Corey Robin's Blog, page 23

Adorno in America

The history of the Frankfurt School in America is usually told as a story of one-way traffic. The question being: What did America get from the Frankfurt School? The answer usually offered: a lot! We got Marcuse, Neumann, Lowenthal, Fromm, and, for a time, Horkheimer and Adorno (who ultimately went back to Germany after the war)—the whole array of émigré culture that helped transform the United States from a provincial outpost of arts and letters into a polyglot Parnassus of the world.

The wonderfully counter-intuitive and heterodox question that animates Eric Oberle’s Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity is: what did the Frankfurt School get from America? To the extent that question has been asked, it has traditionally provoked a negative response. Not a lot. Adorno was notoriously unhappy in the US: the kitsch, the kitsch. And for those Frankfurters who may have found what they were looking for in the States, the suspicion has always been that they were somehow seduced and made less smart—less gloomy, less dialectical, less mandarin, less mitteleuropäisch—by their experience in the US. Witness Erich Fromm.

But Oberle refuses that argument. In a work of boundless ambition and comparable achievement, which combines close reading of familiar texts and synoptic intellectual histories that bring together unfamiliar texts, The Century of Negative Identity shows just how indebted the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno and Horkheimer, was to its time in America. One of the most innovative and exciting sections of the book (of which there are many) involves a re-reading of the relationship between The Authoritarian Personality and Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The two works are often taken as almost polar opposites: the first, a dutiful recitation of American-style social science, replete with data-sets and survey modules, and enough quantitative evidence to make a social psychologist swoon; the other, a recondite work of continental philosophy, with enough obscurity (of argument, style, organization, scope) to make a comp lit grad student swoon. The freshness of Oberle’s approach is to show how much the two works owe to each other. Deftly combining different facets and disciplinary invocations of identity—from logic and epistemology to social psychology and politics—Oberle demonstrates that Adorno consistently found himself reworking issues of identity through his efforts in The Authoritarian Personality, setting him up for his masterwork in postwar Germany, Negative Dialectics. Often presented as an unpleasant distraction from his philosophical work, Adorno’s work on The Authoritarian Personality was something Adorno actually enjoyed; as Oberle notes, Horkheimer reports in a November 1944 letter that Adorno said “that he ‘had a lot of fun’ meeting with the Berkeley Public Opinion group to develop preliminary questions on the ‘F-Scale.'”

Since the election of Trump, The Authoritarian Personality has been revived as a kind of Rosetta Stone to our age of authoritarianism. For good reason. In its time, the work was a path-breaking attempt to combine different methods in the social sciences (in-depth interviews, surveys, and so on), with an orientation that was both quantitative and qualitative, approaching questions of individual personality through a variety of lenses: politics, economics, psychology, and sociology. It was highly self-conscious about its methods, about the relationship between researcher and researched. More important, it asked the question of whether it was possible for a democratic seeming society to prove host to assorted anti-democratic tendencies. Understandably, a work of that sort would seem like a natural resource for our present moment.

But as Oberle shows, the actual approach of The Authoritarian Personality was light years away—and ahead!—of our current approaches. Too often today, the discussion around authoritarianism in the US devolves into a set of easy oppositions. There is a part of the country, the coasts, that is enlightened, tolerant, open to diversity, and opposed to racism and misogyny. Then there is the benighted part of the country—the proverbial white working class, who are thought to be located in the Upper Midwest, Appalachia, and the South—that is psychologically disposed to the opposite values: ignorance, fake news, racism, misogyny, nativism, and parochialism. It’s like a parody of the Enlightenment that Rousseau would rise up and roar against, where moral values and intellectual typologies become the markers of greater and lesser civilization.

The Authoritarian Personality, by contrast, was inspired by the dialectician’s belief in what Oberle calls, in a luminous phrase, “the shortest distance between norm and extreme.” Where much of the dominant social psychology of the time (and this would increase during the Cold War) set up a contrast between the normal, adaptive, humane, egalitarian ethos of democracy and the pathological, maladaptive, domineering ethos of authoritarianism, Adorno and his co-authors understood the world as one of contradiction, where the poles of disagreement or dissimilarity often masked or rested upon a deeper synthesis of agreement or similarity. The adaptive and maladaptive might simply be different expressions of a more structured diremption in a society or institution. As Horkheimer wrote to Adorno in a programmatic letter of 1945:

If in a family with two boys where the respected father or beloved mother complains repeatedly about having been cheated or outsmarted by Jews, one boy sticks to the general doctrines of good behavior and neighborly love advocated in school and home, and the other boy goes out and hits a Jew, who, do you think, acts more neurotically? I admit, the problem is not easy.

