- All articles

All articles

- Liberalism’s Natural Disadvantage—and How to Overcome It

- Donald Trump’s Last (We Hope) Grift

- Liberalism Has the Ideas–but Does It Have the Will to Impose Them?

- For True Freedom, We Need Power-Sharing Liberalism

- Can Liberalism Stop Being So Darn ... Liberal?

- Remembering Vint Lawrence

- Don’t Be Fooled By Liberalism’s Modesty

- Defend Liberalism? Let’s Fight for Democracy First

- An Everglades Scientist on Trial in Ron DeSantis’s Kingdom

- Ritchie Torres vs. the Left

- How Will Montana’s Population Boom Shift Its Politics?

- Liberalism Under Siege

- The Case for Taking Reality TV Seriously

- Is the United States Too Devoted to the Constitution?

- Last Summer Is a Marvel of Toxic Lyricism

- The Woman Behind Freud’s First Case Study

- Can the Museum Survive?

- Hari Kunzru’s Escape From the Art Market

- dramatic monologue as Johanna Magdalena Beyer

- Figuration

Liberalism’s Natural Disadvantage—and How to Overcome It

We are vastly outnumbered, but our record of accomplishment is formidable. Today, though, the task before us is as grave as ever.

Michael Tomasky   20 Jun, 2024

I sometimes marvel that liberalism manages to hold its own in this, or really any, country. Its insistence upon openness to change and new ways of thinking is, let’s admit it, a pretty large boulder to be carrying right out of the chute. Your average person is suspicious of change and perfectly content with the old ways of thinking. As much as liberals might wish otherwise, the desire to conserve runs far deeper in the human soul than the desire to reform.

The natural liberal disadvantage is, alas, quantifiable. Going back to 1992, Gallup has done a yearly survey asking Americans if they considered themselves moderate, conservative, or liberal. The 2024 numbers: moderate, 36 percent; conservative, 36; and liberal, just 25. But don’t despair! Twenty-five is good! Back in 1992, the distribution was moderate, 43; conservative, 36; and liberal, 17. (As for left of liberal, Gallup doesn’t even bother, although a 2021 Pew survey that tried to drill down more specifically found “progressive left” clocking in at just 6 percent.)

A stroll through American history makes readily apparent the reality that our default position as a society has been resistance to change, which carries on for ages—or more often, is enforced, and usually brutally—followed by paroxysms of progressive reform, which are in turn followed by backlash against said reform. The periods of liberal regnancy in this country’s 248-year history can easily be counted on one hand.

And yet, given all that, liberal change has proved remarkably durable. People may spend years allowing themselves to be convinced by powerful interests that they’re indifferent to this or that liberal reform; but once it happens, they usually like it. And so conservatives in Washington have not found it easy work to walk back public education, dismantle Social Security, reduce or revoke the federal minimum wage, reintroduce child labor, and so much more. Liberalism constructed the modern welfare state, for mostly better and occasionally worse; every Republican president since Reagan has taken office vowing to smash it, and every one of them has left office being calumniated by fiscally obsessed rightists as just another feckless big spender, unable to reverse liberalism’s grimly inevitable tide. For a creed that is reputed to lack conviction, that’s not a bad track record.

Today, though, is different. Today, it really does feel like the barbarians are at the gate. As Thomas Paine put it, “tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” And as the rapper Fat Joe put it, “The shit is real.” We must fight as we never have, or we genuinely and literally stand to lose everything. The assault on the ban on child labor—the ban on child labor!—is the least of it.

Can liberalism guard the gate?

Mindful of the cycles of history alluded to herein, and of the apocalyptic circumstance in which we find ourselves, I asked the contributors to this special section the following question, which seemed appropriate to a “celebration” of this magazine’s governing ethos on the occasion of its 110th anniversary (another sign of liberalism’s surprising stoutness):

The word “liberal” comes from the Latin liber, which means “free.” Three times in American history, liberalism has triumphed over conservatism to defeat forces of reaction and expand freedom: in the 1850s and ’60s, when slavery was ended; in the 1930s, when “freedom” first took on an economic dimension with the New Deal; and in the 1950s and ’60s, with the civil rights movement and the other personal liberation movements that followed.

The United States is at a similar—or more severe—inflection point today. Is today’s liberalism equipped to win this battle? Where, in recent years, has it succeeded, and where has it failed? Given that most Democrats are loath to even call themselves “liberal,” is the word—and the belief system—an anachronism, or is it due for a rebirth?

In his answer, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin is the most optimistic—perhaps not surprising, considering that he’s a politician in the arena, and those in the arena have to maintain faith in a way critics don’t. The other four—three of our country’s most brilliant academics (Danielle Allen, Jefferson Cowie, Nell Irvin Painter), and a writer and podcaster (Sam Adler-Bell) who identifies as a socialist but admits in these pages to certain liberal habits of heart and mind—offer thoughtful mixtures of optimism and trepidation. It seems appropriate to the moment. But remember: Liberalism has been counted out before.

Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic.

Donald Trump’s Last (We Hope) Grift

The man has been running scams for decades. But now, with either the White House or the Big House beckoning, he’s kicked it into overdrive.

Alexander Nazaryan   10 Jun, 2024

Have you been to the Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico? It’s absolutely lovely; you must visit one of these days. I did, a little while back. Let me tell you all about it. The resort is in Mexico, just over the border with the United States and southwest of “TJ,” as Tijuana is generally known to locals from both nations. My visit took place during a family trip through Baja. I had to go, to see what golden glories Donald Trump had foisted on this nation of supposed “bad hombres.”

It was bad, hombre. Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico cannot, it is my unfortunate duty to report, be called one of the more luxurious hideaways in the vicinity of the Punta Bandera wastewater treatment plant. What it can be called is a huge, muddy hole with glorious views of the Pacific, only no bungalows or hotel rooms or even beach chairs from which those views could be enjoyed. There was a chain-link fence, an empty guard booth, and nothing else. I lingered for a few moments, while the rest of my family waited in the rental car. I don’t know if my wife explained to the children; I don’t know if there was much to explain. Daddy was chasing after Trump’s wealth, and chasing after Trump’s wealth sometimes took you to unusual places. At least I didn’t drag them to Azerbaijan.

Trump Baja is a classic Trumpian swindle: grandiose promises that shatter like cheap glass against the hard, unyielding edges of reality. For a man who became famous for his forays into the brick-and-mortar business of real estate, Trump has thrived and survived by jumping from one lily pad of fantasy to another, saved at critical moments during his career by bankruptcies and loans, not to mention ordinary Americans willing to hand him their money and their trust.

But as Trump runs for president for the third straight time, his political and business fortunes are headed for an unpredictable collision. His decades of making grifting look like business acumen could be coming to an end, thanks to a number of civil and criminal cases that could not only extract hundreds of millions of dollars from him but hinder him from campaigning—and possibly even put him in prison.

“Trump’s career has been to go from business fraud to election fraud,” said Norman L. Eisen, who advised the House Judiciary Committee on the first Trump impeachment and remains a strong critic of the former president. “The bill is finally coming due. It’s starting to be paid.”

Then again, Trump is not exactly known for paying his bills. And this time around, the whole nation could be on the losing end. The cases brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith (one for whisking classified documents away to Mar-a-Lago, the other for his role in instigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection) are devastating. Or should be, at any rate, except Trump’s attorneys have successfully delayed both (having a Trump-appointed judge helps). Then there’s an election interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, where District Attorney Fani Willis has Trump dead to rights committing fraud. Only her ill-advised decision to hire an attorney with whom she was having a romantic relationship to work on the Trump case turned into a disaster of its own, not to mention a media circus. So now that case is in limbo, too.

The delay-delay-delay-and-then-delay-some-more approach “was their absolute best play. And they worked it to almost complete perfection,” said Bradley P. Moss, a Washington, D.C., attorney and a frequent Trump critic. Almost, but not entirely: In late May, Trump became a convicted felon when a Manhattan jury found him guilty in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. (Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The New Republic.)

Over the years, I have come to think of Trump as an autoimmune disease, very much a product of our own body politic. And as is the case with such afflictions, he is curiously resistant to ordinary treatments. In fact, they only make him stronger. Which is to say that Trump could emerge in October having been found not guilty in at least one trial, and with the rest receding into the distance, shackled by motions and countermotions.

He would be vindicated and vindictive, ready to use the federal government to punish his enemies. Beyond going after obvious adversaries like U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Hunter Biden, the current president’s troubled son, he will stock his administration with effective ideologues who will use his grievances to remake every aspect of American life, eliminating social services, rolling back green policies, restricting abortion, and promulgating Christian nationalism wherever they can.

Un-Invincible

Trump is rich. Very, very rich. Unimaginable wealth whose scope would require a whole new branch of mathematics to describe is the foundational premise of the Trump myth, the unstated but universally understood creed at the heart of MAGA. He demands to be understood through the prism of immense wealth. “I’m really rich,” he explained in his 2015 announcement speech, vowing not to rely on donors and lobbyists (which he soon enough would).

His career has been full of such promises, lies blithely tossed out like coins to paupers. “When I worked with Trump, he was a P.T. Barnum,” said Barbara Res, who was a high-level executive at the Trump Organization into the 1990s. He even lied about the number of floors at Trump Tower. “Trump is a fraud. He is a cheat. He is a thief. He is a criminal,” Res said of her former boss. I doubt he still sends her Christmas cards.

“When I worked with Trump, he was a P.T. Barnum,” said Barbara Res, who was a high-level executive at the Trump Organization in the 1980s. “Trump is a fraud. He is a cheat. He is a thief. He is a criminal,” Res said of her former boss. I doubt he still sends her Christmas cards.

Lately, Trump’s record of dishonesty in both business and politics has come under a scrutiny that not even John Barron, Trump’s fictional alter-ego press agent, could negate with a well-placed item in the New York Post.

“We’ve always said, if you want to understand Donald Trump—we’ve said this from the very beginning—just understand the money,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough commented last year. Not just where he got it, which is always a question with him, but also how. And what he did with it. And what he offered in return.

“It’s all bullshit,” Res said of the eternal hype man. But things have changed, she added. “He exaggerated to a fault, but back when I knew him, he was not really scamming,” she wrote in an email. “Now, yes.”

The business ventures, the political campaign … it is all a version of the Baja resort, a muddy hole promising ocean views. His detractors and opponents are giddy at the possibility that he will spend his remaining days in a resort of Trump Baja–like amenities, with a Department of Correction sign on its gate.

They’ve thought that many times before, only to be somehow bested by a man with the survival instincts of a cockroach. Trump’s career began with the destruction of the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue, his promises to preserve the graceful art adorning its facade quickly turning out to be little more than false assurance. And here he is, more than 40 years later, striking licensing deals in Dubai. If that is not genius, then Garfield is not a cat.

Garfield is not a cat—he is a cartoon character, created by Jim Davis. Donald Trump is a cartoon character, too, a fictive businessman created by the tastemakers and gatekeepers who knew better but said nothing: the bankers and newspaper editors, the politicians and producers, all of whom sustained his legend in hopes of profiting from it.

Maybe it was January 6 that changed everything. Maybe the prospect of a second Trump term, and what it would mean for the American project, also made a difference. Whatever it was, Trump suddenly lost his invincibility, as both a businessman six times bankrupt and president twice impeached.

The Walls Start to Close In

Since the beginning of the year, Trump has been battered by a series of court cases that threaten to reveal just how little cash he has—and to take a good chunk of what he does have, all while straining his third run for the White House by hijacking his fundraising operation to pay his legal bills. Florida federal Judge Aileen Cannon and the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are obviously trying to save him (without imperiling their own reputations, presumably), and the delays in some of the criminal cases mean that he may reach the legal sanctuary that is the Oval Office before federal prosecutors get the chance to try him. But he won’t pull through unscathed.

“He’s finally met a mechanism he can’t control,” said Moss. “And it’s the criminal justice system. It’s not like it’s Robert Mueller, where he could just threaten to fire him or he could obstruct the investigation. He is not in control.”

The year began with Trump ordered, in late January, by a federal judge to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll, a fashion writer who accused him in a civil trial of raping her sometime in the 1990s in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store. In early March, Trump posted a $91.6 million bond and appealed the ruling in a bid to avoid payment. That bid failed, and late in April a judge refused to grant him a new trial.

Shortly after the Carroll judgment, he lost a case brought by Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, who accused him of consistently churning out false real estate valuations. That judgment, also in a civil trial, comes with a $454 million penalty. So far, Trump has had to pay only a $175 million bond.

Meanwhile, in a little-noticed but potentially disastrous development for Trump, a judge in Washington, D.C., has found that he could be held liable in three consolidated cases brought by House Democrats and law enforcement officers for injury incurred during the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

Here’s a little-noticed but potentially disastrous development for Trump. A judge in Washington, D.C., has found that he could be held liable in three consolidated cases brought by House Democrats and law enforcement officers for injury incurred during the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

The politicized discourse surrounding the storming of the Capitol has occluded the human pain that day’s events caused. At least four law enforcement officers involved in the response committed suicide. Members of Congress and staffers who had to cower from the violent mob remain scarred.

“I haven’t felt that way in over 15 years, not since I was an Army Ranger,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, said of his harrowing experience in the Capitol that day. In a social media message posted four days after the attack, he offered simple advice to others who had been through the insurrection: “don’t suppress post-traumatic feelings & fears. Seek help.”

Many have. But some want financial damages, too. “That strikes me as a potential huge judgment problem. How do you even put a number on somebody’s trauma from January 6?” wondered Robert DeNault, a Manhattan attorney who writes about Trump. “It could be a very unsympathetic jury,” he said, drawn as it will be from the citizens of a city Joe Biden won in 2020 with nearly 92 percent of the vote share.

While the judgments are likely to be much smaller than they were in Carroll’s case, the multiple cases will represent yet another drain on his finances at a time when he can hardly afford such encumbrances. And they will be in the headlines, potentially, for weeks on end.

Then there are the criminal cases: Besides the hush money case, which ended disastrously for Trump, there’s the one now languishing in Fulton County and two brought by Jack Smith, in South Florida (documents) and Washington (insurrection). Smith is a determined special federal counsel who has made no obvious unforced errors. Drawing Cannon, the Trump judge, in South Florida was bad luck, but the January 6 case in Washington could move forward this summer, depending on how the Supreme Court rules on the matter of presidential immunity.

“That would be a nightmare for Donald Trump,” Moss said, “because he would—unless he has authorization from the court—be stuck in court throughout the fall during the closing weeks and months of the campaign.”

Letitia James and Trump’s Bill Cosby Moment

Bill Cosby’s sexual predations had been known for close to a decade, yet there was something about the Cosby-themed jokes comedian Hannibal Buress delivered during a 2014 set that refocused attention on “America’s Dad.” It was inexplicable, a ripple in the zeitgeist turning into a tsunami that finally sent Cosby to prison in 2018. In some small part, it was because Buress simply said the thing that everyone seemed to know: that Cosby was a rapist.

Trump had a Cosby moment of his own in early 2024. He, too, might find himself in jail for transgressions that, like Cosby’s, have been well known for years. They just needed to be spelled out, made plain for all to see.

That is the role Letitia James had long imagined for herself.

A former state assemblywoman from Brooklyn, James launched her candidacy to become New York’s attorney general in 2018. By then, state attorneys general from California to Massachusetts had emerged as an effective bulwark against the Trump administration. After she won, becoming the first Black woman to hold statewide office in New York, James promised to join them in the resistance. “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn,” she said.

James was inaugurated on January 1, 2019. Late the following month, she took note as former Trump fixer Michael D. Cohen testified on Capitol Hill. Cohen, who had pleaded guilty to a host of financial and campaign improprieties in 2018, told lawmakers that Trump had blatantly exaggerated his wealth between 2011 and 2013 in order to gain favorable terms on loans from Deutsche Bank.

“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” Cohen said.

Less than two weeks after Cohen testified, James announced that she was launching an investigation into Trump’s finances, quickly moving to subpoena records from financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank, that had had dealings with him.

“Until Cohen blew the lid off, we did not know the scale,” said Tristan Snell, author of the book Taking Down Trump and a new newsletter of the same name. “It was one thing for him to lie about, like, the size of his condo tower. We didn’t realize exactly how he had been doing this systematically until Cohen gave us a sense of it. And then the AG started digging into it.”

Loan by loan, property by property, James’s office meticulously described the fundamental deception at the heart of Trump’s wealth, and the remarkably straightforward means he deployed to accrue that wealth. “It was not sophisticated,” Snell said. “This is not complex financial arbitrage.” Trump would tell Cohen and Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, that he wanted his personal worth to “go up,” and they would inflate accordingly.

There was a beautiful simplicity to the grift: 40 Wall Street, a tower in the heart of lower Manhattan, had been bought by Trump in 1995 for less than $8 million. By 2012, it was worth $527 million. Why? Because Trump said so. Trump Tower and Trump Park Avenue in Manhattan, Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas, and many other properties elsewhere all had fallen victim to fictive valuations. And it was those fictive valuations that allowed Trump to continue borrowing.

Trump’s liquidity had plummeted to a mere $192 million by 2015—and that was before Trump spent a reported $66 million of his own money on his first presidential campaign. He sustained his empire and image by borrowing against lies.

“The Donald Trump show is over,” James said outside the courtroom.

Judge Arthur F. Engoron ordered Trump to pay $350 million. Because of interest, the amount has since risen to $454 million. Trump has so far paid only a $175 million bond. The money was put up by Don Hankey, who made his own billions through predatory car loans. Snell thinks the bond is itself suspicious, because Hankey’s company, Knight Specialty Insurance, is only allowed to put up a $13.8 million bond, according to state rules. The bond Knight put up for Trump is, by Snell’s calculation, 1,260 percent higher than the permissible amount.

Snell also pointed out that, according to Letitia James’s investigation, Knight may have been using a Cayman Islands cutout to hide serious shortfalls in its books, further raising questions about the integrity of the bond. “This is classic Trump, I have to say,” Snell wrote. “Trump found the Trump of insurance.”

The Grift Intensifies

The Bible was priced at $59.99, more than double what you might pay for the Holy Book on Amazon. But this was an especially holy book, because it was the Lee Greenwood edition, hawked on the exceedingly patriotic country singer’s website.

Trump told his followers to pony up: “Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again,” the famously pious former president wrote in a social media post in March. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.”

I did as instructed. After three weeks, the Greenwood Bible arrived, bound in what appeared to be faux leather, its pages gilt-edged. The word of God is what it is, but the production values were, I have to say, on the low end, leading to online speculation about whether the book was printed in China (probably, consensus says).

Before the Bible, there were Trump sneakers, which retailed for $399. The shoe, named “Never Surrender,” and possibly China-made, was introduced at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia earlier this year by Trump himself, who walked on stage to the sound of—wait for it—Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” He held up a pair of the shoes, which looked as if they had been dipped in a pool of gold. “There’s a lot of emotion in this room,” Trump said. He did not say what the emotion was.

Why is Trump hawking Bibles and sneakers?

Very simply, because he needs to. He needs money for the presidential race, because short of being Mel Gibson, returning to the White House may be the best get-out-of-jail free card in our political system. But first he has to get to Election Day, which requires him to pay millions of dollars to attorneys who have, so far, shown remarkable skill at delaying the most potentially damaging trials he faces.

He has always been a grifter, but Trump’s recent shenanigans are getting more and more desperate.SOCIAL MEDIA SCREEN GRABS (X6)

It could be, then, that Trump manages to thread his way between clusterfuck and shit show, emerging in the late hours of November 5 as the forty-seventh president of the United States. But it’s going to cost him real money, not the fake stuff that Cohen and Weisselberg played with for years.

Trump began the year facing 91 felony counts across four separate jurisdictions. Each of those cases demands attorneys with knowledge of criminal and civil law, not to mention whatever kind of assistance those attorneys may require in the form of paralegals and other support staff.

Trump has a tendency to cycle through attorneys the way he once cycled through White House chiefs of staff, and it is therefore difficult to get a full picture of his legal team across different jurisdictions at any one time. “He’s got a bit of a hodgepodge of people from different firms,” said DeNault, the New York attorney.

Let’s give it a shot, though. Trump had three attorneys in the Stormy Daniels case; two in Fulton County; three for his election interference case in Washington. D. John Sauer argued the immunity issue before the Supreme Court. Todd Blanche was the point man in the Manhattan hush money case, joined by Susan Necheles, and is also handling the South Florida documents case. Blanche was formerly with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, a high-end Manhattan firm that was an industry leader in charging $1,000 per hour (other firms have caught up).

It’s impossible to say just what Trump is paying his lawyers today. But even if they are not charging Cadwalader rates, few are doing the work out of the goodness of their hearts.

“The fees must be out of control,” DeNault said. “I’m assuming most of these people have arranged some sort of financing agreement, given the reputation risk and his known reputation for not paying.” These are not the kinds of folks who are going to be duped by promises of Baja vistas, or villas in Oman. After all, they represent sophisticated swindlers for a living.

Political fundraising is notoriously obscure, especially in this age of dark money super PACs.

But earlier this year, The New York Times calculated that since 2021, when his career as president ended and his career as defendant was about to begin, “Mr. Trump has averaged more than $90,000 a day in legal-related costs for more than three years—none of it paid for with his own money.” The newspaper found that of the $104.2 million donated directly to various efforts to reelect him in 2023, $59.3 million—more than half—went to legal expenses.

“The small donors are paying for this,” Eisen said. It’s one thing to run a grift on people who can afford a $10 million condominium; quite another to bilk ordinary Americans who believe that MAGA is their way out of economic and social despair. Yet he keeps doing it—and they keep sending him their money.

Those donors “are getting fleeced by their fundraising strategies, which are pretty gross,” said Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist who now writes for The Bulwark and contributes commentary on MSNBC. “People are having the wool pulled over their eyes.” But others, he said, “are so deep in the cult that they’re happy to pay a proclaimed billionaire’s legal fees.”

Lately, Trump’s fundraising emails have taken on an especially unhinged quality. Trump is no longer simply asking for money. He’s begging for it. In early May, Juan Merchan, the judge in Trump’s hush money case, slapped him with a $9,000 fine for violating a gag order. Trump’s campaign quickly fired off what has become a typical solicitation. “The nasty judge just threatened me!” the subject line said. “But no matter what these ruthless thugs do to me, I need you to know this: BECAUSE OF YOU I WILL NEVER SURRENDER!” went the email.

“I am your retribution,” Trump famously tells his supporters. But not without your contribution, he may as well add. “These WITCH HUNTS are conceived by political operatives for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” ` another fundraising email. “But as long as YOU are by my side, I know nothing they throw at me will stop our MAGA MOVEMENT.”

Laugh, but it seems to be working. In April, his campaign announced that it had raised $76 million. “Donald Trump is the master of this,” attorney Moss said. “There is no one who matches his ability to spin and refashion a negative into a positive. He gets that from the father,” Fred Trump, also a real estate developer of questionable ethics. “That’s what his father taught him: You’re always winning. You’re never, ever losing.” In the 24 hours after his conviction, his campaign claims, it raised nearly $53 million.

Earlier this year, daughter-in-law Lara Trump was installed as head of the Republican National Committee, as part of a purge that Politico described as a “bloodbath,” with some 60 staffers dismissed. The point, people who know the RNC’s internal workings say, is to ensure that as much cash as possible is funneled to Trump’s presidential campaign, as opposed to down-ballot races. The party apparatus was always going to stand behind its chosen candidate; now it just looks like it won’t stand behind anyone else.

Miller, The Bulwark’s editor, related the story of an RNC employee who, in early 2017, voiced concern about the Trumpian direction of the party on high-level conference calls. One day, while the staffer was at his desk, the phone rang. On the other end was Jared Kushner, the president’s immensely influential son-in-law, “kind of checking in, making sure he’s on board,” as Miller put it. “That’s just how the Trump family rolls.”

Fortune does seem to favor the shameless. In April, the RNC and the Trump campaign asked other candidates using his name, image, or likeness to donate 5 percent. “Any split that is higher than 5% will be seen favorably by the RNC and President Trump’s campaign,” the letter not-so-subtly advised.

The new Trump functionaries at the RNC are using the lie that Trump won the 2020 election as a loyalty test. As I understand it, any high-ranking official who says otherwise should be looking for another job. The committee’s counsel, Charlie Spies, was forced out of his job in early May because he had defended the integrity of the 2020 election in a 2021 speech.

If that’s not enough, this election cycle has seen $32 million spent by the Republican Party and Trump-affiliated committees at Trump properties. “Trump and his family are in the unique position to profit directly from his public service,” said nonprofit OpenSecrets, which chronicled the questionable spending. “Special interests in Washington have caught on.”

Another windfall may come later this summer, if Trump manages to sell his shares of Truth Social, the social media company founded by his associates. Truth Social went public in late March. Originally valued at $8 billion, the sparsely used platform has seen its share price tumble. Trump won’t be allowed to cash out until late September, but when he does, he could reap a windfall of more than $1 billion. “There are legal issues that pop up that throw that into doubt,” Snell said of the complex financial machinations that have turned a floundering social media company into a golden goose for Trump. “There could be an investigation.” True, but none has been announced so far, and the election is approaching.

Now or Never

In the fall, when Americans head to the polls to vote, the fate of Donald Trump and the fate of the American republic will converge in a way entirely new to American politics. “If Donald Trump wins in November, if he becomes president again, the two federal cases”—the classified documents and January 6 cases—“are gone. He will end them immediately on Day One,” said Moss, in reference to the charges brought against Trump by special counsel Smith. “He can order the whole thing shut down as president, and no one could stop it.”

Trump’s return to the Oval Office would make it impossible to actually prosecute him. That would have to wait until at least 2028, by which point phone calls made to Georgia election officials eight years before may not have the same legal potency they once did. That’s assuming he willingly leaves office in 2029, which is something short of guaranteed. It’s now or never.

“These next six months are all about him having a life outside of jail,” Moss said. Trump is fundraising as much to stay out of the federal penitentiary as he is to return to the Oval Office.

“The message about our system of criminal justice is an unhappy one,” Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe wrote in an email. “Sadly, its elaborate safeguards, theoretically designed to minimize erroneous convictions, do much less for the innocent than they do for guilty. And when the alleged crimes are crimes against democracy itself, the old adage that justice delayed is justice denied casts an especially dark shadow.”

I invite you back to Trump’s resort in Baja California. The marketing materials for the project show modern glass towers set on the cliffside. “Mr. TRUMP is personally involved in everything that his name represents,” the attractive brochure says. Staring out over the barren ground beyond the chain-link fence, I could very much believe it.

The question is whether Trump will get away with one more grift. If not, he could find himself behind a fence, and a tall one at that, far from Baja California.

Alexander Nazaryan writes about politics and culture.

