Corey Robin's Blog, page 41

Great Minds Think Alike

In a pathbreaking ruling, the National Labor Relations Board announced yesterday that graduate student workers at private universities are employees with the right to organize unions.

For three decades, private universities have bitterly resisted this claim. Unions, these universities have argued, would impose a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach on the ineffably individual and heterogenous nature of graduate education. Unions might be appropriate for a factory, where all the work’s the same, but they would destroy the diversity of the academy, ironing out those delicate and delightful idiosyncrasies that make each university what it is. As virtually every elite university now facing an organizing drive of its graduate students is making clear (h/t David Marcus for discovering and pointing me to these specific links).

Here, for example, is Columbia:

Here’s Yale:

Here’s the University of Chicago:

And here’s Princeton:

Casual readers might conclude that the only thing standardized and cookie-cutter about unions in elite universities is the argument against them.

Or perhaps it’s just that great minds sometimes really do think alike.

Positions Available at Brooklyn College

The Department of Political Science at Brooklyn College is looking for an instructor or instructors to teach the following two courses:

POLS 1005: Guns, Money, and Politics: Introduction to American Government. 4 credits. M, W, 9:05-10:45.


POLS 3410: Radical Political Thought. 3 credits. M, W, 11-12:15

Both classes are capped at 25.

If you are interested in either or both of these positions, please contact Corey Robin, crobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu, right away, as the first class meets in ten days, on Monday, August 29.

Please share this announcement widely.

September Songs

Liberal Clinton supporter, from now till November:

Hillary Clinton is the most progressive candidate, running on the most progressive platform, that we’ve seen in at least 50 years.

Liberal Clinton supporter, after November:

You’ll never get it past Congress. What did you expect?

Oh, the days dwindle down

To a precious few

September, November

Donald Trump is the least of the GOP’s problems

There’s a good AP story this morning on the continuing crack-up of the Republican Party:

As he [Trump] skips from one gaffe to the next, GOP leaders in Washington and in the most competitive states have begun openly contemplating turning their backs on their party’s presidential nominee to prevent what they fear will be wide-scale Republican losses on Election Day.

…

Republicans who have devoted their professional lives to electing GOP candidates say they believe the White House already may be lost. They’re exasperated by Trump’s divisive politics and his insistence on running a general election campaign that mirrors his approach to the primaries.

The central weakness of the article—like so much of the reporting on the election this year—is that it posits Trump as the source of the party’s crack-up.

In actual fact, the seeds of the decline of the GOP and conservatism more generally were sown long ago. They have little to do with the weaknesses of any candidate or elected official, mistakes this one or that one might have made. To the contrary, they reflect the strengths and achievements of both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Both the party and the movement are victims of their success.

The candidacy of Donald Trump, for all its idiosyncrasies, is symptomatic of two cycles of political time: one peculiar to the Republican Party, the other to the conservative movement.

As I’ve argued many times on this blog, presidential/party regimes in the US have a rise and fall. The first regime was the Jeffersonian Republican regime, which lasted from 1800 to 1828. The second was the Jacksonian Democratic regime, which lasted from 1828 to 1860. The third was the Lincoln Republican regime, which lasted from 1860 to 1932. The fourth was the FDR New Deal regime, which lasted from 1932 to 1980. We are currently in the fifth regime: the Reagan Republican regime, which began in 1980.

These regimes are inaugurated by presidents (Jefferson, Lincoln, etc.); they are carried on by presidents (Monroe, Polk, Teddy Roosevelt, LBJ, George W. Bush); and they are destroyed by presidents (John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter). Other factors—social movements, the economy, international relations, cultural shifts—obviously play a huge role, but I’m focusing here on presidents.

As the Yale political scientist Steve Skowronek has argued, it is often those successor presidents, like LBJ or George W. Bush, who do the most to carry on the legacy of the inaugurating presidents, it is often these presidents who set the stage for the destruction of that inaugurating president’s legacy. These successor presidents (Skowronek calls them articulation presidents) so vastly over-use their power to extend the basic commitments of the party regime, to fulfill its unfulfilled promises, that they wind up shattering the regime itself. LBJ did it with his commitments to Vietnam, the War on Poverty, and the Civil Rights Movement. Bush did it with his paired commitments to the massive tax cuts and the Iraq War. In both cases, these presidents bring to the fore and empower the dissonant forces have long been restive under the regime—both African Americans and white supremacists, in the case of LBJ; the rank-and-file Tea Party and Christian Right versus the more elite business and national security types, in the case of Bush—who now see each other not as natural allies but as enemies. (It’s interesting, as Skowronek notes, that these articulation presidents often fought wars that helped destroy their regimes. Polk with the Mexican-American War, LBJ with Vietnam, Bush with Iraq.)

Donald Trump is now facing a situation similar to that of people like George McGovern in 1972: he’s the beneficiary of an unprecedented mobilization of one part of his party’s coalition, which put him in the place he’s in, but like McGovern, he can’t turn that coalition into something broader. Hence that quote in the AP story above:

They’re exasperated by Trump’s divisive politics and his insistence on running a general election campaign that mirrors his approach to the primaries.

