Corey Robin's Blog, page 61

Out in Texas: Where public is private and private is public

The news this morning out of Texas:

On Sunday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a formal opinion declaring that county clerks throughout the state may refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Clerks need only state that serving a gay couple would violate their “sincerely held religious beliefs,” Paxton explained, and they are exempt….

Paxton believes that Texas’ Religious Freedom Restoration Act gives clerks the right to turn away gays, because serving them would substantially burden their religion….

At least one Texas county clerk has already turned away gay couples. More are likely to follow suit in the deep red state. The Texas legislature may consider passing a North Carolina-style law that permits clerks to opt out of performing marriages or issuing licenses.

But the North Carolina law forbids clerks from performing any marriage, gay or straight, once they’ve opted out. Under Paxton’s interpretation of his state’s RFRA, Texas clerks are encouraged to marry straight couples while turning away gay couples. That’s the kind of blatant discrimination that gay rights advocates sought to avoid by pushing a non-discrimination amendment to Indiana’s RFRA. Texas’ law has no such protections for LGBTQ people, so clerks can openly refuse service to gays simply because they are gay. That’s religious liberty in action.

It’s interesting. At the dawn of modernity, John Locke, one of the chief theoreticians of our notions of religious liberty, toleration, and separating the power of the state from that of the church, had to consider such a scenario. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, he asked:

What if the Magistrate should enjoyn any thing by his Authority that appears unlawful to the Conscience of a private Person?

There’s just one difference in the Texas case: this time, the private person in question is the magistrate.

 

Mi Casa Es Su Casa

Barack Obama:

President Obama showed little patience for a protester who interrupted him at a White House Pride Month reception on Wednesday, immediately waving a finger and scolding, “Nonononononononono, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“Listen, you’re in my house,” said the president to cheers and applause. “You’re not gonna get a good response from interrupting me like this.”

“Shame on you,” Obama added before having the heckler removed by White House personnel.

Michelle Obama:

This is really what the White House is all about. It’s the “People’s House.”

whitehouse.gov:

The White House is known as “The People’s House”…

whitehouse.gov:

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are committed to opening the doors of the White House and truly making it the People’s House.

Why Do We Fear the Things We Do: Maybe the Wrong Question (Updated)

The New York Times reports this morning:

In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.

But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims…

…

If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke University.

“Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from Muslim extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing extremists,” said Dr. Kurzman, whose study is to be published by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and the Police Executive Research Forum.

…

John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said the mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases has become steadily more obvious to scholars.

“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. Horgan said. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”

Counting terrorism cases is a notoriously subjective enterprise, relying on shifting definitions and judgment calls.

..

Some killings by non-Muslims that most experts would categorize as terrorism have drawn only fleeting news media coverage, never jelling in the public memory. But to revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why.

Wonder why indeed. In the 1990s, I pondered a version of that very question: Why do we fear the things we do? I came to realize that it’s the wrong question. It assumes that people’s fears drive government action and the culture industries rather than the other way around. That view, I also came to realize, is one of relatively recent vintage. It occludes an older view—rooted in Aristotle and Hobbes—that I thought worth resurrecting. The result was my dissertation and my first book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Since then, and along the way, I’ve written a few pieces on the topic. This one in Jacobin may be the most comprehensive. As I write there:

Once we agree to submit to the sovereign, he becomes the decider of our fears:  he determines whether or not we have reason to be afraid, and he determines what must be done to protect us from the objects of our fear….

When the government takes measures for the sake of security, it is not simply translating the people’s fear of danger into a repressive act of state.  Instead, the government makes a choice:  to focus on some threats and not others, and to take certain actions (but not others) to counter those threats.

Update (9:35 am)

On that reference above to the culture industries: I just remembered this morsel from a recent post on the Charleston murders by Jeb Lund in Rolling Stone:

Mercifully, even some mainstream outlets seem willing to use the term “domestic terrorist.” Five years ago we might not have been so lucky. Back then, Newsweek absurdly convened an in-house discussion to decide who is a “terrorist” and emerged with “people in caves,” while whites were accorded terms like “separatist.” This, despite the fact that the event that inspired the discussion was a white man flying a plane into a building he hated, which you’d think would be a slam-dunk post-9/11 definition of the term.