Liberalism Has the Ideas–but Does It Have the Will to Impose Them?

This magazine’s own history reflects liberalism’s halting progress. Can it, and we, do better?

Nell Irvin Painter   20 Jun, 2024

A man wearing a hat with a card that reads “Bread or Revolution” during a rally in New York’s Union Square, in April 1914. >/span>

The editors ask if today’s liberalism is equipped to win “this battle,” too sprawling a question rooted in too runny a concept. We have more than just one current battle! Then, after the mystery of the “battle,” there’s the gooey concept of “today’s liberalism.” For this historian, “today” reaches back into the early twentieth century, where “liberalism” as a living, breathing, inspiring-but-myopic phenomenon resides in my own historical imagination. I know histories of liberalism date its origins to anti-monarchy, to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. But in American history, where monarchy was a foreign idea and slaveholding handicapped the Founding Fathers’ civic imagination, liberalism only truly starts to come alive in the Progressive era. The founding of The New Republic in 1914 embodied liberalism institutionally. While definitions of liberalism vary tremendously, The New Republic and its history offer means of thinking about a concept with a political history that is, in large part, a partisan history.

Erstwhile TNR editor Franklin Foer sees former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt as a crucial figure in The New Republic’s birth. Roosevelt’s 1912 National Progressive Party presidential campaign did not succeed, but his campaign platform called for including a minimum wage and “a single national health service.” Roosevelt’s blessing signaled TNR’s founders of the approval, Foer says, of “T.R.’s social set—Harvard and Yale men with an intellectual proclivity and a progressive bent.” At the time, they were most likely Republicans.

TNR’s founders were the crème de la crème of American “progressivism,” a description they initially preferred to “liberalism,” which they associated with Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s Southern, states’ rights, small government creed. TNR’s founders’ book titles broadcast their optimism: Herbert Croly, a Harvard man married to a wealthy wife, had published The Promise of American Life in 1909 and Progressive Democracy in 1914, both with the Macmillan Company, among the most prestigious publishers of the time. Walter Weyl, a Wharton School-Penn man who also married into wealth, published The New Democracy: An Essay on Certain Political and Economic Tendencies in the United States with Macmillan in 1912. Another founder, Walter Lippmann, also a Harvard man, had published his influential A Preface to Politics with the New York publisher Mitchell Kennerley in 1913. These were no obscure, self-publishing radicals, and they received sizable and repeated infusions of money from the cotton-gin-Whitney heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney and her investment banker husband, Willard Straight, a Cornell man.

The Progressive Party’s 1912 platform included a brief “Equal Suffrage” plank advocating voting rights for women but made no mention of the disfranchisement of Black men in the South. This omission carried over in the Progressive Party’s credentials committee’s recognition of white Southern delegates and its refusal to seat Southern Black delegates. This is where early-twentieth-century liberalism gets personal for me.

I never met my grandfather Charles Hosewell McGruder, who was born in 1877 and died sometime before my parents married 60 years later. At the time of the Bull Moose campaign of 1912 and the founding of The New Republic two years later, my grandfather was the principal of the colored high school in Victoria, Texas. He had been educated at Straight University, now a part of Dillard University in New Orleans, and served on its faculty in the early twentieth century. A lifelong believer in public service, he was a member of the Texas Equal Rights League. Perhaps as a courtesy to a leading colored man, white society might have allowed my grandfather to vote. This would have been purely honorific, for most Black men in Texas had been disenfranchised after the passage of a poll tax law in the state in 1902. Texas’s white primary law, which declared the Democratic Party a private institution, was enacted in 1923. Even so, I know from family lore that Charles McGruder was active in as much civil life as his race allowed.

Had my grandfather sought to attend the Bull Moose convention in 1912, he would have been among those turned away, for early-twentieth-century liberalism did not make Black citizenship rights a priority. In 1914, The New Republic ran articles on politics in Ireland, Germany, and Mexico, and on immigration and labor in the United States. TNR took what passed as correct, nonsentimental positions on poverty, avoiding the mistakes of socialists on the left and standpatters on the right. Black civil rights were not liberalism’s pressing concern, even in its quintessential achievement: the New Deal. The New Deal made liberalism Democratic, just as Democratic partisan politics kept racial justice out of the New Deal’s signature liberal achievements of Social Security and minimum wages. These policies mostly bypassed Black Americans, 90 percent of whom still lived in the Democratically controlled South in 1930. Workers in the categories where most Black workers were employed—farmwork and domestic service—were excluded from New Deal protections.

American conservatism built on the values of the slave-owning Founding Fathers and unfettered capitalism, but liberals’ blindness to the fundamental role of race in U.S. society cramped it right down into the second half of the twentieth century.

Liberals’ myopia regarding Black human rights was not unique at that time or for many decades to follow. American conservatism built on the values of the slave-owning Founding Fathers and unfettered capitalism, but liberals’ blindness to the fundamental role of race in U.S. society cramped it right down into the second half of the twentieth century. With voting rights omitted from the New Deal, that advocacy fell to radicals like the Birmingham, Alabama, Communist Hosea Hudson (1898–1988).

Hudson joined the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1931, when Communists became the strongest defenders of the Scottsboro Boys, who were menaced with lynching after being falsely charged with the rape of two white women hoboing on the same train. In addition to vindicating the Scottsboro Boys, in 1937–1938, the CPUSA encouraged Hudson to organize his fellow steelworkers into a union and to urge them to register and vote. In 1980, Birmingham gave Hudson a key to the city in gratitude for his pioneering voting rights advocacy. Until his death in 1988, Hudson remained convinced that the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s could not have succeeded without the earlier work of Communists like himself. Hudson stayed in the party until his death, declaring it the surest means for the working people of the United States, and in particular the Black working people of the South, to exercise their civil rights.

Even down into the 1960s, prominent liberals like Daniel Bell (a Columbia man who taught at Harvard) did not have Black civil rights in their sights. In The End of Ideology, published in 1960, Bell looked backward to the “radicals of the thirties [who] fought ‘capitalism,’ and later, fascism, and for some, Stalinism.” He continued: “Today, intellectually, emotionally, who is the enemy that one can fight?” In the context of such common blindness, the question of Black Southern voting rights lay beyond liberalism’s ken until the 1950s and 1960s, when Black activists and their radical allies forced the issue into view, and leaders of the national Democratic Party wrested voting rights away from Southern Democrats.

Even though liberalism came late to Southern Black civic empowerment, liberalism has played an essential role in broadening its support. Here is where a liberal journal like The New Republic has done and can do important political work, for its social prestige brings policies deemed too radical into the mainstream. The mainstream of the Democratic Party, that is, for Republicans are seldom liberals.

Our most tragic, most vexing political and humanitarian crisis of this moment involves the conflicts within and among Israel, Hamas, and Palestinians. For me, this is not entirely new. Given my personal interest in Black civil rights, Martin Peretz’s New Republic of the 1980s moved me to discontinue my subscription. My own issue was the magazine’s relationship with the Republican President Ronald Reagan, an advocate of states’ rights who had opposed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I watched the Reagan administration reverse the Department of Justice’s protection of Black voters in the South. Peretz’s New Republic’s outspoken defense of Israel was not of crucial importance to me at the time, focused as I was on the domestic policies of the Reagan administration. Support for the government of Israel simply did not figure in my understanding of the conflict between liberalism’s Democratic history and a Republican presidency at that time.

In recent years, the Netanyahu government has snarled the long-standing association of liberalism, The New Republic, Democrats, and Israel by ostentatiously courting Republicans and their allies: American white fundamentalist Christians, anti-immigrant activists, and groups opposing race and gender minorities. In the tragic events of the last many months, the interrelated and seemingly insoluble tragedies of murderous terrorist attack, genocidal bombing, and settler aggression have divided liberals—that is, have divided Democrats. Some Jewish Democratic politicians have denounced Israel’s prosecution of the war, while others continue to offer unconditional support.

Thinking about—talking about—the intertwined conflicts of the Holocaust, nationalism, religion, government, Zionism, settlers, and two-tiered citizenship would seem to be too hard and complicated a problem for twenty-first-century American liberalism to solve. What liberals can do, what The New Republic can do, however, is to continue to use their lofty educations and journalistic prestige to clarify the issues, even the partisan conflicts, and to suggest remedies.

Thinking about how to solve Israel/Hamas/Palestinians is really, really hard. On the other hand, the great illiberal challenge of our times, Trumpist-Republican authoritarianism, is not at all hard. The remedies in law, voting, and political policies are straightforward. All we need to do is add “universal” to the suffrage plank of the 1912 platform of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and rally support. Already in 1912, the need for universal health coverage was obvious. Still, in 2024, when the needs are even more obvious, liberalism knows what needs to be done. The American partisan politics around Israel/Hamas/Palestinians is infinitely hard, but if liberalism remains true to its long-standing values—from 1912, equal suffrage, government in the interest of “the people,” for “social and industrial justice”—it can recommend solutions to even this agonizing crisis.

Nell Irvin Painter is the author of I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays.

For True Freedom, We Need Power-Sharing Liberalism

The answer is simple: policies that reflect homespun values and stick up for people getting the short end of the stick.

Danielle Allen   20 Jun, 2024

Outside Trump Tower, a woman protests the Trump administration's proposed tax cut, 2017.>/span>

Liberalism is Dead! Long live Liberalism! The foundations of liberalism are quaking once again, but liberalism’s future is also here, in its newest form: power-sharing liberalism.

An insistent desire for freedom fires the human spirit. It has always done so, and it will until there are no longer such beings as can be called human, I would wager. But over the long span of history, human beings have not always lived in conditions of freedom. Nor in the current moment do all people live free—where that means control over one’s life and personal property, protection from arbitrary interference by the government, and felt opportunity to participate in collective governance.

Instead, over the course of history, oases of freedom for some have been carved out from a broader surround of habitual domination of the many by the few. Starting in the eighteenth century, those oases have been formed with the conceptual architecture of human rights and necessary limits on governmental power. Ever since, the entrance to the oasis has had strung over it a welcome sign that says LIBERALISM.

No liberal order has been pure. The liberal order of the American founding was shot through with the domination of African Americans, Indigenous Americans, and women. In other words, from its very birth, liberalism had within it the seeds of conflict. Would the forces of domination extend themselves, or the forces of liberation? And so war came. First, the Civil War, and then world wars. Freedom was expanded again in the New Deal against domination flowing from economic power; and again during the era of the civil rights movement, when not only African Americans but also, later on, women and members of the LGBTQ community found new emancipation.

Yet the “iron law of oligarchy” of early-twentieth-century sociologist Robert Michels persists. In a book called Political Parties, he argued that every political party, and implicitly every form of social organization, tends over time toward oligarchy, toward capture by a small elite. Every free society will always find the human thrust toward freedom impeded by the efforts of some to dominate others. The work of freedom is constantly to resist this emergent capture by elites or other minority interests. The elites can change, but the work of freedom remains the same. There are always forms of capture to undo.

Our current moment is no different.

In the early 1990s, economists’ nascent recognition of a startling rise of income and wealth inequality in a globalizing economy broke through to public consciousness. Coincident to that rise has come increasing capture of U.S. political institutions by wealth elites, as measured by the degree to which congressional decisions track the preferences of different socioeconomic segments of the population. According to the work of political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, the preferences of the bottom ninetieth income percentiles in the American electorate result in their chosen political outcomes only if they happen to align with the preferences of the most affluent 10 percent.

Yet wealth elites broadly are not the only minority currently capturing American politics. A subset within them—tech elites, now concentrated around AI, who build firms with extraordinary profits while employing astonishingly few people—is rearchitecting the very public sphere with little oversight or steering by our democratic polity. That Elon Musk has been able to dominate the world’s space-based satellite systems—and global communications infrastructure—with little pushback from nation-states speaks to extraordinary capture of our political possibilities by microscopically small elites.

But capture attempts are also underway from other positions within our social landscape. Radicalized right-wing activists (a group distinct from Republicans at large) push tactical civics in which “unlike politics … only half of 1 percent of the People” are needed to accomplish the goal of “taking America back,” according to the website TacticalCivics.com. A mere 2,500 people, a flash mob meaningfully coordinated by social media tools, was nearly able to bring to a halt the peaceful transition of power on January 6, 2021. The group at the Capitol was far smaller than the group turned out in Union Square in New York City in August 2023 by a social media influencer promising to give out free game consoles at 4 p.m.

What precisely do these capture attempts seek to block? Interestingly, if you attend not to national but to state politics, you find a picture of an American people who can come to supermajority consensus around policies that reflect homespun values of fairness, inclusion, and sticking up for the person getting the short end of the stick. Recent ballot measures that have secured supermajority support include cannabis legalization in multiple states, a decision in Mississippi to replace Confederate iconography on the state flag with new forward-facing iconography, and a decision in Massachusetts to give small auto shops access to the data in cars so that they can continue to compete in the repair business with the big auto manufacturers. There was also a near supermajority decision in Florida to restore voting rights to people with some past felony convictions. Similarly, robust majority coalitions resting on cross-ideological alliances have protected reproductive freedom in states like Kansas and Ohio. Each of these decisions is about affirming not material well-being but core freedoms (personal and political) and inclusion in the political community. This is liberalism. Twenty-first-century liberalism. Power-sharing liberalism.

This twenty-first-century version of liberalism reflects a genuine effort to establish conditions for all to share in power, which is being reclaimed from a criminalizing state, from tech elites, and from right-wing radicals.

This version of American liberalism is not the eighteenth-century version from which some were explicitly excluded. It is not the late-nineteenth-century version where industrialists were permitted the unimpeded exercise of power. It is not the early-twentieth-century version where new racialist exclusions had developed to replace old ones. This twenty-first-century version reflects a genuine effort to establish conditions for all to share in power across remarkable lines of difference in conditions of extensive diversity. Power is being reclaimed from a criminalizing state (cannabis legalization and restoration of voting rights), from tech elites (the right to repair), and from right-wing radicals (rejecting emblems of the Confederacy, protecting women’s control of their bodies).

The commentariat perhaps fails to see this grassroots rebirth of liberalism because the rebirth is so much about political, personal, and civil rights and not economic rights. New Deal economic liberalism gave way to neoliberalism, but the most profound wrong of neoliberalism has been not the remarkable transfer of income and wealth to the one percent but the erosion of agency for ordinary people. This is what people have had enough of. This is what affronts our most fundamental human desire—not merely our animal desire for material sufficiency but our human desire to steer the course of our own lives.

The commentariat may also fail to see the rebirth of liberalism in the grassroots because of the problem of capture itself. Corporate lobbying managed to stall the right to repair law in Massachusetts for years. And the restoration of voting rights in Florida has been blocked because the MAGA Republican Party in the state (again, as distinct from ordinary people with Republican views who voted for the ballot initiative) has found ways to prevent implementation.

Also, our national politics obscures our desires because minuscule portions of the electorate determine our candidates—in party primaries with startlingly shrinking participation. The combination of lower party membership, reduced turnout in primaries, and gerrymandering yields a situation where Texas Republican and Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy could win his party’s nomination in a district that is not competitive in a general election with votes from only around 3 percent of the electorate in his district in 2018, and New York Democrat and Progressive Caucus member Grace Meng could do the same with votes from only about 5 percent of the electorate in her uncompetitive district in 2012. How our party system currently functions is another form of capture.

So the future of power-sharing liberalism depends on a project of democracy renovation that would reverse the dynamics of capture of our political system by small elites (wealth elites, radicalized MAGA acolytes, and hyperpolarized party bases). Democracy renovation requires a set of critical reforms to rebalance and spread the allocation of power in our political system. Critical reforms include ending party primaries and replacing them with a unified ballot for the primary on which candidates from all parties can run, and in which some number of finalists (two, four, or five) advance to a final round where a majority winner is chosen. (In the case of the larger finalist sets, the least costly way of choosing a majority winner will be through instant runoff or ranked-choice voting.) We also need to close the loophole on foreign expenditure in American politics by prohibiting political contributions by corporations with meaningful levels of foreign ownership. The existence of the loophole supports corporate capture.

The commentariat does not yet see next-generation liberalism—power-sharing liberalism—because its policy footprint differs from the liberalism of the last era. It is emerging as democracy renovation—work to reconnect people to their civic power, experience, and responsibility and to redesign our political institutions to achieve responsive representation. But every new era of liberalism to date has proceeded by means of new methods: first constitutionalism; then through abolition, and the establishment (in principle, though not fully in practice) of personal freedom as a precompetitive matter beyond the reach of markets (meaning that there couldn’t be markets in humans); then by recognizing the power of the public sector to support Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms; then by acknowledging group-specific needs for emancipation; and then (in neoliberalism) by recognizing the need to emancipate innovation from public-sector domination. Now the method is democracy renovation.

The next generation of liberalism will pursue political emancipation. Long live liberalism!

Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, a political philosopher and scholar of public policy, author of Justice by Means of Democracy, and president of Partners in Democracy.

Can Liberalism Stop Being So Darn ... Liberal?

Needed: a liberalism that ceases to fear itself.

Sam Adler-Bell   20 Jun, 2024

Demonstrators march with an American flag in St. Louis, Missouri, in November 2014, to protest the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager who had been shot by police earlier in the year in nearby Ferguson.>/span>

Leftist critics of liberalism tend to take one of two positions: Either liberalism is a necessary but insufficient condition for achieving justice and fairness, or else liberalism is an active impediment to these aims, an “ideology,” in Marx’s sense, whose chimerical aspirations naturalize and perpetuate the status quo.

To the annoyance of my friends (liberal and radical alike), I often find myself flitting between these two propositions in my writings and commitments. To be frank, I hope the former is true: that universal rights and dignity not only are compatible with but require a scheme of material redistribution to be realized. But in my darker moments, I fear the latter is more true: that individual liberty will always be, first and foremost, the handmaiden of property, that exceptions to liberalism’s universal pretensions can always be found when they imperil the privileges of the propertied class. In like manner, I want very much to believe that something like socialist democracy can be achieved in this country through democratic means, i.e., without violent upheaval or the suspension of liberal norms; historical experience is not altogether encouraging. If ever another American revolution kicks off, I hope my motto would be something like: “Let’s be careful, but let’s go!” I’m certain no one would bother to listen.

Dispositionally, then, I couldn’t be more liberal, at least by the definition attributed to Robert Frost—“a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” (I’m not sure even which side is my own!) I’ve often wondered whether there was some way to vindicate this constitutive timorousness in the liberal personality. One of my intellectual heroes, George Scialabba, has said that a person of the left must cultivate “discrimination” and “democratic passion” in equal measure. Passion without discrimination leads to unthinking fervor, the subordination of means to ends: tyranny. But discrimination without passion leads to paralysis, the extinguishing of hope. The timidity of liberals, our obsession with getting things right, our worry about going too far, could generously be categorized as thoughtful discrimination. More often than not, however, our wan, philosophical reticence is really some species of self-deception: a primal, conservative fear of disorder, masquerading as principle.

The timidity of liberals, our worry about going too far, could generously be categorized as thoughtful discrimination. More often than not, however, our wan, philosophical reticence is really some species of self-deception: a primal, conservative fear of disorder, masquerading as principle.

Not that the left can so easily be divided into factions of impotent worriers and righteously passionate doers. (After all, even the most committed revolutionist has encountered a comrade she wishes would do less.) A better path to vindicating liberal dis-ease can be found in contradiction. Perhaps what liberalism fears most is its own shadow: the aspirations it tends to unleash in the lower orders, among those who take liberalism’s guarantees all too seriously. This fretful dance can be seen at work in the historical examples furnished by the editors in the question they ask us to reflect on. The abolition amendments, for example, were championed by some of the same men who, several years later, would sow the seeds of Reconstruction’s demise. (Not incidentally, they called themselves Liberal Republicans.) “In their own eyes,” Eric Foner writes, “liberal reformers [of the postbellum years] stood above social divisions as disinterested spokesmen for the common good”—a signature liberal delusion: that we alone are untainted by interest or faction—“Yet at the same time, the ideology of reform helped crystalize a distinctive and increasingly conservative middle-class consciousness.”

For this incipient intelligentsia, a bone-deep conviction that they and their ilk represented the “best men”—endowed with the appropriate learning and temperament to rule—stirred an attendant suspicion of the febrile democratic passions of their lessers, Black and white alike. Class conflict and machine politics in the North and Radical Reconstruction in the South were, to them, flavors of the same alarming egalitarianism. In the heady postbellum ferment, words like freedom and liberty had acquired too capacious definitions; they needed to be recircumscribed. As Foner writes, “Freedom, [liberal] reformers insisted, meant not economic autonomy or the right to call upon the aid of the activist state, but the ability to compete in the marketplace and enjoy protection against an overbearing government.” As such, the government had done all it could for the Blacks; they should now fend for themselves. Reconstruction, per the liberal magazine The Nation, was “morally a more disastrous process than rebellion.” Ulysses S. Grant handily defeated his Liberal Republican opponent, Horace Greeley, in the 1872 election. But the cause of Reconstruction was permanently tarnished; liberal reformers had opened the door for white supremacy’s return to the South.

The New Deal years contain elements of this same stutter-step inhibition. It was FDR’s liberal reforms that facilitated a wave of militant unionism and the building of the radical Congress of Industrial Organizations. And it was FDR’s liberal successor, Harry Truman, who signed Executive Order 9835, the “Loyalty Order,” which jump-started the Second Red Scare and profoundly curtailed the transformative potential of the New Deal. Likewise, in the 1960s, liberal presidents backed civil rights reforms, expanded the welfare state, and encouraged a generation of young people to chart their own moral destiny. But as anti–Vietnam War protests spread and the Black freedom struggle entered its more militant phase, LBJ coordinated with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to root out domestic subversives and dispatched federal troops to put down riots in Democratic-run cities. As I write, liberals, including President Joe Biden, are wringing their hands—when they’re not ringing the police—over protests by young people who have taken all-too-seriously certain universal propositions: that Palestinian lives are as inviolable as Israeli ones, as worthy of dignity and protection, and as deserving of the right to self-determination.

If it is constitutive of liberalism to fear the liberatory energies it unleashes, so is it characteristic of liberal historiography to identify, retroactively, with the liberators and not the forces cracking their skulls. In the uplands of history, liberals tend to forget their trepidation and the sententious admonitions it inspires. I have little doubt that the same elisions will someday apply to this moment. To be a liberal is to be a protagonist of history, if sometimes only in retrospect.

So to come to the question at hand: Is today’s liberalism equipped to win “this battle” against Donald Trump and the forces of reaction? I’m not sure. Today’s liberalism seems to be afflicted by the same self-flattering anxieties as yesterday’s. Liberal leaders are eager to contain and stigmatize the energies of the left flank; this, they say, is what political maturity and prudence demands. And it may be so. (The best men know best!) But history suggests another possibility: that liberalism has never quite won a battle on its own trepidatious terms; that in every instance some unbridled force of impassioned will—of precisely the sort that liberals instinctively mistrust—has been necessary to defeat reaction; and that, all too often, when liberals have indulged uncritically in their fears of democratic passion, they have undermined the cause of justice.

Whether one is more intimately familiar with liberalism as advertised or as routinely practiced—that is, with liberalism’s exceptional modes—depends on where and how one lives. Suffice it to say, a strategy for saving liberalism premised on scolding Americans, left and right, for their insufficient gratitude for liberalism’s blessings is unlikely to succeed. Personally, I take liberalism to be a precious inheritance. Indeed, I was recently reminded of what it might mean to live without its protections while watching my political allies be beaten and jailed by police in the employ of a liberal mayor. Such experiences are not, I suspect, altogether rare in this country.

American liberalism, Irving Howe once wrote, cannot escape its “heritage of Protestant self-scrutiny, self-reliance, and self-salvation. Consequently, American liberalism has a strand of deep if implicit hostility to politics per se—a powerful kind of moral absolutism, a celebration of conscience above community, which forms both its glory and its curse.” This strikes me as remarkably true of today’s Democratic Party. Its loudest boosters take for granted that an aura of moral righteousness attends the party’s actions, and that it is every person’s solemn duty of conscience to walk, soberly and somehow alone, beneath its banner. Liberal politics divorces itself from interest, need, and passion; “from the soil of shared, material life,” as Howe put it. In Biden’s message, one hears a stultifying admixture of high moral panic with utter political banality and sloth. Our existential crisis demands prudent equanimity; we are called to frenzied urgency—but not like that.

Ezra Pound once called this sort of liberalism a “mess of mush.” And it can feel that way: liberalism as the politics of anti-politics, studiously vague and neutral about everything except its own superiority to every alternative. And yet, Irving Howe understood—as Pound, a fascist, did not—that there were “far worse things in the world than ‘a mess of mush.’” If the forces of reaction succeed, we may long for these days of mess and mush. A liberalism of fear, focused on minimizing cruelty above all else, is not an unworthy goal. Except that when liberals themselves are being cruel, the program resembles a protection racket. What we need, instead, is a liberalism that ceases to fear itself.

Sam Adler-Bell is a writer and co-host of Know Your Enemy, a Dissent magazine podcast.

Remembering Vint Lawrence

A short homage to The New Republic’s longtime illustrator and caricaturist

Timothy Noah   21 Jun, 2024

The most gifted illustrator in The New Republic’s 110-year history was a former Central Intelligence Agency counterinsurgent named Vint Lawrence. In 1960, James Vinton Lawrence, then a graduating art history major at Princeton, was recruited by the Company to train Hmong tribesmen in the Laotian mountains to fight the Communist Pathet Lao. Eventually, Vint grew disillusioned with the long twilight struggle and became an artist instead. He landed in the late 1970s at The New Republic, where over 30-odd years he accumulated a ravishing portfolio. We thought that an anniversary issue was the perfect occasion to remind old TNR readers, and tell new ones, of Vint’s deft and graceful touch.

The preeminent highbrow caricaturist at that time was David Levine of The New York Review of Books. Levine had a dark and often angry style; he once drew Henry Kissinger literally fucking the world. By contrast, Vint—perhaps because he’d had his fill of darkness in Southeast Asia—drew in a sunnier and more playful vein, especially when sketching the liberal pantheon. That’s Lyndon Johnson in Franklin Roosevelt’s side-view mirror; John F. Kennedy is FDR’s steering-wheel ornament. Mario Cuomo, famously a devotee of the cosmic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is a head floating above mere wisps of a corporeal frame. Where Vint’s drawings possess darkness, it’s usually to contrast with light; note the pitch black behind the lively waves and crevices of Ted Kennedy’s face and the quieter elegance of Eleanor Roosevelt. (These depictions of Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt, incidentally, did not appear in TNR’s pages; they were perhaps created for The Washington Post or Washington Monthly, two other outlets where Vint contributed occasionally.)

