MARCH 2017

THE MISTAKE THAT DOOMED

DEMOCRATS—AND PAVED

THE WAY FOR TRUMP

JOHN LEWIS HOW TO TAKE ON TRUMPJEDEDIAH PURDY FORGING A NEW OPPOSITION

EXCLUSIVE INSIDE THE FAILED RECOUNT BATTLE

TRUMP’S BIG AGENDA FEMINISM’S FAIL THE RETURN OF THE KLAN

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UP FRONT

6 Trump’s Big Agenda Conservatives are poised to privatize everything in sight. BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN

8 The Populist Ploy Decades ago, Irving Kristol predicted Trump’s rise. BY WIN McCORMACK

10 Trump’s Think Tank How the Heritage Foundation is shaping his playbook. BY ALEX SHEPHARD

12 The Art of the Con What Trump shares with America’s best swindlers. BY CLANCY MARTIN

COLUMNS

14 All the President’s Phantoms Trump isn’t the first conspiracy theorist in chief. BY JESSE WALKER

16 Feminist Fail It wasn’t America’s rampant misogyny that doomed Clinton. BY JESSA CRISPIN

REVIEW

54 A View to a Kill How nature documentaries obscure more than they reveal. BY COLIN DICKEY

60 Look Back in Anger The origins of today’s global upheavals lie in Western history. BY SAMUEL MOYN

63 The Eye of the Beholder Rorschach’s inkblots turned personality testing into an art. BY MERVE EMRE

66 The Big Short Why are ambitious writers turning to the power of aphorism? BY RACHEL SYME

68 Only Human Silicon Valley’s high-tech obsession with living forever. BY ANNA WIENER

72 BackstoryPHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY MILLER

POETRY

59 Love Poems in the Time of Climate ChangeBY CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ

MARCH 2017 | 1

COVER PHOTO BY ANDY OMEL

contents

18

Obama’s Lost ArmyThe untold story of his biggest mistake—and how it paved the way for Trump. BY MICAH L. SIFRY

32

The Fight AheadJohn Lewis, plus nine leading activists and scholars, on the best ways to take on Trump, from Congress to the streets.

38

Hate in the Age of TrumpAcross America, Klan and neo-Nazi groups are not only flourishing—they’re joining forces. TEXT BY VAN JONES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY MILANO

46

Inside the RecountJill Stein and a ragtag team of computer experts decided to take America’s elections to court. Here’s how it all went wrong. BY STEVE FRIESS

The New OppositionFrom Occupy to Black Lives Matter, the left has been reborn. Can it harness the discontent fanned by Trump?BY JEDEDIAH PURDY

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contributors

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Jessa Crispin is the founder of Bookslut and the author of Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. She admires radical feminist saints like St. Teresa and St. Hildegard for confronting society’s love of money and power: “The #resistance is not going to be about directly fighting Trump. It has to be about transforming our culture.” FEMINIST FAIL, P. 16

Merve Emre is assistant professor of English at McGill University. Her first book, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, will be published this fall by the University of Chicago Press. Her second book, a cultural history of personality testing, is forthcoming from Doubleday. THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER, P. 63

Steve Friess is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time. In 2000, as a staffer at the South Florida Sun Sentinel, he broke the story of the chaos ensuing from the badly designed “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County. INSIDE THE RECOUNT, P. 46

Van Jones is the former green jobs adviser to President Barack Obama and founder of the Dream Corps, a social justice accelerator. He is a CNN political commentator and author of The Green Collar Economy and Rebuild the Dream. HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP, P. 38

Johnny Milano is a New York–based photographer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. He spent five years capturing the rise of white supremacy groups in the United States. HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP, P. 38

Kim Phillips-Fein teaches twentieth-century American political, business, and labor history at New York University and is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. Her history of New York in the 1970s, Fear City, is forthcoming from Metropolitan Books. TRUMP’S BIG AGENDA, P. 6

Jedediah Purdy is the Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University and the author, most recently, of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, n+1, and Jacobin, and is on the editorial board of Dissent, where he is a frequent contributor. AMERICA’S NEW OPPOSITION, P. 26

Micah L. Sifry is co-founder and executive director of Civic Hall, a community center for civic tech and innovation. In 2004, energized by the potential of the internet to democratize politics, he co-founded the Personal Democracy Forum. A decade later, he wrote The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet). OBAMA’S LOST ARMY, P. 18

Jesse Walker is books editor of Reason magazine and author, most recently, of The United States of Paranoia, a history of American conspiracy theories. The politician who most reminds him of Donald Trump is Pappy O’Daniel, a bandleader and radio star whose fame and populist rhetoric got him elected governor of Texas. ALL THE PRESIDENT’S PHANTOMS, P. 14

Anna Wiener is a writer in San Francisco whose work focuses on life in Silicon Valley. A frequent contributor to the new republic, her articles have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, n+1, and Pacific Standard. ONLY HUMAN, P. 68

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4 | NEW REPUBLIC

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Like a giant Valium descending on Dulles International Airport, the Bush transition has come to Washington. Many of us are already sedated by the sheer grown-upness of it all. Compared with the Clintonistas, yapping into cell phones at the Dupont Circle Starbucks at all hours of the day and night, the Bushies seem preternaturally calm. Where we once had a permanent campaign, we now have intermittent naps. Where transitions once involved endless ruminations on nannies and gay soldiers, we now get to ponder the unbearable whiteness of Dick Cheney.

It’s not as if the Bushies have no style. It’s just that it isn’t, er, immediately visible. A city once run by twentysomethings has now been surrendered to fat, white, straight guys in their fifties. A town previously mesmerized by definitions of “sexual relations” is now pondering the résumé of Donald Rumsfeld. For Stairmasters substitute angioplasty. For Georgetown substitute McLean. For Gold-man Sachs substitute Alcoa. To be sure, the Bushies don’t quite generate the buzz of lower TriBeCa, but hey, we’re in Washington. We don’t do buzz here.

There is, of course, the small question of relief. The era of the Clintons is mercifully

drawing to a close. The first sign is the silence. Listen: the air is no longer quite so filled with the incessant circumlocutions of the blabberer-in-chief. Whatever other qualities he has, the man can surely talk. The sheer volume of verbiage he has expelled over eight years is enough to make John Updike look blocked.

But now we have the wonderfully inar-ticulate George W. Bush. As Dianne Wiest whispered to her lover in the movie Bullets Over Broadway, one can only enjoin, “Don’t speak! Don’t speak!” And this is not merely out of concern for what’s left of the English language. W.’s inarticulacy is the point. After the interminable blather of Clinton, W.’s ver-bal void is a balm, an oasis, a spa for the spun soul. After all we have endured over the past eight years, are there words to describe the rapture this relative mute evokes?

Then there’s the executive style. We have gone from a Cabinet of yea-saying lawyers to a Cabinet of grown-up CEOs. Bush has produced a Cabinet of people so obviously more skilled and experienced than he is that it is pretty close to embarrassing. It either takes an extraordinarily secure man or a completely clueless one to have gathered

such an assembly of superiors. My gut tells me it’s the former—and that this shrewdness is far more important in politics than any sort of bookish intelligence and may lead to small increments of progress.

There will surely be plenty of reasons to be irritated by the W. culture soon enough: the sense of entitlement, the narrowness of vision, the stuffiness, the dynastic pre-sumptions, and so on. But for now the new culture of Washington, perhaps because it is also an old one, seems worth celebrating.

Politics as tedious but effective manage-ment is an ancient conservative doctrine—but, these days, a strikingly fresh one. Such a politics does not need, as the Clintons did, to infiltrate every part of our lives, to mesh the exigencies of statecraft with the tawdriness of Hollywood. It is a politics that does not need to be permanently in the spotlight on the national stage and is often content to op-erate quietly behind the curtain. The promise of Bush is to make politics boring again, to return it to the prose of government rather than the drama of private life or the poetry of the broader culture. After eight years of ceaseless psychodrama, we will be deeply, permanently grateful for the change. a

SINCE ANDREW JACKSON descended on Washington in 1829 and purged the federal government to make way for his cronies, incoming presidents have always remade the capital in their own image. In early 2001, as George W. Bush prepared to take office, new republic editor Andrew Sullivan observed that Washington was suddenly populated with “fat, white, straight guys in their fifties,” determined to return the city to the more dignified days before Whitewater and that blue dress from the Gap. The Bushies were boring, sure, and they made Washington boring, too, but they were a welcome change from the “ceaseless psychodrama” of the Clinton years. ✯ Today, as Donald Trump assumes office, Washington may forfeit the cultural renaissance it underwent during the Obama era. The first family ate at trendy restaurants and attended SoulCycle classes, while their young staffers helped spur urban revitalization. It’s hard to imagine Trump out on the town, enjoying hip eateries or visiting local bookstores. He favors charred steaks and tomato juice, wide ties and Florida winters. In Trump, America is getting the worst of both George Bush and Bill Clinton: a stodgy administration full of old, straight, white guys, and a “blabberer-in-chief” already immersed in scandal.

Sounds of SilenceJANUARY 15, 2001

Andrew Sullivan

Donald and Melania Trump at an inaugural ball in January.

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ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, Donald Trump famously portrayed himself as a populist. His campaign ads took aim at sinister elites governing the United States, and his ability to target the frustrations and fears of Rust Belt communities helped propel him into the presidency. But many of those same positions—especially his criticism of free trade—put him squarely at odds with decades of conservative orthodoxy. The Koch brothers, for their part, refused to support Trump, freezing him out of their donor network and declining to share voter data with him. Charles Koch blasted Trump’s call for a Muslim registry as “reminiscent of Nazi Germany,” and said that choosing between Trump and Hillary Clinton was like choosing between “cancer or a heart attack.”

Now, of course, the Kochs and most of the GOP establishment have come around to Trump’s side, at

least for the moment. Or, perhaps more accurately, Trump has come around to theirs. At the center of his ever-shifting agenda, Trump has placed a single, overarching goal that he shares with the oil billionaires from Wichita: turning as much of the government as possible over to the private sector.

The push for privatization—long a conservative dream—is most evident in Trump’s cabinet picks. Tom Price, his choice for secretary of health and human services, wants to replace Medicare with a system of private health accounts that would hand over millions of taxpayer dollars to private insurance companies. Betsy DeVos, his nominee for secre-tary of education, is a leading advocate for charter schools, which are designed to channel much-needed

6 | NEW REPUBLIC

up front

PROFIT CENTER

Trump’s Big AgendaReagan started it. Bush expanded it. Now conservatives are poised to privatize everything in sight.

BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNA BARCZYK

resources away from public education and into pri-vate enterprises. Trump has expressed interest in turning the Department of Veterans Affairs into a “nonprofit corporation”—an idea that emerges di-rectly from Concerned Veterans for America, a group backed by the Kochs—while Ben Carson, his choice to head up the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has spoken of simply dismantling fed-eral health care for veterans entirely. Even Trump’s proposals for modernizing the nation’s infrastructure are centered not on carefully coordinated federal ef-forts, but on giving tax breaks to for-profit companies to erect new bridges and repair the nation’s roads.

At the heart of the conservative faith in privat-ization is the idea that the public sector is inherently cumbersome and inefficient. The public good, the thinking goes, can best be served not by inflexible government bureaucrats, but by enlightened busi-nessmen who function as “trustees for the poor,” as the philanthropic steelmaker Andrew Carnegie once put it. This worldview has its roots deep in the conservative movement that took shape in the United States after World War II. The growth of the federal state during the New Deal was met by strong resistance from business leaders, who feared the rise of the only centralized authority powerful enough to counter their own interests at the national level. They organized vigorously against both labor unions and the welfare state, funding think tanks that were incubators for free-market ideas. The American Lib-erty League, for example, a business organization financed by the du Pont brothers (of the DuPont Chemical Company), argued that the New Deal was “a vast organism spreading its tentacles across the business and private life” of America, and that the state should stop providing economic assistance to the destitute, leaving such efforts to the Red Cross.

In the decades that followed, many corporate executives grudgingly came to accept Keynesian economics and the larger role for the state it implied, and they tolerated bargaining with labor unions that represented their workers. But some business conservatives never stopped working to upend the New Deal, to restore what they saw as the proper balance between the private and public sectors. In 1955, economist Milton Friedman wrote an essay arguing that the state should turn public schools over to “private enterprises operated for profit.” Providing parents with taxpayer-funded vouchers to pay for private schools, he said, would help re-verse the “trend toward collectivism.” In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, white conservatives in the South loved the idea of school reform. As Jesse Helms put it in 1957, when he was still the head of the North Carolina Bankers Association, “We are far

from convinced that public schools are the only way to make education available to our people.”

In the 1970s, the idea of privatization became closely linked to hostility toward public-sector un-ions, which conservatives viewed as a “covetous” bureaucracy that would give labor too much power. The Carter administration flirted with the notion, but privatization gained a true champion in Washington under Reagan, whose Commission on Privatiza-tion pushed to allow for-profit interests to operate everything from low-income housing and air traffic control to prisons, Amtrak, and the Post Office.

There’s little evidence that privatization actually improves government services. Privately run fire departments have been a disaster, for-profit prisons are rife with cost overruns and human rights abuses, and charter schools don’t consistently outperform their public counterparts. But since the 1970s, the push to hand public funds over to private compa-nies has gained traction well beyond the far right. Strapped for cash, many liberal cities have sought out public-private partnerships and other ar-rangements that outsource such basic government responsibilities as maintaining parks, cleaning city streets, enforcing parking regulations, dispatching ambulances, and educating school kids. As Donald Cohen, a leading critic of privatization, has pointed out, liberals at the national level also embraced privatization as a way to “reinvent” the Democratic Party. Under Bill Clinton, the federal government began handing out contracts to for-profit prisons, allowed private companies to determine who was eligible for welfare benefits, and even toyed with the idea of investing Social Security in the stock market.

The election of George W. Bush advanced the agenda further. Early in his presidency, Bush sug-gested that about 850,000 federal jobs—almost half the federal workforce—should be outsourced to the private sector. He enjoyed his biggest success, sur-prisingly, in the armed forces. During the Iraq War, private military contractors actually outnumbered U.S. troops, and companies like KBR, a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old firm Halliburton, raked in billions of dollars in federal contracts providing services that were once the province of the U.S. military. Obama continued the trend, allowing for-profit companies

MARCH 2017 | 7

PUBLIC GOES PRIVATEFederal jobs Obama turned over to for-profit companies:

� Managing gas and water systems for U.S. military

� Printing nautical charts for federal oceanographers

� Modernizing and expanding border crossings

� Conducting airport security screenings

� Inspecting poultry safety for USDA

Deep down, Trump shares with Andrew Carnegie the belief that corporate leaders alone have the right, the power, and the obligation to rule.

8 | NEW REPUBLIC

up front

to run immigrant detention centers, and doing lit - tle to stem the spread of private charter schools.

Yet what makes Trump’s version of privatization different is not just its ambition, but the ideology of business superiority that guides it. If the new president and his cabinet picks have their way, some of the biggest and most central functions of the federal government—education, housing, infrastruc-ture, health care for veterans and the elderly—could wind up being managed by for-profit corporations. Trump’s own businesses, after all, have benefited from public subsidies, including the tax breaks that New York doled out to for-profit developers as part of its effort to woo investors after the city’s fiscal crisis in 1975.

Deep down, Trump favors turning state functions over to private firms because he shares with Andrew Carnegie an underlying belief that corporate leaders alone have the right, the power, and the obligation to make decisions for society. Their financial success, in his mind, is all the proof that’s necessary. “I have made billions of dollars in business making deals,” he declared at the Republican National Convention. “Now I’m going to make our country rich again!”

Now that Trump and his inner circle of conser-vative businessmen are in charge of the state they have long despised, they are poised to rule it as they do their own companies: uncontested by—and unaccountable to—those who will be most deeply affected by their decisions. a

IT IS SOMETHING of an understatement, at this point, to say that no one saw Donald Trump coming. Initially opposed by almost every Republican official, Trump went over their heads to galvanize a working-class base that none of them understood existed. In the process, he exposed the party’s underbelly of bigotry and xenophobia with deliberately provoc-ative rhetoric, and went on to make a mock ery of both the mainstream media and the liberal political establishment.

But one right-wing luminary did, in fact, see Trump coming—a full three decades before his ar-rival. In 1985, Irving Kristol, the leading founder of the neoconservative movement, wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal called “the new populism: not to worry.” In it, Kristol foresaw the possibility that a conservative posing as a populist could one day lead a successful democratic uprising against the

nation’s liberal elites. What’s more, Kristol argued, such an uprising was an absolute necessity to sal-vage America from what he had come to see as the pernicious effects of the Enlightenment principles on which it had been founded.

Kristol, a Trotskyite-turned-antiliberal intellec-tual, was at first repelled by the emerging populism of the 1970s, much of it tied to the religious right. In a 1972 article in his magazine The Public Inter-est, he described populism as “the belief that the world is being misdirected by a kind of mischie-vous conspiracy against the common man,” and noted with obvious condemnation the “tendency toward xenophobia and racism” of American populist movements of the past.

By 1985, however, after Ronald Reagan swept into office with strong support from the Christian right, Kristol had done an about-face. If there was any potential danger to republican government that concerned the Founding Fathers, he acknowledged in the Journal, it was that of populism, which he defined as “democracy at its least rational, least sensible.” The Founders knew from reading their Plato that a sudden upsurge in anti-elitist, popular passions— legitimate or not—often ended in the triumph of demagogic tyranny, a common phenomenon in the ancient world of small city states. That’s why they

Kristol believed the country needed a strong leader who could rally the masses to reclaim American democracy from the liberal elites.

NEOCON NOSTRADAMUS

The Populist PloyMeet the conservative thinker who predicted Trump’s rise.

BY WIN McCORMACK

MARCH 2017 | 9

DISASTER FORETOLD

“What is going on is something very strange and without precedent. To put it simply: The common sense of the American people has been outraged … by the persistent un-wisdom of their elected and appointed officials. To the degree that we are witnessing a crisis in our democratic institutions, it is a crisis of our disoriented elites, not of a blindly impassioned populace.”

— Irving Kristol, 1985

built into the Constitution mechanisms like the Electoral College—which Kristol hailed as a true “republican remedy for the diseases of republican government.” (How ironic that it was this supposedly fail-safe constitutional provision that put into office the first genuine demagogue in American history to accede to the presidency.)

But unlike the old kind of populism that struck terror in the hearts of the Founding Fathers, the “new populism,” as Kristol dubbed it, was nothing to worry about. In his view, the sentiments of the people now represented a “common sense” reaction against the “un-wisdom” of the elites. What was needed, he believed, was a strong leader who could rally the masses to reclaim American democracy from the clutches of liberal intellectuals, institute a faith-based government, and bind the nation together by preaching an assertive nationalism.

As political scientist Shadia Drury has pointed out, Kristol’s evolving view of populism was heavily influenced by the reactionary political philosopher Leo Strauss, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Though atheistic in his own personal views, Strauss

objected to the fact that the Enlightenment, and the philosophy of liberalism that constituted its political expression, privileged reason over religious faith, which he thought was the glue that held society together; without that glue, he believed, the social order would descend into Nazi-style barbarism. Through his reading of Strauss, Kristol was also influenced by the ideas of Carl Schmitt, who served as the legal-political philosopher of the Nazi regime in its early years. Schmitt considered the whole idea of parliamentary democracy, with its naïve and romantic notion of accommodation among political rivals, as absurd and futile. The key to politics, he believed, was adopting a “friend/foe” mentality of identifying your political enemy and then bringing about his political destruction. And the enemy, in his view, was liberalism itself, in all its manifestations.

But the most important idea Kristol took from Strauss and Schmitt may have been what Drury calls the “populist ploy”—playing on the inherent weakness of democracy itself to defeat the enemy of liberalism, just as Hitler came to power by winning the popular vote in 1932. Kristol believed that the

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE BRODNER

10 | NEW REPUBLIC

up front

American people were not as liberal as their ruling overlords, and that the right leader could use the democratic process to overthrow them. This new leader, in keeping with the views of Schmitt and Strauss, would then impose a national religion on America, thus unifying the country and saving it from the moral disintegration of liberalism.

Has Donald Trump successfully carried out Kris­tol’s “populist ploy”? To a large extent, he has. Af­ter using the democratic process to repudiate and vanquish the elite of the Republican Party, he de­feated Hillary Clinton, a veritable exemplar of the liberal intellectual class despised by Kristol. Trump accomplished this feat with the strong support of conservative evangelicals, an alliance he cemented by choosing one of their own as his vice­presidential candidate, as well as alienated working­class voters in the Midwest. What’s more, he has nominated for secretary of education a woman whose life mis­sion is to turn the American school system into a state­funded training ground for the Christian right.

Although no one in the American conservative movement went looking for a populist demagogue to pick up their banner, congressional Republicans

certainly laid the groundwork for Trump’s suc­cess by wholeheartedly embracing Carl Schmitt’s “friend/foe” tactic of identifying and crushing their enemies—a strategy that also enabled them to win majorities in both houses of Congress. Intentionally or not, the GOP has effectively implemented the populist blueprint laid out by Irving Kristol and his philosophical forebears. In the final paragraph of her book Leo Strauss and the American Right, published in 1997, Shadia Drury offers a description of the neoconservative movement birthed by Strauss that doubles, virtually unaltered, as a prescient summa­tion of Trumpism:

It echoes all the dominant features of his philosophy—the political importance of religion, the necessity of nationalism, the language of nihilism, the sense of crisis, the friend/foe ment­ality, the hostility toward women, the rejection of modernity, the nostalgia for the past, and the abhorrence of liberalism. And having established itself as the dominant ideology of the Repub li ­ can Party, it threatens to remake America in its own image. a

IN EARLY DECEMBER, Mike Pence took the stage in the Presidential Ballroom at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. “We did it,” the incoming vice president told the cheering crowd. Donald Trump, he said, had secured a mandate. “It was a victory,” Pence insisted, “that was born of ideas.”

That may seem far­fetched, given that Trump’s worldview relies more on bravado than briefing books. But in fact, the new administration is pur­suing a right­wing agenda that rests squarely on a long tradition of conservative ideas: repealing Obamacare, rolling back government regulations, tightening immigration laws, tilting the Supreme Court to the right. And no group is more responsible for helping to craft Trump’s agenda than the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that hosted

the party where Pence delivered his remarks. “I’m trying not to be too giddy,” Jim DeMint, the foun­dation’s president, confessed that night.

The Heritage­Trump alliance is one of the more improbable developments in an election season that was full of them. A year ago, Heritage’s political arm dismissed Trump as a distraction, with no track record of allegiance to conservative causes. Today the group’s fingerprints are on virtually every policy Trump advocates, from his economic agenda to his Supreme Court nominees. According to Politico, Heritage employees acted as a “shadow transition team,” vetting potential Trump staffers to make sure the administration is well stocked with conservative appointees. At a Heritage event shortly after the election, John Yoo, author of the notorious Bush­era

RIGHT IDEAS

Trump’s Think TankAfter years of being on the outs with conservatives, the Heritage Foundation is back on top.

BY ALEX SHEPHARD

HERITAGE’S INFLUENCEElaine Chao, Transportation Former Heritage fellow

Betsy DeVos, Education Heritage donor

Andrew Puzder, Labor Heritage donor

Edwin Feulner, policy adviser Heritage founder

MARCH 2017 | 11

memos authorizing torture, trotted out a series of one-liners about the foundation’s influence. “I’m surprised there are so many people here, because I thought everyone at Heritage was working over at transition headquarters,” Yoo joked. “I asked the taxicab driver to take me to Trump transition head-quarters, and he dropped me off here instead.”

The partnership between Trump and the Heritage Foundation represents a return to prominence for the conservative think tank. For decades, Heritage was the preeminent policy shop in Washington. Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner, two Republicans who were tired of organizations that refused to get their hands dirty by meddling in pol-itics, it pioneered a new approach, one specifically oriented around right-wing advocacy rather than nonpartisan research. The agenda-shaping worked. “Of a sudden,” the Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed in 1980, “the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

To a large extent, those ideas came directly from the Heritage Foundation. In January 1981, it released Mandate for Leadership, a book-length compendium of more than 2,000 policy recommendations cover-ing nearly every aspect of the federal government. Ronald Reagan famously passed out copies at his first Cabinet meeting, and 60 percent of the Mandate’s ideas—from tax policy to missile defense—were adopted in the first year of his administration alone. Reagan himself later credited Heritage for the suc-cess of his presidency, and Heritage followed up on Mandate with two sequels that helped script foreign policy under George H.W. Bush, the Contract with America under Newt Gingrich, and welfare reform under Bill Clinton.

Under George W. Bush, Heritage’s influence be-gan to wane. Unlike his father, the younger Bush favored the neoconservative ideas of the Project for the New American Century and the American Enter-prise Institute. Although a few ex-Heritage staffers went to work for Bush—most notably incoming Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao—the founda-tion excoriated some Bush policies as insufficiently conservative. Tom DeLay famously banned Heritage from reserving rooms in the Capitol, for example, after it opposed Bush’s expansion of Medicare.

With the election of Barack Obama, however, Heritage came roaring back. It sprang into action as a prominent supporter of the Tea Party, paying for demonstrations and staging town hall outbursts that fostered an intense anti-Obama mood among Republicans. In 2010 it created Heritage Action, a nonprofit entity that could engage in more explic-it political work, and in 2012 it hired DeMint, the fierce Tea Party congressman from South Carolina,

as the foundation’s president. The operation became so pro–Tea Party, in fact, that many establishment Republicans began to complain about its lack of loyalty to the conservative orthodoxy. “They’re de-stroying the reputation and credibility of the Heritage Foundation,” declared Mickey Edwards, a former congressman who served as a founding trustee of the think tank. Senator Orrin Hatch went even further. “Right now, I think it’s in danger of losing its clout and its power,” he told Meet the Press. “There’s a real

question in the minds of many Republicans now: Is Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn’t amount to anything any more?”

