Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 785

Hillary is Trump’s dream opponent: Clinton is exactly the “limousine liberal” his coalition distrusts the most

Two images have electrified American politics for the last half century. One is quintessentially sophisticated, goes about in bespoke clothing, and comes equipped with the most imposing social credentials of fame, fortune, higher learning and prestige. The other is lacking in all that, dresses in non-designer jeans and polyester, is of modest means, employment, and education, and flies well beneath the radars of social visibility. Both images were invented at more or less the same moment. Both were strategically deployed by political elites running the Republican Party to vanquish their Democratic Party foes. However, those creatures have now turned on their creators. The Grand Old Party is in shambles as a result.

The limousine liberal and the silent majority are emblems of class struggle American-style. The first is an epithet, the second an invocation. Their confrontation has produced Donald Trump, the unwelcome offspring of Richard Nixon, the bad boy of a Republican establishment, an outlier now blowing it up from the inside.

Limousine liberals are history’s oxymoron, elites that undermine the status quo rather than defend it. Ironically the term was first used by a Democrat running for mayor in New York in 1969 to chastise his opponent, the sitting Mayor John Lindsay, who was indeed to the manner born, Yale educated, raised on Park Avenue, a high Episcopalian, once employed at a white shoe law firm, and, although a Republican, a proponent of civil rights reform, school busing, police review boards, and the War on Poverty and against that other war being waged in Vietnam. Limousine liberals would be treated thereafter as champions of reform and upheaval as long as it didn’t inconvenience them. They stood up for the (black) poor but had no intention of bearing the cost of doing anything about their plight. Not about to change the way they lived, they wanted everybody else to change, to have their kids bused to school, to shoulder the tax burden, to watch the racial and social make-up of their neighborhoods turned upside down, all the while safe in their exclusive neighborhoods, shipping their children off to private schools, sheltering their capital gains and dividends from the taxman, morally dissolute and irreverent, getting around town in limousines not subway cars.

Just before the “limousine liberal” made its debut, Richard Nixon came back from the land of the politically undead on the backs of something he called “the silent majority.” These were plain folk, working and lower-middle-class people, many of whom were once loyalists of the New Deal Democratic Party, who felt they had been abandoned, as in many respects they had been, by a Democratic Party undergoing its own evolution away from the economic populism of yesteryear. When Nixon ran for president in 1968 that’s who he purported to be defending, promising to give voice to an old-time faith in family, homeland, hard work and cultural propriety. The “silent majority” would thereafter be encouraged to wage holy war on the “limousine liberal.”

Enormously successful at first, this strategem had a fatal flaw. On the one hand, it invited resentment tinged with class animosities. That is playing with fire. At the same time, the Republican Party along with a Democratic Party reconstructed by Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council, presided over what we now call a neo-liberal, market determined capitalism. The outcome was a long epoch of decline for millions of American working people as their material well-being stagnated or was left as road-kill by deindustrialization. Their equality of opportunity, of income and of wealth suffered along with the destruction of whole ways of life and moral, familial, and sexual certitudes. Naturally, resentment grew and grew. No longer “silent” this “majority” (although the actual arithmetic probably doesn’t quite compute) began to vent not only against the limousine liberal establishment, but all establishments, including the one that had called it into being.

All the hullabaloo inside the Republican Party over the last several years, surfacing first most powerfully with the Tea Party movement and its fierce challenge to the Party’s established elite, owes its energy to that unanticipated irony. Only Donald Trump can satisfy its yearnings for payback. He may not be perfect, not exactly the exemplar of old-time religion or familial good order, a bit off-message when it comes to aspects of the welfare state, and a billionaire to boot. But more than anyone else he captures the impassioned mood of our strange civil war, where the limousine liberal functions like a magnet drawing to it all the animosities ignited by economic decline, the looming presence of the leviathan state, frustrated fantasies about national omnipotence, and racial and xenophobias that the subversive elitists from the land of limousine liberalism have let loose.

Trump is likely to suffer a crushing defeat should he turn out to be the nominee. Although we live in disjointed times, he has transgressed too far, frightens too many. Still, he is likely to face the perfect foil for what got him here. He will undoubtedly label Hillary Clinton a “limousine liberal.” And about that he will be right. Although not to the manor born, she has long since become the adopted daughter of that limousine liberal establishment. It is for just that reason that she is so widely distrusted, prepared to talk the talk but not walk the walk when it comes to taking on the powers that be whether on Wall Street or elsewhere. It’s not that Trump will pillory Wall Street, but target instead Clinton’s hypocrisy of which her ties to the Street are Exhibit A. Bernie Sanders has been a beneficiary from the left of the same disenchantment with the bipartisan neo-liberal establishment. But he’s trusted to say what he means to do, which is probably why he consistently outdoes Clinton in defeating all Republican opponents. The “limousine liberal,” the “silent majority,” and the divergent populisms hey have birthed are bound to liven up American politics for some time to come.

 

Porn is the secret of my future success

It seems to me that the time for subtlety, in our American life, has passed. Do we look for subtlety in news media nowadays? In pop music? In fashion? In TV, movies? Even in visual art, is subtlety what we seek out and richly reward? Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life?

We do not.

Why, then, is literary fiction, that boutique culture where I’ve set up my modest shop, such a stubborn holdout? One thing: sheer arrogance! We offer no popcorn, no concessions of any kind, not the Raisinets, not the sour gummy worms, not the Junior Mints. We offer no booming sound system. We offer no beautiful actors. We offer no dance performances and only the most minimal costuming. We certainly don’t offer libations. Not even wine or beer. Much less cocktails. Strictly BYOB.

Black words on a white page. We figure we can get away with that. Laughable. Honestly. No wonder only a handful of us carve out a living from this activity. Give us a few years, we’ll have to cast our lot in with the poets. Those poor saps. No one bothered to tell them about Elvis. Aretha Franklin. The Beatles. David Bowie or Prince, RIP. Man, even Taylor Swift! Guys, newsflash. These people took your jobs. You’re done. Go start a commune in Saskatchewan. Grow mung beans. Do something useful. Jesus.

Sometimes the folks in Hollywood will make a movie from one of our books, or say a TV show. And most times, when this happens, they remove the subtlety — that shit doesn’t make bank. They buy the book, cut out the subtlety in a swift, surgical strike, and there you go. Movie. Sometimes they make that work. Hallelujah! Then people give us some respect. Money, also. At parties, strangers are finally impressed. You write books? Uh huh. Anything I would’ve…they made a movie out of it? Shit! What did you say your name was? Hey, I really like your shirt. That’s nice, the contrast stitching there, over the…was that your husband you came in with? No? Is he your boyfriend?

But that’s a long shot, the movies. We don’t hold our breath waiting for Hollywood, or we’d be dead.

Wait, reader. Dear reader, don’t go away! There was “porn” in the header, I haven’t forgotten that teaser. Kneeling between her splayed-out legs, face buried in her juicy twat, he slowly stroked his wide shaft. That’s just a sample. It’ll get better, way better. Please, read on.

So we’ve got the unmoving words on the page. That’s the first black mark against us. Second: do we get to the point? How soon? Here’s the answer: no. We don’t get to the point, not for 200 pages at least. Sometimes 3,600, if we’re Knausgaard. At writing workshops they taught us to show not tell — well, showing takes time. We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don’t get to the point, and sometimes when we do our readers don’t notice, in fact. It’s so couched in nuance it can fly right over a person’s head. What was that you said? I couldn’t quite make it out.

Third, sound bites. We don’t have them. No pull quotes. No celebrity names. Few if any pictures. The list of what we don’t have is a long one. Our tools for captivation are few, and often ungainly.

Which is why I’ve settled on porn, come to a decision that my next book after this one will be devoted to relentless, often hardcore pornography. I can’t give you an exact preview here on the pages of Salon, of course: this is a decent website. Plus that would be a spoiler.

It’s true that male porn consumers, especially, prefer photographs, indeed may wish to seek out moving images, but hey: there is a place for all porn under the sun. Of that we can be certain, in our American life. We used to read Penthouse Forum at horse-riding camp, when I was a teenager. We sure did. Good times. There were also some hijinks with manure in sleeping bags, as I recall…and once I worked at Hustler — sure, only as a copy editor, dealing with grammar, spelling and semi-colons — but you get some of the skills by osmosis. For instance: Kneeling between her splayed-out legs, face buried in her juicy twat, he slowly stroked his wide shaft; while lapping thirstily, he reached out one heavy, muscled arm and twiddled her nipple. We wouldn’t have said twiddled, OK, that’s not so hot, but the semicolon is correct.

Porn is an honest living. No one can say it’s not. It’s partly a prison service, those guys in prison read serious volumes of porn, and we’ve got lots of guys in jail these days. More than 2 million, if I remember the figure, in this American country. That’s a decent-sized readership. And porn speaks to the human condition. It’s about sex, first off, and most of us are pro-sex. A solid majority. So what it says about the human condition is: we’re human, and we like sex. That’s an important point to make.

It’s also about exploitation, even brutal objectification. And that’s another salient comment. We like to objectify, because it’s a turn-on. If you’re thinking with empathy — a so-called “value” of a boatload of literary fiction — you’re not thinking let’s fuck. Empathy’s like pity. Or generosity. Or even a kind of charity. It is, in a sense, for wusses, and our American life is not for wusses. If it ever was, which I for one wouldn’t bet on, it’s not anymore.

Kneeling between her splayed-out legs, face buried in her juicy twat, he slowly stroked his wide shaft. Then he flipped her over, heaved her up onto all fours and thrust in from behind.

Like, where’s the empathy in doggy style? Nowhere.

Finally, in literary fiction there’s the chronic problem of subtlety, which doesn’t rear its head in porn. In porn, not only is subtlety not, you know, there, but no one says it should be. No one says, Oh, that porn you wrote is lacking in nuance, that porn is way too on the nose, can you just go a little lighter on the hairy cunts and spurting jizz? No one critiques you for missing the mark with a metaphor, for example, or for inconsistency of character.

Let’s say you have a fireman, right? He’s dressed for a four-alarm fire, he’s got the fiberglass helmet, the pull-on boots and high-vis yellow jacket. He goes to a woman’s front door, rings the bell. She lets him in, wearing an apron. He instantly removes his pants. No one says, Hey, a fireman wouldn’t do that! You haven’t earned that moment! Back to the drawing board!