Winning the GOP base is no longer a ticket to the White House, as it was for Reagan and Bush. Because the base is so at odds with the whole of the GOP, not to mention the nation.

So that’s one political time cycle: the rise and fall of presidential/party regimes.

But there’s a second, arguably deeper and more fatal time cycle: the rise and fall of conservative movements and regimes.

Conservatism, as I argued in The Reactionary Mind, is an inherently reactionary movement. This wasn’t my brilliant insight; it’s right there, as the book demonstrates, in the testimony of conservatism’s leading thinkers and practitioners, going back to Burke and Peel, the inventor of Britain’s Conservative Party, up through more genteel voices like Michael Oakeshott or George Nash, the court historian of the modern conservative movement in the US. The only difference is that my book takes their testimony seriously, while others tend to ignore it.

But as I argued at the conclusion of The Reactionary Mind, if conservatism is an inherently reactionary movement, the greatest threat to it will be its success. Once it defeats the movements it was launched to overcome—and those movements will change across time, which is why conservatism, despite being a consistently reactionary politics, will also change across time, in response to the movements it opposes—it loses its raison d’être.

Modern American conservatism, I’ve long held, has succeeded. It essentially destroyed the labor movement, which was, in conservatism’s most recent incarnation in response to the New Deal, its original enemy. It also successfully beat back the Black Freedom movement, which was its second enemy. And it was able to defang the feminist movement, its third enemy. While all these movements are still around—the labor movement, only barely—they don’t have the same traction and forward momentum they once did.

Which is what has left conservatism in the place that it is, as I speculated at the conclusion of The Reactionary Mind:

Which leads me to wonder about the long-term prospects of the Tea Party, the latest variant of right-wing populism. Has the Tea Party given conservatism a new lease on life? Or is the Tea Party like the New Politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the last spark of a spent force, its frantic energies a mask for the decline of the larger movement of which it is a part?…

Modern conservatism came onto the scene of the twentieth century in order to defeat the great social movements of the left. As far as the eye can see, it has achieved its purpose. Having done so, it now can leave. Whether it will, and how much it will take with it on its way out, remains to be seen.

Trump is desperately trying to fashion a new reactionary politics out of the bits and pieces that are now left to it: a white nationalism that draws its animating energies from its hostility to a black president, immigration, and Islam. But the evidence is increasingly clear that that kind of politics simply does not possess enough appeal to propel him or any other similar candidate to the White House. Not, I would argue, because Trump is such a weak candidate (though clearly he is), but because these forces can’t supply the reactionary rationale for modern conservatism the way empowered and radicalized movements of workers, African Americans, and women once did.

It’s going to take a massive victory for the left—not at the polls but in the streets, as a comprehensive social movement of emancipation—for the right to recover its energy and animating purpose. Until that happens, the right might win an election here or there, but they’re essentially going to be in a free-fall.

Trump, in other words, is the least of the GOP’s problems.

On Neoliberalism. Again.

I’m a bit late to this article, but back in July, the Cornell historian Larry Glickman offered a fascinating periodization of the term of “neoliberalism.”

Initially, Glickman argues, in the 1930s, the word was a term of abuse wielded by conservative free marketeers against New Deal liberals. The free markeeters accused the New Deal liberals of betraying the real meaning of the term “liberal” by embracing the state, constraining the market, and so on. So, said these free marketeers, the New Dealers were “neoliberal” while they, the free marketeers, were the true liberals.

Phase 2, we move to Europe and the Mont Pelerin Society, where the term takes on a positive meaning among free market intellectuals like Hayek and, for a time, back in the US, Milton Friedman. That proves to be short-lived, as Friedman ultimately opts for other words to describe the formation.

Phase 3, we’re in the late 1970s and 1980s, and Charles Peters and his little merry band of techno dudes embrace the term as a way of reforming (or gutting, take your pick) New Deal liberalism. They call themselves neoliberals. Also proves to be short-lived. (I wrote about them back in April.)

Phase 4 is where we are today: with the term largely used by the left as a term of art or criticism against, well, the shit around us.

All-around, Glickman’s is a very useful, Daniel Rodgers-style, account of the shifting meaning of the term.

Also, though this wasn’t Larry’s point, it occurred to me that the free marketeers sort of had a legitimate beef in the 1930s.

I mean, think about it this way. The term liberal—though ahistorical people like to use it as an epithet or approbation for everyone from John Locke to Hillary Clinton—didn’t come into political usage until the 19th century, where it was often associated with the cultivation of trade and markets. These liberal arguments about the market and commerce were complicated—often quite different from the simplistic, pro-market arguments you hear today, in so many ways—but from the sheer standpoint of historical experience and memory: you can imagine why it would have seemed like a shock to free market folks in the 1930s to hear this term, which had for its relatively short life span (and with the possible exception of the New Liberals in the late 19th and early 20th century Britain) been associated with a positive embrace of markets and commerce and the like, suddenly come to be associated with the state’s assault on those markets. I can see why that would have been a source of some consternation.