As it turns out, such conflicts with the GOP estab lishment helped position Heritage to serve as a much-needed bridge between Trump and con-servatives. Although the group initially opposed Trump, DeMint quietly reached out to the candi-date last year, offering his group’s assistance. Last spring, the foundation aided Trump with his list of potential Supreme Court nominees that helped him dampen conservative dissent and begin the long process of winning over Republicans of all stripes. Another major turning point came in July, when

Under Obama, Heritage came roaring back as a prominent supporter of the Tea Party—a move that positioned it well for its alliance with Trump.

Trump picked Pence, a longtime friend of Heritage and DeMint, to be his running mate. “The campaign and the transition knows that many of these issues that Donald Trump ran on—repealing Obamacare, securing the borders and preventing amnesty, and draining the swamp—those are things Heritage has been building support for for years,” DeMint said in December.

Now, two decades after it fell from conservative grace, Heritage has regained its standing in the White House. Over the next four years, the think tank will play a key role in steering domestic policy, particular-ly in government departments where Trump plans to

give “long leashes” to his secretaries—some of whom, like education nominee Betsy DeVos, have contrib-uted millions of dollars to the Heritage Foundation. In pushing for government deregulation and lower taxes for the rich, the think tank will be wielding its newfound influence on behalf of its donors, who rank among America’s wealthiest citizens. “Victory goes to those who are prepared,” DeMint boasted in December. “Heritage is not looking for attention or credit, but what we do want to do—on behalf of our supporters—is reinvigorate our country with good policy ideas. It turned out to be a very good match with what Donald Trump wanted to do.” a

12 | NEW REPUBLIC

WHEN I WAS a teenager, I learned the jewelry business from the most gifted swindler I would ever know. This was in Dallas-Fort Worth in 1983, when Texas was drunk on the high price of oil. Precious metals had been booming; the Hunt Brothers were trying to corner the silver market; and I—16 years old and freshly expelled from high school—was working the buy counter at a jewelry store, the Fort Worth Gold & Silver Exchange. We had lines around the corner when we opened the

doors in the morning. People took a number, just like at a deli, to wait for a salesperson. My old boss, Ronnie Cooper —who eventually did five years in federal prison for mail fraud—ran full-page ads in Texas Monthly announcing fine jewelry routinely 50–80% below retail! “Anything to pack the store,” he told me. His idea was to create a feeding frenzy, to use the crowd to convince each new customer that he or she shouldn’t wait to buy or what they wanted would be gone.

In the literature on fraud, this is called “social proof,” a crucial aspect of lowering the mark’s skepti-cism about “buying in” to a con. The second setup is what’s known as the “representativeness” heuristic: If a store looks like a place where the best people shop, buyers will assume it is trustworthy. Ron-nie’s store had walnut-paneled walls and a Baccarat chandelier. When you walked through the brass and lead-paned front doors, the first thing you saw was a Louis XV table next to an enormous chair made of bull horns. When Ronnie came down from his upstairs office in his three-piece suit and Hermès tie, he bestowed prosperity upon us all.

Donald Trump has fashioned his worldview by the representativeness heuristic. The same year I began working the jewelry counter, Trump opened Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets. The skyscraper was widely expected to be not unlike its owner, pompous and shoddy. There had been squabbles about the height of the building—Trump advertised it as ten stories taller than it was, due to a lavish public atrium on the ground floor. “It has not been difficult to presume that the Trump Tower would be silly, pretentious, and not a little vulgar,” wrote Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The New York Times. “After all, what New York building has been surrounded by so much hoopla?”

But upon its unveiling, even Goldberger was impressed: “What is truly remarkable about this

FLIMFLAM MAN

The Art of the ConWhat Trump shares with America’s best swindlers.

BY CLANCY MARTIN

Trump is a gifted huckster. Yes, every gaudy surface is unbelievably tacky—but it’s also somehow both irresistible and convincing.

up front

MARCH 2017 | 13

ALL THAT GLITTERSHow architecture critics greeted Trump’s properties:

Trump International Hotel & Tower

”A 1950s International Style glass skyscraper in a 1980s gold lamé party dress.”

Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue A “pink marble maelstrom” of “pricey superglitz.”

Trump World Tower at the United Nations

“Aggression and desire, violence and sex …undeniably the most primal building New York has seen in quite a while.”

six-story atrium is the Breccia Perniche marble that covers its walls and floors, a rich, lush Italian marble with an absolutely exquisite color that is best de-scribed as a mixture of rose and peach and orange. It is not like any stone that has been used in such quantity anywhere else in New York, and it gives off a glow of happy, if self-satisfied, affluence.”

Trump replicated the con on the campaign trail. Anyone who walked into a Trump rally—and likely every public event he will hold as president—was confronted with a fold-out table covered in Trump steaks, bottles of Trump vodka, cases of Trump wine, and still-wrapped Trump water, a cornucopia of meat and booze worthy of a Dutch still life. Yes, it’s all unbelievably tacky—but it’s also somehow both irresistible and convincing. There is at the heart of every gaudy surface an isolated shimmer of some-thing beautiful: the glint of a diamond, the clink of a wineglass, the hue of a marble surface. This is a part of the draw of a fraud, the self-satisfied affluence that holds up amid so much hoopla.

There are few fraudsters who aren’t worthy of American admiration in some sense of the word, Ed-ward J. Balleisen reminds us in his new book, Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff. Career grifters like P.T. Barnum, Charles Ponzi, and Bernie Madoff are heroes so long as they are in the game; we only turn on them when they become goats. After all, the American Revolution was won by clev-erness, with a dependence on spycraft, smuggling, and guerrilla warfare. The least extraordinary thing about the early republic was its ambivalence toward fraud, and the most extraordinary thing about our current, late republic is that this ambivalence still

widely holds. “Corruption, embezzlement, fraud. These are all characteristics which exist everywhere,” said Alan Greenspan in 2007 on the radio program Democracy Now! “What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum.”

Despite nearly a century of government regu-lation, we are still living in a world in which caveat emptor remains the rule of law, one that takes a certain pride in its American past. The lesson of Bal-leisen’s study is that when we trust businesspeople to be honest, and when we trust the market to regulate itself, the market, and the business person, will take advantage of our trust. Depending on whom you ask, this trust is either the cornerstone of American innovation or the crumbling foundation of a Con-stitution that does little to protect its citizens from economic inequality.

On January 11, the press attempted to ask the president-elect of the United States what he thought of his own new advantage—a role that fea tures, by constitutional design or default, a “no- conflict situation” for the commander-in-chief to engage in business interests with unprecedented insider trading. “It’s a nice thing to have,” Trump reminded the press, the public, and himself during the chaotic press conference. Trump, and most of America, had discovered this loophole only a few months before, a flaw in a system that was supposed to elevate a person with a certain level of human shame to serve a public that holds that shame accountable. Trump then kindly reminded the press that Vice President Pence might also enjoy this luxury, even though “I don’t think he’ll need it,” a sly dig at the underwhelming business hold-ings of the former governor of Indiana, a longtime public official and salary man with a net worth of under $1 million. But why wouldn’t he use it? In the Trump administration, as in the nearly 300-year history of our country, it would be un-American to not even try.

The most dangerous thing about Trump’s rise to the presidency is that the extraordinary web of lies he weaves will continue to be seen as its own kind of American success, impressive for those who can no longer distinguish the forest from the trees, the foyer from the marble. President Trump will be encouraged by a population that voted for him, often against their best interests, because economic mobility has always been a hustle—to leapfrog over seemingly impossible social obstacles requires a certain amount of luck, cleverness, and a cavalier willingness to lie. As inequality widens, so does admiration for the swindler, while playing the sys-tem has become synonymous with achieving the American dream. a

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP HAS an impressive track record as a conspiracy theorist. He claimed,

without evidence, that “millions” of people voted illegally for Hillary Clin-ton. He offered dark speculations about the deaths of Vince Foster and Antonin Scalia. He intimated that Ted Cruz’s father was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, citing the National Enquirer as his source. He sees sinister forces directing the flight of Syrian refugees and Mexican immigrants. He has praised talk-show host Alex Jones, a man whose elaborate demonology in-corporates everyone from the Bavarian Illuminati to Justin Bieber. Trump’s rise to power even began with a conspiracy theory: the accusation that Barack Obama hid the true circumstances of his birth.

We generally expect conspiracy theo-ries to take hold among the more excitable

elements of the political opposition. But Trump shows no sign of ceasing his con-spiracist commentary now that he’s presi-dent. He may even get some help from his inner circle, having spent the transition recruiting a long roster of conspiracy- minded figures to his administration. Mike Flynn, tapped to be national security advi-sor, believes that Islamist infiltrators are poised to subject America to sharia law. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, helped establish the Breitbart web site as the go-to wellspring for paranoid right-wing memes. Prospective HUD secretary Ben Carson blames “neo-Marxist” plotters for subverting the traditional heterosexual family, while Flynn deputy K.T. McFarland once accused Hillary Clinton of sending helicopters to spy on her home.

All this high-level fearmongering has prompted many in the media to suggest

that we’re entering an unprecedented era of presidential paranoia. Mother Jones dubbed Trump the “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,” declaring that he has “made the paranoid style of American politics go mainstream.”

But the paranoid style was already mainstream. The sorts of sinister stories that Trump favors have never been the exclusive preoccupation of marginalized political opponents. Indeed, there’s a long history of presidents and their inner cir-cles obsessing about malevolent cabals. What’s different about Trump isn’t the fact that he talks about dubious conspir-acies. It’s the way he talks about them.

OUR LEADERS’ FEAR OF CONSPIR-

acies predates the birth of the country. The Founding Fathers

declared independence in part because they believed that England’s effort to tight-en control over its colonies concealed a more malicious agenda. In the words of future president George Washington, there was “a regular Systematick Plan” to make the colonists “tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”

This mindset continued after the Founders came to power. While Wash-ington was in office, Vice President John Adams’s son fretted to his father that domestic subversives working with the French were planning the “removal of the President,” to “be followed by a plan for introducing into the American Consti-tution a Directory instead of a President.” (The Directory was France’s ruling com-mittee.) That son, John Quincy Adams, later became president himself—and spent the last decades of his life obsessed with the alleged evils of Freemasonry.

In more modern times, Lyndon John-son was convinced that the Communist bloc was behind the race riots of the 1960s. Richard Nixon once asked an aide to “get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Demo-crats.... Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?” When Bill Clinton was elected, he instructed an appointee “to find the answers to two questions for

body politic

BY JESSE WALKER

All the President’s PhantomsTrump isn’t the first conspiracy theorist in chief—just the most shameless.

ILLUSTRATION BY EDDIE GUY

MARCH 2017 | 15

me. One, Who killed JFK? And two, Are there UFOs?”

Conspiracy theories in the Oval Off- ice can be more than private opinions. They can shape policy. George W. Bush put a conspiracy theory at the center of his approach to global terrorism, declar-ing that Iran and Iraq—two of the Middle East’s most bitter and bloody rivals—were working together in an “axis of evil” to sponsor jihadist groups. During World War II, fears that Japanese-Americans were covertly aiding the enemy led Franklin Roosevelt to imprison more than 100,000 people in internment camps.

Conspiracy-fueled policies sometimes last far longer than the fears that fed them. Entire federal bureaucracies owe their reach and power to long-dead conspiracy panics. The FBI, for example, underwent its first big expansion in the 1910s because officials were eager to stop “white slav-ery” cabals that supposedly controlled the prostitution trade. The bureau got further boosts in its resources and authority from the fears of communist conspiracies that erupted after World War I, from anxiety about fascist plots in the late 1930s and early ’40s, and from the return of the Red Scare after World War II. Throughout his long career atop the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover invoked conspiracies, both real and imag-ined, to build a bureaucratic empire. The ever-present threat of those cabals served, in the logic of the die-hard plot-spotter, as a sturdy justification for Hoover’s own conspiratorial behavior.

In short, conspiracy theories haven’t just coexisted with executive power. They have served as a rationale for both the ap-plication and the expansion of executive power. As many presidents before Trump have understood, few things mobilize popular opinion or a recalcitrant Con-gress more than fear itself.

SOME OF THE INCOMING ADMINIS-

tration’s anxieties fit easily into the tradition of White House paranoia.

Mike Flynn’s anti-Islamic theories, for example, could slot snugly into the ex-ecutive branch’s history of social scape-goating. (Just ask the survivors of FDR’s camps.) It’s not hard to imagine a host of areas where Trump’s conspiracy chatter

could be intertwined with policy- making. The man who once cracked that the “con-cept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive” isn’t likely, for instance, to lead a push for new carbon regulations.

Yet Trump seems poised to transform presidential paranoia into something new, thanks to two of his most distin-guishing qualities: his shamelessness and his cynicism.

Conspiracy theories tend to be disrep-utable. Indeed, in most circles of respect-able opinion, the very phrase conspiracy theory is used as a pejorative. So when high-level officials embrace a position considered to be taboo, they often prefer not to talk about it. John Kerry has long rejected the official story about JFK’s assassination, but when Meet the Press brought up the subject in 2013, the sec-retary of state clammed up. “I just have a point of view,” Kerry demurred. “And I’m not going to get into that.”

Our new president, to the delight of his supporters, presents himself as a man unshackled by such mores of polite society. Richard Nixon may have been prone to seeing plots everywhere, but it’s

hard to imagine him publicly promoting a transparently phony theory tying Rafael Cruz to Lee Harvey Oswald; it’s harder still to picture him backing up his claims by citing the National Enquirer. For Trump, neither the story nor the source is some-thing to be ashamed of.

There’s a strong chance, of course, that Trump doesn’t actually believe the Enquirer story, and that he only brought it up because Ted Cruz happened to be his chief political foe that day. That’s where his cynicism comes in. Trump doesn’t just spout unsubstantiated accusations; he often drops them as quickly as he brings them up, as though it never really mat-tered if they were true. When he finally gave up on the birther BS that launched

his political rise, he congratulated himself for having “finished” the controversy, without acknowledging that he’d argu-ably done more than anyone to fan it in the first place.

While he was fanning the birther f lames, Trump claimed to have dis-patched private investigators to Hawaii to dig into Obama’s origins. His detec-tives, he declared, “cannot believe what they’re finding.” And then he dropped the subject, refusing to discuss it when prodded. The content was beside the point. Ever the showman, Trump un-derstands that making an accusation and holding out the promise of more to come can be more important than ac-tually delivering on the promise. That’s what happens when shamelessness and cynicism combine.

They combined again at the weirdest moment in last year’s final presidential debate. When Hillary Clinton claimed that Trump would be Russia’s “puppet,” Trump responded with a blast of absurdity: “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the pup pet!” It wasn’t clear who Clinton’s puppet-master was supposed to be. It’s unlikely that Trump even had a marionettist in mind: He just needed an accusation in the

moment, and he settled for I know you are but what am I? It sounded ridiculous, but only to someone with a sense of shame.

During the run-up to the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson justified his conspiracy theories about the English by insisting that he had detected a pattern in his opponents’ actions. An isolated act of oppression, he conceded, “may be as-cribed to the accidental opinion of a day.” But “a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalter-ably through every change of ministers,” was sufficient proof of “a deliberate and systematical plan.” Trump turns Jefferson on his head. Show him an enemy’s opinion of a day, and he’ll conjure up a conspiracy that explains it. a

A president’s conspiracy theories can be more than private opinions. They can shape public policy.

16 | NEW REPUBLIC

ON PAPER, AT LEAST, 2016 LOOKED

to be a banner year for feminism. As the GOP primary field suc-

cumbed to Donald Trump’s insurgency, Hillary Clinton’s march to the White House seemed all but inevitable. Dis-cussions about rape on college cam-puses, workplace harassment, pay dis-parity, and other feminist issues finally broke through to the mainstream. A-list celebrities began embracing the word feminism—a significant shift after decades when feminists were little more than pop-culture punch lines, derided for their humorlessness, earnestness, and ideo-logical single-mindedness. Seemingly overnight, feminism had become fash-ionable. Pop stars used the word to sell records, guys used it to get laid, models used it to push product, writers used it to advance their brand.

Like all fashions, it passed. And like all fashions, it turned out to be a frivolous, cosmetic change, completely divorced from the actual lived experience of most women. Instead of the first female president, we now have an accused sexual predator in the highest office in the land and a proud mi-sogynist homophobe as his deputy and de facto head of domestic policy. Even more startling, in a way, are the exit polls show-ing that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump—and that many of those same women consider themselves feminists.

How did we get to this point? How could a majority of white women choose Trump over the first woman to serve as the presidential standard-bearer for a major political party—and call themselves fem-inists while doing so?

Now that we appear poised to lose much of the ground women have gained

over the last 40 years, many feminists have taken a cue from Trump and gone on an aggrieved blaming binge of their own, chalking up the colossal political failures before us to the entrenched misogyny of America’s voters. But that, too, is a fashionable distraction. The fault here lies with mainstream feminism itself.

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL DECADES, the gap between mainstream feminists and the daily realities

of most American women has grown wid-er and deeper. Feminism, as our most prominent, mediagenic feminists prac-tice it, does little to address the struggles of poor women, rural women, working women—women, in short, who live out-side the sophisticated urban bubbles that mainstream feminists inhabit.

That gap was embarrassingly obvi-ous in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Performance artist and feminist commentator Amanda Palmer, for one, proclaimed that the Trump presidency would be really, really great for art-ists. “Having studied Weimar Germany extensively—I’m like, ‘This is our mo-ment!’ ” she exulted, right before an-nouncing that she was moving to Aus-tralia. Girls star and feminist pundit Lena Dunham hit the rock bottom of elite fem-inist cluelessness by cavalierly dismiss-ing the emotional and physical suffering of many women who have terminated unwanted pregnancies. “I still haven’t had an abortion,” Dunham said on her podcast, “but I wish I had.”

Feminist commentators like Lindy West, Jessica Valenti, and Sady Doyle of-fered up a nonstop litany of mass recrim-ination, insisting that Clinton lost solely because of our culture’s deep-seated rac-ism and misogyny. “Half of the country,” Rebecca Traister concluded in New York, “would prefer to return to the Founders’ original vision, with people of color and women on the margins and white men restored to their place at the center.” This line of argument conveniently overlooks the more than 29 million women who voted for Trump—women who felt they would be better served by a preening

battle lines

BY JESSA CRISPIN

Feminist FailIt wasn’t America’s rampant misogyny that doomed Hillary Clinton.

ILLUSTRATION BY LUBA LUKOVA

MARCH 2017 | 17

beauty-pageant purveyor than by the most accomplished female politician of her generation.

The root of the problem is that fem-inism has abandoned its core insight. Radical feminists traditionally believed that the patriarchy was inextricably in-tertwined with capitalism: that the entire structure of our society was based on the exploitation of the poor, women, and nonwhite races. The liberation of women entailed nothing less than the overthrow of old systems based on competition, greed, and power.

There is still a radical wing in femi-nism. Every day, activists and organizers are working to improve women’s access to family planning services, mounting nonprofit efforts to counteract the steady rollback of the welfare state, and com-bating the neoliberal policy consensus that consigns women—and men and children—to acute conditions of inequal-ity and precariousness. But all that slow, thankless work has been eclipsed by the more prominent voices of mainstream feminism.

To reclaim the truly radical spirit of American feminism, we should call mainstream feminists something more anodyne: “pro-woman.” The designation seems fitting, since mainstream feminists work to shore up the status quo, seeking equal access to the system of oppression. That explains why one of the buzzwords favored by pro-woman commentators is self-empowerment—a term that gained currency on the right in the 1980s to char-acterize the individual’s obligation to take responsibility for her position in life.

Like much of the policy rhetoric of the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, “em-powerment” provided a feel-good eva-sion of the consequences of a society-wide breakdown in solidarity—and an excuse for overlooking all the ways that the social order sets women and racial minorities up to fail. As the rest of the political main-stream shifted in concert with the callow bootstrap social mythologies of Reagan-ism, so, too, did feminism: Workplace issues like equal pay and parental leave took a backseat to enlightened self-care and success. Second-wave feminist icon Gloria Steinem signaled this political sea

change in her 1992 self-esteem tract Rev-olution from Within, and Oprah Winfrey expertly transmuted feminist political grievance into soft-focus nostrums of self-acceptance, using her own life story as a didactic case study in the miracles wrought by a gospel of female self-help. In 2010, when Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg launched the Lean In franchise, her individualist handbook of corporate success, with a viral TED talk, she was mainly offering C-suite variations on what was by then a generation’s worth

of self-healing feminist counsel aimed at getting ahead and staying there.

Under the sway of “self-empowerment,” feminist progress began to be measured accordingly: how many women serve as CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, or enjoy bylines at male-dominated magazines like The Atlantic, or gain admission to elite business schools. Much of mainstream feminist discourse likewise focuses on how best to empower yourself via money and work. The pro-woman power elite peers deeply into the savage inequalities of American life and asks, in essence, “Where’s my half of the profits?”

It was this single-minded pursuit that propelled Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer into the state of corporate abjection that she now cites as a feminist para-ble: While at Google, she recounts, she was so hell-bent on besting her male competitors that she took to sleeping under her desk. But once she became the boss, she put a stop to employees working from home—thus making it harder for working moms to balance employment and parenthood. Within this cloistered, corporatized worldview, there’s precious little attention paid to what power should be used for, once it’s won, or what values we want to see governing our world. Working in your own self-interest is mistaken for a polit-ical act, and accruing money and power becomes an unquestioned feminist goal.

HEREIN LIES A PARTIAL ANSWER

to the question of how Trump won a white female majority.

Rightly or wrongly, the women who voted for Trump decided that it was in their self-interest to do so. And under the current logic of mainstream feminism, a vote for Trump can easily be depicted as a feminist act. “I have the right and capability to make my own decisions, and live the life I choose for myself,” one female Trump supporter told The Guardian. “A feminist does not blindly do

what she is told—she thinks and makes her own choices.”

Well, of course—but this banal line of reasoning points to the very failures of the moral imagination that have locked main-stream feminism into its present privileged dead-end. When feminism can be used as a way to justify support for a candidate who boasts about groping women without their consent, and when broader female access to executive perches in Wall Street and Silicon Valley gets treated as some sort of movement-wide victory, then something clearly has gone wrong in our understand-ing of what feminism is and can do.

Society progresses reluctantly, only after a small group of the dedicated and the idealistic insist on it. Women won the right to vote in part because a handful of suffragists endured imprisonment and torture. During the heyday of second-wave feminism, while most women’s ambitions were confined to becoming wives and mothers, radical thinkers and reformers took up the fight against unequal pay and sexual harassment in the workplace and limits on abortions. Today we must continue that fight—not to place more women in the boardroom, but to construct ways of living and working that are mea-sured by something greater than money and success. After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, it may look like women lost because we dreamed too big. In fact, women lost be-cause we dreamed too small. a

The pro-woman power elite peers deeply into the savage inequalities of American life and asks, in essence, “Where’s my half of the profits?”

18 | NEW REPUBLIC

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He built a grassroots machine of two million supporters

eager to fight for change.

Then he let it die.

The untold story of

Obama’s biggest

mistake— and how it paved the way

for Trump.

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ON JULY 20, 2008, Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and a longtime denizen of Silicon Valley’s in-tellectual elite, dialed in to a conference call hosted

by Christopher Edley Jr., a senior policy adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Joining them on the line were some of the world’s top experts in crowdsourcing and online engagement, including Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, and Mitchell Baker, the chairman of Mozilla. Drawing on Kapor’s influence, Edley had invit-ed them to join a “Movement 2.0 Brainstorming Group.” Together, they would ponder a crucial question: how to “sustain the movement” should Obama, who was still a month away from accepting the Democratic nomination, go on to win the White House.

Edley had been a personal friend of Obama’s since his days teaching him at Harvard Law School. Their kinship had been underscored the previous summer, when Obama had invited Edley to the Chicago apartment of Valerie Jarrett, the candi-date’s closest confidant, to deliver a stern lecture to the sea-soned political operatives who were running his underdog bid for the presidency. The campaign team had Obama on a relentless pace of town halls and donor calls, and Hillary Clinton had been besting him in the early primary debates. Both Barack and Michelle Obama were unhappy. According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s account in Game Change, Edley urged Obama’s campaign managers to sched-ule fewer rallies and fund-raisers, and allow the candidate more time to think and develop innovative policy ideas.

The intervention, delivered with a full-blown harangue telling the troika managing the campaign—David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs—to “get over yourselves,” was deeply resented by the political professionals; in his memoir, Believer, Axelrod would later call Edley “system-atically antagonizing.” But Jarrett and Michelle Obama, who was also in the meeting, hung on Edley’s every word. “He’s channeling Barack,” Jarrett thought, according to Game Change. Jarrett told Axelrod she thought Edley’s fiery presentation had been “brilliant.”

Now, a year later, Edley had been moved over to Obama’s still-secret transition team, helping to map out policy and personnel on education, immigration, and health care. It was a better fit for Edley, a dapper and soft- spoken law professor with a salt-and-pepper beard, who had served in senior policy-making roles under Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. “Although I have worked in five presidential cam-paigns,” he told me recently, “I hate them because there is never enough emphasis on policy.” But Edley found himself newly motivated by a single big political idea, born in part from his past experience trying to win policy fights. What if Barack Obama could become not only the first black man elected president, but the first president in history to organize an enduring grassroots movement that could last beyond his years in office?

