Corey Robin's Blog, page 15

Arno Mayer, 1926-2023

The historian Arno Mayer, who had such an influence on my work and eventually became a friend, has died at 97. He wrote books on everything from the French Revolution to the First World War to the Holocaust to the creation of the State of Israel. He was one of a cohort of brilliant scholars at Princeton University who made the study of history, in which I majored as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the most exciting discipline and department in the world.

I have a tribute to him at the New Left Review. Some excerpts:

Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a marginal country, Mayer was repelled by nationalism and drawn to cosmopolitanism like those other great historians of Europe from small countries: Pirenne (Belgium), Huizinga (the Netherlands) and Burckhardt (Switzerland). That inheritance led him to diplomatic history, a world in between states. Mayer told this origin story so often – and the story has so often been told ­– that I’ve come to think of it as the equivalent of a family myth. I see his in-betweenness differently.

I was introduced to Arno as an undergraduate at Princeton by my roommate, the son of the European intellectual historian Stuart Hughes. I don’t know if it was my personality or my connection to Hughes, but for whatever reason, Arno immediately made me feel like family. His writing gives the impression of an old-world Jewish sophisticate, but in his being and bearing, he reminded me of nothing so much as my very non-academic Jewish American family from the suburbs of New York. 

…

Other diplomatic historians studied the relations between states. Arno looked inside of states, at the domestic relations and power struggles within. When he wrote about the French and Russian revolutions, he turned not to Marx or Lenin but to The Oresteia and the Hebrew Bible, master texts of familial violence and personal vengeance. Where other Marxist historians of the twentieth century spoke of the transition to finance capital and the corporate form, Arno was more impressed by the staying power of the family firm.

His most daring and enduring ideas – that the First and Second World Wars were like the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century; that the history of modern Europe is not one of a rising bourgeoisie but of a regnant aristocracy; that the Holocaust might be compared to the pogroms of the Crusades, a work of detoured ambition, in which a marauding army from the West, crazed and stymied in its quest for the lands of the East, acts out its zeal and frustration on the helpless Jews caught in the way – are not the creations of a contrarian. They are reflections of a spirit seeking to dispel the depersonalizing aura and bureaucratic myths of modernity in favour of more intimate, domestic, familial, and lineal, but no less tractable or terrible, examples from the past.

…

Where we imagine today’s city as the home of the left, The Persistence of the Old Regime reminds us that the city can be the natural space of the right. At the turn of the last century, European cities, particularly imperial capitals, employed vast numbers in the tertiary sector of commerce, finance, real estate, government and the professions. Members of those sectors, which included much of what we today would call the PMC, often outnumbered the more traditionally recognized ranks of the urban proletariat. Far from generating a cosmopolitan or metropolitan left, they were a breeding ground of the radical right.

Until recently, Mayer’s political geography of the city might have seemed of historical interest only. With Israel’s war on Gaza, it bears re-reading. 

You can read the entire tribute here. May his memory be for a blessing.

We’re all norm eroders now

Up at The New Yorker this morning, I’ve got a double review of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s new book, Tyranny of the Minority, and Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, which came out last year.

My essay addresses the Constitution and the rise of the right, and asks whether any part of the Constitution might help us counter the right. I come out, surprisingly, thinking that, maybe, yes, it might. That’s what I learned from Fishkin and Forbath’s “wonderfully counterintuitive” book, as I say.

The other surprise, for me, is the shift in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s position. Five years ago, you may recall, they were the leading scholarly voices arguing against the norm erosion of Donald Trump and the GOP. Now, in their work, they call for an erosion of the Constitution, the deepest norm of all in American politics. What happened?

Find out here.

How ChatGPT changed my plans for the fall

Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT.

Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do.

But this recent article, by a Harvard undergraduate, made me think again.

I decided to ask my daughter to run through ChatGPT a bunch of take-home essay questions that I had assigned to my students this past year. One course was on politics and literature, the other course was on American political thought. I’ll admit I take a certain foolish (and, I now realize, complacent) pride in asking somewhat out-of-the-way type questions of my students. So I wasn’t too worried.

The initial answers ChatGPT spat back reinforced my complacence. All of them were well written and structured, good on the surface. There were none of the usual flaws you find in student writing: each sentence logically followed the other, paragraphs had points, transitions were purposeful rather than obfuscatory, that is, trying to cover the tracks of an unjustified leap in logic or evidence.