If you follow Lund’s links you get this from Glenn Greenwald:

Aside from the suffocating denseness of their discussion — most of them ramble on about who is and is not a “Terrorist” for three straight days without even attempting to define what that term means — just look at how blatantly tribalistic and propagnadistic they are about its usage.  Many of them all but say outright that it can apply only to Muslims but never non-Muslim Americans.  The whole thing has to be read to be believed — and what’s most amazing is that they published it because they obviously though it was some sort of probing, intelligent discussion which would enlighten the public — but let’s just examine a few of the contributions.  First, here’s the question posed to the group by Newsweek Editor Devin Gordon:

We’ve been having a discussion over here about the aversion so far to calling the Austin Tax Wacko a terrorist – or as the Wall St Journal called him “the tax protester.” And I’m wondering if anyone has read yet – or would tackle themselves – a thorough comparison between our ho-hum reaction to a guy who successfully crashed a plane into a government building versus the media’s full-throated insanity over the underpants bomber, who didn’t hurt anyone but himself.

This is the first answer, from Managing Editor Kathy Jones:

Did the label terrorist ever successfully stick to McVeigh? Or the Unabomber? Or any of the IRS bombers in our violence list?

Here is my handy guide:

Lone wolfish American attacker who sees gov’t as threat to personal freedom: bomber, tax protester, survivalist, separatist

Group of Americans bombing/kidnapping to protest U.S. policies on war/poverty/personal freedom/ – radical left-wing movement, right-wing separatists

All foreign groups or foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American gov’t: terrorists.

So according to Newsweek‘s Managing Editor, only a foreigner who “protests the American government” can be a Terrorist.  Americans cannot be.  Indeed, according to her, “all foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American government” are “Terrorists,” which presumaby includes Muslims who fight against American armies invading their countries (which is how the U.S. Government uses the term, too).  Meanwhile, Leftist Americans who engage in violence are “radicals,” while those on the Right who do so are merely “protesters, survivalists, and separatists.”  Only anti-American foreigners can be Terrorists.  That’s really what she said.  Then we have this, from reporter Jeneen Interlandi:

I agree with Kathy. Right or wrong, we definitely reserve the label “terrorist” for foreign attackers. Even the anthrax guy (not that we ever found him) wasn’t consistently referred to as terrorist.

Reporter Dan Stone takes that a step further:

Yep, comes down to ID. This guy was a regular guy-next-door Joe Schmo. Terrorists have beards in live in caves. He was also an American, so targeting the IRS seems more a political statement — albeit a crazy one — whereas Abdulmutallab was an attack on our freedom. Kind of the idea that an American can talk smack about America, but when it comes from someone foreign, we rally together.

One might think he was being ironic or merely describing how Americans (but notNewsweek) foolishly thinks, but he described the views of his fellow reporters and editors perfectly, and virtually nobody in the discussion took that as anything other than accurate and serious.  Reporter Eve Conant goes so far as to provide the justification — or at least the mitigation — for what Stack did as opposed to those dirty people with beards in caves:

Isn’t the ho-hum reaction in part the simple psychology behind the fact that a) no one likes the IRS and b) he’s an American (so closest he might get is “domestic terrorist” in terms of labels) who doesn’t hate Americans but hates an institution. The act is horrible, but somehow the motivation is perceived as less offensive. As one conservative at the CPAC conference told me, Stack simply “made a poor life choice.” There’s no way anyone would say that about the underwear bomber.

Three rather obvious points to note. First, these are media decisions about how to characterize events; they make no references to how the public thinks. Second, the decisions don’t reflect an unmediated anxiety on the part of the media, pure affect without thought. The decisions are in fact reflective: these journalists have thought through (perhaps not well) their positions. Third, those positions are freighted with moral valences (“the motivation is perceived as less offensive”) and ideological biases. When we talk about the politics of fear, that is in part what we are talking about.

Thoughts on Charleston

So much excellent stuff has been written on the murders in Charleston, I hesitated to weigh in. But one part of the story that I thought could use some amplification is the politics of safety and security in this country, from the backlash of the GOP through today, how that intersects with the politics of racism. So I took it up in my column for Salon. I’m not sure I said exactly what needed to be said or what I wanted to say: for some reason, the precision and specificity I was aiming for here proved to be more elusive than usual. So if you find that the article misses its mark, I’ll understand.

Here are some excerpts:

In response to Wednesday’s murder of nine African Americans at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, President Obama said, “Innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

I’ll admit: When I first read that statement, I thought Obama was talking about the police. Unfair of me perhaps, but it’s not as if we haven’t now been through multiple rounds of high-profile killings of African Americans at the hands of the police.