By that point in the race, there was every reason to think that Obama could build a lasting grassroots operation. His

political machine had already amassed more than 800,000 registered users on My.BarackObama, its innovative social net-working platform. “MyBO,” as it was known, gave supporters the ability—unthinkable in a traditional, top-down political campaign—to organize their own local groups, campaign events, and fund-raising efforts. Its potential for large-scale organizing after the election was vast—and completely without precedent in American politics. By Election Day, Obama’s campaign would have 13 million email addresses, three million donors, and two million active members of MyBO, including 70,000 people with their own fund-raising pages. This wasn’t just some passive list of campaign supporters, Edley realized—it was an army of foot soldiers, seasoned at rallying support for Obama’s vision of change.

“As the primary season wound down, it struck me that the campaign’s broad-based engagement via the internet could evolve into a powerful tool to shape progressive politics at the national, state, and local levels,” Edley recalls. “One goal would be to support an Obama presidency. But the agenda would be far broader.”

After discussing his idea with his wife, Maria Echaveste, who had served as White House deputy chief of staff under Bill Clinton, Edley turned to his friend Kapor, a digital pioneer and progressive activist who was widely seen as a folk hero of the computer revolution. “I knew that Mitch would be an

indispensable partner to judge the merits of the general idea and help figure out some details,” Edley says. “I also realized, quite quickly, that Mitch had amazing contacts in that world whom we could enlist for the project.”

Opening the July brainstorming session, Edley framed the stakes sharply, according to notes he prepared for the meeting and a summary he wrote afterward. “On the morn-ing of November 5,” he told the assembled tech leaders, “imagine saying to millions of donors, new voters, volun-teers: ‘Thanks for everything; so long.’” Instead, he urged, “Imagine a way to transfer/transmute all of that involvement into a new mechanism or set of instrumentalities through which people can feel a heightened and more powerful kind of civic engagement with each other and with Obama and other leaders. And vice versa.”

Edley echoed what many progressives were beginning to believe was possible with a President Obama: “There is a rare opportunity to have a citizen movement heading in the same

The idea was audacious: What if Obama could become not only the first black president, but the first president to organize an enduring grassroots movement?

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progressive direction as an incumbent president.” According to his notes, the Silicon Valley luminaries on the call agreed. “Most felt it would be an unacceptable loss not to take advan-tage of the rare alignment of an incumbent President with a progressive agenda, and an online constituency of donors and supporters who can press for change against the inevitable upsurge of entrenched special interests which will resist it.”

As we now know, that grand vision for a postcampaign movement never came to fruition. Instead of mobilizing his unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his cam-paign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National Committee. It was the seminal mistake of his presidency—one that set the tone for the next eight years of dashed hopes, and helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed.

“We lost this election eight years ago,” concludes Michael Slaby, the campaign’s chief technology officer. “Our party be-came a national movement focused on general elections, and we lost touch with nonurban, noncoastal communities. There is a straight line between our failure to address the culture and systemic failures of Washington and this election result.”

The question of why—why the president and his team failed to activate the most powerful political weapon in their arsenal—has long been one of the great mysteries of the Obama era. Now, thanks to previously unpublished emails and memos obtained by the new republic—some from the John Podesta archive released by WikiLeaks, and others made available by Obama insiders—it’s possible for the first time to see the full contours of why Movement 2.0 failed, and what could have been.

IN THE MIDST of the 2008 cam-paign, the idea for Movement 2.0 seemed both obvious and inevita-

ble. Obama himself recognized that he was sitting atop an organizing juggernaut. Speaking to hundreds of his core staffers in June, Obama praised them for building a campaign machine that had just taken down Hillary Clinton. “Collectively, all of you—most of whom are I’m not even sure of drinking age—you’ve creat-ed the best political organization in America, and probably the best po-litical organization that we’ve seen in the last 30 to 40 years,” Obama told them. “That’s a pretty big deal.”

Movement 2.0 gathered steam quickly. In the wake of the initial brain storming call, Edley connected Mitch Kapor with law professor Mark Alexander, a senior Obama adviser, and gave them the job of chairing the project. Kapor was excited. “Mark

and I are exchanging email brain dump to try to surface big question and big priorities overall, speaking by phone, and meeting all day next Tuesday in New Jersey to do Vulcan mind meld,” he emailed two colleagues. “Already Mark and I have shared vision it’s huge, and will go far beyond normal January end of transition.”

Kapor and Alexander dived into the task. They spoke with Bob Bauer, the campaign’s legal counsel, about how to structure a new organization after November. They had several meetings with the architects of Obama’s online operation, including Slaby, the chief technology officer; his boss, Joe Rospars, the new media director; and Chris Hughes, the online organizing director. They dug into the details of how the campaign had built and managed its online network, and sketched out a way to transition it forward.

With barely three months left until Election Day, Kapor—a veteran of many tech startups—knew that time was short for such an ambitious effort. “Coordination is going to be vital,” he emailed Edley on July 23, “and I know campaign time and attention is going to be very limited, so the sooner we can figure out what the ‘bridge’ is between campaign and tran-sition with respect to online community, and whether it’s a footpath or a highway, the better. I am worried that as each day goes by without knowing anything about what we on the transition side might be building and how it does or does not connect, the deadline pressure to actually deliver on time gets worse and worse.”

A few weeks later, on August 18, Edley sent a progress report to John Podesta and the other two co-chairs of Obama’s tran-sition board, Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse. “Campaign folks are joined at the hip with this effort (Rospars, Slaby, others),”

Obama joins volunteers in Brighton, Colorado, a week before Election Day in 2008. He had built an unprecedented army of foot soldiers, but the future of his campaign machine was still uncertain.

22 | NEW REPUBLIC

Edley assured them. “The technical discussions about the software platform, etc., are moving quite well.” While he acknowledged that “the Senator” would ultimately have to sign off on the plan, Edley—confident that he was still channeling his old friend’s wishes—said he didn’t “see any particular hurry about it.” The candidate, he understood, had a few other things on his mind.

Edley attached the initial concept document for Move-ment 2.0. It outlined an audacious vision: to create “a new ‘home place’ for Obama supporters” that would be ready to go, the day after the election. The new entity would be closely aligned with Obama but independent of the party and his re-election campaign. “Think of it for now as AFO (Americans for Obama),” the memo declared, envisioning it as the “principal means for continuing the active partic-ipation of people in the Movement.” AFO would not simply whip up support for Obama’s legislative agenda—it would “gather the input to help shape it.” It would “be a place where Obama supporters can come together, affiliate and organize for change using cutting-edge online tools that will create and support a new and deeper form of civic engagement.”

Critically, the Movement 2.0 team envisioned AFO as a tax-exempt organization that would operate free of the Democratic National Committee. “Mitch and I argued that to make the movement ‘authentic’ and entrepreneurial,” Edley says, “it would have to be built outside of the DNC—which has institutional commitments and incumbent allegiances that will always be a fact of party life.” The team concluded by asking for permission to raise $250,000 to set up a staff

infrastructure and develop the web site. The founding board would include Edley, Kapor, Alexander, and Podesta.

Podesta decided to circulate the concept document to higher-ups in the campaign. He asked Pete Rouse, Obama’s Senate chief of staff and key political consigliere, to forward the memo to Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, partners in a political consulting firm who had risen to positions at the top of Obama’s organization. Hildebrand was the deputy national campaign manager, and Tewes, after directing Obama’s Iowa campaign, was now running the DNC on the candidate’s behalf. Podesta had a simple question for them about Edley’s plan: He wanted to “see if they care whether this goes forward to a planning stage.”

That was the moment when Movement 2.0 began to stall.

THE PROPOSAL HAD started with the campaign’s tech-nology team and true believers, but now it had landed in front of two consummate Washington insiders. Hil-

debrand came to like the idea; creating a movement free from the DNC, he believed, would put more pressure on Congress to implement Obama’s agenda. But where others had seen great possibility, Tewes saw potential disaster. Four days later, he wrote to Rouse and his colleague Hildebrand:

As both of you know, I have many concerns about this..... as a lover of “Party” I really don’t like this.

I think the decision needs to be made and discussed on “this vs. party” or “this and party.” The discussion should focus on—What is best for Barack Obama, his politics, his agenda and his future.

If the first step is to move outside the party with your orga-nization, the political ramifications and “future” ramifications need to be thought through. Further, a discussion should be had of party over this—why and why not?

Marching into this seems premature and secondly creating something before hand (before e-day) has appearance prob-lems in my opinion.

I would ask that we postpone any of this till after the con-vention and do a little gathering where we can discuss. Please.

Rouse forwarded Tewes’s response back to Podesta. Podesta, in turn, sent it along to Edley with a pithy comment: “Let’s discuss Monday. Obviously some heartburn with the political crowd.”

There was plenty in Movement 2.0 to inspire heartburn in that crowd. In Silicon Valley terms, Obama 2008 had “disrupted” presidential campaigns, demonstrating how an underdog can-didate could defeat a more experienced opponent by changing the terms of the game and empowering millions of people in the process. Now, it seemed, the Obamaites and their tech wizards wanted to disrupt the Democratic Party, diverting money and control from the DNC into an untried platform, while inviting “input,” and possibly even organized dissent, from Obama’s base. Earlier that summer, activists unhappy with Obama’s flip-flop on warrantless surveillance had used MyBO to build a group of more than 20,000 vocal supporters, earning national press and compelling a response from the candidate. What if Obama’s base didn’t like the health care reform he came up with, and rallied independently around a single-payer plan? Besides, grassroots movements, no matter how successful, don’t reliably yield what political consultants want most: money and victories for their candidates, with plenty of spoils for themselves. For insiders like Tewes, Movement 2.0 was a step too far.

Edley knew that Tewes’s blowback spelled trouble. On Au-gust 24, the day before Obama’s triumphal convention began in Denver, he emailed Podesta to express hope that it was just a “misunderstanding.” He asked Podesta to keep the issue off the agenda of the transition board’s next meeting until they figured out what to do. Podesta agreed. “I think we should [n]ot raise at all tomorrow,” he told Edley, “and come up with seperate [sic] plan on how to proceed.”

In Silicon Valley terms, Obama had “disrupted” presidential campaigns; now, it seemed, his true believers wanted to disrupt the Democratic Party.

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Looking back, Edley says now, Podesta made a tactical error by sharing the plan with party regulars like Tewes and Hildebrand before it had garnered more high-level support in the campaign. “John should’ve realized that of course the DNC would have competitive objections,” he says. “Our proposal would’ve created, at least in our dreams, yet another set of po-litical forces and policy energy. At the time, I just didn’t realize the powerful pull that the architects of the Obama ‘movement’ would feel away from movement building and toward paranoid possession of the conventional trappings of political power. If you’re not really that committed, as a matter of principle, to a bottom-up theory of change, then you will find it nonsensical to cede some control in order to gain more power.”

IT WOULD BE five long weeks later, on October 2—just a month before Election Day—before any reference to Move-ment 2.0 would surface again in Podesta’s emails. By that

time, radical revisions had been made to appease the “politi-cal crowd.” Chris Lu, the transition team’s executive director, circulated a revised concept memo to Podesta and its board,

in preparation for an all-day meeting. It was a far cry from Edley’s original call for a “citizen movement.” Instead, the memo explained, “we recommend a new, integrated approach to the Movement 2.0 work, in complete coordination with the ongoing efforts of the DNC, to plan for the continued growth and devel-opment of the online-offline community in support of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, our candidates and issues.”

Gone was the idea of a new organization, independent of the DNC. “A key working assumption,” the memo stated, “is that we should affirmatively empower Barack Obama as the head of the Party, and in the process strengthen both him and the Party. All Obama politics should be filtered through the DNC, and all Party politics”—including existing organizations that support candidates

for Congress and statehouses—“should be filtered through the DNC. This all serves the agenda of one person, Barack Obama.”

The original backers of Movement 2.0 had been sidelined. “I had nothing to do” with the new memo, Edley says. “I guess they liked our name for it, but chose to pervert the idea to something quite conventional and, forgive me, trivial. To me, real movement building had to be about defining and advanc-ing progressivism, not a communication strategy from the West Wing basement costumed as faux movement. The kind of movement we wanted would have helped Obama a great deal, without making it all about him. After all, even Obama’s campaign wasn’t only about him or his policy platform.”

Edley and his cohorts weren’t finished yet. The idea of keeping Obama’s online loyalists involved and active had not entirely died; the new memo called for moving quick-ly to enable the campaign to keep engaging its grassroots supporters after the election. “Steps should be taken now to ensure this possibility does not evaporate, leaving no vehicle for community in the short-term,” the memo read. But there was no proposed budget for that to happen—just a call for the

formation of a new working group for Movement 2.0, to pull all the stakeholders together. That group never materialized.

The revised memo was not the only post-election plan being considered. Julius Gena-chowski, co-chief of the transition team’s “Tech-nology, Innovation, and Government Reform” group, wanted to launch a White House web site aimed at engaging the public in policy discussions. The tigr group was a powerhouse of wonks, many of whom were headed into top positions in govern-ment, and its planning memo ran to 12,500 words, compared to just 1,500 for the revised Movement 2.0 proposal. The result—in the middle of a heated campaign and a global economic meltdown—was widespread confusion about what would happen to Obama’s campaign machine after Election Day.

On October 10, Edley told Kapor and Alexan-der by email that Pete Rouse had “agreed to try to arbitrate all of this.” But five days later, Edley reported that he was getting nowhere. “I am frus-trated beyond words on this. Will work it hard

today. I think since the campaign team has rigged something for the transition period they just keep back-burnering the longer run issue.” A day later, Kapor reported back that Rouse was “too busy (w/ debate prep and all) to deal with M2.0.… I think fundamentally it’s not going to be a priority until after the election.”

Ultimately, the transition team agreed on only one project: build a simple postelection site, to be called Change.gov, as a place where people could learn more about the transition’s plans and job-seekers could submit their résumés. In the end, there would be no “footpath” or “highway,” as Mitch Kapor had envisioned, for transitioning Obama’s two million supporters on MyBO into a new platform. There wasn’t even a rope bridge.

Obama huddles with his inner circle, days before his big win in Iowa. Some, like political consultant Paul Tewes (right), opposed the plan to launch a grassroots movement.

24 | NEW REPUBLIC

But Kapor didn’t give up. In late October, he spoke to Jim Messina, chief of staff to campaign manager David Plouffe, and came away convinced that both Plouffe and Rouse now backed the original vision for the movement. “Importantly, Messina said Plouffe is not only on board but wants his sole responsibility after the election to be getting M2.0 going,” Kapor emailed Edley and Alexander on October 23. Even if it was too late to build on the momentum from Election Day, there was still a chance that Movement 2.0 would take wing.

ON NOVEMBER 5, the day after Obama’s victory, his headquarters in Chicago was deluged with phone calls and emails from supporters asking for guid-

ance on how to keep going. Exactly as Edley had feared, no answers were forthcoming—not even about whether the tens of thousands of volunteers who had built personal fund-raising groups on MyBO would be able to continue them. “We’re all fired up now, and twiddling our thumbs!” wrote one frustrated volunteer from Pennsylvania. “ALL the leader volunteers are getting bombarded by calls from volunteers essentially asking: Nowwhatnowwhatnowwhat?”

It wasn’t until three days after the election that Chris Hughes, the campaign’s director of online organizing, put up a post on his personal MyBO page. “The site isn’t going anywhere,” he promised supporters. “The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on. Barack Obama supporters

will continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact.” As a stopgap, that was reassuring to grassroots organizers who had used the site to build strong local networks. But it wasn’t a plan. There was no plan.

One person, however, seemed to understand that such half-measures wouldn’t be enough: the president-elect. The same day Hughes posted his message, Obama reached out to David Plouffe. Unlike other top operatives from the campaign, the campaign manager had decided not to fol-low Obama into the White House, but to take time off to be with his family before returning to political consulting. His daughter was born in the early hours of November 7, and Obama called him that morning.

“I know you’re disappearing for a while to change diapers and play Mr. Dad,” Obama told Plouffe, “but just make sure you find time to help figure out how to keep our supporters involved. I don’t think we can succeed without them. We need to make sure they’re pushing from the grassroots on Washington and helping to spread what we’re trying to

do in their local communities. And at the very least, we have to give them the opportunity to stay involved and in touch. They gave their heart and soul to us. This shouldn’t feel like a transactional relationship, because that’s not what it was. I want them along for the ride the next eight years, helping us deliver on all we talked about in the campaign.”

Three days later, Kapor emailed Edley and Alexander, frus-trated that no progress was being made. “What is needed now,” he wrote, “is for the President-elect and his designees to decide how to move forward with Movement 2.0.” Would the group be independent or part of the DNC? Who would run it? How would it interact with the White House? “I don’t see how anything can happen until the project is given a green light and the basic issue of structure and leadership is settled by those with the power to do so,” Kapor concluded. “In other words, someone please just make a decision.”

Plouffe led Obama’s supporters to believe that the decision was in their hands. On November 19, he emailed a survey to everyone on the campaign’s list. “You’ve built an organization in your community and across the country that will continue to work for change,” Plouffe told them, “whether it’s by build-ing grassroots support for legislation, backing state and local candidates, or sharing organizing techniques to effect change in your neighborhood. Your hard work built this movement. Now it’s up to you to decide how we move forward.”

Obama’s army was eager to be put to work. Of the 550,000 people who responded to the survey, 86 percent said they want-ed to help Obama pass legislation through grassroots support; 68 percent wanted to help elect state and local candidates who shared his vision. Most impressive of all, more than 50,000 said they personally wanted to run for elected office.

But they never got that chance. In late December, Plouffe and a small group of senior staffers finally made the call, which was endorsed by Obama. The entire campaign machine, renamed Organizing for America, would be folded into the DNC, where it would operate as a fully controlled subsidiary of the Democratic Party. Plouffe stayed on as senior adviser, and put trusted field organizers Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird in charge of the new group. Bird says the OFA team was never even told about the idea for Movement 2.0. “None of these documents were even shared with us,” he says. “I’m not sure the senior staff on the campaign even knew they existed.”

Obama unveiled OFA a week before his inauguration. “Volunteers, grassroots leaders, and ordinary citizens will continue to drive the organization,” he promised. But that’s not what happened. Shunted into the DNC, MyBO’s tools for self-organizing were dismantled within a year. Instead of calling on supporters to launch a voter registration drive or build a network of small donors or back state and local candidates, OFA deployed the campaign’s vast email list to hawk coffee mugs and generate thank-you notes to Democratic members of Con-gress who backed Obama’s initiatives. As a result, when the political going got rough, much of Obama’s once-mighty army was awol. When the fight over Obama’s health care plan was at its peak, OFA was able to drum up only 300,000 phone calls

The grassroots discontent that Obama had harnessed so skillfully in 2008 would soon belong to the right.

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to Congress. After the midterm debacle in 2010, when Democrats suffered their biggest losses since the Great Depression, Obama essentially had to build a new campaign machine from scratch in time for his reelection effort in 2012. (Plouffe and Messina declined requests to speak about Movement 2.0; Axelrod, Po-desta, and Rouse said they had no comment.)

Republicans, on the other hand, wasted no time in building a grassroots machine of their own—one that proved capable of blocking Obama at almost every turn. Within weeks of his inauguration, conservative activists began calling for local “tea parties” to oppose the president’s plan to help foreclosed homeowners. FreedomWorks, an antitax group led by former

Representative Dick Armey, and Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch brothers, quietly coordinated hundreds of nationwide demonstra-tions designed to look like a spontaneous popu-list uprising. When members of Congress went home for the summer to hold town hall meetings with their constituents, they were confronted by well-organized and disruptive protests over health care reform. The grassroots discontent that Obama had harnessed so skillfully in 2008 now belonged to the right.

“Killing OFA reduced the possibility of com-peting for the hearts, minds, and votes of the Tea Party disaffected,” says Lester Spence, associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. It also “killed the one entity possible for institutionalizing the raw energy created by the Obama campaign in 2008.”

Edley, for his part, still can’t get over the opportunity that was lost. He admits that he pro bably alienated Obama’s top campaign brass with his earlier intervention, but he doesn’t think that’s why his idea for Movement 2.0 died. Mostly, he believes, it was an issue of control. “Our pro-posal would have required that members of the political team who had just won the nomination be willing to cede control of the grassroots move-ment and turn it more in the direction of policy advocacy and progressive advocacy,” he says.

Even today, Edley doesn’t know if Obama was ever told of the idea, and he regrets not bypassing the campaign operatives and reaching out to him personally. “I was loath to go around them and try to reach Barack directly,” Edley says. “That is probably one of the biggest mistakes of my professional life, given the dismal disappoint- ment that OFA became.”

Ultimately, of course, the failure to keep the grassroots movement going rests with Obama. It was his original, and most costly, political mistake—not only a sin of omission, but a sin of imagination, one that helped decimate the Dem-ocratic Party at the state and local level and turn

over every branch of the federal government to the far right. In December, in an exit interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, Obama himself sounded haunted by it. “You know, when I came into office, we were just putting out fires,” he said. “We were in a huge crisis situation. And so a lot of the organizing work that we did during the campaign, we started to see right away wasn’t immediately transferable to congressional candi-dates. More work would have needed to be done to just build up that structure. And, you know, one of the big suggestions that I have for Democrats as I leave, and something that, you know, I have some ideas about is: How do we do more of that ground-up building?” a

THE DREAMERS

Christopher Edley Jr. Obama’s senior adviser and former law professor; came up with idea for a grassroots movement to build on the campaign.

Mitch KaporSilicon Valley legend who teamed up with Edley. Generated support from the tech world; fought for independence from DNC.

Mark AlexanderCampaign adviser tapped to co-chair project. His “Vulcan mind meld”with Kapor generated a “huge” vision for Movement 2.0.

THE INSIDERS

Valerie JarrettObama confidant who co-chaired transition team. Called Edley “brilliant,” but may not have shared his idea with Obama.

John PodestaTransition co-chair who seemed to support M2.0, but warned Edley that it caused “some heartburn from the political crowd.”

Pete RouseObama’s Senate chief of staff; after he forwarded an early draft of the idea to two D.C. insiders, it quickly ran into trouble.

THE CONSULTANTS

Steve HildebrandDeputy campaign chief and top D.C. consultant; argued that keeping M2.0 out of the DNC would put more heat on Congress.

Paul TewesPolitical consultant who ran the DNC for Obama. His reaction to the idea was swift and decisive: “I really don’t like this.”

David PlouffeTold by Obama to “keep our supporters involved,” the campaign manager bottled up the movement inside the DNC.

26 | NEW REPUBLIC

In late October 2011, I was volunteering at the Occupy Wall Street library in lower Manhattan. Tucked into a corner of Zuccotti Park, the library was staffed mainly by anarchists of an exceedingly orderly bent. If society were suddenly freed from coercive institutions like libraries, these people would gladly spend the morning sorting donated books by Dewey decimal number—as they were doing in the mild fall weather. I was there for only a few days, but one conversation with a book borrower has stayed with me. He was having trouble understanding why he kept returning to the encampment. He wondered: Had anything like this happened before? Were there books that could tell him who had done it, and why? I felt I was meeting a victim of a political shipwreck. In my mind, he became emblematic of a left that felt itself so unmoored from any shared past that it was puzzled by its own existence.

Now that Donald Trump occupies the White House, it’s easy to feel that we are all castaways in historical time. There is talk in some quarters of leaving the country, of turning blue cities and states into sanctuaries, not just for the undocu-mented, but for disillusioned liberals—a response that amounts to giving up on creating a just and inclusive democracy in this divided land. But such feelings of despair miss the deeper and perhaps more lasting political transformation that has taken place in the five years since Zuccotti Park. Indeed, the irruption of radicalism at Occupy turned out to be prophetic. For the first time in decades, the left regained its focus and put down new roots. Fight for $15, the campaign for a higher mini-mum wage led by fast-food workers, made gains in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle,

FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET TO BLACK LIVES MATTER, THE LEFT HAS BEEN REBORN. CAN IT FIND A WAY TO HARNESS THE POPULIST UPRISING THAT BROUGHT TRUMP TO POWER?

BY JEDEDIAH PURDY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEX NABAUM

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and San Francisco. Rolling Jubilee, found-ed in 2012, bought and canceled almost $32 million in medical and student debt. Black Lives Matter has forced America to reckon with police violence against black men and highlighted the economic isolation of many black communities. Last year, Bernie Sanders won more than 13 million votes. And recent polls show that a majority of Americans under the age of 30 now prefer socialism to capitalism. While it is unclear just what they mean by that, a renewed openness to radical ideas is unmistakable among young people. At the very moment when establishment pol-itics have been severely undermined—the GOP hijacked by Trump, the Democrats confounded by Hillary Clinton’s loss—the American left has been reborn.

For most of the 2016 election cycle, however, the left was told, implicitly or explicitly, that while they might be charming or admirable, they should leave real politics to the adults of the Demo-cratic National Committee and the liberal commentariat. There was one candidate, we were assured, and one web of institu-tions and experts who understood how to get things done: They were battle-tested and ready to win, then to hit the ground governing. The rest of us had pretty sen-timents; it was sweet that we thought the word democracy could refer to something larger in ambition and imagination than the current version of the Democratic Party; but politics means putting away childish things.

In the wake of Trump’s victory in No-vember, the present leadership of the Democratic Party has failed to grasp the lessons of its own defeat. “I don’t think people want a new direction,” Nancy Pe-losi insisted on Meet the Press just after the election. The DNC doubled down on that position in early January, announcing the creation of an anti-Trump “war room” staffed with Clinton operatives who will continue attacking Trump’s ethics, char-acter, and speculative ties to Russia. This is the same strategy that failed to win the presidential election against a palpably flawed and eminently beatable candidate.

Though fragmented and incipient, this nascent left is now best placed

to mount a convincing opposition to Trump, and to engage with the forces that brought him to power. With its fo-cus on economic inequality and collec-tive action, the left knows things that liberals have been reluctant to acknowl-edge, or in any event to say—knowledge that is necessary to embrace the populist moment, push back on its reactionary inclinations, and seize its progressive potential. The left is able to diagnose the malfunctioning of our democracy

because, unlike the Democratic estab-lishment, it starts from the premise that American democracy as it is currently constituted is profoundly insufficient.