Vint’s personal kindness and intelligence were reflected in the gentle wit of his caricatures. These were sometimes more prescient than the articles they illustrated. In the 1980s, TNR opposed Jesse Jackson’s efforts to tug centrist Democrats leftward in two presidential runs. Four decades later, much of Jackson’s program lies well within the Democratic mainstream, rendering the affection evident in Vint’s Jackson portrait more durable than whatever grumpy TNR article it likely accompanied.

“Vint uses his talent for intricacy more often for aesthetic than didactic purposes,” former TNR editor Michael Kinsley observed in 1988. It’s no surprise to learn that, after Vint left The New Republic, he turned to painting, which he pursued until his death in 2016. His was a buoyant spirit that inspired all who knew him and endures in these drawings.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Mario Cuomo

Mary McCarthy and Jesse Jackson

Ted Kennedy

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.

Don’t Be Fooled By Liberalism’s Modesty

Is the creed that’s always reexamining itself up to the task of stopping authoritarianism? In a word—yes.

Jamie Raskin   21 Jun, 2024

Demonstrators at a rally protesting Trump’s Muslim immigration ban, on January 28, 2017, in San Francisco>/span>

Don’t count liberalism out in 2024. I know it’s a Rodney Dangerfield political philosophy—meek and mild, self-deprecating, it gets no respect—but battle-hardened post-Trump liberals have proved tough as nails and ready to fight all necessary battles for freedom and democracy in these days of resurgent authoritarianism.

To be sure, American liberals exist for the most part implicitly—in our work, our arguments, and our values, and not so much in terms of explicit, much less exclusive, political self-identification. The Democrats fighting to stop Trumpism have to cover a lot more ground than just the theories of John Stuart Mill. We are indeed emphatically liberals because we defend individual liberty, but we are equally progressives because we champion progress for everyone; and these days, we are the closest thing America has to conservatives, too, because we want to conserve the land, the air, the water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, public integrity, judicial independence—everything in society and nature that the party of nihilists and authoritarians wants to destroy.

I’ve traveled to 19 states in this campaign, and I find old-fashioned Enlightenment liberalism alive and well at ground level in the surging party of democracy. The abortion issue catalyzing activism everywhere has become a fight not just for women’s access to health care but an organizing juggernaut for the rights of women and men to make their own life decisions free from the designs of the misogynist theocrats, billionaire plutocrats, and plundering kleptocrats who make up the sinister autocratic cult of Trump.

Local activists, ACLU lawyers, and teachers are defending books and libraries against book-banners and government censors with gusto. Liberal feminists are defending birth control and IVF against nasty puritan scolds in state capitols. A surging movement of secular citizens is defending the separation of church and state against cultists and the local bosses of right-wing megachurches. And everyone from the League of Women Voters to the NAACP is fighting for our voting rights against the mutating tactics of voter suppression, the endless cycles of gerrymandering and the straight-up disenfranchisement of millions of people, including former prisoners in at least eight states, 3.3 million Americans in Puerto Rico, and around 689,000 Americans living in Washington, D.C.

Meantime, online progressive liberals with an attitude are zealously fighting for free expression and reason in the cyber-trenches against high-tech fundamentalism, racism, antisemitism, fanaticism, fascism, and tribalism, as well as the disinformation and propaganda interjections of foreign state actors like Vladimir Putin.

Ordinarily a live-and-let-live philosophy, liberalism fights hard when it’s up against the ropes. And here we are—in the fight of our lives ever since Florida Man came down the escalator to run a new nationwide grift. The good news is that the post–Donald Trump networks of liberals and progressives are ready for battle, strategically focused, and plentiful in the land. We are committed unswervingly to defend both the negative liberties of early liberals like John Locke and the pragmatic changes in society, law, and government that have dramatically expanded our freedom over the last two centuries, the structural social changes and positive rights that people in the civilizing movements of the last century fought and died for.

What has become clear in this troubled century is the essential and necessary relationship between liberalism and strong democracy. In 1861, President Lincoln observed this link when he made a private note about the relationship between constitutional democracy in practice and the liberal and egalitarian ideals that Thomas Jefferson had inscribed in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln said that constitutional democracy is like the beautiful silver frame upon which rests the “apple of gold” of freedom promised in the Declaration. In other words, there must be a democratic structure or frame in place to center and keep safe the freedoms of the people.

But even a democratic structure is no guarantee of freedom. For, as we have seen throughout American history, the procedural forms of democracy, including elections and the separation of powers, can co-exist with massive deprivations of liberty, including the institutions of slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, the subordination and disenfranchisement of women.

A state engaged in institutionalized assault on social freedom will produce only a cheap, counterfeit, and cosmetic form of “democracy” that becomes psychologically and politically unsustainable for the population. This is why the struggle for freedom against oppression, like Jim Crow segregation, almost always doubles as a struggle for voting rights, responsive democracy, and popular control over government.

There’s an old saying, commonly attributed to John Dewey, that the only cure to the ills of democracy is more democracy, and what we are suffering from today is not democracy but all the structural impediments to it, like gerrymandering, voter suppression, right-wing judicial activism, the filibuster, and the antiquated, anti-democratic, and manipulable Electoral College system. The system of anti-democracy, the GOP’s bulging bag of tricks, thwarts our democracy and our freedom at the same time.

The struggle for democracy has always been a freedom struggle. When Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee went farm-to-farm and door-to-door in Jim Crow Mississippi in the early 1960s, registering voters in the face of every form of brutal violence and intimidation, they coined the expression “one man, one vote,” which became not only the aspirational statement of moral and political equality at the heart of the civil rights movement’s “beloved community,” but the “radical equation” that transformed the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence in the Warren court—and which, of course, has grown to become “one person, one vote,” as Moses said it would. This belief in the freedom and equality of every man and, eventually, every woman remains the commanding impulse of progressive liberalism in America: the determination that every person, every voice, must count and count equally, which is why the next great wave of liberal democracy will insist on ranked-choice voting and other forms of proportional representation to replace winner-take-all elections and empower the whole electorate.

Liberals know in our bones today that there will be no freedom without democracy because the autocrats in Moscow, the kleptocrats in Mar-a-Lago, and the theocrats in MAGA-world will never willingly grant people, especially women, our basic liberties and freedoms.

Liberals know in our bones today that there will be no freedom without democracy because the autocrats in Moscow, the kleptocrats in Mar-a-Lago, and the theocrats in MAGA-world will never willingly grant people, especially women, our basic liberties and freedoms. Also, the technologies of domination and surveillance are becoming more totalitarian all the time, and we must take urgent care that artificial intelligence does not usher in artificial democracy. The autocratic parties and states will use every technology available to be all-powerful and all-seeing over the people to subdue and control restless majorities.

But the converse is equally true: There will be no real democracy without freedom. Authoritarian despots like Putin and Viktor Orbán, who start by shutting down newspapers and closing LGBTQ nightclubs, inevitably turn to harassing and jailing opposition leaders and using the state to crush political competition. Tyrants depend not just on scapegoating of specific minorities but on suppression of voting rights and democratic participation for the whole populace and the fail-safe manipulation and break-glass stealing of popular elections when all else fails.

The times now call upon us, the liberal enemies of fascism, to defend freedom and democracy together. Fraternal twins, liberalism and modern democracy were born together in the Enlightenment and have won all their major battles for humanity together. They have weathered the opposition of British monarchy, feudalism, and theocracy; slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and political white supremacy; and corporate oligarchy, economic monopoly, and tyrannical class power. They now stand shoulder to shoulder again and face all the dictators and despots of the world.

Liberalism must pull democracy back from the clutches of authoritarian populists. The enemies of freedom gather happily under the banner of Orbán’s “illiberal democracy,” which means elections without freedoms, mob control of government without minority rights, and authoritarian “culture war” against dissent and difference.

Because of its essential modesty—it does not purport to have the keys to the iron laws of history—and its long-distance focus on simple human freedom, liberal democracy has never been a showy political ideology. But today progressive liberalism is a resilient fighting creed that has given us in America everything from massive infrastructure investment to muscular defense of the people of Ukraine to insistence upon human rights and civil liberties against all the despots and terrorists of the world.

We have our work cut out for us with the Florida Man’s scapegoating and immigrant-bashing, the undeniable lure for many Trump voters of political violence, and the dizzying effects of election denialism. The democracy and freedom project in 2024 requires not just fundraising, which seems to be the main default activity of our political campaigns these days, but organizing. And that means we have to go to every neighborhood in America and “bounce a ball,” as Bob Moses recommended in Radical Equations. When you bounce a ball outside, the little kids will come to play, and then their big brothers and sisters will come along to meet you, and pretty soon the whole family arrives to talk and have dinner. That’s the imperative this year: Take time to bounce a ball. Meet some new people. Let’s use our time to organize America.

Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s 8th district in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he is the ranking member on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability. He is the founder of Democracy Summer, the Democratic organizing project for high school- and college-age students, which is in over 40 states this summer.

Defend Liberalism? Let’s Fight for Democracy First

America never really was liberal, and that’s not the right fight anyway. The fight now is for democracy.

Jefferson Cowie   21 Jun, 2024

A rally and march in New York City demanding that every vote be counted in the general election, despite Trump’s premature claim of victory, on November 4, 2020.>/span>

There are words we know, and there are words we argue about, working our way to a shared meaning. And then there is that unique category of terms that, once they appear, stubbornly refuse to succumb to any mutual understanding no matter how belabored the discussion. Such is the boggy terrain known as “American liberalism.” At best it carries meaning through its modifiers—but then, there are just way too many of those. Lockean? Rawlsian? Jeffersonian? Social? New Deal? Libertarian? Pragmatic? Great Society? Keynesian? Feminist? Muscular? Patriotic? Neo? The mind reels.

Hardly a snapping pennant of faith, American liberalism is one hot American mess.

American liberals would like to see U.S. history bursting forth from its Jeffersonian roots, launched on a steady march from monarchy to democracy, from slavery to freedom, from rapacious Gilded Age capitalism to robust regulatory state. Instead, confusion reigns. By the time I get to the 1980s in my history classes, for instance, it takes me a 45-minute slog of a lecture just to explain the etymology of “neoliberalism.” The root of the term is a nineteenth-century Manchester-style economic “liberalism” deployed to overturn a twentieth-century New Deal and Great Society “liberalism.” That nineteenth-century version was a very selective implementation of a more abstract liberal idea—one that highlighted free trade (a total myth in the U.S. case) while often ignoring the liberties of free citizens, the rights of workers, or the process of democratic government. When I suggest to my students that the individualism of their generation’s identity-based liberalism could be said to feed the hypercapitalism of neoliberalism, their heads are spinning.

Given that the term lacks depth, coherence, and precision, let alone a fighting creed, allow me to introduce a multipart political puzzle. First, nobody can truly agree on what the term means, partially because it has rarely existed in the first place in the United States. “American liberalism,” therefore, has proved to be as much of a nostalgia trap as a forward-thinking enlightenment project. And, when liberalism did work in a politically progressive way, it tended to do so best when it transcended its own logic, ironically achieving liberal ends through illiberal means.

So, while the question today might be, “How to make America liberal again?” the problem is that it never really was. That’s not the right fight. By the time this is over, I hope to draw your attention more narrowly to one part of the liberal idea that is most important and most contested: democracy.

We begin with the nostalgia trap. The best proof of the fact that we don’t know what we are even talking about is the belief that some classical version once defined American history. What must be regarded as, at best, the most blinkered and, at worst, most pernicious interpretation of American history is Louis Hartz’s staggeringly influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Hartz argues that Americans enjoyed the absence of a class-structured feudal past, which also meant little tradition of militant revolution or reaction. Americans were born free, capitalist, and committed to the liberal ideal. Hartz’s flat, conflictless version of history was always in conversation with European socialism more than the American historical record. It stands as a document of its postwar moment, when the United States needed to make sense of itself as hegemon of the “free” world.

The persistence of the Hartzian idea, even if only fumes remain, has prevented us from understanding the frequent failure of our own political systems.  This makes liberalism more of a longing for that which never existed than it is a useful guide for democratic values.

Yet the persistence of the Hartzian idea, even if only fumes remain, has prevented us from understanding the frequent failure of our own political systems. This holds especially true for the question of democracy, because the Founding Fathers had a tortured, suspicious relationship to the people, which we have yet to overcome. This makes liberalism more of a longing for that which never existed than it is a useful guide for democratic values.

Thankfully, this year, Steven Hahn finally wielded his hefty historian’s hammer, sinking nails in the coffin of liberalism by separating Hartz from fact in his perfectly titled book, Illiberal America: A History. Hahn writes “not of the country’s recent departure from long-established and entrenched ‘norms,’” but instead “how our present-day reckoning with the rise of a militant and illiberal set of movements has lengthy and constantly ramifying roots.” He also shows how the mythology of liberalism has been sustained less by its proponents than by its anxious critics. The right attacks it, while the left defends some kind of imaginary norm to fight off the new assault on great (mythical) American values.

Individual freedom is often seen as the core of liberalism (root: liber, free), that most cherished of American values. Yet the practice of freedom hardly holds up to any litmus test of American liberalism. In my recent book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022), I found a near two-century history of the practice of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian freedom wielded by white elites to dominate the land, labor, and political power of other people. Freedom for white Americans meant the freedom to control, exploit, subjugate, deny, and even murder. When, for instance, the federal government intervened militarily to back the political rights of formerly enslaved people, elite Alabamians fought the feds with a twisted but enduring version of the liberal ideal. Whites saw federal intervention as a “flagrant and dangerous invasion of the ancient conservative principles of personal liberty and free government.”

Annelien de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History (2020) has a similar finding. As democracy broke out across the North Atlantic, the liberal idea of freedom was mobilized to control the unruly democratic expressions of the people. Freedom, she shows, was not deployed as a source of liberation but as a “formidable reaction against democracy.” In his book Bind Us Apart (2016), Nicholas Guyatt further problematizes Enlightenment liberal values by showing how the founding generations invented, and were committed to, the logic of separate but equal. There never was a place for a multiracial, multicultural (liberal) republic. Men may have been created equal, as some claimed, but they’d have to go be equal somewhere else—for American Indians it was out West, for slaves it was “back” to Africa.

A contemporary “liberal” view looks to foundational moments of expanding access to democracy and economic prosperity—signposts of the American reform tradition. Eras like Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the civil rights era may have been partially inspired by liberalism, but their most salient victories were fostered by forceful departures from it. This is the mobilization of illiberal means for liberal ends.

Consider Reconstruction. Eric Foner aptly calls it The Second Founding, but we ought never forget that it was a product of military subjugation followed by what former Confederate states regarded as the “forced ratification” of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Given the rather unliberal, albeit overdue, military means of statecraft, the old Confederacy cried foul on the “forced ratification” necessary for them to rejoin the Union as federal bayonets ruled their land. Even the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, barely met the two-thirds majority to pass, and that was without the Southern delegations voting (suggesting it would have had a hard time in any other circumstances besides those born of military subjugation).

Not so ironically, the party that grew in opposition to the Radical Republican agenda was called, of course, the Liberal Republicans, who fetishized civil service reforms and proper procedures while whites seized power in the South. Then, in the tradition of what Richard Hofstadter called “a democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity,” the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law, became a tool for supporting corporate personhood while Black people sought their rights in the streets.

When the New Deal came along during nation’s second great moment of peril and reform, Roosevelt’s Brain Trust also abandoned the core values of liberalism by creating the corporatist National Recovery Administration. Here FDR saved liberal capitalism by suspending its rules, selecting to call his project “liberal” because the individual rights inflection of the word provided useful cover for the NRA’s collective tendencies. While the NRA was found both unworkable in real life and unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, it nonetheless opened the way for the great and semi-enduring breakthroughs in controlling and managing capitalism: Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the National Labor Relations Act (upheld after FDR’s threat to pack the court and the autoworkers’ rather illiberal seizing of General Motors). I’ve called the era “The Great Exception” because it was based on the muting of the American love affair with the ideology of individualism and the bolstering of organized class power—at least for a few decades.

When it comes to the modern civil rights era, it is worth mentioning that the brave actions of the Little Rock Nine integrated Little Rock High School, but it also took the illiberal means of Eisenhower’s executive order and a show of force by the 101st Airborne Division to make sure the job got done. This is an age in which liberal stalwart Hubert Humphrey, segregationist Senator Richard Russell, and master manipulator Lyndon Johnson—and perhaps even Eisenhower himself—were all liberals. How can that be?

I suspend my caustic take on liberalism when it comes to the momentous achievements of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. They may have been the most liberal pieces of legislation ever passed in the United States. For the first time in American history, the United States legally declared itself to be a democracy and did so by parliamentary (not military) means. That makes the United States a very young republic indeed. Yet those great historical breakthroughs, “the liberal hour,” now seem fleeting, tactical, and so propulsive of anti-liberal reaction that they generated what can only parallel the post-Reconstruction era of white “redemption” from the grip of federal power (known in the 1960s and beyond by the more populist term “backlash”).

This delivers us to the missing piece of the liberal story. As the historian James Kloppenberg noted in a 2001 retrospective essay on Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition, we need to stop debating liberalism and “turn our attention toward democracy.” In this time of political crisis, the path forward should be focusing on the single definable dimension of liberalism, democracy, and promoting a robust expansion of the franchise, through very active federal intervention, ideally a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote for all citizens—full stop—and some system of equal representation of that vote (say, getting rid of the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and other tricks of the trade).

Our current political system is based on who gets to vote and which states’ votes matter, not what the policies or ideas could or should be. That is a failure. The clarion call of “Democracy Now!” is a lot more attractive than “Vague Culturally Relative and Historically Defined Liberalism at Some Point if It’s Convenient and Procedurally Correct!”

Authoritarian conservatives now own nearly every political value—liberal (as a pejorative), freedom (a scary version), patriotism (the white nationalist variety). But confront them with the one concept that remains up for grabs, democracy, and they buckle. It’s the key dividing line. The real American history is a contest over whether this will be a democracy—culturally, institutionally, and participatorily—or will be something else: authoritarian, oligarchical, white nationalist, fascist, segregationist, elitist, or some other.

The question of democracy was there at the founding. And, sure, it is part of liberalism. But it is the part that is clear and makes sense. It was there at Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. As Louis Menand paraphrases the essence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “democracy is an experiment the goal of which is to keep the experiment going. The purpose of democracy is to enable people to live democratically. That’s it.”

The confusion inherent in liberalism risks drowning its most urgently needed value: democracy. Clearly, if you’re not some kind of liberal at this moment in history, you are not helping. That’s fine, but let’s define our aims more precisely, with a vision that is more energizing, more inclusive, and yet still identifiable within some kind of American tradition. A system of a federally enforced and equally weighted right to vote for all citizens would be the best and most unifying place to begin. Despite everything, if the system is run right and aggressively so, the people can be trusted. Let’s gamble not on the chimera of liberalism but on pursuing the unfinished vision of an American democracy.

Jefferson Cowie received the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for his book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. He teaches history at Vanderbilt University.

An Everglades Scientist on Trial in Ron DeSantis’s Kingdom

A powerful nonprofit, closely allied with the Florida governor, sued one of its former scientists for stealing trade secrets. What was it really after?

Boyce Upholt   25 Jun, 2024

Tom Van Lent resigned from the Everglades Foundation in February 2022. Five weeks later, the foundation accused him of destroying scientific archives and stealing trade secrets>/span>

In early February 2022, Tom Van Lent sent a note to his employers: He intended to resign from the Everglades Foundation at the end of the month. He adopted a conciliatory tone—“my career at the Foundation has been a source of personal pride,” he wrote—but everyone knew that Van Lent, one of the most prominent scientists in Everglades restoration, had been unhappy for years.

The Everglades Foundation is an exemplar of a certain strain of nonprofit: well-connected and well-funded, bankrolled by a hedge fund billionaire. The group is open about its focus not on grassroots but on what its CEO calls “grasstops,” the lobbyists and politicians who set Everglades policy. Van Lent came on board in 2005, tasked with ensuring that this policy was grounded in good science. He was a conduit, in essence, ensuring that the best and latest research reached the desks of decision-makers.

By all accounts, he was good at distilling complex subjects into easy-to-grasp form, and by 2016 he’d ascended to vice president of programs. Soon, though, he began to feel that his bosses had changed the meaning of his job. Rather than pushing lobbyists to incorporate the best science, they were listening to the lobbyists’ favored plans and seeking to publish science that conformed. When his final day arrived, after Van Lent wiped clean his work-issued laptop, he couldn’t help but take a swipe at the organization: In a note on Twitter, he announced his plan to move to another nonprofit, smaller and scrappier—one that “put facts over politics,” he wrote.

Five weeks later, the foundation filed a lawsuit in district court, accusing Van Lent of waging “a secret campaign of theft and destruction.” He’d destroyed scientific archives, the complaint said, and made off with trade secrets. Van Lent, for his part, accused the foundation of attempting to “bully, harass, scare, smear and silence” him.

Beloved parks like the Everglades usually offer a chance for feel-good politics; polls show that Americans of all stripes support protections for nature, water especially. In Florida, Democrats and Republicans both clamber to position themselves as the Everglades’ greatest champions. But beneath the veneer of the press releases, there have always been disagreements over the best approach to conservation—and differences in how willing politicians are to accept inconvenient science.

“For somebody to try and shut up the scientists,” said Stuart Pimm, one of the world’s foremost conservation ecologists, “that is very, very worrying business.”

The Everglades Foundation’s case against Van Lent offers a rare glimpse of those tensions, and reveals the extent to which money and power can influence decision-making in the world of conservation. The idea that a science-focused nonprofit might possess trade secrets presents a particular stumbling block to some conservationists. “You cannot have trade secrets and call it science,” Stuart Pimm, one of the world’s foremost conservation ecologists, told me. He thinks that with this lawsuit, the Everglades Foundation has crossed a threshold, undermining its credibility as a research institution by smothering its own research. “For somebody to try and shut up the scientists,” he said, “that is very, very worrying business.”

The foundation, of course, contends that this case is not about science or research at all. It’s just an employment matter—an attempt to seek restitution after Van Lent’s alleged sabotage.

The foundation’s story and Van Lent’s are, in most ways, entirely contradictory, but there is one point of agreement: Van Lent was disgruntled.

Many people have been unhappy in Florida lately, with good reason. Again and again—in 2013, in 2016, in 2018—red tides and vast blooms of algae have appeared on its shores. The blooms first appear on Lake Okeechobee, a giant but shallow pool of freshwater that, filled with runoff and baked under the summer sun, serves as a breeding ground for toxic microbes. The lake once spilled its water into the Everglades, but, beginning in the early twentieth century, a dike was built along its southern shore to protect local farms. When the lake grows too filled with rainfall, its tainted water is shunted east and west, through man-made canals, into rivers that reach the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way, the water flows through delicate coastal estuaries. The beaches begin to stink of rot; the tourism economy grinds to a halt.

Fishermen navigated a toxic algae bloom on Lake Okeechobee in July 2018. Florida has suffered algae blooms and red tides in 2013, 2016, and 2018.Photo by Ben Depp

Van Lent’s boss, Eric Eikenberg, came on board in 2012, after serving as chief of staff to a congressman and a governor, both Republicans. In a brief stint as a lobbyist, he helped bring the beloved Pennsylvania convenience store chain Wawa to Florida. He was, in other words, a consummate politician, and he knew how to play a crisis to his advantage. In 2016, he used the latest batch of grim headlines to push for a restoration plan that had long been environmentalists’ dream. A sprawling reservoir, built south of Lake Okeechobee, could store (and clean) some water before it was sent on to farms and cities and to Everglades National Park. At 60,000 acres, the proposed pool could swallow entire Florida cities.

The state Senate president, Republican Joe Negron, promoted a bill that authorized the government to acquire the necessary land, even in the absence of willing sellers—a bold move, given the politics involved. Land tends to be the sticking point for conservation projects, not just in Florida, but across the world; conservative groups love to describe restoration projects as authoritarian “land grabs.” Though Floridians have voted in favor of land acquisition, some environmental groups complain that the designated money is being used for other purposes. Negron eventually grew gun-shy. On a Sunday in spring 2017, he called Eikenberg into his office, where the senator announced he’d changed his bill. He’d reduced the size of the proposed reservoir’s footprint so that it could be built on property the state already owned. “It was presented as a take it or leave it,” Eikenberg later told NPR. He decided to take the deal, because he did not want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Eventually, the reservoir was whittled down to just 10,000 acres.

Jacquie Weisblum, the nonprofit’s vice president overseeing communications, told me that the foundation’s leadership consulted its science team—including Van Lent—and determined that, despite the smaller footprint, the reservoir could still meet the needed goals. What mattered was not acreage, but volume; to increase the volume stored, the reservoir could be surrounded by tall walls. Other Everglades conservationists, however, objected to a different element of the compromise law: It prohibited the use of eminent domain. This one reservoir would not be enough, they felt, and the state needed a path to acquire more land. The disagreement made for a confusing and argumentative time, one organizer told me.

MAP BY HAISAM HUSSEIN

Van Lent said that he had never endorsed nor condemned the reservoir proposal, just tried to make clear its potential impacts. To that end, and at the request of other nonprofits, Van Lent pulled together a technical FAQ in early 2018. Federal laws, he noted, set strict limits on how much pollution can be in water sent into the Everglades, and the reservoir was unlikely to meet these requirements; the increased depth would inhibit the growth of the vegetation that helps clean the water. Van Lent had questions, too, about the computer models that the South Florida Water Management District—the state agency that, in collaboration with the federal government, controls local water flow—used to justify the plan. Van Lent sent the document to Eikenberg and to leaders of other environmental groups. Eikenberg, he said, was disappointed he had not had a chance to edit the final version.

Soon afterward, the foundation scheduled what was supposed to be a technical meeting with the water district. Van Lent hoped to discuss the flaws he saw in its models. But when he and his colleagues posed questions, Eikenberg stepped in to conduct a cross-examination, Van Lent said. The foundation declined to make Eikenberg available for an interview, but Weisblum described the meeting as a constructive conversation.

Van Lent, however, said that he felt he and the science team were “under attack—not just by the district, which we kind of expected, but by our own leadership.” Eikenberg had not just accepted a compromise; he’d become its cheerleader. Eikenberg’s view, as Van Lent understood it, was that political science trumped science when it came to getting things done. Soon the two men had what a judge later described as a “loud disagreement.” One of the foundation’s executives testified that the event went down in infamy. Though the fight preceded her tenure, she’d heard stories that Van Lent had shouted and pounded a table with his fists. According to her testimony, Eikenberg feared that he might be assaulted by his employee.