But all of the answers lacked a clear or strong thesis, provided needless exposition, referred to texts not read for class, and made basic errors about the texts, mistaking their genre and so on. If not easy to prove as not the student’s own work, they’d still be easy to assign a grade of C or lower to, simply on the basis of my rubrics for papers.

I was feeling pretty good about things.

Then my daughter started refining her inputs, putting in more parameters and prompts. The essays got better, more specific, more pointed. Each of them now did what a good essay should do: they answered the question. It became clear that so long as a student has a minimal sense of what a paper is supposed to look like or do, or at least knows what a bad paper (by my lights) looks like, they could easily use ChatGPT to come up with excellent answers to even the most out-of-the-way questions.

Where I had initially thought that such a student would have to have mastered quite a few skills in order to do this—that is, would be able to write such a paper on their own—it’s clear to me now that that’s not necessarily the case. Students just have to be able to spot the difference between good work and not good work, which even the most struggling students can already do. It’s always been amazing to me that students who have a difficult time writing a thesis statement can spot it a mile away in another student’s essay. Likewise, a well structured paragraph or paper. That doesn’t mean they can do it themselves, though.

In all my nearly 30 years of teaching, I’ve never once assigned an in-class test. But it looks like until a better option comes along, I’m going to have to go with in-class midterms and finals. It makes me sad, but I’m not sure what else to do.

Update (4pm)

As much as I complain about grading papers, it makes me sad that I may not be able to do this kind of work with students anymore.

For me, grading was never about grades; it was about the intensive feedback, the ongoing revisions of drafts, the individual conversations with students, that went into doing good work.

Good work was never about writing good papers. It was about being able to order your world, to take the confusion that one is confronted with, and turn it into something meaningful and coherent. And to know that that doesn’t just happen spontaneously or instinctively; it’s a practice, requiring, well, work.

That’s not simply a skill for college classes. That’s a life-long practice, of being able to see a situation, pick out those elements that matter and lend it significance, and bring clarity out of chaos.

That’s critical to being a good friend, a good parent, a good citizen, a good neighbor, and having a good life. I really, firmly believe that. I wouldn’t spend as much time as I do on student papers if I didn’t.

But now it all kind of seems pointless. I’ll still do that work in class, obviously, but there is something about clear writing that is connected to clear thinking and acting in the world, that I don’t think can easily be replicated in other mediums.

The only thing, in my life, that has even come close to what writing forces me to do is psychoanalysis, not therapy, but five days on the couch, with your analyst behind you saying almost nothing. Only on the couch have I been led to externalize myself, to throw my thoughts and feelings onto a screen and to look at them, to see them as something other, coldly and from a distance, the way I do when I write.

We are all totalitarians now

One of the most interesting dimensions of our contemporary crisis of democracy discourse and literature is its moralism.

If you listen to the talking heads on MSNBC or read more sophisticated academic treatments of the topic, you’ll find a frequent claim that mainstream Republican leaders who are not Trump—people like McConnell or McCarthy—are cowards or careerists. Unlike the Greenes and Gaetzes of the party, goes the argument, these men are not ideologically opposed to democracy. They’re just insufficiently committed to democracy. That’s the problem.

If they were ideologically principled, if they were honorable, if they were dedicated, out of conviction, to democracy, these leaders would take on the authoritarians in their midst. In the past, the argument continues, Republican leaders did just that: Goldwater, famously, told a Watergate-addled Nixon that he didn’t have the votes in the Senate and that it was time for him to go. But today’s leaders are saddled by their interests; bound to expedients of the moment, they refuse to do what must be done. And so we swirl down the authoritarian drain.

What’s interesting about this moralistic turn is how it pushes against what once was supposed to be the genius of American politics, born of the hard-headed realism of the Framers of the Constitution. That genius was embodied, above all else, in the idea of the separation of powers. Though many liberals have come to question certain parts of the Constitution—even the Supreme Court is now an object of liberal critique—the basic constitutional framework of the separation of powers remains a source of affection and pride.

Why do people value the separation of powers? Because concentrated and undivided power is an invitation to tyranny or autocracy. But how does the separation of powers actually stop tyranny? What is the precise mechanism of its operation?

James Madison famously provided the answer in Federalist 51:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. 