The Sanders campaign recovered eclipsed ways of talking about politics and the economy, and began reinventing them; in resisting Trump, left ideas can help to make sense of our shared experi-ence, suggesting how life came to be as it is, and how it might be different. None of this guarantees political success, of course. But it does mean that, far from being dreamily irrelevant, the left must place itself firmly at the center of the fights ahead.

T ITS HEART, THE NEW POPULISM is a revival of themes that many well-intentioned liberals thought had been stamped out long ago,

at least in the world’s rich, culturally avant-garde countries: nationalism, bat-tles over international trade, the relation-ship between democracy and capitalism. The liberal elites of the Clinton-Obama years believed that history itself was over, and that they were charged with supervising the eternal present that fol-lowed. Whether they had read Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, or simply absorbed a version of his ideas through liberal think tanks and Thomas Friedman’s columns, it comes

to the same thing: They held that dem-ocratic capitalism, plus the defense of human rights, was the only theoretical framework left standing for making sense of human life.

This serene confidence left liberals in the United States and Europe totally un-prepared for the present wave of populist insurgencies by millions of people who, whatever their other grievances, do not feel secure or dignified in their economic lives. At home, populism currently en-compasses both the left-wing version of Bernie Sanders, with its calls for universal

health care and a regulatory crackdown on Wall Street, and Donald Trump’s blend of atmospheric anti-elitism and a large-ly right-wing economic agenda. Abroad, Marine le Pen’s ethno-nationalist populism is building in France, and Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism has swept India. We are living through a return of history.

Over the past year, two competing explanations for the populist wave have emerged. On the one hand, journalists like John Judis and Nate Cohn have traced political discontent to economic inequality and insecurity. In The Populist Explosion, Judis argues that Democrats in the United States and Europe’s social-democratic par-ties gave up the traditional working-class vote when they embraced free trade, failed to acknowledge class conflict, and with-drew from their traditional alliances with unions. By contrast, writing in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that Republicans won by mobilizing voters who rejected a black president. At Vox, Dylan Matthews reviewed polling data and concluded that the concerns of Trump supporters are “heavily about race.”

It is perfectly clear that both econom-ic inequality and racism fueled support for Trump. Only the left is equipped to explain how these two factors are entan-gled, by looking at the experience of life under capitalism. In this economy, most

A political party, as Trump and the Tea Party have both demonstrated, is well worth fighting to take over.

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people lack important forms of security and control over their lives. They answer to bosses, who answer to investors, who answer to global flows of goods and cap-ital. As Marx pointed out long ago, the system assigns the roles, and people fill them. An investor need not be a greedy person, nor a boss a bossy one; but if they do not maximize returns in the face of competition, they will be replaced by someone who will try harder, so they had better be prepared to act greedy, or bossy, or—in the case of the line worker—diligent and subservient.

When no one talks about how the system itself produces economic insecurity and a loss of control, scapegoating falls on the groups and individuals closest at hand. Immi-grants particularly get scapegoated because often they are willing to take low-paying jobs or lack legal authorization to work. When no one in politics talks about brutal economic realities—including a merciless and de-unionized labor market, the unfettered mobility of capital, and the investor-driven im-perative to squeeze every possible “efficiency” out of people—then your competitor for wages on the building site becomes the only economic rival you can actually see. Racism and xenophobia are not merely symptoms of economic anxiety, and are not to be morally or politically excused on account of hard times. But they are likely to be stronger and more politically effective when there appears to be no other way for people to address their sense of helplessness.

Liberals tend to ignore this analysis, and to personalize racism and xenopho-bia as moral failings, because they think the necessary preconditions for a decent cosmopolitanism are already in place: markets and multiculturalism. Conserva-tives from Edmund Burke to Ross Douthat have argued almost the opposite. They posit that people are basically tribal, and therefore all forms of cosmopolitanism, from liberal humanitarianism to social-ist solidarity, are utopian fantasies that will reliably fall apart in the harsh light of human nature.

The left presents an alternative view: We simply don’t know what kinds of sol-idarity people would be capable of if they felt control and security in their lives. Historically, xenophobia and racism have been inseparable from enslavement, imperialism, economic domination or competition, and fear of losing one’s place. At the same time, people have shown enormous flexibility and resil-ience when they encounter changing notions of national identity (a concept that hardly existed in present form a few centuries ago), religion (witness rising secularization and syncretism),

and gender identity (where our notion of “human nature” is turning out to be full of new expressions). There is no rea-son to assume, as conservatives tend to conclude, that what we already know marks a natural limit of human behavior or potential.

On the national stage, however, the left has not always made these ideas clear. The Sanders campaign lacked a political vocabulary for talking about the complex realities of capitalism. On the issue of trade, for example, Sanders roundly criti-cized liberal agreements such as nafta for

hollowing out American industry, but he often failed to follow this deeper economic logic to its conclusion. Restricting im-ports would not, by itself, bring back some twentieth-century idyll in which work-ers shared the fruits of robust economic growth. Yes, American industries might gain a greater portion of global expendi-ture. But that would merely increase prof-its at the top—so long as investors like Mitt Romney and bosses like Donald Trump can hold automation or mass firings over the heads of recalcitrant workers.

To understand how the U.S. econo-my is changing, you have to understand

not just trade but property law that gives workers no claim on the wealth they help to produce; labor law that makes firing easy and union organizing hard; and corporate law that helped Don-ald Trump stay rich while leav-ing indebted municipalities and investors in his wake. Turning these features of the market into political issues would help show economic life not as a natural-seeming struggle for survival, but as a legally constructed competi-tion as arbitrary as the rules of the Hunger Games.

The left needs to get better at talking about how the economy affects the way workers view them-selves and their political options—their sense of what they deserve and what is possible. The Rolling Jubilee gets at these themes by sug-gesting that debt is not necessarily a deep moral obligation, that there

is justice in eliminating it. Calls for a uni-versal basic income reflect the idea that people deserve some share of the world’s good things, some elementary security, just for showing up—that not everything has to be earned on the market or inher-ited from one’s parents. Likewise, in the Sanders campaign’s insistence on social entitlements as a right of citizenship, not a shameful badge of dependence, there was a glimpse of the older, social-democratic idea that the economy should produce not simply abstract efficiency, but security and dignified work.

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HE CURRENT RESURGENCE OF populism is linked to a crisis in the functioning of democracy it-self. Trump won the election by

scorning the political system and vandal-izing its norms. But he did not create the conditions for his chaotic campaign; he merely fed on them. In much- discussed recent work, political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa found that young people across Europe and the United States are increasingly skep-tical of democracy and sympathetic to strong-man rule, even military govern-ment. People may not be clear what they are rejecting when they say they don’t care about democracy, but the air of indifference and hostility is unmistakable.

In the months since the election, many have struggled to understand why voters behaved the way they did. Some centrist commentators have expressed misgivings about democracy itself, arguing that it becomes self- indulgent and de-structive unless responsible elites step forward to guide political pas-sions. Joseph Schumpeter, the Aus-trian émigré economist, provided a memorable slogan for these wor-ries when he wrote, in 1942, that “the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field.… He becomes a primitive again.” In democracies, Schum-peter continued, political judgment is “unintelligent and irresponsible,” and “may prove fatal” to any country that it governs. Writing in New York maga-zine after the election, Andrew Sullivan seemed to agree, arguing that support for Trump was “absolute and total … not like that of a democratic leader but of a cult leader fused with the idea of the nation.”

There is some truth to these argu-ments. We know from our everyday lives that much of our decision-making is not entirely rational. But Trump has played on a deep sense of unreality about the political process. His candidacy reflected the peculiar idea that someone “strong” and “smart” could singlehandedly master

a complex world, untangle the politics of the Middle East and the South China Sea, renegotiate trade agreements, and see behind the obfuscations of intelligence agencies. This is a bizarre view of what it means to act in politics. It combines the epistemic amateurism of the conspiracy theorist with the virtual self-assertion of a first-person-shooter video game. It is an approach to politics tailored to people for whom politics is a domain of fantasy. 

Who could expect political judgment to arise spontaneously in a world that does not afford many people the experience of participating in actual self-rule? Political

judgment, like any other skill, is trained in practice. The decline of unions has meant fewer opportunities for workers to vote, debate, and even strike over issues that directly affect them. At the same time, the consolidation of businesses into large, integrated operations has meant that the ordinary experience of work for many people involves taking orders in a one-way and often remote hierarchy. The decline of voluntary civic and political organizations has made opportunities for democratic participation scarcer still. Although people can express themselves loudly online, or at concerts, sports events, and Trump rallies, they have few chances to practice

making shared decisions with concrete consequences. The essential links between opinions and consequences are, in daily life, very weak.

This weakened sense of what it means to participate in a democracy comes at the same time as a crisis of shared truth. Rough-and-ready American success once bolstered the notion that a rich country with a “free market of ideas” should be able to sustain a good-enough democracy more or less automatically. It is increas-ingly clear, however, that the market for ideas works much like the market for rec-reational drugs: People consume the ones that relieve them of their ordinary mis-eries and make them feel special. Thanks

to the proliferation of ideological media, citizens now enjoy the same range of choice in facts as in ideas.

Liberals and those further to the left differ sharply over how to res-pond to these threats to demo cracy. The Democratic Party professionals who circulated among the Clinton campaign and its affiliated institu-tions tend to accept Schumpeter’s pessimism about democratic ir-rationality. Instead of appealing to voters’ reason, their campaigns slice and dice voters into marketing categories. They then make target-ed moral and emotional appeals to them (Trump is a bad man; be with Hillary), and use canvassing technology to prod swing-state voters who, their data models in-form them, will likely support the Democrat. Clinton canvassers in Michigan, where she narrowly lost,

were instructed not to engage in “per-suasion,” but just to make yet another phone call or flyer drop to beleaguered folks who showed up on party lists as likely Democrats. Clinton counted on the political rationality only of an elite class of technocrats, whom she expected to bring in a victory.

By contrast, there is a swath of activists to the left of the Democratic establish-ment whose politics center on fostering self-rule. Labor organizers try to shore up the power of workers in workplaces from fast-food chains to universities that run on the labor of underpaid and overworked adjunct faculties. In places like Durham,

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North Carolina, activists from Black Lives Matter have gone beyond street protests to craft alternative municipal budgets that would redirect new expenditures on police into more inclusive and produc-tive forms of community investment. The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of groups within Black Lives Matter, has called for community oversight boards to supervise police departments.

These activists reject the idea that our current political crisis will be resolved by technocratic solutions or get-out-the-vote strategies alone. Over the past 50 years, low-information, low-energy democ-racy has limped through a period when technology and elite institutions kept disagreement within a workable range of opinion. Today, however, technology and markets will produce increasing-ly self-indulgent and nihilistic forms of politics, unless our response goes beyond trying to restore the familiar consensus, and pushes toward deeper forms of dem-ocratic power. 

The Sanders campaign showed that it is possible to connect this sort of ground- level democracy-building with demands for a larger-scale renovation of democracy. Sanders campaigned on overturning the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which gives corpora-tions the power to invest unlimited sums in political campaigns, and on moving toward a system of public financing for elections, breaking the undue influ-ence of private wealth altogether. He also advocated easing ballot access and making Election Day a national holiday—effectively halting Republican efforts to deny the vote to minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.

T WOULD BE IMPLAUSIBLE TO SUG- gest that the American left is on the cusp of any great victory. It remains far from most concrete forms of po-

litical power. Yet its intellectual clarity can help guide and coordinate the work of grassroots activists, open up new al-ternatives for voters, and raise the bar of public argument. Five years ago, when Occupy set up in Zuccotti Park, talk of economic inequality had long been con-descended to as “class warfare.” Today, no serious argument about American

politics can avoid the underlying eco-nomic reality. Pundits like David Brooks may still get away with regretting, as he recently did, that “globalism” suffers only from being “despiritualized.” In the years ahead, perhaps it will finally become impossible to talk about glo-balism without talking about capitalism and democracy.

Two caveats are terrifically important. First, none of this will be easy. That is in large part because the Democratic Party establishment believes in the rightness and adequacy of its ideas and is com-mitted to maintaining its power. From the Democratic National Committee to Clinton-friendly commentators such as Paul Krugman, mainstream Demo-crats mocked and belittled the Sanders

campaign and its supporters. Many will continue to denounce anyone to their left as naïve at best, dangerous at worst. The left must respond with ambitious but rigorous argument. We will need to challenge the establishment to address the threat of rising nationalism and the crises of inequality and democracy, while also building power that the mainstream cannot ignore.

Second, none of this criticism of lib-erals means jettisoning or demoting the core liberal commitments to personal freedom, especially free speech and oth-er civil liberties. The point of the left’s criticism of liberals is that these sorts of rights are not enough to secure digni-fied lives or meaningful self-rule under capitalism, inherited racial inequality, and an ever-deepening surveillance state. Liberal values are not enough; but they are essential. A broader left pro-gram would work to deepen people’s lived experience of liberty, equality, and democracy—values to which liberals and the left share a commitment.

For now, the left should follow the lead of Bernie Sanders, and that of many activists who have entered state and local politics, by fielding candidates for elected office. In the two-party system of Amer-ican elections, the Democratic Party is the natural vehicle for campaigns like those of anticorruption activist Zephyr Teachout, who ran for Congress in up-state New York, and Occupy veteran Jillian Johnson, who won a seat on the city council in Durham, North Carolina. The party exists to maximize political pow-er and to support a network of consul-tants, think tankers, friendly journalists, and patronage seekers. The left wastes energy when it vents its indignation at the Democratic Party for being an ordi-nary party in these respects. By the same

token, however, the left owes nothing to everyday partisanship. A political party, as Trump and the Tea Party have both demonstrated, is well worth fighting to take over; beyond that, there is nothing in it that deserves loyalty or deference.

Nor should the left take its blueprint entirely from the Sanders campaign, as extraordinary as it was. Back in October 2011, in the convivial shipwreck that was the Occupy library, it would have seemed impossible for a self-described democratic socialist to become the coun-try’s most popular politician, as Sanders was in October 2016. In Zuccotti Park, it seemed utopian to imagine that the young activists who shut down Wall Street would wind up reviving gen-erations of work for economic justice and democracy. Now their insights and efforts, once derided as hopelessly in-sufficient, serve as our starting point, however tenuous and endangered in this bizarre and chauvinistic political moment. Who can say what utopias will come over the horizon next? a

The nascent left rejects the idea that our current crisis will be resolved by technocratic solutions alone.

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Immediately after the election, progres-sives began forming groups dedicated to resisting Trump. But they didn’t know what would be most effective. Liking something on Facebook isn’t going to move your member of Congress. We want to provide better tools. As former Democratic con-gressional staffers, we know how powerful local action can be, because it’s been used against us—by the Tea Party. So let’s use the Tea Party model for progressive goals.

The Tea Party recognized that they had the most leverage when they organized around issues that were in the national conversation, mobilized at the local level, and targeted individual lawmakers. They knew how each member of Congress had voted and never let them forget that they were accountable to their constituents. Everything lawmakers did was being watched. People came into our offices and were mean, aggressive, even vio-lent. One weekend in 2010, there was a big Tea Party rally against the Affordable Care Act, and we had to lock our doors. At town halls, it seemed like every other question was really hostile. It reflected a level of organization and preparedness we had rarely, if ever, seen.

If we use the same approach, we can stall the Trump agenda. To be clear, we do not endorse the Tea Party’s rac-ist or violent tactics. But some of their efforts—calling congressional offices and attending town hall meetings—can be exceedingly effective.

The strongest lever you have is your local member of Congress. There’s always

10 Ways to Take On Trump

Republicans were united in opposition to Obama, but it’s much tougher to stay united on offense. There are a lot of working-class Republicans, for exam-ple, who don’t believe the government has any business messing around with

their Social Security and Medicare. So Paul Ryan’s budget is a tough sell, and it’s clearly an area where Democrats may see an opportunity to drive a wedge be-tween the president and congressional leaders. Democrats should look for these

an election coming up, and lawmakers are squeamish about losing their seats. If a local newspaper reports that protesters at a town hall barraged Congresswoman X with questions about corruption in the infrastructure bill, or if a group of constit-uents on social media calls Congressman Y unresponsive and untrustworthy, that makes them nervous. Some will go to great lengths to avoid those outcomes.

Some may even change their positions or public statements.

Progressives aren’t accustomed to this type of organizing. We like to talk about what we’re for: a clean climate, economic justice, universal health care, racial equality, gender and sexual equal-ity. That’s what galvanizes us. But now we have to come to terms with the fact that for the next four years, we’re not going to set the agenda; Trump and the Republicans in Congress will. The best way to respond at the federal level is to go on defense, protect each other, and stick together. That’s what the Tea Party did, and that’s what made them so effective.

Adopting the same strategy will force Congress to redirect energy away from their priorities. It will sap their willing-ness to support reactionary change and deprive the Trump administration of any semblance of legitimacy. Remember: We won the popular vote by an enormous margin. Trump is not coming in with a mandate for change, and he has demon-strated a disrespect for democratic val-ues. That’s categorically different from anything we’ve seen before. It’s not a situation we can treat as normal politics.

Copy the Tea Party Angel Padilla and Leah Greenberg, former Democratic congressional staffers and authors of Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda

Play Hardball in Congress Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

WHAT WE CAN DO, FROM CONGRESS TO THE STREETS

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We’re not a monarchy. We’re a represen-tative democracy, so we have agency, we have a voice. We have the ability not just to navel gaze, but to act, to be engaged—to resist. We’ve got to dust ourselves off and step up, and not just roll over and act as if we don’t have a very potent role to play in our democracy, particularly at the city level. At the end of the day, 80 percent of us live in metro areas. The economic en-gines of this country are its cities: They account for 85 percent of the GDP. If Trump wants to go to war with cities, he’s committing economic suicide.

Here on the West Coast, we’re prepar-ing for the worst. We are taking Trump’s rhetoric both literally and seriously. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities are preparing to push back on immigra-tion, on the environment, on health care, on education. Cities have passed supple-mental appropriations to fund legal aid to undocumented residents, and the state of California is doing the same. We are doing everything to protect and preserve the privacy rights of our Dreamers—not just at the state level, but also on campuses at the University of California. And we’re working with superintendents of public schools—there are over a thousand school districts in California—to do the same.

When it comes to the border wall, it’s self-evident that Trump cannot achieve that goal. It’s laughable, because logis-tically that wall will never be built as he has described it. There are geographic

impediments and sovereign Native Amer-ican lands on which a lot of the fencing would need to be constructed. But if he does try to build a wall, there is legislation in California to challenge the administra-tion, by requiring the construction of the wall to be put to a vote of the people of California. There are also many hurdles that could be put in the way of procuring the contracts for construction permits.

California is also very resilient when it comes to climate policy. We survived the Reagan years, we survived the Bush years. We are prepared to be very adapt-able now in the Trump years. The state has identified all the ways we can expect the Trump administration to assault our environmental rules and regulations. We have mitigation strategies—plans A, B, and C—and we are preparing a very ag-gressive countereffort. As the governor said, if the federal government stops col-lecting climate data from satellites, we’ll build our own damn satellite. If they want to roll back EPA protections, we have our own state EPA.

So even though it’s difficult right now to determine exactly where the Trump administration will begin and end on all of this, there are a lot of backstops in California, and we will happily assert our autonomy and jurisdictional authority. We’re not going to be timid. We are going to remind the administration that there will be consequences for trampling the rights and values that we hold dear.

kinds of vulnerabilities. They should not be deferential at all when it comes to the confirmation process. And they should try to derail a quick repeal of the Affordable Care Act. The idea for Democrats should be to slow things down.

The obvious model, of course, is the Republican effort that began the day Obama was inaugurated. It was a com-plete strategy of obstruction and delegit-imation of the governing party. In pursu-ing that strategy, however, Republicans were willing to say things that just weren’t true. For Democrats who aspire to use government in a positive way, it would be a mistake to follow the precise example that the Republicans set. It was much too cynical, and much too destructive of our democratic system. Democrats shouldn’t take the position of “opposition now, op-position forever.” But they do have to play hardball in resisting the Republicans—while still standing up for truth and evi-dence, science and democracy. That will serve them well over the long run.

The congressional strategy should be followed by a larger effort to communicate that what the Republicans are proposing to do has nothing to offer those who voted for Trump. The diminished prospects for realizing the American dream are certainly at the root of the GOP’s success, but the policy proposals in their agenda aren’t responsive to those concerns. And a lot of their proposals will make new Repub-lican voters feel very uncomfortable. The Democrats can take advantage of that, by getting people engaged and angry about what’s going on. They need that inten-sity. They need to replicate the way they opposed changes to the Office of Con-gressional Ethics: using social media to mobilize interest groups and raise the alarm at the local level.

It’s also important for Democrats not to be distracted. This is not the time for reconsidering what the Democratic Party stands for. No unnecessary battles over, “Do we stick with our core constituents or appeal to white, working-class voters in the industrial states?” All that is be-side the point now. This is not the time to frighten or discourage core constituents— it’s the time to mobilize them. The focus has to be on what the Republicans are trying to do.

Look to Cities and States Gavin Newsom, lieutenant governor of California

There is a certain typology that cuts across both time and space. Authoritarian lead-ers ask the people to believe in them and their sole capacity to accomplish great things. They attempt to forge a direct bond with the public, often at the expense of

established institutions. “Democracy has failed you,” they say, “but have faith in me, and I will take care of you. I will get it done.” It’s a very paternalistic style. We have seen this with Mussolini and Berlus-coni in Italy, Erdogan in Turkey, Franco

Learn From History Seyla Benhabib, professor of political science and philosophy at Yale University

WHAT WE CAN DO, FROM CONGRESS TO THE STREETS

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One of the interesting things about Trump is the utter absence of ideological lan-guage. Even when he’s going on about Obamacare, the problem is that it costs too much, not that it’s a socialistic in-trusion on American liberty. That’s not something Trump would say. Instead, he makes emotional appeals. He plays on cul-tural insecurities and fears of violence and offers a restorative anger in their place.

Democrats have to rediscover language that can channel a sense of anger about social and economic inequity, though not so nihilistically. I don’t think that it helps to call this sort of language “populist”—that’s a word that Trumpism has emptied of any vestige of its meaning. But Demo-crats in the past have found language that connects with popular emotions. Think of Bill Clinton in 1992—“I’m tired of seeing the people who work hard and play by the rules get the shaft.” Even Obama spoke this way for a while in 2011 and 2012, though it isn’t his natural register, the way it is for Joe Biden.

Hillary Clinton was clearly uncomfort-able with this kind of language—she had trouble conveying her anger about social injustice and establishing a visceral con-nection with her listeners. So that’s the challenge. As Obama said in December, “The problem is that we’re not there on the ground communicating not only the dry policy aspects of this, but that we care about these communities, that we’re bleeding for these communities.”

So: How do you respond linguistical-ly to Trump and Trumpism? On the one hand, you focus on the man himself as

a grotesque. I don’t know that it helps to call him a fascist—he’s menacing and creepy in his own Trumpy way, and you have to call him out on his deceptions and fabulations. But resistance calls for a broader linguistic strategy. You want to build solidarity among your partisans, but you have to reach the voters you lost in November, the people who know that Trump is an asshole but voted for him

anyway out of frustration or dislike of the Clintons—as opposed to the people who voted for Trump because he’s an asshole, who are really a minority of his supporters.

This is likely to play out in terms of resistance not just to Trump himself but to the radical programs and rollbacks the Re-publicans are going to be implementing— on the environment, wages, unions, im-migration, education. These issues are going to be fought out one by one in the linguistic trenches, by deploying language that makes the stakes clear.

in Spain, Perón in Argentina, Modi in In-dia. And we see it with Trump, as well.

There’s always a lot of subliminal sexual politics in authoritarian person-alities. Every television image of Trump, for example, is Trump the family. Three wives, five children—by American puri-tan standards, it’s an unusual family. But it’s also the image that he’s projecting: I’m a strong man. These are my children. This is what I brought to the world. I’m not a wimp.

We have to be careful, however, about throwing around the language of fas-cism. Yes, Hitler was also elected. But Trump does not represent a strong fas-cist movement. We are not living in a dictatorship—not yet! It’s going to be a rough ride, but let’s avoid the exaggerated examples. Trump is sui generis.

I prefer to call what Trump is engaged in “autocratic presidentialism,” meaning I’m the one who lays down the rule of law. To what extent is he going to respect the division of power laid out in the Con-stitution? Are our public institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court—going to be strong enough to prevent the country from sliding toward a kind of presidential dictatorship? To oppose these tendencies, we need as many moments of resistance as possible. We need to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.

There’s another way in which Trump differs from authoritarian leaders of the past. He has tried to use the language of nationalism: triumphal whiteness, “Make America Great Again.” But what we are really hearing from Trump is the corpo-rate language of business success— the language of “making deals.” He and the Republicans are likely going to move to-ward privatizing everything. That is not something you can say about past au-thoritarian movements. Most authori-tarian leaders believe in a strong state. Trump doesn’t. For Trump, the state is a corporation—and he is going to treat it as such. In that sense, he’s almost more dangerous than previous authoritarian leaders. If the government is like a big corporation, we are clients, not citizens.

How are we to oppose this? We need a new, constructive vocabulary. It’s not

enough just to call him “fascist,” “pa-triarchal,” “white,” “reactionary.” He is all that. But to mobilize people against him—especially people who might not necessarily agree with a progressive, left agenda—you have to create a language

of caring for civic institutions, caring for the Constitution, caring for making democracy better. You have to instill a sense that this may really be the end of a certain kind of republicanism, with a small r. The art of the deal has to be op-posed by a language of civic commitment and solidarity.

