Corey Robin's Blog, page 24

The Scandal of Democracy: Seven Theses for the Socialist Left

1.

The Supreme Court has always been the scandal of American democracy. How do you justify the power that nine unelected judges—almost all of them, historically, white men—wield in a society that styles itself a democracy?

2.

That scandal reached a peak in the last third of the twentieth century, when a combination of hard-right judicial theorists (Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia among them) and nervous liberals started worrying about what was called “the counter-majoritarian difficulty” or the “counter-majoritarian dilemma.”

3.

The result of that reconsideration of the Court and judicial review was, among other things, the theory of constitutional interpretation that we call originalism. Originalism held that the only justification for the Court reviewing and overruling the decisions of democratically elected legislators was that it was doing so on the basis of the Constitution itself. Not the living Constitution—that is, as a progressive document whose meaning changes over time—but the original Constitution. Because the original Constitution, as a written text, represents the expressed will of the people, enacted in actual words that are binding across time. Counterintuitively, when it comes to the Court, the idea is that it is the cold, dead hand of the past, interpreted through the abstemious and self-effacing modesty of the present, that is most likely to yield the greatest democracy in the future. That, any rate, was the theory, and it came to be adopted by many liberals as well. As the liberal Laurence Tribe, paraphrasing the liberal Ronald Dworkin (paraphrasing either Nixon or Friedman on Keynes), would say in 1998: “We are all originalists now.”

4.

What a difference two decades make. In the now of 2018, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of having two Supreme Court justices—Gorsuch and Kavanaugh—elected by a president who lost the popular vote (that is, does not, on any credible theory of democracy, represent the will of the majority of the people) and confirmed by a group of senators who represent a minority of the people (that is, do not, on any credible theory of democracy, represent the majority of the people). Those two justices—a minority chosen by a minority and confirmed by a minority, with each minority marinating in whiteness, maleness, and wealth—will comprise 40% (or 2/5) of the 5 votes that will be striking down progressive legislation and policies of Congress and the states, legislation and policies reflecting the will of the majority. This is the new frontier of the counter-majoritarian dilemma.

5.

The politically smartest—because it is the truest—answer to this latest iteration of the counter-majoritarian dilemma is to go after all three of the institutions that have come together to create this latest iteration of the scandal of democracy: the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College. We cannot stop merely at criticizing the Supreme Court, packing the Court, calling into question its legitimacy. It is the entire panoply of these three institutions—the Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College, which are baked into the constitutional design of this country—that we must confront.

6.

The principle to mount against that scandal of democracy is simple: one person, one vote. In a democracy, no one’s vote should count for more than any other person’s vote. In the democracy of the future, where the 2/5 Rule of Gorsuch/Kavanaugh shall dominate the polity, it seems like the opposite will be the case. Every rich white man’s vote that stands behind the votes that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will cast on the Supreme Court will carry more weight than that of everyone else.

7.

Mounting this kind of political program against the scandal of democracy—which involves confronting a good deal of the Constitution, not all of it, but a good deal of it—would be radical. I don’t expect the Democrats to do it. It seems like a great task for the socialist left to take up. And very much in keeping with the historical reality of the socialist movement, particularly in Europe. Democratic reform in Europe was won by the socialist movements. Democratizing ancient, sclerotic institutions of the state has always been the project of the socialist left.

Love and Money: On Keith Gessen’s “A Terrible Country”

The title of Keith Gessen’s new novel is A Terrible Country, but the novel is less about a country than a city: Moscow. Not just Moscow as a city in its own right, though the city is very much a character in the novel, but the experience of Moscow by an American millennial, Andrei Kaplan, a 30-something academic in flight from his failures in Brooklyn, failures of love and work, family and friends. A Terrible Country, in other words, is the anti-Brooklyn novel.

If the Brooklyn of the public imagination is the place where young intellectuals move to make their lives among writers, journalists, academics, and artists, public lives that happen out of doors, in parks and readings and rallies and talks (now in election campaigns, too), Kaplan’s Moscow is the opposite. Everything of interest happens inside. In part by necessity.

