Corey Robin's Blog, page 36

What if Trump Turns Out To Be…

If…

—Donald Trump continues to get major pushback—both judicial and popular—on his immigration bans, such that they can’t move forward;

—parts of the GOP continue to refuse to pay for his wall;

—the Republicans continue to tie themselves in knots over Obamacare;

—the Supreme Court, even with Gorsuch, continues to uphold Roe v. Wade (overturning it will take at least one more Trump appointment, after Gorsuch);

If in the end all Trump really delivers, when you get rid of the bells and whistles, is tax cuts and deregulation, race-baiting and saber-rattling*…

…what will that mean?

That Trump is pretty much like every other Republican in office we’ve ever had.

Which is the one thing he cannot afford to be.

*The wild card in this, as I said the other night, is whether Trump goes to war. Which may be his only out.

God Is an Accelerationist

At shul today, my eight-year-old daughter Carol asked about the parsha we were reading, from Exodus 10-11, which details the last of the three plagues before Pharaoh lets the Jews go. Up until that final moment, God is “hardening Pharaoh’s heart,” stiffening his tyrannical resolve so that he won’t let the Jews go. Which prompted this exchange:

Carol: Why does God harden Pharaoh’s heart? Why doesn’t He soften it?

Me: I have no idea. Why do you think?

Carol: Maybe if He did, the Jews would get too comfortable and wouldn’t want to go.

Me: That’s what people call “heightening the contradictions.”

Trump was the best the Republican Party could do

There’s lots of news out today suggesting that Trump’s antics and histrionics may be jeopardizing one of the GOP’s top aims: repeal of Obamacare.

The Republicans, who originally spoke of repeal, then shifted to repeal and replace, are now taking about “repair.” It’s unclear what that will mean in terms of concrete policies, but it’s very clear that enough of the leadership believes it is losing the political battle over Obamacare such that it now has to describe what it is doing in vastly different terms. Terms not unlike those used by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.

Listen to Paul Ryan as he twists himself into a pretzel:

“So what kind of got going on here is, I’ve got a confluence of words,” Ryan said during the television interview. “To repair the American health-care system, you have to repeal and replace this law, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Kind of like Selena Meyer forgetting what “the three R’s” were during that presidential debate on Veep.

Part of the reason the Republicans have lost the script on Obamacare has to do with the program itself, and the difficulties they’re running into in repealing it. But part of it, as the New York Times is reporting tonight, has to do with commotion Trump has caused with his Cabinet appointments and his executive orders, and the massive resistance both have provoked.

Congress’s rush to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, once seemingly unstoppable, is flagging badly as Republicans struggle to come up with a replacement and a key senator has declared that the effort is more a repair job than a demolition.
…
An aspirational deadline of Jan. 27 for repeal legislation has come and gone. The powerful retirees’ lobby AARP is mobilizing to defend key elements of the Affordable Care Act. Republican leaders who once saw a health law repeal as a quick first strike in the Trump era now must at least consider a worst case: unable to move forward with comprehensive health legislation, even as the uncertainty that they helped foster rattles consumers and insurers.
…

When Congress convened this year, Republicans immediately introduced a budget resolution clearing the way for legislation to gut the health law, with strong support from Mr. Trump, who took office 17 days later. But Mr. Trump’s rocky start has slowed the momentum, depleting his political capital and dimming prospects for bipartisan cooperation.

In addition, many senators are preoccupied with fights over the confirmation of Mr. Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court and top jobs in his administration. What was once considered Congress’s Job No. 1 is being eclipsed for some lawmakers by more immediate matters.

It’s way too early to tell what will happen, but at a minimum, it’s clear that Trump’s way of doing business is getting in the way, at least right now, of the GOP’s business. The more that happens—and the more the GOP is forced to beat a further retreat on Obamacare (and perhaps other issues)—the more enraged the base will get. Either with Trump or with the GOP. Either way, things could get hairy, internally, for the party.

But I want to step from this immediate news to raise a larger issue.