How Clinton Enables the Republican Party

I’ve been saying that one of the problems with the “Trump is like no Republican we’ve ever seen before” line is that it prevents us from consigning the Republican Party to the oblivion it deserves. In making Trump sui generis, by insisting that he is an utter novelty, you allow the rest of the party to distance themselves from him, to make him extreme and themselves respectable, and to regroup after November.

Now a leaked email from DNC Communication Director , which I stumbled across in Carl Beijer’s excellent discussion here, makes plain just how costly this strategy is. Writing back in May, Miranda protests that the Clinton campaign wants to separate Trump from the GOP so that it can point to all the Republican officials who oppose Trump and support her. But as Miranda points out, what’s good for Clinton is bad for down-ballot Democrats. So long as down-ballot Republicans distance themselves from Trump, he says, Clinton is willing to give them an out, thereby hurting their Democratic opponents. (And as Carl points out, Clinton is keeping a lot of the money her organization raised for down-ballot Democrats, doubly hurting them.)

Not only is this bad for down-ballot Democrats. It lets the entire Republican Party—all the decades of its rotten, racist, revanchist formations—off the hook. Clinton gets to say she has the support of mainstream, respectable Republicans; they get to say, if not I’m with her, then at least I’m not with him. And with that, a ticket to legitimacy.

We’re now seeing the fruition of that campaign, as Clinton rolls out one endorsement after another: John Negroponte, enabler of death squads in Central America; Michael Hayden, the man who, according to Jane Mayer, made “living on the edge” the motto of US foreign policy after 9/11; and, if Clinton can land him, the biggest prize of them all: Henry Kissinger, of whom Kissinger biographer Greg Grandin recently wrote: “He stands not as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s feared recklessness and immorality but as his progenitor.” All of these men are among the most bloodthirsty elements in the right-wing firmament. But now they’ve been re-branded as “center-right foreign policy voices.”

So that’s what is at stake with the “Trump is like no Republican we’ve ever seen before.” This isn’t an academic argument about history; this has real consequences at the ballot box. In Congress, in state legislatures, and in elections to come.

Here’s the text of Miranda’s leaked email:

Hi Amy, the Clinton rapid response operation we deal with have been asking us to disaggregate Trump from down ballot Republicans. They basically want to make the case that you either stand with Ryan or with Trump, that Trump is much worse than regular Republicans and they don’t want us to tie Trump to other Republicans because they think it makes him look normal.

They wanted us to basically praise Ryan when Trump was meeting Ryan, or at a minimum to hold him up as an example. So they want to embrace the “Republicans fleeing Trump” side, but not hold down ballot GOPers accountable.

That’s a problem. I pushed back that we cannot have our state parties hold up Paul Ryan as a good example of anything. And that we can’t give down ballot Republicans such an easy out. We can force them to own Trump and damage them more by pointing out that they’re just as bad on specific policies, make them uncomfortable where he’s particularly egregious, but asking state Parties to praise House Republicans like Ryan would be damaging for the Party down ballot.

Can you help us navigate this with Charlie? We would basically have to throw out our entire frame that the GOP made Trump through years of divisive and ugly politics. We would have to say that Republicans are reasonable and that the good ones will shun Trump. It just doesn’t work from the Party side. Let me know what you think.

Thanks, – Luis.

As Miranda shows in his P.S., it’s very clear that not only was this “Trump is so different” line a deliberate line created by the Clinton people to suit her own interests; it also ran against the way many Democratic insiders, including heavy-hitters in Congress, wanted to frame the fight. Here again is Miranda:

P.S. – – that strategy would ALSO put us at odds with Schumer, Lujan, Pelosi, Reid, basically all of  our Congressional Democrats who have embraced our talking points and have been using them beautifully over the last couple of weeks to point out that GOPers in Congress have been pushing these ugly policies for years. Trying to dump this approach would probably not work with Members of Congress, it’s worse than turning an aircraft carrier, we would lose 3/4 of the fleet. Let me know what you think. It might be a good strategy ONLY for Clinton (which I don’t believe), I think instead she needs as many voices as possible on the same page.

Update (12 am)

This, incidentally, is how you know—one of the many ways you know—that Clinton’s is not going to be a realignment presidency. Realignment presidents run not against a candidate from the opposing party. They run against an entire political and social deformation. Lincoln against the slaveocracy, FDR against laissez-faire rule, Reagan against the New Deal. They run against decades and decades of rule and ruin. In working so hard to separate Trump not only from the Republican present but the Republican past, Clinton is deliberately announcing that her campaign is not against a political formation but is instead simply an effort to defeat one man. I’d say it was a missed opportunity, but from the beginning it was clear that Clinton didn’t see the election in these terms. And the truth is, neither does the Democratic Party apparatus and its leadership. They want a return to the status quo ante, to life before Trump, when we had things like the Iraq War, massive tax cuts, and the like to contend with.