Use Vivid Language Geoffrey Nunberg, linguist at the University of California at Berkeley

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In a funny way, Trump may actual-ly have made the linguistic job easier for Democrats than it was a few years ago. His own ideological indifference

undermines a lot of the language that Re-publicans traditionally use to justify their approach. Would-be populists like Trump can’t play the “class warfare” card against

Democrats, or rail about “makers and takers.” And the rhetoric of trickle-down sits uneasily with attacks on the elite—even if you bellow.

Beginning in the 1930s, Democrats were the party of the working class. Their vi-sion of social justice involved protections for workers, small businesspeople, family farms, and independent retailers. In the 1970s, however, Democrats decided to adopt a new ideology that viewed Wall Street as useful and efficient, rather than as a threat. They began to allow big busi-ness to make important technological and political decisions that affect all of us.

Right now, Democrats are just panick-ing and whining and saying, “You have to say mean things about Trump on Twit-ter,” as if that’s a strategy. Instead, you should fight Trump on economic populist grounds. Today, farmers face monopoly power in the form of Bayer, Monsanto, ADM, and Tyson. People in urban areas face other monopolies, but they’re driven by the same concentrated financial power. The ideology of Democrats should be to break up that power.

You can fight Trump by saying, “It’s outrageous that he wants to allow the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, be-cause that’s going to raise our cell phone bills and put our telecom infrastructure in the hands of a guy who might be in-terested in censorship.” You can fight him the way Bernie Sanders has on the Carrier deal, by saying, “We’re going to deny you federal contracts if you’re offshoring jobs and you’re profitable.” When it comes to the trillions of dollars that corporations are holding in offshore bank accounts, Democrats could strike a deal to allow that money to come home tax-free. Or they could fight it by saying, “This money is just going to be used to pay off share-holders and pay for more mergers and acquisitions so that companies can lay you off.” That’s the right way to fight it.

People will vote for you if you deliv-er something concrete—as long as they know that you did it and it’s simple to understand. Instead of throwing bankers in jail and stopping foreclosures, Dem-ocrats did very complex, weird things, like Dodd-Frank. Obamacare allowed the concentration of hospitals and in-surance companies and Big Pharma, and ignored the fact that millions of people got shifted from mediocre insurance to terrible insurance.

During the New Deal, Democrats smashed the power of the trusts, which cleared the road for improvements in

social welfare. Barack Obama, by contrast, didn’t restructure the economy when he had the opportunity to, in 2009, when banking was on its back and everyone was asking “What do we do now?” Instead he said, “We’re going to re-empower the same people who destroyed the econo-my and disempowered the middle class.” That’s what the bailouts and amnesty for bank executives were. Dodd-Frank is es-sentially a 2,000-page note to regulators that says, “The 2008 crisis was really awk-ward, so try not to let that happen again.”

If you look back at history, there was this whole other antimonopoly tradition that Democrats ran on aggressively for a really long time—you can trace it all the way back to the Revolutionary War period. We need to get back to that.

Revamp the Democratic Party Matt Stoller, fellow at New America, a nonpartisan think tank

The interests of working-class people have not been at the center of the Demo-cratic Party agenda the way they should be. The question going forward now is: How do we build a labor movement that truly embodies the hopes and dreams of a diverse electorate?

The labor movement needs to be out there fighting tooth and nail for policies that allow workers to live and work with dignity in this economy. For immigrant workers, that means living free from raids and registries and deportation. For black workers, that means living free from racial exclusion and profiling. And for workers in the Rust Belt, it means living free from corporate cronyism and deals that get cut without working people’s interests at the table.

Today a lot of work is service-based, and a lot of it is disaggregated and fissured and isolated. The traditional image of a union member is that of a factory worker, but in reality, today’s worker looks much more like a nanny. One of the fastest- growing occupations in the entire econ-omy last year was home care. We’ve found that it’s incredibly powerful to organize people with the broadest possible sense of what “we” means. We’re trying to bring together all caregivers—everyone from nurse’s aides to family members caring for loved ones with Alzheimer’s. Rather than saying this is the worker’s interest and this is the family’s interest and this is what workers of color need and this is what immigrants need, we’re saying that this is an American challenge.

Reinvent Labor Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance

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The federal government’s capacity to undercut rights granted by the states is very limited. When it comes to issues like lgbt rights, voting rights, immigration, financial regulations, and the environ-ment, a state can increase the rights it affords its own citizens. lgbt rights are easiest to conceptualize: We recognize same-sex marriage, we decide who gets to vote in our states. Our ability to expand those rights to universal status across the nation may be limited, given the chang-ing makeup of the Supreme Court. But the Constitution will not be interpreted in a way that denies a state the right to extend marriage rights or voting rights to certain individuals.

Financial regulation and the environ-ment, same thing. The federal govern-ment could pass laws exempting certain institutions from state regulations or consumer claims. But no court would uphold a federal statute that said a state cannot pursue a fraud action against banks or require power plants to limit emissions. So if Trump does something dubious on policy grounds and there’s a plausible legal argument to be made against it, governors and state attorneys general should say, “No, we’re not going to let you tell us how to run our state.”

This is a much better way to fight Trump than to focus on ethics violations or conflicts of interest. For one thing,

rules relating to federal officials are en-forced by federal officials. In terms of actual enforcement actions, not much can be done there. And more importantly, those things won’t win the public back to our side. All the shouting about Trump’s business structures certainly didn’t reso-nate. So how do you win people back? By making the case that regulations actually help people. If Republicans try to roll back the Clean Air Act, Democrats should say, “They want dirty coal to be belched into the jet stream in Ohio, but it will come down in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. So our kids are getting asthma, and acid rain is killing our trees.”

Utilize the Courts Eliot Spitzer, former governor and attorney general of New York

The labor movement needs to lead the way toward economic solutions that lift all boats. We need to enable immigrants to fully integrate into the workforce, provide training for everyone, and im-prove the quality of these jobs so people can support their families. To do that, we need new forms of organizing and new ways to connect people. We need to organize entrepreneurs and technologists to reflect the new forms of work in our

economy. We need to take risks and try new things as a movement—like using social media and texting platforms to do meet-ups, create groups, and enable people to self-organize. Coworker.org has created an online platform that’s a good example of this kind of experimentation.

We’ve built a membership associ-ation that provides domestic workers access to benefits and social services, and the ability to feel connected to the

community—kind of an aarp for workers. We’re building our own benefits plat-form for gig workers, and we’ve created a web site to help women understand their rights. We’re going to be setting up committees around the country to help people know where to go for help and how to defend their communities against things like raids. It’s not just worker soli-darity; it involves everyone who believes that America is meant to be a multira-cial democracy, where everyone has the opportunity to live and work with dignity.

That is a better, more visceral argument to make than, “Gee, Wilbur Ross still owns 2 percent of this coal company.”

There are other areas where it’s going to be much harder for states to retain their power, though. If the federal government wants to wield its full authority on immi-gration, for example, it will be hard for states to object, because that’s an area where the courts have said the govern-ment has a clear capacity under the Con-stitution to do what it wants. Another problem is that over the past decade, we’ve argued in court in favor of administrative latitude in decision-making. Now, by as-serting the primacy of states rights, we’re flipping that argument on its head. How do we go back to all these cases where we’ve been arguing for executive discre-tion and say, “Oops, we didn’t mean it”?

On Election Day, we rejected our deepest moral and constitutional values for a cam-paign rooted in hyperbole and outright distortions. When someone can create this fear—class fear, race fear—and rev people up almost into a frenzy, it’s not just about political parties or ideology. It’s about the morality of our politics. Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic

Party can get any better until we have a moral movement that calls all people—regardless of their party or faith—to lean in to their better angels.

In 1967, Dr. King looked at America after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. When he saw how militarism, materialism, classism, and racism still had such a hold on the body politic, he began

Organize a Moral Resistance Rev. William J. Barber II, architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement

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My message is very, very simple: You cannot give up. You cannot give in. You cannot get lost in a sea of despair. You have to be hopeful and optimistic. Keep pushing, keep pulling, keep organizing, keep believing. This too shall pass.

Since the election, I have seen so many people saying, “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” A young woman came up to me and started crying. I told her, “I’ve cried, too.” I cried the night of the election, and for two or three days after that. But I stopped crying. I shed all of the tears that I wanted to shed. We have got to stand up. We have got to fight. Be unafraid. Don’t let anybody or anything get you down.

At the height of the civil rights move-ment, we were beaten and jailed, but we never lost faith. When we were first ar-rested, some of us felt free. We felt that we had been liberated. We had been told over and over again, by our mothers and fathers and grandparents, never to ask questions about the signs that said whites only and colored only. They would say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t get in the way. Don’t get in trouble.” But individuals like Rosa Parks and Dr. King and thousands of others inspired us to get in the way, to get in trouble. We got in what I call “good trouble,” “necessary trouble.” Somehow, we believed that we had the ability to make things better; that we could succeed. I almost died on that bridge in Selma. I thought I saw death. But I never lost that sense of hope.

The election results were shocking. I truly believe that something went wrong, that outside forces intervened. I believe the Russians played a major role in influ-encing the outcome of the election, and one day the truth will come out. But this should also serve as a teaching experi-ence. The lesson is that we’ve got to be stronger. We’ve got to do more. I believe people will emerge from this period more organized and more inspired to be engaged in American politics.

As a younger man, during the March on Washington, I said, We cannot wait, we cannot be patient; we want our freedom, and we want it now. That sense of urgency must still be there—the feeling that ev-ery day we must work to bring about the changes we desire. But it’s important to recognize that our struggle is not a strug-gle that lasts a few days or a few weeks or even a few years. It is a lifetime struggle. There may be setbacks, but in the final analysis, we are going to achieve victory.

Now is the time for Americans of goodwill—it doesn’t matter whether they’re black or white, Latino, Asian American, or Native American—to get in good trouble, necessary trouble; to push and resist what is happening. We should do it in an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent fashion, but people must stand up and not be silent. To be silent is like going along, saying it’s OK, it’s all right. We cannot do that. But we will get there, I truly be-lieve that. I think that sense of hope is in our DNA. You have to be optimistic. a

to organize a poor people’s campaign. People forget what he said: that America needs “a radical revolution of values.” That’s what we need now.

You don’t change things tweet to tweet. You need a sustained movement, not a moment. You have to reimagine what hope means. You have to hook up with unlikely allies. You have to build a voting strategy. And you have to have a legal strategy for challenging unconsti-tutional acts. It all has to flow together.

We need moral movements led from the bottom up—from the states, not the top down—because a lot of the prob-lems are in the state legislatures. We need fusion coalitions that are antiracist, antipoverty, and pro-labor. I talk about “fusion politics” instead of “populism,” because in the South, populism can be a lynch mob; it used to be. Populism can be whatever’s popular. Segregation was popular. So, now, is Trumpism.

We’ve got to get people to see that something is wrong when power is used to create oppression and injustice. In the Moral Monday movement, we’ve brought

together people who don’t even believe in faith, but they believe in the moral arc of the universe. They look at our Con-stitution, at those inalienable rights and values, and say, “Well, I might not be a Christian, but this is unjust.” And they’re willing to go to jail to stand up against it.

Remember: Even if Trump had not won, we would still have millions of peo-ple in poverty, millions of people without health care. The movement that spawned

Moral Mondays started in North Carolina in 2007, when Democrats were in office. We looked at issues of poverty, health care, education, and we said, “Uh-uh. We’re still not living up to our highest values.” We challenge even Democrats. That’s not partisan. It’s moral witness.

What we’re seeing in this country has always been there; we can’t make the mistake of just blaming Trump, or

blaming ourselves. This is in our DNA. As the Princeton historian Nell Painter says, without Obama there’d be no Trump. It’s part of our history: The call of justice goes forward, and then there’s a response, a pushback. It’s always been there, and it keeps rising back up, and in every age, somebody has to meet it. Every despot and demagogue in history has ultimately met a moral resistance. It’s just our time.

Don’t Give In to Despair Rep. John Lewis, Democratic congressman and civil rights leader

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A Klansman’s daughter in Buchanan, Georgia, watches an old-style cross-burning with a new addition: a flaming swastika. “Christian” Klansmen have long clashed with neo-Nazis, but they’re now staging joint rallies in the name of white solidarity.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY MILANO

HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

INTRODUCTION BY VAN JONES

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All across America, Klan and neo-Nazi groups are not only flourishing—they’re joining forces.

HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

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HATE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

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We are forced to confront many things in the images that photographer Johnny Milano spent five years capturing. The ceremonial burning of a cross and a swastika in an open field. The sil-houette of a child, a young and defenseless observer of hate, situated between the flaming structures. The Nazi symbol on shirt and skin. Some of the images look modern; others seem straight out of an earlier era. They represent a people striving to keep with tradition, while simultaneously looking to rebrand their beliefs and appeal to new followers. Membership spreads not simply through inheri-tance, but through outreach.

Taken together, Milano’s images make it impos-sible to deny that white supremacy is alive and well in this country. Powered by social media platforms, and encouraged by the rise of Trump-as-champion, America’s hate groups have emerged from the fringes with a newfound sense of respectability. In 2015 alone, the number of homegrown hate groups jumped by 14 percent—a proliferation un-precedented in recent times.

These groups—Klansmen, neo-Nazis, white nationalists—did more than talk and meet and march. They plotted to turn their hatred into vio-lence. “They laid plans to attack courthouses, banks, festivals, funerals, schools, mosques, churches, synagogues, clinics, water-treatment plants, and power grids,” reports the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They used firearms, bombs, C-4 plastic explosives, knives, and grenades.”

It would be all too easy to turn away from this reality, or consign it to the distant past. But Milano turned his camera lens directly toward it. For many, these images will be shocking. Others will be more saddened than surprised. But thanks to his work, we are all met with the direct evidence that white supremacist groups are thriving in America.

Let these photographs serve as proof that we are far from the postracial ideal that many Americans have been clinging to. And let them remind us not to be fooled: The spread of white supremacy is not confined to the South, to states like Tex-as, Georgia, and Tennessee —it extends deep into the heartland, to Pennsylvania and Maryland and Ohio and Indiana. Hate groups exist all across the United States—coming soon, quite possibly, to a neighborhood near you. a

A Klan rally near Versailles, Indiana, last spring included a raffle for a “custom-made” robe and hood. Although the Klan remains small—with fewer than 8,000 members nationwide—the group has gained a newfound momentum and respectability with the rise of Trump.

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Members of the Confederate White Knights get dressed, and armed, for a rally in rural Maryland. While organized Klan violence is rare, a recent study found that Americans are seven times more likely to be killed by homegrown right-wing extremists than by Islamic terrorists.

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A swastika armband—part of the “battle dress uniform” of the National Socialist Movement—laid out in preparation for a rally at the Georgia State Capitol onHitler’s birthday. Last year, in a makeover designed to

“mainstream” neo-Nazis, the group dropped the swastika and replaced it with an Odal rune worn by Nazi troops in World War II.

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Children watch family members stage a march at a farm in rural Indiana last May. Klan rallies feature a mix of patriotic symbols and emblems of hate; the group’s oft-chanted slogan urges devotion “for God, for family, for country, for the Klan.”

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A young woman is fitted for a Klan hood before a cross-burning last year near Danville, Virginia. White supremacist groups—traditionally all-male, with a strong patriarchal bent— are recruiting women as a sign of their new “inclusiveness.”

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A member of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which calls for Christians to take up white supremacy, before a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, three days before Trump’s election. The group’s co-founder, Matthew Heimbach, calls Trump a “gateway drug” for white nationalism.

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Members of the National Socialist Movement kick back after a rally in rural Texas. The group aims to unite America’s white nationalists in a single movement. “They always attempt to silence us,” says Jeff Schoep, the organization’s leader. “But they always fail miserably. Thankfully, we still have freedom of speech here.”

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INSIDE THE RECOUNT

MARCH 2017 | 47MARCH 2017 | 47

INSIDE THE RECOUNT Jill Stein and a ragtag team of computer experts decided to take America’s elections to court. Here’s how it all went wrong. BY STEVE FRIESS

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FIVE days after Donald Trump was elected president, Alex Halderman was on a United Airlines flight from

Newark to Los Angeles when he received an urgent email. A respected computer scientist and leading critic of security flaws in America’s voting machines, Halderman was anxious to determine whether there had been foul play during the election. Had machines in Wisconsin or Michigan been hacked? Could faulty software or malfunctioning equipment have skewed the results in Pennsylvania? “Before the election, I had been saying I really, really hope there’s not a hack and that it’s not close,” he says. “Afterwards, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, there’s enough reason here to be concerned.’ ”

Now, wedged into a middle seat on the cross-country flight, Halderman stared in disbelief at the email from Barbara Simons, a fellow computer scientist and security expert. Working with Amy Rao, a Silicon Valley CEO and major Democratic fund- raiser, Simons had arranged a conference call with John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, to make the case for taking a closer look at the election results. Could Halderman be on the call in 15 minutes?

United’s wi-fi system didn’t allow for in-flight phone calls. But Halderman wasn’t fazed. “I’m blocked,” he emailed Simons, “but I can try.”

Within minutes, Halderman had circumvented the wi-fi and established an interface with computers at the University of Michigan, where at 36 he is the youngest full professor in the history of the computer science department. He dialed in to the call but did not speak, afraid of drawing attention to the fact that he was violating the airline’s phone ban.

As he listened in, Podesta came on the line. Simons and Rao—along with David Jefferson, a computer scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—then laid out the reasons that Clinton’s campaign should call for an official review of the election results. The tech experts explained that America’s elections are fundamentally unsound, thanks to a new generation of electronic voting machines and tabulators installed after Florida’s “hanging chads” debacle in 2000. The machines are prone to malfunctions and miscounts, and many have back doors that can enable attackers to alter the outcome by infecting them with malware. The performance of the machines is often verified only by the companies that profit from them, while maintaining the equip-ment falls to underfunded and under-trained county officials. And because many voting districts create no paper record of electronic votes—more than 80 percent of ballots in Pennsyl-vania are cast without a paper trail—there is no way to confirm independently whether the tallies are accurate.

To Halderman, the 2016 election seemed like the perfect opportunity to review concerns about America’s voting sys-tem. After all, Trump himself had warned that the election was

“rigged.” The final vote diverged sharply from the predictions of pre-election polls in a handful of swing states, and the FBI later uncovered evidence that Russian hackers had launched a coordinated effort to defeat Clinton. “If there was ever going to be an election where we should double-check the results,” Halderman says, “this was it.”

Podesta wasn’t entirely convinced. Did the computer scien-tists, he wanted to know, have reason to believe the election had been turned? Simons, Rao, and Jefferson acknowledged that they had no such evidence, and that a recount would be unlikely to change the result. What was needed, they argued, was a limited “audit” of the results in a handful of voting districts. That way, everyone would know for certain if the outcome could be trusted.

After more than an hour, the call was adjourned with no specific agreement other than for more conversation to fol-low. For his part, Halderman was encouraged. “My God,” he whispered to his traveling companion on the plane. “Podesta is seriously considering the possibility of a recount. That would be enormous.”

In reality, the call exposed the underlying fault lines that ultimately doomed the recount effort before it even began. For Halderman and his colleagues, reviewing the election results was never intended to put Hillary Clinton in the White House. They were scientists, and they thought like scientists: They wanted to review the ballots to gather evidence and test a hypothesis. To them, the recount was a sort of real-world, live-wire experiment. “This wasn’t about sowing doubts or pushing for any particular outcome,” Halderman says. “It was about proving something about election security.”

The problem, as they would soon discover, was that the Clinton campaign and the courts weren’t interested in sci-ence. Before they would authorize a costly and extensive recount, judges and politicians wanted to know if there was any evidence to suggest that such an undertaking was nec-essary. “We were going to need something pretty concrete,” a high-ranking Clinton aide later told me. “They didn’t have anything to hang a hat the size of this sombrero on.” Within days of the Podesta call, in fact, events would spiral beyond the control of Halderman and the scientists. The measured,

impartial audit they envisioned was quickly swept up into a chaotic and high-profile partisan battle—an effort that may have actually wound up undermining the cause of election security.

“It’s bothersome that there are claims made when there does not appear to be evidence, because it tends to undermine people’s confidence in the election,” says Michael Haas, who serves as the top election official in Wisconsin. “We were all surprised by what was motivating the requests for the

The recount “wasn’t about sowing doubts or pushing for any particular outcome,” Halderman says. “It was about proving something about election security.”

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recount, because we had not seen anything raising red flags. And now, because it went as well as it did, it will probably be much harder for anyone to try to do this again.”

IMMEDIATELY after the phone call, while he was still in the air, Halderman

logged on to a secure online chat service called Slack and cre-ated an invite-only channel he named “Voting.” The encrypted conversations, which were obtained by the new republic, pro-vide a minute-by-minute log of the seven weeks of the recount effort and its aftermath. Halderman deputized Matt Bernhard, one of his doctoral students, as a co-administrator, and the two men began assembling a group of 30 that included some of the world’s foremost computer scientists and statisticians. There were academics from top universities, expert advisers to the Defense Department, and activists who have spent years decrying vulner-abilities in electronic voting machines. None of the participants was a political player or professional partisan. Their goal was not to bring down Trump, but to study and strengthen America’s election system. Some in the group dubbed it the “A-Team.”

From the start, the Slack conversations made clear that the A-Team never wanted to conduct the full statewide recounts that would eventually be pursued in Pennsylvania, Wiscon-sin, and Michigan. Instead, they preferred what is known as a “risk- limiting audit,” or RLA. Writing in USA Today five days after the Slack channel was created, two members of

the A-Team—statistician Philip Stark from the University of Cal i fornia, and cryptographer Ron Rivest from MIT—spelled out the benefits of an RLA. Hand-checking a total of 700,000 ballots in the 29 states won by Trump, they explained, would provide “95 percent confidence that the results are correct.”

At the time, the computer experts were optimistic that Podesta would ultimately sign on, and they focused on pre-paring for an RLA. The problem was that the A-Team had no idea how to actually go about conducting an audit.

“What would it take to conduct a statewide RLA for a state that is not prepared for it?” Jefferson, the scientist from Law-rence Livermore, asked in Slack on the first day. “How can we select random ballots from across the state when they are held in many separate counties? We would need either the extraordinary cooperation of all county election officials, or a federal court order, no?”

“Are counties even allowed to do this voluntarily?” Hal-derman asked.

“Good question,” Jefferson replied. He suggested focusing on a single state where turnout was lower than expected, then arguing that the anomaly could have been the result of “tech-nical attacks” on electronic scanners. “This is a technically stretched argument,” he conceded, “but I am looking for an argument a court might buy to justify an audit order.”

“Sounds reasonable,” another expert interjected, “but I’d prefer to focus on what will help technically and let the cam-paign figure out legal and strategy angles.”

Alex Halderman speaks to reporters with Jill Stein in Philadelphia on December 9, after testifying in the most dramatic legal battle of the recount.

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There was also discussion of arranging a security briefing at the White House, Congress, or the Defense Department, to secure their support for an audit. “I reached Podesta via text,” Simons wrote. “He said he’s willing to ask about a security briefing but he’s not opti-mistic. I asked if perhaps someone higher in government than he might be able to make it happen. (I’m not shy.) He hasn’t responded.” The briefing never happened.

The Slack conversations are filled with technical debates about how to analyze precinct and voting data to identify an anomaly that could be explained only by malfeasance. At one point, the A-Team created a spreadsheet with 20 different ideas for lines of inquiry, involving ten states. “We appear to be having some strange data coming out of Wisconsin,” Bernhard wrote at one point. Trump had outperformed Mitt Romney by nearly 20 percent in some counties, while Clinton underperformed Barack Obama by almost 30 percent. “It could be that these are just swing-y counties,” he allowed, “but those are *huge* swings.”

Discussions also focused on the countless ways someone might execute an election-altering hack. Last summer, the FBI notified election officials in Arizona and Illinois that Russian hackers had infiltrated their voter registration sys-tems, stealing voter data and the username and password of at least one election official. The A-Team theorized that attackers could have used such voter records to cast absen-tee ballots in swing states. There was precedent for their concern: In 1994, a state Senate race in Pennsylvania was invalidated after Democrats were caught using the names of Puerto Rican residents to cast absentee votes. “So the hy-pothesis is that someone registered a whole mess of people, and then requested absentee ballots for them,” one scientist said. “That’s certainly possible (absentee ballots are a weak link, especially now that it’s feasible to request them by the truckload via online systems).”

Much of the debate centered on where to conduct the RLA. Members of the A-Team tried to “think like an attacker,” as Halderman put it, to figure out which states they would most likely have targeted. “Who has done the calculations about possible paths for fraud making a difference?” he asked. “What’s the smallest fraud in the smallest number of states that would have flipped the outcome?” Bernhard offered to crunch the numbers, but Stark disagreed with the premise of the question. “I don’t think the ‘minimal path’ is the best question because I don’t think that’s the computation an ad-versary would do,” Stark wrote. “I’d meddle where it’s hard to find because there’s little or no paper, e.g., PA, and/or where it would be written off to bad election administration, such as FL has had historically.”

Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania soon emerged as the prime targets. In falling to Trump, all three had defied both the polls and their own electoral histories. Taken togeth-er, they also included enough electoral votes to change the outcome, which made them worth attacking.

Planning for an RLA continued, without much progress, until November 16, when a veteran activist jumped in and hit the A-Team with an overdue dose of reality: No state had laws that allowed for a limited audit. “Doing an RLA is not a thing, not legally and not as a strategy pursued by any of the parties committed to pursuing a recount,” the activist informed the team. “A recount is a process defined by law and carried out by the election officials. It’s not carried out by the third party and the third party has no standing to say, ‘Oh we only want to count the votes like this now.’ There is no path to ask for a recount and do an RLA, please don’t represent to anyone that there is.” The whole idea was a legal nonstarter.