In their interviews and empirical research, the team behind The Authoritarian Personality consistently found cases of the tolerant and egalitarian enfolding more racist and anti-Semitic views. Rather than simply seeing the first as a mask for the second, however, the authors attempted to show how imbricated the two views were and how easily they could co-habit in the same mind.

Another distinctive feature of their research was their refusal to take group identities as pre-existent or natural.  Adorno, Oberle argues, was haunted by the same question that haunted Simmel: “Why must the Stranger be hated?” All too often in contemporary discourse, there seems to be an assumption that there must always be in any group an Other. Adorno and his colleagues worked tirelessly to understand how groups are constructed as in-groups and out-groups, and how that process of construction so often preceded or transcended more psychological accounts of identity formation. As Oberle writes of The Authoritarian Personality:

The study went out of its way to avoid naturalizing identitarian logics. In conducting interviews, the interviewers were instructed to make no assumptions about outgroups—neither their membership, nor mutual antagonism, nor even their actual existence. Outgroups were analyzed as they existed in the minds of the interviewees…most individuals related to group collectivities first through the law and property relations, and then through a sense of shared vulnerability. Groups therefore formed not organically but as a network among similarly situated individuals. Therefore, though interviewers probed whether self- or ingroup concepts were formed antithetically, they were careful neither to suggest identitiarian thinking is necessarily neurotic, pathological, or aggressive, nor to cast notions of group antagonism as inevitable or natural. To do so would tribalize individuality.

As this passage suggests, The Authoritarian Personality took the materiality of identity and social and psychological life seriously. Identities are not given; they are made, through law, property, institutions, and the like. That, too, sets Adorno’s work off from much of the contemporary discourse of authoritarianism in America, which sees the source of the problem to be overwhelmingly psychological, strictly within the heads of individuals, something that can only be solved by better education.

The materialism of Adorno and his team leads Oberle to make a fascinating connection between The Authoritarian Personality and the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, and the great midcentury works of American social analysis such as Myrdal’s American Dilemma. This discussion opens an entire new window on the discourse of race and racism in America, with Adorno offering a counterpoint to the heavily psychological approach that so many writers took to what used to be called “race relations” in the United States. In an afterward to The Authoritarian Personality that was never published, Adorno wrote of Myrdal:

The gist of Aptheker’s argument is that the Negro problem is [in Myrdal] abstracted from its socio-economic conditions, and as soon as it is treated as being essentially of a psychological nature, its edge is taken away.

The Aptheker in question, of course, is Herbert Aptheker, the Marxist historian of slave revolts. That Adorno would find a sympathetic critic in Aptheker suggests not only how resolute he was in his effort to meld economics and psychology (“the concept that there is economy on the one hand, and individuals upon whom it works on the other, has to be overcome”) but also the connection he saw in the question of anti-Semitism and European fascism, on the one hand, and racism and American authoritarianism on the other. That connection has recently been taken up quite a bit in histories of the Nazis (most notably in the work of James Q. Whitman), but Oberle reveals a whole discourse in the 1940s that was very much concerned with the same problem. A discourse that got shut down during the Cold War, when the attention of the American state shifted from fighting fascism to fighting communism.

But while that discourse was live, it insisted, as Adorno did, not on sequestering the psychological, the way so many contemporary accounts of racism do, but on mixing the material and the psychological.

As Oberle shows, that discourse from the 1940s now reads almost like the lost tractates of an ancient civilization. And yet, as Oberle also shows, it still speaks to us, calling out what we have yet to learn. As Ralph Ellison put it in an unpublished review of An American Dilemma from 1941:

In our culture the problem of the irrational, that blind spot in our knowledge of society where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest they actually meet, has taken the form of the Negro problem.

So it remains today, where discussions that attempt to relate the question of race to the organization of capitalism are dismissed and reduced to the mocking rubric of “economic anxiety.”

Update (8 pm)

As someone on Twitter pointed out, Ellison’s review, while it was not published by The New Republic, which had commissioned it, did appear in his collection of essays Shadow and Act.

On Facebook, Peter Gordon, who knows more about the Frankfurt School than just about anyone, says that my claim about the American connections of the Frankfurt School not being sufficiently studied is overstated if not wrong. He pointed me to this volume, which he says has been “unjustly neglected,” and which also looks excellent.

A State of Emergency or a State of Courts?

The Washington Post reports this morning, “If President Trump declares a national emergency to construct a wall on the southern border, only one thing is certain: There will be lawsuits. Lots of them. From California to Congress, the litigants will multiply.”

One of several elements of our time that I don’t think proponents of the authoritarianism or fascism thesis truly confront is just how much of Trump’s rule is mediated and ultimately decided upon by the courts.