Indeed, until Wednesday’s murders, it seemed as if the national conversation about public safety had dramatically and fruitfully shifted. From a demand for police protection of white citizens against black crime—which dominated political discussion from the 1970s to the 1990s—to a scrutiny of the very instruments of that presumed protection. And how those instruments are harming African American citizens.

It’s tempting to seize on this moment as an opportunity to broaden that discussion beyond the racism of prisons and policing to that of society itself. In a way, that’s what Obama was trying to do by focusing on the threat posed not by the state or its instruments but by private guns in the hands of private killers like Dylann Roof.

But that may not be the wisest move, at least not yet. So long as the discussion is framed as one of protection, of safety and security, we won’t get beyond the society that produced Dylann Roof. Not only has the discourse of protection contributed to the racist practices and institutions of our overly policed and incarcerated society, but it also prevents us from seeing, much less tackling, the broader, systemic inequalities that might ultimately reduce those practices and institutions.

…

To assume that the state can provide for the safety and security of the most subjugated classes in America without addressing the fact of their subjugation is to assume away the last half-century of political experience. If anything, the discourse of safety and security has made those classes less secure, less safe: not merely from freelance killers like Dylann Roof or George Zimmerman, who claim to be acting on behalf of their own safety and that of white society, but also from the police. As [David] Cole writes, the proliferation of criminal laws and quality-of-life regulations that are supposed to make poor and black communities safer often serve as a pretext for the most intrusive and coercive modes of policing in those communities.

…

Far from providing the ground upon which a more expansive vision of social policy can be built, the discourse of safety and security ensures that politics never gets off the ground at all. When we make the safety and security the sine qua non of politics—whether in the form of Nozick’s minimal state or Williams’ “Basic Legitimation Demand”—we start refracting all political problems through that lens….Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan Simon goes further, claiming that our entire society is now organized around the principle “governing through crime.” Social problems are treated as crimes, citizens as victims or criminals, and solutions as punishments.

…

In 1833, John C. Calhoun, a slaveholder and a racist who had been Andrew Jackson’s Vice President and was now representing South Carolina in the Senate, defended the honor of his state by claiming that “no State has been more profuse of its blood in the cause of the country.” Calhoun was referring to South Carolina’s sacrifices during the American Revolution, but his comments can be usefully read against the grain of this week’s events.

Dylann Roof shed blood for the sake of a racism that, if not quite the cause of the country, is nevertheless not exclusive to South Carolina or the South. To counter that bloodshed, we need to move beyond a politics of safety and security that would seek only to punish or prevent it. For that politics of prevention and protection, of safety and security, has indeed become the cause of the country. A cause that is all too friendly to racial inequality—and all too hostile to a politics that might overcome it.

Read more here.

You Have to Go: Dylann Roof in Historical Perspective

Of all the things Dylann Roof said, that “you have to go” is the most chilling. It’s so historically resonant.

It makes me think of Jefferson:

…convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race….

When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.

Dew:

If our slaves are ever to be sent away in any systematic manner, humanity demands that they should be carried in families.

And Harper:

…one race must be driven out by the other, or exterminated, or again enslaved.

The Liberating Power of the Dismal Science

I’m reading Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics (1975), which had a major influence on Clarence Thomas. Sowell is a black conservative economist. In his chapter on slavery, Sowell writes:

Although a slave-owner’s power to punish a slave was virtually unlimited by either law or custom, there were economic limits on the profits to be derived in this way.

In many respects unremarkable, the passage nevertheless gives a sense of what a disenchanted black radical like Thomas, searching in the 1970s for a way past the impasse of the Black Freedom movements, might have found in Sowell’s conservative and economistic mode of thinking. For what Sowell is suggesting is that the one power that stood above or beyond that of the white slaveholder was the power of economics itself. While law and custom put no constraint on the slaveholder—that claim of political impotence would have echoed throughout the disillusioned left of the 1970s—the economic imperative did. Profit and loss was the one force that transcended and trumped the white master’s personal authority over the black slave. It’s not too much a jump, I think, to see how Thomas might have seen in this vision of the market’s disciplining force a way past the power of the white man, an ally in the struggle against the white man.

