Corey Robin's Blog, page 29

Yesterday, I got into an argument with Chelsea Clinton. On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt.

Yesterday, I got into an argument with Chelsea Clinton. On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt.

It began with Clinton tweeting this really upsetting story from the Washington Post about a man who set fire to a LGBT youth center in Phoenix. The headline of the piece read:

Man casually empties gas can in Phoenix LGBT youth center, sets it ablaze

Here’s what Clinton tweeted, along with that headline.

The banality of evil: https://t.co/BbhxhmGl0q

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 28, 2017

I didn’t think Clinton was using Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” correctly. I retweeted her with some snide commentary.

This is what happens when you know something as a cliche or slogan rather than as an idea. Totally the opposite of what Arendt meant. https://t.co/Rh8jT7jlct

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 28, 2017

Sidwell Friends, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia: all that money for fancy schools, and nowhere did you learn the meaning of this phrase?

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 28, 2017

To my surprise, Clinton’s didn’t appreciate my commentary.

No, let me rephrase that.

To my surprise, Chelsea Clinton—author of a best-selling book; vice chair of a powerful global foundation; former special correspondent for NBC; possible congressional candidate, with a net worth of $15 million; daughter of the former president of the United States; daughter of the former Secretary of State and almost-president of the United States—read my tweet.

To my even greater surprise, Chelsea Clinton had an opinion about my tweet.

And to my even greater greater surprise, Chelsea Clinton responded to my tweet.

Hi Corey-Did you watch the video or read the article? Comment wasn’t about the headline. Thankful to have read Arendt at Sidwell & Stanford

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 28, 2017

How do you respond to Chelsea Clinton? On Twitter? About Hannah Arendt?

I thought about that a bit.

And then it hit me: The way you respond to any mistaken comment on Twitter about Hannah Arendt.

So I re-read the article, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything the first time around, and tweeted my reply.

I read the article, which suggests the arsonist is mentally unbalanced or has a personal beef. How do you think that holds up your claim?

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 28, 2017

Now I need to make a detour and explain something about Eichmann in Jerusalem.

One of the key questions Arendt takes up in that book is: What motivated Eichmann to help organize the mass murder of the Jews?

Was he crazy?

No, says Arendt.

Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal”—”More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable”…Behind the comedy of the soul experts lay the hard fact that his was obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity.

Did Eichmann personally hate the Jews?

No, says Arendt.

His was obviously no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He “personally” never had anything whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of “private reasons” for not being a Jew hater.

This, as virtually every reader of Arendt knows, was one of her more controversial moves, and it has plagued her and discussion of her book ever since. But regardless of one’s position on Arendt’s argument, it’s a relatively well known fact—certainly well known to anyone who’s read the book—that one of the central postulates of the book is that Eichmann’s crimes cannot be explained by his personal animus to the Jews.

According to the original Washington Post piece that Clinton was referencing, the Phoenix arsonist had once used the services of the LGBT youth center. From 2013 to 2016, when, the article reports, he turned 25 and “aged out.” So why did the arsonist do it? The article doesn’t reach any conclusions, but it strongly suggests that the man is mentally unstable and in desperate need of some kind of psychiatric care.

“This news hurts,” executive director Linda Elliott said in a news conference Wednesday. “Obviously this young man has issues and needs help.”

…The center staff last made contact with him about two months ago. He apparently also sought services at other organizations in the Valley.

…

A number of the young people who come to One-n-Ten struggle with mental illness and behavioral health problems.

Virtually nothing in the story is suggestive of the banality of evil. Not the arsonist’s motives. Nor his deeds: one of the major issues of contention in and around the Eichmann trial as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem was that this was a man who had sent millions of people to their death, without ever (or hardly ever; I’d have to re-read the whole book to say for sure), lifting a hand against them. Eichmann’s crimes were not ones of personal or direct violence; they were of a completely different order.

So that’s why, to get back to my exchange with Clinton, I tweeted that I had read the article but still wondered why she thought it held up her claim regarding the banality of evil.

Hours went by. I didn’t hear back from her, which is exactly what I would have expected.

I mean, if I were Clinton, I wouldn’t be wasting my time with me.

But I’m not Clinton, so I did waste my time with me. I tweeted out a few other comments about the strangeness of this exchange (one of which I’ll come to below).

Then, on Friday night—Friday night!—Clinton came back to the conversation.

