirize its considerable moral shortcomings. The
published version of the play is closer to this. Ed has his eye only on the deal.
Myra sees that Schwartz actually cares for her—but she also knows that he
wants to bring her back to Chicago as his classy Manhattan-model trophy wife.
This gaudy, status-object fate turns
out to be merely a high-end version
The critics did not forgive of the one Ed has engineered for her
Dawn Powell for flouting the as a glorified sex worker.
Not surprisingly, Adler and her
proven formulas of the day. earnest Group colleagues could not
accept that. Powell’s interest as a
satirist was in attacking not only the
ruling class, but also the average, everyday strivers—us—who long to join the
ruling class (or at least move in its rarefied circles). Unlike the comedy-of-man-
ners fare offered by Coward, Lubitsch, Kaufman, or Ferber, Powell’s is cold
satire, about Depression-era people desperate just to pay rent. “I have noticed
that ethically unsound lives on the stage do not offend audiences if it is early
established that the characters are financially secure,” Powell wrote, after
considering cool preview audiences and class-focused reactions to her script.
“Such readers and rehearsal guests have astounded me by referring to some of 167
my characters as ‘persons of that class.’ I’m far too polite to answer, ‘Why,
honey, that class is your class.’”
The critics did not forgive Powell for flouting the proven formulas of the
glittering social satires of the day. Richard Lockridge of the New York Sun
viewed Powell as a misandrist. “Big Night turns like an angry cat, claws out,” he
wrote. “Miss Powell does not care much for men.” Like most critics, he was also
put off by the low-rent setting of Big Night. “If there are people like that, a matter
on which—thank heaven!—I have to take Miss Powell’s word, no chastisement
could be too severe.”
The open class contempt of Powell’s detractors is still striking. “A very
unconvincing amateur saturnalia,” wrote Stark Young at The New Republic,
referencing the ancient Roman festivals where slaves were allowed to feast in their
masters’ homes. “Miss Powell’s drama is even more tiresome than the odious little
microbes with whom it is concerned,” wrote the Evening Post’s John Mason Brown,
who, in the space of one review, managed to describe Big Night’s milieu and
characters as “common,” “unattractive,” “sad,” “repellent,” “an insect comedy,”
whose “grubby inhabitants” are “cheap” and “unpleasant.” A week later, having
perhaps run out to borrow a friend’s thesaurus, he returned to call it a “sodden tale
about some repulsive nonentities in the advertising business.”
Robert Benchley, in The New Yorker, was the lone critic to defend Powell
against such sexism and class derision:
S
A
If unpleasant characters are to damn a play, then Mr. O’Neill has L
V
been getting away with not only incest but murder all these years. O
 And when unpleasant characters speak as amusing lines (I’m sorry,
but many of them were amusing to me) as those in “Big Night,” I
would much rather sit through the grimmest scenes of middle-class
cheapness. . . . Dinner at Eight and Dangerous Corner are about
unpleasant people for the most part, but they wear evening clothes.
Are we only to have high-class cads on our stage?

Thanks to all the critical tag-teaming, Big Night was gone in a week. “Those
of my friends who laughed most at the script for Big Night are jovial souls who
take human frailty for granted,” Powell wrote in an essay defending the play for
the New York Evening Post. “The reformers insisted that what the characters do or
say can’t possibly be funny because the way they live is wrong.”
Add all this austere bourgeois moralizing to the Group’s proletariat piety—
not to mention that of Big Night’s few audiences—and the lesson of Powell’s
fledgling run at the Broadway stage is clear: the reformers won. The debacle of
Big Night set a creative puzzle before Powell. She did not want to soften or
simplify her characters to make them “likable.” Nor was she going to write what
she felt was expected of women writers, a glum prospect she described thusly:

Each page is squirming with sensitivity, every line—no matter how

well disguised the heroine is—coyly reveals her exquisite taste, her
delicate charm, her never-at-a-disadvantage body (which of course
she cares nothing about and is always faintly amused at men’s
frenzies over her perfect legs, breasts, etc.) What gallantry, what
168 equalness to any situation in the home, the camp, the yacht, the
trenches, the dives—what aristocrats these women writers are. . . .
Fit companions and opposites to the he-man writers—Hemingway,
Burnett, Cain—imitation he-manners.

Powell wanted the opposite of such caricatures. She wanted to write some-
thing far less morally comforting than what her critics demanded. “I think it
is the key to great satire,” she wrote in her September 1, 1933, diary, as she
pondered her next play, Jigsaw, that “not one acting part or thought represents
the norm, the audience, the critic, or the author—there is, in a word, no voice,
no pointer to the moral.”