For most of the novel, the city is so damn cold. Gessen registers the cold’s many moods. Even spring is haunted by the cold: as the rooftop snows begin melting during the ever so slightly warming days, the sub-zero nights freeze the droplets into murderous icicles, which then fall on the heads of unlucky passersby the next morning.

The cold is one barrier. The vast tracts of Moscow’s thoroughfares—avenues, plazas, ring roads, highways—are another. The entire city seems as if it was dreamed up by Robert Moses in the late stages of his hubris, with no constraining hand of Jane Jacobs.

A master artist of physical desolation, Gessen gives us a city that can’t be lived in public. As the narrator observes near the novel’s end, “The city was closing itself off from itself.” That becomes not only a through line of the novel (even in springtime, even in love, Andrei is constrained by the sprawl) but a symptom of the neoliberal world that we slowly begin to realize Gessen has been sketching for us, without our noticing it. Every road, every sidewalk, every street, courtyard, cab, bus, train, subway—everything that’s out of doors is a conveyance to somewhere else, somewhere inside.

I don’t know of another urban novel that devotes so much of itself to the getting of places. One thinks of A Hazard of New Fortunes, but instead of the Marches’ epic quest to find the perfect home, we have an equally epic quest, rendered in exquisite detail, to get from home to home, place to place. Or Notes from the Underground, where Nevsky Prospect is the setting of the Underground Man’s struggle for public recognition. Gessen offers a wonderful little homage to that famous moment of Dostoevskian confrontation, where the Underground Man confronts his tormentor, a haughty officer who scarcely notices him, only this time the settings are a bar and a hockey rink, and the tormentor is a lowlife without a cause. An urban novel of interiors, A Terrible Country serves as an unexpected comment on not only the St. Petersburg of Dostoevsky but also Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.

A Terrible Country is the anti-Brooklyn novel in a second sense. Though Andrei develops a circles of friends, and even a girlfriend, the central relationship in the book is between him and his grandmother, with whom he returns to Moscow to live. She’s frail and failing, slowly slipping into dementia, and through his care-taking of her, Andrei becomes a grownup. Capable of not only the greatest gentleness—some of the most tender passages in contemporary fiction have Andrei cooking for his grandmother, walking her to and from the market, shopping for her, and playing anagrams or reading to her—but also terrible betrayal.

It is through his grandmother that Andrew gets drawn out of his claustrophobic world of online teaching, cafe internetting, and the like. It’s telling that the world of this novel opens up in this tiniest of spaces, the grandmother’s apartment. (“Inside that circle,” says the narrator, “and inside the city that the circle had created within the larger city, was a whole other world.”) Gessen renders its window sills, medicine cabinets, even plumbing, with great care. There’s a memorable scene involving a clogged drain that recalls the opening passages of The Wealth of Nations and chapter 15 of Capital: two books about the worlds nested within worlds that is modern capitalism.

But it is the relationship itself, between Andrei and his grandmother, that love across the generations, that is the real motor of the novel, which adds to the sense of its disruptions of the canons of contemporary urban fiction.

There is one sense, however, in which A Terrible Country is not the anti-Brooklyn novel, in which it becomes a novel of something larger than urban matter and anti-matter. And that is the emphasis it places on money. There’s not a bowl of soup that’s purchased, not a bottle of vodka that’s drunk, not a coffee that’s consumed, not a cab ride that’s taken, not an hour on the internet that’s used, that we don’t know the price of. That’s how much of an obsessive theme money is in this novel. It’s been a while since I’ve read a novel of such detailed and deliberate attention to the cost of living, in both senses of the word. Virtually every experience involves a commodity; virtually every experience has a price.

