Corey Robin's Blog, page 43

The Two Clarence Thomases

One of my contentions in the book on Clarence Thomas I’m writing is that while Thomas was championed during his Senate hearings as a man of the South—the Pin Point strategy, they called it—he is in fact very much a product of the North. Specifically, a North that gave lip service to racial equality, that deemed racism a southern problem, but that was either exploding with raw hatred and bigotry or hiding that racism beneath a veneer of liberal do-good-ism.

Re-reading several books about Thomas’s time at Holy Cross, where he was an undergraduate in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you get a strong sense of this, not just from Thomas but also from his black classmates and close friends, men like Edward P. Jones, who would go onto write The Known World, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

You also get an eerie sense of premonition: the problems Thomas and his friends encountered at a relatively elite, predominantly white northern university in 1968— invisibility, condescension, marginalization, well-meaning but often clumsy overtures from administrators, professors, and students—sound almost identical to the problems students of color on elite campuses describe today.

On a different note, Thomas was the Court’s conservative pathbreaker in three critical areas of jurisprudence: campaign finance and the 1st Amendment, gun rights and the Second Amendment, and national regulation and the Commerce Clause. Three cases—Citizens United, District of Columbia v. Heller, and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (the Obamacare case)—were, essentially, his babies. Even though he didn’t author the opinions, he was the intellectual godfather, the most right-wing justice, who lay down the markers that pushed the Court to these extremes. As Jeffrey Toobin writes of Citizens United, “the opinion was Kennedy’s, but the victory was Thomas’s.”

The point of this book: to bring the first Clarence Thomas, who speaks a lingua franca that is so familiar to liberals, and the second Clarence Thomas, who speaks a lingua franca that is so familiar to conservatives, together. They are one.

 

What’s Going On? Thoughts on the Murder of the Police

On Friday, in an email to a journalist with whom I had been discussing the murder of five policemen in Dallas, I repeated a point I had been making since Dallas to various friends in private conversations and on Facebook:

We’re going to be seeing more [anti-police] violence. The combination of returning military vets, with real training (and in some, perhaps many, cases, PTSD); the widespread availability of firearms; and the persistence of the fundamental grievance at the heart of all of this: it’s a witches’ brew. On top of that, I just have to believe there are some groups out there — less the lone wolves, more little groups — who are asking themselves these very questions [about the legitimacy of taking up arms against the police] and preparing for something more violent.

I was hesitant to make such a statement here. The experience of writing and publishing a post about Dallas, as the event was unfolding, which was read and criticized by many as an endorsement or call for violence—I’ll admit that made me somewhat gun-shy about saying anything in this volatile situation that could be misconstrued.

But now that we’ve witnessed a second killing of police officers—this time in Baton Rouge, where three policemen were shot dead by an African American veteran, who served in Iraq and showed some signs of mental illness—it may be time to face the fact that we are probably going to see more of this type of violence in the coming weeks and months. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote last week after Micah Johnson killed the police officers in Dallas:

There is no shortcut out. Sanctimonious cries of nonviolence will not help. “Retraining” can only do so much. Until we move to the broader question of policy, we can expect to see Walter Scotts and Freddie Grays with some regularity. And the extent to which we are tolerant of the possibility of more Walter Scotts and Freddie Grays is the extent to which we are tolerant of the possibility of more Micah Xavier Johnsons.

If Coates is right, it may be time to ask, what’s going on?

Whither Nonviolence?

Coates’s reference to “sanctimonious cries of nonviolence” reminds me of something Jeremy Kessler wrote on Facebook a few weeks ago.

The success of non-violence during the civil rights movement is the lynchpin of contemporary American liberalism: its invocation has become a way of both condemning racism and reaffirming the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly of violence. But the thing about the tactic of non-violent resistance as developed from the 1920s through the 1960s was that its function was to intensify and thereby publicize the brutality of systems that often brutalized out of national view. Publicity would lead to policy change.

To the extent that the current civil right crisis has been triggered by widely-disseminated videos of the daily execution of African-Americans by police officers, it’s not at all clear what role non-violent tactics have to play in the resolution of the crisis. The tactical function of non-violent resistance has already been fulfilled — the brutality is intense and public. Yet policy has not changed accordingly. What else is non-violent resistance supposed to accomplish?

It’s not a rhetorical question. I may definitely be missing something, but am just troubled by the persistence of analogies to previous civil rights struggles that don’t seem to make sense in this context.

As I pointed out to Jeremy at the time, I think there are (and were) other functions of non-violence, one of them being to create a sense of chaos and ungovernability. But Jeremy’s point still stands, and has seemed especially salient these past few weeks.

Consider, for example, this news from May 2015:

The United States was slammed over its rights record Monday at the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, with member nations criticizing the country for police violence and racial discrimination, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the continued use of the death penalty.

For 3 1/2 hours last year, delegates from 117 countries repeatedly criticized the US for its record of police brutality against people of color.

Did you know that? I certainly didn’t, and that’s the point. The news came and went with barely a notice or conversation in the US.

Once upon a time, US elites were terrified of this kind of international response to America’s domestic ills. The Civil Rights Movement shrewdly exploited that fear through its nonviolent tactics. Nonviolence, as Jeremy reminds us, derived part of its power from its ability to provoke racist state and non-state violence. Activists knew that violence would embarrass US elites on the international stage.

