Corey Robin's Blog, page 24

The Waning Hegemony of Republican Tax Cuts

Vote on the Reagan Tax Cuts of 1981

House: 321-107 (131 of those 321 yes votes are Democrats; one Republican votes no)

Senate: 89-11 (37 of those 89 yes votes are Democrats; one Republican votes no)

Vote on the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001

House: 240-154 (28 of those 240 yes votes are Democrats; no Republican votes no)

Senate: 58-33 (12 of those 58 yes votes are Democrats; two Republicans vote no)

Vote on the Trump Tax Cuts of 2017

House: 227-205 (none of those 227 yes votes are Democrats; 13 Republicans vote no)

Senate: 51-48 (none of those 51 yes votes are Democrats; 1 Republican votes no)

Why is the media—including the liberal media—supporting these teachers’ strikes?

I’ve been amazed—in a good way—at how positive is the media coverage of all these teacher wildcat strikes and actions in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Particularly from liberal media outlets.

I say this because it was just six years ago that the teachers in Chicago struck. Even though their cause was just as righteous as that of the teachers in these southern states, featuring many of the same grievances you see in the current moment—the Chicago teachers’ final contract included a guarantee of textbooks for all students on the first day of class; a doubling of funds for class supplies; $1.5 million for new special education teachers; and so on—the hostility from media outlets, including liberal media outlets, was palpable.

Time‘s education columnist had this to say about the Chicago teachers—many of whom were women of color, in a union led by a woman of color—on the Diane Rehm Show:

Part of this strike, it’s pretty clear, is that the union needed to have some theater for its members, let them blow off some steam, and that’s increasingly obvious.

I got into a Twitter spat with ABC News’s Terry Moran, who tweeted, “I wonder if the Chicago teachers realize how much damage they are doing to their profession—and to so many children and their families.” Moran, who makes $25k to $30k for each talk he gives (at least back in 2012), even had the gall to suggest that the teachers shouldn’t be complaining about their paltry raises.

If you were on line during that strike and supported the teachers, you were part of a fairly small crew of folks like Kenzo Shibata, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Megan Erickson Kilpatrick, Doug Henwood, and myself, arguing with the likes of Dylan Matthews (then at the Washington Post), Matt Yglesias (then at Slate), and others of that ilk. Almost no one with a national platform, save Diane Ravitch, supported the strikers.

Given the way the discussion of race, gender, and identity politics has gone the past few years, you would have thought that the Chicago teachers would have been a natural cause celebre for liberal commentators. Their spokesperson was Karen Lewis, a black woman (also Jewish!) Many of the strikers were women of color. They were working in a multiracial city, dealing with all the sorts of challenges liberals claim to care about. Yet so many of the liberal outlets and voices who have made race and gender politics a concern in recent years were either silent or critical of the teachers. (Women of color: cool; women of color in unions: not so cool. That’s how we get to preserve the fiction that when we speak of the working class or union members, we’re only talking about white men.)

There are a lot of reasons for the change in tone and coverage today: Sanders has helped change the conversation among liberals and in the Democratic Party. Trump and the Republicans have dramatized the cost of policies the nation has been pursuing for some time: less focus on funding, more focus on testing and charter schools.

But one of the big changes is that six years ago, the face of the opposition to the Chicago teachers was Mayor Rahm Emanuel—the Svengali of both the Clinton and Obama White Houses—and, behind Emanuel, the Democratic Party. People have probably already forgotten this, but in the last decade or so, the Democrats—and liberals like Jonathan Chait—have gotten really bad on education, teachers unions, and public schools.

One has to wonder if these strikes were happening in blue states, with Democratic governors and state legislatures, what the reception might be. One also has to wonder if the strikers and/or students were of color, what the reception might be. The coverage could turn out quite different, with the concerns of students of color being pitted against the unions, or with the ugly undercurrents of race working against the concerns and interests of both the teachers and the students.

Regardless of the hypothetical, the fact is that these teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona aren’t just challenging the hard right; they’re also, in a way, challenging the neoliberal Dems.