Gessen captures, like few other contemporary writers, the cost of modern life. Whether through his own experience, study, or intuitive sympathy, he seems to know that terrible feeling of material deprivation and anxiety, where the cost of commodities is less a subject of academic abstraction than a real constraint on what we can and cannot do. “She needed to make money,” says Andrei of his girlfriend. “Yulia was trapped.” If Andrei’s love for his grandmother is the motor of the book, money is its gasoline. Once it runs out, the motor stops.

That nexus of finance and freedom, of cash and capability, is a central motif of the novel, making its sense of constraint and grim proportion, of money and measure—so evocative of the nineteenth-century novel—a resonant and necessary new key of contemporary fiction.

Fall Talks (Updated)

It’s going to be a busy fall with lots of talks and presentations. Here’s the schedule. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello!

Tuesday, September 25

5 pm: “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump”

University of Edinburgh (Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History; School of History, Classics, and Archaeology; School of Social and Political Science)

Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4, Medical School, Teviot Place

Tuesday, October 2

4 pm: “Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas’s Jurisprudence”

Rutgers University (Department of History and Raritan)

Alexander Library, 4th Floor Auditorium

169 College Avenue, New Brunswick

Friday, October 5

6 pm:“On Fear and Governance”: A conversation about Euripides’s The Bacchae with director Anne Bogart and poet Monica Youn (followed by a performance of the play)

Brooklyn Academy of Music

BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place

Monday, October 22

4:30 pm: “Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas’s Jurisprudence”

Princeton University (Law and Public Affairs Seminar)

301 Marx Hall

Thursday/Friday, November 1-2

On Clarence Thomas

Symposium on 50 Years Since 1968: The Global and the Local

Brown University: time and place TBA

Monday, November 5

5 pm: “Race Man: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas”

University of Cambridge (Joint Seminar of the Faculties of American History and Political Theory and Intellectual History)

Old Combination Room, Trinity College

Tuesday, November 6

On Der reaktionäre Geist, the German translation of The Reactionary Mind

Munich: time and place TBA

Thursday, November 8

On Der reaktionäre Geist, the German translation of The Reactionary Mind

Berlin: time and place TBA

Wednesday, November 28

12:30 pm: On Clarence Thomas

New York Public Library (Berger Forum)

476 5th Avenue

UPDATE: It turns out that the 11/28 Thomas talk at the NYPL is not for the general public. My apologies.

Fall Talks

It’s going to be a busy fall with lots of talks and presentations. Here’s the schedule. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello!

Tuesday, September 25

5 pm: “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump”

University of Edinburgh (Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History; School of History, Classics, and Archaeology; School of Social and Political Science)

Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4, Medical School, Teviot Place

Tuesday, October 2

4 pm: “Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas’s Jurisprudence”

Rutgers University (Department of History and Raritan)

Alexander Library, 4th Floor Auditorium

169 College Avenue, New Brunswick

Friday, October 5

6 pm:“On Fear and Governance”: A conversation about Euripides’s The Bacchae with director Anne Bogart and poet Monica Youn (followed by a performance of the play)

Brooklyn Academy of Music

BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place

Monday, October 22

4:30 pm: “Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas’s Jurisprudence”

Princeton University (Law and Public Affairs Seminar)

301 Marx Hall

Thursday/Friday, November 1-2

On Clarence Thomas

Symposium on 50 Years Since 1968: The Global and the Local

Brown University: time and place TBA

Monday, November 5

5 pm: “Race Man: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas”

University of Cambridge (Joint Seminar of the Faculties of American History and Political Theory and Intellectual History)

Old Combination Room, Trinity College

Tuesday, November 6

On Der reaktionäre Geist, the German translation of The Reactionary Mind

Munich: time and place TBA

Thursday, November 8

On Der reaktionäre Geist, the German translation of The Reactionary Mind

Berlin: time and place TBA

Wednesday, November 28

12:30 pm: On Clarence Thomas

New York Public Library (Berger Forum)

476 5th Avenue

 

What is the connection between Ezra Pound, the Constitution, and the Steel Industry?