With this:

Anyone who commits arson “casually” or not “needs help.” In 2017, the “casually” reminded me of @PeterDreier piece https://t.co/NTl19OFgLW

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 28, 2017

Remember, Clinton had opened this exchange with the assertion that she wasn’t responding to the headline of the article but to something in the article itself, not conveyed in the headline. Now she was claiming the opposite: she was responding to the headline.

I replied.

Ah, so you were in fact responding to the headline after all.

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 29, 2017

I also thought about tweeting that nothing in Eichmann in Jerusalem suggests that Arendt believes Eichmann was casual about his crimes. In fact, as Arendt goes to great lengths to show, he was extraordinarily meticulous and conscientious about his crimes, demonstrating great initiative and care in their execution. He took his “duty” to organize the mass murder of Jewish men, women, and children very seriously.

But I figured, eh, it’s Friday night, let it go.

Also, I figured we were done.

We weren’t.

Remember, earlier in the day, while Clinton was off doing more important things than arguing with me—On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt—I had been tweeting random thoughts about how surreal, almost lunarly surreal, this whole exchange was.

This was one of my tweets:

When do I get to start including in my bio “Once argued with Chelsea Clinton on Twitter about the meaning of Hannah Arendt”?

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 28, 2017

Kinda lame, I know, but I was kinda flabbergasted—I’d say gobsmacked, but that word annoys me—by the fact that I was arguing with Chelsea Clinton. On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt.

Anyway, on Friday night, Chelsea Clinton returned to that tweet. With this response:

Now? Never? The increased level of hate crimes & desensitization to violence to me is redolent of Arendt’s caution. Will read your article.

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 29, 2017

That article she’s referencing is this one. Someone on Twitter had pointed her to it.

But that reference to the desensitization to violence in Eichmann in Jerusalem: What was she talking about?

In Eichmann, Arendt had argued almost the opposite.

When Eichmann learned of the planned extermination of the Jews, Arendt says that he was shocked. He proceeded to cope with that knowledge, and the role he was to play in the Holocaust, not by desensitizing  himself to violence but by wrapping his actions and deeds in all manner of “language rules”—euphemisms, jargon, and the like—that prevented him from knowing not what it was that he was physically, actually doing (that, he always knew: organizing the mass murder of the Jews) but the moral significance of what he was doing.

And even then, as Arendt goes on to point out in excruciating detail, when he was brought face to face with the actuality of violence, when the facts broke through that scrim of words that was built to disguise the meaning of those facts, Eichmann couldn’t take it.

The system [of language rules], however, was not a foolproof shield against reality, as Eichmann was soon to find out….

Shortly after this, in the autumn of the same year, he was sent by his direct superior Müller to inspect the killing center in the Western Regions of Poland that had been incorporated into the Reich, called the Warthegau. The death camp was at Kulm (or, in Polish, Chelmno), where, in 1944, over three hundred thousands Jews from all over Europe, who had first been “resettled” in the Lódz ghetto, were killed. Here things were already in full swing, but the method was different; instead of gas chambers, mobile gas vans were used. This is what Eichmann saw: The Jews were in a large room; they were told to strip; then a truck arrived, stopping directly before the entrance to the room, and the naked Jews were told to enter it. The doors were closed and the truck started off. “I cannot tell [how many Jews entered], I hardly looked. I could not; I could not; I had had enough. The shrieking, and…I was much too upset, and so on…I then drove along after the van, and then I saw the most horrible sight I had thus far seen in my life. The truck was making for an open ditch, the doors were opened, and the corpses were thrown out, as though they were still alive, so smooth were their limbs. They were hurled into the ditch, and I can still see a civilian extracting the teeth with tooth pliers. And then I was off—jumped into my car and did not open my mouth any more.

Page after page, Arendt narrates incidents and encounters like these. And nowhere does she question Eichmann’s veracity in telling of these encounters. (Though she does seem to question or mock his legal strategy: as if he could slip out of the hangman’s noose by showing that despite being a self-confessed mass murderer, he somehow didn’t enjoy the work.)

Desensitization to violence, in other words, was not one of Eichmann’s problems, at least as Arendt saw it.

I pointed some of these passages out to Clinton.

Except she argues that Eichmann didn’t get desensitized to violence. He could barely tolerate the sight of it, she said. pic.twitter.com/WwUNr0x9vV

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 29, 2017

And that, mercifully, was the end of it.

Except for this guy.

Honestly? All of you people are just being assholes. Find something better to do with your times/lives.

— Jordan Horowitz (@jehorowitz) July 28, 2017

So she can’t possibly know/understand Arendt because *you* are the one who knows/understands Arendt. Got it.

