Corey Robin's Blog, page 44

From the Talmud to Judith Butler: Audiences as Co-Creators with—and of—the Public Intellectual

The Talmud tells a story: the reason God covenanted with the Jews was that they were the only ones who were willing to take the deal.

According to a commentary on Deuteronomy, “When God revealed Himself to give the Torah to Israel, He revealed Himself not only to Israel but to all the nations.” First God goes to the children of Esau, asking them if they will accept the Torah. They ask him what it contains, God says, “Though shalt not murder,” they say, no thanks.

God goes to the Ammonites and Moabites. Same response, only for them the prohibition against adultery is the deal-breaker. He goes to the Ishmaelites, to all the peoples of the earth. Each time, they turn him down. They can’t accept some portion of the Torah’s instructions and injunctions.

Then God comes to the Jews. They don’t ask questions. They simply “accepted the Torah, with all of its explanations and details.” So God “surrendered them [the Torah and all of its details] to Israel.”

You almost get a sense, reading the midrash, of God’s weariness. The Jews aren’t his first choice, but they’ll take the deal. God’s exhausted, history is made.

It takes two to tango in Jewish theology: God and the people. (My rabbi at Yale, Jim Ponet, used to call “Avi Malkeinu,” the prayer we sing on Yom Kippur, a love song—or dance—between God and the Jewish people.) That’s why the act of covenanting is repeated again and again, through the Jewish Bible. At Sinai (in Exodus), on the verge of entering Canaan (in Deuteronomy), after the conquest of Canaan (in Joshua), and after the return from the Babylonian exile (in Nehemia).

God requires a people, the Torah an audience, the text a reader. But as the midrash shows, that people—that audience, that reader—isn’t a passive recipient, the final step of a journey. The reader—the audience, the people—is an active agent in her own right. Not only is she free to refuse the covenant, the text, but she also helps make the covenant and the text what it is. She elaborates it, explains it, interprets it, repeats it, transforms it.

So it is with public intellectuals.

I got to thinking about this issue after a conversation this morning with my friend Ellen Tremper. She pointed me to a wonderful text from Virginia Woolf, “The Reader,” which Woolf apparently never completed, but in which Woolf talks about the active role of the reader, how she is, in some ways, a co-creator—or at least is involved in the creation and transmission—of any text. Ellen pointed out to me that this notion was hovering around the edges of some of my recent work on public intellectuals as well as of an essay I wrote on Fiddler on the Roof, which first appeared on this blog and has now been published at Politics/Letters.

But I realized that, however implicit that notion might be in my argument, the way I’ve construed the topic of public intellectuals still downplays the active role of the audience. Instead it makes the writer a kind of sovereign author, a God-like figure who brings an audience into being. (Someone in the audience at the S-USIH conference, where I first spoke on the topic, also pointed this out to me: that I was relying on a kind of romantic 19th century notion of the intellectual. I knew that he was right, but I also knew that that wasn’t quite what I was thinking or wanted to say. Several people also pointed this out in various comments threads in response to my post on Judith Butler. On Facebook, Lisa Duggan had some especially helpful comments in this regard.)

Speaking with Ellen—and remembering this midrash—gives me a way of thinking more properly about the audience the intellectuals seeks to create. That audience is never the creation of the writer; it is always an independent actor in its own right. The intellectual writes a text, but the audience makes the text what it is. It not only makes the text a public act; it interprets the text, gives it life. Not just life in the here and now, but, with any luck, throughout time. By receiving and then renewing the covenant, the audience turns a temporary agreement, a text of the moment, into a document that not only lives for a few years but forever. It turns a text into a way of life, a way of life that has its own claims to textual autonomy and originality.

When we talk about public intellectuals, not only are we talking about the audience as a recipient or reader of the text, but we are also, necessarily, talking about the audience as an independent, autonomous, and equally original and creative, co-creator of the text.

Trains, Planes, and Automobiles: On the Left’s Ideas about Money and Freedom

There’s a whole essay or dissertation to be written—probably has been—on how liberals and leftists interested in explaining the relationship between money and freedom—namely, that without money, we cannot be free; that we lack liberty if we lack the economic means to pursue our ends—so often resort to metaphors of, or make reference to, travel and transportation.

The Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen does it in his classic essay, “Freedom and Money,” where he shows how not having money is an abridgment of freedom. Not having money does not mean simply that I lack the resources to do what I want to do. Not does it mean that I lack the capacity to do what I want to do. Without money, says Cohen, I am literally unfree to do what I am otherwise physically and emotionally capable of doing.