Whenever Trump does something, everyone automatically assumes (and rightly so) that whether he can do it or not will be settled not by his violence or the alt-right’s strongman tactics or white supremacist masses in the streets but by an independent judiciary.

Now courts can be purely ornamental instruments of an authoritarian regime, that’s true. Judges can be terrorized into supporting a strongman or a fascist party. They can be bought off. Authoritarian rulers can fire or imprison or murder judges and simply replace them with toadies.

But that’s not what we have here. The judges who rule on Trump’s actions are both liberal and conservative; sometimes the former prevail, sometimes the latter. All of them have been duly appointed in accordance with a process (we can argue about Merrick Garland and Gorsuch, but there have been hundreds of judicial nominations or appointments under Trump that have been procedurally sound). However much their critics may not like their rulings, they are, for the most part, the standard judiciary you would see under a composite of Republican and Democratic presidents.

More important, as I said, we all of us in the United States, still assume that these judges and justices will have the last word on Trump’s rule. Not browbeaten or bribed judges and justices but independent judges and justices. Trump is not the decider of his own rule, in other words; the courts are.

For all the sense that Trump has transformed America, then, we still live in an America that looks remarkably like what Louis Hartz described in 1955: a country where “the largest issues of public policy should be put before nine Talmudic judges examining a single text.”

What does Trump’s pending declaration of emergency mean about his power and the state of his presidency?

What does Trump’s pending declaration of a state of emergency, so that he can commandeer funds to pay for his wall, mean politically? What does it tell us about his power or powerlessness?

I’ve talked on many occasions about Steve Skowronek’s theory of presidential power. In that account, presidential power is dependent on two factors: the strength and resilience of the existing regime, and the affiliation or orientation (supportive or opposed) of the president to that regime. The strongest presidents are those who come to power in opposition to an extraordinarily weak and tottering regime, who shatter that regime and construct a new one. Think Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. The weakest presidents are those who are affiliated to a weak and tottering regime, and completely saddled with their affiliation to that regime. Think Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter.

There’s one part of Skowronek’s argument–a third factor, if you will–that I’ve not talked about. That is the organizational resources that a president has at his disposal. Where Skowronek’s theory of regimes and affiliations is cyclical–regimes rise and fall–the organizational element of his theory is linear. The organizational resources of the presidency grow over time. Early in the history of the American state, the material resources presidents had at their disposal were few; with time, they became many. Reagan had far more resources than Lincoln had or than Jefferson had, merely because of the expansion of the state apparatus itself.

One of the most fascinating twists in Skowronek’s argument is that the steady expansion of state power, the growth of material resources, works differently for different types of presidents.

For presidents who are in the strong or realignment position–Reagan, etc., back to Jefferson–there are more resources at their disposal over time. Reagan has more material power than Lincoln had. But there are also more resources available to state actors who would oppose these presidents. So Skowronek argues that if you compare Jefferson to Reagan, you’ll see that despite Reagan’s possession of greater material and organizational resources, Jefferson had far more political power and room for maneuver than Reagan did. Jefferson’s reconstruction of the political universe was far more comprehensive than Reagan’s–Reagan was never able to get rid of Social Security or Medicare, he tried to launch a new Cold War but wound up having to illegally fund the Contras because Congress would not allow him to do it legally, and so on–precisely because the state apparatus under Jefferson was not as strong as the one that was under Reagan. Which meant that Jefferson’s opponents had equally fewer resources to oppose him. Jefferson’s opponents, the Federalists, had the courts, and that was about it. And with time, and more judicial appointments, that went away, too.

But for presidents who are the in Carter/Hoover position–and this also includes John Adams and John Quincy Adams–the expansion of the state apparatus has the opposite effect. Though those presidents are in the weakest political position possible, over time, they are able to do more, despite their weakened position, precisely because there is so much more material and organizational power at their disposal. Yes, their opponents have power, too, but that power is not nearly as effective as the other kind of power their opponents have, namely, the political power that comes under a tottering regime.

So Carter, despite his very weak position, is able to do unbelievable things, things Jefferson (in a strong position) could only have dreamed of. Despite the tottering of the New Deal regime, there is still enough belief in government under Carter that he’s able to get two new Cabinet positions and departments (Energy and Education). He’s able to launch a military buildup. He’s able to deregulate whole industries. Most potent of all, he gets Paul Volcker at the Fed. John Adams and John Quincy Adams, who were in comparable positions, scrambled to do anything; Carter, despite being in the same position, is able to do a lot.

Now we come to Trump and his declaration of emergency.

From a political point of view, the situation looks like that of a classic weakened presidency. For two years, while his party had control over Congress, Trump got not a single dollar for building his wall. Amid the debacle of the shutdown (more on that in one second), it’s easy to forget that while Trump did manage to extract $1.375 billion from a Democratic-controlled House to build 55 new miles of wall, he could not even get that from a Republican-controlled Congress.