If Only Chancellor Wise Read John Stuart Mill…

From On Liberty:

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take some notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent….With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. The worst offence of this kind which can be committed by a polemic, is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men. To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feel much interest in seeing justice done them; but this weapon is, from the nature of the case, denied to those who attack a prevailing opinion: they can neither use it with safety to themselves, nor, if they could, would it do anything but recoil on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language than the other; and, for example, if it were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on infidelity, than on religion.

If only Chancellor Wise would read it.

Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth: Parallel Lives

In the second half of the twentieth century, a writer of uncommon gifts travels to Israel. There, the writer, who is Jewish and fiercely intellectual, attends the trial of a Nazi war criminal. When the trial’s over, the writer writes a book about it.

No, it’s not Hannah Arendt. It’s Philip Roth.

Arendt and Roth led oddly parallel lives.

Both were denounced by the Jewish establishment—at roughly the same time, in remarkably similar terms—for pieces they had written for The New Yorker. Long before Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth antagonized the Jewish community with his short story, “Defender of the Faith,” which appeared in the magazine in 1959. Describing the controversy, Judith Thurman writes:

It sparked a violent reaction in certain quarters of the Jewish establishment. Roth was vilified as a self-hating Jew and a traitor to his people who had given ammunition to their enemies by seeming to reinforce degrading stereotypes….Yet rabbis denounced Roth from their pulpits, and a leading educator at Yeshiva University wrote to the Anti-Defamation League to ask, “What is being done to silence this man? Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.”

Sound familiar?

(Speaking of Yeshiva: The university was the site of an infamous confrontation between Roth and his enemies in 1962, one year before the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Sharing the stage with Ralph Ellison and another writer, Roth was forced to defend himself and his work. First question: “Would you write the same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?” It went downhill from there. Not unlike the 1964 public forum on Eichmann in Jerusalem that Arendt had the wisdom not to attend.)

Both Arendt and Roth were prominent targets of Irving Howe, Gershom Scholem (“This is the book for which all antisemites have been praying”), and Norman Podhoretz. Again, for remarkably similar reasons.

Harold Weisberg was one of the first to note the parallels, in a short piece on Eichmann in Jerusalem in the Spring 1964 issue of Partisan Review:

Jewish attitudes toward Miss Arendt and her book have been varied. No doubt, some have slandered her, but even at the hands of the most zealous guardians of the American Jewish establishment she has fared no worse than some critics of the American Jewish community—Philip Roth, for example.

While writing my piece and the Eichmann controversy, I thought a lot about these parallels. In my original draft, I included some material on the Arendt/Roth connection, and as I was revising the piece, I thought about ending it with a lengthier discussion of the connection. But as my editor John Palattella wisely pointed out, the piece already had a large cast of characters; introducing Roth at the end would only add to the chaos of an already crowded stage. So I left out the entire discussion.

But after the piece came out, I was contacted by Ira Nadel, a literary scholar at the University of British Columbia, whom I met for coffee last week. Ira is writing a biography of Roth and was kind enough to send me a rich and informative paper he’s written on the Arendt/Roth connection. Here are just some of the biographical points of convergence that Ira identifies in his paper.

1. Roth enrolled in the University of Chicago PhD program in English in Fall 1956 (he had earlier received a master’s degree from there). Arendt lectured at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1957. Though Roth dropped out after a term, he stayed on there to teach and write.

2. In 1958/1959, Roth wrote a three-act play, “Coffin in Egypt,” about the Jewish leader of the Vilna Ghetto, who collaborates with the Nazis. The character is straight out of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

3. In August 1963, the Princeton sociologist Melvin Tumin wrote Roth about Arendt’s Eichmann text, “Don’t spoil your summer by looking at it again. I know you liked it the first time,” suggesting that Roth had read and appreciated the work, at least when it appeared in The New Yorker.

4. Roth and Arendt began a correspondence in 1973. In one of his letters, Roth tells Arendt that he’s been reading Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, which Arendt edited (and wrote a famous introduction to). He also gives her a copy of his essay, “Looking for Kafka.” (Kafka was one of their shared interests.) He ends the letter: “It would be nice to get together with you again,” suggesting they already had met in person.

5. In the 1970s, Roth taught a seminar on “The Literature of the Holocaust.” Arendt was on the syllabus.

6. In 1983, People Magazine ran a profile of Roth. The profile included this description of Roth’s life with Claire Bloom in London:

There he stays at her Victorian row house in Chelsea, surrounded by Staffordshire china and proper English prints. He takes long walks by the Thames, gripes about the faulty central heating and stretches out on Claire’s canopy bed to devour the stack of varied books on the night table, a small but imposing hillock whose crest consists of a biography of Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, and The Jew as Pariah by Hannah Arendt.