(FYI I have never read Arendt)

— Jordan Horowitz (@jehorowitz) July 28, 2017

I haven’t read Arendt. But she was talking about the headline. She made that clear.

— Jordan Horowitz (@jehorowitz) July 29, 2017

Who is Jordan Horowitz, you may ask?

He’s this guy.

 

Remember the Academy Awards this year, when at first it seemed that La La Land had won, then it turned out that Moonlight won? That guy in the video, announcing this sudden plot twist at the Oscars, was Jordan Horowitz, co-producer of La La Land.

And that’s Jordan Horowitz protecting Chelsea Clinton—author of a best-selling book; vice chair of a powerful global foundation; former special correspondent to NBC; possible congressional candidate, with a net worth of $15 million; daughter of the former president of the United States; daughter of the former Secretary of State and almost-president of the United States—from me.

So why am I telling you all this?

Because I still can’t go over the fact that yesterday, I got into an argument with Chelsea Clinton. On Twitter. About Hannah Arendt.

We have in this country a really weird ruling class.

Update (4:20)

Originally, I had a different conclusion, based on a series of tweets that I thought were Clinton’s but turned out to be a parody account (thanks to the good people of Twitter who pointed that out to me and saved me from even more embarrassment!) Ordinarily, when I make a mistake or error on this blog, I simply strike through the mistake. In order not to hide the error or pretend that I didn’t make it. I would have done that in this case, but since 3/4 of what I had were tweets from that parody account, and you can’t do strike-through’s with tweets, I’ve simply deleted the whole thing. Sorry for the confusion.

Update (5:55)

People seem to be confused by my update. Let me try this again. In the original post, there were a few (as in three) tweets at the VERY END of the post that turned out to be from a parody account. You can see what those posts were in the links that I provide in my update at 4:20. All the other tweets from Clinton which I respond to in this blog—i.e., EVERY TWEET YOU’VE JUST BEEN READING ABOVE, BEFORE THE UPDATE—is a real tweet from Clinton. In other words, I did have an exchange with Clinton, which you’ve just read here.

The Democrats: A party that wants to die but can’t pull the plug

Yesterday, I noted my exasperation, in the face of the economic desperation of the younger generation, with the Clintonites in the Democratic Party. Young men and women are drowning in massive debt, high rent, low pay, and precarious jobs, and what do the Democrats have to offer them?

In today’s Times, Chuck Schumer, the highest elected official in the Democratic Party, gave an answer:

Right now millions of unemployed or underemployed people, particularly those without a college degree, could be brought back into the labor force or retrained to secure full-time, higher-paying work. We propose giving employers, particularly small businesses, a large tax credit to train workers for unfilled jobs. This will have particular resonance in smaller cities and rural areas, which have experienced an exodus of young people who aren’t trained for the jobs in those areas.

Tax credits to employers to train unskilled workers.

Do you know how old and ancient and bullshit this idea is? Here’s how old and ancient and bullshit this idea is. When, more than a decade ago, the University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer came out with his landmark study The Job Training Charade, demonstrating how poorly these job training programs had performed over the years, he reached back, on the cover of the book, to a 1982 bill that essentially promised to do what Schumer is now proposing to do.

There’s one difference. Where the 1982 bill focused on government programs and partnerships, Schumer’s bill seems to focus exclusively on tax giveaways to employers, already awash in cash.

Why did Lafer feature that bill on his cover? Because despite decades of data and research showing how bad these programs were, they held an unusual attraction to Republican and Democratic legislators alike. Co-sponsors of that 1982 bill ranged from right-wingers like Paula Hawkins and Thad Cochran (remember them?) and Orrin Hatch to liberals like Teddy Kennedy. Job training, Lafer showed in exhaustive detail, has come to be the neoliberal salve for our free-market age. When you can’t do anything else for workers, train them. For jobs that aren’t there or wages that suck.

It’s true that Schumer offers other proposals, including a $15 minimum wage, but for anyone with a memory, the devotion of one sentence, much less a paragraph, of precious column space to this synecdoche of the bipartisan political economy of the last four decades—well, it’s enough to make you think this is a party that wants to die but can’t pull the plug.

The Millennials are the American Earthquake

This is a super-fascinating article for multiple reasons.

First, it turns out millennials are even more like the 1930s generation than we realized. Not just in their politics, as Andrew Hartman recently argued, but also in their economic practices. Having come of age during an epic financial crisis, they’re now staying away from the stock market, and putting their money in savings accounts—the equivalent, during the Depression, of stuffing your dollar bills in a mattress for fear of there being a run on the banks.