After his first two years in office, Trump played what he thought was his strongest suit: he provoked the longest government shutdown in American history hoping to finally get Congress to do what he had not yet been able to get it to do. Despite that power play, he came out with even less than he had going into the fight in December.

These are signs of classic presidential weakness. Remember, Trump staked his entire reputation on winning the midterms over the issue of immigration and the wall. His message heading into the November elections was as clear as it was crude: “If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal immigrants and massive caravans, you better vote Republican,” he said in a campaign speech. Well, the voters heard him, and cast their ballots accordingly, leading to the Democrats’ largest midterm gain since Watergate.

Losing big on a signature issue, not once, not twice, but three times–during the first two years when the Republicans controlled Congress; during the midterm elections; and then, with the shutdown–is a classic sign of what Skowronek calls presidential disjunction.

Like Carter, Trump is in a very weakened position. His ability to define the political field has been almost minimal.

Yet, like Carter, Trump is the beneficiary of the increased resources that are available to a president.

Over time, Congress has granted the presidency the power to declare national emergencies. Though the 1976 National Emergencies Act was meant to constrain the president, it hasn’t worked out that way. As Elizabeth Gotein of the Brennan Center writes in the current issue of The Atlantic:

 Under this law, the president still has complete discretion to issue an emergency declaration—but he must specify in the declaration which powers he intends to use, issue public updates if he decides to invoke additional powers, and report to Congress on the government’s emergency-related expenditures every six months. The state of emergency expires after a year unless the president renews it, and the Senate and the House must meet every six months while the emergency is in effect “to consider a vote” on termination.

By any objective measure, the law has failed. Thirty states of emergency are in effect today—several times more than when the act was passed. Most have been renewed for years on end. And during the 40 years the law has been in place, Congress has not met even once, let alone every six months, to vote on whether to end them.

As a result, the president has access to emergency powers contained in 123 statutory provisions.

Trump is now pushing the presidency’s organizational resources, in the form of presidential emergencies, to their limit. Like Carter, he’s got resources at his disposal that John Adams did not have. But as was true of Carter, Trump’s dependence on those resources is not a sign of strength but weakness.

When Adorno Had Fun

“A November 1944 letter to Horkheimer, for example, finds Adorno recalling that he ‘had a lot of fun’ meeting with the Berkeley Public Opinion group to develop preliminary questions on the ‘F-Scale.'”

—Eric Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Culture of Negative Identity, p. 152

I highly recommend Oberle’s book. It’s a little outside my usual reading these days, but it has some really fascinating readings of old and familiar texts and terrific biographical nuggets like this. I’ll be blogging about it more once I get rid of this cursed flu.

Beer Track, Wine Track, Get Me Off This Fucking Train

Yesterday, on Twitter, I tweeted a version of this claim:

Beto, Harris, Klobuchar, Biden, Gillibrand, Booker: The basis of their candidacies is ultimately them, their person. That’s what they all have in common.

Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates whose basis is a set of ideas, well worked out over the years, about the economy and the state.

The tweet was one part of a much longer Facebook post, in which I elaborated the point. Here’s a short excerpt from that post:

Among the many reasons that I have no time for the first set of candidates is that I’m so tired of these quintessentially American campaigns that are so wrapped up in the personality of the candidate, tied up in a bow of banalities—Biden as the white working class Joe! Harris as a woman of color who’s a prosecutor for the people! Beto as the white man on a horse! Klobuchar as the abusive boss (maybe she’s hoping to give Trump a run for his money)! Booker as the man of love—as opposed to mounting a comprehensive political argument about our world.

One of the things I’ve always found so strange about liberals and Democrats is how much they make fun of Ronald Reagan as an intellectual and political simpleton—when the slightest review of his speeches and writings (many of which he wrote himself) would show just how intense was this man’s worldview, how slowly and carefully he worked it out over the years and decades of his move to the right—while running to embrace candidates almost entirely for their charisma (or putative charisma; I’ve never understood how people could persuade themselves to fall in love with a John Kerry or a Biden or a Gillibrand) and life story.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again: the last successful Democratic candidate who had an actual story to tell about American politics and the economy, about where we were and where we were going, was Bill Clinton. I hated that story, but it was an analysis. Even Obama, whose speeches I’ve been reading so closely, didn’t really have much of an analysis of American politics and the economy, despite his populist nods throughout the 2008 campaign.

Without the larger context of my Facebook post, however, some Twitter Democrats were angered by the initial tweet. And let me know in no uncertain terms.

So let me try to set out a broader account of what I’m getting at here.