That’s another reason why this strike wave may prove to be so historic: in the same way that the late 1970s signified the Republican Party’s growing willingness to challenge the Democrats and New Deal liberalism, so did it signal a fundamental shift within the Republican Party, with the hard right contesting power at the highest levels of the GOP. Those were the years that saw the rise to prominence of these new faces of the party: Orrin Hatch, Alan Simpson, John Warner (remember when he was considered the hard right?), Thad Cochran, Larry Pressler, and so on. (Both Hatch and Cochran are retiring this year, by the way.)

The challenge of this strike is not just to the Prop 13 Order of the Republican Party; it’s also to the neoliberal order within the Democratic Party.

***

That last mention of the Prop 13 Order is a reference to a Facebook post I did the other day about the strikes. Because many readers of the blog aren’t on Facebook, I’m reproducing that post here in full:

It’s 1978, and you’re a politically minded person paying attention to electoral politics. You focus all of your attention on the midterm elections. And you find that after two years of a historically unpopular Democratic president, whose approval ratings are tanking in the low 40s, the voters re-elect a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate by wide margins. You find that the voters give the Democrats complete control over 27 state governments (that is, the governor’s mansion plus the state legislature) and complete control over an additional nine state legislatures. You’ll be thinking: the Democrats are firmly in control of the country and will be for the foreseeable future. Nothing you’ll be noticing will give you the slightest clue that the country is heading for a profound counterrevolution in just two years’ time.

The reason you’ll be thinking this, beyond your focus on the midterm elections, is that you’ll have completely missed the most important political development of 1978: the passage of Proposition 13 in California, which radically gutted property taxes in California and made it extremely difficult to raise taxes in the future. This was the real harbinger of the country’s future, a fundamental assault on the postwar liberal settlement of high taxes, high state spending, high public services, in what had once been one of the most liberal states in the country.

It’s 40 years later. Don’t make the same mistake. Right now, in the reddest of red states, in the places you’d least expect it, teachers are starting a movement not only to raise their salaries and improve the schools, not only to reverse the assault on public education, not only to reverse the rule of Scott Walker which was supposed to provide a national model across the country, but to confront the real governing order of the last 40 years: the Prop 13 order.

In West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona, we’re seeing the real resistance, the most profound and deepest attack on the basic assumptions of the contemporary governing order. These are the real midterms to be watching, the places where all the rules and expectations we’ve come to live under, not just since Trump’s election but since forever, are being completely scrambled and overturned.

Talking liberal amnesia with Brooke Gladstone on On the Media

This weekend, you can hear me talking about my Harper’s piece on Trump and liberal amnesia with Brooke Gladstone for a segment of her NPR show On the Media. If you live in New York, you can catch the show on WNYC tomorrow (Saturday) at 7 am and Sunday at 10 am. The segment is also parked here.

I have to say, having listened to On the Media since sometime around the Iraq War (and this weekend’s show is all about the Iraq War on the 15th anniversary of its launch), this was a bit of a dream come true. To hear that Gladstone sounds in real life exactly as she does on the radio!

The real danger of normalization

I’ve got a new piece in Harper’s, taking stock of a very American pathology—amnesia—which I analyze with the help of Philip Roth, Barbara Fields, Louis Hartz, and Alchoholics Anonymous. The piece is behind a paywall, but here’s a taste:

Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized—it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.

We all have a golden age in our pockets, ready as a wallet. Some people invent the memory of more tenderhearted days to dramatize and criticize present evil. Others reinvent the past less purposefully….Whether strategic or sincere, revisionism encourages a refusal of the now.

Or so we believe.

The truth is that we’re captives, not captains, of this strategy. We think the contrast of a burnished past allows us to see the burning present, but all it does is keep the fire going, and growing. Confronting the indecent Nixon, Roth imagines a better McCarthy. Confronting the indecent Trump, he imagines a better Nixon. At no point does he recognize that he’s been fighting the same monster all along—and losing. Overwhelmed by the monster he’s currently facing, sure that it is different from the monster no longer in view, Roth loses sight of the surrounding terrain. He doesn’t see how the rehabilitation of the last monster allows the front line to move rightward, the new monster to get closer to the territory being defended. That may not be a problem for Roth, reader of Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again.” (Though even Beckett concluded with the injunction to “fail better.”) It is a problem for us, followers of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

In other news, I’ve got a busy schedule of talks coming up. I’ve posted the schedule before, but in case you missed it, here are the remaining events this coming spring:

Tuesday, April 3, noon: Yale Law School, room TBA.