If I were worried that Clinton might lose, here’s what I would—and wouldn’t—do…

I’m on record as saying that Clinton is going to win big-time in November. I’ve believed that for months (even when I was rooting for Sanders, I believed Clinton could beat Trump and said so). The latest polls only confirm what we’ve seen, with a few exceptions, for a year now: in a match-up between Clinton and Trump, Clinton wins.

If, however, I were a big booster of Clinton and if I were at all worried that she wasn’t going to win in November, here’s what I’d be doing:

First, I’d get the hell off social media. This is the place where political persuasion goes to die. The whole point is argument and dissensus, conflict and opposition, often over ancillary matters that distract from the main point. Differences get heightened, misunderstandings mount, feelings get hurt: to paraphrase Adorno, it’s like psychoanalysis in reverse. Not a good place to build and bridge.

And then, if I lived in a safe state, I’d be accumulating lists of people to call in all the swing states; and if I lived in a swing state, I’d be organizing committees either in my neighborhood or town, or if that neighborhood or town were solidly in Clinton’s camp, I’d organize committees in the next town or neighborhood, committees that were trained and readied to make phone calls and knock on doors and hand out fliers and all the rest.

And then I’d spend every waking or at least spare minute of my life between now and November making sure that every potential Clinton voter that I or my committees could reach was converted into an absolutely solid and reliable vote for Clinton come November.

If I encountered anyone who I thought was gettable but who tried to distance themselves from me, I’d do everything I could to convince that person that we were in fact quite similar, that we shared the same values, and that whatever differences we had paled in comparison to our shared desire and need to elect Clinton and defeat Trump. I’d use all of my powers of charm (ahem) and guile and persuasion to soften that brittle opposition that so often gets created between people who are alike in so many ways but one. I’d avoid all the traps of needless and fruitless disagreement, constantly keeping my eye out for those oases of potential concord and consensus.

So if these people I was trying to reach tried to up the ideological octane of the conversation, just to create distance between us, I’d bring the conversation back down to the dull pragmatics of achieving our shared values. If they tried to invoke dull pragmatism, just to create distance between us, I’d bring us back up to the high plains of ideology. I would do absolutely everything I could, in other words, not to create a sense of division or opposition between us. If politics is the contest between friends and enemies, I’d say: let us be friends, let’s leave the enemies out there.

And if I were the shy, retiring type who couldn’t handle face-to-face or phone conversations, I’d try to use social media to that effect, knowing that that can often be a losing proposition.

And here’s what I’d not do: spend my time on social media or in person castigating every member of the left who is a potential Clinton voter but is skeptical or leaning toward Jill Stein or thinking about sitting this one out, castigating them as reckless, irresponsible, childish, purist, fanatical, immature, incompetent, cultish, blinkered fantasists of the revolution, and so on, and then deliver long, sonorous monologues—where I demonstrate zero desire to listen or understand, much less engage, with what the people I’m trying to persuade are thinking—about the need for a popular front that includes the very people I’ve just dismissed as childish and irresponsible.

Now the fact that some people who are pro-Clinton and say they’re terrified she might lose in November are not doing what I’m saying I would do if I were they, tells me one of the three things:

1) they don’t actually think Clinton is going to lose, they’re not even fearful that she may lose, in which case I wonder about all that high dudgeon and heavy breathing over the alleged irresponsibility and immaturity and recklessness and incompetence of those who are cool toward Clinton (but could warm or at least get a little less frosty to her);

2) they do fear that she may lose but they take greater pleasure in going after the Clinton skeptics on the left than they fear her losing in November, in which case I wonder about all that high dudgeon and heavy breathing over the alleged irresponsibility and immaturity and recklessness and incompetence of those who are cool toward Clinton (but could warm or at least get a little less frosty to her);

3) they don’t know what they’re doing politically, in which case I wonder about all that high dudgeon and heavy breathing over the alleged irresponsibility and immaturity and recklessness and incompetence of those who are cool toward Clinton (but could warm or at least get a little less frosty to her).

There’s actually a fourth option:

4) they don’t think they share any values with the Clinton skeptics on the left; they think those leftists actually believe in very different things.

In which case I wonder two further things:

5) do they think they need these voters, and if so, well, we come back to where we started;

6) do they think they don’t need these voters?

In which case we come back to (1), (2), (3), or:

7) they’re right.

 

Sam Tanenhaus on William Styron on Nat Turner: Have we moved on from the Sixties? The Nineties?

Last night, I had a bout of insomnia. So I picked up the latest issue of Vanity Fair, and after reading a rather desultory piece by Robert Gottlieb on his experiences editing Lauren Bacall (who I’m distantly related to), Irene Selznick, and Katharine Hepburn (boy, did he not like Hepburn!), I settled down with a long piece by Sam Tanenhaus on William Styron and his Confessions of Nat Turner.

A confession of my own first: I read Confessions sometime in graduate school. I loved it. Probably my favorite work by Styron, much more so than Sophie’s Choice or even Darkness Visible. I say “confession” because it’s a book that has had an enormously controversial afterlife, which Tanenhaus discusses with great sensitivity, even poignancy.