I think some part of the pushback I got on Twitter (where people rushed to assure me that Beto or Booker or Gillibrand has a long list of serious policy proposals under their belt or on their website) reflects the larger parlous state of our political discourse and analysis. When it comes to presidential elections, people seem to have only two ideas of how it is that a candidate runs. I’m going to borrow from one of the more irritating usages from the 2008 Democratic primary and call it the beer track analysis and the wine track analysis.

The beer track analysis holds that politics and elections are above all about personality. Voters, in this theory, respond to some elusive notion of who the candidate is, is she like me, can I identify with her, is she likable? (As if Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter were likable. And if you’re thinking of Habitat for Humanity Jimmy, you need to go back to Christian scold-y Jimmy of the 1970s. He really wasn’t likable.) It’s basically the “Would I like to get a beer with this person” that we heard so much about during George W. Bush’s first presidential run in 2000.

Now the people who proffer this kind of analysis never think of themselves as being motivated by such jejune considerations. No, personality and likability are just how the rubes and masses respond to politics. It’s unfortunate, of course, but rubes are going to rube.

No, the people who proffer this analysis think that they’re interested in a different, more sophisticated, set of considerations. They’re part of the wine track, you see, and what they care about is that all-important, Ivy-League-credentialed, wonk-mystical and stat-esoteric concern called “policy.”

Got that? The beer track cares about personality, the wine track cares about policy.

Despite what I’m sure is a case of massive self-deception on their parts, the wine track folks really do believe that they, rational beings that they are, spend hours on end researching carefully all the policy planks and proposals of the various candidates. And that they only reach a determination of which candidate to choose based on their close reading of a meta-data study they found on J-STOR that confirms the viability of said candidate’s toolkit of policies.

These are the types of people who will tell you, after much careful study, and with no apparent sense of irony, “I really think that Klobuchar’s tax-advantaged savings account proposal is the sweet spot of this campaign: it’ll do more than anything for poverty alleviation but it’s got real electoral juice.” They’re the people who’ll tell you, when you say you don’t understand why candidate x is running, go to their website. And think they’ve done something in doing so.

What I think both accounts—the personality and the policy, the beer track and the wine track—miss is the role of ideology, of political argument, of collective story-telling.

Now just so I’m clear: When I say ideology and argument, I don’t mean a candidate needs to channel Rawls. I mean, does she have a story about the American polity, about how we’ve come to the impasse we’re in (Trump, rampant inequality, rampant incarceration, a party of unadulterated nativism and racism and misogyny, the 1%, non-existent unions, winnowing voting rights, growing strike waves, impending extinction of the planet, etc.), about who is responsible for it (not just a villainous Republican Party but also a larger political economy and set of social actors), and how we’re going to reverse and undo this development.

The great realigners had such a story. Read FDR’s Commonwealth Club speech. Read Lincoln’s Cooper Union address. What you take away from those speeches is not a list of policies but a narrative, an ideologically-laden narrative, of the last however many decades of American politics, and how those years need to be brought to an end. Above all, they locate a variety of social ills (in Lincoln’s case, not just slavery but also winnowing democracy, constitutional decline, and so on; in FDR’s case, the end of the frontier, the Depression, reaching the limits of capitalist expansion) in a socially malignant form: the slaveocracy, in Lincoln’s case, the economic royalists, in FDR’s case. Again, they didn’t give you a laundry list of issues (sexual harassment here, taxes there, voting rights over there); they wove the whole thing into a single story, a single theory, locating each part in a larger whole.

Some non-realigners also have such an analysis. I’m not a fan of these, but you could definitely say Bill Clinton had such a story, Richard Nixon had such a story. And I would say that Obama had such a story in his speech on Jeremiah Wright.

So to bring this back to my original post: I don’t doubt that all of the candidates in the Democratic primary have their itemized list of policy proposals (many of them, of course, responses to Sanders’s 2016 campaign and the subsequent take-off of AOC and other Democratic Party politicians), as a lot of their supporters on Twitter rushed to point out to me. But policy is not ideology; a list of issues is not a political analysis or argument; a website is not a story. I don’t hear from most of them what I’m talking about here. So I stand by what I said: only Warren and Sanders have the kind of analysis I’m talking about, the kind of analysis that can mobilize voters to do what must be done.

Now it is possible, as my friend Alex Gourevitch pointed out to me in an email, that a candidate like Harris has a story. We saw a version of that story in a couple of the speeches she’s given over the last decade in which we she celebrated her work in prosecuting the parents of truant schoolchildren. As near as I can tell, these are, to date, her most elaborated narrative of how she thinks about the state and society. They’re clear, coherent, and tell you exactly how she thinks about the world—where the problems lie, where the solutions lie—and what policies go with it.