Let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that these tensions and instabilities in the Trump regime are there, if not growing. The military is already blaming Trump for its mishaps in the field. Already 40% of the country are saying that they’d like to see Trump impeached. And we’re still less than two weeks into his presidency. As historian Kevin Kruse pointed out on Twitter tonight, it wasn’t until 16 months into the Watergate scandal that you saw impeachment numbers like that during Nixon’s second term. It’s not a great comparison, given the level of polarization in the country today versus then, but what those polling numbers (and Trump’s historically low, dismal approval ratings) do tell us is that rather than expand his or the party’s base, Trump has shrunk it. Not something presidents in their second week in office seek or tend to do.

So, then, the question becomes: Assuming they could have gotten the nomination, was there any other Republican who could have done better, who could have unified and led the party, if not the country, more?

All the other Republican candidates were loathed by the party faithful even more than Trump was. None of them knew how to bring together together the base, which wanted blood, and get themselves into the White House at the same time. Maybe Kasich or Rubio could have done that, but they were the biggest losers of the final four. They were the equivalent of Scoop Jackson in the Democratic Party, who many party leaders hoped might raise the standard against the Republicans despite the fact that virtually no one supported him besides themselves.

While it’s easy to get caught up in the personalities, politics, and policies of the Trump administration—and no matter how revanchist and right-wing the Republican Party is, it’s difficult to imagine a Cruz presidency seeming quite like this—we have to see the unprecedented opposition to their rule as a symptom of not only their hamfisted tactics but also of the waning unity and power of conservatism itself. Both internally within the Republican Party—it was clear that the party faithful wanted something more than what Bush, Romney, Ryan, and McConnell had provided—and beyond the Republican Party.

In fact, it was the singular insight of Trump and Bannon to recognize that waning power of conservatism and to act on it. That’s what prompted their critique of the Republican Party; that’s what enabled them to take it over; and that is what remains, to this day, the premise of their rule. While much of the bravado and commotion of the past two weeks, I continue to believe, is more the product of incompetence and artlessness than design, there’s little doubt that a winging-it improvisational style is something Trump has always prized. As he says in the second paragraph of The Art of the Deal—the only passage in this 367-page book in which I could find anything resembling a coherent idea—

Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just what develops.

With that chaotic style, which Trump and Bannon mistake for substance, they’re hoping to turn weakness into strength. I have my doubts that they can do that, as I’ve said many times, but the more important point is that this was best the Republican Party could do.

In other words, in some very fundamental and palpable way, the Republican Party had no other choice but to nominate Trump. This—this last-ditch gamble of his—was their only hope.

Morbid Thoughts in Time of Trump

Trigger-warning: some morbid thoughts here, wrought by the day’s events.

The one thing that’s made me super-nervous since the election, the major thing that has given me the kind of anxiety a lot of folks have been feeling nonstop since election night, is the possibility of him leading us into war. Not a 9/11-type event but the more old-fashioned escalation to battle, where reckless rhetoric leads nations to stumble or bumble into war.

If I’ve had any precedents in my mind for the worst that may lie ahead, it’s not been Hitler, Mussolini, Berlusconi, and all the rest. It’s been World War I. It’s been senseless murder on a grand scale, of the sort the United States is more than capable of. And then I start thinking about the seeming irrationality of it all, the way men and women allowed themselves to be led to their own destruction, which led Freud to start thinking about a death drive in European civilization if not in humanity as a whole.

And I start thinking about the way we’ve allowed ourselves to be lulled into our own slow-motion destruction in the form of climate change, where we watch our futures and our children’s futures being held hostage, being mortgaged, not only to our corporations but also to our complacency, our corruption born of comfort.

And I look around for any sign of leadership from the political class, and see nothing at all. They all seem so reactive, so frightened, so cowed, so clueless. They can’t stand up; they’re too used to sitting down.

And then I read today’s headlines, from his threats to Mexico to his dressing down of Australia to the saber-rattling around Iran.

And I think: We’re on our own. No one is going to save us from these people. I’m glad we’re fighting so hard. I believe there is more intelligence, more grit, more vision, more power in all of us than in all of them. We are all leaders, we must all lead. Keep fighting. Keep fighting. They must be stopped.

The American Terrible

Someone recently asked me: if you don’t think Trump is a fascist, what do you think is going to happen? I answered her as truthfully as I could: I don’t know. The fact is: none of us knows. Not even, I suspect, Trump or Steve Bannon.