The A-Team had hit a dead end. They couldn’t do an audit, and the Clinton campaign wasn’t going to participate without the kind of evidence that could only be acquired after a recount. Even if the scientists somehow managed to convince a state to conduct a full recount, it would likely cost millions of dollars—a sum far beyond the reach of the A-Team, which was unable to meet its goal of getting 110,000 people to sign an online petition calling for an audit. To make matters worse, in one of the states they wanted to pursue, Wisconsin, only a presidential candidate could call for a recount. And the A-Team had no presidential candidate.

Not, that is, until Jill Stein got involved.“History came knocking,” Stein later told me. “Who was I

to say no to this effort to verify our vote?”

STEIN was drawn into the recount effort by John Bonifaz, a Massachusetts attorney who tried and failed to

stage a recount in 2004, after George W. Bush narrowly won Ohio. He was also upset by the 2016 election results, and had spoken with Barbara Simons about voting “anomalies.” But he didn’t know about the November 13 phone call with Podesta, nor was he invited to join the Slack channel.

Still, Bonifaz had his own contacts. When a friend pointed out to him that any candidate who could foot the bill was enti-tled to demand a recount in Michigan and Wisconsin—both of

Halderman diagrams ways that hackers can infect voting machines with malware.

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which were so close that their vote totals had yet to be officially announced—Bonifaz went to work to recruit Stein, the Green Party candidate. The narrative that Stein was “simply a puppet for the Clinton campaign is completely false,” says Bonifaz, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant for his legal work on behalf of voting rights. “I took the information that she could do this to her.”

On the same day that Simons and Halderman were on the phone with Podesta, Bonifaz called Stein. He knew it would be better if Clinton led the recount, since her campaign had far more resources, but he also knew Stein would be eager to get involved.

Bonifaz suggested that the effort wouldn’t require much from Stein. “You can take a minimalist role if you want,” she recalls him saying. “If you want to just be the plaintiff of record, you could do that.”

“No,” Stein told him. “If I’m going to do it, I want to come out swinging and really fight on the issues that I think are really important. I’m not just going to be a name.”

Bonifaz didn’t give up on Clinton. On November 16, he spoke with Jake Sullivan, a longtime Clinton adviser. The next day, he was included on another conference call that Simons arranged with Halderman, Podesta, Sullivan, and Marc Elias, the general counsel of the Democratic National Committee. By then it was clear that the campaign was not interested in participating unless a recount would change the election results. “They gave reasons why they saw obstacles,” Bonifaz says, “but I didn’t find any of them convincing.” Hal-derman, too, was frustrated. “They kept asking us what evidence we had that something had happened, and I kept saying the evidence is in the ballot box.”

Two days later, on November 18, Stein’s name entered the Slack discussion for the first time.

“*Oh boy.* I just had a phone call with an attorney who’s … now representing Jill Stein,” one of the scientists wrote. “He’s keen to go to court and file election challenges in Stein’s name. This could well be the ‘public face’ of the lawsuits that every-body’s been talking about, but it’s also something that’s going to require some coordination.” There was never any debate about whether turning to Stein, a candidate who had received only one percent of the vote and was widely seen as a spoiler, was a good public face for the recount.

Four days later, news of the recount effort broke in New York magazine. Relying on anonymous sources, reporter Gabriel Sherman published a story entitled, “experts urge clinton campaign to challenge election results in three swing states.” Sherman named Bonifaz and Halderman as leaders of a recount effort that had “found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” According to Sherman, the group believed that “Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in coun-ties that relied on electronic voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based

on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000.”

The Slack logs show that Halderman and other members of the A-Team believed no such thing. While there was some speculation about possible anomalies in Wisconsin vote totals, no one ever suggested that there was “persuasive evidence” of manipulation. From the start, the argument was only that there were worthwhile reasons to take a closer look. Weeks later, Halderman remained irate. “I’m furious about it,” he said. “I never would have said that.”

The numbers, it turned out, came from Bonifaz. He admits that he spoke to Sherman, but insists that he never mentioned Halderman by name. “The question was presented to me as to what data was being presented,” Bonifaz says. “That was one of the points I made, but I never attributed it to Alex.”

But the damage was done. The message was clear: Computer scientists have evidence that could save the world from Donald Trump! Minutes after Sherman’s piece was posted online, Halderman was besieged by calls and emails from journalists around the world. He quickly stopped listening to them. Only weeks later, after the recount was over, did he discover that he had missed a voicemail from his congresswoman, Represen-tative Debbie Dingell, who had reached out to offer her help. “I would love to hear what you’re willing to share about what you’ve found out,” she told him. “I’m so sorry I didn’t call her

back,” Halderman told me. Having a member of Congress on his side might have helped.

The next day, Halderman published a response to Sherman on Medium, entitled, “want to know if the election was hacked? look at the ballots.” He denied having knowledge that could turn the election, but stood by his assertion that the results should be verified. “The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the avail-able physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts.”

Stein, in her many interviews about the recount, largely stuck to Halderman’s message, expressing concerns about security vulnerabilities and talking about the importance of making sure that every vote was counted. But many observers, including her own supporters, wondered why she was suddenly going to bat for Clinton, a candidate she had vilified during the campaign. Stein’s own running mate, Ajamu Baraka, told CNN that the recount effort made it look like Stein was “carrying the water for the Democrats.”

The A-Team had hit a dead end. Even if they convinced a state to conduct a recount, it would cost millions—a sum far beyond their reach.

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The way Stein handled her fund-raising efforts didn’t help matters. On November 23, she told supporters that she needed to raise $2.5 million to cover the initial filing fees for recounts. After the initial goal was reached in less than 12 hours, the figure rose to $4.5 million. Then, on November 25, Stein boosted it to $7 million, saying she planned to cover the total cost of the recounts, including legal fees. The rapid pace of donations ta-pered off as the Thanksgiving weekend came to a close, but on November 30, Stein again increased the goal, to $9.5 million.

Each time, Stein cited unexpected expenses; eventually, her team had lawyers deployed in all three states fighting legal battles to defend the recounts. But the ever-increasing demand for more money had the odd effect of uniting Republicans and Democrats. Trump called it “the Green Party scam to fill up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts,” while co-median Samantha Bee responded to a clip of Stein defending the recount with an earnest plea: “Oh, fuck off!” The A-Team, true to form, wondered whether the online counter that kept track of all the fund-raising pledges was working properly. “I very much hope that it’s not somehow falsified,” one scientist wrote on the Slack channel.

BY late November, Halderman and the A-Team had become completely dependent on Stein’s willingness to proceed,

and her surprising ability to raise money. There would be no recount without her. But in a sense, the scientists were also using Stein for their own purposes. “What we’re doing right now is clearly a hack,” Halderman told me at the time. “It’s a hack in the other sense of the word—a creative way to use the existing rules to get some necessary thing done.” The effort, as he saw it, was a “historic moment in American democracy. For the first time since we’ve had computer voting machines, we’re going to make sure they’re producing the right result in a national election.”

Over the next two weeks, the re-count battle shifted from the Slack channel to the courts, where the Trump campaign and the states themselves were resisting efforts to reexamine the outcome. The prima-ry legal issue was Stein’s standing: Since the recount wasn’t going to make her president, did she have the right to force a recount? “The law says nothing about having to prove that you’re aggrieved in any way,” insisted Hayley Horowitz, Stein’s attorney. “The statutes presume that anyone who runs in an unfair election has suffered an injury.”

On December 9, Halderman traveled to Philadelphia for what turned out to be the most dramatic legal battle in the recount fight. Stein had filed suit in federal court in Penn-sylvania to allow a team of computer scientists to conduct a forensic assessment of the state’s voting machines. By that point, a recount that had been authorized in Wisconsin, which would end up shifting a few hundred votes to Trump, was underway. A federal court, meanwhile, had shut down the

recount in Michigan after only three days, ruling Stein was not an “aggrieved candidate” because she had no chance of winning. Pennsylvania was the last chance.

Both sides put their own experts on the stand. The state called Michael Shamos, a computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon who has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from voting-machine companies to testify that election hacking is virtually impossible. “Shamos is the guy who is responsible as much as anybody in the tech community for all these lousy systems that are used all over the place,” says Jefferson, the scientist from Livermore. “So, of course, he had to be there in order to defend his past work.”

After first admitting that “a machine of any kind” could be hacked, given time and unfettered access, Shamos walked the court through a detailed explanation of why he believed that would have been essentially impossible to do in Pennsylvania. Even hacking a single machine, he testified, would take far too long to be practical:

One has to break seals, do things to the machine and then apply counterfeit seals back to the machine in such a way that nobody notices what is going on. And to do this to any significant number of machines requires an incredibly long time. I did a calculation earlier this year and found that it would take four months to do it for the DRE machines that are used in my county, Allegheny County. Nobody has un-fettered access to the machine warehouse for four months without being observed.

When Halderman took the stand, his testimony didn’t go as well. “Am I correct,” the state’s attorney asked him, “that as you sit here today, you have no evidence that any machine in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was compromised in such a way as to alter any vote?”

“That is indeed what the forensic examination I’m talking about would seek to find,” Halderman answered.

Judge Paul Diamond, an appointee of President George W. Bush, interjected.

“Is that a yes or a no?” he asked.“Yes,” Halderman replied, acknowledging both his lack of

evidence and his view that a hack was, indeed, unlikely.When the state’s attorney concluded his questioning, the

judge continued to cross-examine Halderman. “Doctor,” he pressed, “is there anything that you have testified to this af-ternoon, other than the result of the vote on November 8, anything at all you have testified to today that you did not know before November 8?”

By raising the alarm when there was no sign of smoke, security activists may have made it harder to force recounts when they’re really needed.

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Halderman’s answer was startling. “No,” he told Diamond. “I don’t think so.” After spending $7 million to force hundreds of county officials across three states to inspect millions of ballots, recount advocates could not provide a single piece of evidence that the election results had been manipulated or miscounted.

Three days later, the judge dismissed Stein’s lawsuit and ended the recount.

THREE days before Christmas, Matt Bernhard, Halder-man’s doctoral student, sat alone in an office at

the University of Michigan, tapping on a computer. The semes-ter had ended a week earlier, and the computer science building was dark and silent. But Bernhard was hard at work poring over the data from the recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan.

“It would be incredibly hypocritical to spend all this time saying you need to do a recount because you need to check that there was no fraud, and then not check the recount to make sure there was no fraud,” he says. “That’s what most people did. They said, ‘Well, we did the recount, the results were the same, let’s go home.’ That’s not the point.”

Unfortunately, the data doesn’t make the point of the re-count any clearer. The Michigan data set is so incomplete—just 40 percent of the state’s 4.8 million votes were recounted be-fore the process was halted—that it provides little insight one way or the other. In Wisconsin, the only state that finished the process, there was no evidence to indicate that anyone stole the election. The hand recount did find that three percent of the 13,800 ballots scanned using an Optech III-P Eagle machine were miscounted. That’s less than 400 votes changed—but the errors followed no apparent pattern, and did not favor either Trump or Clinton. “That indicates that these are just crappy voting machines and we shouldn’t be using them,” Bernhard says.

Bernhard insists that he is comforted by these results. The country’s election system, he concludes, produced a true and accurate reflection of the people’s will. While there is no way to know what security experts might have found if they had been

permitted to conduct a forensic examination of Pennsylvania’s machines, Bernhard declares himself “probably the most con-vinced person in the world that Donald Trump won Wisconsin.”

Bonifaz and Halderman remain less certain. In early December, when President Barack Obama declared that he was confident that no voting machines had been hacked, Bonifaz was incredulous. “How can he know that?” he growled. Later that month, during a presentation at a computer security convention in Germany, Halderman said that because the recounts weren’t completed, scientists can’t conclude that the 2016 election was hack-free.

In the end, it’s not clear that anyone benefited from the recount. Trump gained a handful of votes in Wisconsin, and Clinton picked up a few in Michigan. Other than that, nothing of consequence was resolved. As countless investigations have shown—and recent events have confirmed—the threat of malicious hacking and machine error remains a very real threat to our democratic process. If election results can’t be trusted, then the legitimacy of the representative system itself is called into question. Yet despite all the expense and the drama and the partisan bickering over the recounts, Halderman and his colleagues failed to advance public un-derstanding of the serious risks posed by electronic voting machines. Indeed, the argument could be made that by raising the alarm when there was no sign of smoke, advocates for election security may have made it harder to force recounts when they’re really needed.

“People will be wondering whether all of this was neces-sary,” Halderman says. “I hope the outcome is positive policy change—that people won’t go back to state capitals and make recounts harder to do.” In fact, the Michigan legislature did just that during the recount fight, introducing a bill that would significantly increase the costs of a recount sought by a candi-date who lost by as much as Stein. The measure was dropped after the recount ended, but it’s likely that Republicans will use their dominance in state legislatures to make it harder to scrutinize the outcome of questionable elections.

“I don’t think the whole process was particularly productive,” says Michael Slaby, who served as chief technology officer for Obama’s presidential campaigns. “It cost millions of dollars, and President Trump ended up with more votes in Wisconsin. That doesn’t seem like a good result.”

For his part, Halderman remains baffled by such reasoning. To him, proving that the process worked is just as valuable as showing that it erred. As a scientist, he believes that the democratic experiment must yield verifiable results if it is to be accepted as valid. What matters isn’t proving that there was wrongdoing in any given election. What matters is subjecting our system of elections to constant and careful scrutiny, to ensure that our voting technology stays one step ahead of those who seek to disrupt it.

“The machinery of democracy should be answering the questions we’ve asked,” Halderman says. “We are further from a safe system than I thought we were before the election. That bothers me. That’s not the way democracy should work.” a

Ballot workers in Wisconsin, the only state to complete the recount.

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ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS BUZELLI

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ESSAY

WHAT IS A LEMMING, exactly? Most of us, I’m guessing, could name few of its basic biological attributes. (It’s a rodent weighing one to four ounces and measuring three to six inches in length that lives in the Arctic.) The primary thing we think we know about lemmings—that they throw themselves off cliffs in inex-plicable mass suicides—is actually false. This myth originally arose as a folk explanation for the wide variances in lemming populations from year to year, and was cemented by White Wilderness, a nature film produced by Walt Disney that won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1958. In one sequence, lemmings are shown leaping off a cliff into the Arctic Ocean, destined to drown. “They’ve become victims of an obsession,” intones the narrator. In reality, the lemmings were flown to Alberta by the film’s producers and herded off the cliff.

The popular conception of a lemming blindly rushing to its death does a poor job of describing the animal’s nature, but an excellent job of describing human nature—lemmings has entered the vernacular to denote any group of unthink-ing followers hastening their own demise. To paraphrase Voltaire’s chestnut on God, since no animal that regularly commits mass suicide exists, it was necessary to invent one. We turn to nature documentaries not to understand nature, but to see our own behavior reflected back at us. The natural world—wild, chaotic, mutable—can be endlessly recut to tell whatever story we need to tell ourselves.

Last November, two days after the election, Ellen DeGeneres played a clip for her viewers that had recently gone viral on the internet: A group of baby marine iguanas in the Galápagos make their way from the sand to the safety of the rocks, but are suddenly beset on all sides by racer snakes. As the iguanas are picked off and devoured, one sprints for cover, only to run into an ambush. Then, just as a snake coils around its body, the iguana miraculously breaks free, squirming out of the death

grip. After a series of fantastic leaps, still dodging a tangle of snakes, the iguana finally makes it to safety.

“He made it!” DeGeneres exulted. “That little baby iguana got away!” The audience cheered. Then DeGeneres made the moral of the story explicit for her viewers, who found them-selves living, suddenly, in Donald Trump’s America. “And that’s what we’re gonna do,” she assured everyone. “No matter what your snake is, there is hope for your little iguana.”

The clip was part of a promotion for Planet Earth II, which has its U.S. premiere this month on BBC America. It’s the much-anticipated sequel to Planet Earth, the groundbreaking BBC documentary from 2006 whose calming narration by David Attenborough and vivid, high-definition sequences of migrating birds, shark attacks, swimming elephants, bat-catching snakes, and polar bear hunts became a favorite of stoners everywhere. Five years in the making, Planet Earth was produced and released before climate change became Oscar-winning enter-tainment. The sequel, by contrast, was prepared after David Cameron rode to victory as prime minister in part by arguing that global warming is “one of the biggest threats facing the world.” Planned for release ten years after the original series, Planet Earth II was supposed to arrive, triumphant, as a rising tide against the rising tides of climate change.

Instead, the nature documentary is being released at a mo-ment when the future of nature itself seems unbearably bleak. Had Brexit been defeated last summer, and had Hillary Clinton been elected in November, Attenborough’s soothing voice would have joined an empowered chorus of sane environmental stewards, reminding us of our shared accomplishments and shared commitments. Instead, one of Prime Minister Theresa May’s first post-Brexit acts was to abolish the Department

A View to a KillBy focusing on high-definition thrills, nature documentaries obscure more than they reveal.

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for Energy and Climate Change, and Donald Trump named a climate change denier to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Attenborough’s voice now no longer soothes, but rather intones from the wilderness as an admonishing Cassandra.

“Our planet is still full of wonders,” Attenborough recites in the closing to the original series. “As we explore them, so we gain not only understanding, but power. We can now destroy or we can cherish. The choice is ours.” Unfortunately, Planet Earth II offers no such choice. Instead, the documentary’s emphasis on advances in film technology inadvertently reinforces the rhetoric of climate change deniers: that nature is immutable, that what we see is what we get. It brings the natural world into brilliant focus but leaves the biggest threat to that world—homo sapiens—out of the picture almost entirely. The stories it tells are ancient and unbroken; nature is portrayed in conflict only with itself. The most dangerous and destructive animal on the planet is left, for the most part, unseen and undisturbed, content to glide silently over the landscape, entertained by our god’s-eye view.

THE MOVING IMAGE itself was born from our need to document nature—to see, at last, the invisible world all around us. When Eadweard Muybridge stumbled into creating the motion picture in 1878, he was trying to settle a bet about an animal: Does a horse gallop with all four feet off the ground? To answer the question, Muybridge devised his series of successive cameras, each attached to a trip wire. He captured a flip-book of motion that saw the previously unseeable: a horse in mid-air, all four legs hovering above the ground.

It didn’t take long for this new art form to stumble upon another truth: When it comes to attracting viewers, nature itself isn’t enough. In 1926, William Douglas Burden traveled to the island of Komodo to document a newly discovered giant reptile. The documentary he produced, featuring some of the first images of the Komodo dragon, failed to secure distribution because,

in the words of one producer, it was “without sufficient dramat-ic or adventure interest.” A few years later, Burden’s friend—the aviator, explorer, and director Merian Cooper—fictionalized his story, this time with an ape instead of a lizard. The result, King Kong, offered stark proof that animal fiction is often better entertainment than animal fact.

Since Burden’s failure, nature documentarians have more or less stuck to three tried-and-true tactics. First, they cut the boring parts: Rarely does one see an animal sitting or sleeping,

though this is how many animals spend most of their time. Instead, creatures in the wild are filmed hunting or being hunt-ed, playing or being played. Wild Kingdom, Mutual of Omaha’s wildly successful TV series that premiered in 1963 and ran for 25 years, showcased breathtaking chases and exotic animals engaged in life-or-death struggles. (The show’s sponsor, a life insurance company, may have had a perverse incentive in featuring these memento mori of the animal world.)

The second tactic nature documentarians employ is to use animals as metaphors for human behavior. In Disney’s True-Life Adventure documentaries, produced between 1948 and 1960, nature is unthreatening and often silly: a woodcock dances to a samba in Nature’s Half Acre, seal cows come ashore in Seal Island to strains of “Here Comes the Bride.” (This is the same series in which the lemmings took their awkward, semi-comical dives.) Other filmmakers turned to the natu-ral world for more overt political commentary. The World War II–era film High Over the Borders used migratory bird patterns to forge a sense of international unity in the Western hemisphere. Nazi Germany, meanwhile, depicted insects for propaganda purposes in The Bee Colony, in which the narrator employs military jargon while highlighting the importance of every worker doing its allotted role without question or dissent. Conversely, the 1950s American TV show Adventure aligned bees with communism: According to the film’s narra-tion, the footage was actually produced by Russian scientists, because when “Russian scientists think of bees, they think of themselves.” In 2005, when March of the Penguins became the second-highest-grossing documentary in history, conservative viewers saw the tale of monogamous, family-oriented emperor penguins shielding their young against harsh Antarctic blasts as a thrilling vindication of the Christian right in the natural world. (Emperor penguins, in fact, are only monogamous for a season, and sometimes kidnap the eggs of others.)

The third tactic of nature documentaries, beginning in the 1960s, was overtly political: As the natural world depicted on-screen became increasingly threatened, the documentary became a tool of the environmental movement, a means to focus on the importance of human stewardship. The diver and explorer Jacques Cousteau became the face of that stewardship for nearly three decades with shows like The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which brought viewers face to face with seldom-seen creatures like octopuses, sharks, and whales, as well as the pollution that threatened their habitat.

The success of the original Planet Earth stemmed from its ability to synthesize all three of these strands into one seamless product. Produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit—it was the most expensive nature documentary ever made, at $25 million, and the first to be filmed in high-definition—the series combined entertaining animals, thinly veiled metaphors for human be-havior, and a gentle environmental theme. The original eleven episodes aired in 2006 in two parts: five in the spring (“From Pole to Pole,” “Mountains,” “Freshwater,” “Caves,” “Deserts”) and another six in the fall (“Ice Worlds,” “Great Plains,” “Jungles,” “Shallow Seas,” “Seasonal Forests,” “Ocean Deep”).

Planet Earth’s emphasis on new technology reinforces the rhetoric of climate change deniers: that nature is immutable.

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tourism. About the snake-evading baby iguanas, Attenborough tells us that “when the hatchlings emerge, they’re vulnerable,” without mentioning that the species as a whole is also classified as “vulnerable”—nor that their antagonists, the Galápagos racer snakes, are even more threatened, considered “endangered” by the Galápagos Conservation Trust. To Ellen DeGeneres and her audience, the baby iguanas may seem like innocent victims, but it is the vilified snakes whose survival is more at risk.

It’s difficult to feel too deeply for the iguanas, however, for as soon as they have scampered to safety, Planet Earth II moves on to the next impossibly lush and exotic location. By switching rapidly from scene to scene, the series obscures the individual life cycles of the creatures it showcases; they become nothing more than passive participants in larger geographical concerns: islands, mountains, rivers. Attenborough’s narration itself is minimal and riven with clichés—the Komodo dragon’s teeth, we’re told, are “sharp as steak knives.” The series can be watched without sound to little detriment.

The episodes specialize in depicting the extreme lengths to which many animals must go to acquire food or to keep from becoming food: hunting prey up vertical cliffs, migrating over Himalayan peaks, running for their lives. Sometimes the camera sides with the predator, sometimes with the prey, but it always sides with the desperate. The net effect is to present a natural landscape in which individuals are under constant threat, but the ecosystem as a whole is stable. Animals are in danger, but not endangered.

In between these two halves, however, the entire landscape of environmental documentaries changed dramatically. In the summer of 2006, An Inconvenient Truth was released in the-aters and went on to become one of the top-grossing docu-mentaries of all time, and won the Academy Award that year. Focusing not on visual beauty but on a wonky, Al Gore– hosted slideshow—its most dramatic flourish was the use of a cherry picker to point out the dramatic rise in CO2 emissions—it ushered in a new age of uncompromisingly didactic nature documentaries: Gasland, Blackfish, The Cove, Chasing Ice. These films focused not just on the natural world but on the direct consequences of human action on that world, offering stark depictions of animal cruelty, habitat destruction, and ecolog-ical disaster. It was too late for Planet Earth to respond, but a year later, footage from the series was recut for the feature- length documentary Earth, which offered a more environmen-talist agenda than that of the original series—and ended up grossing almost twice as much as An Inconvenient Truth.

THE YEARS SINCE have only brought more dread and uncertainty about the environment—yet Planet Earth II seems strangely frozen in time. The series is almost entirely free of an environ-mental perspective, failing to inform its audience that many of its showcased species are threatened or endangered. The first episode opens with the charismatic and languid pygmy three-toed sloth; we are told that it lives on the Isla Escudo off the coast of Panama, but not that it’s critically endangered due to

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A cameraman with a gyro-stabilized rig films a swarm of locusts in Madagascar. Despite its advanced technology, Planet Earth II feels frozen in time.

wider world. For the filmmakers, the natural world is a sublime landscape of awe and terror that offers the pure enjoyment of front-row seats to a previously unseen universe. Until the final episode, “Cities,” hardly any humans appear in the series at all, because our presence would break the spell; we might as well be witnessing some entirely alien planet.

This extreme aestheticization of nature represents a par-ticularly dangerous stance in our present moment. Donald

Trump has chosen Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. As attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt worked tirelessly to protect the oil and gas lobby, sued the EPA, and dismissed the debate over climate change as “far from settled.” Trump’s pick for energy secretary, Rick Perry, wants to dismantle the entire agency, along with its regulation of the fossil fuel industry.

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We never form a full picture of any of the various species on display in Planet Earth II; by the series end, the only thing we have a clear understanding of is its true star: the camera itself. Because animals inhabit a realm that is not only beyond our understanding, but beyond our perception, the series serves as a testing ground for innovative new developments in film technology. As a result, Planet Earth II comes off as the world’s most expensive film loop for selling high-definition televisions at Best Buy: The camera is dunked underwater, lashed to high-flying drones, and strapped to the DJI Ronin, a three-axis gimbal stabilizing unit that allows for long, steady tracking shots. The animals are not so much the subject of the camera as its measure.