To create the modern world, engineers had to devise an intricate system for moving water. Seawalls hold back the tides; culverts carry rainfall to where it’s needed. Under every city lies a tangled map of pipelines, feeding our sinks and draining our toilets. Typically, it’s easy to overlook this system, at least when it’s working, but not in Florida. Pull up Google Maps as you drive and you’ll notice the landscape is crossed by perfectly straight lines of blue. These are the canals that allow people to build farms and suburbs atop what, in natural conditions, would be one vast swamp.

The dream of draining the Everglades goes back more than 150 years, but this is a relatively new system. The first canals through the Everglades were dug in the early 1900s. And it did not take long for the scientists to discover bad news. At the tip of Florida, the soils—goopy and black, known locally as “muck”—lay too thin in some places to ever be farmable. So Florida officials settled for a backup plan. In 1947, part of the Everglades was enshrined as the nation’s first wetlands national park. The park, however, preserved only the southernmost fringe of the ecosystem, and its birth was not the end of the drainage dreams. Indeed, the following year, the federal government announced a very different project in the northern Everglades, where farming had already begun. Even more canals—and levees, too—would be dug to ensure a swath of wetlands was kept entirely dry. The purpose of this project was made clear in the region’s new name: the Everglades Agricultural Area, or EAA.

Over the next few decades, the population in South Florida boomed. But the newcomers’ very presence tainted the paradise they were trying to inhabit. Among the most pressing issues was the self-defeating nature of the canals in the Everglades Agricultural Area. By lowering the water table, the canals allowed salt water to infiltrate the aquifers, contaminating urban drinking water.

The imperative of keeping Florida paradisial has made for a strange coalition of Everglades advocates. Van Lent’s first boss at the Everglades Foundation was a former Republican senator named Bob Smith, who once stabbed a plastic fetus with a pair of scissors on the Senate floor, a stunt meant to demonstrate the evils of abortion; he quit the GOP in 1999, calling it too centrist, and ran for president as a third-party candidate. Van Lent said he diverged from Smith on nearly every issue but loved working for him: They were both Everglades warriors.

Van Lent saw himself as an honest broker. The foundation could make whatever compromises it wanted; his job was to clarify the consequences. “Eric Eikenberg saw it differently,” Van Lent explained. “I was a member of the management of Everglades Foundation, I therefore had an obligation to fall in line.” His FAQ was eventually pulled from the foundation’s website—a fact that Weisblum acknowledged but declined to explain. Court testimony revealed that, after Eikenberg decided that Van Lent could not be trusted to speak in support of the foundation’s preferred policies, he was demoted from vice president to “senior scientist.”

By the time that Van Lent developed an exit plan, in early 2022, he realized that disentangling himself would not be easy. His sole computer was a laptop issued to him by the nonprofit, so his personal records—banking data, health care paperwork, family photos—had become intermingled with his official work. A few weeks before he sent his resignation letter, Van Lent began his clean-out.

He searched for, among other queries, “Gmail delete all emails,” and followed the instructions to empty his email and calendars. The hardest task, he knew, would be sorting through his work folder on the foundation’s server. To make the job easier, he said, he pulled it off the server and placed it on an external hard drive, where he could delete the files that were not relevant to the foundation. Then, over the weekend before his last day of work, he said, he attempted to re-upload the cleaned-up folder. Given the volume of data—the original folder contained more than 400,000 files, hundreds of gigabytes—the process would take a long time, especially over the slow internet connection at his home in Tallahassee. So he let the upload run while he left town for a wedding.

When Van Lent returned on Sunday, he said, he reset the laptop to its factory settings, presuming the job was finished. On his last day of work, during an exit interview, he explained the steps he’d taken, noting that all of his files should be on the server. Then he sent his tweet.

The foundation’s leaders were shocked by Van Lent’s announcement. They’d presumed he was retiring. They found his wiped-clean laptop suspicious, too. So, for $275 an hour, they hired a forensic expert to analyze the hard drive and reconstruct what was missing. The investigator quickly noted that Van Lent’s server folder was empty.

According to Van Lent, he realized his upload had failed only when the foundation confronted him with this fact. But he had a backup version of his work on a hard drive, which he copied and delivered to the foundation. To his former employers, this ability to re-create the archive was also problematic. He had copies of models and presentations and strategic plans that the foundation used to seek grants and secure funding. Van Lent told me he was willing to commit to not disclosing trade secrets—if the foundation would identify what precisely was considered to be secret. He felt that the foundation was trying to stop him from sharing any Everglades-related information—which would have meant he could no longer work. The foundation felt Van Lent was being truculent, and decided by April to file suit.

The complaint alleged that by deleting files (including those created by other scientists) off its servers, Van Lent had destroyed the foundation’s property—like setting a filing cabinet on fire while exiting the building. Weisblum indicated that, as of spring 2024, the foundation is still missing some of these documents, though the only specific materials she described were, according to Van Lent, old and irrelevant, deleted weeks before his departure so he could free up space on a notoriously overloaded server. He said that he had, to the best of his ability, restored the foundation’s materials before they filed suit.

The complaint’s second claim, that Van Lent had stolen trade secrets, was more explosive, and more essential to the foundation’s case. Citing Florida’s trade secret law, the nonprofit requested that the court force Van Lent to turn over his laptop and other devices for analysis. But these allegations were also more legally dubious. Lawyers argue that information about nonprofit donors can be considered a trade secret (which Van Lent, in his testimony, seemed to acknowledge, too). Scientific research used for a publicly funded restoration project is murkier territory. In 2020, a prominent Louisiana nonprofit sued two scientists who, upon leaving to join another research institute, downloaded a computer model. But the nonprofit had not explicitly prohibited the download, and the model had been built with public funding. The case was eventually dropped. The main result was a bad look for the field; the whole idea of “trade secrets” suggested that some groups were getting rich off an environmental crisis.

One key challenge in these kinds of cases is the high burden of proof required by trade secret law. Plaintiffs must prove that the trade secrets are in fact trade secrets, and then establish either that they were improperly acquired or that their disclosure breached a duty of confidentiality. Van Lent testified that, in his 17 years at the foundation, no files had ever been identified as a protected trade secret, and that scientists routinely departed with copies of their work—a practice the foundation’s employee handbook did not expressly forbid. Nonetheless, Carlos Lopez, the judge assigned to the case, decided the foundation’s trade secret complaint merited a temporary injunction.

Lopez was generous to the plaintiffs. He adopted the language of the foundation’s requested injunction wholesale, changing only the bond amount. He failed even to strike the word “proposed” from the title—a point of confusion for Van Lent, who said he did not understand it was in effect. Whether he understood it or not, he was now legally required to “immediately cease use or deletion of any materials” on any form of device that could store digital data. If taken literally, the order would have cast Van Lent out of the modern internet era, unable to use a computer, a laptop, a cell phone—unable to attend his trial, even, which was scheduled to be held on Zoom.

Van Lent’s new job is with the Friends of the Everglades—whose name is sufficiently similar to the Everglades Foundation that the two are easy to confuse. If there’s a silver lining to the whole mess, said Eve Samples, the group’s executive director, it’s that it makes her nonprofit’s commitment to science clearer: “We’re not willing to settle for political compromises that won’t serve the Everglades in the long run,” she said.

The two groups have very different origin stories. The Everglades Foundation was formed in the 1990s by two wealthy fishing buddies—billionaire Paul Tudor Jones II and an Orlando real estate developer named George Barley. Friends of the Everglades, meanwhile, was founded in 1969 by a scrappy 78-year-old writer named Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Douglas began her career as a newspaper writer who cheered on the drainage of the Everglades. Then she was commissioned to write a book about the place—and fell in love. Two decades later, after publishing 10 more books, she grew worried about a plan to build a massive airport just outside the park. In her second career as an environmental warrior, she used her age to her advantage: “Nobody can be rude to me,” she once told an interviewer. At five feet tall, wearing floppy hats and floral print dresses, she could be as sharp-tongued as necessary.

Van Lent encountered Douglas during his first stint in Florida, in the 1980s, when he worked for the South Florida Water Management District as a water resource engineer. At one point, the director asked Van Lent to run the numbers on a small ecological project; he’d gotten a call from Governor Bob Graham, he said, who was being pestered by some old lady about doing something to save the Everglades. When the project was done, the governor flew Douglas out in a helicopter: What did she think? he wanted to know. “Not enough,” she told him flatly. “Not nearly enough.”

Marjory Stoneman Douglas championed Everglades conservation for decades. Pictured here in 1989, Douglas died in 1998 at age 108.KEVIN FLEMING/CORBIS/GETTY

Douglas did not think that the perfect was the enemy of the good. The perfect seemed to be the only thing worth fighting for. And her story offers an example that commitment to hard truths can work. Her sharp little rejoinder—“Not enough”—is often credited with prompting Graham to restore the Kissimmee River, perhaps the most successful Everglades project ever untaken.

Van Lent, I think, has something of Douglas in him. When he first came to Florida to work as a hydrologist for the water management district in the 1980s, he had few ecological inclinations. But then he began to explore the Everglades. For years, he spent nearly every weekend in the park with his two sons, paddling through its sloughs. I told him I planned to camp there, too. As he wished me good luck on my trip, his voice faltered. “The Everglades for me is a special balm,” he said, pausing, seeming to hold back tears. “It just talks to me.” Perhaps he is a talented actor, or I’m a mark, but his passion seemed genuine.

In the late 1990s, Congress was working to develop an ambitious plan to restore South Florida—a rare bipartisan effort in a deeply divided moment. Van Lent, who then worked for the National Park Service, co-wrote a report, based on hydrological modeling, showing that Congress’s proposal was just a water supply plan for South Florida’s farms and suburbs, dressed up in ecological clothes. The park would see almost no benefits. That report constituted “the first time that Tom really stuck his neck out,” Stuart Pimm told me. Pimm joined five other prominent ecologists in signing an open letter confirming that there were “deep, systemic problems” in Congress’s plan.

Pimm himself flew to Washington for meetings, including with President Bill Clinton. He did not succeed in changing the plan’s water allocations, but he did convince officials that progress toward the goals needed to be routinely assessed by an independent panel from the National Academy of Sciences. “If you’re going to have a project like this, you have to have peer review,” he told me. “It has to be open, it has to be transparent, and it has to be out there for people to look at.”

Tom Van Lent was pushed aside, he wrote, so that he would not voice “opinions contrary to the prevailing political regime led by Florida’s governor and reigning party.”

Van Lent said he was recruited to work for the foundation because he had a reputation for speaking truth to power; his first boss, Bob Smith, told reporters that he’d wanted scientists who would make clear if he was pursuing the wrong policies. Seventeen years later, however, Van Lent felt isolated. He was pushed aside so that he would not voice “opinions contrary to the prevailing political regime led by Florida’s governor and reigning party, to which the Foundation had become beholden,” he wrote in response to the foundation’s complaint.

The governor in question was Ron DeSantis, who launched his first gubernatorial campaign, in 2018, amid yet another algal emergency. The blooms put a $2.7 billion dent in the local tourism economy alone and upended local politics.

The GOP establishment had backed the state’s agricultural commissioner, Adam Putnam, who had long been allied with the state’s industrial farmers. DeSantis, at the time a U.S. representative, came out swinging against Putnam, dubbing him—not wrongly—an “errand boy” for Big Sugar. Which is to say a man in cahoots with the industry that almost every Everglades advocate blames for the state’s modern woes.

If you’re asked to envision South Florida, you might conjure sandy beaches or glitzy cities or endless sprawl or vast untamable swamps. You’re unlikely to come up with the domain of Big Sugar: the Everglades Agricultural Area, that 700,000-acre swath of farmland just south of Lake Okeechobee. Local farmers like to tout the wide range of vegetables grown here, but the dominant crop, by far, is sugar. Two companies—U.S. Sugar and the Florida Crystals Corp.—together control around half of the area.

The crop is easy to despise. According to economists, the tariffs, quotas, and price support programs that prop up the sugar industry cost consumers as much $2 billion a year. For decades, sugar growers also benefited from a federal program that allowed workers to migrate from the West Indies—a labor pool the growers felt free to overwork and underpay. By the mid-1980s, scientists discovered that the water running off the EAA’s farms was heavily spiked with phosphorus fertilizer—concentrations 20 times higher than the Everglades’ delicate wetlands could handle. The sugar farms already soaked up more than half the water released by the South Florida Water Management District, while paying less than 1 percent of the taxes. Now, it was clear, their fertilizers were reshaping what wetlands remained.

When the Everglades Foundation was formed in 1993, Jones and Barley launched a referendum campaign: They wanted to tax the sugar growers and use the money to restore the wetlands. Barley died in a plane crash two years later, and his widow hired investigators to look into the potential role of Big Sugar. The sugar company owners lived in lavish mansions along the coast; a joke suggested that cane juice flowed out of the capital’s drinking fountains. As a business that soaked up tax dollars and tarnished the environment, sugar was an enemy that could unite both sides of the aisle. So the sugar barons lavished both sides with gifts. One moment looms large in the annals of Everglades history: In 1996, as he was breaking off his “relations” with Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton paused to take a 22-minute phone call from a sugar grower whose family had paid out nearly a million dollars in donations that election season. Soon afterward, the administration amended its proposed Everglades policy in favor of Big Sugar.

As a rule, sugar companies do not talk to journalists. But they do talk to tourists. In Clewiston—America’s Sweetest Town, as the signs proclaim—I met a farmer who gave guided tours. When I identified myself as a journalist, he did not want to give me his name, but he was chatty. He told me he’d put some of his farmland into conservation easements—an effort to protect habitat for the endangered Florida panther. He said that Florida was filled up and did not need to grow any further. But he was not convinced that Everglades restoration depended on farmland. Some of the environmental nonprofits do good work, he said, but others just like to gin up controversy so they can sell more T-shirts and hats.

It’s not just sugar barons who oppose the land sales. Many locals understand that even as the sugar industry creates only low-paying jobs—and leaves as much as a third of some towns’ residents living in poverty—the limited economy of their homeland is nonetheless dependent on agriculture. “If the farmers don’t do good, you don’t do good,” one local told a newspaper in 2017, as Florida debated Joe Negron’s plan to build a reservoir. The farmer who moonlighted as a tour guide pointed out, rightly, that decades of lawsuits and legislation have led to steep reductions in the amount of phosphorous coming off the EAA’s farms. A coalition called Lake Okeechobee Business Alliance claims that farmers have already paid more—$450 million over 20 years, per their accounting—than any other group to restore the Everglades. There are other sources of pollution, too, including old septic tanks and suburban sprawl up near Orlando.

Still, state and federal laws require the water be cleaned, and that cleaning is mostly accomplished in “stormwater treatment areas”—artificial wetlands where the plants will soak up the chemicals. The trouble for farmers in the EAA is, whether or not they are truly the villains, there is nowhere but their farms to build such infrastructure.

DeSantis, after declaring his opposition to Big Sugar, narrowly won his Republican primary. His Democratic opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, went on the record opposing radical changes to the EAA, prioritizing the needs of low-income sugar workers instead. But, unlike DeSantis, Gillum emphasized the science behind climate change, a choice that won endorsements from local chapters of the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters. But the Everglades Trust—a nonprofit with close ties to the Everglades Foundation, but which, as a 501(c)(4), can endorse political candidates—decided that DeSantis “walked the walk.” He was its pick for the election.

After DeSantis won, Eikenberg, who once sat on the board of the Everglades Trust, was named to his transition team. After the new governor made headlines by calling on the entire board of the South Florida Water Management District to resign, Eikenberg sounded a triumphant note: “Here is a governor who is relying on science,” he said. “As a science-based organization, that is what we’ve been yearning for.”

DeSantis’s commitment to science seems, given his lack of emphasis on climate, debatable. It’s undeniable, at least, that he succeeded at spending money on the Everglades. By the end of his first term, the government had poured $3.3 billion into water quality and Everglades restoration—nearly a billion more than DeSantis’s already ambitious initial promise. There is real momentum now; engineers are working on restoration projects at remarkable rates, according to the National Academy of Sciences panel. That includes the controversial reservoir—the EAA Reservoir, as it’s often known. The state is responsible for building the accompanying stormwater treatment area, and DeSantis likes to tout the fact that construction was launched 12 months ahead of schedule, in 2020.

But the Army Corps of Engineers, which will oversee construction of the actual reservoir, has noted “significant technical, policy and legal concerns” with the current plan. In particular, the agency believes there is “significant risk” that the water inside the reservoir will not meet legal quality standards—potentially limiting how much can be released, or even forcing the reservoir to be taken offline. This, as the National Academy of Sciences panel has noted, may reduce the reservoir’s ability to mitigate the kind of algal blooms that stoked DeSantis’s campaign. One key issue is the size of the stormwater treatment area that the state is building. Given the shrunken footprint, there was only space for 6,500 acres. One prominent ecologist calculated that, given current water quality issues, 10 times or more space might be needed.

Or as Marjory Stoneman Douglas might put it: This project is not nearly enough.

Nevertheless, the Everglades Foundation and Ron DeSantis like to portray it as a victory. It’s the “crown jewel” of Everglades restoration, they say. The state needs somewhere to store water—both to supply the national park, which, thanks to the canals in the EAA, receives too little, and to relieve Lake Okeechobee so that its water won’t need to be sent as often into the canals. This project will address that need, Weisblum said. She added that, like other groups, the foundation sees water quality as nonnegotiable, and believes the state will address it.

Some groups think that, instead of spending money building massive walls for a deepwater reservoir—which has a projected $3 billion price tag—it would be cheaper to buy EAA land and create a larger, shallower reservoir that more closely mimics the natural state of water in the Everglades. Cris Costello, the senior organizing manager of the Florida chapter of the Sierra Club, pointed out that, even in its new, DeSantis-era iteration, the South Florida Water Management District has only studied “land-restricted” approaches. DeSantis “is a master of the greenwash,” Costello said. According to her, his battle cries against Big Sugar are “all theater”: “He’s never done anything.” And the Everglades Foundation, with all its supposed clout, has failed to push for something better.

The DeSantis era has been good for the Everglades Foundation. The nonprofit’s revenue hit $28 million in 2022. (Eikenberg was paid $356,765 that year, and Van Lent alleged in his response to the lawsuit that his former boss receives even more money from the Everglades Trust; the trust denies paying Eikenberg.) Weisblum suggested those figures should be set against the funding of “the adversaries of the Everglades”—code, of course, for Big Sugar. Only a well-funded coalition can fight the wealthy sugar industry.

A deep-pocketed and well-connected nonprofit may be positioned to drive restoration forward—but it can also function as a bludgeon, keeping smaller groups in line.

The foundation has long steered some of its resources toward other organizations; the Sierra Club, for instance, has received more than $100,000 in grants in past years. But, after it became clear in 2018 that their viewpoints on the reservoir and on land purchases differed, the two nonprofits parted ways. Costello worries other groups might not be able to take such a hit. A deep-pocketed and well-connected nonprofit may be positioned to drive restoration forward—but it can also function as a bludgeon, keeping smaller groups in line.

Van Lent’s trial, too, has had a David-and-Goliath dynamic. The foundation has retained seven lawyers from three firms, including an attorney who won a billion-dollar settlement in the Surfside condo collapse case in 2022. Van Lent, meanwhile, is represented by a Tallahassee lawyer who mostly deals in real estate closings. Despite his aggressive response to the foundation’s complaint, five months into the suit, in late August 2022, Van Lent agreed to settle. That meant that the foundation’s initial allegations were never tried before a jury.

The terms of the settlement prohibited Van Lent from sharing any of the Everglades Foundation’s confidential information, though which specific files that included remained unclear. More importantly, he’d finally have to ship his digital devices—and his wife’s, too, the foundation claimed—to the foundation’s hired expert. He packed his laptop and handed over the passwords for his emails. And the expert quickly noted a problem: In the weeks before he’d signed the settlement, Van Lent had removed 700,000 files from his laptop, including the foundation’s materials. Some files had been encrypted before deletion.

The foundation quickly asked the judge to find Van Lent to be in contempt of court.

Van Lent does not deny these allegations. But, he said, the devices contained personal information protected by attorney-client privilege, among other confidential documents. The idea that the judge would require that he turn over such information “just does not seem reasonable,” he said in court.

In May, Lopez decided Van Lent was guilty. In the ruling, the judge made his opinion about the initial allegations clear: Van Lent had meant to deprive the foundation of its research and hold onto files for his future use. But this was an aside, really; the trial was not meant to assess the legality of these acts. The real question was whether the scientist had violated the court’s injunction. Van Lent was judged on whether or not he had deleted any files on his computers—which, clearly, he had.

It’s important to note that the trial was not about what the scientist did to the nonprofit, then, but what he did to the court. Another way of seeing this is that Van Lent has become tangled in a carefully woven legal web. (Indeed, an appeals judge reviewing the case appears to be worried that Lopez chose to appoint one of the foundation’s lawyers to lead the prosecution, rather than a more neutral attorney representing the public interest.) Van Lent’s cleanup efforts were irresponsibly sloppy, sure; his refusal to turn over his data was, if righteous, obviously foolhardy. But the foundation based its request for an injunction on the controversial idea that its science constituted trade secrets, an idea that has not been tested in court.

Stuart Pimm, who served as a character witness for Van Lent, finds this alarming. Sure, he said, a tech company might need to protect the discoveries that underlie its products—but that need signals that it’s engaged in business, not true science. Ultimately, Pimm sees the case as bigger than the Everglades: It’s “about whether people who find science discomforting” can try to silence it. If we’re going to restore the Everglades—or fix up nature anywhere—“then we need the best science,” he said. “And Tom was doing the best science.”

Throughout our exchanges, Weisblum put more emphasis on Van Lent’s acts of deletion than on the allegations of stolen trade secrets. The destruction “goes against every scientist’s ethic of preserving data for future reference,” she said, suggesting it was more consequential than the foundation’s decision to remove Van Lent’s FAQ from its website six years earlier. But even if the case is just a personnel matter, the foundation’s scorched-earth approach appears vindictive—and has opened up the nonprofit to valid criticisms. Paul Tudor Jones once told a journalist that the foundation was “100% committed to scientific truth and nothing else.” By taking down Van Lent’s paper, the foundation has demonstrated that it has other commitments, too. Pimm worries that its example might encourage cynical politicians, especially as the climate crisis becomes increasingly hard to deny. They, too, will pursue the easy solutions, promoting new infrastructure, claiming they’re addressing the problem—then quash any research that might suggest they’re not doing enough.

In December 2023, citing Van Lent’s unwillingness to apologize, Lopez imposed a 10-day jail sentence. Van Lent, who had already been ordered to pay some of the foundation’s legal fees, has filed for bankruptcy and is appealing the decision. “I can’t apologize for something I didn’t do,” he told a journalist a few weeks later, when, unbowed, he flew to Miami to attend an annual Everglades conference.

That conference was a reminder that the long project to restore the Everglades continued, as did the politicking—often hand in hand. In January, just a few weeks after Van Lent’s sentencing, officials gathered on a dusty levee at the edge of the Everglades Agricultural Area; the state was ready to unleash water into the treatment area. Eikenberg was there, of course, dressed in a polo shirt; a Biden official attended the ceremony, too. “America’s Everglades is a unifying issue,” the foundation declared in a press release, announcing its plan to fund a series of radio and television ads that would “educate the public” about this vital new project.

The event’s emcee lauded Ron DeSantis, who was making his first public appearance after shelving his presidential campaign. “It’s his direction we follow, it’s his vision that we execute,” he said, “and it’s a big vision.” This man-made marsh was supposed to be an example. At 6,500 acres, the emcee noted, it was bigger than all Florida’s theme parks combined. He did not mention the science that suggested that DeSantis’s vision might need to be far bigger still. The sky was overcast—a reminder that the spring rains were coming. Lake Okeechobee was too full already, so it was clear that this year, once more, the canals would open. Soon enough, anyone flying over Florida could see the signs of one more crisis: electric-green ribbons of algae-choked water, bound for the coast.

*This article has been updated to clarify that the Everglades Trust denies paying Eric Eikenberg, and that some of the files Tom Van Lent deleted were created by other scientists.

This article was produced in collaboration with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization.

Boyce Upholt is the author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, which was published in June. He won the 2019 Award for Investigative Reporting from the James Beard Foundation.

Ritchie Torres vs. the Left

Why the New York Democrat chose Israel over his progressive colleagues

Emily Tamkin   13 Jun, 2024

Ritchie Torres visited Israel with a delegation from the Bronx in April.>/span>

Congressman Ritchie Torres loves Israel. The Bronx Democrat, whom Politico described as Israel’s “loudest supporter” in the House of Representatives, has visited the country regularly since 2015. He says pro-Israel advocacy is a major part of his life.

Torres’s vocal backing of Israel long predates Hamas’s October 7 attack. “Congressman Torres has been a pro-Israel stalwart for nearly a decade,” his office said in a statement to The New Republic. The progressive magazine Jewish Currents dubbed him “the future of pro-Israel politics” back in 2021; a year later, the British outlet Jewish Chronicle introduced him as “the woke Democrat who is an outspoken supporter of Israel.” In 2020, he and Mondaire Jones became the first openly gay Black men elected to Congress. Since October 7, he has argued with his fellow Democrats who have called for a cease-fire; he even left the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a move some speculated was over its criticism of Israel.

Although Torres is not Jewish, his vocal support for Israel makes sense in some ways. New York City has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel; he’s built strong ties with the Jewish community since entering local elected office a decade ago; and, like many politicians in both parties, he counts pro-Israel organizations as major donors.

But Torres’s support stands out. At 36, he is one of the youngest representatives in Congress and is vocally pro-Israel at a period when many young people are questioning America’s staunch support for the country. Torres has found himself sparring with American Jews who are critical of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, which has claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives.

Torres assumes a posture of authority—not only on Israel, but on what it means to Jews—that is surprising to encounter in someone who isn’t Jewish.

Torres frequently invokes what Israel means to Jews, and he has repeatedly engaged in arguments about religious identity, Zionism, and who gets to credibly speak to both. In these exchanges, Torres assumes a posture of authority—not only on Israel, but on what it means to Jews—that is surprising to encounter in someone who isn’t Jewish.

All of this goes over just fine with many of the most prominent American Jews—a number of whom have embraced him in recent months. But it has left others confused and frustrated. For Jews, it can be irksome, after all, to be told by someone who is not Jewish how to feel about Israel. Torres’s posture raises the question of who gets to speak to the relationship between Israel and American Jews—and what the answer means for American Jewish politics in the wake of October 7.

Torres’s combative approach toward Israel’s critics is most often seen on social media. In October, Abby Chava Stein, the author of Becoming Eve: My Journey From Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman and a member of the progressive anti-racist organization Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News accusing several New York City politicians, including Torres, of smearing critics of Israel’s destructive retaliatory campaign in an effort to score political points. For Stein, the most humane response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks was calling for the protection of all innocent life. “True safety for the Jewish community is bound up with safety and dignity for all peoples.”