In the course of several argumens and conversations over the last few days—about Trump, what he’s up to, and so on—I’ve sometimes found myself, against my better judgment, drifting into predictions. I start out trying to think about what this current moment means, and I wind up making claims about where we’re going. That’s not a place I want to be. Not simply because my prediction about the election was so completely wrong, not simply because I’m trying to be more attentive to the mistakes I’ve made in the past lest I repeat them now, but also because prediction is a mug’s game. None of us knows what’s going to happen, and what’s going to happen with Trump, as I’ve repeatedly said, depends in part on what we do. This is not a fixed or frozen force field; it’s changing every day. What makes things especially challenging, however, is that analysis so often lends itself, or bleeds into, prediction.

In the coming weeks, I’m really going to try avoid getting drawn into debates about the future or what’s coming. While I’ll continue to analyze and explain what I’m seeing, I’m going try and be more circumspect about whither we’re tending.

Before I launch on this predictions fast, though, let me explain a bit about where I am coming in my assessments of Trump and Trumpism.

Before I wrote my book on conservatism, I was a student of the politics of fear. My first book, which was based on more than a decade of research, was an analysis of how political theorists since Hobbes have understood the politics of fear. In the second part of the book, I offered my own counter-analysis of the politics of fear in the United States. Fear, American Style, I called it. I focused primarily on McCarthyism and the war on terror, but my archive was based in an array of American experiences: from slavery to the labor wars of the Gilded Age, from Jim Crow to the contemporary workplace. As a followup to that book, I began working on a book about American political repression, which I was co-authoring with Ellen Schrecker, the noted historian of McCarthyism. We never finished the book, but we amassed quite a bit of research and wrote a couple of chapters, from an even deeper and richer array of archival resources.

Here’s what I learned about Fear, American Style: The worst, most terrible things that the United States has done have almost never happened through an assault on American institutions; they’ve always happened through American institutions and practices. These are the elements of the American polity that have offered especially potent tools and instruments of intimidation and coercion: federalism, the separation of powers, social pluralism, and the rule of law. All the elements of the American experience that liberals and conservatives have so cherished as bulwarks of American freedom have also been sources and instruments of political fear. In all the cases I looked at, coercion, intimidation, repression, and violence were leveraged through these mechanisms, not in spite of them. (You can read an article-length version of the argument here.)

My position on Trump and the possibilities of American fascism, in other words, does not rest on any optimism or faith about the American experiment or the resilience of American institutions. Just the opposite: it is precisely because I know how easily mobilized for terrible purposes the American regime can be that I am skeptical of the possibilities or necessity for a strong-man politics of the sort we see in authoritarian regimes elsewhere. This is a country that managed to enslave—to torture and drive unto death, both physical and social—millions of black men, women, and their children, for over two centuries, and then to for another century, not by shredding the Constitution but by writing and interpreting and executing the Constitution. This is a country that managed to mow down trade unionists and dissenters, to arrest and throw them into jail, to destroy vibrant social movements, to engineer a near-complete rout of American social democracy after the Second World War, to build and fill concentration camps, to pass legislation during the Cold War authorizing internment camps: all without a strongman; indeed, often with the collusion of some of the most esteemed voices of liberty in the country. This is a country that in the last half-century has managed to undo some of the precious achievements of liberal civilization—the ban and revulsion against torture, the prohibition on preventive war, the right to organize, the skepticism of the imperial executive—through lawyers, genteel men of the Senate with their august traditions and practices, and the Supreme Court.

When it comes to the most terrible kinds of repression and violence, Fear, American Style has worked because it has given so many players a piece of the pie. The most prized elements of American constitutionalism—shared and fragmented power, compromise and consent, dispersed authority—are the very things that have animated and underwritten Fear, American Style.

Insofar as Trump and Bannon believe that we need authoritarian strongman politics in order to achieve their ultra-revanchist aims, they don’t understand American politics. When it comes to American revanchism, that kind of strongman politics is almost entirely superfluous. Indeed, it’s pure surplus. And may be well counter-productive to what they and their constituents truly want.

We have in this country legions of intellectuals, journalists, and scholars who are steeped in the knowledge of the American terrible: racism, slavery, imperialism, misogyny. Yet when it comes to analyzing the relationship of that American terrible to American institutions, in this moment, these same intellectuals, journalists, and scholars are driven for their explanations either to exotica from abroad—fascism, Putinism, and so on—or to a notion of the American terrible as a shape-shifting anti-institutional, anti-legal, anti-traditional, anti-rational, psychological, cultural, ever-bubbling stew of affect and evil.