The Framers’ gambit was that self-interested men, zealously pursuing and jealously defending their interests, would defend the prerogatives of their office and the powers of their institutions, thereby frustrating the designs of wannabe tyrants or autocrats in the making. Guarding freedom didn’t require high-minded guardians of freedom. It simply required men to be what they were: selfish, narrow, and small. Such men would hate to have their power taken away from them, so they’d do everything they could to hold on to it. Including opposing tyrants and autocrats. Allowing men to think small, the Constitution ensured that the whole would remain big.

If that kind of thinking sounds familiar, it should. One can find similar modes of argument in the eighteenth-century discourse of a burgeoning capitalism—private vices lead to public virtues, the invisible hand, and all that—and in the later political science of pluralist democracy. Both of those streams—free-market capitalism and pluralist democracy—would rush together in the twentieth century, producing a raging river of commentary about the Soviet Union and leftist totalitarianism. What is the great sin of the left, it was asked, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks? It is the left’s insistence that men and women should think and act on behalf of the collective, the whole, rather than attend to such homier virtues as private property, the family, one’s narrow circle of friends and interests.

Yet in today’s discourse of democracy, it is precisely such self-interested, small-minded men and women who are thought to be the enablers of tyranny. Precisely because they are too committed to their interests and insufficiently concerned about the needs and values of the whole. What democracy needs, it seems, are the kinds of high-minded virtuecrats that patrol the pages of Rousseau.

An entire edifice of thinking, extending from the Framers to Isaiah Berlin, has been toppled. Without anyone’s seeming to have noticed.

Alan Arkin, 1934-2023

Alan Arkin was a part of my childhood.

He lived in Chappaqua, where I grew up. His son Tony was in my grade. Arkin used to come to our elementary school, I’m guessing, though I can’t remember for sure, for something like career day. He’d be spotted around town.

More important to me was “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” Not only was it one of my favorite movies as a kid; it was also one of my dad’s. It’s one of the few movies where I remember my dad laughing out loud. The other was Mel Brooks’s “Spaceballs.” Anyway, I have fond memories of my dad and I laughing through “The Russians Are Coming.”

In memory of Arkin, who died a few days ago, I watched “The In-Laws” last night. A movie where I still laugh out loud.

What struck me this time is how much the movie is about the Latin American debt crisis of the 1970s. I mean, it’s not really about that. It’s about the falling in love of two fathers with each other. That’s the real marriage in any marriage: the one between the in-laws. But the sovereign debt crisis is the story’s backdrop. There’s a lot of discussion of hyper-inflation, and at one point, the Peter Falk character, who’s in the CIA, predicts that if the crisis continues, there’ll be things like “atonal music.” It’s a nice touch. It really does capture the anxiety of the late 1970s over countries in the Global South defaulting on their debt and the fear that inflation was trending toward Weimar-levels.

In one of the last lines of the film, Falk’s character says that he’s getting out of the CIA. The reason? Once upon a time, when he and his comrades were fighting communists, he felt like the CIA meant something. But now, in the era of Carter and the IMF, he feels like he’s risking his life for “the international monetary system.”

After I finished the movie, I did a little reading up on Falk and Arkin. Falk had tried to join the CIA out of college. He got rejected because he had been in a union that was dominated by Communists. It was the 1950s. Arkin’s parents were in the CP orbit, and his father, it seems, was blacklisted.

Just one of many stories of the many actors whose lives intersected with communism and whose careers were shadowed by that early encounter. And though Falk and Arkin were not particularly political actors later in their lives, the intensity of that earlier political specter seems to live in on the intensity of their acting, particularly Arkin’s.

Farewell to a wonderful actor who gave me and my father so much laughter and joy. May his memory be for a blessing.

Markets and Speech: Where Does the Public Reside?

If you were to do an informal poll of conventional progressive opinion—asking where is the public to be found, in acts of speech or in the marketplace—I suspect most liberals, and probably not a few leftists, would say: in acts of speech.

Since the eighteenth century, speech has been firmly associated with the public sphere or the public square. “The people’s darling privilege”: that’s how freedom of speech was understood, as the instrument of the people, assembled in their sovereign and public capacity. There’s a long history behind the notion, stretching back to Aristotle, whose justification for the claim that man is a political animal rests upon the fact that human beings, unlike other animals, have the capacity for speech. In the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt argued that our politicalness was to be found in our capacity for word and deed. Speech and politics, speech and the public, speech and the people: Long before constitutional lawyers thought of rights as primarily individual claims, they thought of freedom of speech as something that belonged to, and required, a public square. Freedom of speech was less something that belonged to the individual than it was a property of good public life.