Torres responded by tearing into Stein on X: “A fringe figure wrote an Op-Ed attacking me for affirming Israel’s right to defend itself in the wake of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. She is part of an Anti-Israel organization, named Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (do not be fooled by names), that described Hamas’ terrorist attack as not ‘unprovoked.’” (Full disclosure: In 2022, I made a donation to JFREJ’s winter cultural fundraiser.)

Sophie Ellman-Golan, the organization’s director of strategic communications, cast Torres’s actions in fairly cynical terms. Torres used to work with JFREJ. In 2017, the group collaborated with him on police accountability legislation, only to see Torres, then a City Council member, move forward with a bill that Ellman-Golan said was significantly watered down.

Recently, Ellman-Golan told The New Republic she believed Torres had decided that tightly embracing Israel was politically advantageous. Still, she said, it was “wild how he’s continued to escalate his attacks on left-wing Jews.”

“In 2017, Ritchie Torres was rallying with us,” she said. “At some point, he decided that was not what he wanted to do anymore. Apparently, we were Jewish enough for him to organize with when it was beneficial to him,” she added, “and now we’re not.”

Asked about Torres’s response to criticism from left-wing Jewish groups, his office argued in a statement that he was right to attack “fringe” voices. Citing statistics from a 2021 Pew Research Center survey that eight in 10 Jews say Israel is an “essential or important” part of their Jewishness, his office also asserted that Torres was right to attack Jewish critics of Israel.

“There is nothing wrong with pointing out that anti-Zionists fall outside the political mainstream of the Jewish community, just like there would be nothing wrong with pointing out that Black Republicans fall outside the political mainstream of the Black community,” Torres’s office said.

Some might ask, though, where precisely the “Jewish fringe” referred to begins and ends—or, for that matter, where precisely it ends and the mainstream begins. After all, per the Pew Research Center, only 26 percent of American Jews are or lean Republican. Is it thus acceptable to call the Republican Jewish Coalition fringe? More to the point: Is it appropriate for a politician who does not hold an identity to make declarations about the boundaries of that identity, asserting who is on the periphery and who is in the core?

Torres does have the support of many Jewish organizations, both inside and outside his district. Torres’s office sent over laudatory quotes from seven Jewish leaders. Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, a principal at SAR Academy, a Modern Orthodox day school in the Bronx, praised Torres as someone who “speaks his mind even when it is unpopular, and he does not back down when intimidated and threatened, as he has often been.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said Torres “has consistently demonstrated his moral authority and genuine allyship at a time when Jews have felt abandoned.” Torres’s office also sent statements from representatives of the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, and the Zioness Movement.

As public opinion has shifted on Gaza—particularly among Democrats—Torres has become a valuable ally to pro-Israel Democrats and groups that are anxious about growing calls for a cease-fire. But his stance on Israel has also brought him into conflict with a decidedly mainstream figure in American Jewish politics: Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and president of J Street, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace group” whose conference brings out Democratic leaders.

Last November, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a fellow New York Democrat, told MSNBC that, on a 2021 trip to the West Bank sponsored by J Street, there had been checkpoints he couldn’t pass because he is not Jewish.

Torres was disbelieving. “Jewish checkpoints are as fictional as Jewish space lasers,” he tweeted. Ben-Ami soon weighed in, offering that he led the trip, and that it was “a fact: There are checkpoints in Hebron where security separates who can walk where by religion. Other checkpoints keep roads ‘sterile’ of Palestinians. I’ve been there dozens of times. Join me.”

In a since-deleted response, Torres then implied that the goal of Ben-Ami’s trip was to “incite hatred” toward Israel. “How dare you accuse me of inciting hatred for Israel,” Ben-Ami replied. “My great grandparents founded Petah Tikva; my grandparents Tel Aviv. My father and father in law fought to create the state. I lost friends Oct 7; my family is called up.”

“The Congressman lost his temper in an online exchange with J Street President Jeremy Ben Ami, and, in a moment of rashness, made comments that he has come to regret,” Torres’s office said in a statement.

Ben-Ami said the two spoke by phone after the exchange. “When we talked, his views were much more nuanced,” he said.

A month later, Torres once again faced criticism, this time for describing the story of Hanukkah as one “of Jewish self-defense in the face of an existential threat.” Israel, Torres continued, is “the national embodiment of the Maccabean tradition of Jewish self-defense.”

“We’re just gonna act like it’s totally fine and not at all weird that a non-Jewish congressman is determining the meaning of a Jewish holiday and using that to further a political agenda that countless Jews are vocally opposing?” responded Yonah Lieberman, a self-described movement builder on the Jewish left. Asked for a response, Torres’s office said it had run the statement by several Jewish leaders in his district: “No one to whom he spoke disagreed with what he wrote, and many were moved by it.”

Torres has repeatedly spoken about antisemitism since October 7.

In May, Torres introduced a bill that would empower the Department of Education to establish a “third-party antisemitism monitor” for higher education institutions receiving federal funding, which the institutions could lose if they refused to comply.

Among the hotly debated issues are how antisemitism should be defined and the extent to which criticism of Israel is antisemitic. The position of some mainstream Jewish organizations is that criticism of Israel—for example, saying it is carrying out a genocide in Gaza—is inherently antisemitic; other groups strongly disagree.

“The idea that we should have monitors—what is this, George Orwell’s 1984?” asked Ben-Ami, who said such a concept was antithetical to the idea of higher education. Of universities, Ben-Ami went on, “you shouldn’t be unsafe … but speech and protest that make you uncomfortable? That’s what your time in university’s for.”

The majority of American Jews, Ben-Ami stressed, were comfortable with the idea that criticizing Israeli policies isn’t anti-Israel, let alone antisemitic. “We’ve tested this over and over again.” Ben-Ami said he was worried that, in the current political climate, many politicians are treating antisemitism like a political football. Many of Torres’s critics agree—and think that it’s unacceptable for someone who is not Jewish to weigh in, publicly and repeatedly, about Jewish identity and politics.

A March Gallup poll found that three-quarters of Democrats now disapprove of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza—up 12 points from November. This shift in public opinion arguably only makes Torres a more valuable ally to pro-Israel Jewish groups: A Democrat willing to attack his colleagues and left-wing Jewish groups at a time when many are worried about losing support for Israel. It also points to a growing divide in Jewish organizations, with pro-Israel organizations evidently increasingly comfortable with politicians, regardless of background, speaking on questions of identity and antisemitism—provided they are staunch defenders of the state of Israel.

There are many who are grateful that Torres, as a Democrat who is not Jewish, is advocating for Israel.

And for those who do feel that way, Torres’s star shines ever brighter. The congressman was the distinguished guest speaker at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History’s gala in June.

Emily Tamkin is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and the author of The Influence of Soros and Bad Jews.

How Will Montana’s Population Boom Shift Its Politics?

Can an influx of new arrivals save the state’s vulnerable Democrats?

Grace Segers   25 Jun, 2024

By the time Monica Tranel, the Democratic candidate for Montana’s 1st congressional district, arrived at the Philipsburg Fire Volunteer Department, the event was in full swing. A long line of cars was parked along the dirt road leading to the fundraiser, which featured live music and chili. Attendees sat at fold-out tables inside the fire hall or gathered outside in the parking lot, holding cups of locally brewed beer as they chatted under the strengthening April sun.

Tranel, who came within striking distance of defeating Republican Ryan Zinke when she first ran for the seat in 2022, approached potential voters with a drink in her hand and a smile on her face. Philipsburg is a nineteenth-century mining town nestled among the mountains between Butte and Missoula. It is staunchly Republican. Two years ago, Zinke won the surrounding county with 64 percent of the vote; Donald Trump won it with 67 percent in 2020.

Although she is running as a Democrat, Tranel told attendees, she was first and foremost a Montanan: shorthand to let residents know she was, more than anything, one of them. She aimed to maintain a local focus in a conversation with a mustachioed local business owner in P-Burg, as residents call it. They talked about how coal mine closures had affected the local economy and expressed mutual frustration with increased private ownership of public lands. The biggest political issue in the state is arguably the upheaval—and the rising cost of living—caused by rapid population growth. But Tranel wasn’t trying to connect with recent arrivals—she wanted to make an impression on the native Montanans.

“I’m really trying to convey to people that I know this district,” Tranel explained to me later. “I know the people who live here, and I know what the issues are right now.… I know what’s causing hurt, and I know where people are wanting solutions to be advanced.”

But Tranel’s local focus would not necessarily be enough to sway the man’s vote. He told me that he consumed national political talk radio regularly, trying to hear both sides. He listened to what liberal media outlets were saying until it made him want, he said, to “puke in my mouth.” Engagement with national media only entrenched his stance that his conservative beliefs were the right side of America’s political divide. He appreciated that Tranel had visited, he said—as Tranel later told me, showing up where Zinke did not might sway voters in her favor—but he still didn’t believe he could vote for her. They just disagreed on too much.

Aided in part by the decimation of Montana’s local newspapers, the state’s politics have become ever more focused on national issues, to the benefit of Republicans. The GOP has simply done a better job than the Democrats of tying rivals to their party’s national platform, said Tammi Fisher, a former mayor of Kalispell, a town in conservative Flathead County. At the same time, the type of moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats that Montanans have long preferred are a dying breed.

“The greater Montana population doesn’t know who a Blue Dog Democrat is anymore because they’re afraid—‘Is that Nancy Pelosi in sheep’s clothing?’” Fisher explained.

Of course, moderate Republicans are also nearly extinct as well. Bruce Tutvedt, a business-oriented Republican who previously represented Kalispell in the state legislature, described the current political leanings of his former district as “red meat, rabid, red, red, raw.” That trend is playing out statewide: During its 2023 session, the Montana legislature focused on several issues that have dominated right-wing media, such as barring gender-affirming care for minors and banning drag queens from reading to children in public libraries.

“It used to be that local and state issues mattered a lot more, so you could have Democrats in Montana carve out their unique personal brand that was sufficiently detached from the impressions that people have of the national party,” said Robert Saldin, a political science professor at the University of Montana. “That’s just a lot harder now than it used to be, because in the minds of voters, state and local considerations just don’t register as high as they once did.” In November, Democrats across the state—especially Democrat Jon Tester, arguably the most vulnerable senator up for election—will try to turn back the clock, putting local issues at the center while their opponents talk endlessly about the culture war.

Montana’s rapid transformation isn’t just affecting its congressional race—it bleeds into every part of the state’s politics.

Sitting in a conference room at his office on the third floor of the Gallatin County courthouse in Bozeman, Zach Brown looked out the window at the downtown corridor of his hometown. Although Brown is only in his mid-thirties, Bozeman has transformed dramatically in his lifetime.

“The pace of change that we are experiencing here is beyond what most people can cope with emotionally,” Brown, one of Gallatin’s county commissioners, mused. “That’s a big part of my job: receiving frustration, fear, anger around that—around development.”

In 1990, the year that Brown was born, Bozeman had a population of around 22,000 residents. In 2022, more than 56,000 people lived in the city. Gallatin’s population increased more than any other county’s in the state between 2010 and 2022, thanks in part to Bozeman’s Montana State University, a burgeoning tech sector, and the increased popularity of Big Sky, a nearby resort town that acts as an economic engine for the area. Gallatin County has also gotten slightly more Democratic over that period, with Tranel outperforming Joe Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in 2022.

Montana as a whole grew rapidly in 2021 and 2022, largely due to migration from other states, although that growth slowed in 2023. With over a million residents—roughly half of whom were born elsewhere in the country—the state is relatively small, the forty-third-largest by population in the country. As such, a net increase of roughly 16,000 residents from elsewhere, as occurred in 2022, feels significant. Bozeman residents who never previously experienced traffic are now distraught at having to wait through a stoplight during rush hour.

Montana’s unofficial motto is the “last best place.” It is continually being rediscovered—the 1990s had the Montana-based movie A River Runs Through It—but this transformation feels different for many in the state. If rhetoric denouncing out-of-staters isn’t new, it has never been so aggressive, thanks to a skyrocketing cost of living.

“The resentment and the rhetoric is really out of grief, and around a sadness for a changing place,” said Kiersten Iwai, the executive director of Forward Montana, a progressive grassroots organization that aims to engage young voters.

Montanans generally point to two factors accelerating the population growth in recent years: The national popularity of Kevin Costner’s TV show, Yellowstone, which debuted in 2018, attracted viewers with its magnificent scenery and cowboy ethos. The state has also become a popular destination for the rich, who build second or third homes, particularly in the scenic western regions.

“I don’t think there’s a person in Montana who hasn’t felt both the direct and indirect impacts of population growth,” said state Representative Zooey Zephyr, who represents Missoula, Montana’s second-largest city.

Between 2020 and 2022, as working from home became more common, many people moved to Montana, particularly from nearby states with higher taxes. Newcomers who moved to the state during the pandemic are generally viewed with more suspicion, as their jobs may not be directly invested in the local community. These worries translate into larger concern about rising housing costs and skyrocketing property taxes.

In 2023, the average Montana property owner paid 21 percent more in taxes than they did the previous year, following a biannual statewide reappraisal. A recent report by the financial analysis company Bankrate found that Montana had the largest increase in annual income needed to afford a typical home since the onset of the pandemic: a jump of nearly 78 percent since the beginning of 2020. Homebuyers need to earn more than $130,000 a year to afford the state’s average monthly mortgage payment, and the median home price has jumped more than $200,000 since 2020. Meanwhile, the median household income in Montana is just over $67,000.

Mallory Phillips, a co-founder of Shelter WF, a housing advocacy organization in the city of Whitefish in Flathead County, noted that the influx of people into Whitefish had pushed more locals into nearby Kalispell and Columbia Falls, which in turn raised housing prices in those towns. “It just made it really hard for people making local wages to compete,” Phillips said.

Because Montana does not have party registration—voters who participate in a primary are given ballots for all parties, and may vote on one party’s ballots—it’s difficult to know whether more Republicans or Democrats are moving into the state. Some recent movers may have been drawn by Montana’s more laissez-faire approach to addressing the pandemic, as the state quickly dispensed with mask mandates and business closures.

Many of the people who moved to escape their home state’s coronavirus regulations—so-called pandemic refugees—are more ideologically aligned with the state’s dominant Republican Party. But the influx of new residents from those states has left a blurred picture of who is actually moving to Montana.

“The California mythology is deep here,” said Brown. “If you ask people[, they’ll say], ‘They’re Californicating Montana.’ Well, that doesn’t mean anything to me, because in Kalispell, all the people that move there are expat conservatives fleeing liberal politics and wanting less taxes.”

Flathead County, where Kalispell is located, has seen the second-highest rate of population growth between 2010 and 2022, lagging only behind Gallatin. The area has a staunch libertarian streak and has long been a haven for conservatives. It’s a pattern that Chuck Baldwin, the pastor of Liberty Fellowship in Kalispell, has witnessed firsthand. Baldwin himself migrated from Florida to Montana in 2010, and is ideologically aligned with the “American Redoubt,” a movement that aims to establish a haven for conservative Christians in northwestern states like Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington.

Baldwin—who left his position as chaplain of the far-right anti-government group the Oath Keepers in 2020 because it followed federal coronavirus guidelines—said in an interview that he believed Montana attracted conservatives because of its lax gun laws and identity as a “freedom-loving state.”

“They really do want a place where they can be free. They want a place where they are away from the dictatorial governmental policies of these progressive, liberal big cities and states,” he argued.

Montana might be changing, but its politics remain rooted in the state’s strong sense of identity. During commercial breaks of a new episode of NCIS one evening in April, residents of Kalispell were treated to back-to-back campaign ads from incumbent Senator Jon Tester—the sole remaining statewide Democratic elected official in Montana—and Republican candidate Tim Sheehy. The Tester ad hammered Sheehy, a Minnesota native-cum-Navy SEAL-cum-millionaire business owner and recent Montana transplant, as an out-of-touch out-of-stater. “Rich out-of-staters are changing Montana,” the text of the ad warned, blaming Sheehy and his ilk for “rising housing costs and property taxes.”

Senator Jon Tester spoke to reporters in February 2024.ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY

This is not the first time Tester, who owns a family farm in central Montana, has tried to capitalize on his credentials as a born-and-bred Montanan against a candidate he portrays as a carpetbagger. In 2018, Tester narrowly defeated Republican Matt Rosendale, now a U.S. representative, who is originally from Maryland. Tester’s GOP opponent in 2012, Denny Rehberg, was a lifelong Montanan, but Democrats scathingly cast him as a “mansion rancher,” arguing that his wealth made him an inauthentic vessel for Montana values.

The out-of-stater allegations may not hold the same cultural cachet in the modern era. Montana’s current governor, Republican Greg Gianforte, is a multimillionaire originally from California. Tester squeaked by Rosendale in 2018—but Trump will be at the top of the ticket in November, likely spurring turnout from his loyalists. In an intensely polarized time, Sheehy’s state of origin may be less important than the “R” next to his name. The influx of new residents, moreover, may be more aligned with Republicans. “We’ve seen a lot of people moving to Montana from the COWs—California, Oregon, and Washington,” the state’s Republican senator, Steve Daines, said. “Recent election results, as well as our own data, shows that these new Montanans are largely refugees, not missionaries. They are fleeing repressive policies in blue states in favor of freedom and better leadership in Montana.”

Still, Sheehy’s thin political résumé could be a liability— as could questions surrounding his claim to have sustained a gunshot wound while serving in the military. (Sheehy said he was wounded in Afghanistan, but also admitted to accidentally shooting himself in a national park—a story he now denies.) Democrats have further cast Sheehy as a “rhinestone cowboy,” functionally playing dress-up as a ranch owner. Sheehy’s ranch only allows for private hunting, a flash point in a state where public land access is considered a right.

Some right-leaning Montanans are irked by Sheehy’s sudden elevation as candidate, arguing that he has been plucked out of obscurity and thrust into the national spotlight. Sheehy’s bid earned immediate institutional support from the National Republican Senatorial Committee and its chair, Daines. Flathead County Republican Party chair Al Olszewski, who supported Rosendale in his brief, abortive bid for the Republican nomination for Senate this year, questioned why national Republicans would wish to nominate another candidate from out of state.

“People say out of passion—I hope it’s only out of passion—they say, ‘Well, hell, I’m just voting for Tester. I’m so angry, I’m going to do the opposite of what our Republican senator wants us to do. If he’s cramming this unknown candidate down our throats, I’ll show him. I’m gonna vote for Tester,’” Olszewski said.

Even if it is only a small universe of people who could be swayed to vote—or not to vote—based on whether a candidate was born in Montana, that could still be significant for Tester’s prospects. If support for Sheehy is even slightly weakened by concerns about his authenticity, it could once again help to swing the election toward Tester.

Fisher said that her vote is not given, but “earned.” Although she is no fan of Tester, she is affronted by what she sees as Sheehy’s entitlement. “How can you be so arrogant as to think you can represent my interests when I’ve lived here my entire life, and you’ve been here 10 minutes?” she asked.

She believes she is not alone in this sentiment, feeling that others are dedicated to what she sees as Montana values—that unique combination of respect for privacy and unfailing neighborliness—even before partisan interests. “Our allegiance first is to Montana, because she has been so good to us. It’s always Montana first,” Fisher continued. “Montana comes before party. Montana comes before virtually everything. Because we owe it to her.”

Grace Segers is a staff writer at The New Republic.

Liberalism Under Siege

Is the American experiment doomed?

Win McCormack   21 Jun, 2024

“We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”—comment of a 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021

Robert Kagan, historian and resident scholar at the Brookings Institution, is not befuddled by the question of what liberalism is, leastways not liberalism in the context of American political history, past and current. Liberalism, as Kagan writes in his new book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again, is exactly the philosophy originated by the British political thinker John Locke (building on previous writings of Thomas Hobbes) and embodied in America’s Declaration of Independence, as well as its Constitution and Bill of Rights. As the opening of the Declaration goes, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Patriotic Americans are so used to those words that, in Kagan’s view, they hardly realize how radical they were at the time of their conception, nor, for that matter, how radical—or maybe nonsensical—they must seem today to an unpatriotic American right-wing that rejects the concepts of equality and liberty and seeks instead to constitute (or, in their view, reconstitute) an America of predominately white people and an all-dominant Christian religion. And a large number of ideologically loyal Americans are apparently unaware of the threat these people—now that they have found an effective charismatic leader in the person of Donald Trump—pose to the liberal values by which they (aware of it or not) live.

American Colonial leaders did not originally set out to discover a radically new philosophy of political freedom or establish a virtually unprecedented form of government, one in which members of a political community ruled themselves rather than being ruled over by a king. For a long period of time, they were content with the purported compact between British subjects and their king that allowed them greater freedom than existed in other countries. But much of the freedom the colonists enjoyed was illusory, derived from the fact that, because of their distance from their homeland, they were treated with “benign neglect” by British authorities. As soon as those authorities began taxing them to finance expeditionary military operations in America and elsewhere—without their consent—they rebelled, rejecting “taxation without representation” and setting out on a trajectory that would lead to a final break with Britain and the creation of an unprecedented Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787.

Tom Paine spoke of America as “begin[ning] the world over again,” but there is always a snake in any Eden, and in the case of the United States that was the existence of Black African slavery on plantations throughout the South. Most of the Founders from north of the Mason-Dixon Line would have preferred to abolish slavery throughout the land, but they did not want to truncate the country into what they imagined would be two relatively weak and vulnerable entities. They therefore countenanced its continued existence, without besmirching the Constitution with that concession. They did accede to Southerners’ demand that their slaves be counted as if they were actual voters in apportioning each state’s representation in Congress (using the infamous “three-fifths of all other Persons” measurement). The Electoral College also helped guarantee them a representation greater than their voting population alone would warrant. Through these provisions, the South hoped to make its “peculiar institution” a permanent one. This hope was unrequited. A bloody Civil War ultimately ensued, following which, during the period known as Reconstruction, an intense but likely predoomed attempt was made to put the South on a new footing of rough racial equality. But after the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, the South reverted to its old ways, reducing its Black population to virtual peonage and abrogating their voting rights completely. And this was almost exactly how things still stood in that region when the era of intense civil rights activism commenced in the 1950s.

In the area of religion, Kagan identifies the Mayflower Compact as the source of the erroneous belief on the part of many that the United States was founded as a Christian commonwealth. These professed Christians perceive, or rather misperceive, a straight line from the Compact to the Declaration, perhaps misled by Jefferson’s late insertion, at the behest of friends, of the term “Creator” into the text, resulting in the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” In fact, this phraseology directly contradicts the liberal political philosophy of the Founders in this regard, which, following Locke, held that these unalienable rights preexisted in nature and were not “endowed” by any being. In any case, these same religious agitators reject the liberal principles of human equality and freedom of conscience, and that is what has brought them into the orbit of the crypto-fascist political movement led by Trump.

To understand the full pernicious effect of such misguided Christianity, however, one also has to consider the belligerent reaction of the radical Christian right to the various Supreme Court decisions over the last 70 years expanding citizens’ rights in the arenas of public education, reproductive freedom, same-sex marriage, and prayer in public schools. Kagan stipulates that the Founders created a “rights-protection machine,” and the radical right has manifested its rage against that machine. It is because of Trump’s pledge to put reactionary justices on the Supreme Court—a promise fulfilled—that he has their unwavering support, especially in view of their overturning Roe v. Wade. When that ploy is combined with his clear determination to restore white supremacy (largely through drastically limiting immigration), Trump has a potent case to make to his followers for his reelection. Can American liberalism survive their onslaught?

Win McCormack is the editor in chief of The New Republic and the author of The Rajneesh Chronicles: The True Story of the Cult that Unleashed the First Act of Bioterrorism on U.S. Soil.

The Case for Taking Reality TV Seriously

Sure, “The Sopranos” is art, but “Real Housewives”?

Phillip Maciak   18 Jun, 2024

I have lived in Bachelor Nation. ABC’s The Bachelor franchise of reality shows—which feature a teeming cast of contestants going on exceedingly strange dates and vying for a marriage proposal from the titular bachelor—debuted at the beginning of the century, and, for its first decade, I largely ignored it. But one season of the show’s gender-swapped spin-off The Bachelorette sideswiped my own real life in a way that was irresistible: A friend’s ex, it turned out, was going to appear as a contestant on the show, one of a couple of dozen perfectly tanned, glamour-muscled dudes living frat-style in the “Bachelor Mansion” high in the hills above Malibu. The very idea of this guy participating in such a strange public ritual was enough to light up the group chats in frenzied anticipation. But he didn’t just appear; he thrived. This person who had once hung out with us, made small talk, and seriously dated someone we knew, was now on television, nimbly navigating a slick and shiny simulacrum of those things. I was hooked.

As we watched, we learned the show’s conventions: the narrative drama of the rose ceremonies, the front-runner edits and the villain edits, the contestants who are there for the “right reasons,” the contestants who “aren’t there to make friends,” the contestants who strangely do seem to be there to make friends, the sliding intimacy scale from having “walls up” around your heart to “letting down those walls,” and the way that “letting down those walls” usually means strategically revealing a traumatic backstory, whether it’s the death of a parent or the loss of a beloved cat.

Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily NussbaumBuy on Bookshop Random House, 464 pp., $30.00

The Bachelor shows, like most reality TV programs, are highly formalized. Not only does the competition unfold according to the airtight logic of gameplay, but the individual contestants’ behavior follows spoken and unspoken codes of conduct. In one season of The Bachelorette, a contestant—who was something of a front-runner at the time—casually mused that the bachelorette was performing a different version of herself for the camera. He even called her a “TV actress.” He was not launching a critique, simply describing the premise of the situation, and he was taken aback by the bachelorette’s indignation. She immediately dismissed him from the show rather than waiting for the rose ceremony, breaking a rule of the show’s format in order to enforce a fundamental rule of the show’s universe. You don’t break character; you are not a “character.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and essayist Emily Nussbaum’s new book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, tells the story of this genre and how its strange codes came, not only to exist, but to be near-universally understood. Tracking the development of reality TV as a genre from the early hidden-camera shows of the 1950s to the sprawling empires of today, the book gives us glimpses into the fraught production of these shows, their divided receptions, and the melancholy biographies of some of the thousands of people who have appeared on these shows only to emerge as strange, fractured mutant versions of themselves, no longer TV characters, but certainly no longer the people they were before.

Nussbaum has spent much of her career arguing for the importance and seriousness of television, even its status as an art form. Reality TV puts her thesis to the test: Sure, The Sopranos is art, but Real Housewives? It’s an old argument, even a tired one, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still happening. Nussbaum, as always, makes her case for the seriousness of her subject simply by taking it seriously. Attentive not just to the cultural footprint of the reality show but to its ticky-tacky specificity, Cue the Sun! provides a sometimes grim, occasionally gleeful account of the way that television can not just mirror but also create real life.