Tuesday, April 10, 7 pm: Harvard Divinity School, Andover Chapel.

Wednesday, April 11, noon: Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall.

Wednesday, April 18, 4 pm: Grinnell College, room TBA.

Thursday, May 3, 6 pm: Labyrinth Books in Princeton.

 

Did Jill Abramson Plagiarize Ian Milhiser?

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, has an article in the current issue of New York making the case for the impeachment of Clarence Thomas. I don’t have any problems with the substance of the piece, though I don’t think Abramson breaks much new ground on the Thomas sexual harassment front or with respect to the fact that Thomas committed perjury in his Senate confirmation hearings. (Having co-authored, with Jane Mayer, the book on Thomas and Anita Hill, Abramson knows this case better than almost anyone.)

My problem is that Abramson seems to have lifted, sometimes word-for-word, an extended passage from a October 2016 blog post by Ian Milhiser.

Here is Milhiser:

He [Clarence Thomas] joined the majority decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding for the first time that an employer’s religious objections can trump the rights of their women employees. And, in one of the most under-reported decisions of the last several years, he cast the key fifth vote to hobble the federal prohibition on sexual harassment in the workplace.

…

In Vance v. Ball State University, a 5–4 Supreme Court redefined the word “supervisor” such that it means virtually nothing in many modern workplaces. Under Vance, a person’s boss only counts as their “supervisor” if they have the authority to make a “significant change in employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits.”

One problem with this decision is that modern workplaces often vest the power to make such changes in employment status in a distant HR office, even though the employee’s real boss wields tremendous power over them.

Here is Abramson:

He joined the majority decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding that an employer’s religious objections can override the rights of its women employees.

And, in one of the most underreported decisions of the last several years, Thomas cast the key fifth vote to hobble the federal prohibition on harassment in the workplace. The 5-4 decision in 2013’s Vance v. Ball State University tightened the definition of who counts as a supervisor in harassment cases. The majority decision in the case said a person’s boss counts as a “supervisor” only if he or she has the authority to make a “significant change in employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits.” That let a lot of people off the hook. In many modern workplaces, the only “supervisors” with those powers are far away in HR offices, not the hands-on boss who may be making a worker’s life a living hell.

The number of direct repetitions—of words, phrases, and sentences—is sizable. The faint rewording of other passages is plain. The choice of quotations from and description of the Ball State case, the set-up and syntax of the whole section, the conceptual choices (Thomas “cast the key fifth vote,” which Abramson borrows from Milhiser in order to suggest, wrongly, that Thomas was somehow the last vote cobbled together by the conservative majority, or to suggest, improbably, that if Thomas had not been approved by the Senate, a more liberal justice would have been nominated in his place and, 15 years later, would have cast a different vote) and conceptual ordering: Abramson’s passage mimics Milhiser’s to a high degree.

Abramson is not a rookie reporter. She’s one of the giants of contemporary journalism.

In case the editors at New York revise the web version of the article (it appears in the print version of the February 19 issue of the magazine), here are a screen shot of the relevant section in Abramson’s piece and three screen shots of the relevant sections from Milhiser’s.

Update (1 pm)

I just remembered that Abramson was first made managing editor in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, which Bill Keller, who was made editor after Howell Raines was forced to resign over the scandal, said influenced his desire to change the Times culture. Part of that change involved bringing on Abramson as managing editor.

After some googling, I found that while she was managing editor, Abramson had to deal with at least two plagiarism incidents involving reporters at the Times. In the first incident, which seems to have involved less outright copying without attribution than Abramson utilizes in her New York piece, Abramson admitted the accusation of plagiarism that had been leveled against the Times reporter:

Did Barrionuevo commit plagiarism?

“Yes,” says Abramson. “I think when you take material almost word-for-word and don’t credit it, it is.”

In the second incident, she was more circumspect:

It appears that Alexei did not fully understand Times policy of not using wire boilerplate and giving credit when we do make use of such material. As I mentioned to you, other papers do permit unattributed use of such material. He should not have inserted wire material into his Times coverage without attribution.

That said, because the new examples do not involve many words or an original thought, the transgression does not seem to be as serious as the first instance on paco.