I’m going to ask a poet friend of mine to join me in my new American endeavor. He’s a really good poet and he needs the cash. He recently traveled to the Czech Republic, where people still like poetry — I’m not sure how that works, but maybe they don’t have access to iTunes or Spotify — and yeah, he mostly slept in the homes of well-meaning strangers or sometimes in barns or the beds of trucks, plus ate potato soup, but still it broke the bank. He’ll walk with me down this new path, I think. We’ll go together, hand in hand. For us the future’s shining bright.

Dear white Hollywood: Here are 3 things you need to hear about your defensiveness on race

After covering the “Doctor Strange” casting controversy last week, regarding the casting of white actress Tilda Swinton in a traditionally Asian role, the film’s director Scott Derrickson weighed in. “Raw anger/hurt from Asian-Americans over Hollywood whitewashing, stereotyping & erasure of Asians in cInema [sic]. I am listening and learning,” he said on Twitter.

Since Derrickson is apparently listening, a few things he should learn:

1. “Raw anger/hurt” is a ridiculously condescending way to characterize thoughtful and well-researched critiques.

When Derrickson’s fellow screenwriter C. Robert Cargill addressed the casting choice in an obnoxious and insulting interview, he insisted that “most of the people who have thoughts on it haven’t thought it all the way through.” The suggestion was that he and his colleagues had engaged in countless thought exercises about the issue, and had come to a logical conclusion not captured by most people’s visceral reactions.

Yet when George Takei condemned the casting decision this week, he addressed and tore down each of Cargill’s arguments, and then some. “So let me get this straight. You cast a white actress so you wouldn’t hurt sales…in Asia? This backpedaling is nearly as cringeworthy as the casting. Marvel must think we’re all idiots,” he wrote on Facebook, in response to Cargill’s suggestion that the casting of a Tibetan actress would have alienated Chinese audiences. “Marvel already addressed the Tibetan question by setting the action and The Ancient One in Kathmandu, Nepal in the film…it’s insulting that they expect us to buy their explanation,” he continued. “They cast Tilda because they believe white audiences want to see white faces. Audiences, too, should be aware of how dumb and out of touch the studios think we are.”

Takei did at times appeal to basic human emotions such as empathy, particularly when addressing the broader issues at stake in this discussion, but always in a hyper-rational manner grounded in substance. “[T]here has been a long standing practice of taking roles that were originally Asian and rewriting them for white actors to play, leaving Asians invisible on the screen and underemployed as actors,” he continued. “This is a very real problem, not an abstract one. It is not about political correctness, it is about correcting systemic exclusion.” New York Magazine described the shrewd analysis as such: “George Takei Calmly Dismantles All of Marvel’s Excuses for Its ‘Doctor Strange’ Casting.”

If anything, it was Cargill who went off the emotional deep end when addressing the decision, at one point shouting “You are out of your damn fool mind and have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about!” at a “social justice warrior” foil he’d created for disingenuous and highly illogical rhetorical purposes. (Derrickson, for his part, has resisted Cargill’s characterization of people who care about racism.)

But the technique of subtly diminishing minority voices as speaking from raw emotion and implicitly framing their white counterparts as unbiased parties is a deeply familiar, and itself irrational, one. Derrickson has a vested interest at play here, too, a raw desire to put an end to this debate with hollow platitudes rather than engaging in a meaningful discussion that could hurt his bottom line.

2. The profits made off of hurtful decisions cannot be compartmentalized from the hurt they cause.

Earlier this year, Ta-Nehisi Coates unpacked the framework that led Zoe Saldana to be cast as Nina Simone in her biopic, “Nina.” “The producers of ‘Nina’ are…not personal racists, but cogs,” Coates wrote. “[T]he team…is almost entirely white. Doubtless, these are good, non-racist people—but not good enough…I do not mean to be personally harsh here. I am not trying to hurt people. But there is something deeply shameful—and hurtful—in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic…Nothing about the quality of ‘Nina’ can actually counter the problems inherent in its very inception.”

Part of what makes Derrickson’s self-congratulatory inner reflection ring so hollow is that it comes sandwiched between promotional tweets for the very film he is [almost] acknowledging to be problematic. What, exactly, does he expect us to do with his listening and learning? If he agrees that the decision was wrongheaded, that his own creative process directly led to people’s entirely justifiable anger and hurt, if he agrees that the problems inherent in the film’s inception cannot be countered by its quality, does he support calls for a boycott he must then concede is morally justified, despite costing him materially? If not, why should the recalibration of his moral compass mean anything, to anyone, at all?

3. Life is not a Marvel property. Minorities don’t feel, say, and do things so that white people can self-actualize.

Arthur Chu, discussing Marvel’s continued disregard for its Asian audience, echoed Coates. “Did the producers of ‘Daredevil’ set out to create a storyline where every single Asian character is an agent of supernatural evil who is deeply corrupted by that evil and empowered to be a monstrous killing machine because of it? I doubt they thought of it in those terms. They just took existing tropes from the comics and ran with them without thinking too hard…That’s exactly what people have been complaining about…Because when you don’t put thought into how you use tropes, tropes can lead you to a really bad place without your being aware of it.”

The only reason why anyone gives a damn what Derrickson thinks is because of his cultural cachet, because he occupies a position of power which allows him to create narratives that directly impact social norms. One of those norms is the continued overemphasis, one Takei explores, on white stories at the direct expense of minority ones. Derrickson’s attitude is a direct reflection of this overemphasis. He believes his personal growth is of central concern here. It is not. Minorities have tangible asks: we want broader, more nuanced, representation; we want our own stories told; we want a hand in telling those stories. Last week, I asked why Cargill and his team didn’t think to bring more Asian actors on board. This week, I ask why Derrickson didn’t think to actively recruit and solicit the input of Asian critics like Chu rather than white ones like Cargill.

In a vacuum, I suppose it’s better that Derrickson engages in self-reflection rather than doubling down. But most people must adequately perform at their jobs before getting paid for them. Takei, Coates, and Chu all stand appalled that today, in the year 2016, engagement with and sensitivity to the social justice issues at play in a cultural product is not a prerequisite for the role of developing it. The reason is, as Takei insightfully noted, that studios believe we’re as out of touch as they are. There’s only one way to teach them they’re wrong.

Sex on TV is easy to find — but good sex isn’t

“Not to ruin anything for you, but there’s nothing less sexy than filming a sex scene,” Joel Fields tells me. Fields is one of the two showrunners of “The Americans,” FX’s Soviet-spy-domestic-drama now in its fourth season. He and co-showrunner Joe Weisberg are in the middle of explaining how the sex scenes on the show get made—from sweetly tender lovemaking to the vicious undertones of revenge sex.

“You’re dealing with extremely technical stuff, and you have lights and sound and a crew, and you’re talking about angles. It’s not as sexy as two people alone.”

But it’s Fields’ and Weisberg’s job to make their sex scenes sexy, and in the case of “The Americans,” those scenes can be very sexy. The chemistry between the leads has already been red-hot, but with the rumors of an off-screen romance confirmed between Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell—who now have a baby—the sexual connection between the two goes so far as to infiltrate not just gunfights but also dental extraction.

With Peak TV has come Peak TV Sex, as the vast majority of new shows are cropping up on alternative platforms that don’t have to answer to the standards and practices of the FCC. And the result has been, unsurprisingly, a massive proliferation of sex scenes. Most of the time, when I write about them, I write about the scenes that are exploitative, abusive, or gratuitous; the ones that seem to exist just to satisfy the basest instincts of a certain kind of viewer, at the expense of every other kind of viewer.

Intriguingly, very little of it appears to be enjoyable. The dour antiheroes of prestige television have a lot of tortured, self-loathing orgasms, whether that is in “The Sopranos” or “Mad Men” or most recently, “Vinyl.” The last time someone enjoyed having sex on “Game Of Thrones” might be in season three, when both Robb (Richard Madden) and Talisa (Oona Chaplin) were newlyweds and Jon (Kit Harington) and Ygritte (Rose Leslie) were joyously hate-banging their way through the North. Our current run of prestige comedies, meanwhile, often depicts awkward, stilted sex, à la “Girls” or “Love” or “Louie.” All of these shows do occasionally show good sex, but there’s a lot of emphasis, in the sex scenes of modern TV, on how terrible it can be, too.

So when shows are actually sexy, it’s hard not to stop and take notice. “The Americans” is one; “Outlander” and “The Girlfriend Experience” on Starz are two other examples. Most recently, though, hot sex has come from an unlikely source—not an expensive call girl, bewigged married spies, or gowned and kilted Scotspeple, but the decidedly less sexy environment of upstate New York, on the compound of an aggressively bland suburban cult.

The second episode of “The Path,” titled “The Era Of The Ladder,” segues into a sex scene between the married protagonists Sarah (Michelle Monaghan) and Eddie (Aaron Paul) that is almost embarrassingly sexy, a crackling display of heat and emotion that is so profound it makes the couple’s oldest son, who happens to overhear it, immediately vomit. This energy doesn’t disappear; the kindling romance between two teenagers and even the dysfunctional power dynamics between cult leader Cal (Hugh Dancy) and neophyte Mary (Emma Greenwell) are infused with a kind of deliberate power that makes them somehow arresting.

It makes the show. As I wrote when I reviewed the premiere, “The Path” needs that injection of sexual energy to leaven an otherwise dour show. And with Sarah and Eddie, the connection between them is so physical and obvious, on-screen, that it provides an essential establishing beat for these two otherwise quite different characters.

Showrunner Jessica Goldberg was pleased when I told her I thought the show was sexy. “I always felt nervous about sex on TV, about exploitation. But… adds to the feeling and texture of the show.” According to her, the religious element of “The Path,” which was just renewed for a second season, is some of where the program’s eroticism comes from, too: “Life, and death, and religion — it is very erotic. It’s not supposed to be, but it is. Even the Bible feels very sexy.”

“I’ve always loved turn-of-the-century romance,” she added. “It’s so hard now to make romance, because you don’t have, you know, Edith Wharton characters with gloves who can’t touch. Everything is out in the open. But this environment does deal with people who are repressed, are complicated. It allows for some of that storytelling.”