Martin Luther King certainly did; he deployed that international stage to great effect in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail:

The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

But nowadays, American elites don’t fear that international response. Hence, the yawn of indifference in response to that news from last year. And that has divested nonviolence of one of its critical props. As Jeremy, again, reminds us.

It would be wrong to say that the violence we’ve seen these past few weeks is evidence of any widespread frustration with the failures of nonviolence. Black Lives Matter is an avowedly nonviolent movement, and as Coates recently claimed on the Brian Lehrer Show, it has been enormously successful in raising public consciousness around the issue of police violence. Action and changes in public policy have been slow in coming, of course, but no social movement has ever been able to execute a fundamental turnaround in state policy quickly. It’s simply too soon to issue any verdicts on the success or failure of Black Lives Matter and nonviolence more generally.

Still, Gavin Long, the man who killed the police in Baton Rouge, had this to say in a video:

One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their oppressors, have been successful through fighting back, through bloodshed. Zero have been successful just over simply protesting. It doesn’t — it has never worked and it never will. You got to fight back. That’s the only way that a bully knows to quit.

You’ve got to stand on your rights, just like George Washington did, just like the other white rebels they celebrate and salute did. That’s what Nat Turner did. That’s what Malcolm did. You got to stand, man. You got to sacrifice.

Revenge

But there may be another way to think about these murders of the police.

Over the last few days, I’ve been wondering how many of these killings are inspired by a desire for revenge.

Revenge isn’t something that figures much in social or political theory. To the extent that it does, it’s often depicted as a pre-political or psychological motivation, something that precedes the creation of a formal state apparatus of crime and punishment.

That’s certainly how it works in Aeschylus’s Oresteia: the characters wander around blindly, seeking retribution and revenge, until finally, at the end of the trilogy, we see the apotheosis of revenge, in the form of the Furies, and the creation of the rule of law, which is supposed to put an end to the never-ending cycle of revenge.

But what happens when the rule of law no longer serves the cause of justice, when murder goes unpunished, when revolutionary politics does not seem in the offing, when the “appeal to heaven” that Locke spoke of cannot be heard because it isn’t made? Do we see a reversion to revenge, the return of the repressed?

However we understand these killings, it’s clear that the combination of well-trained veterans and persistent racial injustice and brutality in our criminal justice system will continue to have toxic effects.

Empire

I don’t think we can overestimate the impact of America’s wars in this regard. Not merely because fighting can be a traumatic experience, leaving soldiers with all manner of mental illness. Not merely because soldiers learn fighting skills abroad that they can then deploy at home (Long’s shootings were described as a well-executed “ambush“). And not even because the weapons the police use in response, like the infamous “robot bomb” in Dallas, are often first tried out by the military abroad.

The Black Freedom struggles of the second half of the twentieth century—everything from the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement to organized and armed movements of self-defense—were all framed against the backdrop of the Second World War, the ultimate just war fought on behalf of an organized and organizing ideal of justice. It’s hard not to see the war’s inflections of justice in the various speeches and organized movements for Black Freedom after the war.

But now we are living in the shadow of the War on Terror. A war that was prompted by Osama bin Laden’s own call for revenge, and continued by the US’s answering cry of vengeance. And so we get the kinds of murders and murderers we’ve seen in these past weeks: driven perhaps by vengeance, and like the franchises of Al Qaida and now ISIL, freelance, entrepreneurial, and inflected by an unsteady combination of psychopathology, power politics, and disorganization.

If empire, as Hannah Arendt once noted, is “the only school of character in modern politics,” we may be seeing here the kind of education our veterans are getting, not only when they fight wars abroad, but when they come back to confront what is now being called—by today’s Sheriff Clark no less (you can’t make this up)—an anarchic and episodic “civil war” at home, between the police and African Americans.

Bad Books

I’ve been reading many bad and/or badly written books of late. One by choice, the rest by necessity. I think it was three or four birthdays ago that I vowed I would never do that again.

Speaking of which, I always took it as a mark of a great book—not the only or a necessary mark, but a mark—that it contains certain passages that, because of the vividness of an image, power of an argument, or stylishness of the prose, you remember years later. Read them once, they’re with you forever.

Foucault’s opening description of the execution of Damiens the regicide; Arendt’s meditation on the 1957 launching of Sputnik and how it was greeted not as a celebration of human power or the wonder of adventure but as a welcome relief, an opportunity for men and women to at last get off the earth; Lukács’s remarks on how, in contrast to Frederick the Great, who fought his wars in such a way that no one would notice them, the French Revolution turned warfare, and thus consciousness and history, into a mass experience; Sartre’s analysis of the waiter and bad faith; Janet Malcolm’s description of the psychoanalytic encounter as a kind of shadow boxing (she doesn’t use that exact phrase) or her wintry description of her last sessions with Aaron Green (and his claim that what he is doing in psychoanalysis is brain surgery, where the patient one day wakes up with a new mind)—these will always be with me.

So why then do I remember so many bad books? Actually, what I remember about them is less their contents than my reaction to them. Which I guess is the point.

 

We can get rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but not the Speers

1.