Markets, on the other hand, have a more checkered status in the contemporary progressive imagination. Returning, again, to our hypothetical poll of liberal and left opinion, I suspect many progressives associate the market, first and foremost, with private acts of possession: the ownership of property, ownership of the means of production, personal possession of money, and so forth. Though all of these elements—property, money, production—involve the state, indeed are inconceivable without some public entity of acknowledgment and enforcement, they are not thought to be public, of the people, in the same way as speech. In fact, we often think of the market as involving individuals, and even when we think of social classes or groups in the market, the idea is that they are pursuing their own particular, non-public, interests. From the point of view of some parts of the left, that is one of the problems of the market: its privatizing or individualizing effect.

Which leads me to 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, yesterday’s Supreme Court case that pitted the First Amendment rights of a graphic designer against the anti-discrimination claims of LGBTQ individuals. Contrary to popular myth, the rights at stake here do not involve religion. Lorie Smith, the designer looking to go into the website business for weddings, was claiming that her free speech rights were threatened by Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, which prohibits public accommodations, including public-facing private businesses, from denying goods and services to individuals on the basis of those individuals’ sexual orientation (and race, creed, religion, etc.)

How was Smith’s freedom of speech at stake, you ask? Smith claimed that because she doesn’t believe in gay marriage, the state’s requirement forces her, compels her, to utter words that she does not believe. A website is a combination of text and graphics. It would be, in this case, custom-designed for the individual couple in question. To design a website celebrating a gay couple’s union would be the equivalent of forcing a Muslim filmmaker—the Court kept returning to this analogy—to make a movie with a Zionist viewpoint. (I’m just the messenger here; not endorsing the claim. Or the assumption about Muslims behind the analogy.)

What’s interesting about the case is how it reverses the left’s usual assumptions about speech and markets. If you read Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, which was joined by the Court’s liberals, it’s clear that while she does not deny that Smith’s website design involves speech, that it is expressive and communicative, she nevertheless insists upon putting Smith’s actions in the context of the market. Not because Smith would make money from her web design but because, by virtue of entering the market, she has opened her business—including her business’s expressive activities—to the public. By entering the market, she has to accept the rules of the market, one of which is to provide access to any and all members of the public. One might say that the market is a kind of public.

Sotomayor traces this principle back to a 1701 case in English common law, but it also animates much of the Enlightenment’s thinking about commerce and markets. Adam Smith, like David Hume and many other theorists of commercial society, thought that an increasingly widened commerce would draw us all out of our local and parochial attachments, connecting us to ever broader and more distant parts of the world. One can easily find the trace of his and other eighteenth-century thinkers’ positions in the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution and in some of the great civil rights cases of the twentieth century, which involve institutions like inns and hotels and restaurants—not just places of commerce and the market, but places of commerce that are connected with travel, with encounters between strangers, with the growing relationships between peoples from distant places and lands. The market connects us, in this tradition, so if we enter the market, we have to connect.

Now we come to Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the opinion for the Court’s conservative majority. For Gorsuch, and for his fellow conservatives, the market barely makes an appearance in this case. Instead, he and the conservatives take the side of Smith, not Adam Smith, but Lorie Smith, the anti-gay marriage website designer. What is at stake are not her rights in the market, which, as Sotomayor relentlessly observers, would open, even force, Smith the designer, into the hands of the public. Instead, says Gorsuch, it is her rights of speech, which Gorsuch and the conservatives see as belonging to the sphere of conscience, of Smith’s inner beliefs. In the same way that the state cannot force me to take an oath to avow a belief I do not hold, to utter words that I do not think, so should the state not force Smith’s business to avow beliefs that she does not hold. That she has entered the market to express herself is neither here nor there, to Gorsuch. Her beliefs, her words, are hers. She may be in the market, but that doesn’t mean she has to connect. Her speech protects her from connecting. It protects her from the public.

So there we have it. Obviously there are all kinds of politics and interests going on here, which have little to do with the formal statements that are being articulated in these warring Court opinions. But the statements matter, and should get us to think some more about our own assumptions regarding where the public lies: in our speech acts or in our market life.