Anyway, I recommend Tanenhaus’s article for a variety of reasons: great narrative pace, with that perfect balance of distance and engagement; it blows hot and cold exactly where and when you need it to; and it moves with an almost symphonic sense of time, back and forth across the decades and centuries.

But here are three things I wanted to comment on.

First, I was struck by the fact that white people in the US, before Styron’s book came out, had so little knowledge of Nat Turner’s Rebellion. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, but it tells you something, I think, about how much our culture has changed that I would be.

Tanenhaus nimbly shows the disparity between the reactions of black people, who were more than familiar with the Turner story, to the novel, and those of white people, who were pretty clueless about it. At best, the Nat Turner story was a repressed memory for white people, only dimly present in a fading billboard from Styron’s Tidewater boyhood. Today, the Nat Turner story is part of a lot of school curricula. We’ve made some progress.

Second, as I said, I always knew about the controversy over the book. Styron, a white man writing at the height of Black Power (though he had begun the novel in the earlier, more hopeful days of the Civil Rights Movement), had ventriloquized a black slave. That and a great many other moves made the book an object of opprobrium across the literary and political stage.

But, as Tanenhaus shows, part of what made the controversy so painful for Styron was that it had been preceded by months of plaudits from all the great and the good of American literature. It was celebrated by R.W.B. Lewis, James Baldwin (albeit ambivalently), Robert Lowell, Alex Haley, Robert Penn Warren, and more. It seemed like it was going to be Styron’s Summa. And then the controversy broke, and suddenly, he was a man without a country. Styron had the crap luck of setting out on the novel when the dreams of interracial brotherhood (not quite yet sisterhood) were riding high, at least in certain literary and political quarters, and finishing it when those dreams had been dashed. There’s something about the way Tanenhaus tells that story of the beginning and ending of a writing project—and that great unpredictable goddess of timing—that’s quite moving.

Last, if you get to the last few grafs of the piece, you’ll notice something really interesting about the tone. Tanenhaus steps back, way back, and assesses the controversy from the vantage of 2016, where questions of cultural appropriation have become quite central, where the fissures between white and black experiences are leading items of presidential debates and electoral campaigns. The Nat Turner controversy might have been the opening shot in the argument (which has never subsided) over whether we can have a common, unifying history in this country. And what the Turner controversy and subsequent controversies reveal, Tanenhaus seems to suggest, is: perhaps we can’t. And he suggests that with, yes, some sorrow, but absolutely no rancor.

And here’s what I found so fascinating about this. Tanenhaus is a kind of moderate, centrist, liberal-ish writer on political and literary topics. (His biography of Whittaker Chambers is the definitive work, and he’s now working on a biography of William F. Buckley, which many of us have been eagerly awaiting for some time. I’ve been quite critical of some of Tanenhaus writings on conservatism and culture over the years: one of the provocations for The Reactionary Mind was his short book on conservatism. But when he’s on, he’s really on.) I can’t help but feel that a much younger Tanenhaus, say from 25 years ago, would have taken a more oppositional, less elegiac tone toward these matters.

Back in the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a whole group of intellectuals, academics, journalists, and writers who, reeling from the assaults of multiculturalism, were bemoaning the loss of a common, unifying narrative of American history. This was by no means limited to the right. Many liberals—like Arthur Schlesinger, Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty, and many more—gave voice, in a variety of registers (anxious, angry, contemptuous, concerned), to the notion that the United States could not flourish amid so much fragmentation.

Thinking back today on those liberal arguments from a quarter-century ago, they have a kind of ghostly quality (the conservative versions, of course, live on, in Donald Trump and others on the right). Even though I was an avid reader and consumer of these debates, I can’t help but ask myself: What exactly were these people so worked up about? Multiculturalism today seems as American as apple pie. And that expression—as American as apple pie—seems like from another country, or at least another century. In fact, it is.

What I took away from reading the last few paragraphs of Tanenhaus late last night is the realization that for today’s liberal intellectual, those debates are pretty much over, too. They’ve moved on; they’ve embraced multiple narratives, multiple voices. The agony of that confrontation, that moment, is no more. (Again, quite different on the right.)

What you hear in Tanenhaus’s voice is not necessarily a celebration over the loss of a common narrative. But accommodation, acceptance, even equanimity.

Again, progress?

My First Seven Jobs

There’s a meme going around on Facebook: list your first seven jobs. Here are mine. With some commentary.

First seven jobs:

Not exactly a job, but my sisters and I sold coffee and doughnuts to customers waiting to buy gas on one of those epic lines of the Carter era (ca. 1978?) The line stretched from the gas station at the corner of King Street and Bedford Road, all the way down Elm Street, and up and around Ridgewood Terrace, to the corner of Ridgewood Terrace and King Street, caddy corner from our driveway.


Newspaper route. Colossal failure. Lasted only a few days. Too active. A scary dog named Caesar, which my sisters and I always heard as “Seize her.”


Babysitting. Lots of it. More my lazy speed. There was TV. And I loved kids.