To explain that argument, which is an attempt to take apart Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty, Cohen deftly uses the analogy of a train ticket. If I cannot afford to buy a ticket to travel to Glasgow (Cohen was a Canadian who made his career in Britain), I am not free to travel to Glasgow. I am physically able to board the train and make the trip. But without a ticket, I’ll be physically stopped and prevented from doing so—not by the frailty of my body or infirmity of my mind, not by the weakness of my will, but by the conductor and behind her the force of the state.

This afternoon, Alex Gourevitch reminded of a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg that I posted on Facebook a while back. It’s from an interview she gave to Elle magazine where she explains that poor women, by virtue of being poor, lack the same right to an abortion that wealthy women have. Freedom is unevenly distributed in relationship to social class and wealth. To drive the point home, she too invokes travel, less as an analogy than as an instance:

The impact of all these restrictions is on poor women, because women who have means, if their state doesn’t provide access, another state does. I think that the country will wake up and see that it can never go back to [abortions just] for women who can afford to travel to a neighboring state…

You find the same trope in the Buckley v. Valeo decision, where the Court upheld the constitutionality of limitations on campaign contributions but struck down limitations on campaign expenditures as a violation of the First Amendment. Explaining the connection between expenditure and expression, between money and speech, the Court wrote:

A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.

And then to, um, drive the point home, the Court added a footnote:

Being free to engage in unlimited political expression subject to a ceiling on expenditures is like being free to drive an automobile as far as and as often as one desires on a single tank of gasoline.

This being the United States, the Court naturally invoked the car and the gas tank—rather than Cohen’s train and ticket—as the appropriate metaphor.

The invocation of travel makes some sense: Going back to Hobbes, the absence of external impediments to the motions of our body has often been taken as the most basic definition of freedom. (In chapter 14 of Leviathan, as opposed to chapter 21, Hobbes is a little more elusive on the question of motion, but his emphasis on external impediments remains.) Likewise, the hallmark of the state’s power is the right to control a person’s entry and exit across its borders.

But rather than external physical impediments serving as the barrier to motion, in these examples, what is doing that work of impeding motion is money itself.

From God’s Lips to Clarence Thomas’s Ears

Exodus 4:

And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent…I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue….And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses, and he said, Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well….Thou shalt speak unto him, and put words in his mouth: and I will be with thy mouth, and with his mouth, and will teach you what ye shall do. And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people: and he shall be, even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God.

Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. Federal Election Commission (1996), Thomas concurring and dissenting:

When an individual donates money to a candidate or to a partisan organization, he enhances the donee’s ability to communicate a message and thereby adds to political debate, just as when that individual communicates the message himself. Indeed, the individual may add more to political discourse by giving rather than spending, if the donee is able to put the funds to more productive use than can the individual. The contribution of funds to a candidate or to a political group thus fosters the “free discussion of governmental affairs,” Mills v. Alabama, 384 U.S. 214, 218 (1966), just as an expenditure does.

 

 

Judith Butler as a Public Intellectual

I’m a bit late to the party on this article in New York about Judith Butler, which was making the rounds last week. But it’s got me thinking, again, about public intellectuals and their style of writing, a topic I addressed earlier this year in The Chronicle Review.

Now, I should confess at the outset that I’m a rank amateur when it comes to queer theory and gender studies. I read, and know, about it from a distance: from friends like Paisley Currah, from my students, and from colleagues in real life and on social media. So forgive me—and happily correct me—if what I am about to say is wrong.

The premise of the New York profile is that Butler was/is the theoretician of our contemporary politics (and culture) of sex and gender, even as that politics and culture have surpassed her in certain ways.

Taking into account that there were many writers and theoreticians who have contributed to our contemporary sensibilities and mores around sex and gender; acknowledging that none of these theories would have become remotely actual were it not for the millions of people, activists and non-activists alike, who worked to make the world more hospitable to the claims of the non-gender-conforming—the article still presumes that much in our world today would be inconceivable were it not for Butler’s original intervention in Gender Trouble. That’s the premise of the article I take to be true.

I don’t mean that to sound as if I don’t believe it to be true, though I recognize that it presumes a problematic narrative of the “Hero Theorist” who makes the world what it is. I just mean that for my purposes, it’s a necessary premise for what I really want to argue.

What struck me in reading the New York piece is that for much of the 1990s, Gender Trouble led a second, or shadow, life in the republic of letters. Where it was received, often nastily, less as a document in our ongoing arguments about sex and gender and more as an instance of Bad Writing. The article references that controversy over Butler’s writing style—a style that could be characterized as strenuous, I think it’s fair to say—but it doesn’t quite capture how heated and vicious the controversy often was.

In a famous essay, Martha Nussbaum flayed Butler for her writing style. And thousand of others did, too. Not just in lengthy articles, but in everyday conversation. (I’m sure I did, too; Butler’s style was not my own.)