I’ll leave it to readers to adjudicate which of these two cases is more relevant to what Abramson did in this New York article. Either way, she seems to have violated the very policies she upheld while she was an editor at the Times. And in a link-laden piece like this, she should, minimally, have credited and linked to Milhiser.

Speaking events this spring

I’m doing a bunch of public events this semester. Here’s the schedule.

On Tuesday, February 13, at 6 pm, I’ll be joining Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and Tom Sugrue on a panel about Nikhil Singh’s new book, Race and America’s Long War, which I highly recommend. Singh puts the current moment in a broad historical context, tracing Trump’s licensing of new states of cruelty back to the earliest days of America as a settler society. The book is full of surprises, which will shock even the most jaded observer of American life. The panel will be at NYU, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor.

On Thursday, February 22, at 4:30 pm, I’ll be delivering the Oscar Jászi Memorial Lecture at Oberlin College. Jászi, an émigré historian from Hungary who taught at Oberlin for years, was the teacher of Sheldon Wolin, who was one of my undergraduate professors. Circle of life. Anyway, I’ll be talking about Clarence Thomas. The lecture will be in Oberlin’s Norman Craig Lecture Hall.

On Sunday, March 4, at 3 pm, I’ll be talking about The Reactionary Mind at the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival. I’ll be in conversation with Kathy Newman, my old friend from graduate school and now a professor at Carnegie Mellon. Location here.

On Saturday, March 10, I’ll be delivering the keynote address at a conference on “Withering of the State” at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The exact time hasn’t been announced, but I’m told it will be between 4 and 5 pm, in the Student Center East, Room 713.

On Tuesday, April 3, at noon, I’ll be speaking at the Yale Law School about Trump and conservatism. I don’t have a link or place yet, but when I do I’ll post it.

On Tuesday, April 10, at 7 pm, I’ll be in conversation with Zachary Davis about Trump and conservatism at the Harvard Divinity School, as part of the Ministry of Ideas series. I don’t have a link or place yet, but when I do I’ll post it.

On Wednesday, April 11, at noon, I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Law School on “Donald Trump’s Reactionary Mind.”

On Thursday, May 3, at 6 pm, I’ll be in conversation with Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor of Princeton about The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be talking at Labyrinth Books in Princeton.

Oedipus in Berlin: How a German television series about the Cold War re-tells an ancient myth

If you’re looking for an excellent television series to watch, I highly recommend The Same Sky, a German production about Berlin in 1974, which you can now stream on Netflix.

I had been complaining on Facebook about how amid all the new detective shows from abroad—especially the noirish/Anglo/Nordic TV series —it was hard to find a series that didn’t rely for its suspense and thrills on either the sexual abuse and rape of women or harm to children. The series Fortitude is one of the worst offenders on this score.  At one point I thought I was going to literally throw up and had to run out of the room to the bathroom. I didn’t throw up, but I didn’t go back either.

The Same Sky is different. It is suspenseful, involving Cold War espionage in a divided Berlin at the height of detente. There are some scary moments, and some unsettling characters, whose stirring malignity you feel but can’t quite figure out. And while there is some harm to children, it’s not pornographic or sadistic. It’s realistic: the kind that flawed—i.e., all—parents inflict on their kids, the psychological harm that families do to each other in the normal pursuit of life.

But what makes the show truly great is that it is almost Greek in its ambitions. In the same way that Greek tragedies tell the story of the city through the story of a family, so does The Same Sky narrate the story of a divided city through stories of that city’s divided families. There’s also a fascinating retelling of the Oedipus story, involving a family broken in two by the Berlin Wall: one side of the family is dedicated to the East German regime and building socialism; the other is dedicated to the West and whatever the West entails (though part of the power of the series is that that is not at all clear.)

In its weaving of family and political history, the series also reminded me of an amazing review that Benjamin Nathans did in the New York Review of Books. The review was about Yuri Slezkine’s new book on the Russian Revolution, which also sounds amazing. Toward the end of the review, Nathans zeroes in on a theme that is evocative of The Same Sky (forgive the long quote; it’s worth your while):

Most histories of the Soviet Union emphasize the failure of the command economy to keep up with its capitalist rivals. Slezkine, however, is not terribly interested in economics. In his account, the Soviet experiment failed, half a century before the country’s actual collapse, because it neglected to drain the oldest, most persistent swamp of all—the family.