High-Class Cads
“No pointer to the moral” is a tough sell in American humor, where we expect our
slob comedians to learn an important lesson at the end of every story (be nice, be
a good parent, help poor people, pet dogs, etc.). And it mattered to Powell that her
work was funny. In a letter to a friend about Jigsaw, she wrote that audiences saw
Big Night as “too brutal, too real, so I thought it would be amusing to cast the new
play in very exact French farce form. . . . Audiences can absorb as little meaning
B
as they like so long as the function of comedy—to amuse—is fulfilled.”
A In other words: morally correct, no; entertaining, yes. For Jigsaw, Powell
F
F leaned on her gift for witty dialogue. In it, Claire Burnell, a divorcee in her late
L thirties, lives in a Manhattan penthouse (an upgrade from the Bonneys). She
E
R spends her time shopping, drinking, and picking up the occasional young man
 while out with her best friend, Letty. Claire has started seeing Nathan, a slight
fellow in his twenties, who lives off the ill-gotten gains of his deceased, swin-
dler-banker father and provides a nice distraction from Del, her indifferent
boyfriend of fifteen years. When Claire’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Julie,
comes home from school after quite a while away, she’s become a prim, lecturing
reformer who sets her sights on
Nathan for herself, in order to “save”
Powell was a tough sell him from her mother. “Last time I was
home I wandered through the house
in American humor, where
like a poor mad thing,” says Letty,
we expect our slob “leaning over my children’s beds with
comedians to learn an such a gush of tender mother feeling
that they woke up screaming—thought
important lesson at the end I was Dracula.”
of every story (be nice, be Now critics found Powell funny, but
a good parent, help poor lightweight. The Nation’s Joseph Wood
Krutch wrote, “She has achieved a
people, pet dogs). casualness which relieves any
distressing suggestion that she
considers herself unusually naughty or
is deliberately trying to shock.” “Enough wit for seven plays—and not quite plot
enough for one,” wrote Gilbert W. Gabriel of the New York American.
The play ran forty-nine performances—not a disaster, but hardly a success.

169
No Pointer to the Moral
Too brutal or too light and fluffy—Powell finally found a way to balance all this
while working on her new novel, begun in 1930, and eventually published in 1936,
as Turn, Magic Wheel. She set it in the New York literary scene of the 1930s, the
world in which she was daily immersed. The story is about Effie Callingham,
ex-wife of a Hemingwayesque he-man writer and celebrity expat, Andrew
Callingham. For fifteen years, Effie has continued to dine out as Mrs. Callingham,
frozen in time from the moment he dumped her for another woman. Effie has
surrounded herself with hangers-on—and indeed, remains a hanger-on in her
own right, fiercely attached to the high-society world of her ex. Effie has sold her
retinue of literary-minded admirers on the collective delusion that she is still in
touch with him and that he will one day return to her. In other words, Effie is
literally the opposite of the perfect heroines, the “fit companions” to Hemingway
he-men, who made Powell’s eyes roll.
Excited by the writing, and back home in the familiar world of prose, Powell
worked steadily on the novel despite unpaid bills, a meager income, and the
disastrous-to-faint praise that her plays won on Broadway. And that’s why, after
Powell showed her publisher John Farrar the first forty-odd pages of it in February
1935, she was devastated to hear not only that he disliked her novel-in-progress,
but that he would be terminating her contract. Farrar had once signed her to a
three-book deal as the proven voice of small-town Ohio ladies’ stories. Now, he
S
had a sample chapter that featured sordid affairs, lying, gossip, and betrayal in the A
literary world (and not one quivering heroine)—and this from a writer who was a L
V
middling seller at best, and a proven failure in satire. O
 For the next eight months, Powell held it together, working doggedly on
Turn, Magic Wheel while seeking out a new publisher. Everyone turned it down.
Still excited and passionate about the book, she finished it that November and
took it back to Farrar & Rinehart. By now, her career was picking up. Her last
Ohio novel, the weak-selling Story of a Country Boy, had sold to the movies and
was coming out that Christmas as
Man of Iron. With her book finished
Turn, Magic Wheel is (no doubt superior to the early sample
Farrar had read) and a movie on the
filled with many similar set
way, she won Farrar over—not that he
pieces, featuring mercenary had any serious hopes for its commer-
publishers, slippery cial success. Exactly why he changed
his mind is unclear, but Turn, Magic
magazine editors, cheating Wheel was published in 1936 to
spouses, climbers, excellent reviews and her best sales
wannabes, and hangers-on. in many years.
Turn, Magic Wheel is set in a literary
world of backbiting authors, pompous
publishers, and sketchy editors of weeklies always in need of “pieces”—a milieu
Powell knew well. The novel finally struck the balance between light, come-
dy-of-manners dialogue and brutal satire she had long been seeking. Witty and
trenchant, Turn, Magic Wheel allowed Powell what the stage did not: an inner
voice to expose her characters and flashbacks that permit the reader to see what
led Effie to her current situation. Such techniques establish the tremendous
170 cognitive distance between what the novel’s literati know about Effie and what
actually happened between her and Callingham.
It opens with Effie discovering that a backstabbing young man, Dennis
Orphen—her young novelist protégé and companion—has written a comic novel
based on her, The Hunter’s Wife. Orphen has given her an advance copy of The
Hunter’s Wife and arrives to pick her up for a date just in time to see her expression
as she reads the first few pages and realizes the lead character is based on herself.
In short order, her affect shifts from excitement on behalf of a friend to the
sinking humiliation of seeing herself savaged in his pages. She had no idea that
literary New York viewed her as a woman suffering from Miss Havisham levels of
delusion. Orphen has betrayed her, but he is also in love with her. Powell’s
readers soon learn that his book expresses his own concealed anger at living in
Callingham’s shadow when out with Effie. The suspense at the heart of Turn,
Magic Wheel was familiar turf to a veteran of New York’s bitchy literary scene like
Powell: how will Effie respond to Orphen’s book?