The assumption of so many of those attacks—it ran through Nussbaum’s like a red thread—was that Butler’s style of writing was a betrayal of not just the philosophical vocation but of the public intellectual vocation: the vocation to speak to the issues of the day in a style that was as demotic as it was democratic. Nothing was thought to be so emblematic of Butler’s political un-seriousness—of her failure to speak to the polis—as the hermetic style of her prose. It was a prose for the initiated and the elect, not for everyday men and women.

Yet here we are today: an entire polity and culture awash, saturated, in Judith Butler’s ideas. From the President to pop culture, “It’s Judith Butler’s World,” as the piece’s URL title puts it. Butler has gone on to write eminently readable opeds (in defense of difficult writing, no less) in the New York Times, make brave interventions in the debate over Israel/Palestine, and pen learned essays on Kafka and Jewish identity in tony venues like the London Review of Books. Yet, a quarter-century later, it is Gender Trouble—that difficult, knotty, complicated book, with a prose style that violates all the rules of Good Public Writing—that has generated the largest public or publics of all: the queer polity we all live in today.

All of which is to say, it’s not the style that makes the writing (and the intellectual) public. It’s not the audience. It’s the aspiration to create an audience—and, with any luck (and it is luck, as Bonnie Honig and Lida Maxwell have reminded me), the actuality of having done so.

Judith Butler has done so.

As I wrote back in January:

Though the public intellectual is a political actor, a performer on stage, what differentiates her from the celebrity or publicity hound is that she is writing for an audience that does not yet exist. Unlike the ordinary journalist or enterprising scholar, she is writing for a reader she hopes to bring into being. She never speaks to the reader as he is; she speaks to the reader as he might be. Her common reader is an uncommon reader.

The reason for this has less do with the elitism of the intellectual — mine is no brief for an avant garde or philosopher king — than with the existence, really, the nonexistence, of the public. Publics, as John Dewey argued, never simply exist; they are always created. Created out of groups of people who are made and mangled by the actions of other people. Capital acts upon labor, subjugating men and women at work, making them miserable at home. Those workers are not yet a public. But when someone says — someone writes — “Workers of the world, unite!,” they become a public that is willing and able to act upon its shared situation. It is in the writing of such words, the naming of such names — “Workers of the world” or “We, the People,” even “The Problem That Has No Name” — that a public is summoned into being. In the act of writing for a public, intellectuals create the public for which they write.

This is why the debate over jargon versus plain language is, in this context, misplaced. The underlying assumption of that debate is that the public is simply there, waiting to be addressed. The academic philosopher with his notorious inaccessibility — say, Adorno — obviously has no wish to address the public; the essayist with his demotic presence and proficiency — say, Hazlitt — obviously does. Yet both Adorno and Hazlitt spoke to audiences that did not exist but which they hoped would come into being. Adorno, explicitly: “Messages in a Bottle” was the title of 10 fragments he meant to include in Minima Moralia. In Hazlitt’s case, as Stefan Collini has argued, the

“familiar style,” which was to serve as something of a model for later generations of critics who aspired to recreate a “lost” intimacy with an educated readership, was consciously adopted as a voice that was not appropriate to the new age; it was an attempt to refashion a mode of address to the reader that was already felt to be archaic.

Whatever the style, the public intellectual is always speaking to an audience that is not there.

Of all our contemporary academics with claims to the title of public intellectual, Judith Butler is the first among equals.

The Second Time Around: James Traub on Neoliberal Technocracy

James Traub—last seen in the 1990s (when it was fashionable to shit all over public institutions that helped advance the cause of black and brown people) attacking Open Admissions at CUNY, which had done so much to make higher ed accessible to students of color—is back, calling, in the wake of Trump and Brexit, for a global realignment of political forces.

In a blog post at Foreign Policy titled, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” Traub writes:

One of the most brazen features of the Brexit vote was the utter repudiation of the bankers and economists and Western heads of state who warned voters against the dangers of a split with the European Union.

…

That is, chunks of parties from the left and right of center could break away to form a different kind of center, defending pragmatism, meliorism, technical knowledge, and effective governance against the ideological forces gathering on both sides. It’s not hard to imagine the Republican Party in the United States — and perhaps the British Conservatives should Brexit go terribly wrong — losing control of the angry, nationalist rank and file and reconstituting themselves as the kind of Main Street, pro-business parties they were a generation ago, before their ideological zeal led them into a blind alley. That may be their only alternative to irrelevance.

…

Perhaps politics will realign itself around the axis of globalization, with the fist-shakers on one side and the pragmatists on the other. The nationalists would win the loyalty of working-class and middle-class whites who see themselves as the defenders of sovereignty. The reformed center would include the beneficiaries of globalization and the poor and non-white and marginal citizens who recognize that the celebration of national identity excludes them.