A king who enjoins inhuman deeds
Will find enough retainers, who for grace and payment
Avidly accept half the anathema.


—Goethe, Iphigenia in Taurus

2.


In 1942, Albert Speer drafted a decree that made it a crime, punishable by death, to provide false information about raw materials, labor, machinery or products. Himmler thought it was too harsh.


3.

So contemptuous of bureaucracy and paperwork was Speer that he welcomed the Allied bombing raids on Berlin in November 1943, which partially destroyed his ministry’s offices. In a memo, he wrote:

I believe that thanks to this [raid] the question of the bureaucratic treatment of problems that should best be dealt with in a manner free from administrative restraints, is automatically resolved.

In a speech, he added:

During of the first heavy raids on Berlin we had the good fortune that a large part of the current files was burnt, so that for a time we were rid of unnecessary ballast; but we cannot expect in future that such events will bring this much-needed freshness to our work.

4.

As Minister of Armaments, Speer relied extensively on slave laborers from concentration camps to work in the factories. In 1944, he fell ill for an extended period of time. Himmler seized on the opportunity of Speer’s absence to remove those laborers from the factories—at the pace of roughly 40,00 per month—and send them back to the camps. Back at the office several months later, Speer complained about the “kidnapping” of his workers.

5.

After the war, while he was being held in Nuremberg awaiting trial, Speer sought to delegitimize Göring, whom he loathed, by calling him an art thief.

6.

Imprisoned for 20 years in Spandau, Speer often received gifts and packages. After a former comrade sent him a birthday present of caviar, truffles, venison, and wine in 1959, Speer wrote back:

Even though for us experts Beluga comes second to that other outrageously expensive one we tasted together at the Kuban bridgehead [in southern Russia]: remember?

7.

Beginning at Nuremberg, Speer worked hard to clean up his image, casting himself as a repentant naif who got swept up in the mania of Hitler and Nazism, but who never participated in or had any knowledge of the extermination of the Jews. On one issue, however, he remained unrepentant: the legitimacy of the Nazi campaign against the Soviet Union. In his diaries, Speer reminisced about Operation Barbarossa as a “European Crusade” that attracted thousands of volunteers from Belgium to the Balkans (it did). On his release from Spandau in 1966, his closest associate gave him a Westphalian ham from a pig that had been born on the day Stalin died.

8.

After his release from Spandau, Speer became friends with Erich Fromm.

9.

One of the few writers to challenge Speer’s self-presentation after the war was Erich Goldhagen, father of Daniel Goldhagen.

10.

In one of his postwar publications, Speer claimed that Himmler erred by using slave labor in the concentration camps. Had he been a better businessman, Speer argued, Himmler would have contracted out the inmates to local companies.

11.

In 1944, the German exile journalist Sebastian Haffner wrote about Speer in the Observer:

He symbolises indeed a type, which among all the belligerents has become increasingly important: the pure technician, the classless, brilliant man without a background, who knows no other goal than to make his way in the world, purely on the basis of his technical and organisational capabilities….This is his age. We can get rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but not the Speers. Whatever may be the fate of each individual man, they will be with us for a long time.

—All information in this post, including the Goethe epigraph, comes from Martin Kitchen, Speer: Hitler’s Architect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). I wrote two posts on this book over the winter.

Clarence Thomas: I was never a liberal, I was a radical

From an interview at Regent University:

Interviewer: What’s a nice person like you doing being a conservative? How did that happen? You, like I, started out to the left.

Thomas: I was truly on the left.

Interviewer: How far left were you?

Thomas: Well, there was no body on the other side of me. Let’s just put it this way. I thought George McGovern was a conservative.

…

Interviewer: How did you go from a McGovern liberal to …

Thomas: I was never a liberal.

Interviewer: What were you?

Thomas: I was a radical.

It Has Begun

Reading the news of the latest police murders of African Americans in this country, I’ve been wondering how much state violence American elites believe African Americans are supposed to tolerate before they take matters into their own hands.

I suspect most officials, intellectuals, and journalists don’t think much, if at all, about that question. Back in the 1960s, they did. From the Kerner Commission to Hugh Graham’s and Ted Gurr’s lengthy two-volume study Violence in America, which was a report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

Michael Walzer’s essay, “The Obligations of Oppressed Minorities,” which first appeared in Commentary in 1970, is an interesting document in this regard.

For two reasons.

First, Walzer’s description of African Americans as an oppressed minority in the 1960s features many of the elements you might expect: pervasive discrimination; limited economic power; social marginalization and exclusion; and continuously frustrated political action. Blacks, in Walzer’s treatment, are the victims of a white majority in a putatively free liberal democracy. That combination of systemic unfreedom and inequality, for the minority, amid relative freedom and equality, for the majority, is what characterizes their oppression as a minority.

But one element of their oppression does not appear in Walzer’s account: rampant extra-judicial murder by the state. Why it’s not there I’m not sure. Writing in 1970, as a participant-observer in the Civil Rights Movement, Walzer is certainly sensitive to the multiple dimensions of the oppression of black Americans and would have been aware of police brutality. But for whatever reason, police murder is not part of the story. Instead, what Walzer is interested in is the ways in which blacks are “the victims of popular oppression.” That is, blacks as the victims of whites as citizens, who constitute a democratic majority in a democratic state.