Effie hesitated as he held open the door for her.

“You say the book isn’t out yet?”
“Not til the tenth. Why?”
She drew a breath of relief.
B
“Because I wouldn’t dare go anywhere with you if it was already
A published. Everyone would know then that it really was about me—
F
F everyone would laugh.”
L
E
R It’s a perfectly Powell moment. Until Orphen’s novel comes out, betrayal or not,
Orphen is useful arm candy, so why not go out? Turn, Magic Wheel is filled with
many similar set pieces, featuring literary scenesters, slippery magazine editors,
cheating spouses, climbers, wannabes, and hangers-on, all centered around
Orphen’s book launch. Now that Orphen is moving up, a smarmy magazine
editor accuses him of being a snob. “I’m not a snob,” Orphen says. “Would I be
out with you folks if I was a snob?” To which Powell adds: “Everyone laughed but
on second thoughts got a little mad.”
From her opening pages, it’s clear that Powell has tilted decisively away from
the cold satire of Big Night and the frivolousness of Jigsaw. It’s hard not to feel for
Effie, but Powell never loses sight of the signature tensions of class and sex, and is
happy to punch down and up. On the eve of the release of The Hunter’s Wife, news
reaches Effie that Callingham’s second wife, Marian, the woman he left Effie for,
has arrived from Europe and is in a Manhattan hospital, dying of cancer. The
hospital has contacted Effie assuming (like everyone else) that she’s still in touch
with the writer and can bring him to visit his dying wife. From Marian, Effie learns
that Callingham has now dumped her, too, for a younger woman. And like Effie,
Marian pathetically clings to the hope that he’ll come back to her.
When Callingham does return to Manhattan to negotiate movie deals and
sign with a new publisher, Effie is determined to make him do the decent thing
and visit Marian on her deathbed. Like many such reckonings in Powell’s later
fiction, it has complicated motives, combining score-settling personal vendettas
with larger moral imperatives. Powell never makes Effie out to be a saint. But
seeing herself in Orphen’s book, and in the sad eyes of Marian, Effie is finally over
Callingham. And she gets some satisfaction from Callingham’s self-centered
pique over her romance with Orphen, author of a book he of course reads only as 171
a nasty attack on himself. Seeing Callingham humbled for once is all she needs to
close the door on him for good. Powell does not give us a clear resolution for Effie,
Orphen, or their various love triangles, but she does gives us some high comedy
and indelible characters.
Given the book’s sales and reviews, it’s fair to say that Turn, Magic Wheel
marks the emergence of the Dawn Powell we recall today. As The New Republic’s
Jerre Mangione wrote at the time, “It is only when Dawn Powell is completely
unserious that she becomes a serious writer.” At home in the novel, Powell
renders her protagonists in a far more fully realized fashion than she was able to
do with the more schematic characters who populate her plays. These people are
no more pleasant than the Bonneys, no less funny than Claire and Letty, but here
they find a dimension that required all the skills Powell had developed over years
as novelist, playwright, and humorist: snappy dialogue, situation, a strong inner
voice, and some perfectly timed one-liners.
Planning new books, Powell left telling notes in her diaries about future
work: “the women are in command of jobs and lives, the men scavenge franti-
cally through the city for a life women can’t get at, for pleasures reserved for them
alone. The desperate, back-to-the-wall fight for independence, for pleasure.”
Wisecracking, flawed, on-the-make urban operators in a modern New
York—these would be the signature characters across the balance of Dawn
Powell’s career. It’s easy enough to shock a reader with unpleasant people you
S
might not care to meet in your drawing room, who may even be horrid. But it A
takes something else again to make them engaging and recognizable characters L
V
in their own right. O
Colleen Tighe
 Ann Neumann