In between their epic labors at the great construction site of socialism, residents of the House of Government “were settling into their new apartments and setting up house in familiar ways,” unable to transcend the “hen-and-rooster problems” of marriage and domestic life. Many of them expressed unease at the prospect of sinking into the traditional bonds of kinship and procreation. “I am afraid I might turn into a bourgeois,” worried the writer Aleksandr Serafimovich (Apt. 82) to a friend. “In order to resist such a transformation, I have been spitting into all the corners and onto the floor, blowing my nose, and lying in bed with my shoes on and hair uncombed. It seems to be helping.”

But it wasn’t. No one really knew what a communist family should be, or how to transform relations between parents and children, or how to harness erotic attachments to the requirements of revolution. Bolsheviks were known to give their children names such as “Vladlen” (Vladimir Lenin), “Mezhenda” (International Women’s Day), and “Vsemir” (worldwide revolution). But naming was easy compared to living. The Soviet state went to great lengths to inculcate revolutionary values in schools and workplaces, but not at home. It never devised resonant communist rituals to mark birth, marriage, and death. The party ideologist Aron Solts (Apt. 393) claimed that “the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell…, a collectivity of comrades in which one lives in the family the same way as outside the family.”

In that case, why bother with families at all? Neither Solts nor anyone else had a convincing answer. Sects, Slezkine notes, “are about brotherhood (and, as an afterthought, sisterhood), not about parents and children. This is why most end-of-the-world scenarios promise ‘all these things’ within one generation…, and all millenarian sects, in their militant phase, attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether (by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity).”

Unable or unwilling to abolish the family, Bolsheviks proved incapable of reproducing themselves. For Slezkine, this is cause for celebrating the resilience of family ties under the onslaught of Stalin’s social engineering. It’s worth asking, though, why the same Bolsheviks who willingly deported or exterminated millions of class enemies as remnants of capitalism balked at similarly radical measures against the bourgeois institution of the family. Could it be that they, especially the men among them, realized that by doing so they stood to lose much more than their chains?

Whatever the case, the children they raised in the House of Government became loyal Soviet citizens but not millenarians. Their deepest ties were to their parents…not to Marx and Lenin. Instead of devouring its children, he concludes, the Russian Revolution was devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. As Tolstoy’s friend Nikolai Strakhov wrote about the character Bazarov, the proto-Bolshevik at the heart of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (another work about family), “The love affair takes place against his iron will; life, which he had thought he would rule, catches him in its huge wave.”

The Same Sky seems to follow a similar plot twist, only it’s not just children undermining the revolution by their devotion to their parents but also parents undermining the revolution by their devotion to, well, not exactly their children—as I said, there’s a fair amount of psychic harm that is inflicted on children in this series—but to their own ambitions as lived through their children.

It’s telling how much this story departs from the standard Cold War and even post-Cold War narratives that claimed that civil society was pulverized by the totalitarian state. As this series shows, that’s not at all the case; indeed, the one character who lives up to the stereotype of children being willing to rat on their parents is almost a comic figure in this series, singular in his fanaticism. Almost everyone else is drawn to a more human proportion.

What makes the story so tragic and Greek is that the characters are impelled by some invisible force—call it dramatic fate—to act in ways that you can tell will destroy them but that they are pursuing for reasons of salvation and redemption.

A Constitutional Crisis? Or Partisans Without Purpose?

You hear a lot of talk on Twitter these days about a constitutional crisis.

The thing about previous moments of constitutional crisis in the US is that they were never strictly about institutions and narrowly political questions; they were always about something socially substantive, something larger than the specific issue itself. The crisis provoked by the election of Lincoln in 1860, which led to secession and then the Civil War, was, of course, about slavery. The crisis of FDR’s Court-packing scheme was about the New Deal and whether the American state could be used to bring American capitalism to heel. Watergate was about the Cold War and a murderous US foreign policy.