For Weisberg and Fields, the eroticism of “The Americans” comes from the characters’ fundamental identity-shifting, their wearing of multiple masks. “It really comes down to character exploration,” Fields said. Each sex scene is “different based on who those characters are—not only generally, but in those specific moments.”

“That’s often the case in our sex lives as human beings,” Weisberg said. “They can define us, in terms of our identities, and they are also how we can explore those identities.”

One of the reasons it’s difficult to discuss good sex on TV very much is that doing so requires owning up that you, the viewer, are admitting something turned you on. I asked the showrunners how they felt about the possibility that viewers might be turned on by their sex scenes. They were all a little unsure of how to respond. “We don’t judge,” Fields joked, and Weisberg added, “It depends on depending on what parts of the show they find sexy. We did set someone on fire last year.”

Goldberg said it did worry her, at first, about people being aroused (too aroused, even) by the sexual content of the show. But she also recalled how important pop culture with great sex was to her—she cites the Diane Lane film “Unfaithful” as formative (which, I’ve no doubt, many viewers would agree with). She points out that there is a “joy” to sex. “It’s fun sometimes, to see bodies, to feel romance.”

She likes writing them, too. “Because I have a secret fantasy to be a novelist, I do like to write [the scenes]. Very emotionally, and purple, and explicitly,” she added, laughing. “For my own pleasure, I write out the details.”

Weisberg and Fields occasionally will describe the scene in text, but in this season’s long sex scene between Phillip and Elizabeth, set to Queen’s “Under Pressure,” the script had just three words: “They fuck hard.”

But, Weisberg added, “We spent a lot of time talking about those three words.”

Which, of course, can lead to its own troubles. “We’ll sometimes be in the strange position of talking about specifics you wouldn’t otherwise talk about,” Fields said, recalling a much-discussed episode of “The Americans” where Phillip and Elizabeth’s teenage daughter walks in on them giving each other oral sex at the same time, better known as “sixty-nining.”

“There was a lot of discussion as to what that act might be, but then when we got down to what that act might be—look, there are a lot of variations of that act,” Fields said. The question at hand, as posed by episode director Thomas Schlamme: “Whose ass are we going to see, here?”

What works on-screen in any context is going to be different from viewer to viewer; there’s probably nothing harder to define, though, than a great sex scene. And that’s because sex is, more or less, everything—the meeting point of self, intimacy, biological drive, and desire. Even when it is consensual and enthusiastic, it can still contain multitudes: Sex can be routine or eventful; it can be easy or challenging. It can be harmful and healing; it can be good, bad, or just “meh.”

But there are some guidelines. When asked about what makes a great sex scene, all three showrunners pointed to the emotional state of the characters. For Weisberg and Fields’ spies, it’s about the complicated and not always gratifying quest for closeness. The characters “claw through” their multilayered identities “towards the intimacy,” Fields said. “That allows you to feel the importance of intimacy, that people will fight their way through that.”

For Goldberg’s characters, it’s a bit more mundane. Her characters are not international superspies; for that matter, they are not jaded antiheroes or awkward 20-something hipsters, either. They’re people who are trying to engage with their own fantasies and also trying to come back to earth, living suspended between faith and doubt. Eddie and Sarah are so invested in this system of belief that the reality of their corporeal bodies seems to occasionally come as a shock. In a television landscape where so much screentime is spent dismantling and deconstructing fantasy and myth, “The Path’s”’s twisted practice of worship and electric sex scenes strike a note of dissonance, pointing to the value of at least some of our illusions.

Two big, fat tax cheats: Donald and Hillary find common ground in screwing the American public

There’s a pile of money hiding offshore. It’s true that jobs are also leaving the United States because American companies find it convenient to cut labor costs by moving manufacturing abroad, the economic issue you’re hearing most about in this election season. But the stunning amount of money that continues to flow across American borders (and those of other countries), and eventually disappears into the pockets of the corporate and political elite, ultimately causes even more damage to our finances and our lives.

While the two leading candidates for the presidency, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, have indeed suggested cosmetic fixes for a situation that only grows more extreme with the passage of time, they have themselves taken advantage of numerous tax “efficiency” strategies that make money evaporate. Of course, you shouldn’t doubt for a second that they’ll change their ways once in the Oval Office.

As with so much in our American heritage, there’s a history to the “offshore” world, too. Finding places to shield money from tax collection first became commonplace among upper-crust industrialists, bankers, and even public servants back in the 1920s. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, a millionaire mogul who served presidents Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover (and had a knack for cutting taxes on the wealthy), left office under mounting congressional probes into his tax evasion strategies.

Fast-forward about a century and tax dodging has been woven into the fabric of the lives of the affluent and corporate worldwide in an extraordinary way. According to an April 2016 Oxfam report, the top 50 U.S. companies are hoarding more than $1.4 trillion in cash offshore.

What’s more, for every dollar that these firms spent lobbying Congress for “favorable” tax treatment (a collective total of $2.6 billion between 2008 and 2014), they received $130 dollars in tax breaks and $4,000 in subsidies from the U.S. government. These companies, including Pfizer, Goldman Sachs, Dow Chemical, Chevron, Walmart, IBM, and Procter & Gamble, created “an opaque and secretive network” of more than 1,600 company subsidiaries located in tax havens that they decided to disclose. (Because of the weak reporting requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission, there could be thousands more.) According to a March 3rd report from the Citizens for Tax Justice, the Fortune 500 companies are now saving $695 billion in federal income taxes on a total of $2.4 trillion in offshore holdings.

Americans can’t afford to ignore such tax games, since we’re the ones who, in effect, wind up paying the taxes these firms don’t. For government policymakers, such tax evasion is a grim matter of attrition, since the U.S. (and other countries) plunge ever deeper into debt thanks to such antics and then find themselves cutting services or raising taxes on us to cover the gap between the money they’re losing and the taxes they’re collecting.

Not only are such firms unpatriotic, they are parasitic and while they’re at it, they use similar techniques — let’s not call it theft (though it is) — to avoid tax payments in the poorest places on Earth. As Oxfam reports, “the biggest burden” of tax havens “falls on the poorest people.” In the process, they only increase already oppressive levels of inequality globally.

Tax “secrecy” specialists — people working in the money-hiding field — help rich individuals, multinational corporations, political leaders, terrorists, and organized crime groups divert cash and capital, sometimes in staggering amounts, from local economies into an obscure, complex, multi-layered global financial network that operates outside any national or international regulatory or tax system. Given this, isn’t it a little surprising that the top candidates for the presidency barely pay lip service to the impact of such hidden money?  What toothless policies they have proposed to deal with the phenomenon will do little or nothing to change it.

The Panama Papers

U.S. trade agreements generally include rosy promises about partnering with regional economies around the world to encourage the flow of goods and services across borders. At the same time, they generally are focused on the obliteration of barriers that in any way restrict money from flowing out of the United States or into the embrace of other nations. The free movement of capital, or financial globalization as it’s called, has been a bedrock Washington policy for a century and, since the 1980s, places like Panama — a renowned tax haven — have abetted this process.

A month ago, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released a trove of documents, 2.6 terabytes of them, including “more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs.” These were turned over by an undisclosed source (“John Doe”), communicating through encrypted channels to avoid repercussions. Now known as “the Panama Papers,” they reveal how elite multinational companies, the super rich, and government figures have engaged in tax-dodging practices engineered by a single Panama City-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca (MF).

In addition to public officials and billionaires, more than 500 global banks, their subsidiaries and branches, have registered at least 15,600 shell companies there using MF’s services. That word “shell” is descriptively accurate since such “companies” rarely have employees and are commonly no more than a post office box providing a façade through which books can be doctored, taxes dodged, losses concealed, and money-laundering and other criminal actions carried out.  And keep in mind that MF, which acts for approximately 300,000 companies, is only the fourth largest provider of such offshore services globally.

One mega-bank that used its services extensively was HSBC, which created an astonishing 2,300 shell companies with that law firm’s help. We’ll return to HSBC.

Mossack Fonseca’s official mission, it claims, is “to deliver quality, reliable and comprehensive services to our worldwide clients in the legal, trust, investment consultancy, and digital solution fields.” That’s code for helping select establishment outfits and dubious enterprises to avoid paying taxes on profits, investments, or money made from buying and selling real estate, luxury yachts or planes, oil wells, weapons, or drugs, among other things.

Secrecy is its calling card. Tax havens, or locales amenable to tax dodging, whether in the Caribbean, Central America, Switzerland (still the world’s top location for financial secrecy), or for that matter the state of Delaware, exist to circumvent tax laws. Period. And these operations are so shady that even the functionaries working in the shadows to establish such secret accounts are barely aware of exactly who owns them, where the money came from, or where it’s going. For regulators, prosecutors, and tax collectors, the opacity is far worse.

You don’t necessarily have to be rich or powerful to access the services of such offshore firms and banks, but it helps. Some havens take anyone ready to put up a minimum of $25,000, while others demand staggering sums. Western Samoa, for instance, requires a cool $10 million to get started.

The most alarming aspect of the Panama Papers revelations was not MF’s clientele or even its secretive practices, but that what it does is completely “legal.” Nor was this the first such disclosure. In November 2014, for instance, the “Luxleaks” scandal involving a whole “menagerie of Luxembourg-based tax schemes,” as the Guardian put it, was disclosed by two whistleblowers from the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. (Luxembourg is a major European tax haven.) Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Facebook, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and Microsoft were on the list of its more than 350 multinational “tax avoiders.”

Avoiding vs. Evading Taxes and Corporate Inversions

Avoiding and evading taxes are technically considered different kinds of acts, the former being legal in the U.S., the latter not. According to the Internal Revenue Service, “Taxpayers have the right to reduce, avoid, or minimize their taxes by legitimate means.” Tax evasion, on the other hand, involves an “act to evade or defeat a tax, or payment of tax” by “deceit, subterfuge, camouflage, concealment, attempts to color or obscure events, or make things seem other than they are.”

The line between the two is obviously thin and vague, but both practices result in the same thing: paying fewer taxes or hiding money.