Cue the Sun! is by no means the first book to examine this topic or to trace the complex ways it’s interwoven into our lives. Lucas Mann’s intimate memoir Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV (2018) tells the story of his marriage through the reality shows he and his wife have watched together throughout their relationship; media studies scholar Amanda Ann Klein’s 2021 Millennials Killed the Video Star looks at MTV’s transition from music to reality programming, and what the network meant to the generations who watched it religiously; and popular sociologist Danielle J. Lindemann’s 2022 True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us uses the genre as a lens to theorize the social fabric that exists off-screen.

Rather than presenting an “untold story,” Nussbaum focuses on the artistic and ethical dilemmas that shaped these shows, drawing on hundreds of interviews with producers, filmmakers, and on-screen talent. Nussbaum calls reality television “dirty documentary,” or “cinéma vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect.” The story she tells in Cue the Sun! is one of lofty cinematic ambitions compromised by way of hundreds of incremental slippages and brazen betrayals over a period of generations. Alternately craven and credulous, the accumulated acts through which documentary, as a form, came to be “dirtied” in this way amount to a gripping tale of decadence and decay. A rise and a decline all at once.

The genre emerged much earlier than casual viewers might realize, and its early years read like a slow-motion Frankenstein. Nussbaum’s first subject is Allen Funt, who began his career in radio before developing the hit proto-reality series Candid Camera in the late 1940s. Nussbaum paints Funt as both a puckish provocateur and an intellectual theorist of the medium. On the show, unsuspecting people would get chatted up by a mailbox or watch in disbelief as their bowling ball shattered the pins. The stunts were silly, sometimes cringeworthy, but Funt’s patient act of surveillance—catching you “in the act of being yourself,” as he put it—was influential beyond the Nielsen ratings. As Nussbaum points out, David Riesman lauded Funt as “the second most ingenious sociologist in America” in his groundbreaking 1950 study, The Lonely Crowd. Funt was playing with the possibilities of the form, both aware and not of the ramifications his experiments might have down the line.

Then, there’s An American Family, the infamous 1973 PBS documentary series that first truly revealed the sticky ethics of following regular people around with a camera for the sake of mass entertainment. The show—which tracked the everyday lives of a California family in the midst of a divorce—was a controversial hit, but its production and reception were defined by an internal schism that would characterize the genre itself. On one side were Alan and Susan Raymond, the husband-and-wife filmmaking duo who shot most of the footage for the series. They were committed to the documentary principles of cinema verité, the idea that “if you recorded with your camera and microphone for long enough, with enough patience, eventually the truth would emerge.” This approach, which the Raymonds regarded as “almost a religion,” is at the core of why anybody has ever responded to reality TV, the idea that the camera might find something otherwise hidden, precious. But the Raymonds found themselves at odds with Craig Gilbert, the show’s mastermind and producer, who compromised the principles of verité by involving himself in the lives of the family, by adding narration to the final cut, and editing the footage in suggestive and even salacious ways—and who thereby helped establish the norms so familiar to us now.

This tension reappeared surprisingly often as the giant reality franchises of the 1990s and early aughts—The Real World, Survivor, and Big Brother—emerged. In one telling moment early in the filming of The Real World, for instance, a producer plants an embarrassing object in the loft’s kitchen—an art book that contains a nude photo of Eric Nies, one of the cast members—in order to provoke filmable reactions from the other cast members. When Nies discovers what’s happened, he reflexively looks straight into the camera, to the producers he knows are watching. Nies breaks the on-screen illusion, but only because the producers looking back had broken a much more fundamental rule, by messing with “reality” itself.

It’s a revealing anecdote—about the fine line between exploitation and performance, about the emergent ethics of the genre, about the psychologically complex (if deliberately undertheorized) collaboration between screen talent and producers that undergirds all of these shows. But it also marked the moment when something irrevocably changed—when the violation of verité became standard practice, rather than an aberration. One producer opposed the planting of the book because, in Nussbaum’s words, it “would taint the format’s purity.” Later in the same show, a director insisted that cast members kiss at the end of a blind date—a moment that another of the show’s directors described as “the original sin of reality television.”

Purity. Of all the words we might use to describe this genre of entertainment, purity is certainly not one of them. But, in Nussbaum’s telling, for decades, reality TV producers and stars held onto the lofty ideal that what they were doing held the possibility of a sort of pure or unmediated access to the human condition. Nearly all of the foundational decisions in this mode’s history are also violations or betrayals. “Dirty documentary” is powerful, not only because of its mass appeal over the course of decades, but because somewhere out there in an alternate timeline, it might have been something better. The real tragedy is that any of these idealistic, even brilliant people ever believed that.

Perhaps because Nussbaum writes with a keen sense of the genre’s manipulations, she often credits the shows’ producers with making the kinds of choices an auteur makes, and she watches them with the kind of attention usually reserved for more noble genres. Cue the Sun! breaks down the visual language of each different show, stopping frequently to describe the particular dynamics of individual scenes, moments monumental and passing. There’s Pat Loud—of An American Family—smoking a cigarette in loose white pants on the sofa as she negotiates her divorce; the chaotic scramble of producer Mark Burnett initially dividing Survivor contestants into “tribes” after their arrival in Borneo; a port authority worker quietly working through his internalized homophobia with Kyan Douglas on an early episode of Queer Eye. Nussbaum sees these human moments as screen moments and describes them with the same care she might otherwise apply to a prestige drama series.

Likewise, she underlines the importance of logistics in these shows. Reality TV is an art form and an industry, a craft and a business. Its history, Nussbaum suggests, is actually a history of specific evolutions in form, from editing to production design. Where is the camera? Where are its subjects? How do the editors draw them together or slice them to shreds? These formal questions are the real questions at the heart of the genre. Especially as the book moves into the genre’s decadent aughts period, she describes on-screen moments alongside the often grotesque behind-the-scenes machinations that produced them—the ethical violations of the genre cementing themselves in its formal architecture.

We read about the way Big Brother producers manipulated the design and arrangement of furniture on the set in order to pit contestants against each other. We track the development of the “Frankenbite,” a technique used to spackle snippets of speech together to form misleading sound bites. There’s even the moment when Project Runway contestant Jay McCarroll admits that “his own memories had long since been displaced by the edited version of the show.” This genre that once imagined it could use the camera to capture the truth of existence had managed to replace the truth of existence with the camera’s effects.

I left Bachelor Nation for a while as it predictably fell to accusations of racism and sexism on set. As Nussbaum chronicles in the final section of her book, reality TV was an industry made for, and increasingly by, scammers and bad guys. Producers like The Bachelor’s Mike Fleiss and stars like The Apprentice’s Donald Trump are poster boys of the loss of purity once bemoaned by those early Real World producers. And, as much fun as it was to watch all those cringeworthy hot-air balloon dates, at a certain point guilt overwhelms pleasure. What Nussbaum calls the “erotic terrarium” of the Bachelor Mansion starts to stink.

But something last fall brought me back: The Golden Bachelor. The concept of The Golden Bachelor was that it was the same show we’ve come to love and loathe, but, instead of 28-year-old personal trainers, the contestants were sixty- and seventysomething retirees. It was an intriguing switch. The Golden Bachelor not only drew me back in; it shocked me.

For the 14 or so years that I’ve been watch-ing these shows, I’ve been seeing contestants who have also been watching the show itself and learning from it. Nearly everyone who appears on the countless reality series that have grown up in the past 30 years arrives at taping having already studied the role and the way others have played it before them. Even the most starry-eyed romantics show up with a plan. That’s as true on The Bachelor as it is on The Amazing Race or Real Housewives, and it can give the enterprise a stagy quality: Though the show is full of tears and tension, nobody really gets hurt, and nobody’s really there for “the right reasons,” unless those reasons include securing a contract to do sponsored-content posts for skin care brands on Instagram.

But this was not the case on The Golden Bachelor. The cast of characters was the first set of older contestants on the hit show and came in without age-appropriate models to imitate. Some interactions were sweet, some sour, some deeply melancholy, but none formulaic. It felt both refreshing and dangerous to watch. If there are more editions of this particular spin-off, we’ll start to see better-versed contestants, people who have identified the elements of a winning performance. But the first season, in which a houseful of elderly women bond and bicker and speak frankly about loss and mortality and hope, appeared to capture something real, or at least something hidden in plain sight and that television had managed to uncover.

Like Cue the Sun!, The Golden Bachelor revealed something true about both reality TV and the world it mediates. Reality television didn’t put our reality on the screen, it splintered that reality. Shows from Candid Camera to The Golden Bachelor serve up a universe that is neither the one we live in nor one entirely fabricated. The “reality” of reality TV is a secret third type of reality, a place where we perform a shadow play of our lives for others, a place where we cling to flimsy distinctions like viewer and viewed, a place tarred by exploitation but enlivened by optimism, or something like it. We are in it, we are of it, whether we watch or not.

Phillip Maciak is The New Republic’s TV critic and the author of Avidly Reads Screen Time.

Is the United States Too Devoted to the Constitution?

A new book argues that worship of the Constitution has distorted our politics.

John Fabian Witt   24 Jun, 2024

Which version of the Constitution will shape America’s future? Emboldened coalitions on the right purport to tether the country’s tomorrows to the original meanings of an eighteenth-century Constitution—or to so-called natural law principles that are even older. Anxious liberals, by contrast, hold out frayed hopes that a living Constitution will be able to translate the nation’s constitutional history into a new century. An increasingly vocal cadre on the left proposes something altogether different—to scrap the whole arrangement, to make a clean break from a tarnished constitutional tradition by marginalizing the Supreme Court and doing away with the project of the Constitution entirely.

In his new book, The Constitutional Bind, lawyer and political theorist Aziz Rana adds his voice to this swelling chorus, urging that a truly emancipatory politics requires breaking free from the U.S. constitutional project. Rana takes aim at what he calls the worship of the Constitution. U.S. politics today, he contends, idealizes the Constitution to its own detriment. Our political formations—especially those on the left—trim their sails in advance of doing battle by accepting the charter’s historical compromises. But such compromises, Rana says, come at a galling democratic cost. They grant unelected justices on the Supreme Court unwarranted authority over the basic terms of our social life. And they sustain voting inequities in the Electoral College and the Senate, which confer unwarranted representation on rural states with disproportionately white and conservative populations.

The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them by Aziz RanaBuy on Bookshop University of Chicago Press, 824 pp., $45.00

Since the middle of the twentieth century, Rana argues, constitutional politics has shape-shifted into a kind of idolatry.

As late as the first decades of the twentieth century, Rana proposes, Americans took part in a more robust debate over the Constitution, one that nurtured a wild profusion of alternative political visions. The most promising of those visions, in Rana’s eyes, chafed at and often even rejected the Constitution as a parochial and limiting framework. In the middle third of the twentieth century, however, U.S. politics marginalized the political formations that were most critical of the Constitution’s basic terms. And since the middle of the twentieth century, Rana argues, constitutional politics has shape-shifted into a kind of idolatry. Constitutional devotion has sustained American global empire, supported white ethno-nationalism, justified security panics, and cabined real democracy. Constitutional fetishism, according to Rana, sustains “a fundamentally undemocratic order” by granting the Constitution undue “immunity from challenge”; it produces an anti-democratic “cultural genuflection” before a Supreme Court that supports the interests of elites over the liberation of the masses. We are, Rana tells us, bound “by a narrow constitutional narrative” that constrains our collective life and imposes severe limits on our aspirations for true freedom and equality.

Rana’s account is charismatic and forceful on every page. His book conveys the moral weight of arguments against an order that murdered Indigenous peoples, sustained the enslavement of millions of people of African descent, enshrined patriarchy in law, and adopted racial exclusions that made immigrants from Asia ineligible for citizenship. Rana urges us to free ourselves of the charter that sponsored such evils and to chart a new course toward an emancipatory politics, untethered from the crimes of its history. Yet at the heart of the book lies a conundrum. Is there a viable alternative focal point for American democratic politics? Or are shrewd, disillusioned strategists of political change well advised to draw on an imperfect document to make the world a better place?

Rana would have us see veneration of the Constitution as a relatively recent phenomenon. Fighting over the Constitution, he observes, is almost as old as the document itself. In 1788, the charter’s anti-federalist critics literally burned the document in the streets. Fifty-five years later, in 1843, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned it as a covenant with death for its compromises on slavery.

The Constitution had its ardent defenders from the beginning, but the basis for today’s Constitution worship began to emerge in the 1850s and 1860s. As scholars like Garry Wills and the late Robert Ferguson showed, Abraham Lincoln and a generation of anti-slavery constitutionalists argued that liberty and equality were woven into America’s constitutional compact. Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg address conjured a constitutional order committed to the values enshrined 87 years before in the Declaration of Independence—a “nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” After Lincoln’s assassination, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments wrote these values into the charter’s basic law.

Historians have long observed that in practice the post–Civil War Constitution failed to live up to the anti-slavery ideals of freedom and equality. Rana’s further point is that the document remained hotly contested even in theory. Radical political movements from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth often derided the Constitution as an anti-democratic obstacle to liberation. The Socialist Party of America, for example, conceived of the Constitution and the courts as cogs in the state’s exploitative capitalist machinery; the party’s candidate for president in 1916, Allan L. Benson, condemned a document “by the rich for the rich” in his book Our Dishonest Constitution. Critics of American militarism like ACLU co-founder, feminist, and socialist Crystal Eastman emphasized that peace was essential to human flourishing, to be secured through a system of international cooperation rather than through any one state’s laws. Revolutionary unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, fought to seize ownership of the means of production; the Constitution’s protections for the bosses’ property rights, they contended, were a form of legalized robbery from the exploited workers.

In their efforts to maintain independent sovereign nations, Indigenous peoples have been especially fierce critics of the Constitution’s imperial ambitions. Indeed, in Rana’s account, it is Indigenous peoples who, perhaps best of all, have been able to grasp the Constitution’s true structure. Tuscarora Chief Clinton Rickard, for example, resisted the extension of U.S. citizenship—and thus the extension of the Constitution’s reach—as what Rana calls a “negation of Indigenous self-determination.” Rickard insisted, “citizenship was in our own nations.”

Perhaps most spectacularly, American Communists for a time offered a similar self-determination critique of the Constitution, proposing nothing less than to break off part of the United States. Following the party line from the Sixth Congress of the Third International in Moscow in 1928, Communists described a crescent-shaped swath of the South, from Virginia south and west as far as Arkansas, as a nation of African peoples colonized by white capitalists. Self-determination for the so-called Black Belt became a watchword for the party faithful—although support among Southern Black people for national self-determination was modest. Rana’s point is that ferment in the first decades of the twentieth century made available a form of dissent from the framers’ charter that was so radical as to contemplate undoing the Union.

Modern attitudes toward the Constitution began to take shape, Rana contends, in the early twentieth century. World War I brought an era of compulsory patriotism, when President Woodrow Wilson vigorously repressed the world of radical constitutional critique: Wilson’s Department of Justice indicted over 2,000 Americans on Espionage Act charges, convicting more than 1,000 of them, including Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs and virtually the entire leadership of the IWW. Many of the Constitution’s most vociferous critics fled the country, were deported, or found themselves in prison.

World War II served to entrench the view of the Constitution as a legitimator of U.S. power, Rana writes. The Supreme Court’s famous 1937 decision to uphold Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal suggested that a charter mostly written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could adapt to modern social problems. In the years that followed, the New Deal court began to require that states respect individual rights like the First Amendment’s religious freedoms and the Fourth Amendment’s freedom from unreasonable search and seizure—rights that until that point only the federal government had to assure. A new generation of free speech decisions at the court lavished attention on liberty in wartime, overturning flag salute mandates and reversing the denaturalization of Communists. This expansion of freedoms at home, contrasted with totalitarian threats abroad, seemed to instill an entire generation with respect for the Constitution as a document for all ages, tough, resilient, and versatile.

Cold War geopolitical imperatives turned respect into outright adoration. As the legal scholar and historian Mary Dudziak showed in her book Cold War Civil Rights in 2000, decisions like Brown v. Board of Education arose in part out of America’s efforts to style itself as the leader of the free world. Whereas their predecessors had participated in the construction of American apartheid, the justices now proceeded to denounce Jim Crow as unconstitutional. The court also recognized new constitutional rights to privacy in the use of birth control (Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965) and in the right to have an abortion (Roe v. Wade in 1973). Criminal procedure decisions like Mapp v. Ohio (1961) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) created rights against the police. Cases such as Monroe v. Pape (1961) and Bivens v. United States (1971) recognized new rights to sue government officials for constitutional violations. Free speech decisions like Yates v. United States (1957) and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) narrowed the government’s power to prosecute radicals.

All in all, a generation of postwar decisions made the Supreme Court and the Constitution appealing sites for liberal political mobilization. As Chief Justice Earl Warren put it early in his term, the Cold War put the entire U.S. system on trial. The court and the Constitution seemed to rise to the challenge. As Rana writes, lawyers and law professors by the 1970s “did more than simply treat decisions like Brown v. Board of Education as morally well-meaning. They elevated various Warren court cases, with Brown as the centerpiece, to the status of exalted texts.”

At The New York Times Magazine, journalist Anthony Lewis wrote in 1962 that the court had become the “conscience to the country.” Lewis’s bestselling book on the court’s establishment of a right to a lawyer in criminal cases, Gideon’s Trumpet, cast the court as a mighty instrument of justice. (The book became a television movie starring Henry Fonda.) At Yale Law School, dean Eugene V. Rostow praised the court for convening a “vital national seminar” on the country’s most sacred values. For the great liberal institutions of the age, the Warren court infused the Constitution and its authoritative robed interpreters, as Rana puts it, with a kind of “hallowed status.”

In Rana’s telling, the New Deal and the Warren court offered apparent successes but ultimately served to truncate the political imagination. The gains afforded by such cases, considerable though they may have been, fostered fidelity to a Constitution that closed down more radical opportunities. Whereas pre–New Deal social mobilizations critiqued the constitutional order, later movements made crucial compromises with it.

Midcentury labor leaders like Walter Reuther and Sidney Hillman aimed not to replace the constitutional order, but instead to gain for labor some of the wealth afforded by the order that existed. In the Treaty of Detroit, the UAW’s agreement with General Motors set the pattern for future union contracts: Labor would gain strong middle-class wages, job security, and health and retirement benefits, in exchange for dropping its more radical demands. Gone from labor’s lexicon were bolder aspirations such as joint ownership of the means of production or a robust social safety net enshrined in federal law. Rana asserts that such compromises entailed a grave mistake, cutting labor off from more fundamental goals like achieving a true industrial democracy.

The NAACP’s legal campaign to desegregate schools, in Rana’s account, made a parallel mistake. Beginning in the 1910s, the organization had helped to establish constitutional rights for Black criminal defendants, to ban race-based residential zoning, and to contest whites-only primary elections in the South. Yet, Rana argues, the organization’s strategy of working through the courts limited what the NAACP could set out to achieve. NAACP lawyers could win anti-discrimination victories, but they could not launch more foundational attacks on race-based injustice. In cases like Brown v. Board, he asserts, the Warren court gave Black people in the United States court-enforced rules against bigotry without building a foundation for genuine political and economic power.

Rana champions instead radical alternatives like Black nationalists’ 1960s resurrection of the old self-determination idea—“not just US civil rights, but decolonization,” Rana writes. For groups like the Black Panthers, anti-discrimination concessions from the Supreme Court would not suffice. Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver called for revolution on the decolonization model, condemning the electoral system of the United States as fundamentally illegitimate. Malcolm X disciples proposed a Republic of New Afrika that would use a United Nations–backed plebiscite and a new constitution—the Code of Umoja, or Code of Unity—to establish a Black territorial nation state in the Deep South. White radicals at Students for a Democratic Society praised such efforts. The “Black Panther Party,” announced SDS in 1969, “is not fighting black people’s struggles only, but is in fact the vanguard in our common struggles against capitalism and imperialism.” Brown v. Board, by comparison, offered a kind of milquetoast politics of accommodation and reform.

Rana’s account both understates the advantages of working with the Constitution and substantially overstates the popularity and prominence of radical groups that have proposed dispensing with it.

In Rana’s telling, organizers and advocates who tilted against the Constitution gave voice to the views of repressed democratic majorities. Yet none of the groups he highlights enjoyed anything like mass appeal, let alone democratic success. The Socialist Party, Rana tells us, was “electorally viable” in the 1910s. But its high-water mark as a share of the popular vote was 6 percent of the presidential vote in 1912. Membership in the IWW in the first half of the 1910s was tiny, ranging from 10,000 to no more than 30,000 people. (In the same years, the more conservative American Federation of Labor boasted two and a half million members.) Two decades later, the Communist Party’s Black Belt self-determination thesis had almost no support among Black people. The policy was imposed on the Communist Party of the United States of America over the objection of its small cohort of Black members; one Black member in Moscow in 1928 said that there were only about 50 Black members in the entire United States. Forty years later, Martin Luther King Jr. warned that the kind of revolution advocated by the Panthers found “no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves.”

Constitutional veneration has flourished for far longer than Rana allows. In 1887, on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the Constitution’s framing, the editors of The New York Times wrote of “AN INSPIRED CONSTITUTION,” praising it both for offering equal opportunity to the immigrant masses and for repressing the anarchists of Haymarket. In 1909, The New Republic’s future co-founder Herbert Croly gushed in The Promise of American Life that “Americans have more reason to be proud” of the Constitution’s “triumph than of any other event in their national history.” Croly’s view, which was wholly unexceptional for the time, was that the “formation of an effective nation out of the thirteen original colonies was a political achievement for which there was no historical precedent.”

Constitutional critique as a political strategy was typically weak, in part because social movements have tended to find that invoking patriotism and the Constitution brings significant payoffs in U.S. politics. The early American Civil Liberties Union, as Laura Weinrib has shown, invoked the Constitution’s free speech clause to advance a radical labor syndicalism. (“Get a lot of good flags” and “talk a good deal about the Constitution,” urged ACLU co-founder Roger Baldwin.) The Highlander Folk School, where organizers like Myles Horton, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. connected Southern agricultural workers to Appalachian socialism and Black emancipation, took Baldwin’s advice to heart. Highlander flew U.S. flags prominently and proudly. So did the Congress of Industrial Organizations. For these groups and many more in the early-twentieth-century left, social mobilization aimed to co-opt and remake the national tradition by elevating its virtues, not to reject it for its ugly vices. In this they followed the efforts of the pre–Civil War anti-slavery constitutionalists. Constitutional veneration is not a new phenomenon, not one conjured in the mid–twentieth century, but a recurring cyclical phenomenon, deployed as a tool by rivals vying for political power.

Rana has a tendency to undervalue the gains that canny strategists on the left have made this way. Mass democratic organizations like the CIO—having been set in motion earlier in the century by many of the radicals Rana’s book admires most—built the midcentury prosperity of the American working class. The NAACP’s racial equality project originated in the same circles that produced the CIO and aimed in its earliest formulations to build an organizable Black working class. When its litigation campaign culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, wealth inequality was nearing its historic low point; union density in the private sector was reaching its high point; and Black households became more likely than white ones to have a member belonging to a labor union. Such moments are evidence that the hard work of leftist visionaries brought astonishing transformations.

For Rana, the existing order hobbles the left while empowering the right. The Constitution, with its anti-democratic features, “fundamentally empowers rule by a minority coalition,” he writes, and makes it “especially difficult for today’s multiracial and largely urban majority coalition to implement widely backed policies.” Recent decisions to overturn reproductive rights and insulate unpopular gun rights from majoritarian politics lend Rana’s position added force. U.S. politics is being reshaped by justices whose power has little democratic basis. Five were nominated by presidents who first reached the White House without winning a popular vote majority. At least four purport to deploy an anti-democratic methodology of original meaning rooted in the values of an older, whiter, patriarchal country. All nine were confirmed by a Senate skewed toward low-population states, the same Senate that blocked popular-vote-winning President Barack Obama from filling an empty seat at the court in 2016.

In the past few years, the court has deployed controversial readings of the Constitution to hobble environmental regulations in the fights against climate change and water pollution, to constrain public health measures during the pandemic, to ban race-based affirmative action, and to undo student debt relief. As I write this, the justices seem poised to dramatically reduce the power of government agencies by stripping them of the power to interpret ambiguous laws in the public interest. The court this term is expected, moreover, to rule that the Constitution curbs federal regulatory power over corporate securities markets.

Yet is abandoning the Constitution the correct response? For conservatives, constitutional veneration has served not as a constraint on the political imagination but as a mobilizing tool. As legal scholars like Jamal Greene, Reva Siegel, and Mary Ziegler have shown, originalism has dominated not because it’s a powerful interpretative method (it’s not) but because of its adoption by an effective and energized political coalition. Ostensible original meanings have turned out to be so capacious and flexible as to permit the construction of a successful political movement under the Constitution’s big tent.

Abandoning America’s national charter has been a recurring temptation, and sometimes a stirring call to justice, but never a winning political strategy.

Historically, liberals and the left have deployed the Constitution to build coalitions and make change happen, too, and for good reason. Abandoning America’s national charter to one’s political adversaries has been a recurring temptation, and sometimes a stirring call to justice, but never a winning political strategy. The document establishes the boundaries of the body politic and, for better or worse, shapes its identity, too. No wonder Rana’s history offers a litany of losing efforts to change the world for the better.

As for today, there is little evidence that a suppressed left-wing popular coalition of nonwhite and working-class voters lies in wait, chafing to be unleashed from the Constitution’s constraints. Opinion polls find that Latino voters currently favor former President Donald Trump over Joe Biden. Voters who identify as Asian American are widely seen as turning rightward because of issues like crime and education. By some estimates, 40 percent of nonwhite voters will vote for the conservative Republican presidential candidate in 2024. National surveys regularly find essentially half of all voting-eligible people in the country supporting conservative presidential candidates. We live in a nation of razor-thin electoral margins, even absent the distorting influence of the Senate and the Electoral College.

Under such circumstances, a clean break with the Constitution would be as likely to produce a turn to the right as to the left. Rana acknowledges as much in the book’s surprising final pages: Breaking from the thrust of his historical account, he cautions that right-wing critics have been eager for a new constitutional convention in recent years. Rana therefore counsels against counterproductive anti-Constitution radicalisms, urging instead the formation of a practical coalition for the enactment of social democratic policies, at least for now.

But the case for coalition-building is a more general one. Working within the Constitution has not meant giving in to its worst features. The most successful political projects have reshaped the charter time and again. Changing electoral demographics pose new challenges to the task of adapting the document to our times. But making the best of the Constitution’s content has proved politically indispensable for nearly two and a half centuries. The foreseeable political future belongs to the coalition that wins the struggle for its meaning.

John Fabian Witt is a professor of law and history at Yale. His book Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History won the Bancroft Prize in history in 2013.