What strikes me about the current crisis over Trump and the FBI, if that’s even what it is, is how far removed it is from the larger social questions that animated these previous crises. Obviously Trump and the GOP have a social base and are pursuing a social agenda, but the constitutional expression of the disagreement over the FBI and the Mueller inquiry bears no relationship to that social agenda. It’s not as if what Trump is really seeking is an FBI or Justice Department that’s willing to pursue his anti-immigration agenda; that Justice Department already exists. And it’s not as if Congress is releasing this memo in order to protect Russian interests; this is the very same Congress, in a lopsided bipartisan vote, that slapped heavy sanctions on Russia. And even if you think the real story behind the immediate controversy is the rise of an international oligarchy that’s removed from all political constraints, it’s not as if the Democrats have any great interest in restraining that oligarchy. Nor have the Democrats shown, prior to Trump, any great interest in restraining the presidency.

So the narrow political controversy that is so dividing the two parties and leading to talk of a constitutional crisis is completely stripped of almost all the larger questions that are said to currently divide our country. As Seth Ackerman said to me the other day, and today again on the phone, you hear this talk on Twitter and Facebook of a massive constitutional crisis, but when you go to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times, you learn that the larger social and economic and even political world is just humming along, as if nothing’s happening. If there’s a constitutional crisis, the New York Times doesn’t seem to know about it. That’s quite different from the Watergate years, when every social conflict—over race, Vietnam, the economy, and the Cold War—was refracted through this massive showdown over a break-in at a hotel, which was then reflected in the day to day reporting.

And even if you think that what the right is really doing here is trying to salvage a presidency from what it fears is impending damage—and I do think that’s the most plausible interpretation of what the congressional Republicans are doing—you still have to confront the fact that in doing what they’re doing, they’re not salvaging their substantive agenda, but instead jeopardizing it. As the Boston Globe just reported this morning, at their annual retreat, the congressional GOP spent almost the entire time talking about “the memo” rather than any real agenda—whether immigration, taxes, healthcare, and so on—they wanted to pursue. So salvaging the presidency seems to be divorced from pursuing a substantive agenda.

Conversely, on the liberal side, you might say that Democrats and progressives see in this controversy everything that’s wrong with Trump—the lawlessness, contempt for institutions, and so forth—but even the most imaginative liberal would be hard pressed to see in the protection of the FBI from Trump’s meddling hand a path forward on immigration, Obamacare, sexual harassment, the alt right and racism, and any of the other myriad issues that make Democrats loathe Trump.

It’s almost as if we really are living in a perfect Schmittian moment, where the political issue that divides friends from enemies is not in any way related to factors and concerns that lie outside the political realm, but is instead wholly unto itself. In the same way Schmitt believed that the political divide of friend and enemy had to be removed from, or somehow transcend, whatever social or economic or religious or cultural question that might have originally underpinned that divide—so that the divide would be purely existential, a question of life or death of one’s own side, without any external concern for the substance of the divide—so does this current crisis seem to be almost entirely about itself. It’s a Court-packing scheme without the New Deal, a civil war without slavery, Watergate without Vietnam. Partisans without purpose—save partisanship itself.

Democracy is Norm Erosion

Two or three weeks ago, I had an intuition, a glimpse of a thought that I pushed away from consciousness but which has kept coming back to me since: The discourse of norm erosion isn’t really about Trump. Nor is it about authoritarianism. What it’s really about is “extremism,” that old stalking horse of Cold War liberalism. And while that discourse of norm erosion won’t do much to limit Trump and the GOP, its real contribution will be to mark the outer limits of left politics, just at a moment when we’re seeing the rise of a left that seems willing to push those limits. That was my thought.

And now we have this oped by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zilblatt, two of the premier scholars of norm erosion, about the dangers of norm erosion. Nowhere will you find the word authoritarianism, though there is a quick reference to “Trump’s autocratic impulses.” What you find is concerns about “dysfunction” and “crisis.” What you find is this:

Democrats are beginning to respond in kind. Their recent filibuster triggering a government shutdown took a page out of the Gingrich playbook. And if they retake the Senate in 2018, there is talk of denying President Trump the opportunity to fill any Supreme Court vacancy. This is a dangerous spiral.

Now imagine—bear with me—that it’s 2020, and Sanders is elected with a somewhat radicalized Democratic Party in Congress. Or if that’s too much to swallow, imagine some version of that (not necessarily Sanders or the Democrats but an empowered electoral left) in 2024. All these counsels against norm erosion and polarization—which many people in the media and academia are invoking against Trump and the GOP—will now come rushing back at the left.