The truth of the matter is that Trump and Bannon could get most if not all of what they want—in terms of the revanchism of race, gender, and class, the white Christian nation that they seem to wish for—without strongman politics. American institutions offer more than enough resources for revanchism. That they seem not to know this—that they are willing to make opponents of the military and the security establishment, that they are willing to arouse into opposition and conjure enemies out of potential friends—may be their biggest weakness of all. Or, if they do know this, but seek strongman politics anyway, perhaps because it is a surplus, then they’re willing to put strongman politics above and beyond the project of social revanchism that their base seeks. Which may be their other biggest weakness of all.

So I do think Trump and Bannon are vulnerable: Not because American institutions are so strong and resilient, but because Trump and Bannon don’t seem to understand how weak and pliable those institutions actually are, if you know how to delicately use and manipulate them. And if you only hear in my analysis a hope for the future, you’re missing the cloud in the silver living.

But enough with the predictions.

 

If Trump is a fascist, he may be the most backassward fascist we’ve ever seen

1.

Rousseau thought that in a real democracy, each person would be so concerned with the fate of the republic that at any sign of a problem, she’d “fly to the assemblies” to make things right. Tonight she flew to the airports.

2.

It is absolutely too soon to predict anything at all, but Trump’s executive order regarding immigrants and refugees has generated so much protest and pushback that it has already generated cracks in the Republican Party.

Trump’s people are not as all-powerful and invulnerable as they seem. Quite the contrary. Remember: Donald Trump wasn’t just rejected by the majority of this country. He was also rejected in the primaries by the majority of his party: 55.1% of the Republican electorate voted against him!

This is not a steamroller. Reagan faced opposition—most notably, the PATCO strike—and he simply pressed forward to crush it. These people are different. They’re not as in control, not as confident in their purpose or their purchase on the nation. The more astute among them know that they don’t have the country, they know that their ideas, which used to lend them and their followers and even their detractors so much buoyancy, don’t resonate or register the way they once did.

Again, I’m not making any predictions. One day you’re up, the next you’re down. Trump could turn this to his favor, declaring a national emergency, sending in troops to keep the airports free and clear. Since the election, the major contingency that has worried me most has been has been international politics: that is a sphere that is always unpredictable, and wars happen. The latest news out of China doesn’t make me feel any better.

But if this is what this executive order has launched—just outside his first week in office—what happens when they start throwing people into the streets to die without health insurance?

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I simply refuse to believe we are the country we were as recently as 15 years ago.

3.

Had Reagan or Bush issued this executive order—I know, the ideological valence on immigration was different for both them, but hear me out—there would have been tremendous planning in advance, and every airport in the country would have been surrounded by a perimeter of National Guard, local police, even federal troops. There would have been top-to-bottom, Cheney to Rumsfeld, advance men, designing a security fence as secure as that which surrounds the White House. People wouldn’t be able to get in without pre-registration and elaborate ID checks and so on.

Instead, we got not only what we saw outside, in the streets and at the airports, not only what we saw in the courts, but this:

When President Donald Trump declared at the Pentagon Friday he was enacting strict new measures to prevent domestic terror attacks, there were few within his government who knew exactly what he meant.

Administration officials weren’t immediately sure which countries’ citizens would be barred from entering the United States. The Department of Homeland Security was left making a legal analysis on the order after Trump signed it. A Border Patrol agent, confronted with arriving refugees, referred questions only to the President himself, according to court filings.

…

Trump’s unilateral moves, which have drawn the ire of human rights groups and prompted protests at US airports, reflect the President’s desire to quickly make good on his campaign promises. But they also encapsulate the pitfalls of an administration largely operated by officials with scant federal experience.

…

Asked during a photo opportunity in the Oval Office Saturday afternoon about the rollout, Trump said his government was “totally prepared.”

“It’s working out very nicely,” Trump told reporters. “You see it at the airports. You see it all over. It’s working out very nicely and we’re going to have a very, very strict ban, and we’re going to have extreme vetting, which we should have had in this country for many years.”