Lickety Split. Worked as a short-order cook. My co-workers included Matt Park, one of my best friends, behind the ice cream counter, and several cheerleaders, one of whom sometimes talked to me. I got my right-hand index finger sliced off (just a tiny bit) in a meat slicer. I had to stop working and actually got workers’ comp for six weeks or so. My introduction to stitches and the welfare state.


Research assistant for Richard Garwin at IBM’s Watson Research Center (I had gotten a scholarship from IBM, where my dad worked, and part of the scholarship included summer jobs there). Garwin was one of the leading scientists opposing SDI, aka Star Wars. My introduction to anti-nuclear activism, though Garwin wasn’t so much an activist as an uber-wonky scientific expert who argued that Star Wars was destabilizing and expensive and could be easily overcome with fairly cheap countermeasures. I loved my co-workers. All we did was gossip about Garwin and complain about the food. That job launched me on my first letter to the editor. To The New Republic, actually, back in the heyday of Marty Peretz, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Michael Kinsley. All told, not a bad gig.


IBM’s America’s Group. The summer after Garwin, I worked in international communications, dealing with IBM’s Latin America and Canada divisions. I often say being department chair is the second-worst job of my life. Working at IBM that summer was the worst. My introduction to the quiet desperation of corporate life. Most people there didn’t seem to be doing much of anything except wasting time and marking the days till retirement. Everything you wrote needed to get “clearance”—as if we were in the most ultra-high-security branch of the NSA. Made me realize I could never, ever work in the “business world.”


Waiter, Friendly’s. My sister Emily got me the job. Eventually, my sisters Gaby and Jessica worked there, too (or did Jessica predate all of us?) Anyway, another bust of a job, though I did enjoy hustling there. Something about the pace and the turnover was exhilarating (though no one ever worked as fast as Emily). There was enough animosity between the grill staff, many of whom were Latinos, and the long-term waitstaff (older white women) versus the manager (a doofus who defined the meaning of white male privilege, even at the ranks of middle management) to keep me going for months. And it did.

 

Trump’s Indecent Proposal

One of the most storied, Aaron Sorkin-esque moments in American history—making the rounds today after Donald Trump’s indecent comment on Khizr Khan’s speech at the DNC—is Joseph Welch’s famous confrontation with Joe McCarthy. The date was June 9, 1954; the setting, the Army-McCarthy hearings.

It was then and there that Welch exploded:

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

People love this moment. It’s when the party of the good and the great finally stared down the forces of the bad and the worst, affirming that this country was in fact good, if not great, rather than bad, if not worse. Within six months, McCarthy would be censured by the Senate. Within three years, he’d be dead.

But there are two little known elements about this famous confrontation.

First, Welch chose his words carefully: Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Joe McCarthy had been running wild for four years, wreaking havoc on the Democrats and then the Republicans. He had been indecent for quite some time. For many people—Welch’s syntax shows, almost unselfconsciously—June 9 marked the moment when McCarthy finally revealed that he had no decency, as opposed to only a very little decency, the moment when he showed America that he had no redeeming qualities at all. Prior to that, it seems, his watchers thought his record murky.

In the four years prior to this confrontation, McCarthy had been riding high. Not merely among the rubes and the yahoos of the Commie-fearing hinterland, but at the highest levels of the Republican Party. McCarthy, as Robert Griffith showed many years ago, was the party’s useful idiot, even darling. No one made the case better that the Democrats were the liberal party of 20 years of treason. It was for that reason that he was favored by the party pooh-bahs and the party faithful.

As I wrote three years ago of the collusion between McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft, nicknamed “Mr. Republican”:

Taft did not merely “allow” the man and the -ism to dominate; Taft actively coddled, encouraged and supported him and it at every turn.

As early as March 23, 1950 — four weeks after McCarthy’s famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia — Taft gave McCarthy his firm support, telling McCarthy, “If one case [accusing a State Department official of being a Red] doesn’t work out, bring up another.” And added, for good measure, “Keep it up, Joe.”

When Truman attacked McCarthy’s speech — no amateur when it came to red-baiting, Truman called McCarthy “the greatest asset the Kremlin has” — Taft responded in kind, accusing Truman of being “bitter and prejudiced” and of “libeling” McCarthy, who was “a fighting Marine.” (Asked whether he had indeed libeled McCarthy, Truman responded, “Do you think that is possible?”)…

In 1951, however, Taft pulled back — after it seemed that McCarthy had gone too far, accusing George Marshall on the Senate floor of aiding the Communist cause….But within weeks, Taft reversed course. In response to a wave of letters from complaining fans of McCarthy, Taft issued a correction in which he downplayed his disagreements with McCarthy (“I often disagree with other Republican senators”) and reaffirmed his support: “Broadly speaking, I approve of Senator McCarthy’s program.”

Just in case there was any doubt about that, Taft personally endorsed McCarthy’s reelection bid during the Wisconsin primary of 1952, claiming that “Senator McCarthy has dramatized the fight to exclude Communists from the State Department. I think he did a great job in undertaking that goal.” He even campaigned for McCarthy — despite the fact that McCarthy never returned the favor by endorsing Taft.