The steel industry is making profits, hand over fist. But it’s not passing the profits on to the workers. So the 30,000 members of the United Steelworkers Union are talking strike. If the workers wind up benefiting from the current boom, it’ll be in spite of the industry, not because of it.

Which reminds me…

Literary scholars know the publishing house New Directions as the publisher of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Tennessee Williams, and Wallace Stevens, among others. It was founded by James Laughlin, scion and heir of the Pittsburgh Laughlin family, of Jones & Laughlin Steel fame, after Pound told him that he didn’t have a future as a poet.

Constitutional scholars know that Jones & Laughlin Steel produced one the most transformative Supreme Court cases of the New Deal era, NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel, which upheld the Wagner Act, thereby making joining and organizing a union a fundamental right, blessed by the Constitution (the Commerce Clause, however, not the 13th Amendment, as an earlier generation of labor organizers and scholars had hoped). With that case, as Karen Orren argued, the entirety of the old constitutional order, grounded in feudal common law, came crashing down.

NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel was decided in 1937, one year after Laughlin founded New Directions.

So two bursts of modernism: one literary, one constitutional; one in 1936, the other in 1937—both the products of the American steel industry, in spite of itself.

Shana Tova.

As political scientists head to their annual convention, the workers at the convention hotels prepare to protest: Here’s what you can do

The American Political Science Association is holding its annual convention this coming week in Boston. As luck would have it, the three hotels (all owned by the Marriott chain) at which the convention is being held are in the midst of a labor dispute with the hotels’ workers, who are members of Local 26 of UNITEHERE.

The issues are many, but the main one is that, as the union contract has expired and the workers renegotiate a new one, they’d like to make sure that a hotel worker should only have to work at one job—not two, not three—in order to support herself and her family. That’s the workers’ demand: “One job should be enough.” And that’s the name of their campaign, which you can read more about here.

Additionally, the workers are frustrated by the hotels’ cynical use of environmentalism to cut costs and increase the burden on workers.

Whenever you go to a hotel these days, you see these signs: don’t wash your towels every day, save the environment. Or don’t opt for housekeeping, make the planet green. Sounds great, right? For the workers, it’s a nightmare. According to this eye-opening expose in the Boston Globe:

But the housekeepers who would otherwise be cleaning these rooms, many of them immigrants, say the increasingly popular programs are cutting into their livelihoods by reducing their hours, making their schedules more erratic, and — ironically — making their jobs harder. That’s because rooms that go without housekeeping for several days are often a wreck — trash piled up, shower doors coated in gunk, crumbs in the carpet, and hair everywhere.

I can’t help noting the irony: The hotel industry, which depends on the carbon-emitting and planet-destroying activity of millions of people hopping into their cars and driving to the airport where they then fly hundreds and thousands of miles to their destinations, happily gives its customers the opportunity to do their little bit for the planet by cutting workers’ hours and making their lives and jobs harder. I guess this is the hotel version of carbon offsets, and as is often the case, it’s working class people of color, many from the Global South, who pay the price.

I reached out to one of the officers at Local 26, who said that the union is not asking people to boycott the hotel or to refuse to cross picket lines. At least not yet. Instead, here are three things the union would like members of APSA to do:

Sign this pledge to support Marriott workers at this dispute develops.
Refuse the “Make a Green Choice/Your Choice” program at check in.
Participate in an informational picket and action that is planned at the Sheraton, one of the main hotels of the convention, on Thursday, August 30, at 1 pm. Meet at the main lobby near the front desk, which is also called the Dalton Street entrance.

 

Freedom and Socialism

The New York Times asked me to write something on socialism and its current appeal. I did, and it’s running as this weekend’s cover story in The Sunday Review. Here are some brief excerpts:

The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.

…

The stories of these candidates are socialist for another reason: They break with the nation-state. The geographic references of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — or Ms. Tlaib, who is running to represent Michigan’s 13th District in Congress — are local rather than national, invoking the memory and outposts of American and European colonialism rather than the promise of the American dream.