These little gestures signal deep cultural shifts that are ultimately really important for politics. My generation was raised to think that the stock market was our savior. Fuck pensions and Social Security! You can’t trust the state or the long-term future. You can get much better returns from the whiz kids on Wall Street. That millennials are rejecting that kind of message seems hugely significant to me.

I’ve been saying for years that I would love to see a contemporary version of Edmund Wilson do what he did during the Depression: go and report on the everyday life of the Financial Crisis and its aftermath, seeing how the mood and manner of this generation has been fundamentally altered and reshaped by that experience. It may not be quite The American Earthquake—yet—but there certainly are tremors (what Wilson called, in the book’s first iteration, “the American jitters.”)

Second, that the Post thinks millennials earning $40,000 a year have tons of extra disposal income to sock away for their futures seems risible. Given rents and job precarity and student loans that have to be paid off, it seems totally rational to me that a young person in today’s economy would want to be assured that they’ll have money for food and rent come next month. Better to keep it in the bank than tie it up in a long-term index fund or whatever. Having the money near at hand seems perfectly understandable.

Third, the freakout from the Post and the investor class over this is delicious. Wall Street has ever been the antenna of the nation. It registers —inadvertently, unconsciously—movements and shifts that aren’t always apparent to the eye. Not just economic movements but also cultural and political ones. As Jevons said:

Just as we measure gravity by its effects in the motion of a pendulum, so we may estimate the equality or inequality of feelings by the decisions of the human mind. The will is our pendulum, and its oscillations are minutely registered in the price lists of the markets.

What the market is telling us is: the motion of the pendulum is moving in a different direction, the will of this new generation is not like that of its recent predecessors.

Update (9:45 am)

Just a few minutes out, and I’m already seeing tons of responses to this on Twitter and Facebook. Young people telling their personal stories—with precision, concreteness, detail—of their struggles in this economy. I find it all unbelievably poignant.

It just makes me all the more enraged at the Clinonite blather you hear on social media. And not just the Clintonites; it’s also the left. What in the end do we on the left have to offer people today? Medicare for All and free college. Don’t get me wrong; these would be great, and I’ve been fighting for them, too. But they don’t touch the fundamentals of the economy. I don’t mean that in a Marxist sense.

Just think of everyone from the New Dealers to Bill Clinton: all of them had a theory of the economy and how it might improve people’s lives and standing. Clinton’s was bullshit, but he was the last one to even think he had to offer a comprehensive account to people. Perhaps that was due to the hangover from the Cold War, which is now over. Without the challenge of communism, we don’t think we need to give people something like a vision of the economy.

So we let this generation die. We bury them, without having even the decency to perform an autopsy or deliver a eulogy.

 

All the president’s men were ratfuckers

On MSNBC, former Bush White House Communications Chief Nicolle Wallace went after the new White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci and his team: “These are not all the president’s men, these are all of Sean Hannity’s men.”

I gather Wallace thinks “all the president’s men” means men of great virtue and talent, the proverbial Wise Men of the early Cold War or the Knights of the Roundtable or something.

In reality, the phrase refers to Nixon’s team of White House advisors and convicted Watergate felons, all of whom went to jail: Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell, Colson, Chapin, and Segretti, who literally invented the phrase “ratfucking” for the dirty tricks he was hired to do for the Nixon campaign.

It’s also a riff on Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men—a fictional account of one of America’s great and most dangerous demagogues—not to mention a famous poem by Lewis Carroll nursery rhyme, where the entire point is that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty back together again. Not the most efficacious bunch, in other words.

The ever present need to believe in some mythical past of American virtue—particularly at liberal media outlets like MSNBC, where Bush White House officials are refurbished as honorable elders of state*—inevitably produces a history where we’re forever defining deviancy downward.

Meanwhile, Wallace has this to say about Trump: “He knows scant presidential, or frankly world history.”

* Thanks to Dave Daley for that point.

 

We have the opportunity for a realignment. We don’t have a party to do it. Yet.

One of the interesting things about the great realignment elections—1860, 1932, 1980—is that the presidents who win them (Lincoln, FDR, Reagan) never run simply against the losing candidate. Nor do they run simply against the party of that candidate. They run against a decades-long regime, which is never simply a party or political regime, but always, also, a social regime. Lincoln ran against the slaveocracy, who had nested in the Democratic Party. FDR ran against the economic royalists, who had found their protectors and agents in the Republican Party. Reagan ran against a complex of “special interests” (civil rights organizations, unions, feminist groups, poverty programs) that had captured the Democratic Party. In repudiating Carter, Hoover, Breckinridge/Douglas—and the Democrats of 1980, the Republicans of 1932, and the Democrats (Southern and Northern) of 1860—Reagan was really repudiating the special interests, FDR was really repudiating the economic royalists, and Lincoln was really repudiating the slaveocracy. You could hear this in their words, and see it in their deeds.