The problem, of course, with that narrative is that it is now in bad odor. It may express the truest version of what Harris thinks, but carceral capitalism is not a winning platform, the way it was under Bill Clinton. This isn’t Harris’s fault; like a lot of other candidates of her generation, she came up as a politician under the hegemony of the Clinton New Democrats. They had developed a once-in-a-generation political story or analysis, and now that story/analysis is not acceptable. Hillary Clinton found herself in a similar boat. So Harris can’t run on the one story we have some reason to believe she really believes. So she’s got to get another one, or failing that, a laundry list of platform items, or failing that, a compelling story about herself.

But that’s the thing about stories and ideologies and analysis: unlike Medicare for All, or some other issue you’re willing to support (at least rhetorically) because it polls well or because Bernie has shifted the discourse, an ideology or analysis is not something you come by over night.

Lincoln, Reagan (I’m less certain about FDR on this, I’ll confess) worked their way over the years to what they said. We mistake that point for authenticity; I don’t think that’s the significance here. What I’m talking about is not the authenticity of a candidate’s positions, how anciently or recently she’s adopted those positions (FDR’s, of course, changed radically over the course of his first and second term) but the credibility and depth of their analysis. Voters will forgive all sorts of adaptations and policy revisions; they find it harder to accept the idea that yesterday you thought this—where this is not support or opposition to a healthcare policy, but something more fundamental about the relationship between states and markets and society—and today you think that.

Developing a story or analysis or ideology takes time; it’s not something you crib and adapt in response to polls. It doesn’t mean a candidate needs to be as ancient as Sanders (Bill Clinton, of course, was quite young, but he nevertheless had a whole analysis of the problem). But it does mean that her political voice has to have some sense of continuity, and if she’s changed her positions or policy (as Reagan did, as Warren has), that she has a credible story about how she came to that new position.

Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures

Now that I’ve finished my Clarence Thomas book—it’ll be out in September, pre-order it now—I’m catching up on my reading. Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures wasn’t first on my list, but once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down.

Hecht was a screenwriter, the force, or one of the forces, behind films like Scarface, Notorious, Twentieth Century, and many other films. “He invited 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” said Godard. As Hoffman explains:

Screwball comedy’s airborne patter; the brooding tones of the gangster saga; the newspaper farce and its hard-boiled banter—these were among Hecht’s signature modes, and whether or not he fathered these forms, he certainly played a major role in their upbringing.

Hecht was something else: a Jew. An American Jew, in fact, a Jewish-American. As Hoffman shows, he took to the hyphen with all conviction of a convert. (Indeed, his onetime collaborator Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane, said, after one of Hecht’s many explosive episodes involving the question of Judaism, “Six years ago Ben found that he was a Jew, and now he behaves like a six-year-old Jew.” It wasn’t really true, but it captured something about Hecht’s zeal.)

I was going to say that, for me, the Jewish Hecht is the real power of Hoffman’s book. Hecht, you see, aligned himself in the 1940s with the most right-wing forces of the Zionist movement, the Revisionists as they were called. Menachem Begin visited him in Nyack (this was a famous visit of Begin to the US, which Hannah Arendt mobilized fellow intellectuals to protest. Arendt called Begin the leader of “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” That should give you a sense of how far-out Begin was and how adventurous Hecht’s expeditions were.)

Hoffman captures Hecht’s sympathies, and this larger world of right-wing Zionism, with great sensitivity. You see in Hecht’s extravagances—and he got a lot of justified hell for that—a premonition of the Zionist project, what it would mean and come to mean, to an American Jew. It’s a cliche of nationalism studies that the author of a national identity will often come from outside the nation; think Napoleon, Stalin, or even someone like Alexander Hamilton. In Hoffman’s hands, and through Hecht’s outsider eyes, we see what Zionism meant to so many Jews. So much so that Begin spoke at his funeral, and there was a move in 2003, while Ariel Sharon was prime minister, to have Hecht reburied in Jerusalem.

But as I said, I was going to say this, the Jewish Hecht, is the real power of her book. But without giving anything away, Hoffman does something at the end of the book that nearly took my breath away, bringing Hecht’s Judaism back to the question of his filmmaking. Late in life, Hecht wrote a searing and sentimental book about the Kasztner trial in Israel. (No need to dwell on the details, but the trial raised profound questions about the role of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis and the role of those collaborators in the construction of the Israeli state. Arendt takes up the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem.) Hecht was in his element: denouncing the Diasporic Jew, the collaborating Jew, the compromising Jew.

The easy and obvious move would be to mock Hecht, demanding machismo and martyrdom, denouncing compromise and collaboration, from the safety and comfort of his Nyack estate. Hecht wasn’t the first armchair warrior; he wouldn’t be the last.