The subject of tax avoidance and evasion has generally gotten little traction on the campaign trail in election 2016, the exception being corporate “inversions.” These happen when, for example, an American company merges with a foreign one in a tax haven, and so gets a lower tax rate by re-incorporating (filling out some paperwork) there. This, too, is “legal,” although it represents the purest form of corporate tax evasion.  Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the practice began in Panama about 30 years ago.

In 2014, companies with household names like Apple, Microsoft, Pfizer, and General Electric avoided paying a collective $90 billion in taxes through inversion strategies. Apple led that list, holding $181.1 billion offshore.  That’s a lot of iPhone sales.

The Leading Candidates and Hidden Money

Tax havens are, in essence, perfectly “legal” criminal facilities designed to steal money from the rest of us. The two leading candidates in this election season, however, aren’t talking about closing down tax havens for good (which would piss off lots of rich people, banks, drug cartels, and terrorists). They are instead focused on getting companies to voluntarily repatriate, or return, profits made abroad for taxation purposes or on closing tax “loopholes” that allow money to disappear.  Neither, however, offers much detail as to what that means.

Both do share one thing, however, when it comes to tax havens: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have companies registered at the same address (also “shared” by 285,000 other companies) in Wilmington, Delaware. In other words, they make use of the “Delaware loophole,” which allows for the legal shifting of earnings from elsewhere in the country to the ultimate tax haven state in the U.S.  Neither, as Rupert Neate of the Guardian has written, has been willing to offer any explanation for this. That’s the political beauty of loopholes: closing one is different from eradicating an entire practice but suffices as a promise.

Hillary

Hillary has gone after tax havens before. In 2004, as a New York senator, she vowed to close tax loopholes for “people who create a mailbox, or a drop, or send one person to sit on the beach in some island paradise and claim that it is their offshore headquarters.”  She introduced no bills to do so, however.

She has spoken out against corporate tax inversions, too. She wants Congress to prevent them by imposing what she calls a “commonsense 50%” threshold on them; in other words, as long as a company keeps at least half of its operations in this country, it would be considered a U.S. company for tax purposes, no matter the inversions. She also has favored an “exit tax” to ensure that multinationals pay a “fair” share of U.S. taxes owed on earnings stored overseas. Both of these suggestions would put some modest limits on offshore tax dodging (after the fact), but not come within a country mile of banning it.

On such subjects, she can sound strong indeed at appropriate moments. In February 2016, for instance, she said, “We need to go after a company like Johnson Controls that is trying to avoid paying taxes after all of us bailed it out by pretending to sell itself in a so-called inversion in Europe.” It evidently didn’t matter to her that the same automotive parts company set to merge with Tyco International (based in Ireland to dodge taxes) had donated money to the Clinton Foundation charity as recently as December 2015. (Johnson Controls denied Hillary’s claims that it had received a bailout during the financial crisis.)

Hillary, lest we forget, joined the board of directors of the the Clinton Foundation, the family charity, in 2013. She resigned in April 2015 to run for president. Now, keeping it in the family, her husband, Bill, and her daughter, Chelsea, remain standing members of the board. Spawned from the William J. Clinton Foundation, founded in 1997, the charity has raised $2 billion, has about 2,000 employees (including at times members of Hillary’s political team), and boasts an annual budget of $223 million.

Like many gilt-edged couples, Hillary and Bill Clinton have themselves utilized onshore and offshore tax loopholes. In 2010, they used a common tax-dodging technique by placing their multi-million dollar home in Chappaqua, New York, in a “residence trust.” After he left office, Bill spent five years as an “adviser” to billionaire (now-ex-pal) Ron Burkle’s investment fund, Yucaipa Global, which had funds registered in the Cayman Islands and Dubai. That alliance netted Bill at least $15 million.

Hillary’s bedrock thinking on money flowing out of the U.S. and into the offshore world can best be seen in her support for the 2012 U.S.-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement when she was secretary of state. The agreement removed “barriers to U.S. services, including financial services,” which actually simplified the process of squirreling money away in or through Panama by allowing it to flow freely into that country.

The Clinton Foundation inhales donations from people using tax havens (including Panama). Although Hillary denounced Mossack Fonseca’s dealings on cue after the Panama Papers story broke, a number of individuals and multinationals that have contributed to the foundation used MF to establish offshore accounts, according to McClatchy. These include Canadian mining billionaire Frank Giustra who features in the foundation’s $25 million top-tier donor bracket, and two firms tied to Ng Lap Seng, the Chinese billionaire implicated in a major donor scandal involving the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee.

Similarly, in a speech she gave at the New School in July 2015, Hillary highlighted the “criminal behavior” of global bank HSBC. In 2012, the behemoth financial institution agreed to a record $1.92 billion settlement with the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department for enabling drug cartel money laundering and violating U.S. sanctions by conducting transactions for customers in Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma. She vowed, “On my watch, it will change.”

Yet, in 2014, the Clinton Foundation accepted between $500,000 and $1 million from that bank.

The Panama Papers are but one conflicted instance in which Hillary’s stated beliefs, her actions, and the generosity of her friends and acquaintances came together in a contradictory fashion. The evidence suggests that tax-dodgers will, in fact, be able to breathe a sigh of relief if she becomes president.  Her actions are likely to — if you’ll excuse the expression — trump her words when it comes to curtailing the behavior of offshore scofflaws in significant ways.  And speaking of Trump…

The Donald

Consider the fact that The Donald won’t even disclose his tax returns. His indignantly delivered explanation is that they are “under audit.” Under the circumstances, don’t hold your breath. Perhaps he doesn’t make nearly as much money as he claims — or maybe he has an embarrassing tax haven habit. Who knows?

Ironically, Mossack Fonseca’s Panama City headquarters is located a mereseven-minute drive from the Trump International Hotel and Towers in Panama City. (If you’re interested, its website is pitching a bargain on rooms at “15% off our currently available Best Unrestricted Rate.”)  That decadent complex is one of many sketchy enterprises to which Trump lent his name for licensing purposes. According to his (unaudited) personal financial disclosurereport filed with the Federal Election Commission, the deal earned him $5 million. In true Trumpian style, lawsuits and battles surround the endeavor.

Under the tax plan he’s touting in his presidential campaign, U.S. businesses would see a reduction in their maximum tax rate from 35% to 15%. This lower rate (“one of the best in the world”) would, he claims, render corporate inversions unnecessary. The Donald apparently hopes that corporate America will be so eternally grateful to him that they’ll move their money back onshore and pay taxes on it voluntarily (though most of them already don’t pay the top tax rate here anyway).

Trump’s views on a “repatriation tax holiday” that would let companies bring home their overseas stashes on a one-time basis for little or nothing have shifted over the course of his candidacy. Last year, he proposed the repatriation of hidden funds without penalty or taxation of any kind. Now he’s advocating a more populist one-time 10% tax on them.

Although a key promise of his tax reform plan is to end the practice of stockpiling money in offshore accounts by American companies, he has personally invested in many of the companies that do so. As CBS News noted, in October 2015, Trump owned stock in 22 of the top 30 Fortune 500 companies ranked by their number of offshore subsidiaries. It’s a group that has engineered 1,225 tax-haven subsidiaries holding $1.4 trillion. Of course, Trump has a keen understanding of the practices that disguise or shelter money from taxes. As he explained to supporters in Iowa this January, when it comes to his own business enterprises, “I pay as little as possible. I use every single thing in the book.”

Bernie

As far as we know, Bernie has no personal experience with tax havens and has a far more structured plan than either of the leading candidates to combat their money-sucking, tax-dodging prowess. His policies would prevent American companies from avoiding U.S. taxes through inversions, block them from escaping taxes by establishing a post office box in a tax haven site, and end the practice of letting corporations defer paying taxes on profits from offshore subsidiaries.

In the real world, financial speculation, crime, and tax evasion — sorry for this word again — trump the highly touted goal of “free trade” when it comes to tax havens. Bernie understood this well when he voted against the Panama “free trade” agreement of 2011. In a Senate speech on the subject, he presciently noted that “Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing large corporations and wealthy Americans to evade U.S. taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens. And the Panama free trade agreement would make this bad situation much worse.”

He was right then and he remains right today. Unfortunately, no one was listening or interested in acting on his warning — certainly not Hillary, who, as secretary of state, characterized the agreement as “an example of the Obama Administration’s commitment to economic statecraft and deepening our economic engagement throughout the world.”

In practical terms, Sanders went significantly further than Hillary by formulating actual legislation on the subject. Last April, he introduced theCorporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act of 2015 in the Senate. Among other things, it aspires to “prevent corporations from sheltering profits in tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands and would stop rewarding companies that ship jobs and factories overseas with tax breaks.”

Regarding inversions, he would treat companies as American for tax purposes if they were majority-owned by U.S. interests and operating in this country. Even his plan, however, would fall short unless it made inversions illegal — and too many companies are invested in not letting that happen.

Ted

Ted would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and enable people and companies to file taxes on a postcard, so there’s no real point in further analysis of his “positions” on tax havens.

Missing Money Costs

As of 2014, according to Gabriel Zucman, University of California economist and author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations, at least $7.6 trillion, or approximately 8% of global financial wealth, was “missing” somewhere offshore. His analysis demonstrates that the sorts of tax-dodging practices we’ve been discussing put governments across the planet in the red by approximately $200 billion annually. Tax avoidance by major U.S. companies costs governments an additional $130 billion per year since nearly a third of their profits are hidden offshore.

The U.N. estimates that tax dodging by multinational companies costs developing countries $100 billion a year, an amount “equivalent to what it would cost to provide basic life-saving health services or safe water and sanitation to more than 2.2 billion people.”

There are, in other words, harrowing costs to tax dodging. When the wealthy and powerful hide money from governments or speculate with it in sneaky ways, it destabilizes economies and enables the commission of crimes that place a further burden on ordinary people. When money flows from the economic necessities needed by the less privileged to the top fraction of a percent of the world’s population and is then hidden offshore, essentially “disappeared,” it’s a net drain on and a blow to the world economy. This impacts jobs and the quality of our future. Unfortunately, the leading candidates in this election year aren’t championing a major change for the better.