The reason these realignment presidents do this is not simply because they want to gut what they view as a malignant social formation. It’s that they are presented with, and don’t hesitate to seize upon, a golden opportunity when the candidate/party that represents those social formations is at a historically low ebb. The Democrats were fractiously divided between two candidates and two regions in 1860. Hoover and Carter were haplessly presiding over economic crises. Lincoln and the Republicans, FDR and the Democrats, Reagan and the Republicans: all were shrewd enough to see and seize upon their moment. In part because all those candidates and parties had undergone a radical internal transformation (in the case of Lincoln and the Republicans, that involved a break with preexisting parties and the formation of a new party). In order to topple these regimes, these realignment presidents first had to come to power through a major faction fight within or without their party, where they forced one faction to give way to another.

Realignments, in other words, are what are called, in fancy terms, conjunctures. You have an immediate political or economic crisis that, in the hands of the right kind of party, gets turned into a repudiation of decades of rule and misrule and a broader social malignancy. It’s not enough to have a crisis: the 2007 Financial Crisis didn’t generate a realignment; the Democratic Party, despite Obama’s rhetoric, wasn’t interested or ready for that. Things certainly were pushed to the left—relative to both Bush and Clinton—but it wasn’t a realignment. No, it’s not enough to have a crisis; you need a party and persons ready to turn that crisis, rhetorically and politically, into a catastrophe that sets the stage for an entirely new mode of politics.

The great possibility—and potential peril—of the current moment is that we are once again presented with that kind of opportunity. It’s not simply that Trump and the Republicans are a walking disaster. Their disaster opens out onto—reveals—a much deeper social malignancy: the triumph of the business class. I’ve spent the entire morning reading article after article on the GOP’s plans on taxes, the budget, the debt, and the regulatory regime they’re trying to destroy. And what comes away more than anything else is the players. It’s not Bannon or Miller, both of whom seem to be completely sidelined. It’s not even Ryan or McConnell. Almost all of the players are straight from Wall Street, corporate America, the Chamber of Commerce, Heritage, and so on. And it is consistently their interests that are winning in the Trump administration.

What’s also revealed in these documents is just how incompetent and bad these guys are at their jobs. Steven Mnuchin—from Yale, Goldman Sachs, and more hedge funds than I can count—can’t do the simplest thing in Washington because he hails almost entirely from the very class that Republicans and neoliberal Democrats have been telling us for decades knows what it is doing. Remember, in the wake of the Financial Crisis, Obama’s smug and self-important defense of Lloyd Blankfein’s and Jamie Dimon’s multi-million-dollar, year-end bonuses? “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.” Well, as it turns out, those guys aren’t so savvy. And when they get political power, they’re even more clueless. That’s important for us to stress. Part of what gave FDR and New Dealers like Rexford Tugwell and Sidney Hillman such élan in the 1930s was their sense that the business class had thoroughly discredited itself. Their sense was: the economic royalists had their chance; it’s our turn now.

We have an amazing, once-in-a-half-century opportunity not simply to discredit and disgrace Trump or Ryan or McConnell or the Republican Party. We have an amazing, once-in-a-half-century opportunity to repudiate the entire business class. They are the authors of our current predicament. They are the doyens of our current moment. They are the social malignancy—like the slaveocracy, like the economic royalists—that needs to be repudiated.

But we can’t do that unless and until we either transform the Democratic Party, as Reagan and the right did with the Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s, or find and found a new party, as Lincoln and the Republicans did in the 1850s.

The Jewish Question has always been, for me, a European question

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French leftist leader who I was hoping would beat Macron in the last election, really sullies himself with this comment about French collaboration with the Holocaust. Responding to Macron’s speech in which Macron said France needed to take responsibility for its role in the roundup and extermination of the Jews (for decades, a touchy subject in France), Mélenchon resorts to the worst nationalist tropes to defend the honor of the French nation.

Never, at any moment, did the French choose murder and anti-Semitic criminality. Those who were not Jewish were not all, and as French people, guilty of the crime that was carried out at the time! On the contrary, through its resistance, its fight against the [German] invader and through the reestablishment of the republic when the [Germans] were driven out of the territory, the French people, the French people proved which side they were actually on.