Death Trips
Accessorizing the final exit lane

173
to ask whether he should become a death doula
A F R I E N D R EC E N T LY T E XT E D M E
or a hospice volunteer. Turns out he was on the wagon, looking to swap a long-
time drinking habit for what he imagined was the more purifying work of looking
after the dying. “Attempting self love,” he wrote.
Need someone to “be present” for your final hours? Need music, aroma-
therapy, reiki? A death doula will, for a fee, swoop into your home and help you
navigate the end of your life, from your spiritual needs to the arrangement of the
furniture in your sickroom. Awkward, Americanized, consumer-focused forms of
Buddhism have long since taken over our exercise (yoga), our offices (mindful-
ness), and our homes (feng shui). Now, with doula programs popping up like
mantras in the mind, they’ve come for our deaths.
I write about death and dying in America, which explains why my friend
assumed I’d understand his question—and also how I know that doulas aren’t just
some wacky passing fad. For a movement that is supposed to be “alternative,”
this one is strikingly in tune with the consensus dogma of the death industry at
large. While doulas are not medical professionals, they are experts in the art of
arranging a certain kind of death scene. Doula, derived from the Greek, means
“woman who serves,” but in the modern iteration, it also means that you, the
dying person, won’t be alone for a single minute.
Which is, we’re told, a good thing, since a death without warm bodies is
practically taboo. On my trips to various end-of-life care facilities as a reporter
S
or a volunteer, I have heard the same belief over and over again, breathed into A
L
my ear by the cooing, pastel-wearing do-gooders who have taken on grieving as V
their life’s salvational work. What they say is, “No one should have to die O
 alone.” What they mean is that dying alone is a character flaw—an imperfection
growing somewhere deep inside of you that, provided it is caught in time, can
be rooted out or zapped away.
My Google Alert is “death” (anything for the cause), so this belief is
likewise etched into my inbox. “11 Signs You’re Going to Die Alone—and
How to Avoid It,” goes a typical headline, turning my weekly digest of death
news into a vacuous lifestyle guide, complete with tips for a full-body
makeover. If you want to meet the reaper encircled by a team of smiling
faces, well then, you had better look sharp. First, give up all your filthy
habits, like ordering take-out pizza and spending too much time on
Facebook. Then, get rid of your cats.
Or, when the time comes, call in a death doula, who will hold your hand,
caress your spirit, and send you a hefty bill. Otherwise, you might end up
sprawled out on the floor of your apartment in a pose that is most decidedly not
zen: rotting and totally alone, dripping fluids through your downstairs neighbor’s
ceiling, until the stench, your final legacy, makes someone notice you at last.

Plague of Lonesomes
The Japanese, adding to their rich and ancient vocabulary of loss, have given it a
name: kodokushi, or “lonely death,” meaning the quiet but messy end of a solitary
life. With family far away and neighbors respectfully or distractedly distant, a
decomposing body can sear its dark shape into the dirty mattress or the floor
boards of a home, to be found days, weeks, or even years later.
174 Multiple factors over the past few decades have made Japan ripe for the
kodokushi coinage: an astounding 26 percent of the Japanese population is now
over the age of sixty-five, the result of a post-war baby boom and a long-declining
birth rate. Elders increasingly live longer and live alone, separate from the
daughters and daughters-in-law who would once have been their caregivers. And
the Japanese economy took a nasty hit in the 1990s (soon after kodokushi first
came into use), pushing aging adults out of the work force and relegating them to
poverty, isolation, and less respected roles in society.
The plight of Japan’s elders may be extreme, but it is not unique. Most
nations of the so-called industrialized West, including the United States, are
experiencing their own rapid rise in the elder population, a wave of seniors that
some have hailed as the “age boom,” or worse, the “silver tsunami.” The U.S.
Administration on Aging predicts that by 2060, 24 percent of Americans will be
over the age of sixty-five (compared to just 9.9 percent in 1970).
Americans haven’t yet invented a name for what we fear will happen to
all these aging people now that feminism and childlessness and career-
driven migration patterns have cracked apart the system of free-of-charge
female caregiving that used to keep Ma and Pa comfortably ensconced in the
family home.
Instead, we have retreated into our most familiar American idioms. To ward
B
off the specter of elder isolation, we are redoubling our faith in individualism,
A strangely enough—or more precisely, our conviction that what you choose will
F
F be your fate. Bad personal choices get you a lonely death. Good personal choices,
L on the other hand, get you something like “The Death of Socrates,” that painting
E
R by Jacques-Louis David in which attendants throng around the deathbed,
 contorting their bodies in energetic devotion. (The hemlock may have been
bitter, but at least he felt the love.)
Feats of self-improvement are what will put you on the path to a worthy
end—and these days, those feats include spending money on the very thing that
our new service economy is keenest to offer you: customized experiences. A
doula-assisted death is a bespoke affair. Through made-to-order rituals, your
death can be propelled into the realm of the unique, just like everyone else’s.