But Hoffman does something far more interesting:

Ben Hecht, no martyr he, knew a thing or two about compromise—and even if he’d recently bristled on live national television at the mere suggestion that he’d sold out, he had in fact spent his life making deals, hustling, opting for the actual over the ideal, improvising with wile, collaborating, if you will, in the more positive sense of that term. Much of his best work had, in fact, been the product of collaboration—and while whipping off a Hollywood script with an old pal like Lederer or MacArthur, or doctoring a screenplay for Hawks or Hitchcock. Selznick or Zanuck hardly entailed the same crushing ethical concessions as did bargaining for Jewish lives with Nazis during wartime, Hecht himself certainly never aspired to the purity it seems he demanded of the players in this wrenching life-and-death drama. That paradox seemed to land squarely in his blind spot.

Hoffman appropriately holds back here, but it’s a fascinating insight and question she raises about compromise and collaboration: when it produces barbarism and when it yields art.

But there is something much more profoundly subversive at play here, beyond the usual culture/barbarism meditation that we’ve come to expect from writing on the 20th century and Jews. Hoffman also seems to be suggesting, offering, collaboration as the hidden thread of Hecht’s whole life: of his artistry, of his life as Jew and as an American. All of it was compromise, all of it was collaboration, all of it was genius. What else is Hollywood, at its best, if not collaboration and even compromise? The genius was in the compromise, in the collaboration, not in the purity. There’s a sense throughout the book of that kind of miraculous alchemy, where vice becomes  virtue.Brecht, or Adorno, or one of those guys said the mansion of culture is built on dog shit. He, whoever it was, offered that up in a declensionist mode. Hoffman turns that around and serves it up as exaltation.

It’s the kind of question Hecht would have scorned as fancy and highfalutin, yet it’s the kind of question that haunted him throughout his life—drawn as he was to the seamy side of the gangster world, the world of Jewish terrorism, the world of the cynical newspaperman, yet always rousing himself to make great art and tormenting himself for failing to do so (in his head, at least).

 

Neo-Nazi Fathers, Jewish Mothers, and Political Converts

I’ve got a piece in The New Yorker—my first—on political conversions. I look at the case of Derek Black, a white nationalist who is no longer a white nationalist, and Max Boot. With the help of Burke, Arendt, Isaac Deutscher, and Daniel Bell, I try and make sense of why it is that you so often see converts from left to right—and why they have such an impact on the right—but don’t often see converts from right to left with nearly the same impact. (Incidentally, that was a topic—converts from right to left—that I wrote about nearly 20 years in Lingua Franca.)

Anyway, here’s a taste:

Derek Black didn’t become a white supremacist. He was born one. His father, Don Black, was a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and the creator of Stormfront, one of the most popular white-nationalist Web sites in the United States. Derek’s mother, Chloe, had previously been married to David Duke, America’s leading neo-Nazi and Derek’s godfather. Smart, articulate, and savvy, Derek co-hosted a radio show with his father, addressed conferences, and wrote articles on the Web. From an early age, he knew how to package racism for a crowd that was warm to the message but uncertain about its implications. He didn’t argue for the supremacy of whites. He said that whites were a group, one of many, that had the right, like other groups, to defend its interests and identity. Races weren’t unequal; they were different. White nationalists were the “true multiculturalists.” He had his dad scrub Stormfront clean of Nazi signs and racial epithets. Press too hard, speak too crudely, you’ll lose people. All things in moderation.

A gifted code-switcher, Derek had the ability—strangely not rare among racist demagogues—to understand and relate to people who weren’t like him. That came in handy in 2010, when he enrolled at the liberal New College, in Sarasota, Florida.

And it goes on. Have a read.

On that dreadful Brexit movie

We saw that Brexit movie on HBO last night. God was it dreadful.

Set aside the fetish for elite movers and shakers behind the scenes, the conspiratorial mindset of master manipulators of public opinion. (It’s kind of a weird moment where everyone across the spectrum seems to have their own versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)

What was most grating about the film was how utterly familiar and clichéd was the lead character Dominic Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was the mastermind behind the Leave campaign.

In Benedict/Cummings, we get—inadvertently, I’m quite convinced: self-importance; failed attempts at oracularity that wind up being platitudinous; incomprehensible scribbling on the white board, meant to signal that we’re in the presence of the political version of John Nash, that resolve on the insertion of a “back” in between “take” and “control”; historical grandiosity that can never quite decide whether Brexit is the most important event since the fall of the Berlin Wall or Alexander the Great’s decision to launch the Persian campaign.

Watching all of this, getting increasingly bored and irritated, I suddenly remembered where I had seen it all before: in the television ramblings of Pat Cadell.