There’s an argument to be had (and one could see why in republican France some would want it to be had) about the relationship of the people to a collaborationist government under foreign occupation. Had Mélenchon simply said, look, the French people were divided, it’s hard to generalize, many collaborated, some resisted, Vichy wasn’t the official representative of the French people, let’s have a more textured understanding of history—that would be one thing. But that’s not simply what he says. (I’m not a reader of French, so I’m relying on the translations here. I’m also an outsider to French politics, and by no means an expert on all the local nuances and subtleties of this engagement. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.) He goes further. With that last line in particular, he does more than try to remove the stain of collective guilt. He tries to claim collective innocence: what the Resistance did, that was France. What Vichy did, that wasn’t France. That was those evil ministers, forever betraying the French nation and the French people, who proved by the actions of the resisters who they really are.

Not only is what Mélenchon said an offense against the historical record, but it evinces all the worst features of nationalism that I loathe: the special pleading, the knee-jerk impulse to defend one’s own (with the implicit acknowledgment that the Jews aren’t thought of as one’s own), the retrograde identity politics (one might say the original form of identity politics), the offshoring of evil (though in this regard, Mélenchon ties himself in knots, saying, according to that Haaretz report, that Vichy wasn’t really France; France was off in London), the tribalism and groupiness. Even worse, this desire to assert and insist upon the purity of one’s group: deep down, we’re really good, it was those evil politicians, who weren’t really French in their hearts, who did the bad things. That kind of thinking is just the flip side of Bush-style axis of evil talk. The left should defend collectives, yes, but for God’s sake, let them be collectives based on justice rather than purity, and let them be collectives other than the French—or any other—nation.

This whole episode brings me back to a moment more than 25 years ago.

It was after my first year in grad school. I was spending the summer in Freiburg, learning German. At the language school where I was studying, I made a group of friends from Italy, France, Britain, and elsewhere. One guy, Pascal, and I really hit it off. He was from France, the south of France I think, and a hardcore leftist. Super sweet guy, with a German girlfriend named Claudia. I really liked them both.

One night, around the end of the summer, Pascal and Claudia had me over to dinner. They lived pretty far outside of the city, in the country. It was a lovely evening. We all spoke German (our one common language), with Claudia gently helping Pascal and me along when we needed help. There was a lot of wine.

Toward the end of the evening, the topic turned to French politics. Mitterrand in particular. This must have been some time around his second term as President. I don’t remember what prompted this, but at some point in the discussion, through my wine-sodden haze, I heard Pascal hissing that Mitterrand was a Jew. Everything bad that Mitterrand did—and Pascal really hated Mitterrand, from the left—was because Mitterrand was a Jew. It was a tirade: Jew this, Jew that. I think Pascal even began slipping into French: Juif, Juif.

(Mitterrand, incidentally, also liked to pull this line that France wasn’t responsible for the roundup of the Jews, that it was this alien, un-French presence called Vichy that did that.)

After a few minutes of this, I gathered myself, and said, as calm and composed as I could be (why is it so hard to assert one’s dignity in these situations?): Mitterrand is not a Jew, but I am.

It was a terrible moment: a wonderful summer’s friendship, across the barriers of language and nation, poisoned by this sudden extrusion of anti-Semitism. From the left.

I said I wanted to leave. They drove me home (as I said, we were way out of town). Claudia, the German, was scandalized by what her boyfriend, the Frenchman, had said and told him so. She couldn’t stop apologizing to me, up until the minute I got out of the car. He just drove, silently. That was the last I ever saw of them.

I’ve traveled a lot, have lived abroad, and have been friends with people from all across the globe. I’ve been involved in all kinds of anti-Zionist politics here in the US, with Jews, Muslims, Christians, Arabs, and atheists. But it’s only been among Europeans—I talked about my experiences in Britain here—that I’ve ever felt someone look at me and see: Jew Jew Jew.

The Jewish Question has always been, for me, a European question.

Trump: The Profit Unarmed

In the wake of the collapse yesterday of the Republicans’ effort to repeal Obamacare—let’s hope this really is the endgame of that effort—it’s time to re-up, first, this piece I did for the Times, just after the House Republicans’ effort to repeal Obamacare collapsed; and, second, this piece I did for n+1, arguing that Trump’s would be a spectacularly weak and ineffective presidency, along the lines of Jimmy Carter’s.