In a sense, the Planet Earth series pulls off a marvelous trick: It allows us to see a world under almost constant threat of extinction without ham-handedly calling our attention to conservation issues. By chronicling in minute detail a world that could fall apart at the slightest disturbance, the series aims to passively foster an ethos of stewardship among its viewers without calling overt attention to it. In identifying with the baby iguanas over their snake predators, we’re relieved of any obligation to understand the greater ecological complexities of nature. In this telling, the baby iguana is not threatened by us, it is us—and, as with the iguana, our resilience ultimately overcomes all odds, fending off the dangers and horrors of the

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In Planet Earth II, individuals are under threat, but the ecosystem as a whole is stable. Animals are in danger, but not endangered.

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When Attenborough recorded his opening monologue for Planet Earth II, intoning that “never have those wildernesses been as fragile and as precious as they are today,” he surely had no idea how ominously his words would ring by the time the episode aired.

Nor does Attenborough seem to understand how ill- suited his chosen métier is to face these new disasters. Trump’s cab-inet picks spell potential doom for any number of species, but the animals most threatened probably won’t include the charismatic creatures favored by Planet Earth. The American pika—a small cousin of the rabbit that lives high in the west-ern mountain ranges of the United States—is one of the first animals that will likely succumb to climate change, but it has little of the grandeur of the snow leopard or the polar bear. The nature documentary has been conditioned for decades to focus on the same stock setups—the drama of migration, the thrill of the hunt—but extinction is far more difficult to photograph, requiring narratives that forgo the usual struggle of life and death for storytelling that lays bare the existential shift into nothingness.

Don’t expect this from Planet Earth II, which ends in the British version with Attenborough himself atop a London sky-scraper, making the same decades-old plea for empathy with the natural world. “Looking down on this great metropolis,” he tells us, “the ingenuity with which we continue to reshape the surface of our planet is very striking. But it’s also sobering. It reminds me of just how easy it is for us to lose our connection with the natural world. Yet it’s on this connection that the future of both humanity and the natural world depend.” In the world of Planet Earth, do humanity and the natural world actually depend on each other? As we are largely absent from the series, it’s hard to know for sure; Attenborough relies, as always, on a belief that mere exposure will produce empathy; a risky gambit at best.

And one likely to be unsuccessful. Filmmaker and scholar Derek Bousé, who attempted to catalog the impact of wildlife films on public policy and the environment, concluded in his 2000 study, Wildlife Films, that there is a “great deal of op-timistic presumption but a dearth of real evidence about the power of wildlife films to ‘save’ nature.” Indeed, he suggests, nature documentaries tend to “ratify and legitimize status quo values,” and he points out that the golden age of wildlife documentaries, from the 1960s onward, coincided with in-creasing rates of extinction and habitat destruction—hardly an indication of their success at fostering conservation.

The filmmakers of Planet Earth II may know this already. Perhaps they have already given up on conservation; the very name of the series sounds like a hopeful exoplanet waiting in the wings. With its emphasis on camera work over education, the series comes across more like a desperate cataloging of soon-to-be-extinct animals than a well-intentioned effort to save the vanishing world it seeks to document. What Plan-et Earth offers us, in the end, is less a documentary than a high-definition menagerie: a lush and stunning collection of final glimpses and last looks. a

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Love Poems in the Time of Climate ChangeBY CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ

Sonnet XVIII don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals, diamonds,or reserves of crude oil that propagate war:I love you as one loves most vulnerable things,urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

I love you as the seed that doesn’t sprout but carriesthe heritage of our roots, secured, within a vault,and thanks to your love the organic taste that ripensfrom the fruit lives sweetly on my tongue.

I love you without knowing how, or when, the world will end—I love you naturally without pesticides or pills—I love you like this because we won’t survive any other way,except in this form in which humans and nature are kin,so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,so close that your sea rises with my heat.

Sonnet XIIGlobal woman, waxy apple, record heat,thick smell of algae, burnt peat and sunset, what rich nitrogen opens between your native trees? What fossil fuels does a man tap with his drill?

Loving is a migration with butterflies and refugees,with overcrowded boats and no milkweed:loving is a clash of petro-states,and two bodies detonated by a single drone strike.

Kiss by kiss I walk across your scarred landscape,your border walls, your dam, your reservations,until our little extinctions transform into peak oil

and push through the narrow pipelines of our veins,until we bloom wide, like water hyacinth, until we are and we are more than a fracture in geologic time.

Craig Santos Perez is the author of FROM UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [GUMA’] (Omnidawn, 2014).

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ILLUSTRATION BY PETER HORVATH

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BOOKS

IN HIS YOUTHFUL first book, an enthusiastically received novel called The Romantics (2000), Pankaj Mishra portrays young men from provincial India who immerse themselves in modern intellectual history. Like many students from the provinces before him, Mishra’s main character seeks his place largely through reading. But unlike those earlier generations, he explores who to become not just in his new city, but in globalized modernity.

Mishra’s hero reads Gustave Flaubert’s coming-of-age novel, Sentimental Education, and Edmund Wilson’s interpretation of it as a commentary on exclusion and its consequences. He shares his reading with a more politically aware friend, almost embarrassed by his own bookishness. But when they meet again years later, it turns out that his friend has taken Wilson’s essay very seriously. For in nineteenth-century Eu-rope and its struggles, he discovered an environment much like his own. Although a new world of moral and material possibilities seemed to open up before the young men of his generation, now, as then, only a few would actually succeed in their strivings. Flaubert captured the mismatch that a modern

youth experienced between “large, passionate, but imprecise longings” and the “slow, steady shrinking of horizons.” The European bildungsroman addressed what has become a world-wide situation in our time.

Mishra’s novel went on to diagnose the consequences of such a mismatch. After the students witness some rioting on campus, the friend explains with “a new vehemence” that the perpetrators were mainly “young men with nothing to do, nowhere to go, with no future, no prospects, nothing, nothing at all.” The bookish young man is clearly Mishra in another guise, down to their common birth year and education. His friend, who is more familiar not simply with politics but also with criminality and violence, is also based on a real person; they met the year Mishra moved from Allahabad to Benares and fell in love himself with the literary criticism of Edmund Wilson. Mishra has not published another novel since. But in his admirable career writing on politics, he closely identifies with the lesson of his erstwhile friend (who later became a contract killer): If people are exposed to grandeur and then their horizons shrink, the results can prove dangerous.

While Mishra long ago recognized the uses of Western thought in understanding the causes of global rage, in his new book, Age of Anger, he turns to intellectual history to counter civilizational or theological explanations for that rage in its more recent forms. After September 11, 2001, a crew of special-ists arose to designate Islam the cause of hatred and violence; their essential goal was to immunize our own way of life from blame and scrutiny. Such analysts could never anticipate how their own states and cultures gave rise to a broader discontent— including in Europe and the United States. After votes for Brexit and Donald Trump, it turns out it was not just “radicalized” Muslim youths who resented elites and resorted to violence as a means of revenge.

Instead, Mishra argues that the European past was a dry run for our global present. In the German and Russian populists and terrorists of the nineteenth century, Mishra finds avatars of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the Muslim radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. In the “Frenchmen who bombed music halls, cafés, and the Paris stock exchange” in the 1880s and ’90s, he sees forerunners of today’s “English and Chinese nationalists, Somali pirates, human traffickers, and anonymous cyber-hackers.” Understanding political and eco-nomic inequality is vital to understanding these convulsions; but we also have to examine how the ideals we live with—of capitalism and liberalism—have long produced unbearable disillusionment. To grasp the fear and desire behind violent reaction, Mishra contends, we need not just Karl Marx and Thomas Piketty, but also analysts of the psyche and spirit.

AGE OF ANGER traces today’s discontent back to the beginning of modernity, when Europe underwent commercial and later industrial revolutions, toppled its aristocratic elites and some-times kings, and trumpeted freedom and equality, even as it

Look Back in AngerThe origins of today’s global upheavals lie in Western history.

BY SAMUEL MOYN

MARCH 2017 | 61

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redoubled the prestige of luxury and the lure of hierarchy. It was the start of the process of building a world of plenty and self-transformation, but also of distinction and envy. Philos-ophers of the eighteenth century diagnosed the likely outcome of this divide; the nineteenth century experienced that out-come, in furious, violent responses to it.

Mishra starts with a set piece on Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who offer us two opposing views of modernity and how to think about its shortcomings. Voltaire, the mainstream rationalist, embraced commerce and progress; he saw little daylight between the celebration of the one and the inevitability of the other. He endorsed individual freedom and pluralistic tolerance up to a point. Compared to the democratic mob, hereditary rulers—especially if well tutored by freethinkers like Voltaire himself—were less likely to become oppressive. He held a low opinion of Rousseau, the rebellious son of a Genevan watchmaker. Rousseau returned the compliment, writing to Voltaire in 1760, “I hate you.”

Rousseau, on the other hand, thought modernity was bring-ing about not progress but tragedy. Modern men and women learned to envy the magnificence of the winners and to define their ends in a triangular process of assessing what others valued first. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rous-seau depicted how enraging it is to subordinate oneself to the desires of others, in a state of exclusion from Voltaire’s opulent civilization. Because Rousseau had experienced the life of a social climber himself, he understood “the many uprooted men” who failed to “adapt themselves to a stable life in society,” and began to see that failure as the product of a larger “injustice against the human race.” Enslaved by manufactured desires, most Europeans experienced merely the frustration of never seeing them realized. Commercial modernity imprisoned the rich as much as the poor in a syndrome of “envy, fascination, revulsion, and rejection.”

It is Voltaire’s vision of modernity, however, that has been the more seductive one throughout much of history. His theory fueled the first age of globalization before World War I, and has gained currency again in the enthusiasm for markets that burgeoned after the end of the Cold War. “As Louis Vuitton opened in Borneo,” Mishra observes sarcastically, “it seemed only a matter of time before the love of luxury was followed by the rule of law, the enhanced use of critical reason, and the expansion of individual freedom.” But in part because the results benefit only a few, in part because modernity is a cage for everyone, Rousseau’s heirs await the moment to strike.

THE QUESTION IS: What are those left behind to do with their frustration? They can convert it, as Rousseau did, into insight into the limits of modernity, even for those who win the game. Or, sensing that there will be no chance of winning for all, especially as the competition goes global, they can wreak vengeance on the system.

Mishra sees an early example of such revenge in the German Romantics, whom he calls “the first angry young nationalists.” By the start of the nineteenth century, Germany—decades away

from industrial modernity or even political unity—had failed to keep pace with the power and wealth that made Britain and France so opulent. Educated young Germans shared a sense of being belated, peripheral, and weak. They looked to France as “the home of the worldly, elegant, and sensuous philosopher, who spoke a language of unparalleled clarity and precision.” Yet when they arrived there, they perceived the same shallowness that Rousseau had seen before them. In 1769, the incisive philosopher J.G. Herder set out from the Baltic port of Riga to Paris, hoping to become gallicized. He left the next year, acutely disappointed, and convinced of the need to formulate a sturdy alternative to what he saw as hollow cosmopolitanism.

Building on Rousseau, German poets and philosophers such as Herder and Friedrich Schiller introduced a profound diagno-sis of their own alienation. A feeling of being divided from the world, and even from one’s very self—as well as from one’s own work, as their follower Karl Marx added—was the worst thing about modern consciousness. Along with J.G. Fichte, Herder proposed a nationalist cure for this sense of estrangement. Herder extolled the popular genius of German Kultur, as well as the ineffability of particular cultures across the board. It was the opposite of the French idea of civilisation. Instead of seek-ing justification for their culture in progress and the promise of the future, Germans looked to the distant past to confirm

their sense of national greatness, elevating folklore and myths to the pinnacle of high art. Whereas civilisation was centered on commerce, luxury, and urbanity, Kultur infused local ties and traditions with fervent spirituality, and idealized the Volk.

In the nineteenth century, such ideas drove German unifi-cation and national awakenings across Europe, and found their nadir in Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the twentieth century. Not only did nationalism give the world’s peasantries an outlet for their rage, but it now tempts those countries once at the apex of civilization toward populism. The Brexit vote and Trump’s unexpected win illustrate that when stagnation sets in at the center, anger can drive nationalist backlash. A nostalgia for “little England” takes revenge on cosmopolitan and diverse London, while calls to “make America great again” imply xeno-phobic and militaristic policies. Even Voltaire’s France is now a battleground in liberalism’s fight for survival against explosive nationalist resentment.

Mishra also lavishes attention on Russia, the first global hinterland where the Enlightenment’s liberatory wave crashed

Out of the gap between expected liberation and experienced limits, fury boils.

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against the wall of a massive peasantry—sparking the invention of nihilism and terrorism. Since the Enlightenment, Russia’s ruling class had debated whether to westernize, and foreign kibitzers were divided over whether and how to extend civ-ilization to Russia’s feudal society of aristocrats and serfs. (While Rousseau doubted it made sense to “tutor” Russia, Voltaire advised Empress Catherine the Great, and she bought his library after he died, hoping it would help.) But as the nineteenth century dragged on, autocratic rule did not bring forth progress fast enough to forestall its critics.

When you start so far behind, the very attempt to catch up breeds self-hatred. Your “conscience murmurs,” Fyodor Dos-toevsky lamented, that you are “a hollow man,” condemned in advance to a “state of insatiable, bilious malice.” But whereas Dostoevsky only wrote about this discontent, other Russians took the route of terroristic deeds. The activist and thinker Mikhail Bakunin argued for the need to bring the system down in one swift stroke; he believed that “heroic acts” could “trans-form the world from an authoritarian cage into an arcadia of human freedom.” Battling against Marx for intellectual lead-ership of Europe’s working classes, Bakunin spawned a coun-tercultural tradition of “lethal individualism,” whereby vivid destruction, instead of patient creation, would serve to define a self. His fellow critics of capitalism and empire were trans-national. They bombed cities and assassinated political leaders across the Atlantic, inaugurating “the first phase of global jihad,” and anticipating the long-distance networks of lone wolves and terrorist cells of today.

“Large parts of Asia and Africa,” Mishra concludes, “are now plunging deeper” into their own “fateful experience of that modernity.” They are told they live on a flat earth, but find it impossible to claw their way forward on what feels like a vertical cliff of hierarchy. Westernization destroyed existing beliefs and institutions in these countries, promoting instead a culture of individual freedoms and rights. But, as Mishra points out, “Most newly created ‘individuals’ toil within poorly imagined social and political communities and/or states with weakening sovereignty,” narrowing the opportunities for

personal flourishing. Western modernity opens up fault lines that “run through human souls as well as nations and so-cieties undergoing massive change.” Out of the gap between expected liberation and experienced limits, fury boils.

A SELF-PROCLAIMED HISTORY of the present, Age of Anger also feels like a blast from the past. In its literacy and literariness, it has the feel of Edmund Wilson’s extraordinary dramas of modern ideas—books like To the Finland Station—but with a different endpoint and a more global canvas. Mishra reads like a brilliant autodidact, putting to shame the many students who dutifully did the reading for

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their classes but missed the incandescent fire and penetrating insight in canonical texts. Yet his narrative of the outcasts of modernity has been told before, at different times and with different emphases, to explain earlier episodes of revolt and revolution: He is not the first to locate the origins of fascism in nineteenth-century German malcontents, and it was once popular to tag Rousseau for paving the way for communism and the student movement.

Nor is Mishra ready to offer solutions. Though he looks at the bleak record of commercial modernity in propagating itself across the world and marks its self-defeating expansion, he holds out no defined alternative. It is unclear whether Mishra feels the chief flaw lies in modernity’s failures—its false promise to liberate everyone—or in its successes, and the devastation that has accompanied them.

Of course, true freedom and equality beckon, which is why Mishra shows an occasional soft spot for lone wolves—including Timothy McVeigh—who hope a spectacular blow will shatter the glass. But ultimately he does not hold up such anarchists as models. Indeed, even though they unceremoniously dismiss the “gaudy cult of progress,” it seems to Mishra nonetheless that “the men trying to radicalize the liberal principle of freedom and autonomy, of individual power and agency, seem more rootless and desperate than before.” In a world that can no longer count on progress, and that fears its consequences for the planet, Mishra praises Pope Francis’s exemplary moral stances on behalf of the environment and the poor—if only because no one else is offering hope. Yet he also acknowledges there is no going back to a premodern metaphysics or economy, when ambition has come to seem everyone’s birthright, first in Europe, later everywhere.

If intellectual history matters in this parlous situation, then getting Rousseau right does, too. Interpreting him, as Mishra does, as nostalgic for ancient liberty or protective of interior freedom in the face of the modern catastrophe will ultimately not work. After all, Rousseau also rejected the viability of re-viving the Sparta he sometimes idealized. For that reason, he thought carefully about how to bring about free communities of equals in our economic and political circumstances.

And he also wrote The Social Contract, a text Mishra barely addresses. After reading The Social Contract’s commitment to modern freedom and equality, a fellow Enlightenment think-er, Immanuel Kant, early saw that Rousseau’s main impulses between a lamentation for modernity and an emancipatory program for it have to be reconciled at all costs. There is no way to sever Rousseau’s critique of painful exclusion and “glit-tering misery”—now, as Mishra shows, applicable across the world and into its smallest byways—from a political attempt to answer it.

“Rousseau,” Kant remarked, “was not far wrong in prefer-ring the state of savages—so long, that is, as the last stage to which the human race must climb is not attained.” Starting from his remote corner in the Benares library reading Edmund Wilson, no one has discerned better than Mishra just how far we still are from the top. a

AGE OF ANGER: A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT

BY PANKAJ MISHRA

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp., $27.00

MARCH 2017 | 63

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JUST AFTER APRIL Fools’ Day in 1922, Hermann Rorschach, a psychologist who used a collection of symmetrical inkblots to treat patients with manic depression and schizophrenia, died of appendicitis in Herisau, Switzerland, at the age of 37. Had he lived, he would have been 40 when his inkblots made landfall in the United States in 1925; 55 when they emerged as a helpful tool for profiling college applicants; 62 when the Pentagon used them to fashion a line of tropical shorts for World War II veterans; and 99 when Andy Warhol poured paint onto a canvas in 1984, folded it in half, and opened it to reveal his first inkblot-inspired painting. Rorschach would have been 121—unlikely, but not impossible—when Gnarls Barkley released his 2006 music video for “Crazy,” which featured a series of liquefied inkblots that morphed into threatening or reassuring shapes, depending on one’s perspective. And he most certainly would have been dead by 2016, when the film Arrival imagined a world in which aliens could communicate with humans by means of a visual language written in a mysterious, inky pattern.

Over the past century, Rorschach would have seen his inkblots morph from an obscure therapeutic instrument into a nearly universal cultural meme, at once a familiar touchstone for art, music, film, and fashion, and a controversial test for assessing job applicants and prosecuting criminal defendants. Perhaps he would have wondered why his inkblots, once re-served for the assessment of patients with serious mental illnesses, should have emerged as the preeminent metaphor for the relativity of all acts of perception and the flexibility of all personalities. “I am like a Rorschach test,” Barack Obama proclaimed in a 2008 interview. “Even if people find me dis-appointing ultimately, they might gain something.” “I tell people that Donald Trump is a Rorschach test,” echoed Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, last year. “People see in him what they want to see.”

DAMION SEARLS TRACES the long arc of Rorschach’s influ-ence in his scrupulously researched new book, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing. Equal parts biography and cultural history, The Inkblots tra-verses Rorschach’s short and undramatic life in Switzerland, Russia, and Germany, and his inkblots’ far longer and more interesting afterlife in the United States, where they came to play a crucial role in postwar organizational psychology.

It was impossible for Rorschach to know, or even to dream, that his blots would play the outsize role that they did in the modern cultural imagination. When he first attempted to publish the test in 1918, he encountered a staggering series of obstacles: money (the publishers he approached wanted him to pay to reproduce the blots), a wartime paper shortage, and skeptical colleagues. When the blots finally appeared in Rorschach’s book, Psychodiagnostics, in 1921, they were rejected by German academic psychologists as crude and insufficiently theorized. Shortly thereafter, at the height of his professional uncertainty, Rorschach died.

The inkblots would have died with him, were it not for the child psychologist David Mordecai Levy, who, in 1923, trans-lated Psychodiagnostics into English and taught the first U.S. seminar on the Rorschach. Gradually at first, and then with a rapidity that shocked the psychiatric community, Levy’s stu-dents and colleagues adopted Rorschach’s inkblots for test-ing the psyches of patients, college students, artists, army officers, and the “strange and mysterious” people of far-flung African and Asian nations. It was not long before everyone knew, more or less, the Rorschach protocol: A psychologist would quietly pass her subject Rorschach’s inkblots, one at a time; first the five black-and-white cards, then two with large splotches of red, and finally three multicolored ones. “Tell me what you see,” she would say, and wait for an answer.

What makes Rorschach’s test so intriguing is that, unlike questionnaires and other language-based approaches to personality assessment, the inkblots present the test subject with a visual task. The images, Searls explains, are designed to get “around your defenses and conscious strategies of self-presentation”—to clear a direct path from perception to

The Eye of the BeholderHow Rorschach’s inkblots turned personality testing into an art.

BY MERVE EMRE

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the expression of personality. Upon seeing the blots for the first time, many people gasp. Others look away, ashamed. Some stammer secrets they have long repressed. For Searls, the blots are not only a helpful pseudoscientific instrument, they are also a testament to the power of the aesthetic in the Romantic sense of the word: a state and study of heightened perception, one that exists somewhere in between feeling and cognition.

Searls places the Rorschach test and its creator in the cross-hairs of art and science, impressionism and empiricism, ob-jectivity and subjectivity. Its language of interpretation is essentially a painterly language: The most important features of one’s response to the inkblots are Form (F), Movement (M), and Color (C). Form refers to the shape the test subject sees: a bat, a bear, two women standing back-to-back eating turtle soup. Movement registers how much motion the client ascribes to these forms. The more Movement suggested in the answer—the bat shrieking, the bear dancing, the women lifting the spoons to their lips—the greater a person’s “psychic inner life,” Rorschach claimed. Color measures a test subject’s reaction to the sudden appearance of red, blue, and green in the last five blots. Subjects whom Rorschach considered ex-aggeratedly emotional—hysterics, neurotics, artists—tended to react more strongly to the colors. Some even experienced “color shock,” a near-catatonic state. The science of the Ror-schach, to the extent that one can refer to it as a science, is a science of artistic response as the key to personality.

To achieve their desired responses, the blots themselves had to function like works of art—an unusual ask for a psycholog-ical test. Rorschach was not the first or even the second to try his hand at designing inkblots. Klecksography, the study of inkblots or “blotograms” as they were once called, originated with the German poet and physician Justinius Kerner. Unlike Rorschach, Kerner was neither a scientist nor an artist but a mystic. He believed his inkblots to be “incursions of the spirit world,” magical images that spoke to him in the voices of the dead; voices he ventriloquized in the gloomy poetic captions he added to his blots. More popular than Kerner was the French psychologist Alfred Binet, who drew his inspiration for his

inkblots from Leonardo da Vinci, who, it was said, had once thrown a bucket of paint at a wall and divined his next paint-ing from the shapes he saw before him. In keeping with this backstory, Binet’s inkblots—messy, asymmetrical things—were used to measure a person’s imagina-tive capabilities: the greater the number of distinct forms the respondent saw in the inkblots, the greater his creative powers.

By contrast, the power of Rorschach’s inkblots derived in large part from their painstakingly crafted designs, refined through much clinical trial and error to give them the appearance of naturalness—as if the shapes had not been crafted at all, but rather “had made themselves,”

Searls writes. The point was neither disordered inspiration (as it was for Binet) nor spiritual connection (as it was for Kerner), but technical perfection. There could be no trace of the artist’s hand in the thickness of the brushstrokes or the shading of the ink; nothing to rouse suspicion among Rorschach’s paranoid patients that the inkblot had been created to elicit a particular response from them. There could be no captions, no border, nothing to distract respondents from the lines, the curves, the colors. Only the aesthetic impersonality of the blot could reveal the personality of its viewer.

To some degree, all personality assessment, whether visual or verbal, stalls at the uneasy intersection of art and science. A stylized language is designed, tested, altered, and retested until it evokes a consistent and verifiable response from its test subjects. The work of the personality assessor is not unlike the work of the writer or the editor or the artist, even if their ends are vastly different. Yet Rorschach was the first to imagine that the test itself might be an art form, that it would exhibit a “pictorial quality” that would transcend the genre of the test.

WHEN THE RORSCHACH test burst onto the American scene in the 1940s, it seemed wholly different from other personality tests, or “people-sorting instruments,” as they were then called without a trace of irony. With the rise of the labor force during and after World War II, corporations had warmed to the idea of using cheap, standardized tests to fit workers to the jobs that were right for them, a match made under the watchful eyes of executives eager to keep both profits and worker morale high. In this late-capitalist pursuit, they were guided by tests like the Personality Inventory, the Personal Audit, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and the Humm-Wadsworth Scale, all of which promised to help corporations manage the influx of millions of new workers into the workforce, most of whom were women and veterans who had enrolled in college after the GI Bill passed in

The Rorschach test’s ten inkblots, five in black-and-white and five in color, are designed to reveal conscious strategies of self-presentation.

THE INKBLOTS: HERMANN RORSCHACH, HIS ICONIC TEST, AND THE POWER OF SEEING

BY DAMION SEARLS

Crown, 416 pp., $28

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existence,” as Michel Foucault would have it. Should one choose to believe in it, the psychological knowledge that the test offers provides a way of caring for the self, of managing one’s thoughts, feelings, conduct, and way of being to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, or well-being. By this measure, what is important is not exclusively the Rorschach test’s aesthetic pre-sentation, but what happens in the process of administering it: a dialogue between a psychologist and her subject in which the subject can articulate her impressions, listen to the psychologist’s interpretation, and upon hearing this interpretation—“You are introverted, imaginative, stable”—embrace the language of the self with which she has been presented. She can feel comfort-able dwelling in her imagination, eschewing drama, embracing quietude. With the help of the test, she can accept this version of herself as her true self.