Beyoncé speaks for herself: Stop demanding an artist be all things for all of her fans

Was Beyoncé’s North Carolina protest too little too late? On Tuesday, the “Lemonade” singer performed in the state’s capital, Raleigh. In March, that city witnessed the passage of one of the harshest pieces of anti-LGBT legislation yet. House Bill 2, signed into law by Gov. Pat McCrory, repealed local nondiscrimination ordinances across the estate that offer protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, employment, and public accommodations, including public bathrooms.

Although portions of that bill were amended, the state has not repealed provisions that force trans people to use the restroom that corresponds to the sex they were assigned at birth. In fact, North Carolina’s lawmakers have been defiant in the face of criticism from the Department of Justice, which recently stated that the bill violates federal law. The state has until Monday to respond to the DOJ statement, but it has reportedly refused to comply with that deadline.

Since that bill was passed, musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr have declared they would boycott the state; others, like 80s icon Cyndi Lauper, declared that the show would go on but pledged to donate profits to LGBT causes. Beyoncé, however, offered a more muted response: On her website, the singer posted a statement urging fans to donate to groups like Equality North Carolina, one of the LGBT non-profits working to repeal HB 2. However, its condemnation of HB 2 is measured and carefully worded, repeating the oft-used phrase “Y’all Means All” without a more thorough rebuke.

In a response for Vice, writer Allison Hussey pointed out that the statement was actually released during her North Carolina show, one in which she didn’t mention the legislation on stage. Hussey registered her disappointment that Beyoncé wasn’t more willing to take a stronger stand. “It is not enough,” Hussey writes. “Beyoncé’s statement barely even qualifies as Beyoncé’s statement—it’s passive and lukewarm PR fluff that feels like an afterthought, delivered at exactly a time where almost no one was paying attention.”

The fact that Hussey was underwhelmed that an icon she looks up to didn’t speak out more forcefully about the discrimination facing the LGBT community is understandable, but what’s so meaningful about Beyoncé’s activism is that it’s deeply particular and insular, rooted in the experience of being a black woman in America. Audiences want her impact to be universal and Beyoncé to speak to everyone’s struggle. That, unfortunately, is not her job as an artist. We do not own her or her message, and to hold her accountable to standing up for the LGBT community when she’s so busy fighting for marginalized voices across America is unreasonable.

This criticism is similar to those lobbied at her following the #BeyAHero campaign, a well-meaning but misguided hashtag which encouraged the singer to speak out against last November’s Houston Equal Rights Amendment (HERO). That ordinance, which would have provided equal access in public accommodations for trans people, as well as veterans and the elderly, was voted down by a 35-point margin. Its defeat followed a sadly successful campaign in which those opposed to the bill painted trans people as vicious “bathroom predators.”

In an essay for the Huffington Post, Carlos Maza urged Beyoncé to do her part to raise awareness about the ordinance and fight the dangerous myth that transgender folks pose a safety risk to anyone else in a public facility. Every single serious study on the subject has shown there are no reported instances of a trans person attacking someone else in a restroom.

“Over the past few months, Beyoncé has repeatedly refused the opportunity to speak out against the legalization of discrimination against LGBT people in her hometown,” Maza wrote. “And as hard as it is to say this, her refusal should raise serious questions about her support for her gay, bisexual and transgender fans. … A single post from her would have motivated young voters to the polls, focused national attention on the fight over HERO, and dramatically reframed the narrative away from the talking points of HERO’s opponents, who ended up saturating media coverage of the ordinance.”

In an essay for The Daily Beast, Arthur Chu (who is also a contributor to Salon) pointed out that the campaign unintentionally “[turned] a decision that was actually the fault of thousands of voters in Houston into somehow the fault of Queen Bey.” He wrote, “It’s frustrating that people project power onto celebrities that, in all honesty, they probably don’t really have.”

The beef that Maza and others had with Beyoncé, in part, stems from the singer’s often cautious stance when it comes to embracing the LGBT community. After Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled visual album debuted, Slate’s Matt Capetola noted that queer people were noticeably left out of its message, especially in the video for “XO.” The love song features a multitude of couples engaging in PDA, but every single one of them is heterosexual. When speaking about her massive LGBT fan base, she told Flaunt in 2013 that she finds the adoration “flattering.” For some, the statement read as almost dismissive, the equivalent of saying: “Well, isn’t that nice.”

That criticism dismisses the important work the singer has done behind the scenes, including donating $6 million to a homeless youth center in Houston. But when it comes to Beyoncé, the struggle is that it’s very easy to project what we want onto her. If we want her to be a fierce LGBT advocate (look at her rainbow tribute to marriage equality!) or someone who has failed the community, it’s easy to cast her in either role—precisely because she says so little at all.

Beyoncé has always been incredibly guarded when it comes to her public image, whether it’s erasing unflattering photos of herself off the Internet following her 2014 Super Bowl performance or her cagey approach to giving interviews. When the singer appeared on the cover of Vogue, there was something notable missing from her appearance in the magazine: Beyoncé. According to the New York Times, the singer declined to do a sit down for the spread. “At some imperceptible point around 2013 to 2014, she appears to have stopped giving face-to-face interviews,” the Times’ Matthew Schneier notes.

Around that time, Beyoncé broke up with her father-manager, Mathew Knowles, as she began to take greater control of her famously guarded public image. She once claimed that this decision was inspired by the Material Girl herself. “I felt like I wanted to follow the footsteps of Madonna and be a powerhouse and have my own empire and show other women when you get to this point in your career you don’t have to go sign with someone else and share your money and your success—you do it yourself,” Beyoncé told Billboard during a 2013 appearance.

That is precisely what she has done in the years since: control the message. As Complex’s Karizza Sanchez argues, this is part of what makes her such a revolutionary figure. “Beyoncé has been the gatekeeper to her life, only providing what she wants and in the manner she wants to do it in—a rarity for even the biggest celebrities,” she writes. “It’s easy then, as a fan, to hate the veneer. But how could you not respect that power?”

This mantra also applies to her music itself. These days, Beyoncé releases her work completely on her own terms: She decides exactly when it is released (with little public warning), where it will be broadcast (“Lemonade” aired on HBO and streamed on Tidal), and precisely who it is for.

In the case of “Lemonade,” that work is very specifically rooted in black femininity, one that New York magazine’s Kat Ward argues is steeped in a “feminist spin on the traditional Southern Gothic tropes.”

As many have noted, part of the power of “Lemonade” is that it allows black women to be angry, whether that’s about a broken relationship or the marginalization of those who live at the intersections of oppression. On one track, she excerpts a famous statement from Malcolm X: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” Throughout the visual album, she features young women who have experienced this truth first-hand, including Amandla Stenberg and Quvenzhané Wallis. Both actresses became targets of racial hate at a profoundly young age.

As a pop-political figure, Beyoncé has always spoken through her music. When her recent performance of “Formation” caused controversy at this year Super Bowl, it was because of the number’s visual tribute to the Black Panthers. It was not her own statements on the subject of black power. That might frustrate those who are used to our celebrities being public and accessible, but as Chu argues, it’s precisely what has allowed her to be so effective: Her political neutrality means that the nagging backlash that has followed more outspoken black figures has eluded her.

In her pseudo-documentary “Life Is But a Dream,” Beyoncé reminded her fans that she will never be ours, as much as we might want her to be. “My story has never been told—no one really knows who I am,” she said. That might continue to confound those who want her to adhere to our definition of what an icon and an activist should be, but it shouldn’t send her LGBT fanbase the message she isn’t listening. Beyoncé simply works in mysterious ways, like God herself.

Republicans have turned God upside down with their so-called “religious liberty”

God understands the concept of religious freedom.

Republicans, on the other hand, just don’t get it.

The Republican Party is seeking to enact laws all across the country permitting businesses to refuse to serve LGBT people. Approximately 200 discriminatory bills have been proposed in nearly three-dozen state legislatures.

And if you happen to work for a company with pious owners, you may be out of luck. Companies owned by religious families have denied birth control coverage to women employees under the company health insurance plans.

This is all being done in the name of “religious liberty.”

Republicans argue that Christian florists who are opposed to gay marriage should be able to deny service to gay couples seeking to obtain flowers for their wedding. Otherwise, devout florists would be forced to violate their own religious beliefs by condoning gay marriage merely by providing the flowers.

Similarly, Republicans argue that Christian owners of companies should be able to refuse to provide birth control coverage to their female employees, otherwise, these holy owners would be forced to violate their own religious beliefs by facilitating birth control merely by providing a company health insurance plan.

This is all utterly absurd. These Republicans have taken the concept of “religious liberty” and turned it on its head.

The “liberty” part in “religious liberty” is not intended to empower the believers of a dominant religion, such as, say, Christianity, to give them the “liberty” to impose their beliefs upon everyone else. No. This is a perversion of the term “religious liberty.”

Instead, the “liberty” part is intended to protect minority NON-believers to ensure that they have the liberty to maintain their own independent beliefs without suffering any disadvantages imposed upon them by the dominant believers.

So when Republicans start talking about “religious liberty,” just keep your wits about you so you don’t get turned around and fall prey to the old intellectual switcharoo.

One case in point is Indiana Gov.  Mike Pence. Donald Trump recently met with the governor and called him “terrific,” and Pence has now endorsed Donald Trump for president. Pence signed a discriminatory religious liberty law in Indiana that unleashed an avalanche of national scorn that forced him to change the law only a week later.

Another example is North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, who signed a religious freedom law banningn cities from being able to enact local non-discrimination ordinances against LGBT people. This caused another public outcry, including demonstrations, boycotts, and rock stars canceling their concerts in protest, including Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr and Pearl Jam. It even resulted in the U.S. Justice Department declaring the law illegal and demanding that North Carolina repeal the law. But the North Carolina Republicans do not care. They remain obstinate and continue to defy the request from the Justice Department.

Many prominent Republicans have voiced support for these laws, including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and the entire Republican National Committee.

To keep your wits about you, just keep in mind our nation’s history because our country was founded upon the accurate version of “religious liberty.” Just think of the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower ship in 1620 from Plymouth, England across the Atlantic Ocean and landed at Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts. These were the folks who put on the first Thanksgiving celebration in 1621 and began the festive tradition that we enjoy to this day.