That gives Walzer’s story a particular spin, for contesting the more or less nonviolent modes of oppression that are inflicted through the mechanisms of a more or less democratic state imposes, Walzer claims, a specific set of constraints on that oppressed minority that a more straightforward situation of oppression—say, slavery—would not. As Walzer writes, “slaves owe nothing to their masters and nothing again to the ruling committee of their masters.” But democratic citizens in a democratic state, even if they are oppressed democratic citizens, have to negotiate a more complicated path.

But the police force of large or small city, even when the political leadership of that city is African-American, even when the police officers in question are African-American, poses an altogether different kind of challenge. For theirs is a mode of power that is especially unaccountable to citizens, whether majorities or minorities; theirs is a mode of power that is, for a multiplicity of reasons, highly protected against democratic challenge and rule.

The philosopher John Drabinski made an interesting observation today on his Facebook page:

In my corner of the world, I keep seeing the phrase “extra-judicial killing” over the last couple of days. Like, I’m seeing it a lot a lot. Everywhere.

I find this to be a really interesting and important phrase. Technically or by strict definition, that’s exactly what these police murders of Black people are: killings by the state without the adjudication of guilt or innocence, killing outside the law without consequences for that killing. But rhetorically, for me anyway, the phrase “extra-judicial killing” is the way we used to characterize military and militaristic dictatorships in 1980s and 1990s Latin America.

…

But I think we have to start associating extra-judicial killing and its broader (lack of) meaning with the notion of a military dictatorship. Think about it: what support is there, nationally, for continued presence in Iraq or Afghanistan? Or support for intervention in Syria? Do any of us, except those who read targeted stuff about that part of the world, really even know the extent of our presence, expenditure, death toll, and so on? No, of course we don’t. Because that’s the point: the military works (and has been for a very long time, maybe since the beginning) completely autonomously, bearing little if any relationship to the democratic arm of the state.

And who would ever question that autonomy? No one does.

The police operate with that autonomy, absolutely. Not unlike the paramilitary forces I associate with the phrase “extra-judicial killing.”

Which got me to thinking, with Walzer, about the obligations of an oppressed minority that is not only the victim of a popular majority and all the relatively non-violent ways in which that popular majority rules, but that is also the victim of a more specified kind of military dictatorship, which operates with relative impunity, murdering black Americans without accountability or remedy or justice at all.

Second, despite having defined the question of African-American oppression without reference to state violence, Walzer asks a fairly radical question:

What obligations can they [oppressed minorities such as African Americans] be possibly said to owe the (more or less) democratic state?

His answer is stark:

On this issue, liberal and democratic theorists have had very little to say, but what they have said is clear enough and, it must be admitted, very radical. They have argued, in effect, that oppressed minorities have no obligation at all within the political system.

Walzer takes that—”when justice is not done, there is no legitimate state and no obligation to obey”—as the premise of his essay. He proceeds to qualify and hedge that premise in all sorts of ways (I can’t do justice here to the richness and care of his argument), but what’s interesting to note, again, is that the oppression he had in mind did not include the open possibility, on any given day, that the oppressed minority in question could become, as the African-American congressman Keith Ellison put it so memorably today, a “hashtag.”

Every one of us on this stage knows that all it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then our name is a hashtag.

— Rep. Keith Ellison (@keithellison) July 7, 2016

As Walzer suggests, the most basic texts of the liberal tradition are quite radical on this topic.

So let me close with the most liberal—and arguably radical—of them all, Locke’s Second Treatise.

Two passages seem relevant to me.

First, this, from the third chapter, on “The State of War”:

…nay, where an appeal to the law, and constituted judges, lies open, but the remedy is denied by a manifest perverting of justice, and a barefaced wresting of the laws to protect or indemnify the violence or injuries of some men, or party of men, there it is hard to imagine any thing but a state of war: for wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice, it is still violence and injury, however coloured with the name, pretences, or forms of law,…

And, then, this, from the fourteenth chapter, on “Prerogative”:

And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven [Locke’s frequently used term for the right to rebel], whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven. And this judgment they cannot part with, it being out of a man’s power so to submit himself to another, as to give him a liberty to destroy him; God and nature never allowing a man so to abandon himself, as to neglect his own preservation: and since he cannot take away his own life, neither can he give another power to take it.

As I finish this post, just past midnight, I take a quick glance at the news, and see that three police officers were killed, and seven others were wounded, tonight in Dallas during a demonstration against the recent police killings.

It has begun.

I pray, fervently pray, that we can step back from the abyss and resolve this issue without more killing; I have no taste, desire, or relish for violence. But that’s on all of us—citizens, elites, journalists, who must find the pressure points to eliminate this pervasive condition where a portion of us cannot feel safe on the streets.

Update (12:45 am)

Several people on Twitter have pointed out to me that we have no idea at this point who killed these police officers, what any of it means. It’s irresponsible for me to suggest that we do know what it means, without further information, and to jump to the conclusion that this was African Americans fighting back. My critics on Twitter are right. I shouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion. My apologies. I had just been writing, and thinking about this issue, for a good part of the night, and then was shocked by the news that I was seeing—which was, literally, a three-sentence article in the New York Times, with no mention of snipers, assassins, or anything like that—and put the two things together in my head. We’ll have to wait to find out more.