…

Did I say “ignorant”? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them. Is that “elitist”? Maybe it is; maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history. If so, the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality, and its enablers among those who know better. If that is the coming realignment, we should embrace it.

On the one side of this new alignment will be a neoliberal coalition of elite, well-educated technocrats (the “beneficiaries of globalization”), poor people, and people of color. On the other side, an ethno-nationalist racist rump of losers on the right.

Traub’s is a useful clarifying statement from the neoliberal center, which confirms something I wrote just the other day on Facebook:

The Clinton forces want nothing more than to make all of American politics—not just in this election but for the foreseeable future—into a battle between a racist, ethno-nationalist right and a multicultural, neoliberal center. Our job is to make politics into a struggle between a multicultural neoliberal center and a multicultural, multiracial socialist left.

The only drawback of Traub’s statement is that it bears so little relationship to reality.

First, neoliberal technocracy has been in the driver’s seat for some time. Traub says it’s now time, at last, for the educated, globalizing elite to rise up against the ignorant nationalist masses. The very last book of Christopher Lasch, published two decades ago, was an attack on precisely this political formation of an Ivy-League elite at war with the middle and working classes of this country. The title of his book? The Revolt of the Elites.

The world Traub longs to bring into being has been around for a long time. The very force he recommends as a new solution is, to many, the long-standing source of an old problem, the very problem Traub would like to address.

Second, Traub’s imagined ruling class of neoliberal technocrats lacks the taste and the talent for exercising the sorts of political skills that he thinks are now in order. These technocratic elites show no desire or aptitude for seizing the political field, taking command of the debate, and instructing the masses in the hard facts of reality. Clinton tried it for a day—remember when her message was, essentially, “It doesn’t get better“—and was forced, by the victories of a 74-year-old Jewish socialist in a string of primaries, to beat a hasty retreat behind a phalanx of race and gender happy talk.

Traub’s vision—and, make no mistake, it is a vision—is basically an Aaron Sorkin script in the guise of a blog post.

Or, as that old Shalamar song has it:

The second time around

Ooh, the second time is so much better, baby

The second time around

And I’ll make it better than the first time

Unintended Consequences

Thomas Nides, former deputy secretary of state under Clinton, offers a perfect summation of the creed (h/t Doug Henwood):

Hillary Clinton understands we always need to change — but change that doesn’t cause unintended consequences for the average American.

Off the top of my head, here’s a brief list of changes that caused unintended consequences for the average American (whoever that might be):

The election of Abraham Lincoln.
The passage of Social Security.
The entrance of women into factories during World War II.
Brown v. Board of Ed.
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Asking an unknown state senator from Illinois to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Party convention.



Politics is the field of unintended consequences (“Events, dear boy, events.”) Don’t like unintended consequences? Don’t do politics.

Update (11:30 am)


On Facebook, Timothy Burke added this:

Don’t do change, either. Fear of unintended consequences at this level is high-modernist control freakery. There are unintended consequences to being too afraid of unintended consequences.

Clinton Opens Double-Digit Lead in National Poll

Brexit’s got people nervous about a possible Trump victory in November. It shouldn’t. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Clinton opening up a double-digit lead over Trump, 51%-39%. Now that she has clinched the nomination, Clinton is beginning to consolidate and expand support—as many observers predicted she would.

The poll also shows:

First, Trump’s racism and sexism play well with a rump—though never a strong majority—of the GOP. Racism and sexism are a disaster, however, in the general electorate. Roughly two-thirds of those polled think Trump’s comments about Muslims, women, and racial minorities are racist and/or unfair, and an overwhelming majority strongly disapproves his recent comments about a judge whose parents were Mexican immigrants. Only 36% of the electorate thinks that Trump is standing up for their beliefs.

While some may claim that people are hiding their real views from the pollsters, we should remember that this was also often claimed in 2008, that there was a sleeper racist cell in the country that was going to vote in McCain. We know how that ended. We should also remember that women are the majority of the electorate, and non-whites, in the last election, constituted 28% of the electorate.

Second, Trump’s handling of Orlando cost him. Only 28% of the electorate approved of it, whereas 46% approved of Clinton’s response to Orlando. That’s an 18-point spread. The Orlando massacre also did not make the voters more inclined to support Trump’s ban on Muslim immigration. The notion that terrorism makes people feel safer with Trump is risible.

In other words, the very things that many liberal-minded observers fear make Trump so strong and appealing to the voters—racism, ethno-nationalism, and terrorism—are in fact tremendous liabilities.

Third, not only are elite Republicans defecting to Clinton—the last few weeks saw top executives at AT&T and GM, as well as George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Richard Armitage, and Brent Scowcroft announcing their support for Clinton, and George Will announcing his exit from the GOP—but so are the rank-and-file. 13% of Republican voters who cast their ballots during the primaries for candidates other than Trump (which was the majority in many states) are now supporting Clinton.