Religious liberty was the reason the Pilgrims left England for America. They were “separatists” in that their religion did not conform with the official Church of England, and they suffered persecution and discrimination as a result of their religious beliefs. So they came to America where they could be free to practice their own religion without enduring prejudice.

Religious liberty, in fact, was the reason that many people came to America. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island were safe havens for persecuted Quakers. Maryland was a refuge for Catholics. The early American colonies welcomed all sorts, including Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, as well as Mennonites, Jews, and Amish from various European countries.

Religious liberty was crucial to our towering founding father, Thomas Jefferson. He was adamant about maintaining a strong separation between church and state to prevent government from favoring any particular religion so that every citizen would feel equally welcome in society regardless of their religious beliefs. This principle is now enshrined in the First Amendment of our Constitution.

Today, the United States has grown to become the most religiously nation in the world with more than 2,000 distinct religious groups.

But the Republican Party is seeking to take us backward with these laws that favor the dominant Christian religion and impose hardships upon people who happen to have different beliefs. This directly violates our nation’s fundamental principle of freedom of religion.

Republicans say that Christianity is under attack and needs to be protected. This is utter nonsense. A recent ABC News poll found that 83% of Americans identify as Christians. If anyone needs protection it would not be the 83% majority.

And Christians are hardly under attack here. No one is taking away their rights. No one is seeking to force them to be gay themselves, or to force birth control upon them. No. They are perfectly free to hold their own religious beliefs and live their lives accordingly.

For religious liberty to work, of course, it must be a two-way street and apply to everyone equally. If Christians are permitted to freely hold their beliefs, then Christians must reciprocate and allow non-Christians to freely hold their own beliefs.

If someone believes that being gay is fine under their own religion, then let them hold these beliefs. If someone else believes that birth control is fine under their own religion, let them hold these beliefs as well. There is no justification for discriminating against people who happen to hold differing beliefs by not serving them as customers.

Allowing businesses to refuse to serve customers based upon religious beliefs is a horrendous pathway to slide down and we must resist this as a society.

Denying service to people would lead to all sorts of division, antagonism, and conflict throughout our entire society. If various people were not welcome at various businesses, not only would this divide people physically, but it would cause people to resent each other and it would breed an environment of hostility. Shockingly, this would take us back to the dark days of discrimination when black people could not sit at lunch counters in diners or ride in the front of buses. This would be disastrous.

A healthy society does not seek to turn people against each other, but instead seeks to promote harmony and cooperation among its population.

But perhaps the most obvious reason against this course of conduct comes down to simple common sense. Just imagine how this would play out in practice.

People would not know whether to enter a store or a restaurant because they would not know whether they might be denied service based upon their religious beliefs. Maybe businesses should post helpful signs. “No Jews allowed.” “No gays allowed.”

And when a customer walks into a store or a restaurant, how would the employees know what beliefs they hold? Hm. Well, of course they’ll need to find out before they can serve these people. God forbid a non-believer should be served a slice of pizza. But how? Hm.

Well, we’ll need a law that permits businesses to interrogate customers, and another law that requires customers to answer all the questions truthfully.

Good afternoon Mr. & Mrs. Customer. Are you gay? Oh thank goodness. But, do you believe in God? Which God? Did you attend church this past Sunday? Have either of you ever committed adultery? When you have sexual intercourse with each other, do you use birth control? Madam, have you ever had an abortion? Do you as a couple engage in any sexual activity that would be regarded as deviant?

Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind.

“The evidence is pretty incontrovertible that he doesn’t exist”: Stephen Colbert’s favorite scientist on the universe, naturalism and finding meaning without God

More than two decades ago, the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan wrote that “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.” Unfortunately, Sagan’s warning remains as true today as ever: American culture is deeply infused with an anti-intellectual distrust of scientific knowledge, a failure to understand the nature of peer-review, and an unwavering predilection for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

In some cases, scientific illiteracy is nothing more than an occasion for chuckling, such as when the rapper B.o.B insisted that Earth is flat rather than an “oblate spheroid,” prompting a “mic drop” response from the famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. But in many other cases, the consequences of ignorance about reality are very real. The most salient instance of this concerns the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change. According to a recent paper published in Nature, the policies we implement in the next few decades will determine the habitability of our planet for the next 10,000 years. The stakes really are high today — higher than ever before — and the fact that many public leaders fail to understand the urgency and causes of climate change, not to mention the difference between ions and eons, as Sarah Palin demonstrates in a tweet from 2009, is reason for genuine anxiety about the future of humanity.

Aside from the existential importance of understanding science, there’s also a purely aesthetic issue. The scientific worldview offers, I would argue, a far richer and more elegant picture of the cosmos than any ancient myth or grand narrative conjured up by the human imagination during the Iron Age. As Charles Darwin would put it, there is grandeur in this view of the universe. And he’s right. Consider a few nuggets of mind-boggling truths, courtesy of science’s ongoing investigation into the arcana of reality: the cosmos has no center and no boundaries. The fastest moving organism travels more than half the speed of sound — and it’s a plant. You very likely have some DNA from an ancient Neanderthal in your cells. Earth rotated faster when the dinosaurs were alive, meaning that the days used to be shorter. The universe is, in other words, an endless playground for curious minds.

Sean Carroll is one of the few scientists today who excels at conveying complex ideas in simple — but not simplistic — terms to the public. A cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), his work focuses on dark matter and general relativity. You may have seen him discussing these topics on The Colbert Report or in Through the Wormhole, a documentary series hosted by Morgan Freeman. Dr. Carroll is also a vocal atheist who’s debated Christian apologists such as Dinesh D’Souza and William Lane Craig. His new book, The Big Picture, explores a wide range of fascinating topics, from the submicroscopic components of the universe to whether human existence can have meaning without God — and everything in-between. It’s a tour de force that offers a comprehensive snapshot of the human situation in our infinitely strange universe, and it does this with highly accessible language and engaging storytelling.

Curious about some of The Big Picture’s central themes, as well as the impetus for writing it, I contacted Dr. Carroll through email.

What inspired you to write this book? What kinds of topics does The Big Picture cover? Given the finite resources of time and memory, is it possible for any single individual today to truly acquire a “ big-picture” understanding of the human condition?

We tend to talk about the world in a myriad of ways – a microscopic world of elementary particles, a biological world of organisms and evolution, a social world of morality and meaning. But it’s all the same underlying world. That’s the underlying theme of The Big Picture. My goal was to use science and philosophy to weave together a story of how all the different strands fit together.

In particular, the story of the world that has been assembled by modern science can seem utterly different from the world of our everyday. Physics talks about particles and forces and wave functions, using an intimidating language of mathematics and jargon, while our immediate surroundings are populated by familiar things like people and cars and tables. I wanted to show, or at least hint at, the world with which we are all familiar can emerge out of the very different-sounding world of modern science. That involves a journey through cosmology, epistemology, ontology, physics, complexity, biology, neuroscience, and ethics. It’s a fun ride!

Of course I’m not an expert in all of the fields I talk about in the book – nobody is. But the different disciplines need to keep up a continual conversation, if we’re to fit the big picture together. And individuals can certainly grasp the basic ideas behind the most important topics, no question.

You call your philosophical approach to the world “poetic naturalism.” This is a lovely term that, to my knowledge, you coined. What exactly does it mean? What is “naturalism,” and in what sense is your version of it “poetic”?

Naturalism is the simple idea that there is only one world, the natural world; there isn’t a separate spiritual or theistic realm of existence. In practice, naturalists are also usually willing to accept that the natural world obeys rigid patterns, the “laws of nature,” and that we can discover what it’s like through the process of scientific investigation. Naturalists are atheists – they don’t believe in God – but the label is a positive claim about what one does believe in, rather than what one rejects.

Naturalists don’t all agree with each other. On the one end of the spectrum you have the most hard-core variety, who claim that only the most deep-down fundamental description of nature can be said to describe something “real.” They might say that consciousness, or morality, or free will, are all just illusions. On the other end of the spectrum you have naturalists who believe in only the natural world, but are willing to ascribe objective reality to various extra properties it might have – moral judgments, for example, or inner states of conscious experience.

Poetic naturalism sits in between. There is only one world, but we have many ways of talking about that world. And if a particular way of talking gives us a useful handle on what the world is and how it behaves, it’s completely appropriate to consider the concepts it evokes as “real.” Air is really made of atoms, but its temperature and pressure are real, even though the individual atoms don’t have temperatures or pressures. Human consciousness and free will are real, even though they’re not present in the individual particles or cells of which we are made.

When it comes to meaning and morality, there are multiple allowed ways of talking, and the correctness of one or the other can’t be settled by doing experiments. That’s where naturalism becomes its most poetic – when we use our creative powers to attach judgment and significance to what goes on all around us.

You also talk about “planets of belief,” a metaphor that one could have guessed came from a cosmologist! What do you mean by this term, and what makes a planet of belief “stable”?

Ever since René Descartes and his famous Cogito, Ergo Sum, people have sought out an absolutely firm and unshakable foundation for their beliefs. An honest poetic naturalist admits that such a foundation just doesn’t exist. We could, however unlikely it may seem, be brains living in vats, or be misled by a mischievous demon.

What happens, instead, is that we assemble together a variety of different beliefs about the world. To the extent that these beliefs are compatible with each other, we can think of them as mutually reinforcing, as if they exert a gravitational field that pulls together a “planet of belief.” A stable planet is one where the different pieces truly are compatible – we’re not just fooling ourselves about the consistency of different parts of our belief systems. If they’re not stable, beliefs that we simultaneously hold can come into conflict, forcing us to reject one of them (or just live with the burden of cognitive dissonance). Alternatively, new information can cause us to change our beliefs, as if a giant asteroid barrels into a planet and causes disruption.

As we get older, we tend to grow quite fond of the planets of belief we have constructed for ourselves. We build elaborate defense mechanisms to ward off attacks from competing ideas or new data. The system makes us comfortable, but resistant to change, no matter how much change might be called for.

One thing you emphasize in The Big Picture is the importance of being comfortable with “uncertainty” and “incomplete knowledge.” Unlike religion, which sees beliefs as the points of departure, science sees them as the destinations of an ongoing journey for truth. Why exactly is it so crucial to be flexible in our belief systems? What if flexibility is too uncomfortable for people?