The policy team at the White House developed the executive order on refugees and visas, and largely avoided the traditional interagency process that would have allowed the Justice Department and homeland security agencies to provide operational guidance, according to numerous officials who spoke to CNN on Saturday.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Department of Homeland Security leadership saw the final details shortly before the order was finalized, government officials said.

…

Friday night, DHS arrived at the legal interpretation that the executive order restrictions applying to seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Yemen — did not apply to people who with lawful permanent residence, generally referred to as green card holders.

The White House overruled that guidance overnight, according to officials familiar with the rollout. That order came from the President’s inner circle, led by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. Their decision held that, on a case by case basis, DHS could allow green card holders to enter the US.

Now while some will argue that the spectacle and the chaos are all part of the point, I’m not persuaded. Trump wants displays of power; instead, he got a display of powerlessness.

These guys were completely caught off guard. They didn’t know enough to get the cooperation in advance of governors like Cuomo, who’s ultimately responsible for the Port Authority along with Christie, and who decided to allow the protestors to keep going through AirTrain to get to JFK. And how could they: even with the White House, they weren’t sure what they were doing till they were doing it.

It’s not just that the White House is filled with incompetents; it’s not just that they’re flying by the seat of their pants. The lack of planning, the agitated implementation, the incompetence (seriously, Reagan and Bush attracted genuine talent, even if it wasn’t always on display [see Iraq]): it’s all a symptom of a lack of political coherence.

4.

What is the first thing fascists or Nazis do when they come into power, the very first thing? They destroy the left.

Before they go after the Jews, as in Germany, before they go after the liberals and anyone who is not a fascist, before they go after national minorities, they arrest, imprison, torture, and murder the communists, the socialists, and the trade unions. Because they know that in order to pursue their maximal agenda, they need to drain the field of all opposition.

Trump hasn’t done that; in fact, he’s done just the opposite.

Now you could say that the reason Trump hasn’t done that is that there is no real left to do it to. Trump thinks he can do what he’s doing now because no one will stop him. I actually think there is something to that argument. And one could see how, from the point of view of a conservative or Republican activist, the last 40 years would suggest that you have little to worry about from the left: not from the activist left and certainly not from the Democrats. I think the facts on the ground with regard to the left has begun to change, slowly, but knowledge of the world is path dependent, and changes like this take a long time to register, particularly when you’re in an ideological bubble. Look how long it took Democrats and the left to realize that Reagan was for real and here to stay.

That is why I don’t buy the notion that somehow today’s events, with all the opposition at the airports and the imposition of a stay, was part of a grand plan. I think they have no idea what they might be facing from the left. And let’s be honest: neither do we.

Whatever the case may be, the point is this: If Trump is a fascist—I’m dubious, as many of you know—he may be the most backasswards fascist we’ve ever seen. Having seized control of the state, he doesn’t destroy his opposition in order to pursue his maximal agenda. Instead, he creates an opposition—what may be shaping up as the largest mass movement this country has seen in 50 years—by pursuing his maximal agenda first.

5.

Tonight feels like our color revolution. Not one color. Every color.

Migrants and refugees detained at JFK Airport, which is named after a passionate defender of immigration

As I write, migrants and refugees from around the world seeking a respite, refuge, or home in the United States are being detained at JFK Airport. An airport named after a man who, whatever his many failings and faults (I’m no enthusiast or subscriber to the Kennedy mystique), was passionate on the subject of immigration and the migration of peoples. Kennedy was a sharp critic of the country’s immigration restrictions and was, I believe, one of the inspirations, after his assassination, for the 1965 immigration reform bill, which Ted Kennedy pushed hard on the Senate floor.

Right now, there is a growing contingent of protesters at JFK; if you can, join them in Terminal 4.

In the meantime…

We are the descendants of 40 million people who left other countries, other familiar scenes, to come here to the United States to build a new life, to make a new opportunity for themselves and their children. I think it is not a burden, but a privilege to have the chance in 1963 to share that great concept which they felt so deeply among all of our people, to make this really, as it was for them, a new world, a new world for us, and, indeed, for all those who look to us.

Share the Earth

Donald Trump thinks it’s appropriate to leave out any mention of the Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

So what happens when we remove any mention of the Jews from Hannah Arendt’s final statement in Eichmann in Jerusalem?

And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with…the people of a number of other nations…we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.

We get an apt description of Donald Trump’s executive order regarding immigrants and refugees—and of our revulsion for it, and for him.