Caddell, for those of you who don’t know or remember, was the pollster impresario behind Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign. He never was really able to repeat that victory again, though he certainly gave it a go with Gary Hart in 1984, Joe Biden in 1988, and Jerry Brown in 1992. But, boy, did he hold on for decades, trying to position himself on TV or elsewhere as the man who held all the keys to the castle.

All the same elements that we see in HBO’s portrayal of Cummings were there in Cadell: the impulse to self-dramatization, the combination of crackpottery and kitsch, and the sheer luck or happenstance of having won one campaign, propelling him, in the mind of his admirers and detractors, to the level of genius.

And at the same time, despite the grandiloquent homages to history and community and destiny, the HBO film gives you no real sense at all of what this guy actually thinks or is about. Just some vague sense of him—as was also true of Cadell—lurching from one cause to the next campaign to the next candidate, always in search of something, something. You do, however, get a much clearer—and, ironically, more poignant—sense of what the maestro behind the Remain campaign thinks and feels. Which may or may not have been deliberate.

I guess it’s just an irresistible conceit of the genre, the man behind the scenes of the political campaign, always reinvent to the wheel.

Speaking of which, the film’s obsession with online data tracking, micro-targeted ads and such: there was a whole spate of this kind of discussion back in the 1980s, just when more localized and computerized forms of marketing and market research were getting going, and how that all was going to completely and utterly transform our politics. In fact, my sister Jessica gave me a book for either my high school or college graduation that was all about this topic. I remember poring over page after page, chapter after chapter, of discussions about how zip codes were destiny, and how all political choices would be determined by this newfound granular knowledge of our consumer choices. The fetish for technology and microscopic knowledge as the grand explainer of politics never ends.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the film, you can give it a pass.

The Future of the Supreme Court in the Liberal Imagination

Imagine you’re a law student today—remembering how Gorsuch was appointed for a seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland; thinking about how Kavanaugh was appointed despite the obvious truth of Christine Blasey Ford’s claims about his attempted assault on her; and anticipating the very real possibility that Trump may get yet a third appointment to replace Ginsburg.

The Supreme Court of your future will consist of a six-person right-wing majority.

Two justices of that majority will forever have the stench of credible charges of sexual assault or sexual harassment hanging over them.

Four justices of that majority will forever be the appointees of presidents who didn’t win the popular vote (or five justices

if you throw in Alito, who was appointed in Bush’s second term, which Bush did win with the popular vote but wouldn’t have won had he not won the electoral vote, with the help of a conservative Supreme Court, in 2000).

Three justices of that majority will forever be the appointees of a president whose victory, many in elite liberal circles of the law believe, was secured with the illegal collusion of Vladmir Putin.

Put that all together and it’s hard for me to see how the law students and budding law professors of this generation aren’t going to view the Supreme Court and the enterprise of constitutional law with a skepticism so jaundiced, it will make the arguments of Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory seem like Thomistic natural law.

An interesting historical parallel arises.

Imagine you’re a progressive law student coming of age between the 1910s and the 1930s. You’re a student of someone like Felix Frankfurter or his ilk, politicized by the labor movement, the Socialist Party, or the Depression to join various radical causes.

You’ve read a lot of legal realism. You come to a view of the Court as not a source of legitimacy but as the bastion of the American ruling class, forever enforcing the dictates and injunctions of capital. And you start casting about for a legal philosophy or theory that would not empower that Court but defang, even strangle, it.

I have to believe we’re in for some version of this from the legal left in the next decade or two: not an effort to rehabilitate the law in more progressive directions but an effort to systematically delegitimize the law and the Court, recognizing to some degree that that has already been accomplished by Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and the right.

It’ll be interesting to watch.

Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven

In shul this morning, I came upon this passage from the Talmud: “Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven.” It’s an arresting thought, on two grounds.

First, we tend to think of omnipotent power as causing fear, even terror. Yet the one thing, the Talmud says, that omnipotent power cannot determine is whether we are afraid of it.

Second, we tend to think of our fear as something we don’t control, as an automatic and instinctual response to some power or threat. Yet here is the Talmud suggesting that everything within us is out of our control—except for our fear.

As it happens, these two claims are similar to the arguments I’ve often tried to make about the politics of fear: that fear in politics does not reflect a simple, automatic, instinctive response to threats; that our sense of what is threatening in politics is mediated through our prior moral and political beliefs; that when it comes to the objects of our political fear, we have choices, our responses are not predetermined.

Fear is a serious constraint on our freedom, but it is also an opportunity for freedom, an occasion to exercise moral and political choice, to make a determination about whether to be afraid or, failing that, to make a determination about how we should respond to the object of our fear, whether to flinch, flee, or fight.