Where There’s a Will

We think we know what failure looks like in our grand meritocracy—obsoles-
cence, uselessness, the wrong consumer choice—and that’s what we imagine a
bad death looks like too. But this picture is a product of reverse-engineering; we
work backward from the remedies we’re sold. Before swallowing, we might pause
to remember something about our innovative market solutions: they have a funny
way of floating free of real-world problems.
Consider the case of the “The Lonely Death of George Bell,” a New York
Times feature that ignited readers’ imaginations in 2015 by detailing, with no little
melodrama, the solitary end of a man with few friends, no immediate family
members, and a longstanding hoarding problem.
While fifty thousand New Yorkers die each year, as N. R. Kleinfield wrote, “A
much tinier number die alone in unwatched struggles. No one collects their
bodies. No one mourns the conclusion of a life. They are just a name added to the
death tables. In the year 2014, George Bell, age 72, was among those names.”
Even so, as soon as this macabre tale hit the newspaper, Bell’s death became a 175
metonym for the plight of America’s aging baby boomers.
The first anyone knew of Bell’s death was the smell of his body; the fire
department was called to jimmy the door of apartment number 23. He died alone
of natural causes in a coffin of his own design, the kind made with half eaten
containers of noodles, overflowing
ashtrays, strewn dirty laundry, stacks
Dying alone is seen as of newspapers, and unopened mail.
The Times sent a photographer to
a character flaw—an
document the mess.
imperfection growing It seems clear that we’re meant to
somewhere deep inside of see Bell’s fate as a cautionary tale, and a
gripping one at that—there is something
you that, provided it is about a hoarder’s nest, consumerism’s
caught in time, can be darkest timeline, that never fails to
rooted out or zapped away. quicken the breath. “This is not some
random human interest story,” wrote
Bella DePaulo at Psychology Today a few
days after Kleinfield’s story ran. “This is a morality tale, a scare story aimed directly
at anyone who would dare to live single and live alone.” DePaulo takes Kleinfield’s
story as an indictment of all the single ladies (and men) out there—who, perhaps
like George Bell, step off the approved path of coupled-up reproduction and then
S
continue to quietly, defiantly exist, until one day they don’t. A
We’re supposed to shudder, as the dead no longer can, and then we’re L
V
supposed to shape up. But in my mind, it is not the failings of the life that are O
 instructive, but the misdirections of the article itself. In the host of unsightly
administrative tasks that followed Bell’s death—not what Emily Dickinson
called “The Sweeping up the Heart / And putting Love away,” but the work of
burying Bell’s body, cleaning out his apartment, trying to notify any next of
kin—Kleinfield found a pathos that verged on the universal. For my part, I saw
errors of omission.
Bell, you see, was not a typical isolated elder: he was a man embarking on his
eighth decade on earth with several hundred thousand dollars in the bank. And
Kleinfield’s story for the Times, while stuffed with poignant details, was, in the
end, less a profile of a squandered life than a classic journalistic game of follow
the money, in the form of a hunt for Bell’s lucky and unsuspecting heirs.
By contrast, 45 percent of those over sixty-five living alone are poor (below
200 percent of the poverty level). Fifty-seven percent of those over eighty are
poor. Hispanics (68 percent) and blacks (60 percent) have it even worse. If we
were to take the time to dramatize the deaths of any one of these nameless
people, the follow-the-money line of inquiry would be laughably easy, and
painfully short: there is none.