Ms. Tlaib speaks of her Palestinian heritage and the cause of Palestine by way of the African-American struggle for civil rights in Detroit, while Ms. Ocasio-Cortez draws circuits of debt linking Puerto Rico, where her mother was born, and the Bronx, where she lives. Mr. Obama’s story also had its Hawaiian (as well as Indonesian and Kenyan) chapters. But where his ended on a note of incorporation, the cosmopolitan wanderer coming home to America, Ms. Tlaib and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez aren’t interested in that resolution. That refusal is also part of the socialist heritage.

…

And of course, there’s overlap between what liberals and socialists call for. But even if liberals come to support single-payer health care, free college, more unions and higher wages, the divide between the two will remain. For liberals, these are policies to alleviate economic misery. For socialists, these are measures of emancipation, liberating men and women from the tyranny of the market and autocracy at work. Back in the 1930s, it was said that liberalism was freedom plus groceries. The socialist, by contrast, believes that making things free makes people free.

It’s also important to remember that the traffic between socialism and liberalism has always been wide. The 10-point program of Marx and Engels’s “Communist Manifesto” included demands that are now boilerplate: universal public education, abolition of child labor and a progressive income tax. It can take a lot of socialists to get a little liberalism: It was socialists in Europe, after all, who won the right to vote, freedom of speech and parliamentary democracy. Given how timid and tepid American liberalism has become — when was the last time a Democratic president even called himself a liberal — it’s not surprising that a more arresting term helps get the conversation going. Sometimes nudges need a nudge.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the main critique, from conservatives, of my claim that making things free makes people free is that they aren’t free to read my piece because it’s behind a paywall and is not free.

Not owning the means of production, I can’t do much on the paywall thing. But if you’ve got money and can breach that wall, here’s the piece.

On Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and Sexual Harassment in the Academy

I wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Avital Ronell/Nimrod Reitman sexual harassment story. Here are some excerpts:

The question of sex, of Ronell’s work and stature in academe, of literary theory or critical theory or the academic left, of the supposed hypocrisy of the scholars who rallied to her side, of the fact that the alleged harasser is a woman and gay while the alleged victim is a man and gay — all of this, if one reads Reitman’s complaint, seems a little beside the point. And has, I think, clouded the fundamental issue. Or issues.

What’s clear from the complaint is just how much energy and attention — both related and unrelated to academic matters — Ronell demanded of Reitman, her student. At all hours of the night, across three continents, on email, phone, Skype, in person, on campus, on other campuses (Ronell berates Reitman when he does not accompany her to the weekly lectures she is giving at Princeton that semester; according to Reitman, she even punishes him for this act of desertion, removing him from a conference she was organizing and at which he had been slated to present), in apartments, classrooms, hallways, offices, subway stations (there are multiple scenes at the Astor Place stop, with Ronell either insisting on walking Reitman to the train or keeping him on the phone until he gets on the train), and elsewhere. It’s almost as if Reitman could have no life apart from her. Indeed, according to the complaint, when Reitman had visitors — a member of his family, a friend — Ronell protested their presence, seemingly annoyed that Reitman should attend to other people in his life, that he had other people in his life. That really is the harassment: the claims she thought she could make on him simply because he was her advisee.

…

The issue of sex always clouds these discussions. One side focuses on the special violation that is supposed to be sexual harassment; the other side (including many feminists) accuses the first of puritanism and sex panic. Try as they might, neither side ever gets beyond the sex.

…

Hanging over all of these exchanges, unmentioned, is the question of power. This is a grad student trying to make his way in an institution where everything depends on the good (or bad) word of his adviser.

The precinct of the academy in which this story occurs prides itself on its understanding of power. Unfortunately, that understanding is often not extended to the faculty’s dealings with graduate students, where power can be tediously, almost comically, simple. Cross your adviser in any way, and that can be the end of your career.