Fourth, Obama’s approval ratings continue to climb. They are now at 56%. Incumbency approval or disapproval has an effect on the party’s candidate. Unless the candidate distances himself from the incumbent, as Gore did in 2000. Clinton shows no sign of repeating that mistake.

Fifth, 36% of the electorate now identifies as Democrat (up a few points from a month ago). Only 24% identifies as Republican.

And to cite the conclusion to The Reactionary Mind, to which no one ever paid any attention:

Which leads me to wonder about the long-term prospects of the Tea Party [remember them?], 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.

Yes, polls can change, but we’re fast approaching that moment in a general election campaign, if we haven’t already, when the polls start becoming an increasingly good indicator of the national election results.


 


So to repeat my mantras since February: Donald Trump is going to go down as the George McGovern of the Republican Party. As someone who has been writing about conservatism since 2000 or so, I look forward to seeing my academic cottage industry put out of business.

Neera and Me: Two Theses about the American Ruling Class and One About Neera Tanden

A few days ago, I had a strange experience. I got trolled—some might say gaslighted—by the person who many think will be Hillary Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff.

Her name is Neera Tanden. Tanden is the head of the Center for American Progress, the Democratic Party think tank that works closely with the Clintons.

Though you may know of Tanden for other reasons. I’ll come back to that.

It began on Tuesday afternoon, when I tweeted this.

Take six minutes to watch Cornel West take on the DNC re Israel/Palestine, while Neera Tanden rolls her eyes. https://t.co/XZkQ5Moe4V

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) June 22, 2016

Cornel West represents Bernie Sanders on the DNC Platform Committee. Tanden represents Clinton. Electronic Intifada had excerpted some clips from the Committee’s public deliberations about, among other issues, Israel-Palestine. The hearings had originally been broadcast on C-SPAN. I was struck by the force of West’s moral witness, and what I saw as Tanden’s visible impatience, which you can evaluate for yourself at the 4:40 mark on the Electronic Intifada video.

The next day, Tanden responded to me on Twitter. Not to challenge my characterization of her response to West, but to, well, read for yourself.

@TyHealey @CoreyRobin I wasn’t there for any discussion of Israel/Palestine. If you have to rely on lies, doing progressivism wrong

— (((Neera Tanden))) (@neeratanden) June 22, 2016

@CoreyRobin please correct this tweet. I wasn’t in committee for discussion of Israel Palestine. #facts

— (((Neera Tanden))) (@neeratanden) June 22, 2016

Tanden makes three moves here.

First, she claims—twice—that she was simply not there during the Committee’s deliberations on Israel/Palestine. Not for “any” of those deliberations.

Second, she accuses me of lying.

Third, she asks that I correct my statement.

I instantly get nervous. Here I’ve been accused by Clinton’s possible Chief of Staff of lying. This is not a person you want to cross. Especially on Twitter. I’ll come back to that. Could I have gotten this so wrong?

I go back to the video. I watch it again. And there, at the 4:40 mark, just after DNC Platform Committee member Jim Zogby asks if there are any more questions, I can hear, off-camera, Cornel West talking about the Trump-like elements in the Israeli government—Netanyahu, Lieberman—and I can see Neera Tanden, on camera, rolling her eyes. 

I go back to Twitter and see that people are starting to point this out to her. 

But, maybe, I think to myself, the visuals I’m seeing of her next to Zogby were for another part of the hearings, having nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. 

But then someone on Twitter posts a still from that video, from just that moment.

There, in the upper left, it says, “Highlights: Democratic Platform Committee debate on Middle East.” So she was there, right?

But still no word from Tanden.

Then I think to myself: Wait a minute, I don’t know what Neera Tanden actually looks like. Sure, the person on camera is sitting in front of a name plate that says Neera Tanden, but maybe that’s not her? Maybe in DC circles it’s considered the height of cool to have a flunky sit in front of your name plate and pretend to be you? Maybe it’s gauche or Sanders-style old-fashioned—not retro chic, just dorky and dinosaur-ish, like labor unions and Social Security—to sit in front of your own name plate?

These thoughts are running through my head. Because I’m one of those people who, when accused of doing something wrong, instantly assumes my accuser is right. Why else would she say it if it weren’t true? This is someone who, come next January, could be one step away from the most powerful person on earth. She’s not crazy or stupid. She went to Yale. She must be right.

Just as I start feverishly googling images of Tanden—and truth be told, she doesn’t look in this photo the way she does in the other photos of her that I find online, so now I’m really panicking—she speaks. Or tweets.

@ishtaranonymous @CoreyRobin watch the whole hearing. I wasn’t there for Wexler. Q’s on conflict were during Wexler. Was there for Duss.