Good Endings for Sale

“The Lonely Death of George Bell” is just one example of how colossally we can
miss the point when we try to sensationalize or pathologize a trend—living and
dying alone—that is as deeply rooted in our social institutions as it is in any
personal failing or individual aberrance of the mind.
176 Lots of people live alone as they get older, and most of them won’t end up
like Bell. His was a story worth telling, but it is not the whole story of how “bad”
and “death” now overlap. If we’re looking for a problem that is quintessentially
American, there is really only one that every aging person shares: we all face a
health industry—and by default, a death industry—that treats patients as
purchasers. Forget the crazy cat ladies and the scary hoarders and all the other
reductive stereotypes that get trotted
out to prompt a shiver of “There but
The command to improve for the grace of God go I.” Here’s a
fable that should really chill our veins:
yourself to avoid a lonely
in a country of mind-boggling wealth,
death is not just a social health outcomes are as divergent as
media meme; it is the white our incomes, professional care is held
hostage by profit, and more often than
noise that drowns out our not, the kind of death you get is the
calls to improve end-of-life best one you can buy.
care in the United States. The command to improve yourself
to avoid a lonely death is not just a
social media meme; it is the white
noise that drowns out our calls to improve end-of-life care in the United States. It
B
masks the real challenges that some elders face by diverting attention to
A self-betterment—and away from systemic issues like poverty, racial and gender
F
F disparity, lack of caregiver resources, and a health care system that saves its best
L for those who can pay top dollar.
E
R The tale of this diversion is written in the history of American hospice. Once
an “antiestablishment, largely volunteer movement advocating a gentle death as
an alternative to the medicalized death many people had come to dread,” wrote
Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times in 2005, hospice has become an
institutionalized program that has lost sight of some of its clear, early objective: to
provide comfort and pain relief for all dying patients.
While more than two-thirds of those who die each year are enrolled in
hospice, few stick around long enough to benefit from the program. Hospice is
available to patients for the last six months of their lives, but in 2014, the average
length of service was about seventy-one days; the median was about seventeen
days. That’s a whole lot of people not getting what hospice was made for: quality
pain relief away from the anxiety of a crisis-ready hospital room. And hospice has
stubbornly remained a white people service: in 2014 only 7.6 percent were black
(though they are more than 13 percent of the total population); only 7.1 percent
were Hispanic (17 percent of the total population).
The more money and education a patient has, the better the chance she is
enrolled in hospice care—and the better the chance she will die at home, some-
thing that most Americans say they would like to do. Which means that the
stories we tell ourselves about the great benefits of hospice care are only half true;
a system meant to care for all Americans doesn’t really reach them all.
There are a host of reasons for this low use overall, and for underuse by
minorities and the poor: Doctors aren’t always trained to give terminal diagnoses,
or they don’t talk to elders about hospice care until it is too late; there’s a lack of
early detection and diagnosis among minorities and the poor, often because of
inadequate health care; and our medical industry has focused on (earning oodles
of money from) curing diseases, not preparing patients for their deaths. Cultural 177
differences that frame hospice enrollment as giving up, not fighting the good
fight, are also a factor. Still, with the elder population doubling in the next few
decades, the program seems woefully unprepared for the future—and particularly
for those groups that have traditionally remained outside its scope. Like all of
health care (and so many of our social systems) hospice is a system in which racial
and economic inequalities are deeply embedded.
It is an odd interlude for a much-loved program that is powered in part by
hundreds of thousands of well-meaning volunteers—430,000 hospice volunteers
nationwide, to be exact. In 1984, when Congress decided to cover hospice with
Medicare and Medicaid funding, volunteerism was baked into the financial
formula, for the sake of a leaner budget. Thirty years later, volunteers are still
essential. Hospice couldn’t run without them.

Soul Calisthenics
Maybe this is all just a long way of saying that when my friend texted me with his
momentous question—death doula or hospice volunteer?—I wasn’t ready with a
snappy reply. If anything, it got me thinking about how working as a hospice
volunteer is kind of like the new AA. It draws in people who are seeking to find
themselves or, as my friend put it, “attempting self-love.” I don’t mean this as a
knock on my friend. After all, there aren’t enough hospice volunteers to go
S
around and he’s a good person. But the transactional ethos that infects all forms A
of volunteering starts to sound a bit facetious when you apply it to death- L
V
watching: It won’t be fun but it will get you into spiritual shape. O
 As for the death doulas, the promise of self-actualization they extend to others
tends to rebound on them in an even trickier way—one that hints at how circular
and Sisyphean our market-approved quests for self-improvement really are.
The International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA) will host twelve
trainings this year for hopeful trainees. “BE A PART OF THE MOVEMENT,” the
ad copy urges. Over two and a half days in a Hilton or Embassy Suites conference
room, attendees will take the first steps toward becoming Certified End-of-Life
Doulas (CD) or Certified Advanced Doulas (CAD). Don’t forget your check for
$600, plus $100 for the annual membership fee.
Henry Fersko-Weiss, INELDA’s executive director, claims that his end-of-
life doula program, which he founded in 2003, was the first in the United States.
As a licensed social worker, he has managed social services at a number of
hospice programs (including the one where I did my own hospice training in
2008; I’ve never met him).
Fersko-Weiss isn’t the only trainer in town, however. Not only is the doula
discipline rife with competing philosophies (along with the implicit belief that
there is, of course, just one way to die), but it is led by competing gurus (often
male) who oversee their practice with
a heavy Eastern flair and a dash of
Need someone to “be mysticism.
“How we show up for the dying
present” for your final hours?
is how we show up in our own lives;
Need music, aromatherapy, it’s how we show up in each moment
reiki? A death doula will, and how we walk in the world,” said
178 Bodhi Be, a doula trainer and founder
for a fee, swoop into your of Doorway Into Light, in a promo-
home and help. tional video for his April training in
Hawaii. The training, “Showing Up
for Death, Nourishing the World,”
cost $950, not including hotel, airfare, and most transportation and meals.
Presenters included Ram Dass, the former “Harvard psychologist and psyche-
delic pioneer” who went to India and never came back, and Prakash Mackay,
a “Diamond Approach teacher in the Ridhwan School for Self Realization.”
(I don’t know either.)
There’s also Doulagivers, “the new specialized area of non-medical health
care for the elderly,” founded by nurse Suzanne O’Brien, which offers online
courses and a training certification program that costs $1,997. Under the fee, the
site reads: “Time Magazine just named End of Life Doulas as one of the top seven
new professions in 2017. This independent practice makes $40,000–$70,000
dollars annually. This is the new specialized area of non-medical health care.”
(The Time magazine article referred to is titled, “7 New Jobs That Are So ‘2017.’”
The other six “new professions” are definitely worth noting: simulated astronaut,
YouTube Sex Ed teacher, vegan butcher, professional activist, bug bounty hunter,
and compost collector. It’s clear from the introduction that Time’s tongue is at
B
least partially in its cheek.)
A The self-improvement INELDA and these other programs promise to doulas-
F
F in-training is overt—and indeed is used as a promotional tool. The few trainees I’ve
L spoken to, all women, see being a doula as a new career opportunity; the training is
E
R an investment in their happiness, life satisfaction, and financial future.
 Susie, who I met up with last year in Brooklyn, went through doula training
after a series of personal tragedies. She was looking for a new way to make a
living after a successful career as a photographer. Jane, put in touch with me by
the friend of a friend, had worked as a nurse during the height of the AIDS
epidemic and saw doula training as a possible way to return to that work. She was
watching her father approach death and thought that she could care for him
better as a trained doula—and again make a difference in the lives of the dying. A
new profession that incorporates financial security and doing good is powerfully
appealing to many of these women—and, I might add, sanctifying.
My book on end-of-life care came out last year, and since then I’ve fielded
countless inquiries from women who want to know what the best doula training
program is—but not once have I had a patient ask me where to find a good
doula, forget the cost. By contrast, I could start a side career of matching home
health aides—who are often women of color who earn a pittance of cash under
the table to do the dirtiest work there is, cleaning, feeding, and medicating the
dying—with friends’ aging parents. Jessica Mitford, the acerbic writer of the
1963 takedown of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, warned us
against those who would prey on grieving elders and their families. Similar
advice might now be directed at the self-bettering, soul-searching aspirants
who want to care for them.
In any case, I will tell you this: Sidling up to a magical dying person is not as
life-improving as the doula gurus make it sound. If there is meaning there, it’s
shifty. Hanging out with the nearly departed has taught me that when we dabble
in the dark art of vicarious dying, we often make the wrong assumptions about
the needs of the people we’re there to attend. It’s hard to find a deathbed that isn’t 179
shrouded in projections.
Most every nurse or hospice worker can tell you about one particular death
bed phenomenon: patients very often die the very minute their loved ones have
stepped out of the room. Lizzy Miles wrote about it at PalliMed, one of my favorite
hospice and palliative medicine blogs, last year:

This may be an unpopular assertion within my own hospice

industry for me to advocate for leaving a patient alone sometimes.
Hospices have entire programs devoted to assuring patients and
families that they will not ever be alone. Many of them are actually
called, “No one dies alone” or NODA. The perhaps unintended
consequences of the marketing of these programs is the programs
may perpetuate the myth for the public that nobody ever wants to
die alone.

Maybe, just maybe, dying patients really don’t mind slipping out the door by
themselves, kissing sweet earth goodbye without getting kisses back, riding off
into the sunset without a sidekick. Maybe the directive we take as bedrock
wisdom—“No one should die alone”—is just another flimsy old saw, like “Death
is the great equalizer.” That one, at least, we can lay to rest for the time being: as it
stands, there is nothing equitable about dying in America.
S
A
This project was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and its L
V
Puffin Story Innovation Fund. O
 Sanctuary
By sam sax

my man was committed

to an asylum as a child
wild thing fungal
phylum virus

thought they could fix him

that he could be fixed

his sickness too much

too much his diagnoses
180

drugs & boys & language

& boys & drugs

he was given a pill & made old

he was made cold in his skin

i try to place myself

inside the conversion clinic
when i touch his back
as he sleeps

B
A
F
F
L
E
R
baby queer with bangs
hanged like dead men before his face
arms a collision of scissor wars