I talk a lot in The Big Picture about Bayesian reasoning. To some set of competing ideas, we assign a “prior” credence (roughly, the probability we think each one might be true), then update those credences as we gather new information. It’s crucial that our credence in a given idea never go all the way to precisely 0 or 1, because that means that no new information could possibly change our mind about it. That’s no way to go through life.

The universe is big and complicated and subtle, and we human beings are small and short-lived and not always as rational as we like to think we are. We are the product of millions of years of evolution, optimized for survival in a challenging world, not necessarily for puzzling out the ultimate laws of reality. We need to recognize that we are subject to biases, that we have incomplete information, and that we can always be surprised.

This kind of flexibility can be psychologically challenging, but it shouldn’t be debilitating. Just because we never reach perfect certainty doesn’t imply that we can’t go through life believing certain things with very high confidence. It’s an important skill to be able to navigate between dogmatic certainty and enervating skepticism.

You’re a self-described atheist, but you don’t appear to be “militant” like some other New Atheist leaders. For example, you write, “ The universe is much bigger than you or me, and the quest to figure it out unites people with a spectrum of substantive beliefs. It’s us against the mysteries of the universe; if we care about understanding, we’re on the same side” (italics added). Could you elaborate on your approach to disbelief?

As I write in the book, I don’t want to think of someone as my enemy just because we disagree about some issue of science or philosophy. As a working scientist, I disagree with my professional colleagues all the time, and we still manage to be friendly to each other. Disagreement about theism or naturalism should work the same way.

I’m not someone who is so eager to paper over disagreement that I would end up claiming that one’s stance toward God or the universe doesn’t matter. These things do matter – not only directly for how we think about the world, but also for how we construe meaning and purpose in our lives, and ultimately for how we choose to live together. I strongly feel that the methods of science and empirical investigation can be brought to bear on all interesting questions about the fundamental nature of the universe, including whether or not God exists, and the evidence is pretty incontrovertible that he doesn’t. If I meet someone who disagrees, I am happy to engage them in dialogue and work to understand each other better.

Some people argue that every effect has a cause. If the universe is an effect — which one could certainly argue that it is — then what caused it? Why does it exist? Was there just a large empty space waiting to be filled, and then the universe popped into existence?

It’s not true that every effect has a cause! That’s just a convenient way of talking about certain features of the macroscopic world of our everyday experience, one that is not applicable to how nature works at a deeper level.

When you want to tackle questions about the fundamental nature of reality, it’s necessary to leave behind concepts of “cause and effect” and replace them with “the laws of physics.” Those laws take the form of patterns relating different parts of the universe to each other, not relationships of causality.

So a better question is: what does our best understanding of the laws of physics tell us about the origin of the universe, and why it might exist at all? The answer is “not much.” This is a case where we have to be humble. The universe might have had a beginning, or it might have existed forever, we just don’t know. There’s certainly no reason to think that there was something that “caused” it; the universe can just be.

I’ve often thought of science as a special kind of story-telling in “assertion mode.” And the story it tells — involving quivering atoms, swirling galaxies, and evolving organisms — is without a doubt the “greatest story ever told.” But what’s missing from the story is a transcendent source of meaning for our lives. Without such a source — usually said to be God — how can our lives have true meaning? If the ultimate fate of the universe is a state of infinite entropy, then what makes life valuable and worth living?

The trick here is “true” meaning. My life has meaning without any supernatural guidance, no matter what anyone else might say about it. The meanings that we finite human beings attribute to our lives are the only kinds of true meanings, because those are the only kinds of meanings there are.

In my view, the fact that life is temporary is precisely what does give it value. Why should we care about a century-long existence if it was followed by an infinitely-long span of additional existence? We are fragile, ephemeral, finite creatures, bringing meaning to the world around us through our understanding and our care. Our lives have meaning exactly because they are all we have, and therefore are infinitely precious to us.

What’s the number one message or idea that you’d like readers of The Big Picture to take away from the book?

I need to cheat and pick two messages. First, we live in a natural world, obeying unbreakable laws. Second, that’s okay. It’s not a reason for existential despair. There’s plenty of room for us to create meaning and mattering, if we can muster the imagination and courage to do so.

Andrew Sullivan is wrong again: His mainstream liberalism has become scarily anti-democratic

In Andrew Sullivan’s ballyhooed debut in New York magazine, he presents the candidacy of Donald Trump as a unique, “extinction-level” threat to the United States of America. One does not have to read far beyond his headline, however, to realize that Sullivan’s real purpose is to malign his usual antagonists on the left. His argument is an example of just how bankrupt the mode of liberalism he represents has become. It’s anti-democratic and culturally elitist message, however, reveals an opportunity for the left to reinvigorate its politics through an engagement with the humanities – an engagement that mainstream liberals like Sullivan have abandoned.

Sullivan establishes his cultural authority and diagnoses our contemporary crisis by opening his piece with a dubious reading of Plato’s Republic, painting a picture of Plato’s views on “late stage democracy:”

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled…Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

Sullivan evokes this portrait of radical equality not as a utopian ideal, but as an ominous warning. It is in a democracy that overthrows these implicitly natural hierarchies, Sullivan warns, that “the would-be tyrant would often seize his moment.”

Sullivan’s liberalism prevents him from directly endorsing Plato’s prescription for governance by “philosopher kings” as a means of preventing rule by tyrannous demagogues. Instead, he is forced to turn to the contradictory work of praising recent expansions in democracy even as he works to denigrate them. He imagines the “miraculous” election of Barack Obama as an expression of a potentially dangerously radical populism, but one in which America “lucked out” because Obama was “paradoxically, a very elite figure, a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School.” He praises the digital revolution that allowed voices like his own to speak truth to the power of corporate media, but laments the lack of elite control over the digital sphere has now created a space in which “the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further.”

Having issued these perfunctory and backhanded compliments to recent democratic developments, he turns his attention to the political movements on the left that our supposedly hyper-democratic moment has empowered, arguing that they both enable Trump and pose their own unique threats to rational public discourse. He warns that Black Lives Matter has “stoked the fires” of rage against the beleaguered white working class. He admonishes what he remarkably calls “the gay left” for lacking in “magnanimity” (emphasis in original) toward its homophobic antagonists. He excoriates the supporters of Bernie Sanders, “the demagogue of the left,” as “playing into Trump’s hands” for daring to ask questions about the ideological implications of Clinton’s connections to the political and business elite.

As an alternative to these dangerous leftist alternatives, Sullivan urges support for Hillary Clinton, for whom he has a few suggestions. Clinton, he believes, needs to “moderate the kind of identity politics that unwittingly empowers [Trump]” and “make an unapologetic case that experience and moderation are not vices.” (One wonders how Clinton might do more in terms of touting her own moderation and experience.)

Moreover, he argues the left should have supported those elite Republicans working to disenfranchise Republican voters by using party rules to prevent Trump’s nomination in the event that he were to garner a plurality rather than a majority of delegates. The war between left and right, Democrat and Republican, is in his view far less important than the war between the educated, reasoned, and disinterested elite and the impassioned, ignorant, and self-interested masses.

The crisis of demagoguery of which Sullivan warns, and the contradictory solution to this crisis that he poses – elites using anti-democratic measures to save democracy from itself – is not unique to our moment or even our century. Crises and backlashes such as these have been endemic to modern liberalism since its inception.

One hundred and fifty years ago, a notable one of these crises occurred when a demonstration of British workers rallying in support of the 1866 Reform Bill devolved into a riot when the demonstrators stormed the railings of Hyde Park after being denied entry by police. Witnessing this event inspired in poet and educational reformer Matthew Arnold a visceral revulsion that Andrew Sullivan would find familiar. Arnold’s disgust at the actions of this “mob” was in large part what inspired him to write Culture and Anarchy.

This famous essay argues that mass humanities education could cultivate in the anarchic working classes the rationality and disinterestedness they supposedly lacked. As scholars David Lloyd and Paul Thomas argue in Culture and the State, Arnold imagines that this feat could be achieved through the study of cultural “touchstones” of Western art and literature. In learning to see themselves represented in high culture, Arnold believed, the working classes would learn to be represented in politics: as Arnold famously put it, “culture suggests the idea of the state.” The vision of the role of humanities education in a liberal society presented in Culture and Anarchy dominated discussions of the social value of humanities education in Britain and the United States for nearly a century.

In a way it is surprising that Sullivan’s essay, with its high falutin’ classical references and its championing of Arnoldian political values, never mentions the decline of humanities education in its litany of complaints about our contemporary political moment. Sullivan has written on the subject in the past, and the rise of Trump has been concurrent with a depressing set of milestones relating to education in the humanities, ranging from record declines in new humanities majors to shocking new lows in the adjunctification of humanities faculty. The humanities and the arts continue to be the first victims of the continuing assault on public education by conservatives and neoliberal reformers alike at the K-12 level.

Why then, in the midst of this “extinction-level event,” occasioned by Trump’s rise, are mainstream liberals like Sullivan not decrying the decline of the humanities as one of its primary causes? Probably because many liberals see contemporary humanities education as productive of the very sort of “identity politics” that they, with increasing boldness, disparage as a mode of politics equivalent to Trumpism.

Roderick Ferguson addresses this shift in liberalism’s relation to the humanities in his 2012 The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Difference. Ferguson brilliantly argues that, in response to the pressures brought to bear by feminist and anti-racist social movements on the university in the 1960s and 70s, universities did not affect a radical revision of humanities curriculum in the traditional disciplines, but instead created the interdisciplinary departments – ethnic studies, women’s studies, etc. – that were intended to contain the representation of these insurgent cultural traditions within the formal structure of the university without fundamentally challenging the ascendancy of the Western canon, and the cultural and political ideals, that Arnold and his acolytes championed.

Despite this attempted institutional cooption, the politicized scholarship that originated in the “interdisciplines” (as Ferguson dubs them) has thrived throughout humanities disciplines while the Arnoldian model has steadily declined. Theorists and activists emerging from within the academy have energized transformative social movements such as Black Lives Matter and thos associated with queer liberation. Instead of being celebrated, these emancipatory developments have been concurrent with an abandonment of the humanities by many liberal elites at the very moment they are under most strident attack.