And how could they not? When you set up “norms” as your standard, without evaluating their specific democratic valence in each instance, the projects to which they are attached, how could you know whether a norm contributes to democracy, in the substantive or procedural sense, or detracts from it? How could you know whether the erosion is good or bad, democratic or anti-democratic?

Levitsky and Zilblatt mention two norms: mutual toleration and forbearance in the exercise of power. Sometimes forbearance serves the cause of democracy; sometimes it does not. But by their lights, a lack of forbearance, by definition, becomes a problem for democracy.

Consider this revealing moment in the piece:

Could it happen here? It already has. During the 1850s, polarization over slavery undermined America’s democratic norms. Southern Democrats viewed the antislavery position of the emerging Republican Party as an existential threat. They assailed Republicans as “traitors to the Constitution” and vowed to “never permit this federal government to pass into the traitorous hands of the Black Republican Party.”

The authors want to posit the 1850s as a moment that “undermined America’s democratic norms,” strongly suggesting that prior to the 1850s, there was a robust enjoyment of democratic norms in America. Most of us would argue that when one portion of the people enslaves another, denying them their humanity (and the vote), there’s no real democratic norm in play. (Not to mention that one-half of the population, white and black, didn’t have the suffrage at all.) And while it would have been awfully nice if the southern slaveholders had agreed to vacate the stage of history peacefully, most of us realize that was never in the offing. Outside the South, wrote C. Vann Woodward, the end of slavery was “the liquidation of an investment.” Inside, it was “the death of a society.”

If American slavery were going to be eliminated, someone had to call the question. That’s what the abolitionists (and the Republican Party) did. They polarized society. (For a representative example of how polarizing their discourse could be, read this.) And the result—however awful the Civil War was (and make no mistake, it was more awful than you can imagine)—was not the destruction of democracy and its norms but the creation of democracy —a “new birth of freedom,” Lincoln called it—which then got undone after Reconstruction, which was also a politics of norm-shattering.

As Jim Oakes has shown, the Southern Democrats were right to be terrified of the Republican Party, to see that party as an existential threat. The Republicans did want to destroy slavery, they did want to break the back of the slaveocracy, to gut a longstanding way of life. They wanted to do it peacefully, but they also understood that if war came, it would offer an opportunity to do it violently, an opportunity that they would not fail to seize. The Republicans were norm-breakers: they didn’t just want to limit the expansion of slavery into the territories (which one could argue was or wasn’t a norm in antebellum America; see Mark Graber’s book on Dred Scott); they wanted to limit that expansion as prelude to destroying the institution everywhere. Freedom national.

Levitsky and Zilblatt know that norm erosion and polarization were afoot during the 1850s. Only they want to put the onus entirely on the slaveholders. That way, they can take a stand against norm erosion without endorsing slavery; they can pin the polarization of the era entirely on the Southern Democrats. That’s politically understandable, in some sense, but wildly off the mark, historically.

And, in the end, not so politically understandable. For it suggests—no, says—that had the southerners merely shown some forbearance toward the Republicans, democratic norms would have persisted. On the question of slavery’s persistence, Levitsky and Zilblatt have nothing to say.

A similar, though perhaps less fraught, moment arises in their treatment of the Constitution:

We should not take democracy for granted. There is nothing intrinsic in American culture that immunizes us against its breakdown. Even our brilliantly designed Constitution cannot, by itself, guarantee democracy’s survival. If it could, then the republic would not have collapsed into civil war 74 years after its birth.

One of the last books Robert Dahl, one of our foremost analysts of democracy, wrote was How Democratic is the American Constitution? His answer: not very. Yet in the same way that the discourse of norm erosion re-describes antebellum America, half of which was a slaveholder society, as a democracy, with democratic norms needing protection from polarizing forces, so does it re-describe the Constitution as a “brilliantly designed” text that is necessarily, though not sufficiently, connected to “democracy’s survival.”

What the oped does is show what the real object of concern is in the discourse of norm erosion: not authoritarianism, as I said, but extremism—whether that extremism comes from slaveholders or abolitionists, the Republicans shutting down the government to deny people healthcare or the Democrats shutting it down to allow immigrants to live here. Both sides do it.