7. Not about Roth and Arendt but interesting nonetheless: William Styron claimed that Sophie’s Choice was inspired by an incident (a woman forced to choose which of her two children will live, will shall die) that Arendt reported in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In actual fact, Nadel observes, Arendt had reported the story in Origins of Totalitarianism. Styron also claimed Eichmann in Jerusalem was “a kind of handbook” for him. Arendt possessed her own copy of Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Beyond these biographical tidbits, I think the connection between Arendt and Roth is threefold.

First, there is the theme of doubles and impostors. In Operation Shylock, narrator Philip Roth travels to Israel, where he observes the trial of John Demjanjuk and has to endure the ordeal of an impostor acting in his name. Right there, as Bonnie Honig pointed out to me in an email, we have an interesting point of contact. As I explained in my piece on Arendt/Eichmann, one of the charges many of Arendt’s critics have made against her—Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem is the most recent version—is that she got taken in by Eichmann the impostor. Eichmann, they say, put on a show at his trial, pretending to be the schlemiel he was not. The real Eichmann was a vicious and cunning anti-Semite, not the hapless clown Arendt described. (I seem to recall that Arendt was also interested in how identical twins unsettled her theory of natality, the unprecedented novelty of each and every newborn, but now I can’t find the passage anywhere. Well, it’s late.)

Second, one of the motifs of Operation Shylock is narrator Roth’s ongoing attempt to establish the credibility of his own existence against that of the impostor Roth. “Up against reality,” says narrator Roth, “I had at my disposal the strongest weapon in anyone’s arsenal: my own reality.” That is also one of the themes of Eichmann in Jerusalem: the difficulty—and importance—of establishing the credibility of one’s own existence. Eichmann, says Arendt, had almost no sense of reality, no sense of right and wrong, apart from the opinion of others. His others, that is: the higher-ups in the Nazi hierarchy. And while Arendt is scorching on the subject of Eichmann’s conformity to his superiors’ views, she carries on, in good Rothian fashion, her own counterpoint to the problem of conformity. It is critical, she says, that as we form our own opinions about the world, we attend to the views of others about that world. Attending to those views, without getting lost in them, is the foundation of human judgment. The counterpoint of these two lines—Eichmann’s dissolution in the views of others, the necessity of attending to the views of others without getting lost in them—is the music of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Finally, there is the question of comedy. In her 1944 essay on Kafka, Arendt observed that laughter “permits man to prove his essential freedom through a kind of serene superiority to his own failures.” In the same way that it was important for Mel Brooks to be able to laugh at Hitler, so was it important for Arendt to be able to laugh at Eichmann. It was her way of divesting his evil—any evil—of grandeur, of any claim to gravitas or depth.

One of the funnier moments in Eichmann in Jerusalem comes near the end:

Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister, the Reverend William Hull, who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live, and therefore no “time to waste.”

Only Arendt would have paused long enough to note the hilarity of the statement. “No ‘time to waste'”: Where the hell did he have to go? But there’s another irony. In making that statement, Eichmann thought he was proving his superior cast of mind, his impatience with anything so childish as the Bible. But instead of showing off his mannish impiety, he came off looking like the preposterous efficiency obsessive he was, fretting in even these last minutes of his life over a possible misspent second.

Eichmann’s final words similarly betrayed his attempts to prove himself the hard thinker, the refuser of silly comforts:

He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläuber, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: “After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.”

At the end of my essay on Arendt, I talk about how uneasy she was made by the Zionist bid for sovereignty in Palestine. Reflecting a deep ambivalence in the Jewish tradition, Eichmann in Jerusalem—as well as Arendt’s essays on Zionism—can be read as a warning of what will come to the Jews from that having kind of power, that kind of possession over the land and its people.

But in a 1964 interview with Joachim Fest, Arendt holds out for a different kind of sovereignty, a different path to power. In response to the question of whether, in writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, in pursuing the truth as she saw it, she hurt people’s feelings (remember, she was withering on the topic of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis), Arendt says:

There’s no question about it: I have wounded some people. And you know, it’s somehow more unpleasant for me when I hurt people than when I get in the way of organizations and their interests, right? I take this seriously…You see, it’s my view that the legitimate feeling here is sorrow…There’s nothing I can do about it. In fact, in my opinion people shouldn’t adopt an emotional tone to talk about these things, since that’s a way of playing them down…I also think that you must be able to laugh, since that’s a form of sovereignty.