I should probably add—I didn’t think I needed to say this, given my last paragraph, but now I see, given tonight’s events, that I should clarify—that this post is in no way a call or endorsement or celebration of violence. As I said above, that is not my vision. What I am raising here is a different question that has been on my mind, and that I raised in the first paragraph: how long do we think this situation can go on like this, without the victims of police brutality fighting back, and what do some of our most mainstream traditions and voices, from the past and present, have to say about that question?

Why Clinton’s New Tuition-Free Plan Matters

The Clinton campaign made a major announcement today:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will pursue a debt-free college for all policy, including a proposal to eliminate the cost of college tuition for a significant portion of the public.

…

Clinton’s new proposals move her beyond previous statements that she would try to make college “as debt-free as possible“ and toward making “debt-free college available to all.”

Clinton is adding three features to her plan for higher education policy, called the “New College Compact.“ They include eliminating tuition at in-state public universities for families making under $125,000 by 2021 and restoring year-round Pell Grant funding so students can take summer classes to finish school quicker.

The plan isn’t great. I think means-testing higher ed makes about as much sense as means-testing Social Security or elementary school (though, alas, we still do that in this country through local funding and property taxes). I would have preferred free higher ed for everyone.

That said, and assuming Clinton can get this plan through (a big assumption), this is still a big step forward. For three reasons.

First, lots of men and women—students and their families—will get this benefit, not in a far-off time, but soon. And make no mistake: whether you’re going to CUNY, where annual tuition is a little over $6000, or Berkeley or Michigan, where in-state tuition is about $13,000, this will come as welcome relief to a lot of people.

Second, and more important for the long term, I’ve been saying forever that the biggest challenge facing contemporary liberalism is that, from the point of view of the average taxpayer, it has so little to offer. Imagine you’re someone who lives in a house with the median household income of about $54,000 per year. You pay your taxes, but what do you concretely get for the taxes? Sure, I can point to the roads (which are often falling apart) or the schools (which are often not so good), or, down the line, to Social Security or Medicare (which, we’re often told, aren’t in great shape either, and in the case of Social Security, certainly can’t fund a retirement). But it’s hard to make the case to your average man or woman that taxes fund things that help you concretely and directly. Particularly when, at least going back to Mondale, the only message we’ve heard from Democrats on taxes is either: a) we’ll cut them; or b) we’ll increase them in order to cut the deficit and pay off the debt.

Way beyond anything between Clinton v. Sanders, this plan by Clinton is something that can, potentially, change the way people think about their taxes and what the state can do for them. It’s a step toward a political and ideological realignment.

That said, there’s this, too:

The new plan, announced by [Clinton’s] campaign Wednesday, incorporates a major plank of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) platform and is a direct result of the private meeting Clinton had with the Vermont senator in June, the campaign said.

…

Clinton’s embrace of one of the most popular parts of Sanders’ platform comes as she is trying to get his core supporters — including many young people worried about college debt — to enthusiastically support her candidacy in November.

Sanders gained huge support among young voters by pushing for tuition-free public colleges nationwide, and Clinton now says she would do that for families making less than $125,000.

Which brings me to my third reason.

At moments like this, you really need to get beyond the personal politics a lot of DC and media people want to make all politics into. Despite the fact that they accuse Bernie supporters of being a cult, of worshipping an ancient socialist patriarch, they’re the ones who often think of these electoral campaigns completely in terms of personality, of who’s winning and who’s losing. To my mind, this announcement today goes way beyond the Clinton/Sanders horserace or the Clinton/Trump race. If there is anyone to be celebrated here, it’s the millions of people—particularly young people—who pushed so hard during this campaign, and who have been slowly changing American politics outside the electoral realm.

One of the biggest challenges facing democracy—as opposed to liberalism—and democratic ways of thinking and doing things, is the sense, among a lot of citizens, that political action, whether in the electoral realm or the streets, doesn’t matter. That sense is not delusion; there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that on some fundamentals, it doesn’t matter, at least not yet. But you don’t change that common sense by repeating it over and over to people. Sometimes, we on the left do that. We forget that when we do, we’re not telling the average citizen anything she doesn’t already know. We’re merely repeating what she does know. And reinforcing her sense that there’s really no point in even trying to do anything, whether at the voting booth or in the streets.

It’s way too soon to say what I’m about to say, but I’ll say it anyway: If this plan of Clinton’s does come to pass—again, a big if—it could help, ever so slightly (I stress that ever so slightly), change our sense, if we claim this victory as our own (not as a beneficent handout of an elite neoliberal politician but as a response to real pressure from citizens, particularly younger citizens who have been active in so many social movements these last few years), it could help change our sense of where power lies. It could help more people see what the good activist and the smart organizer already sees: that if we could just possibly get our shit together, we might, sometimes, find power elsewhere. Not power in the abstract, but power to change the concrete terms and conditions of our daily lives.

So here’s my new (really, hardly new at all, and actually not mine) political slogan, as we enter a season of (I hope) increasing, if ultimately finite, concessions from the neoliberal state: Take this, demand more, seize all.

Update (6:45 pm)

A hepful Vox piece reports on three other elements of the Clinton college plan that we should not be thrilled about.