And on at least one occasion (there might have been more), Taft quietly passed information to McCarthy about possible subversion in the State Department, suggesting to McCarthy that one employee deserved “special attention.”

In his confrontation with McCarthy, Welch opens a window onto an even subtler and more corrosive form of establishment collusion with McCarthy.

For many years, Welch had been a partner at Hale and Dorr, a Boston law firm, and had temporarily gone to work as the general counsel to the U.S. Army. That’s how he wound up at the Army-McCarthy hearings. What immediately provoked Welch at those hearings was that McCarthy had launched a broadside against Fred Fisher, a young attorney in Welch’s law firm who had once been a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild, a left-wing outfit that Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general had called “the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party.”

This is how Welch responded to McCarthy’s charge:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. When I decided to work for this Committee, I asked Jim St. Clair, who sits on my right, to be my first assistant. I said to Jim, “Pick somebody in the firm to work under you that you would like.” He chose Fred Fisher, and they came down on an afternoon plane. That night, when we had taken a little stab at trying to see what the case is about, Fred Fisher and Jim St. Clair and I went to dinner together. I then said to these two young men, “Boys, I don’t know anything about you, except I’ve always liked you, but if there’s anything funny in the life of either one of you that would hurt anybody in this case, you speak up quick.”

And Fred Fisher said, “Mr. Welch, when I was in the law school, and for a period of months after, I belonged to the Lawyers’ Guild,” as you have suggested, Senator. He went on to say, “I am Secretary of the Young Republican’s League in Newton with the son of [the] Massachusetts governor, and I have the respect and admiration of my community, and I’m sure I have the respect and admiration of the twenty-five lawyers or so in Hale & Dorr.” And I said, “Fred, I just don’t think I’m going to ask you to work on the case. If I do, one of these days that will come out, and go over national television, and it will just hurt like the dickens.” And so, Senator, I asked him to go back to Boston.

With that mention of his own interrogation of Fisher and decision not to bring him to DC, Welch was inadvertently testifying the corrosive process by which moderates, centrists, liberals, and leftists—across the country, at all levels of government, in the tiniest corners and most obscure crevices of civil society—cooperated with McCarthyism, lest they too become targets not just of McCarthy (who was, after all, just the tip of the red-baiting iceberg) but also of the FBI, freelance blacklisters, employers, and more.

In the face of red-baiting, many of these establishment figures didn’t speak up or protest; they cleaned their own house, making sure that they wouldn’t be targeted next. Welch’s decision to keep Fred Fisher out of the hearings was relatively anodyne; usually, people were simply purged. As Yale’s president famously put it, “There will be no witch hunts at Yale because there are no witches at Yale.”  (To get the tiniest flavor of how creepy this process was, just read the story of Robert Bellah’s encounter with McGeorge Bundy at Harvard.)

These were the men, in other words, who quietly, subtly, carefully colluded with the red baiters’ (including McCarthy) indecency throughout the Cold War. They colluded and colluded until that rare moment when they finally exploded, as Welch did on June 9, 1954, in recognition that McCarthy’s indecency was total, that there was no saving remnant of virtue or value that might mitigate it. But until then, they were silent, or worse.

There’s a point here about political evil, a point that Hannah Arendt understood all too well. One of the reasons evil attracts this extended circle of collaborators and colluders is that it seldom arrives in a big box, wrapped in a bow, labeled “evil.” Instead, it works in small and subtle ways, overtaking a society slowly but surely, in those grey zones where people aren’t quite sure what it is, till, when they finally figure it out, it’s too late.

As I wrote in The Nation last year:

Arendt attends to the smallest moments of the Shoah, not to lend her account novelistic detail but to make the point that the devil literally is in the details. “Cooperation” with evil is “gradual,” she explained to a correspondent. It’s always “difficult indeed to understand when the moment had come to cross a line which never should have been crossed.” That is also the banality of evil: the smallness of its package, those gray lines, those devilish details….

If evil comes in small steps, overcoming it, nearing goodness, also inheres in small steps. As Susan Neiman explains: “Arendt was convinced that evil could be overcome only if we acknowledge that it overwhelms us in ways that are minute. Great temptations are easier to recognize and thus to resist, for resistance comes in heroic terms. Contemporary dangers begin with trivial and insidious steps.”

And that brings me to my second point.

By the time Welch confronted McCarthy, by the time he recognized and proclaimed McCarthy’s evil to the world, it was too late. The damage had been done. The red-baiting had done its work. (Likewise the Supreme Court’s heralded rebuke to McCarthyism.)

What finally did Joe McCarthy in was not Joseph Welch. It was the fact that the GOP was getting decreasing returns out of redbaiting the Democrats—redbaiting and McCarthy had helped them get liberals booted out of the Senate and get the Democrats to purge whatever remaining elements of the left they had not already purged in the late 1940s—and the fact that McCarthy had begun to turn on the GOP (and the security establishment), too. Within four short years, their wonder-boy asset had become an increasingly erratic, almost sclerotic liability.