It goes without saying that it’s too early to celebrate, and now that McConnell has declared his intention to pass a simple repeal (rather than repeal and replace), we need to stay on the phones. But there is some reason to think, as Brian Beutler argued yesterday, that even though the House GOP came back after their defeat to pass different repeal and replace measure (one far worse than the one that was defeated), the only reason they could do that is that they knew it would not be passed by the Senate. Which turned out to be true. Likewise, it may turn out to be true that the only reason the congressional GOP could pass those Obamacare repeal measures all those years was simply that they knew Obama would veto them. Which he did. When brought face to face with the reality of their dreams, they continue to balk.

So let’s hope (and make sure): good riddance. As Irving Howe said of Irving Kristol: may he have a long life, and many many defeats.

Back to the Trump/Carter comparison: Since I first made it, there’s been a lot of resistance to it.

The most obvious reason for the resistance, particularly among Democrats, is that Carter has acquired a kind of saintly halo about him, whereas Trump is an id-driven immoralist. Even though I constantly point out that the comparison between the two presidents is structural rather than substantive (though Carter’s policies and politics were in fact a lot more conservative than people remember), something about the comparison rubs people the wrong way, as if I’m sullying the name of a good man.

But I think there’s actually a much deeper reason for the resistance. And that is that Trump and Carter play to our deepest archetypes of power and strength: Trump as the menacing fascist, Carter as the meek and mild-mannered do-gooder. That archetype pervades the political spectrum, for it rests on an ancient belief: that power and morality, power and ethics, are ever and always opposed.

So even on the left, which opposes Trump, there is a subterranean belief that that performance of his—which is so obviously a case, almost kitschily so, of the emperor has no clothes—is in fact really strength. Precisely because Trump is so transparently uninterested in morals. Likewise, there is a subterranean belief on the left that Carter had to be weak. Precisely because he was so transparently interested in morals.

The truth, funnily enough, is that while the Trump/Carter comparison continues to hold—holds up quite well, in fact—if we had to compare the two presidents, we’d find out, that as of this point in their presidencies, Carter had delivered far more, had transformed the national agenda far more, had acted and imposed his will far more, than Trump has. Carter was in fact the stronger leader.

But we continue to fear, in the face of all the facts, that Trump is. And not because Carter did good things (a lot of the things he did were in fact pretty terrible) but because, as Orwell saw in his essay on Gandhi, we like to think of our prophets as unarmed. We like to think that powerlessness is a virtue and power a vice—a dangerous delusion that feeds its own dangerous counter-delusion: that strongmen are strong.

Unlike Jimmy Carter, Trump has been remarkably weak. And that may turn out to be his salvation.

Using Steve Skowronek’s theory of the presidency, particularly his theory of disjunctive presidencies, I’ve been plugging the Trump-Carter comparison, as many of you know. It occurred to me this morning, however, on reading this quite astute piece from Matt Yglesias, that there may be an interesting flaw in that comparison.

Yglesias points out, and I think he’s right in ways that few people have grappled with, that in many ways, Trump ran well to the center of the Republican Party during the primaries. Trump promised not to touch Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid; he seemed chill with gay marriage; at times he praised Planned Parenthood; he ran against free trade; and he was a sharp critic of the neocon adventurism of the Bush Administration. Rhetorically; in the campaign. I’m not talking about how he has governed; that’ll come in a minute.

That kind of willingness to mix it up, to fuck with standard GOP positions, is the hallmark of disjunctive presidents. Carter did something similar during the campaign in 1976: he promised to scramble the New Deal coalition (particularly labor), to roll back the regulatory state, to take on welfare. As occurred with Trump, that scrambling of the map provoked a major backlash from the pillars of the party, and like Trump, Carter won the nomination and the presidency.

Oddly enough, one of the few people to appreciate how powerful and potent Jimmy Carter was in this regard—and to appreciate that early on in the wake of Carter’s failed reelection campaign in 1980, when the standard line was that he was a massive fuck-up and a loser—was none other than one Donald Trump. In Art of the Deal, Trump recounts a story in which Carter comes to him, asking for five million dollars for his library. Trump is dumbfounded—and impressed.

Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president.

The reason candidates like Trump and Carter do this sort of thing is that they have a sense that the established orthodoxies, the familiar coalitions, are no longer working. Where candidates like Ted Cruz or Teddy Kennedy believe that the answer to a party’s dwindling fortunes is to double down on the party’s commitments, the Carters and Trumps know something (believe it or not) that their competitors don’t: not simply that the electoral majority no longer answers the party’s call, but that in its heart of its hearts the party itself is no longer where it once was. It no longer truly believes in the animating faiths of the regime. That’s what enables an ideological scrambler like Carter or Trump to slip through and win.