What you need to remember—and I had forgotten—is that today’s plan builds off the previous plans Clinton has announced. Those plans featured three elements, which, according to this article, will remain in play and will apply to the tuition-free plan:

First, the funding for the tuition-free plan will follow the Obamacare Medicaid expansion model, which—thanks to the Supreme Court—states can refuse to participate in. That’s exactly what happened with Republican states. So even within the less than $125k range, this isn’t guaranteed to be a universal benefit.

Second, students have to work ten hours a week to get the benefit. That seems like a huge boondoggle of free labor either to the university (which might wind up firing workers) or to local employers (which could do the same). Not to mention that the whole point of taxpayer-financed benefits like this is that you deserve them as a right of citizenship—and pay for them as a taxpayer—and not because you’re earning them as a worker.

John Protevi pointed out to me that in her famous Daily News interview, Clinton gave us a sense of what she had in mind:

Okay, so you’ve got the states, you’ve got the institutions and you’ve got the families, and then students who want to take advantage of debt-free tuition have to agree to work 10 hours a week. It’s work-study at the college or university, because a couple of public institutions — Arizona State University being a prime example — have lowered their costs by using students for a lot of the work. Yes, it’s free. It’s in effect in exchange for lower tuition. So I want that to be part of the deal.

And here is a nice primer on what that Arizona State program looks like in practice:

Education at Work (EAW) begins expansion outside Cincinnati, where it was founded, at Arizona State University in an innovative three-way partnership with worldwide online payments system company PayPal. Students working at the non-profit contact center will have the opportunity to earn up to $6,000 a year in GPA-based tax-free tuition assistance in addition to an hourly wage. The students will work as part-time employees in a fast-paced, collaborative contact center environment responding to social media and email inquiries.

Go PayPal!

Third, colleges and universities have to “work to lower the cost of actually providing the education — by, for instance, experimenting with technology to lower the cost of administration.” A link in the piece takes us to an article that elaborates thus:

It’s not yet clear what colleges would be required to do about costs in order to participate in the grants, but the adviser mentioned keeping spending on administration in check and using technology to lower the cost of education — for example, making it easier for some students to fulfill some requirements online. (Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, a provider of free online courses, was one of the advisers on Clinton’s plan, according to the campaign.)

The neoliberal state giveth. And the neoliberal taketh—and taketh.

Season of the Bro

It’s interesting for me, reflecting upon the months and months that I’ve been called a bro because of my support for Bernie Sanders. Me, who listens to Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland, who couldn’t throw a ball if my life depended on it. What’s interesting is that the Clinton supporters in the media and on Twitter would never call men in the military or major league sports a bro. Those people they accord a fawning, almost embarrassing, reverence and deference.

Still Blogging After All These Years

Five years ago today—so my wife Laura tells me; I had thought we’d reached this point a couple of weeks ago—this blog was launched. Since then, I’ve written 901 posts, totaling, I’m guessing, about a million words, which has provoked some 16,000 comments. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, my posts are guaranteed to reach at least 30,000 people (there’s overlap in these audiences so I’m subtracting a good amount to try and account for that), and on a good day, anywhere from 10 to 20 thousand readers will come to the blog and read its posts there. I often cross-post at Crooked Timber, where I’m a regular blogger, or Jacobin, so the readership for any one post can be even higher.

I started this blog kicking and screaming. I had joined Facebook in late 2010 and instantly started writing mini-blog posts there on politics and culture. Often a lively conversation would ensue. Laura urged me to turn my Facebook jottings into a blog. I refused. What I wanted was an author’s web page. Laura, who’s a digital media strategist as well as a writer and editor, agreed to set it up. Only she set it up as a blog, which she had been quietly building over a few weeks on WordPress. Web pages were static, she said. If I wanted readers, I needed to write. Not just books or articles but blogs.

I remember my howls of protest. Why I was so resistant, I can’t exactly say, except that I feared that I was going to tumble down the rabbit hole of popularization and vulgarization. Every academic—well, maybe not every academic, but a lot of academics—wants readers but fears them. Or fears the reputation of wanting readers or having them. Academics worry about being seen as dumbing things down, as not being serious. If they forsake the rarified halls of scholarship, where monkish rules of long silence are punctuated by only the most periodic of speech acts, they and their work will be thought of as not rigorous.

That was the fear. I got over it. And I’m glad I did. Even though I had been writing for popular audiences for years—in venues like the New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and Lingua Franca—blogging threw me into a world of conversation of the sort you never really get in either academia or print media. The immediacy of the response; the unpredictability and range of the engagement; the depth and thoughtfulness of the comments; the ease of the back and forth; the willingness to interrogate first principles; the presence, almost material, of the audience: this was the kind of conversation I had gone into academia—and had moved to New York—for. This was the kind of conversation that, except for my union days in grad school, I had always wanted and never found. And here it was, on the internet.

Since then, I’ve gone on to write about a range of topics, some of them with a focus and intensity that I never would have employed were it not for my readers. My work and interests have changed in all sorts of ways because of blogging. Lately, I’ve been talking quite a bit about public intellectuals (a term I’d long eschewed and been wary of): not only their will to create an audience but the role of the audience as an independent and autonomous co-creator. This blog—as well as Facebook, where I increasingly try out smaller bits and pieces of what often becomes a blog—is what, in part, I’ve had in mind.