Additionally, there’s an assumption, particularly on the left, that what the right has pursued, through neoliberalism, is the relentlessly economistic organization of society. Everything should be subjected to the rule of the market. Yet as 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis demonstrates, that’s not quite true. It’s not simply that the right wishes to uphold the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people, though that is true. It’s also that the neoliberal right does its work not simply by economizing the public sphere but also by refusing to see, sometimes, the economic dimensions of the public sphere, preferring to see those dimensions as speech acts, expressive, communicative rather than commercial. Conversely, the left, sometimes, can do its best work not by denying the economic dimensions of the public sphere, not by relegating market relations to a second-order sphere of private property and possession, but by seeing the public dimension of market relations and insisting on their connective tissue, the ways in which the market brings us together and creates a public, however imperfect and deformed.

If you want to read more about these issues, take a look at my article on Adam Smith and chapter six of my book on Clarence Thomas. I’ll also be pursuing these issues in my next book, King Capital.

June is the Cruelest Month

June is Supreme Court month, when Clarence Thomas gets to hand down one edict after another. As an antidote, my publisher is offering The Enigma of Clarence Thomas on sale! You can get the Kindle version for the low price of $2.99. Buy it now!

We’re slowly moving past the clichés of Clarence Thomas

If you haven’t been following all the Clarence Thomas news, I’ve been talking with a lot of media outlets about him, the corruption scandal, how it fits with his larger life story, and where things are headed with Thomas and the Court. At the bottom of this post is a roundup of all the interviews and programs and pieces I’ve been involved in.

Aside from tooting my own, I’ve for a reason for listing all my media appearances about Thomas. As you’ve probably noticed, there has been a demonstrable uptick in interest about Thomas—and his Black nationalist origins—since last year. It began with his infamous concurrence in the Dobbs decision, which I wrote about at The New Yorker, and it hasn’t let up since then. The latest corruption scandal is, to my mind, a continuation of the newfound interest in Thomas.

The question is: What explains this interest? For years, Thomas was ignored, dismissed as the judge who never speaks, the judge who doesn’t think for himself or write his own opinions, the judge who isn’t smart. The only question I ever got from people was: Why doesn’t he ask questions from the bench? Then, with Trump’s appointment of three right-wing judges to the Court, and the Court’s dramatic shift to the right, people began to recognize that Thomas has a lot of power. It’s not the John Roberts Court; it’s the Clarence Thomas Court.

We no longer hear much about that silent Thomas, the stupid Thomas, or Scalia’s puppet. Instead, it’s the corrupt Thomas, the con man Thomas, which, say what you will about those epithets, none of them treat him as stupid. All of those epithets—some of which are totally fair (Thomas does get a lot of unsavory gift from very rich men), some of which are not fair at all (that he’s con man)—show that people are now reckoning with the most salient fact about Clarence Thomas, which is that he’s powerful.

But those epithets still try to evade another salient fact about Thomas: that he has a well developed jurisprudence that reflects his deep philosophy about race, wealth, and the Constitution. Harlan Crow didn’t create that jurisprudence; Clarence Thomas did.

What I really appreciate about all the shows I list below is that they are made by journalists who are trying to get beyond the easy stories and lazy stereotypes about Thomas. Thomas is powerful and he is corrupt—and he also has a well developed, constitutional vision of Black people in America and their relationship to wealth and power. Those elements of his persona may be in tension, they may make for contradictions, but they cannot be captured or understood by clichés and slogans.

So read or listen to these stories and shows I mention below, and see what you think.

On Sunday, I joined the NPR show, Notes from America with Kai Wright, to talk about “Clarence Thomas and his Hotep Supreme Court.” I first heard the term “hotep” applied to Thomas in Twitter conversations with Tressie McMillan Cottom, and as soon she made the connection to me, it all made sense. I was happy to hear Kai Wright pick up on it in our conversation, and that it’s in the title of the episode. Our local NPR station in New York, WNYC, is currently featuring the show as its “top story” on the website, and it has a great description of my thesis on Thomas: “Justice Thomas is a Black nationalist — but that doesn’t mean he loves all Black people. We unearth his ideological roots and what they mean for the Court’s looming opinions.” Anyway, have a listen to the show here.