& o the shower steam that rose behind him

as his man who was also a child
& also committed
entered him for the first time

between the shifts

of the nurses 181

took him raw in the open stall

with only the salve of soap
between them blood

i enter him like this

brushing the bodies
from his face
tasting the plastic
restraints

P
O
E
M
 Bafflomathy
(No. 35)
Kaveh Akbar (“Against Poetry,” p. 38) is the
author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and the chap-
book Portrait of the Alcoholic.
Daniel Brook (“Creative Alibis,” p. 108) is
the author of A History of Future Cities and
The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-
Take-All America. He was born in Brooklyn and
lives in New Orleans.
Tom Carson (“The Wrong Stuff,” p. 134) won
two National Magazine Awards during his
stint as Esquire’s “Screen” columnist and was
nominated twice more as GQ’s movie reviewer.
He is the author of Gilligan’s Wake (2003) and
Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter (2011).
182
Molly Crabapple (“Hidden Fighters,” p. 6)
is an artist and journalist. Her memoir is
Drawing Blood.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (“Race to the
Bottom,” p. 40) is a professor of law at UCLA
and Columbia Law School. She is the cofounder
and executive director of the African Amer-
ican Policy Forum, a gender and racial justice
legal thinktank, and the founder and executive
director of the Center for Intersectionality and
Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School.
Katherine Cross (“The Art of the Real,” p. 16)
is a pizza-loving feminist sociologist, trans
Latina, and amateur slug herder, working on
her PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her
blog can be found at quinnae.com.
B
Dave Denison (“You Gotta Serve Somebody,”
A p. 144), who was brought up not to discuss
F
F politics and religion at the dinner table, writes
L about politics and religion. He is associate
E
R editor of The Baffler.
Monica Ferrell’s (“Pony,” p. 65) second collec-
tion of poetry, Oh You Absolute Darling, will be
published by Four Way in September 2018.
Ann Friedman (“California Über Alles,” p. 80)
is a writer who was raised in Iowa and now
lives in Los Angeles.
Amber A’Lee Frost (“All Worked Up with
Nowhere to Go,” p. 58) is a writer and musi-
cian in Brooklyn. She is a contributor to Rosa
Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy and False
Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary
Rodham Clinton. She cohosts The Baffler’s
Whale Vomit podcast.
James Livingston (“Why Work?” 88) is a
professor of history at Rutgers University and
the author of No More Work: Why Full Employ-
ment Is a Bad Idea (2016).
Yasmin Nair (“Abortive Reasoning,” p. 66) lives
in Chicago and is working on a book, Strange
Love: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Invention
of Social Justice.
Ann Neumann (“Death Trips,” p. 172) is the
author of The Good Death (2016), a contrib-
uting nonfiction editor at Guernica magazine,
and a visiting scholar at the Center for Religion
and Media at New York University. She writes
“The Patient Body,” a monthly column about
the intersection of religion and medicine, for
The Revealer.
Dzvinia Orlowsky (“Age of Osteo-Collosus,”
p. 117), Pushcart Prize winner and a
co-recipient with Jeff Friedman of an NEA
grant for translation, has authored six poetry
collections. Her newest, Bad Harvest, will be
published in the fall of 2018.
 Art Contributors
Tina Berning,
Joe Castro, Molly
Crabapple, Lola
Dupré, João Fazenda,
Justin Francavilla,
Leigh Guldig, Bran
Dougherty-Johnson,
Greg Kletsel, Amrita
Marino, Roderick Mills,
Office of Paul Sahre,
Colleen Tighe,
Lyall Wallerstedt,
Stephan Walter,
and Daniel Zender

The front and back

covers of this issue
of The Baffler
are illustrated by
Lola Dupré. The
reconstructed etchings
throughout the
issue are illustrated
by Leigh Guldig.

Ladan Osman (“Auto-Correct,” p. 79) is the
author of The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony.
Emilia Phillips (“Deep Calls to Deep,”
p. 156) is the author of two poetry
collections, Groundspeed (2016) and Signal-
etics (2013), and she will join the MFA faculty
at the University of North Carolina at Greens-
boro in Fall 2017.
Lewis Robinson (“Intervention,” p. 124) is the
author of the novel Water Dogs and the story
collection Officer Friendly.
sam sax (“Sanctuary,” p. 180) is the author of
Madness (2017), winner of the National Poetry
Series. He’s received fellowships from the NEA,
the MacDowell Colony, and Lambda Literary.
Ben Schwartz (“People Like That,” p. 164) has
written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, David
Leigh Guldig
183
Adele M. Stan (“What We Do Is Secret,”
p. 28) is a weekly columnist at The American
Prospect and winner of the 2017 Hillman Prize
for Opinion and Analysis.
Miya Tokumitsu (“Did The Fun Work?” p.
100) is a lecturer of art history at the Univer-
sity of Melbourne. She is a contributing
editor of Jacobin and the author of Do What
You Love: And Other Lies about Success and
Happiness.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper (“Childhood’s End,”
p. 118) works as a union organizer and inde-
pendent journalist in Southern California.
Tom Whyman (“No Prophets, No Honor,”
p. 158) is an academic philosopher and free- B
A
lance writer from the United Kingdom. F
F
L
Eugenia Williamson (“Abortive Reasoning,” O
M

Letterman, and the 84th Academy Awards p. 66) is a contributing editor of The Baffler. A
broadcast. He is working on a history of Amer- She lives in Chicago and is working on a book T
H
ican humor set between the two world wars. about the nineties. Y
 Letters
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muster every ounce of your praise or damnation—we’ll take
either—and send it to us at 19 West 21st Street #1001, New York,
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Invite Us
So they put you in charge of the speaker’s budget; now it’s your
turn to invite some sap who won’t make everyone in the office feel
dumb. Bradley, the smart guy in the cubicle down the hall, would
love to see Malcolm Gladwell come in and fire up the sales
department with a pep talk. But you think the boss is more likely
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say, or a big shot from the Bush administration.
At this point, you feel a pang of courage. Sure, your boss and
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184

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