Last Summer Is a Marvel of Toxic Lyricism

Catherine Breillat’s provocative new film is like a watercolor dabbed with cyanide.

Adam Nayman   26 Jun, 2024

Few filmmakers can rival Catherine Breillat’s origin story; by all accounts, the director who would later refer to herself as “the pariah of French cinema” emerged fully formed from her homeland’s subconscious. If she didn’t exist, the French cinema—or at least the wing perennially dedicated to threading together philosophical and erotic provocation—would have to invent her.

In 1968, as a precocious student in Paris, Breillat published a sexually explicit novel entitled L’Homme facile (translated as A Man for the Asking), a book whose contents were deemed too salacious by the French government for readers under the age of 18. Breillat was 17 at the time, meaning that legally she couldn’t purchase a copy of her own magnum opus. A few years later, she acted in Bernardo Bertolucci’s seminal erotic drama Last Tango in Paris, arguably the most controversial movie of the 1970s; while on set, Breillat absorbed aspects of Bertolucci’s mastery as well as his iconoclasm, which she has carried with her through five decades of filmmaking and acerbic self-promotion. “All true artists are hated,” Breillat has said. “Only conformists are ever adored.”

It is, then, a compliment to say that Breillat’s new feature, Last Summer—which chronicles the unexpected and extremely unhealthy relationship between a prosperous middle-aged lawyer and her wayward teenage stepson—is a difficult movie to like, a marvel of toxic lyricism, like a watercolor dabbed with cyanide. It’s also a comeback: Breillat hadn’t made a movie since 2013’s bleak and semiautobiographical Abuse of Weakness, which dramatized the director’s struggles after suffering a debilitating stroke, including being swindled by a notorious con man whom she’d taken as a live-in companion. In that film, Isabelle Huppert brought remarkable shading to Breillat’s unsentimental exercise in self-portraiture, inhabiting the director’s forbidding and restless intelligence while believably evincing physical paralysis. A few years ago, when producer Saïd Ben Saïd (the patron saint of sacred-monster auteurs) approached Breillat to remake the 2019 Danish drama Queen of Hearts, it was not a gesture born of pity but the feeling she could do better by the material.

If Breillat can be said to have a sweet spot, it’s in the arena where impulse wages war against intellect; she’s interested in characters whose basic instincts lead them gloriously astray. In terms of plot, Breillat’s remake (co-written by Pascal Bonitzer) hews closely to its source material, prodding such taboo subjects as grooming, incest, and pedophilia within the confines of a well-heeled domestic melodrama. In terms of scenario and style, the film is far less radical than some of Breillat’s past triumphs: The location, as well as the actors and their wardrobes—all sun-dappled and attractive—could plausibly belong to a more benign sort of art house release (the title, meanwhile, could be a parody). What’s crucial to Breillat’s stewardship of the material is her merciless clarity; the textured, tactile cinematography by Jeanne Lapoirie feels like a manifestation of the filmmaker’s lucid worldview.

There has always been a certain strain of French cinema that likes to spoof—or skewer—what Luis Buñuel identified as the “discreet charm of the bourgeoisie,” but it never appears that Breillat (whose best work ranks with Buñuel’s) is scoring points off her well-heeled ensemble. Instead of working overtime to expose her characters’ selfishness or hypocrisy, she takes such flaws as a given—a starting point—and then uses drama to map their fears and desires. There is a sense in which Breillat is ultimately a humanist: In her cinema, all people are created equally capable of anything. In a moment when many viewers seem unwilling—or unable—to engage with fictional narratives that diverge from their own intellectual or ideological perspectives, Breillat’s ruthless instincts as both a dramatist and an (anti-)moralist have a tonic, almost cleansing effect. It’s rare to watch a movie with so little interest in ingratiating itself to an audience, and which holds us, viselike, all the same.

The opening shot sets the tone: the hard, staring eyes of attorney Anne (Léa Drucker) as she scrutinizes a teenage female client, whose own gaze is cast shamefully downward. Anne, who is in her early fifties and evidently successful, specializes in cases involving sexual coercion; she’s familiar with the myriad ways that (male) attorneys will work to put the plaintiff on trial. “Just be aware, the defense will try to portray you as a world-class slut,” she explains, with a bluntness that might seem uncalled for if not for the fact that we see her win the case.

The idea of Anne as a woman who protects adolescents from a harsh world follows her back home and into the next scene, where her husband, Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), informs her that his 17-year-old son has been arrested, and that the boy is going to come live with them and their adopted twin daughters. Evidence that the “problem child” is on the premises accrues shortly in the form of dirty socks, a discarded sweatshirt, and crushed soft drink cans. “Haven’t you grown?” asks Anne not-so-rhetorically as Théo (Samuel Kircher) emerges from the shower, his slender torso bisected by a dragon tattoo. “Yeah,” he replies, absent-mindedly wiping his lips and, like the girl in the previous sequence, looking at the floor. “It’s cool.”

As played by Kircher, Théo is cool in a way that plenty of viewers will find familiar, seductive, and exasperating—a moody, self-absorbed brat who knows how and when to lean into his black-sheep status. He’s a bad liar, but also a compulsive one, and when Anne discovers he is responsible for an ostensible break-in, we wonder why she’s willing to forgive—and enable—his treachery, especially since he treats her less like a surrogate mother than like a live-in maid (or else is too aloof to know the difference). And yet: Anne sees something in Théo, and, whatever it is, it draws her in to the point where her looks are a bit too lingering—which he notices and reciprocates. The implication is that the boy has grown up without maternal love, but Anne isn’t filling a void so much as creating a vortex. Sitting with Théo in the garden one afternoon, she lets him improvise an ad hoc tattoo on her forearm; when he chides her squirming (“Do you think the Mona Lisa moved all the time?” he asks), her face registers delight, embarrassment, and terror—expressions that start returning even when she is alone.

Considering her reputation as a master of discomfiting sex scenes—including the remarkable long-take deflowering sequence in 2001’s Fat Girl, which was so anxiously, harrowingly realistic that it inspired a second feature partially about the conditions of its production (Sex Is Comedy, in 2002)—Breillat arguably holds back a bit when it comes to showing Anne and Théo’s inevitable sex scenes; in one, we get an extended close-up on Drucker’s face, her eyes closed, her ecstasy apparent but remote, to us as well as possibly to herself. What’s harrowing about the film’s second half is not the explicitness of the various events (including a few more trysts under the noses of family and friends alike), but the way even mundane or comfortable images become pressurized with guilt and dread. A shot of husband and wife casually eating lunch in the sunshine while Théo lurks shirtless in the background behind a glass door is like something out of a horror movie; even though Anne is in the foreground, the composition seems ripped out of her own fraught, guilt-stricken subconscious.

If there’s a single question hanging over the action in Last Summer, it’s at once vexingly complicated and bluntly obvious: Why would Anne, who has devoted her life to holding sexual predators to account, engage in behavior that even a sympathetic observer would surely place along a similar continuum? It may be that the answer is embedded in the question—that so many years of exposure to the methods and rhetoric of exploitation have cultivated a kind of perverse curiosity—but Breillat isn’t necessarily interested in psychoanalyzing her characters (or playing with layers of irony as Todd Haynes does in May December). The point of her greatest film, Romance, was that the more its protagonist indulged and hypothesized her various desires, the less she was able to understand them.

Breillat’s cool, discursive side is part of her artistry, and sometimes it yields intricately conceived curiosities like her fairy-tale riffs Bluebeard and The Sleeping Beauty—postmodern edifices that exist to be deconstructed. Where she really pushes boundaries is when she stages illicit hookups between realism and abstraction, as in Fat Girl, a work of naturalism that careens over the edge into different territory, including an ending that manages to be shocking, hilarious, tragic, unlikely, and unreliable all at once.

Last Summer doesn’t possess that kind of escape hatch, and what’s at stake in the scenes after Pierre begins to suspect his wife of sleeping with his son is not theoretical or symbolic. The logic of the fallout, which is nasty, brutish, and swift, belongs to the world the characters occupy, which is recognizably our own. It could be argued that, insofar as Breillat is a filmmaker preoccupied with sex, her true subject is power, and while some viewers will surely be startled by the film’s refusal to literally or figuratively judge Anne—either directly or by proxy—for her actions, it’s hard to read the final scenes as anything but critical of larger structures that enable the people who make and maintain the rules to bend them.

In one extraordinarily acted sequence, Breillat shows us how, when it comes to matters of both marriage and parenthood, good and bad faith can interlace on a molecular level alongside honesty and denial, with lies and truths essentially amounting to the same thing: intimacy weaponized more woundingly (and convincingly) than in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. This is a film in which nobody really deserves what happens to them, good or bad, and yet somehow everybody gets what they want, like it or not. The final line—a sharp but resigned instruction to “be quiet”—hits the precise, devastating note of self-conscious repression required to set everything in its right place: the terrible, irresistible allure of keeping one’s mouth (and eyes) wide shut.

Adam Nayman is a critic and lecturer based in Toronto. He is the author of books on the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Fincher.

The Woman Behind Freud’s First Case Study

The case of Anna O. showed that psychoanalysis worked. Did Freud tamper with it?

Hannah Zeavin   28 Jun, 2024

There is perhaps no one more devoted to the cause than a convert, and there is no one more violent toward it than a person who has lost their faith. The faithful turned faithless take up the act of crusade, but in reverse: new atheists confronting the world with secular eyes, children who learn that their parents aren’t omnipotent. They have suffered the loss of an organizing principle, the very thing they built their life around. Now, they may seek revenge on the object that caused an earlier delusion. The commitment doesn’t end—it just takes on new guises.

Beyond the reactions of former lovers and former zealots, we see this in the history of psychoanalysis, perhaps because the practice attracts and demands those same qualities of immersion and devotion. Many have justly loved psychoanalysis, and many have justly despaired of it. This includes the very founders of rational emotive behavioral therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, who brought about a sea change in mental health care, and the critics Frederick Crews, Jeffrey Masson, and Philip Rieff, who turned against Freud even after he had been unthroned as king of the twentieth century. This hatred can feel quasi-personal, aimed at the originator, their father figure, Sigmund Freud.

The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure by Gabriel Brownstein Buy on BookshopPublicAffairs, 336 pp., $32.00

This loss of faith looms over Gabriel Brownstein’s book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure. On its face, the book is a study of the first analytic patient (although she didn’t exactly receive psychoanalytic treatment), Bertha Pappenheim. Pappenheim, who was treated by Freud’s mentor Josef Breuer in Vienna, was the subject of one of Breuer’s case studies and was much discussed by Freud throughout his own career. The book’s stated aim is to offer a full portrait of someone flattened and circulated as a specimen. For Pappenheim is best known by another name—Anna O.—and is best known not as her full person, who left a legacy of feminist and activist patronage, but as the world’s most famous hysteric.

But quietly, this is also a book about the birth and death of psychoanalysis—which is to say that the narrative of Freud’s ascendance and betrayal is the engine that drives the book. Brownstein argues, sometimes contradictorily, that Freud’s brilliance and his drive to make his way as a medical doctor propelled him to tamper with Bertha’s story.

Given that Pappenheim’s stunning cure is the origin story of psychoanalysis, Brownstein seeks to denigrate the whole endeavor on these grounds. If the Anna O. case was a fraud, so, too, would the cure be that she discovered.

Hysteria, much like psychoanalysis, has a storied past, one with a powerful crescendo followed by a caesura. Though the term “hysteric” is now assumed in common speech to be either a pejorative epithet, synonymous with performative hyper-emotionality (he was hysterical), or a historical diagnosis made up by misogynistic doctors (like, some argue, Breuer and Freud), the condition was once quite common. For the uninitiated, hysteria is an illness where the body speaks, where neurotic symptoms appear in and on it. It was treated by an array of cures, from gynecological massage (prescribed orgasm), hypnotism, rest, and drugging, to change of scenery, and, yes, for a very few patients, starting in the late nineteenth century, Breuer and Freud’s cathartic method. This eventually became psychoanalysis. This was, it must be said, a treatment that seems preferable to the other options.

Bertha Pappenheim was in many ways a typical hysterical patient, and an extraordinary woman. When she went to see Breuer in 1880, she presented with the typical hysterical complaints: partial paralysis, disturbances of appetite and language, pain. She couldn’t recall her native German and only spoke in English. She wouldn’t drink water. She had fallen ill while nursing her father, and her condition deteriorated upon his death. She was treated both in her home and in an asylum, often with high doses of drugs. What marks her case as special is that Pappenheim was the first person on Earth to be treated by the cathartic method, in large part because she invented it. Anytime you hear someone say “talking cure,” they’re using the very term Pappenheim ascribed to the yearslong experiment she undertook, morning and night, with her doctor. As she chattered on, as she engaged in the “chimney sweeping” of her mind—so the story goes—she felt better.

Freud and Breuer went on to co-write the groundbreaking Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895. The two doctors, one senior and one junior, open the book with a co-written introduction and end it with a pair of stand-alone essays (Freud’s undermining Breuer’s) in which the nascent theories of repression, defense, catharsis, and abreaction first appear. Each supplied case material of hysteric women treated by this nascent cathartic method. Freud wrote up four cases, and Breuer only contributed the case of Pappenheim, now disguised and named “Anna O.” The two detailed the symptoms of their patients and how each was aided, if not outright cured, by this new talking protocol.

In Breuer’s write-up of Anna O., which only runs about 25 pages, he elaborates on the case study, telling his readers how ill Anna was, when, and why. He then goes on to describe his therapeutic practice of sitting with her at night, and how, while Anna O. was under hypnosis, the two came to “develop a therapeutic technique” of linking each of her symptoms to the moment it appeared. The water she will not drink, for instance, is linked to a moment she saw her English ladies’ companion let a little dog drink from her glass. After the connection is revealed under hypnosis, Breuer tells us, Anna O. drinks water once more. The process repeated until there were no symptoms left, and Anna O.’s mental state presumably returned to normal.

The problem is—and basically all historians of psychoanalysis agree on this point—that even though Breuer and Freud reported a miracle cure, Anna O. didn’t get better. In fact, she got worse and was put in a sanatorium. The question is why. Brownstein, following the anti-Freud tradition, attributes this failure to the treatment. Freud, of course, attributed this failure to the person who offered the treatment—Breuer—not because he couldn’t cure her, but because he didn’t finish doing so.

Like all origin myths, the case has been subject to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. Even the original case study is retrospective: Breuer didn’t write up the Anna O. case at the time of treatment. He did so at Freud’s urging, so that the two might document this new technique of psychotherapy. Anna O. thus became the first patient of psychoanalysis only after the fact, and even though her treatment has just about nothing in common with psychoanalysis today, she is celebrated as such. Freud then revised the case multiple times across his life (in private letters, then in publications in 1910 and 1914), often to diminish Breuer’s role in the origin of psychoanalysis. This is in part due to what Freud thought of privately as Breuer’s failure: When Anna O. showed Breuer she had transferred onto him—by fantasizing about having his baby—Breuer ran away. Breuer could have invented psychoanalysis had he stayed in the room—but he didn’t dare. And thus Anna remained ill, but, in Freud’s understanding, psychoanalysis was not at fault.

Once Freud died, others revised the case in their own ways. Stacks of books can be called up in any research library by those who either defend or revile Freud—and nearly all of them, at one point, turn to Anna O. These studies often seek to collate and correlate Breuer’s flattened write-up of the case with historical reality, trying to reconstruct both Anna O.’s illness and her medical treatment. Some are feminist rereadings of the case, arguing that Anna O. was sick with patriarchy; others center squarely on Freud’s obsession with the case, excavating his letters about Anna O. to various ends.

What’s plain as day: Pappenheim has become the Rorschach test for the field. What we see in her case tends to be run through our feelings about psychoanalysis. The great historian of psychoanalysis John Forrester has argued that the baby that Anna O. spoke of wanting to have with Breuer was psychoanalysis—something she conceived with Breuer, even though he wouldn’t stick around and take responsibility for it. Anti-Freudian Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen sees Anna O.’s case as entirely fabricated, a young woman taken in by her handsome doctor and given huge quantities of drugs; if she invented psychoanalysis, she was the first to be duped by it. As the late Peter Gay observed, “There are contradictions and obscurities in successive versions of the case, but this much is more or less beyond dispute: In 1880, when Anna O. fell ill, she was twenty-one.”

But because very little besides Breuer’s documents is known of her life at the time of treatment, we project what we want onto her, and we can, for her history is a mere fragment. That we continue to do so makes exquisite sense: Psychoanalysis teaches us we must go back to our origins to go forward. And the treatment of Anna O. by Breuer is one way—a decent way—to conceptualize the start of Freud’s theory of mind.

Brownstein’s main critique of Freud’s use of Anna O. is this: that he took her case for his own material ends (though, by the same token, we might ask after Brownstein’s book advance). Freud was a broke young doctor; he needed to get married, and, to do so, he needed to press Breuer into writing Studies on Hysteria so that he could practice this new treatment with a kind of paternal authorization, styling himself as a doctor of “the cathartic method of J. Breuer.”

Brownstein agrees with anti-Freudians like Borch-Jacobsen and Crews that Anna O.’s treatment was a dismal failure. And even though that would make the lie—that Anna O. was cured—Breuer’s, Brownstein argues it was Freud who metaphorically had a gun to his mentor’s head and forced him to write it. More softly, Brownstein argues that Anna O. obscures Bertha Pappenheim, whom Brownstein now promises to deliver to us. Here’s the problem: Brownstein wants to make Freud the (very) bad guy of a story that had little to do with him, even if he had a great deal to do with the case becoming a story. So much so that Brownstein treats the possibility of Freud seeing Bertha Pappenheim at a party years after the treatment as corroborating evidence for some kind of misdeed.

Brownstein thus rewrites up the notorious case, with his chatty, negative asides and interpretations taking center stage. His first close reading from the book is, appropriately, from the first page. He argues that, though Studies purports to be “about the sex lives and sex drives of young bourgeois women,” it “begins by announcing that, for the purposes of propriety, any discussion of their actual intimate lives will be avoided.” Brownstein argues that this is a cover—that Breuer and Freud are maliciously withholding evidence for their theory because there isn’t any and because the doctors wanted to appear respectable. But if we read the first page of Studies, here’s what Breuer and Freud actually wrote: “It would be a grave breach of confidence to publish material of this kind, with the risk of patients being recognized and their acquaintances becoming informed of facts which were confided only to the physician.” There is a deep truth to what Freud and Breuer argue: They were working in a small coterie of largely wealthy Viennese Jewish patients. Everyone knew one another (hence, the great possibility of Freud running into Pappenheim). If you circulated reports of the ills of a young woman’s “marriage bed” or lack thereof, it would have meant no father would refer his daughter to Breuer or Freud, let alone the greater ethical considerations Brownstein says are gestured to half-heartedly.

Elsewhere, Brownstein accuses Freud of having a faulty memory and disguising the patient (despite the authors’ own opening warning to the reader not to go looking for biographical information of Pappenheim). To cover over the lack of details about her, Brownstein freely narrativizes the case, turning it into a historical fiction. At other times, Brownstein seems furious that Freud tends to write beautifully—Brownstein takes this as a sign of fudging the facts—while he then turns to close reading it like a literary critic.

By the end, we know from Brownstein that we’re supposed to find Breuer largely unobjectionable, but in the grips of a young Freud. The cardinal sin for Brownstein, though, is that Anna O. wasn’t made better. (Brownstein believes that she was in fact suffering from a functional neurological disorder, a contemporary diagnosis that overlaps with hysteria.) She was transported back to the asylum, so ill that Breuer reportedly told Freud his beloved patient might be better off dead, so that she might be free of suffering. Yet we might pause and say something did indeed happen in that treatment: Pappenheim was ultimately able to recover enough. By 1889, at 29 years of age, she was able not only to get out of bed, to talk, but to work in a soup kitchen. From this year on, she published—first anonymously and then pseudonymously, under the name Paul Berthold. Soon, Pappenheim was finally known not as Anna O., not as Berthold, but as herself. She also became famous as herself, a powerful, feminist leader, founding the Jewish Women’s Association and centralizing Jewish women’s organizing toward both employment and charity.

Just as some have turned once more to Freud, so have others returned to maligning him. Brownstein has offered us, perhaps, the first book of the Freud Wars 2.0.

Why a book about Bertha Pappenheim now? One answer: With its claim that it will deliver readers Pappenheim in full, Brownstein’s book sits on that ever-expanding shelf of nonfiction books that seek to tell the stories of women who have been relegated to the margins of history, returning them to their larger, unobfuscated import. The book, too, in trying to bring Pappenheim’s story up to the present by rediagnosing her with functional neurological disorder, joins the book market for explorations of contested illness. Yet this book isn’t exactly proper to either of these subgenres. Instead, we might make sense of it as a work of backlash: Just as a range of analysts and writers have turned once more to Freud (as The New York Times proclaimed in an article not quite aptly titled “Not Your Daddy’s Freud”), so have others returned to maligning him. Brownstein has offered us, perhaps, the first book of the Freud Wars 2.0.

Brownstein, in fact, inherits the role of Freud skeptic from an earlier generation. His father, Dr. Shale Brownstein, was a prominent New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a Rolodex of famous patients. Sometime in the 1980s, Dr. Brownstein became disillusioned with psychoanalysis and became an anti-Freudian—though we are never quite told why. One night, when Brownstein went to visit his father, he found him in his underwear, speaking wildly. The subject: Bertha Pappenheim. His father held a thick envelope filled with scientific and historic papers, newspaper clippings, reviews of books, and his own essay on the subject.

His father gave him the manila envelope. The younger Brownstein went home to Brooklyn, and the next day his father was dead. As if in a novel, Brownstein then becomes fixated on the envelope and its contents only to discover he has misplaced it. His own book is as much an attempt to decipher his father’s theory about Bertha Pappenheim as to understand his father’s turn against Freud. Brownstein makes clear that his father was a devoted doctor, and treated luminaries in downtown New York, including Peter Hujar and Richard Serra. Dr. Brownstein tended to babies with HIV in the 1980s who languished otherwise in their cots, when others wouldn’t dare go near. Dr. Brownstein gave everything to psychoanalysis, but then something changed. We don’t quite know what, but his father became so disillusioned that he burned all 24 volumes of Freud’s Standard Edition.

Was it the homophobia of mainstream psychoanalysis that rightfully made him repudiate his training? Was it indeed the legacy of Anna O.? I wish we knew what Brownstein felt as he wrestled with Freud via his father. As author and son, Brownstein is overwhelmed by the research subject he must now try to understand and, more importantly, terribly overwhelmed by the pain of being alive when life is most brutal. Shortly after his father’s death, his wife is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, and when the global pandemic arrives, Brownstein must weather it without them.

While Brownstein seemingly hates Freud, he, like many others, can’t escape him. Early in the book, he disparages two Freudian terms: “secondary gain,” which can be described as the unconscious advantage patients acquire through their illness (stereotyped here as attention), and “la belle indifférence,” a calm character in the face of crisis. But toward the book’s close, Brownstein suddenly tips his hand: He comes to a form of self-understanding through these concepts. In not getting treated for a heart problem, he says he has a case of la belle indifférence. In writing the book, he self-analyzes, he can be understood as having a case of secondary gain—after all, Brownstein was quite literally paid for producing it.

But Brownstein uses these concepts defensively—to show his reader he is in on the joke. The book itself, more movingly, is a testament to yet another set of Freudian concepts: the return of the repressed, as evidenced by his return to the use of Freud; working through (here, loss of his father, his wife); and, indeed, sublimation. Writing the book then might be an act of Freudian sublimation; it is also an act of devotion.

This article has been updated.

Hannah Zeavin is an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy.

Can the Museum Survive?

From looted artifacts to rogue employees, a series of crises have beset some of the world’s most visited collections.

Richard J. Evans   1 Jul, 2024

Museums, as the anthropologist Adam Kuper notes in his new book, The Museum of Other People, have never been more popular. There are more than 50,000 of them in existence across the globe. The Louvre, the world’s most popular museum, registered more than 10 million visitors in 2018, up by a quarter over the previous year. The 20 most visited museums in the United States hosted nearly 50 million visitors in 2019. The Covid-19 epidemic cut visitor numbers by over three-quarters, but they bounced back quickly once restrictions were lifted. In 2021, the turnover of the museum business in the United States reached $15.4 billion, up nearly 20 percent on the previous year.

And yet, museums are experiencing a rapidly spreading crisis, sparked to begin with by ever-louder demands for the restitution of treasures seized in the era of colonialism. The museums under most pressure are what Kuper terms “museums of other people”—ethnographic or cultural museums established specifically to cover non-European or non-Western cultures—but what he has to say has important implications for others with a wider, more general coverage, such as the British Museum in London or the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions by Adam Kuper Buy on BookshopPantheon Books, 432 pp., $35.00

Museums were mostly conceived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, driven by a curiosity about other peoples and other parts of the world, signaled by the creation of learned societies of anthropology and ethnology as part of the new bourgeois public sphere, the spread of education, and the emerging belief that European and North American culture was superior to cultures in other parts of the world. Western collectors sallied forth into Africa, Asia, and Latin America, sending millions of objects back to the newly created public museums. For many nineteenth-century directors of ethnological museums, the obvious way to organize a collection was chronological, illustrating humankind’s progress from barbarism to civilization. The display would begin by showing artifacts from “primitive” or “savage” societies and proceed onward up to the “civilized” and the “advanced.” Thus bourgeois culture in Europe could convince itself of its superiority.

In the nineteenth-century United States, ethnographic interest focused particularly on Native American “Indians” whose culture was investigated by anthropologists during the long penetration of the West by white settlers. They confirmed the rightness of this internal colonization by concluding, in the words of Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 book, Ancient Society, that “savagery preceded barbarism in all the tribes of mankind as barbarism is known to have preceded civilization.” The Native Americans were fated to be assimilated or exterminated, their savage culture to be superseded by a more advanced one. By the late nineteenth century, the rise of “scientific” racism was inspiring collectors to amass large quantities of human skulls and other remains in the belief that these would illustrate crucial physical differences between the races. In 1987, it was reported that the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., held some 34,000 bones and skulls, 42.5 percent of which were American Indian, and a little less than 12 percent of which were Alaskan Native.

After World War II, most European institutions turned away from scientific racism, having seen its use in Nazi Germany as the basis for programs of mass sterilization and extermination. Anthropologists, not surprisingly, now agreed that “race” was a cultural construct, not a biological phenomenon. With the wave of decolonization that swept the globe in the postwar era, newly independent nations in Africa and elsewhere began to raise the demand for the restoration of the cultural artifacts taken from them by colonialism. These demands have mounted in recent years, both as activists have brought wider attention to the legacies of colonialism, and as research has identified growing quantities of cultural objects acquired under questionable circumstances. (One group has even begun to offer “stolen goods tours” of the British Museum.)