— (((Neera Tanden))) (@neeratanden) June 22, 2016

Wexler is former Congressman Robert Wexler, who for most of the video clip that I watched is giving pro-Israel testimony before the Committee. Duss is Matt Duss, who used to work for the Center for American Progress, and is now at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. So what is Tanden saying? That because she missed Wexler’s testimony, which was about Israel/Palestine, but was there for Duss’s, which was—presumably—not about Israel/Palestine, she wasn’t there for any discussion of Israel/Palestine?

That seems like the only possible interpretation. I listen to the video again, though, and there, at 4:40 is the shot of Tanden and Zogby, with Cornel West talking about Netanyahu off camera, and then—voila!—at 4:51, Matt Duss appears on camera! Nodding his head as West continues talking, in what seems like a seamless auditory transition from when Tanden is on camera to when Duss is on camera. I’ve got the proof! Right?

Tanden tweets this.

@RealTrevinShu @obvious_humor @CoreyRobin why don’t you watch the whole hearing instead of an edited version

— (((Neera Tanden))) (@neeratanden) June 22, 2016

What is she saying now? That the edited video is misleading, making it seem as if she was there when she wasn’t there. Or is she saying it was doctored? That West’s voice was somehow spliced in from a different part of the hearings? Suddenly, I think, maybe she’s right, maybe this is one of those gotcha type videos that people like James O’Keefe on the right specialize in.

She doubles down. 

@BarkerTV @CoreyRobin watch the whole hearing.

— (((Neera Tanden))) (@neeratanden) June 22, 2016

What do I do? I watch the whole hearing.

Well, not the whole hearing, but a major chunk of it.

I go back to the original C-SPAN video, not the edited version on the Electronic Intifada site. I start at the 1:04 mark. What do I see? Sitting next to Zogby is someone different than the person who I (still) think (hope) is Neera Tanden. This non-Neera Tanden person starts introducing Wexler, but then interrupts herself to say that she is not in fact Neera Tanden, that Neera Tanden had to step outside. This non-Neera Tanden person is Carol Browner, she says, and she’s sitting in for Tanden. On the plus side, the name plate in front of her says that her name is Carol Browner. So people in DC do sit in front of their name plates after all. Phew. She finishes introducing Wexler, and he starts.

There’s a long back and forth; other panelists, including West, get in on the discussion; another person gives his testimony; and then, at the 1:37:43 mark, Tanden appears! Next to Zogby! But introducing someone who talks about climate policy.

I start to get nervous again. Maybe Tanden really wasn’t there for any discussion of the Middle East? Maybe the C-SPAN caption on that picture was wrong, maybe the video was doctored, maybe I’ve just embarrassed myself on social media, maybe I’ve just crossed someone whom you don’t want to cross. Especially on Twitter. I’ll come back to that.

But, wait, I remind myself, Tanden has said, a few tweets above, that she was there for Duss’s testimony, right? Duss is the head of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He writes about Israel/Palestine all the time. So what else could he have been talking about if not Israel/Palestine?

Hmm, I think again, maybe he was talking about Syria, though, or Libya, or the Emirates. With a sense of dread, I keep watching.

At 1:49:59, I finally come to Duss. Zogby introduces him, Tanden’s still there, so that’s good, and he starts talking. About…Israel and Palestine! The importance of peace between the two peoples, ending the Occupation, how the conflict between Israel/Palestine generates resentment in the region of the whole, the importance of Israel’s security and Palestinians’ needs for self-determination. The entire statement he gives is about…Israel/Palestine! And Tanden is there for the entire time! She’s already admitted that, right?

And, then, at the very end of Duss’s statement, as Zogby asks if there are any questions, at 1:54:06, there is Tanden, still right next to him. The camera is on her and Zogby, for a moment of suspended silence, till finally we hear West start to pose his question to Duss—again, about Netanyahu and Trump-like elements in Israel—and Tanden does her thing.

There: I’ve got it, the proof I needed!

I turn back to Twitter. And here’s what I see:

@epizoooxis @CoreyRobin I was gone for Wexler which is most of video.

— (((Neera Tanden))) (@neeratanden) June 22, 2016

Huh? She was gone for Wexler. Okay. But who said otherwise? And what does it even prove? Nothing at all. It’s just part of Tanden’s ever-shifting goal posts: She wasn’t there. She was there but only for Duss, with the implication being that he didn’t talk about Israel/Palestine, which he did. She missed Wexler’s testimony, which is neither here nor there.

So let’s recap.

Tanden said she wasn’t there for “any discussion of Israel/Palestine.” That’s not true. She was.

Tanden claimed that I was lying. That’s not true. I wasn’t.

Tanden asked me to correct my tweet. But what was there to correct?