If your highest value is the preservation of American institutions, the avoidance of “dysfunction,” the discourse of norm erosion makes sense. If it’s democracy, not so much. Sometimes democracy requires the shattering of norms and institutions.

Democracy, we might even say, is a permanent project of norm erosion, forever shattering the norms of hierarchy and domination and the political forms that aid and abet them.

 

Trump’s power is shakier than American democracy

“As soon as Trump became a serious contender for the presidency, journalists and historians began analogizing him to Hitler. Even the formulator of Godwin’s Law, which was meant to put a check on the reductio ad Hitlerum, said: ‘Go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump.’ After Trump’s election, the comparisons mounted, for understandable reasons.

“But as we approach the end of Trump’s first year in power, the Hitler analogies seem murky and puzzling, less metaphor than mood….

“There’s little doubt that Trump’s regime is a cause for concern, on multiple grounds, as I and many others have written. But we should not mistake mood for moment. Even one that feels so profoundly alien as ours does now. For that, too, has a history in America.

“During the Vietnam and Nixon years,…”

—My weekly digest in The Guardian, on the uptick in Trump authoritarian talk, wherein I deal with Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, Hitler, and the ACLU. And the question of Trump’s authoritarianism: Contrary to the media and academic discourse, there’s more precarity to Trump’s regime than there is to American democracy.

By way of an epilogue to my Guardian piece, let me add this.

In the wake of the serial abuses of Richard Nixon’s regime, liberals and Democrats led an effort in Congress to rein in “the imperial presidency.” It wasn’t always effective, and it got undermined by the increasing conservatism of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But this coalition—extending from old-fashioned New Deal liberals to Watergate Babies to moderate Democrats to a sizable contingent of liberal Republicans (they used to exist)—did place constraints (sometimes over Nixon’s veto) on the power of the president to make war, the power of the intelligence agencies to engage in domestic surveillance, and much more.

On Thursday, as Glenn Greenwald reports, liberals and Democrats were given a similar opportunity to rein in a presidency they’ve deemed the most authoritarian in American history. What’s more, they had nearly 60 Republicans willing to join them. 125 Democrats went for it. But 55 of them—including the top two Democrats in the House, the former head of the DNC, and one of the most visible faces of “The Resistance”—did not. Thereby sinking the bill.

I’m genuinely unsure what conclusions to draw from this.

That there’s a lack of seriousness to the discourse of authoritarianism, not just at the highest reaches of the Democratic Party but also in the media, which hasn’t focused nearly the attention on this that it has on tweets and other forms of “norm erosion”?

That the danger of Trump, personally, is not nearly as great as that of Nixon, and somehow or another, in their heart of hearts, people know it?

That there is a failure to connect the dangers of Trump to a deeper analysis of the surveillance state?

By way of contrast, think of Arthur Schlesinger. Schlesinger was a classic Cold War liberal, defending J. Edgar Hoover as a model red-hunter as a counter to the crudeness of the red-baiters in Congress. (That the two forces were working in cahoots never seemed to cross his mind.) But in the wake of Nixon’s abuses of power, Schlesinger did not focus his attentions on the man, settling for Victorian shock at the improprieties of the uncouth—and remember, Schlesinger loathed Nixon with every fiber of his being. Instead, he launched a comprehensive revisionist critique of the imperial presidency, seeing in the Cold War state he once supported the seeds of the presidency he now reviled.

That the discourse of democratic decline is so focused on impropriety and norms that it has completely lost sight of the classic forms of repressive state power and abuse? (This is the flip side of the failure to appreciate, as I argue in my Guardian digest, all the ways in which the minimal institutions of liberal democracy—the press, the courts, even, despite this vote, the Democrats as an opposition party—are far more resilient today than they were as recently as ten years ago.)

As I said, I don’t know what to conclude.

But, as I’ve also said in other contexts, actions speak louder than words. With this vote, the leadership of the Democratic Party has told us something about the political utility and performativity of their rhetoric, how they see the relationship between the repressive state apparatus and the man who leads that repressive state apparatus: namely, that there isn’t one.

But for context, read The Guardian piece.