The first part of Kuper’s book goes through the process by which museums were founded, stocked, and arranged, and while those details are illuminating, it is in the book’s second half that he really gets to grip with today’s crises. How much of a threat do growing demands for the return of cultural objects pose to museums? Beyond particular items in its collections, is the universal museum itself a product of colonialism that expresses an implicit belief in the superiority of Western culture over Indigenous cultures in the areas the West came to control in the age of imperialism? Indeed—a question Kuper might have considered more—is the very idea of a museum outdated in the digital age?

A classic example of the shape of disputes over looted cultural objects is provided by the thousands of intricately worked sculptures, busts, plaques, and reliefs known as the Benin Bronzes. They were comprehensively looted in 1897 by a British military force sent to punish the precolonial West African kingdom of Benin for its actions in massacring a trade expedition. The scale of the pillage was extraordinary. Back in Europe, the loot found its way into a host of major museums; 580 were collected for the Ethnological Museum in Berlin alone. Some 950 were acquired by the British Museum. Sold at rapidly escalating prices on the open market, many others found their way into smaller provincial museums in Europe, but the Metropolitan Museum in New York also acquired 160, mostly donated by private individuals over the decades.

The demand for their restitution seems unstoppable. Already museums in a number of European countries, including Britain, France, and Germany, have begun to return Benin Bronzes in their possession to the countries where they originated. Yet the moral balance sheet of their restitution was not without controversy. What, for example, was the moral right of the successors of the obas (or kings) of Benin to get back the bronzes? Defenders of the looting, beginning with the looters themselves, pointed out that they had engaged in human sacrifice on a considerable scale: As British forces approached in 1897, the oba of the day had hundreds of slaves and captives sacrificed to his ancestors, and, on arrival, the British troops literally had to wade through blood to reach their objective. Their commander reported from the town that “this place reeks of sacrifices and human blood, bodies in every state of decay, wells full of newly killed, crucified men on the fetish trees (which we have blown up), one sees men retching everywhere.”

Moreover, the precolonial kingdom of Benin practiced slavery, along with its neighboring states such as Asante, whose king boasted in 1824 that following a successful military expedition, he “brought more than 20,000 slaves to Coomassy,” or Kumasi, the capital town of Asante. “Some of these people,” he went on, “being bad men, I washed my stool in their blood for the fetische. But then some were good people, and these I sold or gave to my captains.” Along with another precolonial kingdom on the “Slave Coast” of West Africa, Dahomey, these powerful and well-organized states were a major center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, supplying more than two million slaves to the British ships that brought them to the Americas. The present-day heirs of these states have apologized for their ancestors’ practice of owning and trading in slaves, and the current government of the Republic of Benin has opened a museum of slavery and is building what has been called a “theme park” with artifacts, including a slave ship, in the hope of bringing African American tourists to the area. Organizations that have been campaigning against restitution, such as Britain’s History Reclaimed, a conservative pressure group, have underlined the blood-tainted origins of the bronzes and argued that this invalidates any claim to moral superiority put forward by their original owners as a reason to get them back.

To add to such moral reservations, European museums sometimes argue that the restitution of cultural objects endangers those objects because there is no guarantee that they would be properly cared for. They can point, for example, to the political instability that is endemic in twenty-first-century West Africa, with its frequent military coups, uprisings, and jihadist incursions from the north. In 2012, Islamist extremists destroyed the majority of mausoleums in the Malian city of Timbuktu, all of them inscribed on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites, and as French troops approached the following year to restore order, the extremists torched a library housing irreplaceable manuscripts, some of them dating back to the thirteenth century. The national museum of Iraq was looted during the war of 2003, and the sweeping victories of the Taliban in Afghanistan left local mobs to pillage heritage sites and collections following the U.S. withdrawal. The global market for artworks, ancient cultural remains, and other cultural objects has been flooded with illegally acquired material as a result. Corruption in Nigeria and other countries has added to the toll: Writing in 2009, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah reported, “hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art has been stolen from the museums of Nigeria alone, almost always with the complicity of insiders.” Nigerian Minister of Culture Walter Ofonagoro warned in 1996, “We are losing our cultural heritage at such an alarming rate that ... we may have no cultural artifacts to bequeath to our progeny.”

A further question raised by the issue of restitution is the identification of recipients. To whom should the restitution be made? Surprisingly often, competing claims are put forward. Native American societies are sometimes divided over the question of what to do with the human remains they receive from museum authorities: Should they inter them or (if custom dictated) incinerate them with due religious ceremony, or display them in an informative though suitably reverential manner? In West Africa, the issue of who had the right to the Benin Bronzes was hotly disputed. In January 2022, the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments announced it would in future deal with claims for them, but on March 23, 2023, Muhammadu Buhari, then president of Nigeria, declared the oba of Benin their exclusive owner. His decision was roundly condemned by the commission, which claimed it was impractical.

In the meantime, the Restitution Study Group, an African American nonprofit organization, went to court to prevent the Smithsonian from sending its Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria, pointing out that some of them were made from brass bracelets presented to the oba and others by slave traders in exchange for slaves and then melted down to make the bronzes. So, the group argued, the descendants of these enslaved people surely had a strong moral interest in these extremely valuable artifacts.

Few such objections to restitution have proved convincing. Arguments that the museums shouldn’t return artifacts to societies such as Asante or Benin because of violence in their histories do not make much sense when one considers the scale of brutality and plunder inflicted by Western powers over the same period. Asante was a slaveholding society, to be sure, but then so, too, were the European powers, in their Caribbean possessions, and the United States.

Nor have European states been models of peace and stability over the past centuries and decades. True, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 obligated states that were victorious in war to respect the cultures of the countries they defeated. But in World War II, the Nazis in particular ran roughshod over the conventions, even though Germany had been a signatory to them. In the summer of 1941, invading German troops, for example, occupied and destroyed much of the novelist Leo Tolstoy’s house at Yasnaya Polyana, while the composer Tchaikovsky’s home was wrecked as German soldiers drove muddy motorbikes over the musical manuscripts littering the floor. Millions of cultural objects were looted by the Germans during the war, some of them carried off for never-realized display in Hitler’s planned Germanic museum in Linz; yet more were appropriated by the victorious Red Army as “trophy art,” which is still exhibited in uncatalogued galleries in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum.

In 2023, the British Museum discovered that up to 1,500 items in its care, including gold, glass, and jewelry, had been stolen in an “inside job.”

At the beginning of the Balkan Wars of the late twentieth century, in 1992, Serb forces razed the Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo to the ground. More recently, UNESCO has reported that Russia’s war against Ukraine had resulted in damage to 126 religious sites, 148 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 30 museums, 19 monuments, 13 libraries, and an archive by January 2024. And it’s not just war that has imperiled artifacts either: In 2023, the British Museum discovered that up to 1,500 items in its care, including gold, glass, and jewelry, had been stolen in what its chair, George Osborne, described as an “inside job”; the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, took responsibility for failing to detect the thefts and was forced to resign. Governments have added their bit by misconceived policies designed to save space and resources. The U.K. Ministry of Justice, for instance, is now proposing to destroy millions of historic wills after digitizing them, but the dangers of this policy were starkly laid bare by a massive cyberattack on the British Library in October 2023 that left huge numbers of items still unavailable to readers.

After more than a century in which millions of people across the globe were killed in wars fought between European, American, and Asian armies, destruction and ruin on an unprecedented scale, and torture and suffering of an indescribably horrific nature inflicted on millions, it is difficult, to put it no more strongly than that, for museum directors in London, Paris, or New York to refuse to restore stolen objects on the basis of the supposed moral inferiority of the non-Europeans who want them back, or the danger that they might be destroyed. In the end, what counts above all else is the moral claim for the restitution of stolen goods based on original ownership. If the claimants have a moral right to have their possessions returned, then the question of how they, in their turn, got them, and what they intend to do with them once they have recovered them, is not really relevant.

There are threats to the “museum of other people” beyond the rising tide of demands for restitution. Such exhibitions might have been educational for the societies in which the museums were based at a time when travel overseas or to far-flung parts of the globe was impossible except for a tiny minority of intrepid explorers, missionaries, and traders, but the invention of photography in the 1820s soon began to satisfy the curiosity of Europeans and Americans about other peoples. Cinema and television further undermined the claims of museums to provide exclusive knowledge about other parts of the world. By the middle of the twentieth century, you could vicariously experience life in a tribal village in New Guinea or the Amazon basin without moving from your armchair at home. Who needs to visit a museum to discover what a totem pole looks like, or an igloo, or a pagoda, or an Easter Island statue? If you’re not satisfied with what you see on television, then cheap air travel enables you, even if your income is modest, to go and see for yourself, in situ, surely a superior experience to that of looking at objects in a glass case. On the face of it, we no longer need the “museum of other people” to tell us what other people were like, or how they lived.

More than this, the rise of identity politics in the early twenty-first century has helped foster the belief that it is morally wrong for one society or culture to say what others were like. Instead, it is arguably preferable for Indigenous cultures themselves to tell the world what they are like, and how they live. By doing so, they can wrest their story back into their own hands and begin to correct the legacies of colonization. Difficulties can arise, however, as Kuper notes, when museums fail to couple their missions with rigorous scientific methods. The National Museum of the American Indian, inaugurated in Washington, D.C., in 2004, was conceived as a showcase for Native American culture, yet critics commented that it lacked depth. The resulting displays were, the playwright and filmmaker James Lujan complained, “an exercise in cultural propaganda that emphasizes the positive, glosses over the negative,” and provides a “depth of understanding” that “is little more than what we would get from stopping at a tribal community center or gift shop.” Many of the displays were chaotically organized and difficult to negotiate. Captions were frequently banal and uninformative (“Native Americans of the past consider many places holy,” read one in the Washington museum). No wonder the museum was almost empty when I went there a few years ago, in contrast to the well-organized and informative National Museum of African American History and Culture, a stone’s throw away.

At one museum, Kuper adds, the process of “decolonizing” meant inviting diviners to use religious rituals to identify objects for repatriation. In 2005, a group of Huichol shamans from Mexico was invited to inspect a number of artifacts in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. The shamans unhesitatingly identified as Huichol several objects that were not. In this case, the museum’s attempt to engage with Huichol culture did little to improve public understanding of its collections. It made a clumsy gesture and showed a loss of faith in the best resources that it has to offer the public: its body of curatorial expertise, and its ability to attract and engage with quality research that could have truly aided in restitution.

Over the past few decades, not least as a result of these developments, the ethnographic museum, the “museum of other people,” has gradually been changing into another kind of museum altogether. To see what has been happening, we need look no further than the Benin Bronzes themselves. From the point of view of museums, the key characteristic of the Benin Bronzes nowadays is the fact that they are regarded not as evidence of “other peoples,” but as works of art. This is the end result of what Kuper describes as “the long-running competition between the art world and the anthropologists,” which, he concludes, has been won by the art historians. Museum directors from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the recently established Humboldt Forum in Berlin now agree, as Kuper puts it: “This stuff is the business of art historians, not anthropologists.”

Still, Kuper notes, “art museums do not explore what these artifacts mean to the people who make and use them.” For this, a different kind of museum is needed: “a genuinely cosmopolitan museum, one that transcends ethnic and national identities, makes comparisons, draws out connections.” Above all, he argues, we need museums that are “informed by rigorous, critical, independent scholarship.” Museums could, for example, display artifacts from around the world that have been loaned or exchanged, rather than looted. Future exhibitions should surely be informed by the best scholarship in the field, drawing on work from a range of countries and approaches. Deals like the one struck by the Ethnological Museum in Berlin for the repatriation of more than 500 Benin Bronzes perhaps point the way forward: Two-thirds of the bronzes will return to Nigeria, while the remaining third will be displayed in Berlin on loan.

Museums surely have a future. The numinous power of a genuine cultural object is far greater than anything a mere photograph or reproduction can convey. Not long ago, while in New York, I visited the Museum of Modern Art and made my way to Van Gogh’s Starry Night. A large crowd of mostly young people was gathered in front of this wonderful, iconic, endlessly reproduced painting. Everyone there was clearly thrilled to see the actual artwork. And yet no one was looking at it. Almost all of them had their backs turned to it. They were wielding their cell phones and taking selfies with the picture in the background—a ritual that onlookers might bemoan, though nonetheless one that depended above all on the presence of an original.

Richard J. Evans is deputy chair of the U.K.’s Spoliation Advisory Panel, advising the government on claims for the restitution of Nazi-looted artworks. He is writing here in a personal capacity.

Hari Kunzru’s Escape From the Art Market

“Blue Ruin” is a sharp novel about art, authenticity, success, and disaster.

Jess Bergman   3 Jul, 2024

In Honoré de Balzac’s 1831 story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” the young artist Nicolas Poussin presents himself at the studio of Porbus, a seventeenth-century court painter, hoping to inhale the fumes of creative genius. It is a stroke of luck that his visit coincides with that of the eminent Frenhofer, Porbus’s own mentor, who possesses “the secret of giving figures life.” When he reveals that he has been secretly laboring over a single portrait for a decade, Poussin is possessed by the desire to see it. As Frenhofer claims the delay is partly due to the lack of an ideal model, Poussin barters a sitting with his beautiful mistress, Gillette, in exchange for a look at the painting. When he and Porbus finally lay eyes on Frenhofer’s work, they are speechless. Not because, as the old master claims, he has achieved “the look and the actual solidity of nature,” but because they struggle to discern anything beyond “a chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist.” Upon hearing that his canvas contains “nothing,” Frenhofer is enraged, then bereft. He burns his paintings and dies in the night.

Jay Gates, the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Blue Ruin, borrows the title of Balzac’s story for his degree show at a London art school in the 1990s heyday of the infamous Young British Artists. Unknown Masterpiece is both Jay’s entrée into performance art and a retirement from the painting that he’d come to school to study. “It was a refusal,” he explains, “a way to separate myself from all the other artists who were jostling at the money trough for a chance to dip their snouts.” For the duration of the show, he lives in a secure cell in the gallery equipped with food, water, and “basic sanitary facilities.” With a camera watching him work from behind the easel, transmitting his movements to spectators, he produces a painting over the course of three days. When it is finished, he takes a Polaroid of the work, then passes it to a set of witnesses, who sign a document affirming that a painting has indeed been made. After, Jay cuts up both the photo and its original, submerging the scraps in a bucket of plaster. Unlike Frenhofer’s passionate act of despair, Jay’s destruction is a calculated provocation: The painting, he admits, was nothing but a “mediocre self-portrait.”

Blue Ruin: A Novel by Hari KunzruBuy on BookshopKnopf, 272 pp., $28.00

Despite being intended as a gesture of art-world disavowal, Jay’s piece catches the eye of a young gallerist who invites him to restage Unknown Masterpiece at a newly opened space in East London. Meanwhile, his closest art school friend—a peacocking Mancunian named Rob, whose “garish lime green suit and matching sneakers” index his desire for attention—doesn’t manage to sell a single painting from the show, a failure that puts him off making any new work “for some time.” Jay’s rejection of his former medium creates a fissure between the two friends that is never really repaired: Though they fall in and out of each other’s lives, including during a shared stint at a warehouse squat-turned-artist’s collective, they cannot recover the manic intimacy that defined their relationship as students. The break becomes final when Rob absconds to New York with Jay’s girlfriend, Alice, a French Vietnamese art history student in flight from the expectations of her wealthy family.

When chance circumstances reunite this dysfunctional trio two decades later, in the spring of 2020, the fortunes portended by Jay and Rob’s degree show seem to have reversed. The former is delivering groceries through an app, living out of his car after being booted from a boardinghouselike rental in Jackson Heights for contracting Covid; the latter is ensconced with his pandemic pod at the upstate New York retreat of an art patron wealthy and paranoid enough to have both a private security team and a doomsday bunker in New Zealand. (If Rob was once nosing at the trough of capital, he’s now guzzling from its firehouse.) Jay collapses at their door with the groceries they ordered, and Alice secretly gives him a place to stay.

The reckoning that results from this unexpected meeting allows Kunzru to dramatize a series of questions about art-making in a capitalist society besieged by many different kinds of crisis. How far outside the market, institutions, and audiences can a work travel while retaining its essence as art? What is the political valence of refusal in a world deformed by individualism? And who pays the price for an artist’s unwavering principles?

Like Kunzru’s last two novels, Blue Ruin is about creative labor’s inevitable crash into politics, as well as the allure—and danger—of artistic monomania.

Blue Ruin forms a kind of triptych with Kunzru’s two previous novels, Red Pill and White Tears—the colors a sly nod to the project’s engagement with contemporary American upheaval, from police shootings to Donald Trump to Covid-19. Where Red Pill followed a frustrated writer’s deranging odyssey from a genteel fellowship into the bowels of the alt right, White Tears employed the techniques of horror to expose the material thefts underlying a young white music producer’s appropriation of the blues. Like its predecessors, Blue Ruin is a story about creative labor’s inevitable crash into politics, as well as the allure—and danger—of artistic monomania.

In each of these novels, a first-person narrator’s monologue is eventually interrupted by the voice, or story, of another: a Berlin cleaning woman who confesses her entrapment by, and eventual cooperation with, the Stasi; an elderly record collector who recounts a nightmarish odyssey through the American South. In Blue Ruin, however, Kunzru’s signature nested narrative belongs to Jay himself, a move that underscores the extent of his transformation between turn-of-the-millennium London and pandemic-era New York. It isn’t just Alice and Rob who haven’t heard from Jay in all these years: He has essentially fallen off the face of the earth, to the extent that many in the art world presume him dead. In order to avoid being thrown out of the secluded upstate property, he must narrate where—and who—he has been.

After Alice and Rob’s betrayal, Jay explains, he returned to an old obsession with borders and boundaries, lines of demarcation that “came into being every time an identity was checked, then disappeared again.” Throughout Blue Ruin, his political views tend to be thinly and somewhat unconvincingly sketched: “I was becoming preoccupied by all the intersecting causes of the nineties left, the Zapatistas, corporate branding, globalization, the predatory behavior of the International Monetary Fund,” goes one representative line. But boundaries also have a more personal resonance for Jay, whose very existence represents the crossing of one. He is the product of a one-night stand between his mother, a white Englishwoman named Patricia, and a black photographer whom she met at a soul club; when Patricia later resolved to pursue a respectable middle-class existence with a strict, military-adjacent husband, he found himself stranded on the wrong side of an invisible fence. Years later, he would make a piece by crawling down a random street with a piece of chalk, arbitrarily dividing one half from the other.

The border-work he made in the wake of his breakup, Jay says, escalated in intensity and risk. From drawing “maps of disputed border areas in other parts of the world ... with dotted red line indicating routes where they could be crossed on foot,” he embarked on a three-part action called THE DRIFTWORK. It involved a credulity-straining caper that saw him travel undetected and without papers from Paris to London, and culminated in Fugue, a performance in which Jay burned his clothing and meager possessions before walking, naked, into the night. After a short interval, a gallerist informed the crowd that the artist was gone, but the piece continued. His goal, he says, was to create “a kind of artwork without form or function except to cross its own border, to cross out of itself and make a successful exit.” In the time since, he has traveled to Bangkok, Goa, southwestern France, Spain, and finally the United States, working odd and sometimes illegal jobs, producing—other than the continued fact of his survival—nothing at all.

Fugue is clearly inspired in part by the American artist Lee Lozano, who furnishes Blue Ruin with its epigraph (“Poverty Piece: Remain poor until the war ends”). According to the writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Lozano “conceived of what she was doing—her activities, actions, walks, language—as her work.” She called this practice “Life-Art,” and its most extreme example was Dropout Piece, a project of indeterminate length that began in the early 1970s and entailed Lozano’s total withdrawal from the institutional art world and from the creation of art objects, even in private. It was an act, Lehrer-Graiwer writes, of “willed marginality,” an anti-work protest intended “to neutralise or reverse the inexorable pull of capital on art.” At the same time, it imbued Lozano’s challenging personal circumstances, like exclusion or eviction, with a sense of meaning and agency. The same is true of Jay’s project: “When I was fixing a fence, or delivering takeout, or standing knee deep in gray water pumping out a flooded basement, it had given me an underlying purpose, a larger context for my actions.”

But that feeling evaporates with the telling of his story. After nearly 20 years, Fugue’s arc has led Jay back to the people who precipitated it, bringing the piece to an end. Has it succeeded?

Writing about “The Unknown Masterpiece” in 1995, the art historian Lynda Nead lingered over the figure of Gillette, Poussin’s mistress, who agrees to sit for Frenhofer even though she fears it will irrevocably stain her relationship with Poussin. Balzac introduces her as “one of those noble, generous souls who endure their trials at a great man’s side,” a woman who is “steadfast in her passion, devoted to [Poussin’s] suffering as to his happiness.” As thanks for her selflessness, Gillette is reduced to a bargaining chip; when Poussin and Porbus are granted access to Frenhofer’s mysterious portrait, she is “forgotten in a corner” until the sound of her weeping reminds the men of her presence. In this way, Nead writes, “artistic creativity is shown to be a form of melodrama, played out between the older and the younger man, over the bodies of women: real and painted.”

Blue Ruin highlights and to some extent reenacts the plight of Gillette through the figure of Alice: not so much a person as the turning point in Jay’s relationship with Rob, the inciting event of his most substantial work. Alice, we learn, has been continuously cheated on by Rob throughout their marriage, and his financial and administrative fecklessness has curtailed her curatorial ambitions; managing his studio, and his personality, is a full-time job. Kunzru doesn’t suggest, though, that she would have been better off staying with Jay, despite a brief physical rekindling at the upstate compound. It’s clear that he was an insecure and possessive partner, once enlisting Alice in a monthslong drug binge that was ruinous to her physical and mental well-being. “You never seemed to see me,” she tells him at one point. “I’m not sure you even liked me.”

Ultimately, Jay’s conversations with Alice prompt a realization that undermines not just the apparent differences between him and Rob, but the ethics of his art practice:

An artist ought, I thought, to live like a spy, a spiritual fugitive. Art itself consisted of finding ways to say no, to become invisible to power.… When I wouldn’t speak to anyone and locked myself in my studio, I was holding a line, taking my vocation seriously. In practical terms, it amounted to the same thing. Rob and I both expected other people to pick up after us. Of the two of us, I was probably the more self-righteous about it.

The meaning of Jay’s work is further complicated by the presence of the novel’s only other major female character, Nicole, a young Black internet artist in a relationship of convenience with Rob’s gallerist, Marshal, the de facto leader of their pandemic pod. Nicole has clearly not relinquished her ambitions for artistic success, but, unlike Jay, she remains engaged with the world in ways both big and small. She frequently excuses herself to FaceTime with her elderly grandmother, who is struggling to stay afloat in a partially locked-down New York; and after the police murder of George Floyd, she orders a taxi back to the city to participate in the historic protests—an event that Jay, preoccupied by the drama he’s unleashed on the compound, almost fails to register. Nicole’s mix of professional pragmatism and political passion, though obviously imperfect, becomes a foil to Jay’s zero-sum approach to art. He has escaped the tyranny of the market and the hypocrisy of institutions, but at the cost of committing to anything besides his own freedom.

Occasionally, the achievement of Blue Ruin can feel as ambiguous as Fugue’s. Kunzru’s London, perhaps more a product of memory than research, lacks the sensory fullness of the rural Mississippi of White Tears or the Berlin suburb Wannsee at grim midwinter in Red Pill. The same could be said of Blue Ruin’s characters, who tend toward the broad: Marshal, the gallerist, is a confusing amalgam of political signifiers, the son of an Upper West Side art dealer who believes strenuously in masking but maintains a weapons cache worthy of a Three Percenter. Rob, despite an eleventh-hour revelation that complicates some of his resentment, feels like a caricature of the bad-boy artist past his prime. And the aura of dreamlike suspense that Kunzru is so adept at conjuring is almost entirely absent here, despite the appearance of multiple Chekhov’s guns.

What ultimately distinguishes the novel is its searching quality, a greater open-endedness than his two preceding works, whose moral universe was more clearly defined. It requires a reader to think rather than to offer a sage nod of agreement. Blue Ruin isn’t strictly autobiographical, but it’s clear that whether Kunzru is writing about the degradations of the art market, white profit from Black pain, or the conservative romanticism that runs through mass culture like sewage, he, like his protagonists, is aiming to create works of literature that do more than satisfy a contemporary publishing niche. In other words, there’s something distinctly meta about Jay’s resistance to the institutionalization of his art.

Kunzru’s investigations into the politics that scaffold contemporary cultural production are equally preoccupied with aesthetic integrity: Red Pill’s paranoiac writer is haunted by the fraudulence of his book project about “The Lyric I,” while the action of White Tears is set into motion by distorted notions of authenticity. If the binaries Blue Ruin wrestles with—money versus art, action versus refusal—feel familiar, it’s because we are still so far from resolving them.

Jess Bergman is an editor at The Baffler.

dramatic monologue as Johanna Magdalena Beyer

Stella Wong   20 Jun, 2024

this is some hard music

to listen to. my dutch clogged

name. what you’ve heard about me is

whom I’ve predated. some of it hostile

and probably not well-informed. some of it

mediated. as a port’s port,

I have my baby like a mushroom,

pinning away for

my own logged arrhythmic growth.

my developing chestnut nubs.

my coup d’épée as king

oyster. the spongy spores are all ready

there. I am an ever-changing

something. a sprouted hair.

Stella Wong is the author of Spooks and American Zero. Her next collection of poems, Stem, is out this fall.

Figuration

Timothy Donnelly   20 Jun, 2024

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent collection, Chariot, was published by Wave Books last year.

Table of Contents

The New Republic Magazine: July-August 2024

All articles

Liberalism’s Natural Disadvantage—and How to Overcome It

Donald Trump’s Last (We Hope) Grift

Liberalism Has the Ideas–but Does It Have the Will to Impose Them?

For True Freedom, We Need Power-Sharing Liberalism

Can Liberalism Stop Being So Darn ... Liberal?

Remembering Vint Lawrence

Don’t Be Fooled By Liberalism’s Modesty

Defend Liberalism? Let’s Fight for Democracy First

An Everglades Scientist on Trial in Ron DeSantis’s Kingdom

Ritchie Torres vs. the Left

How Will Montana’s Population Boom Shift Its Politics?

Liberalism Under Siege

The Case for Taking Reality TV Seriously

Is the United States Too Devoted to the Constitution?

<i>Last Summer</i> Is a Marvel of Toxic Lyricism

The Woman Behind Freud’s First Case Study

Can the Museum Survive?

Hari Kunzru’s Escape From the Art Market

dramatic monologue as Johanna Magdalena Beyer

Figuration