The chauvinisms that cause many liberal elites to recoil at the thought of Black or queer studies being taught as a required part of a humanities curriculum are indicative of a broader political resistance to racialized and queer people being included in their political communities. This resistance is abundantly clear in Sullivan’s willingness to dismiss Black Lives Matter – a movement premised on the eminently reasonable assertion of the right not to be summarily shot by law enforcement officers – as an overly impassioned threat to the fragility of the white working class.

Sullivan shares with Arnold a distaste for racialized groups forcefully asserting their rights (ironically, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy is at its most emphatic in declaring the Irish unfit for the political rights enjoyed by the English), but also for the white working class they both claim to represent. In his litany of evil portents leading up to the ascension of Trump, Sullivan cites a story about Sarah Palin, years before her entry into politics and working as “a commercial fisherman” being interviewed at a promotional appearance by Ivana Trump for her perfume line at a J.C. Penney’s in Anchorage. “We want to see Ivana,” the Anchorage Daily News quotes Palin as saying, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”

What initially appears to be a snarky aside, in fact contains the essence of Sullivan’s argument. He does not fear Trump’s working class white supporters because they are racist. He fears them because he finds them uncultured, untrained in the mode of disinterested spectatorship that would teach them that both Ivana Trump’s perfume and radical politics are tacky.

Unlike Arnold, however, Sullivan has nothing to offer in the place of the “semblance of…culture” with which Trump has ostensibly lured his white working class supporters.

Having abandoned humanities education as a means of cultivating in the working class a willingness to be represented by liberal elites, Sullivan and those like him are left advocating a position that reveals their true allegiances. They would rather cheer Ted Cruz’s attempt to overturn the will of his party’s voters than support “the demagogue of the left” and his promise of free college education for all; they would rather castigate “political correctness” than question how their own neoliberal economic policies have alienated working class voters of all races; they would rather seize the state for the elite than see it defiled by the will of the voters.

One hopes that Clinton will not follow Sullivan’s advice to abandon “identity politics” or double down on an attempt to sell the value of elite leadership to the white working class. It seems unlikely, in any case, that she will make any further major concessions to a working class economic agenda. If she wins – and one must credit Sullivan for publicizing the fact that Clinton’s election is far from a foregone conclusion – it will more than likely be thanks to white liberal elites and upwardly mobile people of color, a coalition that will remain vulnerable to some form of Trump’s quasi-populism.

For the left to establish a multiracial working class coalition that can effectively combat the noxious politics that Trump has harnessed, it will have to embrace a pedagogical project, but an appeal to Plato on behalf of the Democratic Party’s would-be philosopher kings won’t cut it. Sullivan’s intuition that the Trump phenomenon is a crisis of culture as well as politics was essentially correct. His failure lies in his proposed response, which so clearly demonstrates the collapse of the Arnoldian marriage between liberalism and the humanities. This collapse signals a crisis but also an opportunity.

As the democratic socialist coalition that has coalesced around the Bernie Sanders campaign starts to look to the long game, it should pay heed to the innovative forms of cultural engagement being explored by interdisciplinary humanities scholars and students (often working against the institutional constraints imposed upon them) as a means of advancing its emancipatory project.

The rise of Trump through the ranks of a party working overtime to disenfranchise voters is not a crisis brought on by an excess of democracy, but by a lack of it. The radical work of American, ethnic, Indigenous, queer, and women’s studies scholars to champion education in modes of culture that empower rather than deracinate the marginalized citizens of our democracy is needed now more than ever. An embrace of this work offers the political left an alternative to the specter of fascism presented by Trump and the increasingly antidemocratic bent of mainstream American liberalism.

We want Robert E. Lee’s name off our school — and in return, we were greeted with hateful Internet trolling

You may have seen the headlines this week.

“Trump, Hitler, Schooly McSchoolerson in running for renaming Robert E. Lee Elementary”

“Of course Schoolie McSchoolface is a suggested name for a school”

“Boaty McBoatface, meet Donald J. Trump, er, or Adolf Hitler Elementary School”

In Austin, Texas, the School Board solicited suggestions for new names for Robert E. Lee Elementary School, and it got hijacked by the internet. The suggestions included Adam Lanza Elementary, Bleeding Heart Liberal Elementary, and worse.

As it happens the school-soon-to-be-formerly-known-as-Robert E. Lee Elementary is where my kids go. More than that. My wife and I have been involved from the start in the effort to change the name. So it’s been a surreal and disturbing week.

The headlines seem to suggest either that our community is really so backward it endorses such suggestions or that the work the parents have done is so politically correct and hypersensitive it deserves this kind of treatment.

The truth is less sensational. We are ordinary parents who have been struggling with a classically American question in a very traditional, democratic-minded way: What kind of school do we want for our kids?

The real story begins last summer, after the horrific shooting in Charleston. Jessica and I, along with a small group of parents, began organizing to change the name of our Austin, Texas school.

It wasn’t a novel idea. In fact, it’s been broached many times over the last couple of decades. Even for Austin our neighborhood is a deep blue zone. It’s close to the University of Texas campus, and the community of parents includes writers, professors, artists, musicians, and a lot of transplants from the northeast and the west coast.

It’s also a very white neighborhood, and a very white school. In part this is a consequence of standard demographic patterns of money, race, and inequality. In the case of Austin it’s also the consequence of very deliberate policies of segregation, dating back to before the school was built in 1939, and persisting for decades after. These policies have left a clear and living imprint on what kinds of people live where in Austin today.

The school name, which was chosen in 1939 at the suggestion of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was a reflection of the character and ideology of the neighborhood in the 1930s. In 2016 it’s an active deterrent to black families in Austin to move to the neighborhood, and it honors a narrative of southern history that we believe is false and toxic.

It’s been an open wound for a while. Until the shooting last year, however, and the national conversation it provoked about the persistent Southern celebration of confederate heroes and icons, the occasional complaints hadn’t gotten much traction.

This time was different. We started out with about eight of us. We began meeting with School Board members. We started a Change.org petition. A few of us wrote op-eds in the local newspaper. We spoke at public meetings. Our numbers grew. The School Board decided to take up the issue, and began investigating what would need to happen for the school name to be changed. Local media began showing up outside the school and wanting to interview us. Our numbers grew some more.

It’s been a slow, often frustratingly bureaucratic process. Meetings after meetings. School Board rules that have had to be amended. There was a counter-petition on Change.org, and a group of people who began organizing in opposition to the idea of changing the name. The historic commission got involved, and there were questions about whether or not the art deco lettering on the school’s facade was protected.

As we went our arguments acquired depth and subtlety in response to criticism. We took on the question of whether we were trying to erase history. We asked ourselves, very directly and candidly, whether we were being precious, whether this was a purely symbolic effort to expiate our white guilt, or preen self-righteously before the public.

We decided not that we were pure, or that our motives were uncomplicated, but that we have a right to influence who and what our kids’ school honors. This is about our values, and about the message we are sending to students of color and their parents. It is also about correcting, not erasing, a sentimental, factually inaccurate, and politically toxic historical narrative of the South and the Civil War. We decided we could do better.

And we did. On March 28 the Austin Independent School District Board voted 8-0, with one absention, to change the name of Robert E. Lee Elementary School.

I don’t want to dive back into the arguments we made that won the day. You can read what we and others have said elsewhere. If you’re inclined to disagree, I doubt anything I’d say right now will change your mind. And it’s over. The name will be changed to something thoughtful and meaningful, suggested by the school community and selected by the School Board. (The online form was only to solicit suggestions; it was never a vote.)

What I would hope to persuade you, whatever your feelings on the issue, is that we’ve been mischaracterized. It’s right there in some of the names that were suggested, like Hypothetical Perfect Person Memorial Elementary School, Bleeding Heart Liberal Elementary. The idea is that we’re frivolous, that somehow this isn’t serious, substantive politics.

The rejoinder to that is the history to which we’re responding. It’s the decades of work, by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to populate the south with monuments to the Confederacy. These were people who believed that it was profoundly important to make sure that their kids’ schools, among other institutions, were named after Confederate heroes. They fought for it. They spoke at meetings. They organized with other parents. Sometimes they faced opposition. Sometimes they didn’t (I looked in the minutes of the Austin School Board in 1939 — no one had any objection to naming the school after Robert E. Lee).

These were real people. Passionate about their history and their politics, committed to creating a world for their children that honored their values.

It’s easy to lose sight of the actual people-ness of distant, anonymous people. It’s easy when they lived decades ago, and had values that you find abhorrent (as I find those old neo-Confederate values). And it’s easy when your only sense of people comes from sensationalized headlines and quick-take tweets.

There’s a cost to the dehumanization. It makes the whole process seem like a goof, and it hasn’t been. It wasn’t 75 years ago, and it isn’t now. It’s our school, our kids, our hallways, our lives.

We didn’t do any of this lightly. You’d know this instantly if you spent even five minutes on any given morning, at around 7:45 a.m., watching us drop off our kids, hugging and kissing them goodbye. You’d know it if you saw the tense moments, in the hallway, when parents on opposite sides of the issue pass each other. You’d know if it you saw how much we support and sustain the school, in a million little ways, every day. You’d know it if you spent a few minutes in the shoes of our principal, who’s handled all this craziness, in his second year on the job, with admirable patience and judgement.

Recognizing our basic humanity and good faith matters, I think, because while Hypothetical Perfect Person Memorial Elementary School is pretty funny, and Schooly McSchoolerson is a little bit funny, Adolf Hitler Elementary School actually isn’t. Adam Lanza Elementary School isn’t. And I’d wager it was the ability to lose sight of our basic humanity, in the first place, that enabled anonymous form-submitters to propose these really gruesome names.

It’s a losing battle, maybe, to push back against the ways in which mass media, and the mass nature of modern life, enable us to dehumanize other people. But it’s one worth fighting. Because it’s not just silly internet kerfuffles that happen when we dehumanize, it’s all the worst aspects of human nature and politics.

It doesn’t take much to imagine distant, anonymous people as caricatures. It takes more, but really not that much more–maybe a few seconds more–to imagine us as flesh and blood people, who love our kids, care about our school, and have fought to change it’s name because it’s important to us.