It’s the classic statement of a powerless people: to offer laughter as a kind of sovereignty, a triumph over one’s own powerlessness. It is the comedy of the oppressed against the oppressor—and of the oppressed against herself. That, too, is part of the Jewish tradition. (Oppressed people tend to be witty, Saul Bellow is supposed to have said—again, a quote I can’t confirm.) Against the sovereignty of the state, Arendt offers the sovereignty of comedy.

That puts Arendt in some surprising company: of not only the chorus of Jewish comedic voices coming into their own in postwar America—Sid Ceasar, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce—but also a young writer of scathing satire from Newark.

How Corporations Control Politics

In my Salon column today, I look at new research examining how corporations influence politics.

Money talks. But how?

From “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” to Citizens United, the story goes like this: The wealthy corrupt and control democracy by purchasing politicians, scripting speech and writing laws. Corporations and rich people make donations to candidates, pay for campaign ads and create PACs. They, or their lobbyists, take members of Congress out to dinner, organize junkets for senators and tell the government what to do. They insinuate money where it doesn’t belong. They don’t build democracy; they buy it.

But that, says Alex Hertel-Fernandez, a PhD student in Harvard’s government department, may not be the only or even the best way to think about the power of money. That power extends far beyond the dollars deposited in a politician’s pocket. It reaches for the votes and voices of workers who the wealthy employ. Money talks loudest where money gets made: in the workplace.

Among Hertel-Fernandez’s findings:

1. Nearly 50% of the top executives and managers surveyed admit that they mobilize their workers politically.

2. Firms believe that mobilizing their workers is more effective than donating money to a candidate, buying campaign ads, or investing in large corporate lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce.

3. The most important factor in determining whether a firm engages in partisan mobilization of its workers—and thinks that that mobilization is effective—is the degree of control it has over its workers. Firms that always engage in surveillance of their employees’ online activities are 50 percent more likely to mobilize their workers than firms that never do.

4. Of the workers who say they have been mobilized by their employers, 20% say that they received threats if they didn’t.

My conclusion:

 

When we think of corruption, we think of something getting debased, becoming impure, by the introduction of a foreign material. Money worms its way into the body politic, which rots from within. The antidote to corruption, then, is to keep unlike things apart. Take the big money out of politics or limit its role. That’s what our campaign finance reformers tell us.

But the problem isn’t corruption. It’s…

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Poetry and Power: Challenges for an Aesthetics of the Left

Hazlitt’s essay on Coriolanus seems apposite to some of the themes I explored in The Reactionary Mind. Hazlitt suggests a deep and abiding affinity of poetry for power, an affinity that explains how the right is able attract a broad formation of followers from below. Hazlitt also hints at why an aesthetics of the left, at least one centered on the more pedestrian claims of the mass, is so often difficult to attain and sustain; indeed, why any aesthetics may ultimately serve as an argument for the arrogations of power:

The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. . . . Poetry is right-royal. It puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many, might before right. A lion hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild asses is a more poetical object than they; and we even take part with the lordly beast, because our vanity or some other feeling makes us disposed to place ourselves in the situation of the strongest party. So we feel some concern for the poor citizens of Rome when they meet together to compare their wants and grievances, till Coriolanus comes in and with blows and big words drives this set of ‘poor rats,’ this rascal scum, to their homes and beggary before him. There is nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable rogues not wishing to be starved, or complaining that they are like to be so: but when a single man comes forward to brave their cries and to make them submit to the last indignities, from mere pride and self-will, our admiration of his prowess is immediately converted into contempt for their pusillanimity. The insolence of power is stronger than the plea of necessity. The tame submission to usurped authority or even the natural resistance to it has nothing to excite or flatter the imagination: it is the assumption of a right to insult or oppress others that carries an imposing air of superiority with it. We had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed. The love of power in ourselves and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man: the one makes him a tryant, the other a slave. Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.

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The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left. The people are poor; therefore they ought to be starved. They are slaves; therefore they ought to be treated like beasts of burden. They are ignorant; therefore they ought not to be allowed to feel that they want food, or clothing, or rest, that they are enslaved, oppressed, and miserable. This is the logic of the imagination and the passions, which seek to aggrandise what excites admiration and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate; to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes. The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of poetical justice; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil. We may depend upon it that what men delight to read in books they will put in practice in reality.