So on this, the five-year anniversary of my blog, I want to thank three people.

First, Laura, who not only pushed me, kicking and screaming, to do this, but who has since been my consigliere in all things digital. Laura often is the first reader of my posts, in draft. She either gives me the green light or says no, not this one, and thereby spares you all of a great many false starts. She’s an inerrant stylist, with an eye for the fullness of a sentence and an ear for the flatness of its fall. She has a sense of taste, which I always depend on. And despite being a rather reserved and retiring person, she has a feel for the fight.

Second, Remeike Forbes, who spent nearly a year working behind the scenes on the aesthetics of the blog in 2014, before we launched this new design in February 2015. I hesitate to say much about Remeike or what he did because when it comes to talking about aesthetics, I’m hopelessly out of my league. All I can say is that Remeike’s aesthetic vision and imprint is so strong that I cannot think about this blog—its contents, arguments, and sentences—without seeing it as he sees it.

And, last, you, the reader. I don’t always respond to your comments, but they often lodge somewhere in my head. Worrying me, bothering me, inciting me.

When I began this blog, in 2011, blogs were supposed to be on their way out. New bloggers were supposed to be incapable of finding or creating an audience because the market was already saturated. Too much supply, not enough demand. (I didn’t know any of this at the time. In my usual bumbling fashion, I was pretty clueless about the whole thing. I only found out later.) That hasn’t been my experience. This blog has acquired new and more readers every day. Not, I’d like to think, readers in search of a hot take or a partisan broadside, but readers interested in history and theory, in the laden-ness of political experience.

That makes me proud—and grateful. So, thank you, again, dear reader.

 

 

My Resistance to Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel’s death has prompted much discussion on social media. I’ve written—quite negatively—about Wiesel in the past:

It’s long been remarked that the Holocaust and Israel have replaced God and halakha as the touchstones of Jewish experience and identity. The Holocaust is our deity, Israel our daily practice.

You get a sense of this in a New York Times oped Elie Wiesel wrote on the day that NBC first aired its mini-series Holocaust. That was in April 1978.

All Jewish families, mine included, watched it. One Jewish magazine even said that watching it “has about it the quality of a religious obligation” for Jews. Like the Six-Day War, it was a founding moment of contemporary Jewish identity.

I remember it vividly. I watched all nine and a half hours of it. I developed a mad crush on one of the characters, a beautiful, dark-eyed Jewish partisan in the forests of Poland or Soviet Russia (played, I realized much later in life, by a much younger Tovah Feldshuh). During one scene, of a synagogue packed with Jews being set ablaze by the Nazis, I ran out of my parents’ room, sobbing uncontrollably.

It was terrible TV; I tried to watch it years later and couldn’t make it past the first half-hour.

But Wiesel didn’t complain about the aesthetic quality of the show; it was the desacralization of the Holocaust he objected to. As quoted by Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life:

It transforms an ontological event into soap-opera…..We see long, endless processions of Jews marching toward Babi Yar….We see the naked bodies covered with “blood”—and it is all make-believe….People will tell me that…similar techniques are being used for war movies and historical re-creations. But the Holocaust is unique; not just another event. This series treats the Holocaust as if it were just another event….Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized….The Holocaust transcends history…..The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of nor capable of recovering…..The Holocaust [is] the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who were there know what it was; the others will never know.

It’s all there. The Holocaust not as an event in secular history but as a leap into transcendence; it cannot be explained, it can only be circled, like a holy fire. Auschwitz is our Sinai, the ovens our burning bush. Like the Jews receiving God’s commandments, the Jews of the camps experienced a sacred mystery, received a secret message, which we can only approach at a distance, with awe and trembling. I, the Holocaust, am your God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Last night, on Facebook, I reiterated my longstanding concerns:

I know Elie Wiesel is beloved by many, Jews and non-Jews alike. But as someone who’s written about—and against—him over the years, I feel like I have to issue a dissent.

(Please don’t tell me today’s not the day. Unless you’ve complained about what I said about Christopher Hitchens upon his death or a great many others. If you don’t want to read any criticism of Wiesel, I completely understand. I honestly do. Might I suggest then that you stop reading what I’m about to say?)

Set aside Wiesel’s stance on Israel/Palestine, which was often indefensible.

More than anyone, Wiesel helped sacralize the Holocaust, making it a kind of theological event that stood outside history. “The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” was how he once put it.

At the same time, he helped turn the Holocaust into an industry of middlebrow morality and manipulative sentimentality.

Primo Levi had a special dislike for Wiesel’s ways and means, which makes Wiesel’s infamous verdict on Levi’s suicide (“Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later”) all the more grating.

Decades ago, in a scorching essay, “Resistance to the Holocaust,” Philip Lopate caught the measure of the man: “Sometimes it seems that ‘the Holocaust’ is a corporation headed by Elie Wiesel, who defends his patents with articles in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday Times.”

An interesting discussion ensued.

After I was accused on another thread of being insensitive to the claims of survivors, to how a survivor chooses to represent himself and his experience, to how my position only reflects the fact that I was not There nor even near There, I followed up with this statement from the Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, who was a survivor (he died earlier this year), from his essay “Who Owns Auschwitz?“:

I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of ‘civilization’ as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust. Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.