In a sense, the Rorschach may be more hospitable to an art of existence than tests with sternly categorical schema, like the Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, insofar as it does not slot the individual into a predetermined and fixed

set of categories, but seems to offer a looser, less constrained assessment of one’s personality. This may explain its appeal to creative types. The fantasy of the expressive creation of the self has become so naturalized by writers, poets, musicians, and painters that the Rorschach test must strike them as a totem of artistic freedom.

In Searls’s preoccupation with the Rorschach’s aesthetic valences, a second-order truth emerges. Writing about the Ror-schach test is itself a projective exercise; one that often reveals as much about the writer as it does about the test. Searls seems to have no interest in either confirming or disproving the test’s validity as a diagnostic tool. He is not a cynic; The Inkblots is not an exposé. He is an aesthete, and to him the greatest value of the blots is as art objects. “The blots look great,” he proclaims again and again throughout the book, as he details how their forms inspired visual artists from Warhol to Alan Moore, from Barkley to Jay Z. “They just look good.” At moments, Searls’s words fail him and a sort of mysticism takes over—a feeling of pure aesthetic bliss emanating from the blots. “You can feel the answers coming at you from the image. There’s something there,” he insists. There is something there, of course. Yet it is difficult, maybe impossible, to know ultimately whether that something is in the blots or in his mind. Intended or not, the history of the Rorschach test that emerges from Searls’s account is, ultimately, a Rorschach test. a

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Personality tests were used to identify individuals as specific “types,” initiating them into vast systems of social bureaucracy.

1944. Next to these tests, the Rorschach seemed to be something else entirely: not a mechanism for sorting people, but an occa-sion for self-expression—more like “art therapy,” observed an early Rorschach adopter, than a multiple-choice questionnaire.

We do not tend to think of personality tests as akin to works of art: unique, complex, irreducible, infinitely signifying. The opposite is often the case. Since their efflorescence in the 1940s, personality tests have often been used to identify individuals as specific “types,” initiating them into vast systems of social bureaucracy. Individuals were encouraged to think of themselves as examples of more general and generic models of human be-ings, who, taken together, made up a well-ordered social whole.

There was a darker side to “people sorting” as well. By the time the Rorschach test was a cultural icon in America in the late 1930s, German authorities had begun planning the sorting and deportation of Jews from the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno con-centration camp. Theodor Adorno would make the connection between the management of minorities and the management of workers explicit in The Authoritarian Personality, which offered a blistering critique of personality typing and testing. “It cannot be doubted that the critique of psychological types expresses a truly humane impulse, directed against that kind of subsumption of individuals under pre established classes which has been consummated in Nazi Germany, where the labeling of live human beings, independently of their specific qualities, resulted in decisions about their life and death,” Adorno wrote. “The rigidity of the construction of types is itself indicative of … the potentially fascist character.”

Of course, personality testing did not create this state of af-fairs, it only consecrated it. For Adorno, type and its “people- sorting instruments” were not the real problem, they were mere-ly a symptom of a more invasive psychological disease: social modernity. The rise of industrial capitalism and the division of people into classes—owners versus workers, white-collar versus blue-collar—had left an indelible imprint on the souls of men and women, stamping a standardized way of thinking, feeling, and behaving onto their psyches. Those who believed in the sanctity of the individual had been conditioned to do so by their class position. If you worked a managerial job, the kind that stressed creativity and gumption and “thinking outside of the box,” you would be more inclined to think of yourself in such individualistic terms. A line worker, a mere cog in the machine, had not been initiated into this language of self-actualization because he had no profitable use for it on the factory floor. “There is reason to look for psychology types because the world we live in is typed and ‘produces’ different ‘types’ of persons,” Adorno wrote. “The critique of typology should not neglect the fact that large numbers of people are no longer, or rather never were, ‘individuals’ ”—people who enjoyed real “freedom for action.” (One cannot imagine the existence of the BuzzFeed quiz in a world without such mass cultural artifacts as fast food, Friends, Harry Potter, and Taylor Swift.)

The Inkblots, however, does not take its critical cues from Adorno. Searls wants to redeem the Rorschach test, whether scientifically valid or not, as a technique of the self—an “art of

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ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL BEJAR

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I FIND MYSELF thinking a great deal lately about Mary Sve-vo, the character from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind who has had her memory erased but who loves quotations. She rattles off lines from Bartlett’s compendium when she has nothing else to say. These quotations cling to her cortex, forming a bridge between confusion and clarity. By repeating the wisdom of others, she manages to reconstitute some sense of holistic identity. Everyone in the film believes that her obsession is silly; but is it? A mind in need of answers seeks them out in small kernels that it can repeat, build upon, and constitute itself around.

The technical definition of an aphorism is a “pithy ob-servation that contains a general truth,” and it is the pith that gets us more than the truth; it is the tone that seals the writer to the words. The voices of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker and Benjamin Franklin still feel electrically alive to us because they managed to bake their personas into their brief observations. While proverbs and adages (cousins of the aphorism, to be sure) often lose their authorship and become orphaned—think about how many times someone has

mentioned “an old Irish saying” without knowing anything about its actual provenance—aphorisms stay tethered to their creators, dragging their voices along through history.

Aphorisms are linguistic memes. They were, in essence, an attempt by Greek philosophers to go viral 2,500 years before the internet existed. Hippocrates, who is credited with origi-nating the genre, understood that his best hope for immortality would be to fling self-contained thoughts into the future, little literary vessels that could travel independently across borders and generations. Aphorisms migrate to places where bigger books cannot, and most stay more or less intact over time.

300 Arguments, a collection of new aphorisms by the es-sayist Sarah Manguso, performs much of the same feat: Man-guso ties her eccentricities to brief statements that are in-tended to outlive her. Her book is only 90 pages long, and can be digested in a single sitting, but it also beckons the reader to return, to read a sentence, and put it down again. Each argument is meant to stand alone, yet there is an arc: This is a woman grappling with heartbreak and ambition and decep-tion and through it all, questioning her own decision to write so concisely. Are such small writings enough? Perhaps she is demonstrating that despite her inner emotional turmoil, she is able to exercise some level of control over her prose. Perhaps it is about mastery over chaos and how to find it—harness the lines first and then the self.

THE APHORISM HAS come back into vogue, or at least into the cultural conversation, because we are currently enmeshed in short-form writing, which is flourishing on Twitter and in the proliferation of political sound bites, both true and false. We are engaged in big cultural battles for truth and where to find it, and we are all searching for verified phrases that we can repeat over and over in order to maintain a sense of sanity as facts shift beneath our feet.

Some of Manguso’s arguments are only one sentence long, and these read like ancient koans. “Vices have much in common with their corresponding virtues,” “People congregate according to their relative levels of luck,” “Happiness begins to deteriorate once it is named,” “Worry is impatience for the next horror.” These statements feel like they have maybe always existed; like they came from an oracle. What makes Manguso’s book feel so surprising, however, is that she quickly veers away from these more decisive observations into idiosyncratic personal memories: “I fret about my lost scarf. Then I miss my flight. The scarf is no longer a problem.” Or: “I’ve taken on bad habits in order to grow closer to certain others—watching an inane television show, playing a video game, drinking. The habits lasted, but I never minded because they weren’t mine. They were just affectations of other people’s.”

Manguso is not on Twitter, and this is a conscious choice. As she wrote in an essay in Harper’s last year, “The brevity of fragments, scraps, the collective brain lint of the internet, is one thing; the brevity of the best aphorisms, which are

The Big ShortHow ambitious writers are turning to the power of the aphorism.

BY RACHEL SYME

MARCH 2017 | 67

complete in themselves, quite another.” Twitter was perhaps intended to foster lucid nuggets, our best selves boiled down, but sometimes it can feel like a jumble of incomplete thoughts by incomplete souls. Which, of course, we all are. Faced with the 140-character container, which is inherently social but also fragmented, Manguso chooses an alternate form that is, as she puts it, more complete.

Some may see this as a turning away from the world—a cloistering of the self—but I see it as Manguso’s attempt to communicate with her readers outside of the chattering and often heart-numbing melee of the web. 300 Arguments is one of many short, intensely personal works by women that have in recent years blurred the boundaries between poetry and prose—Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Rebecca Solnit’s Men Ex-plain Things to Me come to mind. The phenomenon of women writing in short form is not new: The remaining fragments of Sappho’s works show that she wrote brief odes, built to travel the seas of time. But this new crop of writers brings to the form an unusual urgency and density. Their works are short but saturated with research and references and layers of experience. In Bluets, Nelson chronicles her descent into madness following a breakup by charting the aesthetic and literary history of the color blue, which she has become fixat-ed on as a palliative idea. In Men Explain Things to Me, Solnit weaves her own stories of being talked down to by pedantic men with stories from myth, the scandal around Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the words of Virginia Woolf.

These are expansive narratives, but ones that take place inside compact vessels. It is as if these writers feel they need to pack as much into as little space as possible. It can be powerful to grab a form of condensed wisdom—one that is, however, often full of cliché—and attempt to infuse it with a new reso-nance and weirdness, with something human and desperate.

“A FAIR NUMBER of aphorisms seek to justify or explain the form itself,” Manguso observes in her Harper’s essay, defend-ing her preference for the short. She notes throughout that concision has been her obsession since she was a child; she has always been preoccupied with cutting the fat. Yet she also acknowledges this need to pare down has been the cause of

her anxieties and depressions. “I used to write these while playing hooky on what I hoped would be my magnum opus,” she writes. “Assigning myself to write 300 of them was like forcing myself to chain-smoke until I puked, but it didn’t work. I didn’t puke.” Her arguments, which are crystalline and often walloping, were not meant to be Manguso’s great work. She thought her calling was elsewhere, and these were just distractions.

But what if the small work is the great work? As Manguso writes, “I’m weary of the American idea that unless one is reaching toward the next, greater goal,

one is effectively choosing failure. This cultural pressure to think big—to equate size with ambition—is especially burden-some for writers who cannot follow, or choose not to follow, in the footsteps of Great Men.” This is not to say that Manguso— and Nelson, and Solnit, and writers of their ilk—are not writers of tremendous ambition; there is ambition leaking out of every page of 300 Arguments. But it is this ceaseless desire to be great, to reach the other shore, that keeps us ceaselessly borne back. It is a very individualist and deeply ingrained cultural desire, this need to capture the entire world in a book, to straddle it with one’s words.

Manguso is, instead, a memoirist who works in miniature. Before 300 Arguments, she wrote four much-admired short books about segments of her life, including The Two Kinds of Decay, which explored her years-long battle with a debilitat-ing autoimmune disorder, and Ongoingness, the story of the

journals she has kept for years. Compulsively recording her experiences in a diary became an unmooring compulsion, but the book itself rescues aphoristic fragments from the whole. In it, she writes looping, cryptic sentences such as, “I reread my favorite books to make sure they’re still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.” She is always mining her own experiences for material, but she is not confessional; she uses terseness and brevity as weapons. If no word is out of place, then it is much more difficult to question or undermine her truth.

If there is any point at which I bristle at Manguso’s lifelong enthusiasm with being brief, it is that she regularly equates excess with vulgarity. She talks often about “rescuing sen-tences” from bloated books, and refers to her own project as “a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.” There is a romance in this—the perfect book, with no gristle on it—but also it implies that there is something obscene about writers who choose to give in to their hunger and go long on a subject. It can be daunting to read a book like Manguso’s, because you walk away from it thinking, I am almost certainly doing too much.

Manguso’s need to write short has sharpened her lines into diamonds, but it has also driven her slightly mad, and it has caused her to perseverate over words to the detriment of her happiness and, as she admits, her health. These arguments are forged out of hard work and sustained effort, and also out of pain. It is impossible to read them without feeling for her; for what it took to write on such a tight leash. a

REVIEW

Manguso’s statements feel like they have maybe always existed; like they came from an oracle.

300 ARGUMENTS: ESSAYS

BY SARAH MANGUSO

Graywolf, 104 pp., $14.00

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ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL

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IN OCTOBER OF 1994, Wired magazine ran a feature about a new Californian subculture, cheerfully titled “meet the extropians.” Extropianism, the article enthused, was a philosophy of tran-scendence. With technology and the right attitude—aggressive individualism, cool rationalism, and other vaguely libertarian leanings—followers of the movement would “become more than human.” They would become transhuman, possessing “drastically augmented intellects, memories, and physical powers,” or maybe even posthuman. They envisioned a future in which human brains would be downloaded and preserved for posterity. So, too, would the human body, through cryogenics.

These transcendental technologists took the word extropy to mean the opposite of entropy, the process by which all things eventually decay, and they imagined a way of life to match. The Extropians invented an exuberant handshake to greet each other, and referred to themselves as VEPs, or Very Extropian Persons. When they gathered, they called it an “Extropaganza.” An article from Extropy magazine, published in the mid- Nineties, laid out their vision for existence. “You can be any-thing you like,” Extropy promised. “You can be big or small; you can be lighter than air, and fly; you can teleport and walk through walls. You can be a lion or an antelope, a frog or a fly, a tree, a pool, the coat of paint on a ceiling.” The Extropy In-stitute, which shuttered in 2006, defined its work as “a sym-bol for continued progress.”

In their early days, the Extropians looked quaint enough: a group of technophilic counterculturists clustered in a hot tub. But they helped set the stage for a sector of the tech industry that has, of late, been flooded with money from philanthropists and venture capitalists alike. Life extension, artificial intelli-gence, robotics, and other posthuman ambitions are still very much a part of the techno-utopian agenda, in a way that’s more mainstream than ever. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is looking into blood transfusions as an anti-aging treatment. (“peter thiel is very, very interested in young people’s blood,”

Inc. reported last summer.) Google co-founder Larry Page has invested $750 million in Calico, a laboratory for anti-aging technologies. And in 2012, Google appointed Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who believes artificial intelligence will soon allow humans to transcend biology, as an engineering director.

It’s easy to take these ambitions more seriously than those of the Extropians. It’s harder to know where they will lead us. In To Be a Machine, the Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell infiltrates groups of transhumanists with the aim of discov-ering how they think and live. A literary critic for Slate and a former academic, O’Connell is less interested in evaluating technology than in the people who make it and its philosophi-cal implications. As he places the quest for immortality under the microscope, he follows the individuals—tech visionaries, billionaires, and futurists—who are trying to eradicate, or dramatically postpone, death. “I wanted to know,” he writes, “what it might be like to have faith in technology sufficient to allow a belief in the prospect of your own immortality.”

This might be another way of saying that the idea of living forever is as influential as the actual possibility of living forever. Immortality is a long shot. But why is it such big business now?

THE FUTURE, AS A CONCEPT, has always been lucrative; the more abstract, the better. Though O’Connell doesn’t focus strictly on Silicon Valley—transhumanists dot the globe— transhumanism is a distinctly Californian project. The state has a long legacy of self-improvement programs, exercise crazes, and faddish diets, amounting to a unique brand of bourgeois spirituality. California is a pusher for freedom. Lifestyle is supreme.

These days, this utopian futurism can take the shape of New Age management philosophy, corporate wellness, or the annual conference Wisdom 2.0, which brings together tech luminaries and the spiritual leaders of industry, from Eileen Fisher and Alanis Morissette to the CEOs of Slack and Zappos. Recent years have seen an uptick in venture capital–backed products that carry the promise of not just a better, more productive you, but a better life overall. From Soylent (a meal-replacement drink) to nootropics (capsules that purportedly level-up one’s cognitive ability), investors are pursuing extended youth, neurological enhancement, and physical prowess.

Of course, much of this is less new than it feels. In Silicon Valley, there are no new ideas, only iterations. Soylent looks a lot like SlimFast, a protein drink marketed to dieting women since the 1970s. Nootropics tend to contain ingredients like l-theanine—found in green tea—and caffeine. These companies’ web design has a lot to do with this illusion of newness—sexy front-end design signals trustworthiness and hints that there is something technologically impressive happening on the back end. Their products get a boost from their association with work- addicted engineers, who turn to them as high-tech solutions to self-created high-tech problems. But this promise is bigger than Silicon Valley, and carries with it a distinctly Californian air of self-improvement, of better living through technology.

Only HumanWhy the tech industry is obsessed with living forever.

BY ANNA WIENER

MARCH 2017 | 69

REVIEW

70 | NEW REPUBLIC

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It is tempting to see transhumanism, too, as merely the latest rebranding of a very old desire. Many of O’Connell’s subjects specialize in the hypothetical. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist who sees death as a disease to be cured. Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist working on mind uploading, wishes literally to become an “emotional machine.” He is also an artist who creates digital scenes resembling early-web sci-fi fan art, and gives them dreamy names such as Dance of the Replicators and Air Castle. Zoltan Istvan, a former journalist who claims to have invented the sport of “volcano-boarding,” ran a pres-idential campaign that saw him travel across the country in a coffin-shaped bus to raise awareness for transhumanism. He campaigned on a pro-technology platform that called for a universal basic income, and promoted a Transhumanist Bill of Rights that would assure, among other things, that “human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms” be “entitled to universal rights of ending involuntary suffering.”

Then there’s Max More, a co-founder of Extropianism, who runs the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alcor is a cryopreservation facility that houses the bodies—or disembodied heads, to be attached at a later date to artificial bodies—of those hoping to be reanimated as soon as the technology exists. The bodies, O’Connell writes, “are considered to be suspended, rather than deceased: detained in some liminal stasis between this world and whatever fol-lows it, or does not.” Alcor is the largest of the world’s four cryopreservation facilities, and houses 149 “patients,” nearly 70 percent of whom are male. (Alcor also cryopreserves pets.) Its youngest patient is a two-year-old who died due to a rare form of pediatric brain cancer; her “case summary,” posted on Alcor’s web site, shares that her parents, both living, also intend to be cryopreserved. “No doubt being surrounded by familiar faces of loving relatives will make the resumption of her life ... easier and more joyful,” the case summary ends hope-fully, heartbreakingly. To date, science has not suggested that reanimation will ever be possible; the dream of re-uploading one’s mind into a new, living body, at a yet-to-be-determined date, remains just that: a dream.

Those working on immortality are long-term thinkers and fall, broadly, into two camps: those who want to free the human from the body, and those who aim to keep the body in a healthy condition for as long as possible. Randal Koene, like Max More, is in the first group. Instead of cryonics, he is working toward “mind up-loading,” the construction of a mind that can exist independent of the body. His nonprofit organization, Carboncopies, aims for “the effective immortality of the digitally duplicated self.” Koene compares mind uploading to kayaking. “It might be like the experience of a person who is, say, really good at kayaking, who feels

like the kayak is physically an extension of his lower body, and it just totally feels natural,” he tells O’Connell. “So maybe it wouldn’t be that much of a shock to the system to be uploaded, because we already exist in this prosthetic relationship to the physical world anyway, where so many things are experienced as extensions of our bodies.”

Aubrey de Grey is in the second, body preservationist group, whose efforts tend to be slightly more modest: Rather than solving death, they focus on extending life. His nonprofit, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, focuses on research in heart disease and Alzheimer’s, and other common illnesses and diseases. (sens, like many organizations the trans-humanists are involved with, has received funding from Thiel.) De Grey’s most mainstream contribution is the popularization of the concept of “longevity escape velocity,” which O’Connell explains as such: “For every year that passes, the progress of longevity research is such that average human life expectan-cy increases by more than a year—a situation that would, in theory, lead to our effectively outrunning death.” One might dismiss such transhumanist visions as too extreme: so many men, so much hubris. And yet, at a time of great cynicism about humanity—and the future we’re all barreling toward—there is something irresistible about transhumanism. Call it magical thinking; call it radical optimism.

A QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY may be the ultimate example of overpromising and under-delivering, but it will still deliver something. Indeed, plenty of the Extropian dreams of anti- aging have already been realized, though these accomplishments now

look less futuristic than we previously imagined. Thanks to improved health care, sanitation, and education, we are living longer than our ancestors could have imagined. We sleep with our cell phones. Prosthetics have become increasingly per-sonalized and affordable. Roboticized microsurgery blurs the lines between human and machine skill. In more staid quarters (where most of the money is), the quest for transhumanism is simply biotech.

O’Connell’s focus is on the more extreme transhumanists, those committed to eternal life. But he also meets a few of the transhumanists taking this more incremental ap-proach, edging us closer to longer and healthier lives. Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist working on brain-machine in-terface technology, created a robotic exoskeleton that can be controlled by brain activity. He exhibited it at the 2014

At a time of great cynicism, there is something irresistible about transhumanism. Call it magical thinking; call it radical optimism.

TO BE A MACHINE

BY MARK O’CONNELL

Doubleday, 256 pp., $26.95

MARCH 2017 | 71

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World Cup, to give a sense of how human and robot might work together in the future. A clear practical application of his work would be to help paraplegics increase their mobility and activity. It’s technology that doesn’t demand that we radically overhaul our idea of reality. It allows us to make minor adjustments.

Nicolelis does not seem to share the technologist’s pas-sion for scalability; though he has proven that brain activity can be translated into data—and that data can be translated into movement—he is not drawn to large-scale projects like whole-brain emulation. “I don’t think we will ever be able to broadcast from one brain to another the essence of the human condition,” he told Popular Mechanics last year. “We love analogies, metaphors, expecting things, and predicting things. These things are not in algorithms.”

As transhumanism gradually alters the length and quality of human life, it will also alter political and cultural life. If the average human life were to span 100 healthy years, then so-ciety, the economy, and the environment would be drastically transformed. How long would childhood last? What would the political landscape look like if baby boomers were able to vote for another 50 years? O’Connell’s foray into transhumanism comes at a moment when our democratic institutions look weaker than ever. Wealth is increasingly concentrated among a small group of people. The future, while always uncertain, looks, for many, particularly bleak. Envisioning a future in

which transhumanism’s wildest desires are realized is a heady thought experiment, one that quickly devolves into a vision of dystopia: too little space, too many bodies, and—if brains are uploaded from centuries past—obsolete software.

As exciting, ambitious, fantastical, or practical as the trans-humanists’ aims may be, they neglect to offer a fully fledged vision for society should they be successful. It would hardly be the first time that actors in Silicon Valley, with an emphasis on speed and scale, innovated first—then scrambled to address the repercussions after they had already arrived.

THIS IS BOTH a core promise and the fundamental problem of transhumanism: It exempts those involved from their debt to the present. As Bill Gates put it in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.” O’Connell finds it odd, too, that “billionaire entrepreneurs” are more interested in developing AI than in eradicating “grotesque income inequality in their own coun-try.” Of course, experimentation is essential to progress, and researchers claim their work will benefit all of humanity in the future. But it raises the question: What future and for whom?

There is something deeply sad about transhumanism, too—a yearning, one that perhaps harks back to the self-improvement doctrines that have so colored California since the halcyon days of the midcentury. The promise of a better world—a better you—is hard to turn away from these days. We are not more than human; we have not found a way to transcend. In the weeks between the election and the inauguration, our collective visions of the future adjusted to accommodate the possibilities of rampant corruption and the rapid perversion of constitutional freedoms, among many other things. It feels indulgent to fantasize about a future in which humanity is optimized for immortality; it feels indulgent to fantasize about a future at all.

Yet I cannot fault the transhumanists for wanting more: more from life, more of life itself. In How We Became Posthuman—published in 1999, and now a touchstone of writing on transhumanism—the literary critic N. Katherine Hayles detailed her ideal version of a posthuman world:

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality … that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.

To focus on the extremes of posthuman ambition is, it seems to me, to miss the point. As a species, we are slowly nudging along a spectrum. Hayles’s vision is solidly in the middle with its mortality and fallibility, rendered not obsolete but more manageable—more human. a

REVIEW

Aubrey de Grey’s nonprofit focuses on extending life indefinitely.

THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 3, Issue 5,001, March 2017. Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and Aug/Sep 2017) by TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone (202) 508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage and handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: www.TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. Box 6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post Agreement Number 7178957. Send changes of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies to IBC, 7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited manuscripts to letters@tnr.com. Poetry submissions must be emailed to poetry@tnr.com. For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our web site at newrepublic.com/customer-service.

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See more of Johnny Miller’s work on newrepublic.com.

backstory

IN MAKAUSE, A SPRAWLING settlement of overcrowded shacks built on an abandoned gold mine, some 30,000 residents face the leafy streets and gracious homes of Primrose, an affluent suburb of Johannesburg. Separated only by a narrow highway, the two neighborhoods offer a stark reminder that, 22 years after apartheid was abolished, South Africa is still defined by massive inequality and stark segregation.

This is where apartheid was born. When British financier Barney Barnato arrived in Johannesburg, not long after miners struck gold there in 1886, it was little more than a tent city, with a single hotel and a handful of saloons. The following year, Barnato founded his first mine just outside the settlement, and named it after his daughter, Primrose. The city’s fault lines were quickly established: Black Africans lived in cramped barracks, set apart from affluent whites.

Today, the residents of Makause live sardined in small shacks constructed from corrugated tin, scrap metal, and wooden planks. The ground is contaminated with toxic chemicals. Water was not available until 2008, when two pumps were installed. Fires are common. One, in 2012, destroyed 18 homes before fire trucks lingering across the street in Primrose finally arrived.

Photographer Johnny Miller moved to South Africa that year and set out to chronicle the country’s segregation from the skies. “Drones have an incredible ability to transform how we see the world,” he says. “There is an electricity in the air in South Africa right now, a nervous tension. People are tired of relying on platitudes and promises from 22 years ago. They want to see change.” a

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY MILLER

LOCATION PRIMROSE, SOUTH AFRICA

DATE JUNE 8, 2016

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