…

In her various responses to the case, Ronell implies that people on the outside of these relationships don’t understand the shared language, the common assumptions, the culture of queer and camp (and of being Israeli, which both she and Reitman are). As soon as she went there, my antenna went up. It reminded me of communitarians in the 1980s and 1990s, who made similar arguments about local cultures, that people outside of them don’t understand the internal meanings of the specific codes and customs, particularly when those codes and customs are oppressive toward women or gays and lesbians or people of color, that people on the outside don’t understand how differently that oppressiveness might read to someone on the inside. And it also reminded me of Judith Shklar’s admonition to the communitarians: Before you buy the story of shared codes and customs, make sure to hear from the people on the lower rungs, when they are far away from the higher rungs, to see how shared that code truly is.

…

For all of Ronell’s talk of shared codes and such, there is one experience, one code, in this story that every academic — gay, straight, male, female, black, white, brown, trans, queer — has shared: being a graduate student.

And here is the whole piece.

The Day Zach Galifianakis Saved Obamacare

The website for Obamacare was launched on October 1, 2013.

That was the same day the 2013 Republican-led shutdown of the government began. The 16-day shutdown—which was essentially caused by Ted Cruz, who held up the passage of a spending bill because the Democrats wouldn’t agree to defund the Affordable Care Act they had just passed—failed. But one of the reasons the Republicans never paid a price for the shutdown was that it got completely overshadowed by the clusterfuck of the failed launch of the website, which was called Healthcare.gov.

The failure of the Healthcare.gov caused no end of tsuris for the entire Obama administration, but especially for Brad Jenkins, who was the Associate Director of the Office of Public Engagement. Jenkins had lined up an army of celebrities to build support for Obamacare, which always depended, remember, on getting younger people to sign up for healthcare. But the celebrity industrial complex is only as strong as your website is working.

“Doing the blocking and tackling of getting celebrities to get the word out” for Healthcare.gov, explains Jenkins,

was going to be the way to go—that was my life for a year—but that all went to shit when the website wouldn’t work for two months. We literally got seventy celebrities on the first day of enrollment to tweet out Healthcare.gov. We got Lady Gaga backstage at her concert, and all of her [forty-eight] million followers went to a website that didn’t work. It was my worst nightmare.

That was October 2. The website wouldn’t even become minimally functional for another two months, in December. The celebs weren’t happy.

All of these celebrities were rip-shit pissed. Maybe they weren’t angry, but their publicists and managers were emailing me: What the fuck? So we burned that bridge. It took two months to fix the website, and it’s very hard to go back to Lady Gaga and ask her two tweet out Helathcare.gov again.

What to do, what to do? If they didn’t get those enrollments up, the whole program would collapse. And the only people enrolling—that is, willing to wait for hours on end while a dysfunctional website endlessly reloaded—were people who were sick or needed healthcare immediately. What the government needed was healthy people to enroll. But that wasn’t happening.

There was always the possibility of pursuing another celebrity route. How about going back to will.i.am and asking him to reprise that modern miracle of art and propaganda “Yes We Can” but for healthcare? Alas, they couldn’t swing that. “This is going to be impossible,” Jenkins feared. “It’s really hard to make health care sexy and cool.” Especially when your website sucks.

Then Jenkins had an idea. Or resurrected a very old idea. You see, apparently it had been a “dream project” of the Obama people—”for years,” says Kori Schulman, Obama’s Deputy Chief Digital Officer—to have Obama go on Zach Galifianikis’s satirical talk show Between Two Ferns. What if they got Obama on the show, allowed Galifianikis to make a little fun of him and his website, and use the platform to get all those young viewers to hear about Healthcare.gov and sign up?

The Obama team sent out Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior adviser, to LA. Jarrett’s people talked to Galifianikis’s people, who “made clear that it had to be like every other Between Two Ferns,” says Jenkins. The art of Between Two Ferns was not to be compromised. “It couldn’t be watered down,” Jenkins explains. “It couldn’t be some big Obamacare commercial.”