But here’s where Skowronek’s theory and the Trump-Carter comparison gets wonky.

As Yglesias points out, Trump in office has reverted to the conservative mean. He’s become pretty much a bog-standard Republican: going after Medicaid, trying to defund Planned Parenthood, budgets that look like they were designed by the Heritage Foundation (budgets that were in fact designed by the Heritage Foundation.) For all the white worker vanguardism, Bannon has mostly cooperated and worked with the free-market/Chamber of Commerce wing of the Republican Party.

More than that, Trump hasn’t done much of anything. At least not legislatively and not in terms of delivering on long-promised Republican dreams. Outside the Gorsuch ascension, which was engineered entirely by McConnell, and the deregulation that he can do on his own, without Congress, Trump has mostly been standing still. No repeal of Obamacare, no tax overhaul, no Ground Zero budgets, nada. At least not yet.

By the end of his first year in office, by contrast, Carter had so dominated the political field that seasoned pols like Robert Byrd and Tip O’Neill were marveling at his political prowess. The most commanding politician of the age, they thought.

Carter was constantly, and successfully, acting in ways that did scramble the political map: he did deregulate the airlines, trucking, oil, and banking industries; he did increase the military budget. Carter was also constantly, and successfully, acting in ways consistent with traditional Democratic Party ideals: he did create an Energy Department; he did create an Education Department; he did aggressively pursue conservation policies. That combination—of scrambling the political map, of carrying out longstanding liberal ideals—is what got Carter into so much trouble. The right hated him for his fidelity to traditional liberalism, the left hated him for his breach with traditional liberalism.

Trump, in office, has done the reverse. He’s reverted to the Republican mean, and outside his roll back of Obama’s regulations, he’s not done much of anything to advance that mean. Carter actually acted in the political field; when he did something like create a new administrative department, he did it with Congress. Trump hides behind the entirely executive powers of his office. He doesn’t scramble the political map.

And that may be, in the end, what protects him. That may be the one thing that saves Trump from becoming Carter.

In Skowronek’s theory, the cause of a president’s undoing—like Carter’s—is not that the president is weak or does nothing. It’s precisely that that president is strong and does something. For all his reputation for haplessness and weakness, Carter, as Skowronek shows, was remarkably powerful and potent as a leader. He really did undo the Democratic Party coalition. He really did set it on a new course. And that’s what he was most hated for. And why he lost the reelection.

Trump, on the other hand, has done the opposite. He has been, as a leader, not just domestically but also internationally, remarkably weak. And that may be his salvation.

Fighting Fascism in France, 1936 v. 2017

Fighting Fascism in France, Summer 1936:

Léon Blum’s Popular Front government establishes extensive labor law protections, including the right to collective bargaining, two weeks’ paid holidays, and 40-hour work week.

Fighting Fascism in France, Summer 2017:

Macron’s government uses summer holidays to ram through extensive labor law retrenchments, including provisions that ensure collective bargaining agreements protect workers who aren’t in unions and that prevent workers from having to answer work-related email and phone calls after hours.

Also, this:

… he’ll [Macron] ask Parliament for legislation that would let the government enact labor reforms by decree, avoiding momentum-sapping debate…

That’s how we fight fascism today: by an enabling act that allows the government to bypass political debate and rule by decree.

On the Republicans’ stalled healthcare bill

I have a piece in The Guardian on the Republicans’ stalled healthcare bill in the Senate. Some excerpts:

At the beginning of this week, Republican senators were planning to head home for the Fourth of July recess and celebrate the nation’s independence and freedom by enacting their idea of liberty: denying health insurance to more than 20 million people. By the middle of the week, their hopes were dashed.

…

Once again the Republicans have found themselves in the peculiar position of possessing total control of the elected branches of the federal government, yet unable to act on one of their longstanding dreams: not just slowly destroying Medicaid, a federal program that guarantees healthcare to millions of poorer people, but also forcing people to rely upon the free market for their healthcare.

…

But that only begs the question: why haven’t the Republican free-market fanatics mobilized their base in support of the bill? Why aren’t they flooding the Senate with phone calls in favor of making people fend for themselves in the healthcare insurance market? Where’s the passion for the market, the hostility to the welfare state, that has so defined the conservative cause since the New Deal?

…

The problem, in other words, may not be the personnel. It may be the principles. Unlike Reagan, today’s Republican is no longer warmed in the same way by the burning belief that anything the state does in the realm of social welfare is automatically bad.

 

Read more here.