Last week, the wonderful NPR podcast series More Perfect aired a lengthy episode on Thomas, which has been in the works for more than a year, and which they called “Clarence X.” That Clarence X is a reference to an article that a former Thomas Clerk, Stephen Smith, wrote about the influence of Malcolm X and Black nationalism on Thomas—and as the More Perfect producers found out, when Smith sent Thomas the article, Thomas wrote back an appreciative reply, which he signed “Clarence X.” The producers also discovered that Ginni Thomas has apparently sent out irate emails about my book to a listserv of Thomas clerks, “railing about how this Marxist professor thinks he understands her husband better than she does.” The whole podcast is filled with tidbits like these and voices like Juan Williams, who, more than any other journalist, put Clarence Thomas’s name on the map back in 1980, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the Dean of Boston University law school, who was one of the early legal scholars to notice Thomas’s Black nationalist roots and their influence on his jurisprudence. I loved working with Julia Longoria, the host of the show, and the entire team of producers and editors and researchers, who were absolutely dedicated to getting the full story on Thomas. The episode is a triumph of narrative journalism.

Last month, I talked with Brooke Gladstone of NPR’s On the Media, and we dove deep into Thomas’s views on money and rich men, and how those views have structured his approach to the First Amendment (on campaign finance and commercial speech) and help us understand this latest corruption scandal.

I also talked to Briahna Joy Gray on her Bad Faith podcast, where we discussed how Thomas shows that the real culture war between left and right is about money.

Finally, I wrote up some of my thoughts on the Clarence Thomas scandal in Politico.

And there’s one more big show coming out on Thomas in the coming weeks; I’ll keep you posted.

A Watergate for Our Time

If you haven’t caught an episode of “White House Plumbers,” the new HBO series on Watergate, I highly recommend it.

For people my age, Watergate will always be connected to All the President’s Men, not the book by Woodward and Bernstein but Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film. I can’t think of Ben Bradlee without thinking of Jason Robards, Deepthroat without Hal Holbrook, or Hugh Sloan without Meredith Baxter Bierney, who played Sloan’s wife in the film.

The point of the film, and those actors, was to supply a sense of gravitas to a country stricken by the sordidness of the affair. No matter how criminal Nixon may have been, his criminality was redeemed by the feel of the film, with its spirit of agonized conscience and liberal reckoning. That feel derived from the piety and passion of the Cold War, making it the perfect film for, and of, the Cold War state.*

We no longer live in the shadow of the Cold War. We no longer live in the shadow of 9/11. Both of those moments elicited a sense that something had to be done, that something could be done. We no longer live in those countries. We live in a country that exudes a sense that nothing can be done. Debt ceiling crisis? The Supreme Court will say no. Diane Feinstein’s refusing to retire and gumming up the works of judicial appointments? It’s her choice. Climate change? What are you going to do?

White House Plumbers is the story of Watergate told from the perspective of our own failed state. The series isn’t the story one attempted break-in at the Watergate hotel; it’s the story of four bungled attempts at a break-in. Gordon Liddy is no longer a scary ideological fanatic, as he was in All the President’s Men, burning his hand over a candle to prove how tough and committed he was. He’s now a dorky bumbler whose hand over the candle trick grosses out the prostitutes he’s trying to impress. Howard Hunt frets over country clubs and career. Both men come off as wannabe entrepreneurs who pitch the break-in at the hotel as if they were making bids for a contract with an aging nonprofit.

White House Plumbers is the story of a country whose time is past, of geriatric grifters who talk tough and trip over their shoelaces. It’s the Watergate for our time, the Watergate that forces us to see ourselves for who we are.

* My daughter, with whom I’ve been watching “White House Plumbers,” found this 1973 article in the New York Times by R.W. Apple, the dean of the White House press corps, about H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff. Headlined “Haldeman the fierce, Haldeman the faithful, Haldeman the fallen,” the article said, “Haldeman made himself into a latter‐day Janus, a guardian of the gateway to President Richard M. Nixon, a god of the going and the coming.” That gives you a sense of the exalted terms in which this extended experiment in criminality was described by the Washington media.

Talking Clarence Thomas and Money with NPR’s Brooke Gladstone

I talked about the Clarence Thomas scandal with Brooke Gladstone on On the Media this weekend. You should be able to hear it on any NPR outlet wherever you are, but in case you miss it, here’s a link where you can catch it.