And never once does she say: Sorry. I was wrong. I was there. I apologize for claiming you were lying. Not even one sentence of that.

And now we come to the biggest question of all: Why am I writing about something so stupid and small at 3 in the morning on a Friday night?

Three reasons. 

First, notice the amateurishness.

This is the head of a major DC think tank who could well be Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff. What is she doing on a Tuesday morning firing off salvoes at a Brooklyn College professor about a matter of not terribly great importance—and getting it completely wrong? And then, in response to evidence-laden refutations, either doubling down on the accusations or throwing up a lot of chaff? Tanden doesn’t go silent, which is what I thought people in these positions do in these situations (why she even got into it in the first place is an even greater mystery). She doesn’t issue a carefully worded correction. She doesn’t graciously apologize. She just flails around, hoping we won’t notice all the bullshit that’s flying around her.

One of the great mistakes I consistently make in political combat is to presume the basic competence of my opponents. But we’re not talking here about the amateur hour I’m used to dealing with. We’re talking about the, well, potential next Chief of Staff of the White House.

As someone said to me, it’s like Veep come to life. 

Tanden’s actually been called out for her erratic behavior on Twitter. Here’s her response:

You know… I know, I think I probably tweet too much. [Laughs] Just to be 100 percent candid about it, I worked for Hillary for a really long time and I feel protective of her. I feel protective particularly when progressives attack her as some kind of right-wing caricature. I feel like that’s ridiculous. I started working for Hillary in the ’90s. People called her a socialist before being a socialist was cool.. I will plead guilty to wanting to defend her and defend her strenuously on Twitter. But I’m willing to concede I should tweet less.

You think?

But in this instance, Tanden wasn’t tweeting in defense of Clinton. She was tweeting in defense of herself. Which brings me to…

…my second point.

Actually, it’s not mine. It’s Astra Taylor’s. Astra is a documentary filmmaker.

When someone commented on Facebook that they couldn’t understand why a powerful player in DC would be so obsessively monitoring her mentions on Twitter, particularly in response to a not terribly important person like me, Astra made a shrewd observation:

This election has really shown the people who feel entitled to rule the country to be deeply narcissistic and not busy doing anything of actual importance — this is the liberal version of Trump reading all his press/mentions every morning and sending “corrected” copies back to the journalists.

Exactly. 

Never underestimate the narcissism—or amateurishness—of America’s ruling classes. While people like Tanden are in meetings with other important people, where God knows what or whose fate gets decided, they’re keeping their eye on their Twitter mentions, making sure no one’s looking at them cross-eyed, making sure they’re someone whom you don’t want to cross. Especially on Twitter. I’ll come back to…no, actually, I won’t come back to that. Now I can come, at last, to that, my third point.

So Neera Tanden jumped to fame in my little world exactly five weeks ago, when she and blogger Matt Bruenig crossed swords. (You can read all about the substance of that spat in the various links regarding the incident that I’ve scattered throughout this piece.) Within 24 hours, Matt was fired from his position as a blogger at Demos. Since then, we’ve not heard a word from Matt, save one piece he wrote for Jacobin. A prolific blogger and social media presence, whose voice was everywhere, all the time, particularly on Twitter, has gone silent.*

Tanden has repeatedly claimed on Twitter that she had nothing to do with Bruenig’s firing. Until this weekend, I was inclined to believe her. Though Matt Yglesias had reported that someone or ones had in fact tried to contact Bruenig’s employer in the federal government to get him fired from that position, his main gig, as well, I figured Demos preemptively did it, perhaps for fear of antagonizing Tanden. And behind her, the Clintons.

But here’s the thing. Tanden made up a story about her not being at the DNC platform hearings for “any discussions” of the Israel/Palestine conflict. She made up that story when there was publicly available and easily accessible evidence to the contrary. When she was challenged about her made-up story, she doubled down. She suggested that the edited video gave a misleading impression about her presence there. She accused me of being a liar and demanded that I retract my lie. She never once admitted that it was she, not me, who was not telling the truth. She never once apologized to me for claiming to her 25,000 followers that I was lying.

So I leave you with this question (and it really is a question): If Tanden can act this way in the face of verifiable evidence that’s plain as day, and there for everyone to see, when the stakes are so low, is it completely implausible that she would act in a roughly similar fashion when the evidence is not so publicly available and not so easily accessible and when the stakes are much higher? When she has an even stronger and more self-interested reason for covering her tracks?

But there I go again, presuming the basic competence of my opponents.

______________________

*Tragically—I am reluctant to say this, lest I be misunderstood or thought to be sensationalizing this case; I only mention it for the sake of full disclosure, so that no one thinks I was trying to hide this information in order to make my point about Matt’s silence—Matt’s 29-year-old sister was stabbed to death in Arlington, Virginia last weekend.