And here’s the craziest, most ridiculous part of this entire story: it worked. The show aired on March 11, 2014. It got 30 million views. Healthcare.gov got a 40% uptick in traffic, almost all of it from people who had never been to the website before. “It was the exact healthy demographic who would never think to go to Healthcare.gov or who had never heard of it,” says Jenkins. That’s how Obamacare got saved.

Liberalism, they said back in the 1930s, was freedom plus groceries. Now? It’s websites plus celebrities. Once upon a time, you got Social Security or Medicare just by turning 65. Now you have to go to a website, which may or may not be working, and the visibility and viability of which depends upon the tweets of Lady Gaga.

Which makes the Republicans’ failure to repeal Obamacare all the more revealing: despite the program having a relatively new provenance, despite its amateur-ish rollout, despite the GOP having total control of the federal government, they still were not able to overturn the legislation. Though they’re certainly trying to inflict a slow death upon it.

In any event, this was Jenkins’s moment of triumph. (It’s prominently featured on his Wikipedia page.) Followed by his debriefing of Obama in “the Oval.”

Someone literally helped me clean baby-vomit stains off of my suit jacket before I went into the Oval, and I had maybe five minutes, way more time than we needed. But I walked him through it all. And not to sound hyperbolic, but no president ever went on a program like this—an internet-only, weird satirical show. [Not to take anything away from Jenkins’s sense of the epochal, earth-shattering events of world history, but he might want to google Richard Nixon and Laugh-In.] It was the biggest video of the year, and I was thinking, Wow, maybe he’ll give me a fist bump. It’d be this moment where Barack and I would become friends, and that did not happen. He smiled and congratulated me. Valerie was in the office as well, and he looked at her. “Val, I thought this was your idea?” And she was like, “No, no. This was Brad’s.” The biggest takeaway from all this was, he expected it. That decision was probably the least-important decision he had made in those twenty-four hours, whether to go on that stupid show. He’s dealing with life-and-death matters on national security.

After several weeks of reading these various Obama memoirs, this is what I’ve come to learn and appreciate about the Obama Style. There’s always a story of mind-boggling inanity, often told by a man, who swings from fanboy ingénue (will he notice me? will he be my best friend? will we have breakfast together? maybe get ice cream?) to aw-shucks self-flagellation (silly me! what was I thinking! he’s the Leader of the Free World! he’s thinking about things like…drones, and killing people! he’s important! I’m nothing!), and is always cushioned by a warm helping of clichés (the baby vomit: Jenkins, you see, is an ordinary guy, just a parent like you and me, navigating everyday challenges like babies barfing all over you) and a cool appreciation of power: “the Oval.”

All of this appears in the very excellent Obama: An Oral History 2009-2017 by Brian Abrams, which I highly recommend.

But a version of the story apparently also appears in a book called West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House. (I’d love see a will.i.am “Yes we can” video about the decision to go with that title.) Which I can’t recommend because I haven’t read it (and probably won’t) but which Joe Biden calls “exceptional because of the people in it: ordinary citizens who did extraordinary work and always put the American people first. We have so much to learn from their stories.”

Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them

One of the most fascinating things, to me, about the current moment and the revival of socialism is how the whole question of democracy—not substantive or deep democracy, not participatory democracy, not economic democracy, but good old-fashioned liberal democratic proceduralism—plays out right now on the left.

Throughout most of my life and before, if you raised the banner of socialism in this country or elsewhere, you had to confront the question of Stalinism, Soviet-style sham elections, one-party rule, and serial violations of any notion of democratic proceduralism. No matter how earnest or fervent your avowals of democratic socialism, the word “democracy” put you on the defensive.

What strikes me about the current moment is how willing and able the new generation of democratic socialists are to go on the offensive about democracy, not to shy away from it but to confront it head on. And again, not simply by redefining democracy to mean “economic democracy,” though that is definitely a major—the major—part of the democratic socialist argument which cannot be abandoned, but also by taking the liberal definition of democracy on its own terms.