David Hume in Defense of Judith Butler’s Writing Style

David Hume—a man who, when he wanted, had little difficulty making himself understood—also had no problem with the notion that public writing should sometimes be difficult, even a tad inaccessible.

From his essay “On Commerce“:

THE greater part of mankind may be divided into two classes; that of shallow thinkers, who fall short of the truth; and that of abstruse thinkers, who go beyond it. The latter class are by far the most rare: and I may add, by far the most useful and valuable. They suggest hints, at least, and start difficulties, which they want, perhaps, skill to pursue; but which may produce fine discoveries, when handled by men who have a more just way of thinking. At worst, what they say is uncommon; and if it should cost some pains to comprehend it, one has, however, the pleasure of hearing something that is new. An author is little to be valued, who tells us nothing but what we can learn from every coffee-house conversation.

All people of shallow thought are apt to decry even those of solid understanding, as abstruse thinkers, and metaphysicians, and refiners; and never will allow any thing to be just which is beyond their own weak conceptions. There are some cases, I own, where an extraordinary refinement affords a strong presumption of falsehood, and where no reasoning is to be trusted but what is natural and easy. When a man deliberates concerning his conduct in any particular affair, and forms schemes in politics, trade, œconomy, or any business in life, he never ought to draw his arguments too fine, or connect too long a chain of consequences together. Something is sure to happen, that will disconcert his reasoning, and produce an event different from what he expected. But when we reason upon general subjects, one may justly affirm, that our speculations can scarcely ever be too fine, provided they be just; and that the difference between a common man and a man of genius is chiefly seen in the shallowness or depth of the principles upon which they proceed. General reasonings seem intricate, merely because they are general; nor is it easy for the bulk of mankind to distinguish, in a great number of particulars, that common circumstance in which they all agree, or to extract it, pure and unmixed, from the other superfluous circumstances. Every judgment or conclusion, with them, is particular. They cannot enlarge their view to those universal propositions, which comprehend under them an infinite number of individuals, and include a whole science in a single theorem. Their eye is confounded with such an extensive prospect; and the conclusions, derived from it, even though clearly expressed, seem intricate and obscure. But however intricate they may seem, it is certain, that general principles, if just and sound, must always prevail in the general course of things, though they may fail in particular cases; and it is the chief business of philosophers to regard the general course of things. I may add, that it is also the chief business of politicians; especially in the domestic government of the state, where the public good, which is, or ought to be their object, depends on the concurrence of a multitude of causes; not, as in foreign politics, on accidents and chances, and the caprices of a few persons. This therefore makes the difference between particular deliberations and general reasonings, and renders subtilty and refinement much more suitable to the latter than to the former.

From David Hume to Judith Butler.

Named and Inhabited Evil

Someone posted on Facebook this article from November 2015, making the parallels between the current refugee crisis and the plight of Anne Frank and her family. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, began exploring options and seeking visas to come to the United States (and Cuba) just as those visas were becoming increasingly impossible to get. Now that Trump has announced his intentions to cut the admittance of refugees even further, the parallel becomes even more painful and apt.

Twenty years ago, in a devastating piece for The New Yorker, Cynthia Ozick wrote about what a literary masterpiece Anne Frank’s diary is, and how it has been distended and distorted by all manner of humanitarian and high school tripe, such that we no longer have access to the disruption and severity of the original.

I thought of Ozick’s last words this morning:

On Friday, August 4, 1944, the day of the arrest, Miep Gies climbed the stairs to the hiding place and found it ransacked and wrecked. The beleaguered little ban had been betrayed by an informer who was paid seven and a half guilders—about a dollar—for each person: sixty guilders for the lot. Miep Gies picked up what she recognized as Anne’s papers and put them away, unread, in her desk drawer. There the diary lay untouched, until Otto Frank emerged alive from Auschwitz. “Had I read it,” she said afterward, “I would have had to burn the diary because it would have been too dangerous for people about whom Anne had written.” It was Miep Gies—the uncommon heroine of this story, a woman profoundly good, a failed savior—who succeeded in rescuing an irreplaceable masterwork. It may be shocking to think this (I am shocked as I think it), but one can imagine a still more salvational outcome: Anne Frank’s diary burned, vanished, lost—saved from a world that made of it all things, some of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhabited evil.