 

Maybe Money Is Speech After All: How Donald Trump’s Finances Measure His Legitimacy as a Candidate

The disastrous finances of Donald Trump’s campaign has gotten a lot of attention these past two days. The Times reports:

Donald J. Trump enters the general election campaign laboring under the worst financial and organizational disadvantage of any major party nominee in recent history, placing both his candidacy and his party in political peril.

Mr. Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.

I’ve noticed throughout this election season—it actually long predates this election—just how much a campaign’s finances are taken to be a proxy for its legitimacy. During the early months of the year, Bernie Sanders was consistently raising more money, on a monthly basis, than Hillary Clinton was. This was often taken by some in the media to be a sign of his greater support among the voters, even, at times, his greater legitimacy as a candidate. Now the same argument is being leveraged against Trump.

But, people may respond, these articles aren’t really commenting on Trump’s (or, before that, Sanders’s) legitimacy; they’re talking about his political viability, his competence as a manager of a campaign.

As someone noted on Facebook, though, that kind of managerial competence is not unrelated to our sense of democratic legitimacy: we assume that a badly managed campaign somehow signals a bad candidate which signals an illegitimate candidate.

But more important, I don’t think that argument quite gets at just how much our media equates robust fundraising skills with a candidate’s political credentials and democratic legitimacy.

Consider this representative passage from a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post:

Trump hasn’t raised much money yet, and he doesn’t seem inclined to do so; according to one report, after telling Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus that he’d call 20 large donors to make a pitch, he gave up after three. Fundraising is the least pleasant part of running for office, but unlike most candidates who suck it up and do what they have to, Trump may not be willing to spend the time dialing for dollars. Instead, he’s convinced that he can duplicate what he did in the primaries and run a low-budget campaign based on having rallies and doing TV interviews. As he told NBC’s Hallie Jackson, “I don’t think I need that money, frankly. I mean, look what we’re doing right now. This is like a commercial, right, except it’s tougher than a normal commercial.” It’s not like a commercial, because in interviews Trump gets challenged, and usually says something that makes him look foolish or dangerous. But he seems convinced that his ability to get limitless media coverage, no matter how critical that coverage is, will translate to an increase in support.

I take it as a given that Trump is a con man and a grifter, who is more than likely in this just for the money (never underestimate the grifter’s appetite for the buck.) But notice what he is saying: I don’t need money to speak. I can communicate directly with the media. Not just communicate, but have an actual back and forth, where reporters get to ask me questions and I get to answer them.

And notice this journalist’s response to that claim: That kind of communication with the media is not the mark of a serious candidate in a democratic election because those back and forth discussions with the media make that candidate look foolish. The real mark of a serious candidate in a democratic election is his willingness to raise large pots of money so that he can fund television aids where he gets to spread his soundbites unchallenged. The real mark of a serious candidate in a democratic election is the fact that he has raised large pots of money.

We hear a lot of complaints from liberals and Democrats about the Supreme Court conservatives who have turned money into speech worthy of First Amendment protection.

But here is our media essentially proffering a version of the same argument, measuring a candidate’s political seriousness by how willing he is to raise money and his democratic legitimacy by how much money he raises.

Writer’s Block

I hate writer’s block. I know, I know: Who doesn’t? But writing about writer’s block is like what Virginia Woolf said about describing pain.

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

There’s no easy language for it.

I’ve been sitting here, in front of the computer, for weeks, trying to get going on this next section of the Thomas book. Just one false start after another. Every sentence falls flat, every paragraph is dead on arrival. And those are the good days.

When the writing is happening, there are few things better. When it’s not…you get posts about how it’s not happening.

Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking about writing that flies and writing that flails. Maybe because I’m reading so many Supreme Court cases and law review articles.

There is writing that has attack: I don’t mean it’s polemical. It just moves. Every sentence says something, every paragraph advances the position. For a good example, read anything by Doug Henwood. His writing flies. As do the opinions of Clarence Thomas.

Then there is writing that dawdles. It goes nowhere or takes forever to get there. And not in a good way. As Nietzsche said of a group of French writers (including Flaubert!), “Fundamentally they all lack the main thing—’la force.’” He was talking about the writers more than the writing, but the point still applies. For a good example of writing without la force, read the opinions of Lewis Powell.

Needless to say, I dislike the latter kind of writing, and try to avoid it.

But here’s the concern: Like all writers, I’m always filling in the blanks of my own writing. I extract from the noise in my head a faux-logic, coherence, and force, and then ascribe to my sentences that assemblage of logic, coherence, and force, an assemblage that is simply not there. Call it the writer’s mode of import-substitution. Only in reverse.

So, how can you tell if the attack you hope is there is really there?

Lapses in logic and coherence are easy enough, with time, to identify.

La force? She is harder.