Welch’s question—have you no decency left—could more properly have been posed as: Have you no utility left? When the good and the great finally denounce the bad and the worst, it’s not because the latter has crossed some Rubicon of decency; it’s because they’re useless or threatening to established interests. And it takes no great act of courage to denounce them; usually, that’s just a sign that the object of denunciation is already down.

I was thinking about this episode all day, reading the reactions to Donald Trump’s comments about Khizr Khan’s moving speech about his son, Humayun Khan, who fought and was killed in Iraq. In response to Khan’s powerful criticisms of Trump at the DNC, Trump claimed:

If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.

With its suggestion that Ghazala Khan was silent because Muslim women aren’t allowed to speak in public, Trump’s comment was gross in every way. And, yes, indecent. Profoundly indecent.

Among the many journalistic critics of Trump, James Fallows was the first to invoke the Joseph Welch precedent. Responding to an earlier iteration of Trump’s comment, Fallows wrote:

But it is important to document the starkness of the two conceptions of America that are on clear view, 100 days before this man could become president. The America of the Khan family, and that of Donald Trump.

“Until this moment, I think I never really gauged your cruelty.” Joseph Welch, 1954.

Ezra Klein followed up. Citing Fallows’s quoting of Welch, Klein wrote:

At this point, I honestly don’t know what to say. I don’t have new language for this, I haven’t found another way of saying this isn’t okay, this isn’t kind, this isn’t decent.

…

This is the woman Trump decided to slander. This is the gauge of his cruelty.

This isn’t partisan. This isn’t left vs. right. Mitt Romney never would have said this. John McCain never would have said this. George W. Bush never would have said this. John Kerry never would have said this. This is what I mean when I write that the 2016 election isn’t simply Democrat vs. Republican, but normal vs. abnormal.

…

What kind of person is Donald Trump? What kind of person says these things?

As emotionally, and perhaps politically, satisfying as these questions are, they are the wrong questions. Like so much of the commentary on the GOP presidential candidate, Klein’s focuses on the person—and the novelty—of Donald Trump rather than on the party and the movement that produced him.

Countering that amnesia doesn’t require any elaborate education in American history; simply recall three moments of recent memory.

In 2002, Georgia’s Democratic senator  Max Cleland—a Vietnam vet who had his two legs and part of his arm torn to shreds by a grenade, leaving him in a wheelchair for life, his two legs and part of his arm amputated—lost his Senate seat to Saxby Chambliss. Why? Despite Cleland’s lead in the polls, Chambliss (who went onto serve in the Senate for two terms as an esteemed Republican, for Saxby is an honorable man) ran television ads questioning Cleland’s patriotism (complete with likenesses of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden). The man had given his two legs and part of his arm to this country, but the Republican Party saw fit to back a candidate, and subsequently a two-term senator, who questioned Cleland’s patriotic commitments.

In 2004, the Republican shadow apparatus ran an entire campaign against John Kerry’s war record, claiming that despite his winning of a Bronze Star and Silver Star for what he did in Vietnam, despite the fact that he had put himself into considerable danger to help save his unit, Kerry actually betrayed his country. Not just when he returned from Vietnam and helped lead the opposition to the war, but also while he was fighting the war, putting his life at risk. That these ads were made on behalf of a candidate who used his family connections to get out of fighting that war only added to the indecency.

That same year, Cindy Sheehan‘s son Casey was killed while serving in Iraq. She soon began protesting the war and George W. Bush, camping outside his ranch in Crawford for weeks on end to highlight what had happened to her son and the injustice and folly of the war. Bill O’Reilly said:

I think Mrs. Sheehan bears some responsibility…for the other American families who lost sons and daughters in Iraq who feel this kind of behavior borders on treasonous.

Michelle Malkin even invoked the memory of Sheehan’s dead son against her: “I can’t imagine that Casey Sheehan would approve of such behavior.” Fred Barnes called her “a crackpot.”

Here we have an instance of a Democratic presidential candidate, a sitting Democratic senator, and a prominent antiwar activist—all with stories of patriotic, almost unthinkable sacrifice—subjected to a pattern and practice of humiliating, disgusting slurs and smears. By figures high and low in—and near and only slightly less near to—the Republican Party.

That we can sit here and act as if Donald Trump’s indecency is a singular pathology rather than a systemic mode of politics, that we can treat his arrival on the scene as a novelty and innovation rather than the logical outgrowth of years of right-wing revanchism, that we would invoke against Trump the memory of an earlier, more decent Republican Party, present as recently as one election ago: that is itself a kind of collusion, an erasure of the past, a collusion with indecency.

In the same way that it took no great act of courage for Joseph Welch to denounce a man who was already on his knees, it requires no bravery—and betrays a great forgetting—to denounce Trump while exonerating the party and the movement that produced him.

It is also a dangerous forgetting: after all, before you can cross a Rubicon, you’ve got to march a considerable way.