But I’ll confess that while my reaction to Wiesel and his brand (Wiesel once said that “the universe of the concentration camps, by its design, lies outside if not beyond history. Its vocabulary belongs to it alone.”) is informed by and reflects Kertész’s position, a more visceral distaste is awakened in me by these kind of strictures from Wiesel. And the negative reactions of people to criticism of Wiesel.

Reading this piece from Haaretz this afternoon, on how Wiesel was received in Israel, helped concretize my feelings. The article shows how little standing Wiesel actually has in Israel. Both the right and the left dislike him, for different reasons. And his particular brand—a survivor who shrouded his experience, and the Holocaust as a whole, with an aura of religiosity—just didn’t sell there for many years, if ever.

What the article shows, by implication, is that the hushed tone we’re all expected to adopt, here in the US, when speaking of Wiesel and his work actually has less to do with the Holocaust or even Israel than with the pervasive sentimentality of American culture and argument, the notion that trauma confers privilege and precludes judgment or argument, that when it comes to the most terrible matters of history, we’re all supposed to act as if we’re in church.

Lopate’s essay, which came out in the late 1980s, really expressed this well. I’ll just quote from him:

When I was small, a few years after World War II had ended, my mother would drag me around Brooklyn to visit some of the newly arrived refugees; they were a novelty. We would sit in somebody’s kitchen and she would talk with these women for hours (usually in Yiddish, which I didn’t understand) to found what what it was like. After we left, she would say in a hushed voice, “Did you see the number on her arm? She was in a concentration camp!” I didn’t understand why my mother was so thrilled, almost erotically excited, when she spoke these words, but her melodramatic demand that I be impressed started to annoy me…

“Holocaust stands alone in time as an aberration within history,” states Menachem Rosensaft. And Elie Wiesel writes that “the universe of concentration camps, by its design, lies outside if not beyond history. Its vocabulary belongs to it alone.” What surprises me is the degree to which such an apocalyptic, religious-mythological reading of historical events has come to be accepted by the culture at large—unless people are just paying lip service to the charms of an intimidating rhetoric.

…

I just don’t get why both New York City and Washington, D.C., should have Holocaust memorial museums. Or why every major city in the United States seems to be commemorating this European tragedy in some way or another. An Israeli poet on a reading tour through the States was taken into the basement of a synagogue in Ohio and proudly shown the congregation’s memorial to the 6 million dead: a torch meant to remain eternally lit. The poet muttered under his breath, “Shoah flambé.” In Israel they can joke about these matters.

…

These monuments have an air of making the visitor feel bad, at the same time retaining a decorously remote and abstract air—all the more so when they are removed geographically from the ground of pain.

…

Will the above seem the ravings of a finicky aesthete? I apologize. But remember that it is an aesthetic problem we are talking about, this attempt to make an effective presentation of a massive event. The dead of Auschwitz are not buried in Yad Vashem; believe me, I am not insulting their memories. Yad Vashem is the product of us the living and as such is subject to our dispassionate scrutiny and criticism.

…

Theodor Adorno once made an intentionally provocative statement to the effect that one can’t have lyric poetry after Auschwitz. Much as I respect Adorno, I am inclined to ask, a bit naively: Why not? Are we to infer, regarding all the beautiful poetry that has been written since 1945, that these postwar poets were insensitive to some higher tact? Alexander Kluge, the German filmmaker, has explained what Adorno really meant by this remark: any art from now on that does not take Auschwitz into account will be not worthy as art. This is one of those large intimidating pronouncements to which one gives assent in public while secretly harboring doubts. Art is a vast arena; must it all and always come to terms with the death camps, important as they are?

…

It has also been argued that the enormity of the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews calls for an aesthetic approach of an entirely different order than the traditional mimetic response. This seems to me nothing more than a polemic in favor of certain avant-garde or antinaturalist techniques, hitched arbitrarily to the Holocaust….

Art has its own laws, and even so devastating an event as the Holocaust may not significantly change them. For all its virtues, the longeurs, repetitions, and failures of sympathy in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah are not exonerated, no matter what its apologists may argue, by the seriousness of the subject matter, as though an audience must be put through over eight hours of an exhaustingly uneven movie to convince it of the reality of the Holocaust. A tight film would have accomplished the same and been a stronger work of art. Lanzmann might reply that he is indifferent to the claims of art compared to those of the Holocaust; unfortunately, you cant’ play the game of art and not play it at the same time.

…

False knowledge. Borrowed mysticism. By blackmailing ourselves into thinking that we must put ourselves through a taste of Auschwitz, we are imitating unconsciously the Christian mystics who tried to experience in their own flesh the torments of Christ on the cross. But this has never part of the Jewish religion, this gluttony for empathic suffering. Though Jewish rabbis and sages have been killed for their faith, and their deaths recorded and passed down, Judaism has fought shy in the past of establishing a hagiography based on martyrdom. Why are we doing it now?

In certain ways, the Jewish American sacramentalizing of the Holocaust seems an unconscious borrowing of Christian theology. That one tragic event should be viewed as standing outside, above history, and its uniqueness defended and proclaimed, seems very much like the Passion of Christ.