The reason this generation of democratic socialists are willing and able to do that is not simply that, for some of them, the Soviet Union was gone before they were born. Nor is it simply that this generation of democratic socialists are themselves absolutely fastidious in their commitment to democratic proceduralism: I mean, seriously, these people debate and vote on everything! It’s also because of the massive collapse of democratic, well, norms, here at home.

First, you have the full-on assault on voting rights from the Republican Party. Then there’s the fact that both the current and the last Republican president were only able to win their elections with the help of the two most anti-democratic institutions of the American state: the Electoral College and the Supreme Court. In both cases, these men won their elections over candidates who received more popular votes than they did. There’s a lot of words one might use to describe a system in which the person who gets fewer votes wins, but democracy isn’t one of the ones that comes immediately to mind. Any notion that anyone from that side of the aisle is in any position to even speak on the question of democratic values—again, not robust democratic values but minimal democratic values—is a joke.

Second, you have the Democratic Party. Massively dependent in its nomination process on super-delegates. Massively dependent in its district-level wins on low voter turnout, in districts where the party structure resembles  nothing so much as the Jim Crow South. You have incumbents like Joe Crowley who’ve not had to face a primary challenge in so many years that, as we saw in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they don’t even know how to wage much less win electoral campaigns anymore. You now have, in the case of Julia Salazar’s race for the New York State Senate (whose campaign I really encourage you to donate to), an incumbent, Martin Dilan, who’s trying to forgo an election simply by forcing Salazar off the ballot, with the help of, you guessed it, the least democratic branch of the government: the courts. I can imagine the DSA folks saying to these Dems: you really want to have a debate with us about democracy? Bring it on.

And last you have this very sophisticated take by Seth Ackerman, who has become in a way the intellectual guru behind the whole DSA strategy, on how the party system in America works. Right around the 2016 election, Seth wrote a widely read (and cited) piece, which has become something of a Bible among the DSA set, on how to think about a left party that can avoid some of the pitfalls of third-party strategies in the US.

Here, in this interview with Daniel Denvir, the Terry Gross of the socialist left, Seth explains how much our two-party system looks like those one-party states that socialists of the 20th century spent their lives either defending or being forced to criticize in order to demonstrate their bona fides.

Again, what I think this shows is that, maybe for the first time in a very long time, socialists have the democracy side of the argument on their side.

Here’s Seth:

In most places in the world, a political party is a private, voluntary organization that has a membership, and, in theory at least, the members are the sovereign body of the party who can decide what the party’s program is, what its ideology is, what its platform is, and who its leaders and candidates are. They can do all of that on the grounds of basic freedom of association, in the same way that the members of the NAACP or the American Legion have the right to do what they want with their organization.

In the United States, that’s not the case at all with the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We’ve had an unusual development of our political system where, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the bosses of the two major parties undertook a wave of reforms to the electoral system that essentially turned the political parties into arms of the government, in a way that would be quite shocking — you could even say “norm-eroding” — in other countries.

If you took a comparative politics class in college during the Cold War, it would have discussed the nature of the Communist system, which was distinguished from a democratic system by the merger of the Party and the state, becoming a party-state. Well, the United States is also a party-state, except instead of being a single-party state, it’s a two-party state. That is just as much of a departure from the norm in the world as a one-party state.

In the United States, the law basically requires the Democrats and the Republicans to set up their internal structures the way that the government instructs them to. The government lays out the requirements of how they select their leaders and runs their internal nominee elections, and a host of other considerations. All this stuff is organized by state governments according to their own rules. And of course when we say state governments, who we’re talking about the Democrats and the Republicans.

So it’s a kind of a cartel arrangement in which the two parties have set up a situation that is intended to prevent the emergence of the kind of institution that in the rest of the world is considered a political party: a membership-run organization that has a presence outside of the political system, outside of the government, and can force its way into the government on the basis of some program that those citizens and members assemble around.